“In a sense,” I said.
“Because you said you’d be done in a year,” he pressed on. “So I figure you should be about halfway done now, give or take a few chapters.”
“Give or take a few chapters.” This may have been true, if you counted notes and vague plans and general intentions. It was certainly not true, if you counted pages. “Why didn’t Missy come down?” I countered, turning on my brother in a manner more reminiscent of a cornered rat than a wounded gazelle.
Missy had been Warren’s girlfriend for nine years. It was unclear which of them was in charge of permanently postponing marriage, but their relationship was one of the few areas in Warren’s life akin to an unfinished novel. Otherwise, he had exhibited extraordinary life-planning skills, the various aspects of which my parents rolled in like dogs in manure. But who could blame them for being proud? I, too, was proud of my brother’s galling success. If we’d ever had any extra money, I would without hesitation have given it to my little brother to invest.
Warren, unlike Brooke, had become an investment banker, not only that, but he did so purely because the market fascinated him. He might have become an economics professor, but he modestly claimed he was not smart enough, so he was instead well on his way toward becoming inconceivably rich as a portfolio manager in a small San Francisco firm.
“Nice work with those midcap funds,” my father said, pouring wine—opened by Ted—into Warrens glass. He often spoke as if his close connection with Warren made him an expert on the market, as well, even though before my brother had this job, my parents both used the word “portfolio” only to refer to two-pocket folders made of stiff, colored paper.
“Mmm, yeah, I think we might sell,” Warren said, mounding his mashed potatoes along the rim of his plate away from the fish. Warren didn’t like his foods to touch one another. He looked worriedly at the rivulets of chutney, which refused to be contained.
“Really?” my father said.
“Al, if he wants to sell, let him sell. Warren knows what he’s doing,” my mother said.
“I know he knows what he’s doing. Hasn’t he quadrupled our portfolio in five years? And that Genslen you had us buy. Whoo-ee!”
“What is that?” I asked. “My friend Brooke was talking about it, too.”
“Oh, it’s a biotech stock,” Warren said. “The product’s done really well in clinical trials so far and it’s got potential, if they can get it on the market.”
“It’s a fat pill!” my father announced gleefully. “It’s going to sell like hotcakes!”
“The thing is they’re not targeting it just toward the morbidly obese. Doctors could prescribe this to almost anyone who wants to drop a few pounds, so the market should be sizable,” Warren said. He looked up from his plate to see if any of us had registered his joke.
“That’s a good one, Warren,” Ted said. I married an extremely kind man.
“So how’s Jim Barnes doing? How’s the leg?” While my father enjoyed “talking stocks,” my mother preferred probing for personal details about the head of the firm, with whom she’d shaken hands twice during tours of Warren’s office. “Skiing accident,” she added knowingly for Ted’s and my benefit. “In Vail.”
“He’s having some kind of special therapy,” Warren said, spearing a broccoli floweret. Since he was about twelve, he’d always eaten in a specific order: first green vegetables, then vegetables of other colors, then starches, and finally meat. It occurred to me that it might be useful to give Robert this habit as a manifestation of his efforts to keep his drifting life under control. I wondered, for the first time, if this was what my brother’s habit manifested. “This woman comes into the office every day with a cartful of stuff,” he was saying, “like medicine balls and giant rubber bands and industrial-sized cans of pineapple juice.”
“Could that be Pie-lates?” my mother asked, doubtfully.
“I don’t think so, Mom,” I said, suddenly feeling a sisterly instinct to rescue Warren.
“Now, Margaret,” my father said, “how’s the Great American Novel coming along?” Of course, by that he meant to make my ambition appear foolish. Unless he meant to be supportive. In the time it took me to sip the mediocre and probably overpriced Chilean wine, I swung wildly to both contradictory conclusions.
“It’s all right,” I said.
“Margaret’s halfway done,” Warren said.
“Really? Already?” my mother said. “Maybe you’re going a little too fast, honey. You want to write something lasting, you know.”
“Oh, it’s very good,” Ted said.
