Home Safe by Elizabeth Berg Read Free Book Online Page B

write. If you thought about walking—the neuromuscular component, the speed at which you should move, what length your stride should be—you'd never get anywhere, right? You'd spend all your time thinking about how to get there.” People would laugh and look at each other, but there were always some who crossed their arms in exasperation: she hadn't answered the question .
    Helen looks at her watch, then quickly punches in the number to call the person who asked her about teaching, Nancy Weldon is her name. She'll let her know right away she's not interested, she'll get this out of the way.
    “Helen Ames!” the woman, who apparently has caller ID, says. “How nice to talk to you! I just have to tell you, I really enjoy your books.”
    “Thank you,” Helen says, and now feels bad about having to decline the woman's offer. Still, she speaks quickly, before the woman can say anything else. “Listen, I'm sorry, but I don't teach. It's not that I don't want to, it's that I can't. I'm a terrible teacher. Honestly. I tried it once and the people who came all but asked for their money back.” A true story. Early on in her career, Helen was lured to an island to teach a group of very wealthy women. She thought the best thing to do would be to show how she found her own inspiration, and so she crafted a number of exercises for the women to do, and brought in objects she thought might be seen as evocative—an old silver hairbrush, a blackened frying pan, a love letter from the 1930s, a pair of men's shoes, a floppy-necked teddy bear, one dusty wing of a butterfly. One of the exercises was to use all of these objects in a short story, and Helen had to practically sit on her hands to keep from doing this exercise herself. Already she saw the man who would wear those shoes, the corn bread cooking in that skillet, the towheaded child weeping because he'd accidentally torn the wing off the butterfly.
    But it seemed that all the women wanted to do was to read from work they'd already done and have Helen praise it. And so Helen sat stiffly, trying to think of kind and insightful things to say and finally agreeing to put in a good word with her agent for the work of the worst (and pushiest) writer, when in fact she had no intention of doing so. “I'm a terrible teacher,” she says, again.
    “Oh, I can't believe that's true,” Nancy says, laughing.
    “Believe it, believe it,” Helen says. “Honestly, it's so very true.”
    “Well, let me tell you a little about this before you decide for sure, okay?”
    I have decided for sure , Helen thinks, and feels herself getting angry. But she listens as the woman describes the kind of workshop she has in mind. Thus far, the people who would be in the group are an old man who lives in an assisted care residence, a middle-aged woman who works for an insurance company and lives downtown, a young woman who is mildly retarded and lives in a group home, a forty-five-year-old day-care worker from the West Side ghetto, a man from Evanston who does the news for one of the Latino television stations, and a twenty-year-old mechanic who lives in Lakeview. And they can add one or two more.
    “Hmmm,” Helen says.
    “This is a kind of experiment,” Nancy says. “It's something we've talked about a lot, how creative writing can help people understand one another's points of view. We wondered what would happen if you had a group of purposely disparate types, both from a literary and a sociological point of view. We've gotten a very nice grant from a humanities foundation so that we can try it for a year, and this is the second workshop, which would be starting the first Wednesday in January. It's once a week for six weeks, it ends with a really lovely celebration, and we can pay you—”
    “I'm sorry,” Helen says. “I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I've got to run and meet a friend downtown. I just wanted to let you know my answer right away.”
    “Would you just think about it?” Nancy says.