A Gaggle of People
It’s interesting what happens when you get any group of people together who don’t know each other. There’s that awkwardness where everyone is super polite: “Oh, excuse me.” “Oh, yes, please.” “Is that seat taken?” “My it’s so hot in here, isn’t it?” “Is that your water?” “What time does it start?”
Everyone is polite, on their best behavior, cautious of those first impressions everyone is racking up in their heads. There’s the nearly bald lady who’s peeping out of her eyes, peering cautiously around like a baby bird in a nest. There’s a tall gangly lady, perfectly coiffed gray hair that’s been molded around her head. There’s a well-dressed professional but blousy woman with tired eyes and a pinched mouth who looks like she’s figured out she’s for sure in the wrong group. There are a few women on the side of the table who look like peas in a pod. They’re mid 60’s, and typical of that polite group of women, they are tidying their papers and looking at the floor. Over on the other side sits a tiny thin-haired lady who’s barely cleared her wheelchair, maybe because her jewelry has weighed her down. She’s got a sharp look in her eyes and she’s canvassing the room for anyone who might piss her off or insult her with an Anti-Semitic comment.
I move down the U-shaped table to the back, looking for a place to hide in this brightly lit room. I spot the one man, and pull out a chair next to him. “Buzzards in the back,” I say. He barely glances up, his ice blue eyes nail me with a question. I answer, “I was a teacher; we always called those kids who bee-lined it for the desks in the back, The Buzzards. You know, the cynics in tattoos who just call out rude remarks and bad jokes at the rest of the class.” He pushes his lips together and I think I’ve alienated him, but he says, “Yeah, I teach too.” That was it. Laconic bastard.
I put my huge purse away, dig out my giant water bottle that is not a fancy one, just a re-filled big old water bottle from the grocery store. Everyone else has little Crystal Geysers and a tiny Mandarin orange in front of them. I turn around and there’s a long table with a little bowl of the oranges, another little bowl with Halloween candy, plates, napkins, and a few more bottles of water.
The U-shaped table means we’re all pointed at one another, but nobody says anything. There’s just shuffling, re-arranging, shoe-pulling, hair fixing. I’m nervous because I don’t like groups or people so I tend to be sardonic and slap-happy. I say to Mr. Serious – “Come here often?” He’s already been checking me out so he tries to sound calm, “Monday’s at 6. Sharp.” Ha ha, funny, I fake a laugh. This is when the Memoir Class starts. I look at him to get a feel for his intentions. He’s wearing a baseball cap, so bald. Well- trimmed gray mustache and those blue eyes. Nice face. In front of him he has all of his things in geometric order, all lined up, large to small, pen laying at the ready. An accountant? Nah, they don’t wear baseball caps.
My eyes drift around the room looking for a simpatico, someone who might be a future friend. Doesn’t look good, everyone looks stiff, nervous, guarded.
The teacher blows in and she’s like a resurrected Carmen Miranda without the fruit. She’s loud and friendly, looking around at everyone in the room, making eye contact, waving her arms around. She’s probably late 50’s but has that kind of sexiness that is ageless. She has on a short black shift, and even though she’s got some rolls, her gyrations and syncopations make her look like a belly dancer. She makes everyone immediately feel welcome, like we’ve all been friends for years. She’s open and self-effacing, and asks, “Anybody here in the food business so we can get free food? Free anything?” I love her, everyone does, for this lovely vulnerability.
She makes a point of looking at the roster and then drilling each person until she’s got their name and face burned together in her mind. With about 20 people this all takes her about five minutes. She introduces herself, talks about this Guided Autobiography class, how it was formed and what she expects of us students. She’s a tough cookie, isn’t going to take any lateness, cell phones or absences. If you’re here, you go the distance.
Then she starts in on us. We’ve made little folding name tags, not that she needs them, but she goes around the room having us do the meet and greet by telling our names, where we were born and why we wanted to take this class. I realize right off the bat that I’ve made a critical mistake by sitting here at the end of the U. When she calls on Mr. Serious beside me, the whole room turns to look at us two at the end of the table. I slink down a little. But Mr. Serious, Ken, is a surprise that brings me up to stare at him. He’s articulate, pithy, funny and says no more than the 15 words he’s created in his head for his answer. Everyone else, all the women, take their turns saying the usual things: “I’ve always wanted to write.” “I’ve kept journals.” “I wanted to leave something for my grandchildren.” When it comes to me, even though I’ve been rehearsing something funny and deflective, I can’t think of anything that matches their honesty. I want to say something unique but end up prattling off something similar to what they’ve all said – “I want to write about my life but I don’t know where to begin. Or how to do it. And I need deadlines and structure. Expectations.”
Terri then takes control and tells us about the class, and that we all have “branches” in our lives, times where we were forced to make a decision or change directions. She tells us that our homework for next week is to write about one of these branches in our lives, that we must read it out loud to the group and it can last 3 minutes, not one second longer. There will be no criticism, no cross-talk, or interruptions, but we must read it to the group. This is exactly what I was afraid of. You can write volumes in your head and on paper, but once you say it out loud, it’s up for criticism and derision. I’d rather have people I’ve never met nor will ever meet read anything I’ve written. Anonymous. That’s me.