“You’ve been reading it?” My mother sounded slightly hurt.
“Just a few bits here and there. Mostly, Margaret’s told me about it.” Ted smiled at me. “Actually, I didn’t realize it was so far along.” Was he trying to tell me he was onto my game, or did he really think I was halfway through? Who could possibly finish half a novel in five months?
“What’s it about?” Warren asked.
“Well, the main character is a Vietnam vet,” I began. “He lives in Pomona. Or, no, I guess it’s Ventura now,” I stumbled. “I wanted to use the ocean. For metaphorical reasons.” I could not now remember what those reasons were. Looking at my parents nodding and smiling, I suddenly saw how ridiculous, how juvenile, this whole project sounded. I was going to write a novel, I’d announced, just as in sixth grade I’d sworn I would be a professional jazz saxophonist; just as in ninth grade, I’d been sure I’d be the next Pauline Kael; just as in my junior year of high school I’d declared my firm intention to become a Near Eastern archaeologist; just as at twenty-two I’d said I’d be joining the Peace Corps. These people knew way too much about me. And what did I know about Vietnam? My parents were well aware that I’d been eleven when the U.S. pulled out of Indochina. How could I have anything to say about the repercussions of modern American warfare? I was only their daughter, after all.
“The important thing,” my mother said, “is that you’re writing it. Remember Emily Dickinson couldn’t get published.”
“And you can always go back to teaching,” my father said, refilling my glass.
“You know what I heard?” Warren said. He had started in on his fish now. “At the end of the day, Ernest Hemingway always stopped in the middle of a sentence, so he’d have something to get him going the next morning. Maybe you should try that.”
I wanted to tell about the newsmagazine show I’d seen in which a chimp, pointing to various companies on the New York Stock Exchange, made more money than twenty-five top financial advisers, but I pushed a dry corner of swordfish into my mouth instead.
“Maybe we should live in Paris like Hemingway, too,” Ted said. This was the sort of remark that made my parents anxious and spawned their compulsion to fashion Ted into a more predictable joy-riding drinks mixer.
“Heh, heh,” my father said experimentally.
I laughed to give the others their cue.
“There are lots of writers in New York, aren’t there?” Warren asked.
“Plenty,” I said. “Too many.”
“Well, I know I couldn’t do it,” my mother said.
I looked at her gratefully, but then I wondered if what she really meant was that she was pretty sure I couldn’t do it either. This is the way you get when you feel yourself sliding quietly but inexorably downhill. Every comment is fraught with significance. Everyone, even people who aren’t sure whether “fatuous” has something to do with humor or gas, is secretly laughing at you.
“How many pages do you write a day?” my father asked. “I remember when I wrote papers in college, I did a page an hour. Of course, that was in the days of the manual typewriter; I suppose you can go faster now with a computer.”
“Did you make an outline, Margaret?” my mother asked. “I think it always helps to have an outline.”
I seemed to be pushing mashed potatoes into my mouth without pausing to swallow. The problem with writing was that pretty much everyone had done i
t in one form or another. It wasn’t like what Warren did, drawing conclusions from factors beyond the realm of normal human understanding.
“You know what author I like?” Warren said. “Charles Dickens. You should write a book like David Copperfield, Margaret. Then I would read it.”
“Warren! You’re going to read your sister’s book!” my father said.
“I meant, I’d read it even if she wasn’t my sister.”
“Oh, Margaret, I forgot to tell you!” My mother set her flatware firmly on her plate for emphasis, the tines of the fork crossed correctly over the blade of the knife. “Guess who’s writing screenplays now? Allison Pumphrey! Don’t you remember her? She was in your modern dance class. Remember? Her mother has the big teeth? And that eye problem, you know, like Marty Feldman. Anyway, she went to USC film school and now she’s writing screenplays. Her mother says some people are very excited about one of them, at Disney, maybe, or DreamWorks, one of the ‘D’ studios. If your book becomes a movie, maybe she could write the screenplay.”
