How to Write a Novel

by Melanie Sumner

  “I know you’re in there,” said Diane. “Please open the door.”

  I let her stand in the hallway, wondering if I still loved her, for as long as I could. Where was team Diane-and-Aris now? Who had her back now? Surely she wasn’t expecting to find an intelligent, insightful, delightful sidekick in this white room reeking of disinfectant. No, sorry, Diane. Aris is gone. An orphan lives here now. As usual, I held out for about a minute.

  “Aris isn’t here,” I said when I opened the door. “She’s been raptured.”

  Diane smiled nervously in my doorway. “Well,” she said, surveying her work. “What do you think?”

  “It’s very white,” I said flatly.

  “Think of it as a clean piece of paper,” said Diane.

  “White is the Chinese color of death.”

  That hurt her feelings. For a moment, she looked like a little kid, with her face so open. I felt guilty, then powerful, then guilty about feeling powerful. It was a good time for me to have my first nervous breakdown, but before I could even begin, Max took the stage.

  “I hate you!” he yelled from his room as something hard hit the wall. “I hate everybody! I hate myself!” There was a repeated banging on the wall—his head?—followed by the wail of a hundred dying cats. “I am hurt!” he groaned. “I am dying! Somebody please, please help me.” One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Then he started the cycle all over again. “I hate you! I am hurt. I am dying. Somebody please, please …”

  Diane and I both glanced uneasily out the window. When Max had a meltdown, you could hear it from the street. It was a wonder no one had called 911. I left Diane to deal with him and firmly shut my door. Stretched out on my bed, I had one of my imaginary talks with Dr. Dhang.

  What are you feeling, Aris?

  I dunno.

  Maybe she would show me the list of feelings she printed out for Max, with faces beside each one, and ask me to select a few.

  In Max’s room, Diane was saying, “Stop that noise. Honey, listen to me. Okay, stop that. I mean it. Sweetheart. Hush! Max, I’m losing patience here. Please, please stop. Try to calm down. Did you take your medicine today?”

  Calmly, I cracked open Songs of Innocence and of Experience.

  O Rose thou art sick.

  The invisible worm,

  That flies in the night

  In the howling storm:

  Has found out thy bed

  Of crimson joy:

  And his dark secret love

  Does thy life destroy.

  At least the poems were short. I was typing a long Facebook message to Billy, updating him on Lab life and detailing the cleaning holocaust, when I noticed a new photograph on his page. I clicked on it and then clicked on two more like it.

  A girl. Tiffany. Pretty.

  She was tall, almost as tall as Billy in the ice-skating photo. Strawberry-blondish hair, blue eyes, and skinny, of course. She had “liked” every post on his page. WTF?

  Breathing in, I calmed my body, breathing out, I smiled … Then I texted him.

  Wasup w/Tiffany?

  Typing her name hurt. Oh God, it hurt. I waited. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi …

  No response. At 273 Mississippi, I realized that an invisible worm named Tiffany had just flown in the night and crawled into my crimson rose.

  Maybe she’s a friend, I told myself as I reached up to my shelf for the mad bomber hat. Or a cousin. He had family up there, right? I wouldn’t jump to conclusions. My hand patted the bare flat surface of the shelf beside Zimmerman. Then I stood on the bed and looked.

  The mad bomber hat was gone.

  “Diane!” I shrieked.

  In the living room, Max was sniffling in a corner with his Legos while Diane, on her hands and knees, cleaned out a bookshelf. I planted myself between them, hands on my hips.

  “Where is my mad bomber hat?”

  “What?”

  “The hat with coyote fur,” I said slowly. “Daddy’s hat.”

  “That? Oh, honey, I’m sorry.”

  “You threw it out?”

  “I didn’t throw it out. I packed up a lot of old clothes that we never wear and gave them—”

  “You got rid of the only thing that connects me to my father?” I was crying. Between sobs, I said, “You could have put the bomber hat in the attic. You didn’t have to throw it away!”

  “Aris, we need to let go of some things. Joe is gone. I know it’s horrible, but he would want us to move on.”

