From Where You Dream (28 page)

Sheila gets up and turns the music up. "How was work?" she asks Jack.

"Fine," he smiles over at her. His job and coworkers are the bulk of the conversations at dinner every night. He looks over at me, dropping the smile. "What makes you say that?"

"Oh, you can tell. Any woman can tell that when a guy's only looking to get in your pants." I sit up straighter in my chair, toss my hair back over my shoulder.

"Sheila, I thought you said this Paul was a nice boy."

Sheila just glares at her plate. I spoon some peas into Gracie's mouth.

"Today he grabbed my titties. I told him to leave."

"Lilly," he says my name sharply and pauses like he doesn't know what to say next. "We don't need to have that kind of talk at the dinner table, young lady. Next time he comes around, you call me. I'll set him straight." He puffs up his chest and squares his shoulders like Paul might be looking in the window.

I nod.

"Idddy," Gracie says, letting some half-chewed peas fall to the tray where she smashes them with her palms. "Iddy Diddy Diddy Diddy."

"What is she saying?" he looks over at Sheila.

"Sounds like Daddy."

She's trying to say my name and they know it but I don't say anything.

Jack reaches over and ruffles her wispy hair. "Are you Daddy's girl?" He gets up and plucks her out of the highchair. He starts dancing her around the kitchen. She grabs his beard with both hands and watches his face, then she starts patting his cheeks as they dance around the table.

"You're too good for him," I stage whisper to Sheila, meaning Paul. "I'm not taking the baby out anymore. I'm staying here. We don't need him."

She looks up from her plate at her husband dancing around, holding the baby over his head now. She still won't look at me. She bursts into tears, scrapes her chair against the hard clean floor, leaves the table without a word to me.

ROB: I want to start by saying something about the coming-of-age story or novel, and in general about child narrators and children as central characters. Such narratives present a particular problem, because we're trapped in the child and she isn't old enough to have any other yearning than:
What's next in this process of growing up? I've got to get out of childhood.

I don't know the details of your life, or any twenty-two-year-old's life. It's very possible that through your childhood and your adolescence—periods when we are driven by our senses—many of you have gone through serious stresses and turmoil. Some of those intense experiences are the generic struggles of young people, and it may be hard to get past the surface track of those struggles and down to the source of your serious ambition as an artist. That applies to all of us at some point. I came back from Vietnam when I had just turned twenty-seven, and wrote the terrible story you've all heard. Clearly, my unconscious was not ready to be accessed. If I had known the things I'm telling you, I would not yet have looked to Vietnam for my material.

There are no child prodigies in literature—there is no Mozart of fiction—and the great writers, at age twenty-two, are not going to have the vision of the world, or the emotional readiness, or the developed unconscious that they will have

at thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, or ninety. That's exciting for you; you've got a lot ahead of you. I just urge you to be patient with yourself. Try to work within the range you will chafe at, because it will feel narrow to you; but work within that relatively narrow range of your artistic authenticity, the intimations that are no longer therapeutic and no longer literal but are tapping into something that no one shares. Be patient with yourself and work through that part of your dreamspace.

I know you're all sitting here with your copy of Rita's story, saying, "Oh shit! Don't tell me this one didn't work!"

This works. It's a wonderful story, Rita. The yearning is really rooted in the central character's situation. This is one of those coming-of-age stories, which does limit you somewhat, but within that range you do it beautifully. You have created little moments that let us know Lilly's identity is involved— a larger identity than "I've got to get out of childhood; I've got to get through a tough family situation"—both problems she has. You have in fresh ways manifested those problems in fine moments of action, and that's a rare thing.

When the story opens we understand almost immediately that this is about identity. Paul stands there grinning with the flowers behind his back, and our first assumption is that he's come for the narrator, Lilly. We do not feel cheated, however, when we realize he's here for someone else; that moment of confusion sets up for us exactly what's going to happen. Paul does—beautiful irony here—put the make on her, and the irony is repeated and twisted at the end, where her sister invents the story of Paul being Lilly's boyfriend. So beginning, middle, and end are tied up brilliantly in that way.

And the issue of identity recurs, recomposes. "I was getting the baby dressed to go when Sheila ..." Again, we don't realize at first that it's not Lilly's baby, and then we do.
Oh, it's her baby.
Then we find that Lilly is covering for the sister, Sheila, who's fucking her boyfriend behind her husband's back, and Lilly is taking care of the child in ways her sister doesn't. Paul follows Sheila, commenting on her beauty and her ass, and Lilly just shrugs. Sheila's always been beautiful. Then come the wonderful scenes in which Lilly examines her own body, carrying a stepladder into the bathroom and looking in the mirror, and we see she has quite a different kind of body from Sheila's. We already know that she has compared herself unfavorably to Sheila, and also that she used to borrow Sheila's clothes—pretending to be Sheila, maybe? And the baby looks like Lilly. She's having to be mother to the baby, and the boyfriend's after her, and yet she's not what she feels Sheila is. These are wonderful issues of identity.

Rita's poetic sense is quite clear here too. When you're really working well, a single word choice can reveal your motif. "And I sit on the couch, capturing one of Gracie's feet at a time"—brilliant verb—"and screwing the little sneakers down onto each"—another great verb.

