(c. sherman's turkey plate)
I never lied to anyone. Not about anything important, that is. What some might call deceit I like to think of as artistic embellishment, an essential component of my quest toward self-realization. Everyone should get a turn in the sun. Even simple people like me deserve to be heard, don’t we?
Really, I’m one of the most honest people you’ll ever meet. For example, if you asked me whether you look good in those jeans, I’d have to tell the truth. I might not come right out and say your ass looks like a sheet cake from Costco, but I will tell you those jeans are not doing you any favors. No, I don’t mean you, I mean hypothetically. Ha ha!
The other day, I found a woman’s purse at the bus stop; her address was inside and wow, was she surprised when I showed up at her door. She acted like I was some kind of stalker. People are strange, aren’t they? No thanks or reward, just a door in the face.
I’m glad I accidentally kept her lipstick. Not that I wear lipstick, but still.
I’d prefer not to get into all that but if you must know, I was born before psychology, back when cigarettes were good for your nerves, when people had crooked teeth and starched collars and ate vegetables from a can. People were different then. My mother always told me, if you can’t say something nice then zip it up. She said that good children should appeal to the eyes and not the ears. She punctuated her beliefs with the smack of a ping-pong paddle, but I was a good kid. I wore the clothes she laid out for me and ate everything on my plate. I didn’t have to choose between GI Joe and Barbie: she chose for me and I didn’t argue.
It started out innocently. Of course it did, I was only a kid. I was running home from school one day, trying to lose the pack of boys on my heels like overheated Dobermans, see, and I came across a Goodwill collection bin in the parking lot of the grocery store. I jumped in and hid beneath a pile of discarded Catholic school uniforms. I pulled one on as a disguise and discovered that I liked it—the rough tartan fabric, the taunting swish of the hem, and I sauntered home unmolested like a swarthy Scotsman. I looked so good in the uniform they let me into the school, no questions asked. In college, I grew out my hair and wore a poncho and played guitar in the quad. After graduation, I was a meter “maid.” I liked the uniform: perma-press black slacks and white shirt with epaulets. I loved the surge of bodiless power I felt driving with my lights flashing and slapping tickets under wipers.
But truth is a powerful thing. It’s the thing that slips out of your pocket and hits the floor with a splat when everyone’s looking. It sits on the tip of your tongue waiting for its moment to escape. No matter how deep you push it under, it will eventually bob to the surface and reveal its mossy face. I had to find other ways to express myself, so I began to write every day, mostly science fiction and fantasy, short stories that morphed and grew into a series of convoluted epics that spanned centuries, millennia, and ended at a point in the future when people no longer need flesh to communicate. For me, writing is like dressing up and playing imagination games, it’s all innocent fun. I chose the penname A. Fante as a nod to a writer whose honesty taught me about how to hide myself in my characters in order to make them more real.
No, I’m not going to talk about who I sleep with or how we do it. If I screwed a rock star or a billionaire, would you like me better? But I will say that I was ecstatic when my debut novel won a Writers of the Future award. Since the prize is for new authors and I was already in my thirties by then, I asked the actor who played the lead in the movie they made to deliver my acceptance speech for me. No one seemed to mind.
Well, the awards kept coming and I kept devising new reasons not to appear. See, I come from a time when a book spoke for itself so the author didn’t have to. I have written over a million words in print; doesn’t that say enough? When they asked for interviews I told them, if you want to see me, just look between the lines. But people are lazy. They want you to show them a diagram and point to exactly what they should think and by the time I won the Hugo, they were tired of wondering, so I attended the award ceremony. I knew better but I made myself go. I wore my hair combed back and a beautifully cut vintage suit that framed my clavicles and showed off my waist. I stood straight and tall and delivered my acceptance speech to a rapt audience while the cameras flashed so brightly they filled my eyes with swimming stars. It was a beautiful spectacle and I just smiled for the cameras, completely oblivious to the fact that it was all over.
Things are different these days: you can be whatever you want but you have to choose, you have to be specific. My agent stopped returning my calls, said she only represents lesbians. My publisher couldn’t look me in the eyes when he told the wall next to me that he just didn’t know what to think-he wanted to wash his hands of the whole mess. My black and Asian and Hispanic readers argued for awhile before the lost interest. The critics all suddenly agreed that my books were meaningless and overrated. They called my work romans sans clé, novels without keys. They said young people shouldn’t read them for risk of pollution or brainwashing. Nobody burned them or shredded my books, they just disappeared from the shelves. Poof.
There’s a danger in attaching a face to the meaning of a word, a danger I don’t think you kids fully appreciate. I only agreed to talk to you because they turned off the water in my apartment and I’m tired of eating from a can. I’m getting old now; I just want a little comfort for my bones.
You seem like a smart kid. I have something important to tell you, but you have to come a little closer. Don’t be silly. I don’t bite. You want me to tell you what it all means, but I can’t. You might as well ask me what came first, the chicken or the egg. Look me in the eyes and listen carefully: I’m only human. I’m just like everyone else.
That’s all I have to say. Sure, go ahead and take my picture, but that’ll cost you extra. Do you want me to take off my shirt?
