Well darlings, I submitted a story.  To a contest thing, I picked it out of nowhere for no reason, I just saw it today and then I sent it.  My story.  A different sort of story, it’s dark and arty. I found it on a CD from my old Dell because I was looking for my resume so I can change it.  (Did you really need all that?  No, but we’re both here and with the time, so …)

So, I sent it and we’ll see.  It’s short — 940 words — and all lower case so it will either be vague and meaningless enough to approach genius (and win the hefty prize, a toaster I think) or will flounder at vague and meaningless and earn a pretty rejection which I’ll post for you here. 

When you think of it, everyone wins. 

My cell phone doesn’t work; first my ankle and now the cell.  So if you’re calling me on it, I can’t hear you.  Of course that’s nothing new because when you’ve called before it’s either been in my car or in a different house than me, so it’s typical that I don’t hear it. What’s different now is that hours later I won’t even see that you called.  It’s dark, no light, no words on its little screen, nothing.  I’ll fix it, in time.  It just doesn’t seem important right this minute, much like my ankle.

Here are more words, then you can go:

He thought of her stories as a television that didn’t shut off, buzzing and humming in the background from show to show from break to break, but then suddenly without warning demanding he interact.  “Did you hear me?” 

What to do when the television demands participation?  It violates every rule.

(Ellen took up with him again on a Thursday.  It was sudden.) 

Well, dolls.  There were cavities, six of them total, at the dentist’s today with the kids.  That means I’m awful.  My own mother turned out a perfectly toothed child, no cavities ever, never ever, her whole life.  Wait — that means A.’s awful.  I passed down the no-cavity gene, he fouled it.

The year 2000 was a leap year starting on Saturday.  It was also the Year of the Dragon and of Leo, too.  Scruffy’s underwear habit is insatiable.  Again, today, nothing of note. 

I’m working on timeline.  I’d left it loose, it’s time to nail it.  I hadn’t picked a year or a month in which to start, it changes page to page.  I’ve got Christmas right behind July 4th and ahead of Easter, I’ve got nighttime things happening in the day.  There’s 2001 always to deal with, too — an elephant if your story’s within 5 years on either side.  I’m leaning toward 2000, re: Where to start.

By the way, and this has nothing to do with that, but I’ve decided, finally, how to make peace with A.’s subway tattoo. I’m going to get one myself.  Either this.  Or this.  Lower back. 

(And psst — I’ll be here all week.)

My ankle still hurts, have I mentioned it yet?  It’s gone from throbbing to searing.  A. wants me to use crutches, I think I’m too clumsy. 

I’m working until Aunt Betty comes, then I will limp-walk her around the house (she’s never been here), fix her a sandwich and send her off.  Isn’t that thrilling?  I’ve obviously nothing to say.  I’m doing grunt work on my book, the dull scenes, the ones that need repair, it bores me.  Why can’t someone else come and spice them up, why always me? 

And I’ve got 30,000 words still to cut.  There are plenty I don’t like, there’s no reason it should be hard.  Here are some.  They can stay or go, I’m indifferent.  They’re not even in sequence, I’ve just grabbed them half-heartedly and plunked them down.  Read them or don’t read them.  Cut them up and use them for toothpicks.  Suits me just fine.

The kitchen, what a hideous monster it had become!  Fruit was piled high in bowls on the window sill, the bottom layers rotted.  Stacks of bills lay on the counter alongside clusters of Michael’s scribblings from school and Sarah’s blue-green drawings of pine trees and skies.  A pile of coupons — milk, bread, Campbell’s soup, Ritz Bits crackers; all expired – had amassed by the stove.  (Ellen would never successfully navigate the arcane world of coupons; nor would she stop trying.) 

There were cupboards open, she’d stopped bothering to close them.  The dishwasher was constantly full — clean, dirty, dirty clean, always full.  Food bits and slime from the morning’s breakfast and last night’s dinner clogged the sink. 

The hours from noon to five nearly killed her.  Over and over again.  Every day.  Howard kept busy at work, so distracted.  Ellen picked at her cuticles and grew anxious. 

There.  Now get on with whatever it was you were doing and if you have time to spare, bring me a Diet Coke, there’s one in the little house out back.  Yes the time, I know – it’s early to be hitting the hard stuff.  But these scenes, remember?  Excruciating. 

Today, I’m convinced, is the coldest one of the year.  I’m freezing, the house won’t get warm and now I’m wearing absurd green puffy socks with a frog’s face stitched on because they’re warm and I’m not and I’m desperate to be I’ll do anything. 

Here’s something that bothers me, and it has nothing to do with the cold.  Joyce (Carol) Oates made a big thing of Beethoven’s Appasionata in The Gravedigger’s Daughter.  The mother played it in Germany and it was a symbolic thread throughout the story. 

The Appasionata.  She couldn’t come up with something else?  Something from Chopin or Kabalevsky, perhaps?  While not specifically referenced in The Good Wife (new title TK), it is on the soundtrack (yes, I have a soundtrack!)  Dammit, Joyce.  I suppose I’ll be called out in literary scandal — publicly shamed and embarrassed in front of my family. 

