Rejection
I’m expecting my writing teacher to be impressed with what I think is the final draft of my novel, Hogwash. I’d signed up for more classes to revise the book and learn about how to get published. I anticipate the teacher—the same one I had years ago when I was writing Shoedog—to say I’ve missed some big opportunities to change the world with my writing by not addressing the politics of environment-destroying agriculture.
Instead, she skips the politics and says it’s “entertaining,” but that she isn’t sure what my main character’s motivation is.
I know my main character pretty well, since she’s basically me. “She doesn’t have any motivation,” I say. “That’s part of her character.”
“It’s not how much motivation; it’s what motivates her that I’m wondering,” she says. “Anyway, she has a lot more motivation than you give her credit for.”
I wonder if that could be true.
Her other main comment is that I still have work to do to develop “a professional interest” in my characters.
Even though it’s a different novel, there’s a father character just like in Shoedog who ignores his family and likes to golf a lot. There’s also a hoarder.
“You have to let your characters have feelings,” she says. “Even people who like to golf a lot have feelings. And people who won’t part with old possessions do too.”
She says she could give me some writing exercises so I could explore themes of isolation and loss in order to develop this professional interest instead of having the narrative voice of a female Ben Stein.
I decide I’m not doing any more work on it, and ask her for recommendations on agents. She gives me some, and gives me the kind of smile my mom and Goli Joon give me when they resign themselves to letting me learn my own lessons. I had been thinking that once I got an agent and we sold the book, I would come to her for a glowing blurb for the back cover. My teacher has Carol Bly’s recommendation on the back of her book, and it just seemed right that I would get hers on mine. But now I don’t think I’ll ask.
I submit the novel to some agents and publishers, and once it’s out of my hands, all of my energy collapses. When I’m not at work, drafting proposals for a curriculum on mastitis in dairy cows, I’m home in bed in the dark, letting Simeen watch the Teletubbies with Goli Joon and waiting to find out if there is any hope for me at all.
Calhoun
This is the summer of 2001, when all our tomatoes rot, in the garden and on the counter. Goli Joon shares a garden plot down the street at Firoozeh’s apartment building now. She lives with us but spends more and more time there, and as happy as that should make me, I feel abandoned, slighted. She had helped me and Naveed get the garden started, then when everything took off she started harvesting produce at Firoozeh’s place instead of here. Naveed picks the vegetables, but he doesn’t cook more than once or twice a week.
I haven’t been cooking at all. Like a writer’s block, I have a cooking block. I can’t think of anything I want to cook or eat.
Cucumbers and eggplants turn to slime on the kitchen counter. Fruit flies take over. The herbs dry up and turn brown. I feed Simeen things from the refrigerator and we buy take-out food. Every week, we eat pizza, tacos, and gyros sandwiches, and Chinese, Vietnamese, and Thai. We eat pasta salads and chocolate cream pies from Byerly’s, and we’re grateful when Goli Joon stays at our place to cook or invites us to eat at Firoozeh’s.
One night Goli Joon asks Naveed why I haven’t been cooking, and when he says I’m just too tired, she asks him if I should see her old psychiatrist. I tell Naveed I’m just really tired, and that I’m in a bad mood because of work. “Join the club,” he says, but then he rubs my shoulders until I soften.
My boss took a supervision course while I was on vacation. In place of his previously rude and unappreciative self, I came back to a different person, and when I see how he has changed, I realize that he must have really wanted to change all along. I open my email and instead of his old demands and put-downs, it says, “Thank you for your great work on the manure management proposal! You did a great job of keeping it realistic and positive!”
Two years in this job, and this is my highest accomplishment: pig poop. The proposal was nothing but bullet points, for a curriculum made up of a bunch more bullet points—burned onto a CD-Rom along with some video clips of foaming manure and interactive quiz questions so that we can market it as multimedia.
Suddenly Melinda’s long, suicidal voicemails don’t seem so absurd.
