From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction

10. "Flamenco" by Erich Sysak

Flamenco

It is impossible to escape the heat of the French Quarter. It is searing and ubiquitous, cruel from early June until late September. The few full-time residents of Toulouse and Decatur and St. Peter near City Park stay indoors living lives surrounded by plaster walls and chugging window air conditioners. The insides of things stare back at you. It is hot. This part of the Quarter sits in the soggy apex of an old geographical spoon. It is where artists live. The rent is cheap.

I had come to my father's studio that afternoon to tell him good news, and to ask of him a favor he would not want to fulfill. My girlfriend, Megumi Kido, of one year, had just agreed to marry me. An American would say, Mey-gumi. Two syllables and a half-silent g. But this is not her name. Her name is Me-gu-mi. Three syllables, each one rising softly in your mouth until the last e flutters out like a small bird. It is her secret name. Her real name; her bedroom name.

Since I met her along the bayou at the New Orleans Museum of Art (she sat alone on a plaid blanket to watch mullet jump) she has been the center of my every thought.

For her, I exercise an uncontainable desire to improve, to read prospectuses late at night, to depreciate the adjusted basis of gifts and fair market values ranging as far back as 1946. She understands my craving for things to remain unchanged in our briar, Covington home — the furniture and books, the Kabuki mask and ceramic vase above the fireplace, the silk throw rugs beyond the sofa. She also understands my need to pace, and then to sit quietly and think, sometimes for hours, about the puzzle of numbers a financial accountant must learn the shape of. I am the youngest to make junior partner at Connick, Castelano, Warwick & O'Connor since the Great War. It is a firm with history.

The double shotgun where my parents live needs more than paint. The neighborhood turns pretty around it. It's an old plan to keep thieves away. Vines of bougainvillea breed in the wrought-iron porch rails, and pose against the darkened windows. The old planks, not wide, but delicate and old-fashioned gingerbread, look powdered with white dust and dry. I parallel park behind the Volkswagen van, once my mother's shuttle for doctor's appointments, late-to-school rides, dance recitals, and classes, now with its guts hanging loose below it, reminds the three of us of the chaos of motherhood. Promises have been made to repair it. I step over the stacks of yellow coffee cans, mostly from the Cafe Du Monde, filled with muddy, mineral spirits and colors, and knock on the studio door before I enter.

It is alleged that Van Gogh's insanity was more than biological. The invisible vapors of mineral spirits inhaled, even swallowed from wet brushes, over time caused his intellect to fail. Inside the studio, these same vapors radiate from the wood floors, the high ceilings where the heat rests, the wet canvas, and the dry stacked arm deep against the walls. All of us have inhaled it over the years.

He sits on a three-legged stool in a cave of paintings. I'm used to the colors, but a stranger is assaulted by it. Your sense of proportion and the familiar, muted tones of the earth, the colors of school buses and buildings, trees and bridges, water, televisions and furniture explode, disappear. His paintings are large, intimidating, colorful, violent, busy, involved. You cannot glance. It takes a while to see them.

He does not turn, but half sits, half stands, juggling the legs of the stool slightly off the ground. He wears no shirt or shoes. There are streaks of red paint on his right arm. His skin is pale. His hair is fine and light gray, tossed up from thinking with his fingers. A box fan twirls near the window where an air conditioner hums. My mother said we look exactly alike. Me at twenty-nine. My father once at twenty-nine. The same. I have seen sketches. It is almost true.

I fall into a vinyl chair near the desk just inside the door, and forget my age.

"I have very good news," I say and cross my hands.

"That would be welcome." His voice is distant. Thinking. Contrary to all logic, it is the best time to speak to him.

"I asked her."

"It's about time."

"She said yes, Dad."

"Congratulations," he says, and offers to shake.

I pull him toward me and gently slap my hand against his soft, sticky back. "I have a favor to ask," I say.

He nods knowingly, but cannot know, and picks through the day's mail at his desk.

"A favor," he repeats to the letters and papers. I look at the painting he's working on and see, through the vastness of time spread out, through the valleys and mountains and creatures within it, a woman, in the distance, on some kind of colorful ledge, a rainbow ledge, and she is dancing. Her hands are posed, fingers snap. She will stomp her right foot in a moment and send catastrophic fissures from her heel.

"Will you paint her?" I ask. The box fan whirs. The air conditioner putters and clicks. From the other side of the shotgun, where my mother lives, I hear her steps on the wooden floor.

"She'll have to sit," he replies.

"Of course," I breathe. "She's so patient, Dad."

Then, from somewhere close, but beyond the universe of my father's studio, a voice materializes. The voice is close. In it there is what can only be called yearning, a friction between the sound, the note, and the ear. It creeps through the windows of the studio: oh-yeh, oh ya-ya-ya-yaya-u-ya, and breaks the closure of our deal.

"What is it?" I ask.

"What do you think? He sings. His name is Paco."

"But where?"

"Where? Can't you tell? It's this Jimayna De Alba shit all over again."

The singing stops for a moment, and then continues, just as loudly as before. Jimayna De Alba is my mother's stage name. It is a name that represents her absence from our home. It is time I spent with my father alone. It is how I grew.

My father turns from the painting and points at me with an ox-hair fan brush. "He is singing to her."

"To Mom," I say, knowing already.

He nods and drops the brush into the turpentine. "Yes, for a week now." He looks at the floor, then at me. His blue eyes surprise me. "She quit the studio. I wanted more time with her. It takes her away, not just physically." He cocks his head and considers something quietly.

He has asked my mother to quit. He has asked before. There is nothing I can say to him, though I wish to. It is not the idea, but the words coming out of him. My father does not speak of these things. He does not speak of my mother as the private woman, ever. He does not speak of things inside him, of love, of pain of remembering. Something has changed be-tween us.

"What will you do?" I ask.

"I will paint," he says and points to the canvas.

Then she begins. I feel the vibrations in the floor before I hear it. My mother dances in the next house, where I learned to crawl and speak and run and think. I listen to the clacking, as fast as a card in a bicycle wheel, at times, then hard and

final. A thunder in the floor.

From my mother, I learned this: flamenco borrows from Arabic and Eastern Indian musical rhythms, Spanish and African spirituals, and the Gypsy. It is a guitarist, a singer, and a dancer. They weave a song between them. The guitar is the bridge and the background. The dancer is sung to the floor. Sympathetic, she is held in grief by the voice. The singer kneels to sounds, trills the pieces of the song that call for it. I saw them through the windows of the car, from the back rooms of the dance studio where my mother worked. I heard them do this.

I imagine Paco with his hands, Christlike, palms up, an offering from his chest to my mother where something brews to come out as voice. His eyes are closed. He sits in a wooden chair in an empty room near the windows. His boots tap the floor. The wood shutters are dark, unpainted. And sunlight there, full of dust, touches his white teeth. He sits on the edge of the chair and calls out to who will hear. His singing is devout.

When my parents were younger than I am now, and I was not yet born, people followed my mother to a little club below studio apartments at the corners of Poydras and Decatur, at the fringe of the old Quarter. Ciro's, a small club with doors wide-open at night, spilled music and light into the half-darkened streets. You would walk past and see the crowds— penultimate, staggering groups, cold drinks, laughter. Later, you would also hear the masculine strumming of a flamenco guitar, and then the hard clapping of my mother's shoes on a parquet floor. When the dancer is called, she rises and taps the floor like a drum. She gesticulates. The movements are an expression of temperament. This I know.

My mother learned flamenco at Tulane where she also studied the art of making paper, restoring archival documents, preservation. This is where she met my father, a visiting artist, a devoted painter. She danced weekends and Tuesday nights at Ciro's. But now, Ciro's is boarded over, the studio apartment where she lived above, where my father leaned and watched the crowd adore her, and where it was revealed that she was the most desired woman in all the Quarter at that moment, is empty.

Three days later, we arrive. A boy darts into the street ahead of me, and chases a soccer ball beneath my mother's van. I see his legs V'd beneath the frame, and slow my car to a crawl. I hear my wheels crunching gravel. Megumi smiles and purses her lips in the way she does. Her dark hair is pinned off her neck, and swirls at the crown. We are having children. Her long fingers trace the line of bangs curling above her eyebrows.

"He'll be fine," I say. "I'll be there."

She nods. Her chin gently rises. "I know," she says.

On the porch, at the stoop of my father's door, I see red carnations and white roses draped in paper. When Megumi sees them she captures my hand, thinking that I've put them there for her. I have not. I know they are for my mother, but someone, Paco I assume, has calculated wrong and courted the wrong door.

"They're so fresh," Megumi says, and spreads the flowers beneath her nose.

"There he is," I say and watch my father's silhouette move toward us. I smile. I can't take away her happiness.

The studio floor is swept. The clutter has been stacked into meaningful piles. My father wears a white oxford button-down, khaki shorts, and tennis shoes.

"Welcome," he says warmly, and holds the door for us.

Megumi's yellow dress overwhelms the colors of the paintings. She walks through the rooms toward the kitchen. Suddenly, I look at my father and know he is thinking the same thing.

"My God, I've forgotten how beautiful she is," he says.

"I've never been happier, Dad," I say, watching her appear briefly in the kitchen doorway. "I'm sorry about the flowers."

"What?" He sits at his stool and arranges his colors in little blobs near a large, primed canvas smeared with muted tan and brown.

"They were outside the door," I say.

"Again? He won't give up."

I watch Megumi at the other end of the house, in the kitchen, pulling the flowers from the white sheet, then slicing the stems. She drops aspirin in the water of a large bowl, and then pours in a little 7 UP. Her long fingers pluck at the flower buds and move them like the heads of children for a photograph. Suddenly, she looks up and smiles. I think: these flowers are for my mother.

My father moves the canvas closer to the stool, pulls at his shirt and strokes his chin. I see the wooden window screens open behind him, and through them the close walls of the house next door. Only a narrow alley separates us from Paco. Is Paco her lover? Or does he want her to dance, to return to the studio where a small group of aging musicians gather and recollect?

"Where should she sit?" I ask.

He looks up, surprised, and glances around the studio. "I forgot," he says. "I've never done this."

"Not even for her?" He knows exactly whom I mean.

