From Where You Dream (25 page)

"You almost died from having me? I thought you were so happy that I was a girl and that you didn't even believe them until they put my butt in your face?" This is the story I liked to remember.

She brushed through her hair, straight back, and then scrunched it with her fingers. The brush was still in her hand as she spoke. "I sure enough did make them put your butt in my face. I was so happy to finally have a little girl I couldn't see straight. But afterwards, I had my tubes tied and they didn't hold my stomach."

"Why would they need to do that?"

"I was coughing and they were supposed to hold my stomach so that I didn't rupture any of the stitches. Well they didn't and I came untied and hemorrhaged. They liked to have let me die. I kept telling them that I didn't feel right, that something was wrong. But they didn't listen."

I interrupted. "Why didn't they listen? Couldn't they tell?"

"Well, you'd think so, I was swole up like a toad frog. But they just kept telling me that it was normal to feel that way after having a baby or some such nonsense. I told 'em that I knew just exactly what it was like to have a baby; this was my third. But they still wouldn't listen. Finally when the nurse came in to check my blood pressure I was damn near dead and they had to do emergency surgery."

I crossed my legs under me and sat up higher in the desk chair.

She repeated herself, "I was bleeding to death. Those nurses weren't watchin' me like they were supposed to."

I grabbed my side of the completely assembled arch and lifted while my mother lifted the other side. She was finally able to get out and work in the yard again, but now everything was just about done blooming and it was almost time to get the yard ready for winter. "I want to get that arch in before it gets cold, Becky. That way next year the wisteria will just run up it," she told me. We angled the arch beside the holes, then lifted it in. It slid in with a clunk and one of us had to hold it while the other packed the dirt around the poles. I volunteered for the dirt.

"Get the water hose over here and wet that old clay. It'll harden like concrete around the poles," Mother said, pointing toward the hose cart at the side of the house.

After reattaching the hose to the faucet I wheeled the cart to the flower bed where the arch now stood with my mother's support. The water was cool. When it hit the hard, cracked ground it didn't soak in right away but splashed against my legs.

I shoveled the mud into the holes and knelt down to pack it with drier dirt at the top.

"Now, that's just right," she said and let go of the arch.

The project had been a success. In a year or so the white plastic arch would be dripping with cones of purple petals. But I still hadn't told her.

She was already smoking when I got around to sitting down with her on the porch.

"Mama, I'm sorry if. .. ," I started to say, trying to fight back the tears as they inched into my eyes, but she seemed to have softened a bit. Her body was relaxed against the back of the chair, and she was rocking. "I know I'm not exactly what you expected in a daughter."

She stopped rocking and looked right at me. "Oh honey, yes you are. You're independent, full of life, everything I ever wanted." She leaned back in her chair again and looked out over the yard. "Never mind that silly husband of yours, and doctors can do so much these days; you may have children

someday if you want, just look at what all has happened to me. All the problems I'm still alive to tell it."

"No, you don't understand," I protested.

"I know you two aren't getting along. He hasn't called all weekend, not even to see if you got here safe. You don't need him anyway, and you should be grateful for that. It wasn't like that when I got married."

"That's not what I meant. How did you know I lost the baby?" I tried to be pathetic, but it came out hard and cracked.

"It's been three months since you told me you were pregnant. You haven't said much about it since. At first I thought it was because I was sick but you have been completely avoiding the subject. Besides, you're shaped just like me. If you were three months along you'd already be swole up and big all over." She gave a half grin when she said this.

"Mama, I'm never gonna have a baby," I blurted and glared at her.

"Do you really want children? I mean, you have so much more. Just look at me and what all I've had to go through with my body. When I was your age I thought that children, and a husband, was all there was. But you have a choice." She took the last drag of her cigarette and put it out.

I couldn't believe this was the same woman who put me through ballet, piano, tap, and a myriad of other things to try and make me into a lady so I would grow up and marry well, have babies, and repeat.

She leaned back and propped her foot against the porch post. "You probably only did it to prove a point anyway." She laughed.

Instead of crying or screaming, I leaned back in my rock-ing chair and grabbed one of her cigarettes.

"I just thought a baby would ..." I stopped to take a long first drag from the cigarette.

"Yeah, that's what we all think at one time or another. Now, I love you kids and I wouldn't have it any other way than having had you. But children won't solve your problems."

Even over the smoke, a floral smell still hung in the sticky air. The garden arch was a brilliant white against the rough black dirt at its base and the green of the wisteria all around it. I thought about the day I miscarried and the champs that woke me up at six in the morning. For about a week afterward all I could think about was sex, though I neither felt like having sex nor wanted to be anywhere near Terry.

"I think my hormones are out of whack," I said.

"Maybe you're about to go through menopause," she laughed and I laughed with her but it wasn't because it was funny. "I don't guess I will ever have to really go through that," she said with a tone that suggested a change of subject.

I held the cigarette awkwardly between my thumb and my forefinger. "The slugs are bad at my house this year. Slimy old things. I can't stand 'em," I complained.

"Pour salt on 'em. They'll just wither up and go away." When she said this I felt like the Morton Salt Shaker girl, without an umbrella of protection over my head, holding my life in my hands, which was still a reflection of her life. I thought about the store-bought wisteria shriveling in my front yard and decided to ask her for a cutting.

"Sure, they just grow up wild around here. I couldn't tell you how long it's been there." She got up to get the shears. After clipping a small branch with lots of leaves and an unopened bud, she brought it over to me. "Now, don't say thank you or it'll die."

