I wrote some time ago about my short story "Wendy and the Lost Girls," appearing in the anthology Nothing But Red. Recent events in the news compel me to produce it in its entirety here.


WENDY AND THE LOST GIRLS
By Elizabeth Bales Frank

Our number one dream is the one we call “The Milk Carton.” Maya dreamt it first and told us about it the next day in the cafeteria. That night, we all had it. You’re at the quick-store buying milk. Wendy’s photo is on the milk carton -- the famous photo, the one you by now know better than your own face, the one on the flyers you’ve been handing out every weekend. So many weekends now that you can’t remember what you did with your time before finding Wendy was your purpose. The carton provides the numbers on Wendy, what we used to call the “vital stats” and then, as the hope of vitality faded, the cold facts. Five feet, 98 pounds, hair sandy blonde, eyes -- with their cute downward-slanting corners and their amber flecks and their ability to refract prancing shifts of light -- “brown.”

After we had dreamed the dream enough times, we started to have variations: Susannah sees herself on the carton. Kimmy sees Wendy buying the milk, not in the grainy surveillance camera footage, but live, as though she’s hovering somewhere in the store, although even being there doesn’t focus the picture any – Wendy is still dulled and blurry. Tricia sees herself buying the milk, dropping the carton. It explodes, spewing blood.

The dream of the milk carton is the first united dream, silent, like an ancient movie. In it we hear nothing but our heartbeats, nothing but our breathing. Except when Kimmy dreams it. Then we hear a voice calling through a wave of crackle. Through white noise. Through the sound between stations.

Maya was the first, too, to dream “Wendy, Indifferent.”

In that one, you find Wendy, safe and whole. At the sight of her, your back arches like a cat stretching out of a nap. Your relief is electric. It hums like a string on an electric guitar and the reverb burns up your spine and sends hot spidery shivers across your scalp. All those sensations happen at once, as scary as a first kiss. Not the real first kiss, the clumsy pressing, but the one you wait for, the one that will awaken you. The one that will explain to you all the fuss about kisses, that will penetrate your shyness and spiral deep inside you where you never thought a kiss could reach. We’ve heard all about those kisses and in our dreams we feel that sensation, seeing Wendy, safe. In the early dreaming of the dreams, we fell out of bed with the excitement of her sighting, but by now we’ve learned to control the salty currents of relief. Our ability to control the impulse to give way too soon, we think, is what brings us the dreams in the first place. After all, everyone wants to see Wendy. But we’re the ones who do.

We learn to relax. We stay in the dream. There she is. Wendy. In the flesh. And we love her. We love Wendy. Maybe we didn’t before, but we do now. Before the disappearance, she was on the social fringe. New in school, shy, joining us late. Uncertain, with those pity-me eyes and her smile that tried too hard. Her nervous courtesy pricked us, reminded us that our mantle of cool wasn’t there as recently as yesterday and could vanish again as soon as tomorrow. Her bright redundant greetings oh hey hi what’s up good morning Maya Susannah Kimmy, how are you Trish you look great your hair oh my God those earrings are great, only pointed out that our current ease was temporary, something that, at any moment, could be taken away.

But whatever we thought of her before, Wendy is all that anyone thinks of now. We all love Wendy now. We love her because she was so loyal so fast to our stupid rules and traditions. We love her because she admired things about us that everyone else had stopped noticing. We love her because she was such a hungry audience for our puny talents. We love her because she isn’t here.

And we treasure her as you treasure anything you’ve lost. A kitten. A charm bracelet. A grandfather. A dad. Our daydreams about her once she’s gone dress her up so much that if she came back no one would recognize her. Wendy is ideal. Because she isn’t here to prove you wrong, Wendy is everything we need her to be.

So we find Wendy, safe and whole. And we’re ecstatic with relief – now we’ll get attention, too! We’ll be heroes, ‘cause we found her! It’s Wendy’s indifference after we dance around her, after we cover her with hugs – it’s then that we realize we’re in a dream. She doesn’t care that she’s been found. She doesn’t want to come home. She won’t even write a note to her mother (and in the dream, of course, we never have a pen.) In the dream, she’s gone over to some other side, a place where she’s free of our concern. She can barely tolerate the time it takes us to understand that she just doesn’t care.

Her indifference is regal. Wendy is a princess of the land in between the stations.

The sequel to “Wendy, Indifferent” is “Wendy, Rescued” although the rescue is still in progress when the alarm buzzes us awake. If , in a rare but exciting version of “Wendy, Rescued,” we get to drag her along with us, heading for home, hellbent for breakfast, something always prevents us from getting Wendy to her mother. And that’s what we used to want to see. We used to want it so much that it was the first dream that left our bed and nagged at us in waking time – we wanted to see Wendy back with her mother, the kneeling, the hug, the tears.

