Aerogrammes and Other Stories - By Tania James Page 0,53

smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “A tell-all, huh?”

“Not exactly.” I felt a childish desire to impress her. “Actually it won an award. I’m supposed to go to Prague for this artists’ colony …”

“You’re leaving?” Her smile disappeared. “When? For how long?”

“In a couple months.” I scratched at a peeling patch of paint on the door frame. I still hadn’t discussed my plans with Amit, and here I was, unloading on Ivy. “I haven’t decided. We’ll see.”

“Wow,” Ivy said, but not in the tone I’d hoped for. “Good for you.”

She peeked over my shoulder at the tank. Moses was on his relaxation rock, his back to both of us.

Ivy said, “Still sleeping, huh.”

I shrugged, smiled weakly.

“All right, I’ll go.” Ivy lowered her voice. “But tell him he can’t sleep forever.”

She left me with a package for Amit—some PayDays, a DVD of Sense and Sensibility, and, oddly, a box of Darjeeling teas.

I removed the DVD. “You can probably have this one back.”

“Oh no, that’s his,” she said. “Yeah, he loves Sense and Sensibility. You didn’t know that?”

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, my dad helped Amit into the wheelchair and rattled him down the ramp toward the car that would take them to physical therapy. I spent those three hours in my bedroom, trying to write. Once, I used my brother’s computer and stumbled across a small, multicultural library of porn. I spent some time in the Asian division.

I also got to thinking about Caryn a lot, her bright, elfin eyes peering at me over a crappy hand of cards. She looked like a student herself, in jumpers and wool tights that rasped when she walked. Things had ended breezily between Caryn and me. She had gone home to Newton before I had a chance to tell her about my brother, and now I couldn’t find the words. So instead, in a late-night moment of beery loneliness, I e-mailed her my novel.

She sent a brief and instant reply: !!!

I figured that Caryn would make a better reader than Amit. He had always viewed my writing with a combination of bewilderment and dismissal, as if I were trying on a panama hat and had yet to glance in a mirror and see how ridiculous I looked. My dad told anyone who asked that I was a teacher.

Two weeks into my time at home, I called Caryn. Our conversation lurched from one piece of nonsense to the next—her new coffee press; what constitutes the ideal mug—and as the minutes gathered, my stomach began to jostle with dread.

“Well, I read it,” she said, finally.

“Yeah?”

“And I jotted down some notes.”

I found a pen, a notepad. “Okay. Ready.”

“So the first few chapters are great.” She paused. “But around page fifty or so, the story starts to sag.”

I wrote: page 50 → sag.

“Partly because you spend all this time on describing every little thing,” she continued. “And, I dunno, I’m not one for fussy prose, it’s just not my thing. Like here, with the playground scene on page sixty-three: while the four hobbyhorses, nostrils aflare and frozen, glared down on us in what seemed an apocalyptic moment. I marked a lot of places like that, where it feels like you’re trying too hard.”

“Okay.”

She recommended cutting a number of scenes. “The swimming pool thing, for example? Where the one brother doesn’t make it up the high-dive ladder?” I heard her flipping pages. “I didn’t see the point. Other than the fact that the younger brother is kind of a prick.”

“I dunno, it sort of seemed to paint a picture of the relationship right away, their relationship.”

“Yeah, but, it’s …” She paused, searching for the perfect word. “Boring. Also, how come they never talk about the mom?”

“I don’t know. They just don’t.”

This went on for half an hour. I drew a turd with a big bow on top.

In the last five minutes, Caryn seesawed her comments in the positive direction, trying to boost me with vague praise for my thorough characterization, my attention to setting, her voice full of pity and pep. By this point, I was lying on the couch.

As the conversation wound down, Caryn reassured me that the future was still bright. “It’s awesome that you’ll be around all those writers in Prague. Maybe one of them can give you advice.”

“Yeah, maybe.” I promised to write her from Prague. I could tell that she didn’t believe me.

“Good-bye,” I said.

“Good luck!” she said, and hung up, leaving me to ponder her word choice.

Early in the evening, Dr.