The writers’ group

She is a stranger more strange than anyone in the land she is in. She wonders if they sense this, if they will ball their fists and gently offer them to her to sniff before taking their seats.

Christ. She is flummoxed and exasperated already, with herself. She surveys the calm faces of the writers’ group, filing in to Gayle’s oddly sparse, yet oddly cozy living room. A sitting room? A setting room? What room is this? Where is she? Where is she, ever, anymore?

The writers take their seats, smiling with cautious welcome to her. This is Jenny. They do not know her trail, her M.O. They know little of the little she pretends to understand of herself. Perhaps a few know that she is a writer, perhaps not. She does not want them to think she has worn her underwire bra for anything but support. She worries suddenly that her V-neck t-shirt is cut too low. She does not want them to judge her by her flushed cheeks, her too-frequently careening speech patterns. She holds her own reins tight, has promised herself that she will behave, behave.

Still: I write better than I knit, is what she manages, in greeting. And: I left my writer’s card at home. This is followed by a silence that is terrible to her ears, the roar of surf overhead and no air left, face planted in the sand under the sea. Oops! Writer’s card!

It’s a joke, she says quickly, struggling to come up for air once more.

Ah! Of course! All in good fun. They are smiling again, friendly souls — writerly Brits and an Irishman, getting settled now in the navy-blue cushions, shuffling their papers. She is savvy enough to know that her awkwardness has a brief, safe home here. Like Jenny, these writers travel with an eye out for comic fodder, puddles of tragedy, metaphor in progress. Jenny catches one or two of them acknowledging in her a brushstroke of vulnerability, so key in the success of a principle character. It was a joke is four-word proof of the human condition.

She digs her new knitting needles into a ball of wool and tells herself she will keep her head up tonight. Perhaps someday, again, she will be a principle character. For now, though, she is here — well — she doesn’t know why she’s here. She hasn’t known for some time.

Kentish apple cake is served. Coffee, tea, are served. It was a joke slithers down the upholstery and under the sofa, where it will curl up with the boys’ pirate coins and take a nap. Unless it is not a sofa after all, and it is a settee, or a fainting couch, or some other such piece of English furniture. Writers’ group is about to begin.

She finds herself easily confused and full of questions, in this country. But she is no principle character anymore, so she tries to calm herself, not ask more than one out of every two dozen questions that pop like bright balloons in her mind as the writers’ group chats. Gayle grins at her reassuringly from across the room. Gayle still has faith in her, although Jenny has lost faith in herself.

The Irishman, he has lost faith in Anna Karenina, and his commentary is frankly hilarious. Too many “-skys.” All their names end in “-sky”! Ridiculous!

In truth, she has not read Anna Karenina. She does not want to. She is mildly humiliated that she does not want to. These days, Jenny is humiliated by the sound of her own breath. She is humilated by her wide hips, the beginnings of jowls, by what remains of the person she was.

She is humiliated by the lump of chaste white wool and twee teddy-bear-headed knitting needles in her lap, gifted to her earlier in the day by G’s pal Kath. Kath had assured her that she’d learn, with a spot of practice. But perhaps Jenny had not understood. Perhaps Kath’s mild-mannered British accent had confused her once again. Perhaps it was a spot of whiskey that was needed, for her knitting. Yes. Whiskey would help the knitting.

Earlier in the day, Jenny had been afraid to put her stockinged feet down after lunch when Kath mentioned a terrible infestation of encrustaceans. Noticing Jenny’s unnerved expression, Kath was quick to explain that no matter now much English livestock was roaming about the house (a hamster named Freddy; several stick insects, one dangling an egg from its leg), there were merely encrustations of unidentifiable dried messes — not crabs and lobsters scuttling about, preying on the toes of awkward Americans, who still insist upon referring to prawns as shrimp.

Listening to the writers talk, Jenny catches herself sighing, wishing her English and Irish ancestors had simply stayed put. Most Brits are quite able and willing to tell you about their lineage, she thinks. Even the most common commoner seems to have some fabulous tale to tell about vicars and viscounts and Stonehenge orgy participants, plucked directly from their clean, double-hung DNA.

Fewer Americans are able to tell ancestral tales. Even fewer are suave when it comes to expressing their horror at being American ducks on the other side of the Great Pond. The problem, of course, is that everyone sounds so damn smart, in England. What is left for an American to say? Jenny wonders. The apologies alone would take years. So sorry about the tea. So sorry about the tarring and feathering. So sorry we sound so sublimely, bumblingly stupid as we rave like loons about your yogurts.

Two writers have brought new work. They read their own work aloud, in this group. Jenny does not know where to look. At first, she cannot help but try to absorb the writer as he reads, but then she notices that the rest of the group stares politely at the floor, nodding. So Jenny looks away, at her toes, at the fire.

