As Far As I Can Tell
Stephanie Turner is a cat mom and professor of English at the University of Wisconsin- Eau Claire, where she teaches science writing, creative nonfiction, and other interesting courses. Her scholarship focuses on the human/animal connection, especially our relationship with the recently and nearly extinct species. She’s working on a memoir titled Expected to Live, and in her spare time, tries new cheesecake recipes.
by Stephanie Turner
As far as I can tell, my insurance agent Sue Morgan doesn’t know she’s become the nearly omniscient co-narrator of my memoir. Or she does know but, for whatever reason, is not letting on like she does, more secret agent than insurance agent. I’m not sure how to proceed. The whole thing is off-the-charts weird. I don’t know how to even begin to broach the subject with her. I worry that querying her—asking “how?” or “why?”—would lead her, the real Sue Morgan, to either stare at me in confusion or hate me for blowing her cover. I don’t want to jinx our joint project, and I may need more insurance, because it’s occurred to me, I need Sue Morgan to help me tell my story. BUT WHO IS SHE?
Ours is an unlikely acquaintance and not a little fascinating, like those Dodo videos featuring interspecies friendships. Watch this chicken and this rabbit share a popsicle out on the deck, chase a beach ball around the hen house, snuggle up together for a nap in Bunny’s well-appointed hutch. It’s not merely the unlikeliness of the friendship that fascinates viewers; it’s also the unlikeliness of the activities they share. A rabbit and a popsicle? A chicken and a beach ball? Do you ever wonder about how these videos are edited, like did they cut out the part where the chicken and the rabbit fought over the popsicle, scattering bloody fur and feathers across that recently pressure-washed deck, their stage? Did they edit the scene where one tried to bite or peck the other while chasing the beach ball to suggest it was an accident, rather than the act of pure, unbridled aggression it really was? How like us they are, and how like them we can be! The human stain is upon us all.
But back to Sue Morgan. She just had to have grown up in Green Bay. Blond, white, chubby. Comfortably middle class, heterosexual, Lutheran. I try to imagine the bland normality of Sue’s 1970s girlhood in Packers country. She had the requisite two parents and not one, but two sisters. Sue was the middle child. Her Lutheran family didn’t always attend church, but they never missed a Christmas or Easter service, nor a home game at Lambeau Field, which they could walk over to, they lived that close. Her dad sold RVs. Her mom was a “homemaker,” in the parlance of the times, though I wonder whether she might have experienced a twinge of what Betty Friedan called “the problem that has no name” in the midst of doing some household chore she’d done a million times before that no one ever noticed. The dishes were always washed, the laundry always clean and folded in the children’s drawers, organized by color. Sue Morgan was growing up in some kind of Heaven and didn’t even know it. Meanwhile the Heaven I knew was a remote mess of dead people I should’ve gotten to know better before they died, like my father and sister, wafting around in caftans listening to angel harp music.
So here we are again, in real life, not my memoir, discussing my umbrella policy in CoffeeNation, the café next to her office. I decide to risk something. “Heaven’s a crushing bore, Sue, don’t you think?”
Before sketching out this scene I test it on my wife Zoe. She says it isn’t going to work. I say, no, please shut up, thinking she means the Sue Morgan shtick. I say, “You mean Sue Morgan in general?” I’m bonded to Sue Morgan by now, my memoir rests on a foundation of her near omniscience, her willingness to witness. To my relief, Zoe says, “NO, the fallen angels! The concept of heaven fails from the outset because not even the angels could agree. Thus, Hell.” “Well, yes,” I say, “I guess that’s my point.” And wasn’t there once some nightclub in Berlin that offered patrons a choice of two themed rooms, Heaven and Hell, and of course the majority chose Hell? Because who the hell wants to drink and carouse in Heaven? I mean, is it even allowed?
But back to the scene. Sue Morgan gets it. “Yeah. All those robes. Too much fabric. I like how you think.”
Actually, no, she doesn’t say that. I just want her to have. Instead, she shrugs at my dumb question and launches into the details of the umbrella policy coverage. Taking a sip of coffee, I nod politely, as if I understand.
(Click here to read an interview with Stephanie Turner, author of “As Far As I Can Tell!”)