We pull the vinyl chair from between the two tables. Megumi appears with the bowl and the flowers. "Should I put these on the desk, Mr. Bonnard?" she asks and puts them there before he can answer.

The vinyl chair is arranged near his stool and canvas. Lights are directed toward the coffee-soft cloth. Megumi slips out of her elaborate heels, sits, tucks her legs beneath her, and straightens her dress. She smiles and blinks. The light hits her small shoulders. In the light, little quilts in the fabric around her breasts reveal their intricate stitching. I am standing next to my father, next to the blank canvas and staring with him. We both stare. The old and the new. She is there. Her presence, to me, is suddenly profound, surreal. There is a blue glow in her black hair. I think of turning to my father; this is something he will also know. She is beautiful. But instead, Paco appears between us.

His voice seems louder now. The anguish in his trilling tongue is severe, cracked: yah-yo-yah-yahahahah-o. We both turn to the window.

"Sketching a rose," my father says.

"Sketching what? Maybe he's practicing," I say.

"Impossible. She will dance soon."

"Have you talked to her about it?" I ask in a quiet voice. "What does she say?"

As a marine, my father survived nine months in Tu Cung, Vietnam. He was never wounded, nor did he receive any commendations. The pattern is hard to follow. He talked about rivers like the sound of rain. And when it rained he felt as if a river was being dropped on him. His stories are told in chunks. The images aren't clear. I can't picture him in fatigues and boots, holding a rifle and humping a rucksack. Maybe he didn't. Maybe he served in some other capacity.

After the war, and college, and graduate school and teaching, he sold work in the Tate Mitchum Gallery. He was collected and appraised. I have found his name in serious books of art criticism. At times, he visited universities by invitation to speak and to teach. But years have since passed. The Tate Mitchum is closed. The collectors are obscure.

But he still paints. His work has stretched beyond the days of Tate Mitchum. He says he has invented a wholly original process more compatible with human brain chemistry than seratonin. I am not sure what he means, and do not ask. It is not what matters. It does matter that Paco disrupts an already shaky marriage. But one that has lasted through its shakiness,

and perhaps because of it, a long time.

* * *

"I married a restoration expert. A practical woman who wanted a kid for Chrissake." He tries to sit at the stool calmly. He sketches the shape of a face and intersects the face with lines.

I move closer to the window, and hear across the alley, the tink of glass against glass. Paco's singing slows and moves farther away. I try to imagine what would happen if we simply knocked on the door, confronted him. But it won't happen.

I watch my father filling in Megumi's left eye. I know that eye, its smallness, its Asian teardrop, its engaging brown. He will not confront Paco. He will not confront his wife. They must decide for themselves. I understand. If I discover Megumi watching a man in the Indian restaurant where we often eat lunch, or the little playhouse on a warm night, it hurts. A little knife stabs me in the side. But I will not speak. She must love me in the face of other men.

The singing is louder, comes close. My father cracks the pencil against the floor, then stands and paces. He pushes his fingers through his hair and shakes his head. I grab the stool before it falls, and look at my fiancee.

"We should go," Megumi whispers.

"No, I can't leave him now." I go to the window where he kneels, and peer over the sill with him. I see nothing. The song has stopped. I wonder if we are the only ones who hear it.

"I think she's there," he whispers.

"Impossible," I say and kneel too.

"Help me push this," he says and unlatches the window.

The windows of the studio have not been opened in years. I pry my fingers into the paint and dirt between window and wood and push as the seal cracks, the window slowly opens and warm, wet air flows in and settles against our faces.

"You watch. I'll be right back," he says and rises.

I watch the alley and the darkness of Paco's windows. A white curtain floats up and settles, floats up again. I imagine an entire life beyond the alley and that apartment. A life my father makes in his paintings. I could have chosen to be a painter. Maybe I am. He taught me to draw. He encouraged me. I drew sneakers and the toaster oven and her, even her, when she dressed in long skirts and shawl, the chopsticks in her hair, to teach at the studio or to dance. I didn't know. I fixed her. He was proud. He taught me to draw without looking at the paper. I remember the first time. The old shoes tangled together, the laces, the perspective of one shoe atop another.

No singing. No sound at all. Not even cars on the roads outside, doors, children, music. Nothing. My knees start to ache, but do not move. This is important. Not to see Paco or my mother, but to carry this through for him.

He returns, and between his legs, pointing straight up, a rifle. It has a thin barrel and a metal sight at the tip. "I didn't know you had that," I say.

"Pellet gun. She's gone, Son."

"Gone," I repeat. Not my mother, I realize. The chair where Megumi sat is empty. The light brightens and burns the empty chair. The canvas where he started to paint her looks like it's smoldering in the intense light.

My father pumps the pellet gun angrily. He claps the stock shut, then pumps it again.

"It needs ten pumps to get through that window," he says between breaths.

He sticks the rusty barrel through the window and rests it against the windowsill. He snuggles the stock against his shoulder and cheek, cocks his head, watches. "Tell me if you see them," he says.

"You won't shoot her?" I ask.

He looks at me like he can't believe I would ask the question. He will not shoot her. He is sane. He will shoot Paco.

"I can't see anything," I say.

My father takes deep, heavy breaths, then blows air slowly from his pursed lips. Some practiced routine for shooting, I guess. But the alley is silent. The windows are empty of movement. I'm not sure if anyone is there anymore.

"I'll check around back," he says. Before I can ask him what this means, he's gone, slipping from the room like a young man, agile, on a grave mission.

I watch the alley for a few seconds and wonder if my father will appear wearing fatigues and a mask of black and green. I hear the screen door slam, but no one appears. I stand and try a few numb steps, but my legs are chunks of wood. I walk like Frankenstein, grab the stool, and lean on it. I stretch my legs and feel the size of the canvas in front of me. My legs run beneath it when I'm this close. I see all the grains and imperfections of the undercoating. I see the spaces in the charcoal lines where he's drawn Megumi's faint outline. It's only a human shape. I don't see her yet.

I take a pencil and press the tip into the line of her left eye. i imagine her face close to mine. We are in bed and she's laughing. I smell her; feel her breath on my chin. Her soft eyes widen, and she looks at me; I count three freckles.

When I finally look, I'm surprised to see I've ruined what little there was to start. It looks nothing like her. It seems ridiculous to realize I don't know her well. Maybe I never will. I drop the pencil into the tray. I look toward the front windows of the studio to see if the car is still there. Maybe she waited. I realize that one day she will know some furtive craving I will be unable to satisfy. I open the front door, smell turpentine baking in the heat, the vegetable smell of hot vines, dirt, and grass. The car is not there.

ROB: I want to say this about these pieces — all are remarkably well written. You've got the tools, folks. Good writing, very good writing. Why don't you give yourself a moment and refresh your memory about Erich's story. Remember the guidelines in here: if you feel you have something useful to say, great. Keep it focused on the text and let's work from basics first, but you're under no compulsion to speak. On the other hand, I don't want you to take anything I've said to mean "Keep your mouth shut," either. You will often have wonderful, useful things to say. It won't affect your grade either way. So it's up to you.

No one? OK, I'll start.

The story sets up quite beautifully — line to line, it's nicely written. "His hair is fine and light gray, tossed up from thinking with his fingers." That's a fabulous line; And you set the tone of New Orleans beautifully. You must have responded to Tom Piazza — remember the Brownsville story? You catch New Orleans — not derivatively, but in a way reminiscent of that milieu. Your narrator talks about coming into this place in the Quarter where artists live, and you evoke it vividly.

The father is an artist, and when you have a father artist and an accountant son, there's at once a discrepancy that suggests the possibility not only for traditional conflict but also for the prime mover of conflict, yearning. And there's an interesting kind of undercutting of polarity, in that the son met Megumi along the Bayou at the New Orleans Museum of Art.

But that undercutting, in fact, is just the foreshadowing of the actual dissipation of any sense of difference in the story. The son readily understands his father's art — seeks it out, in fact, with regard to Megumi — and the father in turn seems quite comfortable with his son and totally accepting of Megumi as a future daughter-in-law. The only problem is beyond the wall. And it's a shared problem, of sorts, but it remains a problem.

So I've got the yearning deficit here. There is no dynamic of desire. It's not until pretty late in the story that anybody thinks to take any action. Once taken, it gets sort of extreme. As a result, it feels dragged in. When we get to scenes that might contain heat — that is to say, scenes that involve the mother from the past, or even in the present — we never see her. To make anything of the story, you have to believe that the mother and even his mother being with his father are somehow important to him. But there's no evidence of that, and this is where the emotional logic of the story breaks down. Before there's even a serious reference to the mother's flamenco career — the background of her stage presence, the relationship of the mother and father, the mother dancing next door with this Paco guy — all of this is done in summary, abstraction, generalization. There isn't a single memory, not a single scene, not even a peeking through the window. Here these double shotgun houses sit. The son comes and goes always to the father, and yet the mother's right there. We have no real sense of why there's this absence, this division, this gap between son and mother. The past offense seems to be, even from his point of view, between the mother and the father. It's not as if he's sided with the father in some drastic way against the mother. Then when we hear about the mother learning flamenco in Tulane — and this was some time ago, wasn't it— there's not even a moment of flashback of his seeing her. If your mother suddenly turns into a flamenco dancer — there's a lot of potential here, Erich, but there needs to be a moment when he sees her dance for the first time, at whatever age, im-pressionably. And a moment when he is compelled to see her dance now, in the present of the story. When, for example, he is somehow compelled to carry those flowers from this doorstep to the other and put them where they're supposed to be, and then look, peek, spy. We want to see his mother dancing the flamenco, especially with a strange man.

I would not be surprised to find that this is one of those stories where there was something hot you were looking into, something dangerous, and you cooled it down, defensively, before it got onto the page. So much is possible here if, in fact, a dynamic of real desire got into the story. As it is, the situation represents only a kind of distant problem to the narrator.

Megumi is not really developed as a character, especially in relationship to him. Why is he seeking the painting? There is a reference briefly to a work in which his mother appears in one of his father's paintings, but it's quite incidental; she's lost in a landscape, and the image doesn't become a functioning part of his psyche; it does not tap into his yearning. There just seems to be so much potential in this story. His father had done a portrait of his mother, and now the son wants to bring Megumi here, to recreate in this woman he's about to marry an emblazoned image of the mother — that, for example, would be possible. Development of that kind of interconnection and connection with desire.

