Slaughterhouses
This is an excerpt from my novel, Brenda Corrigan Went Downtown:
As a child, I visited slaughterhouses. They lined a street so wide it could have been a boulevard. The asphalt shone with bloody puddles of sunlight. Trucks and cars backed into the curb for easy loading. Drivers loped determinedly in and out of doors, arms full, faces closed.
I always waited in my father’s car. He dealt lunches to factory workers from the deck of his station wagon, then we’d go to market to buy next day’s supplies. Sometimes I’d bring a book to read, so as not to see the blood. Sometimes I’d close my eyes, lean back against the seat, and dream. That the animals sang, that they played and danced in a happy zoo and these men who paced in blood were, like me, merely visitors.
But I always knew that the animals longed to be free. Their singing wounded my heart and I wished that they would one day trample the bloody aprons and dash onto the wide, free street. Oh what a fairy tale this would make!
Of course, they never strayed. They huddled in grand choirs, scraping the senses of all who still heard.
I learned to chant: “Chop! the chicken head. Ping! the pig is dead.”
Brenda’s 9/11 Dream
This is one of my favorite passages in my novel, Brenda Corrigan Went Downtown — a dream of 9/11 in Washington, DC:
Awash in the news, her former neighbors would converge on the lawn in front of their building, consultants wandering off to Café Deluxe to nurse a cappuccino; retired foreign service officers entrenched, waiting for official word of what to do next. The Romanov heir would twist his rings and murmur memories of his Paris boyhood. The General from the Shah’s army would pierce the air with his foul cigarettes, his wife silent at his side. Nannies would comfort toddlers alarmed by the sudden roar of an F16 . . .
All true and exactly how it happened in real life, when I was a Washingtonian.
What Is Your Book About?
I’ve read umpteen articles about “The Pitch,” but when it comes to answering that five-word query—What is your book about?—my expertise on pitching vanishes. I stutter and stammer and gaze at the ceiling, while trying to compress the story of a captivating woman into a few scintillating sentences.
For I am a writer, after all, and not a pitchman.
I started out in advertising, but that was long ago, in the Mad Men era, and I turned to editing because that better suited my personality—not exactly shy and retiring, but tending to prefer solitary quiet pondering and paring, while leaving team efforts to the unruly.
As a magazine editor in a huge publishing company, I was classified as a “creative,” meaning I was paid less than execs who sold advertising. But I hobnobbed with the latter long enough to learn by osmosis how to pitch.
So why is that knowledge failing me now? Why does it not enter stage front when I am faced with those five little words (not facing, exactly—more aptly, evading), at book sales, when guests take me aside and ask what Brenda Corrigan Went Downtown is about:
315 pages, I joke, then get serious,
a woman coping with a catastrophic event,
the men she’s loved,
her experiences in a career that took her around the world,
her loyal friends and children
Now I’m cooking. Brenda Corrigan Went Downtown is about faith and the lack thereof, what kills faith, what restores faith. It proposes a dilemma: What would you do, dear reader, in similar circumstances? It is about the joys of friendship and children and grandchildren, about love and failed love and failure to love, about loss and death.
“But is he really dead?” I am asked at book groups. “I wanted him to rescue her, marry her, carry her off on his muscular white steed to a land where they will live happily ever after.”
“That is a different book,” I suggest.
“A sequel!” someone shouts. A scattering of applause, big smiles.
“Perhaps,” I grant. “Perhaps I will call it, Brenda Corrigan Came Home.”
Perhaps that will be easier to pitch.
My Lost Boy
When I suddenly birthed a child at home, my husband followed instructions from a nurse on the phone, moving me and the baby to our bed and settling us and the umbilical cord on clean towels. I was in shock and no help at all.
“It’s a boy,” he whispered, shocked as well, as we waited for the ambulance.
In the hospital, I asked my obstetrician to bring the baby to me. He did not. He would not veer from a certainty that it made no sense for me to see a six-month fetus weighing only two-and-a-half pounds, whose life would be fraught with problems had he lived.
He would not tell me what they did with my baby, with Kennedy—that’s what I’d planned to call him (or her), in honor of JFK who only months before had been assassinated.
How could this happen? I asked. What did I do wrong? I had just felt him bouncing around inside me. I was only twenty years old, healthy.
“These things just happen,” he answered. There was no ultrasound yet, no device that would have forecast trouble, only platitudes meant to soothe a distraught girl.
As I left the hospital a week later, the doctor handed me a round packet of tiny pills to be taken each day with strict adherence. The age of simple, reliable birth control had arrived. “No more pregnancies for two or three years,” he said. “Your body has to heal and grow strong. You need to take care of yourself and your husband and Andy.”
Andy. My eight-month-old son.
A year earlier we had moved from Philadelphia to the Washington DC area for a business opportunity that excited my husband. I hadn’t wanted to go. I didn’t want to leave my mother, who, at 40, was coping with brain cancer; our parting had been wrenching and most of me was still there, in her heart and household.
Our new apartment was in a modern high-rise in Hyattsville, Maryland, the only sign of life on an abandoned stretch of Route 1, the wretched, meandering road that preceded Interstate 95 as a means to travel from Maine to Florida. The University of Maryland was about three miles north of us. A mile south was the District line. We crossed it every weekend to visit federal monuments, the White House, the Capitol, Smithsonian museums, a harbinger of what would become, over the next forty years, a life brimming with adventure and learning.
As I struggled to adapt to my stark new environment, these expeditions distracted me, provided a respite from loneliness. Often, we went to the zoo, pushing Andy’s stroller among exotic caged creatures and diplomatic families wearing vivid saris and dashikis, turbans and veils. I would remember those days a decade later upon discovering “Woman at the Washington Zoo” by poet Randall Jarrell.
The saris go by me from the embassies.
Cloth from the moon.
Cloth from another planet.
And I would borrow his title for a play about a young woman lost in futility.
You know what I was.
You see what I am: change me, change me!
A week after my “spontaneous abortion,” my husband gave me a cobalt blue Chevy Nova convertible for my twenty-first birthday, hoping that would cheer me. But I could not stop thinking about my lost boy. There had been no ritual to mark his death, no urn of ashes, no teddy bear in a grave that we could visit. In my mind, he wandered alone in infinity.
Driving aimlessly in my little Nova one day, I began to cry. I cried that night and the next day and every day. My alarmed husband called my doctor, who referred us to a psychologist. “You should both go,” he told us, “because you both lost a child.”
After the first visit, my husband declared himself okay and never returned, but I was drawn to the comfort of Mrs. Osterman’s lovely office and her concern for me. I so hungered for the warmth of my large extended family back in Philadelphia.
We talked about my lost little boy, my valiant mother, my childhood. She counselled me on motherhood and wifedom and steered us toward a community of young families where I would find friends and Andy would have playmates.
With that move, I began to feel capable again.
My equilibrium returned.
The crying time ended.
Andy thrived.
On the death of Desmond Tutu – 12/26/21
I had the pleasure of meeting Bishop Tutu on the morning after his Nobel Peace Prize was announced, in 1984.
He was going to the Washington Post for an interview and I was going to my office next door.
As I am star-struck and given to chatting with strangers, I stopped to congratulate him as we strode past each other.
He clapped his hands and giggled, practically jumped up and down with joy, absolutely adorable. “How do you know already?” he asked.
“It’s on all the news,” I said, laughing with this hero who helped end apartheid in South Africa. A perfect moment in my cache of memories.
When Nelson Mandela was released from prison a few years later, he too was interviewed by the Post and I was one of many who gathered nearby to watch as he entered the building, surrounded by bodyguards.
Working next door to the Washington Post was very exciting.