All Is Vanity

by Christina Schwarz

  Have never before made major purchase without consulting the Pennysaver.

  Delivery in three days.

  Letty

  P.S. Also, am beginning to research private schools for Mario. This will basically mean blowing the college fund on middle school, but she started to teach herself Latin this summer out of my old Wheelock, so it seems that now that we can afford to give her a really rigorous education, we probably should.

  CHAPTER 8

  Margaret

  I’D HAD TO FOCUS SO SINGLE-MINDEDLY on my own submission that I didn’t lift the cover page of “The Leaf Blowers: A Novel” by Zelda Jackson until late the night before class. Within two pages, I wished with a desperation so intense that it brought tears to my eyes that I could snatch my offering back from Kinko’s. Zelda’s prose read like a published book, every phrase exquisite, measured, angled together to form a gemlike whole. The story moved forward, not with the inexorable, crude pull of a thriller, but with a steady accretion of carefully observed moments. It rendered gorgeous the gritty, secret lives of Mexican gardeners in Rancho Santa Fe, who conversed in perfectly captured accents between the roars of their signature tool—the leaf blower. I wanted to hate it, but it drew me on, through descriptions of dirt that glinted like mica under broken fingernails and pickup trucks rumbling like heartbeats through gated communities at dawn.

  On page seven, I spotted a comma splice and circled it with relief. On page ten, I wrote in the margin, “Would Pablo be eating grapes in December, given the fruit’s expense, not to mention the solidarity he would feel with his countrymen laboring in northern California? Perhaps a rice and bean dish would be more authentic.” And then I crossed it out. It was obvious that Zelda knew about these people. If she said they ate grapes in the off-season, that is what they did.

  In the end, I could in all honesty only gush, which I did, three single-spaced pages’ worth. The next evening, the rest of the class, including Peter Berginsky, universally agreed with my assessment. We all urged her to finish quickly, to secure an agent, to collect her Pulitzer. Some of us—Peter Berginsky, I’ve no doubt, and perhaps the retiree—probably did so without jealous claws tearing at their guts. Maybe others, too. Maybe I, in fact, was the only one who felt diminished and defeated by her talent, who in some dark, locked cupboard of my soul wished her ill.

  “Where did you get all this stuff?” Bathsheba dared to ask.

  I winced, waiting for some haughty reply declaring her intimacy with oppressed peoples everywhere.

  “I don’t know,” Zelda answered, shrugging her slender shoulders winningly. “We had a gardener, but he was Japanese, and I never really talked to him. I guess I just made it up.”

  I reprimanded myself sternly for my selfishness on the way home. Wouldn’t someone who truly loved writing feel only delight in the presence of such obvious natural skill? Apparently not. Apparently she would find room in her heart only for bitter reflection on the unfairness of a world that bestowed every advantage on one random and undeserving creature. No, I thought, catching a glimpse of myself among the scraps of cardboard and mismatched shoes that formed a display in the window of the Parsons School of Design, that was not strictly true. Part of me could not help but admire Zelda. And, I reminded myself, as a trench-coated man jostled me off the curb in his eagerness to hurl himself into the crosswalk and elicit furious honking, that Zelda had been born with a genius for arranging words on the page did not mean that I could not also produce a perfectly readable novel.

  It occurred to me that meeting Zelda might make taking this class worthwhile, even beyond the tutelage of Peter Berginsky. Anne Lamott often mentioned the value of the writing group as a source of artistic and emotional sustenance. Perhaps Zelda, after she read my chapter, would be interested in forming such a group with me. We could meet in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel on Thursday evenings and critique each other’s work.

  Letty’s e-mail that evening was a refreshing distraction.

  M,

  Blue or yellow? What do you like for a kitchen? I’m also thinking about tangerine. Or we could go all sophisticated yet warm with granite and cherry, in which case I probably should have chosen the cherry-paneled dishwasher.

  Can you please get out here and help me choose a floor?

  Have I told you that Michael took the job? We agreed that he’s published so much that he could always go back to the groves—or brambles—of academe, so why not take a chance, try something new?

  So we got the dishwasher to celebrate, except it turns out that a dishwasher is impossible given this awkward kitchen design. There’s no room for a dishwasher, unless we install a hanging rack for the pots, which would either obscure the view of the driveway out the kitchen window or collect grease over the stove. And now it seems there’s some trouble with the pipes that we never had occasion to discern before. Apparently, the previous owner routed them in an idiosyncratic way, so as to install the hot tub that was in the backyard when we moved in.

  “Michael is going to help me re-envision the museum’s role. We’re going to make it a significant national presence,” Duncan Bishop told me yesterday.

  I was in Michael’s office to help him decide where to hang his “office art”: Marlo’s charcoal “Wild Horse,” Hunter’s tempera “Daddy in a Yellow Jacket,” and Noah’s fingerpainted “Sunset on the Pacific” or “Egg on the Carpet,” depending on your mood.

