Tumbling Dice and Other Tales from a Life Untitled Tammy Mckillip Mckillip University of Texas at El Paso, [email protected]
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University of Texas at El Paso DigitalCommons@UTEP Open Access Theses & Dissertations 2016-01-01 Tumbling Dice and Other Tales from a Life Untitled Tammy Mckillip Mckillip University of Texas at El Paso, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.utep.edu/open_etd Part of the Creative Writing Commons Recommended Citation Mckillip, Tammy Mckillip, "Tumbling Dice and Other Tales from a Life Untitled" (2016). Open Access Theses & Dissertations. 897. https://digitalcommons.utep.edu/open_etd/897 This is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@UTEP. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Theses & Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@UTEP. For more information, please contact [email protected]. TUMBLING DICE AND OTHER TALES FROM A LIFE UNTITLED TAMMY MCKILLIP Master’s Program in Creative Writing APPROVED: ______________________________________ Liz Scheid, MFA, Chair ______________________________________ Lex Williford, MFA ______________________________________ Maryse Jayasuriya, Ph.D. _________________________________________________ Charles Ambler, Ph.D. Dean of the Graduate School TUMBLING DICE AND OTHER TALES FROM A LIFE UNTITLED ©Tammy McKillip, 2016 This work is dedicated to my beautiful, eternally-young mother, who taught me how to roll. Always in a hurry, I never stop to worry, Don't you see the time flashin’ by? …You’ve got to roll me And call me the tumbling dice —The Rolling Stones TUMBLING DICE AND OTHER TALES FROM A LIFE UNTITLED BY TAMMY MCKILLIP, MFA THESIS Presented to the Faculty of The Graduate School of The University of Texas at El Paso in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF FINE ARTS Creative Writing THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT EL PASO May 2016 Table of Contents Table of Contents………………………………………………………………………................iv Preface……………………………………………………………………………………….…...vi Introduction……………………………………………………………………………….…...xviii Tumbling Dice…………………………………………………………………………….………1 Truth Be Told………………………………………………………………………….…………77 Dysfunctional Dining………………………………………………………………….…………93 Whatever Gets You There: Learning to Appreciate Reality through my Obsession with Fiction………………………………………………………................................................96 Diana and the Do-Gooder………………………………………………………………………115 Captain Hook and the Chicken…………………………………………………………………122 I Bite………………………………………………………………………………….…………133 An Unquiet Mind……………………………………………………………………………….136 One Step Forward, Two Steps Back……………………………………………………………143 The Toucan and the Tooth……………………………………………………………………...145 The Zipper………………………………………………………………………………………150 Dawn……………………………………………………………………………………………156 Amazing Grace and the Lemonade Stand………………………………………………………161 On the Move……………………………………………………………………………...…….165 Trafalgar West……………………………………………………………………………….....170 Daddy’s Second Chance……………………………………………………………………......180 Show Biz and Slenderama……………………………………………………………………...189 Drawing Nudes……………………………………………………………………………...….195 iv Family Assembly…………………………………………………………………………….....199 Something New, Something Blue………………………………………………………………204 Sleep with the Angels…………………………………………………………………………..206 Over the Rainbow…………………………………………………………………………...….208 All That Glitters……………………………………………………………………………...…211 The New Me………………………………………………………………………………..…..213 Across the Rio Grande…………………………………………………………………...……..216 The Unevens…………………………………………………………...……………...………..219 When Kendal is Here……………………………………………………………….…………..221 Shrinking…………………………………………………………………………………..……224 Ambitions…………………………………………………………………………………….…227 It’s My Party……………………………………………………………………………………229 Behind the Glass………………………………………………………………………………..231 The Fives………………………………………………………………………………………..238 Culture Clash…………………………………………………………………………………...244 The Vanishing Twin………………………………………………………………………...….252 The Gene Pool……………………………………………………………………………..…...262 The Band Plays On……………………………………………………………………..………275 Curriculum Vita.