Tag: novel writing

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“A Girl Moves,” excerpt from the novel “Pushing the River”

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The call came from Marie one morning: “I need your help,” she said.  “I have no memory of how to do this. I have no idea how people move from one place to another.”

The decision that had begun with a gentle hand against a baby elephant’s trunk in far-off Asia had been made. John would remain in Boston to finish school, and Marie would return to Chicago. She would move into the top two rooms on the uppermost floor of Madeline’s house, and she would await the gathering storm.

Billie Rae, Marie’s mother, and Sienna, her baby sister, made it abundantly clear that this was thoroughly unnecessary, confounding, and furthermore, insulting. They steadfastly maintained that they had full control of the situation at hand.

Unwanted in the new life ahead, and leaving her old life behind, she would await the gathering storm.

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Madeline knew the low rumble of the U-Haul when it pulled up in front of the house, though her back was turned to the windows facing the street. She considered how many times she had helped her children move in, or out, since each of them had first left home. She was pretty sure the number was somewhere around 623 times, or so it certainly seemed to her. Still, she rued that her advancing years allowed her to do less and less; her legs now wobbled by the third flight of stairs, and she needed to put boxes down to rest for a moment all too often.

It had been decided that Marie would bring the majority of her and John’s possessions back with her, leaving him with a skeletal assortment of bare necessities as he focused on the grueling home stretch of his school. Still, Madeline was quite taken aback when Marie swung the U-Haul cargo doors open to reveal a van that was crammed completely full, every possible square inch consumed in what amounted to a breathtaking feat of engineering.

Reading Madeline’s thoughts on her face, Marie remarked, “Yeah. We had to pack it and re-pack it a few times.”

Marie had also brought their dog. Everyone had marveled since the first day Marie chose the impossibly tiny sleek brown puppy that she had managed to find the exact canine equivalent of herself, for Proust was relentlessly demanding, deeply affectionate, possessed of strong and generally instantly-formed impressions of all people and things in his path, somewhat unpredictable, and generally in-your-face with his intense and abiding love.

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“COFFEE,” a Short ‘N Sweet for the long week still ahead

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Marie, along with every other member of the family, had an irrational but intense distaste for Madeline’s coffee maker. Marie’s very first job had been in the coffee house directly across the street from her apartment, a place she had such a deep and abiding affection for that she still found any reason to drive past it more than ten years later. In the years and the motley assortment of coffee joints in the time since then, she had babied and cajoled her fair share of finicky machinery in order to produce the sumptuously rich shots of espresso and foam flourishes that kept customers standing in line for her creations.

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She would not even go near Madeline’s useless behemoth.

 
The thing had been a gift from a long-gone beau and held no particular sentimental place in Madeline’s heart. Still, it was there; and Madeline had been raised by a woman who said “I’m too Scotch to throw it away and get a new one” enough times that it had stuck, especially considering that her mother had no Scotch ancestry whatsoever.

 
Each and every part of the coffeemaker required precise handling and placement – the handle of the filter basket needed to be facing forward for brewing; the lid of the basket assembly then had to be positioned just so; likewise, the lid of the coffee pot itself had to be screwed on to an exact point and then placed meticulously under the filter assembly. This so struck Madeline as an apt metaphor for nearly all aspects of her life – that great effort and painstaking care were requirements—that she never questioned the coffeemaker, nor felt put upon in carrying out the steps each morning that resulted in an excellent and deeply satisfying pot of coffee. After all, wasn’t it her own daughter who had said, “Not everything that’s really hard is also good; but everything that’s good is also hard.”

 

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Photos from internet

Middle photo: Dollop Coffee &  Tea, Chicago

 

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Friday Short’N Sweet, excerpt from the novel “Pushing the River” #FridayReads

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Dan maintained an unflagging, feverish whirl of dance through the entire set of the band they had all come to hear. Marie and her two friends stayed at a measured distance, occasionally regarding Dan with the attitude of the stone-cold sober towards the merrily drunk – a mix of envy, pity, amusement, warmth and disdain.

 
“Jesus, I missed you. That was the longest less-than-forty-eight hours of my life,” Dan said as they were gathering their stuff to leave the bar. Madeline smiled, expecting to see a drunken glow when she looked over at him. But Dan seemed sweaty and slightly wild-eyed. “Really. All I could think of was how much I wanted to be with you.” As the words came out of his mouth, Dan reached around the side of the bar and retrieved two sizeable, well-used shopping bags.

 
“Ha,” Madeline said, “looks like you did a little bit of shopping yourself, long as you were traipsing around with your sis.”

 
“Huh? Oh. No. That’s my stuff.”

 

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“What do you mean?”

