by Marlene Lee
But Rebecca veered off toward the bathroom. Behind the double swinging doors, over a sink stained brown from iron deposits, she placed a cough drop in her mouth, closed her eyes, and began to practice the deep breathing exercise her doctor had recommended. Breathe. Hold. One, two, three. Slowly fighting her way up through the syrup of anxiety, she lifted her head. The cough drop clicked against her back teeth.
“I’ll enroll in anything,” she whispered to her reflection, “if they’ll give me a room.”
***
It was a writers’ conference. She’d never heard of such a thing, but she signed a check drawn on her inheritance funds and was directed to a room on the second story of a stone dormitory. Crossing its dark interior courtyard, she suddenly stopped, frightened again by her own action: traveling across the country, searching for a life now that Mother was gone. She should have stayed at home on the orchard north of Sacramento, safe and comfortable, sleeping late, shopping, going to the movies, as she had done for fifty years.
What could have possessed her to drive three thousand miles, only to find herself blundering into a building that meant nothing to her?
What could have possessed her to fritter away fifty years?
She stepped up through the stairwell to the balcony overlooking the courtyard and carried her suitcase to a plain room with an open closet and no dressing table: a room without comfort. The damp breeze blowing in through the window screen could not dry the rainwater on the sill, the single bulb could not light the room. She opened the door to the bathroom and snapped on another low-watt bulb. At least there was a cabinet above the sink. As she was arranging her medicines, a second door to the bathroom opened and a young man burst in.
“Pardon me!” He backed out of the bathroom into an adjoining room that looked as dim as her own. She locked his door from the inside and began lining up her special soap, disinfectants, ointments, creams, pills, sprays, and inhaler. There was another flurry of activity at the young man’s door, then a polite knock.
“Yes?” Rebecca opened the door.
This time it was a young woman, very young, perhaps eighteen or nineteen. Rebecca envied her silky blonde hair, undyed, and the moist skin of a person who still manufactures her own estrogen. The woman introduced herself as Darla.
“We have a shared bathroom,” she said in a Southern accent, and, after studying Rebecca with a mixture of doubt and pity, began to explain the locks. “See this?” She stepped aside so that Rebecca could watch her depress the little button in the center of the doorknob. “You press it in, then press again to release it.” She crossed to Rebecca’s door. “Yours works the same way.” She demonstrated and returned to her door. “Let’s practice. I’ll go back in my room, then you lock the door.”
Rebecca followed instructions.
“See?” Darla called out from the other side of the door. “You’ve locked it.” She wiggled the doorknob. “I can’t get in.”
Rebecca was less interested in the lock than in the young woman. “Are you here for the writers’ conference, Darla?”
There was a muffled sound, then, more clearly, “Unlock the door.”
Rebecca opened the door.
“I’m not here for the conference, but my husband is.” Darla wore shorts and a halter-type blouse with embroidery and pretty buttons. “Do you mind if I splash water on my face? It will just take a second.”
Through the frosted bathroom window, open at the top, Rebecca could hear fresh gusts of rain blowing along the balcony. She resumed the arrangement of her medicines and creams and listened to the brisk splashing.
Darla dried her face. “My goodness you have a lot of medications.”
“I have several doctors,” Rebecca said
Darla hung up the towel. She looked as if she wanted to touch the collection, but instead she said, “Are you here for the writers’ conference, too?”
“Yes, I guess I am.”
“My husband, Timmy, is a writer. He’s written hundreds of pages.”
Rebecca popped a calcium tablet in her mouth. “Are you from North Carolina?”
“Yes, both of us are.”
“What do people do in writers’ conferences, Darla?”
“Write, I guess. I’m only here because Timmy’s here. Are you literary?”
Rebecca didn’t know what the girl was talking about. She swallowed the calcium. “I don’t think so.”
