Rejected Writers Take the Stage (Southlea Bay Book 2)

by Suzanne Kelman

  The Rejected Writers’ Book Club had been getting together for several years now. They were an assortment of women of different ages all brought together by a common purpose: reading their awful manuscripts to each other. All were rejected repeatedly by traditional publishers, and they now chose to celebrate their rejections in style with tea and cake and by collecting their rejection letters by the bucketload and putting them in a leather-bound album they called The Book. The Book was now stuffed full of well over five hundred letters that they had been collecting over the last few years, the last twenty-five obtained on a crazy road trip that we’d taken to California.

  When I knocked, Ethel opened Doris’s front door dressed as a gnome or something like that. She wore a red cotton hat, blue baggy culottes, stripy socks, and a blue-and-white T-shirt.

  Wearing the costume of happiness and triviality and the face of foreboding, I had definitely made some inroads with this vision of happiness and light over the year. At least she didn’t click her tongue at me anymore, but it seemed she got up every morning and set her compass at gloom, doom, and despondency.

  As I followed the dwarf of misery up the hall, it didn’t get any saner in Doris’s front room. It was always hard enough adjusting to Doris’s décor: her green vinyl sofa was still covered in plastic, and the furry orange bucket chairs, all throwbacks to when the seventies were a child, were slammed right up against a splattering of country wicker that belonged to Gracie. But today, there was even more to pickle my brain.

  In the center of the room was the regular circle of mismatched chairs, and, seated on them, the whole group of the Rejected Writers’ Book Club. But all was not normal here in Crazy Town. Every one of them was wearing an outrageous outfit.

  Same Bat day, same Bat channel, same crazy bats, I thought.

  Ruby jumped up to greet me. She was wearing an extravagant Aladdin affair, with peach chiffon pantaloons and a cropped red sparkly top with white fringe and gold bells. Around her head, she’d wound a gold scarf into a turban, and as she clattered over, it appeared that her usual ensemble of bangles and beads offset the rest of her outfit nicely.

  As I observed her more closely, I noted that even though she was a vision of Arabian Nights, she still proudly displayed her large peace pendant, and dangling from her ears were earrings with a picture of John Lennon. I also noted that, through her makeshift turban, her hair was sprayed in stripes of red, yellow, and blue.

  Interesting costume combination, I thought. If Ziggy Stardust and Barbara Eden had a child, this would be her.

  As I acknowledged the group, I guessed the character. Lavinia was a swashbuckling Robin Hood with long green pantaloons, high boots, and a feather cap. Next to her, Lottie was dressed as Maid Marian. On her favorite wicker lounger was Gracie in one of her fairy outfits. Next to her sat Flora, dressed up as a very uncomfortable pirate, a huge tricornered hat sliding around on her head with one dangling long white plume that she had to keep blowing away from her one good eye, as the other was covered with a patch.

  Inside the circle, Doris stood to the side of a huge whiteboard. She appeared to be dressed as Captain Hook, complete with a hook arm and a fake parrot on her shoulder. The pirates apparently came as a matching set, I thought to myself. I took it all in with my usual filters of small-town tomfoolery. They looked like some manic recovery group for theater AA.

  “Did I miss something?” I asked, looking around me. “Aren’t we just a little early for Halloween?”

  Suddenly, Ethel strode up to me and pushed cat ears onto my head and thrust a cat nose at me. “Put these on,” she said.

  Not wanting to argue, and knowing it was only part of the ridiculousness that happened in this house, I did as I was told and sat down in my usual spot.

  “Purrfect,” I quipped back.

  The humor seemed to be lost on all of them as they sat there, twitching and scratching in their costumes, looking very uncomfortable.

  “What are we doing?” I whispered to Ruby, once we were seated.

  She whispered back to me through a veil, which covered her nose and looped over her ears with elastic, “Doris thinks it would help with the process if we’re all in costume. It will help us all think clearly and get into character.”

  Get into character? I thought to myself. Plenty of characters here.

  “So glad you could join us, Janet,” Doris said, tapping her hook on the board.

