She is sitting on her clean white couch enjoying the strong morning light, looking out the window, watching her doves, her mother's bone china teacup in her hand.
She buys the birds at the nearby feed store. Walks in among the dusty farmers in her cool silk prints and buys up doves meant for food. Then she sets them free, and feeds them every morning. They are morning doves, and they come to her window with the sun. She is in the habit of drinking her tea with them, listening to their cooing and the soft whirrs of their wings. The birds are crowding her picture window today, the big window she had put in specially so she could see Lake Ray Hubbard, named for her great-uncle, see it properly.
In her teacup is homeopathic chamomile tea, for her digestion. Though she answers any questions about her age with "I'm in my prime," she has begun to take more care of herself recently. To pay more attention to knees and elbows when moisturizing after a bath. Her hand strays to the back of her hair, pulled back and away from her high forehead and coiled at her nape. She absentmindedly tucks in a grey strand, sips her tea, listens to her doves. She thinks about water and light.
Across the room is a large print of a Georgia O'Keefe painting, from the last retrospective at the Dallas Museum of Art. She loves the artist and her paintings - loves that she was a hard woman who fell in love with wide open skies and painted beautiful flowers. Her face resembles Georgia's, handsome and clean in its planes, with deeply set eyes. She tells her students about Georgia, about how she saw things differently, about how she learned to play within the lines while creating something new. She thinks about her grandson; considers whether it is time for him to start school. She's been teaching him Longfellow. "I wandered lonely as a cloud - that floats on high o'er hill and vale..." is his favorite. He is brightly blond, like his mother, and has inherited her pointy ears. It is a relief he bears no resemblance to his dark father. Her left hand drapes along the back of the sofa.
She doesn't know yet that today she will hear her daughter has fallen or been thrown or jumped (it will never be clear) from three floors up, and lived. She doesn't know that today is when her grandson becomes her own to raise. She doesn't know yet that her daughter is a drug addict, who will only grow worse, until they meet only once a year, to exchange photographs.
7 comments:
I posted this because it was the hardest exercise for me- the one that required the most work. How to convey the depth of a real person that you adore? How did you guys feel about that process?
This seems very stylistically different from your work in class. You always have a clear voice in your pieces which is hard to achieve.
This piece doesn't feel as sharp as your other work but full. The character is definitely realized.
This attempt to balance the contempt while trying to maintain sympathy is a tricky endeavor. I wasn't always sure if I should add or delete.
i found the character full if sometimes straying into the expected - oddly enough this happened for me at the chamomile tea moment. like she was too wholesome and into care, of herself, the doves, and soon her grandson. also i love the pace of your descriptions, the balance of your sentences.
Exactly!
I felt like it was very easy to stray into stereotypes/conventions. I couldn't get a handle on a real hook to create the character from, even though it is someone I know really well.
It was cool to work on though, because it revealed that hole. People you love without a lot of conflict are hard to write about.
I liked the calm, warm desciption of this character at peace in later life, and then the slow trickle of more complex aspects of her life trickle in but still maintain the serenity of the moment. This serenity is punctured for the reader by the terrible realities of wha she doesn't know yet. Jarring, rude and GREAT!
Oh yeah. the process... As I said in class, the love/hate excersize didn't work for me, but i realized later that may have partly been because the picture excersise worked so well for me and might have tapped me out at that moment. I hope to take another try at it.
I liked the doves and her way of always answering "I'm in my prime". Perhaps it is b/c I have Molly Ivins on the brain this week, but I pictured a Southern woman w/ a hard edge or w/ the capacity for hardness.
I agree that some of the details become too pat, and I wasn't quite prepared for the turn at the end, but the final description of the daughter is powerful--great.
At the risk of being tedious, I have to say that "I wandered lonely as a cloud" is Wordsworth. Please forgive me. I'm a recovering Ph.D. in English lit who taught Romantic poetry far too often.
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