DAVID LAWRENCE MORSE

The Memoir

Only two days after Irene Canter was deposed at the law office of August Jackson, she received the transcript of the deposition in the mail. That was a surprise. How did they get it typed and xeroxed and mailed so soon? It didn’t seem like something her attorney could manage. His office didn’t turn things around quickly. After she met with him the first time to explain her injury, it was three weeks before she received from him the instructions that he’d promised right away. That was okay. She understood. Mr. Jackson wasn’t one of those slick attorneys with his grinning photos plastered on the back of phone books or billboards all over town. He was a decent man with no interest in that kind of attention. He didn’t have a team of underlings to boss around. Just him and his secretary, a lady named Susan that Irene liked because even though she was a divorcée, she had a positive attitude.

Irene’s deposition arrived in a manila envelope with no return address. The pages had been hole-punched and fit snugly into a binder with a blue see-through plastic cover, like the cracked blue see-through plastic trays at the Westlake cafeteria. Just like the food at the cafeteria, the transcript made her stomach turn.

She had been nervous about the deposition, but she tried to tell herself that it wouldn’t be difficult. All she had to do was tell what happened, and she could do that, because she knew exactly what happened. That’s what her attorney kept saying. Just tell the truth, he said. Any question that their lawyer asks, you can answer. If there’s a problem, I’ll be there. If you’re unsure if you should answer, or if you’re unsure how to answer, let me know and we’ll take a break and talk about it. She liked her attorney. He was a calming presence, always clasping one hand in the other, either in his lap or resting on his desk, with his fingers interlaced like you do in prayer. The reassuring way he talked—that smooth, resonant voice like a forest stream flowing over a bed of pebbles. August had told her that she would be deposed by a state attorney representing Westlake, the hospital where she’d been employed, a woman named Rhonda Sawyer. Rhonda was no pushover, said August, but she was decent and fair and would pull no punches. Except Rhonda didn’t show up, she was ill. Instead it was a fussy man with unflattering glasses and ugly shoes named Cox Tributon. They sat in her attorney’s office at a long table too large for the room, surrounded by floor to ceiling shelves filled with law books the color of faded money. She thought Tributon would sit across from her but he sat too close, almost right next to her, diagonal at the head of the table. He smelled like boiled potatoes. She hadn’t eaten breakfast that morning because of her nerves. Whenever Tributon heard her stomach rumble, he would stop for a second, staring at his notes as if personally offended, then proceed.

“What’s your husband’s name?”

“Marshall Canter.”

“And is he working now?”

No, he wasn’t working now because he mostly worked nights. He wanted to be with her today but she wouldn’t let him. And why was that? Tributon wanted to know. Because her husband loved to talk, and if he came with her to the deposition, he would answer all the questions, not her. She said she didn’t mind listening to him, he was like one of those morning DJs on the radio, he rambled on, sometimes it was too much, but she knew how to turn down the volume or spin the dial.

“And where is your husband’s current place of employment?”

Her husband worked at the same place where she worked until she hurt her back—the state mental hospital. Tributon kept asking nosy questions that were none of his business, but when she asked her attorney, he said she should answer. Like about how ten years ago she spent five weeks on the 6th floor at Three East. And what about her emotional state last year when she couldn’t get pregnant with their third child? And how long back in the day had she been on food stamps, and how long had she worked as a seamstress at the Mill, and why had she been fired? None of that had anything to do with the fact that her back popped loose at Westlake and she couldn’t walk or even feel her legs for two weeks. But she answered all those questions patiently and didn’t get upset until the end. That’s what she’d turned to when the transcript came in the mail—she flipped immediately to the end. She read what Cox Tributon said at the end, and she read what she said at the end, and she got that awful feeling like she had when they confined her for five weeks at Three East. The dizziness and confusion and vomit taste on her tongue. Her heart like it was gripped in a fist. “Let me ask you a good catch-all question right now,” Tributon had said at the end. “In order for me to understand your claim, and the little problem that you’re still having with your back, and so forth, is there anything else that you think you need to tell me that I need to know? I’m not talking about anything that’s irrelevant to your claim that you’ve already talked quite a lot about—somebody you got mad at over at the hospital. Or about how you think you’ve been mistreated by a team of trained medical professionals. I’m talking about your injury, your strength, your ability to return to work. That kind of thing.”

To answer that insulting question, she had started out explaining again certain details about her injury that she thought Tributon didn’t hear the first time, since he rarely took his eyes off his notes and never seemed to be listening. That was the same with the doctors—they didn’t listen. Even though she was a nurse, the doctors didn’t listen. That was because she was a nurse at Westlake, and apparently nurses at mental hospitals weren’t respected at “real” hospitals. She started explaining to Tributon that the doctors didn’t listen, and Tributon wasn’t listening while she was explaining that the doctors didn’t listen, and his breath made an unsettling, faintly flapping rasping sound, like moth wings fluttering against a screen. Then she was claiming that she’d been discriminated against. She hadn’t used that word before—discriminated. But once she used it, she used the other word, too—racism—then she was claiming that she’d been abused, all of which finally caught Tributon’s attention: he put down his notes, removed his glasses, looked her in the eyes, and said, “Now hold on—racism?”

