How to Write a Novel

by Melanie Sumner

  “Yo!” he yelled in the doorway. “Anybody home?”

  The hallway filled with the light scent of his cigarette smoke and brilliant rays of yellow light. Diane had skipped work again. I was trying not to track her 5.5 absences and 2 tardies, but grading her papers puts me in teacher mode. Perhaps she was edging toward a new career as a trophy wife? As she greeted Penn, standing in that awkward space where southerners usually hug, Penn looked her up and down. I went to my room so they could have some privacy, in case they wanted to start a romance. According to my outline of the novel, if a romance was going to blossom, they needed to get on it.

  While I was letting that happen, I crawled under my bed to do some research. Kate had suggested the under-the-bed office as a temporary measure, until my executive suite on top of the new playhouse was ready for occupancy. Since Kate shares a bedroom with her sister, she has innovative ideas about creating personal space.

  It was a tight fit, but since Diane had cleaned all my junk out, I was able to squeeze under the bed with enough room to lift the cover of my laptop. Resting on my elbows, I managed to type. A headlamp gave me plenty of light, and the dust ruffle provided privacy.

  The small space of wall behind the bed frame held the motivational sticky notes that the author of Write a Novel in Thirty Days! suggests for a writer’s bulletin board in an exercise called “Remember the Why.” You might think it’s easy to remember why you are writing your novel, but it’s not. Diane says it’s like remembering why you married your spouse.

  Sticky note #1: I am writing this novel to circumvent the bother and expense of therapy.

  Sticky note #2: I am writing this novel to make money so Diane can retire, Max can go to camp, and I can chill.

  Sticky note #3: I am writing this novel in case things don’t work out with Diane and Penn—maybe somebody else will notice her.

  Beneath the “bulletin board” sat the stack of journals I was using for research. What! Cat out of the bag. Yesterday, when I was alone in the house for twenty minutes, I snuck back into the attic and swiped Diane’s journals. I knew it was wrong, but my shadow side overtook my common sense and respect for the personal property of others. Anyway, the best fiction is based on research.

  I tried to stop reading them. I’d tell myself, Just one more page, and then I’ll put them back. Then I’d read another one, and another. I was an egg-sucking dog looking down the barrel of a shotgun. Sometimes the Ghost of Dad would appear, flicking a light switch, playing a song on my phone, but what could he do? I learned more and more about him.

  A LIST OF THINGS THAT REMIND ME OF JOE

  Jazz

  Aaron Neville

  French, especially Cajun French

  The smell of garlic, onions, and green peppers on the stove

  The red flag flapping at the end of a pine on a logging truck

  Snow cones

  Car wrecks

  Handsome men with broken noses

  The mad bomber hat

  Aris and Max

  How thoughtful of her to mention the offspring. Thanks for the shout-out, Diane. I couldn’t forgive her for getting rid of the hat. I tried. My enlightened self said, These memories bring her pain. She wants to let go of the pain. My shadow self said, That was a stupid way to do it. You should have had all your stupid moments before turning thirty.

  She wrote a poem about the red flag on the logging trucks, “Death in Northwest Georgia.”

  It killed him.

  Made me stronger.

  Strong as a semi barreling logs up the pass.

  The wind whistles right through me;

  My red flag flaps.

  Rain, mud, endless pines.

  We’re making paper, clearing a view.

  How else can a dead man and a strong woman

  Keep the family together?

  Joe was never weak. He used to hold his arm straight out, like a tree branch, and I’d swing on it, do a little flip. I wasn’t allowed to see his corpse. They called it “the body,” as if it now belonged to everybody. I saw a lump covered with a sheet on the side of the road, briefly lit by a flashlight reflecting off the snow. After that, Diane told me, the body went to a refrigerated room, even though we were in Alaska. Later, it traveled in a temperature-controlled container to Kanuga, Georgia. There, it was burned.

