by J. J. Murray
“Well, you know, it, uh, it was raining earlier today, and—”
“I know that.”
Why am I talking about the weather at a time like this? he thought. “And, uh, Stevie was outside playing, and—”
“In the rain? You let him play outside in that thunderstorm?”
Arthur sighed. “No, it was only raining then, not very hard, kind of a mist really, just enough to cool him off. It was so hot, and he had been swinging on the swing set, and—”
“What were you doing during all that lightning?”
Arthur sighed again, dragging his hands to his lap, where they wrestled with each other. “Writing.” He looked up at the dark brown eyes. “Downstairs.”
“Writing, huh?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t even know it was raining, did you?”
Arthur scrunched up his lips. He could deny it, but it would do no good. Who doesn’t know when a thunderstorm is raging outside his window? he thought. Besides me, I mean. He shook his head. “Once I heard the thunder, though—”
His interrogator’s hands sliced through the air. “Are you that…unaware, Mister Jefferson?”
Is that a rhetorical question? he thought. If I say, “Yes, I am that unaware sometimes,” I’ll be doomed. If I say, “No, I knew there was a thunderstorm churning through the backyard,” I’ll be lying. Mercy. That’s all I want.
He sat up straighter, still feeling the dull ache in the base of his neck from hours hunched over his laptop. “I was on a roll, a real breakthrough. I was, um, really cranking it out.”
My fingers were flying, and I couldn’t catch up to them! he thought happily. Please understand! Please recognize that inspiration doesn’t always come, that it’s sometimes like a game of baseball where so much nothing happens for innings at a time and then—bam! Someone hits a home run, a grand slam, a grand salami, a towering shot over the bleacher creatures onto Waveland Avenue. That was me today, and I had to let it fly, set it free immediately with no hindrances, no attention to misting rain falling on a healthy, happy, albeit muddy boy on a summer’s day.
“So, you’re downstairs ‘cranking it out,’ as you say, while your child runs around in the lightning.”
There was lightning downstairs, too! he wanted to say, but he only thought it. Inspiration sometimes has a price. “I called him in the second I heard the thunder.”
Which is not to say that Arthur had heard the first rumbles of thunder. He had only heard the loudest thunder, that rolling peal that had broken the inspiration, caught that towering fly ball and turned it into a can of corn bloop to center field, sent it wherever inspiration goes, perhaps to Cleveland? Why Cleveland? he wondered. I haven’t been there since the Steelers used to win games. Wasn’t I with Dad then? It was raining then, too, at the old stadium. Yes! And we were in the front row—
“Stevie came in right away?”
“Huh?”
“Did your son come inside right away?”
He winced. “Not exactly. He, uh, frolicked a little, um, in the mud.” In the circle of mud where a pool used to be, where Arthur had attempted to plant grass, only to have the grass seed eaten by every robin and sparrow in Virginia. “On his way inside.”
“And it didn’t occur to you to make him take off his shoes before coming into my kitchen?”
I’m so glad I didn’t marry a lawyer, Arthur thought, though I suppose every woman has the lawyer gene. “I’ll clean it all up, I promise.”
His wife’s dark brown eyes met his. “Artie, we go through this every single day.”
“I know.” He brightened. “It’s only gum on the carpet, cinnamon, I think. If I take an ice cube—”
She snatched his Diet Coke and took a long drink, shaking her head. She did that a lot, that head shaking, usually once in the morning and a whole lot more at night. He couldn’t blame her. It wasn’t easy living with a would-be author.
To be more specific, it wasn’t easy living with him, a man, raised in the melting pot, whose mind was three parts stew and one part broth, a literal bouillabaisse of lives and memories congealed within the goo of his brain, spewed forth in staccato, home run—like bursts on a laptop whenever inspiration returned from Cleveland.
“I’ll, uh, be more attentive tomorrow. I just—” Her eyes told him not to speak, so he stopped.
“Don’t say you’ll be more attentive because you just can’t be attentive.” She backed up to the closet next to the refrigerator and took out the mop.
