How to Write a Novel

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How to Write a Novel Page 16

by Melanie Sumner


  “Henry!” she hollered before anyone could answer her question. “Henry! They’re here! The children are here!” When Papa failed to materialize in two seconds, she said, “I don’t know where he is. He goes off and hides.”

  Their house is huge. It’s so big that they had an intercom installed back in the seventies, but Grandma never uses it, because she likes to yell.

  “Henry!” she yelled again. Two seconds later, she said, “I give up,” and turned to us. “I bought some Cokes and strawberry ice cream. I guess we’re having pizza for supper, if that’s okay with your mother. I know she’s picky.”

  “All that sugar and processed white flour isn’t good for them,” said Diane. “Have you read The China Study?”

  “The what? I’m sorry. This was last-minute. Who is this fellow? You never did tell me where you met him.”

  “Under a bridge,” said Diane.

  Grandma didn’t think that was funny, but Papa did. He was coming down the stairs with a big grin on his face. “Well, here are my long-lost grandchildren and my long-lost daughter. Coming to see your old Papa!” I hugged him, careful not to disturb the tiny Band-Aid on his bald head. Papa takes blood thinners to prevent a stroke, and this makes him bleed from the slightest nick. When I was small, I usually had a Band-Aid on my bear, Zimmerman, so this is a nice association.

  “What time will you be back?” Grandma asked Diane. “Do you want them to spend the night?”

  “I’ll call you,” said Diane.

  “I hope this isn’t a spend-the-night date,” said Grandma. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but your father and I think it’s important for you to set a good example for Aris. She’s getting to be that age.”

  Diane glared at Grandma.

  Grandma glared back.

  “You are amazing,” Diane said coldly.

  “Excuse me,” said Max, but we ignored him. I could tell this was going to be a good fight, so I settled into my favorite chair in the den, a mamasan with faux-leopard-skin pillows from the seventies, and dug my spoon into the pink ice cream.

  “Why am I amazing?” asked Grandma.

  “You have no boundaries,” said Diane.

  “Well, I hope you have some,” said Grandma. “There’s no reason to buy the cow if you can get the milk for free.” Having won that battle, she turned to Max. “What is it, honey?”

  “I forgot,” said Max. “Are we getting a cow?”

  “Come in here and let me give you a present,” she said, taking him by the hand. “I don’t know if you’ll like it or not.” He skipped along beside her, asking for a horse “to keep the cow company.”

  Papa patted Diane on the back and told her she looked pretty. Then he asked her if she needed any money. “Let me just give you something,” he said, taking out his wallet. “You might need to buy some milk. Do you have gas in your car?”

  “She has no boundaries,” said Diane. “I can’t put up with this.”

  “Well,” he said, patting her on the back some more. “Your mother is just that way. We all have to forgive each other sometimes,” he said, counting out crisp twenty-dollar bills. “She means well.”

  He looked at me and made a monkey face. I made one back. Diane pocketed the twenties and left.

  I spent most of the evening on Grandma’s manual typewriter. I like the way it makes a song of my writing, clackety-clack, clackety-clack, clack, clack, zing! The zing is the return key.

  “I see you’re still writing your novel,” said Grandma. “What’s it about?”

  “Well,” I said, and then I froze up. What was my novel about? I had no idea.

  “I’m illuminating reality as I transcend it,” I said.

  “Aren’t you smart.” She pushed the typewriter back on the table so it wouldn’t fall on the floor—manual typewriters sometimes dance while they sing. “You’re not going to tell me what it’s about?”

  I tried to remember the story statement I had to write for an exercise in Write a Novel in Thirty Days!, but all I could think about was how Grandma’s face would look when she was reading about herself.

  “Is it about me?” she asked. “Am I in it?”

  I fake smiled. Luckily, Grandma doesn’t wait for people to answer her questions.

  “Your mother wanted to be a writer once,” she said. “I guess she gave up.”

  “She’s not dead yet,” I said, and that made Grandma laugh. Grandma almost never laughs. Once, I tried to read her jokes from a Far Side book. Not a single one made her laugh, or even smile. She says she doesn’t understand jokes.

