Colliding with Scheherazade

Recently, while I was traveling west through a green light at the intersection of Cork and Burdick Streets, a car turned left, north onto Burdick, in front of me. Though I braked and swung right to avoid the crash, the front of my newly acquired 1982 VW diesel truck met the right rear body panel of the late-model green sedan. The impact knocked my reinforced bumper to the right so it stuck out a foot on the passenger side, and I would discover later that it bent the frame. As soon as we limped our cars into the corner gas station parking lot and got out, both of us remembered to say how our not being hurt was the most important thing. Our bodies were fine, we assured each other. The other driver, a college sophomore, suggested we need not call the police. But I had no collision coverage on the little truck, and I would never collect on the insurance if the sophomore didn't get a ticket. To be honest, I only knew this fact about insurance coverage because a woman who witnessed the accident while pumping gas into her SUV came over and told me so. The sophomore had her own witness, a woman who had been right behind her in another SUV; this woman comforted the sophomore and assured her the accident could not possibly have been her fault—after all, she had stopped before turning left and, presumably, looked.

The left front corner of my truck had pressed a deep dent in her car. Her parents were going to be so mad, she said. The bashed-in front fender on the driver's side was from an accident a month ago, she told me. If I called the cops, her insurance was going to go up a lot. After one of several rapid-fire cell phone calls, the sophomore said it might go up as much as two hundred dollars a month. The sophomore was alone in the car at the time of the accident, but her first friend arrived on the scene within minutes. Within a quarter hour, a half dozen girlfriends would show up to commiserate. She did not offer to let me use her phone, so I went into the gas station to call the police.

My witness, whose name was Betty, offered her phone number, in case the sophomore contested the facts. I managed to produce a clipboard and paper, but my hand was shaking so violently from the adrenalin surge that I couldn't write her name or number. Because I couldn't write, Betty generously copied down all the information from the other driver. It's shocking how a trauma can compromise your simple rational functions and force you to rely on other people. Maybe with a big trauma, your functions stay screwed up for a while, maybe months, maybe the rest of your life in some cases. This adrenaline surge problem is maybe why my brother Tom and his wife Heather have been unable to calm down, get the facts straight about what has happened to them, and to get a lawyer to help them unravel their legal situation. They need help.

Betty asked the sophomore for her driver's license and proof of insurance. Betty didn’t even raise an eyebrow as she wrote the young woman’s first name on my clipboard: Scheherazade. Sheh-hare-eh-zahd. Stress on the second and fourth syllables.

Scheherazade. What a pleasure to read that name, to set it loose in my head. What wonderful parents she must have, to have chosen that name for her. Though her assembled friends were grumbling about my calling the police, Scheherazade was keeping her cool, preparing for the inevitable. The world must slow down a little for a young woman with such a name. Everyone must pause and attempt to pronounce it. The name conjurs up a strange and ancient world, a time without fighter planes and green zones, in which Baghdad is a market town bursting with lush fabrics, polished oil lamps, and ruby pomegranates instead of Kalashnikovs and exploding trucks; her name suggests a world in which the ruler of Baghdad would be dissuaded from his cruelty not by bombing runs but by the stories a beautiful girl told him in his chambers at night.

Telling stories to save your life

The premise of Arabian Nights is as follows: When the King of Bahgdad discovers that his wife has been unfaithful with a slave, he beheads her and all of her girlfriends, who also (he decides) are cavorting with slaves at the palace. His distrust of women is so fierce that he vows to continually marry virgins and have them beheaded the following morning, before they have a chance to be unfaithful. Lovely Scheherazade, daughter of the distraught vizier who beheads the girls, desires to save all maidens from the brutality of this ruler. Like any good heroine, she has a plan, and as in any good story, her plan is fraught with risk. The first night she begins telling the story of the Merchant and the Genie; at daybreak, the King is so eager to hear the conclusion that he delays Scheherazade’s beheading for one night. But the next night she continues with the part of the story about the calf that is actually the bewitched son of the merchant, and she goes until daybreak again. And again the third night and so on. She tells stories about Ali Baba and the forty thieves, Sinbad the seaman, Alladin and the wonderful lamp. Eventually, after 1001 nights, after Scheherazade has bourne the king three sons (there was more than story telling going on!), he pardons her and marries her properly, saying she is chaste, pure, ingenuous, and pious. We are grateful he appreciates her ingenuity.

