if I ever told you this,’ Muriel says, ‘but when I read something good my ankles get prickly. It’s been happening since I was nine and I read Elizabeth Bowen by mistake when The Last September got shelved in the kids’ section of our library.’
I’m nervous. I know she said she liked it, but I also know that all those notes are not praise.
‘I’m sorry it took me two weeks. I started to think, what if I hate it? I got scared it might turn out like it did with Jack.’ Jack is a colleague who stopped speaking to her after she gave him feedback on his memoir. ‘Two nights ago I dug in, and it was such incredible relief. My ankles were going crazy.’ She pulls the pile closer and pushes her glasses farther up the bridge of her nose. ‘Kay Boyle said once that a good story is both an allegory and a slice of life. Most writers are good at one, not the other. But you are doing both so beautifully here.’ She strokes the top page. She starts flipping through the manuscript to show me the parts she loved best. Her checkmarks are everywhere. My body is flooded with sweet relief. My heart slows to enjoy it. She has marked all my favorite parts, the ones that came so easily and the ones I struggled so hard with. She says Clara is so particular, but she’s also the embodiment of women undone by the history of men. She goes off on a riff about the male hegemony within Clara’s family. She gives me credit for all kinds of things I hadn’t been thinking about in any sort of ideological way.
When she begins showing me the spots that need to be cut or expanded, characters who need more attention, I start taking notes. She points out the places where I have described a character’s emotion instead of the reaction to the emotion. ‘Don’t tell us the girl is sad. Tell us she can’t feel her fingers. Emotions are physical.’ She has put an X through several pages about the Battle of La Plata, which had taken me weeks of research.
‘And,’ she says, ‘you have to write that rape scene.’
‘No.’
‘You have to.’
‘I can’t. I don’t want to.’
‘It shouldn’t happen offstage like that.’
I shake my head. ‘I tried. It didn’t work.’
‘Try again. You can’t follow her so carefully for most of the book, then just turn away. Is it because of your father?’
‘It’s not the same. He didn’t rape anyone.’
‘He got off on watching.’
I nod. My face slowly reddens.
‘Use those feelings,’ she says. ‘Use all of them.’
When I get back to the potting shed I sit with the stack of papers she gave me. I write down some ideas in my notebook, then turn to a fresh page and stare at it for a long time.
You don’t realize how much effort you’ve put into covering things up until you try to dig them out.
The leather couch was cool on my cheek. You feel like a furnace, I remembered my mother saying once when I went to her in the middle of the night and she ran a washcloth under cold water and laid it on my forehead. I missed her then, in a way I didn’t let myself miss her anymore. I think I cried a little. It was too loud to sleep, people going in and out of the locker rooms, pushing hard on the metal door to the gym. And those noises—whispers, scuffling—from closer by. I thought they were in my head.
I write it all out in my notebook: the fever, the couch, the boys in their basketball shorts. The sickening sound of my father buckling his belt as he came out last from the closet.
The next morning I read though her notes and flip through all the pages of the manuscript again—Muriel’s comments and checkmarks, sometimes four on one page. She understood it. She got it. Even if no one else ever does, Muriel did.
I bake a small banana cake in my toaster oven and drop it off for her before work.
Each morning that week I take Adam’s dog to the park as soon as I get up. His name is Oafie, Adam finally told me. The cooler air makes my mind feel sharp and purposeful. In the park, Oafie lumbers around with wiry Fifi and miniature Hugo and I chatter with the owners and none of it derails me. I’m back at my desk by