How to Write a Novel

by Melanie Sumner

  (“Your father is writing his memoirs,” my mother says when we sit down at the table.

  “Ha-ha,” he says, clearing his throat as the young waiter comes by with our water. “It’s not that long.”)

  2. Write the funeral program.

  (“He was going to have a soloist at the funeral sing ‘My Old Kentucky Home.’ But there is a line in there about naked babies on the cabin floor.”)

  3. Plan the graveside event.

  (“We’ve paid for the plot and picked out the headstones, so you don’t have to fool with that.”)

  4. Teach your children how to die.

  (Oh no, they are telling me in those familiar voices, you hold the broom like this and sweep in one long motion. No, not like that! You point the blade away from yourself so you don’t cut your finger off, but when you set the table, you point the blade toward your own plate so the person beside you isn’t offended. Keep pedaling and you won’t fall over. Get up and get moving—keep your dauber up! Don’t keep your foot on the brake; don’t lay on it—slow down! You support the baby’s head with your hand like this. Don’t let the children play in the attic; they’ll fall through the floor, and you don’t know what’s up there. Tell the teacher you have a concern, but don’t make her mad, now. You’ve got to use a little psychology sometimes. Don’t marry the first man you meet—you marry the family. Pay every bill on time. Open every piece of mail; there might be a check. Don’t throw that away; you can use it again. You need a lot more kindlin’ than that for a fire. Don’t leave the dryer on when you go out—you’ll burn the house down. Don’t stay up all night. Look under the bed before you leave the hotel. You have the visitation and the funeral in one day. Don’t drag it out. They can’t sing “My Old Kentucky Home,” but they can play the instrumental after they’ve lowered the coffin into the ground—while everyone is walking away.)

  As I scooped the remaining journals into envelopes, stuffing loose pages back into the binders, I imagined myself as one of the book buyers. I would open the manila envelope and think, Oh, what’s this? Someone’s diary? I’d touch the frayed edge of the notebook, flip open the ruffled pages, check the address on the label. Then I would read it.

  A part of me wanted to keep the last journal. It contained a list of my dolls and a story about Diane’s own doll, Sheba-Lisa. That was a story of Diane’s shadow side. It should at least go to a good psychiatrist, but there was no one left on the list except Shalimar O’Doole, of 1020 Benton Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA, 15016. Shalimar sounded more like a palm reader, but of course you never know.

  I wasn’t even sure if Diane was finished with the story of Sheba-Lisa. What if she went to the attic looking for it?

  “We have to be practical,” I told Lucky. She cocked her head, then went to the window to check the driveway; dogs were always practical. Still, I hesitated. A creepy feeling started in my stomach and worked its way down to my toes. I was doing something bad, very bad. Had Diane felt like this when she got rid of my mad bomber hat?

  The dogs began to bark, Penn is here! Penn is here! and I heard wheels on the driveway. Eighteen thirty hours, on the dot. I dropped Shalimar’s sealed envelope on the pile of packages to be mailed. It was done.

  Tomorrow, all over the United States of America, little pieces of Diane—and me and Max, and Joe and Penn—would appear in people’s mailboxes. People would open us up. They would know us. It wouldn’t be the fake knowing of Internet dating or the pinched-smile knowing of the country club. This wasn’t the good-ole-boy clap on the shoulder or the old-lady finger press. It wouldn’t be the knowing of church, where we were all dressed up and arranged in rows like Easter eggs in a carton, or the way we knew one another at the Lab, with our eyes so worn-out from seeing one another all the time that everyone becomes a blur. It wouldn’t even be like family knowing, where you make the person up and try to fill them in. No, this would be knowing from the inside out, from stranger to stranger, like meeting characters in a book, but better.

  “You’re on the ball this morning,” Diane said the next day. She was watching me tiredly over the rim of her coffee cup as I loaded the stuffed manila envelopes into the car. I had weighed them on the food scale and stuck the stamps on before breakfast. When we pulled up beside the big blue mailbox on the corner, I rolled my window down and slipped each package into the slot, waiting for the satisfying plop as it hit bottom before I dropped the next one. Diane drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, afraid we’d be late for school again. I was worried sick that she’d look over her shoulder and say, Those envelopes look a little thick, but she’d stayed up all night double-checking the papers I had graded and was half-asleep.

