Making Stuff Up
Ordinarily Amy would have been pleased at the small number of drops. The room was almost filled when she arrived, and within a few minutes the rest had straggled in. As far as she could see, she was missing only Tiny Arena, Airhead Tiffany, and the Boudreaus, and she had gained Carla Karolak, no surprise there, sparkling at her from the front row. As promised, Marvy Stokes, helpfully wearing another Hawaiian shirt, had brought in a pile of Xeroxed manuscripts. Amy asked him to pass them out to the class and to her, and asked if anyone had seen Tiffany.
“I’m right here,” said Tiffany Zuniga.
“I meant the other Tiffany. McGee. The one who was supposed to bring in a story tonight.”
“Maybe she dropped,” said Charlton Heston.
“Bite your tongue,” said Amy. She regarded the class severely. “There is a special circle of hell,” she told them, “reserved specifically for people who promise to bring something in and then renege. I want you all to understand this.”
Carla stood up. She had taken to doing this lately, standing up instead of raising her hand or just speaking out. “Take it from me,” she told the others, “she’s dead serious.”
“Why,” asked Charlton Heston amiably, “should we take this from you?”
“I’ve been through this course six times.” Carla sat down, then rose once again. “She’s that good, people. Take it from me!”
No one, with the possible exception of old lady Wentworth, looked inclined to take anything from Carla Karolak. Carla was clearly in one of her manic phases, and anyone not acquainted with her would likely assume she was some kind of nut. The fact that she was so spectacularly obese that she made Amy look lithe in comparison did not help her credibility either, especially in Southern California, where physical health was synonymous with moral virtue. Carla was a constant annoyance to Amy, mostly because of moments like these, when she was forced to defend her.
“Carla,” Amy said, “knows what she’s talking about. She also writes dynamite short fiction,” she lied. Carla’s work was getting better, but that was about it.
“Not anymore!” said Carla, starting to rise again. She was wearing a tight magenta jogging suit of threadbare velour. “I’m back to poetry again!”
Swell. “The point is,” Amy interrupted, settling her back down, “that it’s inexcusable for any of you to let down the rest of us. I want to make myself clear on this point. If you promise to bring something in and you fail to do so, for whatever reason, then we are doomed to a three-hour class without a common text. We’ll spend three full hours twiddling our thumbs, or worse, listening to me drone on and on, or to one of you reading aloud. As I warned you last week, nothing on God’s earth is more soporific to the average adult than being read to.”
Charlton Heston raised his hand, speaking effortlessly for the whole class. He had that degree of self-assurance. “What if you sign up to bring something in and then die?”
“Then you go to hell,” said Amy.
He glanced over his shoulder at the nervously chuckling crowd. “She’s really strict,” he said, in a stage whisper.
“Look,” said Amy, “obviously there are valid excuses, but none of them involves failing to notify me so I can make other arrangements. That’s why I gave you my phone number last week.” She stopped and surveyed their faces, searching out the whispering maniac. Of course there were no obvious candidates. She had a cunning thought. “I can’t teach you anything,” she said slowly, scanning the room for a furtive sign of startled recollection, “in the abstract. I can’t teach you anything unless you give me something to work with.” Zilch.
Dr. Surtees, seated once again in the front row, raised a languid hand. “I took the liberty of bringing twenty copies of Code Black,” he said, indicating a Nordstrom’s shopping bag beside his desk.
“Well, that’s enterprising of you. How many pages are we talking about? Not the one hundred twenty you gave me last week—”
“No, the whole thing.”
“The entire novel?”
“Whoa,” said one of the outdoorsy guys, who was either Syl Reyes or Frank Waasted.
“Whoa is right,” said Amy. “I appreciate your bringing this in, but you can’t expect—”
“I don’t,” said Dr. Surtees. “I’m merely asking for feedback on the first two chapters. I included the rest just in case anyone wanted to see how it ends.”
The middle-aged woman in a fuzzy lime green suit said she couldn’t wait to read it. Amy couldn’t remember her name, and she’d left her cheat sheet in the car. Typically, Amy didn’t nail down the names of all her students until she’d read their fiction. She was trying, though, and getting marginally better at it. Who was this silly woman who rushed to embrace the doctor’s novel? Surtees and Marvy Stokes passed out copies to the class and to Amy.
