“Would you like a house tour? Want to see the rest of the Haven of Love?”
Strolling the myriad of rooms, Dan remained decidedly quiet. Madeline ran her fingers along walls and gestured with giddy abandon as she dug up tidbits of historical facts about the 100-year-old house, and recounted treasured memories of her thirty years within the confines of its walls. Dan nodded once or twice. He knit his brow now and again.
The house tour completed, Madeline plopped down beside Dan on the sofa, their thighs pressed together. The arc of the evening – the deep pleasure of Auggie and Bess, the astonishment of Dan actually getting it about her house, the chance to tell its stories – had left her in woozy, buoyant spirits. She sighed aloud and rested her head against Dan’s shoulder. He reached his arm to encircle her, kneaded her shoulder, then withdrew it.
“Are you feeling it? Are you as totally uncomfortable as I am?”
For a split second Madeline thought he must be pulling her leg. An attempt at a bit of ha-ha hipster ironic humor; but one quick look at his face persuaded her that this was not the case. “What?” she said.
“You can’t tell me you’re not feeling the same. How completely different this is from last night. How awkward.”
No…I…I’m so sorry that you’re feeling uncomfortable.”
“Last night just flowed. Every minute. Flow.” Dan sat forward on the couch, leaning as if ready to spring.
“You look like you’re thinking pretty seriously about leaving,” Madeline said.
“I am. Thinking about it. This is just so…weird. I’m not sure what I should do”
Something old, and very deep, within Madeline felt a profound shame. She tamped down the instinct to apologize over and over, to do anything, to do everything, that might possibly make Dan feel better, like her, want to stay, want to hold her, want her. She was also aware of a flash of rage, an intense desire to slap Dan’s flow-spouting face. Inside, a part of her screamed, “Fuck you, you arrogant fuck!” Alongside the shame, and the blind anger, the most profound feeling of all was a wish that something, just one thing, could be simple. Clear. Easy. Known.
With swift and precise movement, Madeline pushed Dan backwards on the couch, threw her leg across his lap so she fully straddled him, and gripped his head between her two hands. “Want to know what I think you should do?” Madeline moved in, her lips, tongue, teeth showing all of the threat, and all of the promise, of a wild and starving animal. She threw her head back, panting hard. “Any questions?” she asked.
Sierra was in her usual spot on the couch in the sun room, except facing the other direction, her back to Madeline as she came in and leaned against the door frame. Also as usual, Sierra was dressed head to toe in clothes that belonged to her big sister – right down to the borrowed socks — with the exception of the fleece Madeline had lent to her, and which Sierra wore day and night, inside and out. She was on the phone, though it was difficult to tell at first, as she was saying absolutely nothing. It was only the slight crook of her head which implied that her ubiquitous cell phone was buried somewhere under her hair, tucked against her ear – that, and the fact that she didn’t turn around when Madeline came partway into the room, didn’t jump at the barest possibility of a warm, live body to talk with. She spent an astonishing amount of time “talking” on the phone, saying absolutely nothing. Hours, sometimes. Hours in which she would walk all around the house, open and close the fridge, go in and out of the bathroom, play with the dog, the silence broken by an occasional giggle, or a comment of notable brevity, such as “What?” “No way,” “Are you shitting me?” – four words was pretty much the max.
Madeline caught a glimpse of the impossibly neon blue gum in the corner of Sierra’s mouth, which promptly fell onto her boob when she eventually turned her head towards Madeline, rolling her eyes as if being on the phone was really an enormous ordeal. She reached down without thought to grab the blue wad, pop it back into her mouth, and chew the heck out of it to soften it back up. This happened a lot, too.
Jesus, Madeline thought. Fifteen. She really is fifteen.
What the hell was I doing when I was her age? Madeline’s mind leapt to a photo of herself and her father that a visiting camera-crazy aunt had snapped when she was fifteen. It was very early in the morning, and her father was about to give her a rare ride to school. She had an armful of books, and though she looked sleepy, a supremely chipper smile. Ha, she thought, every single time she ran across that picture. It seemed that between her aunt and her mother, about a million copies had been made of that picture, because everyone thought both she and her father looked so good. More to the point, it was probably the one and only photograph that included both of them, as it was most likely the one and only time she had stood that close to her father for a period that extended a number of years in both directions of that particular morning. Plus, her other dirty little secret was: she wasn’t just sleepy; she had been stoned out of her mind the night before.
