By Thanksgiving, Brett and I—pleased as anything that this new television show, Sesame Street, had completely enthralled our children—had completed our manuscripts. By Christmas, we'd put together agent lists and drafted letters describing our books. Brett included a lovely paragraph that said she'd graduated summa cum laude and written for the Radcliffe newspaper, and had done graduate work at Harvard. I put in a sentence reporting that I lived in Palo Alto with my husband and our two young children and tried not to worry that it didn't look like much.
Kath took one look at our letters and said, “Ladies,” in a tone that might have been addressed to Anna Page when she was caught playing in the mud. “Do you think General Motors sells cars with ads that say ‘Would you like to see a brown car with seats and wheels and windshield wipers?’”
“You could compare yourself to some famous writer,” Linda suggested. “Frankie, you could say something like ‘in the tradition of—’”
“Daphne du Maurier,” Kath said.
“To name a brilliant example,” Linda said, rolling her eyes. “And Brett could say something like . . .” She paused, unable to come up with anyone to whom she could compare Brett's writing. Brett's story ought to have worked, but it didn't, and yet none of us could say there was anything wrong with it exactly.
I wondered if the same thing was happening with my book, if it wasn't really good enough but they were too chicken to tell me “Michelangelo's Ghost” wouldn't fly.
“This is preposterous,” Brett said. “We're supposed to boil four hundred manuscript pages down to a single paragraph?”
“Like churning sweet milk,” Kath said. “How about this, y'all? How about you start with a question to draw in the reader, then give them a little peek at the story but don't tell the ending? Show them a little ankle, maybe some calf, but don't go sleeping with the boy before the wedding day.”
“I heard they're getting copy machines at the library, so you could send a sample chapter, too,” Ally suggested. “It's so easy to say no, you don't think you'd like a book, but then you read the first line and pretty soon you've finished a whole chapter and you realize you do want to read this story about, say, a middle-aged widow manor owner in thirteenth-century East Anglia.”
So Brett and I went back to the drawing board. It's amazing how much time you can spend on a simple one-page letter, but Kath was right: that one page would determine whether anyone would ever read our books.
• • •
DANNY STUMBLED in the door one night not long afterward to find me working on the same paragraph I'd been working on for days. It was 1:00 A.M. I had a moment of fearing I was in Kath's shoes—or those boots she talked about putting on backward—especially since his initial wave of enthusiasm for my writing seemed to have waned, leaving in its wake a hint of disapproval. I wasn't getting enough sleep, and he missed waking up next to me; couldn't I just stay in bed in the morning?
That night, though, he just started rambling enthusiastically and incoherently—he was definitely a bit sloshed—about chips and wafers and yields. “From two to twenty-five good chips per wafer, Frankie,” he said. “We popped so many champagne corks that the ceiling needs to be replaced!”
I heard what he was saying then. His MOS dream, his “baby,” was becoming a reality, a product they might be able to mass-produce.
“It was the rubber-chicken good luck, was it?” I said, and he laughed, a silly-drunk laugh; he'd started praying to that rubber chicken every morning.
I could get no sense out of him after that—just a bad imitation of his co-worker Les Vadasz jumping all over the place, screaming “Sooooper dip!” in a thick Hungarian accent. I was sure he would wake the children, just as I was sure, in bed not much later that night, that we would both wake them, though we did not.
It wasn't yet dawn when I woke the next morning—no sounds of trash collectors or early traffic yet, but I already had a new first sentence for my query letter in my mind. I slipped out from under Danny's arm, which was draped heavily over me, and reached for my glasses on my nightstand.
“Hey,” he whispered. “Where are you going?” He lifted the sheet and blanket and pulled me to him, nuzzling, morning-breathed, into my neck. “Let's do that again.”
What would you do if you were Risa Luccessi? I thought. Hold on to the line. Ideas evaporate so easily if I don't get out of bed and write them down.
“It's morning,” I said. “Mags and Davy—”
“Shhh,” he said, reaching under my nightgown, stroking my thigh. “It's not even light yet.”