Out of the Depths: Wendy C. Ortiz's Excavation

When I first read Wendy C. Ortiz’s Excavation: A Memoir, I was living in a house at the top of a hill overlooking the harbor. I sat on a couch in the lounge, reading in the sun while my friends watched My Girl. I had only just returned to New Zealand from a trip to the United States, where had seen old friends from the Internet and made some new ones. And then, the same week I sat down to read Ortiz’s memoir, someone back in the States whom I care for quite a bit had stepped forward and named a mutual online friend in a string of revealed sexual offenders in our community.

So I sat and I read and I kept reading, but it was hard and slow going. I felt carved up, learning about these men back in the States, most of whom I had trusted and thought I had known, and the personal stories of women coming forward, some far younger than the men they had trusted and thought they had known. And Excavation bled into this, My Girl bled into this, every crush on an older man, a high school teacher, a friend’s older brother, an older cousin’s friend bled into this and what could have been, this and what was.

Wendy C. Ortiz writes about herself and for herself, for her former self and her present self and everything she lost and gained from knowing Mr Ivers. Her style is easy and accessible, and without all of my emotional baggage I saw myself flying through the book. If only I wasn’t feeling so shitty about everything, I thought, I’d have this read by now. I was doing her a disservice, I thought. I felt guilty for liking Excavation, guilty for being swept up by Wendy and Jeff and Nicholas and Veronica, guilty for not being able to give them my undivided attention. In the end, it took me about three weeks to read Excavation cover to cover; it took eight months to process it enough to get past saving an empty word document.

Ortiz writes devastatingly well. Excavation is crafted to be effortless, eyes racing over the page, caught up in prose easily attributed to the language of one specific, articulate teenager, prose that reads like poetry in its fluidity. This is writing that sounds great when read aloud, which is alarming, given the measure of its content and the weight of its impact. This is writing that carries the feeling of summer, a carefree sensibility the reader surely cannot, should not, be feeling but that teenaged Wendy so desperately craves. This placement bears an emotional toll on the reader – lassitude chained to gravity, and an inability to separate the two.

Wendy the teenager is an everygirl pushed to the extremes. She is myself at fifteen, heavy black eyeliner and dark clothing, a penchant for danger and poetry and darkly soothing music. She is someone else’s self in her tie-dye and her wild mother, someone else’s self in her recklessness, someone else’s self in her choice of friends. She is all of us in the details, staying up late talking to her crush on the phone and then writing about it in her diary, sneaking around, feeling alive and ecstatic and above, removed from, parental understanding.

Except, with Wendy the crush on the phone is in his late 20s and Wendy is 13, she is 14, she is creeping toward 15. The crush is her teacher and he is a manipulator, he is playing a game so well he’s forgotten how to stop. Wendy is so smart and she knows it and she wants to learn everything, and he is a bad man (but they all are, aren’t they?), such a bad man he can make himself look good.

This is how Ortiz makes it work so well – writing compellingly, consumingly, about this thing. Because it would be consuming, it would be darkly compelling, it would feel sexy and dangerous in the good way at 13, at 14, at 15, and terrifying only later, terrible only in contemplation, as all sorts of risky behaviors are; Ortiz knows this because she lived it, and that makes it all the worse on the reader. It is Ortiz’s ability to reflect, to slip back into this headspace and write from the depths of Wendy at 13, 14, 15, that allows the reader this insight, this extent of connection, and this power of knowing.

And that is why I sat, mourning Wendy the child, as Wendy the woman ‘looks back at that fossilized time’, mourning for the Wendy pushing her daughter’s stroller around the tar pits, for the piece of her that ‘feels trapped in time’, for the women on the Internet and for all of us, for Ortiz the author who carries it all with her, the Wendy who finally feels a ‘sense of belonging’ in her current life, the Ortiz who was ready to pull it up from the tar pit and excavate it all.

These days, I am living in a house on the other side of the city at the top of a valley. From here, I can see my old house, the window I looked out of while I was reading Excavation. I can see a tiny version of the harbor I gazed down upon. I can almost see a tiny version of myself and my friends watching My Girl that October afternoon so long ago.

Put My Head In Your Lap

The sixteen short-short stories in Claudia Smith's “Put Your Head In My Lap” (Future Tense Books, 2009) convey such tenderness it's difficult not to develop a big-ass lump in my throat, the kind that causes tears to well and fall. This is a collection to read alone, wrapped in a blanket beside a crackling fire, a steaming cup of tea nearby. But beware: anyone who's had a prior relationship with heartbreak will re-experience that sorrow, those losses. Proceed, however, and be brave. Your reward is to discover prose that resonates with simplicity, prose that prompts aching and, subsequently, hope. You will want to reach for someone dear; you will want to dial up an old friend and catch up, someone whose voice once soothed. This is the complication in Smith's writing: her words remind us of our pain, but the pain reminds us, inspires us, to reconcile with that, or those, we have lost.