OK, but besides that smoking pot thing, Madeline pondered, what the hell else was I doing?
Well, babysitting. She did a lot of babysitting in those days, largely to support her music habits of album-amassing and concert-going. A flipbook of the various families she regularly babysat for ran through her mind. The Roys. The Kelloggs. Families she could no longer remember names of either them or their children, but whose homes – their furniture, wall art, record collections, the various Things they had positioned in places of honor because of status, or nostalgia, or duty – these remained locked in her memory as if it were yesterday.
When she thought of these families as a whole, they all seemed impossibly earnest, clean-cut, each and every one of the men a future Scout Leader, and the women, they would be battling one another for PTA president, a freshly baked batch of cookies/brownies/banana bread forever on the spotless kitchen counter. And religious. Each and every one of these families was devoutly religious. Weird, she thought. How in the world did that happen?
Once the kiddies were asleep in their beds, she would peruse the snack options, put on some tunes, and settle in for an evening of making some money to sit there and do homework. She always expected that the parents would return home with flushed cheeks, giggling and leaning against one another in a blush of fun at having a Night! Out! and perhaps one too many cocktails. But this never happened.Never! The mommies and daddies would arrive home looking every bit as polished and coifed as when they had left, and even more surprising, seeming genuinely eager to talk with her. How was school going? Was she still studying piano? What was she reading in her spare time? Their interest amazed her in a way that made her feel inexplicably sad — all wide eyes and toothy smiles.
There was that one couple, though. What the heck were their names? Rick? Was that it?
Kathy? They had that one baby boy who was generally asleep by the time she arrived. Even when he was still awake, the kid did absolutely nothing. Just kind of hung out. Then went to sleep.
One look at Kathy and Rick and you couldn’t help but picture them as that glorious high school couple – the Captain of the football team and the head cheerleader – You knew that Rick would have been captain based not on any real degree of skill, or even leadership ability, but because he oozed an easygoing, blond smoothness and a manner that gently projected, “Damn! It is really good to be me!” Kathy could be defined by a word Madeline hardly ever thought of, let alone used in a positive way: cute. She had porcelain skin with a dusting of freckles across her nose, and red hair that grazed her shoulders in a perennially perfect flip. Sometimes she wore her black-framed, cat’s-eye glasses, other times not. She had married The Catch, and was devoting herself to the role of wife, mother, homemaker. She would keep herself trim, keep a spotless, if modest home, try out new recipes from Ladies Home Journal on a regular basis, make a boxed cake mix every week, and always wear an apron so she’d look her best when she sat down for dinner with Rick.
She was also the only one who would arrive home from her date night with her husband with her hair out of place here and there, her smile a little goofy, fumbling with the money, all of which Madeline found immensely adorable.
Rick would always be the one to drive her the distance of fifteen or twenty houses from their home to her own, which struck her as quaint but ridiculous in what she viewed as the world’s safest and most preternaturally bland suburb in existence. She disliked Rick for reasons she couldn’t put her finger on at first. His perpetual too-deep tan, his mirrored aviator shades, his profound and unflappable belief that every guy he met would yearn to be his best friend and every woman would sigh internally in his presence, unable to shake the image of his blond hair brushing against their faces, his sun-kissed hands gripping their hips.
Madeline had grown used to the parents’ fascination with her; but Rick possessed a clear, confident expectation that she would, of course, be fascinated with him. He fiddled with the radio dial and changed the station to something he thought she would love. She glanced over at him. He had turned his body part way to face her and let his knees fall open. He might have looked friendly and relaxed and nothing more, but she knew better.
You fucking piece of shit, she thought to herself.
He was waiting. Expecting that Madeline would be overcome with desire and would make a move. And if she did not, he was contemplating making the first move himself.
You fucking piece of shit. Madeline thought of Kathy at home, drowsily checking on the baby, removing her clothes, crawling under the covers in a boozy glow that told her that life was truly good. Rick’s hair was just beginning to thin, his overly-tanned skin withering with the advancing years. Shit, the guy didn’t have a clue how desperate he was, how much of a joke. But he would break his wife’s heart nonetheless. He was one step away from trying to fuck everything in sight, while Kathy continued to hum in the kitchen and bake him cakes.
