“Thank you,” said Grandma. “I am just worn-out. Diane doesn’t understand how hard this has been on me. Henry’s not right in the head since that stroke. I have to do everything now. He leaves it all to me.”
“Would you like some corn on the cob?” asked Miss Octavia.
“Yes, that would be fine—you don’t have to wait on me. Oh, where did you get those beautiful ears of corn this time of year?”
“That comes from my mother’s garden,” said Miss Octavia. “I got in the habit of freezing them because my son, Charles, he loved corn on the cob. But after he got back from his duty in Afghanistan, he wouldn’t touch it. These days, I can’t get rid of it.”
“I grew up on a farm,” said Grandma. “My daddy grew corn.” Her face softened, remembering a happier time in her life.
Grandma was gnawing into her second ear of corn when Diane and Papa came in.
“I took him around back to show him the playhouse,” said Diane.
“It’s fantastic,” said Papa. “Y’all should go outside and see that thing. It’s two stories high. There’s a playroom on the first floor for Max, and an office on the second floor for Aris.” He smiled at us. “Penn is even putting windows in. I’m going to give him some money for glass.”
“What about the lawn mower?” asked Grandma. “You were worried about that. Where are they going to put the lawn mower with all that gasoline?”
“What lawn mower?” asked Papa.
“The lawn mower!” she shouted. “The one you bought for them. The one you use to mow their lawn, honey. You said it had to stay in the shed, and now they have turned the shed into something else. What is wrong with you?”
Papa shrugged. “I don’t care where they put the lawn mower. It’s their house.”
“It’s our house,” said Grandma. “We own it. We paid for it. You were afraid Diane was going to set it on fire if the lawn mower was in the garage.”
“That’s crazy,” said Papa.
“Crazy how? All you have to do is tell her. She doesn’t listen to me.”
“Why not?”
“Henry! Have you lost your mind?” She looked at me and Miss Octavia and then out in the yard at Penn and Charles and Max. “He’s lost his mind,” she said to all of us.
Papa came to the table with a plateful of chocolate cake and sat down.
“That’s a sharp hat you’re wearing, Aris,” he said. “That looks like the hat your daddy used to wear, up in Alaska.”
“Henry! What are you doing?” cried Grandma. “You can’t eat all that cake. Put that back. That’s for dessert.”
Papa took a bite of cake. He licked his lips. “I can do whatever I want,” he said, laughing. “This is the best chocolate cake I’ve ever had in my life.” Then he stood up and looked through the French doors. “There he is. Look, Diane, he’s building you a house. He needs to paint it, though. Don’t we have some paint in the garage?”
He shuffled out to the garage and came back in a few minutes later with the can of purple paint. He said, “My! Wasn’t that a pretty color.”
After our guests had all left, except for Penn, I went outside. There was an eerie silence in the yard. Where was everyone? Even Max had disappeared. Looking around the empty backyard with the purple playhouse where a shed used to stand, I felt a moment of panic. Everything was changing. It was changing right before my eyes, faster than I could write it down. Diane was wrong. You could not “address the whole underlying issue of chaos to design a streamlined space.” You could not move that fast. Maybe God could look at a heap of Legos and zap! But human beings? Any novelist can tell you that character study inevitably reveals some poor sucker hanging on by a thread.
“Diane!” I called. No answer.
“Hello!” I called. “Is anybody out here?” Penn and Max came around the corner of the house, where they had been washing out the paintbrushes.
“Where is Diane?”
“She’s in there,” Penn said, inclining his head toward the playhouse.
Diane was standing in the dwarf-sized door of the playhouse, looking out at us. The doorframe fit perfectly around her, like a picture frame, but the house was too small for her. She looked as though she could lift the entire building on her back and walk off like a turtle.
“There’s still some work to do on your office, Aris,” Penn said. “I don’t have the right size board to fix that hole in the floor, but I have to leave now.”
“No!” yelled Max. “Don’t go!”
“I’ll be back,” said Penn. He pinched the red ember of his cigarette until it was out and placed it carefully behind his ear, saving it for later.
“Please stay,” said Max. “Please. We haven’t finished working.”
