My Last Innocent Year(21)

“And it’s like she’s been transplanted to a different pot,” Linus offered, but no one ever listened to Linus.

“The bond between the mother and daughter is really strong,” said Ginny, one of several vague comments she made that confirmed she hadn’t read my story.

“She reminded me a lot of my mother,” Holly said, and then she launched into a story about a trip she took with her mother to Johannesburg. Connelly usually stopped us when we made self-referential comments, but he didn’t stop Holly. He’d been quiet all morning, slouched in his chair sucking on the end of his pen like a cigarette. He liked to let us sort things out before saying anything. I wanted so badly to know what he thought about my story, if he loved it or hated it. Worst of all would be indifference.

Alec raised his hand, even though Connelly always told us we didn’t have to. “How old is Miriam supposed to be?”

“Twelve,” said Holly.

Alec screwed up his face. “She feels way older than that.” He looked like he was about to say something else when Connelly interrupted him.

“I agree, it is a mature voice.” He took the pen out of his mouth. “It’s hard to believe this is the voice of a twelve-year-old.” I wanted to say something to defend myself, but the writer wasn’t allowed to say anything while their story was being discussed.

“But,” Connelly continued, sitting up in a leisurely way, like a cat getting up from a nap, “I think that’s deliberate. It is the voice of someone looking back on an experience, rather than writing from inside the experience. It’s a choice the writer has made, and I believe it was a good one. Let’s see how she does that, on page five, for example.” As the class turned to page five, Connelly looked over at me and winked. It was so quick, I almost missed it. I looked down at my lap, at the whites of my knees shining through my tights.

I sat and listened as Connelly discussed voice and narrative distance, shocked at what he was able to find in my writing—themes, imagery, allusions, things I hadn’t intended and didn’t know were there. It wasn’t a great story. Miriam’s motivations were murky. The historical context was thin. But Connelly ignored the weaknesses and pointed instead to the places where my writing sang. I’d successfully “charted the emotional landscape of the story,” he said and, the way he described it, that was all I was interested in as a writer or a reader anyway: what people said and did and what they thought about when they weren’t saying or doing anything. Girls with feelings. If it had felt like a poverty before, now it felt like a gift.

“You’ve been quiet, Andy,” Connelly said when he was finished. “Anything you’d like to add?”

Andy was sitting across from me, writing something in his notebook. Before Connelly called on him, he had leaned over and whispered something in Kara’s ear and she smiled, like she was laughing at an inside joke. I’d seen them together a few times outside of class, standing in line at the dining hall, once walking down Main Street sharing an umbrella. Andy hadn’t said anything all morning, even though I could see he’d read my story; his copy was marked up.

“There’s something unfinished about it,” Andy said, thumbing through the pages. “Some of the writing is nice, a little sentimental maybe, but I think the real problem is that it felt too close to the truth.”

“What do you mean by that?” Connelly asked.

I looked down at my hands. Andy knew the broad outlines of my life, and I’d talked to him perhaps more than anyone, besides Kelsey, about my mother. “I don’t know,” he said. “It feels autobiographical to me. I think if the writer had left more to the imagination, the story might have been successful.”

“So you don’t think she pushed it far enough?” Connelly asked.

“Exactly. It feels more like a fragment than a complete story. A memory.” Andy pushed the pages aside. “Oh, and you should never start a story by describing the weather. Sorry, that’s just a pet peeve.”

The room tittered. I felt something turn in the pit of my stomach. Kara looked over at me and smiled wanly.

“Fair enough,” Connelly said. “It’s possible the author didn’t take it as far as she could have. There are things I’m left wanting to know as well. For example, what is the life Miriam has left behind, and what makes it so different from the one she finds at the lake? There’s also the curious absence of the father, although he feels like a benevolent figure to me. And certainly, the historical details could be fleshed out better.” He spoke slowly and deliberately, like he were backing a truck onto a busy street. “As for the weather, I’m not sure I agree that you should never start that way, but there might be a more effective opening. Do you have a suggestion, Andy?”

“Me? Oh, I’d have to think about it.”

“Okay then.” Connelly folded his hands. “What I would say is that this character feels richly drawn, perhaps because of what you call the autobiographical piece. As for the fragmentary quality—I would argue that that is part of its strength. We may not know everything about this narrator, but we know enough. She doesn’t need to tell the reader everything. She respects us enough to let us figure it out for ourselves. Listen, for example, to what she does at the end:

“One afternoon,” Connelly read, “I swam out too far, way past the buoys. When I looked back, the people on the beach were impossibly small. My mother was turned away from me, her face hidden by the brim of her hat. The water below me was dark and cold, and I wondered if I could make it back to shore. For a brief moment, I was afraid. But then I focused on the echo of my breath and my mother’s hat and I made my way back to her, stroke by stroke, kick by kick. When I got there, I lay my head in her lap. She jumped up, surprised by the feel of my wet hair on her thigh. She hadn’t even noticed I was gone.”