Chapter 28
From the Kate Fair Desk of Denial and Hope for the Best
9/12/92
Dear Frida,
Autumn is finally rolling in. There were hints of coolness when the sun went down last night, and I woke up to a drizzly rain on the skylights. When I opened my window, I could tell the air is ready to be done with the heat. It’s that back-to-school feeling that makes you nostalgic in an aching kind of way.
Two weeks is more than up. Are you still in Sarajevo? Dumb question since if you are you can’t answer since you won’t get this letter until you’re back. I don’t know if you’re safe, but I have to keep writing to you like you are, like everything’s normal, whatever that means. I know the world is miserable, but good things are happening right now, and I feel like I’m going to explode because I haven’t shared them with you.
I was promoted to our special orders department. When a customer asks for a book we can’t get from our distributors or the publishers we have accounts with, our department hunts it down. We’re like book detectives. We have this massive resource called Books in Print . It weighs in at 1,287 pages. Take that, Larousse Gastronomique ! We process more than a thousand special orders a month. The department is run by Mae. She’s an artist who makes sculptures out of stripped mass markets, and to call her a tough boss is an understatement. She’s not mean or anything. She just wants the job done right, and she chose ME! She put me in charge of something as important as tracking down special requests. She thinks I can do the job right!
Please don’t think I think this is more important than Sarajevo. It’s confusing knowing about what’s going on over there when my life keeps going on over here like over there doesn’t exist. Does that make sense? Does it make sense that I cried when I read about that bomb hitting the busload of orphans, but the same day I felt happy about a short story I started? I got to thinking about trying short stories after I read Laura Kalpakian’s “Sonnet.” It made me wonder if maybe it’s easier to try an idea in a story because if it doesn’t work you haven’t lost a year writing an entire novel. (Plus you can pack a punch with a short story, like in “Sonnet” when the daughter is deciding whether or not to give her dad the cologne. I won’t spoil it for you since I’m sending it to you.)
Once I finish, Sven’s going to help me sell it. He has lots of contacts through all the authors he knows. It’s about a young woman who works in a bookstore. She’s obsessed with writing about her family, and even though she isn’t sure what she wants to say, she keeps writing anyway. I got the idea from Madeleine L’Engle’s A Circle of Quiet . She wrote, “Inspiration does not always precede the act of writing; it often follows it.” Sven says I’m doing something called metafiction. He’s trying to get me to read Jorge Luis Borges, but I’ll stick with Madeleine for now.
Things are going great for Sven, too. He finished his novel, and his agent thinks he could be the next Updike. How amazing is that? We had dinner at Lombardi’s to celebrate being Special Order Royalty and Sir Updike the Second. Afterward we headed to Bumbershoot, this big arts and literary festival that happens at the end of every summer at Seattle Center. It was still blazing hot. All the flags in front of the international fountain drooped like limp dishrags, but no one cared. The sky was pearly blue from the city lights. There was this Latin band, and the whole crowd was dancing. There must have been hundreds of us. Sven was waving his hands in the air and spinning around and laughing. I love it when he gives his Big Thoughts a rest. I can literally see the tension leave him. He smiles differently and
Ring-ring goes my phone. Be right back!