We Wish You Luck

by Caroline Zancan

  Years later, when the New York Times did a profile on Leslie after a novel she published with a tiny press became a bestseller, we would understand, a little more, why she’d reacted the way she did. Why she loved the story so rabidly. Because, like Hannah and the unnamed narrator of “Broken Eggs,” she had lost her mother at a young age. That was the way the Times piece worded it. “She lost her,” the way you might lose a favorite sweater. And she didn’t only love the story, she loved Hannah, and not only because she had written it but because motherless girls are like white dresses and red wine, or mustard—they inevitably find each other, and will not be separated once they do. We didn’t know any of this then; Leslie was only an oversharer when it came to the present and recent past. We knew how many pairs of underwear she had ruined in the last year from not tracking her period, but we couldn’t have told you how many siblings she had. (From the same Times piece we would learn that she was an only child.) We must have smelled something feral and broken and searing to the touch in what she said, though, instead of just her normal bravado, because of all the things we might be tempted to hold against Leslie, both as individuals and as a group, this workshop isn’t one of them. Like the plan she eventually set in motion—one so daring and foolish and bold we still hardly believe it now—it was an unthinkable overreaction that somehow felt just right.

  For all their absurdities and lack of awareness, writers can also be very sensitive and kind, and Professor Pearl, who has likely seen more severe outbursts than even rumor or legend can spin, still didn’t cut Leslie off, though he did sit up a bit straighter, that much more ready to intervene if he needed to.

  “If you’re going to quote someone, quote someone interesting, whose stuff people still read and actually enjoy instead of only saying they do,” Leslie continued. “Someone who makes you feel things. He can still be old and dead and white. Like Hemingway. Do what Hemingway said and write like the iceberg.”

  “An iceberg?” Jude looked confused, and a little bewildered, but he didn’t look angry, and we still remember feeling something very close to sorry for him when reports of this exchange first made their way to us. He was a nuisance on par with gas on a long coveted third date, but he wasn’t mean, only clueless, and he looked a little sad. He wasn’t challenging her, everyone who was there agreed, he just really didn’t know.

  “‘The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.’ He said that. Like, that’s a direct quote, I’m not paraphrasing. Most of an iceberg—the majority of the mass that makes it able to sink a ship like the Titanic—is underwater. You don’t see it, but it’s there. And if you write really well, like, really well, a lot of the story is off the page, under water, but the person reading it feels it as strongly as if it wasn’t. Stronger, maybe. No not maybe, definitely.”

  “Death in the Afternoon,” said Professor Pearl, turning up the edges of his mouth just enough to make it clear that he was impressed, or maybe pleased. “That’s good. I think that’s relevant here. So what do the rest of you know or feel that isn’t on the page? That the author isn’t telling you directly here?”

  The rest of the workshop was friendly enough, as far as workshops go. Leslie didn’t say anything else. At the end of class, Pearl asked her to stay after, as wholly without emotion or affect as he said everything else, so Leslie and Hannah didn’t walk out together the way it might have gone in Leslie’s dream version of the day. But everyone who was in the room noticed that on her way out, Hannah went the long way around the table, so that she passed right by Leslie, and that the smile she gave her was direct, fierce but warm, the kind of smile you feel in the same place where that last line of her story gets you.

  * * *

  Professor Pearl is a gentleman and Leslie, impossible to embarrass though she was, was in no rush to disclose information people wanted just because they wanted it, so no one has even a seedling of how that conversation bloomed. If he chastised her, or comforted her, or asked her if everything was okay. If that was the start of their long, now legendary friendship, or something they had to overcome to build it. Whatever he said, though, he took his time saying it, because Leslie was fifteen minutes late for Penny’s meeting.

  By the time she arrived, making no more effort to be quiet when arranging herself and her belongings than she had when she was late for workshop that first day, the rest of us had already realized that the “ideas” Penny had in mind was mainly a T-shirt with our class motto on it. The challenging part about this was that we didn’t have a class motto, writers being wary of mottoes in general, often seeking to overturn or poke holes in the most familiar of them. While none of us would have even voted for a class shirt, given the option, none of us was going to have words we less than fully believed and stood behind printed above our names for all the family and friends of the seventeen people who would be receiving these T-shirts to see. And this was a problem, because Penny was proposing that all our names go on the back, right under whatever slogan we finally landed on.

  Leslie had finally reclined herself against her backpack at an angle sufficiently comfortable after a good five minutes of leaning forward and back, testing out various possibilities, just as Penny decided it was time to open up her grassy semicircle of authority to suggestions from the class, which was when she lost the scraps of control she had been grasping at since the meeting began.

  “I got it,” said Patrick Stanbury, whose six feet and three inches were arranged awkwardly on the grass in an as-compact-as-possible cross-legged position. “Just write it.”

  We all burst into robust laughter at the same time, which we had to bottle before it ran its natural course once we realized from Patrick’s wounded face that he had been serious.