“All right,” said Amy, “the deal is, next week we’ll have read thoroughly and be ready to discuss chapters one and two of Code Black and”—she glanced down at Marvy’s manuscript—“‘Nobody Wins All the Time.’ Is this a short story?” she asked Marvy, wondering as she did so if it would be possible to go on indefinitely avoiding his ridiculous nickname.
“Yeah. Well, you can tell me if it is. It might be something bigger.”
“Fine. Understand that you are each to read each manuscript carefully, and mark it up with your comments, so that you can pass it back to the author at the end of next week’s discussion.
“Meanwhile, we are faced with the Problem of the Second Class. We talked about this last week, and I asked all of you to think about bringing in something short for reading aloud and extemporaneous discussion.”
Five hands shot up, Carla’s first.
“Poem, right?”
“Sorry about that,” said Carla. “I know you don’t like to deal with them. But it’s what I’ve been doing lately.”
“Carla, if you’re not doing fiction, then maybe—”
“Don’t worry. I’ve got a story for later. This is just for tonight.” Already on her feet, Carla asked if she should read from where she was or come forward. Amy made the mistake of leaving it up to her.
Carla shuffled up front, pausing to send copies of her poem down each row of students, deposited one on Amy’s desk, and faced forward. She had, Amy thought, put on a few more pounds since the last quarter. Her magenta sweatshirt was a couple of sizes too small and didn’t quite reach what would have been her waist if she had one and displayed a pink roll of midriff. Amy had never figured out whether Carla knew how unwisely she dressed. She was always otherwise well groomed, so it was hard to believe that she chose garish apparel on purpose. Carla was a twinkling mystery to Amy.
“I just finished this one recently,” Carla told the class brightly. “I’m interested in brutally honest feedback, so listen up.” There were nervous titters; the audience certainly wasn’t hers, but probably nobody wanted her to crash and burn either. “It’s called ‘Engine 101.’”
Engine 101
By Karla K
The rope must be new
Or all bets are off
Rope changes when you pull on it
At first it’s elastic
At last it’s not
Not when you pull too hard
When you pull too hard it breaks.
Upon buying the rope
You should consider its tensile strength
Sometimes expressed in “newtons.”
Sometimes in “psi.”
Be sure to examine the label.
You must also consider
The maximum safe working load
To prevent tragic accidents
Or whatever.
Suppose you have a working load of
Say
Two hundred seventy-eight pounds.
You could use 3/8-inch diameter twisted nylon
braid
Or ½-inch manila
Or maybe ½-inch sisal
(if you’re feeling lucky)
But the first is slippery, like an eel
And the others are scratchy, like bad wool
And none of them feels as good as cotton
You can buy cotton rope on e-Bay
GREAT BUY
½-inch DIAMETER
MAX WORKING LOAD OF 300 LBS
But don’t.
They lie.
Carla lowered her paper and regarded the class. Amy, directly behind her, couldn’t see the expression on her face, but could hardly miss the expressed reactions of the rest, which ranged from polite dismay through pity to horrified stupefaction. Even Dr. Surtees looked uncomfortable. Carla had really outdone herself this time. Amy didn’t know whether to applaud or just put her head in her hands.
“Who wants to go first?” Amy asked disingenuously. “Look, the writer asked for feedback, and even if you’re not up to brutal honesty just yet, you are all capable of reacting to what you’ve just heard.” In fact, you’re doing it right now. “I warn you, I’m going to call on someone in a few seconds.”
“Well, first off—” said the outdoorsy guy in the back.
“Excuse me,” said Amy. “As it’s only the second class, it would be helpful if you would all identify yourselves when speaking up.”
“Syl Reyes. Well, first off, I thought it was going to be about a train.”
“Why?” asked Amy.
“‘Engine 101,’” explained Charlton Heston. “Charlton Heston,” he added.
“See?” said Syl Reyes. “The title is wrong.”
Tiffany Zuniga identified herself and explained to Syl that “Engine 101” was a college course, of course, short for Engineering 101. “I think most readers would know that.”
