“My teacher said it was ranty,” Cabbie said to Ed, who was looking over her high school essay nearly a decade and a half later.
Ed, the editor of the Northern Gazette, rolled his eyes. “Teachers would be better off if they knew what they were talking about. I remember I wrote cliche poetry for a friend as a joke, and his teacher gave him an A on his assignment. Can you believe that? What hacks.”
Cabbie could understand it. She was in college and she had a creative writing professor who was blown away by her work, but part of her thought it was just because she actually put some thought into her creative writing. Everybody else just wanted the pass.
Cabbie smoked outside of the newspaper while her editor read the essay. A car drove by and the town councilman waved at her. Smiling with some tic tac teeth like so many years ago. Town councilman Teddy Bosworth. Good guy, but loved to ham up to the paper to give and get the latest scoop. Ed, meanwhile, was tight lipped, but he also smooshed with the best of them.
Cabbie was disinterested.
The town she worked in wasn’t her town. It was somebody else’s town. She had moved almost 140 miles North just to get started as a reporter, but it had been a hard row. Working at a fast food joint and spending her evenings typing drivel into a borrowed laptop had given her the sense that life was going to be tough.
If she had rewritten that essay in high school, would her life be different? Silly, of course not, but she liked to think. The rage under her skin boiled her blood in her veins like volcanic magma. Author Philip Roth called it indignation, and she was alive with it. For what reason, she could only figure a few.
A laugh echoed in the room, and she came back in after smashing the butt of the cigarette out on the pavement.
Her editor looked at her, “It is ranty.”
***
Every night in high school she would come home to her parents screaming and yelling at each other. Some times she could make out what it was they were on about and some times she had no idea.
“Your mother’s being a …,” and the words stabbed into her ears and brain, and she turned away from him.
“He needs to get his head checked out,” her mother said, when Cabbie talked to her. Her mother always said that when things were rough, and she wasn’t wrong, but it belied the point.
Two hours later and Cabbie was screaming at her father who had a kitchen knife and was walking toward her mother in their bedroom.
stop, please stop, she was saying. stop, stop, stop.
He did, and turned to her. “I was just trying to get my dresser drawer unstuck.” Her mother had backed up against the wall, the blankets pulled up over her chest and under her chin like an innocent child.
But innocence was gone now.
Cabbie, a high schooler, crying into her pillow night after night. Cabbie, listening to the screams and hollers from downstairs as her parents engaged in violent parade. The evenings she was pulled into the arguments on one side or the other. Her mother grabbing her wrist and pulling her from her room to confront her father.
For what reason? It didn’t matter. Indignation mattered, and the quiet rage.
“Your teacher was on to something,” Ed said, handing her essay back. “If it helps, you are a much better writer than you used to be.”
He smiled at her, and she shrugged, but a strange feeling twisted inside of her, even though she knew he was right. She was angry at Ed, but she knew he wasn’t wrong. Yet, she wasn’t as indignant about the essay anymore. Cabbie had the benefit of hindsight.
But criticism still stung.
She was in final acceptance–acquiescence in fact–and put the essay away in her desk, and she did not look at again for another 10 years. At the paper, and a few months later, a local pastor called her to make sure that she understood her writing was not representative of the community.
That comment hurt, but again it was different. It didn’t come with the weight of whatever it was that burned so fiercely under her skin.
“He’s an angry man,” Ed said about the pastor. “He says mean things to make himself feel better.”
You are a bad writer, one email to the editor said. My wife and I laugh at your writing often.
Ed never backed down, but she didn’t need his protection.
“We all start some place. I have had to eat a bunch of articles before, and you will, too, just make sure you are practicing. You will thank yourself one day.”
His protection came from his own experience, but already the world was changing for Cabbie, and the words fell away faster and faster.
Innocence was gone, but so lashing judgment and rage.