Thinking about this, about all of this, filled her with an intense rage, a full forty years later.
She looked again at Sierra, right as Sierra’s gum dropped out her mouth yet again.
Shit, thought Madeline. Every single day of my life has been a cake walk, a total fucking cake walk, compared to this kid.
Yeah, this is something else that goes along with the territory of writing fiction – at least if one writes in the non-chronological, non-linear way in which I approach the craft.
Sometimes it happens that yesterday’s EPIPHANY is today’s…meh.
This used to happen quite regularly when I did much of my writing in various coffee houses around town. When on a caffeine-fueled roll, I would crank out some stuff with a Very High Degree of Enthusiasm!! I would sip my java and reread the day’s work, thinking “This stuff is GREAT! I’ve done it. I’ve said something.” There is no more satisfied feeling than taking that last gulp of coffee, packing up your gear, and heading out the door feeling that you have lived your life well that day.
Alas. It happens all too often that, once that happy Caffeine Achiever feeling has begun to wane, I read over those same words and find myself thinking, “Huh?! This is what struck me as so (fill in the _________: poetic, profound, truthful, flowing, ingenious, inventive, just plain nifty!)
Sometimes an epiphany lands squarely in the middle, meaning, the idea seems like it may work really, really well; and then again, maybe not. Meh.
I’m not sure about this one. The “epiphany” concerned a change in the narrator, moving from third person to first person part way through the book – beginning with the narrator speaking as a third-person observer, and shifting to narrating in the first person, but as one of the other main characters.
The set-up would look something like this:
“Mr…Merle…there is something else.”
“What’s that, Miss Shirley…er, Shirley?”
“When I said that you were getting it all wrong…I didn’t mean the facts…exactly.”
“What else could you mean? You said that I was too far away down here. Too much removed from the goings-on.”
“I did say that. You’re right. But I meant it in a different way.”
“Like what? What other way is there?”
“I meant to say that the way you are telling the story is too far removed. You’re telling it like you are far away, as if you are watching everything from a great distance, as if you have no particular feeling about the events.”
“That’s the way stories get told. They just get…told.”
“Due respect, Mr… Due respect, Merle, I think it would be a better story if you got inside of it. Inside.”
It happened exactly the way it’s supposed to. It was our second, or maybe our third, day on the island. I woke up early each morning, just as I am accustomed to doing at home. We had no clock, no way to tell the time. Often I woke when it was still dark, or perhaps there was the barest hint of dawn in the distant sky.
Sometimes I would fall back into a profound sleep, but more often I would drift in that most magical place that teeters just at the edge of both awake and not. When our thoughts are loose, and hints of dreams spread out across our minds. Sound would be the first thing that entered my awareness. First the palm branches outside our room’s two walls of windows – suddenly their gentle, incessant flapping would enter; and right after, the waves of the sea coming one after the next.
I would become aware of his body, the parts that touched mine – the cross of limbs, or the barest graze of fingers against my back. Or he would be fully on the other side of the oceanic bed, arms close against his sides as he lay on his stomach, his long frame stretched diagonally. I listened until I could hear his breathing, mixed in with the palms and the waves, before I would allow myself to drift again.
It was in this state, wandering in and out of a cavernous haze of utter contented relaxation that it happened. An epiphany.
I have been working on my third novel, Pushing the River, for around ten months now. I have had the experience of an entire book – my first novel — pouring from me, a finished first draft in five months. I have also had the experience of a second book that took years to write. And a couple more years to re-re-re-rewrite. I try to ride the waves of bountiful yield and the soul-killing periods of drought as best I can.
And once in a while: magic. An idea comes, a true lightning bolt – in this case, a solution for something that I was not even fully aware was a problem. An entirely different approach to the narrative structure. In other words: inspiration. The moments we cannot force. We just try to trust that they can, and that they will, happen.
My Lady lets the book drop into her lap. She closes her eyes, and lets herself drink up the quiet, the solitude, for a few seconds more. She takes her time climbing the stairs, listening to the sound of each footfall and its brushhh brushhh brushhh on the wooden steps.
When she turns the creaky old knob that then bangs against the kitchen counter, she hears only the hum of the refrigerator. A few quick steps through the kitchen, she finds Sierra and her mother Billie sitting on the sofa in the back room of the house, mountains of clothes piled on and around them. It looks like the room – which is everyone’s favorite — little but made mostly of windows – has exploded with clothing, spewed them out like a heedless volcano.