When we finally come to a statement of how Paco has corrupted a situation that the narrator might wish to be pure, we begin to get a whiff of yearning. The narrator says that "Paco disrupts an already shaky marriage." He finally asserts a feeling about this but, again, it's done abstractly and analytically.

The absence of a relationship between our narrator and Megumi is also reflected in the fact that he's so open in front of her about what's going on next door. It's as if Megumi vanishes from his consciousness — indeed, that's part of the reason she walks away from him. But how much does she realize here? When she whispers, "We should go," it feels like she understands whatever ache he's feeling but, again, this is only vaguely hinted at, not really there.

There's a story full of possible yearning here. It's just that you've distanced yourself drastically from that story. I'm left with the question that I put to most of you at this stage, which is: Did the story come from your head? And then, if so, why?

It could be because the story from the get-go was a willed story, a thoughtful story, an idea story; in which case, when you put this thing away go on to something utterly different. Or, given that there's so much potential, was something coming from your unconscious that began this process, but you flinched and distanced yourself (and us) out of some kind of self-protection? In which case, I still say put it away and don't look at it — but do go back to your protagonist, to his father the artist, and his mother the flamenco dancer. There's a rich circumstance, a wonderful setting, a lot of potential here. But the story itself, as written, is disassociated from it. Do you have a sense at this point of which it is, whether the story is hot and you flinched, or whether the story was cool from the start?

Erich: Oh, yeah. Very cool from the start.

ROB: Well, then I'm impressed that you coolly set up so many possibilities.

Jocelyn: I'm curious why you say Put it on the shelf. I thought there was a lot of excellent rendering of setting, for instance. That was something very beautiful.

ROB: No matter how much beautiful stuff — we all have to learn this — I know I do — we're all struggling with it — if you write a thing from your head, everything in that piece is tainted. Even if you have passages that are beautifully written, brilliantly sensual, and maybe in their beauty and sensuality have actually come from the outer foyer of your unconscious — you don't go back and try to save those passages. Don't say, "OK, I've already got a good description of New Orleans; I'll just stick that in." An art object is organic, and this beautiful rendering of New Orleans may be exactly the wrong beautiful rendering of New Orleans for the object that's going to come out of this place. This make sense to you, Jocelyn?

Jocelyn: It's so hard.

ROB: It's the hardest thing in the world, but it's necessary. You go back and pull something out of one piece and stick it in another and everything is lost. It will just bend the story to fit an external factor. It's the same danger you run with a literal memory. Yes, Kent.

Kent: In the scene in New Orleans where they're walking down the street — say you go back to your trance, maybe there's something about his mother or something like that.. it won't be rendered the same way..

ROB: It's in the realm of human possibility that the same brilliant sentence may come back and flow right out of your unconscious once again and work perfectly.

Kent: Or you go back into the artist's studio or into.

ROB: Oh, absolutely. Scenes, actions, movements — you can redream them. Sure, he brings Megami into the studio and asks his father to paint her. But you might do that after a scene in which either he sees hanging in his father's studio or remembers from his childhood a painting of his mother that the father had done, that memory having been rendered moment to moment from his yearning to find a home again, or to reconnect with his parents, or to something lost — if such a scene is already in the story, then the minute he and Megumi walk into that artist's studio — everything will be different than it was in this version. Every detail — all the receptors will be thrumming to something in the piece that isn't there now. However, if you have some brilliant phrase from the previous draft that you're bound to work in, but which was created in a context without these new scenes in which the yearnings are manifest, then you've got a problem. As I say, it's in the realm of human possibility that walking into that studio, the same brilliant sentence may roll out and turn out to be perfect, but not if you go and get it to save it.

Janet: There's a parallel here with Mary Lee Settle's advice about research, where she says: Don't read about the period that you're researching, read in the period. magazines, memoirs, letters that were written in that period, and take no notes. Because when you come to write the thing, if you've taken notes you think you have to use them, whereas if you've immersed yourself in the period, what you need will come to you.

ROB: Absolutely. The work is an organism. Any external thing that has its own existence, anything outside the creation of the work that insists on getting in, is like a virus. Once it gets into the body, it will eat up everything around it. The organic nature of art is such that within the process everything must be utterly malleable, utterly fluent, so that everything ultimately can be brought together; and if there's anything in there that will not yield, is not open to change, you cannot create the object.

11. "My Impossibles" by Brandy T. Wilson

My Impossibles

My mother stood beside me with the shovel in her hand and I stood looking at the ground wishing I had the shovel and that sweat was dripping from my forehead instead of hers. My mother and I seemed to always be flying at different ends of the earth, and whatever I did, she did it better. It was a quarter past four on the Saturday afternoon of my weekend visit and the poles for the garden arch were still in plastic wrap at my foot. I bought the thing for a project my mother and I could do together while I broke the news to her. I had miscarried and she wouldn't be a grandmother after all, and never would be, through me anyway. She delivered and raised three children practically on her own and I couldn't even carry one. It had been a last-ditch effort on my part anyway. My marriage was falling apart and I thought it would mend that as well as change the way my mother saw me. Now my plan was to toil over this structure for my mother's garden and hope she wouldn't see me as the worthless failure of a woman I felt I was. But, as I said, she had the shovel and was about to start digging the holes at the very same instant that I was trying to find the sentence in the instructions that told us we needed to dig holes.

"You gonna move, or am I gonna have to shovel around

ya?"

"Just a minute, Mother! I'll do it, just let me see how far apart they're supposed to be." I scanned the page and flipped the instructions over. There was nothing but a diagram on the other side, with no measurements. "You don't know where you want it anyway."

"I know exactly where I want it. So dig the first hole, then we'll see how far apart they need to be." She held out the handle.

I stood up and stuck the shovel into the hard black clay that crumbled into a nearby crack instead of scooping in as I pushed down with my foot.

"Give me that. For God's sake, Becky, don't you know how to shovel?" She yanked it from my hand and dug into the clay. With one swift nudge of her foot, she scooped up a chunk and threw it to the side. She did this two more times. "That oughta be enough. Gimme the pole."

"But, Mom, we've got to measure it."

"All right, get down there and measure it."

I grabbed the tape measure from the tool box and measured from the center of the hole to where I thought the next hole should be. She was grinning when I stood back up. "What?"

"Ain't you gonna measure the width of the arch first or we just gonna dig and hope it all works out?" She held out her hand for the measuring tape and I complied. "Why don't you just sit and watch. You don't need to be out here in the hot sun anyway."

Here was my chance. She brought it up; now I could tell her. But this was not what she meant.

"Becky, did you hear me? At least go in the house and put some sunscreen on if you're gonna just stand there and not get in the shade. This is Texas, you can still get a sunburn after four." She snapped the measuring tape back in and then pulled it out over the pole that connected the front of the arch to the back. I dusted my hands and moped toward the house.

It had always been this way. No matter how hard I tried to live up to the woman my mother was and wanted me to be, I couldn't. This was never more clear to me than when we lived alone together for the first time. At the end of the first summer in the house my mother bought after the divorce, the heat of the summer battles was over and she didn't talk about my father much anymore. We were settled. The furniture was in place, the boxes unpacked, and the yard, the one thing my father would never let my mother spend money on before, was gorgeous. This small rectangular patch of grass was placed directly in front of our porch. I say "placed" because that's just what it was. My mother bought a truckload of grass squares at the local lawn-and-garden center and placed them, like she was playing Tetris, between railroad ties that outlined the flower beds and our house. I had always wanted grass like this and the plush blades tickled my bare feet when on a day that August I took my shoes off just to walk across it.

"Why don't you quit prancin' around on the grass and help me out for a change," my mother muttered without looking from the dirt where she was yanking up weeds. She patted the dirt back down by the wild wisteria bush that she built the bed around. Its long coned bunches of purple flowers bounced around her when she brushed up against them. "Get down here and start pulling out anything that doesn't belong."

I squatted beside her, reached in and wrapped my hand around a long, thick weed sticking up above the rest, and pulled. My hand slid up its stalk and over the sticky seeds at the top. I fell back on my rear, and she started laughing. I scrambled back to my squat.

"You're gonna have to get down on your knees and give it some elbow grease."

"Fine," I said and stood up.

"I didn't think that would last long." She didn't even look up.

"I'm just going in to put on something else, I don't want to get these shorts dirty," I protested and ran into the house. I dug my bathing suit top out of the drawer, slid on my cutoffs, and then checked myself in the bathroom mirror. After pulling my hair back and then readjusting my bangs, I lubed up with some cocoa butter and went to the door.

"Don't stand there with the door wide-open, Becky! How many times do I have to tell you, we can't afford to air-condition the outdoors!" she screamed from her rocking chair. She was finished and had taken up her customary seat on the front porch to smoke. I shut the door and slunk into the chair beside her.

"This ain't the prom, Becky, it's just yard work. I swear, for a sixteen-year-old, you sure don't have much sense." She laughed, her cigarette bobbing up and down on her lips. She had noticed the lipstick I smeared on my lips just before I walked out the door. I snarled. By this time of the summer her hands were rough, her nails were jagged, and she had a farmer tan all the way down to built-in socks and the most awkward stripes across her thighs and back from too many different tops and shorts. Her outfits, as well as the tan lines, were a running joke between us.

"Well, I'm sorry if I don't have any farmer gear," I said, thinking that I couldn't get tan even if I dipped myself in chocolate.

Sweat dripped down her temples, and she grabbed the wet rag off of her shoulder to drag across her entire face and neck. "Well, I guess asshole and that slut he's been seein' ain't gonna drive by and flaunt themselves today," she said and punched out her cigarette in the clay pot filled with sand she kept on the front porch. Then she added with a sarcastic snarl, "And I so wanted him to see my new flower beds. I put them out just for him." My father had driven by the house only once with his new girlfriend since he moved out last October. But with my brothers off at college, the divorce had left us alone and once was enough. I still wanted to kid her about her tan, but I knew that it was too late. It was normal for her to change subjects in the middle of a conversation, especially if it was one I had begun.