  “Close the window!” yelled Max. “I’m freezing! There’s snow on the ground!”

  “That’s frost,” said Diane. “Where’s your jacket?”

  Max thought it might be in his locker. He wasn’t sure. Southerners can’t keep up with their coats; I don’t know what we’d do if we actually needed them. Freeze, probably.

  The deer grazing in the meadow beside the Lab seemed comfortable in the cold weather, perhaps more frisky than usual, but the ducks had gone into a huddle at the edge of the pond.16 On the way to the library, I stomped on a frozen mud puddle. The ice broke easily into shards that floated around my shoes: “God Is. God Isn’t.” The “n’t” was wearing off my right foot; soon both shoes would say, “God Is.” How do you feel about that? Dr. Dhang might ask me. I dunno, I dunno, I dunno.

  “Aris, let’s wipe our feet before entering the classroom, shall we?” suggested Mrs. Waller as I walked into English.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, and went back outside to wipe my feet on the mat.

  “Shall we?” whispered Anders as I slid into the empty desk beside him, which was, unfortunately, the only available desk near Kate.

  “There is no future tense in the English language,” said Kate. “That’s why she says ‘shall,’ which—”

  “Kate,” said Mrs. Waller. “Are you talking?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Kate. “I mean, no, ma’am.” She blushed. “I’ve stopped talking now.”

  I opened the book on my desk to use as a cover for my phone while I checked my email. No word yet from Ms. Chu on my manuscript. It had already been more than three days! I hoped she wasn’t sick or dead. What if she hated it and didn’t know how to tell me?

  Mrs. Waller announced that she would be returning our papers, but first she wanted to go over a few points. While she rambled on about critical thinking, “the intelligently self-controlled process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information,” I thought about Diane’s journals. Had the postman picked them up yet? Were they sorted and separated now—one manila envelope headed to New York, another to Alabama? I wished I had kept the one with the doll story.

  MY DAUGHTER’S DOLLS

  Stud Ken, in bathing suit, Puerto Rican

  Barbies, two containers, all women of color

  Kaya, a Nez Perce Native American

  Josefina from New Mexico

  Addy, an escaped slave from Philadelphia, circa 1864

  Her Royal Highness Gunnhild, Norwegian (“I know you like dark-skinned dolls better,” Aris said, “but I’ve never had a white one.”)

  DOLLS NOT ON DISPLAY

  Sheba, the fifteen-inch vinyl doll of color, circa 1973. This is Sheba’s story:

  Like the homes of many childless couples, the small brick house where my uncle and aunt lived in rural Kentucky held within it a certain stillness. In the narrow living room where they put the three-foot-tall artificial Christmas tree, decorated with matching gold and silver ornaments, nothing had changed since our last visit. The couch and chairs, covered in coordinating ruffled brown and yellow prints, remained in their places against the walls. On the mantelpiece over the gas fireplace, the blond, blue-eyed shepherd stared adoringly at the blond, blue-eyed shepherdess. Even the rabbit ears, which sat on a doily crocheted by
Aunt Peggy to protect the wood-grain surface of the television set, remained pointed at the same angles.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” said Uncle Earl, pulling his pipe away from my cheek as he leaned over to look inside the box I had unwrapped. “It’s a little nigger.” Then he laughed the big laugh that made his belly shake against the tight buttons of his shirt. Even though I loved his smoky smell and the rumble of his voice, blood rushed to my face as if I had been slapped.

  “I didn’t know if you’d like a Negro doll or not,” said Aunt Peggy, peering at me through her glittering glasses, “but I saw her on the shelf and thought she was just the cutest thing.”

  “What do you say?” my mother said.

  I sat paralyzed.

  “That’s okay,” said Aunt Peggy, leaning into her chair without pressing her hair against the backrest. She owned the beauty salon she had worked at since before she married Uncle Earl at fifteen, and even though she could get her hair done for free, she never messed it up.

  “She’s just looking at it,” said my father, smiling to everyone.

  “I can take it back and get something else,” said Aunt Peggy.

