Fiction Thursday: Life Between Parentheses

It's been a while since I've brought a Fiction Thursday to this little space, and tonight as it thunders in the distance, it feels a bit like a night to curl up with some words. I found this little piece tucked away in a folder. I had just read To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf for a writing class. Let me tell you, there is no one quite like Virginia Woolf for making punctuation do theatrics on the page. I remember being struck by the way she used parentheses to tell the action of the story while the character's thoughts abounded outside them - as if thoughts were the true reality and the actions taking place were simply intrusions or asides. I wrote these three paragraphs shortly after for an assignment. They are much more playful than To The Lighthouse. There is just no keeping up with Ms. Woolf.

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My God, they must be married thirty years now, and still? Foolish! That's what it is. Foolish to act like children half their age, him stroking the inside of her wrist and her giggling, acting as if they don't notice the waiter. The least they can do, if they won't stop, is acknowledge the waiter (listing tonight's entrees by memory). The least they can do is pay attention. Sit still. My God!

Had they always been this brazen? Yes. They had. (Mr. Donaley excuses himself from the table to take a phone call and Mrs. Donaley watches Mrs. Ivers rub the back of Mr. Iver's bald head.) Last fall, while dining at this same restaurant, Mr. Ivers had worn that leather cap. Mrs. Ivers had thought it made him look "dashing," but it had not. He had looked ridiculous. He had looked absolutely ridiculous, and yet, Mrs. Ivers had kept herself pressed against him all night with, Mrs. Donaley was sure, her hand upon his thigh. Shameless!

At least, tonight, Mr. Ivers is not wearing that cap. Although, if he had, Mrs. Ivers could not rub his head as she is. (The Ivers are now recounting a trip to see their grandson, from which they have just returned.) Against the luster of candlelight, the creases at her eyes and mouth covered in shadow, Mrs. Ivers looks rather young, Mrs. Donaley thinks. She has aged well. (The sommelier pours the Grüner Veltliner. The women have ordered quail with port sauce while the men have chosen pork medallions with smoked scallops.)

Fiction Thursday: Candle Piece

Today I set up shop early: fed the baby, got in some reading (two pages), grabbed a bagel and brought the computer to a hum in hopes of beating the garbage truck, the stacks (of dishes, mail, laundry, children's books, felt), the itch and inspiration for other projects, and dates with friends. Today, before my cup is filled to teeming (no matter how wonderful that might be), here I am with more words than yesterday, well, at least a paragraph or two more.

This Fiction Thursday piece began with a focus on using sentence fragments to suspend time (no verbs = no action or tense) and a memory from my childhood of a blue candle. Ironically, I wrote this about seven years ago, before the birth of Grey's Anatomy or reemergence of the name Addie.

***


The final deterioration had happened in this room. It had taken less than three months. It is odd to observe, to watch your mother weaken daily in this bedroom, as if it were these four walls and not the disease taking her little by little. The cancer had begun out in the fields before she knew to wear chemical-proof goggles or a full-face respirator and rubber gloves with extended cuffs at the elbows, before she knew the heavy white canister of anhydrous ammonia she pulled between the rows of corn while soaking the soil was poison to her lungs.

The deterioration began out there, long before any of us could see it. It concluded here. Here: her bedroom with walls like the whitewash of her youth. Clean walls with no memory of sunken cheeks and shallow breaths. No leftover notes of whispers, "Poor Addie." "Any day now." Only my memories of dim blue candlelight against stark white walls. Remnants of deep shadows, dustless nightstands. My hand on her dry wrinkled palm. My ear to her wrung-out chest. The lights off, the room soundless except for sporadic labored breath. Her extinguished eyes in candlelit glow.

And now, the room radiant bright as I pull open the dresser drawers.


***


Hidden in the two pages of reading I snuck in this morning was this quote from E. L. Doctorow, "writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." I don't know that I see this piece as part of a novel, but regardless, I'm seeking that next pool of dark-clearing light. I'm just wondering if this time around my car doesn't need to go in reverse. Hmm...

As for that Paris bloke, rewriting out that piece (and ruminating on it a bit all day) did give me an inkling of an idea about this fellow, but I haven't sat down to experiment further yet.

I promise more light-hearted fare tomorrow. There are laughs to be shared.

Fiction Thursday: The Paris Bloke

This week I was going to choose a story start written in third person, since the last story I shared was written in first person. But, the third person starts I have feel a little heavier than I'm wanting to delve into this morning, so here's another first person start. This one is written from a male point of view, which is unusual for me (and, perhaps, one of the reasons I'm struggling with the piece). That's all I'm going to say until the end.

