Family Affair

by Saxon Bennett

  The rest of the writing group hadn't shown up yet so Chase had Alma all to herself which she rather liked. Whenever the group meeting was at Alma's house she showed up early.

  "I know," Chase answered Alma, "but it just seems so odd that I get stuck all the time. I can barely get a page out and I have to force myself. I look at that particular notebook with complete dread. I've never dreaded writing before. Now, I know why there are all those writing manuals. I never understood writer's block before."

  "You love writing. You're the most prolific writer I've ever known." Alma poured them both an iced tea from the pitcher sitting on the white wicker table between them.

  "I want to write more than moist-mound sagas. I've written so many and I'm sick of them."

  "It would be nice to have a larger, more diverse audience." Alma handed Chase her glass.

  She drank her tea and frowned. "Yes, it's not like I don't appreciate my lesbian readers..."

  "But there are only a finite number of them." Alma was good at finishing Chase's sentences. Picking up her train of thought effortlessly as if picking up a shiny penny off the blacktop—so evident that its presence couldn't be missed.

  "Yes." Chase bit her lip and moved a stack of books on the white end table so she could set her glass down.

  Alma leaned back in a wicker rocker with floral cushions. Looking at her, Chase imagined Margaret Mitchell sitting on her porch, the magnolias throwing off their scent while she contemplated writing Gone with the Wind.

  "Just write the story line and follow your plot—you're good at that. Block out the places that require forensic details. Write the scenes, develop the characters, and fill in the details later—those nuggets of authenticity that readers are so adamant about can be inserted later. They aren't the story, they're the reality bites."

  "That's what keeps holding me back." Chase flipped her mechanical pencil between her fingers like a baton.

  "If you insert the forensic details later you can weed through your research and put in only the most crucial." Alma sipped her tea and stared at Chase.

  "An overabundance of factual detail is the sign of a novice." This seemed to be the correct answer because Alma smiled at her and refilled her tea.

  "You got it."

  "Thanks, Alma." She flipped up her pencil and expertly caught it.

  "Chase, can I ask you a personal question?"

  "Does it have to do with my sex life?"

  "No."

  "Then, yes." Chase couldn't imagine what this would be. Writing conversations were as close as Chase ever got to baring her soul to anyone other than Gitana.

  "How many of those mechanical pencils do you have?"

  "Eighty-one. It's three times nine equaling twenty-seven added together seven plus two equals nine which is a multiple of three. Three is my magic number. Purple is my preferred color but blue or gray will work. I avoid red." Chase curled her lips in her best version of I-can't-help-it-if-I'm-crazy look.

  "The trinity. The power of three. It makes perfect sense to me.

  "Let's just keep this to ourselves."

  "Of course. Always the same black and white marbled composition books as well?"

  Chase nodded. "It has to be that way. It's how I write."

  "Lots of writers have their little quirks. I'm not judging—just observing. You worry too much."

  "I know."

  Chase looked up unsurprised as Bo and Jasmine came out the back door. At Alma's house she expected you to let yourself in. She knew you were coming so it was kind of stupid to ring the bell. It seemed so relaxed to Chase whose house was rigged like a fortress—there was a gate at the bottom of the driveway, then there were the dogs and several more gates before you actually got to the front door. Bo had made mention of this fact once. Chase reminded him that she didn't like people.

  "She was lost again." Indicating Jasmine, he flounced down on the wicker love seat. "I had to chase her down. She thought I was some kind of stalker."

  Jasmine threw her hands up in total resignation. "I'm terrible with directions. The streets are so convoluted here. I can't keep it all straight. Chase's house is the only one I can find. I get on the freeway, take a left at exit one-forty, go straight, turn at the mountains. I can handle that."

  Alma poured her a glass of iced tea. "Sit down and relax. We're still waiting on Delia."

  Jasmine took her iced tea and made Bo move over. "Thank you."

  "As a writer, you're supposed to be studying details. Next time someone is honking and flashing their lights you should recognize it means something." Bo said, taking the glass Alma offered him.

  "Jasmine, he drives a green Pacer. How many Pacers are still around?" Chase said.

  "It is an unusual car," Alma said. The rain had stopped and she eyed her saturated flower beds. She smiled.

  "That car should never have been made," Jasmine said.

  "It's ugly, but Laura-Lie has taken me any place I've ever wanted to go."

  "Who names their car?" Jasmine said.

  Chase and Alma both raised a hand. "What's yours?" Chase asked.

  Alma drove a nineteen sixty-four faded red Volkswagon van. "Vaughn."

  "Mine's Pauline the Passat or rather was. Now, it's Henrietta the Hummer."

  "I give," Jasmine said.

  "How's the story coming?" Chase said.

  "It's progressing. I'm past page one hundred. I've never gtten that far." Jasmine flushed.