  “Do you want me to hate you?” I said. “Okay, that’s nice and simple. I hate you.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, rising to her feet. “I wanted to create a new start for us, a clean platform.” She tried to hug me, but I wouldn’t let her. “I put your dollhouse in the attic. I kept Zimmerman in your room. I would never let go of Zimmerman.”

  Pathetic, Diane. I looked at my feet. “God Is. God Isn’t.” A dollhouse, especially one inhabited by a low-rent, dysfunctional family like the Devereux bunch, is one thing, but without my father’s hat, I was lost. Flopping onto the couch, I stared at the ceiling. It’s a big ceiling because our living room, dining room, and kitchen are basically one room. Open concept—who needs walls when you don’t have boundaries? Penn had patched the hole Diane made when she fell through the attic last Christmas, but you could still see an outline over the kitchen table. Our family was almost—but not quite—falling apart. With my brain addled from grief and Clorox fumes, an evil thought began to worm its way into the crimson corridors of my subconscious.11 Now the main character, Aris, had a second motive: revenge.

  6 Historical reference: Diane grew up watching black-and-white fifties reruns featuring physically perfect, well-dressed white middle-class people who talked like this. Intermittent canned laughter cued the audience to perceive the shows as humorous, but the social stereotyping and implied moral code were rigid enough to bring on the cultural revolution of the sixties. Call someone a young lady often enough, and she will end up at an orgy dropping acid. I’m just saying.

  7 Do you want to FaceTime me?

  8 In your opinion.

  9 Not judging, just saying.

  10 I made a B in World History, but it wasn’t wasted on me.

  11 Crimson prose!

  Write a Novel in Thirty Days! warns that two flashbacks in one chapter might kill sales; however, this is my first novel, and I don’t see any way around it.

  FLASHBACK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  It happened on a Wednesday. Diane and I agree that Wednesdays are yellow. My Tuesdays are blue and hers are green, but we both color Sundays black because we feel religiously oppressed. Anyway, on this yellow Wednesday before Christmas break, Diane had to teach, so Penn picked Max and me up from the Lab.

  The Christmas tree he had cut for us that morning was tied down in the bed of the truck. It was a truly yellow Wednesday, with the sun streaming through the windows. Penn was wearing thick boots and an army jacket with Batman stenciled on the back; he smelled like wood.

  Diane was in the attic when we got home, looking for the Christmas tree stand. We dragged the tree into the living room and started chopping off the lower branches with Max’s tomahawk. We could hear Diane’s footsteps as she stomped around over our heads. I kept smelling my hands—Douglas fir. I was thinking about reindeer on the rooftop or something, when suddenly there was a loud thump overhead, followed by a yelp.

  A chunk of plaster landed on the kitchen table, and then Diane’s legs dropped down, dangling through the hole in the ceiling. She had a run in her tights, and one of her shoes was unstrapped but still hanging on her foot. Her dress had caught on something and was bunched up around her hips. That’s all we could see.

  “Hang on!” called Penn. “Is there something you can hold on to up there? A beam?”

  Max was crying. I don’t know if he had plaster in his eyes or if he was just disturbed to see his mother this way. She looked like one of those cartoon ladies that pop out of cakes, but upside d
own. I tried not to laugh.

  “Don’t you laugh when your mother is hanging out of the ceiling,” said Penn, and then of course we were both laughing.

  “It’s not funny!” Max said, glaring at us. He’s a very conventional little boy, and something of a gentleman. “Mom!” he called out. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, honey.”

  “The table is right here, Diane,” said Penn. “Right under your feet.”

  When he reached for her legs to guide her down, his face turned bright red, all the way to the tips of his ears. As I’ve mentioned, Penn doesn’t touch people. The red patches got brighter and brighter as she slid down into his arms. Somehow the dress stayed up in the hole while she shimmied down. Adult Content Alert: She was wearing nothing under the panty hose.

  At that point, Max, who was having an oedipal moment or just feeling especially hyperactive, hurled himself into the kitchen table, knocking it out from under Diane’s feet.

  Penn caught her. From between Diane’s knees, he said, “Aris, get me a chair! You can let go, Diane. I’ve got you.”

