Karen Andrus

Find A Collection of River Rock Writing (Sacramento) for purchase on Amazon.com by clicking the image to the left or clicking here.

A Collection of River Rock Writing represents eight voices of a group of Sacramento-region writers who come together to write on Tuesday mornings. The anthology is inspired principally by the Amherst Writers & Artists (AWA) method. Some pieces may mention a prompt; others may not. In any case, these poems, stories, essays, and memories “needed to be written.” The River Rock Writers find freedom in expression as we follow the AWA method’s Five Essential Affirmations.

Below are my contributions to this anthology.

The Interview

There’s the gestalt lie and there’s the expedient and more pedestrian lie—one may have a broader scope than the other and be globally impactful, but the smaller one does have long-lasting residual effects.

By the time I was eighteen, my lying was orchestrated with the aplomb of a virtuoso. Deceits had served me well for much of my life and I saw no reason for this to change.

Now I was in a new country, in a new city, and I needed work in order to pay for my passage home. The eastern edge of South Africa touches the Indian Ocean, and the city of Durban is a beach town. An acquaintance told me that the clothing store he managed was in need of a white retail clerk. Russ offered to recommend me, and an interview was set up at Woolfson’s, the parent store.

Having spent the previous year backpacking across two continents and fifteen countries, I had no interview clothing to wear. Russ led me through his boutique to the more formal section with racks of choices. He located a pair of beautiful lined slacks and then pulled out a fitted designer top.

“Try these,” he said, and he left me to it in the dressing room. “We’ll hem them if the slacks need it.” They did need it, and by “we” he meant the black South African employee in the back, a man named Pious.

I bought new platform shoes, and I was set. The interview was scheduled at the corporate store on the other side of the city. At the appointed time I was ushered into the “Whites Only” door of the Personnel Office. A man who looked like a Ken doll surveyed me in classic up-and-down mode, lingering below my neckline. He introduced himself with the same last name that was painted on the front of the Woolfson building.

“So,” he began. “What brings you to want a job in the clothing sector?”

“Oh,” I beamed. “I love fashion retail.”

He looked down at my application. “Tell me about your experience.”

Experience? Apart from shoplifting at Macy’s and Joseph Magnin in middle school, I had no fashion retail history. What I told him, however, was that I’d managed a clothing boutique in another beach community.

“Have you heard of Carmel, in California?” I asked.

He nodded, glancing at the application on his desk. “I see that you managed a shop there.” And he added, “You’ve done quite a lot for your age.”

On my application I supplemented my age by four years. He didn’t know that I was just eighteen.

“Tell me,” he continued, “ about your inventory.”

I thought wildly. My only jobs in high school were babysitting and working at a cheese and wine shop. I had no idea how to answer a question about clothing stock. I smiled effusively. “What would you like to know?”

“Volume? Numbers?” He smiled, expectant.

“Let me put it this way,” I responded, as if he and I spoke the same business language. “We handled a lot of inventory. And…” I rushed to segue, “since Carmel is a beach town— just as Durban is a beach town—we handled an almost identical range of product: casual lines for the sun, and a more finished category for summer evening wear.”

Ken flashed another grin and was about to ask something further when his phone buzzed. He picked up the receiver and listened.

“Right, brilliant!” he said. “Get me a driver, I’ll be there in five. Could you process the young lady in here?” He listened for a moment. “Karen,” he said, pausing again. “The American.”

When he hung up, he stood and reached out to shake my hand. “Congratulations,” he pronounced. “You’re hired. Welcome to Woolfson’s.”

Palm Reader

He read my palm on a day that was cold, hung with fog. Before he reached for my hand, I wiped it clean on my jeans. I didn’t want him distracted by accidental obstacles along the way. A piece of lint could redirect a passage and lead me to an unsettling future. On the other hand, it could protect me from a horrific outcome and provide, instead, a detour to a place of peace.

Tracing the longest line from the wrist, his voice was matter-of-fact. Longevity depends on your view of life, he said.

Go on, I said, eyes on the line.

