Ever since I badly lost the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest, actually even before that, I've been restructuring my manuscript. I've cut a ton, moved the puzzle pieces around like crazy. Before entering the contest, I got several nice, personalized rejections from some kind NY agents. They varied radically in their ideas of why they believed The Goodness of Meredith Beam wouldn't sell. One well-known agent said that my story was "too internal". A few others claimed that they couldn't engage with my protagonist, Meredith. All the advice seemed to boil down to the fact that no one could bring themselves to care all that much about my girl, M.
And here's where I'm hoping my voracious reading habit will come in handy. Not that I'm comparing myself to published authors, successful or otherwise (and certainly not to any who ever made it on Oprah), but I've noticed, in my bookish travels, that one technique writers sometimes use that makes me love and want to protect a character from certain tragedy, is showing that character as a child.
Or perhaps this is less a technique and more a natural element of the story. But, I? I'm admitting it's a technique. I don't quite understand the deficiency in my writing that causes the blase apathy toward Meredith but I'm determined to make people love her, dammit.
I've gone through the chapters, attempted to add more feeling, more yearning. And I've inserted, at the beginning of each section, a few pages about Meredith as a girl (a high schooler, to be precise). Because when, in life, is there more yearning than those teen years?
It's a little long, but I'm including my new first few manuscript pages in this post. If you're so inclined to read it, I'd love critiques.
••••••••••
Our luggage sits,
unpacked, just inside the front door, sand collected along the canvas piping of
the suitcases and duffel bags. Looking at them, from my spot on a carved wooden
bench inside the foyer, I swear I can smell trout and sturgeon, gull excrement
and the lemon verbena candle my mother likes to burn in the Suttons Bay cottage
we rent every summer.
I
pick at the pink polish flaking from my toenails, my flip-flops splayed on the
floor beneath me. I don’t want to proceed further into the house. My mother is
in the kitchen, where she immediately drifted to sort through mail and play the
messages on our answering machine, where my father trailed her, hoping to find
a snack of hummus and Ritz crackers.
A
few moments after their departure toward the back of the house, a woman’s
voice, that was vaguely familiar and also out of place in our mock tudor house
nestled in Lansing, Michigan, brayed down the hallway. The voice, in its first
message, made me think of curlicues and balloons doodled in margins of a
notebook, asked my father to please call her when he had a chance.
As
the amplified clicks of her hang-ups progressed, though, her tone descended
into anger. And then frenzy.
The
first time she called him a mother-fucking coward, my mother could be heard sighing and saying, “Oh, Joe. How could
you?”
Shortly
thereafter, my father scurried through the living room and into his den where he
slammed the door. I saw him, through the panes of leaded glass as he sunk into
his leather loveseat, head in his hands.
The
inside of the house is still and hot after being closed for a week. Sweat
trickles down the back of my neck and into the collar of my shirt. My skin
still reeks of the Hawaiian Tropic that Carolyn and I slathered over arms and
legs and chests for our seven days at the beach.
My
mother has turned up the answering machine’s volume. “You fucked me just last
week, Joe. Just last week and now you’re off with your wife and kids pretending
to be the family man. I know you’re checking messages, Joe. Call me. Fucking
call me.”
It
is 1988 and I know who she is, though I’d only met her once, at a non-partisan
dinner given for Michigan’s governor-elect. She had boufy, blond-streaked hair
and bright, high cheeks. The night my father introduced her to us as a lobbyist
for Amoco she wore purple, plastic earrings and a blazer with sleeves rolled up
to her elbows. I’d sensed her studying Carolyn and I as we picked from the
buffet and did our best to chat with our father’s congressional cohorts.
At
one point we’d ended up in the bathroom together, she dotting on lip gloss as I
washed my hands. “Love your top,” she’d commented through flattened, sticky
lips.
“Thanks,”
I said, ripping off a paper towel. The truth was, I admired her look too. She
was the epitome of eighties swank. The exact opposite of my mother in her
canvas Keds and conversative, gold-rimmed glasses. “I just got it at Maurices.”
