Progress, Not Perfection

Progress, Not Perfection

“So how have you been spending your time, now that you’re retired?” Dan asked Laurie across the restaurant table. Laurie and her husband, Frank, were dining out with their neighbors, Dan and Joann. Despite the twenty-five-year age gap between the two couples, they had become friends since Dan and Joann moved next door two years ago, and they now had at least that in common.

“Well, I’ve been writing,” Laurie said.

“Hey, that’s great! What are you writing?”

“I wrote a memoir, about my experience with my father’s addiction. I grew up with an alcoholic father.”

Dan and Joann nodded sympathetically.

“And other things. Personal essays and short fiction.”

“I’ve been thinking of writing a book myself, about the situation I went through when I lost the department position,” Dan said.

Dan, a high school business teacher and owner of a self-storage company, had shared how he had mixed business with colleagues, and it had not gone well. He had rented out a storage unit to his administrator’s girlfriend. The story ended with Dan losing his department chair position after he pushed the administrator’s girlfriend for overdue payment for her storage unit. Laurie was surprised to hear Dan wanted to write about it. It seemed she wasn’t the only one with a traumatic story that needed telling, or with the fanciful idea of publishing.

“Hmm, that could make an interesting story,” Laurie said, thinking how it could cause him more harm than good.

“You know,” Dan said, “You might want to try using AI with your writing. It can do amazing things. Joann can help you. She’s great with it, uses it to write lesson plans and Google reviews.” He beamed at his thirty-something wife, a stunning blonde speech teacher. Joann returned his handsome smile.

“Oh, I don’t know, I don’t think it would help me. My writing comes from my life experience, from me.” Dan looked skeptical. Laurie didn’t say what else she was thinking, that although she had never published, had never been in an MFA program or even a top university, she did have a graduate degree in teaching literacy and knew a thing or two about writing. She had taught writing, albeit only to fifth-graders, for 22 years.

“Just watch,” he said, taking out his phone and looking at Frank, who was long retired from a professional baseball career. “Write a story about the second baseman, Frank Amado.” Dan observed his phone at work, then, with a satisfied grin, started reading the results.

Once upon a time, an athletic young boy named Frank Amado picked up a baseball bat and glove, realizing he had the tools to achieve his life’s dream in his hands. He used them to refine his skills, fielding and hitting on Little League fields in his hometown of Elmhurst, New York. Frank’s father would take him to Yankee Stadium to watch his favorite team play. Ever since his first visit to The House That Ruth Built, Frank dreamed of being a Yankee. His hard work and determination brought his dream to fruition on April 10, 1989, when he took his position at second base for the New York Yankees in his first major league game.

“Frank didn’t grow up in Elmhurst, and his father never took him to a baseball game in his life,” Laurie said, happy to know that ChatGPT did not know everything.

Laurie spent the next two years writing daily, pouring her heart and soul into everything she wrote. Personal essays and short fiction about addiction, about grief, about relationships. Stories that grew from what she knew. One about her mother’s biracial relationship with her true love, a man she wanted to but could never marry. A personal essay about losing her virginity to her now husband of thirty-five years. And many about her love-hate codependency with her addict father.

While creating, Laurie spent hours editing, rereading, cutting, pasting. Of course she used AI; Microsoft counted her words, read her work aloud, edited grammar, presented synonyms when she needed a more powerful verb or adjective. Siri and Google researched questions related to her writing. She wondered how writers did it, pre-internet, although she did vaguely remember during her school days using a typewriter and two thick blue canvas covered books, a dictionary, and a thesaurus.

Sometimes she worried that she wasn’t spending her retirement in the most efficient or healthy way. She sat too long at her desk drinking coffee and snacking, which left her house untidy, her back aching, and her middle expanding. She made several half-hearted attempts to publish, which cost fees to submit, and were to no avail. Her most precious essay, Intervention Gone Awry, about her unsuccessful attempt to intervene in her father’s substance abuse and ending in her decision to let go, was critiqued in an online writing class, and after she revised it accordingly and submitted it to a literary magazine, was politely rejected. Still, she wrote on.

While opening her work on One Drive one morning, she noticed the option to review and decided to see what AI had to say about her latest essay. She had heard recently on CNBC, which her husband watched every morning for guidance with stocks, how innovative technology would soon multiply the capabilities of AI, as if AI hadn’t been doing enough already. Surprising to her, the tool summarized her writing succinctly, and evaluated it as emotionally moving, describing themes and the narrator’s growth. It did suggest adding stronger emotional language, offering “...her disappointment felt like a knife twisting in her stomach,” which Laurie dismissed as flowery, trite. Still, the review impressed her. She wondered what else AI could do.

