As Good as Dead (17 page)

I headed across the scrappy backyard to the shed.

I knew the shelf where the cardboard box
WRITERS
’ WORKSHOP/DRAFTS
sat (I saw it whenever we got out Christmas decorations or I went for paint or a tool for yard work), and I went right to it and pulled it toward me and set it on the shed’s dirt floor.

The top of the box was covered with a fine grit, the way it had been four years ago, the day I’d taken it off the shelf during Will’s and my clean-out of the shed. That day, though, in my haste to be done with the box, I’d simply folded the lid shut, not bothered with tape, and so there was dust inside the box now, too. Dust dulled those three taped-together photographs of Esmé and me dressed up as little old ladies.

Immediately, I tossed the photographs into the shed’s trash can; then I pulled a stack of stapled manuscripts and other papers from the box and settled it on the dusty top of a tub of roof sealant.

It turned out that a few of the stories I’d stored had been written by people I’d kept in touch after leaving Iowa, or at least ran into those times that I could prod myself into attending the Associated Writing Programs conferences. One of the stories, “Grass,” had been written by Glynn True, the most famous person to come out of my class, but I’d hardly known her. Many names I did not recognize at all—Robin Clark? Jeff Eldridge? Dan Hale?—or hadn’t thought of in years.

In my days at the Workshop, I’d assumed that I’d always remember my classmates.

“Dry Dock.” A story by Esmé Cole. A good story, as I recalled. All of her stories had been good.

Leaving that first stack of manuscripts on the tub of sealant, I pulled out another pile. This one I settled on the big red toolbox that we had bought in the days when we were fixing up the house. I rifled my way through that second pile. Found a letter that I had written to Esmé toward the end of Will’s and my time in Iowa City—had I mailed an edited version to her? There were all kinds of slashes through the thing:

Dear Esmé,

I hope all is well for you and your little family. [crossed out:
I’d love to hear from you again, but I’m sure you’re very busy—hope my letters aren’t annoying!
]

Rob Roy must be getting big. His eyes were dark in the baby pictures, but I know that can change (he still had the little Buddha look back then—cheeks you want to give a smooch).

Will and I have been working hard. He’s writing his dissertation and I’ve been doing stuff for the Iowa Arts Council (Writers in the Schools, K–12, and sometimes working with senior citizens). I shouldn’t complain. It seems like all of us here go around talking about how hard we work. Like, if we said we’d taken off a couple of days we’d be viewed as total slackers. I don’t want to be this way, but when it’s all around you, it’s hard not to be.

I’ve written [crossed out:
some new stories
]
a story and would be glad to send it along, if you have time. [crossed out:
Will seemed to think a couple of them were a bit too weird, but you know how men often can’t abide pictures of women that don’t conform to their idea of proper female behavior!
]

Well, I should get back to work—ack! I can’t believe I said that. Really, I schlepped around in my bathrobe today until ten and then went out and bought a Snickers bar for breakfast. I can be quite the dissolute character! [crossed out:
Write when you have a chance.
]

XO, Charlotte

There were not many stapled manuscripts left in the box when I removed the last batch, but the stapled pages from
The Holy of Holies
that Jeremy Fletcher had handed around to everyone in our class made up the third manuscript in the pile.

A special ops soldier—scion of a civilization yet to recover from the War Between the States—now whacked-out after flying midnight search-and-destroy missions over Vietnam, went staggering through the Heaven and Hell that were the streets of his native Birmingham
.
From the second-story window of a spectral rooming house, an alluring phantom hailed said special ops soldier:
Come on up, y’all.
Slowly, slowly, Soldier—such was the main character’s name, enhanced with that capital
S
—Soldier climbed a phantasmagoric staircase, traversed a dark and ancestral hall that pulled at the very currents of his blood (in his ears sounded a distant confusion of what he took to be the roar of factories and clank of slave chains mixed with strains of hymns and the wind winding through limbs of oak trees heavy with Spanish moss). The woman he found after his long climb, however, was not she who had called to him but a flesh-and-blood bottle blonde with dark roots, “beach ball” breasts, limbs “thin and cold and see-through as icicles,” and a deep yearning to display to the soldier the “privates” she had hacked at with a piece of glass broken off that same canning jar from which she’d recently drunk what must have been an anesthetic amount of hooch.

