See How Small
Page 14
60
TWO BLOCKS FROM our Nana’s place, there’s an abandoned house near the beach that will one day burn down. But that part doesn’t matter yet.
We are eleven and twelve. We don’t see our horsey girl as much since her parents divorced, since she moves back and forth. We’re upset. Moody. Vengeful. There’s another man involved, we’re sure of it, we tell her. How could her mother do this to him? To Mister Lopez, with the kindly face, who never raises his voice except for that time when we get into his stash? We try not to talk this way unless we need to put our horsey girl in her place.
The stakes seem higher now when we’re together. So we try to make it count.
At the abandoned house near our Nana’s, we use a screwdriver to pry loose the wood from the bay window where the stained glass used to be. Inside, despite the mess, everything is as it once was—in the sink a shriveled-up bar of Dial soap, seventies stickers stuck to the back of the bathroom door (KEEP ON TRUCKIN’!). In the sink, lime green plates thick with muck. A few shattered on the floor. A fogged glass pitcher on the table we imagine filled with Tang, the drink of astronauts. On the counter, a Rotary Club cookbook, opened to Chicken Cordon Bleu. Old clothes cover the bedroom floor three inches thick—dresses, blazers, pants, underwear, bras, all blackened with mildew and rot from leaks in a ceiling that looks like a bubbling upside-down sea. In the middle of the bedroom, a pyramid of shoes rises that reminds us of something that hasn’t happened yet. In another bedroom, filled with old luggage, a polished wood baby crib. Something passed down that won’t go any further.
The place won’t last much longer. Someone has already blackened a living room wall by starting a fire where the fake fireplace is. Someone stole whatever valuables the family had years ago from the dresser drawers, cabinets, and jewelry box. Still, they missed a few things. Some photos taken on the beach where a Mexican-looking woman (swarthy! our horsey girl says) in a two-piece and a wiry man roll in the surf From Here to Eternity–style. (The oldest of us shows how it’s done, arms hugging herself, but rolls into the tide of rotted, mildewed clothes.) In one photo, a girl about our age is eyeing the man and woman, her mouth opened into a shriek or a laugh. We imagine she’s their daughter, surprised and embarrassed to find her parents are still in love after all these years. The youngest of us stuffs the photos in her pocket.
Other keepsakes are left behind. On top of a kitchen doorframe, we find a three-legged cast-iron horse with a Civil War rider. In a wool coat pocket, a makeup compact with powder still inside. A shellacked horned frog in a desk drawer. On a medicine cabinet shelf, among bottles of Campho-Phenique and yellowed Q-tips, a thin silver ring engraved with ALWAYS LOVE ANTOINE. A plea or a promise? Discuss.
As our Nana says, the mind reels. Where did these people go so suddenly without their keepsakes? Without their Chicken Cordon Bleu? Or shellacked horned frog? Were they told to leave this place or else? Were they cursed? Did their luck turn against them? Or maybe, just maybe, did they get lucky? Did they leave before whatever was coming got here?
We find old bills from JCPenney and Texaco. Timothy Crabtree is the man. Carmona Exposito, the woman. We piece it together in our heads. Tim and Carmona put their feet up by the fake fireplace, make their plans. We call the daughter we’ve given them Nina. Nina Exposito. We like the sound. Sexy, like an international assassin. Our horsey girl says Exposito is Spanish for “orphan.” Foundling. Abandoned, but taken in. You just look up one day and there she is down among the duckweed and cattails. Thick eyelashes and dark skin. Swarthy, our horsey girl says.
When we bring our keepsakes back in a cigar box we found (we imagine Nina smoking cigarillos), our Nana is quiet for a while. Then she tells us a story we never used to listen to, about her mother, whose family abandoned their house in Poland, just before the war. Just before the Nazis came. Everything left just as it was. Our Nana’s mother, only seventeen at the time, obsessed all her life with the things they’d left behind. She’d dream of strangers ransacking the place. But then one day—isn’t it always “but then one day” in these stories?—our Nana’s mother had a dream about a woman, a stranger combing a little girl’s hair with a left-behind whalebone comb, the one our Nana’s mother had combed her own hair with, hair that at the time of the dream had been falling out in the sink. It made our Nana’s mother happy that these things had gone on without her, that they had a life of their own.
The clock ticks loud and slow in our Nana’s kitchen.
Our Nana lifts the cigar box lid again and again, as if she expects to find something different inside each time.
See the abandoned house? See the flames roll over the clothes along the floor, leap to gauzy curtains? See the wallpaper blacken and curl? See the bindings and ligatures ignite?
We’re not here. We’ve taken our things and gone.
Acknowledgments
I’m especially grateful to Tommi Ferguson for her guidance, vision, patience, and love. And to Ethan Bassoff and Pat Strachan, without whom…
Heartfelt thanks to Dean Blackwood, Scott Stebler, Ben Fountain, Miles Harvey, Jordan Smith, Rosa Eberly, Janet Burroway, Jarrett Dapier, Ellie Blackwood, Darren Defrain, Debra Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and Jill Meyers, who generously read early and late versions of See How Small and helped improve it.
To my parents, Anita and Bob Gatchel and Bill and Lois Blackwood, for their love and generosity.
And special thanks to the Whiting Foundation, The Texas Institute of Letters, everyone at Little, Brown and Company, and to my colleagues and students at Roosevelt University and Southern Illinois University–Carbondale.
