Deleted Scene: The Scar

Here’s another section that didn’t make it into Through the Veil. Read it first, and at the end I’ll tell you why I left this scene out of the book.

The Scar

I stayed home with the baby that night. I must have fallen asleep on the sofa, because when I woke about midnight, Todd wasn’t home yet. The gathering at the Manning’s house must have run late, I thought.

While I was putting on pajamas and brushing my teeth, Todd was helping Tim out of the wrecked taxi. A couple of Arab shabab stopped at the scene of the accident to ask if they could help; they took Tim to the emergency room to have his head sewn shut.

When they left the Manning’s house, the guys had waved down a taxi. Tim sat in the front seat, because his Arabic was better than Todd’s. There was a seat belt on the passenger’s side, Tim remembered later, but it was grimy and dusty. He thought briefly that he should put it on anyway, but pushed the thought away knowing that the driver would interpret this as an insult to his driving—and a lack of trust in the will of God.

Todd woke me up when he finally got home, early in the morning. It was still dark, but I remember hearing the birds sing outside our bedroom window. When I turned on a lamp, I saw blood all over Todd’s sandals and a deep gash between his toes, almost splitting his foot for an inch or so. It should have been sutured, but he hadn’t noticed his own injury while he was at the hospital with Tim. Todd’s wound took weeks to heal, and he still has the scar. It’s easy to hide under socks and shoes.

We didn’t see Tim over the weekend, and when he came to the language school that Monday he had a big piece of gauze taped over the wound. When his forehead healed enough he took gauze off, but it wasn’t until the sutures were removed that we all saw the jagged crescent.

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So there’s the “deleted scene.” The guys were in a taxi crash. Tim hurt his head and ended up with a crescent-shaped scar. It’s kinda interesting, but so what? I mean, really, why would this story matter to anyone but our family and Tim’s? I might tell about the accident when we get the old gang together, sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s book-worthy.

As I assembled my chapters for Through the Veil I wanted each memory, each chapter to say something more than, “This happened then that happened, now isn’t the Middle East exotic?”

Ultimately, the taxi accident memory just didn’t make the cut.

Damascus, February 1990

We bumped suitcases up a set of stone stairs, and into the narrow pathway of the Old City. Along with the eleven other Americans in my research group, I followed our team leader, Steve, through a maze of stone and dust, of small doorways and little children. I could not imagine finding my way in or out of these corridors every day for three months, but Steve assured us, "Everyone will know where the foreigners are living. If you get lost, just stop and ask." Two boys playing soccer with a grubby ball stopped their game to stare at our strange procession of suitcases and foreigners. I thought I heard one of them whisper the name of our Syrian host, Abu Mousa.

Steve smiled in triumph as we rounded the turn leading to Abu Mousa's doorway. One by one we passed through the front door and into a wide atrium garden, where Um Mousa had prepared a welcome feast—chicken over rice, with vegetables and pine nuts. We were jet-lagged and hungry, and the chicken was so good. We sat together and ate. A lot.

I remember it was cold in Syria in February in a hundreds-of-years-old stone house with no heat. I remember sneaking up to the rooftop to meet Todd after a day of ethnographic research. I remember weeping three months later when it was time to leave Damascus, the city I had learned in such a short time to love.

Twenty years ago. For every detail I remember there are dozens I’ve forgotten. And for every chapter in Through the Veil there are memories that didn’t make it into the book. In these last months before the book releases (summer 2010) I’m going to post “deleted scenes” from Through the Veil. By sharing these memories I hope to serve up an appetizer for the forthcoming book as well as commemorating the twenty-year anniversary of our time living in Damascus.

First Snow

We’d planned a hike yesterday, but the day was so cold that instead we drove an hour with cousins, one uncle, and two aunts, up to Portland to visit the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.

The first flakes started falling some time between 1:00 and 2:00, and a dozen children rushed out the museum exits to leap and rejoice and catch snowflakes while adults watched from the museum windows. I for one was much more interested in watching the snow come down over the Willamette River than I was in learning how electricity works. Fortunately, the museum has lovely large windows.

By the time we left at 4:00 p.m., the snow was sticking, with a couple of inches on the ground. My girls and their cousins built two-thirds of a snowman on the sidewalk in front of the museum before we insisted they climb into the cars for the hour-long ride home to Newberg.

An hour later we had driven a dozen city blocks through stop-start traffic and hadn’t yet made it to a freeway onramp. Driving wasn’t treacherous, just slow. Todd and his brother Jeff grew up in Indiana, where snowy roads are the norm. We made a bathroom stop and decided to have dinner before making our way to the bridge that would take us over the river and onto the freeway home.