Some bodies inhabit space for a very long time and yet the experience of life is thin.

Some bodies don’t linger long, but the experience of life is rich.

It’s not the length of the line but all that fills the space it occupies.

For the very fortunate, the line is long and satiated. The beauty of the length here is the magic that happens with old age. Pieces of the puzzle come together, events and situations can be seen differently through multiple lenses of experience. We live long enough to learn from our mistakes. We recognize patterns. We revisit anger and honor the wounds. Same when we encounter those in pain. We move forward with a new vision. We get past judgment and move forward with compassion.

I closed my palm. Thank you, I said.

He pulled his white cane off the floor. You’re welcome, he said.

Mother’s Day

Three women stand in silence in front of the gilt-framed painting dominating the museum wall.

It is a portrait of a nude, a female elongated in Modigliani verticality but influenced by a decidedly earlier time. The face bears a semblance to those daVinci painted, the eyes almond- shaped, the defined nose, the small secretive mouth.

“I don’t know,” Martha says. Her flat rubber-soled Oxfords anchor her to the floor. “It was such a long time ago.”

Her sister, two years older and standing in the middle, quietly studies the painting. She breaks her silence. “I remember the strand of beads. I played with them and…don’t you remember? I pulled too hard on them from around her neck. She had to have them all restrung.”

Lisel, the youngest, is wearing her comfortable heels today. “I swear that it’s her, I would bet on it. We all know how she made a living.”

Two sisters are convinced; one is contemplative but not committed.

Then, Martha again. “I suppose so,” she says, averting her eyes. “It’s probably Mom. Let’s get some lunch.”

Eggs

My family never attended the service but we did dye Easter eggs. My mother recognized a need her children had for the festivity of the Easter egg hunt, so on Easter Sunday, she devoted time for boiling eggs, a couple dozen perhaps, and for preparing dye for dipping and staining the eggs. The dye was not store-bought. My mother steeped tea and let it cool. She had my brother and me search out leaves and grasses in the backyard. We’d then wrap our finds around the eggs before dipping them in the cold tea until the depth of color satisfied us. After the eggs dried in the sun, we peeled away the leaves and grass to reveal elegant shadowy silhouettes, relic vestiges of the original shapes of slender weeping willow leaves and stems of sour grass. In the afternoon, while we were distracted by other things, my mother hid the eggs, and before dinner, we got to search them out. While this was fun, I remember the disappointment when our collection, beautifully gathered in baskets, was immediately transformed into deviled eggs and egg salad sandwiches for supper. There was no chocolate involved at the end of our Easter egg search, no pretty pastels, just an early dinner with a sulphur aftertaste.

Regardless of the time of year, eggs have figured significantly all of my life. I love decorating them with sharpie pen and water color, but the loveliness of eggs is consummate in their unadulterated shells. A half dozen ostrich eggs gleam as they sit in the light of my office window. Emu eggs from a Minnesota farm rest in a black soapstone plate from East Africa. I have unearthed amazing eggs in second-hand stores, eggs with meticulously painted landscapes. And I have inherited carved and painted enameled wooden eggs from my Russian relatives. These sit out all year. They are not held in egg cups or on the pedestals designed specifically to display eggs. I keep them in companionship with each other, clustered together in bowls or baskets.

I have wondered about my attraction to eggs. What is it that draws me to this lovely shape, this vessel of soon-to-be-born life? I don’t have children. Maybe it satisfies some suggestion of parenthood? I do stop short of sitting on them for incubation, since, after all, they are empty. But I feel a comfort for them being in my home.

Chocolate Cherokee

“So yellow.” Winnie looked down at her breakfast. Two poached eggs, split open, each yolk spilling and pooling at the curvature of the plate.

So yellow. She marveled at the intensity of color. What was different today?

The difference was the tomato her neighbor brought to her the evening before, a Chocolate Cherokee tomato, swollen and pungent, crying out for immediate consumption. That a tomato could change everything was a wonder.