I've often asked myself what would happen if I were held prisoner and my captors said: "Write a compelling story or we kill you." Something tells me that I would in fact be able to write good stories under those conditions, at least briefly. If I were writing stories to save my life or the lives of the women around me, I would write better stories. Such desperation would realign my senses so I could more readily invent new situations and remember old stories I thought I had forgotten. The desperation might open my eyes to the stories right in front of me.

The first time I see my mother Susanna after my accident, I ask whether she thinks she could save her life by telling stories, and she gets kind of excited at the prospect. She says she'd tell about the pigs getting loose in the swamp. She would tell about accidentally burning four hundred acres and several barns in South Carolina (she got fined $10), and about the time she dyed her friend Margo's champion Appaloosa pony black with Lady Clairol the night before a horse show. Because I would not want my mother beheaded, I'd advise her to skip the dull business of her dental hygenist leaving town for her husband's new job, but to definitely tell the old story of her friend Drew Anderson and the giant donkey condom.

Susanna's encounter with the police

If you visit her now, Susanna might tell about the police brutality she and her gentleman friend Loring encountered while driving through Goshen, Indiana in July, returning from a folk festival. The two of them drive in a leisurely fashion, and they choose old roads, which curve, and so it is not surprising that Loring did not signal two hundred fifty feet before a left turn in Goshen late at night, and that was the reason the police gave for pulling him over. Loring provided the officer with insurance, registration and license. Soon the young officer returned a handful of documents and said "hang tight." Loring assumed that "hang tight" meant something like, "have a good night." He also assumed that stack of documents contained his license, so he pulled back onto Highway Fifteen and continued slowly on his way. Lights flashed, sirens blared, and Loring pulled to the shoulder once again. With guns trained on them, Loring and Susanna were ordered from the truck and handcuffed. Loring was handcuffed easily. Susanna, however, has a crippled arm, an injury from birth, that does not allow her to put her left arm behind her back. The other wrist, her good wrist, is compromised with carpal tunnel syndrome, and coincidentally her surgery was scheduled for the following afternoon. The young officer told her she would be charged with resisting arrest for not putting her hands behind her back. As four other police cars arrived on the scene, the officer pushed Susanna's head down, twisted her shoulder and yanked her arms behind her. A half an hour later, she was released, and she and Loring were sent on their way. "With no apology," Susanna says, and with an aching shoulder and arm. They later learned that no official report was filed concerning the incident.

Loring and Susanna wrote detailed letters of complaint establishing that they were citizens with rights, describing the treatment, reporting the distress of the surgeon, who was furious about the handcuff bruises on Susanna's wrists. They sent these letters to the Goshen newspaper, to the mayor's office, and elsewhere. Now they are getting sympathetic phone calls and visits from Indiana dignitaries. Two weeks after the accident, they received a visit from the Goshen Chief of Police, a tall man who apologized for the rough handling. This fellow admitted fault in his ranks but urged Susanna to see the point of view of the officers.

"Once in our community a schoolteacher was stabbed to death." The chief says and goes on to tell the story of an officer, who, unaware as of yet of the stabbing, noticed the odd behavior of a man "looking away from him" at a stop sign. The officer followed the man, pulled him over for something trivial, a license plate light maybe. The officer saw the bloody knife and thereby caught himself a murderer. The chief of police tells us about other officers who have followed their hunches and benefitted the community. This tall man, with all his authority, is choosing to tell us stories. Police work is tough, he is telling us.