We’ve shared other dreams: Kimmy’s dreary documentary “Looking for Wendy,” Tricia’s thriller “Looking for Wendy While Being Stalked by Someone Unseen,” Susannah’s existential “Wendy, in a Parallel Universe, Thinks We’re Missing.”

It was Maya who suggested that we unite our dreams deliberately. We keep the visions to ourselves. We call each other at night and agree on the dream that will take us, together, to Wendy. We don’t tell the shrinks they send to the school to help us “deal with it.” We say nothing to our mothers. Comfort would only weaken us. It only takes one mother’s touch, one light on in the hall, one Let’s talk about it, honey to initiate the wave of static that loops around and feeds on itself until the transmission is broken and we’ve all lost Wendy for the rest of the night. And we can’t lose Wendy. She has things to tell us that no one else will admit.

The moment she wins us is the point in “Wendy, Indifferent” when she gives us that weary, grown-up smile, tired of our tirades about searching and worry and curfews. She won’t come back. She can’t. She is beyond our pleading and our dread. It is when realize that that we know that we want to be there, too.

Kimmy went first. She left a note that read: “Dear everyone, I had to go, I couldn’t resist it anymore.” After that, they rounded us up and grilled us for hours, which only proved her power. Who would have listened to us before? Just say “Wendy” now and see what happens. See how just saying her name invokes trembling and action, respect, legislation. No one ever hinted that a girl could have such stature. Nothing we can do can equal that. That’s something we learned together in the white noise.

Maya, steamed that she was not the first to go and exhausted from the official questioning, ordered “Kimmy” for that night’s viewing. It was a risky choice, since we hadn’t yet created “Kimmy” and all we wound up getting was a fog and the sound of two girls laughing. Tricia was found in the park later that night, barefoot in her nightgown, bruised and mute. They took her to the emergency room, then to the psych ward. We weren’t allowed to see her. We knew they gave her drugs because we couldn’t raise her on our frequency. Her voice grew fainter and fainter and eventually disappeared.

Susannah went next and went far, having learned from Tricia’s lesson. She went without a trace, no strand of hair, no fallen button, no idle witness to tell a story of an unmarked van. Susannah dove head first into the white noise. When we found her in the dreams, through the static, she said only, “Can you hear me? Can you hear me?” forgetting, we realized, Maya’s instructions that the next to go had to give detailed directions. It seems that our rules don’t apply out there.

We’re locked in at night now, kept home from school, questioned like suspects. It’s worse, we imagine, than anything that was done to Wendy before her martyrdom. Why question us so hard? You wouldn’t understand our answers. Even if we confided about our network, you wouldn’t believe us. You never do. Girls, Wendy told us, are prey: skittish, glossy, small. Our strength lies in camouflage or short bursts of speed, our ability to dodge. Our bodies, our lives, are soft, dispensable.


We disappear in your distraction – a glance away, we’re gone. You let it happen all the time. Listen to us? Wendy, lost in silence, is the only one you’ve ever heard.

Labels: Nothing But Red, Wendy and the Lost Girls

posted by Elizabeth at 11:52 AM   1 Comments

Every once in awhile, you need to get out of your comfort zone, and when that time comes, a good place to start is Eastern Colorado. I was out there last week; I flew into Denver, while my luggage went to Jackson Hole, and then I took a shuttle van up to Greeley, where my best friend Linda’s daughter was enrolling as a freshman at the University of Northern Colorado. She seemed to me a strange creature, long-legged, shy but serene-eyed, with the kind of long hair a romance writer would describe as “chestnut tresses,” when so recently she was a toddler splashing in the bathtub boisterously misquoting Pearl Jam, “Hearts and darts they fade, fade away …”

I tried to quell these thoughts, since Linda was all but drowning in them, and it was my job as aunt to try to distract mother and daughter from the grief of this milestone separation with whimsical pranks like filling the school-supply shopping cart at Target with notebooks depicting pink kittens and Zac Efron. Target, yes. And Sears and J.C. Penney and lunch at The Olive Garden.

