Copy Boy

by Shelley Blanton-Stroud

  “They used to call this Carville, out here, so many people lived in these. Mayor got rid of most of ’em. We saved ours. History,” Jonesie bragged.

  The space was tiny but neat—the last maid had tidied up before she’d run off with Jonesie’s silver. At the end of the car was a narrow bed with a white pillow and sheets and a rough blue wool blanket on top, laid out smooth. On the left was a kitchen table for one. On the right was a makeshift kitchen, with a hose coming in through a hole drilled in the side of the car, wound up in an old ceramic basin set on a board on a trestle. Just above the sink was a driftwood shelf bearing a coffee pot, cast iron pan, bag of cornmeal, can of beans, can of Folgers, coffee mug, and plate. Like I said, less than what she’d come from.

  A low roar rose, different from the wind or the waves beating the coast. It grew louder.

  “Feeding time at the zoo,” Jonesie said. “Them lions get noisy.”

  For crying out loud, I thought. Back to the starting line.

  Momma looked out the window in the direction of Jonesie’s Victorian, though it was invisible with all that sand.

  “I’ll take it,” she said. “When do I start?”

  “Are you sure, Momma?”

  “Did you hear me?”

  Jonesie said, “Start tonight. Go get your stuff, settle in first.”

  “I don’t have stuff. I’m ready.”

  That’s all it took to set her up in a railcar at the back of Jonesie’s property, behind a gray, weathered mansion at the edge of the sandy world.

  But then she was accustomed to grit, and this would be her own space, not some man’s. It probably felt right, too, that it was a railcar. She’d always been heading away from something, to something else. Maybe that’s what she liked about it.

  Or maybe she just wanted to get out of Rivka’s, fast. Two queen bees wouldn’t work.

  Jonesie went back into his house and returned with a big dresser drawer with a pillow in the bottom. Momma looked down at her baby girl, too big already to fit in a drawer as a bed.

  “You can carry this from room to room in the big house while you clean during daytime and then put it in the back seat when I drive you to the roadhouse to clean there at night!” His voice was cheerful, resourceful.

  Momma bit her lip and looked around the railcar and at Elsie.

  Elsie chuckled, dimpling high on her cheeks under her eyes, looking right at me, like she was thinking, Well, are you gonna?

  Okay then, I thought.

  “Why doesn’t she stay with me and Rivka for a while? Until you’re settled. We can work it out, get some help.”

  You could see Momma’s wheels turning. Her face flushed, angry.

  Then she rubbed some milk off Elsie’s cheek and cleared her throat. “Just for a time then. Just until I’m settled.”

  I waited for her to hand Elsie to me. I didn’t reach for her myself. It was better that way.

  I’M not trying to say this was the something I was going to do. But it was one of the somethings. I was choosing not to be a one-man guy like Daddy said I was. I was going to give up some things I wanted, for my half-sister. I didn’t know then, of course, how much I’d give up.

  AT first, things did work the way Jonesie said—Momma cleaning the house by day, the roadhouse by night. Then, as her personality began to assert itself, she took on more responsibility. She started serving food at the roadhouse, then ordering supplies, then doing the books. She did this for just a year before she made herself into the new Mrs. Jones—Queen of the Outside Lands—lording it over the customers, the writers and boxers and singers and swindlers, reigning from that old Victorian, glowing with electricity, basement to attic, all the power she wanted. Good thing she never got those papers from Uno or Daddy. She liked Jonesie’s papers better.

  But Elsie stayed with me.

  The arrangement worked all right. We could get out there when we needed to—Momma didn’t come to us—but I didn’t have to see her all the time. Our relationship was something we’d tend or avoid, as we chose.

  Even when we said or did despicable, unforgivable things, and didn’t see each other for months afterward, we were still tied by a rope I couldn’t unknot. Momma and I always came back together, grudgingly, permanently.

