As Diane sipped her coffee, she texted her department chair at Kanuga Christian College: Due to a family emergency, she wouldn’t be on campus today.
“Mom, don’t lose your job!” cried Max. “We’ll be poor!”
“I’m a lowly adjunct,” she said. “My job is secure because no one else wants it.”
“They fired Billy’s mom.”
“She was denied tenure,” I said loftily. “Now she is a professor at Harvard.”
Briefly, I wondered if Diane could make that transformation—I could live next door to Billy! However, a glance at Diane in her overalls, with the bandana wrapped around her head, dampened that hope. Sometimes Diane looks like a twelve-year-old.
Now she assured Max that she would only miss one day of work to power clean the house. “You all can give me a head start by picking your rooms up before I take you to school,” she said briskly. “Get everything off the floor; I’m going to vacuum.”
At the word “vacuum,” Hiroshima looked up from her tennis ball and glanced nervously at Lucky. The vacuum cleaner was a known enemy.
“Removing physical clutter helps us eliminate the mental clutter that obscures our goals and objectives,” Diane was saying in her teacher voice. She paused and then went back to her Mom voice. “I will vacuum anything left on the floor.”
The dogs headed to the closet.
My room is standard purple. Walls, rug, bedding, curtains, furniture, clothes on the floor, backpack, hairbrush, stapler … all purple. Once, when Diane gently suggested that my decor was at odds with the earth tones in the rest of the house, I pointed out that my print of The Garden of Earthly Delights was flesh colored. Grandma calls this Bosch masterpiece “that orgy poster.”
“Are you cleaning up your room?” Diane called from the hall.
“Yes, ma’am!” I replied, pushing a pair of jeans with the underwear still inside them beneath the bed. I crammed some homework into my sock drawer. Finally, I straightened the muffs on my mad bomber hat and set it carefully on the shelf next to Zimmerman, who was overseeing my work with a satisfied expression on his threadbare face.
I was looking around to see if I had missed anything when my gaze fell on the dollhouse in the corner. It’s a three-story Victorian in a run-down neighborhood, and despite the fresh coat of purple paint, it had a sad look about it. Piles of broken furniture were heaped on the porch, and a car with a missing wheel sat on blocks in the front yard. One of the six badly dressed Devereux children was hanging halfway out the attic window.
Inside, I found dirty doll dishes scattered around the kitchen and a half-empty glass of lemonade leaving a wet ring on the polished Steinway. Grandma bought the piano for me one Christmas. She said it was the most expensive piece of dollhouse furniture she had seen in her life, but she bought it anyway. When you hit the keys, it plays music that you can download from iTunes. The memory only holds two songs. On the current playlist, we had “Here We Come,” by the Monkees, and “Greensleeves.” I played the Monkees because I didn’t think Mrs. Devereux could handle a sad song right now. She was slumped over in the bathtub, fully dressed, because Mr. Devereux, who has a drinking problem, was MIA again, and there was no peace to be found in that house with the children and their mess. I straightened up the nursery for her and put the baby to bed. Then I went back to my world to get dressed.
I put on my Lab white shirt (one minute) and my Lab plaid jumper (two minutes) and tied my Converse (two minutes). With the outfit out of the way, I stretched out on my bed to work on a sketch of Billy. I had been working on it all week, hoping to have it done in time for Valentine’s Day. His nose turned out remarkably well. He has a straight, perfect nose, but I was having trouble getting the braces on his teeth. No matter how delicately I etched the silver pencil across his teeth, he looked like he was wearing a train track on his face. Given my frustration at the moment, I probably didn’t sound as docile and attentive as Diane would have liked when she knocked on my door.
“What!” I yelled.
“Don’t use that tone of voice with me, young lady,” she snapped.6 “I’ll be back here in fifteen minutes for a room inspection.”
