SOMETHING to BE SAID for SAYING SOMETHING by THOMAS

SOMETHING TO BE SAID FOR SAYING SOMETHING

THOMAS SANDERS

A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF FINE ARTS

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2017

To Tarver Shimek

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For their invaluable instruction, patience, encouragement, and inspiration, I thank Kevin

Wilson, David Leavitt, Jill Ciment, Amy Hempel, and Padgett Powell. For their ongoing support and unconditional love, I thank Carl, Gigi, Tye, Mimi, Jenny, and Elaina Joy Sanders. For helping me develop as a teacher and professional, I thank the University of Florida Department of English and the University Writing Program. For creating the ideal environment for my growth as a writer, I thank the University of Florida Creative Writing program, the MFA@FLA in particular, as well as all the funding bodies that made my time at the University of Florida possible. For hundreds of pages of thoughtful feedback and hours of critical conversation, I thank my friends and fellow MFA@FLA students. For the invaluable emotional support, I thank

Tupelo Sanders. For being by my side, and for giving more love than I deserve, I thank Tarver

Shimek.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

ABSTRACT ...... 6

LIFE RECENTLY ...... 7

VFW Chapter 2811, Waldo Rd./NE State Rd. 24, Friday Night ...... 7 The Knot ...... 14 You’re It ...... 16 Who or What ...... 18 Granddaddy ...... 19 Prescient Quotations from an Advisory Meeting on Life Post-MFA ...... 33 What Happened ...... 34 Thirteen Ways of Looking at (and Hating) an American Robin ...... 39

SOMETHING TO BE SAID FOR SAYING SOMETHING: SHORT AND SHORTER STORIES ...... 47

Afterword ...... 47 Something to be Said for Saying Something ...... 49 Open Ended ...... 51 As Seen on TV ...... 55 Do we need another onion? ...... 71 ThunderShirt ...... 74 Or, I Gave Up ...... 78 Familiaris ...... 81 Wretch Like Me ...... 103

IT WILL BE MONEY IN YOUR POCKETS: A NOVEL BEGINNING ...... 126

Section 1 ...... 126 Section 2 ...... 139

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 146

Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts

SOMETHING TO BE SAID FOR SAYING SOMETHING

Thomas Sanders

May 2017

Chair: David Leavitt Major: Creative Writing

This document is composed of two collections of short stories titled “Life Recently” and

“Something to be Said for Saying Something,” as well as the beginning of a novel with the working title “It Will Be Money in your Pockets.” The stories that make up “Life Recently” are connected, meaning they share locations and characters. The stories in “Something to be Said for

Saying Something” are not connected. The excerpt from “It Will Be Money in your Pockets” is intended to be the beginning of that novel.

LIFE RECENTLY

VFW Chapter 2811, Waldo Rd./NE State Rd. 24, Friday Night

“I’ve always wanted to drink there.”

“Where?”

“There.”

I pointed to a low, single-story building fronted by two tanklike vehicles. My girl and I, we’d spent dusk bowling and shooting pool.

“It’s open to the public,” I said. “See the sign in the window?”

A neon Budweiser logo with the word OPEN beneath.

“I never knew,” my girl said. She passes the building twice daily, to and from work.

“Wanna go?” I asked.

“Okay.”

I pulled a U-turn.

Then, lately, I’d felt confident, less anxious, less willing to let opportunities slip by. The turnaround was part of that.

“Wow,” my girl said. “That was a super-confident turn. Badass driver.”

At the front of the building, a locked door. We had to buzz in. My girl pressed the button and a moment later the door unlocked.

When we entered, the normal bar scene paused. Everyone turned to look at us. The bartender, an older woman, asked what we wanted.

My girl took off her sweater and made a move to sit at the bar. “A beer, I guess,” she said.

“First, I need to ask,” the bartender said, “are you members?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t know you had to be.”

“You do,” the bartender said. “If you want to be served, you have to be members.”

Regardless of fault, my kneejerk reaction is to apologize. A habit my girl hates. “Sorry,”

I said.

We started to leave.

“I’ll sign for them.” This was a middle-aged man, the drinker closest to us. He wore black leather motorcycle chaps and a matching vest. I noted a pocket-sized Confederate flag patch stitched to the vest.

“That’s fine,” the bartender said. “Sign that book over there.” She pointed at a guest book on a podium. “But you’ll be his guest. If he leaves, you have to leave too.”

Once we signed, we took stools at the corner of the bar, the door at our back. Two men— the one who had signed us in and an older, front-toothless man with suspenders printed with

Confederate flags—walked up to us.

“Does anyone in your family serve?” Suspenders asked.

