Karol Nielsen

​Tall Tales
 
My great-grandmother had Scottish roots. Her maiden name was Bothwell. My grandfather told my mother that she and her sisters descended from a Scottish earl, Lord Bothwell, who kidnapped and married Mary, Queen of Scots. We took a family trip and toured the country in a minivan. We visited Bothwell Castle and learned the history. Mary, Queen of Scots’ third and final husband—James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell—was not our ancestor. It was one of my grandfather’s tall tales.
 
My mother’s father used to hold up a photo of his grandfather in buckskin leaning against his rifle and say that he was an Indian scout who married a Native American woman. When mother did genealogical research for family albums she created, she discovered that the story might be fiction. She took a DNA test and learned that she was mostly Scottish and English, with some Irish, Welsh, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and German. She was disappointed to find that my grandfather’s tale of descending from a Native American was a myth.
 
It was not one of my grandfather’s tall tales that his mother’s first cousin once removed was Albert Bothwell, an infamous cattle rancher in Wyoming who lynched Cattle Kate and her husband after falsely accusing the homesteaders of cattle rustling. Witnesses to the murder all died mysteriously. These events, known as the Johnson County War between ranchers and settlers, inspired the Jack Schaefer novel Shane and the movie that followed about a fictional gunfighter who defends the homesteaders against the cattle barons.
 
**
 
A Thug Like That
 
I still think about the French girl on the kibbutz. A dancer with chestnut curls and alabaster skin. Delicate, taken by the British guy with dark chocolate waves and big blue eyes—a real movie-star kind of guy. Friends, alone in our room. Everyone would blame her, she said. Didn’t want to tell. So we dumped cow dung in his boots.
 
Sometimes, I think about the girl from Penn, gang banged by fraternity boys before my freshman year. Didn’t think that kind of thing happened in the Ivy League, such a fine Philadelphia campus. The big red-brick frat house loomed empty all year, their sentence.
 
Can’t forget Sandy Hoyt. Raped, strangled, dumped in leafy Connecticut woods when I was a girl. Pretty Sandy with her curvy hips and long blonde hair. All the boys had crushes on her.  That man who did those awful things lived down the hill from our small brown colonial.
 
Wonder about that woman from work who shot her fiancé at the front door. He survived; she went to prison. A pretty girl, Filipina with nice tanned skin, petite and boyish but dainty, too. She could sport John Lennon frames and still look feminine cute. Funny, she’d gone to Los Angeles to study law of all things.
 
Remembered something about a mass murder my parents talked about when reading In Cold Blood. Truman Capote’s nonfiction novel about Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, Midwestern boys who killed four people out on a Kansas farm in ’66. Perry did all the killings, calling Dick’s bluff. Both sent to death row—The Corner—then the gallows.
 
Asked my mother, and she said it was Charlie Starkweather instead. Went on a shooting spree back in ’58 with his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate. Charlie killed a gas station attendant, Caril Ann’s mother, stepfather, toddler sister, and seven more. Men went looking for Charlie, and my grandfather taught my mother how to use a gun. 
 
Charlie got the electric chair, and his girlfriend, Caril Ann, got life and parole in ’76. Made movies about that couple: Badlands, Natural Born Killers. Charlie played football with my father in junior high. A clean-cut Nebraska boy, my dad; who’d have ever thought he’d know a thug like that.
 
**
 
Wilson
 
My father choked up when he found Wilson’s name among the dead on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall. Wilson was a hillbilly from the South who was going to be court martialed. My father’s job was to straighten him out. Wilson was always joking around and he and my father became friends. When my mother sent popcorn to my father, he shared it with Wilson. Eventually, Wilson began to report to a new commanding officer in the artillery battery. He took pity on his men one night and didn’t make them dig in. Wilson slept in the fire direction tent with all the maps laid out. When the North Vietnamese Army ambushed the battery before dawn, my father rolled out of his cot and rushed to one of the big guns. He ordered an anti-personnel round of fleshettes and repelled the attack. When it was over, he found Wilson lying in the fire direction tent. He told him to hang on, but he realized later that Wilson was probably already dead. My father won the Bronze Star for valour in battle. He said he wasn’t trying to be a hero; he was just doing his job.
 
**
 
Highway Hero
 
In the early 1990s, I worked as a journalist at a weekly newspaper in the Bronx. I needed a car to get to reporting assignments. My father drove my grandmother’s 1967 Dodge Coronet back from Lincoln, Nebraska and gave the car to me. My grandmother didn’t drive anymore and she was glad her car would be useful. 
 
I lived in Larchmont and parked by the train station. Two weeks after my father installed a new radio in the car, thieves chopped up the whole dashboard to get the radio. The car had to be junked. My father bought me a used Mercury Sable.
 
I moved back to Manhattan and started dating an artist in my building on the Upper West Side. He was extremely frugal and he convinced me to give up my Sable with full collision and liability insurance. He offered to let me drive his old Honda Civic and pay the liability insurance. 
 