Then
the hand-dryer whooshed to life and I left, not sure how, exactly, she fit into
my father’s life, but sensing that her place was as more than a walk-on.
“Come
on, you pussy. I know you don’t go more than six hours without checking your
messages. Call me back.” Her scream then echoed through the house and I slinked
out to the porch with Carolyn, to huddle under the umbrella of her indignation.
She heard it all too, I was sure, and her acerbity would protect me, would keep
me from sinking in the downpour of my own sadness and guilt.
The
truth was, my mother would explain later, that our father hadn’t checked the
machine at all that week. He was trying to forget about the-bitch-named-Sue
(Carolyn, a Johnny Cash lover’s, pet name for our father’s mistress) and had
embarked on the trip, one we took every summer, actually hoping, that year, to
start fresh with our family.
Still,
news of his betrayal batters us like whitecaps crashing across a breakwater,
sweeping everything out into the cold, blue lake. And I don’t know how we can
forgive him.
Carolyn
sits on the porch railing, kicking a post, her arms crossed over her chest. She
squints out at the yard, sun browned and dry, and slowly shakes her head.
I
plop onto the bench swing across from her, the chains creaking as I push off
with my toe again and again. A large bubble forms in the center of me and rises
up into my stomach, my throat, my sinuses until my scalp prickles and the
bubble overtakes everything. It is malleable, yet strong and filled with fear. If
it pops, and I am able to utter one word, it will be a meek, “Help.”
Carolyn
finally murmurs, “That bastard. Our father is a first class, number one
bastard. Did you know that, Mer?”
I
can only push myself back and forth.
She
continues, “I think I’ve always known. Deep down.”
I
don’t want to believe her. Yeah, he messed up royally. But he’s our dad. Daddy.
The one who, when we were small, galloped around the yard with one of us on his
back, whinnying, then stamping the ground with his toe.
“Now
be a pig!” I would shriek, and he’d obligingly waddle around snorting.
Carolyn
always requested the ostrich, which he did not know how to do, so he pranced
with his neck stretched high, his arms looped beneath her knees.
He
wasn’t often so present, so farm-animal-like, but it is this game I remember as
I sway on the swing.
“Maybe
he was… in love?” I try, testing my voice. Only, it doesn’t sound like mine,
but snivelly and high.
“With
someone other than mom? That’s no excuse! God!” she shook her head hard, as if
to erase my suggestion.
A
goldfinch yodels, flutters around in the birdbath that is mucky and only
half-full.
I
get up, drag the garden hose across the scratchy grass and into a flowerbed
that is normally perfectly-maintained, but during our week-long absence has
begun sprouting small weeds. I fill the birdbath. The water is cold, lurching
around air bubbles in the hose, gasping like a living thing in my hands.
Suddenly
I imagine the hose is a penis and I drop it. I wipe my hands on my shorts and
leap to crank the spigot closed.
I
have a boyfriend. Sort of. Our relationship is still new, still tentative. We
met the previous spring at a multiple-school dance and have gone out seven
times, to movies, for walks. The last two dates have concluded in make out
sessions that end abruptly when he pulls away, inhales deeply and stares off
into the middle distance.
And,
though, in the moment I am taut and electric with desire for more, am the one
who unbuttons my top and guides his hands around my body, now the thought of
him, of what lives inside his pants, that he’s the same gender as my father,
leaves me queasy.
“What
are you doing?” Carolyn asks, her tone accusatory. She has rotated slightly on
her perch, to better eye me standing in the middle of the yard, my hand to my
stomach, a slight tilt forward of my body.
“Nothing,”
I say, and turn. I walk to the sidewalk that runs in front of our house. I have
no destination in mind, but suddenly do not want to be near Carolyn and all her
bitterness. I have never been good with conflict. I have never been good with
holding position and arguing my point, or even with existing in the same room,
the same mental space as negativity. So I leave, down one block, then two and a
dozen more.
I
don’t know it now–I wonder if the psychic at the Sutton’s Bay arts festival saw
it–but I am, in running away, setting a precedent that will forever haunt me.