The aroma of the tomato, peppery and bright, beguiled. It beckoned. It pleaded for the knife, sharp-bladed, to part the fruit into segments, segments small enough to fill the mouth, while reserving space for the burst of juice to gorge the taste buds. The soft eggs rested on thin slices of plum-colored tomato meat, filaments of skin streaked with olive green.

Winnie felt dizzy. How is it, she asked herself, that a tomato could alter the color of an egg?

Ann

You can tell a lot about somebody by the way they cook an egg.

Ann pulled the cardboard carton from the fridge, shook oil over the cast iron frypan, and cranked the burner to low. Once the oil sheened in rings, she cracked the first egg hard on the thin rim of the aluminum measuring cup she kept for this singular purpose. With one hand, she split the shell over the pan, loosening the egg as it slipped from its case to the surface of the pan, now bubbling with earnest heat. She followed suit with the second egg. Ann grabbed a plate from the drainer by the sink, placed it squarely beside the stovetop, reached for the spatula, flipped the eggs, counted to ten, and expertly slid the eggs from pan to plate. The whites were soft but fully congealed; the yolks’ membranes pierce-ready for the first explosive bite.

This exacting nature didn’t surprise those who knew her.

Her first home away from her boisterous family, a Catholic chaos of eleven, was an assigned dorm at John Reed College in Portland. She’d gotten in on scholarship, and it was understood she’d share living quarters with another female. The girl on the other side of the crowded room was a gabber and a drinker, loose with her friendships and loose with the dirty clothes she hung over Ann’s desk chair. When the roommate staggered in the door after midnight, muffling giggles and, shortly, moans while tangling with another body in her twin bed, Ann urged the wax earplugs deeper into her ears. To her relief it was within only weeks of the first semester that the dormmate moved in with a boy. Once Ann had the dorm to herself, the 200 square feet felt airy and light. She could stretch and breathe. Silence was weirdly deafening, so her tactile habit of using earplugs provided a steady if unnecessary comfort.

To keep herself fed, Ann worked at a coffee house three nights a week. The precision of a barista’s skills woke her to a satisfaction in ritual, in the repetition of right steps leading to an expected result. Her interaction with customers was efficient but not warm.

After graduation, she chose to celebrate by traveling solo to the unfamiliarity of Southeast Asia. The density and energy of Bangkok was thrilling but jarring. The fecundity of the Laotian rain-forested mountains quenched her thirst for the unknown, and the centuries of pilgrimages to the decaying temples of Cambodia seeped time into her cells. She lingered longest in Japan, where she came to appreciate bathing as high art. Her favorite bath took place outside on a tea farm. A body-sized bronze bowl served as a tub. The bowl hung from thick rope knotted around a heavily-beamed scaffold. An open fire beneath the bowl heated its water, made fragrant by a mesh bag filled with carrot peelings. A thick plank of wood served as the surface to protect her skin from the hot bronze. Floating on the plank, breathing in the sweet aroma of carrots, she took in the view of Mt. Fuji. She wondered if the bath might improve her hindsight. The following day she sought out a master at an Urasenke school to teach her the practice of the Tea Ceremony.

Wherever she went, she sought single-residence lodging. It was simpler that way. She was polite to other travelers but kept them at a distance. Her senses heightened when she was alone.

Ann traveled for three years before she decided to return to North America, bringing back a clearer understanding of herself: Alone works. Ritual is important. Predictability matters. You don’t need much.

She chose to settle into a small Central Valley town. The local Buddhist Center needed a caretaker, someone who would clean and maintain the facilities before and after meditation, in trade for lodging in a spare studio space. Ann moved into this life, bringing all she needed in a large rucksack. It didn’t take much time to unpack. The first thing she pulled out was the heaviest item, the cast-iron frying pan. Setting it on the two-burner stove, she turned toward the window facing east.

Ten yards from her gaze was a rolling chicken coop. A dozen Bantam hens pecked for breakfast in the pine needles and gravel. Ann smiled. Eggs.

