(Back to Fiction Workshopping) Assignment 3: L'Avenir de l'Homme

I'm back in a fiction workshop, trying to rev my engines again after a long time of letting this jalopy sit idle. Don't want the batteries to die, and other extensions of the metaphor, etc.

Once again, I'm at the Writer's Studio doing Level 1 with Joel Hinman. The format: Each week, we get short readings, alternating fiction and poetry, and must write roughly two pages (and for godsakes no more, or we'll never get home) using narrative techniques borrowed from the reading.

I had a hell of a time with last week's assignment. It was based on a piece by Annette Sanford, "Nobody Listens When I Talk," which was published in the anthology Best American Short Stories 2001, edited that year by Barbara Kingsolver. My problem was that I found the piece unutterably boring. While Sanford certainly portrays the teenage narrator in a perfectly tuned stream-of-consciousness so realistic and believable that it was like a recording of the insides of a sixteen-year-old suburban girl's head, the trouble was I found her so totally believable that she bored me to tears just as a real sixteen-year-old girl of this ilk would. Unable to gain inspiration, I fudged it.

I was sick two weeks ago, then out of class last week (on vacation, out of town), so I had an excuse, in that I'd missed the lecture. I was supposed to write from the limited point of view of the interior headnoise of a younger narrator, but instead I crafted a truly adult nine-year-old and just cribbed only vaguely the idea of youth and interiority, plus the friction with the family. I came up with this solution at the eleventh hour — to be more precise, one hour and a half before class — after having made several game attempts at more autobiographical material, which bored me to tears. What I wrote was nothing like Sanford, but amusing enough that I was proud of it in parts. I may do more with it. I may not have succeeded at the assignment, but who the hell cares?

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"La femme est l'avenir de l'homme." — Louis Aragon

You will find me in the bathroom, but you won't see me unless you have X-ray eyes — the door is locked. It's a plain door, hollow wood, false brass doorknob, painted not quite white. The edge of it is smeared with a dirty patch where, while sitting, my back against the jamb, I have rolled the cool flat plane against my cheek over and over and over. When I am tired of that, I lift — daintily, daintily — my left side and roll over, with the frictionless, balletic motion of whales breaching, onto the cold bathroom tile, and push the door shut with my foot. When my stomach is cold enough from contact with the beige speckled ceramic floor, with its small deliberate darker dings that, if you squint, swarm like insects across the vision, I rise slowly, from all fours like a dog, then crouch, then unfold upright, recapitulating the evolution of man, and lock the door. On my side of the door are treasures that rival those of Egypt. On the other side of the door is the kingdom of the nearly dead. The sizes I wear are found in the section marked "Husky." I am nine years old, roughly spherical, built like a snowman, with one round thing on top of a larger round thing. What I do makes my mother angry. What I do depletes her inventory of nice things. But why must only mothers have nice things? Where are the nice things for nine-year-old boys of a husky deportment? It is one of the secrets of the universe that no one has yet explained, or at least not to me, not to my satisfaction. Nobody looks at me except when I make myself pretty, and when I am pretty, nobody thinks so but me.

"Get that stuff off your face!" barked my unpretty father before chasing me, blubbering and red and smeared, to the bathroom where once again I locked the door, not to wash, as per his loudly announced hopes through the wooden barrier, but to touch up.

Being pretty is an effect that depends only marginally upon the canvas itself. You can create prettiness if you have the eye and hand for it. And the materials, a bathroom of your own. My aunt Lisbeth, my father's sister, is proof of what you can build prettiness upon. She has my father's nose, his thick ankles, his fatty neck, but he is an ogre and she is a queen. She stoops to kiss me in a cloud of powder. Her hair smells of hair, but also of hairspray lilacs. Her eyelashes are benign parasites, which live on her body but are not of her, and they sometimes flutter free, one at a time, skewing slowly across her reddening face as she grips her vodka tonic. Her clothes are very tight. She says to me, with a knowing look, after everyone else has left the room to look at the new tool shed: "Paints and potions, my dear." And she pets my golden hair fondly as if I were her puppy. She has no children — she says she thinks of me as hers. She gave me, once, the necklace she was wearing. They were false pearls. I understood I was only to wear them in the bathroom. At all other times I kept them knotted at the bottom of the pocket of my brown corduroys, to be fingered and meditated upon as a rosary, while gazing in rapt silence at the bristly hairs that spike from the tip of the nose of the discount psychiatrist my mother takes me to see.

"Donald," my mother scolds me through the door, "a boy your age should be out doing things!"

Doing things to her is riding a bicycle or catching baseballs, veering plastic helicopters into piles of fresh dirt that I've scrabbled out with my own dirty hands. Doing things to me is making beauty out of the beast, becoming something the eyes of the world can feast upon. She regards me across the dining room table with the look of someone trying to calculate in her head something too complicated to do without a pencil.

My father regards his plate. When he does see me, it is with surprise, as if we'd never met. Sometimes, when I ask for someone to pass the bread, he stops my mother's hand. I understand that I am a large boy, but this is unfair. When he does this, it means I must spend at least an hour in the bathroom: it means talcum powder, it means a violet line across the upper eyelids; it means Tabu. Then it means I wipe it all off with Ponds cold cream, replace all the pencils and jars, and there is nothing amiss except for the telltale atmosphere that floats away from my body as I walk.