More Fiction? Fiction it is.

Today was a big day for me, so I will be posting the story that I wrote yesterday rather than digging through my mind for nonfiction.  I wrote it instead of doing homework, because my burgeoning career as an author is clearly more important than everything else.  It is over 1300 words, which was an accomplishment for me, because normally my stories are shorter than two pages.

Read after the jump if you want to read "My Plain Name."  It has bad words, I know this will surprise you.  It's still a little rough, because I wrote it yesterday, but that's that.

Until next week, wayward travelers.

-Rachael

P.S. The spacing is a little weird.  P.P.S. Some of these names I actually like and I used my own justification for.  P.P.P.S. This was my exercise in creating a narrator that readers would not necessarily side with.

My Plain Name

i.                     Austen: “My good opinion once lost, is lost forever.”

I found a slip of paper that morning.  It had five words, four names, written in her scrawl that could be called artistic if you were forgiving, messy and childish if you were not.  These names confirmed what I’d suspected.  Her breasts were bigger, her sharp cheekbones eroded: she was pregnant, at least ten weeks along, and she knew it.  Rifling through the trash, I hadn’t found a pregnancy test, but on her desk, tucked into a book, the slip of paper.  It was proof.  I threw the book, Sense and Sensibility, across the room.  It hit the wall with a satisfying thud and lay against the floor spine up, pages folding and crumpling haphazardly.

This handwritten list was in alphabetical order—was she so obsessed with perfection?  Even in the face of giving birth to a shitting, puking, screaming child, she had these names in a perfect, alphabetical column like she could defy the very nature of the problem, if she even saw it as one.

But it was a problem.  Here were four names representing the things she loved in this world more than me, names she would choose between and bestow onto a fifth thing that she would love more than me.  It was a fucking problem.

Austen, her favorite author, who died a spinster: proof to her that you could write about love without experiencing it.  Proof to her that beneath the cover of your favorite novel was your soulmate, with only superficial flaws that you would eventually see past, eventually learn to love.  Your Darcy was just waiting for you to crack the book open and revisit him.  It was sickening. 

ii.                   Ezra: “What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage”

When she got home, I was waiting, the list moist from my clenched hand.  She carried two bags of groceries, I can still remember to this day—a head of celery poking out, nestled beside a bottle of white wine that I had asked her to pick up.  She kissed me mildly on the cheek, not meeting my eyes.  “Hi, Ben,”—notice my plain name did not make her list; I was not one of the things she loved most—“I thought maybe we’d have lentil soup tonight.”

I stifled the raring animal inside me, upset that she could act as though everything was normal.  But I would wait until she was cornered.  “Sounds good, darling,” I said.  “How about opening the white?”

Her back was turned to me; she was already at the sink rinsing the celery.  At my request, she turned around, brown eyes blank as she dried her hands on a blue dishtowel.  “Of course, Ben.”  I could almost imagine that she was the devoted wife that she portrayed so well.  But the act was over.

I didn’t understand it.  I married the most romantic girl I’d ever met, and she shriveled up into this shell of a woman.  She had loved Ezra Pound since college.  I bought her an early edition of Ripostes for her twenty-first birthday.  Ezra, the second name on the list: her love for him had endured, but her love for me was empty, superficial, nothing more than a necessity.  She was a lit major when we met, and dropped out after we married, her junior year, my senior.  It didn’t make sense for her to continue; I was offered a full time position at a bank in Denver, and we moved.  I gave her a library, built her the very desk she scrawled these names on.  I loved her, and she abandoned me for fiction, for Ezra Pound and Jane Austen.

iii.                     Henry: “His promises were, as he then was, mighty;

But his performance, as he is now, nothing.”

When she put the glass of wine before me, hands steady that should have trembled with the great secret she was keeping from me, I grabbed her wrist and looked up at her.  She looked back, a sparkle of fear in her eyes that she tried to disguise with a half-hearted smile.  I did not return it.  “Doing some reading lately, honey?” I asked, the pet name sounding more like a hiss.  “Some Austen?”  Her smile faded as she realized I’d found the book with the names.  I stood up from my chair, hand tightening on her wrist.

She knew better than to deny it any longer.  Looking down, steeling herself for her next lie, she said, “Ben.  I was going to tell you tonight, I thought we could celebrate with a nice dinner.”

My ears roared.  I let go of her wrist, and she looked up, took a step toward me, eyes alight, thinking all was forgiven.  How wrong she was.  I drew my hand across her face, leaving four finger marks, one for each of the names she had written on that fucking paper, the names she wanted to leave me for.  One inkling of a thumbprint for the inkling of a baby she wanted to leave me for.  My hand stung, and I picked up my glass of wine and took it into our bedroom like nothing had happened.  I heard her quiet sobs and a prickle of guilty delight crept into the back of my brain.

I didn’t know it then, but have since found out: Henry was just her paternal grandfather’s middle name.  He broke the heart of her grandmother after thirty-five years of marriage, divorcing her and swiftly remarrying.  So she was conflicted about this name.  But her romantic side loved to hear stories of how her ancestors met, relished in the pure tragedy of love lost, of a grandmother driven nearly mad from grief.  Whether or not she saw a parallel in our own lives, I never asked.

iv.                     Violet Joyce: “Stars will blossom in the darkness, Violets bloom beneath the snow.”

I thought the slap would keep her there.  I don’t know why.  I thought it would show her I loved her enough to do anything to make her stay.  She sent me a picture of the baby, without a return address.  Wrapped in an unmarked green blanket, I don’t know which name she chose, or even what gender it was.  But I hope it was a girl, and I hope she named her Violet Joyce.  Violet was her favorite color and by default, her favorite flower.  Violet was the name of her grandmother’s sister, who had romantically died at a young age.  Violet had a classic ring to it that other names did not have, a name that could belong in the times of Austen and Pound and her grandfather. 

Joyce was the middle name of both of her grandmothers, two women who were polar opposites, the two women who she strived to be like, half-crazy, half-comforting; half-profane, half-apposite; half-outspoken, half-yielding.  But both women had been strong and beautiful in their own way, and both women would have called me a bastard and left me, too.  She lived up to her grandmothers that day.

I have three children now, with a woman whom I will never love half as much as I loved her, with a woman whom I will never hit.  My children do not fill the hole in my heart that Violet should occupy.  My right hand still pains me from where I slapped her.  My doctor calls it osteoarthritis, but I know better.  Those four names are tattooed onto my four fingers, beneath the surface, hot with shame.  My thumb is ice cold, never gripped by the warm clasp of Violet, a baby who will always be a mere inkling to me.  When my hand goes numb, I know it is not arthritis, but the pang of my wife’s good opinion lost forever.

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Quotes:
Austen- Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Ezra- "Pisan Cantos, LXXXI" by Ezra Pound
Henry- Henry VIII by Shakespeare
Violet- "For a Silver Wedding" by Julia C. R. Dorr