“My father was black even though I don’t show it much. Depends on how much time I spend out in the sun.”

“All right. And the doctors abused you? Which doctor? You haven’t said anything about abuse. Exactly how did they abuse you?”

Her attorney August Jackson told her that she’d done just fine. He said she had nothing to be embarrassed about. And she had tried to believe him, and she had believed him, until she read the transcript of her deposition. She’d never read her words in print before. Ordinarily when you talked, your words just disappeared into the air, so you could have said any old thing and no one would remember and no one cared. But not her words at the deposition. They were made permanent in the transcript. Was it part of the public record, in a file cabinet at the courthouse, that anyone could see? Would her children read it someday? Her grandchildren? Could anybody come down to the courthouse and read the foolish words that Irene Canter said? Could they read her answer when she had to admit that no, the doctors didn’t abuse her, not like that, she didn’t mean physical abuse—“Well what kind of abuse did you mean, Mrs. Canter?”—and she could only stammer an answer, how the doctors didn’t talk to her, how they wouldn’t tell her why she was hurting—just didn’t even want to hear about her suffering. “I was in good health before I had the back injury, I kept my figure and wore comfy clogs and never let the patients get me down, not even the aggressive ones because I knew how to turn on the charm. But then I damaged my back and even though after a month I could still hardly walk, those doctors told me to go back to work four hours a day, which they never would have told a white woman. And they made me take that personality test, when my personality didn’t have anything to do with my injury. Because of the discrimination—they want to say women are crazy, it’s not my back, it’s my head. But I knew when I tried to pick up that mop bucket full of water, something popped loose. They gave me that myelogram, and I was in so much pain I couldn’t turn my head or sit up. They sent me home and I was back there two days later because I couldn’t walk. That doctor named Caddis, he examined me, he said, ‘Now Mrs. Canter, how in the world did you get yourself in such a condition?’ As if I injured myself out of plain stupidity. By going the extra mile on the job, is what I said. I have never seen doctors treat a patient like this. If I knew how, I’d write a book about it. But I never studied books like that in school. I studied practical stuff because I wanted to earn a decent living, to make enough to buy myself the little things that a woman needs—cocktail dresses and cute shoes, and Alma Hagen’s latest album because I couldn’t get enough of R&B soul.”

Her testimony at the end rambled on like that for four pages until somehow she stopped herself. The time she was hospitalized a decade ago at Three East, when she got in a panicked state like that, and she couldn’t quit talking, they called it a “neurochemical pathology.”

***

It took her attorney eleven months, but he finally managed to reach a settlement with the State Board of Workers’ Compensation, awarding her $7500 dollars. The employee contends that she is entitled to be compensated for total disability, while the employer contends that employee is able to work, and that any economic loss suffered by the employee is the result of the employee’s desire not to work and is not the result of her employment with Westlake State Hospital. There being a bona fide dispute as to the facts, the parties have agreed upon a settlement which gives due regard to the weight of the conflicting evidence available relating to the disputed facts.

Her own attorney and Cox Tributon cc’d her on all their correspondence, as they jockeyed for position with the administrative law judge and negotiated for a settlement. Tributon tried to argue that, according to several doctors who examined her, she had suffered no structural damage, only a minor “lumbar sacral strain,” which would ordinarily only require a few days or weeks to heal, and that the actual cause of her ongoing malady was either stress or she could be malingering, since she had been fired previously for sleeping on the job. And she had an incentive to malinger, Tributon pointed out, because she needed money: fifteen thousand dollars in credit card and nursing school debt. But her attorney August Jackson rebutted that, if money were her primary objective and she was truly desperate for it, why would she quit work and opt for workers comp instead, when workers comp only paid a portion of what she earned from work? As for the doctors’ reports, Jackson pointed to their universal agreement that lumber sacral strains in some cases could go unresolved for years; also, her psychological profile suggested that, though the pain signals from her back may have diminished, psychogenic pain could continue indefinitely, defined as discomfort that is experienced in a part of the body which is functioning normally and initiating no pain impulses. The label of psychogenic pain, the psychiatrist who tested her had noted, should not necessarily carry with it the implication that the complaint of pain is fictitious, exaggerated, or imaginary.

She read all these letters between Jackson and Tributon to her husband and two children, gathered in the living room—her oldest, Melanie, sprawled on the sofa with her head in her father’s lap, and her youngest, AJ, pushing her back and forth in the rocking chair, which settled her nerves. As she read out loud to her family everything she got in the mail concerning her case—the arguments from Tributon and rebuttals from Jackson, the notes from the judge or her employer, the doctors’ reports—her family listened raptly as if to the drama of an epic narrative. The kids were especially eager to hear their father interpret the meaning of the documents. He was good at that kind of thing: telling stories. It wasn’t always accurate, what he told the kids, but it made for a great story and reassured them that all was fine. “That means Mr. Jackson and Mr. Tributon, they’re all tangled up. But Mr. Jackson, he’s got the blade and he’s going to use it.” “That’s the doctor talking about how your mom isn’t going to be sick forever cause she’s a warrior.” “You ever hear a man that sounds more like a big old fool than that? That man thinks just because the plate on his door says ‘lawyer,’ he can make up lies about your mom. She won’t take it. Not one minute, she’s going to take that.”