  Rivka hired a housekeeper who watched Elsie when we were at work. She arranged for those crates from the old country to be carted away, stored somewhere else, and we turned that interior parlor into Elsie’s room, right there in the center of the flat. And when I started making more money, I paid the housekeeper extra for taking care of Elsie.

  She thrived on Clay Street.

  She was impossible to resist, those plump dimples, knees, fingers. Everything about her said, “Love me. Keep me.” And I did. But her wailing pink lungs—“I’m healthy, a person to invest in”—made me feel bad about Benjamin.

  I studied it, interviewed experts about it, the connection between family members, pretending the questions weren’t personal. I understood that kin must save kin, but biologically, historically, that’s only true when benefit outweighs cost, as I learned from my own parents. Then it was also complicated by genetic distance. She was half my mother’s genes, half Uno’s, who was my enemy, not my kin. What does that make her? I wondered. Half me? Quarter me? Does it make her Benjamin? No, she was just herself.

  She wanted everything she could get from me—food, touch, time, attention, validation, loyalty. Even when I wanted something else, something for myself, designed as I was to spread my attention over a great landscape—her, of course, always her first, but also men and women I loved, my work, secret stories into which I would throw myself, another child who came out of me, P. B., who sometimes made Elsie jealous.

  I thought a lot about how I was like Momma and how I was different.

  Evolution requires you to save enough of yourself from a child so you can care for the others, the rest of it, yourself. Propagation of the species. Survival.

  Women like Momma often leave more surviving young than the others. They know how to work the system—when to pretend to be subordinate, when ambition will pay off. Like Momma, I couldn’t help doing the math, and the sums didn’t always work out. I had to make choices that made Elsie unhappy, both of us unhappy.

  But then those wailing pink lungs—a person to invest in, one of my somethings.

  I had a therapist once. I married him. I told him what happened on the day I was born, or what I’d been told about what happened. I even told him about Benjamin’s voice in my head, which was a mistake because that’s the kind of thing people want to fix—“It’s pathological”—that’s how he saw it.

  It’s not how I see it.

  It’s been a comfort, these years, to rely on Benjamin’s judgment.

  He got me out of that ditch. Then he rode along after, lighting me up, adding a vibrancy, a nerve I don’t know I would have had otherwise. I believe he’s proud of that now.

  You might say it’s not true, that his voice is really my own self, another part of my own self, chiming in. But I know the difference. It’s Benjamin. He’s not dead. He’s alive, electric with ideas. I give him that credit and he accepts it.

  My body has never been the thing. My body is clay. My self is different.

  I don’t feel too bad anymore about what happened on our birthday. I figured that out. As Uno said, “That warn’t my fault!”

  I think Benjamin sees it like that too. The way his voice works in me now, seems like he wants the best for me. Seems like that’s usually his purpose—usually.

  I’m sorry Daddy ran off again. Though maybe it was good, his disappearance. That might have turned out the way it should.

  I did get it wrong about Grete. She wasn’t a killer. She didn’t try to kill Vee. Didn’t kill Jesson, just let him die, so obsessed was she with what she was trying to do. She was ambitious. How could I, of all people, hold that against her? But she came out all right. No jail time. Just the right amount of scandal to add another layer to her repu
tation. If anything, those headlines made her more in demand. She’d always been such a difficult woman that her new criminality made her more appealing. Howard at the Horse Trough Tavern was right about that.

  Then there was Vee.

  I visited her until the end. I’d hold her hand, spread the paper out on her bed. I’d read it aloud as she slept, getting thinner, whiter, every day. I relied on those visits—that spot of calm in a noisy life. I read her the paper, never my own gossip columns. They didn’t seem right for her. She was too good for that. She was good.

  I’d tell her stories about P. B., how she was so smart, so pretty.

  Then one evening I came by Vee’s room and she was gone, no bed, the room just clean, antiseptic. She’d never once woken to accuse me.

  Still, I’ve tried to pay my debts all the way around, raising Elsie, helping with P. B., sending her money.

  I know—that wasn’t enough.