It’s a good thing we ate when we did, because once we got onto the freeway it took us four more hours to drive down to Newberg—usually an hour’s drive, tops.

We found ways to pass the time. When my ten-year-old nephew—son of Todd’s eldest brother—asked Todd to turn up the car stereo and play “something hard,” Todd gave him a choice: Rush, Kansas, or Yes. What ten-year-old knows these bands? The ten-year-old raised by the same man who introduced Todd to these bands thirty years ago, that’s who! “I want Yes!” my nephew shouted enthusiastically.

So we rocked out, cruising the icy freeway at a couple of miles an hour, top speed. When we’d been on the road three hours and were still not quite halfway home, my sister-in-law began to sing, “One thousand barrels of beer on the wall, one thousand barrels of beer … ”

We were warm. Plenty of gas. Todd knows how to drive in wintry conditions, so we weren’t stressed. But it was a long trip and hard for the kids to sit still and not to pick at each other. All of us were relieved to make the final turn into our driveway at 10:00 p.m.—nearly six hours after we left OMSI.

That first hour, when we drove just a few blocks, car length by car length, Todd rolled down his window and gathered a handful of snow from the car roof.

“What are you doing?” I protested. “That’s not safe, Todd.”

He packed the snow, patting it back and forth between his palms as any boy raised in the Midwest knows to do. Then he chucked it at the car ahead of us, the car his brother was driving, with our two older daughters and our niece in the back seat. Todd reached up to gather another handful of snow before he answered me.

“I want them to remember this,” Todd said as he packed the snow into a firm ball. “I want them to tell my grandkids about this day.”

We’ll have to wait another ten or twenty years to know for sure, but I suspect that Todd shaped our girls’ memories of their first snow in Oregon as purposefully and firmly as he packed those snowballs.

Full Circle

During my junior year of college I thought I would need to leave school in order to pay the rent. Before withdrawing from classes, I applied for one more job on campus. A friend had mentioned an opening at the English Language Institute, where international students came to study English before going on to university studies. I walked into the ELI, asked about the job, and was led to a back room for an interview on the spot.

The man interviewing me was somewhat famous on campus. His name was up on posters everywhere, as he was always recruiting native English speakers to be paired with his international students for conversation practice. I’d meant to volunteer but hadn’t gotten around to it. Now I was interviewing to be his assistant.

So I thought. It became clear during the course of the interview that the director was moving out of state and I was interviewing for his position. The job offer came a few days later—unexpected, unbelievable. I finished college because of that job and continued working at the ELI after graduation, right up until I went to Damascus (where I met Todd) and became an international student myself.

When Todd and I married, we moved to Philadelphia with $300 cash and a tiny U-Haul trailer packed with books and a futon. We had an apartment and a promise from Todd’s grandmother to pay seminary tuition, but no jobs. I walked into Drexel University’s English Language Center and walked out with a job. Unfortunately, the job was part-time and just barely supported us. A few months later I interviewed for an office job, working for a Christian radio broadcast. My new boss at the radio broadcast saw writing and editing talent I didn’t even know I had. Thanks, Diana!

Back to the full circle thing. Last summer our girls were part of a drama camp during our first weeks in Newberg, and at the closing picnic I met another parent who works at the English Language Institute at George Fox University. I told him I’d once worked in ESL, and he encouraged me to drop by the ELI once the fall semester was under way so he could introduce me to folks there. Things didn’t come together for the fall semester, but last week I was offered a part-time course load teaching speech (my bachelor’s degree is in speech communications) and a few writing tutorials for ESL students. For the first time since I left the radio broadcast sixteen years ago (and not counting freelance work), I have a job!

I’ll keep up my own writing. I’ll continue freelancing with editing and critique on projects I really love. As I look at the blinking lights on our Christmas tree and the gifts loaded beneath it, I’m thinking about how excited I am to unwrap this neat package that has been placed before me: a convergence of employment doing what I enjoy. Merry Christmas, folks.

The Night in Question

While ironing shirts, I listened to Tobias Wolff reading his short story, “Bullet in the Brain.” When the titular shot was fired I put down the iron and sat on the side of the bed, so riveted by Wolff’s words and images I couldn’t do anything but listen. Then it ended, perfectly.

Wow.

A normal person would at this point breathe a deep sigh of satisfaction, stand, spritz a sleeve, and resume ironing. But I’m not a normal person. I’m a writer.

I had to know how Wolff slowed time, how he revealed character by exclusion, how by the end of the story he made me care so much. To understand his crafting, I would have to see the words on the page. I opened my laptop and clicked to our library’s website to put in a request for The Night in Question, Wolff’s story collection containing “Bullet in the Brain.” Only then was I able to finish my ironing.

