December 23, 2011
Friday

Today is Express a Regret Day. I started it in 2008 as an antidote to the negativity of Festivus, a bogus, manufactured “tradition” that is itself an antidote to earnest good-willing. Although I enjoy airing a grievance, I think I should mitigate that self-indulgent outburst with an examination of conscience and an effort to acknowledge that I am not always the person I want to be, the woman my daughter thinks I am. So today, I’m going to talk about Garth.

I knew Garth when he was in 11th grade. He was an indifferent student, a youngster who you knew would probably make his way in this world through the use of his physical rather than his intellectual energy. He was built like an offensive lineman, but he didn’t play football, neither did he participate in any other school activities. I had him in a class called “Junior English Skills,” a name devised to try to hide the fact that it was not the elegant “American Literature,” the class crammed with the college bound (or those who perceived themselves so) who were more or less the second string in the intellectual hierarchy of the student body, that top position claimed by those in “Honors American Literature.” “Junior English Skills” was for youngsters who were marking time until they were awarded a diploma and could start work full time at a factory or a chain store or a warehouse.

I remember this incident as taking place in the spring, with the afternoon sun heating up the classroom that wasn’t air-conditioned then, and the busses lined up along the driveway just beyond my open windows, spewing their noise and their diesel fumes into the air. Pregnancy and the school year both last three months too long, I’ve said. Six months of each would be better — in those last three months of each, nothing new happens, everyone is looking forward to the next big thing, and you just want to get on with it.

I was collecting a paper. I have no idea now what the assignment might have been. I only know now that Garth didn’t have his. There followed a scene very much like this:

“I don’t have [the paper],” he said. He couldn’t remember the assignment, and he certainly hadn’t read the story he  was supposed to write about. He’d meant to, but stopped when his break was over, and he’d had time only to  read the  prefatory note (Mrs. Ambrose was big on having them read the prefatory notes) that said the story was about fathers and sons and disappointment and lost hope.A setup like that just didn’t make him want to keep turning the pages.

Mrs. Ambrose started lecturing him on responsibility and the need to pass this class to graduate. “Fuck this shit!” he said and got out of his seat, almost knocking the squat little teacher over.

She followed him out into the hall. He wanted to keep on walking but he stopped when she called his name. She didn’t say anything about the f-note, just started in on him about his great potential and all, how the assignment was simple and well within his capabilities and how she couldn’t understand why he was being so difficult and so resistant, she wasn’t asking for anything out of the ordinary, just a simple critical essay like the ones he’d been doing all year, and what on earthwas wrong with him these past weeks . . .

“You don’t know anything about me and my life,” he said. “Let me tell you what’s up for this weekend. First I have to pick up all my damn brothers and  . . .”

That is a scene from “Brothers,” the story I took to Bread Loaf in 2007, which follows a youngster not unlike Garth (called Gene in the story) through a weekend that includes picking up his five half-brothers (all from different mothers) so they can spend time with their dad, as well as his pregnant girlfriend who has just been thrown out of the house by her father. A story from Stacey’s point of view and showing them five years later, with two children and a disagreement over contact with their sons’ grandmothers, was my manuscript last year. I get praise for the way I can write working class characters, for plucky, energetic Stacey and wounded, vulnerable Gene who is trying hard to establish the family he wishes he had grown up in. “No one here will ever forget Stacey,” said the Bread Loaf fellow in 2007. ” Someone in 2011 asked to read the earlier story, to see Stacey at 17.

The original story exaggerates the number of half-brothers and adds the pregnant girlfriend. By the second story, Gene is firmly established as a character and no longer functions as a recreation of someone I actually know. That’s how fiction writing works — you take something in your here and now and ask yourself, what if?

My regret is that it took me more than a dozen years and the hard work of learning how to render a character, how to think like someone unlike myself, for me to come to an appreciation of a youngster whose concerns were much thornier than what to write for his “squat little teacher.” I am especially regretful because of the joy that the character Garth inspired has given me. I hope he’s found someone like Stacey to share his life.

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