I'm Your Girl (11 page)

Roanoke again. I pick up
The Quiet Game
and rush through the pages until I see…Roanoke mentioned
again. Three
out of four books I have to review take place in “The Star City of the South”? But I’ve only been here a year! I’m no expert on this place. But, I suppose I’m the best MAB member for the job.

I hear books fall and look up sharply. Mr. Shaggy White Man is trying to carry too many books, and the more he tries to catch them, the more they slip through his fingers. He’s hunched down and collecting them into a huge stack. Oh, shoot! He’s coming this way, and I just
have
to finish this chapter.

Who’s she kidding? His daddy has a worm farm. He
has
to be crazy—

“I’d like to check these out.”

Shoot. I close my book and look up at Mr. Shaggy White Man. “We have a policy about how many books a patron can check out at one time, sir.” I count fifteen books! Geez, at around 100,000 words each, he’d have to read 1.5
million
words in three weeks! He’s out of his mind.

I’ll bet he has a worm farm.

“Oh. Uh, what’s my limit?” He hands me his library card.

I try not to stare at any part of Mr. Shaggy…whose real name is Jack Browning. I look up from his library card. “Five is the limit.”

“Okay. I guess I’ll have to weed a few of these out.”

And I get the privilege of waiting for you to “weed them out.” Wonderful. It’s one of my many perks.

I watch him flip over and examine the backs of several books, and it’s not a bad collection. He has Margaret Hodge-Walker, bell hooks, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Tannarive Due, Alice Walker, Margaret Walker, Toni Morrison, Terry McMillan, Omar Tyree, Eric Jerome Dickey, and Yolanda Joe. He has made decent choices all around. He places
Paradise
, by Toni Morrison, on the counter, and I scan it. Terry McMillan’s
Disappearing Acts
follows. Decent novel, but the movie was average. He turns Alice Walker’s
The Color Purple
over several times before placing it on the counter. Great read, great movie, a good choice. Now he’s debating between James Baldwin’s
Go Tell It on the Mountain
and Richard Wright’s
Native Son
.

“I want to read this one”—he holds up Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man
—“but which one of these two should I get?”

Is he expecting me to make a recommendation? I look closer at this man named Jack. He has tiny lips; freckles (or are they moles?); a severe, sharp nose casting a shadow over a ratty, uneven blond moustache and beard; and more worry lines than my grandma. And he has a little boy? I’ll bet he robbed the cradle. That’s what these “don’t-have-to-work-during-the-holidays” white men do.

“Um,” he says, “which one would
you
recommend?”

And, of course, he said “you” louder, as if I, a black woman, would know exactly which black book to recommend. I slide his stack around until I find Ernest Gaines’s
A Gathering of Old Men.
Instead of saying anything, I scan it. I really ought to hit him with June Jordan’s
Technical Difficulties
, but it’s not in his stack.

“
A Gathering of Old Men
. I’ve heard of that one.”

Uh-huh. Right.

He collects his books. “Thanks.”

“They’re due back in three weeks,” I say.

He smiles, and finally I have something nice to say about him. He has a nice smile full of straight teeth, a smile that makes his worry lines disappear. “I’ll have them back well before then.”

Uh-huh. Right.

“Are you open on New Year’s Eve?”

I want to get smart with him and say something like, “Me or the library?” but I don’t, partially because he’s not the least bit attractive, but mainly because I do have to work on New Year’s Eve. I have no life. I’ll have to put up a sign behind me that reads “Dateless on New Year’s Eve—Pity Me.” I force a smile. “Yes, we’re open until nine on New Year’s Eve.”

“Okay, I’ll see you then.”

He nods once, and he leaves.

He just assumed I’d be here. He’s right, of course, but he
assumed
I would have nothing better to do than work in a library on New Year’s Eve. And he’s going to read, what, half a million words in two days? His no-ironing, teenaged wife must mind the child so he can do his thing.

I feel a colder draft and look toward the door. He’s coming back in? I gave him his library card, didn’t I?

He steps up to the counter and collects the books he didn’t take out. “I should have put these back.”

I would love for this man to put these books back so I can continue reading, but I want to make sure they’ll be put back in the right places. “I’ll put those back for you.”

“It’s okay,” he says. “I have plenty of time.”

