Still Life with Plums (12 page)

Natalie steps into the abyss as all those eyes peer at her, expecting authority she tries her best to pull off since, according to their bios, many of these writers are far more educated than she. She scans their faces, mostly young, Nathan’s age, but some middle-aged and older all looking back at her.

The conference table is horseshoe-shaped and the one spare chair is dead center at the top of the U or the bottom. Natalie aims for it, spotting several copies of
Mixed Metaphors
among the students’ conference folders. Hardback and soft. She’s delighted to see one with the original dust jacket, tattered and yellowed. She always loved that particular cover—a Kandinsky painting which exactly expressed her mood at the time. It was that first edition she inscribed for her father:
Thanks for the push
. Some of the students’ books are the most recent edition, the cover forgettable except for the blue Oprah seal. Natalie hopes she brought her good book-signing gel pen.
With warm regards
…
With fond memories of our meeting
…
With the hopes of one day reading your book
…

“Good morning,” Natalie says.

A whir of jumbled pleasantries that sounds like a flock of alighting sparrows.

“I want to begin by asking each of you to tell me your name and why you began writing.”

She starts every workshop with this banal icebreaker because
there’s always plenty of material even if she’s heard most of the stories:
I’ve always written; I love to read; it’s an innate need; I can’t not do it; it’s my only voice; it’s like breathing
.

She’s usually more attentive, but as they work around the room, Natalie wonders how she would answer that question today:
Because my father put all his eggs in one basket
. She can hear Beth add,
But what a basket
.

“My name is Hannah Pasqual.”

The voice plucks Natalie from her misery. It belongs to a girl, a simple, average-looking girl wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Not dressed in all black. No multiple piercings or funky hairstyle. Neither is she too skinny nor in need of a shower—the greasy-haired, pallid look popular among so many East coast writers these days.

“Because words have colors,” she nearly whispers, eyes on her hands. “When I write it’s like painting.”

One of the boys, Brad, says, “At MacDowell you said words have smells and writing is like cooking.”

“It’s my simile; I can say what I want,” she says, still whispering, her face crimson.

No truer words
, Natalie thinks, similar to the ones her father intoned when he not-so-gently steered her toward writing.
Just write for yourself
, a lie, since he ultimately wanted her to write down his stories which all began the same way.
Back in Pittsburgh, when I was a boy
. Her mother’s inevitable interruption:
Don’t forget to tell her about
—His silencing rant:
Shut up, woman. Shut up, shut up, shut up!
Which she did, finally, for thirty solid years. Until the day her husband died when her lips unsealed and the phone calls started:
Natalie, did I tell you, back in Pittsburgh, when I was a girl
—Natalie’s impolite lies:
Sorry Mom. Gotta go write. Big deadline, you know
. She can’t get away that easily now.

The first workshop goes smoothly enough. They critique four manuscripts. It’s a gabby bunch, all that posturing and showing off what they learned at Iowa or Columbia. They all write so beautifully: beautiful words, beautiful sentences, beautiful paragraphs. Whole pages jam-packed with so much loveliness that Natalie unexpectedly blurts: “Yes, but sometimes the characters just have to come into the room and sit down.”

They all stare at her, dumbly, for perhaps half a second before they resume their frenzied ramblings. Except for Hannah Pasqual, who has spent the entire class scribbling in her spiral notebook. She doesn’t utter a peep and Natalie tries to imagine what fantasy she is penning:

The stucco walls can’t survive all that gabbling. So much drywall and wood meant only to withstand the southwestern heat, the sandstorms, but they are no match for the barrage of words. The inane utterings of all those mouths mimicking other writers’ voices: Faulkner, O’Connor, Carver, McCarthy. Here’s how to write a blue story. Now write a red one. Countless beautiful words that amount to nothing. But the assault of language is relentless; the liquid syllables a steady stream that sloughs off the flat avocado paint. Worms a wet toehold in the plasterboard until the gritty compound breaks down. Now a puncture in the outer wall, too, where the words pour through, funneling out into the desert which can’t drink them in fast enough. A deluge of words catching on shrubs and sagebrush, tangled up in cacti. The words fumbling and bumbling into tumbleweeds roiling eastward, sprouting sanserif legs and heads until it’s a stampede of words, their gaping mouths bleating a primal cry: fluke!