“Oh, hi, Maddie,” Billie says. “We weren’t sure exactly where you were.”
“Downstairs. I was downstairs.”
“We’re trying to figure out what to take. I’m going to take Sierra home for a few days.”
“Oh?…”
“Yeah, she wants to come back home.”
“So..what are you doing? Exactly?”
“We’re trying to figure out what to take. You know. For the baby and for Sierra.”
“How long have you both been…here? Doing this?”
“Oh, I don’t know. What would you say, honey? An hour or so? Maybe two?”
Madeline looks at Sierra, who says, “It’s hard. It’s hard to figure out what to take!”
“We thought it would be a good time to go through everything and organize it. You know. Take inventory. Organize,” Billie adds.
“Well, if you’re only going for a couple of days…maybe you don’t need to worry about it so much.”
“I’ll just feel better when it’s all done. Sierra knows how much I like to organize everything, don’t you, baby?”
Sierra nods, and looks over at Madeline with a face that is as unreadable to her as hieroglyphics.
“Plus my birthday’s coming up. I want to make sure everybody has something super special to wear.”
“Oh, right! I knew your birthday was getting close. What are you doing to celebrate?”
“Going to Ho-Chunk. I am so excited. I’ve been trying to go every year on my birthday since I started back in 1987. I skipped 1992 to 1996, no it was 1995, and I missed 2004 and 2006, but every other year I’ve gone. Some of my friends surprised me by taking up a collection to give me some money. Cousin Lou chipped in $20, and then my friend Donna really surprised me by giving $40, and when Nick heard he even chipped in $10. That was on Tuesday. The 5th.”
“I’m sorry. What’s Ho-Chunk? I don’t know what that is.”
“Are you kidding? Are you kidding? It’s a casino! Up in Wisconsin!”
“A casino?”
“Of course! I play the penny slots. It’s my favorite thing to do.”
“I don’t know what a penny slot is, either.”
“Madeline, you do surprise me sometimes. That’s like saying you’ve never seen the stars.”
Sierra picks articles of clothing from one basket, looks at them briefly, and puts them in a different pile in a different basket, or on the arm of the sofa, or on the floor, or anywhere at all.
“No, baby,” says her mother. “Don’t put that shirt there. That’s a whole different color group.”
It was the third time that mice had taken up residence here in the house. On top of all the humans and their cats and dogs and friends that crowded into this here house, them little brown field mice found their way in again, too.
That first dog was a natural-born mouser. By the time My Lady and the Husband even figured out they had a mouse problem at all, the dog was hard at work. Inside. Outside. Didn’t matter where he was, he would make a sudden-like snap of his head, and before you knowed it he’d be licking his lips, the infernal rodent already swallowed up whole without so much as a trace.
That dog had been a squirrel-chaser from way back, but you always kinda wondered if he had any real seriousness about catching one, or if he was in it for the pure fun of the chase. Well, the day came — after many years of chasing he up and caught one, and that settled that. It was like the taste of blood had lent newfound meaning to his life, and from then on the big, gentle beast was forever on the lookout to up and kill any creature in his path that was not either a human or another dog neither.
My Lady might have worried about him swallowing all kind of mice, bones and claws and tails and all, cept for that time when he swallered up an entire roasting chicken they had left up on the kitchen counter to cool off for their family picnic. When they come in later there was not so much as a spot of grease or lick of skin or any sign a-tall that the bird had ever existed. The Husband had even surrounded the cooked-up bird with a sort-of barricade of forks and glasses and other kitchen things, every one of which stood right in its original place – a hedge of utensils surrounding nothing. Well, they called up the animal doctor, and he asked them to remind him how much the dog weighed. When they told him, he chuckled to hisself and said, you don’t need to worry a bit, cause that big boy won’t have any trouble with the likes of an 8-pound roasting chicken. The whole thing became one of those stories that families like to tell over and over at get-togethers; but anyhow my Lady knew that no little teeny mouse would cause a digestive disturbance to the noble dog, or even a whole passel of them.
They counted eighteen mice that the dog chomped down that one summer, and that was just the ones they was around to catch him at.
