by Maria Semple
“Of course not,” I said with an insouciant wave that knocked my water into the dipping oil.
Timby was starting to look concerned.
Spencer mopped up the water with his napkin and moved his phone to the dry side.
It gave me an idea.
“Timby,” I said. “Go wash your hands.”
“But—”
“Fish poop,” I said. “Or you’re not eating French fries, and they have the best French fries.”
Timby burned me with a stare and left.
“Spencer.” I leaned across the table. “If I dial a number from your cell phone, will you try to make a doctor’s appointment?”
“Uh—” The poor guy looked poleaxed.
I’d already grabbed his phone and dialed Joe’s office. “I don’t want them to know it’s me. Just ask when the next available appointment is.” I held Spencer’s phone to his ear.
I could hear Luz answer. I motioned wildly for Spencer to start talking.
“Yes—hello—” he stammered. “I’d like to make an appointment.”
Luz explained something on the other end.
“Ask when he’s coming back,” I whispered.
“When’s he coming back?” Spencer said weakly.
“Monday,” said Luz.
That’s all I needed to know. I snatched the phone from Spencer, hung it up, and placed it on the table.
He looked down at it, then up at me, uncertain if the last minute had actually happened.
“Dr. Wallace…” Spencer said. “Isn’t that your husband? Joe? Are you divorced?”
“Pshaw. We’re happily married.”
Timby slid back in beside a thoroughly charmed or slightly disgusted Spencer, it was hard to tell which.
I’m kidding! He was disgusted.
“Spencer,” I said. “Tell us about you.”
“Well, that’s a three-hour tour!” he said, reassuming his happy-to-be-here persona.
“The abridged version will do,” I said.
“When I left Looper Wash…”
I had to heave my breath up and out. “I was trying to be helpful.”
“What did you do?” Timby asked.
“It’s not important,” I said.
“The difficult people are our most valuable teachers,” Spencer said.
“What did she do to you?” Timby was dying.
“Don’t you have music to listen to?” I said.
“I’m good.”
Spencer pulled out a stylish messenger bag and opened it for Timby. “I have some picture books you can look at,” he said, placing a few on the bench between them.
Timby ignored the offer and raised his eyebrows as if to say, You may proceed.
“When I got hired at Looper Wash,” Spencer said, “it was the happiest day of my life. I thought I’d arrived. I moved out of my parents’ apartment in Queens. I bought a Vespa. I spent all my money on gifts for the other animators.”
“Which I, for one, really appreciated. That signed Stephen Sondheim Playbill is still one of my most treasured possessions.” I held my hand to my face to block even a peripheral view of Timby.
“Then I got fired. The shame of it. There I was, living in the East Village in an apartment I couldn’t afford. I couldn’t face my parents. For the first time in my life I wasn’t sharing a bedroom with five brothers and sisters, and I could finally act on the fact that… I…” He looked at Timby, unsure. “Didn’t like girls.”
“He knows all about it.” I flipped my head toward Timby. “I let him watch the Tonys.”
“Oh. Well, the first guy I fell in love with was a drug addict, the hard stuff. Quicker than you might imagine, I ended up broke and with nowhere to live. But no matter how low I sank, I knew I was an artist. Despite what you said, I knew I was more than a careerist.”
I’d called him that. I was hoping he’d forgotten.
“What’s a careerist?” asked Timby.
“I had to look it up too,” Spencer said. “It’s someone who only thinks about getting ahead in his or her career.”
“That’s not bad,” Timby said, disappointed.
Spencer put his hand to his heart. “Even now, when I think back on Looper Wash, the pangs of humiliation can make me drop the glass in my hand. I was so naive, such an embarrassment to myself.”
“Not at all,” I said. “It just wasn’t the right fit.”
“You had nowhere to live,” Timby prompted helpfully.
“I’d lost all belief in myself,” Spencer said. “But something deep within kept me going. A feeling of hope. And that hope was a pulsing, radiant green.”
“Green hope!” I cried.
