How to Write a Novel

by Melanie Sumner

  “Repeat after me, Max. I am not the belly button of the universe.”

  He gave me a baffled, hurt look and then bellowed, “I’m emo!” Then he began stabbing an umbrella into the pink insulation.

  “Stop it! If you knock that through the ceiling, Penn will know we were up here.”

  “I don’t care! Mom doesn’t love us anymore! She hates us! That’s why she got rid of our toys. Just THREW them out. I wish she had died instead of my dad.” Then the tears came. His button nose turned pink. He squinched his eyes as he squeaked out, “Huh-huh, huh-huh, huh-huh-huh,” at an ear-splitting volume.

  “I’m warning you,” I said, stretching out on my divan with the journal. “The Gestapo will hear you.” While he (conveniently) turned himself into a statue, barely breathing, I flipped through the diary until I came to an interesting page. Diane, apparently instructed by a self-help book to make a list of positive statements about herself, had written: Two men have told me that I’m the best lay they ever had.

  I don’t want to shock anybody, but I come from a long line of Calvinist preachers. To be perfectly honest—and given my background, how could I be anything else?—I’m not exactly sure what a Calvinist is, but I know it’s hard-core. Papa’s grandfather and his grandfather were Calvinist preachers. Grandma’s side of the family is a little shadier, but she says nobody drank in front of people. They both agree, whenever Diane snags a man from Match.com, that I am at an impressionable age and shouldn’t see bad examples. In other words (ahem, Diane), why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?

  I’m actually fine with Diane having sex. Most of my friends say they cannot imagine their parents having sex. It really grosses them out, but Diane, well—it’s not too hard to imagine. And don’t think I don’t know when she sneaks around the corner of the house with Penn to smoke a cigarette. I know every single time. I’ve put my foot down. Wheedled for three days straight until she swore she’d never do it again. Right now there’s a sticky-note affirmation attached to her box of nicotine gum that says, “I am a contented nonsmoker.”

  I flipped through the journals. She wrote a lot of lists. We are all OCD in my family, but in different ways. With Diane, it’s lists. If the house caught on fire, she’d sit down and make a list of what to do.

  DREAMS I SHARE WITH ARIS

  1. We are calling Joe on the phone and get the wrong number.

  2. We are in my parents’ house and discover a doorway leading to a luxurious mansion they know about but never use.

  3. A pedophile kidnaps Max, and we chase him.

  4. We are late for school so many times that Aris is suspended. In my dream, I’m mad because I can’t afford to pay someone to stay home with her. In her dream, since I can’t afford child care, she takes herself to England. In England, she becomes the queen.

  Suddenly, BANG! Something hit the attic floor from below. Max and I looked at each other, and then I grabbed him.

  BANG! BAM! BAM! BAM!

  “It’s the Gestapo!” screamed Max. “They’re shooting at us!” He held me around the waist, crying, “Help me! Someone help me, please!”

  “Shh,” I whispered. “Listen.”

  For a moment, there was no sound but our breathing. Thenheavy boot steps tromped up the wooden ladder. I could feel Max’s heart pounding into my chest, hitting against my own heart.

  Suddenly, the faded green bill of Penn’s cap appeared at the top of the ladder. He held a broom in one hand.

  “What are y’all doing up here?”

  “We’re playing Anne Frank,” I said.

  “She made me,” said Max.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Come down for a minute and tell me what you think of this playhouse I’m putting up.”13

  Is “the nick of time” a cliché? Diane says that if you need to ask, it probably is. Anyway, Penn got us out of the attic in the nick of time. As soon as he snapped the attic ladder into the ceiling, the garage door opened. Diane had come home early from work. and the car’s headlights illuminated the dark corner of the garage where the three of us stood with our hands in our pockets like deer caught in the headlights. That is definitely a cliché. You can see how this works. You let one innocuous cliché slip under the fence, and here come its friends and relatives like a herd of elephants.

  Diane opened the window of the car and called out, “Hey—what are y’all doing in the garage?”