“My brother,” I said.

“What branch?”

“Army. He graduated from West Point.”

“Then you can join the auxiliary part of the chapter,” Suspenders said.

“Not necessarily,” Leather said. “Has he served overseas?”

“No,” I said.

“They can’t join.” This came from a larger woman down the bar. She wore a large tie- dyed shirt and had a pair of Styrofoam to-go boxes stacked on the bar in front of her. Her voice was high pitched, like that of an adolescent boy complaining to his mother.

“Where is your brother stationed?” Leather asked.

“Stationed in Alaska at first. Now he’s down in Oklahoma.”

“Fort Sill?” Leather asked.

“Fort Sill,” I said.

“He won’t work,” said Leather. “He has to have served overseas.” His beer was bigger than the others I saw, a liter-sized plastic pitcher. He drank from the vessel as if it was a stein, sipping from the uncurled portion of the plastic lip. “How about granddads?” he asked. “You have any granddads who fought in wars?”

We both did.

“That works,” Leather said. “Take a picture of their gravestones and you can join.”

We heard this often over the course of the night, a refrain repeated by various people in the club: take a picture of their gravestones. At first, the imperative seemed to legitimize our presence in that room—as much a reassurance of their own decision to let us stay as ours—but as the night went on and we kept hearing it repeated (and when they repeated the statement as we left), the directive seemed more genuine, a legitimate invite back.

They had two beers on tap: Budweiser and Bud Light. We ordered Budweisers in frosty mugs. Turns out, cash only. Cheap, luckily—“Cheapest beer in town!” Suspenders declared.

I withdrew a twenty from an ATM in a dark hallway.

The club looked like other bars catering to local clientele. Not a hole in the wall—the layout felt spacious on the horizontal plane—but with a similar vibe: low lighting, drop ceilings, an L-shaped bar. Behind the bar bottles of cheap liquor and mixers were arranged in front of a mirror. The neon Budweiser sign blocked the only window into the room.

“I apologize for my friend’s suspenders,” Leather said. “They aren’t exactly politically correct.”

This did not sound like an earnest apology. Remember the Confederate flag patch Leather wore. More like an attempt to bait us into an argument.

“Okay,” I said.

We joined a game of soft-tip darts. People at the bar were talking about the benefits of

VFW membership. “Saturday night is steak dinner,” the woman with the to-go boxes said. “For five dollars you get steak, a baked potato, and dessert.”

Leather ran down the weekly schedule: dart tournament, karaoke, bingo. He said, “This is the real center of Gainesville.”

Later, Leather pulled up a picture of Suspenders on his phone. In the picture Suspenders was standing in front of the VFW building, grinning a gap-tooth smile. Though he was now clean shaven, in the picture he had a belly-button-long beard draped on the wind.

“Look at this nigger,” Leather said.

Should we have challenged them? Maybe. But we were outnumbered. Afterwards, my girl said, “They probably don’t believe in safe spaces, but that was their safe space.” Wordlessly we made the mutual decision to stay, to keep our heads down and listen, watch. Do not disturb.

In a lull in the conversation, my girl turned to me and said, “You better remember this.”

“I’m not that drunk,” I said.

“No, I mean for a story. You better write a story about this.”

You better remember this. This became another refrain, both whispered by my girl and implied by her sidelong looks. Afterwards, at home, she showed me a video she had surreptitiously filmed of the bar’s interior, “for your reference.” She made an effort to memorize

quotations and stories I might not have heard or remembered. This was another reason we did not speak up. The idea was to observe the genuine article, at least as much as was possible with our presence there.

The door buzzed. Pressing a button I could not see, the bartender unlocked it. The newcomer was a youngish man, hair buzzed close to his head. The people at the bar shouted greetings. He signed the visitors ledger.

After the new arrival had moved out of earshot, Leather said, “We let homeless guys in here.”

I wondered how broad he meant this statement to be. All homeless people?

Later, playing darts, Leather gestured at the man with buzzed hair. “He’s a dart shark.

Not that bright, but he can throw darts.”

Occasionally, the men became fatherly. Leather showed me a picture of his daughter in front of the VFW, playing a ukulele in the seat of the olive-green tank thing. “She’s really good,”

Suspenders said.

“I tried playing ukulele,” my girl said. “I wasn’t any good at it.”

“It’s just practice,” Leather said.

“Practice and you’ll get there,” Suspenders said.

The bartender seemed uninterested in tips. She looked like she had foot pain. When we ordered, she limped reluctantly over from the far side of the bar. Along the wall opposite the bar were three video poker consoles and a machine helmed with the phrase “Pull Tabs” that vended scratch-off lotto tickets. Instead of a jukebox there was an iPod hooked up to a pair of speakers.