“It was the tip of a crocus breaking through in the winter. It was the shag carpet in the basement of a ranch house. It was the lace on my sister’s quinceañera dress. Stop me if you’ve already heard this.”
“Me?” I coughed, completely baffled as to how I could have.
“If I captured those greens,” Spencer said, “it would release the artist who’d been taken hostage by the careerist.” He unbuttoned his shirt cuffs, held together by silk French knots. He rolled up his sleeves and brandished his inner arms. On each, a tattoo from wrist to elbow: green paint-sample strips.
“Whoa,” said Timby.
“That’s quite a commitment,” I said, then noticed his watch: vintage Cartier.
“I refused to let my failure at Looper Wash define me,” Spencer said. “I spent my last dollar on a painting at a thrift shop just for the canvas, painted it green, and while the paint was still wet, cried onto it.”
“Oy,” I said.
“Mom! You’re mean.”
Spencer removed the napkin from his lap, folded it, and placed it on the table. He stood up and walked over to me. Were my arms shielding my face? Maybe. But instead of striking me, Spencer hugged me. It took breathing exercises from childbirth class to survive his bewildering, tuberose-scented act of compassion.
Timby, traumatized, gave me a look: What’s he doing?
I gave him one back: No idea.
Spencer returned to his seat. Timby handed him his napkin. There was no choice now but to respect the dude.
“You’re right,” Spencer said. “It was sentimental and muddled. But it was the first true thing I’d ever done. That painting is here in Seattle. I’d love to show it to you.”
“I want to see it!” Timby said.
“Read a book.”
“Listen to me!” Spencer smacked his forehead. “I promised I’d make it short. So I came out, became a junkie, got these tattoos, cleaned up, and, well, you know about the past twelve years.”
“I do?”
“Yale School of Art, group show at White Columns, Jack Wolgin Prize, Venice Biennale, blah-blah-blah.”
My eyes closed; my face scrunched; my head shook a thousand tiny times. “Huh?”
“I thought you knew about me,” Spencer said. To Timby: “Your mom—”
But Timby had become absorbed in one of Spencer’s books.
Spencer turned back to me. “That’s why I crave you, Eleanor. You have a way of frying my motherboard when I need it the most.”
“It’s not intentional!” I said. “I promise.”
“The contemporary art world is so insular. We think our sky-high prices make us the center of the universe when of course only about eight people are paying attention. And they’re just gallery owners and art consultants.” Spencer joined his hands and lowered his chest in a slight bow. “I honor you.”
“That’s you?” I said, still gaga. “Yale, Venice?”
“I’m having a solo show at the Seattle Art Museum,” he said. “They asked me to do some stuff at the sculpture park too. There are banners all over town. Of course I just presumed you saw my name flapping in the breeze everywhere you went. But here you are again, holding up the mirror.”
This toadying wannabe, this sweaty ass-kisser, this fraudulent quasi-minority, now he was somebody? Now he was the sh
it? He’d turned everything topsy-turvy and instead of rubbing my face in it, instead of serving revenge cold, he was nothing but hugs and two-hundred-dollar pens and pervy gratitude and—
“Mom?” It was Timby.
He held up what he’d been reading, from Spencer’s bag, a fancy magazine or catalog… It took me a second to even recognize it.
THE MINERVA PRIZE
From my Looper Wash days. It was a prize (now defunct) for graphic novelists. I’d been nominated for one in 2003 by Dan Clowes.
That year’s Minerva Prize winner was going to be announced at a dinner at the Odeon. We were in the middle of production on Looper Wash and I intended to blow off the ceremony. But at the last minute, I grabbed the gang and walked over. We were horribly underdressed and seated at a good table. Across the expertly lit orchid centerpiece, the wife of the arts commissioner looked askance at our rowdiness and dirty jokes. (Ask anyone: being in production on a TV show turns you feral.) I didn’t expect to win, and didn’t. We each came back with a swag bag: POM Wonderful, a Murakami thumb drive, a mug with the Bear Stearns motto: Ahead of the Curve (!).
And that program.