The pair’s bloody and initially very energetic sex lasted longer than her consciousness.

I stopped reading after Soldier “betook himself”—or something along those lines; Jeremy Fletcher’s prose sagged with its King James medals—further on down the hall of his crazed and noble inheritance, there to witness, from a doorway outlined with tiny moons that Soldier understood might or might not exist, a dwarf in the process of stripping away the “night-black” skin of his thigh with a tool that Soldier knew (briefly, he pondered whether his own such remained in the rowboat behind Grandpap’s cabin) did serve as the most efficient means for cleaning a catfish.

I stared out the open door of the shed.

Surely he had improved the novel over the years. Surely the pickings from the contest entries had not been so slim as all that.

Still.

As I stood to pitch Jeremy Fletcher’s manuscript into the trash can, I saw beneath it a very old computer printout (the edges of the manuscript pages were rough from where I’d separated them from their perforated printer feed). “Girlfriends” was the name of that story. A story of mine. A much reworked but never finished attempt to understand my friendship with Esmé Cole.

I scanned the pages in which iterations of Esmé and myself became, respectively, Olivia and Ellen, graduate students in studio art at the University of Minnesota. Slowed for a scene that began before the two students—roommates—shared their first dinner:

Olivia bustled into the kitchen, bringing, as always, an air of confidence that Ellen wished that she could find in herself—or even imitate. A crusty baguette stuck out of one of the paper bags in her arms, and she announced to Ellen—then intently sketching several white eggs in their turquoise Styrofoam carton—that she
finally
had found a place in that Podunk town that sold pan­­cetta and fresh mozzarella! “Which means we’ll be dining tonight on
insalata Caprese
and
pasta carbonara
!
You, my dear, will be
sous chef
!”

Ellen never had heard of pancetta or fresh mozzarella.
Insalata Caprese. Pasta carbonara
. She cleared her sketch pad and pencils from the table and carried them down the hall to her bedroom. When she got back to the kitchen, she found that Olivia had opened a bottle of Chianti and now poured the wine into the tiny glasses that they used for orange juice in the morning.

“Yeah, yeah”—Olivia set the bottle in the middle of the table—“I know you say you can’t drink because of your meds, but one glass won’t kill you! And you
can’t
eat good Italian food without wine!”

Ellen hesitated. What she had told Olivia about the meds was true, but hardly anybody hewed to the proscription. She recited it to people as a means of keeping herself on the straight and narrow. Her behavior was too unpredictable when she drank; and, then, she had promised Dan that she wouldn’t drink while they were apart. Still, what harm could come, at home on a Saturday night, from having an
orange juice glass
of wine—the glass so small it was almost silly—with a substantial starchy meal?

She took a sip. Oh, delicious! Mouth-watering! And the glass was funny, wasn’t it? Little oranges painted on the side, like instructions for its proper use.

While Olivia slivered the pancetta and set Ellen to slicing tomatoes—the wine so sweetly filling cavities inside Ellen—Olivia proceeded to tick through her impressions of the other residents in their little apartment building: “So, you’ll know which ones are worthy of giving the time of day to, and which ones”—to Ellen’s delight, sometimes Olivia sounded like a funny, old granny—“are plain nasty and to be avoided at all costs!”

Olivia did a comical imitation of the way in which the man living directly below them topped off each of his rapid-fire sentences with a small bow followed by the upturning of his palm. “It’s like he thinks each of his thoughts is a gift!” Olivia sputtered. And then there were the building’s three Madonna/Marilyn Monroe wannabes, the “Bimbettes,” Olivia had dubbed them, “total sluts,” whose cluelessness and Valley Girl rising inflections she could mimic to a T.

