The Last Book Party(55)
I liked having daily deadlines and no time to think too long about words beyond their power to say what needed to be said. I’d become quicker at churning out news stories and could practically write a police brief in my sleep. I knew most of the county sheriff’s deputies by name and which of the local gadflies monopolized the microphone at zoning hearings because they didn’t have anything better to do with their time. I’d written a few profiles, including one about the region’s first female alligator trapper, and had been asked to contribute regularly to the feature pages. I’d written a series of front-page stories about a kindergarten girl who’d contracted HIV through a blood transfusion and was at the center of a battle between panicked parents, school officials, lawyers, and doctors about whether she would be allowed to attend public school. The series elicited a record number of letters to the editor, as well as a phone call from my mother to tell me how impressed she was with my reporting and writing. I was surprised by how much her praise meant to me.
I didn’t feel like a local, but nor did I feel like a total stranger. I went out for beers a few times a month with the Chronicle’s other reporters, who hadn’t given up trying to nose out why I had come from so far away for a low-paying, low-prestige job in Citrus County. Typically, I was more comfortable with Sally, the sixty-something owner of the Floral City Antiques Barn and Book Mart, who had barely looked up from her paperback when I had walked in to inquire about a rocking chair in the window. I’d purchased the rocking chair and had become a regular at the shop, where I found and fell in love with books by Florida writers—Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Cross Creek by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Tourist Season by Carl Hiaasen. Soon I started dropping in just to talk to Sally, who had vowed to read every secondhand book she purchased for resale. Her eclectic reading made for interesting conversation. From one week to the next, she might want to talk about Edna Ferber, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, or Sidney Sheldon. What I loved most about Sally was that she found something to love in all of the books, even Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which she said was either profoundly stupid or illogically profound.
On Saturdays, I volunteered to read to the blind at a local nursing home, marveling every week how the chatter would cease as my elderly listeners got swept up in the story. With no movie theaters or bookstores in Citrus County, there was little to do in the evenings, which had helped me stop circling my old Selectric typewriter and start writing again. At first I managed only a few minutes a day, but eventually I worked up to an hour and sometimes two or three. I still felt queasy when I sat down, but I didn’t let fear stop me. I had finished several short stories, one of which had been accepted for publication in a literary journal in Georgia.
Taped to the wall above my desk were photographs of Truro I’d found at the swap shop before I’d left. My favorite was of a short row of gravestones at the old Methodist cemetery at the end of Bridge Road. Tilted and weathered by more than a century of salty air, each was carved not only with the years of birth and death, but with the precise age of the person who had died, in years, months, and days. Isaac Rich, 23 years, four months, and two days. Eliza Crane, 42 years, seven months, and six days. The photograph reminded me that every day counts.
I kept up regular correspondence with Danny, who had finally taken a leave from MIT with my parents’ hesitant but resigned blessing. He had started on a new antidepressant, the “wonder drug” Prozac, which seemed to be helping. He had moved in with an old girlfriend in Burlington, Vermont, where he had found a part-time job at a bakery, happily taking the 4:30 a.m. shift, which suited his insomnia, and spending the rest of his day tinkering with his girlfriend’s loom and mastering the sitar. I shared my stories with Danny. For a math geek who didn’t read much fiction, he had an uncanny way of honing in on what I was really writing about, often before I knew it myself.
In his most recent letter, Danny had surprised me by telling me that he had always envied my ability to fly under the radar in our family, to have the gift of not being noticed. I wrote back and asked why families so often act as if there’s only one role each child can play—the smart one, the nerdy one, the pretty one—and that if an older sibling claims a certain territory, the others have to look elsewhere to find their niche. Why can’t we both be the brilliant one? I wrote. And why can’t we do what we love, even if we aren’t brilliant?
Sifting through some boxes of books at Sally’s shop one Saturday afternoon, I came across a folder of sheet music of old songs that I knew my mother loved. It wasn’t the classical music she had studied long ago, but dreamy songs from the 1930s and ’40s I’d heard her sing around the house. “Stormy Weather.” “Bewitched.” “Autumn Leaves.” “All of Me.” I bought the folder, hoping there would come a time when it made sense to give it to her, when she might sit down at the piano and play.
47
On the last Thursday in September, I got to the office early, at around 9:00 a.m., filed a story on a school board meeting that had gone late the night before, and left the office by 11:00. I stopped by my apartment to change, get my suitcase, and grab my mail, which I would read on the plane. With the air conditioner in my car on high and Suzanne Vega cassette in the tape deck, I settled in for the ninety-minute drive to the Tampa airport. I was looking forward to getting out of the heat, spending the weekend in New York, and finally retrieving my remaining belongings from my old apartment.