  “Oh no,” my parents protested, as they fingered the fringe of my doll’s brightly striped poncho, examining her red bell-bottoms, the chaste white panties underneath, her platform sandals. “Don’t take it back! What do you say, Diane?”

  “Thank you,” I mumbled. To show everyone my appreciation, I picked up the wide-toothed comb that came with Sheba—that was the name on the box—and began to comb her kinky black Afro. Silently, I changed her name to Lisa.

  I don’t know when I began to beat Sheba-Lisa. It started as spankings, administered in measured whacks on the bottom as a correction for some misdemeanor: She didn’t come to her shoebox bed when I called her, or she spilled her tea. At first I put her with the other dolls—gentle Beth, a thin rag doll with giant, uneven stitches across her neck; Penelope, an uptight vinyl girl who tended to overdress; and beautiful Heather, who looked like Goldilocks until you unglued her bonnet and realized that the back of her head was bald.

  These were friendly girls, always smiling and ready to give a hug, but they didn’t like Sheba-Lisa. They stopped talking when she came over, and they never shared their toys or clothes with her. Penelope stole her poncho, leaving her bare chested, and Beth refused to use her comb. She said it was dirty. No matter how many baths I gave Sheba-Lisa, everyone said she was dirty. Sheba-Lisa just stood there with that Mona Lisa smile on her face. I spanked them all that day, with their pants down, but I put Sheba-Lisa in the back of the closet and never took her out again.

  I felt so bad about Sheba-Lisa that sometimes at night I cried thinking of her alone in the dark closet, hated by everyone. Finally, I just wanted her to go. I hated having her there in the back of my closet, reminding me of my meanness. I couldn’t give her away; none of my friends wanted a black doll, and I didn’t want them to know that I had one. I couldn’t throw her in the trash can—I knew that dolls weren’t real, everyone knew that, but still.

  Then one day, Lashondra Johnston’s house burned down. Lashondra sat in the back of our third-grade classroom, so far back that it was like she wasn’t there at all. Sometimes, she didn’t wear shoes or a coat or have a permission slip, and then she would have to walk up to the front of the room.

  “Where are your shoes?” Mrs. Blankenship would demand.

  Lashondra would stare down at her dusty feet as if she had not, until this moment, realized that she lacked shoes. Then she would look quickly around the room, covering her mouth.

  Everything Lashondra’s family owned burned up in the fire. Mrs. Blankenship made us understand this—everything. Not a sock, not a pair of underwear, not a toy was left. We were each supposed to bring an item to give Lashondra. It didn’t have to be brand-new, but it should be something nice.

  When Lashondra returned to class, I expected her to look fire damaged, to have singed eyelashes or at least a smoky odor, but she was exactly the same. She wore the same thing she always wore, a cast-off ruffled pink Easter dress over a red turtleneck, and boys’ tennis shoes without socks. Her hair was uncombed, as usual. When Mrs. Blankenship called her to the front of the room, Lashondra swayed from side to side, the way children do in a choir. She kept her head down.

  No one was snickering yet, but you could tell it was about to start as soon as the first child, Missy Carlton, handed Lashondra a brown paper grocery bag of clothing. Lashondra was presented with lace-trimmed socks, still packaged in cellophane, shirts, pants, and shoes—bags of shoes, some of them hardly worn. There must have been twenty pairs of shoes piled around Lashondra as she swayed before us with dazed eyes.

  When a faint snicker sounded from the far back corner of the room, she glanced quickly over there, ready to cover her mouth. Then my name was called, and I walked up with Sheba-Lisa.

  “Aristotle Thibodeau!” called Mrs. Waller.

  “Ma’am?” I responded automatically, but when I looked up, I almost felt dizzy. I had been far away in the Kanuga public school system with Diane thirty-four years ago—Diane torturing herself, then and now. Other than Diane (and possibly myself), who would even remember a doll named Sheba-Lisa? Then I realized what I had done. I had packed one of Diane’s ugliest, guiltiest moments into an envelope and mailed it to a stranger.

  “Are you with us today, Aris?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I smiled hopefully as she handed me my paper. She folds the papers vertically so that neighbors, like Anders, can’t see your grade. I elbowed him sharply as he tried to look.

  “She’ll ask you to read yours,” said Kate. “She always likes yours.”

