I NEEDED A COMPELLING PLOT, a connected thread of events that could draw me, like Theseus, through the labyrinth. Back in my study, I pushed the laptop aside. Time to get to work. I uncapped my pen. “Her mind furiously churning, she uncapped her new Mont Blanc,” I thought. “The nib hung quivering over the porous, yellow page, which waited, patient and still, laying itself open for her words.”
Plot, I told myself sternly. I tried to think. “Theodore wants desperately to get through med school, (med school = Minotaur),” I wrote. “He comes from a long line of doctors. His father is demanding, controlling, sort of a Joe Kennedy with his eye on Mass General as his empire.” I broke off here. Best if I used another color to represent motivating background material.
It took about half an hour to locate my colored pencils in a tin marked “Art Supplies” under my shoe boxes, but time devoted to organization is never wasted. At the top of the page I constructed a key. I would continue the plot in blue-black fountain pen; fill in character traits, tragic flaws, outside influences, etc., in red; insert secondary plots in green; note any quirky supporting details, symbols, particularly apt metaphors and allusions in pink.
“On his own, he’s doomed to fail,” I wrote in red. I could figure out why later.
“His wife, Anna, is brilliant. She helps him cheat on his exams so he passes.”
“Problem.” Problems would be blue. Why doesn’t Anna just become a doctor herself, if she’s so smart? I was stumped for a minute, and then I had a sensation surprisingly similar to the one cartoonists depict with a lightbulb. “Anna is doctor,” I scribbled, in my excitement making a mess of my color scheme by continuing with the blue pen. Anna’s being a doctor would make cheating easier and also cause conflict for her—she’s not only loosing an incompetent doctor on an unsuspecting population of sick and injured, but also endangering her own career. Maybe the book should be from Anna’s point of view.
Theseus left Ariadne. “Once Theodore has used Anna, he leaves her while she’s sleeping, preferably on an island. Maybe Barbados?” Ted and I could take a research trip. “He can’t stand to live with her knowing what she’s done, even though she did it to help him.”
It was a great plot. I could tell by the way the snags unraveled after only a moment’s thought. I waltzed with the legal pad around the room. I passed my hand over the page of scribbled, colored lines in awe. Even by itself, it was a work of art I would be proud to have displayed someday among my collected letters and drafts.
Faulkner printed the plot of As I Lay Dying around the walls of his study in Oxford. I was reluctant to write directly on the walls myself—after all, we were renting—but I did have several large sheets of white paper left over from the “Literary Map of the United States” I’d done for my eleventh-grade class. If I transferred my diagram to those, using one sheet per pivotal event, I could tape them up along the hallway, around the bedroom, and in the space that remained between the bookcases and the windows in the living room. I would leave room to add the chapters in between once I’d decided what would happen in them.
Ted had a dinner meeting, so I worked without interruption. It was five-thirty on the West Coast by the time I taped the final sheet onto the closet/study door and called Letty.
“I’ve got the plot!”
“You’re kidding. That’s great! Not until you’re done with your homework.” The last was not to me, of course.
“Mario?” Mario was her eldest, my goddaughter.
She sighed. “Yes. She wants to go roller blading with Patrick and Conor.” Neighbor kids. “But I told her—”
Mario warbled in a high, faraway voice, “Help me, Auntie Margaret! I’m being held prisoner by an evil queen!” She stomped off in what I assumed was the direction of the tiny bedroom she shared with her infant sister, Ivy.
“No skates in the house! So,” Letty said, “the books going well?”
“No, better than that. I have the entire plot worked out, actually taped all over the apartment, like wallpaper.”
“You should have written it right on the walls, like Faulkner.” This was one of the many things I loved about Letty—she remembered everything I told her. “So? Tell me. What’s going to happen?”
I told her, keeping the story as fluid as I could while still injecting the crucial background information. I walked around the apartment as I talked, moving from one segment to the next, just as I anticipated I would when I began to write. I’d easily be finished with this thing in six months. Or, I could work ten hours a day and polish it off in four or five. I wondered if the sculpture of the recumbent Ariadne could be photographed for the cover. Would that cost a publishing house more than a cover designed by their own art department?