I stand. “Don’t worry about it. You can just leave them on the counter.”

“Are you sure? I don’t mind.”

Don’t you have to be getting on home to your teenaged wife and sneaky brat? “It’s okay. I need to stretch my legs.”

“Oh. Okay.” He smiles. “Bye.”

I don’t say “bye” to him because he has left me with fifteen minutes’ worth of work.

W
ell, at least I had tried to make her day a little easier. It was the least I could do for all her help. I’ll have to ask Diane to recommend even more books, because
A Gathering of Old Men
is a crackling good story.

I spend the next two days reading and taking notes mainly on dialect and dialogue from these masters of the written word, and they teach me that love is love, hate is hate, and prejudice is prejudice no matter who writes it. I know I’ll never even come close to their power, but they’ve inspired me.

And then I sketch out an outline, reminding myself to KISS—Keep It Simple Stupid. My setting will have to be good old Roanoke, the same as my first book, and my main characters will have to be an African American woman and a white man because that’s what my editor expects. As for point of view, well, even though her voice was so much stronger than his in the first book, I’m going to try third-person omniscient and see what happens. I’m going to need the simplest of plots, something much less involved, contrived, and coincidental than the first book. It has to be deeper and more serious. It has to mean something to me. It has to speak from my heart.

In other words, it has to be everything the first book was not. I wish my first draft had stood up to the editor’s scrutiny. That story had heart, soul, and emotion.

Heart, Soul, and Emotion—
not a bad working title. A little vague, though. Hmm. How about…
Greetings from the Melting Pot
. Too long.
The Melting Pot Blues?
Why not? My editor will change it anyway. At least I like it. I might as well get started:

1: Interrogating the Sponge

Why “the Sponge”?

It’s what Noël called me when we first met. I didn’t have anything to say to her at first—

You rarely did—or do
.

True. She said she liked a quiet man, and that I was just a sponge soaking up life.

And now you wring life out when you’re writing.

Something like that. Now hush so I can get going.

“It looks like blood on the floor next to your computer!”

“It’s not blood. It’s—”

“And what about the stains on the walls?”

“I can explain that, you see—”

“And those muddy footprints all over the kitchen leading into the living room. What about those?”

“Oh, that. You see—”

“What happened today,
Mister
Jefferson? Can you tell me?”

And while you’re at it, tell
me.
This is supposed to be a romance?

It will be. Give it time.

Arthur Davis Jefferson, with his ashy, calloused, scarred fingers nervously drumming on the table, a cold can of Diet Coke just inches from his grasp, didn’t look at his interrogator.

“I want answers!”

So do I!

Be patient.

Where to begin
, wondered Arthur.
Where exactly to begin
. He looked up and tried to smile, but it came out more as a wince. “It was an…interesting day, to say the least.”

“Uh-huh. And?”

Arthur glanced at the door, willing it to open. His son could explain this better than he could. His son would clear all this up. He’d fill in all the blanks, and because of his age, he’d get mercy, something his interrogator was obviously denying him. Mercy. That’s what Arthur needed. Just a small amount. Sympathy was out, and empathy was a pipe dream. A little mercy.

He reached for the can of Diet Coke, but his interrogator’s dark brown eyes said, “I wouldn’t be doing that just now.” He withdrew his hand, folding it into his other hand prayerfully, hopefully.

“Well, you know, it, uh, it was raining earlier today, and—”

“I know that.”

Why am I talking about the weather at a time like this?
he thought. “And, uh, Stevie was outside playing, and—”

“In the rain? You let him play outside in that thunderstorm?”

Arthur sighed. “No, it was only raining then, not very hard, kind of a mist really, just enough to cool him off. It was so hot, and he had been swinging on the swing set, and—”

“What were you doing during all that lightning?”

Arthur sighed again, dragging his hands to his lap, where they wrestled with each other. “Writing.” He looked up at the dark brown eyes. “Downstairs.”

“Writing, huh?”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t even know it was raining, did you?”

Arthur scrunched up his lips. He could deny it, but it would do no good.
Who doesn’t know when a thunderstorm is raging outside his window?
he thought.
Besides me, I mean
. He shook his head. “Once I heard the thunder, though—”

His interrogator’s hands sliced through the air. “Are you that…unaware,
Mister
Jefferson?”