“Did you pick up your folder at the registration table? It tells you how to become an author. Well, I’ll be seeing you. Timmy and I will make sure we don’t lock you out of the bathroom.” Darla depressed and released the lock once more for Rebecca’s benefit, and closed the door behind her.
***
Early the next morning Rebecca, wearing walking shorts and a ruffled blouse Mother had purchased, took a seat at a long table in the back of her assigned classroom. She’d read the schedule and she liked to be early. The rustic stone building was quiet, the hallways still. She stared through the rippling glass of the old windows at the perfect blue sky washed clean by last night’s rain and filled here and there with—she tried to think like a writer.
‘Clouds’ was too ordinary. ‘Clouds of marshmallow.’ Yes. Marshmallows and whipped cream. The words reminded her of home—of the rich, soft, airy life she’d led before Mother died. Marshmallows in hot chocolate. Cream over peaches fresh from the orchard. Homesickness swept through her and made her weak. She gripped the edge of the table. Then, as so often happened, the thing she was holding onto buckled. The table collapsed. She, herself, was disintegrating.
She struggled against the anxiety attack. Her therapist had told her to fill nothingness with something that brings comfort and takes up space. She glanced desperately about the empty classroom, as empty as she herself, for a commodity: a filler. She remembered the whipped cream and, in her imagination, began spooning it into her vacancy. She toiled for several minutes. But though she began to feel better, she hated the exercise. Breathing hard, she looked out the window. Through the uneven old glass a distant clock tower rose above the tops of trees. Everywhere, green leaves were fresh and bright. She glanced away. There was something specific she should be worrying about, but she didn’t know what it was.
The bathroom door. She’d forgotten to unlock Darla and Timmy’s side of the bathroom. Hugging her lined-paper tablet and conference folder to her chest, she jumped up and hurried out of the building. Once she reached the green woods she began to run. She imagined Darla and Timmy pounding to be let in, desperate with a bodily emergency, despising her for her carelessness. At the dormitory she planted her large feet on every other step of the stairwell, sprinted along the balcony, her walking shorts flapping about her white thighs, inserted the key into the lock, and burst into her room. She reached the bathroom, drenched in sweat, and released the button in the center of the doorknob. She heard quarreling on the other side of the door.
“It’s just a story!” Darla was shouting. Silence. Taut, vibrating silence. Rebecca stood behind the bathroom door and waited for someone to say something.
“He’s not necessarily writing about you!” Darla snapped. It sounded like a telephone conversation. “Timmy is a wonderful person and he’s my husband. You shouldn’t have been going through his notebooks! With all the authors in the world, why did you have to pick him to read?”
How terrible to be a writer, Rebecca thought. Once you write something, people read it. She slowly backed out of the bathroom and, exhausted from the run, sat down at her plain desk nailed into the dormitory wall. She ran a finger along the pink rubber binding at the top of her writing tablet. So many blank pages. She supposed she was going to have to write something on them. Unless, of course, she left the conference now. The whole day stretched ahead of her. Hours and hours of daylight driving. Even while she thought about packing up the contents of the medicine chest and leaving the Inn and Conference Grounds of the South, she took out the pen that had been provided and experimented with a sentence: ‘Moth
er died three months ago. I loved her more than anybody.’
She was astounded by the words and ran for her inhaler. When she returned, the words were still there. She covered them with the folder. They were too personal. She could not bear to see them.
She lay down on the narrow bed and practiced breathing. She was not going to be able to write a word. Not a word about Mother. It brought on anxiety. Not any other words, either. She couldn’t write a mystery story because she didn’t know anything about crime. She couldn’t write about love or sex because she didn’t know anything about men. She didn’t understand politics. And she couldn’t write a memoir because she didn’t have a life.
A headache struck her between the eyes, but when she tried to open the bathroom door to get an aspirin, it was locked. She knocked. There was no answer. She went onto the balcony, blinking in the bright sunlight, and knocked on Darla and Timmy’s door. Darla, looking as if she’d been to a funeral, answered.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” Rebecca said, “but my bathroom door’s locked.”