  I asked her if I could have the typewriter.

  “No, I use that,” she said, but she gave me a dusty black velvet hat with a rhinestone pin that her mother had worn to church and funerals. Max got a hundred-year-old coffee grinder that you crank by hand. We were instructed to return these items if Diane ever tried to take them to the Salvation Army. Grandma and Papa grew up during the Depression, so they never get rid of anything. Their house is like a time capsule. It pains them to hear Diane talk about Simple Living.

  “Now, don’t you get rid of these things I gave the children,” Grandma said when Diane came back (early) to pick us up. “Just give them back if you don’t want them.”

  “They might be worth a lot of money someday,” Papa said, carefully carrying Max’s coffee grinder to the car.

  “Money, money, money,” said Grandma. “That’s all you ever think about, Henry. You think the world revolves around money.”

  I decided not to add to the tension by telling her that the world actually revolves around sex. “We are keeping these things because they have meaning,” she said. “No one is ever going to sell them.”

  “We have to keep them in the family,” Papa agreed.

  I wore the hat to make Grandma feel good, but it itched and made me sad because I missed my mad bomber hat. On the ride home, while Max sat in the backseat finding things on the floor to grind in his coffee grinder, it occurred to me that the meaning of an object varies significantly from one person to another, and the question of ownership has historically been a matter of controversy. Furthermore, “keeping it in the family” is really a moot point since all humans are descended from a small group of Homo sapiens in East Africa. It would have been interesting to discuss this with Diane, but she was hunched over the steering wheel, scowling through the windshield. Every time we came to a stop sign, the car bounced with the pressure of the brake.

  After a respectful silence, I asked, “Was he married or separated?”

  “Yep,” she said. It’s funny how sometimes we all talk like Penn.

  I sighed and checked my empty phone. If Billy did break off our engagement, would I have the strength left to find a man for Diane? I wondered if love could just run out, like money.

  When we got home from Grandma’s house, we all went to our own rooms. We always do this when we come home. After prolonged exposure to other human beings, Diane and I have to rebuild our psychological infrastructures in solitude. Max, who leans toward extroversion, goes to his room because no one will talk to him.

  My room had slowly been returning to its comfortable state of disorder, but I missed the presence of Diane’s journals under the bed. Their absence created another big suckhole, like the mad-bomber-hat hole. Things were always disappearing in my life. Frankly, even though I’m too old for dolls, I missed the Devereux family. I missed the living-on-the-brink-of-disaster wonder of their world in all its shabby detail: the three-wheeled car, the sagging porch, the half-naked kids hanging out the windows. Poor, crazy Mrs. Devereux. Mr. Devereux would probably turn up one day, stuffed in an old sock that Diane had missed on a cleaning binge, or wedged into the corner of an air vent, one foot chewed off by a young Hiroshima. He’d ask about his family. What happened to the house? Where on earth did he leave his car?

  I found Diane at the kitchen table, drinking a cup of tea called Smooth Move. I made a mental note to hide it in the bottom of the tea basket before Billy
came to visit. I chose licorice tea for myself.

  “I thought you might like some company,” I said as I brought the honey jar to the table.

  She smiled sadly at me. “You’re my darling.”

  On the other side of the wall, we could hear Max in his room, grinding something in the coffee grinder. “This is really hard,” he was telling Fred or some personage. “But it’s worth it. You-just (grind), have- to (grind), keep-try (grind) ing.”

  “Grandma gave him something good for him,” I said.

  “Papa is right,” said Diane. “She means well. And she loves you guys.”

  “Does she love you?”

  “I don’t know,” said Diane, “but she’s been a good teacher. In the Buddhist sense.” She stirred some extra honey in her tea and passed the jar to me. “You and Max should go to bed. Children are supposed to get ten hours of sleep every night.”

  “I’m not a child.”

  “Technically, you are a child.”

  “I don’t feel like a child. I feel like your partner.”

  “Oh, honey. Dr. Dhang says you don’t need this kind of emotional responsibility. We need to let you have a real childhood.”