  Grandma and Papa said this was a waste of money. If they had known Diane wanted to cremate the body, it would have been much cheaper to transport ashes. Diane said she told them, but they wouldn’t listen. Montgomerys don’t like cremation. People want to see the body, they insist, unless it’s—well—disfigured. Joe was disfigured, a little bit, but Wallace Smithson, down at the Smithson Brothers Funeral Home, could have done something. Used makeup and whatnot. Formaldehyde. Hair spray. Wallace did a good job, the grandparents said. They had seen his work.

  Diane said they should have just had the funeral in Valdez.

  No, no, no! said Grandma and Papa. They didn’t know anybody up there. That godforsaken place! Anyway, they were paying for it. Papa said he didn’t mind paying for it. “We are happy to help,” said Grandma, “but everyone in Kanuga wants to see you and your family at the funeral. It’s the least you could do.”

  Joe’s family was Catholic, but Papa said that having a priest at the funeral might offend the Baptists. “We could have a priest and the Baptist minister perform the service,” suggested Papa. “Would Joe be okay with that compromise?” He suggested they take turns conducting the service.

  Diane blinked at him. She was ginormous, carrying Max. She couldn’t even touch her feet; Papa had to cut her toenails for her. When we went out, with me holding her hand tight so she wouldn’t disappear like Joe, men rushed to hold the door open wide for us. Then they edged away, as if she might birth a baby in front of them. Her eyes were empty, just holes in her head. “Joe couldn’t care less,” she said. “He wouldn’t even come to this funeral if we didn’t carry him in a pot.”

  She picked out the cheapest urn, $495.00, but it was the one I liked best, black marble, with a swirl of gray that made me think of a spirit. At the funeral, there was no pastor, no priest. Instead, a Creek medicine man Diane had found on the Internet burned braids of sweetgrass and prayed for Joe’s transition into the spirit world. “The spirit is the hand inside the glove,” said the Creek, who called himself John Red Fox, “and the glove is gone.” John Red Fox had red hair. Grandma said that Diane always gets her way, but she admitted that it was an interesting service. All of Kanuga turned out for it.

  When Papa brought the urn to our house, filled with Joe’s ashes, he rang the doorbell. He wouldn’t carry it inside. “You need to do this,” he said, handing it to Diane. “It’s not that heavy.” So she carried Joe over the threshold, the way Joe had carried her when they got married.

  Papa and Grandma couldn’t convince her to bury the urn. “We aren’t staying in Kanuga,” Diane said. “I don’t want to leave him here.” They went yadda yadda yadda, but she said, “Nope. We don’t belong here. We’re moving.”

  That was eight years ago. The urn still sits in the same place on our mantel, another thing to be dusted. Sometimes I gaze into the swirl of gray spirit, wondering, Where’s the hand?

  I thought it would be a good idea for Diane and Penn to share their love histories with each other. I knew from experience with Billy that you have to do this carefully. Revealing some information about your romantic past is tantalizing; too much is fuel for future fights.

  That afternoon the three of us were taking our coffee break on the back porch while Max practiced an act on the trampoline for the talent show. We had explained that he could not put a trampoline on the small stage at Lavender Mountain Laboratory School, but he refused to listen.

  “Dude!” called Penn. “That somersault ain’t gonna turn into a flip. You’ve got to jump high!”

  “I’m scared,” Max wailed.

  “Do it anyway. You’ll feel better about yourself.”

  “Dude, you can
do this,” Max told himself as he started jumping again. “Dude, this is so easy.”

  He jumped high, bent his head forward, lifted his knees, then chickened out and did a somersault. When he got off the trampoline and came to the porch, he explained, “There was a caterpillar on the trampoline, and my foot slipped on it.”

  “Must have been a cold caterpillar,” said Penn, “out here in February. Was it wearing a fuzzy little sweater?”

  “Maybe it was ice,” said Max.

  “Ice,” said Penn, smiling at Diane. “You’ve got to admire the dogged persistence in his denial of reality. That’s a talent.”

  “It is a little chilly,” said Diane. She was wearing a low-cut long-sleeved T-shirt, so thin that you could clearly see the outline of her bra. Definitely in find-a-friend mode. When she crossed her arms over her chest and shivered, Penn had the perfect opportunity to put his arm around her, but he missed it.