"I didn't even resist," Susanna says. "Look at me. I'm small. They pushed my chest down onto a guardrail and held me there." We are all sitting on Susanna's patio at picnic tables. Loring produces some photographs of Susanna's bruised wrists and chest. It is slightly shocking to have my mother's body become the object of everyone's attention. I am reminded of how fragile she is--on top of everything else, she's recovering from broken ribs she incurred in a fall a few months back. It is not uncommon that a woman's damaged body is at the center of a dispute, but Susanna's bruises somehow command authority.

"Is that standard procedure, what they did to my mother?" I ask. "Would you have treated her that way?"

He shakes his head no. There's another officer, a young mustached investigator, who has accompanied him, but the fellow is sheepish, actually looks a little like a sheepdog about the face. He nods his assent occasionally but doesn't join the conversation, doesn't seem to have a story in him.

"Maybe people with poor judgment shouldn't be cops," I suggest.

"Judgment is a hard thing to teach," somebody says.

"Impossible," somebody else says.

Loring's truck with the big camper was moving slowly through Goshen, the police chief says, the way a drunk might go slow.

"We were looking for road signs telling us how to stay on Highway Fifteen," Loring says. "We didn't know which way we'd have to turn."

The chief explains that, using the police car's computer, the officer was able to access the information that ten years ago Loring had a drunk driving conviction.

"My wife had just died," Loring says. "I was a wreck. This lady saved my life." Loring gestures toward my mother.

We are all silent for a moment.

"They should have cuffed your arms in front," the police chief says to Susanna.

"They were all so young," Susanna says. "I just kept waiting for the old cop to show up. An old guy would have seen things differently." Susanna tells a story about a similar situation, twenty years ago, when some young officers were hassling her, and then an older cop showed up and admonished the young officers and told her thank you and have a nice evening.

"I don't always act according to procedure," the chief of police says. He tells a story about facing off with a local man in a bar, without protection. In his story, the incident resolved itself in the best possible way, with no one getting hurt.

The chief of police and Susanna go back and forth until the warp of the chief's vision of well-intending officers comes together with the weave of Susanna's bruises, and creates a complicated sort of fabric.

Loring then tells a story about the time he was heading up north to Grayling, Michigan with all the money for a Boy Scout venture and his car broke down. A state police officer picked him up and drove him to the county line, where another officer picked him up and carried him to the next county line, and so on, until they got him to his Boy Scout troop with speed and grace. Susanna tells a story about when my brother Tom was nine and a policeman brought him home: according to the cop, little Tommy and his friend Marty Hendrickson had been on their hands and knees oinking at his car.

After the chief of police drives away, Mom and Loring say they that now will write letters to Kalamazoo authorities about Heather's treatment during her recent stay in the county jail. They wonder if people in Kalamazoo will care about police abuse the way they do in Goshen, Indiana or Abu Ghraib. The Kalamazoo jail staff are mostly officers of the Sherrif's department.

Heather's Time in the Kalamazoo County Jail

"They had pillows!" Heather stands up from the couch and points at the TV screen when it shows some newly released video footage of the notorious Iraqi jail.

Heather's incarceration, a half mile from my house, was concurrent with the breaking of the Abu Ghraib scandal in the land of Scheherazade, so I was hearing from my brother Tom about Heather's hair falling out and her breasts shrinking as the photos of weird tortures were transmitted from Baghdad.

"See, they gave those Iraqi prisoners pillows," Heather says. "I would have done anything for a pillow." Heather was pregnant with twins while she was serving her six weeks in jail for a probation violation on an original charge from years ago involving an OxyContin tablet. ("one half of one tablet," she corrects me.) Like the other women in jail, she was kept on a 1500 calorie diet. When her gynecologist ordered more food for her, she was offered an additional graham cracker and an apple or orange, most days. She was hungry, but it was hard to eat the whole breakfast before they took your tray away, she says, because they serve it at four a.m. After I sent her a copy of A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a novel about life in a Soviet prison camp, Heather told me, "At least those guys got to go out and work. They got to see the sky." The flip flops they gave Heather to wear in jail were something like a men's size fourteen so she had to be barefoot. (When they released Heather to the hospital, they forgot to collect her flip flops, and she will show them to you if you ask.) The heels of her feet cracked from the concrete floors and became infected.

