Writing Exercise: After Words

The goal here is to write a scene after a traumatic event has occurred, but without writing a traumatic event. There's definitely something here; I hope to develop this one into a full-fledged story.

***

He had left the back door ajar. When Carrie came in she closed and locked it and turned off the porch light. She remembered another time, when she had had even more to drink, and she had carried a head of angry steam up the stairs intent on heaving it like a medicine ball into him. Tonight she just removed her heels and padded silently, deliberately, up the squeaking stairs. She pressed a thumb and finger to her stinging eyes in the kitchen, then studied the setting: the dirty dishes by the sink, the child’s plate covered in ketchup, the half-full half gallon of mostly melted Rocky Road. She peered beyond the kitchen to a dark dining room, and beyond to a living room, also dark, save a fluttering television glow.

Staying on the balls of her feet, Carrie moved toward the luminescence. Something deep in her chest tickled as she approached the archway. The couch opposite the television crept into view, revealing his bare feet, then his legs. Then, finally, Audrey’s legs, her small feet pressed against his stomach. They were both perfectly still, their faces lit by some Animal Planet story. The girl’s mouth was slack, open, leaking a dead sleep. Michael was the one with a thumb in his mouth. Carrie first caught him doing this in his sleep right after his father’s sudden death, and again on the nights after 9/11. He innocently denied the habit when he was awake.

Carrie sat on the ottoman, captive to the father-daughter still-life. Wisps of the little girl’s hair crossed her mouth. Her eyelashes were almost comically long, one of Michael’s most wonderful gifts to his daughter. Even in the blue darkness, Audrey’s face looked flushed, like it always did after the jubilant running of countless “loops” through the hallway, her bedroom, the bathroom, their bedroom, and the hallway again. Carrie spent a long time staring at the girl’s torso, narrowing her eyes and willing a sign of movement. Audrey’s breath always seemed so shallow when she slept, and on many occasions mother and father had watched her sleep from the bathroom doorway, whispering tense queries to each other about whether they could perceive any movement. Eventually the child would turn over, or sigh, or release that strange hoot in her sleep, and they would roll their eyes at their concern. And now, again, Carrie couldn’t help herself: she needed to see some sign of life. Audrey wore an oversized shirt, Michael’s freebie from a 10K race that was too small on him, so now it was the child’s prize “nightgown.” No matter how hard Carrie focused her eyes down the city streets of the silkscreened Chicago landscape, she could not see a rise-and-fall underneath. Just at that moment where quizzical would turn to panic, her eyes darted to Audrey’s face again, and she finally noticed the bending of the hair strands under the girl’s nose, like thin inverted palm tree trunks in a rhythmic wind. And Carrie exhaled.

In his sleep, Michael pulled his thumb from his mouth and brought his arm down around Audrey. His forearm and large hand covered all of Audrey’s torso as he pulled her into his chest like a teddy bear. The girl allowed herself to be swallowed into his body and the pair sighed in unison. Carrie’s brow furrowed. It was her name that was called in the middle of a nightmare or after a tragic sidewalk spill. But it was Michael’s presence that relaxed the child, that brought on the impromptu dances of sheer delight, leaving Carrie, smiling and biting her lip, feeling like an audience member to their performance.

Michael’s legs still turned her on. Even at rest, they barely contained their power. He had not run for the last six months, an achilles injury that would never end, or so he said. He knew the attraction his legs held, which explained the recent transformation of his running shorts from “sports equipment” to “around-the-house fashion statement.” As if physical attraction would solve things. The arm around Audrey was similarly beautiful. His hand had wedged between the girl’s ribcage and the couch. She was belted in tight against him. Carrie suddenly felt on the verge of tears.

Her eyes traveled to his face and she almost jumped when she was met with a silent stare. The sharpness pierced, and she bled color from the inside. How long had he been awake, watching her watch them? She swallowed, forcing her emotion down into her belly.

“I’m … back,” she whispered. His head nodded almost imperceptibly. “How long has she been asleep?” she asked. His shoulder shrugged gently. “Shall we move her to bed?"