When I returned from getting the sunscreen she instructed me to put on, she was already on the third hole for the garden arch. The sun was getting lower, giving a sheen to the handle of the shovel as her sweat dripped past her hands and slid down the slick wood.

"Becky," she wiped the sweat off her forehead with the rag she still kept over her shoulder when doing yard work, "go unwrap those poles and start assembling them for one side, while I finish up these holes."

The poles were white and made of a hard plastic that wouldn't bend even if you ran over them with a truck. I pulled each one out of its individual plastic wrapper and lined them up on the ground: long with long, short with short, curved with curved, then all of the skinny round ones that connected the back to the front. My mother was on the last hole so I skimmed the instructions and began piecing it together by glances at the diagram.

By the time I had one section of the garden arch assembled, Mother was working on her third cigarette, letting it dangle from her lips as she handed me the next pole. I pressed the top pole for the front left side down over the bottom half which had been cinched for the fit. Beads of sweat rolled into my eyes and I grabbed the bottom of my shirt to wipe it away.

"Here," she handed me her rag, "you'll stretch your shirt

out."

I took the rag though it was drenched in her sweat already and wouldn't do me much good. I dabbed it across my hairline and gave it back. "Hand me the arched piece, Mama." She hesitated but gave me the long curved piece of hard plastic. She pulled the rag across her face again. My sweat didn't bother her.

As I reached to slide the arched piece onto the long poles, I stepped backward and my right foot went sideways into one of the holes. I fell onto it with all my weight and went down onto my side, the arched piece still in my hand. My ankle throbbed.

"Well, what in the hell did you do that for? You knew the holes were right behind you." She had been watching me.

I didn't cry, but I wanted to. Not because of the pain, though it did hurt, but because I knew that I wasn't going to be able to tell her like this. I knew she would say that I hadn't been careful enough, that I knew there had been a risk of tubal pregnancy, but that if I had been careful about it I wouldn't have lost the chance to ever have children.

I didn't stand right away, but I moved the pieces of the arch to my side. I just sat there and refused to speak as she stood over me looking at my foot. I thought of all the things I could tell her instead of what had really happened: that I decided that I really didn't want children, that Terry had left me and I was upset, that it was the doctor's fault, not mine. Anything but that I got pregnant to save my marriage and prove a point even though my doctor told me to wait until my body was stronger, until the endometriosis was under control, until I was healthier and I had more time and less stress. Anything but that I knew better and did it anyway.

When I was in the third grade my nicest white shirt with fitted Victorian lace sleeves was ruined when I got hit with a rock at school. I had begged to wear it and she had conceded, reluctantly. After it happened my grandmother had to take me to my mother because she was having her hair done. I saw my reflection in the glass door before I went in. My hair was matted at my temple where it had brushed up against the blood. My eyes were swollen from the tears, and the blood that had run down my face and onto my shirt had dried leaving flaky streaks down my cheeks. The blobs on my shirt were darkening to a smeared maroon mass. I rushed past the counter with my head ducked and went down to the stall where my mother was. She didn't see me approach and I had to tug on the shiny black smock, almost unsnapping it, to get her attention.

My mother had a look of confusion, concern, and humor all at the same time. "What have you done now? And look at what's happened to that beautiful shirt," she said like she was holding back a laugh.

I could feel my cheeks flush and my face get as red as the dried blood. "Are you OK?" she asked, like it was an afterthought, and I shook my head with more big tears welling up in my eyes. "Well, I guess you're probably gonna need some stitches." She sounded disappointed, like it was something I'd done on purpose.

Finally, I stood up although I knew my ankle was swelling and would be covered by a purple and green pigment in a few hours. I grabbed the arched piece and slid it into its slots.

"You all right?" she asked in the same afterthought way she'd had about my head.

"I'm fine, hand me the hammer, Mama, I'm almost done with this side." I tried to sound excited but it came out more like frustration.

Mother hunched over and yanked at the weeds when she finished the last hole. Her legs were muscular and tan. The veins in her arms bulged from the work. She looked young and strong enough to still have her own babies, but that's when it happened.

She pulled at one more weed and then stopped, but stayed hunched over, and then grabbed her stomach. She didn't say a word but went to her knees and looked up at me in a panic. I dropped the plastic poles at my feet and knelt beside her.

"Mama, what is it? What's wrong?" I reached for her arm.

"I think I'm having female problems," she said with an emphasis on the first syllable of female.

"Oh." I hesitated, "I mean, what?" I helped her to her feet and we walked toward the house. Bright red blood had soaked through the seat and part of the leg of her pants. I felt my face go cold and pale.

"My periods have gotten really bad lately," she explained almost out of breath as we reached the door and went inside. "I'm flooding like this all the time. I think I might have to have something done about it." She went into the bathroom and closed the door. "Get me a change of clothes, Becky."

I rummaged through her drawers and found a clean pair of panties and some pants. She cracked the door and I handed them to her. "Get my purse and bring me the cordless phone."

"Do you want me to call someone for you, Mama?" I asked standing outside the door already with the phone.

"No, I've got to call. Just get my purse."

When she came out of the bathroom she still couldn't stand up straight and tears were welling up in her eyes. "Are you sure, Doctor?" she said into the phone. "OK, I'll be there in a few minutes." She hung up and handed the phone back to me. "We've got to go to the hospital, Becky. I may have to have surgery."

"What? Surgery, why?"

"I've been considering having a hysterectomy for a while and with all the trouble I've been having, the doctor thinks we may have waited too long." I grabbed her arm and helped her to the car.

A nurse was hovering just inside the door when I got up to her room that night. "Shh! Be quiet now, she's still resting from the surgery." The nurse spoke in a stern whisper that probably would have woken my mother up before any noise that I would have made. I sat down without a reply and pulled at a piece of the plastic fern by the bed. The room was cold and the window small. Stiff gray curtains hung past the frame in an attempt to make it look larger. The TV was off, but the room vibrated with a dull hum. I wanted to leave. The cinder block walls reminded me of a padded cell. The only light on in the room was a reading light above my mother's head and I wondered how she could look so pale and sunken yet swollen at the same time.

My grandmother was reading a romance novel in the chair beside me. On the cover was a woman in a torn white cotton dress with ruffles that hung over one shoulder. Her hair was a stringy blond that flew back from her face with the imaginary wind. She clung to the chest of a large man, almost twice her size, with a furrowed brow and a hand on his hip like he had been playing king of the mountain and won.

"Did it go all right?" I asked in a whisper softer than the nurse's had been.

"They said she'll be fine, no difference between a regular hysterectomy and an emergency one." My grandmother went back to her book while I stared at my mother sleeping.

Weeks after her stitches were removed her scar remained red and it drew up the skin around it. She made a point to show me that they had shaved off all of her pubic hair. She looked bare, stripped. They had sliced vertically, directly down her stomach, and the scar was set deep into her skin with her belly swollen on either side.

"Look at that, from my belly button down to my impossibles," she told me. She was standing in her room holding her nightgown up and looking into the full-length mirror on the door. "Now I've been cut into twice." She turned away from the mirror and dropped her nightgown to tell me this.

This was news to me. I may have been told before but I didn't remember another scar.

"The first time was from when I had you and like to have died. Now I've had two emergency surgeries," she glared over the words like I ought to apologize.

"You almost died from having me? I thought you were so happy that I was a girl and that you didn't even believe them until they put my butt in your face?" This is the story I liked to remember.

She brushed through her hair, straight back, and then scrunched it with her fingers. The brush was still in her hand as she spoke. "I sure enough did make them put your butt in my face. I was so happy to finally have a little girl I couldn't see straight. But afterwards, I had my tubes tied and they didn't hold my stomach."

"Why would they need to do that?"

"I was coughing and they were supposed to hold my stomach so that I didn't rupture any of the stitches. Well they didn't and I came untied and hemorrhaged. They liked to have let me die. I kept telling them that I didn't feel right, that something was wrong. But they didn't listen."

I interrupted. "Why didn't they listen? Couldn't they tell?"

"Well, you'd think so, I was swole up like a toad frog. But they just kept telling me that it was normal to feel that way after having a baby or some such nonsense. I told 'em that I knew just exactly what it was like to have a baby; this was my third. But they still wouldn't listen. Finally when the nurse came in to check my blood pressure I was damn near dead and they had to do emergency surgery."

I crossed my legs under me and sat up higher in the desk chair.

She repeated herself, "I was bleeding to death. Those nurses weren't watchin' me like they were supposed to."

I grabbed my side of the completely assembled arch and lifted while my mother lifted the other side. She was finally able to get out and work in the yard again, but now everything was just about done blooming and it was almost time to get the yard ready for winter. "I want to get that arch in before it gets cold, Becky. That way next year the wisteria will just run up it," she told me. We angled the arch beside the holes, then lifted it in. It slid in with a clunk and one of us had to hold it while the other packed the dirt around the poles. I volunteered for the dirt.

"Get the water hose over here and wet that old clay. It'll harden like concrete around the poles," Mother said, pointing toward the hose cart at the side of the house.

After reattaching the hose to the faucet I wheeled the cart to the flower bed where the arch now stood with my mother's support. The water was cool. When it hit the hard, cracked ground it didn't soak in right away but splashed against my legs.

I shoveled the mud into the holes and knelt down to pack it with drier dirt at the top.

"Now, that's just right," she said and let go of the arch.

The project had been a success. In a year or so the white plastic arch would be dripping with cones of purple petals. But I still hadn't told her.

She was already smoking when I got around to sitting down with her on the porch.

"Mama, I'm sorry if…" I started to say, trying to fight back the tears as they inched into my eyes, but she seemed to have softened a bit. Her body was relaxed against the back of the chair, and she was rocking. "I know I'm not exactly what you expected in a daughter."

She stopped rocking and looked right at me. "Oh honey, yes you are. You're independent, full of life, everything I ever wanted." She leaned back in her chair again and looked out over the yard. "Never mind that silly husband of yours, and doctors can do so much these days; you may have children

someday if you want, just look at what all has happened to me. All the problems I'm still alive to tell it."

"No, you don't understand," I protested.