She called Tom collect every evening on the payphone (a local call), which cost Tom twelve dollars for thirty minutes. Every few days Tom called the jail authorities and asked them to feed his pregnant wife the extra calories, give her a pillow, get her a bra (prisoners aren't allowed to bring theirs from home), give her vitamins, stop feeding her aspartame (bad for the babies), and stop letting the male employees into the shower room while she (and the other women) showered. Tom often ended up yelling into the phone that, damn it, Heather had rights.

Back at the scene of the accident

The frame damage to my little truck was not immediately visible, but the bumper knocked to the side that way gave the impression of a broken jaw. Already I grieved for the loss of innocence of my little truck, which had survived twenty-two years in nearly perfect condition, with just a little rust. Now the truck seemed like a broken body; lucky thing Scheherazade and I were fine, I reminded myself. People who know my big old Chevy truck are surprised I'm driving such a little vehicle until I explain that this truck gets four times the gas mileage of my big truck.

Scheherazade was on her cell phone much of the time we were waiting for the police. She was not participating in the discussion when her friends decided that I must have been speeding, and that my speeding was the reason Scheherazade hadn't seen me coming. It is entirely plausible that she wouldn't have noticed me at any speed. My VW truck is small and silver, and small silver vehicles can be difficult to see on gray pavement--just ask a motorcyclist. If I had been driving my big blue truck, the back of her car would have been crushed. Or more likely, she wouldn't have turned left into the path of such a truck. Though I rather doubt I was speeding, I might have been distracted, about my mother's bruises or Heather and Tom's distress.

There's a new twist in my brother Tom's part of the story. A week ago, Tom got a warrant for his arrest in the mail. The charge was three counts of "Malicious Use of a Phone Device." In other words, they are charging him for the crime of yelling into the phone at jail authorities. They are charging him for using harsh language in demanding they feed his wife and shoe her and get her to her doctor. Tom's adrenaline surged during those phone calls. When Heather was first in jail, Tom couldn't sleep so he spent his nights tearing out the windows and walls of his house and replacing them--he said he'd been meaning to do it for years. He took out the attic insulation and installed a cathedral ceiling in the living room. When Heather's hair started falling out, and when she started losing weight, Tom missed work. He removed the sink and cupboards from the kitchen, set about tiling the floor. When Heather didn't call at her regular time one evening, Tom called the jail authorities to ask if she was okay. They said she was fine, no problem, but she was unavailable to talk to him on the phone. No reason. They didn't mention she had miscarried the twins. Later, they said that the new HIPA privacy rules prevented them from informing Tom.

Heather's Story

Tom says I should tell Heather's story, but I resist. Maybe I would agree if I knew it was going to be a story of overcoming adversity, conquering demons and succeeding.

I want her story to be like Scheherazade's story, one of triumphing over a cruel authority by her goodness and cleverness, but there's no guarantee at this point. At first Heather comes across as a party girl, but the longer you talk to her, the more you realize she's read everything, and the more you suspect she might have one of those outsized IQ scores. Whenever Heather sees my six-foot-tall frame unfolding from the bunny-sized VW truck, she says "Little Truck, Big Woman," as though bestowing a native American moniker. Whenever she says that, "Little Truck, Big Woman," it cheers me up. I like the idea that the truck is so small it's almost a contradiction, and my substantial body emerging from it causes a ripple in the universe; the moment of my rising out of my tiny truck to six feet tall induces a kind of paradigm shift, requiring a re-aligning of brain waves from Alpha to Beta. Little Truck, Big Woman. It also makes me wonder if a woman's body always arrives apart from the woman herself.