“I wasn’t invited to the ceremony, of course,” Spencer was telling Timby. “But the next morning I fished a program out of the trash. The other day I was doing some spring cleaning and came across it. I thought your mom might want it.”
Something terrible was occurring to me…
“What?” asked Spencer.
… that program, the one Timby had in his hands. It had profiles of each nominee and their work… which meant my work, all twelve illustrations.
“Hey,” I said to Timby, reaching across. “Gimme that.”
He yanked it away. “Who are the Flood Girls?”
The Flood Girls
Eleanor Flood
The Flood Girls
Nominated
by
Daniel Clowes
I first met Eleanor Flood in 1995, back in the olden days of what we once called the San Diego Con (to differentiate it from Dallas Con, Sac Con, Leper Con), a few years before it was gentrified by Hollywood, and comics were still the main focus. Off in the indie/alternative/underground ghetto corner it was me, Peter Bagge, Joe Matt, the Hernandez brothers, Ivan Brunetti; the usual gang of idiots. We’d sit at tables with our art spread out, praying that Matt Groening would come along and buy something. We were strong believers in noblesse oblige.
For long stretches, nobody even glanced our way and the only time we got anyone was when the line for Todd McFarlane was so long that the occasional bearded man-child would shuffle a few steps off his path to deliver a disdainful glare or perhaps to use one of my originals as a coaster for his drink.
It was during a soul-numbing moment of career introspection such as this that an anomalous young woman emerged from behind the crowd. She had good posture and wore a dress (an actual dress, not a Troll Queen dress). She was apparently a fan of Eightball because she recognized the pages I was selling. “Ghost World! That’s the cutest!” and “I can’t believe you’re selling Ugly Girls, it’s super-cute.” Cute wasn’t a word I usually heard in relation to my art (Ew was number one, followed by Why?). I saw her turn to survey the now-endless McFarlane line. “I suppose I should feel sorry for them,” she said. “What’s the point in that?” I responded. “They don’t even know they’re sad.” We discussed whether this gave us the right to hate them and agreed that it probably did. Then she picked up my whole portfolio and asked, “Would it be bad if I just bought everything?” I told her that would be fine.
She wrote me a check. ELEANOR FLOOD. NEW YORK, NY.
The next time I saw her was nine years later. I was in New York for something and promised my sister I’d go see my nephew who was answering phones for a production company. She said, “You know the show. Looper Wash. The short about girls on ponies that played before Ice Age and now it’s a series on Fox?” I had no idea what she was talking about (thank God), so I just said, “What’s the address?”
I went to a building in SoHo, which sounds impressive but surely was not, and walked up to the fourth floor. Apparently, everyone was in a screening down the hall because the place was deserted. In a corner office I saw a drawing board with a big mirror propped in front of it. That struck me as exactly the kind of egomaniacal, solipsistic self-focus I so admire in myself, so I went over to explore further.
On the drawing board (along with viciously mean doodles of Fox executives, which instantly endeared this person to me) were colored-pencil illustrations. They were busy and “pretty,” full of soft tints and delicate expressions, which aren’t qualities I usually go for. But they were also disturbing, and not in the usual ironic Jughead-with-a-crack-pipe way. They were disturbingly sincere.
I heard a bubbly voice. “Dan Clowes!” It was Eleanor Flood. Turns out she was the animation director at Looper Wash and my nephew had told her I was coming. She pulled out the portfolio of my art that she’d bought years before.
“Do you want any of these back?” she said. “A lot of them are probably worth a fortune now. I feel bad. I could cry sometimes thinking of how little I paid for them.”
I actually had cried thinking the same thing. I told her she could keep them.
She saw me looking at her drawings. “I know,” she said. “Aren’t those super-cute?”
Yes, they were, I said, studying them for an awkwardly long time. “The Minerva asked me to nominate,” I said. “Do you think I could submit these?”
“But isn’t that for graphic novelists?” she asked.
“Put these together and you’ve got a comic.” Even back then, I couldn’t bring myself to use the term graphic novel. She got what I meant.
