Although my life had been largely lived through novels that took me places a freak otherwise could not go, I’d never consideredwritingfiction. I’d read authors who were moral monsters and who seemed not to realize it. I feared that if I revealed more of myself in a story than intended, I might discover I was not just a physical monster. Besides, Captain Farnam would never have provided me with a typewriter. If I had proved to have any talent for composition, it would have been a key with which to unlock the chains of slavery.
Gertie had begun writing two years earlier, when she was sixteen. Everyone assumed it was a passing fancy spawned by a novel she admired. Instead, she had kept at it with increasing enthusiasm, producing short stories and novellas she said were “practice for the real thing.” She forbade anyone to read her work. It was an honored rule in the family that any demand for privacy, if reasonable, must be granted. If you violated such a vouchsafement, you were brought up before the family court to be embarrassed, shamed, and assigned punishment. I had no experience of that, nor had I seen it happen to anyone. But soon after I came to the Bram, Izzy admitted she had broken the rule when she was ten; the experience was so mortifying, neither she nor her siblings had ever again violated another’s request for privacy. If a request for privacy was never made, then snooping was all but required—or otherwise there would never have been either a J. Edgar Hoover Society or a Clyde Tombaugh Club.
The week after our trip to the Palomar, before Izzy came to visit, there had been a four-day period when Gertie took her meals in herroom and vanished from family life. Her typewriter rattled at all hours. When she at last emerged and came to my living room and threw herself onto the sofa as if she were a distressed damsel in a Pearl White silent serial, I asked if she’d found her career, if she might become a writer. She said, “I’m only eighteen, Addie, still in my damn cocoon, going through the pupa stage. I don’t know if I’m going to be a butterfly or just a moth. Or maybe I’m an inferior pupa that just withers in the cocoon and never becomes anything.”
“You’re not an inferior pupa,” I assured her. “You’re a pupa of the finest kind. You’re an amazing pupa.”
“Yeah, well, when I read what I’ve written, it looks brilliant, and five minutes later it’s just crap. Now beautiful, now crap, now beautiful, now crap. Maybe I’ll have a career if there’s a market for beautiful crap.”
“Maybe you just need feedback.”
“Hell no. At eighteen, nobody can benefit from being given writing advice. You have to kick your own ego around until it’s scarred and dented, andthenmaybe you’re ready for feedback. Maybe that’s when you’re twenty. Twenty-five. How would I know when? I’m only eighteen.”
“Some famous writers—not many but some—were writing pretty good work at eighteen.”
“No, don’t tell me their names! Envy is a terrible thing. If they’re dead, I’ll want to desecrate their graves. If they’re alive, I’ll want to put themintheir graves.”
“Maybe the form of fiction you’re struggling with—short stories, novellas—isn’t right for you. Maybe you should try screenplays.”
“What—and throw myself into the family business? No way.” She grabbed a decorative pillow and pressed it to her breast, as though to ward off arrows. “Even if I was the greatest screenwriter ever, they’d say I got to the top because of who my parents were and because with my weird hand I couldn’t do anything else but ride on the family name. It would always be seen as a combination nepotism-pity career. I want towrite novels thatcrushyou when you read them, that shake your heart half to pieces, so no one even notices my weird hand. Or if they notice it, they want to have a hand just like it because they love my books so much that a weird hand has become cool.”
“Well, that’s a perfectly reasonable ambition.”
She sighed. “No it’s not.”
“It’s not?” I said, feigning disbelief.
“Not the part about everyone wanting a hand like this. But I really do want to crush people, totally crush them emotionally, and shake their hearts to pieces, figuratively speaking. Oh, and make them laugh, too, and love the characters.”
“Then am I right to think it’s your intention, in spite of all this violent crushing, to make your readers want to live?”
“It would be difficult to build an audience if what I wrote caused them to kill themselves.” She put the pillow aside. “I came in here being a drama queen, didn’t I. Pretend this never happened.”
“Honey, you’ve been pounding away at this for two years. Maybe it would help to hear a reader’s opinion. Writers write to be read not just by themselves but by other people.”
“Where did you get that? I’d never thought about it that way. Is that Shakespeare?” She sighed and shook her head. “Don’t listen to me. Well, listen to me, but don’t take anything I say to heart.”
“Did someone just say something?”
“You know what it is?” she asked. “Izzy’s out there, singing with a band, living her dream, and I’m spinning my wheels.”
“She’s coming home for three days next week. We could fall upon her in the dead of night and beat the shit out of her.”
“Mother and Father won’t approve of violence in the Bram.”
“We know where she’ll be staying in San Diego after she leaves here. You’ve got a driver’s license. You can use one of the family cars anytime you want. All we need is a baseball bat.”
“I doubt that’ll make me feel better. After all, I love her.” She scooted to the edge of the sofa and leaned toward me. “Maybe it would help me if I had some feedback.”
“Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Could you read a novella and give me an honest opinion, tough and true, without coddling me at all?”
“Yes.”
“If it’s crap, will you pull no punches?”
“If necessary, I’ll eviscerate you.”
