May 2021
Bio Note: Although I’m a homebody and a hermit, this time of isolation seems endless, like a long
convalescence. I’ve used this great pause to write more and to read books again, as well as submit more of my
work. My poetry has appeared in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, and The Nation. I live in
rural central Virginia in the woods, alone, still baking bread.
What I Learned at the Bureau of What Never Happened
In 1972, I would have had a daughter instead of a divorce. I would have entered the club of women who never drive, who vacuum every day, whose parents come for Sunday dinner.
Instead of driving my VW to Florida in 1973 with my dog, I would have moved into an old farmhouse in Tennessee, continuing to beg my husband to pick up his socks, stop smoking. Every night, I would have fallen asleep to the zip of beer cans.
The year I bought the condo in Fort Lauderdale, I would have had an affair with the man who owned the only bookstore in Springfield. And when he feared his own guilt more than my husband’s guns, he would sell the store and leave town without so much as a letter of warning.
When I turned forty, the year I changed careers, bought a house, and got my first short story published, I would have been mourning my daughter’s quitting school to take a job at the filling station, pleasing my husband who’d told me girls shouldn’t go to college. While I was reading and making writer-friends, I would have been gaining fifty pounds, turning into a pear to match my husband’s apple.
At the time I turned fifty, promoted my first published book, and took an African safari, I would have been entering a treatment program for alcoholism, an eating disorder, and depression.
In that timeline, my mother would have gone to a doctor before her colon cancer spread to her liver and my father would have moved away to live alone, which was what he always wanted, instead of killing himself.
In the archives of the Bureau of What Never Happened, I saw that on another path I would have gone to medical school, as my mother had wished.
Originally published in Slipstream, #26, Summer 2006
©2021 Joan Mazza
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