I’m supposed to feel lucky to have a job, to have the privilege I have. Believe me, I know. Half of my thoughts are about how fortunate I’m supposed to feel. Gratitude, Valerie! Millions of people would love to have a job like mine, a house, and a precious family. I am grateful for all of it. But it doesn’t change the bad thoughts chasing bad thoughts in circles in my head, wringing my brain and exhausting me. I’m trying really hard to perk up without going to a psychiatrist, or smoking something to take the edge off, or taking something else to be able to feel the edges of this nebulous, blob-like depression.
Simeen helps, when she laughs, when she reaches out to me and wraps her tiny hands around my neck. The running, although I can still only do one mile, seems to help a little too.
I’ve heard that recovering alcoholics and coke addicts turn to running, and former potheads turn to yoga. But not me. In five more years I will be the only person I know who does not do yoga—except for Savi, and I will think it’s ironic that the only other person I know who doesn’t practice Indian yoga is my one and only Hindu friend. But running is okay. I know walking is just as good, but I’m proud that I can run a mile. Sometimes I can walk after the first mile and then run another one.
Maybe I have more motivation than I give myself credit for.
I also try to get my act together by learning to keep a budget and pay my bills on time, and I’ve even started a Roth IRA for my retirement. Maybe I’m finally growing up, Naveed teases. I tell him I’m trying to prepare for when I’m a successful novelist and the money starts coming in. I’ll need to manage it well.
Laura wants to encourage me in all this, so when I tell her I’m going to walk and jog around Lake Calhoun with Simeen in the stroller, she brings Bella and her jogging stroller to meet me. She jogs a full lap around Calhoun first, while Simeen and I stroll with our clunky Graco stroller. I watch her run off, her tight figure after having a baby a sharp contrast to my softening muffin-top belly rising up over the top of my hip-hugger sweatpants. When she comes back around she slows down and I speed up so we’re both walking fast. It’s a cool-down for her and I’m still warming up.
As we find our pace, I vent to Laura a little bit about Naveed and his hoarding, and how he really needs to quit buying shit now that we’re paying twelve hundred dollars a month for the daycare that we used to get for free.
“Ty isn’t always easy to live with either,” she confides. I think she’s just trying to make me feel better. Ty hand-cranks fresh pasta and none of his family members have ever moved into their house.
We keep walking, and the girls begin to babble with each other, pointing at puppies and geese. Eventually, we start talking about our parents. “Dad wishes they never would have gotten the divorce,” Laura says.
“Sure, he says that now,” I say. “Regrets are so easy. But he had the chance and he didn’t pay any attention to her. He wouldn’t even take her to a movie.”
“Mom didn’t divorce him just because he was a stick-in-the-mud. She just married too young. She needed to redo her young adulthood.”
“But she didn’t do that—not really,” I say. “I mean, she found running. She bought that little house. But then she just found other men, and then Bruce.”
“You don’t have to be so cynical,” Laura says. “Buying that house on her own…that was huge for her. The running too. She’s run marathons. And now she has Bruce and they like to do the same things.”
We stop and sit down
at the beach and let the girls out of their strollers so they can play in the sand.
“Mom was nineteen,” Laura begins. “She was in college. Dad was working in Atlanta. They met at a parade, and he asked her on a date. Then they had a few more dates.”
I don’t know why she’s telling me this. I know the story up to here, and I know how they eloped to Las Vegas after just weeks.
“Mom had an ex-boyfriend. He would park down the block and watch her comings and goings, and he would threaten her and beg her to see him,” she says. I listen. This part sounds only a little bit familiar.
“He would then apologize and convince her that he would stop scaring her. That he’d only been kidding and he wouldn’t do it anymore. But when she met Dad, she cut him off.
“One night, Dad dropped Mom off at home. He walked her up to the door and kissed her goodnight. He asked her to see him again the next day, said he wanted to spend the whole day with her. She said she would think about it.