  “I can handle it. I’ll have a late childhood when I’m forty. I have big plans for us, Diane.”

  “Big plans.” She gazed into her teacup. She looked so pretty in the broken light of a chandelier with only one working bulb—it was sad that no one else could see her. “Joe could see me,” she told me once. “Until I met him, no one had ever really seen me before. Different people saw different pieces, but they didn’t add up to me. When Joe looked at me, his eyes had that light of recognition.”

  “So,” I said. “How was your date tonight?”

  “Ha,” she said. “Ha, ha, ha.”

  “Go on,” I said.

  “I asked him, ‘Have you ever been married?’ He replied, ‘Yes, twice.’ I took that to mean he was now single.”

  “Well, of course,” I said.

  “Men suck,” she said.

  “What about Penn? He’s already used to us.”

  “You know, Aris, the three of us are a family. When you and Max were little, I felt so conscious about all the four-square families in your storybooks: mom, dad, dog, cat.… I thought I needed to find the missing man, but maybe we are whole now, the way we are. We are a single-parent family of three.”

  “What’s one more?”

  “Penn is an atheist,” she said. “He smokes. He lives with his mother.”

  “We’re open-minded?” I suggested.

  She shook her head. “He doesn’t love me.”

  “Oh, Merm. How could anyone not love you?” I reached out and touched her short hair, warm and silky all over, like the fur behind Hiroshima’s ear. “You’re beautiful. You’re strong. You’re smart. You’re even organized!”

  “Old and fat,” she said. “Short and poor.”

  “Careful,” I said. “I’m looking at my future. You don’t want to discourage me.”

  “Okay, erase that. The organization, however—it’s an act of desperation. I’m a reformed slob. When I wake up in the morning, I feel like I’m coming out of a coma. I don’t have any idea what date it is, or even where I am.”

  I nodded. I knew this from reading her journals. In so many dreams, she was lost, driving through a fog that grew denser with every mile. She forgot to attend entire courses at some cosmic university of life. The hands of clocks spun backward. In most of these dreams, she carried a baby, sometimes two, and she was terrified of losing them.

  “You’re a survivor,” I said. I paused, wondering how to proceed with my argument for Penn. I didn’t want to diminish Diane’s self-esteem, but we had a PMI at stake here. At last, I resorted to one of her AA slogans, “If you stay in the problem, the solution goes away; if you stay in the solution, the problem goes away.”

  She smiled at me; everyone likes to be quoted. “Solution,” I continued. “If Penn moves in with us, he won’t live with his mother anymore. As for atheism? You always said people have a right to their spiritual beliefs.”

  “Penn isn’t having nice, quiet, personal beliefs. He’s a rabid atheist.”

  “At least he smokes outside,” I said, but I was losing heart.

  “I’m lonely,” she said. “I admit it. I’m lonelier in my hometown than I was in Alaska, and that is one empty place.”

  “We should move back there.”

  “I want to move, but Alaska is too hard. Beautiful, but hard.”

  “What was it like in Alaska?” She’s told me all the Alaska stories, but I always want to hear them again. I love to hear about my dad.

  “Well,” she began, “I remember one spring, just after the roads had thawed, your father decided we should have Easter dinner at the Arctic Circle. So we took a big halibut out of the freezer, which was just a box on the porch, and drove up Haul Road. The road was all broken up because of the thaw. After we passed through Fairbanks, we never saw another rig. Just caribou, eagles, and two black bears. Joe had already used the extra five gallons of gasoline we brought with us, so we really needed to find a gas pump.

  “Finally, at the Yukon River, we spotted a shed with an ancient gas pump in front of it. As we climbed out of the car, this skinny man came out of the building. He was as weathered as an old fence post, with a grayish beard, wearing four or five shirts. I will never forget the way he smiled.

  “He said, ‘Call me Ned.’ Some people out there had changed their names so no one could find them. It didn’t matter. We came inside the shack for coffee, of course, and sat around a homemade table beside the woodstove. Ned was crocheting.”

  “How old was I?”