AJ went to middle school at Plott, and his homeroom teacher didn’t live in Roselle but in the capital of the neighboring state an hour south. Irene wasn’t familiar with the capital, so she asked AJ to get his teacher to give him the name of a doctor, which his teacher did. She needed to find a new doctor because the doctors in Roselle were assholes who claimed she should go back to work. AJ’s teacher recommended a doctor named Coulson, who gave her a booklet, “38 Expert Recommendations How to Resume a Normal Life.” She did the exercises from the booklet and made some progress—her incontinence improved and she could get up out of that chair and walk without as much pain. Around the house, she hadn’t done any work but simple cooking for months; her husband and kids had been trying to do it for her, which was no good: the floors were filthy, bedsheets unchanged, the fridge was chaos. So when she made a little progress with the exercises, she started back on general house cleaning. But it was too soon and she had to go back to bed. At Westlake, she asked them for part-time light work, something at a desk maybe, and they said, “We can’t rehire you because we don’t want you to hurt yourself worse and ruin your life.” They tried to pretend they cared about her, but really they just didn’t want to give work to a mixed-race woman who hired a lawyer and stood up for her rights.

Her attorney had reviewed with her the contents of the deal, but when the official Settlement Agreement arrived in the mail, she read it front to back, and she was surprised to find, after an outline of the settlement’s terms and lots of legalese, a lengthy discussion of her personal history, which included details from her deposition but also many details that she had not provided to anyone, not her lawyer, judge, employer, children, or husband. In her deposition, she had described how one of the custodians had left a bucket of dirty water in the hall, which was unclean and unsightly, so she’d wheeled it onto the elevator all the way down to the basement, where she was planning to leave it in the utility closet. But she didn’t like leaving a bucket full of ugly water so she decided to empty it. She took the wringer out and tried to lift the bucket to pour it into the sink, but right away, she felt her back pop loose, a socket on either side, and she was in excruciating pain. “I fell to the floor,” she’d said in the deposition. “And there was an open window in there, one of those high basement windows, and I couldn’t reach it but I shouted out for help. No one heard me. I said to myself, ‘Oh God Irene, you’ve got to get help.’ So I crawled all the way past the admin offices, they were empty because it was after hours. I couldn’t move my legs—I don’t know how, but I dragged myself across the floor. I was shouting for help but no one heard me. Finally I got to the soda machines and saw a man out the basement door. He heard me. But he couldn’t get the door open, so I lifted myself up and I opened it. Because I’m a determined woman—I can do anything if I have to.”

That was included in the personal history of the Settlement Agreement, as she had explained in the deposition, but the personal history also told how, in the utility closet, lying on the floor, the pain was so bad that she wet herself. She never told that to anyone. How she managed while lying on the floor to remove her underwear and wipe herself with the dirty mop before she crawled out of there. That wasn’t in the deposition but it was in the Settlement Agreement. How did they know that? And how did they know that, since the accident, she had lost all desire for sex, for her husband or any man? How her desire fell cold like a coma and wouldn’t wake up? She’d never had a problem with desire. Back in middle school, the boys had teased her because she was a beanpole, they cut at her hair with scissors and shut her inside lockers, but in high school, they noticed her, and she noticed them, and she would let some boys kiss her if they knew how to talk. Then when she was working out of high school as a seamstress, she met Marshall at a party, just arrived from Texas. He was a little older. He had a colorful history having worked on an oil rig and played semi-pro baseball for a team called the Car Thieves. He could tell her about the constellations and he knew how to make her laugh. That’s why she was always sleeping on the job at the Mill—because she and Marshall had so much fun, they could never sleep. Her desire for him hadn’t waned, not even after two children, though she had to put her foot down when he got dirty ideas. No thank you! This lady isn’t into that.

But her desire changed after her injury. She didn’t want it to. She wanted to take baths with him with the jets and candles and the funky music like they always did on Saturday night. But that was gone now. When she looked at him, looked at his body, which had only gotten stronger with age, she felt nothing. It was like hearing a song that had once brought her joy but now sounded dull. It didn’t help if you played the song louder just like it didn’t help when he tried harder to seduce her. She’d never told this to anyone. Not how he knew the constellations or about how she used to think he was sexy in his Car Thieves uniform or about the bathtub sex or how it had all vanished after her back popped loose. But there it was in the personal history of the Settlement Agreement.

