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Entry tags:	001, completed omg, story junk

if i could pull up my trailer pegs we could get away together for good
so in year 12 for english literature one of the sacs was to write a piece in the style of raymond carver. if you have read any carver you will know this is a sort of open brief - he is a minimalist but he changes his style from story to story depending on the speaker.

he is also a master of unease in that in a lot of his works there is this deep unsettlement that is hinted at abstractly and sometimes a lot less so. while trying to avoid sounding too silly and literary, there's this very subtle, very quiet sense of malaise that pervades a lot of his stories and it is derived from the working-class milieu that a lot of them are set in

the story i chose to write in the style of was "why, honey?" which is one of the more outright ones. it is written in the style of a woman writing a letter to someone who has asked a question about her son, and as the story/letter goes on you get this portrait of a fundamentally broken young man, violent and possibly sociopathic but written through the eyes of a woman who is scared and confused for her child. it is extremely forthright compared to some of his other work but the actual voice of the narrator changes it - while she is talking about her son trying to explode a cat with firecrackers or coming home with a bloody shirt it transforms from this violent act into a shallow portrait that sounds brittle and fragile.

when i was writing my piece i knew exactly what i wanted to write it about, it was just setting it up that was the problem. i wanted to emulate that very simple voice that was achieved by the use of the letter as setting - it lets you speak with a narrative voice that his other minimalist work takes away. but at the same time this was an issue because i had to write my story but make it something that this character would write, and i look at it now and i know i could do better but i am still extremely proud of how it turned out, for a year 12 lit sac.

i would like to add that i find it amusing that how i wrote then, for a simple character while trying to emulate a writer i could never match up to, is how i write in my livejournal now as a matter of course. something happened there

in some places i think it gets too simple and in others too complex, but i was trying to make a character who wrote in a way he thought he should write, not actually one who wrote how he wrote. think of a man who acts the way he thinks he should act in front of other people and never looks quite natural and that is what i was aiming for with this - there are one or two turns of phrase that i think he has picked up as cliches. in the parts of it that seem too simple i think when i wrote it i was trying to communicate the fact that he remembers it as a child and so he wrote as a child because he still thinks of it in those words

this is one of the few pieces of writing i have ever truly thought about and planned and attempted to communicate a message without saying it and honestly i still feel it is one of the best things i have written. you may think otherwise but i am not bothered, this is not a dismissal of your feelings but a reflection of the fact that i am honestly proud of the work that went into this, because it has not happened for anything since