Most of the students find little value in the last submission of the day though Natalie thinks it’s quite rich. A straightforward story (a
story at last)
written by Peggy, a fifty-something court reporter. Natalie
watches Peggy’s placid face as the students poke and prod. She could not care less, it seems. Natalie knows she shouldn’t assume but she wonders if the woman in the story boiling mason jars is Peggy. There is such longing in each scene, such emptiness. Empty rooms. Empty jars. Empty apron pocket though the woman knows she put her To-Do list in it that very morning. How will she know what to do?

“Nothing happens,” Brad says. “It’s just an old lady bumbling around in her house.”

“What do you mean nothing happens?” It’s Hannah Pasqual.

“I mean nothing happens. She makes breakfast. Checks the empty mailbox. Cans fruit. Maybe if there were a few more characters.”

“She owns a peach orchard,” Hannah says. “She’s surrounded by peach trees dripping with life.”

“All she does is look at them through the window and can plums. And she hates plums.”

“Exactly!” Hannah says. “That’s exactly the point.”

Peggy’s eyes glisten like agates.

That afternoon Natalie lopes across the gravel road to her bungalow and closes the rubber-backed curtains to seal out the stark light. She digs her cell phone from her purse and punches in the digits that will connect her to home.

James picks up on the third ring. “Hello?”

“Hey,” she says, conjuring exuberance to masquerade her guilt. “How’s it going?”

“Great. It’s going great,” he says. Natalie wonders if he’s conjuring his own exuberance.

“How’s Mom?”

“Listen for yourself,” James says, holding the phone toward Natalie’s mother who chatters frantically in the distance.

“God,” Natalie says, guilt doubled. “Why don’t you slip a Xanax in her Jell-O.”

“It’s fine,” James says.

“Times like these I wish I had a sibling to pawn her off on,” Natalie says, because she, too, was sadly and surprisingly an only child.

“Honestly, it’s fine,” James says. “Mixed in with all the gibberish are some interesting stories.”

“Really?” Natalie says, unexpectedly relieved since she thought she might have stoppered her mother up for good during their last conversation when Natalie was preparing for this trip: scribbling down important phone numbers, arranging for the day nurse, searching for the Dramamine, lining up her mother’s pills, trying to dig her good shoes from the high shelf in the closet with her mother droning on and on like a swarm of wasps until Natalie’s temples throbbed and she finally and uncharacteristically seethed:
Shut up, woman! Shut up, shut up, shut up!
Which her mother did, leaving Natalie to skulk away in shame. Apparently her mother has more fortitude than she did thirty years ago, a realization that makes Natalie proud.

Natalie turns off her phone, collapses onto her bed, and waits for the falling sensation that means sleep is coming. She sees plums in her mind. Whole bins of stacked purple-blue plums, so plump she wants to reach her hand in and pull one out so they will tumble and spill with soft thuds at her feet. But the plums turn into lemons and saliva gushes from under her tongue at the memory of tartness. The lemons disappear when Natalie hears the shower being turned on next door, the resounding thud, not of plums, but bare feet on fiberglass, a bar of falling soap (speckled with fingernails and bone, no doubt). A man starts humming
Ode to Joy
quite beautifully. The whir of metal loops sliding against the rod as the shower curtain is whipped aside. “Surprise!” It’s the girl.

“Come here,” the man orders. More feet pummeling fiberglass, then elbows banging the walls, guttural moans. Squeals and peals of ecstasy.

“I give up,” Natalie says, sitting up to turn on the bedside lamp.

Bonobos, apparently, make love, not war. They screw for hello; good-bye; I’m sad; I’m happy; I’m scared; I’ll trade you nooky for a banana; Let’s fight—No, let’s
fuck
. It’s not real fucking, mostly, since often there is no insertion of anything anywhere. It’s more a frantic humping or mons rubbing or penis fencing between any gender at any time, regardless of age or familial connection. There’s also plenty of French kissing, oral sex, and Kama Sutra angles. The only taboo seems to be grown sons and their mothers. This is quite a relief to Natalie, who at that moment wishes she could pluck her son from the desert and hoist him up into a thick forest canopy where he can hide out and be safe. Until she reads that the bonobos’ habitat in the Congo is endangered by war and the militia is hunting them to near extinction for their meat. She pictures sweaty soldiers leaning over the dead animals. Diamonds spill from their shirt pockets and nestle like eggs in the chimps’ fur.

