To the Center - Teaching Autoethnography: Personal Writing in the Classroom

William Rossi

It wasn’t that I hatedthiscar ride; it was the fact that I hate any car ride over fifteen minutes. Yet still, an argument ensued about why we have to go and what exactly we would be doing once we got there. Then my mother snapped back with a response about my father, and his “facility,” figuring once my brother and I got confused we would stop arguing with her. This was the first trip of many and it was the longest. We left the house late because my mother had to toggle getting my brother and I ready. It was too early, especially for a day when I didn’t have school.

It was Saturday, the day for families to visit the patients: we only ever visited on Saturdays. To my surprise, the facility wasn’t a huge brick building with a nice silver and granite sign adorned with a palm tree. Instead it looked like a residential community center, like the one I used to visit my great-great-grandma in when she was on hospice. There were two small buildings; one was full of offices, comfy chairs, and motivational posters. The other was where the patients lived. It was a small building that made a U-shape around an ornate garden. There was a sizeable waterfall in the center, surrounded by bright green shrubbery that always looked the same. The rooms were all dull shades of blue, the stable color palette used for the facility.

My mom parked in the gravel parking lot, and took my brother and I out of the minivan. Her light- brown hair got caught on her sunglasses as she slammed her door shut. She delicately pulled them from her face and untangled her hair, while she shuffled through the gravel kicking it around then complaining there were rocks in her sandals. We huddled into concourse of the center where we heard the low, monotone beginnings of a prayer. In a drab unison, “In the name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit” echoed out of the small rear door to the gathering room.

“Goddamit. We’re fucking late,” snapped my mother as we crept through the white paneled door. In the large square room, we saw an array of other children who were all seated on the floor in front of their parents. Everyone else sat in chairs that lined the walls. We found our seats next to my father who was relieved to see us after our delay led him to believe we weren’t going to come. He stood up to hug us, his tall and lanky stature towering over my brother and I. He wasn’t shaving in rehab so his kisses were scruffy. His stomach protruded his waist in a hard, solid bubble, but it contrasted his skinny silhouette. He had the same “beer belly” all my uncles had, protruding only forward and not out toward the sides. His hands were thick, unproportional to the rest of his body. They were the hands that built the tire swing in our yard, the hands that fixed boats and cut meat, the hands that held ours when we crossed a street. His hands were somewhat unsteady, along with the rest of his being. It wasn’t a shock, or a shake, but a shiver. His body trembled in small jolts of muscle tension as we sat throughout the meeting.

He was always happy to see us, because it was those Saturdays that we were able to see him for a few hours every week. It was those Saturdays that kept him going through the 3-month process. The gathering consisted of men and women discussing their triumphs, and downfalls. They shared the best techniques of overcoming the battle, and told of ways to persevere through the challenges of withdrawal. Sometimes the family members spoke alongside their loved ones and sometimes even the leader of the center would join in the conversation. This was the solemn melancholy that began every Saturday and it remained stagnant throughout the duration of my father’s rehabilitation program.

My father’s roommate, Mike, sat with my brother and I while my parents sat in a small room in the

other building. He told me how he plays his small guitar a lot when he’s bored, or when he needs to take his mind off things. The same “things” everyone was trying to keep his or her mind off of. My brother sat and toggled with a leapfrog toy as we waited for the return of my parents. My parents sat through a half-hour-long initial therapy session, while I plucked the strings of the guitar. They met with the director of the program and then the special counselor who would specialize in my father’s therapy sessions. He would meet the personal counselor shortly after the director finished his speech on the benefits of the program, the success rates, and the payment plans.