  “I’m hanging on,” she said. “I can hang on.”

  With tears streaming down his face, Max picked up the phone. “I’m dialing 411,” he announced.

  “Why is he calling Information?” Penn asked as he lowered Diane to the floor.

  “Max, honey, don’t call anybody,” said Diane. “Stop crying, baby. What’s wrong with him, Aris?”

  “What’s not wrong with Max?”

  “Mom, tell her not to say that!”

  “Oh, here we go,” said Diane, brushing her dress off as she led Max by the arm to the sink. “Thank you, Penn. I don’t know what we would do without you.”

  After that, no one was allowed to go in the attic.

  The next day, when Diane was at work and Penn was in the backyard building something, I climbed onto the wagon in the garage and pulled the string that brings the attic stairs out of the ceiling.

  “We aren’t allowed to go up there,” Max said.

  “No one will find out,” I said. “Take the ladder and pull.”

  “It will fall on me!”

  Max’s company can be more trouble than it’s worth, but I had to bring him with me. For one thing, the attic is a Jungian archetype of higher consciousness. It’s the MIND. Since Diane rules our roost, our attic is her mind. In AA meetings, you always hear that the mind of an alcoholic is a dangerous neighborhood, and you should never go there alone. On a more practical note, maybe, just maybe, Diane had dropped the mad bomber hat in the attic when she put the dollhouse away. Also, if I left Max behind, he would blab.

  “Move it, Max,” I said. “We are going up.” He was apparently paralyzed with indecision, so I grabbed the ladder, snapped it into place, and started climbing.

  As I disappeared through the dark hole, he called out, “What if there’s a ghost up there?”

  Silently, I felt around for the light string.

  “Aris? Are you still up there? Are you dead?”

  “Well, look at that!” I cried as the light snapped on.

  “What? What is it?”

  I waited a moment. I could hear him putting one foot on the first rung of the ladder, taking it off, putting the other foot on, and stepping back down as he weighed the threat of danger against the possibility of delight.

  “Oh my,” I said. “I never imagined that would be here!”

  The ladder creaked under his weight. “Is it something of mine?”

  “My goodness,” I said.

  His head poked through the hole. “Is my tomahawk up here?”

  We found his old Thomas the Tank Engine train set, all sealed up in Bubble Wrap. Diane had kept the “nice” toys, things bought from catalogs that we might pass on to our own children, but the stuff dear to his heart––the broken cassette tape he’d found in the gutter, the carefully preserved bones of a squirrel, the lemon-juice-powered robot made of curlers that never quite worked, and the tomahawk, which Diane had always said was too dangerous for a child of Max’s temperament––were all gone.

  My dollhouse was Bubble-Wrapped too. Mrs. Devereux, her lovers, Leonard and Cynthia (hidden in the dollhouse attic for years!), and their odd assortment of children were packed in boxes, lying side by side in corpse poses, as if they had been gassed. Apparently, Mr. Devereux was still off on his drinking spree. Through the wavy bubbles of my cherished bay window, I could see the loaves of bread I had made from the PCB-streaked clay in the backyard, still cooling on the kitchen table. We were in a holocaust.

  “Do you think my rock collection is up here?” Poor Max was on his knees, digging through a box of tissue-wrapped Christmas tree ornaments. His tongue stuck out the corner of his mouth as he concentrated on his search. “It’s got to be in here somewhere.” He ripped the tissue off a blown-glass reindeer and tossed it aside. “I just know it.”

  How could I tell him that our mother wouldn’t save his rocks? She wouldn’t even throw them back in the yard. I knew from experience that rock collections went in the trash. I mean, really, how can you throw the earth away, Diane? I kicked a few lampshades over, looking for my mad bomber hat, but my heart wasn’t in it. I didn’t want to think about my dead father or crazy mother, or everything a person could lose.

  “Let’s play Anne Frank,” I said. “I’m Anne.”

  When I started stacking boxes to make a bookcase for the annex, Max looked up from his pile of Christmas ornaments. A piece of Bubble Wrap sat on top of his head like a cap. There was a white spot of toothpaste on his shirt, in the same spot it lands every morning when he brushes his teeth. I couldn’t bear the thought of the German soldiers stomping up the ladder in their heavy black boots and taking him.

