I said to him that I had been trying to write a story in a Ring Lardner sort of style. He asked me what a Ring Lardner sort of style was. Ring Lardner was a writer of humorous stories, I said. He wrote back in the 1920’s about your average sort of guy, what we used to call a middle-brow kind of American man—though back then the average sort of middle-brow guy was not like what he is now.
This wasn’t a very good description. But I had already lost him anyway—you have to get his attention with the first few words, and then keep it.
A few days later, I read him my story.
He said there was no beginning, no end, and no plot. He asked if that was the way Ring Lardner would have written it.
Well, no, I said. I’m still working on it.
Years ago, in a book I took out from the local library, I found a letter that was just like a monologue by a Ring Lardner character. The guy was writing from Florida to his buddy, and the letter was about going to Spring Training and about his wife’s health. I kept the letter, it’s somewhere in the house, but I’ve never been able to find it again. The more time goes by that I can’t find it, the more it seems to me, in my memory, a perfect Ring Lardner story.
When the strait-laced brothers dropped by, church-goers Barry and Austin Knickerbocker, to give us their bills, I was embarrassed by the state of the house—the kitchen they walked into from the porch, and the living room, the two places they would see. Clothes and toys strewn everywhere. Stains on the cabinet doors. Dishes piled on the counters and in the sink. The high chair tray sticky. It was no excuse that I was a tired young mother, helping to support us all, and taking care of the house as best I could. And now the baby’s father and I were talking about a separation.
Barry needed a pen to write something on his bill. I gave him a pen that was lying on the kitchen table and walked into the living room with Austin to show him the ceiling.
Later, when they were gone, I looked at the bill, which we would now be able to pay. We had had no money at all, just $42 in our savings account, and then my husband’s father had died—suddenly, out of the blue. He was a bachelor and a bit of a rake. My husband had gone down to New Jersey and sold his Cadillac and come home with a check for $10,000.
I looked at the door they had gone out of, and the empty driveway where their truck had been parked. Then I picked up the pen and looked at it.
Printed on the pen was a joke: “What’s the difference between parsley and pussy? You don’t eat parsley.”
I laughed so hard, then—not exactly at the joke, more at the joke plus the situation—that the baby, off in the next room, started laughing too.
We had probably taken the pen with us from my father-in-law’s house when we were cleaning it out.
But later, I thought: I don’t know about what other people do, but I know that we eat parsley.
From where she is, in another part of the house, she hears his voice in the bedroom, in the distance, speaking gently, domestically, thoughtfully to her. He does not know she is not in the room.
And for a moment, then, she feels there is another she, with him, maybe even a better she, and that she herself is a spurned she, a scorned she, there at the end of the hall, far away from the room where they have something nice going on together.
Homepage Image: Ciara Elle Bryant. Installation View of On-N-On: Ciara Elle Bryant in Conversation With Octavia Butler, 2022, from Gulf Coast Summer/Fall 2023, Issue 35.2.