“I’m done for today, buddy,” said Penn.
“No!” I yelled at him.
“No? No what?”
“I have abandonment issues,” I said.
“Plus, we like you,” said Max.
Facing us, Penn said in a hoarse voice, “What did I say? I said, I’ll be back.”
I wanted to ask him when he would be back. I wanted to ask him all the questions you can’t ask Penn. Penn, why do you do this, why don’t you do that? Penn, my readers would like to know, Who do you love? Who will you touch? How will you live if you don’t have any money? Are you lonesome, Penn? He looked at us with his silvery eyes shining beneath the faded brim of his cap, the closest thing to Jesus I’d ever seen. Then he turned, broad shoulders blocking my view, and was gone.
Two days later, we received a letter from Charles.
As I write this, my first letter from the Kanuga City jail, I am aware of my subconscious desire to emulate the greatness of a similar correspondence, Letter from the Birmingham Jail, by the Reverend King. My little note follows like a moth after an eagle in the great tradition of black men writing from behind bars. However, unlike the Reverend, and despite the spirited provocations of my friend Penn MacGuffin, who has already visited me here, I fight for no great political cause.
Ms. Montgomery-Thibodeau, Diane, you have read some of the story of my childhood. You know the pain I have suffered growing up in an impoverished home dominated by a violent, ignorant father. You know, as well, if you have read between the lines, my love for that man and the despair I felt when I faced him in his cage-for-life. For me to spend even one week in a jail cell—like him—is an inexpressible horror.
And yet it is through suffering that we receive grace. There is a small library here in a converted storage room, and among the Harry Potter books and gardening manuals, I have discovered Memories, Dreams, Reflections, by Dr. Carl Jung. You talked about Dr. Jung in our class, sharing his view that religion is man’s defense against God. With all due respect, as a Christian, that didn’t sit well with me at the time. However, when I saw the author’s photo on the back of the book—an older man wearing his glasses pushed up on his forehead, smiling with his eyes at the reader—I knew I had found a friend.
Diane, as I confessed to you the other day, despite the wonderful things I learned writing the essays you assigned, I have no ambitions to become a writer. As I read Memories, Dreams, Reflections, my decision to join the ministry is confirmed, and I grow more convinced with every line that I have found my next teacher. Dr. Jung states that he never believed in God—how could he believe in something that simply exists? We do not say, “I believe in the sun.” I am sure Penn and I will go around the boxing ring with this one, and I look forward to our next match! I do not judge my friend Penn for his disbelief. I met several atheists while I was stationed in Afghanistan. In fact, it was there, where I earned the nickname “Preacher,” that I first felt my calling to serve the Lord. Carl Jung tells us that he never experienced the absence of God anywhere on earth except in the church. You can imagine how the revelation affects me—I aspire to build the church he would attend.
Please send my regards to your wonderful parents, to the enchanting Aris, and to that fine young man Max.
Y
ours in Christ,
Charles
DENOUEMENT
“Have you thought of an ending?”
“Yes, several, and all are dark and unpleasant,” said Frodo.
“Oh, that won’t do!” said Bilbo. “Books ought to have good endings. How would this do: and they all settled down and lived together happily ever after?”
“It will do well, if it ever came to that,” said Frodo.
“Ah!” said Sam. “And where will they live? That’s what I often wonder.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien,
The Fellowship of the Ring
“I thought your novel was supposed to be finished,” says Max, looking over my shoulder as I type at the kitchen table.
“I’m wrapping it up,” I tell him. Reading over my last chapter is difficult with Max breathing in my ear, drumming his fingers on the table. “Max,” I remind him for the millionth time, “you’re in my personal space.”
According to Wikipedia, personal space ranges from eighteen inches to four feet. My bubble is right at four feet. As you probably know by now, that distance is hard to find in our house. I haven’t used my under-the-bed office since I read “Greensleeves.” I don’t even like to lie on top of my bed. In some weird way, it seems like Mr. Lafontaine is under there, along with the red-haired driver of the logging truck, Grandma on her bad days, and now, Judge Burr Wiglett. They are all rolled up together, all those shadow selves, in one under-the-bed monster.
