My Fears Attack

An essay by Summer Hammond

I wet my curls, note the gray strands advancing like Spartan warriors, yet stand on tiptoe and lean into the mirror, abjectly scrutinizing my teeth.

A new habit, since the MFA Unwelcome Picnic.

How I refer to it now.

Photo by M. Monk

In the mirror, I shake my head at my hopeful past self, my ridiculous past self, laying out her romantic flowered skirt and top, back in Austin, when she read about the picnic in the acceptance materials, and pictured herself a heroine in a fairy tale, finding her place in the world at last. The MFA. The world of writers and books. My God! Was it real? She’d tried for it, never believing she’d make it in. And look, preparing for a welcome picnic in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Life is not a fairy tale.

Life, fed up and eye-rolling, is the big sister who keeps trying to tell me the hard truth. When have I ever listened?

Four months later, I’d return home from that picnic. A decidedly chilly soiree reeking of cliques, competition, and status anxiety. Afterward, flummoxed, in tears, breaking down into my husband’s warm chest. “They don’t like me!” Like a daughter after a humiliating middle school party. My husband patted my back. “What’s wrong with me. Is it my teeth?”

His hand on my back, going still. “Your teeth?”

“When I smiled, they turned away.”

“Not your teeth,” he said. “It has nothing to do with your teeth.”

I would stand on tiptoe then, grinning in his face. “What’s wrong with my teeth? Tell me! Tell me the truth!” I would very nearly grab his shirt.

Studying my smile now, I’m locked again in the grip of these fears.

I’m too old to be in an MFA.  

Too old and too dumb to be a novelist.

Growing up in a trailer, in the midst of cornfields, cattle, and pig farms, poring over Anne of Green Gables and Jehovah’s Witness literature. 

When I smile, I’m sure of it – my teeth tell on me.

The shames I didn’t even know I had.

In the MFA, down every hall, in every class, I’m self-conscious, sweaty.

I check my student mailbox, repeatedly, just to see my name.

It’s still there. It wasn’t a mistake. I’m in!

But – what if they take it back?

The adhesive on that name label, flimsy.

So easily plucked away.

Gone, just like that.

Gone. So easy!

In Austin, I was a respected teacher. Ms. Hammond. I lived for the moment someone asked me, “What do you do for a living?” I nearly stood on tip toe to proclaim, “High school teacher.” The kind of chin-up, swaggering pride you might imagine from a doctor, a CEO. My classroom. My students. All of it. Even the paycheck – nothing less than a boon after years of working odd jobs: carpet cleaner, clerk, cashier, tutor. Trying to carve a way clear through the jungle of Watchtower beliefs, the Jehovah’s Witness righteous insistence on low education and low-status work clogging my head, choking my dreams.

Therefore to become a teacher.

The pride, the pride!

Endless, and so hard won.

Yet I walked away from that – for this.

In the world of the MFA, Ms. Hammond is gone.

In her stead, sits, ostensibly, the oldest woman in the cohort. And yet, in all likelihood, she is the youngest. Not only because she is, at forty, only fifteen years free from her childhood home and the religion that ground her down. But also, she is lately possessed by the spirit of a 13-year-old.

The 13-year-old is taking over my body, and not just metaphorically.

I am breaking out again.

Pimples erupt in the most tender places, on my chin, my nose, above my lip, beside my eyebrow, swollen, throbbing, red.

My sweat smells like I’ve gone to my first dance, and no one will dance with me, and I’m too shy, too scared to ask. I’m the only one, backed up against the wall, no boobs to hold up my dress. My hair simultaneously frizzing, turbulent with hormones, and turning gray.

The hot flashes. Oh God.

Hot flash sweat is end-of-the-world abysmal and screams:

Who does she think she is?

The first week of MFA, an instructor, Harvard grad and notably published, chides me, scoffs that I’ve read Dickens, not Thackeray. Not Thackeray? But – he’s the one you should read! He gapes at me, appalled. Everyone stares.

A cohort invites me to dinner, only to lean in over sushi, and say, gentle yet firm, as though doling out tough love, “Just so you know, we don’t take books like yours seriously in the program.”

My brain goes mad. What does she mean? What’s the fatal flaw?

That it’s YA?

That it’s autobiographical fiction?

That it’s too confessional, emotional, cringey?

I mispronounce archipelago while reading out loud in a class, and the pain is dynamite, obliterating. I slink home, tell my husband, “I’m not going to speak anymore. Not going to share. I’m going to stay quiet.”

The way my husband looks at me, with such grave tenderness. “Then everyone will lose out,” he says.

He touches my face.

I’m in a fiction workshop, discussing a cohort’s short story.

The protagonist, Debbie, is in her 50’s and recently widowed. Debbie’s best friend convinces her to attend an event for the bereaved, hosted by a renowned spiritualist. Debbie is more than skeptical, she is profoundly reluctant, but caves to her friend’s well-intentioned wishes. When the spiritualist singles Debbie out from the crowd, asking her to stand, he delivers a message from her dead husband. From then on, Debbie is sucked into the very cycle she feared. Seeking out messages, omens, signs around every turn, reading love letters from her husband in birds, in clouds, in the shapes that spilled coffee makes. She registers for seances. Her life slowly narrows into a never ending, obsessively interpretative dance, an alluring, and addictive quest, to stay connected, hanging on by the thinnest threads, to her dead husband, the life they might have had.

The class discusses in signature MFA style: does this line land? Was this ending earned? What work is this word/sentence/paragraph doing?

And then, something about dialectics. What is that?

The sweat kicks in, sharp and punishing.

The cohort who said it is twenty-five. She graduated from an Ivy League. This is her second Master’s degree.

 At twenty-five I was still a Jehovah’s Witness, living at home with my parents. I didn’t even have a driver’s license.

The shame spiral begins and this time – I rescue myself.

Rather than sink, I speak.

“Debbie’s grief is so real, it tears at my heart. Her struggle between rationality and hope is so – human. Particularly the part where – the cardinal perches on her window sill, and everything in her rises, when she lets herself believe it’s a gift sent by her husband.”

I riffle the pages.

Take a deep breath.

And then, I say what I could only say at this age.

This tumultuous-terrified-sweaty-heart-on-the-surface-strange-age of forty-thirteen.

“I connect to this story. My father died two months before I moved here. Beside my desk is a window overlooking a small jungle. The other day, while I was writing, a cardinal appeared. Took my breath. Looking right in my eyes. Singing at me. To me. Red as a Valentine heart, embedded in the green. I told myself, stop it, just stop, you know a family of cardinals lives in this foliage. But then, another part of me was like – Dad…”

My voice breaks.

No one moves or speaks.

I can read almost anything.

But not the silence of an MFA workshop.

About the author: Summer Hammond grew up in rural east Iowa one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. In 2019, she graduated with her hard-won MFA from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. She was voted by her cohorts and faculty as the recipient of the Robert H. Byington fellowship, awarded to one who has "demonstrated unusual generosity of spirit toward faculty, staff, and peers and has contributed significantly to the morale, community spirit, and excellence of the MFA program." Summer's work has appeared in Texas Review, Sonora Review, and StoryQuarterly, among others.