The second time them mice moved in, they was already on their second dog and the Husband was already the X. But while the first dog had the Killer Instinct, the second dog was one of them kind that never met a single other creature that she didn’t want to befriend and love up, so when the new batch of mice migrated into the house, she’d go right on up to them and poke at them with her nose, and dance little dance-steps around them, and do any crazy thing she could think of to get them to play with her.
My Lady didn’t feel right about killing the same little creatures that the Boy and the Little One had as pets all them years, so she did her best to ignore the whole rodent situation for a good long time. But once she and the Little One kept spotting them scuffling and skittering across the floors late at night, and all kinds of little holes were getting chewed in the bags lined up in the pantry, she decided she couldn’t ignore the dang things any longer.
She started out with the old-fashioned kind of mouse killer trap that’s been in existence as long as I have, the wooden things with the spring hinge where you put some kind of food that mice love to lure them in and then POW that hinge snaps down hard and kills ’em right fast. Well, it took about 2 or 3 mornings of my Lady checking them traps, only to find the bait clean gone and the trap unsprung – kind of like the whole chicken incident with that first dog – when sure enough she done sprung the trap on her own fingers in the checking process, and even though I heared movie upon movie with all kinds of language I could never even dream of, I ain’t never heard nothing like what come out of her mouth, and next thing you know the whole dang package of traps she bought was tossed in the garbage.
“In your status line list 10 books that have stayed with you. Don’t take more than a few minutes. Don’t think too hard. They don’t have to be great works, or even your favorites. Just the ones that have touched you. Tag 10 friends including me so I’ll see your list. Some of these books I read in a Memoir Writing class I took within the last five or six years. Two took up a lot of my time and contemplation in college.”
Yeah, I know it said “Don’t take more than a few minutes” as well as “Don’t think too hard;” both of which directives proved totally impossible for me. In fact, I found myself thinking about this a great deal over the past couple of days – as I was going to sleep the night of Amy’s post (and then proceeding to not go to sleep as I pondered), again when I woke the next morning, while I walked my dog in the brilliant bitter powder-snow cold, in between work appointments and the assorted tasks of everyday life.
I write (at least at times I do cough cough), and continue to consider what makes writing really, really good. This strikes me as sort of like devoting one’s life to understanding the sound of one hand clapping, in that, of course, there is no one, even reasonably satisfying answer to this. Writing has the capacity to touch us on so many different levels and in profoundly different ways: the beauty of words themselves can awe us in works of fiction and non-fiction as much as the poetry of immortal greats. Writing can teach us, move us, educate us, stir us to action, change our perspective, open us, transport us, transform us. There have been passages in books that I didn’t believe I would ever fully recover from – when little Walt dies in The World According to Garp, when the evil Blue Duck slits the throat of Roscoe, Joe and Janey in Lonesome Dove, when Billy Bibbit takes his life in One Flew over theCuckoo’s Nest – well, after each of these passages I mourned, wrenched for days, not myself, unable to shake the profound effect the authors had fueled within me.
And then there is the question of timing: does our profound love of a particular book depend on the exact time that we happened to read it, and would that book — so beloved once — hold the same power to stir our soul if we had chanced to read it at an entirely different time in our lives? Within the past couple of years, I re-read The Catcher inthe Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird, both of which are often first read during adolescence, and often in a soul-killing high school English class. Both of these novels struck me – again – as so powerfully visionary, so stunningly well-written, and, well, so damn important.
I had the occasion to visit a pre-school classroom this past week, something I do every so often in my work. For the hour that I visited, the classroom of four-year-olds first acted out the children’s book The Mitten, pretending to be each of the animals that one-by-one crowds into the ever-growing mitten to stay warm. Then, it was time to climb aboard The Polar Express. The little ones lined up in the hallway to claim their tickets, then returned to a darkened classroom to board the train when the whistle blew. They bumped up in down in their chairs, making their way to the North Pole, shouting out the sights they saw along the way. By the time the teacher read the story, I was glad that my visiting time was up, and that the room was dark, so I could sneak away as my eyes welled with tears at the story’s end, as they do every single time.
“No, no, no, no no. I cannot stand it one minute longer.”
—
“That is simply NOT what happened,” she added.
“Well, who lit a fire under you?”
“That would be your department. I just think that you’re getting it all wrong. It simply did NOT happen that way.”