Heather is a small girl who manages to be both slender and voluptuous. I mention it because her body is at the center of all this. She has long curly dark hair, bright eyes. She resembles the girl in the fancy engravings of Scheherazade in the Arabian Nights. When she applies eyeliner, she finishes the outside of each eye with a little upturned flourish. The way she dresses in summer, however, she looks like the seductive Hollywood depictions of Scheherazade. She and Tom live on the lake, and she often wears, if not veils, then a bikini top under some sheer veil-like covering or a thin weave white shirt. Both she and my brother are passionate people, known to have their own shifts into and out of civility. Once Heather threw a cup at my brother, and he had to get seven stitches on the bridge of his nose. Probably he said something awful to her. But still.

Maybe another shift occurs when Heather confesses that those marks on her otherwise smooth face are cigarette burns inflicted by her mother when she was little. A few years before sophomore Scheherazade's parents bestowed a magical name upon her, Heather's mother mispelled her new daughter's name on the birth certificate, which reads "Hether." No father is named on the document. Heather grew up near Flint, Michigan. Unless she went into the city, she hardly saw a paved road, but she recognizes the places and the kind of people who show up in Michael Moore movies.

Heather could tell you that while she was miscarrying her twins in the Kalamazoo County jail a few months ago, the authorities left her bleeding on the floor with people walking by. Instead of taking her downtown to the emergency room, they decided to wait for her doctor to call back. Instead of comforting her, the officers yelled at her, demanded she confess what she had done to herself to make herself bleed that way. Heather says that there are a lot of miscarriage anecdotes in the jail. Maybe I should call the lieutenant in charge and ask for the straight-out truth. Would the lieutenant's version resemble Heather's story, or do the two stories exist in entirely different universes? The Lieutenant's story would likely be one of under-staffing, cutbacks, prisoner management, officers of the law carrying on as best they can in a tough situation.

What if Heather's story is not one of triumph, of overcoming? I don't want to write a tragic story of a real girl, a girl I've drunk coffee with and laughed with, a girl who greets me with "Little Truck, Big Woman." Heather has had pain since getting out of jail. A month and a half out, they discovered a tubal pregnancy, and her doctor had to remove a fallopian tube. The king of Baghdad pardoned Scheherazade after she gave birth to three sons. Heather's body has now attempted and failed to deliver three angels.

The authorities arrive on the scene

Back at Cork and Burdick Streets, the young male cop gets out of his car. He starts out by saying that he's glad nobody was hurt. He first questions Scheherazade, who says she turned left because she didn't see me coming. The cop nods sympathetically. He says, "So you just didn't quite make it through?" She nods.

When he questions me, I tell the corresponding story. Our stories fit together perfectly, without a wrinkle, without contradiction. There is no need for the universe to rearrange itself to accommodate both stories at once. The cop must feel as relieved as I do. He takes all our information to copy it himself just as we copied it for ourselves. While he is in his car with the windows rolled up, I take some photos of my bumper looking like the broken jaw.

"Doesn't look like much damage," one of Scheherazade's friends calls over to me.

I nod in agreement.

It didn't look like much damage from the outside. Why had I called the police? Now that my witness Betty had left I was less certain I would get insurance money in any case. By calling the cops, I sacrificed any chance to hear why the sophomore's parents had chosen that name for her. It occurs to me that calling the police ends a story prematurely. Calling the police can turn an interesting story into a morality tale. The cops don't leave an accident scene without giving somebody a ticket.

From what Scheherazade said to the cop, I knew she would get a ticket for failure to yield, but apparently her friends didn't realize it, because twenty minutes later when the cop presented her with the ticket, the universe did change shape. The chorus of friends were surprised and angry, told the cop he was out of line, told him he was just plain wrong.