  There was often a Vee at the center of my stories, not the gossip columns but the ones I wrote under another name. She was always the sore spot, more than anybody else, the thing that kept me trying to do better, though I didn’t like to touch that.

  ON rare days now, I roll through the city, conveyed by the dwindling number of writers still interested in documenting my charm. I try to give them what they want, the eight-decade insider’s swing-slang curatorial tour. I craft my stories to support their point—sometimes, that San Francisco still defines “cool,” that it always will, and others, more of this now, that it’s fallen, too crass to recover. This is what their readers want. Hello, kids, I wrote those scripts, dozens of times over, eighty years of gossip columns behind me. I was the original, the three-dot hipster, inventing the shifting state of this city in limited digits. Telling the truth.

  Now my voice is reedy, but I have no choice but to talk. My fingers tremble over keys. I can’t control a carriage return. I don’t understand the computer they’ve given me. I speak into a headset to record this now, for myself, really for nobody else. I gave my first Royal typewriter back to the Prospect decades ago. The receptionist there must think I’m already dead, the way he describes me in a thick accent to the few who ask. Maybe he’s right. I require one two many splashes of bourbon in my coffee to enliven the now-slack face I crafted so long ago.

  In a black beret and a too-loose cream wool suit and pumps, I direct the young writers who still come around with their phone cameras and electronic notebooks to wheel me down to the old neighborhood, where the Prospect building still stands, now mostly full of digital drones, not writers. I tell them about the switchboard and linotype and the elevator operator and the bottles in every man’s bottom drawer and the boys on the bench and the constant haze of cigarette smoke.

  Then I have them roll me to Benjamin Way—yes, they did it in 1980. And that’s where I describe my pickled old friends, how they’d drink four-ounce martinis and I’d drink bourbon on the rocks, and we’d barter secrets and flick ashes and break promises over the long-gone, seventy-two-foot bar at Breen’s, torn down in seventy-nine, the same year Elsie decamped for Prague with my third husband, the publisher.

  Then these young writers take a picture of me in my dotage, filter it to look old, and post it on the Internet—me in my wheelchair, a shiny cane in my lap. How ironic, the old-school broad dispersed in the Twitter-verse. Huzzah.

  I bring them here to talk, I say, so they’ll know that the city used to be different. And that newspapers were. Some of the change is good, I say, some not so much.

  But that’s a lie. That’s not why I do it.

  I stop with these witnesses on this stretch of Benjamin Way to press a thumb on my black, bruised heart, to remind myself who and what my ambition killed. And the others it hurt that winter, when I was eighteen years old, about to land the best job in the best city in the world. I go there hoping they’ll find me out, report me. But they never do. I never let them.

  My ambition has led to this life, which has never been boring, never.

  If I really wanted to be seen, I wouldn’t hand them eighty years of Prospect columns under my chosen name. I’d take them east, through fog and hills and farmland and delta, where we’d stand on a levee, hot and dusty, the bitter sunny smell of tomato leaf in our nostrils, and, longing to confess, I suspect I’d lie about how it all began.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to Andy, Will, and Henry, for expecting me to be my own protagonist.

  Thank you to Kelly, Yvonne, and Tim, who showed me that the grit gets in you.

  Thank you to the writer- and editor-friends who read early versions of this manuscript, offering their generous, practical advice—David Corbett, Emma Dryden, Dorothy Rice, and Casey Mickle, who said I should be nicer to Momma.

  Thank you to the friends who read this before it was ready, to cheer me on—Beth McClure and Deirdre Wilson.

  Thank you to Baobab Press editor Danilo John Thomas, for seeing something in my first chapter and putting it in a beautiful anthology—This Side of the Divide: Stories of the American West—alongside writers I urgently admire. And thank you to Soundings Review for accepting an even earlier version of that story, a yes that kept me going.

  Thank you to Brooke Warner, Julie Metz, Lauren Wise, Shannon Green, Jennifer Caven, Katie Caruana and the entire She Writes Press team, for their passionate, feminist expertise.

