Chapter 81
Janine placed a hand on top of my manuscript. We sat in her boxy Chinatown office, drowning in books, loose-leaf papers, bankers’ boxes. I had started working as her editorial assistant that March.
She turned her palm upward, heavy bracelets clinking. “So, she gets married at the end and gives up writing?”
Sitting opposite her, I fiddled with the pen in my hand. “Yes.”
“To be frank”—she paused—“I don’t understand that.”
“Why not?”
“Well, doesn’t it undermine everything the story is saying?”
I whined, petulant, “You killed off your heroine at the end of your first novel. Why can’t mine get married and be miserable?”
“I did. Now she’s forever dead and there’s no undoing that decision, just as in life.”
I held my ground. “I’m writing in the tradition of the women who die at the end of books because they don’t comply or assimilate. Except, in this case, the death is spiritual. A death for the modern-day woman.”
Janine leaned forward, her eyes hooking into mine. “Do you feel like you deserve a spiritual death? This character is representative of you, is she not?”
I turned over her question. It was less that I felt I deserved one and more that I felt one was inevitable. “Swimming against the tide is exhausting and doesn’t actually change the tide’s direction. Maybe true freedom is letting yourself be swept along with it. Like, rest is resistance.”
She watched me. “Do you believe that?”
“I mean no, but it’s going to sound so good when I say it in book interviews.”
Janine exhaled. “Catherine, I don’t think you wrote this ending for yourself or for your heroine.
So who exactly is it for? And why do they have so much say, so much power, over how it ends when, isn’t the whole point to wrestle the narrative back?
Why wrestle it back only to fall prey to the same punitive impulse?
” She patted the stack of papers. “Just something for you to think about. Oh, I am a big fan of the scenes between the protagonist and the painter. Though I wonder what would have happened had she not waited ten years to reach out.”
It was evening by the time I left Janine’s.
Instead of walking to the Metro, I turned down Ninth Street, past the brutalist FBI building, past the Justice Department, and wandered down wide-open Constitution Avenue.
A white-haired woman in a little beige coat in front of me looked at the sky with worry and, sure enough, it started to rain.
Reaching into my tote, I pulled out my blue-and-white umbrella.
It ballooned above me like a circus tent.
A beautiful foreign woman walking toward the Mall with her American boyfriend ducked under a restaurant’s burgundy awning, brushing back her hair.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture loomed like a bronze ziggurat or an ark, the Washington Monument hovering in the distance.
I bounded across the street in front of a Jeep carrying two teenagers who were making out like the light would never change.
My shoes squelched with puddle water but, after days of heat, it felt like grace.
By the time I cut across Seventeenth Street, the rain had stopped.
The air was muggy now, thick with moisture.
Tourists emerged from their shelters, cameras around their necks.
The Grecian beauty of the WWII Memorial, spurting arcs of clear-white water in synchronicity.
“Here we mark the price of freedom.” Trees rustled in the wind like dry hands rubbing together, the sound folding into the pitch of laughter, screams, children running around the Mall.
I walked until I saw pale pink cherry blossoms facing the Reflecting Pool, the blue-violet horizon mirrored softly on the water.
I picked a cherry blossom off the ground, holding it between my fingers for a beat before nestling it behind my ear.
The summer after my dad got sober, before relapsing, he became obsessed with teaching me to swim.
Nearly every day we went to Upshur Pool, nine-year-old me in an orange tankini I begged my mom to let me wear.
My dad didn’t even know how to swim himself, but he was determined to teach me.
He never just threw me into the water. He was too afraid.
We always started our sessions the same way: me floating on my belly, one of his hands holding me up, the other resting on my back.
After several breaths, slowly, he removed them until I was drifting alone.
I looked around the Mall, its green expanse, its troupe of tourists, marveling at whatever strange impulse made humans build monuments only to forget what we memorialized.
I marveled at whatever feverish hope made us walk, chant, chasing change.
Whatever primal need made us wade into the ocean without knowing its dark bottom.
Whatever desire for beauty made us flock to gaze upon fickle pink trees.
Whatever desperate desire made us love despite its promised loss.
My dad never did teach me to swim that summer. But, standing at the pool’s edge, I marveled at this big, dark, beautiful animal inside of me saying, Jump in.