Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [175]
19
SUZANNE AND I were living together back in the South End of Newburyport. It was a hot, dry summer, and we lived at the foot of Federal Street across from the Tannery, an L of mill buildings that had been boarded up when we lived here as kids but was now a thriving plaza of boutiques and shops and a dance studio. Late-model cars filled the parking area, and in the air was the hopeful charge of commerce and innovation and a hard-earned well-being.
Pop’s third marriage had ended the winter before. Peggy had moved out with the girls, so now Suzanne was taking care of him full-time and he was paying her enough to live on until she found something else. Suzanne and I had been roommates for a year. I was still working at the Irish pub, and all summer long my older sister had been depressed. When she wasn’t working, she kept playing Mozart’s Requiem over and over again. She’d listen to it curled up on her bed in her shade-darkened room, the revolving fan blowing wherever it blew.
I thought this was a deep and honest way to be depressed, much deeper and more honest than the novel I’d been working on for over two years. It was called Lie Down and Make Angels, and for months I’d been dreading going to it daily. I told myself this was because the story kept bringing me back to some bleak years from my own life, that’s all, but one bright August morning I couldn’t write another word before reading the entire thing from the start. I had the windows open but no fan. About two hours into my reading, I began to sweat, and it wasn’t just the hot, stale air of my room. Down on the street an occasional car drove by. A delivery truck or van would pull into the Tannery parking lot, its brakes squeaking. There were voices calling to one another, the cry of a gull, the smell of asphalt and the Merrimack and the ocean. Living things and dead things.
From behind Suzanne’s door came the barely muffled chorus of women, their voices high and strident, then urgent and accusatory, a string section sweeping in like scythes and cutting them down like wheat. Or maybe the women were doing the wielding and the cutting. I didn’t know. What I did know is that this novel was dead and I had killed it. I’d been trying too hard to say something—about poverty, about overwhelmed single mothers, about absent fathers and tough neighborhoods and all the trouble that could be found there, but most of all I’d been trying to make the reader feel sorry for the children, especially the teenage boy I’d based solely on me. I’d been talking and talking but not listening. The result were scenes that did not ring true, characters who felt more like marionettes than people, a story whose rising arc felt contrived and predictable and false.
The room was a cell, and I pulled off my T-shirt and began to pace. A sick sweat began to roll down my back, and I made myself read more. Scenes I’d thought I’d liked, I now despised. Sentences I had worked and worked and worked were built on a foundation of lies. Why hadn’t I seen this sooner? How could I have not known how rigidly I’d been trying to control this story from its very first line?
In Suzanne’s room, buffeting violins pushed the chorus of women out onto a precipice; they were calling Rex! Rex! In the heart of it a woman screamed. It was off-key and I hadn’t heard it before, and now the chorus seemed to retreat, calling lower and with less urgency, as if they were losing their resolve, but the woman screamed louder, a shriek this time, and I dropped my notebook and stepped to my window and slid up the screen. At the bottom of the street, across from the antiques dealer’s shop, a man was pulling a woman by her hair onto the sidewalk. She was crying and had both hands around his wrists and he was yelling and swearing, spit flying. He yanked her hard and I lost sight of them around the corner of the house, then I was running through Mozart’s final work, a polyphony of rising