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,
If you’re stuck, reading helps:
“The Beauties” by Anton Chekhov, “The Doll’s House” by Katherine Mansfield, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” by J. D. Salinger, “Brownies” or “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” both by ZZ Packer, “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” by Amy Hempel, “Fat” by Raymond Carver, “Indian Camp” by Ernest Hemingway.
We should have them all downstairs. Just ask if you can’t find anything, though you know where everything is better than I.
Love,
Dad
She stuffs the list in her pocket and walks downstairs, where the store is closed for the night. She spins the bookmark carousel—Why, hello there, carousel!—and makes a sharp right turn into Adult Fiction.
MAYA IS NERVOUS and a little excited when she hands the story to Mr. Balboni.
“ ‘A Trip to the Beach,’ ” he says, reading the title.
“It’s from the point of view of sand,” Maya says. “It’s winter on Alice, and the sand misses the tourists.”
Mr. Balboni shifts, and his tight, black leather pants squeak. He encourages them to emphasize the positive while at the same time reading with a critical and ideally informed eye. “Well, that sounds like it has evocative description already.”
“I’m kidding, Mr. Balboni. I’m trying to move away from anthropomorphizing.”
“I’ll look forward to reading it,” Mr. Balboni says.
The next week, Mr. Balboni announces that he’s going to read a story aloud, and everyone sits up a little straighter. It is exciting to be chosen even if it means being criticized. It is exciting to be criticized.
“What do we think?” he asks the class when he’s finished.
“Well,” Sarah Pipp says, “no offense, but the dialogue is kind of bad. Like, I get what the person is going for, but why doesn’t the writer use contractions more?” Sarah Pipp reviews books for her blog, The Paisley Unicorn Book Review. She is always bragging about the free books she gets from publishers. “And why third person? Why present tense? It makes the writing seem childish to me.”
Billy Lieberman, who writes about wronged boy heroes who overcome supernatural and parental obstacles, says, “I don’t even get what’s supposed to have happened at the end? It’s confusing.”
“I think it’s ambiguous,” Mr. Balboni says. “Remember last week when we talked about ambiguity?”
Maggie Markakis, who is only in this elective because of a scheduling conflict involving math and debate, says she likes it, though she notes discrepancies in the financial elements of the stories.
Abner Shochet objects on multiple fronts: he doesn’t like stories in which characters lie (“I am so done with unreliable narrators”—the concept had been introduced to them two weeks ago), and worse, he thinks nothing happens. This doesn’t hurt Maya’s feelings because all of Abner’s stories end with the same twist: that everything had been a dream.
“Is there anything we liked about it?” Mr. Balboni asks.
“The grammar,” Sarah Pipp says.
John Furness says, “I liked how sad it was.” John has long brown eyelashes and a pop idol pompadour. He wrote a story about his grandmother’s hands that moved even hard-hearted Sarah Pipp to tears.
“Me too,” Mr. Balboni says. “As a reader, I responded to many of the things that you all objected to. I liked the somewhat formal style and the ambiguity. I disagree with the comment about the ‘unreliable narrators’—we may have to go over this concept again. I don’t believe the financial elements were handled badly either. All things considered, I think this, along with John’s story, ‘My Grandmother’s Hands,’ are the two best stories from class this semester, and they will be the Alicetown High School entries to the county story contest.”
Abner groans. “You didn’t say who wrote the other one.”
“Right, of course. It’s Maya. Round of applause for John and Maya.”
Maya tries not to look too pleased with herself.
“THAT’S AMAZING, RIGHT? Mr. Balboni picking us,” John says after class. He is following her to her locker, though Maya cannot say why.
“Yeah,” says Maya. “I liked your story.” She had liked his story, but she really wants to win. First prize is a $150 gift certificate to Amazon and a trophy.
“What would you buy if you won?” John asks.
“Not books. I have those from my dad.”
“You’re lucky,” John says. “I wish I lived in the bookstore.”
“I live above it, not in it, and it’s not that great.”
“I bet it is.”
He sweeps his brown hair out of his eyes. “My mom wants to know if you want to carpool to the ceremony.”