“Lights were on in the house, and her mother’s favorite music played on the turntable. Dad waited for her to get inside, and then he started driving back to his apartment. But then something felt wrong. He turned back.”
Laura pauses, gives me a minute to fill in the gaps. “Mom’s ex-boyfriend had gotten into the house.”
I say it as if I’ve always known, and Laura nods.
“Her parents weren’t really home. He’d turned on the lights and put the music on,” Laura says. “Then he’d waited in the laundry room. When our Dad drove away, he came out. He said he loved her too much to let her waste her life without him.”
“So then dad came back, and he saved her?” I ask. She pauses.
“He scared him off just in time.” Laura looks to the left though, like she’s not sure. Or like she’s not sure what she was supposed to say or not say.
Bella puts a handful of sand in her mouth and Laura jumps up to go wipe it out while I sit there in the sand, just clutching a handful of it and feeling the grains slip out from between my fingers. Laura doesn’t have to tell me the rest. A memory comes to me vaguely. I think Mom has tried to tell me about this, but I didn’t let her.
“Did they call the police?” I ask, thinking about Uncle Andy. If only he hadn’t been just a teenager. If only he’d already been a cop then.
“Yes, but they didn’t do anything.” Laura has to go back and wipe more sand out of the baby’s mouth. “People didn’t really want to make a big deal out of things like that back then. They thought it sounded almost romantic, but Dad knew she had to get away.”
“So then what?” I ask.
“Mom packed a suitcase and went back with Dad to his apartment. He went to work to ask for a week off and a transfer to Minnesota. They gave it to him, along with a salary advance the same day—he just had to go to accounting and they wrote him a check.”
Laura hands the babies a couple of toys from her diaper bag, which starts a fight because they both want the one that can scoop sand. Laura has another scooping toy, and takes it out so they each have one.
I’d always heard our dad say our mom had been the valedictorian of her high school class. She could have become a doctor. But she didn’t want to go back to college after leaving Atlanta, and Laura had been born a year later.
We already knew the part in between Atlanta and Minnesota—the part where they get married at a little chapel in Las Vegas and Mom wears a dress she buys for twelve dollars at the shop across the street. That’s the only story we knew before and we always thought it was so romantic, especially because in the wedding portrait the chapel staff took of them, our auburn-haired mother looks as beautiful and glamorous as a movie star in that cheap dress, leaning into our blonde father.
There’s a place in a man’s heart no blonde can go. I think about his second wife, Wanda. She didn’t get there. Dad and Wanda have separated, and Dad’s living at his cabin.
I ask Laura how she knows all of this, and she says our mom and Neil have both talked to her about it. They wanted me to understand how miraculous it was that their marriage had lasted almost twenty-five years, instead of thinking of it as so terrible that they had gotten divorced. After all, they’d only been dating for two weeks, and only eloped because they couldn’t have escaped together any other way.
“Mom wants you to accept Bruce better than you do,” she says, “and to understand that even Dad accepts Bruce because he just wants Mom to be happy.”
“I guess he’s better than some of the other guys,” I say. “Remember Charlie?”
I know Mom and Bruce are happy now. I know that every time I see them in their ridiculous matching shirts and matching belted jeans, getting ready to go out line-dancing. Mom and Dad didn’t choose to just stick it out, and that’s okay. I just wish Dad could have changed a little bit. I don’t like how he’s so alone, how he puts himself into solitary confinement like that.
“Dad should be closer with us,” I say. “He doesn’t have to be alone so much like that.”
“His friends are around. His golf buddies,” Laura says. “He’s fine.”
She suggests that now I should go and do my run around the lake, and she will stay back with the kids so that I don’t have to run with that clunky stroller.