  Without missing a beat, Penn said that we were looking for some lumber to build a playhouse. I had butterflies in my stomach, but I smiled like the cat who has swallowed the canary and waited with bated breath for Max to blow our cover to kingdom come.

  “We’re building a playhouse!” Max exclaimed. “How come nobody told me?”

  “I believe I was asked to do an intervention,” said Penn. “For a cleaning binge?” He put finger quotes around “cleaning binge” before he looked at me. “Old stuff goes out, new stuff comes in.” Max and I rushed at him with our arms out, but he stepped back to avoid the attempted hug. “It was your mother’s idea.”

  Diane smiled and pushed her bangs out of her eyes. It was time for a trim, but our new budget stretched the time between salon visits. Diane calls the salon “the beauty parlor” and would rather go to the dentist. She doesn’t like being touched by strangers and making small talk because she sucks at it. After a silence that has sent the hair stylist into desperation for any conversation at all, she’ll mention that her husband died three months before Max was born. The stylist will go clip, snip, clip, snip while expressing her shock and horror, but before she can whip out the blow-dryer, Diane will ask why we cover dead bodies with sheets. The human is dead. What else can happen? So what if a fly lands on a nose?

  “I don’t think I’d like flies all over me,” the stylist might say, in a voice not meant to encourage further speculation, but Diane can’t stop.

  Why are bodies put in the basements of hospitals and not on the top floors? Why are funeral homes single-story structures with rooms below the ground? In the big mirror, she will meet the baffled gaze of the stylist. Before the merciful blast of the hair dryer, she will ask, “What are we trying to hide?”

  Mostly, I do Diane’s hair.

  Now, as she got out of the car with a bulging bag slung across her chest, a coffee cup tucked under her arm, a notebook in one hand, and keys in the other, I noted that her bun had worked its way out of the bobby pins. Or she’d pulled them out. At least once a week I have to explain that the style is hair that looks messy, not hair that actually is messy. She doesn’t see the difference.

  Penn already had the door to the kitchen open for her, his hand outstretched to take a bag.

  “I’m just home for a few minutes,” Diane said as she closed the car door with her hip. “I gave my students an in-class reading assignment.”

  We followed her into the kitchen. The manic postflood cleanup had trimmed a couple of inches off her waist, and in the purge she’d found an outfit in the back of her closet that didn’t scream, I AM AN ANDROGYNOUS MIDDLE-AGED TEACHER. PLEASE IGNORE ME. She wore black tights and a short black skirt with black boots and a cream-colored sweater. Did I see Penn cast an appreciative glance?

  I made a mental note to write down a list of ways I could get him to ask Diane out on a date. Of course, she could ask him out, but despite the fact that she actually taught a course in feminist literature called Not Chick Lit, she is old-fashioned.

  Diane dumped her stuff on the table, blew her bangs out of her eyes, and looked around the kitchen to see if we had messed it up. We hadn’t, so she smiled.

  “We’ve cleaned up, Penn,” she said. “What do you think?”

  “It looks nice,” he said evenly. Penn has good home training.

  “Nice and neat like a graveyard,” I suggested.

  “She got rid of my Dum Dum wrapper collection and my rock collection and Aris’s mad bomber hat,” said Max. He grimaced at Diane and added, “She has been skipping school.”

  �
�I’d have to take a week off from work to think about that statement of faith they’re making the faculty sign at KCC,” said Penn. “I read about that in the paper.” He turned to Diane. “Are they going to make you say you’re a Baptist before you can teach?”

  “Well … ,” said Diane. “I haven’t seen the form yet—maybe just a Christian?”

  “That is bullshit,” said Penn.

  “It’s just a piece of paper,” she said. “It’s a job. I’m not selling my soul.”

  “You sort of are,” I said, then quickly added, “But you need a job.”

  “Can you still live without a soul—if you sell it?” asked Max. He put his arms around Diane. “Don’t die.”

  “Let’s look at the proposed site for the playhouse,” said Penn, who avoids discussions of souls.

  As we followed him outside, Max suggested that Penn live in the playhouse. “I could bring you breakfast,” he said. I suggested building an office for me on the second floor—perhaps in the tower—while Max insisted on a drawbridge. “I’ve got an idea,” he said, trying and failing to snap his fingers. “We can put some small alligators—very small—in the moat!”