The longer I worked on Billy’s teeth, the worse they got. He began to look downright ugly. What if he really was? I mean, not ugly, but not gorgeous? The more I tried to conjure his image in my mind, the more it slipped away from me. Were his knees actually knobby? Didn’t he have big, splayed feet with weird little pointed nails on his pinkie toes? Looking at his photos didn’t help because I had looked at them so much I couldn’t see them anymore: Billy and me in the backseat of the car, sharing a pair of earbuds as we listened to my favorite Beatles song, “Hey Jude.” Billy on the basketball court, caught midair as he went for a lay-in (or is it lay-up?). He was the first eighth-grade boy to get visible muscles in his arms.
I texted him.
F2F? :)7
While I was waiting for his reply, I scrolled through our recent texts. When he first moved away, we talked a lot about missing each other and wrote “I love you.” Later, we wrote “MYALY,” “miss you and love you.” Then it was just “LY.” Eventually, that was shortened to “459,” the keyboard numbers for “ILY,” “I love you.”
Diane had started her diatribe in Max’s room: “Why do you have three wet towels on the floor? Max, something is growing in this dirty dish; it’s moving! IF I STEP ON ONE MORE LEGO!” I glanced at my phone; Billy still hadn’t responded—maybe he was already at school. I texted Kate.
Me:
Is Billy hot, IYO?8
Kate:
??? u should know.
Me:
just thinking.
Kate:
weird.
Kate:
NJJS9
Me:
trying to draw him.
Kate:
No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.--Oscar Wilde
Me:
Thanks. My drawing sucks?
Kate:
Oops. Not flaming you. See him f2f?
Billy still hadn’t replied to my request to FaceTime, so I texted:
Hellooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
He didn’t respond.
Me (to Kate):
He’s playing dead.
Kate:
Invite him to visit you in Kanuga.
Suddenly, my bedroom door swung open. Bach’s aria, on its fifth or sixth run, filled the air.
“Sweet Jesus,” Diane said. She began to rotate in half circles, pointing at piles of clean and dirty clothing, dishes, drawings and bits of poetry, lab reports, doll accessories, sundries, and collectibles. Then she took a deep breath. “Clean it up. Now.”
“Okay,” I said pleasantly, and sent a quick text.
Me:
Where would he sleep? House is teeny tiny.
Kate:
Couch?
Me:
Dog hair.
“I mean now,” said Diane.
Looking back, it’s clear that I should have made some effort to move my body. That’s what Diane wanted. That’s what she expected. I should have leapt off the bed and scurried around like a squirrel in the final hour before a blizzard, trying to gather those last acorns before my entire squirrel village starved to death. Instead, I said, “Okay, Diane, I’m coming,” and scrolled down to see if Kate or Billy had replied.
She lost it.
“Don’t use that tone of voice with me!” she screamed. “This room is trashed! Don’t you ever put anything away?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, but it was too late. Suddenly, Diane was everywhere at once in my room. She descended on my piles, which, however unsightly they may be, are the archives of my personal life—living diaries, so to speak. As I watched in horror, she rooted into the depths of these mounds, dividing my possessions into two new piles: “keep” and “toss.” “I never!” she spewed, picking up an Appalachian dialect a
s she morphed into Grandma. “I never in my life!”
“I’m picking it up,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Lawdee!” she moaned, and then she dived under my bed.
Please God, I prayed, don’t let her find it. Not that. In the following uneasy silence, I shoved a random sock into my nightstand drawer and pushed my hairbrush under the pillow. More silence.
Then, from under the bed—a dry heave. It came out as “Hee, huck, hew, hew,” like she was choking on an apple core. I thought, Oh my God, I’ve killed my mother.
“Diane?”
All I heard was “Hew, hew.” Finally, she emerged with a dust bunny over each ear, mouth hanging open. In her hand was the training bra with two clementines taped inside the cups. She held it at arm’s length because the clementines had gone soft and turned a kind of bluish green with specks of fuzzy white mold.