  “Brainstorming” was written on that board in large black letters.

  “Okay, this is what we’re going to do,” said our commander as she shifted from her peg leg to her good foot and adjusted the stuffed parrot on her shoulder. “We’re all writers here, so we’re all going to write the story for the show together.”

  Everyone looked around the room at each other.

  “I just hate to burst your bubble,” said Lavinia, crossing one long leg over her thigh-high boots and adjusting her green corduroy pants, “but we are rejected writers. Not one of us has been accepted by a publisher. What on earth could we write that could be any good?”

  “We are not bad writers,” Annie piped up. “We are only rejected ones,” she added, spouting one of Doris’s favorite sayings. Annie was seated in the corner at the far end of the circle and, of course, was dressed as her favorite four-legged creature, a dog. She was wearing a brown nose and long, soft brown ears; she smiled up at us like a happy Deputy Dawg as she knitted.

  “Of course we can do this,” Doris said. “This is why we’re all dressed like this. Look around and see what comes to you.”

  We all looked around the room. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest was the story that drifted into my mind.

  Lavinia adjusted her breasts in her bustier. “Let’s make it a love story,” she said.

  “Yes, with just a little bit of horror,” said Ruby.

  “I could add in a couple of psalms,” said Lottie.

  “With maybe one or two dogs,” Annie added as she hooked a stitch, happily.

  “I would love it if I could add a couple of my poems,” said Flora quietly as she shifted uncomfortably in the seat and moved her patch to her other eye.

  “Perfect,” said Doris. “I could add just a little Jane Austen or some time travel? What do we have with all of that?”

  An old lady’s LSD trip was my first thought.

  I tried to be tactful. “I’m not sure you’re going to be able to incorporate all those ideas into one story. Can you think of a story like that?”

  Everybody stopped and stared at me, as if that thought hadn’t entered into their minds.

  “Of course there has to be something,” said Doris. “Everybody, think. What story has a little bit of horror in it, and a little bit of romance, a whole bunch of dogs, people who say psalms, poetry, and maybe some Jane Austen and time travel?”

  Everybody stopped and stared at the board. There was a long silence.

  Suddenly, Ruby threw her bangled arms into the air and jumped to her gold pointy-toed feet, saying with theatrical flair, “We will be original, and I love it.”

  “True,” said Doris, banging her hook again on the board. “Let’s start pulling the main elements of the story together. Who could be the heroine?”

  “Well, how about,” said Ruby, “we make her a wholesome-looking girl, a fresh-faced girl-next-door type?”

  “Who lives with her dogs?” added Annie, smiling and making her doggy snout ride up on her nose.

  “Yes,” said Ruby, starting to parade around the circle, encouraging them all. “But deep down,” she dropped to a whisper as she drew aside her yashmak, “she has this deep, dark secret that she murders people.”

  “Sounds a bit serious for a musical,” snorted Lottie. “They’re going to need my psalms in the intermission to recover.”

  “And my poems for the way home,” said Flora as she grasped hold of her feather to stop it flailing about as she spoke.

  “Yes, not too cheerful,” I added. “Can’t see us packing the house for the laug
hs with that one.”

  “But it could get cheerful,” said Lavinia. “How about, she meets a big strapping handsome hunk that loves all the bad right out of her?”

  “Then they travel in time and meet Jane Austen,” added Doris, getting excited. Doris took her good hand and started writing ideas on the board. The ideas came thick and fast after that and became more ludicrous as she wrote.

  I adjusted my cat ears and tried to imagine directing something like this. When someone had coined the phrase “herding cats,” they had never met this particular group of writers, or the phrase would have been much different. I watched the ideas as they materialized in Doris’s spidery scrawl. I didn’t know much about the writing process, but I was pretty sure that this wasn’t it.

  Then, suddenly, something came to me, and I blurted out, “Smee!”

  Everyone stopped and looked in my direction.

  “Did I say that out loud?” I said apologetically. “I just worked out who Ethel is dressed as. Smee from Peter Pan.”