  I sent Billy a selfie of myself drinking coffee, but he didn’t respond. This was becoming a pattern. I’d send him a gazillion texts in one day and get nothing back. The next day, I’d text:

  Was it something I said? Where r u? Did ur fingers freeze?

  I’m not a stalker or anything, but he was posting basketball scores on Facebook, so obviously the boy was still kicking. Eventually, I’d break down and send him a long email explaining my feelings. Since Billy never remembers to check his email, that’s basically like putting a letter in a bottle and throwing it out to sea. Finally, I’d message him on Facebook. Somehow that always feels lame to me. It’s like, I know you’re on here interacting with all of your other friends, so you have to acknowledge my existence. Then he’d message back that he lost his cellphone again, and oh yeah, he forgot to check his email.

  “Billy isn’t answering you,” said Max as he leaned over my shoulder.

  “Thank you for that news alert.”

  “Aris,” said Diane. She was measuring creamer into her coffee with a teaspoon, and cheating.

  “I’m busy,” I said, staring at my screen.

  “I know it’s old-school, but men like to chase women.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “It might be genetic,” she said. “The way dogs chase cats. You never see cats chase dogs.” She measured a third teaspoon of creamer into the coffee, stirred it, stared at it, and then splashed more into the cup without the bothersome spoon. “You want to make him wonder,” she said.

  “There are boy cats,” Max pointed out.

  “Thanks for the advice,” I said. “I’ll go act on it now.” I stood up, ready to hunt down some personal space, but suddenly I saw my opportunity and sat back down.

  “Did Joe chase you?” I asked Diane.

  She smiled. Max and I love the story of how she met our dad, and Diane loves to tell it. “I was living in Provincetown, Massachusetts …”

  “And she met the other straight person,” suggested Penn. “I’ve heard of that place. Don’t they have the Gay Policeman’s Ball there?”

  “I didn’t see him at first. Maybe I did—he was so handsome—but yeah, Penn is right. You just assume that everyone in P-town is gay. He told me later that he followed me home, five blocks in the rain. “I was wearing green wellies and carrying this huge broken umbrella I found in my landlord’s house. He said he wanted to know if I was a crazy person.”

  “Conclusion?” asked Penn.

  “It was a legitimate concern,” said Diane. “There are several borderlines in P-town. My landlord had a God complex. He had long white hair, a long white beard, and wore long white robes. He kept my deposit.”

  “Three months later … ,” I prompted.

  “That was in January? In March, I was sitting in an AA meeting when I looked across the circle and saw Joe. He was so handsome with that dark wavy hair, a scruffy beard, big, dark eyes. Definitely some Cajun there.”

  I glanced nervously at Penn: bald. He didn’t look jealous, though, just interested.

  “I looked at Joe and thought, if I were going to marry someone, it would be that guy. I knew. There was something about him, the way he carried himself. He listened with his entire body, taking everything in, but he was also poised to move. He was fast. Oh, that grin! He had a great sense of humor. Once, after we were married, Grandma and Papa came to Alaska to visit us. We were standing on a glacier, and Grandma looked around and said, ‘This doesn’t even look real.’

  “Your father looked her in the eye and said, ‘It’s not.’ ”

  “You knew at first sight that you were going to marry him,” I said, and sighed.

  “No,” she said. “I was actually engaged to some poor sod, still wearing his ring, but I was about to cut loose. I wasn’t planning to marry anybody; I was done with men. When I saw Joe across the room—it was as if I knew him. We went to a coffee shop, a tiny, crowded place where your knees touched the knees of other customers as you hunched over your coveted little table. We drank coffee with cream and sugar. We ate pie. We talked. We smoked. We talked and talked and talked. Somehow, we had known each other before, loved each other before.”

  “The next day, you moved in with him,” I concluded.

  “We waited a week,” she said primly. “My landlord, God, evicted me, and I had nowhere else to go. Joe lived in an attic over his uncle’s Greek restaurant. There were beautiful windows in that attic. The day before I moved in, Joe tied a rope to his waist and scaled the building to wash the windows. The light always changes in P-town—that’s why artists go there. When the sun was bright, it sparkled through those windows, and on gray days, you could almost see the clouds roll across the floor. We left the windows open all the time. The air smelled of sea salt and basil and garlic. I can see him in that apartment in his faded khaki shorts, shirtless and tanned. Sometimes he climbed onto the roof and played ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’ on his old King sax.”