*
Video Killed the Radio Star:
Cindy Sherman/Creep:
*
*
I am participating in the Clarion Write-A-Thon to benefit creative writing education.
Donate now if you can!
Ooooh, I loved the voice in this piece. I really felt a strong presence of the character, and I could really hear her words in my mind as I read.
Thank you! I don’t usually do first person, so this was fun for me. It’s interesting that you call the character a “she” and I wonder why- was it something in the writing or just because a woman wrote it? Hmmm…(stroking chin as if there were a beard). Thank you for reading!!
I don’t know, maybe I don’t give her enough credit, but when my six-year-old asked what I was laughing out loud at, I just had to tell her “Something funny I read”, rather than the image of an ass that looks like “a sheet cake from Costco”. I thought this was autobiographical till I realized that you say you’ve never been published yet. No, you really couldn’t tell if it’s a man or woman who wrote, except that I see a woman snagging the lipstick (as a hedge against the possibility of not getting thanked, maybe?).
I wonder, do you like the book “The Handmaid’s Tale”? I bought it at a rummage sale once, thought it was odd sci-fi that I probably wouldn’t like, but picked it off the shelf today and can hardly put it down.
That’s one FLAT ass.
Yes- I loved it so much I taught it. So good!!!! You scored a good one today.
I’m glad you liked that image because I was trying to make the character accessible. Tee hee!
And I find it very interesting that, so far, everyone assumes the speaker is female.
Interesting….
Love your writing! It really felt like I was sitting in the same room as the author, nodding along to him (for some reason I felt it was a male character). Till the line about the beautifully cut vintage suit framing the clavicles made me think it may just be a woman…
Will be frequenting your other posts soon enough!
I don’t usually write in the first person, so I’m glad to know that it worked for you. Thank you for reading!
I like this story, and I revelled in all the details. Reading the comments here, I realize that I didn’t ‘get’ it either, even though I sensed that there was some sort of subtext (perhaps signaled by this, “But people are lazy. They want you to show them a diagram and point to exactly what they should think…”)
I read it again and I realize now that it wasn’t subtext. It was the story. And now I know how people have felt when they’ve read something of mine and completely missed something I wanted to convey. (This is one of the reasons why I’ve resisted writing stand-alone poetry for so long.) It also makes me see how valuable it is to keep most versions of a specific work. I need them for comparison when I try to figure how to bridge the gap between what I want to say, and what the reader seems to need in order to absorb it. I practice that kind of rewrite often these days, often grudgingly, but even when I decide I don’t want to keep the change in story, I think it stretches my muscles to go back in and look for little things that might have actually been too ambiguous for the reader to come to a specific conclusion.
I like that the speaker was telling the story. That also means that it can be loosely told- being that it’s the character’s own one-sided conversation. One thing I can say now, one writer to another, is that the phrase, “like overheated Dobermans…” gave me pause the first time I read this. That whole paragraph stopped me, so I read it twice the first time (I’m no genius, but maybe now I know why I did.) When I read overheated, I thought of being ‘in heat’ because it described dog behavior, and I never gave it a second thought. I can’t go back and read your story again for the first time, but I wonder if that specific turn of phrase could be fine-tuned? Unless you meant it to be taken more than one way, in which case I think I’m just not smart enough to have really understood this without the hint from you in the comments.
The fact does remain that I liked this, as did your other commenters. (I like your writing voice, period!)
Thank you for your comments! How does one convey ambiguity without being ambiguous? I’ll have to muddle that one over. I chose vague details that could be read either way and perhaps I need to back it up with something more explicit. But to tell the truth, I’m sort of enjoying the confusion for now because it underlines the point I was going for- we all like things to be clearly defined because it makes it easier for us to proceed. But certainly, I’ll have to revisit this in a couple weeks to see if I can fine tune it, because the piece is nothing if the reader doesn’t see that the character is both male and female. Thank you for helping me work it through!!!
If one can be more than humbled, then that describes me right now. I feel like a cat staring at a television set. I hope you don’t mind if I regard this story as poetry for awhile, and simply admire its lilt. My brain hurts (from quite a few difficulties that have converged at the moment to scramble my life) so I’m sorry for my lack-of-sleep induced, premature ramblings above. Here’s to many more writing experiments to come.
What a great combination of precise description and fuzzy, dreamlike narrative. I love the way you set it up in the first paragraph, admitting to “artistic embellishment.” Excellent writing.
I’m glad you liked it! I’ll be reposting a revised version soon- hope I don’t mess up the good parts. Thank you for reading!
very odd and unsettling, guess that means i like it.
I like this a lot. I’m a great fan of short stories. They are a special art - and I reckon you got it, Anna. Punchy voice, quirky incidents, and an attitude. Well done.
Yay, thanks! I think this one just missed its mark but I know just how to fix it. As soon as there is time. Thank you for reading!!!!
Holy shit I adore this story.
I’m so glad!
Pingback: Friday Open Mic! featuring Anna Fonté (Girl in the Hat) | the Satsumabug blog