with an Introduction by Anya Achtenberg

Reflections of America Series

M o d e r n  H i s t o r y  P r e s s

For Millie and Virginia, my grandmothers, who loved despite it all

PRAISE FOR CHRISTINE STARK

“…These brilliantly written pieces stimulated the board into a lively discussion of language, point of view, and politics, and resulted in a resounding ‘yes’ from everyone on the importance of using these two pieces together, as point-counterpoint on the themes of violence against women and the nuanced and challenging process of surviving that violence.”

—Minnie Bruce Pratt

Creative Writing Editor for the Feminist Studies Editorial Board

“The judging panel believes Christine Stark’s work is both art and metaphor. She creates story and mood using a stream of consciousness style. The writing is rhythmic, and lyrical with conscious and authoritative use of various techniques such as repetition. In Christine’s story, the perpetrator behaves as if his act, an assault, is one of mundane evil. This story alludes to the reality of society’s marginalized—vulnerable to everyday evils—mundane for some, not so for others. The panel applauds Christine’s writing talents, her willingness to take a risk by composing a raw, provocative piece designed to invite us to consider the nature of mundane evil from several unexpected points of view.”

—Sandra Lloyd, The Pearls Writing Group

“Take a dark journey with Christine Stark, deep into the dungeon that is incest. Follow crazy girl as she fights for her dignity and sense of self-worth. Then cheer when she finally finds the strength to say: ‘I know my name now and you do not frighten me.’”

—Julian Sher, author of Somebody’s Daughter: The Hidden Story of
America’s Prostituted Children and the Battle to Save Them

“In Nickels, Christine Stark powerfully portrays the story of abuse and its impact on our lives. This beautifully written and compelling story leaves you wanting more. It’s riveting; a book that will capture you from the beginning and carry you through the end. Everyone should read this book.”

—Olga Trujillo, author of The Sum of My Parts

“To be taken into the mind of a child can be an enchanting adventure, but to be taken into the mind of a child who is abused, confused, and taken for granted is a lingering, livid journey. Stark’s poised yet cerebral writing style stays with you long after you have delved into the first chapter and regrettably finished the last. She has vividly exposed a world that unfortunately exists for many. I applaud her fortitude to bring an olden—too long ignored—truth out of the darkness with blazing, innovative light.”

— MariJo Moore, author of The Diamond Doorknob

“Christine Stark has crafted a language and a diction commensurate with the shredding of consciousness that is a consequence of childhood sexual abuse. She brings us a wholly original voice in a riveting novel of desperation and love. Nickels is narrated by Miss So And So, as her mother names her, from the ages of 4 to 26, a character so compelling I never wanted to stop hearing from her. She names herself crazy girl, but the reader sees a different truth: there’s humor and cunning and ferocious love alive in those who survive. Stark enables the reader to inhabit the intricacy and chaos of this potent inner landscape, and we have not seen this before. Every sentence vibrates with a terrible beauty. Every sentence brings the news.”

—Patricia Weaver Francisco, author of

Telling: A Memoir of Rape and Recovery

“I’m just saying the truth. Like oatmeal.”

—Tim O’Brien

“We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others.”

—Virginia Woolf

“Dissociation splits affect and cognition, observer and experiencer, mind and body, self and self into parts, leading to fantastic permeatations and schisms in ownership/disownership, knowing/not knowing, responsibility/irresponsibility…”

—Harvey Schwarz

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction by Anya Achtenberg

Age 4 (Prologue)

Age Five (1973)

School

The trial

China Doll Girl

The hole

The move

Pennies

P girl (Patty)

Age Ten (1978)

The Purse

The Mole

Muhammad

Age Fifteen (1983)

Oh Mickey

What’s your name

Age Twenty (1988)

Stadium lights

Ugly Bird

Grass fire

Connie Baker

Age Twenty five (1993)

Catherine

Cricket

Amanda

How many

Age 25 1/2 - Epilogue I,

Age 26 - Epilogue II

About the Author

Acknowledgments

First and foremost I want to thank Anya Achtenberg for her support, brilliance and encouragement. I’d also like to thank Victor Volkman and the rest at Modern History Press for taking on Nickels, and for Victor’s supreme patience in dealing with my editing process. I would be remiss if I did not thank the McKnight Awards through Five Wings Arts Council for a grant to help me complete Nickels.

Others I’d like to thank for their support and friendship include Melinda Masi, Alison Bergblom Johnson, Trish Campbell, Cyndi Carlson, Sherri Dougherty, Johanna Morrigan, Fred Amram, Sherry Quan Lee, Eileen Hudon, Deb Blake, Skip and Babette Sandman, Karissa Stotts, Rene Simon, Donna Wegscheid, the women at Rain and Thunder, Fred Ho, and the Minnesota State University at Mankato English Department. I’d like to honor the support I received from Andrea Dworkin, who told me when I was twenty-two that I was a terrific writer and gave me hope my life could be something different. And lastly, a heartfelt thanks to April Posner for the love, laughter, and home we share.