“Well, I didn’t.”
“Actually,” said that thrift-shop queen, Ginger Nicklow, “I didn’t either.”
Amy had to stop this before the little sneaks actually got away with what they were trying to do. “Let’s put the title aside for a moment. Let’s talk about the poem itself.”
“Thanks,” said Carla, over her shoulder.
“Well,” said Syl Reyes, “my point was, I was so messed up by the title that I couldn’t concentrate on the rest of it. I kept waiting for the train.”
“Was anyone else similarly distracted?”
A number of them gratefully nodded their heads, including the hypocritical Tiffany Zuniga, which didn’t make any sense, unless you knew anything about human nature.
“Then let’s hear it again, shall we?” said Amy to Carla, and they all did. Amy found their collective consternation immensely satisfying. That’ll teach you, she thought.
“All righty,” Amy said. “What is the poem about?” Silence. “Tiffany. What is this poem about?”
“Well, that’s really not for me to say, is it?”
“Of course it’s for you to say.”
“Well, how am I supposed to know what she meant when she wrote it?” Amy was definitely getting to Tiffany.
“You’re not. You’re supposed to know what you heard when she read it.”
“The writer,” said Carla, “is an authority on his own intentions. The reader is an authority on his own experience, which includes the experience of reading the writer’s work.”
Amy hated it when Carla quoted her. First, because she stole her thunder, and second, because hearing her own words from someone else made them sound pompous, which they were.
“This is not to say,” Carla went on, “that all readings are equal. There are poor readings and—”
“If you don’t understand what you heard,” said Amy, “just say so. This is a process, not a test.”
“Okay, then, I don’t understand what I heard,” said Tiffany.
“Good,” said Amy. “Now, why is that?” Gotcha.
Tiffany looked betrayed.
“Tiffany has given us a good start. Is there anyone here who thinks he understood the poem?”
The buzz-cut reporter, Ricky Buzza, glanced at Tiffany and raised his hand. He reminded Amy of Tom Sawyer, sacrificing himself for Becky Thatcher. “It’s about rope,” he said.
“Pete Purvis!” said the kid in back of Ricky. “Yeah, it’s about rope, tensile strength, and, uh, loads.”
“Does everyone agree?”
Everyone looked down or to the side and kept their traps shut, except for Charlton Heston, who regarded Amy with interest.
“Mr. Heston. Charlton? Do you agree? Is this a poem about tensile strength and working loads?”
“Would you mind calling me Chuck? And no, of course it isn’t. Who’s going to write a poem about rope? It’s about—”
“Excuse me!”
Amy searched her class list for a clue as to the identity of that agitated woman in the fuzzy green suit. Studying her baffled, humorless face, Amy flashed on Margaret Dumont in Duck Soup, singing “Hail, Hail Freedonia!” I use dot. “Ms. Hieronymus, is it?”
“Dot Hieronymus, and I must say something. This is one of the most moving, emotionally wrenching poems I have ever heard. Are we all deaf here? Are we all blind? Are we dumb?”
“Actually,” Amy said, “we’re all timid. Except, apparently, for you. Dot, will you please tell us what you think the poem is about?”
“I will,” said Dot, whose eyes, fixed on Carla, were filling with tears. “But first I want to say, to Carla, that—”
“Wait a minute,” said Amy.
“—that we all heard you. That you are among friends.”
About half the class seemed to emote along with Dot, and the rest looked ready to bolt. Harold Blass Ball made eye contact with Amy. “Before this goes any further,” he said, “I’d like to remind you all that I’m a lawyer, and that this is not a licensed group therapy situation, and that certain liabilities could—”
“Thank you so much,” Amy said, “for bringing this up, and I’ll get back to it in a sec, but first, will someone please, please, please tell us what they think this poem is about?”
Carla clapped her hands and jiggled. “Wow,” she said, “this is so cool.”
Dot half-rose from her seat. “Dear Carla,” she began.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake. The poem is obviously about a failed suicide. The poet herself gives every indication of being happy, and even if she isn’t, it’s none of our business. We are not friends. We don’t even know one another.” Edna Wentworth, of all people, briskly retook her seat and gazed severely around her, particularly at Dot Hieronymus. Edna Wentworth, Amy remembered now, was a retired schoolteacher. Amy loved Edna Wentworth. First, for being a bright, no-nonsense woman; and second, for reconfirming for Amy the folly of cliché expectation.