“I’m in America now,” I reminded myself, as I walked across the parking lot of Wal-Mart, passing a car with a “Nobama” bumper sticker and then strolling by the weaponry section of that fine store on my way to procure a pair of flip-flops. (I had to buy the bare necessities to sustain myself – panties and pajamas, skin care products and a second pair of shoes since my suitcase was still MIA, not that I’m pointing any fingers, Frontier Airlines.) “Y’all still sell guns at Wal-Mart?” I heard a man ask and nearly pivoted to scold him. “Dude! You’re, like, only 50 miles from Columbine!” But I refrained. One thing I hear with disturbing frequency when I venture into America is, “This isn’t New York.” I hope I don’t conduct myself with the provincialism of the Upper West Sider who thinks fresh fruit and vegetables come from Zabar’s but I must confess I am put off by the long, long drives which apparently are not, when they are challenged, long at all. A thirty minute drive to go to dinner is nothing, and this was confirmed the next day when, with no small amount of sorrow and snuffling, Linda and I headed to her home in Ogden, Utah.

This required driving across the width of southern Wyoming, which took an entire day and can best be summarized in haiku:

Sage, trailers, red rock
Great music with my best friend
Antelope do play

In Ogden, I reacquainted myself with Linda’s twin sons, who in my memory were last seen in a double stroller (I exaggerate) and are now happy, freckled thirteen-year-olds on skateboards. Thirteen was the age Linda and I were when we met; eighteen, like her daughter, when we went our separate ways to college (she to Arizona, and I to New York), so that makes five years of concentrated adolescent anguish, record-playing in the basement, picture-drawing, story-telling and synchronized sulking, on which we have built a lifetime of friendship.

But during that time we developed a rich and idiosyncratic patois, which, when as adults we intermittently reunite, causes outsiders to smile politely and back away slowly. Linda’s children have long since learned to tilt their heads at us, turn to one another, and engage in their own secret dialect, bemused but not confounded by the fact their mother and her friend have launched not into the customary exclusive language of adults (insurance, betrayals, medical procedures) but into a lexicon of silliness we ought to have long ago outgrown. Linda’s husband, an outdoorsman of infinite patience, sits by as long as he can stand it, nodding with recognition at the odd phrase in the startrek/starwars/beatles/Dylan/stones/springsteen/yourmom/
mydad/thatteacher dialect --the way a Parisian might cotton to the general meaning of a Cajun -- eventually gives up and politely remembers a neglected project in the garage, on the roof, or on the other side of town.

It is a truth universally unacknowledged, that a single woman in possession of a fortune of musical knowledge, must be in pursuit of a soul mate. In the buddy-movie, bromance Hollywood culture, women who are longtime friends are either sisters or college roommates (i.e., in either case, no choice was made) and what ties them together is first the pursuit of beauty and a man, and later the burden of aging, caretaking and abandonment. But, that ain’t nothing like the real thing, baby. Girls do, in fact, just want to have fun. We like stuff, too. Reading, writing, music. Running, downhill skiing, skating, orienteering. This kind of indulgence – the pursuit of personal interests -- might be the ultimate pornography, since it is never presented on television or in the movies. On the screen, women don’t bond over activities that merely engage them but do not nurture others. They are together only when cooking, sewing, or keeping a home.

Last Sunday, I was the guest co-host on Linda’s radio show “Sunday Sagebrush” on radio station KRCL, the voice of the Wasatch Front. In addition to being a volunteer dj on this Sunday show, Linda is the music feature writer for the local paper, the Standard-Examiner (http://www.standard.net), and has recently begun producing a weekly podcast called “The Beat Beat.” She yearns to dictate the musical taste of the whole of the free-thinking West, and when I joined her as a guest dj, we chortled in the realization of our lifelong dream (“I hate this song, I hate this song!”) to RULE THE AIRWAVES.

With “Americana, Roots and Blues” as the program’s designated category, we played Dave Alvin (she always opens with Dave Alvin), Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Marty Robbins, Raul Malo, Loretta Lynn, the Be Good Tanyas, Sam Baker, Clydesdale, Cory Chisel, Cracker, Neko Case, and Steve Earle, Steve Earle, Steve Earle. (You can find the whole playlist here: the whole playlist). We chatted about the song or artist’s significance, told stories of our girlhood and peered at shelves of CDs the way we had pored over what album to play next when we were 13, 14, 15 and on.

“You girls sound like you’re having fun,” one caller told Linda, as he requested Woody Guthrie’s “Bound for Glory.”

“You two were hilarious. A pair of 13 year olds!” offered Linda’s friend Dan Weldon, a marvelous locally-based musician (http://danweldon.com/) when he came to Linda’s house later that day to eat barbecued carne asada. “You sounded like Gidget goes on the radio.”

Our jaws dropped in simultaneous indignation. “Gidget! We did not! We spoke intelligently about the music!”

“We expressed opinions,” I pointed out to Dan, who I love. “We critiqued.”

“Well,” he said. “Maybe nasty Gidgets.”

