Creative Nonfiction

Here is the second installment of Suzanne Hodsden’s three-part series, “How I Almost Met Dan Stevens Eight Times on a Mission from MAR.” Read the first part, “The MFA Can Kill You,” and stayed tuned for Part III, which will go live early next week. (Frog dissection images: Biodiversity Heritage Library)

Part II – Gaddafi, Frogs, and Jungian Beetles
By Suzanne Hodsden

My father started tailing me to my doctor’s appointments. He just strolled in and sat down as if he also had an appointment. The first time, he ignored me entirely and picked up a three-year-old issue of Time. When I asked what he was doing there, he lowered the magazine just far enough so he could see me, and said “Your mother made me” with a meaningful stare. One day you’ll have been married for 39 years, it said—and you’ll look back on this moment and forgive me. He disappeared again behind the face of Muammar Gaddafi.

Later when I told my mother to call off my bodyguard, she insisted that she hadn’t made him do anything. “I simply said that if he was interested in being a good father, he should want to go with you.” There is a distinction there that only my mother can see.

“You found a job yet?” Gaddafi asked me.

The MFA degree qualifies a girl for everything and nothing at the same time. Applying anywhere outside academia requires a bit of spin, but—luckily—bullshit is one of our specialties. I cast my job net wide. I applied to everything and interviewed everywhere.

There was one listing for a receptionist position that specified the office’s 76 houseplants. How big was this office? What kind of plants? A venus fly-trap that ate people who failed to rinse their coffee cup? Was this why there was an opening? With motivations less than pure, I applied.

On the day before my first surgery, I interviewed for a retail job in an upscale sex-store. I spun a story about the need for a freer world for female sexual expression so fraught with emotion I thought the manager was going to cry. She offered me the job on the spot, but at part time and minimum wage, I declined.

I changed my clothes and collapsed face first into the dirt of Lincoln Park. I laid there and wondered if I’d been too hasty in turning down a paying job. Then I thought about the long forgotten formaldehyde-d frog I’d dissected in 7^th grade. My disrespectful “Ewwww” as I tore open its poor body and laid its innards open to the wind. That poor frog had returned to seek vengeance, I was sure of it. I stayed there in the dirt until my presence started to scare the children. I thought about having my drink.

During my pre-surgery interview, I’d worked in a question of my own. How bad was it—on a scale from one to a winter invasion of Russia—to consider having a drink? The surgeon approved me for one. Just one, and no more.

Picking myself up out of the dirt, I decided it was time. I didn’t want company for this drink. Not at all. I couldn’t endure any wet-eyelashed speeches about how I was going to be “fine.” I chose a bar on W. 14^th, on my way home. It was an out of the way spot and nearly empty. Perfect. I sat down outside and tried to forget about the frog. Then I thought about the frog and drew pictures of the frog.

Seconds after I ordered a Limoncello martini, I heard a British accent behind me. Surely not. No. There’s more than one British person in Cleveland. No. no. no. no. no. I turned. Yes.

Less than two feet from my elbow, there he was. Dan Stevens. He’d had a haircut (A perm, the poor bastard.), but it was him. I looked down at myself. I was grass and sweat stained. I was on the verge of throwing up. The corner of MAR issue 34.1 poked out of my purse and mocked me.

The uncharacteristic ebullience of the entire female wait staff should have tipped me off. If his effect on an ordinarily jaded Cleveland waitress can be used to measure stardom, this guy is going to be a movie star for a very long time.

“You saw him again? By sheer freaking accident?” Despite her earlier confidence, Abby was surprised too. “What did you do?”

“Nothing.”

“Why not?”

I wanted to say something, I did. I really did, but the only thing I could think of to say was this: “What are you? The goddamn angel of death?”

***

When I was wheeling my way towards surgery the next morning, the surgeon remarked on my mood, but I didn’t explain it. I knew it was absurd, but I was pretty convinced. I’d seen Dan Stevens twice. I was going to die.

Luckily I had the presence of mind to keep it to myself. Say something like that out loud and I’d be ushered into an airless room to use an alligator sock-puppet to proxy my feelings. I kept my mouth shut, laid flat and shut my eyes. The doctor and a variety of assistants put me off to sleep, and despite my very worst fears, I woke up again a few hours later.

***

The nurse who greeted me in the recovery room wore dancing duck scrubs and injected something wonderful in my IV that made me revise my position on pharmaceutical interventions.

I’d never spent all night in the hospital before, and it soon became clear that I wasn’t going to sleep. It’s both eerie and comforting to watch the machines, the squiggles and beeps, the numerical representations of your inner workings. It distracts from whatever is going on down the hall. In my case, there was a man wailing and crying. The quiet shuffle of nurses on night watch. I got up and shut the door. The poor soul deserved some privacy, at least from me.