  “How much do you think this will cost?” Diane asked Penn. “I can’t afford to buy a lot of lumber.”

  “Nobody buys lumber for playhouses,” said Penn. “These are built with the wood that falls off the truck. However, I could turn the shed into a playhouse. That would be easy.”

  “My father would have a fit,” said Diane. “He would say, ‘Where will you put the lawn mower?’ ”

  “In the garage,” said Penn.

  “He would say, ‘You can’t put a lawn mower in the garage. That’s a fire hazard!’ ”

  “It’s your call,” said Penn. He tapped his measuring tape. “I’m just here to build.”

  We took turns holding the measuring tape while Penn stretched it across the shed walls. Diane leaned over his shoulder as he scribbled indecipherable numbers on the back of an envelope. After a while, Max was beginning to get nervous. “Mom,” he said, “shouldn’t you go back to work? How long can your students read by themselves?”

  “Depends on the assignment,” said Penn. He lit a cigarette, turning his shoulder so the smoke wouldn’t blow our way. “Who’s that French fellow who wrote down every little thing that crossed his mind while he was in a cork-lined room?”

  “Marcel Proust,” said Diane.

  “Have your students get started on volume one of that shit. Didn’t he write six volumes?”

  “A la recherche du temps perdu,” said Diane. “Remembrance of Things Past. I read some of it in college. He could have used an editor. You might be interested in his ideas about time and space. Some people say that the books are written in the fourth dimension.”

  “Mom, don’t start talking,” said Max. Taking her wrist in his hands, he looked at her watch. “You need to go back to school. Your students might tell on you.”

  “Yes, sweetheart, I’m on my way.” As we headed back toward the house, she said, “When he was a child, Marcel was afraid to go to bed because he lost his orientation of time and space when he slept. You know how you wake up and don’t know where you are or what time it is? His parents got him a projector, the magic lantern. It flashed scenes from stories on the walls of his bedroom. The magic lantern increased his confusion and fear, but it led to his conviction of nonlinear time, nontangential space. Sometimes a sight or a smell can jettison you into a different reality where you inhabit different places at the same time. It was published in 1913.”

  “That’s around the time Einstein developed the theory of relativity,” said Penn. “So he’s exploring the idea of non-Euclidean geometry?”

  Diane shrugged.

  “She doesn’t do math,” I told Penn.

  “He was criticized for his writing; it’s all digression, but that was his point. He said everything was happening at the same time.”

  “That’s like our house,” said Max. He was walking in a circle, trying to snap his fingers. “We’re in the fourth dimension.”

  “Speaking of dimensions,” said Penn, pulling out his scrap of calculations, “I plan to keep the exterior walls of the shed and build up to add a room for Aris’s office. Cheaper to build up.”

  “This is starting to sound expensive—” Diane began, but Penn cocked his head and looked at her just a second too long, and she actually blushed. He leaned against the porch railing with one leg propped up against the wall of the house, rolling a cigarette on his thigh.

  “Strictly community service for me,” he said. “Repayment for my sins against society.”

  “What sins?” asked Max.

  “I’ll tell you later,” said Penn. “It might take a while.”

  Awkward silence.

  “Oh shit,” said Diane. “I forgot about those papers I have to grade. I meant to do that during the class break.” She unlocked her phone and then scrolled through her to-do list app. “There’s too much going on.”

  “Let me grade them,” I said. “Please! I know how to—”

  “I can’t snap!” wailed Max. “I was going to snap to ‘Laffy Taffy’ in the talent show. I don’t have a talent!”

  “Excuse you,” I said. “You have a talent for interrupting people.”

  Max threw a modified (out of respect for Penn) temper tantrum, screwing up his face as he stomped his feet and flailed his arms in silence.

  “You could dance at the talent show,” said Diane. “You can make a costume for it.”

  Max stopped jumping and huffed, “You threw all my costume stuff away when you cleaned up. You got rid of everything so we could be simple, and now you’re going to get fired. My life is over. It was so short!”

