Norman Rockwell, The Accountant, 1924

I lost my job of fifteen years, and as I was filling out my tax return to explain this loss, I thought, Well, this was the one constant that had never changed. Taxes were always there. Every April, the forms explained what had happened to me that year, where I was living and what I was doing. There was a box for every loss and every gain, and there was a box for the things that would always remain the same. There was a record of everything.

I signed up for classes at a tax-prep company. In the first session, we went around the room to introduce ourselves. Many of the other students had been accountants in other countries, others had degrees in economics, some had MBAs or owned their own businesses. All said they didn’t know how to prepare a Canadian tax return and just wanted to learn.

The job I had before was for an investment advice publisher, where I learned that I liked numbers. I liked that the number four was always four and no one could argue with you about that. Every number had its own narrative power, even if you couldn’t see it right away. When a number changed, or when you expected it to and it didn’t change, that meant someone out there in the world had done something to make that happen. People made big decisions because of a little number. Everyone had a theory and a prediction about it. I had been an English major, but I didn’t feel out of place in the class. The theories we read and studied were really about people, and the tax return was a way of telling their stories. Read More

I’m six, speeding my Bicentennial Huffy up and down the sidewalk, or wandering the edges of a playground as the PE teacher blows the whistle through his mustache to end recess, or grinning—blonde ponytails and yarn bows—beside my mother’s maroon Monte Carlo to archive the first day of school. I’m seventeen, smoking Swisher Sweets on the lip of Johnny Roan’s truck bed, or facing off with my father’s clenched jaw after missing curfew, or touching myself to the scruff of that boy in algebra while Air Supply aches through my clock radio. I’ve been writing all of these moments as essays. As a way to reconcile the girl I used to be, the woman I am now—the longings they share. I’m in my twenties, skinny-dipping with a guitar player, or riding a teal-tired rowboat across the Rio Grande, or gripping the black receiver of a pay phone after taking the first exit to Lubbock, Texas. Or I’m older, ducking into a liquor store in Chicago, or mistaking a bearded man on a campus in New York for the one who left me years ago (calling his name, such impossibility), or driving through the yellow fields of Idaho for the first time. Or it’s a few weeks ago, and I’m standing in a cemetery telling my parents the house sold only a year after they both left me suddenly. I’m staring at the tree across the pathway and pressing my hands, hard, into the back pockets of my jeans. All of these moments feel like something I did yesterday or might do tomorrow. I remember a man who played a Dylan record in his living room. I remember climbing the rickety steps to a wooded bar in Stillwater, Oklahoma. I remember that road toward a bleached-out desert and a ghost town named Terlingua. My father and I racing popsicle sticks in the gutter after a storm. The sound of my mother’s sighs, as if she were always staring out a window. The time two friends and I got stranded on our way to a lake and spread our towels in the parking lot of a gas station so the lines of our bikinis wouldn’t miss the sun. Let me explain—in these essays, I am not a mother. It’s freeing to write a self beyond or even before I became a mother. To be ridiculous and reckless, to ride and to roam. My daughter turned seventeen last month. Give me a minute, will you? I have raised her by myself, and she’ll be leaving home in a year, so I’ve been trying to teach myself how to get back to who I was and who I am—beyond a mother—because I will be that woman soon, a woman back on her own. I need to remember how to pedal fast and wander edges and lose my clothes and cross borders and listen to records with men who still play them and listen to music by myself in the dark and take photographs of pay phones and push the gas down on roads away from ghosts until my tires kick up the gravel of a gas station. Watch her fill up, watch her pull away. Watch her answer a call from her daughter and say, “I’m fine.” Watch her mean it.

Jill Talbot is the author of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir and Loaded: Women and Addiction. Her writing has been recognized by Best American Essays and appeared in journals such as AGNI, Brevity, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Ecotone, Longreads, The Normal School, The Rumpus, and Slice Magazine. 

Left: T. E. Lawrence; Right: Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

In the southwest Jordanian desert, among the sandstone mountains of Wadi Rum, there is a face carved into a rock. The broad cheeks and wide chin are framed by a Bedouin kaffiyeh headdress and ‘iqal, and beneath the carving, in Arabic, are the words: LAWRENCE THE ARAB 1917.

If you are visiting Wadi Rum with a tour guide, you can expect to be brought to this carving. You may also be shown a spring where Lawrence allegedly bathed, as well as a mountain named after his autobiography, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, whose rock face has been weathered into a shape that does, from some angles, look a little like a series of pillars.

I am familiar with the legend of T.E. Lawrence—fluent Arabist, British hero of the Arab Revolt of 1916, troubled lover of the Arab peoples—as well as with the ways the Jordanian tourism industry has capitalized on this legend. Nevertheless, I am still surprised when I hear someone mention him with admiration. The image of Lawrence as AN adventuring Orientalist, galloping through the desert in flowing robes at the head of a Bedouin army, has endured in the imaginations of the British and American publics at the expense, arguably, of an accurate understanding of Lawrence’s role in the events of the First World War and its aftermath. Despite the fact that, to date, Lawrence has been the subject of nearly fifty biographies and scores of critical works, it is the image of Lawrence in the film Lawrence of Arabia, starring Peter O’Toole and a heavily made-up Alec Guinness as the Arab Prince Faisal, that has stuck. Lawrence was blond and blue-eyed, and yet, by his own account, successfully “passed” as an Arab—to which he attributed his expertise in both the Arabic language and Arab customs. Not to mention that kaffiyeh he wore. Read More