“That’s great, Margaret.”
I ignored the fact that this was a response one would give to a recitation by a six-year-old. Letty hadn’t much practice critiquing literary works. “I think it’s a book I’d like to read,” I said. “Don’t you?”
“Definitely. I can’t wait to read it. And when it comes out, I’ll casually pick a copy off the shelf and say, ‘Have you seen this book? My friend wrote it.’ I can’t wait to do that. I’ll just spend the whole day in the bookstore.”
I laughed. “Feel free to break for meals.”
“Can I ask you about one tiny thing? It’s no big deal, but I was just thinking—” She broke off. I could hear water filling the dish-pan and small voices making the noise of gunning engines in the background.
“What’s that?” I was open to suggestions. I’d come up with the idea in a single afternoon; there were bound to be some pesky details to tweak.
“Well, I just know, you know, from Lottie”—Letty’s older sister was a hematologist—“that they’re extremely careful with the boards. I mean, a lot of it’s oral. I’m sure you’ve figured this out, but I can’t really see how a person could cheat.”
“What if Anna was one of his examiners?”
“That’s a really good idea, but I’m not sure it would be allowed. I mean, probably definitely not if anyone knew about their connection.”
“Could she change the score later?”
“Maybe. I’m not sure. I mean, security is pretty tight. I guess it might be possible.”
Maybe Letty just didn’t want to believe there was any way to cheat on the test that her sister had passed. “What if she wasn’t his wife, but secretly his girlfriend? Then could she be one of his examiners?”
“Well, that could happen, sure. But I’m just wondering, if he’s not giving the right answers, how’s she going to convince the rest of the panel to pass him?”
“Maybe she could kill them.” She laughed at this and I joined her, but the walls of our apartment no longer looked like a masterpiece.
“Margaret, I really don’t want to be a naysayer. I’m sure there’s some way to make this work. Because it’s such a great story, especially with the myth and all. And I really love the characters.”
“No, no. I want you to be honest. What if I’d spent two months writing and then ran into this problem? You’re saving me.”
I yanked at the first of my drawings. The tape peeled away from the wall, carrying with it a large swath of paint.
“Margaret, I’ve got to pick Hunter up from his play date. Let’s talk in a couple of days. I’ll call you.”
“No, let me call you.” What with the four children and Letty not earning an income, the MacMillans’ finances were tighter than ours. It didn’t seem right for her to have to spend money to be my cheerleader. Or wet blanket.
We hung up. I retraced my earlier, hopeful steps, pulling down my faulty framework. Every strip of tape left a ragged track, a dotted line leading only in a cramped circle around the apartment. My novel was still stuck at the beginning—Margaret = Minotaur?—and I was going to have to repaint the walls.
“It’ll help me write,” I told Ted. Three tenants ago the landlady had attempted an antique effect by painting the apartment a color akin to yellowing linen. As a writer, I was hyperattuned to my environment, and such surroundings were a drag on my wits.
Also, to be honest, I was desperate to destroy the evidence of my mistake. I’d noticed very early in my life that I couldn’t tolerate being wrong. I was understanding when others erred, but, unfortunately, this was only in part from kindness. The rest of my forgiving instinct derived from the conviction that others couldn’t live up to the towering expectations I set for myself. Everyone made mistakes, but I was not everyone.
When, in second grade, I relied on my own experiences with vegetables and recklessly colored the stem on a mimeographed picture of a pumpkin brown, rather than the requisite green, as the directions had clearly instructed, I begged Mrs. Reynolds for a chance to do it over. “No,” she said, “one pumpkin to a customer.”
During recess, she taped the pumpkins colored side out to the windows, blocking the afternoon sun so that the classroom took on the gloomy cast of the earth under an eclipse. Obviously, the whole pumpkin-coloring endeavor had been merely an attempt to provide seasonal, albeit prosaic, decoration. Still, she’d given my picture a C, which would now be prominently displayed in all its oversized scarlet shame—until the pumpkins were replaced by the inevitable trace-around-the-hand turkeys—to anyone waiting to board a schoolbus, in fact, to anyone casually strolling by the school, possibly even to those driving past, given the leisurely school-zone speed. Even Dougie Resnicki, who was still using fat crayons, had been granted a B.