“Oh, dear,” said Darla. Holding a handkerchief to her streaming eyes, she entered the bathroom and opened Rebecca’s door.
Rebecca touched Darla’s shoulder awkwardly. “You look very unhappy.”
Darla sobbed into her handkerchief.
“How long have you been married, Darla?”
“Two weeks.”
“Two weeks isn’t very long.” Rebecca didn’t know what else to say. That was the extent of her knowledge about marriage.
“My husband wrote certain things about my mother, and Mother read them.”
“What kinds of things?”
“Mean things.” Darla blew her nose and promptly embarked on a fresh fit of crying. “But Mother shouldn’t read his stories! They’re his private property until the world publishes them!”
“You’re lucky your mother’s alive,” Rebecca said, entering the bathroom. “My mother died three months ago.” She walked to the medicine cabinet and shook an aspirin into the palm of her hand.
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Darla’s eyes were on the bottle of aspirin. “How do you keep all those pills and things cool when the car gets hot?” she asked.
“I carry my medicines in a picnic cooler,” Rebecca said, proud of her thorough planning. It had been her own idea. She closed the cabinet door and, looking in the mirror, asked Darla, “What mean things does he write?”
“That Mother’s bossy.”
“Is she?”
“Yes. But he makes it sound worse than it is.”
“Writing is hard. It’s hard to make things sound right, at least the way you mean them to. I tried it a minute ago. That’s why I came for an aspirin.” Rebecca filled a glass with water, threw back her head, and swallowed the pill. The conversation ended and they each went into their room, being careful to leave the bathroom doors unlocked.
Rebecca sat down at her desk and added a sentence: “Mother loved me more than anybody, too.” She read and reread her words, but she didn’t know how to turn them into a story.
That’s what the writer’s conference was about: stories. The brochure said so.
By now the daily writing class would be nearly over, so there was no point in going back. She lay down on her single bed and stared at the ceiling, wondering what it would feel like to write something about Mother that wasn’t nice; for instance, that she was bossy. A few minutes after she’d heard Darla’s footsteps going along the balcony and down the stairwell, there was a knock on the door. It was Timmy.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” he said politely, his southern speech low and musical. “I’ve locked myself out of the room.” With the sunlight shining on his glossy brown hair he seemed more like a boy than a married man. Rebecca opened her bathroom door so he could go through the passage. As he walked by the desk he saw her handwriting. “What are you working on?”
Rebecca covered her words with the folder. “Nothing.”
“I’m writing about my—well, someone I know,” Timmy offered. “They say ‘write what you know.’” He opened his folder. “Do you want to hear it?”
Rebecca nodded. Her chair scraped against the plank floor as she moved to face him.
“The Queen of Night,” he began, “descended into the open mouth of hell that spewed flames and hot coals, dragging her daughter and muscular yet innocent son-in-law behind her.”
“My,” said Rebecca, leaning forward. “You paint quite a picture.”
“Her cackle raised the hackles of anyone listening,” he continued, and proceeded to read the part where the Queen of Night dies a tortuous death as the beautiful daughter escapes with the aid of her muscular yet innocent husband.
“True story,” Timmy said. Rebecca caught her breath.
“Just kidding.” He stared thoughtfully down at his thongs and flexed his feet. A little patch of dark hair grew on the top of each toe. He didn’t look particularly muscular to Rebecca. He was young and slim, like Darla. Short, too. Rebecca was taller than both of them. Older, too, of course.
“You don’t mind if I confide in you, do you?” he asked.
Rebecca was flattered. She didn’t tell him she wasn’t a writer. Timmy shook back his wavy, jaw-length hair. “It’s based on my mother-in-law. Darla doesn’t see her objectively. When Darla reads the entire story”—he held up his manuscript—“she’ll see her mother for what she really is.”
