Nervous About Your Year Ahead? by Judy Fowler

 

 

 

I was paying rent on a place no one would want to live in an area of the country with long, winding roads.

I’d found low-paid temp work with an entertainment agency.

I was training in a small group when the owner got a phone call.

 “What? She tap-danced over a dog and killed it? Okay, I’ll send somebody else right away.” He hung up the phone and looked at me. “Come over here,” he said.

I walked toward him.

“Do you tap dance?”

I couldn’t remember whether I had put it on my skill list when I applied for work.

He explained that a tap dancer had tripped and killed a small dog, and that he needed to replace the performer.

“I can tap dance, but not exactly like a dancer,” I said. “I practiced in my dorm room. I tapped out the routines to Bonnie Raitt singing ‘I Ain’t Blue.’”

“That’ll do, “the owner said.

 He said the gig had already started. I left, with scant time to digest his driving directions. I was wearing a red jumpsuit from the year I weighed my perfect weight.

He had said the gig was for Wounded Warriors.

In my red Volkswagen bug, I made my way “over hill and dale.” I arrived sweaty and distressingly late.

The venue was a rundown library. “Wounded Warriors” was posted on the door to one room, and I went inside.

One man waited in the room. He was the only person attending. Or who had stayed.  

Someone had written “Tap Dancing for Bulimia” on a blackboard. The tall man sat in his chair, and I began tap dancing. To make more of a performance out of it, I sang letters along to my taps: “B, U, L…”. I sweated, worried that when I got to “A,” I would not know what to do next, since I had no idea why I or anyone would be tap dancing for bulimia.

My audience of one waited for me to connect it all up, so I transitioned from dancing to conversation.   

I assumed he was a wounded warrior seeking information. I did what bad lecturers do: I fished for him to tell me about my subject.

“Are you bulimic?” I asked.

           “No.”

“Do you know what bulimia is?”

“No.”

“Okay, well, it’s throwing up after you eat. To avoid digesting calories.” Beneath the thin red fabric, my underarms were manufacturing a visible stain.

“Oh,” he said.

          Why on earth had this assignment fallen to an entertainment temp agency rather than a mental health professional?

“Obviously, I don’t have bulimia,” I said, and indicated my girth. How insensitive! To him, and to sufferers of bulimia. What did he care about my problems? Several times, I looked past him to the corner of the room where the walls joined as I hunted for a word to connect tap dancing and bulimia, with no luck.

After a minute or two, he left.

Back in my car, I realized the word I wanted was “control.”

“For control,” the man might have pondered. “Ah-ha.”   

And maybe he wouldn’t have left as wounded as when he arrived. He might have looked for a book on the subject before he left the library.

I got back to the agency before it closed. My employer, who was also my landlord, asked how it went. “No more animals were hurt?”

“No. There were no animals. You neglected to tell me why I was tap dancing for bulimia.”

He chomped on a cigar and closed his cash register.

“And for Wounded Warriors, yet,” I prompted.  

But he said nothing.

My jumpsuit was soaked with performance sweat. I sighed. “It would have been good if you had told me what outcome we were going for.”

He was writing in a ledger. Everything was about money for him.

But I was an entertainer. “And just one man in the audience. Maybe if I hadn’t been worried about arriving late—if I hadn’t had to tap dance—I might have thought of a way to link an eating disorder with PTSD,” I said.

 “Only one person?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Awkward.” 

That’s how much he cared. I walked out of his office and returned to the basement apartment with its cracked walls and its peeling paint.

Then I woke up.

It was 4:26 a.m. I’d been dreaming. I was in my townhouse in Virginia Beach, and it was the day of the annual Hampton Roads Writers’ Conference.

I made coffee. By the second cup, I saw how the dream covered every anxiety I had about attending the conference. I’d signed up to pitch a book to a real agent, my first pitch. I’d opened myself up with a contest entry about my Dad’s military service in WWII and its impact on the family. I had given up control of what people knew about my life. Was it too personal?