Nevertheless, I would like the record to show that I did not wheedle to be taken to the supermarket that evening on a search for evidence to prove the accuracy of the brown stem position. My mother, however, discovered that we were out of spaghetti just as the Bolognese sauce had simmered to the proper consistency. My father was already jingling the car keys, this being a nearly nightly ritual that varied only in the identity of the missing essential ingredient, and since he seemed to enjoy my company, I abandoned the map of the autumnal night sky I was plotting on sixteenth-inch graph paper and went along. The Halloween pumpkins were piled unceremoniously in and around refrigerator-sized cardboard boxes in the Ralphs parking lot. I could not help but observe their stems. Their brown stems.
I felt at once vindicated and outraged. I had correctly rendered the pumpkin in living color and had been rewarded with ignominy.
I found my father already in the checkout line with the spaghetti and a shaker can of Parmesan cheese he’d thought to pick up just in case. “What color is this?” I held up the pumpkin I’d heaved inside and pointed at the stem.
He frowned, suspecting a trick. “Orange?”
“No, not the pumpkin, the stem.”
“Who cares about the stem?”
I sighed. “Just what color is it? Brown or green?”
“I’d call it beige.”
Beige, sand, dun—those were fine distinctions I, as a normal second-grader, was unwilling to make.
“So brown?”
“Brownish,” my father conceded.
As we drove home, I complained at length about Mrs. Reynolds, as well as the creators of the pumpkin outline and its nonsensical instructions, accompanying my diatribe with much angry snapping open and shut of the ashtray on the armrest.
“That’s exactly the way the world is, I’m sorry to say.” My father’s eyes flicked up to check the rearview mirror.
“How?”
“Objective reality counts less than what people say. How do we know what green and brown are anyway? They’re just those colors because we, as a society, say so. Your class, as a society, agrees that stems on pumpkins colored by children should be green.”
“I don’t.”
“Well, that’s a common problem. Especially if the society is led by a cliché-dependent despot.”
“Does that mean if Mrs. Reynolds says it, it’s right?”
“Pretty much.”
I hadn’t needed his thirty-five years of life experience to understand that.
“Still,” he said, turning into our driveway, “we can take comfort in the fact that we know better. We can gleefully sneer at those misguided fools.” He looked at me as he turned off the engine. “That’s what I recommend. A hearty dose of gleeful sneering. You may begin now.”
At dinner, my mother explained the concept of poetic license. She also suggested irritatingly that the stem of a pumpkin while it’s still in a pumpkin field might very well be green. I assured her that the picture was most definitely of a pumpkin long removed from a field and that Mrs. Reynolds was in no way a poet. Warren demanded to know what a poet was, which spelled the end of the pumpkin discussion. Not that anyone wanted more.
I was wrong in the case of my plot, of course, wrong because I’d been so inaccurate as to be unbelievable, affording me neither poetic license nor license to sneer. Clearly, I needed to do much better.
Ted did not agree that painting the apartment was the best use of my time. “I think you should get the book done first. Then, while you’re waiting to hear from agents, you paint the apartment to keep your mind off the future.”
“But what about this mess?”
“Sally Sternforth says a writer’s surroundings don’t matter, because a writer draws her material from within,” he said. “Remember that Annie Dillard essay where she draws a picture of the view from her window and tapes it over the glass, so she won’t be distracted by what’s going on outside?”
So I wasn’t Annie Dillard, I thought the next day, as I draped the couch with an old sheet after Ted left. I worked energetically throughout the morning, pausing only for a restorative square of crumb cake, while I paged through Samuel Johnson: Selected Poetry and Prose for instructive essays on composition. By noon, I’d stacked all our books along the hallway and in orderly piles in the bedroom. There was, literally, no room to stand in the bedroom, except on the bed itself, from which our cat, Pickles, watched me somewhat critically. When the bookcases were bare, they, too, begged to be repainted, especially the one cobbled together from raw wood that we’d found discarded in SoHo.