  “What about that Pablo Picasso quote?” Jenny Ritter asked. Jenny had told us that part of the deal she made with her husband when she quit her job as a real estate agent to be a stay-at-home mom was that she got a home office to write in, and she seemed like the kind of person who would have one of those quote-of-the-day pull-off calendars on her desk. “Oh, how does it go? ‘Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.’ You know, like we’re here, doing the work, not just assuming becoming a serious writer is some lucky fluke, or happens overnight.”

  “I mean, yeah, I guess that’s true,” said Margaret Jibs, “but shouldn’t we also do the work of coming up with our own motto instead of using someone else’s?”

  We all liked Jenny more than Margaret, even if we thought those quote-of-the-day calendars were a little cheesy and kind of a cliché, so we all worked hard not to laugh at this.

  “I know I know I know,” said Lucas White, who seemed stoned even though he had just gotten out of workshop and hadn’t had the chance to smoke anything. “Real writers do it better.”

  “Seconded!” said Robbie Myers, looking at his friend admiringly, even though his suggestion had been as uninteresting and predictable as most of the other things he said.

  Sarah Jacobs and Mimi Kim giggled, earning them a seriously? look from Bridget Jameson, who seemed uptight only when she interacted with Sarah Jacobs and Mimi Kim. The girls had an effect on Bridget that made us forget that she wore her third glass of wine more elegantly than many of us did our second, and had hiked the same trail Cheryl Strayed did in Wild. She wasn’t jealous, exactly, being self-aware and thoughtful enough to realize that she wasn’t suited for either Sarah or Mimi the way they were suited for each other. But their instant close friendship was exactly the kind of thing her life had, until that point, been missing.

  “Can’t we just, like, write these all down and you can type them up and we can vote anonymously, or something?” asked Jibs, who managed to make this suggestion seem annoying and whiny even though the rest of us had been thinking the same thing.

  “I think I have something,” said Jordan Marcum, filling us, for the first time that meeting, with hope. Jordan had the good look
s and youthful spirit of the most attractive married accountants despite being old enough to be their father and, as a district attorney in Chicago, career credentials beyond even the married accountants’ boyhood ambitions. They might’ve gone ahead and considered him a father figure, given the advice he was always happy to dispense when they came seeking it after two too many drinks, but his actual children were well on career trajectories almost as impressive as his own that dissuaded the married accountants from lining themselves up for comparison. Jordan had never shown us a picture of his wife, but we liked to think that she was pretty enough to explain why he never stayed late enough at any of the campus parties to give us anything to talk about. He was the most presidential member of our class, or any class at Fielding, with hair that made a career in politics seem inevitable. We suspected he might still have dreams—realistic ones, at that—of running for higher office, but his age made most of us designate him a retiree. His most annoying habit was making sure everyone’s attention was on him before speaking, but when he smiled directly at us we could forgive him for this. Sometimes a lifetime of being adored breeds bad habits, we understood.

  He paused long enough to give us time to anticipate whatever it was he had to say, wanting to make sure he was at the center of the stage before the Jordan Marcum Show began. It had already become one of our favorite shows, but the grass was really starting to itch.

  “Write your ass off,” he finally said, when all thirty-two of our eyeballs were on him. “Fierce and irreverent, but inspiring and motivational, too, right?”

  We were trying to convince ourselves that this idea was as good as the way Jordan’s features had arranged themselves on his face when Jibs groaned.

  “Dude, The Rumpus sells mugs that say that,” she said.

  We were surprised at how averse Jibs was to this meeting. We would’ve assumed she was the hand-raising type, but we had started to understand that while they both aligned themselves with authority and never broke the rules, she and Penny were on opposite sides of the same too-bright coin. Jibs maintained law and order only because it made it easier to tattle on people who weren’t following the rules, while the whole reason that Penny took that third AP class in high school and started all those clubs was the nodding heads and approving smiles of the teachers who sponsored them. There were plenty of faculty members who could applaud whatever apparel Penny’s efforts eventually yielded, but there was nobody at this meeting with enough authority to discipline anyone who got out of line. We used this observation as a distraction from Jordan’s mistake, which only reminded us that, as good as it was, there was something familiar about his first workshop story. Not in a plagiaristic way, more in a sitcom one. Once we had filed all this away, we all started talking at once, and Penny’s face tightened the way human faces do just before they start to cry.

  “Hey!” said a voice from the back of our semicircle, which was both a relief and a bother. Because we knew we were going to have to do whatever Tammy said, but also that it would probably be the right thing anyway. We can see the appropriateness, looking back, that she was the one who made sure Penny got the chance to advocate for her slogans and spirit wear. Because while Jordan was our class president and Penny was our square, Jibs our whiny little tattletale sister, in addition to being our favorite retiree, Tammy was the closest thing to a mascot that we would ever have.

  “Now, I hope y’all will excuse me for sayin’ so, but y’all are being rude. Whether you like other people’s ideas or not, Penny’s taken some considerable time to get us all organized, and is probably gonna have to spend more time getting these T-shirts made and paid for. And despite all this time and extra work, she’s given y’all a say on what we put on the T-shirts. I think the appropriate response to that is a thank-you, not a bunch of bellyachin’.”