Notice that Lilly likes to "pretend I'm shopping for my own home. . . . I'll have a beautiful home and Gracie will come over in the afternoons when she's a teenager like I am now and ask me for advice and tell me about how she can't get along with her mom and I'll listen but of course I won't say a word against my sister." That complexity of relationship is fabulous. "Gracie won't talk about killing herself because she'll know she always has my house to come to and me to listen to her." How many writers of less serious talent would try to get at Lilly's dark side in some direct way—"Oh, I feel like killing myself sometimes," blah blah blah—but we know she's talking about herself here. Who else would she be talking about? Why otherwise would she want her own place to be a refuge for Gracie? We know that she's talking about her own distress, and at the same time the lines subtly convey Lilly's personal strength. These abstractions I'm using are woefully inadequate.

There's subtext in all the dialogue. There's not a line of dialogue that isn't working on more than one level. Here's a good montage for you: "He leans closer and says, his voice thick now, 'You're a virgin, aren't you?'" How many inexperienced writers would follow that line with: "Oh . . ." and whatever reactions she has to follow. But here it's "I get up and lock myself up in the bathroom." Cut.

Plot too plays itself out subtly, deftly. Because of Paul's line, Lilly locks herself in the bathroom, which means Sheila can't take her shower, so she douses herself with perfume, and feels compelled to make up a story about the flowers, and now Lilly has the confidence to take advantage of that, and so forth. It all fits beautifully together.

Consider the flashback with Lilly sitting in the bathroom while Sheila's in the tub. Again, it's all about bodies. Sheila's just ripping into Lilly for talking small talk. ". .. stupid shit.
Y
ou talk and talk and talk about fucking nothing. Just like everyone else." It's a vivid, unexpected moment, and that scene ends in the present time in the tub when Lilly looks at her own hand in this clinically close way, again pulling it back to a consciousness of her own self, an identity in her own body.

And yet again: evoking identity in a weird transposition of roles—Gracie is saying, "Iddy Diddy Diddy Diddy" and Jack and Sheila try to convince themselves that she's trying to say "Daddy," whereas we all know that she's trying to say "Lilly." A brilliant stroke, consistent with yearning as the center of gravity for this story.

I do have a problem with the very ending. The story does not resolve itself in the terms it's been set up in. This is really about who Lilly is, not about who Sheila is. And we have this little burst of abstract, very reductive analysis that she hands over to Sheila. The gesture, "I'm not going to play this fucking game anymore," is fine, but the abrupt assertion of the reason is not really the core of the story.

The last paragraph offers a lovely tableau, which might work with some other preparation, but—I'm not sure here. You need to let go of it and it'll come back if it needs to. The problem is in the penultimate paragraph. The narrator says, '"You're too good for him,' I stage whisper to Sheila, meaning Paul. 'I'm not taking the baby out anymore. I'm staying here. We don't need him.'" I don't feel the irony there. We need to get to it much more simply, maybe as simply as having Lilly lean down to Sheila and whisper, "I'm not taking Gracie anymore." I honestly think the fewer words the better. The rest of it is so beautifully indirect.

Don't get freaked by it, just work it out. Redream the ending and see if there's some other way. What I need, even if it's revealed in retrospect, is a sense of the moment in which she makes this decision. As it stands, I believe the decision, but looking back to see when she made it, I must go all the way back to the beginning of the scene. Even if she doesn't say, "You're too good for him," that's essentially the decision she has made, to be her own person, to dissociate herself from Sheila in this way. But the moment when this decision was actually made—it happened offstage somewhere. It's not just a matter of thinking Paul's an asshole and having an opportunity to say so to Sheila in this ironic, public way. It's more important than that, it has to do with her identity, so we also need a moment in which the decision is made. And indeed, such a decision, the simpler you make it, the more complex it becomes.

All the beats have to be there. This is where craft comes in. Once you get into your unconscious and are working from there, then you need to be sensitive to the rhythm of how things play out, the emotional logic, if you will. And at the end of this wonderful story, there's a step in the emotional logic that has been left out.

Rita: I had a lot of trouble with the first scene because I kept trying to put everything out of my head that I wanted to get into it, just let it go and let it come to me .. .

ROB: You know, that's a lesson of the universe ... I call it sumo zen—did I tell you I'm a big sumo wrestling fan? I've got a second satellite just so I can get the sumo tournaments from TV Japan. And when the sumo wrestlers are interviewed, they always say the same thing—they barely move their lips— no matter what they're asked, it all boils down to "I'm going to do my brand of sumo, and I'm going to do my best." That's

it, folks. That's the lesson of the universe. You do your brand of sumo, and you do your best. And implicit in that concept is: you just let it go. And you let go to
it,
which in writing this story, Rita, you did. Whenever you try to take control, whenever you impose your will, whenever you start thinking your way into this stuff of fiction, not only do you not get control, you lose touch with the very things that are the most important to you and your work. But, you got it. You understood, you assimilated. [Applause.]

Does everybody understand the difference between what happened here and what happened in the examples that were not quite working? Which is not to say that your stories are bad stories, or that you're not as talented as Rita. This is an extremely talented group. Everything I've seen has been impressive in important ways. Don't leave this classroom feeling gloomy or pessimistic or put down. What I've been saying to you this semester is based on my deep respect for your highest ambitions. There are those among you who are capable of creating works of literature that will endure. I've written more bad stuff than you will ever write in your life, and I've wanted to give you a way to measure yourselves from here on out against the very highest standards. Your brand of sumo is not my brand of sumo; I'm just telling you where in yourself to look. I don't want you writing like me or anybody else. That's the whole point. It's deeply personal. It's your brand of sumo.