He considered this for a moment. “She’s fine for now,” he said, speaking out loud. He was always louder than he needed to be. She constantly feared waking up Audrey, but he always reminded her how heavy the child slept. And he was right: to Carrie’s memory, their louder exchanges these last months had never roused her.

“So … are you coming to bed any time?” she whispered.

He seemed to consider this for an eternity, at one point closing his eyes and pressing his lips against Audrey’s tousled head. “Yeah,” he said. “Eventually.” His terseness conjured her mother on those high-school Fridays of her senior year. Carrie regularly defied curfew, and at some point in the spring, Mom seemed to tire of the haranguing and simply gave up.

Carrie turned her head toward the bright kitchen and the long, black hallway leading to the bedrooms, the optical illusion of walls narrowing to a point of nothingness. Her limbs felt suddenly heavy, and she wondered if she could make it to the bedroom. What she really wanted was to lie back and fall asleep on the big, cushy armchair behind her. But the sense that she did not belong in this room was palpable.

With a sigh that became the exhale that powered her to her feet, she whispered “Okay then,” and, shedding her sweater on the ottoman, she turned and headed toward the bright light.

Free Write: Return to Childhood Home

Walt has arrived back in Shelsandra, his childhood home. It is his first time back in his adult life. He is walking through the house, making his way to see his father, Kris, who he has not seen or spoken to in just as long a time.

***

He took the stairs at a deliberate pace. He told himself this was in order to collect his thoughts, but he had been trying to do that for several days now and he was no more successful now than in Chicago, on the jet, the transport plane, the private plane, the helicopter. At the time he wrote that off to the noise and bustle of the various engines, but now in the silent sturdiness of Shelsandra, the noise in his ears seemed worse than any jet turbine. These stairs—how old were they? Yet perfectly silent, not a creak as he padded on the Oriental rug. The dark wood railing, so smooth, except he was already anticipating the place near the top where his hand would encounter deep gashes in the dark chocolate wood, the result of an “experiment” performed by an 11-year-old Walt, who couldn’t resist the urge to experience the feeling of swinging the machete his father had brought him from Kenya.

More memories in store at the top of the stairs: The chaise lounge with the burgundy velvet upholstery worn down in corners to tan, where he had once found a maid sleeping sitting up and had studied her oddly bent nose too closely until she had awoken with a shriek. The small table with the exact same bowl of wax fruit, though looking pristine from regular dusting; he didn’t check to see if anyone had ever discovered the one ruined apple that his friend Roberto, having been fooled in the low light, took a hearty bite when they were nine. The lead candelabra with three thick candles that Mother always lit when entertaining, though very few guests ever came up these stairs to the Kurtzman family quarters. Noticeably absent was a portrait of Walt, done when he was almost a teenager, by a friend of his mothers who had gone on to become a successful painter in New England. He had worked from a photograph he had taken of Walt on a trip to Boston where Father had worked and Mother and he had walked the Freedom Trail when not sitting through endless lunches and dinners with relatives Walt had never met before and would never meet again. Walt had never liked the picture much because it conjured for him the anger he was filled with that day, made to sit on a porch in Brookline and listen to his mother evading questions that would get into too much detail about their faux-life in Minnesota.

His hesitation at the top of the stairs was not to reminisce but rather to remember where his father would be. When Walt last visited Shelsandra, Kris still spent his resting hours in the parental bedroom suite. But Margot had reported Kris’s increasing reclusiveness, and if it was isolation his father wanted it was more likely he’d be in the study. This was where Walt headed, down the darker of the two hallways. At the end was the closed study door. He watched the bottom of the door for any sign of light, and at first he thought it was completely dark, he was about to double back and head to the bedrooms after all, when he heard a sound of something falling, a box or large book, beyond the doorway. He approached, prepared to knock, and then decided to push open the heavy door.

“Hello?” He was surprised at the sound of fear in his voice. He cleared his throat, fighting the quaver: “Father?”

Actually there was some light, from a single desk lamp, but it was blocked from the side of the room Walt stood on by stacks and stacks of books and file boxes. The sound of papers being moved suddenly ceased as the figure on the other side of the paper wall listened. “Yes? Who is it?”

