The Girls and Me: Fictional Snapshots

By Elizabeth Morris

An array of mid-20th Century women parade through the narrator’s life, who tells their partial early life stories as she remembers them, weaving her own story into the fabric of the whole.
Thus “Margaret Anne” remembers “old” friends, most of them from the fifties, sixties and seventies, whose lives at one time intersected with hers, then largely disappear to be replaced by others.
There are names like, Allison, Zelda, Ellen and Christina, all of whom reflect an innocence of a long-gone way of life. The book is semi-autobiographical, reflecting another era, the characters fading away like “old soldiers.” Almost all of them eventually have children who will live much different lives, in a sense, leaving their parents “in the dust” of a once gentle time that will never come again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elizabeth Morris
• Release date: Jan 24, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310464461

Elizabeth Morris

Elizabeth Morris is a former newspaper columnist, feature writer and teacher. She has published short stories, essays and reviews and had many full-length and one-act plays produced and stage read, including one at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. She was the Assistant Director of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Project until it was retired to the Library of Congress. She has had seven novels published and one self-published as an e-book. At least three of her novels are available on-line.

Book preview

1

There is no meaning of life, my Zen teacher used to say. She died at age 94 in 2011 after many years of practice and teaching, including a lifetime of personal stories she learned to let go of, though I don’t think she forgot them, she just finally refused to allow them to make her miserable.

So, no purpose, no exciting ride to oblivion, just this moment, an expression that has become a cliché in this ambitious culture we live in. Just a what is that often does not suit or please us, at least for long, if at all.

Often we say of someone we know, or knew, What happened to her? She didn’t used to be so mean and unkind, so totally self-centered. I guess, whoever she was, she got lost in the unhappy labyrinthine paths her life took. Or, she went off in a wild search for something that would surely make her feel better. But peace and joy and satisfaction eluded her as she rushed down first one rocky road, then another in a wild grab for what was missing.

• • •

I always call it love, something we are all searching for, but what is love? And where is it? In some sense we all want something we don’t feel we have, so we try one thing, then another, but nothing sustains us for long as pain inevitably raises its head and we run again, madly searching for something that is actually in us. Meanwhile, our bodies pay the price, as an old tennis pro used to call not practicing enough.

It’s all my fault, I said recently to one of my children.

I didn’t say that, she responded, but she didn’t have to, because there always has to be somebody to blame, somebody who is at fault…and this predilection can go back generations. So, without letting it go and accepting what is, there is no end to the demands, the accusations, the anger, the pain, the suffering, and thus the whole scenario continues.

• • •

One day not too long ago I was sitting in one of my three usual comfortable wingback chairs in my condo when I started thinking about some of the girls I’ve known in my now long life. I still know a few of them, but they are women now…supposedly. One I met when I was 18, as was she. We lived in a boardinghouse in Washington, D.C. She was a pudgy, sweet thing and had just gotten engaged, sporting a large diamond, which she excitedly showed everyone.

One evening she was taking a bath and slipped the ring into a metal soap dish hanging on the inside of the tub and, of course, when she pulled the plug to let the water out, she managed to dislodge the ring so it slipped through one of the holes in the soap dish and went right down the drain, causing her to rise, phoenix-like, naked and screaming, bringing everyone in the house running to the bathroom.

This memory led to others and the stories, or half-stories, flooded me unbidden until I had to call a halt. There were so many. But the writer in me began to work, though I had no idea what I would do with the stories even as I began to set them down in a large green notebook. Bits and pieces, some large, some small, of lives that crossed mine, leaving indelible footprints on my very busy mind. And, as they poured through me, I couldn’t help wondering how I had ever lived my own life with theirs filling my head like pieces of an enormous memory puzzle.

I have no doubt the girls would barely recognize themselves, if at all, probably horrified by being thusly defined. As, no doubt, I would be amazed by their memories of me…if indeed, they had any after all this time. Which is why I will interweave their stories, as their lives touched mine, with my own, which is probably as faulty and piecemeal as theirs.

After years and years of producing a voluminous number of short stories, novels, novellas, plays, interviews and articles, I seem to have run out of whatever drove me to pour out such an excess of verbiage in the first place, especially the imaginative works which blossomed at a very, very young age in the form of long-running fantasies and daydreams created by a child’s obsessively fertile mind.

"…Some little talk awhile

of Me and Thee

There was—and then no

more of Thee and Me"

(The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, XXXII)

… .

So sad, so strange, the days that are no more

(Together No more 3rd verse, last line)

Me, Margaret Anne

It began with the daydreaming, the fantasizing, which began…early on in my young life. I always read…Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Heidi, Little Women, Treasure Island, Sherlock Holmes, plus magazines like Redbook, The Ladies’ Home Journal, The Saturday Evening Post, and, of course, comic books. Once my Dad read the whole little book of Tom Thumb to my brother and me. There was no order to it, but because my parents read, reading was obviously something that was okay to do, and what we read was never monitored…except for a book called Never the Twain Shall Meet, which I read anyway, though I have no memory of it. There was one called Barren Ground…which I did not like, though I learned years later that it is a classic. Lorna Doone, Wind in the Willows, all pretty much forgotten now, and I particularly loved funny books like Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Brenda Starr, which seemed magical to my child’s imagination.

When I was in fifth grade one of my friends had a knack for drawing comic book characters, which I tried to emulate, but I could never do it was well as she, so I gave up.