  Though we didn’t disagree with her, this only led to another round of everybody talking at once, which was no less annoying now that what everybody was saying was meant to be helpful instead of combative.

  “Here’s what we’re gonna do,” Tammy said, once again winning our attention over the other contenders for it with the depth and heft of her voice, which you felt physically as much as you heard it. Despite its magnitude it was clearly female, which was the magic at its center.

  “We’re all gonna turn our mouths off and our minds on and give this a little thought over the next day or two, and when we meet again, we’re gonna be more prepared.”

  This, of course, created another gust of seventeen overlapping voices, most of them complaining about the possibility of a second meeting, or listing free periods already accounted for.

  “Penny will decide when we’re gonna meet again, so if there’s a time that’s not gonna work for you, email it to her. All right?”

  Our unprecedented silence in the beat after this question was both its answer and an opening for Penny to take the floor back. “All right, guys, I’ll email you! Thanks to everybody who pitched an idea. In addition to sending me schedule conflicts, send me mottoes! I’ll organize them all, and have them ready for our next meeting!”

  We had all trickled past her by the time she’d finished this final thought. The meeting had ended when Tammy stopped talking, even Penny knew. Though we left disheartened at our failure to avoid getting roped into further commitment to this nonsense, we had to walk past Tammy to get to the dorms, and the commons, where most of us were headed, and it was hard not to notice that she looked like the runty neighborhood kid who had just caught the biggest fish by five pounds, and not even because she had been the star of the meeting, but because she was happy to have reinforced for herself the fact that not all things were beyond consensus.

  And even now, it gives us comfort to report that there are parts of this story that have a happy ending, even if other, more important parts of it do not.

  * * *

  Jimmy and Hannah gave no indication that they understood the meeting was over—they stayed in exactly the same positions they had been in throughout the meeting as the rest of us migrated away. Somehow it was clear that they were together even though they didn’t exchange a single word and Hannah’s eyes were closed. When Leslie saw them lying in the grass, faces to the sun, she threw her body down next to theirs and said something that made Hannah laugh. Hannah’s laugh was like outdoor seating in front of sidewalk cafés on the first real day of spring—a call impossible to ignore.

  Tanner Conover and Melissa Raymond—the last two members of our class whose names you need to learn—were on their way to her dorm room to “read silently to themselves over a bottle of wine.” They had yet to begin the ferocious it’s-on-it’s-off affair that would last two full years beyond our final residency, even though she lived in Washington and he lived in Milwaukee, and she would be married to someone else by the time the last hushed midnight call had been placed.

  Hearing Hannah’s laugh as they passed, they reconsidered their plan and sat down right there, giving up the possibility of sex for the certainty of the sun, and that laugh, and the promise of the day itself, air too pleasant, too perfectly suited to the human body’s temperature to feel.

  “Jesus, that meeting almost killed my Pearl buzz,” Leslie said.

  “I’m not entirely sure what you mean about Pearl,” said Hannah, not opening her eyes, “but I agree that meeting could’ve been about twenty minutes shorter.”

  “Oh my God, that mustache,” Leslie said. “It’s so fucking rad. I don’t know how I’m going to sit through four more workshops with it without watching Super Troopers, though, am I right?”

  Hannah and Jimmy finally looked directly at her, committing to the conversation. They didn’t say anything, but Hannah smiled and Jimmy shook his head pleasantly, both of them pleading ignorance.

  “Nooo! How are you guys gonna come in here and try to tell stories without watching the greatest story ever told? Like, ever?”

  “Jimmy’s not really
a storyteller,” Hannah said, tapping the sole of his shoe lightly with the toe of her duck boot. “He’s a poet.”

  “Ahhhh,” said Leslie, as if this revealed some secret fact about Jimmy, and explained a lot. “I’m familiar with the art. That’s smart. It’s easier to sound smart in poetry.”

  Hannah couldn’t help herself—she laughed again. Not because it was funny, but because it was absurd. Of course it was.

  “I think some people would argue that it’s harder,” Hannah said, looking at Jimmy, who was twisting blades of grass at his feet.

  “No,” said Leslie. “You just use certain words and structures and syntaxes, and banal thoughts become poetry. You know, you just fance shit up.”

  “Did you just use fancy as a verb?” Jimmy asked. Not challenging her, but genuinely intrigued enough by the possibility to emerge from the silence that the rest of us had already started to take for granted.

  “I have no patience for people who speak of ennui—my experience was always wonder,” Leslie said instead of answering him, looking somewhere off into the middle distance dramatically.

  “Who said that?” Jimmy asked.

  Asking two questions in a row is so out of character for the Jimmy the rest of us remember that we made Melissa and Tanner confirm it twice, but they didn’t hesitate either time.

  “No one,” Leslie said. “I just made it up.”

  “That’s not no one. That’s you,” said Jimmy. “And I like that. Wonder.”