That night I slipped out of bed in the room that had been mine before it had become an impersonal guest room. I made my way into the hall, where I stood on a chair to reach the knotted cord that dangled from the ceiling. Quietly, I yanked open the trap door, unfolded the ladder, and climbed to the attic. At the top, I swung my arm in a wide arc in front of my face, waiting for the brush of string against my skin. I knew it was there; it had always been there, but I felt nothing. My fingers grasped only warm, dry air, until I went back down the ladder, turned on the hall light, and climbed back up again. The grimy string with its metal pull dangled just where I’d been reaching. I tugged, two, three times. The bulb had burned out. While I rifled the contents of several kitchen drawers and searched the back of the liquor cabinet and the shelves of the hall closet, wondering if my parents even had any extra bulbs—unlike Letty’s family, who always kept a supply of toothbrushes under the bathroom sink and a larder of canned goods in the garage, mine was not the kind that stocked up—I tried to convince myself to go back to bed.
Pressed into the back of the closet was the navy nylon Pan Am flight bag, in which more than twenty years before I’d packed supplies in case of an earthquake. Inside, between the rancid peanut butter and the duct tape (for use in constructing a tent out of thirty-gallon garbage bags), I found a flashlight, full of long-expired batteries. But I’d seen batteries among my parents’ scant supply of cloth napkins, while looking for a lightbulb. Finally, back up the ladder I went and, crouching under the beams, shone my light along the tumbled stacks of boxes. I was searching for my promise.
The box I remembered was closed only by the trick of fitting flap corners under and over one another to allow for easy access. There had been a time when first my mother and then I had added lovingly to its contents, preserving the one-dimensional evidence of my artistry and imagination and intelligence, if not under glass, at least under cardboard, keeping hold, the way a mother saves a tooth or a lock from her baby’s first haircut, of the little sproutings and shavings of me, as I grew steadily beyond them.
I pulled open the flaps, soft and pliable as cloth from all the times they’d been pried apart and fitted back together again, and lifted the top item, a stack of typed pages, so thick as to require a binder clip to hold it together, entitled “Bewildered: The Juxtaposition of Wilderness and Civilization in American Literature from Hawthorne to Wharton.” This had been my senior project. Next to the red “B-” under the title the professor who’d read it had written in tiny script: “Although your writing is assured and your insights surprisingly original, this is far too broad a topic for a senior essay. You ought to have been advised to tackle something more manageable, say, Whitman’s use of bird imagery in the first six stanzas of ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” ’
I had been so advised. Professor Lindsay, my adviser, had pleaded with me every time we met to focus and trim. “At least concentrate on a single author!” she’d begged, but I pressed stubbornly on, wanting to say something consequential, even perhaps to make a real, nonstudentlike contribution to the study of American literature. Proud of my work at the time, I hadn’t minded the grade. What important point could I possibly have made had I limited myself to six stanzas of a single poem? Now, having long since forgotten whatever points I had made about nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American literature as a whole, I was most impressed by the paper’s physical heft—how had I managed to string so many sentences together?
Hoping to catch hold of that old, jaunty, productive Margaret, I picked a few more relics from the box: a charcoal self-portrait from Art 101, drawn while staring into the back of a spoon; the labeled sketch of an imaginary downtown plaza, in slightly skewed perspective, from a course on urban planning; a biographical poem about Leonardo da Vinci in rhyming couplets, composed in seventh grade; a construction paper Valentine I’d made for my father. Madeleine-like, they evoked for me the hours of their creation. I remembered my mother and me in a thick pond of yellow light, the dark windows showing only our reflections, as if nothing existed beyond our kitchen. She tore apart a head of iceberg lettuce with her long, sure fingers, the bangles clinking on her thin wrists, a sound that I would always equate with femininity, while I cut construction paper, making a noise not quite as rich as that which Captain Kangaroo’s scissors made on TV, but still satisfying. It was hard to get the hearts right, though I knew to fold the paper in half to make both sides even. They often came out too thin or too fat, and they were always marred by that fold down the center.