(I should mention here that this review first appeared in The Chapbook Review, and when given this opportunity to write about PYHIML again, I decided that I said it all best before. What I'll add here is simply this: Anything Claudia Smith writes, I'll buy and read with interest, knowing I'm guaranteed to have a large, satisfying read, made up of small doses of tiny stories. And now, back to the review.)

In “Submarine Dreams,” a mother says, simply, “We came here a year ago. I was hopeful.” An obvious, but unstated, divorce later, she closes this story with the lines: “My son sleeps with me now. I sing to him, Mariposa, sweet dreams, butterfly, close your eyes. It's a bad pattern to set, isn't it?” and I'm not sure if she's addressing us or her departed husband. “Good luck,” she sings, because her son “gets scared, dreaming, at night.”

In the next story, “Valentine,” the narrator recalls how she and an unnamed “you” first fell in love; after falling “asleep together on the floor,” she kisses his forehead. She says, “I did it suddenly and softly, startling myself,” and I, too, am startled by her admission. It seems so natural, that kiss. And yet, it “was like touching the wings of a creature you couldn't see but knew to be beautiful simply from the feel.” Startling, as well, what she does next: “I stood up and walked out of the apartment, down the stairs, into the street. It was cold and I wasn't wearing a coat, but I kept walking anyway, thinking I couldn't go back there because you'd be gone.”

A fiction professor once told me -- and this is some of the best advice I've ever been on the receiving end of -- that physical objects are best utilized when they pull double, or even triple, duty. What he meant was that a coat can just be a coat, sure, but when it actually means something more than that, magic is born. The magic in this particular coat is that, of course, it is back at the apartment, beyond reach; what's more, it tells us something about this narrator -- that she's willing to go without it, despite the chill, because the physical consequences are nothing compared to the emotional; to return to her apartment, to find her object of affection gone, will leave her more bare than she already is, and the idea and fear of such exposure is something she's unwilling, just yet, to face. Interesting, then, that this particular story opens with the line, “You once gave me an apple off a tree, and I thought about its significance, and wondered if you meant something by that, or if you were just handing me an apple.” An apple, a coat, a sleeping son: in Smith's careful hands, they are more than anything we've ever encountered; they are precious cargo, worthy of quiet meditation and further exploration.

In the next story, “Half,” the unnamed narrator wears a locket her mother-in-law gave her; inside the locket, her husband's black hair. She says, “I wore the locket at all times, even when I took a shower. I thought about the thin layer of gold between his lock and the flesh on my collarbone.” A locket, hair, a collarbone: again, the familiarity of such physical objects is recast in such a way that readers can't help but ponder their symbolic meanings; again, Smith's words—their simplicity, their frankness, the magic of their admissions, their very utterances—become more than words; they become experiences, revealed to us. And are we worthy? When else have we been handed such trust? I can't say I've ever felt such a connection to a writer's (dare I say?) soul.

In “Marks,” a woman learns the meaning of what it is to be touched, to be the one who does the touching. The father of her child has “a strawberry mark behind his left shoulder. When she traces it, he stands up and goes to lie down on the stone floor in the bathroom. She watches him through the opened door.” The door here, a physical object that can be opened or closed, is, while open, closed. The threshold is uncrossable. Her touch has gone, worse than unnoticed, unwanted. And from worse to worst, after they have had sex; and all she can do is continue to watch him until, when “he falls asleep, she leaves and looks in on their child.” And then it is up to us to learn the meaning of a touch, and when we read that she “would like to touch the whorl on the back of his head, but it would wake him,” there is only a deep sense of loss, something unexplainably clear -- this is what it is to want to reach out, this is what it is to stop yourself.

I can feel my throat tightening now. Who wouldn't? Fitting, then, that the final story in the collection, “Ice,” opens with this: “They will break one another's hearts -- well, at least, he will break hers, she's not sure now about his.” And having read the other stories in the meantime, we, too, can't help but be unsure about his, though we do know the fate of hers. Which is why, I'm sure, I opened this review with the word “tenderness.” If these aren't prime examples, I don't know what else I can offer in my desperate urging that will compel you to buy this chapbook. It is required reading for any human being; perhaps, more specifically, any woman whose life hasn't quite turned out the way she hoped it would at some youthful age when she was freshly scrubbed and innocent. We may still be freshly scrubbed, but the scrubbing, over the years, will have certainly taken on a different purpose: no longer to cleanse but to cast away the sorrows of our past and current lives. Claudia Smith understands this; and I can't help but think because she's been there. So tonight, wrapped in a blanket and with a cup of tea nearby, I will raise it to her and hope that as I blow away steam, so too will I blow away her hurt, if only for even a moment.