Yesterday I dropped by the library with my two younger daughters in tow. From behind the counter the librarian located my request on the hold shelf and pulled out the book. I could see that it was the size and shape of a book you might buy off a spinning book display. Odd, I thought. Maybe they’re marketing literary fiction for the popular market now. The librarian handed me the book and I slipped it into my purse, collected my daughters from the children’s room, and left.

This morning I took the book out of my purse. Something wasn’t right. It wasn’t by Tobias Wolff, for one thing. The title was correct, but the cover image of a windblown couple jolted me. Across the top of the book in serif all caps I read: HARLEQUIN.

"Max Ross spoke coldly, but the flash of heat that seared through his eyes told her he heard her plea."

I took the book back this afternoon, and a chuckling librarian said she’d tell the library where the book originated that their Harlequin is listed incorrectly in the database. “We don’t even stock Harlequins at this library,” she said. We’re classy here in Newberg, I guess. She filed a new request for The Night in Question, but she said chances are good that this same Harlequin title will boomerang right back to me. My very own drama taken straight from the theater of the absurd.

Rain Returns

My weeks-long absence from the blog is directly related to a weeks-long spell of beautiful clear weather here in western Oregon.

When Thanksgiving weekend came and it wasn’t raining, we decided to go ahead and cut down our Christmas tree—quickly, before it starts raining again! Day after dry day we waited for the clouds to take hold and the rain to fall. We’ve had gorgeous dry weather (and a decorated Christmas tree) for nearly three weeks now.

Today the rain is back, tapping on the skylight, glossing the deck, clinging to the bare aspen branches then falling from them like slow tears. It’s midmorning as I write this, but dark enough that our Christmas tree lights look merry, and in their dim light I cannot see the plentitude of needles I know are sprinkled over and around the wrapped gifts.

Autumn’s nearly over and I never did get my extended, dreary, Gothic season. Not that I’m complaining. It’s nice to have expectations turned upside down sometimes. It is, after all, a season for surprises.

Thanksgiving

Todd and I arrived at The Coffee Cottage for the reading Tuesday night. Already the place was packed, but we nabbed a table near the back door. My cell phone buzzed. College friends Joe and Heidi, who live in the next town over, were one block away. I walked outside to meet them and to tell Joe to carry in patio chairs if they wanted a place to sit.

I knew maybe half the people who gathered for the reading, and as I looked around the room, I remembered. On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving a year ago, Todd had an unofficial interview at the school. When we dropped him off, one of the women in the school office told me to be sure to stop at Coffee Cottage.

“Sally, our music teacher is the owner,” she said. “Great place.”

We drove around town—which doesn’t take long in Newberg. Todd’s interview—unofficial, mind you—would last about two hours. The girls and I stopped at a downtown toy store. Walked through Fred Meyer. Drove into the hills and back down into town. Such a gorgeous place, with the fog hanging low in the hills and hints of fall colors still clinging to a few of the trees. But let’s not get our hopes up. It’s not even an official interview. We lunched at Izzy’s, and I looked at my watch. We still had thirty minutes to kill.

After parking in the small lot behind The Coffee Cottage, we walked through light rain and into the coffee house. I ordered hot chocolates for the girls and a coffee for myself. As I put cream in my coffee, I overheard two women at the counter.

“Well, we do have a writing group. Mostly poets.”

The woman speaking looked about my age. She wore an earthy, flowing skirt and her long hair hung loose down her back.

“I can let you know when the next meeting is,” she said. “Enjoy your tea.” And this dark-haired woman with the flowing skirt went to a corner table to eat her lunch.

She’s the music-teacher owner, I thought. I went over and introduced myself, told her my husband was meeting with the headmaster today—unofficially, of course. And Sally seemed to know exactly who I was. Her husband was the writer in the family, she told me. A poet.

After a few minutes I went back to my table where my two older girls were reading and sipping hot chocolate. Before we left to pick up Todd, Sally passed by our table and said something to me—I couldn’t quite understand and was embarrassed to ask her to repeat it, but I think she said, “I hope he gets the job.”

A year ago everything was unofficial and uncertain, trying to contain rising hope in case things didn’t work out. In December came the invitation for an official interview, and in January Todd accepted a job offer in Newberg.

When my turn came to read, Lynn introduced me as a writer with gumption, and I walked up to the microphone, manuscript in hand. I read about that other life in Texas, before Todd’s mom died, about her failing health and our confused expectations and the crazy ways a mother- and daughter-in-law together created a home.

After the reading we walked out of The Coffee Cottage and into the cool night.

“Lisa,” Todd said.

“What is it?”

“I got the job, Lisa. I got the job.”