“Aristotle Thibodeau,” she said. “I cannot—CANNOT—do this anymore!”
Max stuck his head around the door. “What is it? What happened?” His cowlick was sticking up at the crown of his head. “My fluff,” he calls it. Sometimes it reminds me of the tuft on the head of a baby bird, but when he walked into my room that morning, uninvited, it turned into an antenna roving around my personal space. I wanted to flatten him to the floor.
“Clean up your stuff,” I hissed. “Or she will vacuum up your Legos this time.”
“What’s that smell?” he asked.
“Get out!” I yelled. “Now! Get out of my room!”
Diane dropped the training bra and fruit into the trash can and pointed at an expensive sweater that had somehow wadded itself into a ball and rolled under my desk. She looked around the room again. I saw it dawning on her that she had paid for all this crap.
“I paid a hundred dollars for this sweater,” she said, “and you threw it on the floor? Just threw it?”
My phone beeped.
“It’s Kate,” said Max, who was still hanging around. He picked up my phone. “She says that Billy could sleep in your bed if you both wear pajamas.”
“What?” said Diane. “You are not sleeping with anybody, missy.”
“Don’t touch my phone!” I screamed at Max. Then I turned to Diane and said calmly, “I didn’t throw it.”
She looked from the phone to me, and then at the sweater on the floor. “I can’t take this,” she said. “There’s too much stuff, too much spending, too much going on—!”
“I might have dropped this beautiful sweater,” I said quietly. “Accidentally.”
“Well, pick it up!” she shrieked.
“Okay, Diane. Okay, okay, okay. I’m picking it up. I’m sorry.”
“Stop calling me Diane. I am your mother. I am a single mother. I will have to work all day to clean up the mess from the flood and the rest of this house. Then I have to grade papers and do a load of laundry and help Max with his homework and get him in the shower and feed the dogs, and you are lying there, texting wayward nonsense, with this mess all around you!”
“Kate and I were joking,” I said. “I should have been helping. I’m sorry. I’m helping now.” I folded the sweater. Through the tiny window, I saw Mrs. Devereux hunched over in the bathtub; I felt her pain.
“I’m sending both of you to a private school,” Diane continued. “I pay for braces, birthday parties, and summer camp. I teach five classes of freshman comp at a Bible college, barely making minimum wage—getting no health insurance, no life insurance, and no retirement—to buy you this overpriced crap, which you wad up and toss like garbage!”
“I appreciate everything,” I said. “I know I don’t always seem like I appreciate the Lab, but I do. I’m going to work hard today, as hard as I can. Please don’t cry. Please?”
But she was crying. The tears ran out the corners of her eyes, across the smile crinkles, down her cheeks and neck, onto the straps of her overalls.
Max hugged her and said, “Mom, please don’t cry. Please!”
He held her tightly, as if she might disappear. I stretched my arms out to embrace both of them, and we let her talk it out. She was old and tired and ugly, she told us, and a terrible mother. The house, the mess, she didn’t know what to do. We lose things because we don’t put them away, and that makes us late for everything. It makes her late for work, but she hates her job anyway. The students treat the English Department like the customer service department at Walmart, and why is English so hard for them? They don’t speak any other language.
“I am overwhelmed with”—she looked around—“with us.”
“I know,” I said, patting her back. “I know, Merm.”
You might think, wow, what a loser mom. You might expect her to go AWOL on us, like Anders Anderson’s mom did. I imagined Mrs. Anderson looking at Anders one day and saying to herself, Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time, but I’m free to make a different choice today. Now she’s at a ranch in Nevada with other mature spiritual seekers.
Diane is different. Diane has grit. Grit, not to be confused with grits (for you Yankees), is a measurable quality of endurance. A couple of years ago, Diane had everyone take a grit test on the Internet, and we all scored in the top tenth percentile.
“You must have one good student at KCC,” I said, handing Diane a clean sock. “Isn’t there one student who wants to learn how to write an essay?”