Occasionally, someone would go over to the collapsible table that held the amp and the iPod and change the song. When I needed to piss, the impeccable, handicap-accessible bathrooms

disoriented me, as did the lack of graffiti and the clean floors.

I didn’t see this. (I was in the bathroom.)

It is my girl’s turn at the dartboard. Suspenders says, “You should miss one.”

“I’ve missed plenty,” my girl says.

“No, I mean, throw the dart straight into the ground.”

“Why?”

The woman at the bar with the Styrofoam boxes says, “He just wants to see you bend over.”

My girl gives her a questioning look.

“It’s okay,” says the woman. “It’s just a joke around here.”

My girl turns back to Suspenders. “I want to see you bend over,” she said.

He laughs, walks away.

Late in the night, “God Bless the USA” came on the iPod. Leather sang along. When it got to the chorus, he sand, “God bless the CSA!”

This cleared up any ambiguity about the Confederate flag patch. At the end of the song, he yelled, “The South will rise again!” Someone from the other end of the bar yelled, “It already has.”

My girl looked struck. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said.

“Really, what’s wrong?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you later,” she said.

When we left, out in the parking lot, I asked her again. “What was wrong?”

She said, “At the end of the song, I heard him yell ‘Fuck those niggers.’”

“I didn’t hear that,” I said.

“I could tell you didn’t. I was about to be, like, ‘We need to leave right now.’”

Did I hear him yell that? Did I choose not to hear? I had been sitting right next to him.

The Knot

A mutual friend gets engaged. My boy and I crawl into bed and look up the couple’s registry.

Some of it makes sense. A Teflon coated frying pan. I can get behind nonstick cookware.

Eggs are tricky.

But we’re not there for reasonable requests. We’re there for the Cuisinart ® Hot Air

Popcorn Maker, the seasonal napkin rings, the soft-serve ice cream machine.

He says, “What kind of people think they need a gravy warmer?”

“Who has the room?” I ask.

He holds the laptop and I hold his hand.

Part of it is, we don’t. Our apartment is teeny. We wish we had space enough for items we don’t use.

“Copper cups,” my boy says, letting go of my hand. “Do you know how you clean a copper cup? Lemon and salt. Dry completely. Never soap. Soap, and they end up looking like the

Statue of Liberty.”

“I wouldn’t bother,” I say.

“You won’t have to. We’ll never own them.”

The other part is, we’ve been living together for three years. We own most of the necessities. A sharp knife, a mattress big enough for both of us. We have a buttercup yellow stand mixer, an enamel-lined Dutch oven, a six-quart slow cooker. We will need gimmicky requests or else have no registry at all.

We do this every time we hear about an engagement. Most registries are publically accessible. I suppose couples are scared to impede gift giving, or maybe they don’t care what people think about what they want.

We also do this when we haven’t heard lately of anyone getting engaged. We try random names until we hit someone real. Robert Jason and Gemma Wolpa want an OXO Good Grip

Splatter Screen with Foldable Handle and Ralph Lauren towels in Estate Blue, Regatta Cream, and Resort Turq. Someone with my boy’s name is marrying a woman who is not me in our state.

They are asking for a ninety-dollar Gourmet Paper Towel Roller.

Actually, I want the copper cups. I like any item that requires careful, elaborate care. At this point, I know my boy too well. Loving him requires little effort.

Or maybe we can list what we really need. Sronyx for me, Lexapro 10 mg for my boy. A trash can for the bathroom. A new litter box. A bulk order of Ultra Ribbed Ecstasy condoms, because my boy is paranoid and insists on redundancy even though I’d prefer just one or the other, the Sroynx or the condoms. A set of winter-ready tires for our possible but unlikely new life in mountains, somewhere. Health insurance. Something to take from each other on our wedding night. Fake blood for the bedsheets.

You’re It

My boy has a skin tag on the inside of his left arm. It is the size and shape of a lentil. It is the exact color of the skin surrounding it. I saw the shadow it cast. That’s the only reason I spotted it at all, the shadow.

Actually, it is not always the exact color of the skin surrounding it. When he takes a hot shower, for a few minutes afterwards, the skin tag blushes bug bite pink.

My boy talked about removing the skin tag. You can buy a can of cold spray at CVS. The tag burns for a bit, then falls off. But I got possessive. I said, “What’s next? Your toes? No need for toes. I only notice my toes when I stub them.”

“I only notice my heart when it palpates,” he said, “But I could do without my pinky toe.