“So when the mother dies, that’s not the end of the story?”
“That’s only the beginning.”
“Why don’t you like her?”
“She calls Darla every night and tells her to leave me.”
“How long has Darla’s mother known you?”
“Three months.” Timmy’s left eye moved slightly out of focus. “When I have a best-seller she’ll change her tune.”
Rebecca was beset by a memory of Mother’s amiable laugh when, at age eighteen, she’d said, “I want to go to college and have a job someday. I want to find a husband.”
“You were never good in school, Becky,” Mother had replied. “If you stay at home on the orchard, the right man will find you.”
But he never did.
“Tell Darla not to listen to her mother,” she said to Timmy. “Tell her to just go ahead and live.” The effort cost her. She began to breathe rapidly.
Timmy’s wandering eye snapped back into focus. “I’ve told her!” he almost yelped. “It doesn’t do any good!” He thumped the manuscript, jumped up from the edge of the bed, and began backing toward the bathroom door. “Darla cries all the time. If her mother doesn’t stop criticizing me, our marriage will be shorter than the writers’ conference.”
“Maybe you could write a story about you and Darla instead of your mother-in-law,” she whispered, putting her hand to her racing heart.
“No, I don’t think so.” His left eye strayed again. “Until her mother improves, there is no Darla and me,” and he strode through the bathroom to his room, shutting both doors loudly behind him.
Rebecca turned her chair around and faced her desk. The sharp point of the lead pencil landed almost of its own accord.
“The woman who lived on the orchard loved her daughter and her daughter loved her,” Rebecca wrote. “Never did a cross word pass between them.”
***
She experienced her usual bad nerves and anxiety as she walked in and out of the morning sunlight that lay puddled on the forest floor. When she remembered that she might be called on to say something, or worse, show what she’d written, she turned and ran back through the trees for her inhaler, which gave her a chance to double-check the bathroom door. She returned to the path that led through the green woods. A mourning dove, followed by a three-whistle, one-note bird she couldn’t name, sang out. The air was humid and still.
The class discussed Timmy’s manuscript first. “Mythic figures,” said Professor Wyandotte in the silence that followed the final writhing screams of the Queen of Night. “Possibly science
fiction genre. Is this your first draft?” Professor Wyandotte was old and frail, with shoulder blades that looked like roots of wings worn down to the nubbin. He made gestures in the air that didn’t seem to match what he was talking about. Rebecca understood very little of what he said. He asked Timmy to re-read the opening lines.
“The Queen of Night descended into the open mouth of hell that spewed—”
The story did not sound as good to Rebecca the second time around. The class didn’t like it. Following an acrimonious discussion, one of the other students read a story, and nobody liked it, either. Arguing took up the rest of the class time and Rebecca didn’t have to read.
Walking back to the dormitory she once again considered leaving the conference. Not only was her story a single paragraph, in contrast to other students’ endless pages, but it was written in pencil on lined paper. Everyone else had typed theirs; everyone else had a computer. She decided to stay one more day. But first thing tomorrow morning, as soon as she heard the little three-whistle, one-note bird, she would drive away in a southerly direction—assuming she could find south—and leave writing behind. She had a cousin in Florida.
She spent the rest of the day reading a romance novel in bed. Around eight o’clock, in the orange light of sunset that filled her room, Rebecca heard a knock on the bathroom door.
“Rebecca?” It was Darla standing in the doorway, the last of the sun burnishing her blonde hair. “I have a terrible blister on my foot. Do you have something in your medicine cabinet for blisters?”
Rebecca got out of bed, walked into the bathroom, and directed the young woman to sit on the edge of the tub while she washed, then treated the blister with one of her preparations.
“Timmy’s upset about the criticism of his story,” Darla said, twisting her ankle so Rebecca could get to the heel.
“The class didn’t like it very much.”
“He’s too brilliant for them.”
Rebecca straightened and returned the ointment to the medicine cabinet.