Well, why should she be surprised? It was the government she was dealing with. The government that watched people. The government that sent Cox Tributon to ask insulting questions and pry into her private life. She got her money from the government—that was the important thing. She got her money, which was her right, and she didn’t have to deal with them ever again. She didn’t read the Settlement Agreement out loud to her family, or mention it to her husband, but folded it in a paper bag and hid it in the closet under a box of sewing needles and light bulbs, masking tape and thread.

Soon after the Settlement Agreement, Marshall lost his job as a security guard at Westlake. He said it was for the obvious reasons—the administration was angry about her claim, so they fired him. Not to worry, he said: he would hire her attorney, August Jackson, to accuse Westlake of retaliation. Either he would get his job back or he would win a big enough settlement that neither one of them would ever have to work again. Nobody could treat Marshall Canter Jr. like trash. That was Marshall—big dreams and big talk. He sounded persuasive, and she liked hearing him talk, but there was something that he wasn’t telling. “What reason did they give for firing you?” she asked, but he wouldn’t go into specifics, and when she asked to see the official letter letting him know that he’d been fired, he said there was no letter. But she knew that was false: Westlake always wrote it in a letter. They were particular about that. She kept telling him to call August Jackson but he never did.

A few weeks after she received the Settlement Agreement, she got a copy of her records from Hornbill Memorial Hospital, when she’d been admitted for two weeks because she was incontinent and couldn’t walk. It was the nurses’ narrative record. She hadn’t requested a copy of the records; the envelope had no return address. The narrative record included descriptions of how the nurses helped her with bathing and dressing and cleaning the bed and how they gave her medications for sleep and pain. Married mixed-race female, age 36 years, admitted per stretcher to room 225 for treatment of low back pain. BP 118/60. Temperature 98. Pulse 80. Weight 160 lbs. Patient is allergic to penicillin—non-diabetic. Patient employed as nursing staff for Westlake State Mental Hospital. All that was exactly the kind of thing that a nurse would write in the nurse’s notes—she’d written hundreds of pages of notes herself, about how Franklin had nightmares or Rondell broke a window or the new patient hit Dr. Pape with a bottle. But these nurses’ notes weren’t the same as the notes that nurses ordinarily noted. These notes told her personal story: how her husband Marshall usually worked the night shift as a security guard, and when on the rare occasion they had both worked nights, her mother stayed home with the kids, and she would take breaks with Marshall in between rounds, and they would watch reruns of old sitcoms on the TV in the staffroom. Marshall guffawed at all the jokes. Marshall claimed that the staff pharmacist stole meds and sold pain pills on the cheap. Marshall claimed that he’d walked in on Dr. Pape having sex with Dr. Mecklin in the vault. He claimed that if you hit the right combination of buttons on the machine, you could get a free soda. She wasn’t sure that all her husband’s stories were true, but they were amusing, and she liked hearing of his exploits even as she herself didn’t break the rules. The nurse’s notes explained all that, and they explained how there was one time she did break the rules, when a patient named Diana was out for testing, and Irene couldn’t help reading a few pages of her diary, which she found in the drawer, not written in paragraphs, just notes.

I stay depressed all the time

Accusing other teachers and the principal of being together and not liking me

My friends didn’t want me to have the job. One of my friends said the job needed a white woman not a black woman

I hate to go shopping

My mother says that I’ve broken her financially, because she tries to help me, and she pays my telephone

She read a few pages every chance she got until Diana was transferred to another wing. She didn’t read the diary to invade Diana’s privacy. She read it because Diana was lonely, which is why she wrote in her diary, to share something that she had no one else to share with. Irene was lonely, too. She didn’t have time for her friends or for her mother, who lived nearby (and who never quit giving her a hard time), and she missed her children, her daughter Melanie, now in high school, wanting nothing to do with her mother, and her younger son, AJ, who shut himself in the closet for hours and would sleep in there all night unless her husband carried him back to bed. He wasn’t a timid boy but the opposite—acting out at school, hitting and spitting and getting into trouble. “What are you afraid of?” she asked him, and he answered, “Me.”

All that was written in the nurses’ narrative history—but she’d never told the nurses any of it. And she hadn’t told the nurses how she went to see a witch doctor but that was also in the nurses’ notes. She hadn’t told anyone, not even Marshall, about the witch doctor. To see the witch doctor, you had to meet at the tire warehouse where he worked. You had to go round to the back and knock and he let you in. You had to go early in the morning before the warehouse opened. You had to pay him with fifty one-dollar-bills wrapped in butcher paper that had already been used for meat. You had to hold the flame and you had to say the names of all the dead relatives you could think of. It was the power of the dead relatives that the witch doctor called on to lift the curse. You had to ignore the pinched chemical odor of the tires and focus on the smell of incense from the flame. You had to allow the live ants to explore the inside of your mouth—your tongue and throat. You had to forget the pain until the pain was forgotten. But she wasn’t able to ignore the odor of the tires and she wasn’t able to forget the pain, and her back pain didn’t get better and her desire for sex didn’t return.