Manhattan was the most affordable city we’d ever inhabited, in terms of acquiring furnishings. We’d been amazed and delighted in our first months to discover not only nearly uncreased magazines piled on the sidewalks, but also perfectly good, or only slightly damaged, furniture—the kind of items that in suburbia would have been shifted from the house to the garage or attic, until a large-enough collection was amassed to justify a yard sale. In Manhattan, we sensed that even had there been enough storage and a proper venue for rummage sales, people had too much money to bother. Why spend a weekend marking prices with a roll of masking tape and dickering with confused elderly women, when you could be brunching at your country house?
So far, Ted and I had dragged home, besides the bookshelf, a child-sized, six-drawer dresser containing three dozen rolls of Ace bandages and about two hundred packets of antibacterial cream; a sort of cupboard on wheels with an enamel top, produced, according to its metal label, in Nappanee, Indiana; and a reasonably clean rattan hamper. Our sidewalk shopping was governed by only one rule: nothing upholstered.
“You’re not painting the apartment, are you?” Ted asked at seven-twenty, after he’d stood for an entire minute in silence just inside the door.
I was sanding bookshelves, a task that would make anyone irritable.
“Not right at the moment. No.”
“I thought I told you this was a bad idea.”
I blew the dust that had accumulated along the surface I’d been rasping into the air. “And your opinion matters more than mine because …?”
He didn’t answer. And then, in one nauseating instant, I realized something that made me feel as if I were strapped in “The Zipper”—an amusement park ride of my youth—and had been abruptly turned upside down. Ted’s opinion did matter more, because he was paying for my book. He was, in a sense, my patron. Although, theoretically, my income from the school would continue throughout the summer, I’d taken the remaining months of pay in one lump check, which had already been deposited. Financially, Ted and I had not been equal partners for years, but, nevertheless, I’d always brought home a salary that could support me. I had, in other words, pulled my weight. But now it was as if he were at the top of a cliff with a rope around his waist from which I dangled. If he said, “Reach for the rock on the right,” did I owe it to him to obey? If I thought the left was better, should he trust me? What sort of a team were we exactly?
“Look, Margaret.” Ted set his briefcase down, boosted himself onto the counter, and swung his legs out of the living room and into the kitchen. I seemed to have blocked the traditional passage between the two rooms with the couch. “I know you’re having a little trouble getting started.”
Luckily, he held up his hand as I opened my mouth to protest, since I had no idea how I intended to defend myself. “But you have to give yourself a chance.” He took the Campari out of the refrigerator and held it up. “You want some?”
“Thanks,” I said. “What do you mean, give myself a chance?”
“I mean you need to face the fact that you’re probably going to have to just sit and think, which you can’t stand to do.” He twisted a plastic ice cube tray until the cubes surrendered with a crack. “These people, for instance,” he said, tapping his briefcase to indicate those who’d submitted grant proposals to the Cabot Foundation, “they spent a lot of time observing and mulling over ideas. They didn’t rush around like chickens with their heads cut off, distracting themselves with trivial make-work, hoping that a finished copy would eventually spring full-blown from their heads.”
“I observe,” I protested. “I mull.” His comparing my novel to the proposals he evaluated made me uncomfortable on two fronts. First, concerned as they were with issues like the plight of the poor, these proposals were a continual reminder that others were directing their efforts and talents toward truly worthy causes. Much as I liked the idea of acting noble, such a sentiment could not be applied to anything I’d ever done, including my intermittent volunteer work, which would better be described as vaguely helpful. I didn’t like to admit this, but, in all honesty, I undertook such work more so that I could see myself as a caring person and so assuage my guilt over being born among the privileged, than out of a burning sense of compassion or outrage over others’ distress. And second—and here my discomfort collided with resentment—how many hours had Ted and I spent groaning over those pages almost universally filled with pompous and tortured jargon? And these were to be my models? “Literature,” I said, “is different from your work.”
He handed my drink over the counter. “I know it’s hard,” he said. Was the patron being patronizing already? “You need to give yourself some time, that’s all. Don’t panic. Don’t distract yourself. If I were you, I’d lie on the bed all day. Or go sit by the river. Sally Sternforth wouldn’t even do the dishes when she was working on her book. She didn’t want any task other than writing to satisfy her drive to be productive.”