My mother often lay in bed at night reading, so it was clearly an okay thing to do, and many of the young couples I babysat for all of my young life, sometimes five and six times a week, belonged to book clubs so I often read their books and played their records…notably Oklahoma, over and over and over.

But the daydreaming and fantasizing took over my young life. I made up long running narratives with, of course, myself as heroine, lead character, and I would pick up the made-up story lines whenever I had a free moment. As I got older, study hall was a favorite place, and I was still running them in my head into my early twenties, until I began actually writing down the stories. I wrote the first one when I was living in an off-campus rented room in East Lansing, Michigan where I was attending Michigan State for one quarter. I had been living in Washington, D.C. for almost three years before that, returning to Michigan to continue my education when my D.C. boyfriend was unable to commit to getting married.

• • •

Why I chose to write that particular friend’s story, a girl I met when I first moved to D.C. to work for the FBI when I was 18, is a mystery, except that she was an oddity, like no one I had ever encountered. Besides, I was lonely and unhappy living alone in that rooming house in East Lansing. It was located at least a mile off-campus so I tended to stay in my room when I didn’t have class or wasn’t working part-time typing 3x5 cards in the campus library for pin money. My roommate, who was rarely there, working and engaged and still going to school part time, had a typewriter she didn’t mind my using. So one day I sat down and started writing about Jane. One of the girls I met my first day in Washington.

She was from the deep south, had long, limp-looking, bright red hair, tended to have body odor as well as bad breath and was needy and clingy. Like me, she had come to D.C. to work for the FBI and, in the beginning, we had been assigned different places to live. She hated her place so she called me after a few days and asked if she could move to the boarding house I had been assigned, which she did. By then I was living in a room with another girl who had also arrived in D. C. at the same time we did, so Jane was put in a small room on the third floor next to ours. The house was a large, sand-colored brick, three-story residence located on a hillside corner lot directly across from Rock Creek Park and the National Zoo, so you could hear the lions roar at night. There wasn’t any air conditioning in Washington in those days so the windows were always kept wide open in the summer.

Jane tended to hang on me, riding to work with me every day, so we talked a lot. She was the only child of aged, protective parents. But, despite their hovering, she somehow managed to have a romantic relationship with an older man and, naturally, her parents disapproved, which may have been why they allowed her to go to Washington to work as a clerk for the FBI along with a few hundred other young people like myself from all over the country. She spoke in a whispery, little girl voice, her shoulders were always hunched, and at age 18 had never had a menstrual period.

As I recall, the story I wrote about her was long and wordy. Perhaps I wrote it because I was feeling homesick for Washington, which I had come to love. Years later I would catch a glimpse of her waiting for a trolley on Wisconsin Avenue, N.W., her red hair now bushed out and styled, her clothes fashionable. But, the plain Jane image I still have of her remains indelibly imprinted on my mind and memory of her.

• • •

It took years of writing for me to learn my craft and it really wasn’t until I started writing for a local newspaper in suburban Washington that I learned how to eliminate the wordiness and write with clarity.

At a dinner party one night years later, someone was telling a story and one of the guests said, Is this going to be a long story?"

Well, my first written story was a long one and although it is one thing to tell a long story, it is another to bore readers, and that story was long and boring, but it was a beginning.

• • •

Oddly enough, the first short story I finally had published was in a small press magazine called Artesan which was located in Ann Arbor, Michigan and came out of my brief stay in East Lansing. It was a story told in class by my science professor and, to this day, is a good, if sad tale.

I’ll let your Dad read it, my mother said, when I sent them a copy. A reticent, modest woman, she always feared anything smacking of personal exposure. Clearly she feared that what I might have written would be personally embarrassing, no matter that the story had nothing to do with her. She was never to read any of my work.

• • •

I continued my fantasizing mind stories until I was 21—which was about the time I started taking a short story correspondence course sponsored by The Writer’s Digest. This was also about the time I moved into an efficiency apartment a few long blocks from the then National Bureau of Standards on Connecticut Avenue (now UDC) where I had recently started a new job. Oddly enough, I had once attended Wilson Teacher’s College on Harvard Street, N.W., which eventually combined with the then black Miner Teacher’s College to become the University of the District of Columbia, or UDC.

As it happened, I had walked into the Bureau of Standards one day, asked about a writing position, and was immediately hired as a technical editor. So my life as a writer had become a reality, although it took me years before I was personally able to call myself a writer, conditioned as I was to never pretend to be anybody or somebody.

• • •

By this time, my long-time romance had finally turned into a marriage and the Sears Roebuck reconditioned Royal typewriter I’d bought on credit for $200 followed me everywhere. I loved that typewriter and it would be years before I replaced it with an electric one, then eventually a word processor, and finally an Apple Computer, a Mac.

Not long after having my first short story published, I had another one published in yet another small press magazine called The Smith, and I was on my way, or so I hoped. My now husband was vaguely supportive of my writing and my life in general was finally in a happy groove. We had two, then three children and I was writing novels and plays as well as short stories. Early in the marriage we frequently went downtown to the theatre, ate out, played tennis, entertained and, as they say, life was sweet. Until, of course, it wasn’t.

In the years to come, my novels languished, but I had a moderate amount of success with my plays. One was produced on radio, others were stage read and produced. I took workshops and joined a then newly organized local group of writers calling themselves The Writer’s Center where, years later, after my husband died, I also taught a class called Stories from the Attic.

So, at age 80, I can