Reading about herself in this way had a curious effect on Irene. She didn’t like how there was somebody out there who had intimate knowledge of her personal life. But she also found it weirdly moving to read about herself, in the same way she found it moving to read about Diana. She was becoming a character in a story. Reading about her experiences on the page gave them a significance and mysteriousness they otherwise lacked. She wanted to learn everything she could about this woman named Irene Canter.

She called her attorney to explain what was happening and obtain advice, but he wasn’t there so she left a message. She folded the nurses’ notes into the paper bag with the Settlement Agreement and hid the bag under the box in the closet.

***

It was the usual junk mail, she didn’t read it—except the letter from the insurance company caught her eye. The envelope was an ugly green and it said: URGENT PERSONAL BUSINESS—OPEN IMMEDIATELY. She knew it was just a sales pitch, but her personal business really was urgent. And now that both she and Marshall were out of work, she needed insurance for herself and her family. She scanned the first few paragraphs of the letter: she had a window of opportunity, she needed to act now, this offer was extended to her because of her favorable domestic profile. She would’ve thrown it away except when she turned to page two, looking for a price, she saw her mother’s name. Her mother’s full maiden name. She’d never seen her mother’s maiden name in print before. Florence Ann Burgess.

APPLICANT PROFILE
Irene M. Canter was born out of wedlock on a drizzly and unseasonably cold December day in 1946 to Albert Sutton Thompson and Florence Ann Burgess, their first child. Irene’s place of birth is unknown. The couple wed fourteen months later after Mr. Thompson found work at the lumber mill in the river town of Fabulon in the foothills of the Blacktooth Mountains. Mr. Thompson did not get along with the foreman, who insisted on calling him “Junior,” but he was strong and able-bodied and loved the aroma of fresh cut pine, which called to mind the smell of the sea, though he’d never been. Mildred would give birth to six children, five of whom survived into adolescence, but Irene was always her favorite. Irene was the one who, at age three, would stand balancing her tiny feet on her mother’s lap, arranging her mother’s hair. And Irene was the one who started cooking meals for the family when she was only seven. Her specialty was salt pork lime stew and poached eggs. Irene tolerated her two sisters but loved her brothers, Marcus and Eldridge. Those three siblings, Irene and Marcus and Eldridge, loved to get into mischief. There was the time they brought home the baby bear in the wheelbarrow. And that time they found a bottle of moonshine and three boxes of firecrackers in the abandoned cabin up on Palmetto Ridge. Eldridge died in the war but she still talks to Marcus by phone every Sunday. She has never admitted it, but she was glad when his wife finally left him. She never could stand Clarice, although when she is feeling kind, she is able to admit that Marcus’s drinking is not her sister-in-law’s fault.

The applicant profile stopped abruptly after that, as if her life had ended when Clarice left Marcus. How had Primature Insurance acquired that kind of information about her? She thought she should feel violated—that her privacy had been infringed—but she was starting to get used to this, and she liked reading her family’s story. Seeing her family’s story in print gave it a dignity that it had otherwise lacked. She called Primature and asked to speak to her personal customer satisfaction representative. “Speaking.” And then after a strange extended pause, the voice added, “I’m Aurelia. How can I help you?” Irene asked how did Primature do research to come up with their applicant profiles? How had they known that she had stood on her mother’s lap at age three, arranging her mother’s hair into elaborate French braids? Nobody knew that except her mother. And how did they know that her father loved the smell of fresh pine and had never visited the sea? Aurelia said that applicant profiles were completed by a third party private contractor, it was their business to know everything about their potential customers as their solvency as an insurance company depended on it. Could Aurelia put Irene in touch with the third party private contractor? No she could not. Irene asked to speak to someone who could, and Aurelia said that a representative would call with that information, but they never did.

Irene put her applicant profile in the closet with the other documents, but she couldn’t hide what was happening from Marshall any longer. She told him during lunch while the kids were at school. Since losing his job, Marshall went fishing at Lake Webster and took odd carpentry jobs when he could find them. Only a month since he’d been fired, and he’d already lost ten pounds—from 180 down to 170. The weight loss gave him a skinny, muscular, insectile look, like a grasshopper that lifted weights. His feet were cold no matter the temperature and he started sleeping in his socks. He ate less and worried more. He still talked all the time, but his jokes were less funny, more sarcastic, and he increasingly talked about sports, how his team was always losing. And he became more demanding about sex. He kept making snide remarks, and he demanded that she get a new doctor, someone to help her find a cure. He was a forty-year-old male and he needed to have sex with his wife. She understood that he was a proud man: losing his job was a blow to his ego, just like losing his sex appeal. One blow, maybe he could tolerate—not two. He demanded to read the narrative personal histories and the applicant profile. When he finished reading, he said, “You been spilling your guts to strangers, Irene?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“You and the nurses had a laugh about how your husband is a sad sack that no one could ever have sex with?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“What else did you tell them about me?”

“Oh just the usual.”

“The usual? What’s usual?”

“Just the usual stuff any woman would tell about her husband. What you like to eat for breakfast, your favorite sports, best jokes, stuff like that.”

“And how am I supposed to believe that? The proof is right here.”