I laughed, my hands in the air in a gesture of surrender. “All right. You can do the dishes. But, Ted, honestly, I think better when I’m busy. While I’m painting, I’ll generate some good ideas. And in a week, I’ll be done and we’ll both be happier and more productive in bright rooms. Really, I know what I’m doing.”
That night, I read Joan Didion’s “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.” I underscored passages lightly in pencil, keeping my lines straight and neat with an index card. “Buy index cards,” I wrote on my legal pad, under the exhortation to “Buy baby-naming book,” which was marked with a satisfying tick to indicate its completion.
Didion created an ominous mood and suggested an impending threat of suicide, divorce, and murder with her description of the Santa Ana winds, but when I thought about that weather the words that came to mind were “dry hair” and “allergic reactions.” As in the case of the pumpkin stem, my own observations did not seem very reliable, if my goal was to produce A work.
“There’s no drama in my life,” I complained to Letty the following day.
“There’s drama here,” she sighed. “There’s blood and tears, and sweat, too. Mostly mine,” she added.
“What happened?” This would be another of the mini-misfortunes from which Letty was constantly bouncing cheerfully back. I sympathized, but sometimes the bid for attention that these scenes seemed to represent annoyed me. Particularly when I wanted to talk about myself.
“Noah pinched his finger in a door this morning.”
“My God, Letty, is he all right?” I remembered when this had happened to me in nursery school, my tender, unsuspecting fingers clutching the doorframe during an overly wild game of hide-and-seek, and Jimmy Kaufman slamming the door shut as he ran by. The thought of it still made me gasp and pull my fingers into a tight, protected fist.
“He seems fine. He and Hunter are in the bathroom with the light off right now, trying to see if the bandage glows in the dark. I’m still a little tender though. Also, Zippy peed on the car seat on the way to the vet.”
Zippy was the guinea pig that lived in Hunter’s classroom. Letty had agreed to keep him for the summer, along with her two dogs, three cats, and tank of tropical fish.
“Shouldn’t he have been in a carrier or a cage or something?”
“Apparently so. It’s a zoo, here, Margaret. I love having all the kids home, but there’s just so much … I don’t know … activity.”
“What’s going on with the bigger-house plan?” We’d concocted the “bigger-house plan,” which was actually not so much a plan as a wish, when Letty was last pregnant and realized that if she had another boy, her sons would eventually have to sleep in some sort of triple bunk arrangement suitable only for merchant marines or Tokyo businessmen. Luckily, the baby turned out to be Ivy.
“Well, I don’t know if I should say anything yet, but there actually might be a bigger-house plan this year.”
“What? What are you talking about? Why didn’t you tell me?” I was a little ashamed that in our last few calls I’d not thought to ask about Letty’s life, since I expected it simply to jounce along in its established way.
“Well, I was about to, actually. I mean this all just happened yesterday. Michael got a call from the director of the Otis Museum.”
“The Otis! Would he be interested in something like that?” The Otis was known for its flamboyance. It had a gorgeous site, magnificent buildings, a colossal endowment, and a relentlessly second-rate collection. Letty’s husband, Michael, was a tweedy art historian with a specialty in nineteenth-century Lithuanian print-making who had just been tenured at Ramona University. They hardly seemed a match, and I had to admit that, though I’d phrased my question sincerely, I also wondered if the Otis could really be interested in Michael.
“I don’t know. I mean, we don’t even know what the job is yet, exactly. It’s really all just talk at this point.”
“It would mean a lot more money, wouldn’t it?”
“Oh, you know,” she said dismissively, “we don’t really care about money that much.”
“Money’s not such a bad thing.” In fact, like Letty and many others in my comfortable class, I did think that work should be directed toward some more lofty goal than income. Ample money should be the happy, preferably unexpected, by-product of the passionate pursuit of a meaningful interest. However, if the big bucks were not forthcoming despite passion and obvious talent, what then?
“I’m sorry, Margaret, but I’ve …”
“I know. You’ve got to go.”
“But we didn’t talk about your book! Do you have a new idea?”
