This story was first published in the journal Literal Latté. It is included in Helen on 86th Street and Other Stories,
published by Stillhouse Press (www.stillhousepress.org), copyright 2014,
and reproduced here through permission of the publisher.
When I am nine years old I find the
yellowed newspaper clippings. They are all of well publicized divorce trials
featuring mob men and showgirls. The men—with nicknames like Leo the Leech or
Benny the Bull—are pictured full-faced; the women, with their 48-hour figures
spilling out of 24-hour undergarments, are shown to their best advantage, in
profile. The divorce lawyer, always mentioned in the first paragraph, is my
father. Some of the papers that chronicle these trials no longer exist: the New York Globe and Daily Mirror. The clippings are from before my birth.
These articles spark the idea of writing my
own stories, tales of a nine-year-old girl with a lawyer father and scandalous
clients. Nancy Drew, eat your heart out: This is no milquetoast lawyer dad like
Carson Drew, but rather my lurid retelling of public scandal, sensationalist
angles, and sex—or what passes for sex when you’re nine.
I proudly show these stories to my father,
who, when he reads them, shakes his head and tells me: “You’re funny, kid, but
don’t write what you know.” I realize this means he doesn’t want me to write
about him.
At twelve my parents exchange their city
apartment for a house in the country and we get a different view of the Hudson.
It is the year I learn the meaning of the word “disbarred.” Because of this
unplanned midyear move and a lousy public school system, I find myself the only
Jew at Sacred Heart Middle School, an all-girl affair that is terrifying at
every turn. After my first day of school I tell my father about the life-sized,
half-naked man nailed up in the entranceway. “That’s what they do to Jews who get
a big head,” he tells me. “Watch yourself.”
At the height of this preadolescent
angst I get the idea to write to Woody Allen. After all, who better to relate
to my sense of feeling out of place? I have just seen Annie Hall and I am convinced Woody will understand. I write to him
about my recent exile from the city, my parochial school experience, the works.
I even send along a picture of me in full Annie
Hall regalia, wearing my father’s tie and vest and a hat I bought at a
church bazaar, for good measure.
“You’re just a young girl,”
everybody says. “Why would he write back to you?”
Two weeks later there is a
handwritten reply from an Upper West Side address—of course he’s always happy
to hear from a fan! Have I read Kafka? Have I seen Bergman? This is decades
before movies on demand; I have no prayer of seeing Bergman. The movie theater
in my town has been running The Sound of
Music for about six weeks straight. I read Kafka and write an in-depth
analysis—“I think he’s very funny.” Woody writes not to worry about Bergman,
that he would be happy to take me to a movie when I come to the city. He also
tells me about a film he is making with another twelve-year-old girl, Mariel
Hemingway. We correspond for a while and I decide I can trust him with my stories,
romantic tales of a twelve-year-old girl who has a famous movie director as a
pen pal. I receive his last note after I send those stories, a postcard from
L.A. On it Woody writes: “You’re funny, kid, but don’t write what you know.” I
realize this means he doesn’t want me to write about him.
At twenty-five I am four years older than
my lover’s daughter. My lover is a poet who studied at Kenyon at the slippered
feet of John Crowe Ransom, and with a cranky Robert Frost. After Kenyon, he
went on to divinity school in New Haven. He can actually marry people in the
state of Connecticut. Maybe that’s why the whole time we’re living together we
never leave New York.
We break up over Mexican on Bleeker
Street. In the background there is a roving mariachi band, moving stealthily
from table to table. Behind us a group of NYU frat boys, who think they
recognize the “Frito Bandito” song, start singing. While I am trying to listen
to words that make no sense—“Timing, not working out, you’re too young”—the
boys chant aye yi yi yi in the
background, like some kind of crazed Greek chorus.
During this, our last conversation,
our last meal over Mexican, my lover confesses to accidentally finding my journal, one I placed behind a bag of
potting soil under some cleaning supplies in back of the utility closet. My
journal is filled with stories of a young girl who lives with a narcissistic
poet in an undersized apartment in New York. One of the last things my lover
says to me as he gets up to leave the table is: “You’re funny, kid, but don’t
write what you know.” I realize this means he doesn’t want me to write about
him.
