Outtakes and Orphans 2011
I like looking over discarded drafts at the end of the year: am I making the same mistakes? New ones? What did I find fantastic that petered out, and how many versions did I need to clue in? I had fewer false starts this year; I’m not sure how much of that reflects improvement and how much is because of less time noodling. I scrapped 20,000 words of a novel, but most of my short stories ended up not too different from their first drafts, which I’ve never had happen. The second bit below is from the exception to that, a story I’ve only finished fussing with (I think) a year later:
We are quite well, this year—complaints about the mayor (what’s new?) There is a new market I keep not getting to. D. asks what’s so difficult. Remember me saying you’d end up with him and you said, “but I don’t want him?”
Our building is still graffitied; everything around it glares. I need pictures to see how things have changed.
Some days I wonder if it wasn’t here I liked but arriving.
*
The last time I spoke with my father, a riding mower outside my kitchen window cut back and forth across his voice. By then—it was June—his hands shook too much to hold a telephone receiver. I could hear my mother arrange his headset, and as we talked his mouthpiece slipped until his words were bumps under the mower and I heard my mother pick up—I could picture her, in her kitchen, leaning around a cabinet to look at him—and when her voice amplified I knew his line had clicked off.
*
He wants to do the place up right—so what it if it’s a rental? We’ll leave it better than we found it. In the morning when he’s left for work—good exercise, to walk—Pru is washing dishes and in the sink window she can see up the long side of the house their car and the bumper sticker he wanted to cover over when Hillary Clinton had conceded.
*
Marie had a duffle over her shoulder, and as she navigated around a businessman-type (but natty, tweedy; a time-warped tweed businessman type) she swung the wheeled corner of the duffle (why wasn’t she wheeling it?) into the man’s natty, waved head.
*
The radio stations were filled with God and baseball and Simon and Garfunkel, AM the entire way, until the hour to circumvent New York City, when she said quick to raise the windows, and he shut off the blower, too late to keep out the scents of Carteret and Rahway that curdled at the back of their throats and even spearmint gum would not dislodge. In Pennsylvania only the convenience marts would be open.
*
She was in her early forties, with dyed black, curly hair and creases around her mouth and eyes that hadn’t shown up on Internet video; square-faced, but with a capacity to so instantly, utterly take up anything you said that you might wonder how she had any room for her own enthusiasms, or think that you had only just discovered what she’d liked all along. Her grandfather had fled Trieste in 1943. He’d insisted she be named after Trieste’s castle: Miramare. She’d grown up thinking he was a spy. By the time she was my age—thirty—she was about to have the twins, and in the years since, she must have worked with everyone in London, in Sydney and Los Angeles; everywhere but New York, though she’d hired the man who’d been my first boss. Tony the Rail, she said; all the girls had wanted him. He’d lost the nickname by the time I knew him.
“I bet he did,” Mira said.