Excerpts of Nickels first appeared in:

Dust & Fire, Rain and Thunder, Trivia: Voices of Feminism, WHLR, Feminist Studies, Kaleidoscope, The Sylvan Echo, Blue Earth Review, The Hiss Quarterly, Said It, On the Outskirts: Poems on Disability, Red Weather Literary Magazine, Primavera, Ramblings, Poetry Motel, ache, Pearls

Awards for excerpts of Nickels:

• Recipient of McKnight Award through Five Wings Arts Council to finish Nickels, June, 2008
• Second Prize for 2007 Soul-Making Literary Contest for Novel Excerpt, National League of American Pen Women, Nob Hill, 2007
• Winner of Jonis Agee Award in Fiction, Dust & Fire, 2007, 2004, and 2003
• First Prize for 2006 Soul-Making Literary Contest for Flash Fiction, National League of American Pen Women, Nob Hill, 2006
• Pearls Short Fiction Contest, First place, Summer 2006
• Inglis House Poetry Contest, Second place, Summer 2006
• Placed third (prose poem) Soul-Making Literary Competition, National League of American Pen Women, Nob Hill, 2003

Introduction

This is not just a great book; it is something of a miracle.

So, why an introduction? Shouldn’t a great book speak for itself? Yes, and it does. But it speaks a language somewhat different from mainstream English.

So then is this “different” language an aesthetic choice? In part, I think, yes, but the real choice precedes the crafting of the work. The author, who is indeed very well trained in mainstream English, has chosen to write Nickels in its true language, in the language that her early and continuing severe trauma from extreme sexual and physical violence has created. This is a language that cracks open the world to allow people to see the truth. This is a language that takes as its task a highly pressurized work upon itself, the work of cracking open language that seals in the world at times, making it impermeable to truth. Stark’s language is in a sense less mediated, yet fully developed in its art.

Does this sound mysterious, to read something in a new language?

Don’t worry. The book itself, the reading itself, will teach you. And it begins with a language all of us who were children first spoke; it gives voice to a child’s voice and a child’s world, so we are beckoned in with recognition and tenderness.

The other somewhat disturbing fact, but in a sense a relief to admit, is that many of us, so many of us for so many reasons, speak the language of trauma and dissociation. We are, in a cruel sense, native speakers; in a necessary and loving sense, a community.

We know from depictions of trauma in literature, and we understand from experience, that some situations stretch time, kick us out of our bodies. Ambrose Bierce, in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” gave us Confederate gentleman and saboteur Peyton Farquhar, who in the moment between falling through the bridge, and the Union noose breaking his neck, lived, with superhuman strength and magical sensory abilities, a lifetime of escape and return to his beloved, to die then in her arms; but in “normal” reality, he died alone under the bridge, hanged.

We know from car accidents the stretching of time, the adrenalin that slows it all down so we react or we watch, through each degree of the 360 as the car rolls over and our lives turn around us.

But the language of trauma here in Nickels is not the language of a moment, a single event we relive and tell about, perhaps a bit compulsively, until it loses its powerful flare up of terror. This is the language of continuing and repeated trauma, and it cracks open the world to reveal something we must know, the grit that makes the pearl, the truth of the world that challenges hypocrisy. I am one of those who believe that what we do not face, kills us. What we do not admit of the ugliness of the world, takes us down, and deforms that beauty that most assuredly dances around the earth. But like Farquhar, as he is being hung, the narrator of this story indeed watches, using her “waiting eyes” to “store it in [her] brain”, and I suggest that it is this ability, these eyes, which have led to the gifted vision we see the character develop later in the book as a visual artist.

There are other books, and there will be many more, that treat the subject of the terrible violences against children which make the backdrop of our daily lives; which say that no matter how lovely it may look on one street, we have work to do.

But this book?

This is the motherboard; this, the hidden circuitry we dress up to attempt to tell a story and be understood. There are other books, fine books, which are indicators; they point to the hidden circuitry. They point to this book.

This is enough reason to read this beautiful and brutal work. But there is more.

This book reopens the world of childhood. Beauty is here. Unbearable innocence. Hope is here. Maneuvering around ogres. The sheer terror of childhood, here.

In this land between breakfast and nightmare, with its “imaginary” companions, and a cast of characters only the child could name—oatmeal lady, suit man, spider leg lady, mad dad—stories unfold of how Little Miss So And So maneuvers through and survives, how crazy girl encounters her first friend, and how she finds ways to see beauty, experience it, and create it. These are stories I would not miss.

Need more reasons to read this book? Stark brings us back to the transformative blossoming of first love, the love of our narrator for another young girl. She also writes of the girl athlete crazy girl, in a magical way I have never before seen. “I am pure speed,” Stark’s narrator says as she makes a moment-by-moment opening into the basketball game, into this saving power within this girl, who does, “float like a butterfly; sting like a bee.” It is perhaps that slowing and stretching of time, that floating away from the body in that limitless time that stretches before the neck of the moment is broken, that brings this young woman also to have an artist’s eye and gift, which Stark describes hypnotically as the character is compelled into making art.