“Next time,” I said.
I did not have a new idea. I’d been sanding all day with the notebook open beside me ready to catch any drop of inspiration, but so far the pages had collected nothing but dust. It turned out that, despite my claim to Ted, I didn’t think better when I was busy. I did feel industrious, though, almost virtuous, sanding, listening to Jude the Obscure on audiotape turned up to maximum volume so I could hear it over the scrape of the paper against the wood.
Applying the primer, while the reader rumbled on about how Jude’s misfortunes and ill-chosen associations drag him deeper and deeper into destitution, heartened me, though. The clean, white paint running like a milky river behind my brush renewed my confidence in my plan. Just as I was preparing the wood so that Codman Claret would cling to every grain, so I was preparing my mind for the right idea. But Ted was right, too, in a way. I’d been trying to force inspiration, grabbing like a drowning person at every twig. I would relax. I would float. I would let the ideas come to me.
Letty would approve of this. She’d always insisted that “wait and see” was not just a hopeful way of saying “lazy.” If I hadn’t filled out her college applications for her, she’d have missed all the deadlines. Of course, she wrote the essay herself, started and finished it in one short afternoon, something about how the values she’d learned as a Brownie had guided her behavior ever since. It had turned out quite well—clever, pithy, light—much better than the labored piece on California’s hypocritical attitude toward illegal immigrants modeled on A Modest Proposal that I produced after three weeks of erasing and rewriting in my locked room.
Back in elementary school, when I told my mother that Mrs. Larue had signed Letty up for Brownies, she’d scoffed. She’d said she’d wasted enough hours for the both of us striving for inconsequential badges. She’d said the Girl Scouts was an organization designed to keep girls in their place. She’d also declared her unwillingness to iron the uniform. I yearned a little for that ugly chocolate-milk-colored dress and felt beanie on Tuesdays, when the Brownies met after school, but I had to side with my mother after I saw the “telescope” Letty made with her troop out of a paper towel tube. There were no mirrors, no lenses; they just decorated the cardboard with sequins and glitter. What good was that? And it was obvious from Letty’s creation that no one had taught them to apply glue with a toothpick.
Since the table was hemmed in by the shelves, which needed to stay away from the walls, and the kitchen counter was cluttered, Ted and I ate sitting on the bed, balancing a bottle of wine and our glasses within easy reach on pedestals of books. I may have enjoyed this picnic atmosphere and the sensation of inhabiting a work in progress more than he did.
“How much longer, do you think?” he said on the seventh night, picking a curl of sesame noodle off the pillow.
“Really just another day. I wanted to be sure the walls were dry before I put the masking tape around the windowsills.”
“You’re doing the windowsills, too?”
“They would look shabby, Ted, now that the walls are so nice. Believe me, you wouldn’t like it. And then a week for the hall and the bedroom, and then I’m done.”
“A week!”
“Well, I was thinking of doing something a little more interesting in here. Maybe a celadon with a light, springy green trim. And then the pale yellow base in the hallway, but with a subtle stencil about three inches above the molding, incorporating the green and the red of the bookshelves to draw the rooms together.”
“Are you insane?”
“What? It won’t be a Christmasy red and green.”
He let his face fall forward into his hands and then tipped his head back again, raking his fingers through his hair. Ted tended toward the histrionic. He thrust his arm toward me, index finger aloft. “Margaret, you have one year. One year to write a novel, not to paint the apartment, not to read about writing, not to talk on the phone to Letty.” We’d received a phone bill that afternoon listing a number of calls of surprising length to California during peak hours. “Do you think I would’ve said, ‘Sure, go ahead, take the time,’ if I’d thought you were going to spend it tarting up a rented apartment?”
“Tarting up?”
He shook his head. “No, I didn’t mean that. It looks nice. But it’s completely unnecessary, and it’s taking you away from your work.”
“All right,” I said, my voice tightening as I got up from the bed in a self-righteous huff. My foot tumbled a stack of books, instigating a domino-like cascade of several more stacks. “I’ll get back to work, right away, sir.” I grabbed my notebook and flounced down the narrow path between the books that lined the hall. I tried to make enough noise with my bare heels to communicate my displeasure, but not so much that it would wake our downstairs neighbors.