“Isn’t Day 30 gone?” Max asks.
“This is Day 30. I have time.”
“How much time?”
“Several hours.”
“Three hours?”
“Stop it, Max! We have enough control freaks in this family.” With my elbows resting on the table, I drop my head in my hands and imagine myself sobbing on Dr. Dhang’s divan.
“Aris,” says Max, pulling on my arm. “Are you okay? Why are your eyes closed? Are you sad? Are you falling asleep? Wake up, Aris.” When I open my eyes, he says, “You can finish your novel in your office now. I nailed a small piece of wood over the hole in your floor so you won’t fall through.”
Outside, after taking a deep sniff of fresh wood shavings, I swivel both earmuffs of the mad bomber hat over my ears. It is getting cold. Ghost Daddy will have to communicate with me as best he can. After climbing the ladder to my new office, I haul my laptop up on the dumbwaiter and sit cross-legged on the floor. “God Is, God Isn’t” has worn off both of my shoes, so I am back where I started. Or, perhaps, according to Ms. Chu, I have spiraled above that point? I look down, through the hole Max sawed in his ceiling, around the stick he nailed over it, into his Lego room below. As I gaze into the colorful piles of plastic—a Legos Big Bang—and face the task of ordering chaos into creation, I feel the shiver of God’s madness.
On my screen, I tap out, It’s March 2 here in Kanuga, Georgia, that vale of soul making. As the sun sets into the clouds, the sky deepens into lavender. For a few minutes, the ragged netting of the trampoline looks like lace. All around the Orchard, laundry machines kick into gear, mingling the scents of detergent with paper-mill pollution and the first delicate perfumes of spring. The End.35
Silently, I read it over to myself. Then I read it aloud. It sounds good, but somewhere in the back of my mind, Diane’s voice minces the word shirking.
“Well, yes, you cleaned your room, but you were shirking,” she would say. Marching into the room, she would find socks stuffed in desk drawers, dirty laundry mixed with clean, notebooks kicked under the bed—evidence of the moral failure of shirking.
To distract myself from the panic of my deadline, I check all social media sites. When I see Billy’s face, my heart oh so briefly flutters one broken wing—I am almost over it. Sifting through my emails, I find an intriguing new message from Anders:
plz dont forget to put me in yr novel ok? heres what I wrote for the part about me this is a good ending you can call me seth
Seth drove up in his retrobuilt 1969 Mustang Fastback in Yellow Blaze with a fuel-injected 5.0-liter V8 generating 420 horsepower. Aris was waiting on the curb wearing a halter with her hair down.
“Want a ride?” he asked her. He thought it would be fun to go swimming.
“Okay,” she said after a minute. She acted like she didn’t like Seth all that much but maybe she did. Seth knew girls could be that way.
“You are prettier close up than far away,” Seth told her after they went swimming. She was wet all over. Her hair looked like long twisted ropes.
“That’s profound,” she said. She was always making fun of things. Especially of Seth. He didn’t care. He loved her half to death.
Thanks, Anders. That was very helpful.
Finally—once an egg sucker, always an egg sucker—I check Diane’s email. Her password has been “joegone1” ever since my dad died. I scroll through the ballyhoo: Lab parent meetings, organic food newsletters, a few pathetic Match.com cries for help. I am about to mark everything as unread and close out when I see the message from Miranda Delmar.
Dear Seller,
I assume the inclusion of your journal with the purchase of a used copy of Gone with the Wind was inadvertent, but I like your writing style. I hope you don’t consider this intrusive (how did the journal get in the package?), but I was enthralled with the stories in the notebook. I’m an editor at The New Yorker, and I would be delighted to read a manuscript if you have one. It sounds like you might have a memoir.
Immediately, I text Kate:
my mom isn’t a maid anymore she’s a writer
There is so much to do! I will have to remove Diane’s handwritten copy of “Greensleeves” from its hiding place under my bed and type it up for The New Yorker. Oh, the editing! Even though Diane is an English teacher, or was an English teacher, she makes a lot of mistakes trying to make everything perfect. Rewriting until feebleminded is one of the pitfalls of OCD. Then, of course, there is my own novel to finish. According to the clock on my screen, I have a good twenty minutes left before my deadline. I take another stab at the ending.