“Father, it’s Walt.”

A longer pause. Then another cleared throat. “Son! Your mother told me you were … is today the day?”

“Yes. We arrived about an hour ago.”

“Come here!” he beckoned. Kris's voice was welcoming, but weak, as if he had just woken up.

Walt studied the books and papers. “I’m not sure where …” But then he saw an opening, and he worked his way through there, stepping over more scattered tomes, some open with cloth bookmarks laid across the open pages. The flutter of fear was back again as he came around the edge and caught his first glimpse of Kris, which was in silhouette as the single desk lamp shone in his eyes.

His father laughed, and the chuckle transformed into a cough that shook his whole body. The chair bearing his weight squeaked in rhythm. Walt considered for a moment moving to his father, clapping him on the back, but his disorientation fixed his feet. Instead he asked: “You okay?” which Kris dismissed with a wave of a hand, and in short order he had regained control.

“You … look good, Nicholas,” Kris said. “Considering all the states your mother has imagined you in over the last few years, I believe she must be happy with the state you’re in.”

“Yes,” was all Walt could say, and he wanted to reply with something in kind, something superficial noting his father’s condition, something he might be able to find to say that would be complimentary, except that he still couldn’t see much other than his father’s profile. He could see that Kris was significantly balder … or no, now that he studied him for another moment, it appeared that he was wearing a beret.

“How long will you be with us?” Kris asked, studying his hands in his lap.

“I’m not sure,” Walt said, and suddenly unsure if his father had any idea why he had returned to North Center at all, he diverted the subject: “I brought somebody with me, Father. Two people, actually. Sherry, and her daughter Arden.” He suddenly felt like a college schoolboy, looking for his father’s approval via the girlfriend he had dragged home with him … an experience he had never actually had. Better late than never.

Margot on the Doorstep (10-minute Free Write)

Hard to drop you into the middle of this, but I'll give you what I can to set this scene: Walt has been avoiding his family and their family business -- a very large charitable concern -- for many years. They live a long way away, in a remote town called North Center, and he has been moving around the United States for years avoiding their attempts to find him. What he is unaware of is that a crisis is developing back home -- one that threatens everything his father (and many fathers before him) has built. In this scene, Margot, Walt's first (and deepest) love, has taken it upon herself to find him and make a plea for his return to North Center.

***

As he crossed Sheridan from the shady to bright side of the street, he was struck by how feeble the sun’s rays suddenly felt: despite a cloudless sky and all evidence that summer was still here, it was as if the cosmos suddenly took the brightness for a hoax and in only a few weeks the warmth would be revealed for the fleeting weakling it truly is. This desperation suddenly passed through Walt like an unconscious panic and without realizing it he breezed by MightyBean, deferring caffeine in favor of the safety of his apartment. In his mind, he was already in the sunroom, kneeling on the futon to draw the blinds and see if the Weather Channel could help him sort out this sudden queasiness of the heart, to show him trends and fronts moving eastward through his life to account for this elusive feeling.

His legs working faster, pulling him across a normally busy intersection that was unusually empty the moment he crossed, which was a good thing because now his body was moving on auto-pilot toward home as he puzzled over this distant cousin to paranoia sweeping over him. He instinctively glanced around for a telltale emissary even though he knew this sense was different. He thrust his hands in his pockets. That felt safer.

Through the open gate into his courtyard, head down, shoes cracking the bush trimmings never cleaned up from that morning’s “landscaping.” The right hand in his pocket closing around his keys, two fingertips already unconsciously defining the outer door key, the process being interrupted by a soft “hi” up ahead, certainly not meant for him, except that there was no one else here.

He looked up as he pulled the keys out. A woman stood at his doorway, arms folded across her stomach as if she was bracing for an impact. In a short moment, he squinted, puzzled, recognized her, smiled, and then the smile gave way to fear. Walt stopped.

“Hi,” Margot said again, and then cleared her throat and said it a third time, trying to find the right conviction and warmth. She saw where his face was going and quickly blurted: “Everything is alright.”

