Suzanne Beecher

Dear Reader,

Questions about this year's Write a DearReader Contest? Feel free to send me an email. Get busy writing, I'm waiting to read your entry. Have fun!

Readers ask...

Q. "Can we send in more than one entry for the contest?"-- Vickie D.

Yes, submit as many entries as you like.

Q. "Hello, I am very excited about this contest and am wondering if I can write a fiction story. Thank you for your time!"-- Debra J.

Write what you like, fiction, nonfiction or even a haiku. (Various forms of poetry have won several times.)

Q. "Suzanne I'm excited about writing something for your writing contest, it's something I have never done before. I have a quick question, you say the maximum number of words is 650 words, is there a minimum that you think we should submit?"-- Meghan S.

There isn't a minimum number of words.

One of the tips I'd like to pass on is when you're working on your entry, pay close attention to your ending. I receive so many great stories that take off and pique my interest from the first sentence. But somehow, the writer runs out of steam and finishes the story too abruptly. Write your entry, then walk away from it and re-read it the next day--and the tweaking it needs will be crystal clear.

So come on, start writing and please do enter this year's Write a DearReader Contest. Anyone can enter. Don't be shy if you aren't a writer. I started the contest 21 years ago, especially for people who've never written. So give it a go this year. The who, what, where–and cash prizes can all be found here.

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@firstlookbookclub.com

P. S. This week we're giving away 10 copies of the book Boy From The North Country: A Novel by Sam Sussman. Click here to enter for your chance to win. 

SIX

That Friday morning at the hospital the security guard did not ask for our identification. On the second f loor a woman behind the check-in desk asked my mother's name and how she would like to pay. My mother reached into her wallet, her expression uneasy as she handed her credit card to the hospital employee. She signed the receipt for the day's treatment, which, I saw over her shoulder, cost more than three thousand dollars.

A nurse in blue scrubs and a hairnet led us to a secluded room. My mother sat in the padded medical chair, and I took the chair near her. The nurse knelt beside her, searching her arm for a vein into which to insert the IV that would slowly drip the chemotherapeutic mixture into my mother's bloodstream. The drip began and the nurse said, "You'll be all set in eight hours."

My mother withdrew her magenta yarn and knitting needles from her cloth bag. "It's so strange being back here," she said. I imagined her in the same chair through the chemotherapy treatment she had taken alone, knitting as she told herself that it was not yet time for me to come home. "Yorkville has hardly changed," she said. "It feels like stepping back in time."

She looked through the window, and the street number and avenue came together in my mind, and I realized that we were in the neighborhood in which she had lived at my age. She was responding to my plea. She was bringing me into her memory. I studied her, imagining the young woman she must have been, as she appeared in the only photograph I had seen from that period of her life, a girl with yearning eyes, her auburn hair falling over shoulders left bare by a f loral dress.

New York, my mother said, in the steady voice with which she read me stories when I was a child, was on fire when I arrived. This was the summer of 1973. Every night I'd climb through my bedroom window and up the fire escape onto the roof. From my building, near York and 78th Street, I could look north onto the fires in the Bronx and south onto the fires in the Lower East Side. It was Sodom and Gomorrah. The destruction of the Temple. The Triangle Factory fire on every block of New York.

Everything had burnt to the ground in my life as well. I was nineteen, alone in the city, too ashamed to tell anyone why I'd dropped out of college. My parents weren't speaking to me.

You know enough about my parents' lives to understand what it meant for them to send me to Bennington. They were children of the Depression, children of immigrants. When I was a child we used to go every Friday night to my grandparents' apartment in Bensonhurst, where my mother's parents lit the shabbes candles and whispered to one another in Yiddish. My mother never stopped seeing her life as one long escape from the shtetl her parents transplanted to Brooklyn. She was so proud of spurning the rabbi her father demanded she marry; you've probably heard her tell that story. My parents' instincts were for jazz, rock and roll, everything American. They danced to Louis Armstrong on their first date. My mother sang and my father played piano; they were a music act in the years between when they first fell in love and when I was born. I was their first child, the daughter who was supposed to make good on their choice to sacrifice their artistic ambitions, move to Long Island, strive for the white picket fence. My parents struggled to adjust to that life. When I was young my father moved from job to job, eventually working at a paper supply company. My mother studied to become a teacher. So what greater feeling of success could there be than sending me to Bennington to be educated alongside people whose families walked off the 'Mayflower'? These were the real Americans my parents always wanted to be.

Of course we couldn't afford Bennington. I said it was fine, I'd go to Hunter. I liked the idea of being in New York, and I knew how many brilliant people went to CUNY. Vivian Gornick, the iconic feminist writer. Grace Paley, whose poetry I idolized in high school. Herbert Zuckerman, my parents' most valued friend. Herbert directed theater on Long Island, and I first fell in love with theater as a child going to his productions of Arthur Miller and Eugene O'Neill. Herbert was unlike anyone we knew. He could quote almost anything from the American stage. He knew people in the New York theater world, or at least said he did. My parents trusted Herbert far too much. He had dated my mother and been best friends with my father until my parents married. He would come to our house whenever he pleased, laughing at some joke he claimed Elia Kazan had told him at a party. Herbert taught a summer theater class for girls, and when I turned twelve he insisted I join, flattering my parents with the idea that I had a natural gift for theater. By the time I was thirteen he was taking me alone to Broadway shows. My parents were furious that I'd even consider turning down Bennington. My father told me, "If you need to take two jobs on campus, you take two jobs. If you need to take three, you take three." He was a warm man, I wish you had known him. He was sensitive, introverted, artistic. Rarely domineering. He must have felt that he had worked so hard, and now I had a chance to cross the bridge from our semi- middleclass life into genuine American possibility, if I'd only stop complaining about how hard the walk was.

