Category: Memoir

Family, Humor, Memoir, Nashville, Personal Essay, Prose, Writing Life

Christmas Onions 2000

Posted on by M. Ashley

My first Christmas in my first apartment alone, trying to be a big time grownup. I made French onion soup for dinner. I called home to California earlier in the day. I had read a scripture, I told my mom, something about getting my house in order, and I felt I needed to do that, which involved me staying in Nashville for Christmas, again, alone. She wasn’t convinced, but because she couldn’t fly out and physically drag me home, she accepted it. 

I was trying to be so adult. I was trying to prove something, though, looking back, I can’t imagine what. Was I trying to prove that I could withstand severe holiday depression? Was I trying to prove that no matter how badly I wanted to off myself that season, I didn’t need my family to help me not become a statistic?

I called my Hungarian violin teacher after I called my family. He was a big part of my life then as music was a big part of my life. I also adored his stories of escaping communism. Communists used to make Hungarians eat diseased cow meat and chocolate made from blood. Zsolt was also disappointed I wasn’t coming home. He was put off by my choice of Christmas dinner. He said, “Well, maybe you could float an ornament in it and make it more Christmasy that way.” I laughed and felt lonelier by the minute.

God I was miserable then—a miserable sort of miserable that radiated in waves across the country from Nashville to my little city Berdoo.

I was new to keeping my own appliances then, just as I was new to keeping my own household in general. For example, while I had used a garbage disposal many times as a kid growing up, I somehow never learned that putting onion skins down one is not such a great idea. By the time I had all the onions in the Christmas soup pot sautéing with butter, beginning to oddly smell like apples, my garbage disposal was filled to brimming with onion skins. 

I ran the water and turned the disposal on. It growled like an offended demon and the water didn’t go down. It began to spit up chopped onion skins in great belches, making of the sink water a slimy, stinky soup of its own. I stopped the thing. “That was not bright,” I told myself.

I grudgingly lugged my plunger into the kitchen from the bathroom. In retrospect, it is amazing I had a plunger given that, when I first moved it, I hadn’t realized until I was in dire need that toilet paper doesn’t grow on the roll. 

I stuck the plunger to the drain and plunged for dear life. More and more onion skins belched forth from the disposal along with other unspeakable things most likely from tenants past. I sucked everything out that I could. 

The water still didn’t go down. The chopped onion skin and unnamable goo mocked me as it danced its spiral around the sink.

I ended up having to strain all that onion skin and other detritus out of the sink with my bare hand, letting the water slip through, but retaining the chunks that clung to my fingers. I pulled the trash can up next to me and went to town. I think a year might have gone by. 

The sink came clean, the water went down, and the garbage disposal growled happily, its gut no longer sick.

I washed my hands at least three times. I washed the plunger. I raised the plunger over my head and made He-Man muscles. 

“I am the Garbage Disposal Master of the Universe!” I proclaimed to my empty apartment.  

“I am the Garbage Disposal Master of the Universe!” I shouted again just in case the ghosts I lived with hadn’t heard. 

I lowered my plunger and shrugged my shoulders. Shoving the onion skins down the disposal was not the only terrible mistake I made that lonely Christmas. Not by a long shot.

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Memoir

Falling in Love with The Tin Drum

Posted on by M. Ashley

80019-coverI was assigned The Tin Drum spring semester of my junior year in college, but what would become the love of my life in novels was uninteresting to me then, when it was made a chore.

But I did at least start reading it then, of course. We always start out with the most productive plans for that sort of thing. So many pages a day, I told myself, and I would be golden by the time the paper rolled around. I lost track of it during the week and had to catch up on a Saturday—a beautiful Tennessee early spring Saturday when the air was warm but the sky was gray and lovely. There was a concert called Spring Rites going on at Alumni Lawn, one short, curvy path from my window. I stood up in my bathrobe and cranked the window open to let the air and music in—to make the duty of reading more pleasant.

It became pleasant. It became so pleasant it began to scare me. I began to fall in love with the language, with the off-center, with the dirtiness, with the grit and grime and beauty of the pit. There was a piss joke and sex in a potato field. There was a mental institution and a singing midget. It was like a circus of the grotesque, the kind I would pass with my nose up at a carnival—the kind that would have my heart beating loudly if a lover were to drag me in by the arm and force me to be human for the few minutes it took to walk through it.

I stopped. My lips were starting to feel full and my sex was tingling. It was too rich. It was too much. I was too young and I didn’t know then, what I know now, the eroticism of fine writing.

I left the book unattended for the rest of the semester, but when it was over, moving away from Nashville for the summer, stopped at a dusky motel on the drive home to California, I picked it up again. Something had told me to pack it in my overnight bag. It seemed fitting to pull it out there, to engage again in our dirty affair on sheets that would illuminate with spreading galaxies if under black light.