He rose from his chair, but her dark eyes put him back in his seat. “I’ll do it,” he said, feebly and without conviction.
She rolled her eyes. “Go back to your…typing.”
Mercy? he thought. Mercy from a woman holding a mop? And on a rainy day in a muddy kitchen? “Are you sure?”
She blinked once, and that answered his question.
“Uh, I’ll, uh,…well.”
I am so well-spoken, he thought. At least my characters can speak clearly when I want them to.
He stood. “Thanks.” He stepped to her as she turned away from him, plopped the mop into the sink, and turned on the faucet. He moved as closely as he dared, his body millimeters from hers. “I’m sorry.”
She used the sprayer to rinse some Frosted Cheerios off the mop. “I’m used to it.” She smirked. “For a man who is such a sponge for details, the whole house could burn down around you, and you’d still be down there typing away.”
He kissed her brown neck, marveling at its softness. “Maybe,” he said, slipping his hands to her hips.
“Maybe nothing. I know you.”
It was true. She did. She knew him. It was why he had married her ten years ago.
He kissed the sensitive spot just under the hairline of the softest part of her neck, the tropical scent of protein styling gel tickling his nose. Her hair had texture, but it wasn’t coarse. He had found out the hard way when he had brought the perm back from Food Lion. “I’m regular, not coarse,” she had said. “Regular tampons, regular perm, regular…”
A real regular girl I married, he thought. A regular girl for a regular guy. Two regular people in an irregular marriage. There is something…symmetrical about it all.
“I’m glad you do.”
She wrung out the mop with her hands. “Glad I do what?”
“I’m glad you know me.”
She rolled her eyes, frowned, but gave him a kiss on the cheek anyway. “Am I in your next book?”
“You always are,” he said. “You always are.”
So, what do you think? It’s not too…domestic, is it?
I like it. It’s sweet. It’s a nice memory. Noël was so angry that day, and yet she mopped up the mess and even sang while doing it.
But there aren’t any guilty pleasures.
Have him put his hands on her ass or something.
In the kitchen?
Why not?
But it’s muddy.
You never know. It might turn her on.
I roll my eyes, save the work, and sit back from the laptop, looking at the mess that is my cramped office. It really isn’t an office, though it has all the prerequisites. My laptop rests on a pressboard desk covered with coffee cup-sized circles that Stevie connected together with twelve of the sixty-four colors of the Crayola rainbow. It is as if Spiro-graph has bloomed on every surface. The laptop itself has seen better days, the floppy disk drive occasionally functional, the CD-ROM drive held forever in place and inert by two pieces of masking tape. The blue industrial swivel chair I sit on swivels only ninety degrees each way before complaining to a stop, its movement impeded by several gobs of spent gum and two gummy worms.
The two-drawer dented metal filing cabinet under the desk holds all of my old rejections, and there’s quite a healthy stack in there. My favorite rejection from New York proclaims: “I do not have room for additional commercial novelist on my list, and while I’m happy top have an abundance of great writers on my list, I lament that I cannot
take on writers who seem to resonate with readers.”
What a load of gobbledygook! Who would want to work for an editor who thinks “novelist” is both singular and plural, cannot spell “to” correctly, and uses the word lament in a rejection, as if this editor truly laments anything other than his or her inability to edit a letter?
I look at my printer and refrain from hitting it. It has been one constant, electric paper jam since the day I bought it. A trio of expended ink cartridges—ones I had planned to refill by hand—teeter on the top of the printer. I knock them over, and they jump to the floor to join a string of paper clips and torn envelopes. An overflowing waste can a sneeze from the empty paper shredder, which Stevie nicknamed “the ’fetti maker,” sits under the first set of shelves holding miles of reference books. These books, collected or given as gifts or simply saved from oblivion by me at yard sales, make the shelves sag only in the middle. Yeah, my bookcases are smiling at me.
You shouldn’t have used pine boards. They’re soft wood.
But they’re cheap.