 
“It’s my stuff.” He dropped the bags and enfolded Madeline in his arms. “I decided to stay in town longer. Til the end of the year. I can’t imagine being anywhere else but here right now. With you.”

 
Madeline realized that she was holding her breath.

 
“It’s my stuff. I moved out of my place.”

 

 

So, there you have it. That’s how the third person came to live in this here house with My Lady. And that’s how we came to pass our days as a rag-tag group of four while Sierra’s belly swole up more and more every single day. She mostly lay on the back couch chewing on her crazy blue gum and staring at her little phone with her thumbs flying. Marie spent countless hours in the kitchen at all kinds of odd times, stirring up crazy concoctions from potatoes and garlic in pretty even amounts judging by the smells. She was just hoping her baby sister would get some decent grub into her. Dan and my Lady stayed mostly upstairs when they was both about, lolling around on the bed and reading out loud to each other. Can you imagine that? Poetry, of all infernal things.
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Top: Woodcut by Steve Ashby

Middle: Roy Lichtenstein

Bottom: Vincent VanGogh

 

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Monday Short’n Sweet, from the novel “Pushing the River”

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Dan had been visiting his sister for the past two nights, time together which generally consisted of him completing a laundry list of things she had carefully compiled. This, in turn, invariably necessitated driving around to an ungodly number of retail establishments known as “Big Box Stores” so they could gather extremely heavy things which he then used to build, fix, install, assemble, connect, secure, clean, tear down, buttress, erect, and when all else was said and done, simply move from one location to another – and often back again if she decided the original arrangement was somehow superior. In other words, the exact kind of familiar encounter that led Dan to toss an uncertain number of beers down his throat as he drove the hours’ distance to meet Madeline at the bar where she sat contemplating her next move with the uber-chipper bar patron on the stool beside her.

Dan swooped in on Madeline, slumped over in creeping despair on her stool, as if he’d been lost and adrift for endless days at sea, and Madeline was an emerald isle with Stella Artois running through the cascading streams.

He swung her stool around and nuzzled his face into the crook of her neck, planting kiss after kiss. Enlacing the fingers of their two hands together, he bobbed his head, moved his hips and feet about, and performed a wild giddy drunken dance, all while ordering two beers at once, the first of which he emptied in a single gulp. He grabbed the other bottle off the bar, lifted Madeline from her seat, and kissed her forehead between head bobs, dancing all the while.

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Both paintings by Pablo Picasso

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Friday Short’n Sweet: an excerpt for everyone who’s had a rough week

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The sound of the woman’s voice was driving her nuts. All sing-song and la-la-la as she prattled on and on about how well things were going in every single possible aspect of her entire life with no exceptions whatsoever. Madeline tapped her fingers on the intensely varnished bar. Then she attempted to peel the label off of her beer bottle in little strips that would spell out the word “H E L P.” Marie and her two friends were deeply in the throes of some discussion that Madeline couldn’t quite hear, their heads huddled together. The woman sang on. Madeline felt dangerously close. In a few short moments, she would no longer have a choice about it. If Dan didn’t show up very, very soon, she was going to have to spin the crooning woman around on her bar stool, slap her squarely in the face, and say, “Suffer a little, bitch!”
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Photo credits:  Brassai (top),  Jacques (bottom)

 

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“Haven of Love” part 3, excerpt from the novel “Pushing the River”

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RATED R:  Pretty sure that’s what the MPAA would rate this passage, for sexual content.  Don’t read it if the content might bother you, but gosh, I sure hope that you will.

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.

Taking Dan’s hand, she led him to the staircase.  With her back to him, Madeline ascended with measured, deliberate steps, resting their entangled fingers against her ass, with every intention that he pay keen attention to it.  She took her time lighting the two candles on her bedside table, her back still to Dan, waiting for the match to burn all the way down before she blew the slightest puff of air.  Standing behind her, Dan reached one hand out to caress her buttocks, took a step forward, and cupped her breast with his other hand.  They stood for a time, motionless, listening to one another’s breathing; and that marked the last instant of anticipation, or of anything languorous.  Madeline ground her ass into Dan’s pelvis, hard, and rocked it from side to side.  His fingers dug into the crotch of her jeans.

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Clothing flew.  Hands could not explore fast enough, could not cover enough ground.  Lips, tongues, saliva were everywhere, all at once.  The air in the room thickened to a fecund hothouse from the blossoming of body parts and ooze of fluids.