“Exactly,” said Amy. “Thank you so much, Edna. Is ‘Edna’ all right?”
“‘Edna’ is perfectly acceptable, but if this is going to turn into an encounter group, I’m leaving.”
“Me, too,” said Amy. “Everyone, please pay attention. Before we get back to the poem, let’s get clear on what we’re about. This is a fiction workshop. It is not a journal-writing workshop, or an essay class, or some bogus course on how to get an agent, or a consciousness-raising festival. We’re here to write and read and discuss fiction. Fiction is not fact. Though this much should be obvious, to many people, both here and elsewhere, it is not.
“When one of you—Carla, in this instance—brings in something for the class to read, that person has the absolute right to have his manuscript assessed as fiction, and each reader has the solemn duty to read it that way. Always. In every single case. No matter what. If, for instance, a two-headed, one-legged leper writes a story with a leprous two-headed, one-legged protagonist, we will not assume that the piece is in any way autobiographical.”
“But surely that’s unrealistic,” said Ginger Nicklow.
“Of course it is. That’s the whole point. We are here to write fiction. Fiction writers lie their heads off. It’s their job. They make stuff up.”
“Come on.” Ricky Buzza and Syl Reyes spoke at once. Ricky deferred to Syl. “Okay, I mean, we make stuff up, but a lot of it is going to be about our real lives. Right?”
“Of course it is,” said Amy.
“Then how can you say that it’s all made up?”
“I just told you. Fiction writers lie their heads off.”
“She just lied!” said Carla Karolak. “Just now! Get it?”
There was a pause, and then most of the class laughed. Even Surtees. Dot Hieronymus didn’t look amused, and Pete Purvis, Amy feared, wasn’t quite sharp enough to get the joke. “Of course some of what we write is based upon experience. But think about this: If we’re going to scour one another’s work for autobiographical references, then we’ll become paranoid, in short order, about revealing ourselves in our writing. We’ll be reduced to bland subject matter, just to avoid embarrassment.
“If we wanted to expose our private lives to public scrutiny, we would write autobiographies or memoirs. Or run for political office. Instead we write fiction. Some is made up out of whole cloth. Some is not. We owe it to one another to assume, in every case, that what we’re reading is made up. Does everybody understand this?”
Dot Hieronymus cleared her throat but said nothing.
“I’ll tell you something else,” said Amy. “When you write, you will find that you sometimes uncover the truth anyway, accidentally, through your artful lies. Sometimes that’s the only way to get at it. This may not make much sense to you now, but I promise that it will, if you do your jobs right.”
There was a long silence. “So,” said Amy, “are we all agreed that Carla’s poem seems to be about a failed suicide?”
It turned into an excellent evening. Second class was early to tackle the Making Stuff Up issue, but most of them caught on pretty quickly, and Amy was pleased at how willing most of them were to tackle Carla’s poem more or less objectively. Not only did someone—Frank Waasted—zero in on the poem’s tone, without too much prodding on Amy’s part, but Edna Wentworth helpfully criticized what she called the “forced irony” of the poem. “The poet is cheerful,” Edna said, “in a way that forces us to pay attention. I’d rather be seduced.” Of course, the others rallied on what they took to be Carla’s side, over-praising the poem, going on about how moving and genuine and imaginative it was. Amy followed up on Edna Wentworth’s comments by introducing the topics of style and substance, and noting how the style of Carla’s poem, breezy and colloquial and offhand, contrasted deliberately with its dark substance.
When discussion died down and it was Carla’s turn to speak, she went into her usual self-effacing tap dance, talking more about Amy than about herself, promising the group an ineffable learning experience. Amy could remember actually enjoying Carla’s praise, the first couple of times she experienced it. She knew now that this was Carla’s way of avoiding the end of the discussion. Carla did not so much revel in the spotlight as come alive there. It was not, as Amy had once thought, that she needed the attention for childish gratification; rather, she needed it in order to recapture her creative energy. Carla never wrote except when she was taking Amy’s class. She had probably tossed off this ridiculous poem during the past week.
