Well, Joe, of course. After all, he had promised.
But would Joe really get around to reading a story? He was a busy manager, and I had never known him to read a work of fiction. He was just being kind.
(I really should get that ironing done.)
But if Joe wasn’t my reader, who was? Who would actually enjoy this story?
Of course! Valerie and Elena!
The girls had loved the little stories I had made up for them when they were younger. Now that they were off exploring the world and having their own adventures, I could still reach out and share an adventure that belonged to us alone. I would send them their own story in letters, a chapter a week—a story no one else had ever read.
Working on that story was slow going at first. I hadn’t written fiction in almost a quarter of a century, not since I’d had fiction assignments in middle school. As much as I had always loved books and writing, I had hated to share my stories. They weren’t for the outside world. They were the very things that kept me safe from that outside world.
Now, as I watched this movie in my head, I struggled to find the best way to capture what I was seeing in words. “Not right,” I muttered as I backspaced over half an hour’s hard work. “The sentences don’t lead into one another. They stutter. The image they create is blurry. And right here, the word dark is too . . . flimsy. I need a heavier word.”
Because writing isn’t just a question of setting down accurate images, as I had known from birth, and possibly before, if doctors are right that unborn children listen to their mothers’ voices. There was the rhythm of the sentences to consider, the pauses for breath, and the placement of critical words. As a story unfolds, the words have to flow like a river. That’s how a good book casts its spell. That’s how the words and pages disappear completely and the reader falls into the writer’s world. My literature-loving mother had taught my writer’s ear to listen for balance.
As those spring days slowly passed, I sat at the keyboard and marveled at what was happening on the screen. I would agonize for hours, barely coming up with more than a page or two of prose, and the whole thing would seem like a hopeless waste of time. But the next morning, I would read those couple of pages, and the scene would unfold before my eyes, just as if I myself were reading a book I’d never read before.
What happens next? I asked myself each morning when I came to the last sentence. Let’s get to work. I want to see what happens next!
That’s how the first couple of weeks passed: hours of struggle followed by moments of sheer excitement. Then the goblin King stepped in, and I lost myself in the story. He was so much fun to write!
My new hobby enchanted Joe. He sat down with that day’s new pages the minute he walked through the door each night.
“I don’t know how you do it!” he gushed. “This is the best novel I’ve ever read!”
“It’s just about the only novel you’ve read,” I pointed out. “You know you’ve never been a fiction guy.”
But that didn’t make the compliments any less fun to hear.
Valerie and Elena were thrilled. They adored getting their letters. They called me up and pumped me for information about goblins, as if I were a paparazzo who followed around living people rather than a writer who made things up. Kate and Marak were as real to them as their own friends were—as real as they were to me, in fact.
“When I get a letter,” Elena told me on the phone one night, “I run off with it to where it’s quiet. And then, as I read, it’s like you’re telling the story into my ear. I can hear your voice reading me the words.”
That brought tears to my eyes.
“Write lots!” she begged me as she said good-bye. “Write lots!” echoed Valerie as she took the phone.
After I got off the phone with my girls that night, I sat with that conversation for a while. I leaned in close and warmed my heart at it. Even though it seemed as if my daughters were far away, I could still sit by them in their rooms and whisper my story to them. We weren’t apart while that happened. We transcended time and distance. We were a family.
By the time the girls came home for summer break, I had written hundreds of pages and made my way like a machete-wielding explorer deep into the crisis of the story. Writing had surprised me yet again: I was not remotely in control of this process. My characters were the ones who were in control. It took all I had to keep up with them.
Nothing about who these people were or what they did seemed to be my decision. All I could do was spy on them relentlessly, until I learned things about them that even they barely guessed. Along the way, those characters taught me lessons about hope, endurance, duty, and forgiveness. Their lives were a very serious matter to them. How could they mean any less to me?
Each day that summer, Valerie and Elena dashed by my computer as they played their high-spirited games—sophisticated teens they might be now, but they still were young enough to play. As they passed, they leaned over my shoulder to read the new paragraphs. “Write lots!” they shrieked as they dashed away.
The short German vacation was over in just six weeks. Full of excitement, Valerie and Elena packed their bags again. They gossiped merrily as we made the trek to take them back to school, and they joined the boisterous groups of girls without hesitation.
“Write lots!” they clamored as they hugged me good-bye.
A few more weeks of quiet passed, with just the sleepy dog and cat for company, and the goblin King’s story was complete. I printed it out and read the whole thing through on a train to Paris while Joe watched sunny fields rolling past our window.
“What do you think I ought to change?” I asked Joe as the train rocked us gently back and forth.
“Why should anything change? It’s a great story.”
“I just don’t know if this is it yet, though. I need help with it.”
“But how could it change? It’s finished. It’s all already there.”
“No. That’s only one way the story could be.” And I tried to convey to his tidy engineering brain how the story felt in my mind: like a map, maybe, or like a country covered over with dozens of different paths. Just as the train and the highway both connected our city to Paris, so one story path instead of another would cause the whole feeling of the story to change. But somehow, it was still the same place in my mind. The same country. The same world.
