JUST AROUND THE CORNER: AND SOME OTHER STORIES ____________________ A University Thesis Presented to the Faculty of California State University, East Bay ____________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in English ____________________ By Fordy (Stanford) M. Shoor II December 2018 i JUST AROUND THE CORNER: AND SOME OTHER STORJES By Fordy (Stanford) M. Shoor II Approved: Date: I I 'if j 1.--/ i / ~D j $; t I ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments iv Day Camp 1 Wall-to-Wall Carpeting 29 The Five Ball Cascade 33 Save the Bay! 59 Good on Paper 80 Checkout Counter 97 Just Around the Corner 124 Manicured 172 A Last Minute Trip 193 Pile-Up 199 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author would like to acknowledge for the development of these stories professors Stephen Gutierrez, Jaqueline Doyle, Susan Gubernat, Douglas Taylor, Georgina Kleege, Leigh Burrill, Melanie Abrams, Eric Pape, John Campion, Kirsten Tranter and Benjamin Hale. Colleagues Ali-Jones Bey, Natasha Von Kaenel, Brendan Nystedt, Marisa Gomez, Katrina Wedding, Institutions Sarah Lawrence College, West Valley College, University of California Berkeley and California State University East Bay Literature and Writing Workshops. The Summer Creative Writing Program at UC Berkeley, Atom and Arroyo Magazines. Family Brittany Fajardo, Stan Shoor and Laurie Duckham Shoor iv 1 Day Camp More than any game, the campers prefer “Murderer”. To play it, they need to be lined up along the fence or handball court, as counselors choose a secret murderer and a public detective. The murderer will never reveal himself to the detective. They’re at a party, circling each other, shaking hands in brief introduction before moving on to the next stranger, often meeting the same person in repetition until the game is over. The murderer operates silently, squeezing hands or tickling wrists as indication, causing the victim to die after three more greetings. The detective is granted only three accusations before the murderer exposes himself. They clasped their hands over their eyes as the counselors make certain the children left no fissures. Maria paced behind them to select roles. Jonah scraped his Birkenstocks to cover her tracks. She touched one girl’s head and, after a pace, a boy’s. “We have chosen a murderer and a detective. Josephine will be the detective.” Maia exclaimed. The line broke and they began shaking hands in circle between Maria and Jonah. Ricky raced over to me, waving his ball-cap. In shallow breaths, he called out: “Caroline” “Ricky, get back in line and close your eyes.” His hat obscured his face as he trotted up to me. “I can’t hear you with your hat over your face.” His eyes seemed pinched and sallow, penitent, until he lowered the hat, and a grin peeked out. 2 “I always know who the murderer is.” “That’s why you cover your eyes.” I rubbed his bristled head. He took the hint, closed his eyes, shielding his face with his cap, before leaning in to whisper: “There are cheats for this game. Do you want to know how I always know the murderer?” I whispered back, “No,” cracking a mona-lisa smile. To tell the director how you cheated; that took balls. Or trust, at least. “I can see through the holes in my hat.” I peeked into his sweaty cap, through the vents to see the world moving in a vague kaleidoscope. It wasn’t that clever, but still, he’s a clandestine little mother-fucker. “Come on Ricky, that’s cheating.” Almost imperceptibly, he shrugged his shoulders, as if he hadn’t heard at all, and runs back to meet the other groups. Within five minutes, most of the group members had played out their theatrical deaths and lay giggling, more or less, in a pile. They failed to guess the murderer. I’ve never met anybody who relishes dying as much as nine year olds. I never could have been a camp director before. It was harder to do everything sober. They said a lot in those cheap-coffee, mothballed church basements, those waxed linoleum community event rooms or the sterile latex treatment center rooms. But they never told me I wouldn't be able to do half the things I did before, and could only do 3 them half as well. I'm sure that works for them, especially when I’m there to work for their mental health. That's not happiness. It's settling. The owners embody the Silicon Valley mission: affecting change with minimal accountability. Over coffee, they spoke with a seeping affability that casts an adequately honest demeanour. By default, the job was long hours, little pay and brought a high turnover in employees. They