Write-Back.

It’s either a brain tumor, or maybe because I’ve had Lyme Disease four times. It could be the fact that I’m like fly-paper during the summer (seriously; when I’m around, Susan doesn’t even need bug spray), and the town I live in was hit with West Nile Virus last year. Maybe my body is overreacting to my experimenting with gluten again since I discovered that all those starch-based, non-wheat breads made my cholesterol soar. I suppose it could be Rheumatoid Arthritis, or Hashimotos (I have all the symptoms and it runs in my family). Or it’s Ebola. Maybe.

“Maybe,” Susan said, “it’s the book.” She was sitting on the couch with the dog, having a cup of tea. I limped into the living room looking like Marty Feldman in Young Frankenstein, when his hump switches sides. I groaned, and tried to straighten up. 

“It’s not the f**king book,” I told her. “I’ve been feeling like dreck for months and months.”

“—since you started writing the book,” she answered in her usual Zen manner. “Do you want a drink?”

“I shouldn’t,” I said, virtuously. I assumed she meant something alcoholic, even though we’d long decided to have no wine during the week; this, I reasoned, meant that a small glass of bourbon, or Scotch, or a tiny gin and tonic weren’t entirely off limits. But I didn’t need the sugar, did I. Especially not now, with all the inflammation.

 “Just some seltzer,” I told her. “With a little spritz of organic ginger juice, to strengthen my immune system.”

“What constitutes a spritz?”

She said spritz like someone from northern Connecticut wearing a Fair Isle sweater and carrying a Bermuda bag. S-p-r-i-t-z. Like S-p-r-i-t-e. I said it the right way: SHPRITZ. Like SCHMEAR. When we first met, she said SMEAR but I explained the medical connotations, which made her wince.

This is what things have been like around here for the last few months, while I’ve been writing my next book, Treyf. I appear to have become a neurotic mess. Yiddishisms have oozed out of the depths of my subconscious, like jelly from a donut. My long-deceased Queens vernacular creeps into my sentences. I stand up from my desk and moan like I’m suffering, God forbid, from a herniation. I wake up grinding my teeth, and with a massive headache; every part of my body hurts, from my shoulders to my toes. I’ve stocked up on jars of Tiger Balm and boxes of Turmeric Tea, although my mother suggested maybe I try Ben-Gay.

“It’s a very good product,” she whispered cautiously, like she does when she calls to say that someone she knows has c-a-n-c-e-r.

I’ve taken up a fairly hysterical yoga practice, and discovered that I sleep in advanced tree pose; I always have. Vrikasana, my yoga teacher calls it. But now, while I write this book, I wake up stiff and straight, my hands at my sides, in corpse pose; Shivasana, my yoga teacher calls it. I call it Rigor Mortis.

Last week, while sleeping in corpse pose, I had a vivid dream about the lobby in my grandmother’s apartment building on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn. I could see the tiny brown and gold octagonal floor tiles leading up to the ancient Staley elevator. Because I breathe so deeply in shivasana — let’s face it; who doesn’t? —  I could actually smell the place, its rippling, faux stucco walls damp with a thousand Friday nights of schmaltz. Flat on my back, dead to the world, I dreamt of a Sunday afternoon lunchtime argument between my father and my Orthodox cantor grandfather, half in English, half in Yiddish, back and forth, over and over, across German porcelain bowls of what appeared to be blood surrounding a large stone, but what was actually cold borscht and a boiled potato. It was a fight dripping with rage and a love so furious and thick that I could actually feel it in my sleep, like humidity. 

I’ve dreamt about my father feeding me Spam and eggs for breakfast while my mother smoked the day’s first cigarettes and drank the day’s first Sanka out of a brown melamine mug, stubbing out her Virginia Slims to reach up and kiss our ornate silver Mezzuzah on her way to work. I’ve dreamt of eating shrimp and lobster sauce at our local Chinese restaurant after my best friend’s Bat Mitzvah. Of my frum friend, Shaina, getting me toasted out of my twelve year old skull on a cocktail of Manischewitz and Coke while her parents were in shul for the Havdalah service. Of the stinking, sweet smell of sun-baked garbage and honeysuckle that wafted up and onto our terrace from the yellowing patches of grass on Austin Street, mingling with my Gaga’s Shabbos roast chicken. Of hiking into the tenebrous bowels of Kissena Park with my father’s best friend who carried sticky bags of GORP and a stained copy of Stalking the Wild Asparagus in the back pocket of his Sansabelt jeans; alone and silent, we gingerly stepped over used syringes and old condoms and dead tree limbs, and I believed I was really in the woods. Which I was.

Rigor mortis sets in every night after a day of writing, when I dream of treyf, and what it means, and the wide frame it’s created around my life. The forbidden, the taboo, the illicit — plaited together in a messy, unkempt braid — form the lens, as writer and teacher Dani Shapiro describes the memoir process, through which I see the world, and always have. Treyf is the story of all of that forbidden-ness and the quiet shame that travels alongside it in a sidecar of memory; it’s about what it means to search for a clearing in the muck and the mess, and to find safety and peace and the spiritual ground beneath my feet in the act of feeding people.

Good or bad, hard or easy, I wake up the way I did while I was writing Poor Man’s Feast: pummeled, achy, as though I’ve been excavated like a rotting tooth. Every morning during the writing of Treyf, I feel Rolfed even before my eyes are open, like my fascia has been separated from my muscles and reorganized during the night.

It’s not Rheumatoid Arthritis or Hashimotos, Lyme Disease, Celiac, or Ebola. It’s not a brain tumor or rigor mortis. It’s just neurotic old me, suffering from an affliction I call Write Back, which I first experienced when I was working on Poor Man’s Feast. I’d forgotten all about it the way my friends tell me they forget all about the pain of childbirth once they feel soft baby breath on their neck.

“Can I get you anything,” Susan repeats, as I sink into the down couch cushions.

“Maybe,” I say, deciding against bourbon, my deadening agent of choice, “I’ll take some of that seltzer. With a spritz.”