“Oh,” she said.
Unlike many stories about childhood, The Flood Girls feels immediate and present-tense urgent. Though it’s dense with period detail, a nostalgia trip it is not. The vantage is frank and unsentimental. That Eleanor Flood is able to infuse these ominous, cryptic images with so much warmth is a rare trick, and I look forward to seeing more.
Cracked Actor
“You never told me you had a sister,” Timby said to me over the top of the catalog.
“I don’t have a sister,” I said.
There it was, finally: my lie, now a citizen of the world.
Before I fell asleep at night, I’d cycle through the various intonations in my head, preparing myself for this awful, inevitable moment.
I don’t have a sister.
I don’t have a sister.
I don’t have a sister.
I don’t have a sister.
Sometimes I’d say it out loud without realizing. Timby from the backseat: “What do you keep saying?” Me from the front: “Nothing.”
Sometimes it would show on my face.
Joe: What are you thinking about?
Me: Nothing, why?
Joe: Your teeth are bared.
“But Tess Tyler was your mom,” Timby said. “And Parsley was your dog and—”
“The Flood Girls represents two sides of me,” I snapped. “It was an artistic experiment. That’s all.”
The French fries arrived, a crispy umber heap sprinkled with chopped fresh herbs.
“Whoa!” Timby said. “I call most of them!”
Could it be? Could I have just gotten away with the whole thing?
“Wait till you try the ketchup,” I said, a tremor in my voice. “They make it themselves.”
But Spencer…
Confusion had broken out across his face. His eyes were squinting. His brows were coming together. His mouth was opening. Words were coming out.
“But didn’t I meet your sister?”
For clarity: I do have a sister. Her name is Ivy. I created The Flood Girls as a gift for her. Until Dan Clowes happened across those illustrations years ago, it had never occurred to me to turn them into a graphic novel.
Enter Joyce Primm, junior editor at Burton Hill, doing what junior editors did:
troll obscure prize dinners for promising talent. Late twenties, rail-thin, pure confidence, Joyce cornered me in the Odeon ladies’ room.
“Violet Parry gets all the credit for Looper Wash,” she said. “It’s time we right that wrong.”
“Nice try,” I said. “But Violet is a dear friend. No crime has been committed.”
“I want more Eleanor Flood,” Joyce said. “The Flood Girls begs to be expanded.”
“This is highly flattering,” I said. “But I’m no graphic novelist.”
“Daniel Clowes thinks otherwise,” she said. “So do I.”
“I have no story to tell,” I said.
She handed me her card. “Call me when you change your mind.”
Then, years later, something terrible happened.
And I did have a story to tell.
I called up Joyce, by then executive editor of Burton Hill. She flew to Seattle.
We had drinks at the W Hotel. Joyce had on three-inch heels, peach pants, a floral crinkly silk shirt buttoned low, and a long gold chain. Her face was makeup-free and she wore her long hair in an effortless chignon.
Anytime I get into a one-on-one social situation, especially if there’s something at stake, my anxiety spikes. I talk fast. I jump topics unexpectedly. I say shocking things. Right before I push it too far, I double back and expose a vulnerability. If I see you about to criticize me, I leap in and criticize myself. (One shrink labeled this The Trick. Halfway through our first session, he stopped me mid-yak. He said I was so afraid of rejection that I turned every interaction into a life-or-death charm offensive. That I was so unrelentingly verbal made me, in his opinion, untreatable. He handed me back my check and wished me luck.)
The best/worst thing about The Trick? People fall for it every time!
Over drinks, Joyce and I became instant buddies. Moscow Mules became dinner, became “You’ve got to see this cute hat I bought.” Upstairs in her room, Joyce gave me her cologne; I’d admired the scent but it could be bought only in Paris. I told her she dressed like a spring when she was really a summer; I wrote her a list of colors she needed to start wearing. She confessed to being on the verge of an affair with a married author. I told her I was the direct descendant of a U.S. president. I’m not speaking metaphorically when I say we tried on each other’s shoes.
