Becoming the Story (4 page)

Never in his life had he felt so brilliantly
burned; so raw and so defeated; so determined; so cowardly; and so
courageous.  

He had never felt so 
human.

All her life she had heard stories.

Most of them she loved; the fairy tales with
happy endings; the ones about people who had struggled and
triumphed. She loved epic poems full of heroes.

But some stories she hated. Her least
favorite stories were not the ones in books, but the ones that life
had told her. Usually these stories of life drifted down to her
from other people.

She could see pieces of a story in a glare
of contempt or a roll of the eyes. Those story features followed
her into her dreams and played themselves out in blurs of imagery
and shame. Life whispered stories to her even as she slept. And she
believed them.

The story life had given her was that she
was not pretty; her hair was a mass of brittle curls, and her
features too angular. Her eyes were nice, some had said, even
beautiful, but that hardly made up for the rest.

Her mother had often made it clear to her
that she was the product of an unplanned pregnancy, and that if she
had not come along when she did, her parents would not have to
struggle so much to put food on the table.

She sometimes felt remorse for having “come
along.” If she had had a choice, knowing what was in store for her,
she might have opted out. She had not meant to come along.

Since her parents offered so little love,
sometimes at school she would smile at a boy to let him know she
liked him. In every case, her smile was met with a glower, so she
stopped smiling at boys. In fact, she stopped smiling at all.

Her one escape was the stories, but she had
stopped believing in the fairy tales. In them, princes never
glowered at the princesses, so the fairy tales must be untrue.

Instead, she focused on the tales of
struggle, but the heroes always seemed too courageous and too
strong for her to identify with them. They rushed into danger with
brave words and swords, and no self-doubts, ever. They were mostly
men, all brawn and bravado.

Since the stories she had once loved so much
were untrue, she decided to write true ones, or at least the ones
she thought were true. So she wrote down the stories life had told
her. They were all about an un-pretty girl who had come along and
ruined things, and then smiled at boys and got glowered at.

She wrote the story again and again, in many
different ways, but however she wrote it, she was unsatisfied. She
did not like the story. She thought of returning to her fairy
tales, but there was no going back. It was like she had been cast
out of Eden and was barred from it by cherubim holding flaming
swords.

She asked herself, “What makes a story
good?” She asked herself that question a lot. She started to read
books meant for the older kids, which seemed truer, at least some
of them, because not all of them ended well.

She also found some books on writing and
studied them. She learned that stories had plots and resolutions.
Finally, she got an idea. She would not write a fairy tale, nor the
story life had given her. She would write a story she liked, but
one that would be believable.

For the first time in her life, she felt the
wind of inspiration blow through her, tinged with a minty chill.
With a pencil and a sheet of spiral notebook paper, she wrote about
a girl who was not pretty and had come and made everything awful.
But in her story, her parents were bad people for telling her so,
villains.

It was not until she wrote that down that
she realized: she had not just been hurt; she was angry. She had
had no
choice
but to come along. No one had ever asked her
what she thought about it.

The revelation was so stunning that she
stopped writing and stared at the sentence for a long time and took
it in. It was not her fault. She was not to blame.

The angrier she became, the more she began
to believe that she was virtuous and her parents bad. In her new
story she made herself better than she actually was, and her
parents worse than they actually were. In her story her mother was
secretly an evil witch that boiled babies in her cauldron full of
nasty things. And her dad was a bank robber who slaughtered kittens
for fun.

Her own character was practically a saint, a
beautiful avatar of goodness and light who never asked anything for
herself. In her stories she went around giving candy and medicine
to sick children and even though she was not pretty and had come
along and made a mess of things, everyone loved her because she was
doing so much good for the world.

Meanwhile her parents went to jail and
received lashings and were imprisoned for life for eating babies
and robbing banks and killing kittens.

After she wrote the story, she glowed
inside. Her mood soared to the skies. It was her first truly
original effort. She had finally written a story she liked.

A week later, after a receiving a good
glowering, she took out her story and read it again to cheer
herself up. But instead of it making her happy, it upset her. She
read the story several times. Something was wrong.

She asked herself what is was and finally
understood: the story was not true to life. She remembered,
uncomfortably, moments when her parents had been kind to her. Her
father had brought her a puppy once, squirming and warm, its
heartbeat thumping into her hand as she held it close. And there
had been a time, when she was ill, that her mother had baked her a
crumbly cake and made a smiley face on top with yellow lemon icing.
She had never seen either of her parents kill anything except for
bugs.

Even her own character was questionable. The
part about her giving candy to sick children triggered an
uncomfortable memory. When she was five, her kindergarten teacher
had brought into the class a piñata of a reindeer filled with
candy.

A boy had broken it apart with a stick and
the children had descended on the candy like ants on honey. She had
been slow to act and ended up with no candy at all. The
disappointment had been unbearable.

Afterward, she had seen a boy lay down his
candy on a table in order to bend down an tie his shoe. While he
was not looking, she had swiped his tootsie rolls, lollipops, and
bubble gum. All of it. And stuffed it into her pocket. She had not
given it back even when the boy looked around for his candy and
began to cry. She had not enjoyed the candy after that and had not
eaten most of it.

But if she remembered correctly, that same
boy had had a terrible cough that day. He had been
sick
.

She was so sickened herself by the memory,
she did not write anything for days. But she still had a hungry
imagination, so she read instead. The new books she read were more
complex. She noticed that some of the characters in them were not
all good or all bad.

