“I think I’m okay,” Daniel says. “Are you okay?”
“My leg,” she says. “It might be broken.”
More headlights, this time from the opposite side of the road. “Ismay, you have to drive.” He turns in time to see the truck. A twist, he thinks.
In the first chapter of Daniel’s famous first novel, the main character is in a catastrophic car accident. Daniel had struggled with the section, because it occurred to him that everything he knew about horrible car accidents had come from books he’d read and movies he’d seen. The description he finally settled on, after what must have been fifty passes, never much satisfied him. A series of fragments in the style of modernist poets. Apollinaire or Breton, maybe, but not nearly as good as either.
Lights, bright enough to dilate her eyes.
Horns, flaccid and come too late.
Metal crumpling like tissue.
The body was not in pain but only because the body was gone, elsewhere.
Yes, Daniel thinks just after impact but before death, like that. The passage hadn’t been as bad as he had thought.
PART II
A Conversation with My Father
1972 / Grace Paley
Dying father argues with daughter about the “best” way to tell a story. You’ll love this, Maya, I’m sure. Maybe I’ll go downstairs and push it into your hands right now.
—A.J.F.
The assignment for Maya’s creative-writing class is to tell a story about someone you wish you knew better. “My biological father is a ghost to me,” she writes. She thinks the first sentence is good, but where to go from there? After 250 words and a whole morning wasted, she concedes defeat. There’s no story because she doesn’t know anything about the man. He truly is a ghost to her. The failure was in the conception.
A.J. brings her a grilled cheese sandwich. “How’s it going, Hemingway?”
“Don’t you ever knock?” she says. She accepts the sandwich and shuts the door. She used to love living above the store, but now that she is fourteen and Amelia lives there, too, the apartment feels small. And noisy. She can hear customer downstairs all day. How is a person to write under such conditions?
Out of desperation, Maya writes about Amelia’s cat.
Puddleglum never imagined he’d move from Providence to Alice Island.
She revises, Puddleglum never imagined he’d live in a bookstore.
Gimmicky, she decides. That’s what Mr. Balboni, the creative writing teacher, will say. She has already written a story from the point of view of the rain and the point of view of a very old library book. “Interesting concepts,” Mr. Balboni had written on the library book story, “but you might want to try writing about a human character next time. Do you really want anthropomorphizing to become your thing?”
She had had to look up “anthropomorphize” before deciding that, no, she didn’t want it to become her thing. She doesn’t want to have a thing. And yet can she be blamed if it kind of is her thing? Her childhood had been spent reading books and imagining lives for customers and sometimes for inanimate objects like the teapot or the bookmark carousel. It had not been a lonely childhood, though many of her intimates had been somewhat less than real.
A little later, Amelia knocks. “Are you working? Can you take a break?”
“Come in,” Maya says.
Amelia flops onto the bed. “What are you writing?”
“I don’t know. That’s the problem. I thought I had an idea, but it didn’t work.”
“Oh, that is a problem.”
Maya explains the assignment. “It’s supposed to be about someone important to you. Someone who died, probably, or someone you wish you knew better.”
“Maybe you could write about your mother?”
Maya shakes her head. She doesn’t want to hurt Amelia’s feelings, but that seems kind of obvious. “I know as little about her as I do my biological father,” she says.
“You lived with her for two years. You know her name and some of her backstory. That might be a place to start.”
“I know as much as I want to know about her. She had chances. She screwed everything up.”
“That isn’t true,” Amelia says.
“She gave up, didn’t she?”
“She probably had reasons. I’m sure she did the best she could.” Amelia’s mother had died two years ago, and though their relationship had been challenging at times, she misses her with an unexpected ferocity. For instance, until her death, her mother had sent her new underwear in the mail every other month. Amelia had not once had to buy underwear her whole life. Recently, she had found herself standing in the lingerie department at TJ Maxx, and as she went through the panty bin, she had begun to cry: No one will ever love me that much again.
