—after James Salter
There is a kind of minor writer who is found in a room of the library signing his novel. He wears jeans and a green flannel shirt, offering a certain patina of ruggedness that plays well in small-towns.
To his left, another minor writer signs copies of her short fiction collection. She wears jeans and a button-down shirt, not rugged so much as sloppy, distracted, unkempt. She has a stoic face, strong as a casserole dish, with cracks from where the oven got too hot–stayed too hot for too long. Sustained heat is part of the equation of strength. Between books, she texts her spouse about the sheet music the kids require for their piano lesson at 3:35 pm.
•
The male minor writer thinks it unprofessional to text while signing. He turns off his phone politely.
The last time the female minor writer turned off her phone, the older daughter wound up in the ER getting forehead stitches. The daughter with silken brown hair refused to speak to her for two days.
“What kind of Mommy are you, Mommy?” the daughter finally asked.
“That’s a difficult question,” the minor writer replied.
•
She is writing a book about the Carpool Industrial Complex. She will never finish the book because she keeps losing the thread, keeps finding herself at a playdate or a birthday party jumping on a trampoline or pacing a treadmill that is not writing.
•
They share a literary heritage. His public heroes are Musil, Salter, Saunders, and vaguely, Whitman. Her public heroes are Musil, Salter, Saunders, and Whitman. His secret hero is Robert Plant. Her secret hero is the woman who cleans houses while raising three children alone. If she’s being frank, her heroes are nameless. If she’s being jane, her heroes are Beyonce. His heroes bestsell their way to the top wearing baseball caps and casual chuckles.
•
She bites her nails until they bleed and hopes the readers won’t inquire about the band-aids on the tips of her fingers. A woman with hungry eyes waits for her book to be signed. That’s Vanessa spelled V-a-n-n-e-s-s-a.
“Why do band-aids get wet without water?” the minor writer asks.
The woman nods, looks away. A child wanders near the stairwell crying Mommy. It is not hot, not yet–only the beginning of summer.
•
That is an El Camino, the only vehicle that knows how to 1) ride off wild into the sunset like a stallion and 2) purr like a tabby in a meadow of catnip. The male minor writer explains how a certain automobile can serve as a vehicle to carry a plot twist. His voice carries the words with the authority of italicized text. He could be quoting the canon. The female minor writer remembers twisting her ankle while having sex with a hometown boy in his uncle’s El Camino. It doesn’t seem interesting enough to bring to the table. So she doesn’t.
•
The living room is a wreck. She closes her eyes, whispers a few lines from Saul Williams’ Said the Shotgun to the Head, affirms the yellow curtains, affirms the shitty framed mosaic, affirms sordid unlisted emotional labors. Shouts I’m ho-o-o-me. No reply. Maybe she spoke in italics.
•
“I want you to practice the lost art of listening without saying a word while I take photos of the kids to send to your mother, your brothers, and all seven hundred planets,” the minor writer says.
Her husband asks if he can listen while being in another room where he can check his voicemail. He’s been trying to check his voicemail all morning. He could be missing something important. She says sure, go listen from another room while actually listening to your voicemail or the Marketwatch podcast, whichever is easier to access.
•
Morning after the reading. The dentists text their wives from the golf course. The wives nourish the children who Snapchat under the table. The minor writer assembles her notes for the reading at the conference center. She feels terrible about missing breakfast with her children. They are growing so fast–and other cliches rattle her desk.
She stands up, stretches, slinks into the kitchen for coffee, pauses to chat with the girls. The older daughter is reading a book about swans. The book is terrible. Reading is terrible.
“I like swans,” the younger daughter says.
“Oh? When swans decide whether to take to the sky, they bob their heads repeatedly until reaching a certain threshold of excitability. Once this threshold is met, they rise and fly together.” The minor author explains this to her children and imagines how swans are different from minor writers. With their long white necks and altruisms.
When asked if swans are magic, the minor writer doesn’t know how to reply–whether to preserve the fiction or encourage the field study. As she vacillates between parenting strategies, the girls begin playing an imaginary game in their secret land.
“I’m going to be a magical mermaid named Purple Glitterstar.”
“Mermaids are already magical so there’s no such thing as a magical mermaid. Duh. I’m going to be Ella…. Ellabella.”
“Okay, I’m going to be a magical mermaid named Daniel.”
“You can’t be Daniel! I want to be Daniel!”
“But you’re already Ellabella. And I’m already Daniel. I said it first.”
“What happened to Purple Glitterstar?”
The minor writer steps in, says, “Girls, you can both be Daniel.” She imagines the variants of sisterhood.
“But that’s not fair, Mom! She always takes my name. Why can’t she be Fancia or Eleanor?”
A girl can be anything, as long as she doesn’t earn the ire of her sister. Generosity is the missing pacifier.
•
Given two hours to spend before the conference, the minor writer researches traffic bottlenecks. She writes a story about a civil engineering firm that engineers roadways to increase the waiting time in carpools. This is not a crime. The owners have a side business that specializes in apps which offer tailored, time-sensitive shopping experiences to harried carpool moms. This is not a conflict of interest. Slow food is trending.
When a reporter asks why there is no such app geared towards males–and whether such oversight constitutes a form of sexism–the company spokesman says, “There’s no market for men waiting in carpool lines. If there were a market, we would be pursuing it. Market research studies reveal that masculinity is too rigid a construct for carpools.”
•
The conference is over. The minor writers exit the lecture hall with a sigh of relief. For once, they laugh together, toss those pale blue name-tags into the nearest trash-can. They decide to stop for a beer at the pub next door to the conference center.
“A true slice of average America,” the male writer says.
Since the female writer does not know what is average, she smiles–it seems average and therefore appropriate. She tells him that she enjoyed his novel. It is dark. She enjoys darkness and old-fashioned ghost stories.
He groans. “I have so much time to write and nothing comes out of it. Maybe I’m done. I can’t seem to find the next book.”
She consoles him–“I’m sure it will come.”
She considers saying that she has more books in her head than time to write–she is literally drowning in stories–but decides against it upon noticing how earwax has collected in the hairs that line his ear canal. He would be horrified. She doesn’t want to horrify him. She prefers drinking without that sort of pressure. Without him knowing, he is vulnerable, a fellow human, a minor writer in a bar popping Tums with his beer.
Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Alabama. Find her poems and prose in recent issues of Juked, DIAGRAM, New South, Mantis, VOLT, Cloudbank, New Orleans Review Online, and others. She loves being the Poetry Editor of Pidgeonholes. Her first fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the 2016 Brighthorse Books Prize (Brighthorse Books, May 2018). She can’t wait for you to read it. More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com.