  The Captain Hook in front of me didn’t look impressed. She tapped the board again to bring our attention back to it. “Okay,” she said, “that’s enough for today. I’ll divide the story up. Each one of you can write a part of it, and you can bring it to our next meeting. I will pull it roughly together and then give it to our director, who will make it perfect. Time for tea and cake,” she announced. Smee strode off to do Hook’s bidding.

  I would what? My head was spinning. As much as I loved Annie, I was starting to realize I definitely wasn’t the woman for this job. I wouldn’t even know how to explain this story in a conversation, never mind direct it.

  At the end of the evening, Doris thrust a pile of yellow notepaper at me, telling me she had made copies and to familiarize myself with the ideas.

  “Do you think I’m a script writer?” I asked.

  Doris sniffed. “I’m sure there’s a book about it at your library that you can read. I will write a rough draft so we can sit down and read through it together, and then you can take it from there.”

  I sighed, folded the papers, and put them in my bag. This was going from bad to worse. I was going to have to feign some fatal disease or something to get out of this. I started scanning my mind for all the different diseases I could have to stop me being socially acceptable at rehearsal when Annie approached me and took my arm.

  “Hey, Janet,” she said. “I wanted to ask you about Stacy before you left. How is she doing?”

  “Oh, wonderful,” I said, and we fell into a very easy conversation about Stacy’s pregnancy, the size of the twins, the movement she was feeling now, and all the food she wasn’t eating.

  “I’m just getting ready to send some baby clothes to her,” I added.

  Suddenly, Annie stopped me short.

  “Oh, fiddlesticks,” she said. “I just remembered. I had a gift for Stacy that I left at home. I thought I had put it in my bag.” She shuffled through a massive purse brimming with wool, knitting needles, and patterns as she continued. “Any chance you could stop by the farm on your way home? I would love her to have it as soon as possible.”

  “Sure,” I said despondently. I was already feeling pretty low and just wanted to get home and sulk. “Yeah, I can stop by. I’ll follow you home.”

  As I got in the car, I looked on my passenger seat. On it, there was a pile of theater books I had borrowed from the library and, underneath them, two books on how to be more assertive that Karen had left for me as a joke, with a Post-it note. I picked up the assertiveness books and looked at them. One had a bold orange-and-black cover with a strong, power-dressed woman on the front with her arms folded and the words, Say What You Mean and Mean What You Say. The other book had a picture of a woman with duct tape across her mouth, and the title looming above her head said, Finding Your Voice.

  I placed the books on the top of the pile. I was not going to be dictated to this time. I was going to find a way out of this. I started to feel a twinge of guilt as I drove. But I continued to assure my sacrificial self that I was going to find just the right person to be the director that they needed.

  Before long, we were at Annie’s happy farm. A little red-and-white sign on the road read, “Doggy’s Day Care and Spa, the Home of Happy Dogs.” I followed Annie’s car up the long, winding, tree-lined driveway to her house. About halfway up the drive, even with the windows closed, I heard them. The dogs were starting to bark. They obviously knew the sound of her car. When we arrived, I got out, and she was already calling out to them, cooing and chatting and greeting them. They sounded as if they were bouncing up and down in their cages to say hello back.

  She opened a big barn door, where she housed the dogs. “I just have to let them know I’m home; otherwise, they’ll pine.”

  I smiled, followed her to the door, and, to my surprise, found they weren’t in cages at all. They were all kept in lovely, neat little wooden pens. They leapt up and down when they saw her.

  I followed her around as she walked from one pen to another, opening their gates, rubbing their furry heads, and nuzzling their happy snouts. It was contagious. I couldn’t help but join in and snuggle all the dogs as we went. There seemed to be hundreds of them, but I guessed there were about fifty. The noise in the barn was pretty deafening, but Annie didn’t seem to even hear it. She addressed each of them by their name and introduced me to them. Each one had a story that she loved to tell in enthusiastic, high-pitched, loving tones, making the dogs yip and wag their tails madly. Some of them she had found as puppies, some of them had been dropped at the farm, and many of them were strays.