  “Two or three. I remember that you were saying ‘Hot’ every time you came near the stove—that’s the first word Alaskan babies learn. Ned crocheted a little doll for you while we sat there, drinking coffee and talking. His voice was rusty because he hadn’t spoken to people in months. When we finished our coffee, we went outside and looked at the heavy, broken chain his dog had snapped on a negative-thirty day. We met the dog, who was mostly wolf. Everything around us was white and still. It was just the four of us, and the wolf-dog, in the world. Before we left, Joe hacked off a hunk of the halibut and gave it to Ned.”

  She paused and looked back into her teacup. “Do you know what I’m saying?”

  “We belonged,” I said.

  “Exactly.” She scratched the foil from a piece of nicotine gum and chewed it reflectively. “Down here, you spend your time sorting through categories: political party, religion, school, family, income … there’s no simple human connection. Even with family.”

  I held out my hand, palm facing her. “Human connection,” I said. As soon as we touched palms, the last kitchen light bulb died out.

  Back at the Lab, I was avoiding Ms. Chu. I kept hearing her words, something terrible must happen. As Kate pointed out, Ms. Chu wasn’t going to walk up to me and say, “Hi, Aris. Has your protagonist faced a situation she can’t handle, the outcome of which will change her life?” But she would think it.

  However, Ms. Chu has a highly developed sense of social context clues, and she left me to myself during library period. After recommending an Italian play, Six Characters in Search of an Author, she busied herself with several rowdy boys in our class who have zero social context clues. Drunk on their own hormonal cocktails, they were turning our cool, quiet library into a dark, noisy tavern. Anders nosed around the edge of the group, looking seedy.

  When he sidled up to me and asked if I had heard from Billy lately, I said sternly, “This is a library. I am reading. That’s what people do in libraries. Get a book.”

  Actually, I had not heard a peep from Billy Starr. During science, I found three new pictures of his “cousin” Tiffany on his Facebook page. At home later that afternoon, I discovered that Tiffany had followed him on Twitter and Instagram. When my cellphone rang, I jumped, thinking, He’s calling me! That was ridiculous, of course—m
y friends and I haven’t “talked on the phone” since third grade.

  It was Grandma, who rarely begins with “hello.”

  “I cannot get your mother to pick up her phone,” she announced. “I called her phone twice. Where is she?”

  “Taking a bath.”

  “A bath? I thought she was supposed to be at work.”

  “Oh, that’s right. She’s at work. Maybe you shouldn’t call her at work?”

  “Well, I can’t keep up with everyone’s schedule. Who is over there with you? Is Penn there?”

  “Uh, yeah. I mean, yes, ma’am. He’s over here.”

  “What’s he doing over there while she’s in the bath?”

  “She’s at work.”

  “Well, it’s late. I can’t imagine why she would be working so late. She’ll have to pay Penn a fortune.”

  My head had begun to spin from telling lies, so I didn’t say anything. Grandma eventually answers her own questions.

  “I guess she’s giving a makeup test,” she said. I could hear her shouting over the phone to Papa, “She’s not home yet. Giving a makeup test to her students. The children won’t tell me when she’ll be home.”

  Finally, she got down to the real reason she had called. She and Papa were coming over for dinner on Saturday night to celebrate her diamond jubilee wedding anniversary. “My diamond jubilee,” she called it, as if Papa wasn’t even a player. She wanted to know if we had that gold tablecloth she had given Diane a while back. She hoped Diane hadn’t thrown it away. She wanted us to put that cloth on the table, if it wasn’t too much trouble. Gold, she informed me, is the color of the diamond jubilee wedding anniversary. We might all want to wear something gold too, for the pictures.

  “Only queens are allowed to call their anniversaries diamond jubilees,” I said.

  There was a pause in which her feelings got hurt. Then she forgave me because I was under the age of thirteen.

  “Well, shoot,” she said. “I guess I can call my anniversary anything I want. I’ve put up with your grandfather for a long time.” Then she went into details about how he was losing his hearing and too proud to admit it and wasn’t any fun and didn’t like to go to movies and picked up after her all the time, just moved her things around so she couldn’t find them, blob blob blob.

 

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