Things had gone well for me, and I wasn’t ungrateful. I passed the hours planning my life and its various contingencies. I had a novel to edit. Why hadn’t I started that? All kinds of journals are open in the summer, but I hadn’t sent anywhere, but then, I’d had other things to worry about.

Doctors had asked me about my stress levels, and I offered graduate school as an explanation. Most of them seemed dubious that a degree in creative writing was anything to get worked up over. The prevailing attitude was that I’d spent a few years being frivolous and maybe I had. There’s a certain amount of psychological adjustment required to pass from creative captivity back into the wild. I was beginning to see why not everyone can resist the urge to go native.

The nurse came in throughout the night to check my vitals, and we made small talk. This particular nurse didn’t really read books, but she watched Downton Abbey.

“Did you know the guy who played Matthew is in Cleveland?” I asked.

“No, shit. Really?”

I spent the next couple of hours researching “thing theory” and Jung’s ideas about synchronicity. I was beginning to feel foolish about the whole affair, applying rules of literature where they didn’t belong. Spend enough time crafting fiction, one can begin to believe that life has a plot. It doesn’t. There’s no objective correlative to reality. Images aren’t necessarily symbolic. One of the reason we love stories so much is that they apply pattern to chaos. As much as it may have seemed that my life had acquired its own Cetonia Aurata, it hadn’t. Does Dan Stevens have to happen for a reason? In short, no.

Coincidence is coincidence. After all, it was only two times. That’s not that weird.

But then it got weird.

(To Be Continued…)

Suzanne Hodsden is Mid-American Review‘s Technical Editor.
Her fiction appears most recently in Crab Orchard Review. Find
her on Twitter: @zannahsue.

MAR is excited to publish a three-part essay by Suzanne Hodsden, a recent graduate of Bowling Green State University’s MFA program and MAR‘s Technical Editor. Stay tuned for additional installments. Photo: Ian Freimuth

Part 1 – The MFA Can Kill You
By Suzanne Hodsden

I saw my exit and bolted. Around the doctor’s legs and through the exam room door, my mother hot on my trail, hollering after me, using my full name. First, middle, and last, if you get my drift. Suzanne. Elizabeth. Hodsden.

Between my feet and my freedom there was a couch, one of those overstuffed floral monstrosities and the octogenarian seated on it was sucking air through an oxygen tube. Seeing me and my speed, her eyes bulged up and she had just enough time to cover her face before I high jumped the couch and slammed against the door, knocking my breath loose.

I clawed at the door handle, but mom’s hand clamped down over mine and pried my fingers loose. She hauled me back, the tiny squawky flailing mess of me, to where the nurse waited with the syringe.

This is how I was vaccinated for Measles, Mumps and Rubella and qualified to enter Ohio public school in 1986.

Nearly three decades have passed but my attitude toward my medical care has not matured. I hardly ever see a doctor, and I don’t take pills if I can help it. Instead, I favor a carefully crafted cure for sickness made out of fierce denial and medicinal whisky. It’s always worked for me, and I’m famous for it.

So on Easter Sunday when I staggered into the living room and declared that I’d like to be taken to the ER, my family lost their minds.

***

Make no mistake, the MFA can kill you. I’ve done the math. Two programs in three years equals fifty-four credit hours. Roughly 225 students works out to approximately 2,812 marked essays (multiple drafts). 167 pages of critical thought, 8 short stories, 1 screenplay, 4 issues of Mid-American Review (MAR), two trips to AWP and a 367-page novel thesis, written-revised-defended. And the reading. I can’t even begin to calculate the reading.

Not everybody ends up in the hospital, but some do. I did. Intimate relationships shatter. Personal hygiene and grooming habits dissipate. I don’t know how I became the kind of girl who eats Kraft dinner out of the pan with a dirty plastic fork, but I did it. It was, by far, the three most stressful years of my life. It was also three of the best. It was Dickensian.

I was released from the hospital under the stern directive that I return for testing once I’d graduated. After a full night of rigorous prodding, my doctors failed to make a diagnosis. They gave me a list of dietary restrictions that ruled out everything but rice and bananas and let me go. I made my decision before I hit the parking lot. If I had to spend the rest of my life eating like a toddler, I’d do it. I wasn’t going back.

***

I went back. Turns out there’s only so much plain rice you can eat. And it will most likely be another three years before I can look at a banana.

I submitted myself to a battery of tests so barbaric that one day they will be afforded the same esteem we reserve for bloodletting and the leech. The doctors decided that my condition was genetic but aggravated by stress and “life choices.” They scheduled me for surgery.