And Stark accomplishes something in Nickels which presents a great and often opaque challenge to writers struggling with using a narrative voice that must show development over many years in stories beginning with childhood.

This exile from straight[forward] time is somehow an expert in it, not only showing a different kind of time or showing time in a new way, but also quite capably showing the shifts in “actual” time, informing the reader of these shifts through subtleties in the development of the narrative voice. She crafts or discovers the very distinct voices of her narrator over time, over the span of the narrator’s telling; at the same time there is a necessary blurring as one moment comes back to be present in another, both crucial tasks for this narrator.

It is perhaps Stark’s defeat of straight time, along with the powerful bringing forward of symbols, which eventually brings this story from the dramatic realm into the mythical, as well. Her arrival at the merging of the character’s experience into the mythical realm, into her understanding of the beginning of the world with its ancient taboos and the horrific consequences of their violation, is stunning. The section including the story, “The Girl Who Dragged Her Entrails Through Life Behind Her on The Ground,” is prominent among the many sections of this book which must turn up anthologized.

Crazy girl lives tethered to the extreme pole of injustice, being made the last, the one who most knows the edge of the world, whose knowledge is central, and most repressed. Her knowledge remains something that society works most energetically to make invisible, to keep hidden behind the opaque social wall.

So, we need this book. It brings forth in the reader such a powerful wave of love and tenderness, such a deep desire to care for the children, the daughters, unable to be argued with. This is a great work to do in the world.

Stark says, “the body remembers the emotions recall what the mind cannot hold the mind is a sieve the mind is an imperfect entity alone however in cooperation with the body and the emotions operating with a perfect genius.” I have come to think that Stark operates in this book with a perfect genius that makes the impossible in expression, possible; the unknowable in experience, knowable.

So, prepare yourself, although, really, you cannot, for a tidal wave of brilliance, an arrival at a language both intimate and mythical for what we call the “unspeakable”, and for irreplaceable gifts that make their way forward, convincing me that anything I want to save, can be saved; anything I want to make as beauty with its inextricable link to truth, can be created.

Anya Achtenberg

Minneapolis, 2011

Age 4 (Prologue)

Trip trap

trip trap went the bridge Who’s that roared the troll who lived under the bridge his eyes as big as saucers and nose as long as a poker It’s me said baby billy goat gruff Well I’m going to gobble you up as a midmorning snack Oh no wait for the next billy goat gruff he’s much bigger

trip trap trip trap went the bridge Who’s that roared the troll licking his lips It’s me said the second billy goat gruff who hadn’t such a small voice I’m going to gobble you up for lunch roared the troll Oh no the second billy goat gruff said wait for the biggest billy goat gruff of us all!

trip trap trip trap went the bridge Who’s that roared the troll It is I the biggest billy goat gruff Well then I am going to gobble you up the troll said Well come along I’ve got two spears and I’ll poke your eyeballs out at your ears I’ve got besides two curling stones and I’ll crush you to bits body and bones and so he did and so he did

snip snap snout this tale’s told out

If you sit still and be quiet when your dad gets home I’ll read you one more story mom says I say nothing stare at mom’s hand a shiny ring on the green three billy goat gruff book Okay she says I nod nod nod Okay she says I nod nod nod touch the book it is shiny

Once upon a time there were five Chinese brothers and they all looked exactly alike the first Chinese brother could swallow the sea the second Chinese brother had an iron neck the third Chinese brother could stretch and stretch his legs the fourth Chinese brother could not be burned the fifth Chinese brother could hold his breath indefinitely

Swallow the sea! my eyes big as saucers swallow the sea!

See how slanty their eyes are mom points at the drawing slanty sneaky little eyes

The first Chinese brother fished everyday and whatever the weather he would come back to the village with a rare fish one day a little boy stopped him and asked to go fishing he begged and begged until the first Chinese brother consented but only if the boy obeyed him promptly Yes yes the little boy promised the next morning they went fishing the first Chinese brother swallowed the sea

He swallowed the sea! I think inside my head but say nothing mom’s shiny ring

All the fish were left high and dry at the bottom of the sea the little boy was delighted he ran here and there stuffing his pockets with strange pebbles Strange pebbles! I think extraordinary shells Shells! I think and fantastic algae Algae! I think but don’t know what it is The first Chinese brother gathered some fish while he kept holding the sea in his mouth presently he grew tired it is very hard to hold the sea he told the little boy to come back but he paid no attention the first Chinese brother felt the sea swelling inside him the first Chinese brother held the sea until he thought he was going to burst all of a sudden the sea forced its way out of his mouth went back to its bed and the little boy disappeared

The little boy disappeared! I think the little boy disappeared! Why! I say He drowned mom says

Clomp clomp tromp tromp Oh! Your father is home mom says closes the book the tips of her fingers still inside be quiet be still clomp clomp tromp tromp He killed that boy he is a bad man I say a bad man! Shh mom says her hand on my mouth clomp clomp tromp tromp dad walks up the stairs