"I know you two aren't getting along. He hasn't called all weekend, not even to see if you got here safe. You don't need him anyway, and you should be grateful for that. It wasn't like that when I got married."

"That's not what I meant. How did you know I lost the baby?" I tried to be pathetic, but it came out hard and cracked.

"It's been three months since you told me you were pregnant. You haven't said much about it since. At first I thought it was because I was sick but you have been completely avoiding the subject. Besides, you're shaped just like me. If you were three months along you'd already be swole up and big all over." She gave a half grin when she said this.

"Mama, I'm never gonna have a baby," I blurted and glared at her.

"Do you really want children? I mean, you have so much more. Just look at me and what all I've had to go through with my body. When I was your age I thought that children, and a husband, was all there was. But you have a choice." She took the last drag of her cigarette and put it out.

I couldn't believe this was the same woman who put me through ballet, piano, tap, and a myriad of other things to try and make me into a lady so I would grow up and marry well, have babies, and repeat.

She leaned back and propped her foot against the porch post. "You probably only did it to prove a point anyway." She laughed.

Instead of crying or screaming, I leaned back in my rock-ing chair and grabbed one of her cigarettes.

"I just thought a baby would…" I stopped to take a long first drag from the cigarette.

"Yeah, that's what we all think at one time or another. Now, I love you kids and I wouldn't have it any other way than having had you. But children won't solve your problems."

Even over the smoke, a floral smell still hung in the sticky air. The garden arch was a brilliant white against the rough black dirt at its base and the green of the wisteria all around it. I thought about the day I miscarried and the champs that woke me up at six in the morning. For about a week afterward all I could think about was sex, though I neither felt like having sex nor wanted to be anywhere near Terry.

"I think my hormones are out of whack," I said.

"Maybe you're about to go through menopause," she laughed and I laughed with her but it wasn't because it was funny. "I don't guess I will ever have to really go through that," she said with a tone that suggested a change of subject.

I held the cigarette awkwardly between my thumb and my forefinger. "The slugs are bad at my house this year. Slimy old things. I can't stand 'em," I complained.

"Pour salt on 'em. They'll just wither up and go away." When she said this I felt like the Morton Salt Shaker girl, without an umbrella of protection over my head, holding my life in my hands, which was still a reflection of her life. I thought about the store-bought wisteria shriveling in my front yard and decided to ask her for a cutting.

"Sure, they just grow up wild around here. I couldn't tell you how long it's been there." She got up to get the shears. After clipping a small branch with lots of leaves and an unopened bud, she brought it over to me. "Now, don't say thank you or it'll die."

"Why's that?" I took the cutting and twirled it in my hands.

She shrugged, "Old wives' tale."

ROB: What we need always to be in search of is the way in which a character's yearning is manifested. Stories are driven forward by causality. All plot comes from the character's trying to get something, to achieve something, wanting, desiring, longing for something. The complications ensue from the drive of those yearnings and the attempt to get around the impediments and difficulties that thwart desire.

In Brandy's story — talking now in this artificial, secondary way — planting things in a garden could operate as a metaphor for each of the character's barrenness. But barrenness itself is a problem; it does not constitute a yearning. You're on the verge of it here, Brandy, but the story does not yet move to the yearning in a clear and comprehensive way. One difficulty is that the building of the garden arch has not yet been made to work with metaphorical logic. Another is that some crucial things are told in flashback.

The narrator Becky feels unappreciated. She believes that her mother has always thought her worthless and in effective. The back story starts on the bottom of the second page and goes on for another two pages, recalling an earlier time in the garden. But the put-down element here, the mother's critiques of Becky, feel too small to have stuck and wounded. I need a scene in the back story to reinforce the hurt.

We miss some important things. The father drives by. That's very briefly dealt with. Again, the mother criticizes Becky, but in trivial ways. The mother's flashback to the hysterectomy does not resonate into Becky's grief over her miscarriage; Becky remains merely an observer here. The moment when the mother realizes that she's sick, that there's something wrong with her femaleness, is not in the story. At the end of the story, once it's clear that the mother knows about the miscarriage — which is therefore not a secret after all — she suddenly transforms; she's tolerant and approving, which feels unearned at that point. And then the story finishes on new terms — the cutting of the wisteria branch — so that the climax happens in sensual terms that do not recompose the story.

Nevertheless 1 think this story is on the verge. I think it came from something hot in you, and that there's yearning fluttering around the edges. The opening lines are often explanatory in a kind of on-the-nose way. Indeed, the first flashback is very sharp: "No matter how hard I tried to live up to the woman my mother was and wanted me to be…"

We have to figure out how to flip the story around, from developed "problems" to a dynamic shape that could come out of those problems. If she has been criticized by her mother all her life, and if she had a miscarriage and cannot have children, and her mother has had a hysterectomy, what is the issue here?

What is the deeper issue? It certainly has to do with the common literary theme, identity. But more specifically, what does it mean to be a woman? What is womanness? The yearning is to understand what it means to be a woman in her life. I yearn to identify myself, to find my identity as a woman. The challenge is that she's had a miscarriage, she cannot have children. That's the natural yearning that comes out of the problems you give us.

So we begin in the garden. Now we have to find the connection between what she's doing in that garden — the deep, sensual patterned connection between that and this yearning. Again, I'm talking in analytical terms, figuring this out rationally, saying that certain scenes are needed and so forth. It's not the right way to work. But for the moment it's OK, because this is a learning process, and identifying what's needed, going through those motions, is helpful.

What is it in the arch they're erecting in the garden that relates to the yearning I've described? A portal is an opening, which is the female pattern, so there's a suggestion of the female body. (That may not be your intention, but it is a traditional metaphor, so you need to be aware of it. I'm doing this to help everyone understand how yearning relates to what usually ends up in stories; I'm not suggesting this as a way for you to work.) This garden has been cultivated since the departure of the ex-husband, an act of the two women in contradiction to the man. The ex-husband forbade the garden. The male thing was corn and soybeans — I don't know — but this is the thing that the women have done as an assertion of themselves. These things must somehow be in the story in real time.

Perhaps the instructions should say that the placement of the arch is of crucial aesthetic importance, and Becky keeps looking for where to put it? At the moment there's no such suggestion in the instructions. Say the present action has to do with where the arch should go; we know it's important, but we don't know where it goes. She's got this terrible thing to tell her mother. There's a reference made to the ex-husband having driven by sometime in the past. This is an opportunity. Is there a scene there? — I don't know — but think in terms of what's in front of you.

Or suppose we set the moment when the mother becomes sick. The mother's female body is still intact, and the daughter doesn't know how to approach her with bad news. Maybe she approaches her, and the mother's horrified — but in any case let the event of the mother getting sick and going to the hospital be in the story. She has an emergency hysterectomy and then the mother and the daughter are on the same plane. The mother always criticizes the daughter about what it means to be a woman — so that strain between them is indeed about what this means, and we dramatize the reality of Becky's fear of confessing her miscarriage.

Then, what happens in the hospital room between mother and daughter where the mother has just had her womb removed? There's a lot that's still to be dreamed here. Maybe in the dreaming you will have had her tell the mother already, and she had a harsh reaction, so that there will be a reconciliation. Or maybe this is when she tells her — even as the mother's devastated—this is something as women we can share because I've lost a child. Suddenly there's a very complex relationship possible, and a complex reaction involved.

Whether we come back to putting the arch in at the end of the story I don't know. I'm sketching out a way in which the stuff that's in the story can be transformed from problem to yearning, and the way that yearning can find its arc; a way that everything can be pulled together, so that mother and daughter together redefine what it means to be a woman. I hate the way I'm talking here. You understand why I'm doing it, right? Feel free to alter or ignore anything I've said. But that's the kind of thing all stories need in order to shine in their best light. There's a lot of good stuff here, Brandy, and I think it'll be a wonderful story. It's just a matter of taking the problems and transforming them toward the dynamic that will make us understand what's at stake.

Jocelyn: You mentioned "metaphorical logic." How does logic come to bear on this, or is there any need for logic?

ROB: Logic itself is being used here in a metaphorical way. I mean that a story has emotional logic; there's a spiritual logic, an aesthetic logic to a work. The universal principle behind any narrative sequence is the yearning. But once the character's desires are driving her forward, then, given that yearning, given that character's ability, her circumstances, the milieu, the kinds of obstacles challenging her, there is a logic of sorts to what goes in and what stays out — what scenes are necessary, inevitable, emotionally logical, and what sense details are the logical choices.

The logic here is not that of rational premises and intellectually perceived results but rather a kind of emotional, psychological, aesthetic, spiritual, metaphorical fitness. If certain conditions exist and they are accessed by the writer through the senses and the dreamspace and perceived by the readers through their senses and their dreamspace, certain things will necessarily follow. That describes the kind of logical form. It's an emotional logic.

Janet: I have heard you, including in these lectures, talk about the way that you picked up images, and I know that when I read you one of my great pleasures is seeing the repetition of motif. There are many other writers' works where I'm not aware of that as a pleasure; mostly I'm reading for the page-turning, wanting to know what's going to happen. As a writer my main pleasure is that other sort, and it comes at the moment when a metaphor or motif clicks into place.

ROB: Let me address the "logic of the metaphor." Metaphor works, of course, at its first level as a vivid intensifier of sensual experience, to enhance sensual access to the creative world. It vivifies the moment. That's its first function. But metaphor then has, like all the other sensual elements in this organically whole object, a pattern behind its content. Whether you think of it as motif from the reader's point of view, or think of it as recomposing, reincorporating things that are already at play in the work, the metaphor's essential pattern needs to intersect or interlock with the pattern echoed microcosmically and macrocosmically in the work. The movement between one metaphor and another is also by its pattern the arc of the character through the book.

12. "My Summer in Vulcan" by Rita Mae Reese

My Summer in Vulcan

When I open the door, Paul is standing at the top of the stairs grinning, with one hand behind his back. He looks past me and puts a finger to his lips, pulling his other hand from behind his back, revealing a bouquet of flowers. I notice some red and orange and yellow before he winds his hand behind his back again. He's wearing a blue sports coat though it's hot outside and too-white running shoes. He steps through the doorway.