Easily removed. Just a bit of frostbite.”

Do I need him? Literally, not likely. I could keep on. He is more than vestigial, though.

He has a purpose. Not vital, but I would miss him and what he did. If he failed, I would need a workaround, possibly a donated replacement, to live normally.

My boy had a skin tag. Today I noticed it was gone. In its place, a bit of dried blood and the beginnings of a scab.

“You didn’t ask me,” I said.

“I was distracted,” my boy said. “I was teaching. I didn’t know I was tearing it off.”

“Did you save it?”

“No.”

“You didn’t even save it for me.”

“I had to cancel class. The blood was dripping down my arm.”

He mopes when I’m angry at him. It is hard to be angry at my mopey boy.

He is probably telling the truth. He’s stressing over this semester’s teacher evaluations.

Mindless self-harm seems possible. He has scars from cigarette burns on his upper arm, just up from where the skin tag was.

Still, I can’t help imagining him on his back, naked, in a hotel bed, a woman lying on her side beside him, red hair to my blonde. Not thinking of my feelings, both naked on top of the sex rumpled sheets. Full frontal. None of the waist-down decency of R-rated movies.

A few minutes earlier, she came. My boy is a ruthlessly equitable lover. He has trouble finishing if I haven’t yet.

This other woman, she has her cheek on his shoulder and is surveying from that angle the hairless topography of his chest. Without asking, she tears off the tag and flicks it away.

I would have swallowed it. Would have licked away the blood with the sharp tip of my tongue.

Now he is tagless and cannot be returned.

Who or What

Today, on the way to teach, beside a back road, I saw an open suitcase.

I stopped my bike to survey its contents. It was a rollaboard suitcase, black nylon. A stick propped open the zip top. A piece of notebook paper leaned against the stick. Written on it, in double-traced blue ballpoint, TAKE WHAT YOU NEED.

Inside, from what I could see (I did not touch), a can of Pedigree Dog food, a plaid pearl snap shirt with cracked glass buttons, a white stole made of maybe mink, probably faux fur.

The county is in drought. All the items were in good condition. That said, I saw nothing I needed, so I rode on.

I saw the suitcase yesterday, too. Yesterday, there was less inside. The shirt, but no dog food, no stole, no sign.

And I saw it the day before that. Inside, even less, the suitcase empty except for a white tank top and a bag of Haribo Gold-Bears. Not even the stick prop—just the top flopped open into the weedy lot behind the road. This was, I suppose, the foundation of what I would see later.

What’s likely: someone is adding to the giveaway pile. There may be more tomorrow.

What I like to think: someone, traveling backwards through time, today will take the sign, the stole, the dog food. Yesterday, they will the remove the shirt and the stick. The day before that, they will decide they need the gummy bears and the tank top, and they will pack everything in the suitcase, zip it up, and drag it behind them down the pot-holed road.

Granddaddy

We visited him in assisted living. He seemed fine to my adolescent eyes—healthy, mobile, a quick mind. I noted no medical equipment, oxygen tanks, IV bags, or beeping.

I don’t remember feeling sorry for him. I thought it was an invisible illness, or I thought it was between him and his wife, something marital, that kept him from living at home. It is hard to know now if I assumed or if my parents told me that was the way it was, or if he said something, maybe blaming his wife.

I am one of five. Surely someone asked, “Why is he here?”

I watched his TV, NASCAR or college football. I was bored and wanted to leave.

And later, suddenly, when he had no need for assistance with his living, when he moved back home with his wife, my dad’s mom, my Grandmother, I don’t remember thinking the move odd, this healing of an invisible ailment without comment, a forgiveness allowing a homecoming.

I remember white hair buzzed close on either side of a bald dome, or I remember trucker hats with mesh backs and tall, peaked fronts.

I remember him telling me he watched NASCAR for the crashes.

Let’s be honest: I hadn’t thought much about him since he died if you don’t count the time my Grandmother gave me a cardigan she knitted for him: fire-engine red, pearly acetate buttons, scratchy acrylic yarn. It fit me boxily (I remember his pot belly). I thanked her for the sweater but I have never worn it.

In the house he moved back into, I remember the top floor as my grandmother’s, lit by lamp-shaded incandescent bulbs. I remember warmth, pinewood paneling hung with needlepoint samplers she had stitched prior to her arthritis. I remember a tomato-shaped pin cushion. I

remember Coca-Cola cake, and a backyard with red Georgia clay, and tall, branchless pine trunks with bark like cracked mud.