  “I don’t want to scare you,” I said, not sure yet which character he was going to be, “but the SS is outside. They’re putting the Jews in the back of a truck and driving them off to a concentration camp.”

  “Are we Jews?” he whispered back, his eyes big.

  “Yes, we are.” I decided to write him into the story as Anne’s little brother because I really couldn’t see him as Papa, Peter van Daan, or that nasty old dentist. “You’re Anne’s little brother, Hans. It’s World War II, and we are a family of Jews hiding in an attic from the Gestapo.”

  “I want to be a soldier.”

  “The Jews aren’t soldiers. They’re victims.”

  That didn’t sit well with him. Diane is always telling us to reframe our personal narratives so that we are the heroes and not the victims. Dr. Dhang gave her a worksheet.

  “I don’t want to play,” said Max, stomping his foot dangerously close to a patch of cotton-candy-colored insulation. “I want to go back in the house and teach Lucky how to sit. Mom got some dog treats.”

  I could tell he was starting to miss Diane, but then he remembered that she had thrown out his rock collection. I saw the tantrum coming on like a storm, the collision of warm air and cold air, the faint swirl of that ole black twister rising in his little-person soul.

  “My rock collection is gone!” he yelled. “Gone forever! She threw it away!”

  Brothers! I was crawling to the imaginary window to see if the little Dutch girl had found a blackened hand with her father’s ring on it, when I saw Diane’s journals. There they were, still wrapped up in that plastic bag, all seven of them. I took one out and opened it.

  GROCERY

  Soy milk

  Fake meat (2)

  Spinach

  Eggplant

  Dog toothpaste

  Marshmallows ok maybe?

  Coffee (FIND COUPON!!!!)

  Nicotine gum (2 mg 4 mg)

  TO DO—URGENT!!!!

  1. Grade student papers. Power sandwich: Positive statement—the negative punch—positive statement.

  2. Brush Lucky’s and Hiroshima’s teeth.

  3. Find out what smells in the car.

  4. Pay bills. Postdate.

  5. Do something with the eggplant or thro
w it out.

  6. Call school photographer and ask for a do-over—WHY DID YOU PART MAX’S HAIR IN THE MIDDLE, YOU IDIOT!!!!

  7. Reschedule missed orthodontist appointments—two.

  8. Get oil changed. TELL THEM TO SCREW THE CAP ON TIGHTER. Ask Penn to see if any oil is left in the engine.

  Max looked over my shoulder. “Is that Mom’s journal? You’re not supposed to read that, Aris. You’ll get in trouble.”

  His breath was warm on my neck, but I knew he wasn’t reading the words. So far, Max has only read two books in his life: Little Bird, Biddle Bird, a baby book that I remember Diane reading to me through the bars of my chicken crate, and one of Joe’s books, a thick hardback titled Vietnam––The True Story. Max alternates reading these two books, repeatedly marking the titles and authors on the reading chart he has to fill out for the Lab every week. So far, none of the teachers have succeeded in expanding his reading list.

  Each time he finishes reading Little Bird, Biddle Bird, he cries. It’s not his emo12 wail, or the howl of physical pain, which Penn calls “Jake Brake on Ice,” or even his baby boohoo. He cries silently for Little Bird, Biddle Bird, hiding his face behind his arm, trying to make his sniffle sound like the symptom of a common cold. “I’m crying tears of joy,” he explained once.

  He has a completely different experience with Vietnam––The True Story.

  When he comes to the last page, he leans back, crosses one leg over the other exactly the way Joe used to do, and says, “You know, we shouldn’t have fought that war.” Diane thinks this is amazing because he never saw Joe cross his legs like that, never saw Joe at all. I’m like, Duh, Joe is still here.

  “What does the diary say?” Max asked.

  “She’s overwhelmed. As usual.”

  “Is it my fault?”

  “Don’t try to make this about you.”

  “It’s always my fault. There should have just been one kid. Just you. I’m too much trouble.”