In conclusion

The day following the accident Christopher and I read our insurance policy and concluded there would be no insurance money to repair the damage, and so Christopher decided he would get out the 1952 Ford 8-N tractor and straighten my bumper out using brute force. As he headed out to the garage, I called Kay Maxson Insurance Agency (serving our community for three generations) and Kay himself said, yes, I probably would get the $500 mini-torte to fix it. "Hold on just a minute," I said and hung the phone over the back of a chair. I ran out in the driveway and threw myself between the truck's bumper and Christopher's tractor. "It's covered, Chris! The repair is covered!"

I sent the insurance company an estimate for repairs, and within a week I received a $500 check, not from the insurance company, but from Scheherazade's father. Scheherazade's father in Arabian Nights was the desperately sad man who expected he would be asked to behead his own daughter, should her plan fail. But he was also the father who trusted her enough to let her become the heroine. Perhaps this sophomore's father yelled at his daughter, took away her car even, but he would never lose his faith in a girl to whom he has given such a name.

The chief of police of Goshen, Indiana said that after any encounter with his police force, he wants the citizen to feel he or she understands what has just happened and why. Susanna and Loring did not understand why the police treated them the way they did. They have demanded the authorities hear their story, admit some fault, and now they are more or less satisfied. Heads have rolled in Goshen. Although I feel a little bad about calling the cops on Scheherazade, I am grateful for the check--the total bill for truck repairs came to $600 and I didn't bother to fix the cosmetic damage. Now that I got my frame straightened, the story of the accident is over, almost. The mechanic told me that my truck won't be quite the same, not quite as strong. It never is, he said, once the frame has bent.

Heather and Tom don't understand their encounters with the law. "Why couldn't they just give my pregnant wife a sandwich?" Tom says. "If they would have given her a damned sandwich, maybe none of this would have happened." Tom turned himself in at the courthouse on Tuesday on the "Malicious use of a phone" charges--he engaged a lawyer, but on Monday the lawyer informed Tom that he played golf with folks from the Sheriff's Department, and he excused himself on the grounds of a conflict of interest. There was no time to get another lawyer. While Heather sat in a waiting room, Tom was fingerprinted and released on a $250 bond. Meanwhile the two of them argue more than they used to, they cry more, they rarely go out. Tom thinks maybe they should sue over Heather's treatment, at least to change the rules. Heather just wants to put it behind her. Tom wants me to tell Heather's story, but if I tell the whole story, then I have to tell about the lapses in civility. In a story, I want balance and nuance, not just an assignment of good and evil. But I don't think I can write with balance about a small pretty girl crying and bleeding on floor on a thin mattress, with no pillow, begging to go to the hospital, begging to talk to her husband, while uniformed men drink coffee and watch from the other side of the room. And if I start trying to tell the whole story, I'll have to tell about those cigarette burns. Without make-up they were surely visible to everyone looking down on her as she lay on the floor. And a mother burning her kid with cigarettes is just over-the-top melodramatic, isn't it? I try to explain to Tom that I don't know how to tell Heather's story, but he says somebody needs to tell it, and Heather can't do it by herself. A convicted felon's voice--and Heather is now a convicted felon, by virtue of her one half of one OxyContin tablet--becomes small in the face of authority. And when Tom tries to tell the story, he gets angry and swears, oversteps bounds, causes more trouble. Scheherazade of Baghdad told fantastical stories--she told them to save lives. Tom says that maybe telling Heather's story could somehow save lives. One thing I know for sure: Heather and Tom's extended encounter with the authorities will not resolve nicely--it will continue to be a difficult story, however events unfold.

Bonnie Jo Enterprises, PO Box 52, Comstock MI 49041 bonniecamp@gmail.com

This newsletter is the second of 2004, following the January essay "Cooking with Carla." The next issue will be published soon, and will include the usual "news and notes" and "letters from readers" that are not included here, so please send word from your part of the universe!