  Duncan Bishop had to stoop to shake my hand. He is tall enough to make you want to estimate—6’2“?, 6’3”?—and his fingers are so long my hand seemed not to fit properly in his. “We’re extremely lucky to get your husband over here,” he said. He was looking not at me, as he spoke, but at some spot to my right. Possibly Ivy, who was kicking at the desk from underneath, was distracting him.

  “Well, I know he’s happy to be here,” I said. Or some such thing.

  “You should take Letitia to lunch,” he said to Michael. “Copper River salmon today.”

  So last night, when Michael got home, he said, “Let’s redo the kitchen!” in the happy-go-lucky way he’s had since he started working at a place that serves Copper River salmon in the cafeteria. And I said, “Whee!,” which, as you know, is not like me, or hasn’t been like me for several years now.

  Not that I haven’t been happy. You know I’ve been happy. I’ve just not been … giddy, I guess is how I feel just now, a bit as if the rugs been pulled out from under my feet, which you’d think would be uncomfortable, but it turns out that the rug was some sort of brown shag crusted with Cream of Wheat and underneath was this golden-stained, highly polished oak. (That’s one of the floors we’re considering for the remodeled kitchen. What do you think?)

  I didn’t want to complain, Margaret, that we were not where we should have been in life (although, in fact, I know I did complain, it was only to you, which doesn’t count, does it?). I mean we’d made choices: academe over business for Michael, children over a career for me, and that entailed certain sacrifices. That’s the way life is. There are compromises. There are trade-offs. And yet … and yet … what had I done to be cursed with an apartment-sized electric oven? In L.A.! Almost no one has electric in L.A.!

  We’re running a gas line to the kitchen, and I’m going to Koreatown to find one of those big old O’Keefe & Merritts. With two ovens and a griddle. And maybe a working clock, although those are expensive. This Thanksgiving, I’ll be able to roast a twenty-pound turkey without cutting it in half first.

  Seriously, Margaret, I need your help with this. I’m sending you some blueprints and paint chips, and a couple of pages from the Williams-Sonoma catalog (now that we have more cupboards, I might buy a croque-monsieur maker and an asparagus pot—you know, the sort of gadget that performs a single function perfectly twice a year and takes up an inordinate amount of space the rest of the time). Perhaps the children’s art will look nice in the new kitchen. It didn’t work, in the end, in the new office.

  L

  Silently, I thanked Letty
for allowing me to feel again like the generous, warmhearted person I hoped I was. In my imagination, I bestowed upon her the finest kitchen ever conceived. Nothing could be better for Letty than a new kitchen, a kitchen that would not do its best to thwart her every omelette. In high school, Letty had taken home ec, defying her mother, who, like mine, believed that a woman with domestic skills would end up chained to her house. (That neither of them was particularly good at keeping a house, and nevertheless both were, aside from an odd job here and there, primarily homemakers, didn’t shake their conviction.) Even in that bland environment with its exact measurements and its oversimplified substitutions Letty had shown signs of becoming a gourmet chef. While her classmates were learning to keep skin from forming on the surface of pudding, she was making pots de crème. While they mastered the twist of the wrist essential for releasing dough from a cardboard tube, she was practicing puff pastry.

  In general, Letty had developed into the sort of person who appreciated fine touches. If you put a carton of cream on her table, she’d surreptitiously whisk it away and pour the cream into a squat pitcher. She knew how to garnish plates with lemon wedges and sprigs of fresh herbs from the herb garden she’d cultivated in the grassless ring that remained after they’d had the hot tub removed. On her dining room table, she kept a big bowl of oranges for juicing, their luxurious color and abundance belying their provenance: a shopping cart parked in the median at the intersection of Venice and Robertson and manned by a rotating team of Guatemalans, who pushed a bag of fruit through her open car window in exchange for two dollars while the light was red.

  A gift from Letty was always small and inexpensive, but exquisite: a set of four antique linen cocktail napkins; a stainless steel moderne key chain; art deco book plates. This sensibility had not been learned from her family. I remember hanging over the front seat of our car on the way home from a sleepover and asking my parents why the Larues had a giant teak fork and spoon hanging on their gold-flocked kitchen wall. I had recently been reading about the inclusion of useful items for the afterlife in Egyptian tombs and thought the monster utensils might have some similar significance.

  “Some people just don’t have an eye for decor,” my mother said cheerfully. “Take the Chinese.”

  “Don’t teach the children to stereotype, Alice,” my father said.

  “I’m not saying the Chinese don’t have many fine qualities, but taste is just not one of them. For heaven’s sake, Albert, look at their restaurants.”

  Although I understood from this that my mother didn’t admire the Larues’ sense of style, for some years I had a confused sense that Letty’s grandparents had been colonials in Shanghai and had come to America to escape the Boxer Rebellion, carrying with them the fork and spoon with which they’d established their identity as suave Westerners in a land of chopstick-wielding, gauche Easterners.

  I had one foot on the bottommost stair in the New School building, when I saw Zelda step into the elevator. “Going up?” I called, and she held the door.

  “Hi,” I chirped, as I slipped inside.

  She nodded and the doors shut, encapsulating us.

  “Your chapters the other week were so great,” I said, my diction disturbingly reminiscent of that of my former students.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  I pressed on with another insightful observation. “I think class is going really well so far, don’t you?”