I felt unprepared. I feared the agent would stare me down during my two-minute pitch and leave before I could provide helpful information about my book. My only attempt at preparation was a diet I’d started after Labor Day. I’d gained fifteen pounds.  

The genius of the dream? It used my worst performance experience as its backdrop. Years ago, I drove a children’s theatre troupe to a school. We got there too late to perform because I’d gotten lost on a winding road in Vermont, in the days before cell phones. My cousin had recommended us to all his friends. 

As I drove to the conference, I recalled Dad telling me years ago to “tap dance”—i.e., make something up —when I didn’t know what to do next. 

The conference turned out better than the dream. “Dad’s” essay won first prize, and I “tap-danced” through the pitch for an agent who asked me to submit some pages.

On the awards video, I definitely looked fat. But happy.  

DETECTABLE by Judy Fowler

 

It’s spring—a time when reminders of my annual medical appointments pop up in my text feed like the daffodils outside my writing room window.    

Doctors’ offices remind me of police stations, which remind me of crime fiction. I don’t want to play the protagonist in a real-life thriller if I can help it. Since achieving a certain unmentionable age, when I hear myself say, “Uh-huh. Dr. Smith, Thursday the sixth, 11:45 a.m. Got it,” I know there’s a chance I’ll end up in a specialist’s office.

I recall when my retired inlaws put up a large calendar reserved for medical appointments in their kitchen. Now that I've started highlighting my doctors’ appointments in bright orange, I see why they did that. If I see the appointment coming, I've got a few days to get my story straight before the gumshoe in the white lab coat starts asking questions. 

Despite that preparation time, I always confess to something I meant to keep secret. Maybe it’s the way they send out an informant to put me on the scale just before my interview. It puts me on my back foot so that I feel guilty when I’m left alone in the cold interview room waiting for the lead detective to arrive.

Armed with evidence of my weight, it’s not hard for the investigator to get me to cop to other things, like how much coffee I drink or how little I exercise on the days I write. Unlike a tag team of trenchcoat-wearing detectives with little brown notebooks, the lone medic in white plays both good and bad cop while typing out everything I say.

The detection rate for murders is 90%, but the detection rate for cholesterol must be higher. That’s according to an informal survey of friends my age now. At seven years old, I feared the word “shot” the way I now fear the word “statin.”

My instinct as a writer to say whatever I'm thinking often leads to a specialist referral. For example, a few years back, after an eventless annual physical, I noticed aloud that my previously shapely legs seemed to be “looking more and more like my grandmother’s legs.” Out came the referral pad. As the song goes, the leg thing's connected to a neck thing. Now I’m serving two to five with a specialist whose prescription—after getting a blood sample and checking me for neck polyps twice every year—is for me to drink more water.

Before a friend's primary care physician died a few years back, all the patients received invitations to reminisce at a gathering in a downtown bar. Their final prescription? Get good and drunk. That sounds like a detective to me.

I don't know how these Sherlocks--criminal or medical--feel after another day of uncovering humanity's foibles and weaknesses. They deserve to tie one on at happy hour. It’s nice to know that one practitioner of the art of detection thought his patients deserved that, too.

 

  

WHAT WE'RE READING THIS SUMMER! by the Sand In Our Shorts Gang

It’s July, it’s hot, (in the northern hemisphere at least) and it’s time to grab a good book to read at the beach, the lake, the pool, or in the front porch swing! The Sand-in-our-Shorts writers are here sharing their summer reads with you. Their picks might be your next vacation read— check it out!

Michael Rigg:

I’m not much of a beach reader. Sun and sand and sweat don’t create an inviting atmosphere for reading. (And sunscreen makes the pages stick together.)  But sitting at a beach house in Sandbridge pouring over a novel, with the roar of the ocean as background? Well, that’s a horse of a different color. Especially if there’s air conditioning involved. Next on my summer