I remembered the scorn I’d felt for “Roses Are Red,” especially since, as I’d pointed out to my mother, roses were only sometimes red and violets were obviously violet, not blue, although they could also be white or even yellow. Being a California girl, I’d not, at that stage of my life, actually observed a violet firsthand, but I had looked them up in a guide to eastern flowers, after I’d noticed the rose inaccuracy. Missing entirely the point of the standard verse, in which the loved one is at least described in complimentary terms, I had proudly printed my version of the non sequitur: “Birds-of-paradise are orange and also purple at the spine. I hope you will be my Valentine.”
When I wrote the da Vinci biography, Letty was working on Benjamin Franklin. She sat at the foot of my bed, I at the head. We tossed our rhymes back and forth, screaming and breathless with laughter, collapsing sideways on the mattress, digging our heels into the bedspread against the pain of our hilarity. I still had a tiny gray-blue spot imbedded in the skin of my knee from accidentally stabbing myself with my pencil as, in response to one particularly amusing couplet—whether hers or mine, I don’t remember now—I slipped completely off the bed onto the carpet.
These grease-spotted and dog-eared papers were not what I’d remembered them to be. I’d gone to them to be reminded of my earlier, better self. I’d hoped, I suppose, to duct tape them together into a sort of paper reservoir of reassurance and inspiration from which I could draw when faced again with the tedium of the sluggish keyboard and the despair brought on by the nearly blank screen. I’d assumed that among them I’d find evidence of incipient genius. What instead leapt from these pages to grab me by the throat was at best precocity and at worst self-conscious straining. Had I been, after all, only an overachiever type, who, in fact, had not managed even to overachieve?
One more try, I thought, digging gamely into the dark box. My hand emerged clutching a handful of envelopes, thick as two bricks, bound in a disintegrating rubber band, my name and address on each in Letty’s round script. The camp years.
My impatience with most organized activities precluded any serious interest in camp, but Letty, who liked team sports and even marching band practice and who had a predilection for crafts, was different. She began going to overnight camp the summer we finished third grade and went year after year for longer and longer, even into high school, when she became a counselor, while I doused cornbread-coated wieners in boiling oil at Hot Do
g on a Stick. For me, these months were, if not exactly miserable, marred, and she missed me, as well. Whatever talent I may possess as a writer, however, I owe in large part to our separation.
Letty was born knowing how to write letters. She never said, “How are you? I am fine.” She never delivered a long dull list of the day’s activities or described a setting in brochure terms. Instead, she jumped into the good stuff—“Rachel and I had another fight today”—or, if nothing was happening, she made just sitting around counting mosquito bites sound interesting. The secret, I realized, was in the detail. She did not just paint her toenails, she painted them “Very Cherry,” which did not, as it turned out, go with her new pink sandals. I am not ashamed to say that I modeled my own missives after hers, stuffing them with colors and textures and crumbs of conversation I’d never otherwise have noted even to myself. Thanks to her lead, when I was writing to Letty, my own everyday world became surprisingly full and amusing, nearly as fascinating as those of past civilizations. Sometimes, before I sealed the envelope, I marveled at all that had happened to me.
I piled my own papers back into the box and wove the corners closed. Letty’s stack of envelopes, however, I took with me downstairs and tucked into the underwear pouch of my suitcase. I had no illusions that a twelve-year-old could teach me anything about writing now. I just thought it might be comforting to have her old voice near me.
Letty’s adult voice betrayed an edge of desperation, as she opened the front door. “Will Christmas never end?” she said. “I know we were going to have lunch, but you have to help me with the gifts.” A thin but rising wail, akin to her own but somewhat louder, issued from down the hall, and she hurried after it, handing me half a sandwich as she went. I bit tentatively into the soft white bread. American cheese and mayo.
“Don’t eat that!” Letty was back with Noah on her hip. She looked into his face to check that the crying had stopped and brushed some strands of hair back from his warm forehead with two motherly fingers. “I mean, you can if you want, but you don’t want to, do you? I mean, it’s kind of gross. Not that it isn’t absolutely delicious,” she added for Noah’s benefit, taking the sandwich from me and putting it into his outstretched hand.