“Actually, I wrote it a few hours ago,” Carla was telling the class. “I had to stop by Kinko’s on the way here.” She wound up by thanking Edna Wentworth for her critical comments. “You really nailed me,” she said gratefully.
After Carla sat down no one else volunteered to read, and Amy got out her exercise book and put them through their paces for the rest of the night. She gave them all a choice among three exercises:
She gave them a half hour and settled back with a library book, a new novel by an old friend from college. Cy cranked his novels out regularly, one every two years, and still got respectable reviews. Unlike Amy, he hadn’t gotten published until his mid-thirties, by which time he had a tenured position at UConn and all the time in the world to write. Cy had dedicated his first book, The Future Lies Ahead, to Amy (“To Amy, who doesn’t believe it for shit”), and she had been touched, even gratified, at the time. It was a sharp and silly little book in which Lyndon Johnson time-traveled seven minutes into the future at odd intervals, with odder historical results. Amy and Cy had been lovers when Johnson was president. In fact, Amy could never think about LBJ without picturing the two of them one afternoon, naked and stoned, smearing Cy’s black-and-white TV screen with butterscotch pudding until the crafty old bastard dropped his bombshell about not running for a second term. They had goggled at each other and then, like chastened children, had risen and put their clothes on and cleaned up their mess.
Amy was thinking about Cool n’ Creamy Pudding and Cy’s narrow freckled shoulders when Pete Purvis raised his hand.
“I think we’re all about done,” he said. “I’ve got a character name.”
“Let’s hear it,” said Amy.
“Well, it’s this kid, twelve-year-old kid, his name is Murphy Gonzalez! His father is Latino, his mother is Irish-American. He comes from a big family. He’s the baby. He’s the only kid not interested in sports. He’s big on science.”
“And you just now thought of him?”
“Well, no, I’ve been working on this idea for a while. It’s a kid’s book. But I never liked the kid’s name, which was just Juan Gonzalez. This is brand-new, tonight.”
“Excellent.” Amy beamed. “Okay, who else came up with something new tonight?”
Syl Reyes came up with “S. J. Quinn,” an athletic high-schooler, muscle bound but “runty.” He didn’t know what “S. J.” stood for. Amy said he should. “You made him up,” she said. “You’re responsible for him.”
“Like God,” said Carla.
“Yes,” said Amy. “We are all little gods here. We create people and set them in motion and determine their fates. There is a certain aesthetic responsibility to this, bordering on, or at least mirroring, a moral responsibility. You can never know too much about your characters.”
“Sylvester Judd Quinn,” said Syl Reyes, reddening. Amy noted, from her class list, that Syl Reyes’s middle name began with “J.”
There were a few more names. Tiffany came up with a no-doubt-gorgeous, marathon-running Las Vegas district attorney with a troubled past named Heather Francesca. And Edna Wentworth was apparently very pleased to have dreamed up a Miss Hestevold, a censorious, intelligent spinster, curious about her fellow man, who expects the worst and usually finds it. “I like this name very much,” said Edna. “I think I’ll write about her.”
This was going to be a good group. And to top it all off, Chuck Heston did the sex-reversal exercise, which men traditionally avoided (women loved it), and when he read it to the class, Amy actually felt, if for only a moment, as though she weren’t wasting everyone’s time.
“It’s got a title. ‘My Pet.’ It’s really weird. Should I stand up to read it?” Chuck was nervous, which was good. It meant that there was something at stake for him, which, Amy knew, was absolutely essential to a writer’s progress. “Do I have to stand up?”
“Not unless you want to.”
Chuck kept his seat and read “My Pet.”
His name was Mycroft and he had eight knees, at least four too many as far as I was concerned, plus they were bright red, the exact scarlet of the tanager, only Mycroft did not have feathers, and he did not, thank goodness, fly. He was furry. Not the soft fur of a cat, or the springy fur of a dog; not the kind of fur you’d want to stroke. He was furry like a bottle brush. Not a eucalyptus: an actual bottle brush, like you’d use to scrub a bottle. Except that, unlike a bottle brush, he had bristles detachable at will (a terrible thought, that Mycroft had free will), and when he was angry or frightened he would leap straight up in the air a foot or so, from a tense red-kneed crouch, and fling the bristles out sideways, which turned out to be barbed, so that they stuck in your skin and itched like crazy.