To be continued …

Labels: KRCL, Linda East Brady, Steve Earle

posted by Elizabeth at 6:44 AM   0 Comments

I will be away in the wild, wild west for the next week, but should you be glued to your computer on Sunday, August 23, from noon to 4 pm eastern time, tune in to

www.krcl.org

Click on “listen live” in the middle at the top of the page. I will be a guest on my friend Linda's Americana, Roots and Blues show, live from the Wasatch Range.

Labels: Radio

posted by Elizabeth at 5:48 PM   0 Comments

Saw a screening of "The Time Traveler's Wife" tonight.

A romantic drama with gorgeous leads and fabulous set design (I do really love it when people live in homes that looks like homes which people would live in -- let alone the characters in the film would live in, so kudos for that) and lovely cinematography.

But my problems with the film involve major spoilers, so if you object to that, then read no further.

The time traveler, Henry, disappears without rhyme or reason, so abruptly that his clothes crumple to the floor and he arrives at his next spot on the time-space continuum stark naked, at which point hijinks invariably ensue.

In fact, when he first meets his future wife Claire, she is a six year old child playing alone in a meadow and he is a naked grown man speaking to her from the bushes, hardly a promising premise for an epic love story. He repeatedly encounters her as a child, and as a teenager, but he is always an adult. He is always Eric Bana. "You took the heart and mind of a little girl," she says to him in their one serious fight, which elicits from him a puppy-eyed frown of sadness.

One personal frisson of pleasure for me: the song that they dance to at their wedding (on the meadow where they met) is a spooky-sad rendition of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart."

Pedophilia, and all practicalities aside -- the movie is definitely going for magic realism, so questions about how he could obtain and keep a job, let alone a relationship, will remain questions -- the bottom line is that Henry being a time-traveler is a situation, not a story. His condition needs to have a purpose, a crux, a crisis. Without it, he's just a guy who gets around a lot.

Labels: The Time Traveler's Wife

posted by Elizabeth at 12:07 AM   0 Comments

This has been flying around the internet, so you have probably already seen, this nearly perfect tribute to John Hughes by Alison Byrne Fields:

http://wellknowwhenwegetthere.blogspot.com/2009/08/sincerely-john-hughes.html

It's received so many hits I can't get in there to ask permission, so, Alison, hope it's OK.

And yes, soon I'll get that hyperlink thing fixed.

I've had bit of help along the way myself, from pen pals, "mysterious benefactors," and their modern counterpart, cyber-friends, so it's good to see the good guys recognized.

Labels: filmmakers, John Hughes

posted by Elizabeth at 8:45 AM   1 Comments

It is not the purpose of this blog to solicit donations of any kind.

However.

A week ago, I had a couple of days off, so I wrote and cooked.

I made a tomato soup from scratch, including my own vegetable stock.

I reheated the soup in my microwave. I picked up the bowl with one oven mitt and one dishtowel. The bowl was so hot that I released it immediately.

The searing hot liquid, upon being dropped, splashed up and hit my thumb.

My thumb. Look at your thumb. That space between the first and second knuckle? Scalded. The next day, a blister with the diameter of a dime, and the height of four dimes stacked, was on my thumb.

Pus, blood, scab, peel, pus, scab, peel, blood. Daily events in the past week. "Gross!" cried my work colleagues. "Gross! Eew! Keep it covered!"

Even with an area of injury of less than a square inch, I understood why burn victims are often put to sleep in hospitals. It fucking hurts. My wound, I understand, is nothing. But M****f***r, it's everything.

I made a donation to http://www.nyffburncenter.com/?gclid=CMyQxa-EjpwCFRJM5QodzWdpYg. "cause these guys are the real heroes.

Labels: Burns

posted by Elizabeth at 10:57 PM   0 Comments

I was having a very bad day at work (which is itself a trait of the old) when a fleet and kindly messenger arrived in my office and brightened my day with a copy of “How Not to Act Old,” by my new blogger friend Pamela Redmond Satran (she also has a blog, complete with instructional youtube videos, http://www.hownottoactold.com). The book seemed to fall open to the sins of which I am guilty: saying “awesome” (Chapter 2) and “what are you, twelve?” (Chapter 79) and counting out exact change (Chapter 146).

Other ways to camouflage the years? Don’t wear a watch (Chapter 3), dance to “Sexual Healing” (7), or leave voice mails (6). (If you don't say why you called, curiosity will compel a response; besides, you come off as busy and cool, rather than bossy and tiresome.) Talking is the greatest challenge. Don’t talk: too much (58, 177), negatively (75), like a parent (33, 46, 53, 135, 136) about your health (45, 61), to strangers (182), in an Andy Rooney-like rant (177), or, really, at all (77). “Young people use silence to mean all kinds of things … don’t get mad, just get silent.”

