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,