  "That's fantastic," Chase said.

  "I'm so excited. Maybe criticism is a good thing." Jasmine tuckd an errant hair behind her ear. She was attempting to grow her hair out again and this ear-tucking thing was becoming a nervous habit.

  Like she had any room to talk, Chase thought as she flipped her pencil between her fingers. She caught Alma's eye and put the pencil back inside her notebook. She was obsessive. She knew it. This was another thing she'd have to curb if she didn't wasn't to raise a kid with weird lifelong habits.

  "See, we need each other," Chase said, glancing at Bo who was scrutinizing her.

  "Except you. Where's the mystery novel? You use us for beta-readers on novels that are safe for you. Don't get me wrong—I think they are well-written, funny and redemption bound—all admirable traits, but you already know how to do that," Bo said.

  Chase got up to refill her already full glass. Alma put her hand over the top of the pitcher. "Avoidance tactic." Chase sat back down.

  "We all suck. So what if your first mystery novel sucks? Isn't that the kind of stuff you tell us?" Bo said, refilling his empty glass.

  "Point taken. When it's my turn I'll bring it. Deal?"

  Delia came flying out the back door, letting the screen door slam behind her. Alma cringed. "Sorry I'm late. I had to drop Graciela at work. Jacinda removed the radiator on her car, with her bad hip no less."

  "There's going to be nothing left of that car," Chase said. Graciela better start looking around for another clunker. The bus system in Albuquerque was not good. She needed to get around and Chase didn't want to be her emergency taxi service.

  "I didn't know Jacinda had a bad hip. What's wrong with it?" Alma asked.

  "We're not certain she does. It's more a sporadic sort of martyrdom. We added the phrase, with her bad hip no less, as a family joke of sorts," Chase said.

  Delia passed out copies of a short porn story she was hoping to sell to an erotic anthology. They all began perusing it except Chase who was still concerned with family dynamics.

  "Is Jacinda still mad about Graciela's jail stint?" Chase asked.

  "Probably, but there's this other thing." Delia took a chair.

  Jasmine was reading the story with a look of complete confusion on her face.

  "What other thing?" Chase said.

  "Jacinda caught us in her relic cupboard." Delia poured herself some tea and gulped half of it down.

  "Did you find the pinky bone of Jesus?" Chase inquired.

  "I don't think so. Why, did you lose it?"

  "No,
I've been waiting years to go in there. You got a free show and you didn't even care."

  "A better question would be what were you two doing in there?" Alma asked.

  "Graciela wanted some relic thing that Jacinda uses in her exorcisms. God, I've never been so scared in my life. Jacinda comes flying around the corner, carrying this religious candle so the shadow she projects is huge. I about jump right the fuck out of my skin. Graciela drops whatever she had and screams, 'Run!' and we hightailed it out of there."

  "Ugh." Chase rolled her eyes and looking at Delia's story proceeded to circle the word "cunt" which ran through the first page four times.

  "Delia, as part of the select sect of women of words, is it really necessary to use the F-word as a part of speech?" Alma asked.

  "You do use it a lot," Bo said in confirmation.

  "What's tribadism?" Jasmine asked. She tucked her hair behind her ear.

  Chase coughed. These sessions reading Delia's work were always a bit of a shock for Jasmine. Alma, it appeared, was either more worldly or viewed the stories in an abstract way. She was interested in the quality of the writing rather than the subject matter. Alma had done wonders for the beauty of Delia's sentences to the extent that they were now almost literary porn.

  "Did you realize you used the word cunt twenty-one times in ten pages?" Chase said.

  "Really? I had no idea."

  Chase handed Delia her copy with the circled words.

  Bo had already set to work finding the word as if Delia's short story were some kind of word puzzle. "She's right."

  "That might be a problem," Alma said.

  "There's a lot of references to pink folds," Bo said, doing his own circles.

  "What are pink folds?" Jasmine asked.

  Jasmine's lack of knowledge of female parts astounded Chase. Maybe she'd never even masturbated and didn't know where anything was. Her clitoris could be a foreign land. It made her wonder about her husband Philip's ability in bed.

  "Meat curtains," Bo said.

  "In Tristram Shandy, I loved that scene," Chase said.

  "What the fuck?" Delia said. She caught Alma's eye and rephrased. "I mean, I don't get it."

  "Old book, funny, difficult to read, but well worth it," Chase said.

  "Meat curtains?" Jasmine said.

  Delia sighed heavily. She'd obviously gotten the reference. "If you'd let me have an hour in bed with you you'd know every part of your body and some places you didn't even know existed." She drew a quick sketch on the back of the first page of her story and handed it to Jasmine. "There, all the parts including the meat curtains."

  Jasmine studied the diagram. "I didn't realize you were so good at anatomy."