Ted followed, a takeout box in each hand. He liked his environment to be orderly, even in the midst of internal turmoil. “Margaret, you’re deliberately misunderstanding me.”
I’d thrown myself into the corner of the skewed and sheet-covered couch and opened my notebook on my drawn-up knees. This was the closest I could get to demonstrating work, since I’d neglected to pick up any sort of writing implement. “ ‘Go ahead, take the time,’ you said. As if I were your employee!”
“Listen, it was your plan. I liked the plan. I agreed to the plan. Now you have to do the plan! Not whatever you want.”
“I’m not—”
“No! Let me finish. It’s as if we agreed I could use my time, which is basically the same as our money—not your money, not my money, our money—so that I could build a boat, and instead I used it to reorganize my books. When the time was gone and there was no boat, you would feel cheated.”
“If it were important to you to reorganize your books, I would want you to do that.”
“No, you wouldn’t! Not if you knew I really wanted to build a boat!”
“But Ted, it’s not like type, type, type, type, done! You make it sound like if only I applied myself I’d be sliding into the denouement around now.”
“You made it sound like you only needed to apply yourself.”
“Well, I am applying myself. It’s hard, that’s all. It’s art, not boatbuilding. I’m figuring it out as I go along.”
“Margaret, I know it’s hard. I couldn’t do it.” He sat down on the couch next to me. I pulled my nearly empty notebook against my chest. “But I believe you can, and I just don’t want you to look back and see this as an opportunity wasted. I want you to give it your best shot.”
How could I argue with that? Ted was right. The only reason I’d not made more progress was that I hadn’t been giving it my best effort. I needed to buckle down. “You know what?” I said. “I think I’ll just do a quick base coat to cover up the mess and be done with it. Save the celadon for when we buy a place.”
“After you sell your book.”
I got off to an excellent start the next day. Like Sally Sternforth, I ignored the growing ruin of dishes and I turned off the Today show before it was over. The shelves were dry, so I shimmied them back into position and reshelved the books. To discipline inspiration, I forced myself to write one thing in my notebook after every tenth trip to the bedroom to collect books. It didn’t matter what I was writing, I told myself. As long as I got material down, I’d have something to work with later. Then I painted the windowsills.
Really, I got an enormous amount of both writing and apartment work done, so it was unfortunate that when Ted came in the door unexpectedly at three-fifteen, I was sprawled on the couch laughing at something Letty was saying. Our door was weighted so that it swung shut automatically, which it did with a wallop, as Ted stomped back down the stairs.
“This isn’t good,” I said into the phone.
“What? Did you paint the windows shut? I did that once.”
“No, no, it’s Ted.” I explained the wrath of Ted, perhaps putting a bit more stress than was strictly accurate on his patronizing tone and unreasonable expectations and neglecting to mention the elaborate stencil work I’d proposed.
Letty was gratifyingly outraged. “It’s not like you’re making widgets! I mean, sometimes you’ll produce pages, sometimes you won’t. Just because there’s no evidence doesn’t mean you’re not working. It’s a process. Look at me; I must pick up twelve times a day, and the house is still a mess.”
Though I appreciated Letty’s attempt to empathize, I did not, I admit, relish her equating her work with mine.
“I think Ted has a point,” I said. “Maybe I’m not doing as much as I could be. I’m working, but maybe I’m not working in the right way.”
“What is the right way?”
“Well, for one thing, I should do more writing, generally. What about, instead of calling each other, we send e-mail. Writing might become a real habit for me then.”
“And when Ted hears you pounding away at a letter to me, he’ll think you’re working.”
“Letty, I’m not suggesting this to avoid work—it’s to make myself work more!”
“I know.”
“Well, I think it would be an excellent exercise for me. I could even imagine that in the course of writing to you about an idea, I might really develop it. I might end up writing my novel to you.”
“Ooh, that would be neat,” she said. “It would be like reading Dickens in the original serial form.”
That was my first mistake. If only we’d stuck with the phone and kept Letty’s words off the page, I don’t believe I would have done what I did.