“It’s a story!”
“You’re taking too many liberties! You’re all the way down there, far away from so many of the very things that you’re telling about.”
“It’s MY story! It’s my story, according to ME. Course I’m making it up. S-T-O-R-Y!”
“It seems to me that if you open the door on these, well, these very personal things, that you should have a responsibility to some degree of truth.”
“Oh, truth is it? Now you’re flat-out playing with fire, talking about the truth!”
“I suppose you think that’s hilarious.”
“My darling, I have been waiting one hundred years, one full century, listening, and learning, and waiting for my chance to say my piece. It’s my turn! Geez Louise, you’re trying to close the barn door after the horse has already left the stable.”
“Again. Hilarious.”
“Lordy, lordy, what have I done.? Why do I have to put up with this from the likes of you?”
“Accountability! Responsibility! Where is your sense of honor!?”
Honor! Cripes almighty, YOU’RE A DOOR!
“YOU’RE A BOILER!”
—
I ain’t never used this word in all my born days…but…you’re a whore! You’re a whore of a door! A door whore! You’ll let anybody in!!”
“Oh! Oh! As if you are so very discriminating! As if you are particular about whose air you warm up and whose you don’t!”
“I got no choice!”
“None of us has a choice. Not any of us, my old friend. We are all in the same boat, in the identical situation, in the like predicament, in the same fix, on a par, on even terms, on the same footing, alike, equal, together, cut from the same cloth, brothers and sisters.”
“Pretty speech. Not sure if it means nothing. But it was pretty.”
“In short, my equally ancient brother, we are dying. We stand right at the threshold of death’s door.”
“It ain’t right to talk of such things. No good can come of it.”
“Ah, easy for you to say, my friend. But I have heard the whispers; and so, I am sure, have you.”
“What in tarnation are you nattering about now?
“You have the great good fortune to be too large, and too big of a – pardon my language – a pain in the rear end — to remove. Even when there is no longer a fire in your belly, you will remain. The day will come when you will witness this family pack up their boxes, and you will watch the next one move in. And the next after them. You will be eternal.”
“I don’t want to talk about this.”
“I suppose I cannot blame you for that.”
—
“You have not seen me lately.”
“Of course I ain’t. Me being a boiler, in the basement here, like you said.”
“I know that you hear everything though. I know that even running along the pipes, and echoing through the floor, you have heard the difference in me.”
“Well…”
“After all this time. All this time. To think that I could warp so badly after one hundred years. It’s not my fault, you know. Everything has shifted. The whole house, I mean. My frame. The very floor underneath me.”
—
“I am ugly. I have bubbled, warped, bent, caved, buckled and bowed. I have bulged out in some places, and folded in on myself in others. There was a day when I could not budge. Frozen in place, unable to open even a crack. That’s when she started calling people in. I will be replaced.”
—
“For one hundred springs I have felt the first hint of winter’s end floating on a waft of breeze. I have been scorched and plumped by the sultry air of one hundred summers. The gentlest rains and dazzling, torrential storms have knocked against me. I have witnessed the outside world glow a glittering golden color through one hundred falls, and I have held my breath for the first sign of an early snowflake drifting down to melt on my outer face. And all the while that my outer face greeted each completely unique day, every shift in light and air, my inner face remained a constant, warmed by you. Warmed by a family.”
“ ‘Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?’ Do you remember that?”
“Course I do. How could I forget the Little One practicing those lines over and over?
Our Town, was it?”
“That’s right – Our Town.”
—
“There is something I would like to ask of you. A favor.”
”What might that be?”
“I would like to tell one part of the story.”
“That’s a awful lot to ask. It’s MY STORY.”
“Just one part. Before my time is up. Before the day when I get carried away. Replaced. So I might believe that some part of me remains.”
“Well…”
“Please.”
“Well…”
“I will let you know when the time comes. When we reach the part that I would like to tell.”
“Let me think on it.”
—
“Have you ever thought about what your name should be. You know, if you had a real name, like the people do?”
“Can’t say as I have. Why? Have you?”
“Shirley. I always thought my name should be Shirley.”
“Well, I’m guessing maybe I would be Merle. Or Floyd.”
“I like Merle. It suits you.”