"Hello, Lilly," he says.

"Sheila's in the living room, playing with the baby," I tell him.

I was getting the baby dressed to go when Sheila, that's my sister, started tickling Gracie and acting goofy. Gracie's the baby; Sheila's her mom. People say Gracie looks more like me.

I sit down at the kitchen table to put my tennis shoes on. They are looking pretty ratty. Last time I talked with my mom I told her I needed a new pair but she hasn't sent the money yet. We'll see. I can hear Paul and Sheila laughing the goofy grown-up-for-babies laugh and then the quiet murmuring sounds they make when they kiss. I bet Sheila hasn't finished putting Gracie's shoes on yet and sure enough, when I walk in, the baby is waving her socked feet around in the air, looking up at Paul and Sheila kissing. Sheila has the bouquet in one hand and walks past me into the kitchen, sighing something about water and avoiding my eyes. Paul looks directly into mine, grinning purposefully. His eyes are a watery blue, like shallow water.

"Isn't she beautiful?" he asks me.

She is. She has long silky brown hair that I used to brush and brush. I thought it would be more like that, staying with her this summer. Today she has her hair pulled back and she's wearing a white sundress with eyelets and daisies embroidered in white from the waist up and with little white buttons all the way up the front. She has always been beautiful. I just shrug.

"And she's got a fine ass."

"Shut up, Paul," my sister warns him from the kitchen over the sound of running water.

I sit on the couch, capturing one of Gracie's feet at a time and screwing the little sneakers down onto each. She captures the first sneakered foot and watches me.

"It's good for her to know about loving. Not like…"

I don't look up but I can hear his voice travel into the kitchen, the words now pitched in their special frequency, his and Sheila's, and indiscernible from this distance.

I wonder if he has just said her husband's name. We never say it on these Tuesday and Thursday afternoons while he's at work and Paul, Sheila's instructor from the community college, comes over. Jack, Sheila's husband, simply ceases to exist for those hours and I wonder what will happen when he becomes real again. I wonder if any of us will cease to exist that same way some day.

I hoist the baby up on my hip and she bats at my cheek. She smells like baby, like fresh bread but powdery. Her hands are sticky but I don't want to stop to wash them.

I'm halfway down the stairs and nearly outside when Paul calls for me to hold up. He gives me five dollars in case I decide I want anything. He squeezes the baby's cheek with one of his square hands. "Be a good girl," he says.

I've only been in Vulcan a few weeks but I've covered every inch of this town, not that there are that many inches of it to cover. It's bigger than where me and my sister grew up — Wolf Pen, West Virginia, which isn't even on a map, or not on one I've ever seen; there's about fifty families, a stoplight, and a gas station, nothing else. Wolf Pen is 136 miles from Vulcan but Sheila acts like it's in another hemisphere. Since she's moved here a year ago she has come home three times, the last time to pick me up and bring me here to help with the baby for the summer.

In Vulcan, there's a glass-blowing plant at the far west end, about a mile past anything else on Highway 20. There is a library, and a police station, and some shops downtown that sell candles and knickknacks. My favorite shop is Aunt Dee's Quilts. The sign in the window says that the quilts are hand-stitched and inside it always smells like apple pies, so much so that I expected Aunt Dee to offer someone, me or one of the rare customers, a slice. I finally figured out the smell was coming from the potpourri burners on the little table at the back, where she sold some picture frames and candles. Aunt Dee doesn't offer me anything. She was nice to me the first time I came in, cooing over Gracie, but after that she watched me like I might try to stuff one of the quilts up my T-shirt or pull out a can of black spray paint and start running up and down the aisles turning all of her pretty quilts black.

The quilts are pretty and Gracie and I like to go in if Sophia is working instead of her stepmother. Sophia is three years older than me and goes to the same school Sheila goes to. She's a little fat and never wears shorts, even when it's over ninety degrees outside, like today. She always wears T-shirts with the names of bands I've never heard of and her hair always seems greasy. But she's nice and I think she's smart but it's kind of hard to tell.

Gracie and I like to look at all of the nice colors in all of the pretty patterns; my favorite is a double wedding ring mostly in blues. My sister is supposed to pay me for babysitting at the end of the summer, and I'm going to take that money, it'll be just enough, and buy that quilt. I always look to make sure it's still there.

I like to pretend I'm shopping for my own home. When I get older I'll have a beautiful home and Gracie will come over in the afternoons when she's a teenager like I am now and ask me for advice and tell me about how she can't get along with her mom and I'll listen but of course I won't say a word against my sister. Gracie won't talk about killing herself because she'll know she always has my house to come to and me to listen to her. She's smart and she'll know that's enough. In the quilt store Gracie pats her hand against the air, wanting to feel the fabric like I do but I won't let her. I don't let her drool or get anything on the quilts.

Sophia is working today so we go in. She's reading a book behind the counter. I park Gracie's stroller and sit on the stool beside Sophia. She keeps reading her book. I watch a woman in jean shorts and with dark wavy hair pulled back in a ponytail running her fingers lightly over the fabrics. I sit up higher on my stool so I can see her long bare legs. The wood floor creaks beneath her feet as she weaves between a dark blue quilt with tiny yellow flowers in a starburst pattern and the crazy quilt, this king-size riot of reds and oranges and yellows, with gold and shiny strips and silk and velvet, like a costume I'd seen once in a school play — the guy was an old poet or something and would just come onstage and say outrageous things and then be gone. The other characters never really talked to him, not even to tell him to shut up, mind his own business; I didn't get it.

She comes up to the counter and tells Sophia that she wants the crazy quilt and Sophia goes over with a ladder to pull it down from the rod that hangs from the ceiling. The woman watches her for a minute. I can smell her perfume over the apple pie smell. She smells golden. I make myself busy getting the squirming Gracie out of her stroller and trying to get her to play with one of her plastic books or the ring of big plastic keys. The woman smiles at us but I pretend not to see her. Sophia calls me over to help her fold up the quilt and I start to put Gracie back in the stroller but the woman asks if she can hold her. She coos and bounces Gracie while Sophia and I struggle to fold the quilt down into a manageable size. Sophia makes faces at me while we stand across from each other, bringing our hands together and then apart, the quilt growing smaller each time.

The woman hands me back the baby, telling me that I have a beautiful daughter. I don't correct her. When she's gone, I tell Sophia I'm going to miss that quilt. Sophia motions for me to follow her to the door of the back room. She flings the door open dramatically and I see boxes stacked five feet high with quilts just like the ones hanging up front perched in plastic on top of each. Even the crazy quilt has boxes and boxes of more just like it. I say, "I thought they were hand-stitched," and Sophia says, "Yeah, in Pakistan," when she shuts the door.

"Why didn't you just get one out of the back then?"

"She wouldn't even want it then, dummy."

Gracie starts crying in her stroller, kicking her feet furiously. She doesn't like for me to be out of her sight for even a minute. I pick her up and quiet her down while Sophia goes back to reading her book. I tell her we've got to go and she just grunts, waves a little without looking up when we're going out the door.

Gracie is looking around like she's lost something and won't stop crying. I put the pacifier in her mouth and she spits it out. Sometimes I think it would be a lot easier if I just had to stay gone for a few hours but without the baby. Sometimes I picture leaving Gracie on one of the benches in the town square and finding her in the exact same spot, two hours later, still sleeping. It'd be nice to have a locker to put her in where she'd be safe and a pause button so she wouldn't get scared or bored.

We pass the pharmacy. A woman walking out looks at me like I've been beating the baby to make her cry. I stop outside the pharmacy window and pull Gracie up out of her stroller. Shut up, I hiss in her ear. She looks at me for a second from her wet, red face and stops, like she understands me and then she starts in again louder, bouncing her body like she can bounce away. I pinch her calf. I ought to stuff you in a trash can, I whisper. She slumps against me, cries against my shoulder like she's lost her last friend. I feel bad. I relax my grip, hold her gently and say Gracie, Gracie, Gracie over and over in her ear, as soft as I can.

She stops crying, drawing a few sharp breaths after the tears stop. I look into the pharmacy, through all of the posters and displays. The only person in there is the woman behind the counter. I've already read all of the cards in there. I imagine buying one, "Thinking of you," for my mom. But it seems like a lie. I think about buying one for Sheila, "For a GREAT! sister," but she's not great anymore. Maybe it would guilt her into being at least a good sister again.

I take Gracie into the library, which is the best place as long as she's quiet. If I let her taste the books she doesn't cry. We stay in the back aisles and I rotate the books in her hands so none of them get too soggy. She drops them a lot and it used to make me mad. All of the people here are nice. I got a library card last week so I check out some fairy tales for the baby and a book called Zami for me. The cover is orange and has a woman standing between an island and a city. I look at Sheila's watch: 4:00, too early to go back but I'm tired. I want to go home.

When we get back, Paul's station wagon is still there. It's unlocked. I think about putting Gracie in the backseat. She's falling asleep. I've put the books in the dirty blue canvas seat of the stroller and I'm carrying her; she's still cranky and her face starts to ball up when I try to put her down. Her little body is hot and sticky and heavy. I could sit in there with her and read or just lock the doors and go for a walk by myself. I'm not sure I want to go upstairs now. What are they doing?

The baby sighs. She doesn't know we're almost home. I have a key. I park the stroller, leaving the books at the foot of the stairs. I grab the diaper bag from the back and walk quietly up the stairs. Gracie starts to whimper but I hush her. Maybe they're in the bedroom and we can just sneak in. I open the door and tiptoe in, glancing to the left. I can see down the hallway just far enough to see the bedroom door is closed. I put the diaper bag on the kitchen table and Gracie starts crying again.

They're in the living room, on the floor, but it's dark in there so I can't see if they are dressed or not. Gracie is really wailing now and I take her and put her in her crib, try to give her a bottle which she knocks away from her face. I keep saying sssh but she won't even look at me, her eyes are sweeping over the room like a searchlight.

"What's wrong with her?" My sister is suddenly there, picking up the baby who is hiccupy from all of her crying.

I almost say she wants her mother, because that's the first thing I think and the first time it's occurred to me. But I don't want to admit it.

"I think she's got a fever."

