What Now? Read Free Page B

I’ll be bringing home the gold. While other people go to work, I stare out the window. I stare at my dog. I stare at blank pieces of paper and paragraphs and 4 3

    single sentences and a buzzing computer screen. Hours and hours of my day are spent with my eyes glazed over, thinking, waiting, trying to figure things out. The muse is a sweet idea, like the tooth fairy. The muse supposedly comes down like lighting and fills your fingers with the necessary voltage to type up something brilliant. But nobody ever made a living depending on a muse.
    The rest of us have to go out and find our inspiration, write and rewrite, stare and stare and stare until we know which way to turn. I dated my husband for eleven years before I married him. It was the staring that made me so hesitant.
    I just couldn’t imagine living in a house with another person when so much of my life was spent sprawled across the sofa, eyes wide open, saying nothing at all.
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    Nothing at all is very much out of fashion these days, as are stillness, silence, and studied consideration. Studied consideration is hard to come by with those little iPod buds stuffed in your ears and the cell phone competing with the Internet. Perhaps we avoid the quiet because we’re afraid that the answer to What now? will turn out to be I don’t know. Child that I was, I thought admission to college had enabled me to wash my hands of uncertainty. Then, during the second semester of my junior year, some insensitive fool struck the first drumbeat that later rose to a deafening tattoo: What are you going to do after college? they wanted to know. What now? What now? What now?
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    Did they mean, What now as in, What job will you apply for? What exactly are you qualified to do? When I graduated I knew I wanted to be a novelist, but where was the ad in the paper for that one? “Novelist wanted: should be able to stare. Light typing required.” What test could I take that would prove I had completed the necessary course-work? What internship would give me a leg up to be a more successful writer? It wasn’t just that I couldn’t find the key to the door, I couldn’t find the door. I batted around like a shuttlecock after graduation, and when I had exhausted my limited resources I moved home to Tennessee and got a job as a line cook. Oddly enough it turned out to be the 4 7

    one thing for which I had solid qualifica-tions. The very cookies that had gotten me in the front door of the president’s house had led to four years of cooking and serving, and when I lost my way that was the direction in which I turned. I had an idea that it was all for the best; I should be doing manual labor, listening to people’s stories in a busy restaurant kitchen and then at night having my head free to write them down. I wanted to be a writer of the people. With practice and patience I had become a decent listener, and now I wanted to speak for the common man.
    It might have been a good idea except for the fact that I could never stay awake once I got home. Being on one’s feet all day hauling around boiling kettles of soup, chopping vegetables, making fifteen lunches simulta-neously, is exactly why common men work so 5 0

    hard to make sure their children can get a college education.
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    Then one day I burned myself while I was cleaning out the steam table, and the owner of the restaurant fired me for my own safety. I had in essence been told I was unfit to do the one thing I thought I knew how to do, and in that moment I realized I would have to apply to graduate school after all, even though I had previously believed that graduate school was nothing but a big stall.
    As quickly as the decision had been made, I discovered that everyone I knew was suddenly interested in my future again.
    Where was I going to go to school? What would I study? When would I move? It was a 5 1

    wonderful day when I got my acceptance letter from the