***

I don't know why more people don't spend the holidays in Paris. Forget the twinkle lights, which are more trouble than they're worth, that you forget to plug in, to test, before hanging, ultimately hanging a dud string, which means another trip to the roof to take them down, and another, if you're real adventurous, to hang a new string. Forget the fruitcake, with its inconsistent consistency, that your Aunt Bernie requests you bring each year, that you'd rather not partake of, but someone must, since Doan's Bakery sells 5000 a year. Forget waiting in line to buy gifts, which undoubtedly, will be the wrong size or color (or a bad idea altogether), leading the recipient to stand in line the next week to return them.

Simply, forget it. Renew your passport and go to Paris, instead. That is where I spent my holiday season, roaming the corridors of the Louvre, except on Tuesdays and Christmas, when it was closed. I began on the first floor examining Egyptian antiquities, artifacts created by people who lived 4000 years ago, in civilizations that cropped up along the Nile. The exhibit included a scribe's instruments, a spoon, a dagger, and jugs, cracked and broken, pieced together by museum curators. I walked among the artifacts but did not stay long. I did not want to be among broken objects, once useful, now useless, their cracked pieces (both visible and invisible) glued together by unfamiliar hands and deemed "restored."

I prefer paintings. I like the covering they provide to a dull wall. I prefer portraits, like the Mona Lisa, encased in glass to keep the fragile poplar canvas from breaking. The Mona Lisa is also on the first floor, beyond the large-format paintings, paintings of men battling, building new empires, breaking ground to tame the land, these being the sorts of measures men will go to to impress ladies, make them smile.

I passed through this gallery nearly every day, at least every day the museum was open, to view the Mona Lisa, stand and look at her face, constructed of layers of accumulated oil. Da Vinci added turpentine, weak turpentine, to the oils used to paint her, creating oils that were almost transparent, so he could add layer upon layer, endlessly remodeling her face. And, suppose Da Vinci had disturbed one layer of the woman, he could cover his mistake, create a new layer with fresh paint. He did not need to speak with counselors and (when they failed) lawyers, and sign papers. He had weak turpentine.

***

So there you have it. For those of you wondering, this piece was an emulation of Michael Chabon's "Along the Frontage Road." "Along the Frontage Road" seems to have sentences with an excessive number of dependent clauses. My theory (and my apologies to Chabon if this is not the case) is that the clauses are the narrator's attempt to create a diversion and put off talking about the "real" story. They also seem to act as filler, as if the narrator is trying to pad himself with dependent clauses to make up for the loss he feels.

As for my character, I have no idea where this guy is going - if he's even back from Paris yet. All I know is that some girl really did a number on this bloke. Unfortunately, he seems willing to talk about anything but what happened. Pesky men who hide their feelings. Has he filled any of you in?

A Little Background

I have a fault when talking. It's called backstory. I can't seem to tell a long story short. Rather, I tell long stories longer. In that spirit, here is a little background on the material you will be reading (if you so choose) on Fiction Thursdays.

Shortly after our marriage, Jason and I moved to southern Illinois. While there, I had the good fortune to study creative writing under the brilliant Beth Lordan. Not a member of SIU's creative writing program, and barely a student at the university (hers being the only classes I took, as an independent study), I was touched by her generosity of time and encouragement. Beth is one of those rare finds, someone as gifted and enthusiastic in her ability to teach her art as she is at creating her art. The classes focused on the formal features of writing, the tools used to create stories (point of view, punctuation, sentence structures, etc.). Beth taught me that seemingly mundane (and already confusing) items, such as semicolons or independent clauses, could be used metaphorically in fiction. Grammar has the same effect on me as Brie does the lactose intolerant. So, when Beth said that not only EVERY SINGLE word in a good writer's work is used intentionally to move the story forward, but the form (I immediately thought punctuation) should have that purpose as well, I dropped my notebook and raced to the nearest Barnes & Noble self-help section (well, I thought about it).

In the end, her class gave me a renewed appreciation for grammar. Perhaps, it wasn't the reunion-dampening, moth-ball-scented, sharp-tongued Great Aunt I'd made it out to be. I ran out and bought a copy of Eats, Shoots & Leaves. I had intentions of really studying grammar, reacquainting myself will how it all works, if you will. Instead, we moved and I found out I was about to become a mother. Grammar, and writing, took a backseat.

The other thing her class gave me was a handful of "story starts." Our assignments alternated between written analyses (where we analyzed how one of the pros used form metaphorically) and emulations (a few paragraphs or a page where we shamelessly stole said pro's methods). The characters from a few of those starts haunt me a bit. I feel as though they are going somewhere. I just wish I knew where. These first few Fiction Thursdays will feature those story starts with the hope that one of those characters will ante up their secret and tell me where they're going. Now, will the first character please stand up?