  She tried to hum the tune, but poor Diane can’t even hum. To our surprise, Penn sang a snippet, in perfect key:

  Grab your coat and grab your hat, baby

  Leave your worries on the doorstep

  He gave us an embarrassed grin. “My mother liked that song,” he said. “Sang it to me in the cradle.”

  “So, Penn,” I said, WITH STUDIED CASUALNESS. “How about you? Have you ever fallen in love at first sight?”

  I had caught him off guard. For one second, I thought he was going to talk. He scratched his head, looking pensively into the distance. He opened his mouth. Then, suddenly, he stood up.

  “Max,” he said, “fetch me that broom. It’s time for you to watch me sweep out some wood shavings.”

  Later, as he swept, I heard him softly singing the rest of the song to himself.

  15 Imagine this in red ink.

  In response to the KCC form requesting a signed statement from faculty agreeing to refrain from consuming alcoholic beverages in public, to set “the example of clean Christian living,” Diane scribbled, “I’m allergic to alcohol. When I drink it, I break out in jail.”

  “Mom, don’t say that!” Max wailed when he saw the paper on the kitchen table. His ears looked large and pink, the way they do when he has a fresh haircut. “Just say, ‘Okay.’ If they fire you, we won’t have any money!”

  You might think that a young child with such concern for the family coffer (am I rocking these vocab words or what?) had great financial ambitions for himself, but whenever people ask Max what he wants to be when he grows up, he says, “A hobo.” He’s not kidding. He has his spot picked out in Central Plaza, next to an outdoor electrical socket where he can plug in his Game Boy. It’s right in front of Domino’s Pizza, so when money gets tight, as it tends to do when you’re a hobo, he can deliver pizzas and eat the leftovers.

  Normally, we eat at Domino’s with Grandma and Papa on Friday evenings, but they were in the mountains with a group of friends who called themselves the EZers. These septuagenarians shared the philosophy that the hard part of life was over for them. When they got together, they laz
ed around, laughing at the work they refused to do. So this Friday, Diane would have to pick up the check. Since Diane had been smarting off to KCC about their new rules, Max and I were worried, but neither one of us could muster the maturity to say we didn’t want to go out for pizza. We love pizza!

  Raising a Happy Child in an Unhappy World advises parents that children should never have to worry about money. It makes us feel insecure. Diane hasn’t gotten to that chapter yet because every time she picks up the book, she starts all over again with the prologue––she loves beginnings. She’s also a fan of affirmations. The sticky note on the visor over the steering wheel reads, “I am sailing on the river of wealth.” When I started to worry about the price of dinner, I reminded myself that first-time authors often become millionaires. Several cases are cited in Write a Novel in Thirty Days!

  As we strolled past Max’s hobo camp in Central Plaza, I adjusted Diane’s green poncho so it would hang straight. Penn hadn’t come out to dinner with us because, of course, he doesn’t eat, but it’s important for a single woman to look her best at all times. I had my heart set on Penn, but a little competition never hurts.

  Unfortunately, there was no competition at the Kanuga Domino’s that evening.

  I sent Billy a selfie.

  “Nope, no reply,” said Max, peering at my screen.

  “Quit leaning on me, Max. Diane, please make him sit in his chair.”

  “Sit,” Diane said. She handed him her phone with instructions not to download the gun app. He had recently found an iPhone app that turns a cellphone into a gun. Every time he got his hands on a phone, he was armed. If I hadn’t been busy watching my own cellphone for a text from Billy, I would have lectured him on the power of nonviolence. Last year, I memorized Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

  I have a strong memory, which is both a blessing and a curse. It’s wonderful because I never have to study. Everything that enters my brain stays there. The downside is that I can’t forget anything. Memories flutter around my brain with the damned persistence of moths on a lamp. Sometimes entire pages of Diane’s journals flash back to me, unbidden. For example, I might look at a pizza menu and see this: