scene from a novel in progress, a novel two long chapters from done

 

            The day was breaking.  There was still the tooth of the moon in the sky and that black fringe of storm, and she could hear the high slosh in the creek, the endless running forward to the sea.   When she reached the footbridge, she stood for a moment and looked back toward the house—the big rectangle and the small one, the twin chimneys, the unsunk roof sloping forthright in two directions, the garden like a moat.  Slick and stone and root.

            Steam had come in, a funnel of gnats and mosquitoes, the sudden gray heart of a squirrel on a limb above her head.  Becca imagined the boy fishing for marlin in the stream, or sleeping on a bed of hawk-tail feathers.  She imagined him alone in that room, that empty mirror, that barrette balanced on the apple’s glass stem, that jar of honey.  The trees unfurled, a belligerent green.  The crows were thick as thieves.  On the prickle of the forest floor, Becca saw the wet back of a single beetle catching a nick of sun.   

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Revisiting (and novelizing) Tango Fire

In late January of this year, my husband and I escaped to the city, an adventure I wrote about here.  We were there to see an extraordinary troupe of tango dancers who were taking their show, Tango Fire, around the world and had stopped for the afternoon in Philly.  Later that evening, at Amada, I turned and saw the dancers behind me—these marvelous, acrobatic creatures out of costume and laughing and willing, as it turned out, to let me sit briefly among them.

Such odd and beautiful conjunctions are not easily forgotten, and lately I've been writing the scene into this adult novel of mine—changing winter to summer and evening to morning and rearranging the dancers' heights, but not their spirits.   

There is no need to inflate their generosity.

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books in progress, a writer in un-progress

It's only paper, I told myself.  Or (another tactic), One thing at a time.  

But today it seemed too much—three manuscripts in their piles—on the floor, on the chair, on the glass pane.  Three manuscripts, waiting.  The You Are My Only galleys, to be read one final, change-it-now-or-never time. The one hundred pages of memoir proposal.  The adult novel I've been giving myself deliberate distance from, now returned to me after a marvelously close reading.  Three utterly separate worlds in one small space requiring an enhanced version of me.  Three different voices.  Three different things I'd come to say.  Words the only tool I have.  Words insistent and inadequate.

I pulled weeds instead (there are plenty of those to go around).  I took a walk.

I was, I'll admit this to you, afraid.

Tomorrow is another day.

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Excerpt from that novel still in progress (but getting there, at last)

She names a year:  1939.  She names a city:  Triana.  She tells me about a basement bar thick with people hiding from the bad news of the day.  Old corrida posters on the wall, she says.  The smoke of bad cigars.  Short women with big necks talking crazy with their hands, and men thumbing a short deck of cards.  A little stage, up in front, with a stool, and two long tables that you couldn’t walk between at midnight when everyone was sitting three-deep in.  The bar was the thing, then.  The only thing they had.  The best Stella’s parents could make of the city they’d escaped to after they had escaped from Madrid. 

“They only knew taverns,” Stella says.  “They only knew food.”

The nights in Triana were blue, Stella says.  The milk was thinned to blue.   The mussels had a blue attitude and were lazy.  The bread was sometimes all there was—bad bread and cheap rojo, cracked from barrels.  There were already so many dead and those who weren’t dead were like nothing people, dead in the eyes, loose around their bones.  It was October 1939, and the war had been over since April, but Spain wasn’t the Spain any of them had known for it now belonged to Franco.  It was the church against the people, the anarchists against the nuns, the Civil Guard against civilians, the extremists forcing politics onto farmers and working stiffs.  It was dead people hanging from chopo trees. Doctors who weren’t allowed to practice.  Teachers selling charcoal in the street.  Lawyers sleeping in cemeteries.  Priests without churches.  Spain was the Moors of Maria Luisa Park who said they’d been tied to the wings of the German planes.

“Tied to the wings?”

“Imagine.”

There were not enough bars, Stella says.  There was nothing for anyone to do, nowhere to go, it was nothing hoping for nothing.  Stella was eighteen, the cook.  At night the people came for what they could find, which was wine and poor tapas and flamenco.  “Hating Franco,” Stella says, “made us one people.”

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Re-entering the mind space of a novel

The blizzard's here. Thick snow. Blowing wind. I'm not sure what this day will bring, and so I make a quick stop at this blog from the office depicted above.

I mentioned yesterday that a bungled transition (once identified) can give an author a new lease on her own book—a new way in. Yesterday I entered into a home, in my novel-in-progress for adults, that I'd only ever observed (in those pages) from the outside. The broken transition took me here:

Cloris pressed her hand against her heart and stared at Sophie through the wire mesh of the door. Now she exhaled and looked again at Sophie’s feet. “Come in and see her. Come say hello.”

“Oh no, Cloris, really. I can’t. I’m behind on a deadline.”

“Just a moment, dear? It would mean so much.”

“Maybe later today, after she’s rested.”

“Honey, you’re young, still,” Cloris paused. “Aren’t you?”

Sophie didn’t feel young. She shrugged.

“Let me give you a preview of life going forward: Sometimes time is of the essence. Sometimes we do what we can right now, because we don't get a second chance at second chances.”

Sophie stared at Cloris and felt her worrying pressing in. She turned and studied her own dull house from the impossible yellow of Cloris's stoop. She glanced at the bowl at her feet.

“I don’t have much time,” she said.

Cloris jiggled the door handle, let Sophie in. Purple and green splashed the walls—lime green straight up to the wainscot, lilac up above, like an Easter hyacinth. The paintings that hung in Cloris’s house weren’t paintings; they were dioramas—cardboard cutouts in picture boxes depicting scenes from Alice in Wonderland. “It’s my fetish,” Cloris had once said, when Sophie had asked. “The Queen of Hearts. The White Rabbit. Alice big and Alice small. There’s so much dimension to it.”

“But where did they come from?” Sophie had wanted to know.

“A garage sale,” Cloris had answered. “Best garage sale in the history of the galaxy, down by the Boulevard.”

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Snow Falling: A Christmas Eve Excerpt

The promised snow is out there, falling, and I am feeling melancholy. This morning, before a long corporate-work weekend kicks in, I read the novel for adults through one last time. It is going, now, to Amy Rennert, my agent. Come the new year, we shall see what we shall see.

In the meantime, this from a final scene in the asylum. The year is 1955.

Someone had brought in a Collaro hi-fi and plugged it in with Christmas blues and we sat there, the crazy and the no inch short of sane, while Jimmy Butler sang “Trim your Tree” and Felix Gross sang “Love for Christmas,” and when Sugar Chile Robinson sang “Christmas Boogie,” Wolfie took up Virgin Mary’s hand in hers and a space was cleared on the table top and the two of them danced, Virgin Mary’s eyes a million miles away, but something close and near on her lips, something like a blessing, with Wolfie just laughing, Wolfie hollering a good time, and no more giggling, for that single minute, from Liesel, who wore holiday trim in the rolls of her hair and teeth in the pink of her gums. I kept Autumn near all dinner long. I suffered in my thinking about Baby.

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Holding Up

As I walked the Penn campus on Monday I was struck by images of endings. This is a close-up of a campus information kiosk—all the advertisements, slogans, promises, queries snatched out from the rust-grip of staples. Come January, it will all be new again.

Here, in between corporate projects and Christmas shopping, between the tree I haven't gotten yet and the countless gifts I have, I am at work on a final round of edits for my adult novel. Come Monday, the book will be ready for prime time, which is to say, for its submission to editors. There's no telling what will happen after that. All I can say for certain is this: Rahna Reiko Rizzuto read it closely, and so did my agent, Amy Rennert. This book is already far better for the time they took with it—for the questions they asked, for the themes they parsed, for the way they told the story back to me.

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Novel in Progress/An Excerpt (4)

Stories had saved Sophie, stories with their small acts of victorious aggression, their black words on white pages, their strikes against, their love affairs with deviations. There was snatch and thrum in stories. There was sway and influence, shatter and audacity, the glory yield of the road not taken; Sophie had gone her own way. She had set off with no sure understanding of where she had been or why she had been there ....

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Imagine the Past

Though the novel for adults that I am currently writing is inspired by a real (no longer extant) Philadelphia institution, I have been frustrated by the lack of verifiable documentation. Innuendo swirls. Rumor. Whispered references to a dark past. But aside from a spate of newspaper stories from a single brief era, some remarkable photography, a few ambitious blogs, a township planning report, a slim chapter in a slim book, a few generic paragraphs, and an elderly gentleman who agreed to speak with me by phone, I had been coming up short.

It doesn't matter, my friends kept saying. This is a novel. You are free to imagine.

Yes, of course. I am writing a novel. But there are some things that one really must know, and besides, my degree is in the history and sociology of science. I crave the past like runners crave water.

A few weeks ago, though, I noticed a 1959 report listed at the University of Pennsylvania Van Pelt library, set aside in storage. It took a while for the book to make its way to me, and yesterday afternoon I sat with it for the first time. I hadn't much hope. It was, after all, a typewritten, yellow-paged report—full of Roman numerals and bullet points with chapter titles that stated, without romance or flutter, their purpose: "Ergotherapy Department (Hospital Industry) Activities in the Rehabilitation Service," for example, or "The Function of Occupational Therapy in the Rehabilitation Service." Marked as a "First Interim Report," the book had been donated to the library by its author—"with compliments—" and in a neat blue script throughout (the author's own) corrected or amplified with notations.

Who would then have thought that this book would turn out to be the gem that it is? Here, at long last, are many of the elusive facts—matter-of-factly called out, unmanipulated, and unpretty. It's all here, scientifically stated and bullet-ized, and I suspect that I am the first who has ever gone off in search of it; the book shows no signs of having been read. I can't help now but imagine this author, precisely 50 years ago, carrying his volume to the Van Pelt front desk and saying, "It is yours." Did he imagine that a novelist would someday wander in and find his recorded past for the taking?

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Prague, Writerly Remnants, and More Ghosts Kindnesses

Here's something I've learned along this writerly trail: Throw nothing away. Sometimes we have the words, the scene, the mood, the atmosphere, but we don't know what any of it means. The years go by and suddenly we know. Throw nothing that you write away.

Today, while working on this novel for adults, I remembered a short story I had written years ago that was based on a trip I'd taken to Prague. I'd written the short story. I'd flattened it to a poem. I'd based a (failed) novel around it. I wrote an essay. It never rooted in.

The rooting waited all these years and genres. It waited until dawn, today. It's a scene that begins in Prague, the land of puppets, where this photo was taken. It builds to something else—a winter moment between two lovers. Of course this was no cut and paste. Of course I had to think, and rearrange. But the seeds were there.

I excerpt the final moment here:

Once, when it snowed, he fashioned a sled out of handled serving trays and a piece of rope that he’d had coiled in the basement. He’d wakened her and wrapped her in blankets and carried her out into the night, where they were the only ones alive, it seemed, and the snow was new. She sat with her knees to her chin to stay afloat, which was how it had felt—like floating, past neighbors, past trees, upon the sled. He pulled her—a parade of two for no one—and the snow kept falling, all through that night, and his hair was white, an old man’s color, by the time he dragged her home. Marry me, he’d said, but she’d not answered, not then. She wasn’t ready. He left, he went away, but that time he returned. He brought her an azalea from a winter nursery. For spring, he’d said. A second chance.

On another topic altogether, I have been graced by Kathy of BermudaOnion and Melissa of BettyBooChronicles with beautiful, beautiful responses to Nothing but Ghosts. Oh, I do thank you both. I am running out of words.

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Wiser than I: My Boy to the Rescue

For six months, maybe more, I've been at work on a book that has been in my head for a very long time. It's that novel for adults from which I sometimes post excerpts, this strange collision of place, purpose, mood that I selfishly sit with when friends should be called, when grander responsibilities beckon, when I should be cracking the spine on the recipe book to spice up the meals around here. But I can't let it go.

Yesterday I printed the novel's first 150 pages and sat down to read on the deck. Nothing we write is ever what we think we have written—at least it is that way for me. So that, despite the fact that I'd worked these pages through at least two dozen drafts, had already tossed multiple subplots, had trashed a few favorite symbols, had thrashed myself over rhythm and line, I still did not know what I had. I still did not realize that I was up against a pacing dilemma. Twenty pages in, out on my deck, I did.

For the next several hours I was a frustrated writer, shuffling my deck, black Xing through pages I'd loved, shuffling the deck again. I was rewriting, resketching, rethinking, and finally, I called out to my son, whose work, as I have often said, is cleaner and brighter than my own.

"Jeremy," I said, "just take a look at this first page please. Would it interest you if you found it in a bookstore? Would you care enough to read on?"

He studied that page. He scratched the back of his sweet head. He sat down and pulled me to him.

"You want to know what I think?" he asked.

"I do," I said. "I promise."

"You want suspense, I imagine, and tension, right?"

"That's what I want," I nodded.

"Then take the fourth line. Make it the first line. Break the third paragraph right here." He drew a line with his thin finger.

I considered his suggestion. I flipped things in my mind. I went to my computer, typed it all newly in.

"Hey," I called to him when I was done. "Will you look at this?"

He got up, left the room where his music was playing. He came around to my silence, stood by my shoulder, leaned in, read. "That works," he said. "That does it."

And the thing is that it did.

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Novel in Progress/An Excerpt (2)

The house is a storybook house. A huff and a puff and we’ll blow it down house. The roof is soft and tumbled. The bushes grow tall past the sills. Evergreens lean in from high above the cracked slate path, torpedoing pinecones to the ground. The floor slats are slants and the furniture slides, clawing away at the varnish. Big sheets of snaggled paint have split from Sophie’s bedroom wall and, like glaciers, crashed.

But there is a window—one—that is not tumbled, that is whole. Sophie waits until her mother leaves for work before pulling down the mid-air stairs and climbing into the pink scratch of the attic. Through the window at the far end of the room falls an oblique square of sun. Toward that oblique Sophie makes her way (careful on the cross beams, careful with the splinters, careful not to fall into the quilty insulation—that’s what the pink is, insulation), then sits watching the world beyond, the house across the street, the sloppy dog, the scramble of legs and tail that is the dog. The dog rumbles and slides, keeping guard over his house. He runs the grass alley between the fence and the porch and scurries a squirrel into a tree. He barks at the white car with the pistol muffler that goes roaring past—down the narrow asphalt, gone.

The dog is preamble; he waits.

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Novel in Progress/An Excerpt

It’s been a few years since they let the patients go—herded the inmates away in buses; slipped the loonies down the loop in cars; did not see the only escapee who shuffled straight to the river, crab walked the bogged banks, and paddled deep into the channel. So that she wasn’t found until three days later—a turtle egg in the nest of her hair, a chewed strip of rubber on her wrist. A child made the discovery. He’d been playing. He had thought at first that she was Galatea, the milk-white one in his book of myths. No one would believe him when he came shouting, spinning home—mud to his elbows, shoes undone.

“You leave your imagination out of this,” his mother said.

“I’m swearing,” he told his mother, crossing his heart.

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From a novel in progress

Alone in the house, before Vin had moved in, Sophie had found the evidence of earlier owners in the attic, under the sink, on shelves—drawings left behind by children, marbles trapped beneath the radiator cover, a single sweater in the closet, a collection of dried lady bugs, laid out like counting beads, upon the guest-room sill. She had studied the scratches on the floor and imagined the traffic of past lives, had acclimated herself to the idea of spirits and specters, phantasmagoria. She understood, better than she’d ever let on, obsession.

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