The Healing Power of Eucalyptus

The writing life

Writers are storytellers, tellers of tall and not-so-tall tales. We tell what happened, what didn’t happen, what would never happen, what we’d like to have happen. Sometimes we admit our faults, sometimes we whitewash the truth, sometimes we embellish or diminish. We use semicolons, then erase them, quotation marks, then italics, line breaks, run-one, stream-of-consciousness or stunted stubs of sentences.

Words are magical. They can be arranged, rearranged, deleted, strung together to make us laugh, cry and wonder why.

After we have massaged, edited, amended, deleted, un-deleted, changed the beginning, or the ending, removed what we thought was the middle, put that middle at the end; after all that, we send it off to literary magazines, hoping one will agree that what we’ve crafted is as good as we think it is. The response is often, ‘Thank you for the opportunity to read your piece, but we have decided it is not for us etc. etc.’

Getting published is a slow, humbling experience. Do we revise, do we send it out again just as is?

It’s always a thrill to receive the notice that your piece will be published. Imposter syndrome is of course, always waiting in the wings, the secret thought that you’ve put one over on them. They liked it! they fell for it! That said, slowly, slowly, we begin to know, to really know, that what we write is good, that it is worthy of publication, worthy of being read by others. We wake up one day to realize we have developed a craft, after countless hours of practice.

I have been fortunate to get many pieces accepted in literary magazines. Today I share ‘The Healing Powers of Eucalyptus’, which was published in a recent issue of DripLit Magazine.

THE HEALING POWERS OF EUCALYPTUS

It was co-ed day in the Russian Baths in the East Village. Mordecai started in, "Maybe I could be happy just being a grandfather to your children." Louise was sitting naked on the bench below, stadium-style, the way saunas are, so she was able to have her own horrified private reaction. She was in over her head. A fat man was lying in the middle of the dark room, on a big sauna altar, fleshy butt facing up, so his friends could beat his ass with eucalyptus leaves, while Mordecai mused out loud about marrying her. It was flattering that such a loner could be considering such a thing. Louise froze. The fat-assed guy had rolled onto his back. She was relieved that the darkness and the steam didn't allow for much reaction. She sat and glanced around at the other faces on other bodies on other benches and let the heat press on and the sweat start to pour. Mordecai continued his soliloquy. "You know, maybe I don't really need to have my own child. Maybe yours would be enough." Louise stared straight ahead at the eucalyptus and poured a cup of icy water over her head. Steam escaped and let off some of the pressure. She sat there in her own heat, happy to have freed herself from the life she had been living - happy, four beautiful teenage children, but feeling trapped in a script that wasn’t quite right. "Louise, hand me the water," Mordecai's voice came through the eucalyptus vapors. If only he were a little more affectionate, I might let him be a grandfather, Louise thought. She had left a nice guy and knew somewhere in her bones that she was just looking to experiment a bit with bad. She had never been bad. She thought about how adaptive human beings are. When she and Mordecai first opened the door to the sauna, the heat had hit her head-on. If she'd been alone, she would have turned right around, gone back upstairs, put her clothes back on and gone outside into the New York cold. But Mordecai had paid a lot of money and had no intention of leaving. So, she knew she had to adapt. Hadn't she always adapted, really? She could adapt to anything, anybody, any situation. That had always been her particular genius. The heat pressed on. She stared straight ahead, wondering if she enjoyed the oppression. Had she ever felt oppressed before? Not really. She had learned to adapt long before oppression ever set in. She would pivot if her father was in a bad mood, she would wear the outfit her mother preferred, she passed on the invite to Woodstock. Another man was now on the minty hot bench. Who would be next? Were there designated eucalyptus bearers? "I'd make a good grandfather." Louise could hear Mordecai's voice through the mist. She answered with another cup of cold water over her head. Mordecai was tall, dark, striking and depressed. He spent a lot of time lamenting how he'd wasted his youth playing tennis. If only I'd played basketball. He would go on and on about the benefits of team sports and how he was a damn good basketball player. If only he'd been a little taller. And if only his father had been listening more closely. Mordecai had really wanted to quit tennis in college, but he had been awarded a full tennis scholarship, so his father paid no attention. That, and the Russian…Why the hell had he studied Russian? Why hadn't someone pulled him aside? Spanish would have been so much more useful. What good was Russian? Louise had spent several months ready with helpful suggestions like, You could coach tennis, or did you know, there's a huge population of Russians in Brookville? You could teach English as a second language! He always looked a little annoyed at these suggestions. Mordecai was closing in on fifty and had never really had a job. Well, he'd had little jobs, here and there – carpenter, painter, but he couldn't seem to find a real one. The world is so banal. What's the use of my doing my little bit? Louise had to look up the word banal. She had lived a straight-ahead pragmatic life. In the beginning, Louise had thought Mordecai was so intriguing. He was such a big thinker. He had wonderful ideas. He was so smart. He played the jazz clarinet and made stained glass windows. It was amazing he hadn't gotten the recognition he deserved. Louise would make dinner for her kids and clean up the kitchen while she listened to Mordecai tell her about all kinds of things. What a fascinating man! she thought as she folded the laundry. Mordecai leaned forward onto the kitchen table, to make a point, "I really shouldn't have quit that writing program at Columbia. I just walked away and nobody stopped me. I could be a writer by now." "You still could write, Mordecai. Just get started now." Louise motioned for Mordecai to lift his elbows so she could set the table. Mordecai closed his eyes and continued to talk, "I was offered a $70,000 job coaching tennis when I got out of Stanford. That was a lot of money then. If I'd taken it, I'd be very wealthy now." Louise rinsed the lettuce and shook the salad dressing. "And now my shoulders are going and I'm not going to be able to do physical labor anymore." Louise excused herself and took the garbage out. Mordecai sat in the dark steam and mused, "I don't know how important it is for me to create my own child." The eucalyptus seemed to be working. Louise could feel the vapors enter her nose and mouth, clearing her head. She got up slowly, dipped the cup in the bucket of ice water, turned, slowly poured it over Mordecai's head, got dressed and walked out, into the brilliant New York sunshine.

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So, whatever you’re doing, whatever you’re trying, give yourself a pat on the back and keep going! It is a reflection of who you are.

If you enjoyed this story, send it to a friend, your mother, your ex-boyfriend, whoever!