But it wasn’t delightful, Simon’s date with Angela, she finds herself saying. The words want out. He says it was “delightful,” but it wasn’t. Or — if it was — we want to know why. A brushstroke, too, of what he’s missing from his failed marriage to Anna. It’s Anna, right? Something vulnerable about him. An anchor.

Jesus. She sticks her nose quickly into her coffee mug. How dare she? And yet, they accept her easily, consider her points. The writers’ group is tight, quite erudite — she can see — and being heard is pleasant. She wonders what it would be like to have a writers’ group like this, in rural Massachusetts.

Another writer, mistaken once for a tramp himself at Charing Cross and offered tea (can you imagine, Jenny thinks, the fodder there!), reads a surreal piece about the removal of the frontal lobe, the ability to negate perfection and the disastrous obsession with it, for it.

Bleak, the group agrees. Bleak, but beautifully lyrical.

She does not find the piece bleak at all, although she is blinking back tears.

I was envious, Jenny says. Relieved. For him.

Heads swivel. They are listening, kindly. Yes?

She tries to explain. I would give it up too. The relentless memories. Jenny realizes her hands are gesturing lamely of their own accord.

A slight hesitation hangs in the air.

Really, says the author. Really. Well. How about that, then.

This is certainly more than she has planned to say to the writers’ group. It is not her writers’ group, but just like that, they are comrades. Where does she write? What does she write? What direction has her writing taken? they want to know.

She must say something. But how can one say, I want to die, I want to die, I live for two small children, the pain is unbearable, I belong nowhere, I have lost. I have lost. It is all failure now, coming in wave after wave.

She says something. And then, something else. As soon as the words leave her mouth she cannot recall what, exactly, she has said.

What if it could get better? the Irishman asks, his eyes grave and warm. What if it could?

Jenny can feel the tears coming now. She has practiced for two years, three, to keep the tears in. They shame her. She is a beggar of life, now. No longer a star. Her time came and she squandered it, somehow, by simply trying to live.

I want to believe, she tells him, tells the writers’ group. But, honestly? I don’t believe it. Not today. I cannot see this ending well. I would remove the frontal lobe, I would. Remember nothing of how this came to pass. I don’t need to know. Not anymore.

This is writers’ group, and no one has told Jenny that what happens in writers’ group, must stay in writers’ group. She is off-balance, the silver bullet still wedged in her heart heating up, as it does when on the spot. The pain is searing. They can see it. There is nowhere to hide.

I will never see them again, she thinks. Never.

Angela, she says to Chris. I could write Angela. You wrote her off. You wrote her off too quickly. She would have so much to say. You don’t know.

Yes, he says, to the strange American woman with the wide smile, the bright demeanor, who is dying. Yes. He laughs, because even the dying need laughs.

She is more impressed than ever with this country. She wishes to call it home, but nowhere feels like home. Her children, her beautiful, confounding, dazzling daughters, they are home. But at some point, this will become burden to them. Her writing has been laced with arsenic. It is not what he wishes, what they all wish. But it is what she has left, for now. A blog. A history. Friends she has yet to meet, in person.

She bears witness, awkwardly. If she dies tomorrow, she will have left behind words for them that prove only that she was paying attention, that her fight was fought in words, that she cannot pretend the pain that slices her open again and again is not real. She will not pretend.

More cake? Coffee? She earns her keep, the visiting friend. She will be a serving wench. She has not meant to spill, but she is messy that way, terribly so.

And yet, no one is faulting her. Not here, at least. She is safe, again, if for a night.

What if? What if? the writers’ group asks. A good writer always asks, What if?

What if? she echoes, hollowly. There is so little left of her, although she can leave them laughing when they go. The curse, the blessing, the in-between.

The writers’ group. To belong. This, she thinks, is what is missing now. She would like to belong.

They head on their way to their versions of home. One, expecting a baby any day. Another, moving to a town that sounds so pristine, so utterly perfect that Jenny wishes for lightning death, or a new nationality. The others, all with homes that await them, with loves that await them. Two, three years of failure and loss and humiliating herself — Jenny knows it is time to be done with this, but her frontal lobe won’t let go. Brainfruit, strawberries gone mushy and mild, the reality that 99.9% of us, as the Irishman pointed out, will never reach our dreams, our goals.

She weeps after they leaves, and hates herself for it. How long can this healing possibly take? Will she be anything? Will there someday be someone waiting at home for her again?

For now, the stranger in a strange land gathers empty coffee cups, cake crumbs, folded paper napkins. Tonight, there are no answers, as there have not been for months and years. But it does her heart good to know that a writers’ group meets weekly, to sketch in the blurry lives of the weariest, of the drifters, of all who search for home.