Kath said she liked how the passage was really about her brother even though it seemed to be about the machine, and Brett, surprisingly, looked for a moment as if she might cry.
I volunteered to read next, saying, “But of course this isn't really anything, I was just—”
“Never apologize, never explain,” Linda said. “That's what my writing teacher in college said.”
“I don't see you volunteering to read next,” I said.
“Oh just shut up and read and I'll read next, okay?”
By the time I'd read about my driving lesson (which did get a chuckle), the natives were getting restless, so I went for the Popsicles—yes, Popsicles at 10:45 in the morning—and while the children dripped melted rocket pops on their faces, on their clothes, on the arms of those of us holding them in our laps, Linda read. Just a few paragraphs that started with the key chain, wondering what doors those keys might open, and ended with a key opening a temple, and inside the temple a thousand people filing past a casket and a little girl in the front wondering why so many people she didn't know were claiming a loss she didn't want to share.
The five of us were silent for a long time afterward as the children licked their treats and giggled and stuck their tongues out to show them blue or green or orange. Finally Linda said, “Okay, Kath, your turn,” and you could tell from her voice that she was sure we all thought what she'd written was dreadful.
Kath said what we all would have said: “I can't follow something that good.”
“Me either,” Ally said. “That was beautiful, Linda.”
We spread the children's lunch out on the picnic table, calling it dessert since the Popsicles had been lunch, though that didn't convince them to eat more. While they ate, Linda laid out a plan for the next week: we would reread our favorite books, to see how they were written, and we would buy journals—the nice leather ones she'd seen at Kepler's Books. Ally objected that she didn't even want to write, and Kath started to agree, but Linda cut her off. “I'll get journals for everyone,” she said. “I'll get them this evening when Jeff gets home, and I'll drop them by.” She looked to the playground, almost vacant now, with our nine eating their early lunch. “What we need is a babysitter,” she said. “But all mine are high school girls.”
“I suppose I could ask my Arselia,” Kath said reluctantly.
“Your Arselia?” Brett said.
“My housekeeper,” Kath said.
“You, Kath,” Linda said, “just ceded any excuse you might have had for not having time to write.”
WE GATHERED the next Wednesday with our new journals and our copies of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel, which Linda had also bought for us, and—best of all—with Arselia, who, for $1.60 an hour, minimum wage, would stay until noon. We set her loose with the children and started to chat until Linda tapped her watch face. “Ten o'clock sharp is writing time,” she said.
“Though this is ‘just for fun,’ isn't it?” Kath said. “‘Nothing serious’?”
Neither Kath nor Ally had written anything in their new journals, but Brett and Linda and I had, and even Ally and Kath had started to reread their favorite books. I'd bought a paperback copy of Rebecca and cut it—literally—into chapters, which made it easier for me to think about each part.
“Rebecca?” Linda said after she'd gotten over the shock of my having cut up a book. “Come on, Frankie. The protagonist is a spineless dishrag who lets the hired help walk all over her. Middlemarch,” she insisted. “You should read Middlemarch.”
“Though this is ‘just for fun,’” Kath repeated. “‘Nothing serious.’” And she started talking about Pride and Prejudice in the most insightful way, and they were all talking about the books they'd reread—Breakfast at Tiffany's for Brett, The Bell Jar for Linda, and for Ally, Charlotte's Web—as I sat wondering why I was drawn to Rebecca. Because the narrator was an unremarkable girl who'd landed a remarkable man? Because she, like me, imagined other women's lives in great detail, and always imagined those women as better than herself?
“Fitzgerald says, ‘All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath,’” Brett said.
“What's with all the quotes, anyway, Brett?” Linda said.
“‘She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit,’” Brett said. “W. Somerset Maugham.” She just read things and they stuck in her mind, she said. She had no idea why.
I thought Brett might be the only person I knew who was as smart as Danny. And felt the shortcomings of my own education: when I'd read Forster's description of the novel as “most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature—irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into swamps,” I'd had to look up rill in the dictionary (“a small brook,” in case you don't know either). And I'd never read Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, whom Forster claimed were better than any English novelist, and I wasn't sure I wanted to; they wrote big, fat books that were only slightly less intimidating than those of the other author he recommended, Marcel Proust, whose Remembrance of Things Past was several volumes even though he was not Russian but a seemingly more reasonable French.