Diane shook her head. “Not in freshman comp.”
“What about the boy who loves his mother?”
“You mean Charles Hutchins?” asked Diane. “In 1102?” She frowned. “I have told you not to read my students’ work. That’s probably illegal.”
“My favorite essay was ‘Mrs. Octavia Hutchins,’ ” I said. “The one about his mother.” I smiled to show my appreciation of all mothers.
She nodded. “I like Charles,” she said, and wiped her eyes with the sock.
It was raining on the way to school. As the water streamed down my window in the car, I felt a sense of foreboding. Even though we don’t make it to church often, I’ve hit the pew often enough to know what happens after the flood. Everybody goes to the ark two by two. What if you have a family of three? I’m thinking somebody gets wet.
We had to walk across campus to the library that morning, and guess who didn’t have a raincoat? When I sat down at my table, a puddle of water formed around me. Beside me, Anders Anderson said, “The bathroom is over there,” and did his snort-laugh. As stupid as it sounds, I almost cried.
Kate came to my rescue. “I know that boys don’t mature as fast as girls,” she said, “but really, Anders, you should see a professional about this. I’ve known you since kindergarten, and you are not developing.”
“I grew four inches last year,” said Anders. To prove it, he stretched his gangly legs out under the table and began to kick our ankles.
“My point,” said Kate. She turned to me. “I know you think you don’t like Jane Austen,” she said, handing me a tome with a froufrou cover, “but you really should read Emma.”
“I’ve tried Jane,” I said. “After a few chapters, I feel like I’ve been at the Kanuga Country Club with Papa and Grandma, fake smiling for hours.”
“I’ve never been to a country club,” mused Kate. “I don’t know how I’d feel in that setting.”
“Max loves it. He could spend all day in a golf cart, eating curly fries with Republicans. Diane says he just wants security.”
“The search for security—for a physical place in the world—is one of the major themes of Austen’s novels,” admitted Kate. She rested her chin in the palm of her hand as she considered this. Then she said, “Of course, she is exploring the idea of security in the context of friendships and relationships. I know the writing is old-fashioned—which I love and you don’t—but some of her advice applies to our world.”
“For example?”
“Well, you know how you were saying you can’t remember what Billy looks like—I mean, not exactly?”
“Oh. My. God,” said Anders, but
ting his head between us. “You can’t even remember what he looks like?”
“Shut up, Anders,” we said at the same time.
“A tandem shut-up? Okay, that’s not offensive?” he said sarcastically, and left the table.
“In Jane’s world,” Kate resumed calmly, “when the heroine begins to forget about a gentleman caller, he comes to the manor to visit. He stays for weeks.”
“We don’t even have McManors in the Orchard,” I said. Then I glanced around to make sure no one was listening, and lowered my voice. “BTW, Diane freaked when you texted about sleeping with Billy.”
“She read it?”
“The little person grabbed my phone and made an announcement.”
“Ergh,” said Kate, who co-parents a little sister. “I didn’t say you should have sex with Billy—I hope that was clear.”
Kate is very conservative about the human body. She wears her skirts below her knees and buttons her shirts to the collar. In her world, sex outside of marriage is taboo, even for old people like our mothers.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Diane was preoccupied with the mess in my room. She won’t even remember. I thought the pajama idea was good.”
“Of course, it depends on the kind of pajamas,” said Kate, chewing on the tip of her pencil.
“I was thinking about something in purple and gold. Those are the colors of his favorite team—I can’t remember the name. It’s either basketball or football,” I said, but Kate’s mind had drifted back to pre–Victorian England.
“There are cottages in Austen’s novels,” she said. “If the heroine is cut out of the will, she lives in a cottage until she lands a husband with a manor. However, these houses have at least four bedrooms, not counting the servants’ quarters.… In any case, you should give Jane another try. The setting is different, but relationships are the same.”
How to Write a Novel Page 5