I’m not taking it off, I don’t care, I had it there two years ago way before I read her dumb book.  (I didn’t mean that, Joyce, you know I love you!)

It’s a piece about unsurmountable obstacles and the will to overcome, it’s about marriage for crying out loud! 

Hmph.

I’m slipping, don’t think I don’t know it.  My prose has been shoddy, “The Human Comedy“ has languished, my posts are full of typos and misspells and sometimes entire misposts. 

I forgot to put books on the tables this morning at library, hid out back before Holly or Jennifer could ask for the broom, got in a fight with Chiquita, and am now here alone with my words.  Words, words, words and all of them bad.  So many to choose from and yet I chose, just now, these:

“I slept well the night I gave June the key, as often happens with mistakes.”

Hmm.  Well, technically, I didn’t choose those, Nell Freudenberger did and she put them in The Dissident.  It kind of makes me mad, though, because I had been just about to choose them, I swear, right before she did and now I’m left to choose others.  Such as these:

“Elizabeth David Night fell flat and Ellen tottered eerily before the unopened door resembling Carrie at the prom just after they’d doused her in blood.”

Menza menz.  Also these:

“Howard found her swaying like this, bent toward the scattering leaves, and plucked her at the stem like a poppy.”

What do they mean?  I don’t know, they’re just words.  Here’s more:

“Ellen eventually discovered, not to her liking, that Howard looked at everyone in that same gauzy way, in the same way he looked at her.  Bankers, babies, the girl at the information desk at Barnes and Noble; even the guys at the Jiffy Lube.   where he dropped his car every 3,000 miles.”

I’m not crazy about that passage.  I don’t think “gauzy” conveys what I want, nor does it mesh well with the miles – there’s a certain charm about Howard that your “3,000 miles” Joe lacks, but I needed a detail.  The detail I actually need is his car, the kind of car Howard drives, but I don’t know it.  I should know what he drives, but I don’t.  Let’s move on:

“It’s not us, Ellen said out loud one day, three months into their seventh year.  It’s the great room that got small.”

Oh, dear, I’m afraid I have to go.  I just had an episode with the broom that’s left me rattled.  Holly hunted me down and demanded to know where it was.  I stalled, I stymied hemmed and hawed, and eventually I led her to the exact spot of the broom.  (Brilliant luck!)  And with a slight degree of authority, I might add.  I think she thought it was there because it’s where I’d last used it.  That’s the attitude I took, anyway.

Still, I wasn’t prepared for all of that so I have to lie down now and rest.

If you’ve got words of your own to send me, please do. 

[Anne Snow turned 40 two days ago.  E. will, very shortly, write a poem.]

That’s Chekhov, by the way. 

And this (below) is the cover for The Good Wife.  But I’ll hide a knife behind Ellen’s back.  Or maybe a cigarette, whatever plays well with the focus groups.

 

For all of you still sticking around for the late show . . .

A replay. 

(I believe this scene has since been cut.)

[Note: All resemblance to actual dinners served last night, and actual comments made on them are purely coincidental. I.e., note to A.: it didn't really go down like this. I seriously was tired last night! It had nothing to do with the parsley, just gave me the idea.]

She didn’t want to care; she loathed herself for caring.

“What do you think?” She said it quickly, whaddoyouthink, off-handedly, she hoped. She made sure she was looking down, the paper in front of her, so he would think it absent-minded like talk of the weather. She hated herself for having to ask, for caring, she hated Howard for making her ask.

There was one tick; one tick too much, she could count it, tick – before he answered. It’s good,” he said. Dammit. “It tastes like parsley.” Parsley, the pause. The night was done.

The recipe had said this — said it exactly, these exact words — scallops, a hint of lemon, tossed with pasta, a perfect summer meal!  Exclamation and all. (The recipe had, in fact, promised the parsley would lighten the traditional pesto, a detail Ellen took note of, considered a clever thing, a teaser; a coy twist that would pay off. Umm, what is that flavor? It’s different, I can’t quite place it)

Shed even copied the photo, put the pasta in the colorful bowl, garnished it with basil sprigs from the herb garden. The one they’d given her for her birthday. The one they’d all lost interest in once the leaves started to curl, showing ragged little holes. Fuck all of it, Ellen thought. She hated the newspaper, she hated the Tuesday recipes, she hated Betty Rosebottom with her quick summer meals and exclamations. She hated the photographer who’d gone to such great effort; whose own wife surely served pasta in colorful bowls that did not go unnoticed.

She would not withdraw yet, she couldn’t, it was too close to the reply, to the remark on the parsley. She would be exposed; he’d think her needy. And then with strained and saintly patience he’d recite a myriad of other dishes he loved, she couldn’t bear it. He couldn’t be faulted, after all, for tripping clumsily through her invisible course. And she couldn’t be faulted for leaning so desperately toward his approval. Just as an observer couldn’t be faulted for thinking it pathetic, the whole thing.

No, she’d shut down gradually, she’d claim a headache, she’d go upstairs within the hour. She’d refuse him sex in subtle ways that he wouldn’t mistake; the worn nightgown and colored tube socks; a weighty book opened up to the middle and balanced on her chest.