At supper Natalie chooses vegetarian lasagna. She’s sitting at a round table with her class.
Dinner with the author
, it’s called, though even here the students do most of the talking. Across the table sits Hannah Pasqual, scraping the red sauce layer by layer from her meaty lasagna and eating only the abraded pasta. Natalie’s heart begins thrashing again. She has no idea what to say tomorrow at the end of Hannah’s workshop when the class inevitably looks to the leader for ultimate judgment.
Terrific vocabulary. Lovely sensory details. Your descriptions are phenomenal
. All hackneyed drivel that adds up to nothing.

Beside Hannah sits Peggy, spearing the cherries from her dish of canned fruit cocktail, savoring them as if they are forbidden fruit. Something twinges in Natalie’s belly, or lower down actually, where two plum-shaped buds once nested.

That evening there is an open mic for the students in the lodge cantina, a low-ceilinged, square room with a laminate dance floor in the very center like a boxing ring, tables and booths surrounding it. Still sleep-deprived, Natalie avoids the crowded faculty booth in the corner and slumps at a table for two beside the only window, half open, a faint breeze sneaking in. A dangling plant overhead in a macramé sling strokes the top of her head, a soothing caress. Natalie gazes outside at the gentle desert hill rising up, the craggy fissures and bends of pink earth, the low hedge of thorny green shrubs, the impressionistic splotches of yellow. The most striking image of all, of course, are the saguaros looking like alert sentries on watch, or soldiers marching toward battle on the other side of the hill.
Stay down
, she mutters to Nathan, terrified of the insurgents who know this terrain far better than he, every cave, every boulder to hide behind. But there are so many in Nathan’s unit that she can’t count them all.
Cover each other
, she prays. The gentle breeze picks up force, shuddering the green shrubs, the saguaro, which bend in the wind, looking so much like penises that now Natalie can’t think of them as anything else, thank God. This isn’t a battlefield at all and she wonders if after the sun sets the cacti will uproot themselves and engage in their own massive games of penis-fencing. She can’t stifle the bubble of laughter caught in her throat that bursts out of her mouth like a shriek.

“What’s so funny?” Beth says, swaggering toward her with a pitcher of margaritas and two oversized glasses.

Natalie points at the prickly erections which gets her giggling again. “Penises,” is all she can sputter.

“Why the hell do you think I moved out here?” Beth says, as if she gets the full joke, or one of her own.

“Are you sure you don’t want to sit with them?” Natalie says, nodding toward the rest of the faculty yammering away in their booth.

“Be serious,” Beth says. “They’re only here tonight because it’s in their contract.” She sits and natters on about her new life in Tucson, which sounds amazingly similar to her old lives in Boston, Seattle, Denver—except for the wardrobe and topography. Natalie once again wonders where she might relocate if she decided to call it quits. All of it. James. Her blabbering mother. Just pick up and leave with no forwarding address. Forget the books and computer and photo albums—except Nathan’s, she would have to take his. Someplace warm, she thinks, where she can grow lemons.

Natalie drinks urgently as the sun slides behind that hill, the penises just black silhouettes now. She thinks she hears them whispering to each other:
Get ready
.

The room dims and a waitress moves from table to table lighting red candles in chunky fishnet-covered glass bowls, the kind Natalie hasn’t seen in decades.

Students congregate on the dance floor where a microphone has been set up. They pore over the signup sheet, looking lost and disorganized. Several are talking at once, stepping on each other’s words:
Dory should go after Emily and then Matt. No! It should go girl-boy-girl-boy-girl-boy
. All that finger pointing and list snatching. Hannah Pasqual slides in and scuffs toward the melee with her notebook, head down, bumping into people and tables because she’s still madly scribbling.

Natalie presses her back against the wicker chair, the twined cane squeaking.

The microphone wails and Brad from Natalie’s workshops says: “Is someone supposed to kick this thing off?”

“Shit,” Beth says. “That would be me.”