We stayed in the room most of the time. If it were ever nice outside, we would spend time in the grass yard. As the first month passed, my father’s wall became decorated with postcards, letters, and photos exchanged with the members of his family. This mural of memories served to keep his thoughts positive and unwavering. Throughout the three-month program, he became humble and vulnerable. He wasn’t as stern as I once knew him as. A stern where muscles would tense, but his arms wouldn’t swing. Where the authority came up from his throat, like a vomit of demand and muted aggression. His progress to transformation began to impress me. Not enough to transform my opinion, but enough to make me question how I now felt about him. This place, where he remained for three months, had changed my father. It stripped him of his firm shell and diluted the heroic vision of my father that always clouded my mind. My father was not a villain, because although his actions might project otherwise, he was truly ordinary. He made a mistake; he was conflicted, and in constant war with an affliction deemed hereditary. This place had taken my father from his demons and reinvented him. For a while he was actually unrecognizable.

The center was where my father learned the twelve steps to a better life. There he learned the prayer to combat his desire for toxic sips from green glass bottles. It was there my father learned how to control his temptations and comprehend the consequences of his actions. This center was where I first saw my father cry. It was where I first understood what had happened the night a couple weeks ago when my brother and I were taken across the street to stay with the neighbor for the night. We carried over our blankets and pillows, laid on the couch, and listened to my mom yelling. She was angry, upset, and distraught. She stood on the front stoop while my father lurked in the garage. He rummaged through his crafts and tools, not to avoid my mother, but to hide his embarrassment. My eyes welled from severe allergies to the cats my neighbor bred, and I sat up watching the red and blue lights reflect around the room. Rhythmically they danced against the wall till I heard three doors slam and the lights descend back into the darkness they came from.

And there I was, in my father’s 3-month crypt, grasping the fact that the incident was a drunken mistake. I had experienced the fourth step of my father’s drunkard progress, drunk and riotous. He was not the man that taught me how to ride a bike, to catch a fish, or to throw a ball to the dogs. He was his own father; repetitive in the nature of DNA. Repeating the steps that sparked the cancer in my grandfather’s liver; the cancer that killed him just before I was born. It was an addiction to malts, liquors, booze, and brews; little glass bottles of dissatisfaction. A battle I too may have to come to terms with in my future. That’s where, unknowingly, our relationship changed; that’s when my father and I lost our bond.

Discussion Questions

• Why would somebody want to read this piece (the “Who cares?” factor)? • Can you clearly identify the author’s intention for the piece?

• How well does the author support the intention of the piece? Cite specific details that support or take away from the author’s intention.

• Is there information missing from this piece that would make its intention clearer? What else would you like to know?

• Do you trust the author of this piece? Why or why not?

• How clearly does the author establish a sense of setting/space in this piece? Cite specific details that support your claim.

• How clearly does the author establish characters other than the self in this piece? Cite specific details that support your claim.

• Did you learn anything new from reading this piece? If so, what?

• Are there particular passages with engaging language/description that stood out to you? Describe the appeal of these passages.

• Would you read more writing from this author? Why or why not?

Magdalene Moore

Sanitary napkins are to be rolled in tissue three times before they are placed in a garbage pail so that they become unidentifiable among the rest of the trash. This is partly for sanitary reasons, but the reason my mother stressed was that other people in our house shouldn’t have to see menstrual pads. When I was eleven my cousin told me about the menstrual cycle because her mother had told her about it and, feeling betrayed that this seemingly impossible, repulsive thing was going to happen to me and no one had so much as mentioned it, I cried. She showed me diagrams of how a tampon was to be inserted in an American Girl book on women’s hygiene that her mother had bought for her. My mother came home with the same book from a public library a few months later but I told her that I already knew about the menstrual cycle so we didn’t open the book and we never talked about it. Ten days later I bled through white clothes.

At twelve I began describing myself as “more like a boy than a girl” because I did not want to be seen as dramatic, petty or ridiculous. Boys at school did not have any interest in me because I was not pretty, and I did not have any interest in them because my mother had told me that being interested in boys at my age was absurd and I wanted to be taken seriously. My mother became nonsensically accusatory when she found me holding hands with a girl, but she could have caught me kissing one instead, and it would have given her a much better case.