Fiction Thursday

This story is a little longer than what I will typically post on a Thursday, so I won’t give much background. I’ll save that for another time. I will say that it began as an assignment for a class. It was meant to be a short exercise, not a complete story, but once I got going, it just wrote itself. (I’ve often heard professional writers make similar annoying statements. This is the only time it’s ever happened to me. I walked around stunned. For days.) My professor suggested I send it to a magazine. So I did. I entered Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction contest. I won third place and $300. I have a very sweet memory of Jason running into the house from the mailbox with a letter from Glimmer Train with “third place winner” written on the envelope. He jumped onto the bed, waving it in my face to wake me up. I used the prize money to buy an elliptical machine. It’s still in our basement (the elliptical machine, not the envelope).


Southbound

It was a bet made between children. The sort of thing that occurs when boys grow restless with lemonade stands or catching tadpoles, or the creek has dried to cracked dust. Not that anyone (myself, included) had ever witnessed anything of this magnitude before, but we could have. Boys will grow restless.

Boys grow restless when saturated by too much sun, when their bodies become too tanned or their hair too dry. They grow restless when given too many days of summer in which to ride their bikes and create new paths, which they will do – through fields marked with signs of “no trespassing” and the prints of young boys, through the yards of widows, until they feel the itch growing from their bellies to discover new boundaries.

It was a bet made between brothers. A bet, like most between brothers, that one never expects to be carried to fruition, like the time you found a roll of pennies in your father’s desk and insisted that your brother could not fit ten up his nose, which had been true, he only being able to squeeze three into his left nostril before being found by your mother.

(Was she, perhaps, to blame, having not come quick enough? Not quick enough to save him by a nose.)

Many evenings of setting summer sun were spent at the county hospital wriggling the big ideas out of restless boys, extracting pennies from their nostrils, stitching the cuts above their eyes. Nightly, nurses bandaged wounded elbows and knees while mothers administered the medicine of “you should have known better.” Just wait until your father hears.

It was a bet made between an older brother and a younger brother on bicycles. One rode a brand-new red Roadmaster Luxury Liner, its paint slick like the waxy skin of a Red Delicious. The other brother, having not just turned eleven, rode a secondhand (the first hand always being his brother’s) Schwinn Deluxe DX painted green, where paint remained. He was eight.

During the summer, younger brothers become tag-alongs. They follow you through Old Packard’s field riding their scraped-and-dented bottle-green bikes. As they coast through furrows, they whoop like cowboys and ride clumsily over molehills like girls or headless chickens. They draw attention to themselves and pedal slow. They bring fist-shaking widows to their porches.

No eleven-year-old wants to tote his eight-year-old brother through town. It’s not the kind of duty you volunteer for. It’s imposed upon you with threats or bribes of a dollar for fountain drinks. You crease the bill, stuff it into your back pocket and hope you don’t bump into Molly Waters or any of her friends at the soda shop while drinking brown cows with your kid brother.

After you slurp the last suds from your froth-coated glasses, you stick to fields and back roads. You stick to back roads because you will bump into fewer people than you would in town, particularly Molly Waters. You never expect your little brother to get hit.

It was a bet made out of boredom. The dollar had been reduced to change. The creek bed had been visited and jumped over – even though it was dry, presenting little threat or opportunity for amusement. Carvings had been made in the dried trough, the unsettled earth shavings transferred to pant legs and socks. The Carter boys had been invited along and Packard’s field had been ridden through twice. The bikes had even plowed between two rows of corn, the fresh leaves slicing bare arms, the underdeveloped husks beating the knuckles gripping the handlebars.

It was late summer and all the usual paths had already been taken. The bikes turned west, following the fields of corn and beans to the edge of town. They passed the Prue sisters’ place, an old farmhouse that smelled of worn muslin drapes and licorice, where boys were dragged – some by their ears – on the last days of summer to have their pants let down before the start of school. They passed the Prue place. Handy’s Fill-Up, the bait and tackle hut. They passed the last scatterings and scraps of town until they met the edge, marked by the tracks of the Southbound.

It was a bet made never to be repeated. It’s something one can’t even imagine. It’s the kind of dare that you can only conceive as you see the Southbound approaching, when the words form in your throat before you realize what you are saying. “You can have the leftover change from the sodas if you can beat the train across the tracks.”

It’s a gamble your kid brother should never take you up on. But he does. Maybe he wants to impress Bud and Joey Carter, or maybe he gets caught up in the rush of the train. Either way, he begins pedaling in hard, quick strokes upward toward the tracks. The eldest Carter whoops and beats his fist in the air like he’s at Fenway Park wanting your little brother to swing away, past the bleachers and lights.