Laurie typed, Write a story about a counselor who receives an award for her work in addiction recovery. In less than a minute the story popped up, perfectly written. A compelling, focused narrative about a counselor’s exemplary career, her determination, her success, details of the ways the main character had helped specific clients overcome addiction. But not very deep and a bit manufactured. Laurie had spent a week drafting a similar story in response to a writing contest prompt, but had felt it missing something and had lost her nerve to enter it. Now she used her phone to listen to her draft for the twentieth time, deciding it was better than AI’s version. She went back to polishing hers, although the contest had ended, and she had no plans for this piece. Still, by the end of the day, she felt good about her progress.

The next morning, Laurie typed into the program, Write a story about a girl named Carol who grows up with a father with addiction and uses that experience to guide her career as an award-winning addiction counselor. The reply, Working on it came. It took a bit longer this time before the text appeared. Laurie began feeling anxious as she read a story that used sophisticated language, smooth transitions, dramatic details, was more polished than her own, but so close to her story it almost seemed plagiarized. No matter, Laurie thought, I can do better. After all, this was her life. She wasn’t a counselor like the character, Carol, but she did grow up with addiction, had lived through the worst of it. Of course she could use the experience to create dramatic fiction unparalleled by a computer.

Laurie worked into the night, drinking black coffee after dinner, adding in scenes that showed. At 11 PM Frank popped his head into her office.

“Are you coming to bed soon, hon?

“Yes soon.” She kept typing.

He shook his head and turned away.

Falling onto the couch just before dawn, Laurie fought the memory of the last time she saw her father, the words he had said, the way he had looked at her. She kicked the image out with some Tylenol PM and a swig of scotch and finally fell asleep.

“You’re killing yourself, staying up so late, hunched over that computer!” her husband said the next morning over coffee and CNBC. “What the hell are you writing about, anyway?”

“I’ve told you. Stories about my father. Nothing for you to worry about.”

Frank turned his attention to stock news. “Damn, Bitcoin is up again. It was down for a while, but now it’s back up.”

“Isn’t that what Dan has been making money on? How he paid for his new beach house on Fire Island?”

“Yes, he told me to buy it, but I didn’t listen. I mean, it’s not real coin!”

Laurie took her coffee to her office and listened to her latest draft. Then she asked AI for another story, this time adding directions to include a failed intervention between Carol and her alcoholic father. Surely AI could not meet this detailed request. But again, the words came through. AI had nailed down, in a few minutes time, the story, her story, which she had spent weeks writing. The computer’s version reflected hers, and maybe even more effectively captured the father’s sickness and flawed character! How could that be? My work must be too mundane, with an overused plot and predictable ending.

So Laurie persevered, striving to improve her written voice, reaching deep inside, like a surgeon harvesting organs, for the honest, visceral details that would yield a piece only she could produce. Even if it meant stirring up the blood and guts of her past.

Laurie remembered the nights her father came home high as a kite, bouncy and free in the wind. How he teased her mother, reining her close with his demanding arms, saying “How is my cute little wife tonight? Did you make something tasty for dinner for a change?” as her mother warmed up the food he would only pick at. How her mother would play along, hoping to keep peace, hoping he would fall asleep before flying higher, like a sharp-eyed hawk, ready to attack its prey. Laurie remembered her father’s loud laughter, how he made Laurie giggle with his tickling fingers and jaunty piggy-back rides. Until he filled her with fear as he transformed over the course of an evening with each slug of gin, his brown-bristled face becoming distorted, enraged, his heavy hands striking forcefully, his booted feet kicking toys, pets, whoever got in his way.

Laurie used her pain productively, transferring the mental images on to the page. But they haunted her fitful sleep. Every night after writing, she saw her father standing in her bedroom doorway, approaching her silently, like a snake ready to hiss, to strike, as real as when she lived it years ago. Laurie began staying at her desk most nights, until her eyelids fell in fatigue, or with help from pills.

“Stop,” her husband said to her after weeks or months of her insomnia, and her diet of coffee, Doritos, and whiskey. “This can’t go on.”

“You don’t understand, you’re not a writer. You don’t know what we’re up against! And you didn’t grow up with an addict father, then watch him die.”

“Well, I watched you suffer. Do I have to remind you of how I was there near the end, how I saw how sick you were? You had to let go, for your own recovery. This, what you are doing now, dredging it up, this isn’t the recovery you worked for. And your early retirement was supposed to bring peace to your life, to our lives, not stress!”

