Is there anybody in there?

Two o’clock in the morning—my very own witching hour—is the only time I’m compelled to write anything. At this time what vexes me seems more incomprehensible and permanent, and I start to think that each of my eyelashes represent some each question I cannot answer. One by one I pull out my lashes, eventually accumulating enough to build a tiny hair-house, or on less vexing nights, the shape of a heart, or a star. Tonight I stopped after just five lashes because this can’t go on forever, so I lined them across my wrist to look like some long forgotten scar, and I climbed the stairs to my office to write about it.

Here are just a few of the terrible eyelash questions: Why haven’t I talked to Lala in over six months, and why does this pattern recur so often throughout our lifelong relationship? Does this make me a terrible granddaughter, and why am I even asking this compulsory question when of all questions, I know the answer to this one? Why have I convinced myself, over the past few years, that I hold exactly zero skills and do not really know how to do anything meaningful?

Why have I been in a super semi-funk since the election, and does this correlate to my recent addiction to the card game Free Cell? Why am I so worried about God lately, or god, as I write him, and why does any form of church feel like it could never, ever be the answer? Why does my house seem to be out to get me, and by that I mean why did the water heater pipe burst so suddenly and when I was in a perfect state of drunken serenity, and why did—just a few days later—I go to the gas station around the corner and return to my parking spot behind the house to see a fifty foot pine lying where I’d just minutes ago been parked?

Why do celebrities keep dying strangely and regularly, and why does it affect me so? A sub-question—did celebrities die in my youth, and if they did, as I’m sure they did, was it that I didn’t understand celebrity or that I didn’t understand death—or both? Have I gotten over my carjacking a year ago, and though I know those boys repeated ad infinitum, “Let’s pop her,” did they actually have a gun, and does that matter? Why is it that, though my mother is one of my dearest friends, I am incapable of being completely honest with her, or she with me, and why can’t I remember what type of mother she was to me twenty years ago (because I suspect it’s a lot different from the way she is now)? Why do I want to love on Brock one moment and, sometimes, in the very next moment, feel miles and miles from him, marooned somewhere not-so-nice, and lonely? Why do I zone out when I’m trying to learn a specific piece of information that I’m earnestly interested in?

Why am I not always so jazzed about nature, and why, when I am, can I not remember the names of any plants or animals I’ve tried to learn? Why didn’t my mother teach me a saleable skill? Why, lately, in conversation with good friends I feel totally comfortable with, do I lose any articulateness I thought I had, and forget simple words and have to forgo certain sentences and ideas altogether (like last weekend, with Amy, I forgot how to say, “imbedded,” or “indelible,”…I forget which). And are the answers to many of these questions so simple to answer, so clear that I’m the secret laughingstock of the thought community? Is everyone besides me in on this whole life thing?

See, I can make a brick house of my eyelashes. Any of these subjects can get me blinking and my stomach gurgling for all these blue-night hours, but I think what’s most troubling me now, at this moment, is that I graduated with my MFA over four years ago and have very little to show for it. I’m maybe 8,000 hours of pure unadulterated work away from completing my book. Since receiving my degree I’ve perhaps put in five hundred hours. Perhaps. I’ve completed two polished chapters, published one of them, and almost finished a new six-page chapter that I gave up on after two weeks because even I wasn’t buying it. Which begs the question: was the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing just the way I spent some time a few years ago? The ticket to a lifetime of a series of temporary teaching gigs scattered across these States? I know, I know: more questions. And writing is to some degree supposed to arrive at some significant answers, and judging by the vast array of questions I have, my purpose in composing this won’t likely be achieved.

But back to the MFA, or the book it inspired. Sometimes I think I can just will it to be and not put in those thousands of hours I know it needs. Funny, but I’m sure I’ve worked at willing it in my mind for as many hours as it would have taken to concentrate sincerely and worked on—and possibly finished!—the damned thing.

Here’s what my reader might not know about the memoir I’m writing about my life with my grandmother, Lala: if the book ever gets finished, it is likely to be good. It is not false modesty to say that this is not because of any genius writing skill of mine; it is just that living with Lala was that much of an adventure and her character that compelling.

For a moment, imagine the nonfiction section of the bookstore. There lie biographies of war heroes and presidents and pundits and, occasionally, a regular old person who’s written a good true story. Imagine pulling down an unfamiliar title by an unfamiliar author, and finding out some of what’s contained on the inside by reading the back flap. There it says the main character (also known as the real person, the hero, the grandmother):

· once hid in the trunk of her husband’s car because she knew he lied about where he was going, and sure enough, he was attending the wedding of very woman he cheated on her with—so she surreptitiously got out and, mid-ceremony, attacked both the bride and her husband

· taught her five-year-old granddaughter (incidentally, that’s me) that, in life it’s okay sometimes to take it in the ass—literally—because, hey, that’s how she got her first car…and it played “La Cucaracha”

· taught her young granddaughter to steal from the five and dimes because they were too capitalistic, and that was sinful, and they were all white men who didn’t give a damn about anybody anyway

· breast fed her granddaughter--the me of the story

Intrigued? This isn’t even one eyelash of the story. Each time I relate a Lala-anecdote to anyone, either verbally or written, they are fascinated. More Lala, they say, more you-and-Lala. Why are you telling this? they ask. How does it end? More questions, this time from the outside.

I’ll try to answer at least these and hope they serve as a sort of temporary conclusion to this piece of writing. I began telling the story of Lala and I because I needed a subject in a workshop and was asked to relate a unique family event or ritual. Now I can’t remember the contents of that very first piece—maybe Lala’s insistence that I potty train on the dining room table, or her sneaking me out to drink café au lait and eat beignets on Bourbon Street on so many middle of the nights. Whatever I wrote I found that for the first time in my life, I had an audience. Most members of my workshop thought Lala was a terrific character but a bit horrible, bordering on abusive. I realized that, through their white-toast lenses, much of my audience might see her this way. But they were wrong. She was and certainly still is difficult, but she is a force. She’s one of the mightiest people I’ve met. And she loves me with a power that is suffocating and almost sick. Still I get her love and she gets mine.

Why, then, the trouble with talking to her? This also converges with the question of how this story, this book, ends. These are the questions that keep me up at night, keep me here with you right now, whoever you are. I simply do not know. Possibly it’s difficult to be loved in the way that she loves. I’ve always been curious about why she ruled iron-fistedly with her own children (beat my mother bloody with iron hangers, Mommie Dearest-style, on more than one occasion), but with me she was soft as a doe. Really, she loved and hugged and kissed too much. Hugged and kissed always. Kind of like I do now. One quality I own that I’m aware of is my insatiable desire to please and to be loved. If I’m watching television with my husband and something on it makes me laugh, I defer to him with a sidelong glance—is he pleased? Does he love what I laughed at, love my laugh, love me for laughing at it? What is his reaction to me? These questions possess me at any given daily life moment and they stay enough for me to type it here right now. I cannot possibly imagine the pressure I put on him to adore me, until I think of Lala. Think of her looking at me while I’m putting food away at her apartment, going to the bathroom with the door open, or folding her clothes. Her, looking at me, and surely thinking, How much does Brooke love me? Can she possibly know how much I love her? Why can’t she see my heart beating out of my chest? Only she’s thinking all of this in Spanish. And it's up to me to translate all of it.