Your kid brother is losing speed. You notice his stroke has become rough, his feet turning the spokes in uneven increments, off-rhythm. You yell for him to stop, to turn back. But he has cleared the hill and the train’s whistle drowns you out. He continues to the tracks.

It’s a tie. The Carter boy is no longer whooping. He is biting his fist as the other one screams. You run toward the tracks, change jingling in your pocket as you call your brother’s name. But nothing can be done; you must wait for the train to pass. You must wait to collect your brother, wait as the Southbound separates you.

You replay his ascent up the hill, trying to determine where he will be when the train passes.

He might have made it had he kept straight, had he not looked back. But he turned to look, look at the oncoming train, look back at me. He looked and his shoulder arched, the handlebars turning, the cross of the bike twisting. And he was a toddler again, wobbling unsteadily, his arms and legs unable to catch up with one another, as if being partnered for the first time. And he looked back, the look one more of surprise – as if questioning – than fear, as he tumbled. A toss of legs and arms. Appendages.

It was a bet made and lost.

We waited by the tracks, waited for the train to pass. We waited for the crew to collect my brother and clear away the pieces of bottle-green Schwinn. We waited for the sirens and lights to dissipate, for our parents to stop clutching us to their chests. We waited for summer to end, to outgrow our bikes.

* * * *

So there you have it, my last complete story. I’m sorry if it’s a bit more depressing than you were hoping for today (I once had someone read it and say, “but you seem like such a happy person,” and I have to say, it was harder for me reading it this time as a parent - I wasn't one when I wrote it). It’s not the path I wanted for the brothers, but I suppose if they didn’t occasionally have minds of their own, we wouldn’t call them characters. Hopefully, Audrey will offer up some more light-hearted fare for tomorrow. The next Fiction Thursday will be in two weeks. (Please forgive certain things not being centered or spaced right. I began typing this using a different program last night. Unfortunately, I'm not savvy enough to navigate between the two.)

Year One

Today is my one-year blogging anniversary. One year. Really. The procrastinator in me is a bit dumbfounded. After all, it took a couple of former college roommates two years of asking and gently prodding, "When are you starting a blog?" (as if the act was not a question, only the timing) before I finally took the plunge. Now, one year in, perhaps they were right. Now that this blog has become a near daily practice of sorts, it feels as if it was always sitting there, luggage packed, waiting at the train station for me to buy a ticket. And, well, what a pleasant ride. When I began this, I didn't know where it would lead. I did not anticipate reconnecting with old friends, sweet souls who I now correspond with monthly or weekly. I didn't anticipate the new ways in which I would get to know people I already thought I knew well. I wouldn't have believed you if you told me that complete strangers would pop by to see what my family and I were doing in this little space. Who knew that anyone would read this, besides my husband and my mother?

I had simply hoped to build a creative space for myself. A little spot to get back into the practice of writing, to capture inspiring/creative activities of my day, and chronicle one-of-a-kind Audrey moments. I didn't mean to build a home. But this does feel like a home of sorts: a place I hang my coat each day, protected from the elements, where I can kick off my shoes and unwind with a cup of hot chocolate. But one with a bit of whimsy. A tree house, perhaps. With a fireplace. Hmm.

Of course, just like my real home, the New Year has me evaluating my space, looking to see how I could better use the rooms. I have an idea for this little tree house of mine. It began small, unspoken - an idle piece of flint. Then, just over two weeks ago, on our last date night, pre-Nathan, Jason looked up from his soup and said, "You should start putting your fiction on the blog." And just like that, it was out in the open air - a spark.

I used to write stories. Stories that made me think and try to solve puzzles. And, while very few people read them (which, let's be honest, is sometimes better) I loved creating them. I completed my last story in 2004. But I have a stack of "story starts", pieces, if you will - puzzles just waiting to be solved. This year, I'm going to share some of those pieces with you. I haven't figured out the details yet, if it will be once a month a bit each week, but I plan on posting the story starts that I haven't been able to stop thinking about (most of which were also written in 2004 or earlier). My hope is that by writing them out here, I will use the time I would spend on a normal post thinking about these stories, ruminating on them. Hoping for a spark. We'll see what happens. That's the thing about saying something out loud. You never know where it will lead.

I know that my fiction will not be every one's cup of tea, and I will not be hurt if you decide to skip over those posts. I know you each have your own reasons for stopping by here, whether to check in on Audrey or just see what's been cooking on our stove. My plan is to do fiction posts on Thursdays, with the first post being this Thursday. I think I will post that last story from 2004 while I use this week to collect my story starts and figure out a plan. In the meantime, thank you for being a part of this little space, for your encouragement, and for bringing a bit of your own stories here. The train ride is always better with other interesting passengers on board.