My library has no organization whatsoever. The Real Mother Goose is sandwiched between a current Roanoke phone directory and Masterpieces of African-American Literature. The 2000 JC Penney fall catalog balances on top of In Search of Color Everywhere: A Collection of African-American Poetry, Time-Life’s WWII, a Bible (King James version), American Indian Archery, and A History of African-American Artists. My 1950 edition of The Oxford Universal Dictionary sits in the middle of the first “smile,” surrounded by The Autobiography of An Ex—Coloured Man and the 1998 Guide to Literary Agents. Siddharta follows The Awakening, which creeps up on Emily Post on Entertaining, which catches up with Things Fall Apart. I used to have one “smile” devoted to African American writings, and the left half contains titles by Toni Morrison, Brian Egeston, and Octavia Butler, but the rest of the shelf includes The Bonfire of the Vanities and ABC’s of the Human Body. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn blooms next to Native Stranger, Cultural Literacy, Parting the Waters, and Journey to Ixtlan on the top smile. What’s that? Oh, yeah. It’s a wooden carving of an African elephant sitting on top of To Love & To Cherish: Meditations for Couples, The Joyful Heart, and the Shakespeare Birthday Book, a gift from my mother. Yeah, I guess my collection is eclectic and peripatetic.
And ultimately pathetic.
At least I read.
The only things that give this room any kind of order are Post-it notes. Affixed to every flat surface are more fluttering Post-it per square inch than any office has ever seen, each a piece of the puzzle I grandiosely call my “works in progress.” So many scribbles and hieroglyphics. I guess it’s my way of keeping my ideas a secret, even from me. These cryptic notes blot out most of the pictures on the shelves behind them, photographs of Stevie, Noël, my family, Grandma Ella, Noël’s family, Stevie again, a few cousins, my nieces and nephews, Noël again in one of those Glamour Shots, my parents, Stevie again…and again.
Visible atop a speaker attached to no visible stereo is my first baby cup, the silver now a dark black, and inside that cup is a two-dollar bill, given to me by my maternal grandfather after a particularly good day at the dog races in Juarez, Mexico. Next to this less-than-sparkling cup is a baseball autographed by Ted Williams, the Splendid Splinter, who, sadly, has passed away recently.
I would have more room if this office weren’t also the guest room (complete with full-sized bed overflowing with files, newspapers, magazines, and books, each with numerous page corners turned down) and the catchall room. An old Tandy computer, its pride wounded from neglect, serves to keep the closet door closed, and a gargantuan monochrome monitor sporting a TV antenna for a hat stares blankly from atop a TV stand where once sat a thirteen-inch TV with no remote control.
I haven’t opened the closet since 1999, when Noël had heard a rustling sound in the walls. I had located the rustling inside the closet where empty computer boxes and warranty cards (and other things manufacturers told me not to ever throw away) lived in harmony, evidently, with mice. I had played the mighty hunter that day, pinning one of the mice to the baseboard with my shoe. I thought, of course, that I had solved the “noises-in-the-walls” issue, but, of course, I hadn’t. That one mouse dragged itself around in the closet using its front paws, struggling to chew through another warranty card or the corner of another computer box, just wanting to make its way in the world that is the closet.
I don’t plan to open that closet anytime soon.
Other than the laptop on top of the desk, there are several coffee cups, each with brown residue at the bottom and at the top edges, each crying out to be rescued with a semiannual visit to the kitchen sink. In the “97.1 WQMG Smooth R&B…Classic Soul” cup, with the residue covered with fluffs of dust, are several red pens, their tops chewed to the quick or missing. And under my most recent cup, a broad yellow smiley cup in the very best seventies tradition—a Father’s Day gift from Noël—is a stack of paper ripped from a steno pad.
I hardly remember writing this…rambling set of paragraphs, notes, and squiggles, in no certain order, that formed the basis for the remarks I had planned to make at Grandma Ella’s funeral over a year ago. I had written some of them while stuck in traffic outside Philadelphia on I–76 the night of the funeral service. The rest I composed in the pew at the church.
I never read my remarks. I was too choked up, too intimidated by other family members making remarks, and simply too scared to speak in front of 500 people. But for some reason, I saved these notes.