Reading is out (96), as is dieting (97), housework (62) (yay!) or being named “Bob or Pat” (95, which shows a progressive timeline of hip names, “Regular Old Name: Judy. 10 Years Younger: Jody. 30 Years Younger: Jolie.” Other examples: “Wayne … Blaine … Zane” and “Carol … Holly … Christmas.”)

Pamela Redmond Satran is seriously funny. And sadly, I can offer a few tips of my own, should she try a chapter on, say, “How Not to Act Old in New York”: Don’t say “Pan Am Building,” “The Triborough Bridge,” or “where Coliseum Books used to be.”

Got all that?

Thaynk Kyeeew (Chapter 172)
No problem (Chapter 65)

Labels: How Not to Act Old

posted by Elizabeth at 8:38 AM   0 Comments

I saw "Julie and Julia," last night at a screening and was disappointed. Now that I have had time to marinate overnight, my disappointment has soured into annoyance.

Early in the film, and early on her path to becoming the world's most famous instructor of French cuisine, Julia Child laments having to convert metric measurements for an American audience. "Measurements are not important," her future co-author Simone Beck says. Julia Child replies. "I think they're very important."

I have to agree, and this is an ill-measured film. Before the lights go down, we are already more interested in the Julia Child story -- she's an icon, and therefore more interesting than a "cubicle worker" (more on that later), post-war Paris is more interesting than post-9/11 Queens, creating the first and most famous English-language book of French cooking is more interesting than re-creating it because your life bores you, and so on. What this movie needed to do was balance the Julia Child story by attempting to make the Julie Powell story even slightly interesting.

The movie that might have been made is the story of how these two women came into their own through "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," but what we have instead are lopsided servings of the sweet and the bitter. Meryl Streep swoops and whoops as Child in Paris, most of the time delivering a typically Streep-brilliant performance but occasionally lapsing into what my friend over at Head Butler http://www.headbutler.com/ calls "Big Bird Goes to Cordon Bleu." There are tantalizing hints of a life as rich as beurre blanc -- the years in the OSS, the investigation by McCarthy, the loud gawky American at soignee embassy parties -- along with long and completely unnecessary sideplots, such as the one involving the sister (although it was nice to see Jane Lynch having so much fun). But Ephron gives us just a taste, makes us want the meal, and then switches us to the microwave.

I have read Child's book and I haven't read Powell's, but Ephron's job, in bringing the stories together, was to find a balance.

So, Powell. The publicity material presents her as a "cubicle drone" looking to find herself as she approaches the milestone of turning 30. The cubicle in which she drones belongs to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, less than a year after September 11, 2001, and her job, fielding calls from survivors in need of health care, housing, and counseling, is presented as one of no meaning or importance, serving mainly to annoy her, to drive her into one of the many "meltdowns" she has throughout the film when things don't go her way. These hissy fits are meant to make her seem endearingly vulnerable but instead make her come across as petty and petulant. Long Island City, the working-class neighborhood in which she scorns to live, was particularly hard hit by the attacks of September 11, and even eleven months later was still bedecked with makeshift shrines to policemen and firemen.

I'm taking it too seriously, you say. It's a comedy. Well, here's my rule: use 9/11 as a plot point very judiciously, and use it as a backdrop at your own peril.

Regardless of how it unfolded in "real life," Ephron could have used the "drone job" to enhance the character of Julie: to show her setting forth on her adventure because life is short and you must make yourself happy, to show her cultivating cooking as a creative, nurturing act in response to the destruction she spends her nine-to-five time trying to mend.

But no, Julie launches a blog because all of her college friends have flashy positions and shiny gadgets and she was the promising one in college; she was going to be a writer; she has "thoughts." She does, in fact, have a lot going for her, which makes her all the more exasperating. She has, for one thing, a bewilderingly loving husband who endures her constant jibes that she has "nothing," her sulking when no one reads her blog and her tantrum over a ruined stew to such an extent that his final breaking point provides the only crisis in the B plot. Even Julie must finally overcome her self-absorption to recognize that her husband is a sweetheart.

That seems to be Powell's "lesson learned" and it's not enough. By that time I had lost the little interest I had in whether or not she succeeded in cooking her way through "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in 365 days and waited for the scenes of Child shepherding her cookbook to publication, although that, too, failed to compel because we all know how it turns out.

I had to content myself with trying to figure out where Julie Powell was as she whined her way through Queens. That place where she buys the lobster? That's my fish store.

Labels: Julie and Julia, Queens, September 11

posted by Elizabeth at 10:30 PM   0 Comments