The basement belonged to him, Granddaddy. It was windowless, its drop ceilings inset with fluorescent panels. I was permitted to visit the basement occasionally—thin carpet over concrete, musty air. Down there he kept the items he wanted to save in piles on the floor. I remember papers and manila folders. I remember hoping to find something miraculous but never finding it, though once I did find a collapsible one-legged chair for sitting on sidelines. It is the only thing I remember finding.

Eventually, following Granddaddy's death, my grandmother sold the house and moved to my hometown. Now she lives in a retirement community. No assistance needed, not yet at least.

This summer, my brother got married. After the wedding, standing with my partner on the porch of the Alaskan lodge, I talked with my dad’s twin and his wife. I was feeling good, having drunk a few glasses of beer and delivered my best man speech. For some reason—I can’t remember why—my uncle and aunt and I were talking about my past episodes of depression and current problems with anxiety. I even mentioned the variety and dosage of SSRI I took.

“That makes sense,” my uncle said.

“What makes sense?” I asked.

He looked surprised. “I’m sure your father told you.”

“Told me what?”

“About Granddaddy.”

He had not.

My uncle explained that Granddaddy had suffered his whole life from depression, and that once it had got bad enough to require hospitalization. Afterwards, to maintain medication compliance, he was put into assisted living, the facility I visited as a child.

My uncle said that he had warned his own kids, my cousins, so they would know that depression runs in the family, so they could be on the lookout. He asked his doctor for a low dosage of antidepressant, nothing he’d notice but a baseline defense against the creep of depression.

Starting in kindergarten, my parents sent me to a private school run by our Presbyterian church. They feared the secular education we might receive at the high-quality public schools we were zoned for, sex-ed and evolution especially. They believed in the mutual exclusivity of

Christianity and certain evidence-based conclusions: intelligent design > natural selection, abstinence > contraception. With school days, Sundays, and Saturday church events, I usually spent every day of the week on church property. Summers I went on missionary trips to less affluent parts of the U.S. (Jackson, Mississippi and rural Appalachia) and to church camps to supplement my summertime lack of private school Bible class and church-sanctioned biology.

In late high school, my depression started. It wasn’t much at first. Not acute. I was able to explain the feelings as a symptom of my life at that time.

My interest in literature started around then. A teacher named Mr. (later, when he got his

PhD. in Religion, Dr.) Dark taught me “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” I pivoted sharply from science and my aspiration to be an engineer to English literature, modernist poets mostly: Yeats, Hart

Crane, Auden. I read books on prosody. I bought and half-filled Moleskine notebooks with my

ramblings and eraser-scuffed poetry. I practiced scansion in church bulletins with pew pens— dashes, breves, slashes.

I began to idealize the extensional dread, angst, and mental illnesses of the writers I read, and even began to see those qualities as a prerequisite to literature. I became infatuated with Hart

Crane and Sylvia Plath especially.

Late high school also marked the beginning of God doubts, disillusionment with the evangelical strains of Christianity especially. The parable of the house builders inverted, the foundation of my life suddenly sandy, eroding. This likely related to my interest in literature, to

Mr. Dark especially, who held debriefs and criticism sessions following mandated chapel, and who later published a book titled The Sacredness of Questioning Everything.

Liberal ideology budding, I got caught sitting down during praise and worship, reading a collection of haikus in English translation. The football coach who caught me confiscated the book.

Jake, a close friend, was in deeper than I. We talked about the feeling of it. He described the knife he cut with: small, sharp, easily concealed. I never saw the knife but I imagined a blade like an incisor, good for nothing except what he used it for.

I began cutting myself. Sympathy pains, maybe. I wanted to know what Jake felt. Not much and not deep, but still. I tried, per internet advice, the inner thigh, but this proved too soft to take the dull blade of my Swiss Army knife. I moved to the upper arm. I pushed the short sleeve of my t-shirt up on my shoulder, the way nurses do prior to flu shots, and cut just below the hem. It worked, I drew blood, but in my haste—I’d locked myself in the bathroom I shared with my three sisters and brother—I didn’t cut high enough on my arm. Today when I wear t- shirts the scars peek out, lines of lighter skin overlapping, cross-hatched.

I started smoking too, along with my eighteen-year-old friends, but we smoked wrong, not breathing in after we took drags. The smoke sat in my throat and ruined my voice.

I don’t remember any of this making me feel better, but the scabs on my upper arm and the pack of cigarettes stored in my box spring did make me feel legitimately, authentically depressed. I had proof I could point to.

When the thoughts and acts of self-harm Jake recounted to me became more alarming, I double-crossed him, exchanging numbers with his mother to relay updates on his wellbeing. I felt guilty for betraying his trust, but also in the right. I was looking out for him when he couldn’t.