I was thirteen the first time I saw a porn film. The girl on the screen was white and blonde and her skin, tanned golden and unmarred by hair or razor burns, looked like that of a plastic doll. Her eyes were thickly lined with black makeup and her lips wet with a pink gloss. Her thighs did not touch and her stomach was a flat plane beneath her breasts. She had no pubic hair and her skin made me feel like my skin was wrong. When my mother caught me I was punished for a week. Girls aren’t supposed to look at pornography, she said. I knew that she meant that girls aren’t supposed to masturbate.

When I was fourteen I didn’t wear makeup. I had long, mousy hair, freckles, and pale, imperfect skin. My mother complained of my attitude each time I spoke something that was not pleasant or agreeable and yelled if I cried. In December she took me to see her family up north and cheerfully laughed when her friend’s son tugged at my arm and pulled me along throughout the evening. When he took me into the trees and threw me down in the snow there was no audience so no one laughed at that. Having never been kissed by a boy before and having already been told exactly what it was supposed to be like, I writhed and struggled to get away, knowing that this was not how it was supposed to happen. The thought of truly being overpowered by a man had never really occurred to me and, face up on the cold forest floor, I felt every notion of control slip from underneath me. “I’ve never kissed a redhead before,” he said to me. Words would not come. As someone shouted his name in searching for him, I pulled myself up and stumbled away. He looked startled and quickly collected himself, as though he knew then what he had done was wrong, composing himself like nothing had happened. I did not have red hair.

When I was fifteen I tried inserting a tampon for the first time. It’s easy, Becky Nicholson, a sweet, patient girl from school said. She noted the frustration twisting deep within me, coiling tighter with desperation, and she spoke gently. Use a mirror, put it into the opening. I could not make it work no matter how many diagrams I looked at and I could not understand why. What opening? It was months before my rigid body let any tampon enter, but not before a boy forced his fingers deep within it. I let him force his fingers into me and when he did I was in pain. The boy paid me more

attention than I thought anyone would ever give to an ugly girl who spent her time thinking about not eating, but when he left he told me that I would never stop being a mess and that shattered me. With false promises of love, he sometimes called requesting to slip his hands beneath my waistband in the two years after that and, hungry for his attention, sometimes I let him.

The first time I tried to have sex was when I was sixteen years old. I was in a dimly lit bedroom a twenty-minute train ride from my own and the sheets beneath my fingers felt clean. I had stopped menstruating sometime earlier that year so there had been no need to try with tampons, and I was not prepared for the disappointment that, even then, my unrelenting body would not grant entry whether I wanted it to or not. I put my clothes on and rode the train home feeling dirty.

Later that year, in a parking lot of decent vacancy, a police car sat twenty feet away from a car in which I would have more than a kiss forced upon me. As I watched the police car pull away and turned to stare upward toward the sky I would think about how I deserved this. I would think about how I hadn’t followed the instructions laid out for me in black and white, and how I was a slut and I owed my body to this man. When he was done I refused his kiss and he asked me if I liked him. I turned my head away and closed my eyes and did not answer. Nails driven into the material of the car seat, I silently willed him to look away from my exposed skin, unshaved and unfit for his viewing. Shame washed over me and, outside of his field of vision, I began to shake my head slowly. Lights moved through the dark in the distance and I, unmoving, watched without processing them, indiscernible thoughts buzzing discordant within my mind. I had never felt so cold. Slowly, I leaned over to the car floor and began collecting my clothes off the floor.Because I like you,he said. Later in the night, washing the event from my barren body with water hot as the rusty shower would allow, I sank to the floor and felt myself shake. The overwhelming nausea I would feel for the next week had not yet begun, nor did the crying spells that would accompany it. I was not yet sad or angry, desperate or volatile. In that moment, crumpled on the white floor as water ran down my aching pale flesh, I felt almost nothing at all. In the years following I would spend countless hours reliving the event, face twisted with emotion, desperately trying to force back tears, but on the floor of the shower, only hours after its occurrence, I felt almost nothing at all. Eyes closed, I sat wordlessly, consumed by a certain emptiness that felt like, perhaps, it had been there all along.