  “I’m not going to get fired,” said Diane, watching Penn amble across the yard with his tape measure, “but I could use some help. After you finish your homework, I have a small job for you and Aris.”

  “You’re going to let me grade papers?” I asked hopefully as we followed her into the house. But no, she had sold some of our books to people on the Internet. We were to put these books, tagged with color-coded sticky notes, into pre-addressed mailers.

  “It will be fun,” she said brightly, and I felt a headache coming on. “I have to get back to class.” She glanced at her watch and mumbled to herself, “They’ll leave when the bell rings.”

  “I’ll grade your papers,” I said. “Ten dollars a page.”

  Diane hesitated. “You shouldn’t even be reading my students’ work.… Anyway, I need you to work on the mailers. We have customers waiting for those books.”

  I picked up a book with Mary Anne Timmerman’s name printed across a pink sticky note. Chop Wood, Carry Water. Inside the cover, an inscription read, To Diane with Love from Joe. The light bulb in the lamp beside me sizzled and went out.

  “I just put a new light bulb in that lamp,” said Diane. “What is wrong with this house?”

  “I’ll change it,” said Penn, who had just walked in with the stub of pencil over one ear. “You didn’t get rid of the spare light bulbs, I hope.”

  We go through a twelve-pack of light bulbs every month, because, duh, our house is haunted. “Diane is going to let me grade some papers for her,” I said boldly. “Five dollars a page. Maybe I can buy a new hat.”

  “Desperate times call for child labor,” said Penn.

  “Okay,” said Diane, with a big sigh. “Two dollars a page, but I have to double-check your work.” As she zipped around the kitchen, looking for something to throw on the table before she returned to her evening class, she said, “Put Charles’s paper on top of the stack. I want to leave comments.”

  Max was in the rocking chair, going about sixty miles per hour. Joe and Diane built that chair in Alaska, before I was born. Once or twice a year, Penn glues the runners back on, because Max rocks them off. Penn was telling him that there would be no mollycoddling the next time he broke them, when Diane got a phone call.

  “No, I ha
ven’t signed it yet,” she was saying. “I’m thinking about it.” She held the phone between her shoulder and ear, scowling. “I don’t see it as an issue of cooperation,” she said. “It wasn’t in my contract.” After she hung up, she looked out the window and said, “They are serious about this statement of faith. They want to talk to me about it.”

  I started to feel sorry for her, but then I thought about my mad bomber hat. You shouldn’t have done that, I said silently to her back. You shouldn’t have tried to erase my dad. A playhouse, even with an office for me on the second floor, won’t change what you did. I knew if she turned around and I saw her face, I would cry.

  “Just say okay,” said Max.

  “Do you realize how nonconformist it is for you to be a conformist in this family?” I asked him.

  “Society honors its live conformists and dead troublemakers,” said Penn. “So everybody gets a reward.”

  Diane took a deep breath, straightened her shoulders, and faced us with a brave smile.

  “I’m a troublemaker myself,” said Penn.

  “Me too,” she said.

  “Give me your hand.”

  “What?”

  “Come here,” he said. “Give me your hand.” He took her small hand in his large one and spread her fingers out as he studied her palm. I was like, Oh my God, Penn is touching another human being. He is touching my mother.

  “What are you doing, Penn?”

  “I was looking for a stigmata,” he said. “I thought maybe you could just show them that instead of signing the statement.”

  I forget that Diane is actually a small person until I see her standing beside a man. She didn’t look old anymore, just flustered. Even her hair looked flustered. There were big red spots on her cheeks. Sometimes she looks nothing like a teacher.

  “I’ve got this,” said Penn. “I’ll pour the feed.” He held the door open for her. “We’ll see you when you get back.”

  Having papers to grade was an excellent excuse for leaving Penn responsible for both the kitchen and the child. I went into my room with the stack of bombastic, pleonastic, palaverous, magniloquent, grandiloquent, tedious,14 big-talking, and really boring expositions for the persuasive essay assignment. I was persuaded of nothing until I read Charles’s essay—thank God, he had ignored the topic. I read eagerly.