When I was on a road trip with my family and texting with Jake in a moment that seemed dire, I told his mother where he was and what he was doing. His mother and father kicked down the door to the locked bathroom. He was hospitalized.

Jake is doing well. We talk regularly. Once they got his medications right, there were no further problems, at least that I know of. He lives out in Seattle and just adopted a black lab.

All this may make the depression sound fake, put on, or, at the very least, an instance of cause and effect. I’m doing what I hate to see others do: storytelling the illness. Catalysts, mitigating factors, genetic predispositions—of course, of course—but the beginning and the end is illness itself. The impulse is to narrate, to find the pattern and trace it back to an origin, but this can lead to a misapprehension, the idea that different circumstances would have led to a different outcome. Depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder—they don’t need reasons, valid or otherwise. They make small troubles gigantic, turn lemonade into lemons.

The point is, through all this my parents didn’t know about the depression, about my depressed mood or my bathroom cutting. They only knew about the surface changes, my pivot

from science to literature, my friend’s struggles, and to a certain extent my doubts about

Christianity. Their lack of insight didn’t, however, mean they couldn’t have told me about my grandfather. I know now that they knew about his illness at the time.

I went to college an hour and a half south of my hometown. There my depression changed shape. I began to drink, weekend bingeing beer, whiskey, and whatever else was available.

And I made a new good friend, Stephen. He saw that I smoked wrong and taught me to smoke right. We split packs of American Spirits, the teal variety, and went in together on handles of Evan Williams Green Label and cases of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Stephen and I were around each other enough that this sharing was always equitable, 50/50. He lived in my hometown so even over breaks we were together, drinking, smoking.

Stephen also dabbled in the self-harm I had mostly stopped by then. Less depressive, his variety. More jubilant, testosterone driven, like punching a wall. What we did together: stubbing cigarettes out on our skin. Directions: drag hard until the coal at the end grows hot, tall, conical, then grind down into the skin, twisting. Afterwards, brush away soot, reveal the dot of scorched skin. I chose the upper arm, consolidating scars, though I also have burns on the back of my hand and on the inside of my ankle. When Stephen and I were together, the pain felt brotherly.

In Russian class, Freshman year, my professor pointed at a fresh slash on the top of my forearm. “How did that happen?” he asked.

“Rock climbing,” I said.

I don’t know if the cut was intentional—to the best of my memory I had stopped cutting myself by that time—but I do know that the story I gave, rock climbing, was a lie. I still have the scar.

Once, during the cigarette burning era, at home over break, my mother caught me in the hallway on the way from the bathroom to my bedroom. I’d just taken a shower and had a towel wrapped around my waist.

“How did you get that?” she asked, pointing at a scabbed-over burn on my shoulder.

“Oh, that?” I said. “At a bonfire. One of my friends was waving around a burning stick and caught me on the shoulder.”

Either she believed the lie or didn’t want to pursue the truth. Her questioning stopped there. This, a woman who spent most of her practicing years as a nurse in a hospital’s burn unit.

She offered some advice for avoiding infection—cold water and soap, Neosporin.

At the end of my freshman year, during finals, after not sleeping for a night, I had a manic episode. I paced and smoked on the sidewalk outside the library around dusk. My brain was moving so fast it felt like I was outpacing reality, like I could see the future before it happened. This elation and ebullience alternated with hopelessness and sobbing. Stephen walked with me, smoked with me, talked with me. I remember the sunset, clouds checkered across the sky, fire, blush, blue, one of the prettiest I’ve ever seen.

I ended up calling my parents, who called my doctor, a pediatrician. Over the phone he prescribed Ambien. My parents filled the prescription and drove down to deliver the pills. I took some, slept, and felt better in the morning.

Still, through this, my parents didn’t know. They took the incident at face value, the way my pediatrician diagnosed it: an isolated episode of insomnia. Looking back, I wonder if my parents didn’t see the signs, or if they saw and ignored them.

Once, on our way back to our hometown, Stephen said, “I always have good friends, best friends, but they never last longer than a year and a half.”

He assured me we would be different, but we weren’t. Afterwards, we would meet at parties and swear to begin again but never would. I hardly talk to him.

I began dating my then girlfriend who, seeing what I did and hearing how I felt, called counseling services and made an appointment for me to see a psychologist. She forced me to go.