Sheila starts pacing slowly up and down the room, running her hand against Gracie's forehead, bouncing her. Gracie is quieting.

I go into the living room and Paul is sitting on the couch, reading one of Jack's magazines. He looks up at me.

"Come here and talk to me," he pats the sofa beside him. I sit in the chair next to the sofa, look out the window behind him.

"Did you have fun?" he asks and I wonder if he expects me to ask him the same question. I shrug. He looks at my face.

"So, you're sixteen, huh? Sheila tells me you're sixteen."

I look down at the floor but remember they were just there, doing something I don't want to think about now.

"You and I should get to know each other, spend some time alone together. Sheila talks a lot about you," he says, moving closer to my chair.

I look at him. Why do I think he's lying? His Sheila doesn't even know me, maybe that's why.

"I want to get to know Lilly, the woman of mystery and babysitter extraordinaire," he is leaning on the arm of the sofa, whispering and smiling like he's telling me some great news.

"Sure," I say.

"What do you want?" he asks.

"What are you talking about?"

"You know, what do you want out of life?"

"Oh, what do I want to be when I grow up?" This is the question adults love to ask, like they're taking a survey.

"No. No one ever knows that and even if they do, who cares? What do you want now? What does Lilly want, right now?" he pokes his finger at my chest, a few inches away. I pull my shoulders in tighter.

I shrug. "Everybody wants something," he says.

I wonder when my sister is coming back in. I can hear her singing to the baby.

"Why do you want to know?" I decide I don't have to be as nice to him as I am to regular adults.

"If you find out what somebody wants, you know who they really are. I just want to know you."

"What do you want?"

"I just told you: to know you."

"You know my sister."

"Lilly has claws. Good for her. Come on, Lilly, if you had three wishes, what would they be?"

Wishes? Is this what he teaches at his community college?

"World peace."

"Come on, that's a cop-out."

"There's nothing wrong with world peace," I say, sitting up straighter. He's somehow honeyed his voice so that the words seem smooth and inevitable.

"Boring."

"I'd wish for everyone to be happy, including me." I know I don't want to be unhappy but I haven't given much thought to the alternative.

"You're a regular fucking Girl Scout, aren't you?"

"If everyone isn't happy and you are, then they have a reason to want to make you unhappy. The only way to guarantee you can stay happy is to make sure everyone else is." I'm making this up as I go along but it makes sense to me. I like it.

"No one stays happy, Lilly." He puts his hand over mine on the arm of the chair, like he's consoling me. I just look at it.

He leans closer and says, his voice thick now, "You're a virgin, aren't you?"

I get up and lock myself in the bathroom. My sister hasn't gotten into the bathroom for a shower yet. She's in her bedroom. She always showers after Paul. Sometimes when I get back she has already showered, sitting around the living room in her robe with her hair still damp, smoking and listening to the same albums she listened to when she still lived at home.

I take off my clothes and leave them in a pile on the floor. I look at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror. I can hear them saying good-bye to each other. It takes a long time. I wish there were a full-length mirror in here but the only one in the apartment is in Sheila and Jack's bedroom and they don't really like it when I go in there. Or worse, they think it's funny when I look at myself for too long, or Jack does anyway.

Sheila pounds on the door. "Let me in. I need to take a shower," she yells.

"I'm in the tub," I call out sweetly.

"Well get out!"

"Don't you need to be fixing Jack's dinner anyway?"

She hits the door again hard but goes away.

In this mirror I can see down to my waist. Once I took the little stepladder in with me and stood on it in front of the mirror.

I could see almost all of the way down to my knees and it looked like a painting, or something someone should paint. But Jack saw me taking the ladder out of the bathroom and kept asking me what I was doing with it.

I don't like my face so much but I like my body though I know girls my age aren't supposed to. My face is a little too sharp, wolfish in the wrong light and bad pictures, pale with always at least two pimples at any one time, like there's a demon beneath my skin with a pimple quota. My lips are like Sheila's but without lipstick it isn't all that noticeable really. My chin is a little pointier, my nose a little bigger. And my eyes aren't brown like hers, soft like a puppy's or something. My eyes are not any color really, sort of gray, sort of blue, sometimes kind of green, a little gold. One day a tall girl all in black in the lunch line stared at my face and then started saying real loud, "Your eyes is two different colors. That's creepy. Look, look, Charlene. One's blue and one's green." They peered into my face and I didn't know what to do so I just stood there. "You must be the devil or something," she concluded. After I finished my lunch I went into the girl's bathroom and put my face close to the mirror.

I like my ribs, just a faint ripple under the skin, the belly and the belly button (which isn't a button at all, more like a little tunnel and I imagine it going clear through me so that if I stood outside naked I could feel a breeze blow all of the way through my center), my breasts which my hands can cover completely when I want them to, my collarbone, my shoulders, my arms which I position to look like women in paint' ings or pictures. I pretend I'm an artist's model and hold a pose for a valiantly long time.

I run hot water in the tub and put one of Sheila's red bath oil beads in the water, watch the skin of the ball peel away and the oil creep out like timid schoolchildren. I lower my body slowly into the hot water, having to let my skin get used to the heat. I take the wash cloth and cover my pubic hair, the edges of the square of yellow fabric almost touching my hip bones. I relax my body and the cloth drifts away.

I used to sit in the bathroom with Sheila while she took a bath, before she moved out of Mom's house. Sometimes I'd even wash her back for her. She'd tell me about the people at her school, Stonewall Jackson High School, where I'd go too one day. She'd tell me who said what, who liked who, who wore what, who was getting fat (and that ugly girls got fat and the pretty girls got pregnant).

I raise up my wrist. I'd forgotten to take off Sheila's watch. I unclasp the silver buckle of the black band and lean over to put it on the toilet lid. I used to borrow Sheila's stuff all the time; I loved wearing her clothes, her jewelry, her makeup. I don't like wearing her watch now. My wrist has a pasty white indent around it from where I strapped the watch on too tight.

Sometimes my sister would sit in the bathtub and cry. She would let me stay sometimes or she'd yell at me, tell me to get out, and call me names. One night, just after she'd started eleventh grade and I'd started sixth, I sat on the toilet lid talking and talking, telling my sister what my teacher Mrs. Cline had said about my art project, and about this girl I couldn't stand. The little window high over the tub was open because it was still warm out, and I could hear crickets. My sister just sat in the water, staring at the dripping faucet.

"Nobody gives a shit," she finally muttered. It hurt my feelings. I stopped talking and looked at her. Her long brown hair was wet and draped over her pale, freckled shoulders and back. I could see two big bright pimples in the field of freckles on her cheek and a row of blackheads on her nose. She drew her knees up to her chest.

"Quit looking at me, you fucking freak." She said it slowly and didn't even turn to look at me.

"What'd I do?"

"Everyone's all caught up in their own stupid shit. You talk and talk and talk about fucking nothing. Just like everyone else. No one cares about any of that shit." She put her head down on her knees and her body trembled, causing a tremor in the water. I could hear her muttering "nobody fucking cares" over and over. I stood up and started to pat her back but I was afraid to.

She lifted her head and snarled, "Get out!" and splashed water at me, soaking the bottom of my pants and the floor and her pile of clothes.

I hold my own arm straight up into the air and watch drops of water glide down it. I can hear my sister singing along with Marvin Gaye. I bring my arm down, clench that hand into a fist. It causes a dent behind the blue strokes of veins leading into the palm. Veins carry blood to the heart, and arteries carry blood away from the heart: I like knowing that. Sheila's knock on the door makes me jump.

* * *

When I get to the table, Sheila, Gracie, and Jack are already there. And the flowers that Paul brought are in the middle of the table. I feel hot, trapped. Has Sheila decided to come clean? The baby looks fine now and is patting the tray of her high chair and saying, "Annnh." Jack is spooning mashed potatoes onto his plate.

"You drown in there?" Jack asks.

Sheila jumps up. "I forgot the butter."

Jack strokes his beard twice, which he always does before he takes the first bite, three times at the end of the meal.

"Were you in there primping for your boyfriend?" He smiles across at me. I can only see half of his face because of the flowers. I notice the one red rose. The baby stops patting and regards me too.

I shrug. "No," I say like I'm guessing.

"Sheila's told me all about it."

"What?" I get busy putting meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and peas on my plate.

"About Paul," he drags the name out, making it two syllables.

Sheila puts the butter on the table and sits down. I look to her for direction but she won't meet my eyes.

"Your new boyfriend, Paul," Jack prompts. "The poor bastard brings you flowers and you forget him the same day," Jack laughs. "Fickle must run in this family." He leans and reaches for Sheila under the table. She just scowls and pulls away.

"Paul," I say and nod down at my plate.

"When do I get to meet him?" Jack asks, talking before he's completely finished chewing. I'm glad the flowers are obstructing my view of him. And his of me.

"I dunno. I think I can do better." I glance over at Sheila to see if she'll react. She doesn't.

"Well, aren't you something?" He looks over at Sheila, sniffs the air like a dog, grinning. "Are you wearing a new perfume?"

"No. It's the same kind I always wear." She won't look up at him.

He actually gets up and kisses her. She tilts her head away so he gets mostly cheek. He thinks the perfume is for him, which in a way it is, and the clean sheets, the clean floors, the vacant smiles.

He sits down, smiling. "You're too young to be serious about anyone anyway," he tells me. "There's plenty of time for marriage and babies when you grow up."

I spoon in another mouthful of mashed potatoes. They are lumpy and bland; my sister is an awful cook. Gracie starts opening and closing her mouth, watching my spoon. I reach over and spoon a tiny lump of the white paste into her mouth. She makes cooing noises around it.

"Paul's only after one thing," I say as clearly as I can. I feel like I'm in a school play.

Sheila gets up and turns the music up. "How was work?" she asks Jack.

"Fine," he smiles over at her. His job and coworkers are the bulk of the conversations at dinner every night. He looks over at me, dropping the smile. "What makes you say that?"

"Oh, you can tell. Any woman can tell that when a guy's only looking to get in your pants." I sit up straighter in my chair, toss my hair back over my shoulder.

"Sheila, I thought you said this Paul was a nice boy."

Sheila just glares at her plate. I spoon some peas into Gracie's mouth.