When we’re dismissed, we file out quietly thinking our own thoughts, fearful and otherwise. We’re still very polite: “Ah, excuse me.” “Do you have enough room?” “Can you get out?”” You forgot your water.” We exit quickly except for the wheelchair lady and the woman pushing her. I make a deft move to get around them so I can make a clean exit.
The next week we’re all together again, sitting in exactly the same seats. We get comfort from such small securities. There’s still the formality, the coughing, shuffling, the straightening. I’m beside Ken again; he makes a fast grin. I hate silences so I say, “Do we get to keep the pen?” (Funny, any group, class or any captive audience will endure almost anything for a free pen.) “I think so,” he says.
Terri tornadoes in carrying her laptop, folders, purse, and a huge smile. She loves this, loves the comfortable control teaching gives. She does her monologue about memoir writing and then it’s our turn. She puts us in pairs and we are assigned to read our three-minute piece to each other. I panic. OUT LOUD?? We have to read out loud? To another person? How did I miss that instruction? My heart rate triples, and I turn bright red in panic. Jesus, I had not anticipated this. I have never before read anything I’ve written to a person. What if they fall down laughing or shake their head in pity?
Gratefully, I don’t have to go first. The topic has been “Branches” so each person talks about a pivotal time in their lives when they had to make a choice and tells how it affected them. One by one, each person reads about their lives, they peel back the time and slowly reveal a decision or event that changed their lives forever. Last week, when Terri assigned this topic, someone whispered, “I don’t have any branching incidents.” I think this was Donna, a meek, almost invisible, lady I’d clumped into the Ladies on the Left group.
One of the Ladies on the Left describes how, at a very young age, her mother contracted polio, and how her father would take her and her sisters to the window outside her hospital room and hold them up to wave to their mother. She talked about how this changed her family dynamic, and how, when her mother returned, things were never the same. Amazingly, another reader told of how his twin brother and little sister also got polio, and how they had to see them from outside the hospital window. These stories happened in the mid 1950’s, I guess, when polio was rampant. The reader’s twin brother died, but his sister came home, only to die later.
Thin Hair talked about having a boring job that only women did in those days, but that she took courses, went to college, improved herself, and finally was responsible for the financial security of her family. She hadn’t thought she could do it and had no support. Interestingly, it seemed she still couldn’t believe she had done it. She was still reticent and apologetic.
Ken told very briefly and succinctly, like a police report, of the time he was on a drug bust with his partner that went south and ended up with his partner getting shot in the head, right through his eye. That was Ken’s branch that led into retirement from the police force. He didn’t say anything about how it affected him, but his sparse writing made it even more stark.
Wheelchair Lady talked about her first husband and then meeting her second husband, who nurtured her and took care of her, and then did the unconscionable thing of dying. I couldn’t quite grasp what the branching, changing event was, unless it was the fact that this man had changed her life and led her in a different direction, into the mercantile industry. I think there was more there than she told.
Some read banal stories of school decisions, career decisions,and marriage decisions with an excitement in their voices that lent their stories more weight. Others read of cancer survival, death, prejudice, dead children, with a remoteness in their monotone voices, made the stories even more poignant.
It surprised me, the comments of the other students. People were supportive, and what amazed me was when they mentioned something about the person’s piece that I hadn’t heard at all. I wanted them to read it again so I could catch it. Why didn’t I hear it? Was I distracted by one little detail that spun my head into a movie of my own making? Was I a bad listener?
And so it went each week, Terri gave us our “Sensitizing Questions” which were questions aimed at getting your memory fired up. We covered Goals and Aspirations, History of Health and Body, Experiences with or Ideas about Death, and Gratitude. Each sheet had a list of questions and story starters. It’s an interesting experience to read the list of questions that acted like triggers, each one generating a trip into your past that brought both pain and happiness. Once you travelled down that old memory lane, it was very difficult to come back to the same person. We think we are formed unchangeably by these histories, yet when we go over them, reveal them in today’s light, we become different again, enlightened in some way.
After only a few weeks, the flavor of the room changed. We’d come in with “Hi Peggy, did your sister come to visit?” “Did you see your grandkids, Joan?” “Donna, did your son get the job?” “Sue, can I get you some water?” We looked into one another’s eyes, and we could see the history, the chance and recovery, the weaknesses, and the perseverance. We knew each other in a deeper way than we knew some of our own family and friends.
Terri told us many of the stories she’d heard over the years, surviving the Holocaust, death, and about a 91-year-old woman who had flown supply planes in WWII. They had all started out sitting in quiet reverie, soaking in the sum of their lives and writing their silent endings. But putting their own autobiographies on paper, reading them out loud, had given them a legitimacy they hadn’t had before. It led them to a new awareness of themselves and their place in history. Now our group joined this fleet of survivors, this brotherhood of people who carried whole lives and stories quietly around inside themselves until they found their voice.
Even though I’ve learned this many times before, I thought maybe now, when I’m standing in line at the DMV, I won’t make assumptions about the drab gaggle of people around me. I’ll know they all own stories, each one as individual and precious as they are.