Bennington is surrounded by woods and mountains. The buildings blend into the landscape, the way Shakespeare's pastoral plays unfold entirely within nature. I remember discussing 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' in the forest, six students sitting cross-legged on branches and moss as we listened to Ralph Summers, whose plays my father had given me in high school. Summers was ruddy and handsome, at the peak of his talents in his mid-forties, always dressed in linen suits.

Every night I read on the wicker chair outside my dorm. Homer, Virgil, Dante, Marlowe, Ibsen. Nights of earth and sky and feelings. I sat alone with my notebook and felt—you must know this from your own experience—that life could make sense through the written word in a way it never otherwise does. When the sun rose over the hills, and figures wandered out of the dorms, I was always surprised to remember there were other people on campus.

I worked fifteen hours a week in the library and another fifteen in the cafeteria. I stacked books and cleared dishes. It wasn't easy making friends. I wasn't part of the world everyone else seemed to come from. Boys who drove Mustang convertibles to New York on weekends. Girls who knew each other from boarding school, their fathers were partners in the same law firms. I didn't care that prep schools had armed my classmates with witty lines about 'Hamlet'. I had my own observations to make. Through those nights on the wicker chair that autumn my thoughts and feelings came together into a first play.

One night a few weeks before Thanksgiving my mother called. She told me the paper supply company my father worked for had lost a major client and demoted him to part-time. My parents couldn't help with tuition any longer. I felt bad for my father, that company worked him so hard and didn't seem to have the slightest loyalty to him. He'd been there eight or nine years. The least of my frustration was that I'd have to leave Bennington. I didn't fit in on campus anyway. I'd had this notion that my ideas could make up for not having the same background as most other students. That just wasn't true. No matter how hardearned or sincere my ideas might be, I was never going to speak in the right way, know the references that mattered, wear the right clothes. More than that, I didn't care about those norms. I didn't come from money and had no interest in pretending otherwise. I resented the idea that culture and class are synonymous. I told my mother it was fine, I'd transfer to Hunter. She wouldn't hear a word about me leaving Bennington. She kept insisting that I could find more work on campus, yelling that this wasn't an excuse to give up, that nobody in our family had ever had an opportunity like this and I wasn't to throw it away. I wanted to make her proud.

She was right that I could find more work on campus. I started doing odd jobs: typing classmates' papers, washing their laundry, even changing the oil in the boys' muscle cars. I never minded the work. But the comments—being a woman and more guarded in my sexual life, because, well. A few of the boys let me know that changing oil wasn't the only thing they'd pay me for. Bennington is a small campus, and I could feel people starting to see me a certain way.

It was worthwhile for the nights I wrote in the wicker chair and the Shakespeare seminar with Ralph Summers. By spring I had finished a draft of my play. One day, after class, I gathered my courage and asked Ralph Summers if he might read the opening pages. He f lashed his white toothy grin and said to give him the entire play. Every time I walked into the forest that semester I wondered if this was the day Summers would say something about my play. He never did. Then, on the last day of the spring term, the class sat on fallen tree trunks and Summers passed around champagne and lectured on 'The Comedy of Errors'. When he finished, the mood was buoyant and congratulatory, everyone talking about where in Europe they were off to for the summer. We all wandered across the campus lawn, and Summers smiled at me, as if just realizing I was there, and said too quietly for the others to hear, "June, your play—why don't you come to my office."

There were well wishes for the summer, and promises to write, and Summers and I walked alone into a barn converted to faculty studios. He led me up the stairs into a loft with books piled against every wall. There at the center of his desk was my play. Summers gestured me into a chair, and circled me in his cream linen suit, saying my writing was simply spectacular. Then he went silent as his hand slipped inside the front of my dress.

I don't remember standing. Or running across the lawn. I remember turning the lock on my bedroom door and knowing I had to leave campus that night. I couldn't risk the humiliation of seeing Ralph Summers again. What was I supposed to say if he asked to speak with me alone? If he tried to convince me I had misunderstood? I could still feel his hand on my skin. I wanted to report what he had done but didn't know who to tell. It would be my word against his. He was a famous playwright. A star of the English department. Who was going to believe me? Anyway, he had been the adult I felt closest to on campus.

I called my mother and told her I needed to leave Bennington that night, could she meet me at the bus station in New York?

After a few questions I admitted to her that my final exams were the following week, and if I left campus before the exams I wouldn't receive credit for the term. She shrieked at me. I held the phone to my ear, tears streaming down my face, thinking of Herbert Zuckerman. I wanted to call him. He would let me stay with him. He would drive to Bennington in the middle of the night. I told myself: don't you dare call that man.

(continued on Tuesday)

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