Intro: Start with last lines from Robinson’s “Lucinda Matlock”: “Degenerate sons and daughters…It takes life to love life.”
I smile. I had scratched out “Degenerate sons and daughters.” That wouldn’t have gone over too well with my father, aunts, or uncles.
The ideal Ella was a fisherwoman, a fish cleaner, an outdoorswoman in flannel shirts and funny hats, a pianist, composer, and writer.
Grandma Ella was a true Renaissance woman. Noël said that Grandma Ella was really my muse.
She sure could cook.
Yeah.
She survived polio, open-heart surgery, a late baby, a Catholic president whom she thought was the anti-Christ, knee replacement surgery, and cancer. I lived most of my life scared of this woman, This saint who once washed out my mouth with a bar of Camay for saying “dang,” which she said was a derivative of “damn.”
I doubt I would have read all of that. Saying “damn” in a church would have doomed me from attending any future Browning reunions.
I remember so many things:
…The way she drove her Oldsmobile station wagon with one foot flat on the gas, the other foot bumping the brake, as if she were late for heaven or something and everybody had better not stop her from being first in line to see Jesus
…The birthday cards she sent me, 40 in all, each with $2, the last card mailed from what would be her deathbed
…I remember Red Rose tea and the gingersnaps, pretzels, and saltines in the big tins up at the lake in Canada that she swore would “never rot or spoil” since they were made in Pennsylvania
…Her telling me, “can’t is spelled w-o-n-apostrophe t.”
Grandma Ella, who had called me from her deathbed and asked if I had gotten any of my books published; Grandma Ella, who had asked me to write her story one day…The stories she told of her father, George T. the evangelist, who once patched a canvas boat using Teaberry gum and despite a raging thunderstorm stopped to pick up a fallen branch of colorful leaves for his wife Dessie, the best definition of love I’ve found so far…
Maybe I can work some of Grandma Ella’s personality into one of my characters, maybe my main character’s mother? She’d definitely be unforgettable.
The rest are notes I wrote at the funeral while listening to other speakers. I had thought that I knew everything about Grandma Ella, but I was wrong.
Grandma Ella:
*Put envelopes in the freezer so she could remove any uncancelled stamps later<
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*Cleaned and reused aluminum foil
*Put out half napkins on the table
*Had a list for just about everything; said Post-its were invented just for her
*Believed that a messy desk was the sign of a working mind
*Couldn’t eat chocolate or ice cream because of allergies most of her life; in the end, the allergies went away, and at 89, she ate her first ice-cream sundae and loved every bite—“it’s so delicious!”
*Of the three Stephens girls, Helen was the prettiest, Charlotte the smartest, and Ella—“Well,” Uncle Bill said, “Jack got his money’s worth.”
*Had the ability to get folks to do things simply by asserting: “You will do the electrical work” or “you will make this shawl” or “you will sing a solo”
*Got a high school play cancelled in the 60s—play had rape scene—and received angry phone calls and death threats
*Gave “Are You Saved?” tracts to door-to-door salesmen
*Favorite line to her 5 children: “Do you really need it? Or do you just want it?”
*Dad’s story: “Coach said to eat steak before the game.” Mom asked, “Are you on the first team?” I said, “No.” Mom said, “Then you’ll get hamburger until you’re starting on the first team.”
*Planned own funeral; said: “It will be next Friday” (and it is!)
*On deathbed in last moments: “What time is it? I’m still here. This isn’t heaven. Why am I still here?”
*She’s having a reunion with her son, her parents, her husband—“But I’ll see Jesus first”
*Once ran away from home (I didn’t know this!); Left North Carolina for Philadelphia to play piano in a speakeasy during Prohibition; changed her name to Helen Brown; called the “best pianist in Philadelphia” found by father and taken back to NC…later ended up founding a church with Grandpa Jack in Philadelphia…
Grandma Ella was quite a woman, but when I asked my agent if her biography had a chance to be published, Nina said no. “She isn’t famous enough,” Nina said.
I should still do something with this.