Age-otori

I was three years old, asleep on the twin bed covered in a chenille bedspread with little pompoms dangling from the hem. I slept hard in those days, and didn’t notice it one morning when Grandmother paid me and my hair a secretive visit. My hair was slippery and pale blond. It swung freely from the crown of my head, long enough to brush my shoulders. Beyond resisting my mother’s attempts to tease out the tangles, I didn’t give it much consideration.

When I woke up this particular morning, my first yawn brought in the earthy mineral smell of our grandparents’ apple ranch. I abruptly remembered Mom and Dad had dropped us off, my brother and me, to stay the weekend in Sebastopol. Barefoot and pajama’d, I padded my way across an expanse of hardwood to the cool linoleum of the kitchen floor. I was hungry.

Grandmother beamed at me from the open Frigidaire. “Don’t you look lovely this morning! Did you look in the mirror yet?”

I shook my head sleepily, confused. Grandmother was not usually nice.

“Come on,” she said, pulling on me. “I have a little surprise for you!” She led me to the bathroom off the side of the laundry room and opposite the California cooler, filled with Gravenstein apples.

Grandmother lifted me to the mirror. To my horror, a quarter-inch fringe of bangs framed my forehead. It proved to be my first experience of Age-otori (Japanese, for looking worse after a haircut), but it also introduced a cutting awareness of how powerless I was as a child. I longed to speed up the growing up process so I could determine my own fate…including how I appeared to the world.

I Slept Like A Baby

That night I slept like a baby

I shouldn’t have slept so well.

I should’ve been wide awake, reworking the argument,

the soft fingers of it, the howling grief of it.

It was all too raw to be vanquished by sleep,

by an involuntary surrender, to the sinking pillow,

a vacant valley I pounded into the feathers.

That night I slept like a baby,

Slammed straight to a dream,

Someone else’s dream,

I think,

while I’m dreaming.

There’s no familiar here,

I think,

while I’m dreaming.

No breeze to cleanse this groundswell of unfinished feeling,

Just a hard scratch, digging deep, to reach the animal in need of

a rest.

A resolution.

I’ve never had a facility for shouldering the strength of an argument.

Exhausted, I slept like a baby

The night engaging me away from battle, readying me for a new morning,

A new day, but the scars remain, tender,

in need of a salve,

another night’s dream,

not mine.

Sacred Object

There are fewer sacred objects today than yesterday.

I find less reason to keep things now, things about which, for most of my life, I felt a deep lifetime attachment. A lot of this has to do with the fact that my next-in-line kin don’t care much about possessions. The story around Great Aunt Rose’s blue porcelain tea set likely has little meaning for my niece and nephew. They probably don’t remember Great Aunt Rose since they were toddlers when they visited her in the penthouse overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s just an old tea set to them, something they’d see in a dusty antique store. Or they wouldn’t see, since they don’t frequent antique stores.

Even when I was very young, I was drawn to the tea set, most of which stayed hidden inside Rose’s dining room credenza, a cabinet made from olive wood. The cabinet was so substantial that in the 1940’s a crane had to hoist it into the dining room window three stories up. This is the same cabinet that was carried out like a coffin after Rose died fifty years later. It was heavier than sin and had to be carried out by the muscled men in the family, heaved down three levels of staircase to the sidewalk of Filbert Street. After it was hoisted into an open pickup truck, one end of it pointed to the sky as we drove down the peninsula to our home in San Mateo. It wouldn’t fit around the corner of our front door, so we offered it to a friend, but she lived up a set of stairs with no space for a turn into her home, either. So it took up space in our garage until we woke up to the absurdity of sheltering a piece of furniture instead of a car, and since we could find no one to take it, the credenza ended up around the side of the house, within view of the dogs when they spent time in the dog run. Rain warped the piece, and finally, when it came time for us to sell the house, Dane took an electric saw to it. Both of us cringed as he severed the elegance that once drew me into Aunt Rose’s dining room, that credenza that rested against the space of a wall, solid and reassuringly beautiful, providing a staging place for the large serving-size blue and white porcelain plate, the centerpiece to the Japanese tea set no one wants any more.