………………………………………………………………………………..312 v Preface Writing a book feels like a guilty indulgence when you’re a middle-aged mom of two— the hours spent alone each day in an attic office, hunched over a computer keyboard, sweating bullets and agonizing over syntax and content when two flights down, the kids are left to fend for themselves until Daddy comes home from the office—the whole enterprise feels self-serving and more than a little narcissistic. When the manuscript you’re slaving over is memoir, the guilt quota increases tenfold. After all, says the annoying little voice in your head, who the hell do you think you are that people will want to read about you? Are you famous? Have you been in prison? Did you invent a vaccine? Climb Mount Everest? Nope. You’re just an overweight Jersey mom with graying hair and a bad back. There is absolutely nothing glamourous or enviable about your life. You’re behind with the bills, will never be able to repay your student loans, live in a messy house that’s about to be repossessed by the bank, and drive a six year-old car that carries a ridiculous interest rate on its note because your credit sucks. There are so many reasons not to write about yourself that you lie whenever anybody asks you what you’re working on. (You’ve learned the hard way to never answer the question, “What do you do?” with the words, “I am a writer,” or worse, “I am a student of writing.” Instead, you’re more apt to tell people you’re a “stay at home mom,” words which summon the image of practical domesticity, cleanliness, and nurture—in other words, words that need no further explanation and are, indirectly, at least, a lie.) On the other hand, you have kept a journal since you were seven years old. Your favorite genre to read is memoir, creative non-fiction, lyrical essay and biography. Authors like Mary vi Karr, Jeanette Walls, Elizabeth Gilbert, Rick Bragg, Anne Lamott, Joan Didion, Amy Hempel, Francis Mayes, Maya Angelou, Cheryl Strayed, Annie Dilliard, David Sendaris, David Foster Wallace, Eula Biss, Frank McCourt, Anne Frank, Tobias Wolff, Barbara Kingsolver, Joyce Carol Oates, Pat Conroy, Claudia Rankine, Elie Wiesel, and Meghan Daum, to name a handful, have inspired the storyteller in you and proven time and again that, aside from individual details, much of the content of human life is universal in nature. We are born; we grow up with families—some small, some large, biological or foster; we go to school; we have hobbies and friends, hopes and dreams; we experience illness at times and then moments of transcendent joy; we discover sexuality; we fall in love and cohabitate or not, marry or not; we have children or don’t, grow older, grow up (or not), experience heartache and loss, success and failure, glory and degradation. It’s all part of the human experience, even though we live inside our skin as though we are somehow separate from the world and unique. We really aren’t. With that knowledge—that our humanity is a shared experience, that we are variations on a theme—you might wonder why anybody’s story is worth reading. If your life and my life are so similar in nature, if not in the details, that we can read about each other’s pain, joy, hate, love, loss and gain and nod and feel what it’s like to be inside each other’s skin for the length of a page or chapter or book, why bother with a narrative? Why write about one’s life experiences at all? The short answer is don’t. There are already plenty of memoirs on the market—good ones, interesting stories of how simple people overcame adversity or struggled with addiction, healed from sexual abuse, cheated on their spouse, lost loved ones, were sent to jail or rehab or just away for whatever reason. There isn’t a story out there that hasn’t already been told. Except, of course, yours. vii We may have all been given the same raw materials in life, but it’s what we do with those ingredients that make for gourmet reading. It’s true that too many chefs in the kitchen spoil the food, but the right chef, inspired by experience and imagination, can create a sumptuous delight for the palette. Culinary metaphor aside, it’s the way you’ve lived your life that will resonate in the telling. Most of us aren’t Hollywood stars, famous athletes, or victims of notorious crimes. Most of us are just doing the best we can, day by day. We’re keeping afloat, struggling, working, raising our kids, trying to keep our marriages alive. These are the relatable concerns of good memoir. These are the universalities that provide an emotional connection between a reader and an author. Our interior processes as we move through our days, nights, years; our attempts at being more than we are and our failures—these are the experiences that we share. To write that and acknowledge the foibles of our humanity; to ponder the whys and the roads we did or didn’t take that led us to wherever it is we are—therein lies the grace of memoir. We—you and I—are imperfect creatures. We make mistakes. Memoir allows us to forgive ourselves and each other. If I have done it, perhaps you have, too. If you have done it to someone else, has it not also been done to you? Memoir reminds us that it is okay to be human—that no matter what we have been through, we’re still here, keeping ourselves in the game, and that, ultimately, is what is most important—that we participate. Memoir may be historical, but it is not history. Unless you have been followed around by a scribe your entire life, your past is utterly subject to whatever perspective you inhabit now. This subjective nature makes