“Well, I need to do this, to give it my best effort now, but not forever. I’ll stop soon.”

But she didn’t stop. She requested more AI reviews and stories that she held her own up to, always feeling like she was coming up short.

“If nothing changes soon, I’m done. I’ll list the house and move out,” Frank said one morning, his eyes once bright green and concerned, now angry and murky.

Frank and Laurie had discussed downsizing many times, but the idea of selling their family home, where they raised their two boys, where their adult kids would come to visit, where their acre of landscaped lushness would cushion Laurie’s discomfort and cocoon her family in privacy, had been objectionable to them both, and dropped. Yet now it no longer mattered. She hadn’t been out of her office to sit in their backyard garden of pink roses, climbing ivy, and blue hydrangeas all summer. And it seemed her sons had stopped coming around lately, although Laurie really wasn’t sure how long it had been since she’d last seen them.

“List it,” Laurie said and returned to her writing.

When the real estate agent came by to discuss the deal with Frank, Laurie did not acknowledge the attractive, smartly dressed woman, but did notice how Frank seemed taken with her. Laurie did not want to imagine how she herself must look. She couldn’t remember the last time she had her hair trimmed or had worn something nice. When Frank requested Laurie sign the contract, Laurie stared at the papers. She felt disconnected, with a network of intellect as both her foe, and her only friend. She signed her name and left the papers where they lay. Frank picked them up, shaking his head, looking at her with pity.

Pain shot through Laurie’s head, through her hand, across her back. She swallowed some pills, then typed directions, Add an ending with Carol letting go. Laurie wanted this to end. How had it come this far? While the program was Working on it, Laurie deleted her request. Fuck AI. Laurie would be the only author to write this ending.

When Carol woke to her five AM alarm, she recalled last night’s failed intervention, and the boundary she had set. She and her mother and younger sister would move out today. She heard her father downstairs, venting, spouting expletives and blame. Damn. He was still up, had been up all night boiling his brain with pills and alcohol. Then she heard the thump of his clumsy lumbering on the narrow, steep staircase, which led from behind the living room of their 1960’s cape to the finished attic, to Carol’s bedroom. Her father had not come completely up those stairs in four years, not since Carol had turned thirteen. He might start, but would stop midway, then shout for her to come down to endure his fury. But she still remembered the nights he had ascended, fired up, grabbing and swatting her, stinging and bruising her bare skin, for reasons she had not understood.

Now Carol’s father climbed to the top step, weaving there as Carol was about to enter the tiny bathroom at the head of the staircase. She froze, tingling in apprehension, yet feeling ready to face him. She smelled the musty odor of his beer breath, the tang of his sweat. Through the predawn darkness of the unlit hall, she could see the man her father had become. She didn’t notice until after, he was wearing only boxers and socks.

He was quiet at first, peering at Carol like he was trying to figure something out, inspecting her t-shirt, bare legs, bare feet. The suitcase behind her.

“This so-called intervention, this fucking ambush, it was your idea, wasn’t it?” he snarled, scraping the silent stillness with raspy words loud enough only for Carol to hear. “Who do you think you are, trying to destroy our family, betray me, the father who fucking raised you?” He slapped the back of his heavy hand ineffectually at her face, holding his bottle of beer with the other.

Carol still did not understand. Was this his illness, the drugs, or the trauma he had suffered from his stepfather’s abuse, speaking through him? But it didn’t matter. She understood enough. As his hand slapped the air, he slipped and reached for her. She held tight to the top of the railing. He grabbed her arm for support, dropping his beer, cursing at the liquid splashing his legs as the bottle clattered down the steps. But he was stable, his body steady, his grip on her forearm secure, when, with a strong and deliberate movement, she let him go. His socked feet were useless on the slippery worn pine. Crying out, he fell back, looking up at her as if he were seeing her for the first time. She heard a crack as he landed harshly on the thick ridge of pine molding framing the old staircase. Scarlet rivulets seeped from under his head, across the wood, puddling above his bare shoulders. His eyes locked with hers for what felt to Carol like forever, before he finally closed them. Carol sat down on the stairs, immobile, until daylight began to suffuse the dark home.

With dawn came Carol’s plan. She would pursue a career in addiction counseling, would make amends, would help others, would perfect the art of intervention.

And Carol did go on to become an award-winning counselor. But of course, she learned along the way that there is no such thing as perfection. Only progress, not perfection, as they say.

Laurie put down her pad and pen and walked out of her office, outside into the bright sunlight to inhale the color and fragrance of her garden.