“But I didn’t tell them. Why would I tell them any of this stuff? It’s embarrassing. I know how to keep secrets, Marshall. I’ve been keeping secrets since I was a little girl.”

“Oh I bet you can keep a secret. What kind of secrets are you keeping from me, Irene? Anything else you need to tell me? Or am I going to have to read about you fucking your favorite banker some day in a letter from a stranger?”

The next few days, they hardly spoke. Marshall found demo work on an old barn and was gone most days. Irene kept at the PT exercises and spent hours resting on her back on the floor in the kitchen, the coolest spot in the house. She was on the floor when her mother called and told her to turn on the TV to the shopping channel, and she did, and there they were selling a set of plates commemorating the life of Irene Canter. Each plate in the set of eight depicted a different scene from Irene’s life. The camera zoomed in close to reveal one of the plates, as the TV personality, a tall ungainly man who looked sympathetic and wise and sincere but a little confused, like a preacher who’s lost his church, explained what the plate depicted, the dramatic story of how Irene, when she was seventeen, had through quick-wittedness saved the lives of several friends who were lost in the fog swimming at Lake Webster. Another plate showed two of Irene’s close friends from high school, who were sunbathing alone on a remote beach two hours from Roselle when they were shot in the head by a journeyman ex-police officer who wanted to rape them but couldn’t manage it and killed them instead. Eventually the murders made it onto a true-crime show, and her two friends were famous. The remaining plates showed other scenes from Irene’s life, all with a water theme, including her last trip to the beach with her brother Eldridge before he went off to war, and the time that she almost drowned in a riptide, and the swimming pool at the apartment complex where she lived with Marshall in their first year of marriage and where she finally learned how to dive. The illustrations were not accomplished by an artist with much concern for accuracy but that didn’t matter to Irene—the plates depicted scenes that she’d not thought of in years or entirely forgotten, and she found it eerie and nostalgic to be reminded of them in this way. Why should her life be celebrated on a bunch of plates? With the exception of a few rare moments, her life had been nothing special. But what did ‘special’ mean anyway? Why were movie stars or athletes celebrities? What had Ron Howard done that made him so special? He had cute freckles and big ears. Was being a movie star any more important than being a nurse? Why should people care about the boring childhood of a famous actor? Her life wasn’t any more or less interesting than any other. What people ought to care about was human decency, not fake charm or good looks. She called the number to order the plates and put them on her credit card. When Marshall saw the bill, he would throw a fit, but you know what? It was her money from the settlement agreement. Marshall didn’t get to decide how she spent it.

With her exercises and Marshall out of the house so she could rest, again she felt herself regaining strength, so she drove herself to the grocery store for the first time in months, Spector’s IGA, so she could use one of those electric carts on account of she couldn’t stand for too long. She was in the cereal aisle when she noticed that her own photo—herself, Irene Canter—was on a box of Wheaties. Not just one box of Wheaties but all the boxes. Was that really her? Couldn’t be. But—wait, wasn’t it? Not a recent photo but one taken a few years ago before she had the skin damage from sun exposure. On the back of the box, under the caption, “PROFILE IN COURAGE,” was that story of how Irene had saved her friends who were at risk of drowning at Lake Webster—same from the commemorative plate but more detail. When she was seventeen, Irene had gone out to Lake Webster with a group from school. Irene had enough of the water, so she was lounging with a few friends on the beach while the others kept swimming. Her friends swam way out, then a fog rolled in and within minutes, they were lost from sight. For those Wheaties fans unfamiliar with Lake Webster, said the back of the box, it’s a dammed river, and Irene knew that the current would pull her friends toward the dam, and they would not know which way to swim in the fog to escape the danger. Her friends who remained on shore began to panic, but not Irene. She hit on the idea to send one friend out into the lake as far as they could swim and still hear shouts from land. That friend remained dog paddling in that spot, then the next friend swam out past the first friend as far as they could go and still hear shouts from the first friend, and then the third friend, which was Irene, swam out past the second, and it was Irene’s shouts that could be heard by the swimmers in the fog. The lost swimmers swam towards Irene’s voice, which they could faintly hear, and when they found her, they all swam towards the shouts of the second friend, and then to the first friend, and eventually they all made it back to shore. “If those kids had let the current suck them over that dam, it would have been almost certain death,” said Margarita Sanders, a hydroelectric engineer. “At the bottom of the falls, there’s what they call a drowning machine, a tornado of spinning currents that people get trapped in—the frothy, aerated water makes it impossible to know which way is up.” Were it not for Irene Canter’s quick thinking and determination, and her refusal to panic, her friends may have drowned or suffered irreversible brain damage from a collision with debris in the vortex. Remember kids, it’s not only Olympic athletes who can be heroes, but also everyday Americans like Irene Canter who won a gold medal that foggy summer day at Lake Webster.

It was a true story. She still got a thank you card once a year from Alicia Latham, one of the survivors, on the anniversary of the incident. But it happened twenty years ago, and no one except Alicia seemed to remember it any longer. Why had they only put it on a box of Wheaties now? And anyway, who told General Mills?