“I don’t get it,” Joe said finally. “I wouldn’t mess with it. I think it’s fine the way it is.”
“Well, what do you think I should do with it, then?”
He looked very serious. “I think you should send it somewhere.”
“It’s not a bad story,” I conceded. “I studied teen literature in library school, so I know what a young adult novel should look like. And I don’t think I’m bragging here, either. It’s really not bad.”
“Then do it!” he said. “Get it published. You could be a famous author and make me a million dollars. That would be amazing!”
“Oh, please!” I said. “It doesn’t work that way. Everybody wants to be a famous author! Do you know how many people are trying to get published right this minute? Everybody’s written a book.”
“I haven’t.”
“Well, everybody else has, and they’re all fighting to get their name into print. That takes years of hard work, rejections, begging, letter writing . . . You know me—I don’t have that kind of patience.”
“Publishing doesn’t look that hard,” Joe said. “I was on the web the other night, and there are these publishers all over the place who say they can help you get published. One of them could turn your story into a book.”
“So I could—what? Use it as a paperweight?” I countered. “That’s not the way to get a book to readers. The publishers who get their books into bookstores aren’t waiting to hold my hand. They’re the big places in New York City: Scholastic; Simon & Schuster; Holt; Penguin; Harcourt; Little, Brown . . .”
As I said the names, they echoed back to me from my earli
est childhood, from long summer days spent sitting in the corners of offices, listening to the literature professors talk. I had heard many conversations about the New York publishing companies, about their mergers and ruptures, their tastes and trends, and their triumphs and disasters. In my childish mind, these institutions had loomed large but mysterious: the venerable guardians of society and culture, like noble families lodged in great castles. Their logos—the farmer scattering seeds, the sprinting torchbearer, the boxy double H—had seemed to me no different from the quaint images on knights’ shields in my mother’s old books.
There was the House of Tudor, and there was Random House. The main difference, to my young mind, was that Random House seemed to use its wealth more wisely.
But all of this was lost on Joe. He had spent his childhood playing Little League.
“Well, aren’t writers supposed to get agents or something?” he asked. “The agent does the letter writing and begging for you, right?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “I don’t know anything about agents. I guess I ought to find out how this works.”
When we got back from vacation, we both turned to the Internet. I looked for information about agents while Joe went through a stack of YA books from the girls’ rooms and searched the websites of their various publishers.
“There’s this book that lists all the agents,” I told him when we reconvened. “But it’s not at the library, and it’s not in our bookstore, either. I can ask my mother to copy the young-adult agents’ pages and send them to me.”
“Well, it looks like that’s the only way you’ll get published,” Joe said. “The publishers in this stack won’t give you the time of day unless you’ve got an agent. Except one—they’ll look at your manuscript as long as you give them a couple of months to do it. It’s”—he pulled out a Post-it note and consulted it—“Henry Holt and Company.”
“Holt? Oh, that’s nice,” I said. “They published Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain series.”
Even to the engineer beside me, that comment had meaning. Lloyd Alexander is my hero. I’d loved his Prydain books so much as a child that when the girls were old enough for them, I’d sat the whole family down, including Joe, and we had read them out loud together.
“What great books!” Joe said, his eyes dreamy. “Wouldn’t it be great if your book could come out from the same place that published his?”
I laughed. “It’s not going to happen.”
Nevertheless, I had nothing to lose except the cost of a box and some printing paper, so the next morning, Joe posted a bulky package to New York City. Then I got on the phone with my mother to request the photocopies.
A thick packet of copied pages arrived a couple of weeks later. I brewed an extra-strong cup of coffee and sat down to read through them. Page fees, commissions, percentages, extra charges, instructions on what not to send—my heart sank as I slogged along.
This wasn’t my idea of the venerable guardianship of culture. It felt more like selling a used car. This was exactly that uncaring world, that shark-toothed, dog-eat-dog world that was the antimatter to my worlds of imagination.
Market analysis and genre breakdowns . . . what did that have to do with magic and wonder?
Oh, well, I thought. At least I gave it a look. And I set the stack of photocopies aside and did other things. I think I may even have finished the ironing.
Weeks went by. The photocopies started to gather dust. Meanwhile, Joe kept talking about publishers and contracts.
“Did you find some people to send your story to?” he asked.
“Not today,” I said. “I don’t know. Maybe tomorrow.” And maybe tomorrow is exactly where my publishing career would have stayed. But that’s when it happened: that’s when something so extraordinary took place that it could have come right out of my dreamworlds.
The email materialized in my inbox late at night, like a disembodied voice from another dimension:
Dear Ms. Dunkle,
The Hollow Kingdom managed to fall into the hands of the editor here at Holt who would most appreciate it. I am a big fan of this kind of fantasy, and I very much enjoyed reading your novel . . .
Was I asleep? Was I actually reading this?
Here was no hard-bitten analysis of fees and markets. This was the voice of a friend, a kindred spirit, telling me what was great in my story—and what could improve. As I read her suggestions, I felt them fall into place in my mind. Of course! I had known those were problems, hadn’t I?