Is that a rhetorical question?
he thought.
If I say, “Yes, I am that unaware sometimes,” I’ll be doomed. If I say, “No, I knew there was a thunderstorm churning through the backyard,” I’ll be lying. Mercy. That’s all I want.

He sat up straighter, still feeling the dull ache in the base of his neck from hours hunched over his laptop. “I was on a roll, a real breakthrough. I was, um, really cranking it out.”

My fingers were flying, and I couldn’t catch up to them!
he thought happily.
Please understand! Please recognize that inspiration doesn’t always come, that it’s sometimes like a game of baseball where so much nothing happens for innings at a time and then—bam! Someone hits a home run, a grand slam, a grand salami, a towering shot over the bleacher creatures onto Waveland Avenue. That was me today, and I had to let it fly, set it free immediately with no hindrances, no attention to misting rain falling on a healthy, happy, albeit muddy boy on a summer’s day.

“So, you’re downstairs ‘cranking it out,’ as you say, while your child runs around in the lightning.”

There was lightning downstairs, too!
he wanted to say, but he only thought it. Inspiration sometimes has a price. “I called him in the second I heard the thunder.”

Which is not to say that Arthur had heard the first rumbles of thunder. He had only heard the loudest thunder, that rolling peal that had broken the inspiration, caught that towering fly ball and turned it into a can of corn bloop to center field, sent it wherever inspiration goes, perhaps to Cleveland?
Why Cleveland?
he wondered.
I haven’t been there since the Steelers used to win games. Wasn’t I with Dad then? It was raining then, too, at the old stadium. Yes! And we were in the front row—

“Stevie came in right away?”

“Huh?”

“Did your
son
come inside right away?”

He winced. “Not exactly. He, uh, frolicked a little, um, in the mud.” In the circle of mud where a pool used to be, where Arthur had attempted to plant grass, only to have the grass seed eaten by every robin and sparrow in Virginia. “On his way inside.”

“And it didn’t occur to you to make him take off his shoes before coming into my kitchen?”

I’m so glad I didn’t marry a lawyer
, Arthur thought,
though I suppose every woman has the lawyer gene
. “I’ll clean it all up, I promise.”

His wife’s dark brown eyes met his. “Artie, we go through this every single day.”

“I know.” He brightened. “It’s only gum on the carpet, cinnamon, I think. If I take an ice cube—”

She snatched his Diet Coke and took a long drink, shaking her head. She did that a lot, that head shaking, usually once in the morning and a whole lot more at night. He couldn’t blame her. It wasn’t easy living with a would-be author.

To be more specific, it wasn’t easy living with him, a man, raised in the melting pot, whose mind was three parts stew and one part broth, a literal bouillabaisse of lives and memories congealed within the goo of his brain, spewed forth in staccato, home run—like bursts on a laptop whenever inspiration returned from Cleveland.

“I’ll, uh, be more attentive tomorrow. I just—” Her eyes told him not to speak, so he stopped.

“Don’t say you’ll be more attentive because you just can’t be attentive.” She backed up to the closet next to the refrigerator and took out the mop.

He rose from his chair, but her dark eyes put him back in his seat. “I’ll do it,” he said, feebly and without conviction.

She rolled her eyes. “Go back to your…typing.”

Mercy?
he thought.
Mercy from a woman holding a mop? And on a rainy day in a muddy kitchen?
“Are you sure?”

She blinked once, and that answered his question.

“Uh, I’ll, uh,…well.”

I am so well-spoken
, he thought.
At least my characters can speak clearly when I want them to.

He stood. “Thanks.” He stepped to her as she turned away from him, plopped the mop into the sink, and turned on the faucet. He moved as closely as he dared, his body millimeters from hers. “I’m sorry.”

She used the sprayer to rinse some Frosted Cheerios off the mop. “I’m used to it.” She smirked. “For a man who is such a sponge for details, the whole house could burn down around you, and you’d still be down there typing away.”

He kissed her brown neck, marveling at its softness. “Maybe,” he said, slipping his hands to her hips.

“Maybe nothing. I know you.”

It was true. She did. She knew him. It was why he had married her ten years ago.