She only bought one box of the Wheaties because that was all she could afford. She showed it to the checkout clerk and said, “Look who’s famous.” But the checkout clerk was a teenage boy with girls on his mind and paid no attention. Her children were impressed: AJ took the box to school for show and tell. Her Wheaties appearance did nothing to diminish the tension with her husband, only made it worse. “Now you’re gabbing to breakfast cereals? What’s next? An interview with Tony the Tiger?”

“You know what I think?” Irene replied, directing her comments to her children. “I think your daddy’s jealous. He always thought he was going to be famous, but he hasn’t figured it out yet. He hasn’t learned that fame is just about being lucky.”

She was mostly joking—she didn’t really think her husband was that vain, okay maybe a little. But her suspicions were confirmed when the mail arrived a few days later. It was a copy of her husband’s credit report, which provided his name and social security number, date of birth, current credit accounts, and employment history. In this last section, the report explained the nature of each of his past jobs, and the dates, and the reason he quit. Except, the report noted, for his most recent job as a security guard at Westlake, he didn’t quit but was fired for “misconduct reflecting discredit on the department.” The report elaborated on his misconduct in detail, including quotes from eyewitnesses. Her husband had been running his mouth at work. There was a statement from Beverly Nails, Administrative Assistant: For the past five weeks, Mr. Canter has been coming to the admissions area and bragging that he and Mrs. Botts have been doing it in the vault and in the bathroom. Mr. Canter said that he had to quit doing it in the vault because he kept hitting his head on the shelves. He stated that on two occasions he tried to break it off with Mrs. Botts and she became very upset, crying and cussing him out. He has stated on many occasions that Mrs. Botts couldn’t stand to have sex with her husband. And a statement from Leonard Morphy, personnel manager, re Marshall Canter, Facilities Police Corporal: I have discussed with Cpl. Canter several times about how he will stop at nothing to get attention, including him circulating false rumors. Each time I have reprimanded him, he says he won’t do it again, but he has never stopped. And there was a statement from Mrs. Gail Botts: Ever since his wife quit work here at Westlake, Mr. Canter has been running around claiming that he and I have a thing going on. I have a husband that satisfies me, and even if he (my husband) didn’t, I wouldn’t think of going with Canter. Knowing that Canter is a habitual liar, this has really put an upset in my family and my husband is out for blood. I have asked him (my husband) to let me handle this, and my husband has agreed, but not for long.

Soon after Irene finished reading, her husband walked in. She told him about the report.

“Give me that,” he said and skimmed the letter. He was farsighted so held it at arm’s length. “This is slander, Irene. I never did any of that stuff.”

“Should I read it out loud to AJ and Melanie?” she said. “And you can interpret like you did my doctors’ reports? You’re good at making up entertaining stories.”

“The only one running your mouth telling stories is you. You’ve been blabbing about our private life to anyone that’ll listen. They put it on a goddam plate.”

“You never bragged about bagging Gail Botts?” The statement seemed so ridiculous that she laughed out loud.

“So what if I did? I’ve got a wife that don’t give out, how’s a man supposed to put up with that?”

She could think of lots of ways that a man might put up with that. She told him that he had two hours to get the hell out. When he refused, she called her lawyer. “Hello Mr. Jackson? What does a woman have to do in Fulcrum County to evict a scumbag husband?”

***

Over the next few weeks, new portions of Irene’s life story kept appearing in various places. AJ opened a pack of baseball cards from the drug store and there was a card with her husband’s photo on it, Marshall Canter, 3B, wearing his Car Thieves uniform, and on the back was the story about how, after one of his games in which he struck out three times, his wife Irene Canter had made him a special dinner, it was just crock pot corn beef, but she called it a beast, which Marshall thought was funny. “Now pull it apart with a couple of forks and you can see that’s a really good beast to eat.” And she took him to a silly movie at the theater, leaving the kids at home even though they weren’t old enough yet to fend for themselves. Then from the energy company she got a letter detailing her family’s energy use habits and isolating certain incidents when their energy use peaked, such as the time, the letter explained, that Irene had found a blouse at Welm’s that she loved, the color and the look and it was such a unique style, but the store only had one and it was two sizes too large, and no, they couldn’t order more, so she bought the blouse, ran it in the wash on hot, then put it in the dryer and let it run non-stop for four days, hoping the blouse would shrink, until Marshall finally figured it out and got irate (the blouse did shrink but not enough).

By now, Rosellians had started to notice the attention Irene was getting. The mayor sent her a letter of commendation. The Rotary Club held a lunch in her honor; at the end, a man named Pubbington, who called himself an inventor, asked her out on a date. A used car dealership offered her a job in sales, which she planned to accept, once she got her back in better shape. People pointed her out to their children on the street—though not always with kind intentions.