About the Author
SCOTT BLACKWOOD is the author of two previous books of fiction, In the Shadow of Our House and We Agreed to Meet Just Here, and a recipient of a 2011 Whiting Writers’ Award. A longtime resident of Austin, Texas, Blackwood now lives in Chicago.
Reading Group Guide
See How Small
A Novel
by
Scott Blackwood
An online version of this Reading Group Guide is available at littlebrown.com.
Questions and Topics for Discussion
1. The book takes its title, See How Small, from the voices of the three girls who watch Kate matching socks in the laundry room and say, “See how small a thing it is that keeps us apart?” What do you think the title has to do with the themes in the novel? How could death be considered a small thing?
2. Why does Kate reimagine and revise the last time she saw the girls alive? What does it tell us about her? What do you think this kind of revising says about our own memories?
3. Nick Bottom’s dream in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream—a play that Elizabeth stage-managed in high school—is about transformation. It’s a “bottomless dream,” in which anything is possible. Why are there are so many dreams in See How Small? How are our waking lives sometimes dreamlike?
4. A number of characters’ actions in the novel seem like echoes of their inner lives. Why does Jack Dewey redesign his living room to look like Kate’s old one? Near the end of the novel, Hollis Finger steals a backhoe and digs up the ground, making mounds in Zilker Park in the shape of the girls. Why does he do this?
5. How does the struggle to make sense of suffering and death play out in the novel? How do the younger man/hideous man and Hollis figure into this suffering and the need to make sense of it?
6. Is Michael Greer—a high school dropout, drug addict, and accessory to the murders—a sympathetic character? Does he have qualities that you identify with? Do you recognize them in any of your friends? What do you think Michael’s complexity says about all of us?
7. How does the author weave different kinds of stories—the ghost story, the detective story—into the novel in surprising ways?
8. Despite their circumstances, the three girls and Hollis Finger are occasionally sources of humor in the novel. How does this affect you as a reader? How do the dead girls at times seem more alive than the
other characters?
9. A number of the stories in the novel don’t have endings or resolutions as we normally think of them. For instance, the perpetrators are never caught, and Kate’s grieving for the girls doesn’t end. Most of the characters’ lives go on, as each is left wondering what to do next. Yet some stories in the novel are resolved, or they complete an emotional arc. Do you recognize these kinds of “mixed” resolutions in your own life?
10. When Rosa Heller is riding the “L” in Chicago, winding between buildings, she reflects on “many other chance events in her life and in the lives of those she wrote about and cared for. Eventually these events—the good and the bad—would seem inevitable. Would be claimed, finally, as their own by those who lived them, like lost children.” How can chance events—even the most terrible ones––be “claimed” as part of who we are?
Q&A with Scott Blackwood, Author of See How Small
What inspired you to write your book?
The real-life murder of the four teenage girls that inspired See How Small has haunted me for over twenty years. The crime struck a deep chord in anyone who lived in Austin at the time, one that reverberates even now. These girls were, in a sense, the “every girls” of the community: they were loved by their parents, belonged to Future Farmers of America, had sleepovers, and looked out for one another. And then one evening the unimaginable happened. Their brutal and seemingly random murder (still unsolved) challenges our basic ideas of justice, responsibility, grief, love, and even the shape of the stories we tell to make sense of it.
The other inspiration for See How Small was personal. Soon after I began writing the novel, my wife called me at my downtown Chicago office, saying our then-six-year-old daughter had gone missing from school. The police were called, the school grounds searched, the neighborhood canvassed, a search helicopter hovered overhead. While racing home in a cab, I called everyone I knew. Horrific images rose in my mind. Nearby Lake Michigan took on new connotations. Alleyways seemed ominous. Every passerby suspect. How could we have been so oblivious to the dangers? Eventually, nearly an hour after the first alert, my wife called to tell me they’d found our daughter: she’d created a play date in her head with a friend, somehow evaded the school staff, and walked three-quarters of a mile to that friend’s house. She was safe. But the veil had been lifted, everyday life revealed to be potentially treacherous and wondrous at the same time. I think elements of this experience seeped into the writing.
Scott Blackwood’s Playlist for See How Small
Cat Power (Chan Marshall)
“I Found a Reason”
“Sea of Love”
Sidney Bechet
“Si tu vois ma mère”
Gillian Welch and David Rawlings
“Time (The Revelator)”
“My First Lover”
Chet Baker
“Spring Is Here”
“My Funny Valentine”
Willie Nelson
“Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain”
“Funny How Time Slips Away”
Louis Armstrong
“West End Blues”
“Stardust”
Lyle Lovett
“If I Had a Boat”
“Pontiac”
Thelonious Monk
“Blue Monk”
“Ruby, My Dear”
L. V. Thomas and Geeshie Wiley
“Motherless Child Blues”
Billy Bragg and Wilco
“California Stars”
Django Reinhardt
“After You’ve Gone”
The Reivers
“Araby”
“Things Don’t Change”
Spoon
“They Never Got You”
Tom Waits
“Take It with Me”
Patty Griffin
“Florida”
John Fahey
“Remember”
Billie Holiday
“I’ll Be Seeing You”
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Epigraph
Part I Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Part II Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Part III Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Part IV Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Part V Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Reading Group Guide
Questions and Topics for Discussion
Q&A with Scott Blackwood, Author of See How Small
Scott Blackwood’s Playlist for See How Small
Newsletters
Copyright
Copyright
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2015 by Scott Blackwood
Reading group guide © 2015 by Scott Blackwood and Little, Brown and Company
Cover design by Ploy Siripant
Cover copyright © 2015 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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ISBN 978-0-316-37397-5
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