He kissed the sensitive spot just under the hairline of the softest part of her neck, the tropical scent of protein styling gel tickling his nose. Her hair had texture, but it wasn’t coarse. He had found out the hard way when he had brought the perm back from Food Lion. “I’m regular, not coarse,” she had said. “Regular tampons, regular perm, regular…”

A real regular girl I married
, he thought.
A regular girl for a regular guy. Two regular people in an irregular marriage. There is something…symmetrical about it all.

“I’m glad you do.”

She wrung out the mop with her hands. “Glad I do what?”

“I’m glad you know me.”

She rolled her eyes, frowned, but gave him a kiss on the cheek anyway. “Am I in your next book?”

“You always are,” he said. “You always are.”

So, what do you think? It’s not too…domestic, is it?

I like it. It’s sweet. It’s a nice memory. Noël was so angry that day, and yet she mopped up the mess and even sang while doing it.

But there aren’t any guilty pleasures.

Have him put his hands on her ass or something.

In the kitchen?

Why not?

But it’s muddy.

You never know. It might turn her on.

I roll my eyes, save the work, and sit back from the laptop, looking at the mess that is my cramped office. It really isn’t an office, though it has all the prerequisites. My laptop rests on a pressboard desk covered with coffee cup-sized circles that Stevie connected together with twelve of the sixty-four colors of the Crayola rainbow. It is as if Spiro-graph has bloomed on every surface. The laptop itself has seen better days, the floppy disk drive occasionally functional, the CD-ROM drive held forever in place and inert by two pieces of masking tape. The blue industrial swivel chair I sit on swivels only ninety degrees each way before complaining to a stop, its movement impeded by several gobs of spent gum and two gummy worms.

The two-drawer dented metal filing cabinet under the desk holds all of my old rejections, and there’s quite a healthy stack in there. My favorite rejection from New York proclaims: “I do not have room for additional commercial novelist on my list, and while I’m happy top have an abundance of great writers on my list, I lament that I cannot take on writers who seem to resonate with readers.”

What a load of gobbledygook! Who would want to work for an editor who thinks “novelist” is both singular and plural, cannot spell “to” correctly, and uses the word
lament
in a rejection, as if this editor truly laments anything other than his or her inability to edit a letter?

I look at my printer and refrain from hitting it. It has been one constant, electric paper jam since the day I bought it. A trio of expended ink cartridges—ones I had planned to refill by hand—teeter on the top of the printer. I knock them over, and they jump to the floor to join a string of paper clips and torn envelopes. An overflowing waste can a sneeze from the empty paper shredder, which Stevie nicknamed “the ’fetti maker,” sits under the first set of shelves holding miles of reference books. These books, collected or given as gifts or simply saved from oblivion by me at yard sales, make the shelves sag only in the middle. Yeah, my bookcases are smiling at me.

You shouldn’t have used pine boards. They’re soft wood.

But they’re cheap.

My library has no organization whatsoever.
The Real Mother Goose
is sandwiched between a current Roanoke phone directory and
Masterpieces of African-American Literature.
The 2000 JC Penney fall catalog balances on top of
In Search of Color Everywhere: A Collection of African-American Poetry,
Time-Life’s
WWII,
a Bible (King James version),
American Indian Archery,
and
A History of African-American Artists.
My 1950 edition of
The Oxford Universal Dictionary
sits in the middle of the first “smile,” surrounded by
The Autobiography of An Ex—Coloured Man
and the
1998 Guide to Literary Agents. Siddharta
follows
The Awakening,
which creeps up on
Emily Post on Entertaining,
which catches up with
Things Fall Apart.
I used to have one “smile” devoted to African American writings, and the left half contains titles by Toni Morrison, Brian Egeston, and Octavia Butler, but the rest of the shelf includes
The Bonfire of the Vanities
and
ABC’s of the Human Body. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
blooms next to
Native Stranger, Cultural Literacy, Parting the Waters,
and
Journey to Ixtlan
on the top smile. What’s that? Oh, yeah. It’s a wooden carving of an African elephant sitting on top of
To Love & To Cherish: Meditations for Couples, The Joyful Heart,
and the
Shakespeare Birthday Book,
a gift from my mother. Yeah, I guess my collection is eclectic and peripatetic.