"Why's that?" I took the cutting and twirled it in my hands.

She shrugged, "Old wives' tale."

ROB: What we need always to be in search of is the way in which a character's yearning is manifested. Stories are driven forward by causality. All plot comes from the character's trying to get something, to achieve something, wanting, desiring, longing for something. The complications ensue from the drive of those yearnings and the attempt to get around the impediments and difficulties that thwart desire.

In Brandy's story—talking now in this artificial, secondary way—planting things in a garden could operate as a metaphor for each of the character's barrenness. But barrenness itself is a
problem;
it does not constitute a yearning. You're on the verge of it here, Brandy, but the story does not yet move to the yearning in a clear and comprehensive way. One difficulty is that the building of the garden arch has not yet been made to work with metaphorical logic. Another is that some crucial things are told in flashback.

The narrator Becky feels unappreciated. She believes that her mother has always thought her worthless and in effective. The back story starts on the bottom of the second page and goes on for another two pages, recalling an earlier time in the garden. But the put-down element here, the mother's critiques of Becky, feel too small to have stuck and wounded. I need a scene in the back story to reinforce the hurt.

We miss some important things. The father drives by. That's very briefly dealt with. Again, the mother criticizes Becky, but in trivial ways. The mother's flashback to the hysterectomy does not resonate into Becky's grief over her miscarriage; Becky remains merely an observer here. The moment when the mother realizes that she's sick, that there's something wrong with her femaleness, is not in the story. At the end of the story, once it's clear that the mother knows about the miscarriage—which is therefore not a secret after all—she suddenly transforms; she's tolerant and approving, which feels unearned at that point. And then the story finishes on new terms—the cutting of the wisteria branch—so that the climax happens in sensual terms that do not recompose the story.

Nevertheless 1 think this story is on the verge. I think it came from something hot in you, and that there's yearning fluttering around the edges. The opening lines are often explanatory in a kind of on-the-nose way. Indeed, the first flashback is very sharp: "No matter how hard I tried to live up to the woman my mother was and wanted me to be ..."

We have to figure out how to flip the story around, from developed "problems" to a dynamic shape that could come out of those problems. If she has been criticized by her mother all her life, and if she had a miscarriage and cannot have children, and her mother has had a hysterectomy, what is the issue here?

What is the deeper issue? It certainly has to do with the common literary theme, identity. But more specifically, what does it mean to be a woman? What is womanness? The yearning is to understand what it means to be a woman in her life. I
yearn to identify myself, to find my identity as a woman.
The challenge is that she's had a miscarriage, she cannot have children. That's the natural yearning that comes out of the problems you give us.

So we begin in the garden. Now we have to find the connection between what she's doing in that garden—the deep, sensual patterned connection between that and this yearning. Again, I'm talking in analytical terms, figuring this out rationally, saying that certain scenes are needed and so forth. It's not the right way to work. But for the moment it's OK, because this is a learning process, and identifying what's needed, going through those motions, is helpful.

What is it in the arch they're erecting in the garden that relates to the yearning I've described? A portal is an opening, which is the female pattern, so there's a suggestion of the female body. (That may not be your intention, but it is a traditional metaphor, so you need to be aware of it. I'm doing this to help everyone understand how yearning relates to what usually ends up in stories; I'm not suggesting this as a way for you to work.) This garden has been cultivated since the departure of the ex-husband, an act of the two women in contradiction to the man. The ex-husband forbade the garden. The male thing was corn and soybeans—I don't know—but this is the thing that the women have done as an assertion of themselves. These things must somehow be in the story in real time.

Perhaps the instructions should say that the placement of the arch is of crucial aesthetic importance, and Becky keeps looking for where to put it? At the moment there's no such suggestion in the instructions. Say the present action has to do with where the arch should go; we know it's important, but we don't know where it goes. She's got this terrible thing to tell her mother. There's a reference made to the ex-husband having driven by sometime in the past. This is an opportunity. Is there a scene there?—I don't know—but think in terms of what's in front of you.

Or suppose we set the moment when the mother becomes sick. The mother's female body is still intact, and the daughter doesn't know how to approach her with bad news. Maybe she approaches her, and the mother's horrified—but in any case let the event of the mother getting sick and going to the hospital be in the story. She has an emergency hysterectomy and then the mother and the daughter are on the same plane. The mother always criticizes the daughter about what it means to be a woman—so that strain between them is indeed about what this means, and we dramatize the reality of Becky's fear of confessing her miscarriage.

Then, what happens in the hospital room between mother and daughter where the mother has just had her womb removed? There's a lot that's still to be dreamed here. Maybe in the dreaming you will have had her tell the mother already, and she had a harsh reaction, so that there will be a reconciliation. Or maybe this is when she tells her—even as the mother's devastated—
this is something as women we can share because I've lost a child.
Suddenly there's a very complex relationship possible, and a complex reaction involved.

Whether we come back to putting the arch in at the end of the story I don't know. I'm sketching out a way in which the stuff that's in the story can be transformed from problem to yearning, and the way that yearning can find its arc; a way that everything can be pulled together, so that mother and daughter together redefine what it means to be a woman. I hate the way I'm talking here. You understand why I'm doing it, right? Feel free to alter or ignore anything I've said. But that's the
kind
of thing all stories need in order to shine in their best light. There's a lot of good stuff here, Brandy, and I think it'll be a wonderful story. It's just a matter of taking the problems and transforming them toward the dynamic that will make us understand what's at stake.