Chapter 21
We discussed Edgar’s novel about three Afghan refugee women, then we pivoted to my piece.
“Would you talk about your chapter, please?” Milken said.
I hadn’t brought a copy. Or my laptop. “Okay.”
“Go on, then.”
“It’s about a love that turns sour.”
He watched me, expectant, before turning to the class. “What’s working here?”
“There’s a musicality to the writing,” Edgar said. “Not heavy-handed, but just enough. It worked for me.”
Chloe said, “I thought there were some funny parts, like when Dorinda tells Joel not to touch her but then they go on a date.”
“I was wondering if there was a different way to reveal Joel’s drinking,” Oscar said. “Right now it’s told to us, but I want to see her seeing that first bottle. The betrayal of that. Like, she’s living with this man who lied about who he was.”
“Addiction doesn’t make you who you are,” Edgar said.
“Well, he was dishonest about a huge part of himself, right?”
Jason said, “Maybe he doesn’t realize he has a problem.”
“He literally loses his job because he’s drunk,” Oscar said.
I sunk my teeth into my lip, careful not to draw blood or attention. This was making me a better writer, having my insides picked over in front of everyone.
“I wanted more of Dorinda’s perspective,” Michelle said. “I also didn’t understand why Joel would start drinking the night his daughter came home. Wouldn’t this be a happy time?”
A sob I couldn’t swallow fast enough left me. Milken glanced over his glasses. “Sorry, do you need a moment?”
I nodded stiffly, stumbling over my chair to flee the classroom. If I smoked, I would’ve reached for a vape. But all I had in my pocket was my phone, its flash flood of notifications, an old restaurant receipt where someone had tipped me $1.75.
I needed to scream, if only to release trapped air from my body. I belted, “I just talk my shit casanooova, superstar, supernooova, if that’s your man then why he over herreeeee??!!!”
Faces poked out of classrooms. The humiliation of having screamed a medley of Beyoncé lyrics collapsed on me with the horror and surprise of a body crashing through the ceiling.
A frail but firm hand grabbed my shoulder and spun me around with the kind of mother’s strength that made everything you’ve ever cared about seem ridiculous.
Janine stood before me in a black turtleneck and a complicated necklace, a silver, heavy-looking contraption with colorful stones. “What in the world is happening?”
“Why are twenty-nine people on the waitlist for your class!”
She frowned. “Let’s get tea in my office. Come, come. Out of the hallway before you scare anybody else with all that energy.”
Janine was a brisk walker, but her short legs slowed her down. I ended up having to wait for her to catch up. I didn’t know if this was infantilizing, but it seemed rude to bulldoze past a senior citizen.
She unlocked her office with an old-fashioned square gold key. Inside: bland university-supplied furniture with a jaundiced feel; Moroccan rug, hypnotically patterned; papers fanning across her desk, marked to death with red pen.
The room was too warm, stuffy. I nearly tripped over the little towers of books on the floor.
Janine yanked the cord of a Tiffany lamp.
It barely let off any light but somehow brought the chaos of her office into immediate order.
She opened her palm to gesture at the chair opposite her.
I sat down, crossing my legs, trying to seem like I was there to talk business and not about my breakdown.
She said, “Remind me who you are again, dear.”
It felt like a child had stabbed me with a mechanical pencil. “Catherine. I’m in the creative writing program? I went to your reading a few weeks ago and have been trying to get into your spring class?” I decided to tack on a white lie: “I’m friends with your great-niece Nia.”
“Yes, yes, it’s coming back to me now.” It didn’t seem like anything was coming back to her.
She handed me a cup of tea. I fiddled with the smooth handle. “I watched an old interview of you talking about your first novel but couldn’t find a copy of it.”
“That’s because it’s out of print.”
“But you’re a big writer now. They didn’t reprint it for an anniversary or something?”
She smiled. “Being a big writer doesn’t always mean what you think.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about. I’d rather be a big writer than a part-part-part-time student-server living at home.
She rose from her desk and shuffled over to her bookcase. When she didn’t find what she was looking for, she shuffled back to her chair and reached for something on the floor. Eventually she slapped a battered paperback in front of me.
“I’ll save you the trouble. Bonnie, the heroine, dies at the end. Hit by a train.”
“What? That’s terrible!”
“That’s ‘literature.’ ” She lowered herself into her chair. “Plus that ending made everyone so happy. Remember”—she pointed a red nail at me—“writers must make decisions, hundreds of them. But please, read it for yourself.”
While she refilled her cup of tea, I shoved the book in my bag, too nervous to flip through it in front of her. “How do you make all these decisions?”
“How does a writer make decisions?”
“Yes.”
“Well”—she paused—“I think you have to know what you’re after, and each decision is a step building a staircase toward the truest version of the story.
But it’s never that simple. You mostly make a bunch of bad decisions and then have to undo them.
” She turned to no one and said, “What I won’t do is smoke in front of a student.
” Then she wrestled open the window and started smoking. “Don’t tell my niece.”
“I won’t.” I waited until she was done. “So, about your class, is there anything I could do…”
She eyed me. “I thought I told you to email me.”
I guess it had all come back to her. “Right, but you didn’t tell me what I should say.”
“And so your response to not knowing was to what? Simply not do it?” She seemed truly baffled by this.
“Well, when you say it like that, it sounds bad.”
“I don’t understand Zoomers. What even is a Zoomer? Do you know?” She waited for a reply, then kept talking. “Send me your writing. Should we say you’ll get it to me by the end of the week?”
The end of the week was tomorrow. “That’s perfect!”
Her demeanor softened, her eyes resting warm on my face. “I’ve seen the world end many times. It’s never really the end. This is not an argument for complacency, dear. Or for not caring. This is an argument for preparing for what comes after the end because there will be an after.”