“But we just found out today,” Maya says.
“I know my mom. She always likes to carpool. Ask your dad.”
“The thing is, my dad will want to go, and he doesn’t drive. So probably, Dad’ll get my godmother or my godfather to drive us. And your mom will want to go, too. So I’m not sure if carpooling makes sense.” She feels like she’s been talking for about a half hour.
He smiles at her, which makes his pompadour bounce a little. “No problem. Maybe we could drive you somewhere else sometime?”
THE AWARD CEREMONY is held at a high school in Hyannis. Though it’s just a gymnasium (the scent of balls of both varieties is still palpable) and the ceremony hasn’t started yet, everyone speaks in hushed tones, like it’s church. Something important and literary is about to happen here.
Of the forty entries from the twenty high schools, only the top three stories will be read aloud. Maya has practiced reading her story for John Furness. He recommended that she breathe more and slow down. She has been practicing breathing and reading, which are not as easy to do as one might think. She had listened to him read, too. Her advice to him was to use his normal voice. He had been doing this fake-y, newscaster thing. “You know you love it,” he had said. Now he talks to her in the fake voice all the time. It’s so annoying.
Maya sees Mr. Balboni talking to a person who can only be a teacher from another school. She is wearing teacher clothes—a floral dress and a beige cardigan with snowflakes embroidered on it, and she is nodding adamantly at whatever Mr. Balboni is saying. Of course, Mr. Balboni is wearing his leather pants, and because he is out, a leather jacket—basically, a leather suit. Maya wants to take him to meet her father, because she wants A.J. to hear Mr. Balboni praise her. The balance is that she doesn’t want A.J. to be embarrassing. She had introduced A.J. to her English teacher, Mrs. Smythe, at the store last month, and A.J. had pressed a book into the teacher’s hands saying, “You’ll love this novel. It’s exquisitely erotic.” Maya had wanted to die.
A.J. is wearing a tie, and Maya jeans. She had put on a dress that Amelia had chosen for her but decided that the dress made it seem like she cared too much. Amelia, who is in Providence this week, is meeting them there, but she’ll probably run late. Maya knows she’ll be sad about the dress.
A baton is tapped on the podium. The teacher in the snowflake sweater welcomes them to the Island County High School Short-Story Contest. She praises the entries for having been a particularly diverse and moving group. She says she loves her job and wishes everyone could win, and then she announces the first finalist.
Of course, John Furness would be a finalist. Maya sits back in her chair and listens. The story is better than she remembers. She likes the description of the grandmother’s hands like tissue paper. She looks at A.J. to see how it is playing with him. He has a distant look in the eyes, which Maya recognizes as boredom.
The second story is by Virgina Kim from Blackheart High. “The Journey” is about an adopted child from China. A.J. nods a couple of times. She can tell he likes the story better than “My Grandmother’s Hands.”
Maya is starting to worry that she won’t be picked at all. She is glad she wore jeans. She turns around to look for the quickest way out. Amelia is standing by the door of the auditorium. She gives Maya a thumbs-up sign. “The dress. What happened to the dress?” Amelia mouths.
Maya shrugs, turns back to listen to “The Journey.” Virginia Kim wears a black velvet dress with a white Peter Pan collar. She reads in a very soft voice, barely more than a whisper at times. It’s as if she wants everyone to have to lean in to listen.
Unfortunately, “The Journey” is endless, five times as long as “My Grandmother’s Hands,” and after a while, Maya stops listening. Maya guesses it probably takes less time to fly to China.
If “A Trip to the Beach” isn’t top three, there will be T-shirts and cookies at the reception. But who wants to stay for the reception if you don’t at least place.
If she places, she won’t be mad that she didn’t win.
If John Furness wins, she will try not to hate him.
If Maya wins, maybe she will donate the gift certificate to charity. To, like, underprivileged kids or orphanages.
If she loses, it will be okay. She didn’t write the story to win a prize or even complete an assignment. If she’d wanted to complete the assignment, she could have written about Puddleglum. Creative writing is graded pass/fail.
The third story is announced, and Maya grabs A.J.’s hand.