Even the most likable characters had flaws.
She had a revelation. Maybe she did not have to be a saint. But
maybe she could still be a likable character with flaws. And maybe
her parents could be villains who sometimes did good things.

She wrote a story about a girl who stole
candy from a sick boy. But the girl felt so remorseful about what
she had done that she grew up and gave candy to all the sick
children she met. One day she met the boy she had stolen candy from
and she gave him candy tenfold what she had stolen from him, and
they became best friends.

She liked that story.

Meanwhile, life began throwing its own
stories at her. Boys continued to glower at her even when she did
not smile at them, and now she never did. She was not popular with
the girls either. Most of them were pretty. They did not read much
on their own, and she had little to discuss with them.

She did have one friend, a girl in a
wheelchair named Rita who had been born unable to walk. During
recess she would talk to Rita. Rita fascinated her, because Rita
was like the characters in her favorite stories, a kind of underdog
who had not soured on life but seemed because of her situation to
have found strength.

Rita was never bitter about not walking. She
was a humorous girl who did not care what the popular girls thought
of her. Maggi was inspired.

Maggi realized, too, that she did not have
to make herself the main character of every story. She could write
about dogs or birds or imagine how the world must look from the
point of view of Rita. Maggie started to look around and observe
other kids. The creativity this allowed was liberating. Some of the
stories were silly, and others too serious. But she kept writing
anyway.

But life was an insistent author; it had its
own ideas. Her mother died. And afterward she could not even bring
herself to say the words “die” or “death” for many weeks. Even in
her thinking, she substituted the expression “went away.”

The “going away” was sudden and stupefying
and incomprehensible, an accident caused by a shaky ladder that
occurred while her mother was painting the window shutters.

And after the funeral, Maggi could not think
of any of the bad things her mother had done. Maggi thought about
the smiley face cake and all the dinners her mother had cooked for
her, even when she was tired. And Maggi thought about the grieving
face of her father and how much she wanted to comfort him, even
though they had always been distant, and she did not feel free to
hug him.

She wrote new stories, stories of tragedy
and forgiveness; of loss and hope. Her teachers began to praise her
stories, and Maggie would have beamed, except grief was a dark seam
in her pride.

By this time Maggie was thirteen, and her
appearance had changed. She was still not pretty in any
conventional way, but the way she carried herself had changed. Her
figure had rounded out, and her eyes were curious and
sympathetic.

She did not hunch but stood straight, and
she did not bow her head anymore the way she had when she was
younger. And when she started to, she thought of how Rita had never
pitied herself, and how – though physically weak – she had somehow
seemed more
whole
and more beautiful than any of the other
girls in the class.

Maggi was still awkward in some ways. She
had gotten taller. Her limbs were gangly like that of a puppy that
had grown too fast and had not processed the change.

The rejections of her life still haunted and
in many ways shaped her, and they could be seen in the hesitancy of
the gestures, a tendency to pause before speaking, and the softness
of her voice.

But something had changed. She had a dream
now. An ambition. Her dream brightened the colors around her and
enhanced the flavor of her meals. The glow of her cheeks might have
been expected of a girl in love, but she did not have a crush. She
knew what she wanted to do with her life. She was going to become a
writer.

Writing was power. It was the power to take
the stories life had told her and change them.

She had a new story in her head. It was
about a girl who had come along and got glowered at by boys. But
then she met a girl in a wheelchair and realized she could make
choices about what to do with the circumstances life had given
her.

She became more compassionate because of her
personal rejections and befriended others who had suffered from
them. Or suffered from anything. And that included her dad.

The girl in the story named “Margie” was
estranged from her dad. So she made him cookies and went to him
with them. And they were such good cookies he told her he loved her
and was proud of her, and he gave her a hug.

She reread her story but it did not sound
true. And she did not know how to make it sound true, so she
decided to try doing what the girl in her story had done.

So that night did bake cookies, chocolate
chip. They were soft and warm, and the chocolate had melted. When
she left the kitchen she was filled with happy anticipation. Then
she went to her dad who was reading on the sofa and set the plate
of cookies on the coffee table. He glanced at the cookies mildly.
“What is the occasion?” he said.

She told him she had made the cookies for
him. She told him thank you for the puppy he had once bought her
and how she was sorry she had never thanked him more, and asked if
there was anything she could do to make him feel better.

His eyes seemed to soften as he stared at
her, but all of the sudden, his face became mask-like until he
grimaced. “That dog I got you, it was a mutt. No need to thank me,
the damn dog was free. In fact, the guy who gave it practically
made me take the damn thing. I figured it would be my dog, but what
do you know? You took him over. Just like you and your selfish
mother have always done. Nothing in this godforsaken house has ever
been mine.”

She did not know what to say to that. A lump
formed in the back of her eyes and moisture clouded her eyes. She
picked up the tray and offered it to him. “I made these for you,”
she said in a tremulous voice.

“Cookies?” he said. “You think what I need
is cookies? Little girl, if you want to help me, bring me a beer.
In fact, bring me the whole damn carton. Cookies. Shit. They look
like organ meat.”

The words might as well have been a physical
blow. She felt like she had been knocked off a precipice. She lost
her grip on the tray. It fell on the wooden floor with a clatter.
She stared at it in alarm for a moment, then ran from the room and
through the front door and into the darkness, where her body shook
with the sobs that broke from her. Who knew how long she stayed
there?

She heard a rustling and a chirp, and she
looked around. Nestled into one of the cracks in the brick wall of
the carport was a baby bird, just a ball of blue feathers really,
with tiny searching eyes.