Margaret always had to be different. Some people, my mother, for instance, thought she was showing off. “Why can’t she just do like the rest of you girls?” she said the year we were nine and Margaret refused to remove the Socialist Workers Party button from her collar, even for the Christmas concert, and then again the next year when Margaret insisted on trying out for the football team. She wasn’t showing off, though, when she did those things. She was just being Margaret.
The story is that Margaret and I met before we could understand what it meant to know someone else, and I suppose this is true. I can’t remember the single occasion when I first became aware of her, because she was always there, like my own hand. She was more vivid, though, than other children, at least to me. My memories of nursery school are a jumble of unconnected details—penny loafers with a confusing dime in the penny slot, a dress in a Mondrian pattern of red, white, and blue rectangles, swinging around white tights, a boy’s bristly brush cut, and the teacher with a bindi—although then I thought of it as a dot—guiding my fingers to form a papier-mâché bracelet for Mother’s Day. I remember Margaret clearly, though. That morning Margaret made her mother something she said was the bust of Nefertiti, which made some boy, Buddy something, giggle. It looked like a ball with a blue cylinder on top. Miss Betty, the teacher’s aide, frowned. “Wouldn’t your mother like a nice bracelet,” she asked, “like everyone else is making?” But Margaret shook her head, her gaze intent upon her sculpture.
I was never like that. If they said, “Make a bracelet,” I made a bracelet. I was so pliable, so eager to please. It would never have occurred to me to do anything else.
Margaret told me my bracelet was the best. I didn’t say anything about Nefertiti. I didn’t know what a Nefertiti was. Maybe she’d made a good one.
Our high school offered Spanish and French, but Margaret petitioned the language department for permission to take Latin at Occidental College in Eagle Rock.
“It’s the root of all Romance languages,” she said, trying to convince me to go with her. “Once you know Latin, you’ll pick up Spanish like that.” She snapped her fingers. “Not to mention French and Italian.”
I understood. It would be dull and sometimes even a little frightening to take the RTD to Occidental all by herself three days a week. But I wanted to learn Spanish. It was the language not of clean and cozy Glendale, but of the real city, Los Angeles. I may have had vague notions of social work. Mostly, though, I was attracted to Spanish because its speakers seemed to occupy a mysterious and, therefore, romantic world behind an invisible but nevertheless impenetrable curtain. When Lottie and I went down-town with my father, who wore a white shirt and a charcoal gray suit and did something incomprehensible behind a desk in a high-rise under buzzing fluorescent lights, we would loiter in the Central Market with five dollars in a little leather box that folded into a flat square. Instead of my prosaic existence, I wanted the life of the girl with the black hair who swayed to the music of the bright horns as she filled paper cups with horchata at her father’s stand. She slipped before the curtain as easily as she made change and then ducked behind it again, turning to the woman I assumed was her mother with a laughing comment in her rapid, rolling tongue. Unlike Margaret, I had no interest in the words of the past. I wanted the words of the future. Also, Spanish was supposed to be easy.
“If you learn Latin with me,” Margaret said, “we’ll be able to have conversations no one else will understand.”
That was how she talked me into it.
Such conversations were more difficult than we had imagined, given Latin’s vocabulary of poetry and conquest. “Oh, the times; oh, the customs” was a handy phrase when we wanted to roll our eyes at our classmates’ proclivities or our parents’ demands, and occasionally we found opportunity to say, “I sing of arms and a man,” but most of what we learned ran uselessly along the lines of “Gaul is divided into three parts.”
However, as it turned out, I had a talent for Latin. Margaret dropped out after a year and a half, but I went on and on, throughout high school, riding the bus on my own, careful to keep my head far from the windows greasy with hair tonics. At first it was the neatness of translation that attracted me, the puzzle of the line that meant nothing until you broke it apart and applied the rules, moving each word into place. But later, it was the style that drew me on, the elegance of Tacitus, the slyness of Catullus. I felt I knew these writers, as personalities, as people, through their words.
Michael and I met in a class on St. Augustine, an advanced Latin course we were both taking our freshman year of college. At our wedding, Michael thanked Margaret.