—
“Do you know why I would pick Shirley? Do you remember when the ones you call The Boy and the Little One were small and high-voiced and running around in footed pajamas? And on very important occasions, their mama, the one you call My Lady, would make a special concoction for them to drink? They called it a Shirley Temple.”
“I remember.”
“The children would take all the cushions off the sofas and chairs, and build forts and tunnels, and make up stories, and dress in costumes – their cheeks would flush with excitement…those were…wonderful days.”
—
“I am very pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Shirley.”
“I must say that the pleasure is entirely mine, Merle.”
SPOILER ALERT: In this brief excerpt, the narrator of “Pushing the River” is revealed. But, not to worry, The book is not a mystery…
“No, no, no, no no. I cannot stand it one minute longer.”
—
“That is simply NOT what happened,” she added.
“Well, who lit a fire under you?”
“That would be your department.I just think that you’re getting it all wrong.It simply did NOT happen that way.”
“It’s a story!”
“You’re taking too many liberties!You’re all the way down there, far away from so many of the very things that you’re telling about.”
“It’s MY story!It’s my story, according to ME.Course I’m making it up.S-T-O-R-Y!”
“It seems to me that if you open the door on these, well, these very personal things, that you should have a responsibility to some degree of truth.”
“Oh, truth is it?Now you’re flat-out playing with fire, talking about the truth!”
“I suppose you think that’s hilarious.”
“My darling, I have been waiting one hundred years, one full century, listening, and learning, and waiting for my chance to say my piece.It’s my turn!Geez Louise, you’re trying to close the barn door after the horse has already left the stable.”
“Again.Hilarious.”
“Lordy, lordy, what have I done.?Why do I have to put up with this from the likes of you?”
“Accountability!Responsibility!Where is your sense of honor!?”
Sierra is lounging around on the couch, her belly getting so swelled up it don’t look like it could possibly belong to the rest of her body any more. She’s wearing a raggedy old pair of sweatpants that she borrowed off of my Lady and a T-shirt she borrowed off of her sister, and a giant sweatshirt she took right off the Boy’s pile of laundry while it was still sitting on top of the dryer. That girl sure does love to wear everybody else’s clothes.
The television set is on, just like it pretty much always is, but she ain’t really looking at it, cept every once in a long while. I swear the child likes mostly to push on little buttons, cause every so often she pushes on some buttons to make the sound go up or down, or pushes on some buttons to switch to a different picture altogether, and then goes right back to pushing the little buttons on her little telephone that don’t need wires.
Then she holds the little phone right up to her ear and says, “Daddy? Hi. Hey, what do you think I should have for lunch?”
Of course I can only hear but one side of this whole conversation, but it goes something like this:
“Cereal. I had a big bowl of cereal for breakfast.”
—
“No. I only like creamy peanut butter, and right now all we got is the crunchy kind. I hate that stuff. Plus I only really like peanut butter with marshmallow fluff, and pretty sure we don’t have any of that either. What else?”
—
“No, I’ve had bagels every day cause Marie always brings them home. Plus that’s what you said yesterday. What else?”
—
My Lady comes in with a big basket of laundry and sets down at the far end of the sofa to fold it. Sierra puts her teeny little feet in my Lady’s lap and goes on with her phone talk for a bit.
When she pushes on the little button that makes the call come to an end, she says, “That was my dad. I was asking him what I should have for lunch.”
“Your dad?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Your father?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You were asking your father what you should have for lunch.”
Sierra can see that it ain’t a question, so she don’t answer.
“Your father, as in, the guy who put you on an airplane the minute he found out you were pregnant? Who said that you were dead to him? That father?”
“Uh-huh. He wasn’t a very big help. MadMad, what do you think I should have for lunch?”
“Oh, no. No, no. I’m not playing that game again.”
This advertisement comes on the television just then. There’s all these people setting around a table, completely frozen in time. One of them is caught right in the middle of spilling a whole pitcher of water. The first drop is just about to hit. Another is hanging in mid-air, kicking up his heels, his hair standing straight up in all directions. He is at the highest point, held in the split second before he starts on down. Yet another is tipping his chair so far back you know he’s about to tumble over backwards; but he’s caught right at the tipping point, held right there in the balance. There’s one more person. The only one who can move. He gets to walk all around this whole frozen scene, check it from every angle, ponder on exactly what’s going to happen next. He can take all the time in the world to figure it.