-M.

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Memoir, Prose

How Do My Breasts Look? (memoir)

Posted on by M. Ashley

go_cougar_womens_tshirtMy first boyfriend and I sweat together in my room with the door closed and his hand under my navy blue “Go Cougars!” T-shirt. I lay on the floor halfway underneath him, one of his creeping hands at the waistband of my white cotton shorts, the other pushing my shirt up. His alien fingers probed their way under the pale pink of my little girls’ bra that had been too tight for months. He didn’t kiss me. He gave me a hickey on my midriff instead and smiled, proud of himself the way he and his friends were often proud of their own farts. He got serious then and tugged at the band of my bra. I lay there bare-chested for the first time with a boy, still wearing my T-shirt that was now rolled up under my chin. He unceremoniously pinched my left nipple, then my right, frowned and announced, “Your boobs look funny.”

I don’t need a whole essay to tell you I never got over that.

In my later teens I’d stand sometimes in front of my mother’s full-length bedroom mirror and pull my Garfield pajama shirt tight over my chest and belly to get a better view of the curve of my breasts in relation to my other curves. I’d shift right and left—diagonal—I’d bounce, look back over one shoulder, turn around with one arm up behind my head, but I couldn’t tell. I’d pull my shirt up and wonder for a while at my nipples. I couldn’t figure them out either. Too big? Too small? Too low? Too pale? I didn’t know.

I once used a French class report on impressionist artists as an excuse to look at a lot of paintings of naked women so I wouldn’t look like a perv for getting close to the page, squinting at them, and comparing. One red-haired woman, all in fading yellow light, a royal blue wrap around her shoulders and her white underthings visible at her waist, appeared to have breasts that went at near right angles at the bottom—her tan nipples pointing this way and that. I thought surely mine weren’t quite as different as that, and even then, some artist found hers beautiful.

When I got older, I got brave once and asked a lover what he thought of the funny-looking breast issue. I should have known I wouldn’t get a straight answer considering his face was between them at the time.

But maybe that’s my problem—thinking “No!” kiss, “Not at all!” nibble, “Absolutely not!” muffled through busy lips—was not a straight answer.

-M.

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Memoir, Prose

Envy (memoir)

Posted on by M. Ashley

Danny LeavesMy oldest dog—a red, hairy, shedding beast of a border collie/German shepherd mix will be turning ten this August and, at 50lbs, he still loves it when I pick him up and hold him in my arms like a baby.

He isn’t afraid of anything.

Whack him on the top of the head or his big fuzzy butt with a rolled newspaper and he barks, jumps, turns in circles in happy play, which it is.

He thinks his own farts are awesome—smiles a wide, bottom-toothy smile, spotted tongue lolling out the side like a broken window shade. Sometimes they make him sneeze. He wipes his nose on the carpet or, if I’m lucky, on my pant leg.

He isn’t afraid.

He isn’t afraid of the big blue vacuum monster either. He stalks it like the wild beast of mechanation it is, goes on the offensive, attacks with abandon.

I’ve had him since he was three months. I brought him home from the pound shivering a week before Thanksgiving. But I’ve come to the realization the shivering was an act to woo the weepy-eyed rubes, like me. I was wooed. I admit it.

He isn’t afraid of anything

He isn’t afraid because he was never taught he should be afraid.

I picked him up in my arms like a baby ten years ago—all six disingenuously shivering pounds of him, and he never had anything to fear after.

He lies on his back with his legs straight in the air and lets me scratch his tender belly with my toes, even if I’m standing up at the time—and my balance is terrible. And he knows my balance is terrible.

No fear.

No fear.

I think I’ll write this down. I think I’ll call it “Envy”.

-M.

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Family, Memoir, Prose

Unaffectionate Boy (memoir)

Posted on by M. Ashley

Natanon was near the last one to deplane and make his weary way through the Roy Rogers airport. He met us by the empty spinning of the baggage carousel. His mother sent him to us from Thailand to finish his education in the States.

He was sent to us to get a little time with his dad.

He was dressed in black like a cowboy villain, but almost bald being only two weeks out from a stint as monk in his hometown of Phuket. His father and grandfather hugged him welcome. He smiled, but his shoulders were drawn up. He and I shook hands. He smiled again, but looked down at his shiny, square-toed shoes.

Later that day with the family, eating fast food Chinese— a mystery to him—he slid his cookie’s fortune across the greasy table for me to read to him, his English still a little weak. I read it low-voiced like a mystic and, as benediction, exclaimed, “…in bed!”

His English and teenage hormones were just strong enough to make him blush, drop his head and silent shake his drawn up shoulders down, with laughter.

-M.

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