“Or I could take Simeen,” I say, “if I could try out the jogging stroller.” She shows me how to use it and helps me get Simeen belted in. The lake is more than a mile around, but I manage to run the whole way without stopping. It’s not easy, and I still wonder when it will get easy—when, if ever, I will experience that state of flow, that runner’s high. When Laura and her baby come back into view I look down and see Simeen sitting up in the jogging stroller with a look of euphoria on her face.
Letters
Two of the letters arrive the same day from New York City. Holding the letters, I let myself imagine a bidding war. After admiring the postmarks and return addresses of the publishers, I tear open the first envelope and see immediately that it’s a form letter. And so is the other one.
One of these rejections refers me to the new self-publishing arm of their company. It says my novel is a perfect candidate for self-publishing. For vanity press.
Then the literary agent letters arrive, those who bother to send me form letters refusing their services but wishing me the best of luck in my literary future. I line these letters up against a wall and study them all. The code that emerges from the collection spells out that I am nothing but a failure.
Wayzata Bay
I get Simeen strapped into her car seat and drive twelve feet to our mailbox, pull a stack of mail out of the box and plop it on the passenger seat.
It’s Melinda’s birthday, and she’s flown to Minnesota to celebrate her “dirty thirty” with me and a few other people. Most importantly, me, her best friend, she says. After all of this time, after all of her success and how far apart we are, she still thinks of me as her best friend, even though all we do is email and trade packets of articles and gifts (ninety percent from her to me).
Naveed is helping Matthew fix his catamaran and Firoozeh has asked to have Simeen for the day. Goli Joon is at Firoozeh’s place, and now that everyone is slightly more open about the affection between Goli Joon and Mr. Noury, he’s over there helping in the community garden plot.
I hand Simeen to Firoozeh, and compliment her on some thriving basil plants. She picks off a leaf and orders me to smell it. “Fantastic,” I say. Mr. Noury nods at me as he winds the vines of the kadoo tanbali—the lazy squash—around a stake. A big yellow blossom radiates from the end of one vine.
Mr. Noury turns to ask for some help with the plant from Goli Joon. He calls her his little basil flower, in rhyme:
Goleh rayhoon-am, Goli Joon-am.
Goli Joon inspects the pumpkin vines, her fingers moving along the curlicue tendrils, pulling a shriveled yellow blossom toward herself to free it from the rabbit-proof fencing.
“The kadoo tanbali isn’t really any lazier than the other kadoo,” she tell
s me, as if she’s picking up a conversation where we left off years ago. “It just needs more space and time to become what God wants it to be.”
I nod, liking what she says, wishing she may be talking about me.
“And look,” she said, pointing at a little green pumpkin orb growing under the shriveled yellow blossom. “A flower dies, but a baby is not far behind.”
Nobody else is there in the beach parking lot, so I sit in the car waiting, getting madder and madder and wondering if Melinda is going to screw me over this time or not.
The stack of mail sits on the passenger seat, so I glance through it as I wait. There’s one more publisher letter in there. This one has a Minneapolis return address and my heart rises in my chest. A local publisher, maybe they will like my book better than those New Yorkers. It is, after all, a Minnesota story.
But it’s another rejection, albeit this one is not a form letter. The submissions editor writes that he likes some things about my novel, and even wonders if I have any other novels that I would like to submit. There are some flaws in this manuscript that make it impossible for him to currently evaluate for publication.
I throw the letter on the floor and look around for Melinda, hoping that she doesn’t come. A boat ride doesn’t sound fun anymore. As I’m about to drive away, a limousine pulls in to the parking lot and Melinda jumps out.
“Hey, like our wheels?” she asks. She explains that some others wanted to meet at Lord Fletcher’s; she’s planning on avoiding DWIs and thought a limo would be a better start to her party than a taxi.
I think for a second and then remember that I do not want to bring my purse on the houseboat. I still mourn the loss of my pink and green Wayzata tote bag and Ray Bans that fell into Lake Minnetonka one summer during high school. I don’t want my car keys and wallet to join them.
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