organized the hiring process this way: get ‘em young, get ‘em energetic and desperate. So they don’t have a rigorous screening, which works for me because nobody needs to be seeing my pictures or posts. I don’t think I could in good conscience be in charge at any other camp. The Petersen’s company expanded aggressively last year, in all directions across three states. But it’s secondary to their main focus. They write scripts for PBS programs, and have spin off books and other merch. So, they had set up the camps as largely a way to promote, and commit market research on the children. Ingenious. Children’s media is a pretty solid racket. Every school I’ve ever worked at has had a stage. Some of them have two, usually a wider one with a higher platform and a lower elevation so the little ones don’t trip or, if they do, don’t fall very far. We sat cross-legged on stage during our first orientation, in a circle. We did name games, simple improv games that work alternately as teambuilding exercises. I get we needed to build a rapport quickly. Theater people were good with this interactive level. I had been a stage manager in high school and noticed that thespians spent most of their 4 time on stage. Warm-ups always happened on the stage. If somebody was watching a performance, it was usually from the side, not the audience. They reviewed the structure of the camps, with each daily module consisting of a meeting at 7:30am, arrival at 8:00, morning assembly at 8:10, four rotating modules of Writing, Arts and Design, Music, and Stagecraft, with obligatory lunch and breaks in between until a 3:00 pick-up time. It’s good summer work. Especially for teachers. Like school except without the unaccounted lesson planning and homework hours that made me leave fourth and fifth for third grade. The Auteurs’ Studio provides some of the lesson plans, but use a fair amount of my language arts plans. That way I get some input and can work how I please. I get some experience with 1st and 2rd graders for my new position next year. Two less hours at school. About the same pay. It’s Monday of the final week and Malcolm still walks through the door like he isn’t allowed in the teacher’s lounge, ducking his head, awkward smirk. He’s senior at Stanford, studies theater with a major in rhetoric. He’s overweight, with thick, well-styled black hair cut short, and a small goatee, cut longer to narrow his round face. Yeah, he’s just a counselor, but everything felt like home by the end of last week. I admit, it was a weird the first day, and when Malcolm first asked if we could use the room, even I felt the need to ask somebody. I barely felt comfortable in my any of schools’ lounges. Carl jingled his ring of keys, “well, you’re teachers, aren’t ya?”, I stopped, realizing it was rhetorical and smiled affably. 5 The lounge was situated in the middle of the parish, overlooking the playground. I recognized the layout immediately: oblong table in the center of the room surrounding by a horseshoe kitchen and the inevitably repurposed child-height circle table and chair. We tucked our boxes in the back closet, but even in the summer, there were carton piles and to-go containers leftover from the school year. The teachers fled that last bell faster than the students; a subtle reminder. I wasn’t a great actor, but talking with parents were some of my best performances. I played relatable/ invested/ perceptive/ professional/ capable/ yet fully- formed quirky very convincingly. By the end of the day, my eyes had cleared up and the anxious demeanor had faded down to a normal adult worn by another workday. Parents loved my apparent honesty. I truly loved their kids, but really related more to them than the parents; kids aren’t innocent at all, but their parents definitely shape the direction of the corruption and the blinders of their entitled existences. And for that, I revile most of them. There are these memory lapses. Shitty sleep. After long days and dehydration, even the nights are punishing. It’s like I’m sleeping in an oven that just started venting. It cools off right before I wake up. At morning care today, Seth ran up to me, nearly wailing. “Miss Caroline, they’re making pecan pies and they shouldn’t”. After the third day, some of the kids turned the sandbox into a bakery, prepped for a service job down the road. “No, remember: we share the sandbox.” 6 “But they’re mixing tanbark in the sand,” he pointed back to his exhibit where Ricky grabbed handfuls of tanbark, handed them to Jillian, and she placed them into a grey pan shaped pie.