She had read stories in the tabloids about how fame could drown a person; once you became a celebrity, you lost your identity and human decency, which were swept away in the vortex of big money and red carpets and rabid fans, until you became a monster, unrecognizable to yourself. But Irene knew that couldn’t happen to her. That was because she’d never done anything to achieve fame, it just happened to her, like the back injury had just happened to her. It was one random thing then another—could be a miracle or could be a calamity, the important thing was to remember who loved you and to keep it simple. Her children loved her, but her husband didn’t—or maybe he had loved her, but he needed more attention than she could give.

She went to see her attorney, August Jackson, told him how her life story was being revealed in the form of this inexplicable ubiquitous biography. She had thought he might scoff, refuse to believe her, imply that she was crazy like those doctors at Hornbill. But August was a thoughtful attorney and a decent man—he expressed concern, asked questions. He always had questions for his clients. It occurred to Irene that was the only way he knew how to talk—to ask questions. When she asked questions about his own personal life, he didn’t rebuff her—actually he seemed to want to answer her questions, he offered his most genial albeit awkward smile, but it was as if they hadn’t invented the words yet for what he wanted to say. Or as if his life was too complicated or too mysterious or too embarrassing to be put into words.

“What would you like for me to do, Irene?” he asked. “Contact the police? The FBI? Write a cease-and-desist letter to the shopping channel and General Mills?”

Irene laughed. “Remember how, in that deposition, I said that I wanted to tell my story, but I didn’t know how? Well now I don’t have to know how. Everybody else does it for me. I guess there’s something about my story that’s got to be told.”

“You don’t mind?” asked August. “You and your family have lost all privacy.”

“At first, I minded,” said Irene. “But then I thought: what use do I have for privacy?

People want to know me, I’ve got nothing to hide. At least I shouldn’t anyway. I’m a decent lady!” That’s when she pulled the scrapbook out of her bag. She’d collected all the stories of her life and put them in the scrapbook—including the flattened box of Wheaties and photos of the commemorative plates. Her daughter had decorated the leather cover with stickers of rainbows and leprechauns and cute animals, with a title in purple cut-out letters that said: Irene Canter: Her Memoir. She handed the scrapbook to August. As he made an effort to thumb through the pages—he had some trouble because his hands were shaking—she told him she wanted him to send the scrapbook to a publisher. “It could be an inspirational story,” she said. “The kind they sell near the checkout aisle at the supermarket.”

August took another few moments to examine the book, paused to read a paragraph here and there. He closed the book carefully, definitively, planted his hands firmly on the cover as if that were the only way to keep them still. “Ms. Canter, I’d like to help. But the publishing world is outside my area of expertise.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I know you. You’re the locally world famous five-dollar lawyer. You helped me once already against impossible odds. You can do anything if you set your mind to it.” He demurred, but she insisted; eventually he agreed to make some inquiries. A few weeks later, he let her know that he’d located a literary agent in Pennsylvania who, for a fee, would market Mrs. Canter’s scrapbook to various publishers that specialized in the human interest domain. Irene agreed and sent August the money. But the agent turned out to be disreputable and did nothing with Irene’s scrapbook while pocketing her fee. August sent him increasingly threatening follow-up letters, which the agent ignored. Fortunately, August had sent only a photocopy of Irene’s materials, not the originals.

Irene was undeterred. She continued to add to the scrapbook over the years as more of her life was revealed. Whenever she encountered another part of her story, in a full-page back cover ad in the phone book, for example, or a comic strip in the paper, or it could be anywhere really, she would read it out loud to her two children, AJ and Melanie. Her husband no longer joined them for these family reading sessions; he moved to a beach resort, where he found work pretending he knew something about golf. After she kicked him out, for one week and one week only, she and her two children were allowed to eat anything they wanted, wear any clothes they wanted, watch anything they wanted on TV, sing any songs they wanted, even Christian rock. And they could say anything nasty they wanted about Marshall Canter, truth or lies. Then after a week, they had to behave like decent people again.

“Where do you think they’ll print that story?” she asked her children. “About the husband who talked too much? Where do you think we’ll read about how your father is an idiot who can’t quit telling lies to make himself a big shot? I hope they do tell that story. I hope they put it on a billboard on Main Street, so your daddy can finally get the attention he’s been seeking.”

"The Memoir" is the winner of the 2024 Calvino Prize. Of the winning story, judge Elizabeth Crane had this to say: “First: the conceit of this story is brilliant. I will resist giving it away because I do not want to deprive the reader of the delight of that discovery, but it will forever live in my brain cache of things I wish I’d thought of myself. Thematically, the story successfully weaves in multiple topics that speak to contemporary concerns within an incredibly fresh structure, and the humor throughout just adds to all the components that make the story work so well. (What had Ron Howard done that made him so special? will henceforth make me giggle whenever that name emerges.) But in the end, it’s the development of the character of Irene Canter that made this the winner for me: the compilation of the way her life story emerges adds up to the victory of any average person alive. It tells me we all matter, validates my personally long-held belief that what makes up any life is always compelling, especially if we look deeply enough as the author has done so very well here.” To learn more about this award, please visit the University of Louisville's Creative Writing Contests Page.