One day, the car came to a dead stop on the West Side Highway on my way to work. A man behind me offered to help. He drove behind me and pushed my car with his all the way to a repair shop in the South Bronx. He was my hero.
 
After that car was junked, I road the subway and my boyfriend’s beater bike around the Bronx.
 
**
 
Old Mentor
 
I was newly divorced in my late 20s when my mentor said, “You won’t miss the children.” It seemed extreme when I was so young and uncertain about the future. I had a boyfriend who sent me off to work every day with a thermos of coffee and a turkey sandwich with homemade pesto. My mentor met him once and declared—“Handsome men don’t know how to take care of themselves.” Another harsh assessment when I was still impressionable. She had a PhD in chemistry, with an impressive record of an epoxy resin invention. She was also a beautiful writer, with autobiographical fiction honoured in The Best American Short Stories. She wrote about her bisexual finance who rode off on a motorcycle when they were done. She soured on marriage and wrote an unpublishable novel full of purple prose about her distaste for the institution. 
 
She was a columnist for the Bronx weekly newspaper that hired me as managing editor right out of journalism school. I showed her an early draft of my memoir and she said, “It has to be fiction!” She ran a Great Books reading club and invited me to join. I worshipped her, but I dropped out after the group collectively dissed Dostoyevsky for his “weak” chapter questioning free will in The Brothers Karamazov. It hurt to hear one of my idols mercilessly critiqued in this way. But I was not done with my mentor. 
 
The parting came after I published my first memoir about my troubled engagement to an Israeli man during the Gulf War and the emotional fallout that led to our divorce. I sent her the book which included chapters named as notables in The Best American Essays, and she wrote me a letter saying she would get to my book after she finished rereading Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I never heard from her again. She was a chainsmoker who died of lung cancer. She once told me a story about chemical plant workers who never got sick. She took a drag on her cigarette and said that she always had someone but never wanted to marry because she loved her freedom.
 
**
 
No Pants Subway Ride
 
On my way home from a poetry reading in the East Village, I noticed a group of men in their underwear. It was the middle of winter but it was an unusually warm, spring-like day, so at first I mistook their underwear for shorts. I hurried up so I could get a closer look. Yep, definitely underwear. I watched them enter a bar with a crowd of men in their underwear. One man provocatively wore sheer black underwear. Later, I discovered that it was the No Pants Subway Ride, started as a joke by an improv comedy group. Participants take off their pants before their subway stop and, if asked why, they say they were getting uncomfortable.
 
**
 
Work
 
I write evaluations for work visa applicants in the name of professors of computer science, engineering, chemistry, biology, finance, accounting, marketing, fashion design, graphic design, food science, law. I am a ghost writer, using templates created by other writers, shaping and adapting them to the particulars of the case. The paycheck comes direct deposit every two weeks, and finally I have savings. During my long years as a journalist, under constant pressure to keep sources from complaining about my work despite its accuracy, I never had savings. When I became a writing teacher and editor it was never enough. I rarely traveled, too poor most of the time, but I wrote and wrote. Now I struggle to say something poetic on my lunch break. It goes too fast.
 
**
 
Mercedes
 
I used to run into our cleaner at my midtown Manhattan office almost every day. She often was starting her shift and changing into her uniform in the ladies’ room as I made a pit stop before the end of the day. I always said hello and she always gave me a big smile. She spoke little English, but it was always a delightful moment.
 
Suddenly, I stopped running into her. Months went by. I asked around but nobody knew what happened. Then suddenly she reappeared as I was taking the elevator to the lobby. I said hello and she beamed as she got into the elevator on a lower floor. I asked, “Has your schedule changed?” She gave me a puzzled look and asked, “Good?” I said, “Si.” She lit up! 
 
I explained in Spanish that I lived in Argentina but a long time ago. She said I spoke well and asked my name. I said Karol with the Midwestern accent I inherited from my parents. She gave me another puzzled look. So I said my name the way I learned to say it in Argentina—with a long, drawn out a. That did the trick. 
 
She beamed and told me her name—Mercedes. I already knew. Our floor gave her a holiday card and tip. Mercedes got off on another floor and we said our goodbyes—“buenos noches,” then “ciao.” Next time I will try to remember how to ask, “Has your schedule changed?”
 
**
 
A Poem Doesn't Do Everything for You
 
Morning sunshine stretched a long shadow of my legs across the sidewalk on my way to work near the New York Public Library. I stopped, transfixed by the lines by my feet. “A poem doesn’t do everything for you,” wrote Gwendolyn Brooks. Her words fed my hunger for inspiration like a starving beggar. I wanted to answer her wisdom with a poem.
 
**
​
Karol Nielsen is the author of the memoirs Raising the Price of the House, Walking A&P, and Black Elephants and three poetry chapbooks. Her first memoir was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Excerpts were named notable essays in The Best American Essays. Her full-length poetry collection was a finalist for the Colorado Prize for Poetry. Her poem “This New Manhattan” was a finalist for the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Epiphany, Guernica, North Dakota Quarterly, Permafrost, and elsewhere.