and without further ado

Children


Dear Sir,

I was so surprised to receive your letter asking about my sister, how did you come across her? It was years ago now and we have all moved on. I hear whispers sometimes but they are always behind my back and I try not to think about them because they are all rumors. I'm sure you've heard the rumors but they are wrong and I am certain you did not write because of them.
My Sister was born five years after me in May. I was born in December. My parents had been wanting a girl after me so they were very pleased. When they took her home she was put in my room and I moved because my parents told me I wouldn't like the crying. There was a lot of it and whenever she cried my mother or father would rush to look after her.
She was always a daddy's girl when she was growing up. If she was scared at night she would call out and I would listen to my father's footsteps past my door and into her room. He would stay up at night with her into the morning. Once I woke up early and he had fallen asleep watching her. When my father came home from work she would be at the door in a second just like that.
When she was thirteen she came home late from school one day. My father wasn't at home and my mother was waiting for her at the door.
Where were you? she asked when my sister came in smiling.
I was at the library she said.
With who? Who did you go with? You've been gone two hours you know.
With a friend.
With who? she used asked again in her voice she used when she wanted to get her way with my father. I had heard it before.
A friend. His name is J-- and he lives only a block away. She looked at the carpet.
Were you studying?
Yes, mother she said. We were studying.
Alright. Go and put out the dishes. My sister's eyebrows knotted but she went into the kitchen while my mother watched.
When my father came home my mother shood us into the living room where their voices were low and we couldn't understand. They called my sister in and I sat and watched television. I tried not to listen because I knew J-- was my age and they would find out.
She saw her next boy at sixteen and then after that a new one every month or two but she was always at home to meet my father. They never came around while he was at home and my mother remarked on them but I never heard her speak to my father about it.
She stopped one night night when she was seventeen and asked me if I'd told daddy. No I haven't told him anything I said. Why? Never mind she said and giggled at me. She had a smile she put on to stop boys asking questions. This one has nice eyes she said. I looked next time and they were green. They reminded me of my father's and mine. I got my father's eyes and she got my mother's face with big eyes and lips but a small nose. We were their children they said but she was a daddy's girl.
I found her crying one night and asked why? She said daddy told me to stop seeing boys. He said I was getting known and he was disappointed. I sat on the edge of her bed and just like that she put her head in my lap and kept crying but less. Thank you, she said.
Boys asked for her all that year and after her eighteenth birthday. She said no to all of them and if it happened, she would say Daddy, so-and-so asked me to see him today and he would say Oh, he's a bad one or I don't know him. She would reply I said no, Daddy and he would smile and give her a hug.
I went to work upstate when I was twenty-three but I got letters often from her. There was one boy M-- who was in every letter because he kept asking. One day a letter said they had been to a film so I think my father said Oh, he's a good sort and that was that. He was in a lot of letters after that but I was busy with work so I never met him.
The invitation came when I was twenty-five and in a low mood. I was cordially invited to the union of Miss S. P---- and Mr. M. L--- that July and there was a letter from my sister asking me to please come. I borrowed a suit from a man who was longer than me and went back home.
The night before she came into my room with wet eyes and sat on my bed and cried. I sat up and put an arm around her like my father used to do.
She was beautiful at the wedding with a dress flowing over her and her veil but we could still see her crying when she was given away. My father was smiling though and as we were eating his sister remarked that me and him looked the same when we smiled. I couldn't see my sister as they drove away but she had stopped crying by then.
I went back to work until my father died eight years later in hospital. I quit my job and moved back into our house to look after my mother.
My sister seemed very at peace and I was envious of her even if she sat down the back at his funeral. Afterwards we went out and her husband was sick, she said and gave me her smile.
We saw each other often now I was at home. Her husband was sick more and more she said and her son was growing and she looked as if she needed to escape. So one day I said, Why don't you take a break? I can't do that she said, but the next week she mentioned it again and the week after that. We talked about other things as well of course but I do not think you would be interested in them.
One night she rang and said her husband was out of state and could she please come over? I said yes and later that night we went to dinner and spent time with her boy. I hope M--- is alright she said and looked at me, I get so worried.
On the night of August 23 I think you said it was we went out to dinner. Her boy was at a friend's house she said and M--- was having a night in. We went out to dinner at Marco's because we liked the owner. I had pasta and she had the chicken. She seemed worried. At nine we asked for coffee. At nine-thirty we left and walked for five minutes. We passed a public phone and she said she was worried. She called home but M--- would not pick up the receiver. She said we should go. We separated at the car park.
At ten past ten I got a call from her saying M--- was dead and crying and sobbing so I went as fast as she could. I sat there holding her.
The night before the funeral she stayed in her old bedroom. She said she was scared and I thought I should stay up with her.
I think that is all I have to tell you. Nothing to note happened after the funeral so I cannot tell you any more. Here we are years later and we have put it behind us. We have contact often and she has not remarried yet. She is very happy with her boy, he would be eighteen now and she says he has his father's eyes.

E-------








i think putting it up here is a way of finding out how successful i was at communicating what was going on. the original title was "daddy's girl" but i felt that would be making it too obvious; "children" suits me because that is really what it is about, the children of all of this.

i wrote it so i don't know what is obvious and what isn't. if i erred on the side of blatancy then i suppose i regret it, but if i erred on the side of opaqueness then i would like to elaborate in the following paragraphs:

this story is meant to be about attachment on different levels but mainly about deception.

i never quite decided on what i was comfortable writing about when i wrote this (year 12 in a catholic school, hello) but now i think i can state outright that there is abuse in this story of all sorts. the obvious is the father to the daughter and this resulted in some sort of attachment between them that began with the father and his actions but morphed into something else, this concept of the daddy's girl that is based on a self-deception by the daughter/sister about what used to happen when she was young and what it turned into when she was older.

when i mapped out the story i said that she had grown attached to her father and this was her life, basically. daddy's eyes is a central idea obviously, and this connecting thread between her father and her brother and her son. M--- is a boy that her father approved of, so she took it and ran - at the wedding she was crying because her father was letting her go, he was giving her away, and it was breaking that attachment that she'd built up (i think a lot more than her father) - and then when her father died she felt she had no obligation to M--- any more.

this is what saved her son when she killed M---, he was not his son and she still had this attachment to him. i think if he had been M---'s son he would have been dead, because he would have been tying her to this life that she had taken up for a dead man.

the deception stretches to the brother who has these feelings about his sister that he will never admit to in the letter but that appear - talking about the flowing dress - and he shies away from describing any outright attachment to his sister at all. when he stays up with her he is telling himself that is what his daddy did for her, when he puts his arm around her he is acting how his daddy did, it is all this thing where he is emulating his father

basically this story is about people lying to themselves and others about the lives they have found themselves in

finally i would like to note that i never knew what the question was, i never thought about it. i suppose it was a question about the death of M---, there were always lingering doubts about his death but no-one ever felt it could be true. and a question about the daughter and her father, there would be something there too, i think maybe as an incidental that was dragged out too much by the writer because he was driven to try and justify it? i don't know, that was always the flimsiest part of it