Ellen made an effort to look entirely unconscious of her actions as she refilled the juice glasses with second helpings of the Chianti. She herself had been so busy with her teaching assistantship and her own work those first weeks of the fall semester that she had met only the Miles Davis fans in the next apartment and the old man who lived near the front door and did custodial work on the building; but, then, from what Olivia had said, Ellen hadn’t missed much. Which was fine. Ellen had Olivia, after all—captivating Olivia, who could make Ellen feel decked out in Christmas lights and now gaily smashed two cloves of garlic with a single blow of the bottom of a cast-iron frying pan, flicked away the dry husks with the tip of her knife and, with just three chop-chop-chops, minced the remaining flesh to perfection.

Had Olivia applied for one of the teaching assistantships that Ellen herself had considered it a great honor to receive? Ellen never had asked because suppose Olivia had applied and had been rejected and she felt hurt about it. Maybe, though, she had not wanted to teach. She had more free time to paint because of not teaching—and she had plenty of money, too. When Ellen offered to pay half of the bill for that evening’s groceries and wine, Olivia said a funny “Pish-tush! Don’t be silly! I’m loaded, kid!” It seemed to be true; she’d told Ellen that she did not even have to keep track of her checking account balance because, if it went below a certain level, the bank “took care of it.”

Oh, that Chianti—Ellen felt so much livelier and more articulate after the second glass!
Ar-tic-u-late.
During dinner, she told Olivia all about Dan—the wonders of Dan! She ran down to her room for his photograph and she hauled out the giant Magritte book that he had given her before leaving for Berkeley, and she spread the book open on the kitchen table, off to the side of their plates of delicious food and the candle that clever Olivia had produced and lit for the dinner. Very excited, maybe tripping over the words a little because of the wine, Ellen said:

“You see, he thrills you with his representations at the same time that he reminds you that what he paints is
not
the object that it represents! And the words on the canvas—‘This is not a pipe’—they aren’t what they represent either!”

Ellen had been a scholarship kid at a small college established by Norwegian Minnesotans, while Olivia had gone to Yale. Ellen never had known anyone who had gone to Yale. She was the first person in her family to go to college and sometimes worried over the disparities between her own and Olivia’s educations and backgrounds, but, now, Olivia looked up from the Magritte book and she gave Ellen a keen glance and said, smiling a smile that suggested they shared an entertaining secret, “You’re smart, aren’t you, Ellen?”

Ellen flushed and scrambled (emergency!) to come up with the right compliment to offer Olivia in return because suppose that Olivia’s thinking that Ellen was smart made Olivia feel competitive? Like Ellen less? Even
dis
like her?

Thick black lines of Magic Marker obliterated whatever I’d written in the story’s next paragraph. I flipped the page to see if the backside contained a possible rewrite. No. Some box of old floppy disks probably held the original story, but maybe what I’d penciled in the margin alongside the blacked-out paragraph was more pertinent:

Could Ellen actually give Olivia a compliment here? Ellen grew up without compliments! Knows shit about compliments! Giving one to Olivia—if E thinks O has ALL the confidence in the world? E might want O’s friendship—even care for her—but complimenting O would feel like she was tearing off a hunk of herself! And only to feed it to a creature already bigger and better fed than herself? I don’t know that she could.

The story continued after the blacked-out paragraph:

Olivia lifted herself up out of her chair and leaned across the kitchen table toward Ellen. A loose strand of her long hair sizzled up in a tiny puff of smoke from the candle, there. Both she and Ellen startled briefly, but there was no real harm done, and they recovered and after they finished laughing over the
zip
and the pong of the burned hair, Olivia canted her heart-shaped face to one side, and, looking Ellen straight in the eye, she said, “Ellen?”