And with that he folded his arms and shut tight his mouth, as if to ensure that no further morsel of his wisdom might slip past his lips. The great novel underway from Evan Parker/Parker Evan was safe from the lesser eyes, ears, and noses of the Ripley Symposia’s first-year prose fiction workshop.
The mother and the daughter in the old house: that was his writing sample. And if ever a work of prose pointed less to a stupendous, surefire, can’t-douse-its-fire plot it could only be something along the lines of an exposé on the drying of paint. Jake took extra time with the piece before his first one-on-one meeting with its author, just to make sure he wasn’t missing a buried
At the same time, it sort of annoyed him to note that the writing itself wasn’t terrible. Evan Parker—and Evan Parker he would be, unless and until he actually succeeded in publishing his threatened masterwork and requiring a privacy-saving pen name—might have dwelt upon his supposedly spectacular plot in the workshop but Jake’s obnoxious student had produced eight pages of entirely inoffensive sentences without obvious defects or even the usual writerly indulgences. The bald fact of it was: this asshole appeared to be a natural writer with the kind of relaxed and appreciative relationship with language even those writing programs far higher up the prestige scale than Ripley’s were incapable of teaching, and which Jake himself had never once imparted to a student (as he, himself, had never once received it from a teacher). Parker wrote with an eye for detail and an ear for the way the words wove into sequence. He conjured his two apparent protagonists (a mother named Diandra and her teenage daughter, Ruby) and their home, a very old house in some unnamed part of the country where snow was general in winter, with an economy of description that somehow conveyed these people in their setting, as well as the obvious and even alarming level of tension between them. Ruby, the daughter, was studious and sullen, and she came up out of the page as a closely observed and even textured character. Diandra, the mother, was a less defined but heavy presence at the edges of the daughter’s perspective, as Jake supposed one might expect in a capacious old house with only two people in it. But even at opposite ends of the home they shared, their mutual loathing was radiant.
He had been through the piece twice, already; once a few nights earlier in the course of his all-nighter, and again the night after his first class, when sheer curiosity had driven him back to the folders, hoping to learn a bit more about this jerk. When Parker made such sensational claims for his plot Jake had thought inevitably of that body discovered in the sand, aggressively decaying while still illogically in possession of “honeymelon” breasts, and he’d been more than a little surprised to discover that this memorable incongruity had sprung from the fertile mind of his student Chris, a hospital administrator from Roanoke and the mother of three daughters. A few moments later, when he realized that Evan Parker was the author of these particular pages—well written, to be sure, but utterly devoid of any plot, let alone a plot so scintillating even a “lousy writer” couldn’t mess it up—Jake had wanted to laugh.
Now, with the author himself about to arrive for his first student-teacher conference, he sat down with the excerpt for a third and hopefully final time.
Ruby could hear her mother, all the way upstairs in her bedroom and on the phone. She couldn’t hear the actual words, but she knew when Diandra was on one of her Psychic Hotline calls because the voice went up and got billowy, as if Diandra (or at least her psychic alias, Sister Dee Dee) were floating overhead, looking down at everything in the poor caller’s life and seeing all. When her mother’s voice was mid-range and her tone flat, Ruby could tell that Diandra was working for one of the off-site customer service lines she logged in to. And when it got low and breathy, it was the porn chat line that had been the soundtrack of most of the last couple of years of Ruby’s life.
Ruby was downstairs in the kitchen, retaking an at-home history test by her own special request to her teacher. The test had been on the Civil War up through the postwar reconstruction, and she’d gotten an answer wrong about what a carpetbagger was, and where the word came from. It was only a little thing, but it had been enough to kick her out of her usual spot at the top of the class. Naturally she’d asked for another fifteen questions.