Counseling and medication helped. 10 mg Lexapro at first, but when that wasn’t enough,

2 mg Abilify on top of the Lexapro. Abilify was first used to treat Schizophrenia, then scaled back to treat Bipolar 1 Disorder, and finally used, as in my case, as an adjunct treatment to amplify the effect of SSRIs for the clinically depressed. Abilify was expensive on its own— three-hundred dollars for thirty pills—but my psychiatrist didn’t like the generic iteration, the version my dad’s insurance wanted me to take. In order to get the name-brand version of the drug, the doctor had to work with the insurance and drug company to push through the right prescription.

This is when my parents found out, when plausible deniability became impossible for them.

My mother, a registered nurse, began calling counseling services, ostensibly to negotiate the insurance issue. She requested unfettered access to my medical records. I wouldn’t give it.

Arguing ensued, between my mother and the receptionist, between my mother and me. I never gave her access beyond what she needed immediately to deal with the insurance agency.

This would have been the ideal moment to mention the family history of depression, but my parents never mentioned it. My mom sent me an article on adrenal gland deficiency, a catch-

all diagnosis widely peddled in alternative medicine. She seemed to categorically disapprove of psychiatric medication.

My father remained quiet on the subject of my depression. Until recently, I don’t remember ever talking with him about it except in terms of insurance coverage, co-pays, generic vs. name-brand medications.

Eventually, I got the Abilify. It didn’t help. It made me feel sluggish and exhausted. I napped for hours. More than once I fell asleep in class, something I’d never done before. So I stopped taking it. My psychiatrist upped my Lexapro dosage to 20mg, the dosage I took until recently, when I tapered down to ten. Back in college, disposing of the Abilify, I noticed I’d been taking it wrong, in the mornings rather than the just before bed as the accompanying leaflet clearly recommended.

Despite all that, I improved. Taking my depression seriously and clinically helped me address it head on, as a disease in and of itself rather than a symptom of life events. After the initial reaction from my parents, my mom especially, they backed off. For a while, when we talked, my mother asked if I was going to therapy, but even those queries stopped.

And eventually I stopped going to therapy. I disliked my therapist. He analyzed missed appointments, late arrivals, any slight mistake I made in the scheduled bureaucracy of my psychiatric treatment.

“Why do you think you arrived late today?” he asked.

“I was running behind schedule.”

“I see you canceled your last appointment. Do you think you’re skipping treatment on purpose? Do you even want to get better?”

When the therapist and I met, we quibbled over logistics and chased subconscious red herrings rather than talking about the feelings that hounded me. I also quit going because I felt stable, or at least more stable than before, and because my therapist looked like Jerry Lundegaard in Fargo. I kept my appointments with the psychiatrist, every three months for prescription renewals.

Not that I couldn’t slip back into those moods and behaviors. Toward the messy ending of my relationship with the girlfriend, I began beating up my knuckles. Not punching walls exactly, because the blows were glancing rather than straight on. I’d find a rough surface, a tree or the sandstone walls ubiquitous on campus, and swing my fist so the knuckles skipped off, abraded, mostly the back knuckles closest to the wrist. The goal of this knuckle-swiping was to cause maximal surface damage with minimal bruising or bone breakage. I remember a sleepless night on a couch in the German House, a language-themed “living and learning community” where some of my friends lived. I remember swinging my fist over and over against the rough polyester weave of the couch next to mine. In the morning, I saw the results, blood stains from my knuckles dotting the cream-colored fabric.

Eventually, I stopped the knuckle-swiping, too. I passed through the breakup. These days,

I don’t feel the same sort of depressed unless I stop taking my medicine. Now it’s anxiety and obsessive compulsive tendencies mostly, washing my hands until they bleed. Not good but better.

The Alaska wedding revelation led me to question my father. We were alone together, driving to a New Year’s brunch with extended family, when I asked what he knew about

Granddaddy’s depression.

“You’re not going to write a story about this, are you?” he asked.

“Maybe,” I said.

He laughed. “Oh gosh.”

Granddaddy’s depression started in his twenties. What this looked like, how my father knew, I don’t know. After my oldest sister was born in 1993, Granddaddy started getting visibly worse. He was in his mid-sixties and had just retired from Motorola, a forced retirement. He and my grandmother had bought a house. My dad drove down to Atlanta with my aunt, a nurse, to help them move. When they arrived they saw how bad off my grandfather had become.

“He wasn’t shaving. He wasn’t cleaning himself. He’d lost weight. You could see it,” my father said, the illness usually invisible, hidden in the head.

Seeing my grandfather like this, my father, his twin brother, his sister, and their mother went before a judge to obtain a court order to have my grandfather involuntarily committed to a mental hospital. They succeeded. Police officers came and took Granddaddy away.

In the hospital, they diagnosed him with depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, and frontotemporal dementia, a condition where the frontal and/or temporal lobes are smaller than normal. He received electroshock therapy.