  Chase noticed Jasmine stick the diagram in the back of her notebook. Delia noticed it as well. She smiled at Chase, who narrowed her eyes in warning. Delia ignored her. Had Delia been sitting closer Chase would have done bodily harm to get her point across.

  "Back to the business at hand, the repetitive use of certain words is not good. There must be other words or euphemisms that could be utilized," Alma said.

  "Unfortunately, my thesaurus doesn't include the word cunt and vagina doesn't work for me," Delia said. "God, I really did use it twenty-two times—rock on. That's gotta be an f-ing record."

  "Alma's right. There's got to be another way to describe this particular body part," Chase said. She had her own troubles with love scenes and was endlessly being advised by her editor to make them more graphic. As far as she was concerned, love scenes should be left to the reader's imagination. Everyone knew what went where and how it felt. But this was not a common sentiment for moist-mound sagas and so she relented to Ariana's suggestions with reluctance.

  "What about nether regions?" Bo said. He poured his third glass of iced tea.

  With tea containing only half the caffeine of coffee he was doubling up. Chase wondered how long it would be until he had to pee. Men's bladders amazed her. "It's too archaic," she replied.

  "How about woo-woo," Jasmine said.

  "Where'd you get that?" Delia said, giving her an intense gaze.

  "On The L Word."

  Delia raised an eyebrow.

  "When I was clicking through the channels." Jasmine didn't look at her.

  "Yeah, on your way to Masterpiece Theatre," Bo said.

  "Or perhaps it was the Antiques RoadsShow," Chase said. She smiled in complicity with the others.

  "Jasmine, you shouldn't be so defensive about your sense of curiosity," Alma said. "Writers need to be curious. It's what informs our writing."

  "I know." Jasmine looked down.

  In an effort to save her further embarrassment, Chase narrowed in on Delia. "I think sometimes you just put that word in there because you can. In several places you've told the reader about what's being done so the word is redundant."

  "May the Pink Mafia never hear you say that," Delia said.

  "Yes, let's perk up the description and you'll have a nice bit of

  porn here," Alma said, going back to the manuscript.

  "May I use your bathroom?" Bo said, getting up rather abruptly.

  "Of course. I expect after three rather large glasses of tea you should," Alma said.

  "So who calls it a woo-woo on that show you don't watch?" Delia said.

  Jasmine jumped in without a thought for the foil. "Dana Fairbanks. You know they kill her off in the third season." She blanched.

  "Wow, even I didn't know that," Delia said.

  Jasmine was trapped. "There's never anything else on."

  "Yeah, sure," Delia said.

  Chase looked on in pity. She was going to have to teach Jasmine some skill in taciturnity, and soon.

  Chapter Thirteen

  "Like I care if I get a fucking birthday cake from her," Graciela said. She shoved a tortilla chip in her mouth.

  Chase and Gitana were having lunch at Gardenas with her and Delia. It was Graciela's birthday and Jacinda wasn't speaking to her. The luncheon was Chase's idea. She was trying to socialize and acclimate herself to holidays and family events. She didn't want Bud to adopt her hermit ways.

  "We don't have to do this," Gitana had said before they left the house as Chase sorted through her clothes in search of a decent outfit.

  "Does this look okay?" Chase held up a gray shirt and beige trousers.

  "No." Gitana grabbed a white blouse off the hanger, held it up against them. She nodded. "When in doubt choose white. I think a pair of black jeans would do better. This is a little frumpy. When did you buy those hideous slacks?" she asked.

  "The other day. I thought they'd be perfect for PTA meetings." Chase studied them. They were ugly, but they'd seemed like the beacon of respectability.

  Gitana got the black jeans out and whisked away the offending garment. "Bud isn't even born yet. We'll get you proper outfits when the time comes."

  Chase was humbled. Normally, she had good taste. The trousers were a sign that she was trying to be something she was not. She'd have to watch that.

  "I mean it about not going. Graciela won't care. She's going to Delia's tonight where they will have a decadent party in her honor."

  "But we're her family."

  "I know," Gitana had said.

  And now they were here and Chase thought Graciela looked pleased. The waitress came by with a pitcher of margaritas and spring water for Gitana. Chase ordered more chips and grabbed one of the few remaining ones before Graciela devoured them all.

  "I slept with Jasmine the other day," Delia said. She took a sip of her margarita and sat back.

  The tortilla chip headed straight for Chase's lungs. She gasped and turned red, coughing violendy. Gitana patted her back. Delia offered to do the Heimlich maneuver and Graciela suggested a sip of margarita.

  "How about some water," Gitana said, handing Chase her glass.

  Chase took a sip and regained control of her breathing.

  "Like I was saying, remember when we talked in group about sex and how I offer
ed to show her the ropes, well, she took me up on my offer."