  “I suppose,” she said, glancing above the door, where, if the elevator had been in a fancier building, the number of the floors we passed would have lighted up. “I’m really just taking it because of Peter.”

  I frowned, not recognizing by first name alone the man I thought of in no terms other than the complete “Peter Berginsky.” Zelda, it seemed, knew him by more than reputation, or at least she hoped to give this impression.

  The elevator doors opened. “I was wondering,” I said boldly, stepping aside to allow her to exit first, “if you had any interest in forming a writing group. You know,” I went on, when she did not immediately respond, “outside of class.”

  “A writing group?” We were entering the classroom now. About three-quarters of the class were already sitting around the table. “Who would be in it?”

  “Well, me,” I said, “and, I don’t know, maybe there’s someone you’d like to ask.”

  She slid my pages from a manila folder and placed them on the table in front of her. “I prefer to work by myself,” she said.

  The class was not optimistic about my chances for a Pulitzer.

  I managed at the end of the two hours to scrape into a spiky pile the pages and pages of critical notes printed in perky fonts that my classmates shoved toward me across the table. “Good work!” Bathy had printed in red at the bottom of her list of objections.

  Reeling down lower Fifth Avenue after class, I had difficulty gaining a purchase on my emotions, overwhelmed as I was by shame and despair and the desire to wander with eyes closed into onrushing traffic. What besides my own hubris had made me think that I could concoct from the scanty resources of my imagination and the even scantier store of my experience an actual novel? Bitterly, I now recalled the cautions Ted had raised a year ago, as I’d stalked, full of confidence and outrage at his doubts, up Madison Avenue. There were steps you were expected to take to prove yourself before attempting a book. Others wrote short stories, building credibility page by page for years before they burst forth with full-fledged novels. They’d collected prizes: Buntings and Whitings and Aga Khans. They’d sweated for MFAs, garnering the favor of their esteemed and well-connected professors. They’d secured places in artists’ colonies and dined on watercress sandwiches left on the doorsteps of their isolated cabins, because their efforts had been deemed worthy of nourishment. They did not enroll in extension courses with a bunch of other unpublished professionals and hope that these people would help to make them writers.

  But like a sandbag flung before a flood, this last thought gave me hope once again. What, after all, did those who had criticized me so fiercely know about writing? If my classmates understood the rudiments of good composition, would they not be spending their Thursday evenings polishing the most recent in a series of well-acclaimed novels, instead of carping in a windowless seminar room, borrowed from undergraduates?

  This idea buoyed me up the six flights to our apartment. What do they know? What do they know? I chanted on every step until I pushed the key into our door, at which point I remembered that I, too, was an unpublished professional attending an adult education class. What did I know?

  I was, therefore, collapsed facedown on the couch twenty minutes later when Ted came in with Imperial Szechuan.

  “I take it your classmates are blind fools when it comes to recognizing talent,” he said, sinking onto the couch himself and pulling my feet onto his lap.

  “No,” I groaned. “They’re right.” I sat up and looked at him. “What made me think I could write a novel?”

  “What makes you think you can’t?” he answered.

  At least I’d not been mistaken in my choice of husbands.

  I ran through my classmates’ objections: the confusing structure, the boring opening, the suspect bamboo basket, the impracticality of journaling in blood, and the myriad other faults that rendered my efforts a colossal waste of time. “They don’t even like my character’s name!” I wailed.

  “Those sound like details to me,” Ted said. “You shouldn’t be concerned with details yet.”

  Perhaps he was right. Perhaps I shouldn’t be distracted by petty issues like nomenclature and authentic weaving materials. All that could easily be changed or added later. “What about the lack of focus?” I sniffed. But now I was fishing for reassurance, rather than presenting a true concern. Had Ted thought this a problem, he would have said so immediately.

  “That’s not a detail, but the book isn’t finished yet. Is it?” He said this last somewhat wistfully.

  “No, of course it isn’t finished
.” I didn’t add that despite a full summer’s work, it was barely begun.

  “So, it seems to me that any novel that’s not formulaic—”

  “Not formulaic—yes!” I interrupted, sitting up straighter against the sofa arm.

  “Well, it’s bound to lack focus for a while. I mean you’re exploring your characters, trying to discover their full natures. You shouldn’t know exactly how they’ll behave and where their story will go yet.”

  Of course, Ted was right. I’d ambitiously chosen a character whose experience, gender, and social milieu were completely foreign to me. In fact, the only common ground between Robert and me was grocery shopping, which was perhaps why he so often found himself at the supermarket.

  “What did Berginsky think?”

  I glanced at Ted, fearful. I pulled my feet off his lap and put them firmly on the floor. Both of us cared what Peter Berginsky thought. He was, after all, a real writer. Swamped as I was by doubt and misery, I had not, however, read the page of comments he’d given me. From the prickly mass in my purse, I drew a sheet of onionskin. It seemed that Peter Berginsky still used a typewriter, one that needed cleaning. The a’s and o’s were filled, as if the sort of fourth-grade girl who dotted her i’s with hearts had decorated the page.