So,
now I am thirty and living with a scientist who plays the piano, translates
French literature for fun, and teaches me to bake bread—warm yeasty loaves that
sit on the kitchen counter in the house we share. I live on a street that
doesn’t run in cement blocks, with trees and lawns and homes with more than one
room. And I begin to write again. This time, I write in the voice of first
person witness—urban stories of single women, quirky narratives of young girls
who love houseplants. The scientist reads these and says to me: “You’re funny,
but why don’t you write what you know?” I realize this means he wants me to write about him. But by this
time it’s too late. I have learned to combine yeast, flour, water, and salt:
the basic elements that ferment and bubble and bake into something that
resembles none of its murky beginnings and yet tastes only like truth to the
mouth.
*****
THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY
By
Meghan McNamara, Director of Media and Communications, Stillhouse Press
I
was first introduced to Wendi Kaufman by Dallas Hudgens (Stillhouse Press’
founder, and publisher of Relegation Books) and Scott W. Berg, both of whom
attended George Mason University’s Creative Writing MFA program with Wendi and
co-founded the Rotisserie Writers Group, which met for the better part of 20
years. It was mid-June and we had just founded Stillhouse Press six months
prior and were in search of our first book. Dallas, who started Relegation
Books with the goal of publishing established writers who have had a difficult
time finding a place for their work in a larger publishing house (a goal which
Stillhouse very much supports and hopes to embody with more emerging writers),
had suggested we consider Wendi’s manuscript. Despite finding success
publishing many of her stories, Wendi had struggled for several years to find a
publisher for her full collection.
Immediately upon reading Wendi’s
manuscript, Stillhouse’s Editor Marcos L. Martínez and I were struck by the
power of her narrative voice, her dark humor, and her range. We agreed that Helen on 86th Street and Other
Stories would make a perfect debut publication for Stillhouse Press. Of
course, we also knew that this book wouldn’t be like other that follow. After
battling cancer for nearly four years, Wendi’s doctors told her in early July
that her treatment was no longer working and that she had perhaps only weeks to
live. With that in mind, we desperately wanted Wendi to have a chance to see her
book through to publication.
Over the course of that summer, I’m
not sure how much any of us slept, ate, or did anything except think about
making Wendi’s book. It’s nothing short of a miracle that we were able to take
it on at the end of June and turn out a complete book just two months later. I
will say that Wendi had a lot to do with it. I have never met someone so
driven, so enthusiastic. Her energy, even at the end of her life, was
contagious. She had this remarkable ability to get people excited about reading
and writing and supporting other writers. And without that ebullience, I think
the months that followed would have been exceedingly more difficult.
We received the first copies of Helen on 86th Street and Other
Stories in our offices on the same morning that we first learned Wendi had
passed. Like her stories, there is a certain sorrow that comes with knowing
that Wendi never had a chance to see the finished product, but she had a hand
in nearly all the elements of the publishing process that preceded it and
there’s something really special about that. It was like she had left us, only
to come right back and say “but look at this beautiful book!”
Like
many writers of fiction, several of Wendi’s stories are based on real life
experiences and hard truths. There wasn’t a single topic she was afraid to
tackle: from infertility and infidelity to death and heartbreak. When I read “True
Confessions of a Bread Baker,” I see
so much of Wendi in the narrator. Wendi loved to write stories with an
authorial first person narrator. She loved to write stories about women, women
like herself, women true to life. Real
women. In this story, we see perhaps the truest elements of a writer’s
struggle: point of view and voice. Wendi wrote through her “murky beginnings,”
and what we are left with—an economically wrought story, a beautiful
collection—certainly “tastes only like truth.”
*****
ABOUT WENDI KAUFMAN
Wendi Kaufman's fiction has appeared in The
New Yorker, Fiction, and Other Voices, and her stories have
been anthologized in Scribner’s Best of the Fiction Workshops, Elements
of Literature, and Faultlines: Stories of Divorce. She received a
literary fellowship from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, was the winner
of a Mary Roberts Rhinehart award for short fiction, and a Breadloaf Scholar in
Fiction. From 2005 – 2009, Kaufman curated “The Happy Booker,” a prominent
Washington, D.C.-based book blog, and was a frequent contributor to The
Washington Post and Washingtonian magazine. She graduated from George Mason University's
MFA program in Creative Writing. After a prolonged battle with cancer, Kaufman
passed away in Aug. 2014. Helen on 86th Street and Other Stories (Oct. 2014) is her first full-length
collection.
*****
ABOUT STILLHOUSE PRESS
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