"Today he grabbed my titties. I told him to leave."

"Lilly," he says my name sharply and pauses like he doesn't know what to say next. "We don't need to have that kind of talk at the dinner table, young lady. Next time he comes around, you call me. I'll set him straight." He puffs up his chest and squares his shoulders like Paul might be looking in the window.

I nod.

"Idddy," Gracie says, letting some half-chewed peas fall to the tray where she smashes them with her palms. "Iddy Diddy Diddy Diddy."

"What is she saying?" he looks over at Sheila.

"Sounds like Daddy."

She's trying to say my name and they know it but I don't say anything.

Jack reaches over and ruffles her wispy hair. "Are you Daddy's girl?" He gets up and plucks her out of the highchair. He starts dancing her around the kitchen. She grabs his beard with both hands and watches his face, then she starts patting his cheeks as they dance around the table.

"You're too good for him," I stage whisper to Sheila, meaning Paul. "I'm not taking the baby out anymore. I'm staying here. We don't need him."

She looks up from her plate at her husband dancing around, holding the baby over his head now. She still won't look at me. She bursts into tears, scrapes her chair against the hard clean floor, leaves the table without a word to me.

ROB: I want to start by saying something about the coming-of-age story or novel, and in general about child narrators and children as central characters. Such narratives present a particular problem, because we're trapped in the child and she isn't old enough to have any other yearning than: What's next in this process of growing up? I've got to get out of childhood.

I don't know the details of your life, or any twenty-two-year-old's life. It's very possible that through your childhood and your adolescence — periods when we are driven by our senses — many of you have gone through serious stresses and turmoil. Some of those intense experiences are the generic struggles of young people, and it may be hard to get past the surface track of those struggles and down to the source of your serious ambition as an artist. That applies to all of us at some point. I came back from Vietnam when I had just turned twenty-seven, and wrote the terrible story you've all heard. Clearly, my unconscious was not ready to be accessed. If I had known the things I'm telling you, I would not yet have looked to Vietnam for my material.

There are no child prodigies in literature — there is no Mozart of fiction — and the great writers, at age twenty-two, are not going to have the vision of the world, or the emotional readiness, or the developed unconscious that they will have

at thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, or ninety. That's exciting for you; you've got a lot ahead of you. I just urge you to be patient with yourself. Try to work within the range you will chafe at, because it will feel narrow to you; but work within that relatively narrow range of your artistic authenticity, the intimations that are no longer therapeutic and no longer literal but are tapping into something that no one shares. Be patient with yourself and work through that part of your dreamspace.

I know you're all sitting here with your copy of Rita's story, saying, "Oh shit! Don't tell me this one didn't work!"

This works. It's a wonderful story, Rita. The yearning is really rooted in the central character's situation. This is one of those coming-of-age stories, which does limit you somewhat, but within that range you do it beautifully. You have created little moments that let us know Lilly's identity is involved— a larger identity than "I've got to get out of childhood; I've got to get through a tough family situation" — both problems she has. You have in fresh ways manifested those problems in fine moments of action, and that's a rare thing.

When the story opens we understand almost immediately that this is about identity. Paul stands there grinning with the flowers behind his back, and our first assumption is that he's come for the narrator, Lilly. We do not feel cheated, however, when we realize he's here for someone else; that moment of confusion sets up for us exactly what's going to happen. Paul does — beautiful irony here — put the make on her, and the irony is repeated and twisted at the end, where her sister invents the story of Paul being Lilly's boyfriend. So beginning, middle, and end are tied up brilliantly in that way.

And the issue of identity recurs, recomposes. "I was getting the baby dressed to go when Sheila…" Again, we don't realize at first that it's not Lilly's baby, and then we do. Oh, it's her baby. Then we find that Lilly is covering for the sister, Sheila, who's fucking her boyfriend behind her husband's back, and Lilly is taking care of the child in ways her sister doesn't. Paul follows Sheila, commenting on her beauty and her ass, and Lilly just shrugs. Sheila's always been beautiful. Then come the wonderful scenes in which Lilly examines her own body, carrying a stepladder into the bathroom and looking in the mirror, and we see she has quite a different kind of body from Sheila's. We already know that she has compared herself unfavorably to Sheila, and also that she used to borrow Sheila's clothes — pretending to be Sheila, maybe? And the baby looks like Lilly. She's having to be mother to the baby, and the boyfriend's after her, and yet she's not what she feels Sheila is. These are wonderful issues of identity.

Rita's poetic sense is quite clear here too. When you're really working well, a single word choice can reveal your motif. "And I sit on the couch, capturing one of Gracie's feet at a time" — brilliant verb—"and screwing the little sneakers down onto each" — another great verb.

Notice that Lilly likes to "pretend I'm shopping for my own home. I'll have a beautiful home and Gracie will come over in the afternoons when she's a teenager like I am now and ask me for advice and tell me about how she can't get along with her mom and I'll listen but of course I won't say a word against my sister." That complexity of relationship is fabulous. "Gracie won't talk about killing herself because she'll know she always has my house to come to and me to listen to her." How many writers of less serious talent would try to get at Lilly's dark side in some direct way—"Oh, I feel like killing myself sometimes," blah blah blah — but we know she's talking about herself here. Who else would she be talking about? Why otherwise would she want her own place to be a refuge for Gracie? We know that she's talking about her own distress, and at the same time the lines subtly convey Lilly's personal strength. These abstractions I'm using are woefully inadequate.

There's subtext in all the dialogue. There's not a line of dialogue that isn't working on more than one level. Here's a good montage for you: "He leans closer and says, his voice thick now, 'You're a virgin, aren't you?'" How many inexperienced writers would follow that line with: "Oh. " and whatever reactions she has to follow. But here it's "I get up and lock myself up in the bathroom." Cut.

Plot too plays itself out subtly, deftly. Because of Paul's line, Lilly locks herself in the bathroom, which means Sheila can't take her shower, so she douses herself with perfume, and feels compelled to make up a story about the flowers, and now Lilly has the confidence to take advantage of that, and so forth. It all fits beautifully together.

Consider the flashback with Lilly sitting in the bathroom while Sheila's in the tub. Again, it's all about bodies. Sheila's just ripping into Lilly for talking small talk.".. stupid shit. You talk and talk and talk about fucking nothing. Just like everyone else." It's a vivid, unexpected moment, and that scene ends in the present time in the tub when Lilly looks at her own hand in this clinically close way, again pulling it back to a consciousness of her own self, an identity in her own body.

And yet again: evoking identity in a weird transposition of roles — Gracie is saying, "Iddy Diddy Diddy Diddy" and Jack and Sheila try to convince themselves that she's trying to say "Daddy," whereas we all know that she's trying to say "Lilly." A brilliant stroke, consistent with yearning as the center of gravity for this story.

I do have a problem with the very ending. The story does not resolve itself in the terms it's been set up in. This is really about who Lilly is, not about who Sheila is. And we have this little burst of abstract, very reductive analysis that she hands over to Sheila. The gesture, "I'm not going to play this fucking game anymore," is fine, but the abrupt assertion of the reason is not really the core of the story.

The last paragraph offers a lovely tableau, which might work with some other preparation, but — I'm not sure here. You need to let go of it and it'll come back if it needs to. The problem is in the penultimate paragraph. The narrator says, '"You're too good for him,' I stage whisper to Sheila, meaning Paul. 'I'm not taking the baby out anymore. I'm staying here. We don't need him.'" I don't feel the irony there. We need to get to it much more simply, maybe as simply as having Lilly lean down to Sheila and whisper, "I'm not taking Gracie anymore." I honestly think the fewer words the better. The rest of it is so beautifully indirect.

Don't get freaked by it, just work it out. Redream the ending and see if there's some other way. What I need, even if it's revealed in retrospect, is a sense of the moment in which she makes this decision. As it stands, I believe the decision, but looking back to see when she made it, I must go all the way back to the beginning of the scene. Even if she doesn't say, "You're too good for him," that's essentially the decision she has made, to be her own person, to dissociate herself from Sheila in this way. But the moment when this decision was actually made — it happened offstage somewhere. It's not just a matter of thinking Paul's an asshole and having an opportunity to say so to Sheila in this ironic, public way. It's more important than that, it has to do with her identity, so we also need a moment in which the decision is made. And indeed, such a decision, the simpler you make it, the more complex it becomes.

All the beats have to be there. This is where craft comes in. Once you get into your unconscious and are working from there, then you need to be sensitive to the rhythm of how things play out, the emotional logic, if you will. And at the end of this wonderful story, there's a step in the emotional logic that has been left out.

Rita: I had a lot of trouble with the first scene because I kept trying to put everything out of my head that I wanted to get into it, just let it go and let it come to me..

ROB: You know, that's a lesson of the universe… I call it sumo zen — did I tell you I'm a big sumo wrestling fan? I've got a second satellite just so I can get the sumo tournaments from TV Japan. And when the sumo wrestlers are interviewed, they always say the same thing — they barely move their lips— no matter what they're asked, it all boils down to "I'm going to do my brand of sumo, and I'm going to do my best." That's

it, folks. That's the lesson of the universe. You do your brand of sumo, and you do your best. And implicit in that concept is: you just let it go. And you let go to it, which in writing this story, Rita, you did. Whenever you try to take control, whenever you impose your will, whenever you start thinking your way into this stuff of fiction, not only do you not get control, you lose touch with the very things that are the most important to you and your work. But, you got it. You understood, you assimilated. [Applause.]

Does everybody understand the difference between what happened here and what happened in the examples that were not quite working? Which is not to say that your stories are bad stories, or that you're not as talented as Rita. This is an extremely talented group. Everything I've seen has been impressive in important ways. Don't leave this classroom feeling gloomy or pessimistic or put down. What I've been saying to you this semester is based on my deep respect for your highest ambitions. There are those among you who are capable of creating works of literature that will endure. I've written more bad stuff than you will ever write in your life, and I've wanted to give you a way to measure yourselves from here on out against the very highest standards. Your brand of sumo is not my brand of sumo; I'm just telling you where in yourself to look. I don't want you writing like me or anybody else. That's the whole point. It's deeply personal. It's your brand of sumo.