“Someone who died?” A.J. says over dinner. “What about Daniel Parish? You were good friends with him.”
“When I was a child,” Maya says.
“Isn’t he why you decided to be a writer?” A.J. says.
Maya rolls her eyes. “No.”
“She had a crush on him when she was little,” A.J. says to Amelia.
“Da-ad! That isn’t true.”
“Your first literary crush is a big deal,” Amelia says. “Mine was John Irving.”
“You lie,” A.J. says. “It was Ann M. Martin.”
Laughing, Amelia pours herself another glass of wine. “Yeah, probably right.”
“I’m glad you both think this is so funny,” Maya says. “I’m probably going to fail and then I’ll probably end up just like my mother.” She stands up from the table and runs to her room. Their apartment is not built for dramatic exits, and she bangs her knee on a bookshelf. “This place is too small,” she says.
She stalks into her room and slams the door.
“Should I go after her?” A.J. whispers.
“No. She needs space. She’s a teenage girl. Let her stew for a bit.”
“Maybe she’s right,” A.J. says. “This place is too small.”
They have been browsing houses online for as long as they’ve been married. Now that Maya is a teenager, the attic apartment with its one bathroom has shrunk exponentially, magically. Half the time, A.J. finds himself using the public store bathroom to avoid competing with Maya and Amelia. Customers are more civilized than these two. Besides, business has been good (or at least stable), and if they moved, he could use the apartment for an expanded Children’s section with a story-time area, or maybe gifts and greeting cards.
In their price range on Alice Island, all the houses are starter homes, though A.J. feels like he is past the starter home age of his life. Weird kitchens and floorplans, too-small rooms, ominous references to foundation issues. Until the housing search began, A.J. could count on one hand the number of times he had thought about Tamerlane with any sort of regret.
Later that night, Maya finds a slip of paper under her door:
Maya,
If you’re stuck, reading helps:
“The Beauties” by Anton Chekhov, “The Doll’s House” by Katherine Mansfield, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” by J. D. Salinger, “Brownies” or “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” both by ZZ Packer, “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” by Amy Hempel, “Fat” by Raymond Carver, “Indian Camp” by Ernest Hemingway.
We should have them all downstairs. Just ask if you can’t find anything, though you know where everything is better than I.
Love,
Dad
She stuffs the list in her pocket and walks downstairs, where the store is closed for the night. She spins the bookmark carousel—Why, hello there, carousel!—and makes a sharp right turn into Adult Fiction.
MAYA IS NERVOUS and a little excited when she hands the story to Mr. Balboni.
“ ‘A Trip to the Beach,’ ” he says, reading the title.
“It’s from the point of view of sand,” Maya says. “It’s winter on Alice, and the sand misses the tourists.”
Mr. Balboni shifts, and his tight, black leather pants squeak. He encourages them to emphasize the positive while at the same time reading with a critical and ideally informed eye. “Well, that sounds like it has evocative description already.”
“I’m kidding, Mr. Balboni. I’m trying to move away from anthropomorphizing.”
“I’ll look forward to reading it,” Mr. Balboni says.
The next week, Mr. Balboni announces that he’s going to read a story aloud, and everyone sits up a little straighter. It is exciting to be chosen even if it means being criticized. It is exciting to be criticized.
“What do we think?” he asks the class when he’s finished.
“Well,” Sarah Pipp says, “no offense, but the dialogue is kind of bad. Like, I get what the person is going for, but why doesn’t the writer use contractions more?” Sarah Pipp reviews books for her blog, The Paisley Unicorn Book Review. She is always bragging about the free books she gets from publishers. “And why third person? Why present tense? It makes the writing seem childish to me.”
Billy Lieberman, who writes about wronged boy heroes who overcome supernatural and parental obstacles, says, “I don’t even get what’s supposed to have happened at the end? It’s confusing.”