Mycroft was Jack’s. I was so in love and so excited about Jack moving in with me that when he opened the shoebox and took out Mycroft I didn’t scream get the hell out of here with that obscene thing you sadist pervert jerk. I said wow. I said where do you keep him? Jack said Mycroft just roams around. I got spots before my eyes, red spots, but I didn’t actually lose consciousness and instead made up a story about a neighborhood cat who was always coming in the window, and how we had to “protect Mycroft.” I dug up an old fishbowl and threw in some moss and a couple of rocks, and then that son of a bitch handed Mycroft to me so I could put him in myself and then everything went black and when I came to I had actually gotten Mycroft into the bowl and stuck a piece of screen over it. Jack put the bowl in the bedroom while I slipped outside and threw up in the oleander.
Jack left after eight months and didn’t take Mycroft with him. I put the fishbowl in the back hall and got my first good night’s sleep since he moved in. Mycroft was harder to lose than Jack. I was going to just neglect him to death, but then I started seeing him in corners and feeling him on my neck, so I started feeding him again, blurring my eyes every time so I couldn’t see anything but red spots in motion. I tried to give him away. I had nightmares about flushing him down the toilet, murdering him with a hammer, pouring Drano in the fishbowl. I kept feeding him and he stayed healthy. He lived for five years. When he died I put him and his bowl in the trash.
I miss the way I hated Mycroft. I ran into Jack and his lovely wife last Christmas, and he asked, How’s Mycroft? I said he was delicious.
“Wow,” said Amy, and there was general applause.
Chuck was actually blushing. “I never did that before,” he said.
General discussion went on past the nominal end of class time. Harold Blasbalg wanted to know if Mycroft were a tarantula, and if so, why Chuck didn’t come right out and say so, which gave Amy a chance to turn his question around on the group. What was gained by not saying “tarantula”? She reminded them that it wasn’t Chuck who avoided the word, it was his unnamed female narrator.
“In real life,” Amy told them, “and in fiction, we betray our natures in the way we speak. Chuck’s female narrator is a skittish, scattered sort, and also bright and funny. She’s making fun of herself here. But I don’t think she deliberately avoids specifying the kind of creature Mycroft is. Does she?”
“She’s afraid of Mycroft,” said Ginger Nicklow. “She’s probably phobic.”
Ricky Buzza and Pete Purvis asked how she could know that.
“Look,” said Ginger, “she blurs her eyes on purpose when she looks at Mycroft. She can’t even stand to view him head-on. Not using the word tarantula is the same sort of avoidance mechanism. She does it naturally, without thinking.”
“I understand,” said Dot Hieronymus. “If she doesn’t really look, if she doesn’t really use the word, then she can pretend he’s not there. I understand that completely.”
Not everyone else did, and there was a rousing argument, led by Pete Purvis. Finally Amy had to cut them all off because the school janitor was tapping his foot in the doorway. “You’re a great group,” she told them. “We’re going to have some interesting times together.”
Dearest Diary:
Since we don’t know each other, I’d better introduce myself. I’m a person of the opposite sex, writing from an alien point of view. This may strike you as a dumb waste of time, but hear me out: It is not so much an exercise for the imagination as it is a primer on the vagaries of American speech, particularly as regards men and women, who share an enormous vocabulary and ninety-five percent of the available syntactical choices, but differ in certain (predictable!) respects. The dialogue of women, for instance, tends to be timid, exact, polite, even judicious, compared to the dialogue of men compare:
Would you mind terribly getting off my foot?
With
Get off my goddamn foot, you fucking bitch!
Revelation of character through language. Word-avoidance, issue-avoidance. At least she didn’t say GENDER-SPECIFIC.
She’s a slob but she’s not bad. I have a little hope.
THE DOMINANT MALE
THE ALPHA MALE
THE OMEGA MALE
THE TERRIBLE BABOON GOD