Dan gripped her haunches and pulled her onto him, astride him as she had been on the couch.  Madeline ran her hand along his cock as she slid him inside her, and shut her eyes tight to block out any thought, any hint of any sensation, that was not the feeling of his cock reaching into her.   Dan seized her hand and enlaced his fingers with enough force that Madeline’s eyes snapped open.  Her first inclination was to gasp. She had never seen a look quite like the one on his face.  His impossibly blue eyes wide open, his body trembling, Dan looked right at her, right into her, with a hungry yearning that pronounced there would be no place for a single part of her to hide.  A sound arose from deep in her gut, a sound she was not even sure was her own.  And when that sound reached up through her body and spilled from her mouth, she was gone.

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Painting by Varvara Stylidou

Photos from Flickr

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“Billie,” new excerpt from the novel “Pushing the River”

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Madeline rolled Marie’s words over in her mind,  “She’s not safe.”  She flashed back to two years ago, the last time she had seen Sierra.  That summer.

“Not safe.”  Madeline heard about the events of that night after it was all over.  She awakened to then-13-year-old Sierra curled up in a ball, deep in slumber on the couch in the very room where Marie told the story of the previous night as if it were a tale of very long ago, and quite far away.  Grotesque scenes involving the screaming of sirens, spewed vitriol, handcuffs, jail, emergency protective orders, and a young girl – with a freshly stitched and gauze-wrapped gash across her forearm – now in the legal custody of Marie, with the legal residence of Madeline’s home.  Marie blew across the top of her coffee as she spoke.  She unfurled a crumple of pages — various reports from police, the hospital emergency room, child services — and smoothed them with her hands.

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“Not safe,” Marie now said, two years later, into the phone.

Madeline thought of a photo that Marie had pinned to the wall of the room that she and John lived in that summer of two years past.  An old photo of her mother Billie Rae when she was young — a grown woman, but still young.  She was seated at a kitchen table, leaning forward in her chair to nestle herself, her slight-framed body, fully against the table.  One shoulder tilted towards the camera in a way that looked both flirtatiously coy and thoroughly exhausted.  The photo was not a close up, and the distance made Billie seem even tinier, all long dishwater blonde hair and huge blue eyes.  There was something else, too – a softness.  The girl in the picture possessed a definite softness.  This is what Madeline would try to remember.  That there had been a time when Billie was soft.  Vulnerable.  Young.  There was strength in that face.  And fatigue.  And pleading.  Whatever came next, and next after that, Madeline would try to remember the girl/woman in that picture.

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Paintings, top to bottom, by:

Tiziano Vecellio Titian, Henri Lebasque, Julio Romero de Torres

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“Haven of Love” (cont.) from the novel “Pushing the River”

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“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.

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“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.

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All photos from Flickr

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“Haven of Love,” excerpt from novel-in-progress “Pushing the River”

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By the time Dan tumbleweeded through the front door and into the dining room with my Lady, Auggie and Bess had pushed their chairs back from the table in healthy respect of keeping a certain distance from the remaining rubble of pie.  Auggie and Bess looked Dan up and down while Dan looked the tumult of plates up and down, and before fifteen minutes of interesting conversational tidbits had criss-crossed the dining table, Auggie turned squarely to face his wife and said, “Well, honey, we really need to get going.”

“What?!?” Madeline said, nearly before the words were fully out of his mouth.  “Really?!?”

“Really.  Come on, babe.” And with an incredible efficiency of movement, he grabbed Bess’ hand, pulled her up from her chair, and led her towards the front door while both of them exclaimed the virtues of the food and the wine and the company, until the door shut behind them and their continued words drifted into the evening air.

On the other side of the door, the entire atmosphere inside the house shifted by the time Madeline took the twenty or so steps back to sit at the dining room table, side by side with Dan.  He gave a faint chuckle. “Nice folks.”

“The best.” Madeline said.

They sat facing the table laden with the evening’s detritus.  As if he had read the crusted plates like so many tea leaves, Dan said, “This house is so you.  You are everywhere.”

“Really?” Madeline retorted, more than a tad skeptically, as he had arrives less than a half hour before and seen only two rooms.  “How’s that?”

“It’s so clear what this house is.  It’s the place that you created, and have worked hard to protect – a haven to encircle all of the people you love.”

“Geez,” Madeline thought to herself.  “Just how much longer do I have to wait to fuck this guy?”  But what she said aloud was, “Huh.”

“There is love everywhere,” Dan said, still looking down at the plates.

“Maybe not quite yet,” she considered.  “But soon.  Very, very soon.”  The thought exhilarated her, thrilled her, yet also filled her with a quiet apprehension.  She said in a pitch that was decidedly tauter and higher than usual. “Would you like a house tour?  Want to see the rest of the Haven of Love?”

Night dance

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“Babysitting,” New chapter from novel “Pushing the River”

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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.3633530233_eb0ee307ce_z

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.

 

all photos from Flickr