  “Nope, not this time,” I said. I was getting good at offhand remarks that masked deep pain—a sure sign of puberty. There was a big red “I” written across the top of my descriptive writing assignment. “I” stands for “incomplete.” It means F, but we don’t get Fs at the Lab—we might get discouraged and blow up the faculty restroom or something.

  I thought she’d like it. I had envisioned ole Waller’s mouth dropping open as she turned the pages. I’d be asked to read some of it at assembly. Maybe an agent or a publisher, or someone who knew an agent or a publisher, would be at the assembly, and I’d get a call. “Are you Aristotle Thibodeau, the author?” the agent or publisher would ask while Diane and Max and Penn were at the kitchen table, watching me. Oh, those dear faces! Those ragged destinies!

  “Yes,” I would say calmly into the phone. “Yes, I am she.”

  Wrong, X, Incorrect-as-usual, Aris. Mrs. Waller said that I didn’t follow the assigned topic, which was “Describe a person, place, or thing.”

  “This is definitely a Wally Attack,” whispered Kate as she read the red-inked comments on my paper.

  “I might be an actress instead of a writer,” I said. “No one reads novels.”

  “What’s wrong with it?” asked Anders.

  “I don’t know yet,” said Kate. She chewed on the ends of her hair as she read, then took them out of her mouth and examined them for split ends. “It needs either more detail or less.”

  “That’s helpful.”

  Suddenly, Anders snatched the paper away from us. Holding it out of my reach, he read aloud:

  “ ‘… as their Gimme Lean soy dogs slid across each other in this restless, sensuous wrestling.’ ”

  Heads turned. Keller Williams was the first to laugh, a great, hoarse guffaw, immediately joined by Bowers Loudermilk and Frank Harris. I won’t stereotype these young men by calling them jocks. They were unique in God’s eyes, I’m sure.

  “Gimme Lean,” shouted Frank.

  “Gimme restless!” responded Bowers.

  Keller, who was not as articulate as his friends, stood in his desk and shouted: “Sex!”

  “Boys!” said Mrs. Waller. “That’s quite enough. Everyone, please sit down.”

  However, Mrs. Waller was too late. Samantha “I’m so rich” Livingston had bestowed her blue-eyed
attention on the boys. Samantha has her maid deliver a hot lunch from Arby’s to school every day. She carries Prada bags and flies to Palm Beach every twelve weeks to have her highlights done by a man who was once jetted to the White House for a hair emergency. I have seen Samantha throw a bag of change, including quarters, straight into the trash can. When she moves, the boys hold their breath. She’s not really even pretty, but she forces you to think she is. Some women are born with that power.

  “Really, Aris?” said Samantha. She surrounded herself in a force field of breathtaking beauty, and the room went wild.

  I don’t know what would have happened—probably a spontaneous combustion that left us all in ashes—if Coach Bobby hadn’t opened the door. In two strides, he was in the midst of the fray.

  “SHUT UP AND SIT DOWN!” his voice boomed.

  Instantly, the room went silent. My heart hammered in my chest. I am not used to the sound of a man shouting. I swear, the windows rattled. Lisette Fishbourne, a girl with thin hair and a nervous disorder, began crying softly into her sleeve.

  “I’m sorry,” Coach Bobby said hoarsely, walking over and awkwardly trying to pat her back. “I wasn’t talking to you.” He glared at the football team, who sat with their shoulders hunched, red-faced and abashed. “What’s going on here?”

  Everyone looked at the corner where the trouble had started—at Aris, Kate, and Anders, the three single-parent kids—products of death, divorce, and abandonment.

  “Anders,” said Coach Bobby. “Can you explain this uproar?”

  “Well, sir,” said Anders, squeaking on the “sir.” He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, looked at his feet, at the door, at the ceiling, and finally back at Coach Bobby, man to man. “What happened is … um … Aris wrote a really good essay.”

  SAY WHAT?

  Did that just HAPPEN? Anders stood up for me—whatever—and my essay rocks! YES. YES! OH, HELL YES!!!!!! Clichés can’t begin to describe how I felt at that moment. I had to excuse myself, dash into the girls’ room, and lock the stall door. “God Is, God Isn’t, God Is, God Isn’t,” up and down my feet tapped out a happy dance.