It’s March 2 here in Kanuga, Georgia, that vale of soul making. As the sun sets into the clouds, the sky deepens into lavender. For a few minutes, the ragged netting of the trampoline looks like lace.
I read it over, erase it. Hogwash. Should I mention my novel when I write back to Ms. Miranda Delmar? According to Write a Novel in Thirty Days!, connections can’t be overlooked. I don’t want Diane to think I’m competing with her, but a memoir and a novel are quite different. My novel will probably be marketed as a coming-of-age story, a bildungsroman, even if I don’t see it that way. Frankly, I don’t grow up in this tale. I merely survive. Due to nuances of the fourth dimension and the fate of all fictional characters, I, Aristotle Thibodeau, am eternally 12.5 years old, give or take thirty days.
Diane, on the other hand—well, let me just say that I’m proud of her.
The End
35 Diane told me never to end a story with “The End.” She says that’s juvenile. I agree completely, but this is a novel, not a story.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First, I would like to thank my A-team: Andrea Robinson at Vintage Books and Adriann Ranta and Allison Devereux at Wolf Literary Services. Adriann made savvy suggestions for this novel before sharing it with potential publishers. Her minute-to-minute updates kept me on a thrilling email watch. When Andrea took possession of the manuscript, I discovered an editor whose ebullient enthusiasm was matched with the relentless determination of a pro. We edited line by line in a correspondence so demanding and delightful that I saved it all. Meanwhile, Allison led a brilliant and successful campaign to sell foreign rights. To these three women, and all the people at Vintage and Wolf—thank you.
Before this novel met a paying audience, it rested in the hands of kind, wise friends. I am deeply grateful to my friend Shannon Ravenel for offering me spirited encouragement on early drafts. Shannon has read my work since I first began publishing and edited my two prev
ious novels. As I hacked away at How to Write a Novel in a dusty, rented room shared with a few pigeons, Shannon’s scintillating notes of praise kept me moving forward. I also want to thank my Friday Writers: Faith Shearin, Adrienne Su, Diana Rico, Tammy Powell, and Ray Atkins, who share their writing lives with me and accept my weekly reports. To my dear friend and reader Pam Redden, thank you for your laughter, your eagle eye, and your unwavering faith. Finally, I would like to thank William P. Clifton for loaning my character, Penn, a couple of his best T-shirts.
Many years ago, when I first had the idea for How to Write a Novel, I envisioned a nonfiction book on the craft of fiction writing, inspired by my phenomenal mentor, the late Max Steele. With this in mind, I queried some of Max’s other students, asking for their memories of Max’s creative-writing class. I would like to thank Daphne Athas, Doris Betts, Will Blythe, Clyde Edgerton, Mimi Herman, Alane Mason, Rick Moody, Lawrence Naumoff, David Rowell, John Rowell, and Bland Simpson for contributing notes and photos about our teacher to the blog http://friendsofmaxsteele.blogspot.com. I am forever indebted to Max, who would probably be happy that I wrote a novel instead of that other thing.
In addition to the inspiration and hard work of mentors, editors, agents, friends, and peers, a writer needs space and time to write. For this, I would like to thank the National Endowment for the Arts and Kennesaw State University for grants that afforded me the time to work. My sister-in-law, Leslee Sumner, has kindly hosted me (and my entourage) on literary trips to NYC. I am also grateful to the late George Pullen, who rented me that dusty office with pigeons for an unbelievably cheap price with the promise of acknowledgment here. You’re a good soul, George. As always, I am grateful for the support and inspiration of my parents.
Finally, without my two children, Zoë Page Marr and Sumner Rider Marr, this novel would never have happened. In addition to hourly inspiration, you have shown endurance and often tenderness in your forbearance toward a mom who writes. I would like to acknowledge Zoë (Z. P. Marr) for her illustrations in this book, and Rider for his generous offer to create the soundtrack when it becomes a movie.
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