He snorted. “I’d believe that, except that you’re standing on my doorstep.” She had no retort to this, just a slight shrug of the shoulders. He looked up into the empty sky for lack of a better place to gather thoughts. “Happened to be in the neighborhood?”

”I’m worried about you,” she said.

“You must be very worried. You came a long way to just check on me.”

“We’re all worried. No one knows anything, how you’re doing, what you’re doing….”

“That’s not my fault, is it?” he said, and his eyes flared. “Apparently you can’t find a decent emissary anymore to spy on me.”

“You know Fran called them off, Walt. After what you did to the last one.” Suddenly, he did know this, realizing it had been weeks since he’d positively I.D.’d an emissary. Dealing with Lu Ellen’s accident had brought his guard down. The exhaustion of helping everyone in the brownstone hold it together had freed him from that paranoia. It was strangely relieving, this trauma.

“So instead of hiring strangers to keep an eye on me, she’s enlisted you?” As he said this, Walt locked his eyes on Margot again, and he was struck now by how much older she looked. How long had it been? A decade or more, at least. She looked shorter than he remembered, and though her eyes held the same soothing warmth that had calmed him then, the skin across her face appeared more taut, the jaw and cheekbones a little more angular, gaunt. The softer face of the child was giving way to the harder face of a lifetime resident of North Center. Her hair was much darker than the blonde he remembered, duller too.

“Coming here was my idea,” Margot said evenly. “And I didn’t decide lightly, Walt. I know how badly you want to stay away from North Center. But things are getting really …” She sighed. “Things are really hairy right now. I thought you needed to know it. I mean, really know it, because I know Fran says she’s been telling you in the letters, but I’m not sure you realize how bad things are at North Center.”

“What do you mean by ‘bad?’” he asked.

“What do you mean, what do I mean? She really hasn’t told you?” Walt looked at her blankly. Suddenly a look came across Margot’s face. “Oh my God. Walt, you have read her letters, haven’t you?” And now he looked down at the ground. “Oh, Walt, please don’t tell me that you don’t….” Her voice trailed, broke, and that little crack seemed to dig under him, just as it had those years ago, and the urge to hold her came right back, except that the setting was wrong, the timing was wrong, everything was wrong to be able to actually do anything. Except get her out of this courtyard. Yes, they couldn’t just stand out here in this useless sunshine. Without another word, he slipped the key in the outer door, held it open with his foot while opening the inner door, and then held both doors open until Margot passed through both and stood at the bottom of the stairs. She followed him when he started the climb up.

This Old Barn (Writing Exercise)

(Oh yeah: I found the missing Gardner book. It was in Zuzu's music class bag. Thanks for asking.)

Not crazy about this one, but my eyes are crossing from working on it and I can't think anymore. Long week.

***

Consider the following as a possible exercise in description: Describe a barn as seen by a man whose son was just killed in a war. Do not mention the son, the war, or death. Do not mention the man who does the seeing.

- John Gardner, The Art of Fiction, p. 37

From a hazy distance, the structure took on the profile of a broken battle horse making the best of desolate retirement in a pasture. The horizon of its roof line sagged. A hayloft door was missing, leaving a gaping hole like an empty eye socket. The side of the barn that received the worst beating from many summer suns was white-gray, rough, splintery. Long-abandoned bird nests unraveled from eaves. If it had ever been painted, had ever triumphed in its youth in a proud uniform of red, there was no sign of it now. But in spite of it's own state of decay, still the barn stood in defiance of its years, of nature's rout, of the oppressive, thick heat.

It had been used and forgotten, and it had long ago lost any hay-scent memory of the glee of children, the birth of livestock, the smell of motor oil, the secrets of teenagers. To peer through its dilapidated doorway, assuming one could push open the warped doors on their broken hinges, was to gaze into a darkness long ago stripped of purpose. Even the crickets and cicadas that filled the heavy air with their din seemed to fear this dank, musty interior, finding no nourishment. The particularly curious visitor might pause in the doorway, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the black in hopes of spying anything that would deliver some history. But there was nothing to be learned. The barn just was.