In the final weeks of the MFA, professors reiterated the importance of “sticking with it” once we fled the nest. People who sniff at the MFA as an escape from reality aren’t entirely wrong. It’s easy to live a creative life when everyone around you is doing the same thing. Once we walked out and blinked up into the harsh light of the world, many—we were told—would cave in and become bankers. Don’t be bankers. You’re writers. You’re storytellers. The world needs you. Keep writing.

I would. Writing—to me, at least—is more of a condition than an aspiration. I’d do it because I can’t not do it. And I’d nail down a practical and livable life in the meantime. That life, I decided, would take place in Cleveland.

Why? Condensed version: it’s cheap and I grew up there.

I spent the weeks of my diagnostic adventures getting to know the city again, its twists and odd angled turns. A lot has changed, but it’s still shaped like a big toilet bowl. Make enough left turns through Ohio City, Tremont, Warehouse, Downtown and you’ll still end up down in the Flats, home to exotic creatures with either botox or gills and big retractable bridges that mesmerized me as a child. I could have a life here, and as soon as I’d had surgery, it would start.

***

I was downtown taking a look at a gym when I got a phone call from the surgeon, canceling my surgery, and scheduling me for more tests. I’ll confess that I didn’t handle the news well. What ensued was nearly an hour of arguing with the doctor’s offices and placating a mother who wondered where the hell I even was. She knew something was up because the doctor called the house first, looking for me.

You’ll never find me, I thought viciously. I’m behind Jacob’s Field, but you’ll never look here. My long latent six-year old emerged and snickered with glee. Circumstances have changed, baby. I’m bigger. I’m stronger. I have a car and a credit card. I spent my twenties being a hedonist vagabond (ESL teacher), and there were close to twenty foreign couches set and ready to receive me.

My mother anticipated this line of thinking and texted: Don’t you even think about going to the airport.

She’d catch me, even if she had to flag me as a terrorist. I started getting texts from friends asking me where I was. She’s tricky like that, enlisting an army. Just as I was about to release a primal scream of rage, a car pulled up and I recognized the occupant. My synapses exploded with the following thought process:

I know you. I do. Did my mother send you? Check the rolodexes. Ah ha! I have it. I do know you, but you don’t know me. I don’t have to say a word to you, and I won’t. It’s rude, of course, but I’ve had a bad day. I’m sick, my mom is making some serious   threats, and I can’t decide between Prague and Istanbul. I can’t deal with meeting new people just now, so roll along good sir, and leave me to stew in my own bitter solipsism. Roll along! Go!

Granted, I didn’t say anything out loud. I just stared. And he stared back. One of us had to blink, so I walked away, but before I did, I got a look at myself in the backseat window. The look on my face could have peeled paint.

This was the kill-shot to my rebel moxie. Enough was enough. I crossed the street, moxie-less, and drove home under the white flag of surrender.

I called a friend. “I just saw Dan Stevens.” I said.

“Who?”

“Matthew Crawley. Do you suppose that means something? Like a sign?”

“No. Just go home, okay? Your mom is going nuts.”

“Ok.”

“But be careful driving, all right?”

***

Hollywood is considering Cleveland more and more for the same reasons I am, but though rumor has it that Marvel rolls through and lets loose their superheroes, I’ve yet to see one.

Not everyone knows who Dan Stevens is, but they know the show he’s on. I’ve missed a great deal of pop culture during grad school, but I’d have had to be living in a nuclear bunker to miss Downton Abbey. Who’s Dan Stevens? The British actor who played Matthew Crawley, the one who died in a car crash right after his fictional wife gave birth to their fictional baby.

That’s the pop culture reference. In other circles, namely my own small literary pool, he’s the actor who judged the Booker. Editor-at-large for the lovely The Junket—an online zine edited by Cambridge grads, intent on poking each other along in their literary aspirations. He’s been discussed.

I couldn’t have told you what he was doing in Cleveland, but it was him. I’m sure of it. My glasses need replaced, but he was less than four feet from me. If he’d been closer he’d have run over my shoes.

This news amused Abby Cloud. In addition to being editor-in-chief of MAR, Abby’s a bit of an anglophile and can explain Cricket to an American in under ten minutes. I’ve seen her do it. She told me that if I ever saw him again, I should recommend MAR.

I agreed. If I ever saw Dan Stevens again, I would give him a copy of MAR. No problem. I agreed mostly because I thought there was no way I’d ever see him again. Still, I carried a copy of MAR in my purse, issue 34.1, as a gesture of good faith. I didn’t worry much about it. I’d never see him again.

I was wrong.

(To Be Continued)

Suzanne Hodsden is Mid-American Review‘s Technical Editor.
Her fiction appears most recently in Crab Orchard Review. Find
her on Twitter: @zannahsue.