She Kept a Folder of Everything I Ever Published
I found it at her house, labeled simply with my name.
I was looking for her insurance papers when I found my own name in her filing cabinet, between GAS and MORTGAGE, in a green folder thick as a phone book.
Carol was in hospital that week, a hip, nothing sinister, and I had been sent to her house with a list: nightgown, reading glasses, the policy documents, and "the good biscuits for the nurses, top shelf, don't eat them." We had been friends for forty-one years, since teacher training college, and I had a key to her house the way she had a key to mine, for emergencies and plant watering and, apparently, for this.
The folder was labeled in her round schoolteacher hand. Just my name. Nothing else.
Inside was my entire life as a writer. All of it.
The poem from the college magazine in 1985, the one about my grandmother's kitchen, photocopied twice in case one faded. A church newsletter piece from 1992 I had forgotten writing. Every small magazine that ever took a poem of mine, the actual issues, bought and kept, some with a neat pencil star beside my page. Contest results printed from library computers. A letter to the editor I wrote in 2003 about a bus route. The order of service from my mother's funeral, because I had written the reading myself and apparently that counted too. Forty years of a career so quiet I had never once used the word career about it, kept in chronological order by someone who evidently disagreed.
I sat down on her kitchen floor with the folder in my lap and the good biscuits forgotten on the counter, and I want to be honest about the first thing I felt, because it was not gratitude...
It was shame.
Because I knew exactly how many of those poems I had described to her, over the years, as nothing. "Oh, it's a tiny magazine, nobody reads it." "It's not a real prize, there were probably nine entrants." "It's just the parish newsletter, Carol." Four decades of her watching me hand her my small proud things and then talk her out of them before she could even finish being pleased. And her response, all along, silently, filed between GAS and MORTGAGE: evidence. A counterargument in a green folder.
Near the back I found the thing that undid me completely.
In 2011, bruised by rejections, I had published a handful of essays under a false name in an online journal. Pen name, separate email, the whole disguise. I never told a soul... not my husband, not Carol. They were in the folder... Printed, dated, starred in pencil.
I drove to the hospital with the folder on the passenger seat like a witness I was transporting.
She was sitting up in bed doing the crossword and she saw the folder before she saw my face, and this is what forty-one years of friendship looks like: she did not apologize and she did not explain. She put down the pen and said, "You found the biscuits, then."
"Carol. The essays. The pen name. How?"
"Third paragraph of the first one," she said. "You described a marmalade sky. You've been describing marmalade skies since 1984. You can change your name, love. You can't change your weather."
I asked her why... Why keep it. Why keep all of it, the bus route letter, the newsletter, forty years of things their own author threw away like ticket stubs. She looked at me the way she used to look at the children in her class who claimed to be stupid, a look with no pity in it at all, and gave me the sentence I expect will be read at one of our funerals, whichever comes first.
"Somebody has to keep the record. Writers are the last people on earth who believe they exist."
Then she went back to the crossword, because Carol has never in her life allowed a moment to stay big for longer than it needed to be.
Here is the part I have to tell you next, the part I did not see coming on that kitchen floor. When I brought the folder home and told my husband, he suggested I do the obvious thing, and the obvious thing had genuinely never occurred to me: find out what Carol had, and keep it.
So the next plant-watering visit, I went back to the filing cabinet. I am not proud of the snooping. I am telling it straight anyway.
There was no folder with her name on it... Of course there wasn't. But in the bottom drawer, under old lesson plans, there was a shoe box, and in the shoe box were notebooks.
Eleven of them.
Poems, in that round hand, dated from 1979 to two winters ago. Poems about her classroom, about her sister, about her husband Gerald in the years he was dying, about the specific silence of a marked stack of exercise books at midnight. Decades of them. Never shown to anyone, never sent anywhere, never once mentioned in forty-one years of friendship with a person who wrote poems.
My best friend had spent her whole life archiving me while filing herself under nothing at all.
I confronted her with a notebook the way she had been confronted with the folder, and she flapped her hand, the classroom flap, the one that dismisses nonsense. "Those are private scribbles." "They're not for anyone." "It's not real writing, it's just what I do instead of smoking." Every deflection was one of mine. Word for word. I had taught her the whole routine, and she had learned it the way she learned everything, thoroughly.
So I did to her what she had done to me. I kept the record.
It took a year of pestering, but last spring Carol let me copy out one poem, the one about Gerald's dressing gown still on the hook, and post it where other people could actually see it, a community wall for poets, under her real, round-handed name. Strangers wrote to her. One woman said she had been unable to write about her own husband until she read it, and then went and wrote about the grief straight, no armor. Carol printed that message and pretended it was to show her niece. It is on her fridge. It has been on her fridge for fourteen months.
This year, aged seventy-four, she let me send three more out into the world, and one was even about me, about us, two students in 1983 eating chips on a sea wall, which I suppose makes us each other's archive now, officially, in matching folders. I have started mine already. Green, thick, her name in my untidy hand. Filed between GAS and MORTGAGE, because some traditions arrive complete and you do not tamper with them.
Tucked in the front of my folder about her, I keep the photograph that fell out of her folder about me: the two of us at nineteen, squinting into somebody's flash, holding the college magazine open to my grandmother's kitchen. She is pointing at my name on the page. I am waving the camera away.
Forty-one years it took me to understand that photograph.
She was never pointing at the poem.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.