  Thank you to the workshops that showed me ways to write this story—the Creativity Workshop, the Book Passage Mystery Workshop, the Community of Writers at Squaw Ualley, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference (Helen Schulman squad), the Belize Writers’ Conference, the Stories on Stage Sacramento Workshops, Ellen Sussman’s Novel in a Year, and the Sonoma County Writers Camp.

  Thank you to writers, teachers, and friends who delivered intelligent critiques of excerpts of this book when they were needed—Jodi Angel, Kate Asche, Tom Barbash, Karen Bender, Ruth Blank, Kari Bovee, Mary Camarillo, Valerie Fioravante, Joey Garcia, Dana Killion, Marilyn Lanier, Kathy Les, Charlene Logan-Burnett, Amanda McTigue, Kel Munger, Geoffrey Neill, Bill Pieper, Tigh Rickman, Angela K. Small, Sue Staats, Amy Sedivy, and Maureen Wanket. Thank you to the wonderful workshop readers whose names I have failed to list.

  I relied on many works of history to learn about the people and places and period of this novel, especially Linda Gordon’s Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits and San Francisco in the 1930s: The WPA Guide to the City by the Bay, a Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration. Also essential were iconic columnist Herb Caen’s Baghdad-By-The-Bay, Robert Coles’s Doing Documentary Work, Dorothea Lange’s and Paul Taylor’s An American Exodus, and Paul C. Smith’s Personal File: An Autobiography.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  photo credit: Anita Scharf

  SHELLEY BLANTON-STROUD grew up in California’s Central Valley, the daughter of Dust Bowl immigrants who made good on their ambition to get out of the field. She teaches writing at Sacramento State University and consults with writers in the energy industry. She serves on the advisory board of 916 Ink, an arts-based creative writing nonprofit for children, and co-directs Stories on Stage Sacramento. She has served on the Writers’ Advisory Board for the Belize Writers’ Conference. She and her husband live in Northern California with an aging beagle and many photos of their out-of-state sons. To learn where you can read her stories and more, go to shelleyblantonstroud.com.

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  1. Scientists suggest that our experiences and those of our ancestors live on in our DNA, affecting our and our children’s health and behavior. Is that true for Jane? Can she escape biology or family history? Can any of us?

  2. What influence does Daddy have on Jane? What explains the way she circumscribes her loyalty to him? How do you feel about their reconciliation and his disappearance afterward?

  3. What do you think about Momma after learning what happened when she delivered her twins at fifteen years old? Does this sufficiently explain the way s
he treats Jane? Should Jane continue to tie herself to such a parent? Why or why not?

  4. Jane says the voice in her head belongs to her dead brother, Benjamin. What do you think? How else can the voice be explained? How does this voice affect what she does, who she becomes?

  5. What do you think about Jane choosing to raise Elsie? What kind of mother would Jane make? Would it have been better to leave Elsie with Momma?

  6. Does Jane really have to pretend to be a boy to succeed? Could she have earned the same opportunities as a girl? Why or why not? Does any part of her situation seem familiar today, or does it live in the past?

  7. What do you expect a masculine character to do and be? What do you expect a feminine character to do and be? How do the characters in the novel match or diverge from those expectations?

  8. Jane becomes a skillful liar about her parents generally, the fight that sends her to San Francisco, and her very identity. These lies lead to her lifelong career success. What do you think about her lying habit and skill? How does it help her, and how might it hurt?

  9. Grete Wright crosses boundaries to make the best, most moving, most powerful photographs, arguing that facts are less necessary than truth. Are documentary photographs or stories more powerful and useful with or without artistic framing? What do you think about the relationship between fact and truth?

  10. Some characters in the book concern themselves with basic survival in a time of poverty and hunger. Others work for worldly success. How do they get what they want? What are they willing to discard to win? Is it necessary? Is it worthwhile?

  11. Vee may be the only character who risks herself solely on behalf of others, trying to report the death of the hungry man. How do you explain what makes one person altruistic, when others focus only on protecting themselves or those in their family?