“If you’d like to discuss anything I’ve said (or haven’t said),” that magical letter concluded, “please feel free to email or call me.” And there followed the contact information of a real, live editor ensconced in one of those semimythical castles of my childhood—the actual number of an actual phone that rang on an actual desk halfway up an actual skyscraper in the heart of really-truly New York City.
Joe’s proposal of marriage didn’t sweep me off my feet the way that midnight email did. I wandered to bed in a rainbow-colored haze, in a cloud of pure, blissful romance. I was every bit as happy and giddy as any girl who ever went to a ball. All I needed was a rose to hold as I drifted off to sleep.
The school year went rattling by as my editor—my editor!—and I worked on perfecting Marak’s story. And every three weeks, Valerie and Elena rode the train home from school, changing at the huge Cologne train station. Germans from northern Germany heard them speak and thought they might be from Bavaria. Germans from southern Germany thought they might be from up by Bremen. But no German could tell that they were foreigners anymore, a fact that brought them endless amusement and delight.
Each free weekend, the girls would burst back into our lives and fill them with color and excitement. “Guess what!” Elena would announce breathlessly as she flung herself down the steps onto the platform at the train station. And, no matter how hard I tried, I could never guess.
If I was growing through my writing, both girls were growing through their experiences at school. Untidy by nature, Valerie was learning to enjoy the order and routine of her contained little world. She was laid-back and well liked, and her language skills were brilliant. It annoyed Elena to no end that Valerie seemed to learn German by effortless osmosis.
But Elena, too, was changing in amazing ways. Given before to anthropomorphizing objects and living a rich imaginative life, Elena had turned her attention outward, and her lively sense of compassion had blossomed into real goodness to those around her. She tucked homesick little girls into bed at night. She helped the older girls study English. Like Don Quixote, she couldn’t resist tilting at windmills: she took frightened classmates directly to Sister to plead their causes, and she fought pettiness and injustice in any form. Every penny of her allowance went to thoughtful little gifts.
A whole group of girls had flocked to Elena and nominated her their leader. Lively and creative, she set the tone for their free time: if she took up jogging, they all took up jogging. When I pointed out to her that she could be an influence for good, she announced that they would all attend daily Mass, and they lined up next to her in the church pew like lambs.
“It’s a lot of responsibility,” she confided to me with distinct satisfaction. “I think they would help me commit murder if I asked them to.”
By the time Valerie and Elena came home again for the short summer break, I had written three complete stories for them, and my editor and I had polished the first manuscript to a fine gloss. And late in August, in the middle of the night, I woke up my entire family one by one to tell them the news: The same house that had published Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain series was going to buy and publish my first book.
“That’s great news,” Valerie murmured. “You deserve it, Momma.” And she closed her eyes again.
“That’s great, Mom,” Elena said blearily. “Now you can make us a million dollars.” And she rolled over and went back to sleep.
As I tiptoed back to bed in the middle of that peaceful night, my heart brimmed
with happiness.
I’m so lucky, I thought. Except, there’s no such thing as luck.
When I was a young loner of a teen, I used to help my mother get everything ready for Mass. Priests would fly in every week to say the old Latin Mass for our small congregation in any venue we could provide: a hastily converted hotel room, or, later, a small recital hall. In those days, the Latin Mass was frowned upon as old-fashioned, and the local bishop disapproved it. The priests who looked after our congregation were a small missionary order, and each priest had a territory that covered several states.
One day, I was loitering outside in the parking lot, and I found a penny. I saw this week’s priest nearby, walking slowly back and forth as he read his breviary. Having nothing else to do, I brought the coin over to him.
“Here’s a penny for luck,” I said as I held it out.
His eyes twinkled.
“There’s no such thing as luck,” he said. “But I’ll be happy to have the penny.”
That caught my attention, and I took a closer look at him. The missionary priests were practically interchangeable to me; they wore their long black habits, and they no longer looked like people—they weren’t regular people anymore, they were priests. But this priest was only a young man, and in spite of his smile, he looked exhausted. He had flown in that morning from Oklahoma City, and he would fly out again in another few hours. He spent half his life crammed into small commuter jets on monotonous airline flights.
While other men his age were waxing their cars and taking out girls, this young man was spending all his time bringing the sacraments to congregations like ours. And what could we offer in return? We didn’t have the money to provide a pretty church. We barely had the money for his airfare. He lived out of a small suitcase, and the nicest thing he owned was his breviary. No wonder he was happy to have the penny.
I watched him walk away, turning the pages of that breviary as his lips moved silently to the ancient prayers. It hit me why he was doing that work on his feet. If he sat down, he would be asleep in seconds.
He’s telling the truth, I thought with a sudden flash of insight. He doesn’t believe in luck. No one chooses a life this hard if he believes in luck. And in that moment, my small, lonely, bitter world stretched and became a little bigger. I wasn’t quite the same person I had been, thanks to that young priest.
Hope and Other Luxuries: A Mother's Life With a Daughter's Anorexia Page 5