When they discharged him, my grandmother refused to have him home. She didn’t think she could handle him. Part of her resistance had to do with his medication noncompliance, but another part was the way he treated her, especially his obsession with her spending. Instead, he went to an assisted living facility.

“He was the youngest, most functional person in that place,” my father said.

Eventually, Granddaddy started taking his medicine consistently and repaired his relationship enough for my Grandmother to allow him to return home. Shortly after he moved back, he was diagnosed with sarcoma.

Towards the end of his life, Grandaddy seemed better, more at peace. My father hugged him, told him that he loved him, this despite their previously strained relationship.

A few years after he died, when my grandmother decided to move to Nashville, my father and his siblings cleaned out their parents’ house and the basement beneath. Items they found in the basement:

• Financial documents. Old, sometimes twenty-years plus. His fear: What if I need them? What if someone comes knocking, needs proof?

• A journal of regrets. “He kept a journal of his regrets?” I asked my father. He said, “Not all of them. Just some. I remember buying the house, that was one.”

• Magazines and newspapers, saved for a day when he might want to read them and have the time to do so.

• Office supplies: boxes of rubber bands, Scotch tape refills, staples. These came from Motorola when he retired. My cousin saved them and is still using them in her ESL classroom.

• Food containers, various sizes rinsed and stacked. “If he needed to ship something, he’d have the perfect-sized container.” Empty tubs, Ready-Whip, Country Crock. Un-zen, a collection of containers for potential items. A hopeful clutter? No. The containers, the whole hoard of items, dread-driven accretion.

The siblings rented a dumpster and filled it.

The story my father told was one I’d sensed and seen but never understood as a child.

Now, though, I see the genetic ripples in me. My depression, yes, but also that pile of old magazines, my tendency to save receipts and W-2s, the way I journal regrets.

I also see Granddaddy in my dad. I asked my father if he had any New Year’s resolutions. He said, “I’m going to clean out the garage.” It’s been cluttered since we moved to the house. Some of items he moved there from Granddaddy’s basement.

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” I said.

“This year I’m going to clean it,” he told me.

My mother’s mother died of melanoma. My mother, after chemo and a mastectomy, survived breast cancer. Because of this medical history, I meet biannually with a dermatologist to check my moles. I wear sunscreen. I wonder if this mole has grown, if that mole has always been there. On medical forms, I detail my family’s cancer history, judiciously checking the apposite boxes. My mother insists and I obey.

Earlier this year, I found a mole growing in three dimensions on the underside of my upper arm. Knowing my family’s history, I went to the doctor. The mole that was making me anxious was normal, but the nurse practitioner found a more worrisome point of interest, a mole on my chest with an abnormally dark center. She referred me to a dermatologist.

The dermatologist checked my moles while I sat in my underwear on crinkly exam-table paper. When he wanted a closer look, he shined a penlight on the spot and leaned in with what looked like a jeweler’s loupe to his eye. Working on my shoulder, he said, “I see you’ve had moles taken off before.”

“No,” I said.

“What are these marks then?”

“Burns,” I said, hoping that he wouldn’t ask me to elaborate, which he didn’t.

They biopsied the mole with the dark center, injecting local anesthetic and then slicing the top off with a scalpel. Thankfully, not even pre-cancerous. The scar, on my sternum, is a dot of red, waxy skin. It looks like I stubbed a cigarette there.

Why the double standard? Why did my parents insist on mole checks and due-diligence when it came to the familial threat of cancer but neglect to tell me about my family’s history with depression?

Guilt is one possible reason. The disease can spread in a family. The genetic groundwork is in place. Surely they knew of the ancestral risk factors, the way depression can filter down through the generations while remaining undiluted by the better half of the coupled genes. I have an older brother and three little sisters.

Or maybe they kept quiet for sentimental reasons. Their kids had memories of their granddad. Other than the practical and medical reasons, why muddle those? Why lift the curtain on family drama?

Denial is also possible. No one wants their child to be clinically depressed. Better for their sadness to be a phase, or attention-seeking behavior, or a deficiency easily supplemented.

An alternate diagnosis sidesteps possible guilt, as if not acknowledging its existence would disappear the threat, like the child who closes his eyes and thinks himself invisible. Maybe they believed that pointing out the possibility would trigger the reality.

I want to ask my parents why. This is curiosity only, though. The damage of the withholding is already done and mostly healed. I don’t want to pick the scab.

My sisters and brother need to know, though. I gave my father an ultimatum: If you don’t tell them, I will.

Prescient Quotations from an Advisory Meeting on Life Post-MFA

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