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"Visitation"
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About the Author... Pamela L. Laskin
Pamela L. Laskin is the author of three picture books; two young adult novels; a book of poetry; four poetry chapbooks; and hundreds of poems and short stories. She recently edited an anthology, THE HEROIC YOUNG WOMAN, a collection of original fairytales, fables and fantasy, published by Clique Calm Books, Inc. She is a lecturer in the English Department at The City College, where she teaches both undergraduate and graduate Children's Writing, and where she is the Director of The Poetry Outreach Center. She is a member of PEN America; Poets & Writers; The American Academy of Poets' The Poetry Society of America; and The Society for Children's Book Writers and Illustrators.
A description of Visitation
"I wore a mask and my face grew to fit it" George Orwell
Pati is about to turn thirteen and she can no longer separate her face from the mask. She has moved to a new neighborhood, Park Slope, Brooklyn, and has concocted an elaborate charade -- the costume of normalcy. In order to wear this wardrobe, she has had to discard her ghosts. What she leaves behind (remnants of her old neighborhood) is her mentally ill mother, Sarah, who she must see every week, according to the terms of the divorce between her parents. Though Pati's custody has been granted to her beloved father, she still has too see her mother, a major challenge because she has come to Park Slope and her new junior high-school with a script -- her stepmother is her biological mother and her family is perfect. The only glitch is her omission -- the woman she must see every Saturday, when her friends ask her to join the fun -- happens to be her mother, not her aunt, and a mother who -- at any moment -- may unravel, right in the middle of Brooklyn. Pati is so entrenched in her deception, that she forgets the web of lies she has created in order to protect her mask.
Pati is able to ride the waves of her duplicity, until she forms an intimate relationship with Jayne, her "blood sister," friend forever. Jayne introduces her to all the neighborhood hang-outs and draws her into a fabulous friendship, one she has never had before. Jayne has secrets, too, and though the girls pledge eternal friendship and are together every waking moment, each girl has her own mask and neither will discard it. Appearances are everything, and the girls yearn to present themselves as having "normal" families, so each is unwilling to shed the masquerade, until the climactic moment.
Jayne demands that Pati give up her Saturday rendezvous with her "aunt" so the girls can take a long bike ride to the Rockaways together. Pati succumbs to the pressure, but not without a price. The day of Pati's liberation is also the day her mother attempts suicide, yet again. Pati is plagued with guilt, anger and a sense of responsibility, for having canceled out on her mother; she is convinced that she has made her mother attempt this suicide, and as a consequence, she can't be friends with Jayne. Isolated and living without the mask, no one can help her; she goes to school and avoids contact with her best-friend and her family, too. It's only when Jayne reaches out to Pati and the girls cross the bridge of hidden secrets, where Jane, too, has guarded her personal deception -- a mentally ill father -- that a new trust can be formed, one which enables both Pati and Jayne to throw their masks out to the wind, and take that long and liberating bike-ride out to, "another borough, another world, maybe, where no one knows us, and we can feel the wind on our faces and the sun on our backs and the ache of our legs from a ride with no particular destination in mind, to visit no one."
Visitation is a 28,099 word expansion of the short story, Visitation Rites, originally published in short story form in Sassy magazine. It is told through a first person point of view, and has a great deal of interiority.
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