  From the corner of the barn, an old collie wove its unsteady way toward us. He was obviously older and not in a kennel. It took him a while to get to Annie, but he seemed happy to greet his mistress, his tail high and bright, and his watery eyes could do nothing but display his love for her.

  We leaned down and stroked his head gently. “This is Bruiser,” she said. “He’s been with me a long time. I called him that because he used to throw himself so hard at me to greet me when he was a pup that he would often cause them. Not so much anymore, eh, old fella,” she said, tickling his chin. A long, leathery pink tongue lopped out of his panting mouth as she continued to speak words of love to him. “He’s like the guard dog here. He takes care of all the other dogs when I’m not here.”

  “That will be the collie in him,” I added, smiling.

  “Yes,” she laughed. We walked around the rest of the stalls, and Bruiser stumbled behind us, slowly weaving his way the best he could. “He has arthritis now,” she said, closing up the final pens and making her way toward the barn door. “But he’s still as bright as a button.” He followed us outside, and she locked up and shouted good night to her dogs.

  I followed her into the farmhouse. I was amazed to see that there was more art featuring dogs and even statues of them. She had a whole wall of painted portraits of every dog she had ever owned. She showed me the pictures of all the dogs that she had lost, and with sadness in her eyes, she told me their stories, from people who had dropped them on her doorstep to heartbroken pet owners who had to give them up for medical reasons.

  She took a picture off the wall and handed it to me. The happy little face that stared back at me had copper-colored fur with white flashes and a long, thin, slippery-looking tongue that drooped out of the side of his mouth. There appeared to be some whippet in his heritage. His mischievous eyes looked playful and adventurous.

  “This was Dodger,” Annie said with a knowing smile, and then she added, “He was a rascal. He turned up on my doorstep one morning as if he was here to pay a visit. It was really early, and I thought maybe someone had dropped him off. But I was soon to learn that no one really owned Dodger.

  “He constantly came and went, no matter how hard I tried to secure him. The whole property is fenced, but somehow he found a way to escape. I would turn my back, and he would be gone, sometimes for days, then he would turn up on my doorstep again as if h
e hadn’t been anywhere. He was like a wayward child.”

  She giggled as she continued to recount the little dog’s story. “I named him Dodger after the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist. Because I couldn’t tie him down and because whenever he returned, he would bring me gifts—a scarf, a hat, or a shoe, and once a whole purse. He would just drop them on the doorstep and wait for me to open the door as if he was back to exchange them for his breakfast. I hate to think of the poor woman’s closet that was slowly being emptied.

  “One day he brought me a surprising gift. He brought me Popeye the pug. I have no idea where he found him, but when I opened the front door that morning, there they both were, covered in mud, ready for their breakfast. Popeye was obviously well cared for, but even though I did a search, I never found the owners of either of them. I think they were just a pair of carefree bandits out roaming the countryside.”

  She placed Dodger’s picture back on the wall as she continued to tell me story after story about her dogs. I was taken aback with her devotion.

  “Let me get you a cup of tea, Janet,” she finally said, “while I’m sorting out this parcel for Stacy.” She led me into her sitting room. On a well-loved dark oak table, laid out in pink tissue paper were two matinee coats, several pairs of booties, and four little knitted hats.

  “Oh, these are beautiful,” I said.

  “I knitted one for the girl and one for the boy,” she said decisively.

  “How do you know they’re a girl and a boy?” I asked. Stacy had been very quiet about the sex of the twins, as she wanted it to be a surprise. It looked as if Annie already knew.

  “I just have a feeling,” she said confidently.

  As she went to go and make the tea, I looked around the room. The whole room had the air of muddled love. There were piles and piles of knitting patterns, books, women’s magazines, and every conceivable kind of collectable plate. As I looked through her large picture windows, I saw a full moon had started to take center stage. A picture in a frame on the windowsill caught my attention. I picked it up and examined it closely. It was obvious from the resemblance that it must be one of Annie’s relatives.