Etude: An umbrella, a feather duster, and a book, Part 2/5

A continuation. Read Part 1.

The entry to the small, square shop is on a corner, with windows and displays running down the right and left sides. The door overlooks a cross-roads of the mall, scattered with benches, trash cans and a small fountain. The nearest mall entrance is through the Dillards to the right of the software shop. This is the way she usually arrives to work, unless she hopes to beg an Orange Julius. Then she comes in through a main mall entrance further down the promenade.  

The man arrived from the left side of the store and could see her through the display window, looking down at her novel, one elbow on the shelf, one foot curled around the other ankle. Her cheeks were slightly flushed. He stopped at the entrance to lean his drippy umbrella against the wall, and she looked up at him.  

He’d seen her before, of course. He was in here all the time. Short of seeing an actual work schedule for the store, he had been trying to figure out her regular nights, but had been wrong most of the time lately. It wasn’t his fault, really. The manager had been shifting the schedule around in odd ways, much to everyone’s aggravation. She wasn’t even sure whether she had regular nights anymore.  

She was wearing that cheap plaid skirt again. The buttons were supposed to be on her left front, but the skirt had shifted so they were along the outside of her thigh. The skirt suggested a school girl’s uniform.He tried to imagine it paired with a white buttoned shirt and knee-high socks instead of a t-shirt and dark tights. Once again he wondered how old she was. Over twenty, he was sure, but not more than twenty-four. Maybe. He hoped she was at least twenty-one.

He had never managed to talk to her yet. One of the guys on staff always seemed to be the one to sidle up offering assistance. Hw didn’t think she was avoiding him, and had several reasonable explanations for why she’d never been the one to say,“Hello, Is there anything I can help you with this evening?”

He stared at her for a moment before realizing that she’d said this out loud to him and was waiting for him to speak. She raised her eyebrows slightly, a pleasant smile plastered firmly on her face.  

“Uh, sorry. Mind was wandering,” he said. She nodded, the Customer Smile still in place. “Could you show me where the OCR software is?” He knew where it was, could name every title in stock. 

“Certainly. Right over here,” she said, turning to lead him around her shelf to a corner of the store. He glanced at the shelf where she had been standing, trying to read the title of her book.  

More tomorrow…

Etude: An umbrella, a feather duster, and a book, Part 1/5

Editor’s Note: I don’t have a name for this one. Drop a suggestion in the comments below. xo

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She likes to wear black tights under her skirts to work so that it doesn’t matter whether she’s shaved her legs. Her favorite work skirt is a short, tartan plaid that’s a bit too big for her. She almost always wears a black pair of mary janes because they look tidy but are comfortable with their thick soles and don’t leave her feet feeling like lead at the end of an eight-hour shift.  

She is 21 or 22. 

Most of their customers are men and boys. She is the only woman on the six-person staff. There are usually a minimum of two people working in the small boutique electronics store in the featured corner in the mall. A crossroads corner. Busy times mean more staff.  On this weekday evening, she is working with the manager, and so even though the manager is very soft and not all likely to do any kind of discipline except in the case of gross negligence, he is also nice, so she is making a half-hearted attempt to look busy. There are no customers. She can hear the rain falling on the skylights in the mall breezeway. It must be raining pretty hard to hear it inside the cave-like little shop. She moves slowly around the shop, sliding boxes over, waving the duster at the shelves, sliding them back. Returning mis-stocked items to their proper spot. Throwing out the trash left by the after-school mallrats.  

At some point she has listlessly dusted everything that is reasonable to dust without dismantling anything. There are no shipments to process. There are no promotional materials to take down or put up. There is only the heavy, cold air of the mall, the relentless “pow pow pow” of the demo of some permutation of a two-person fighting game on the center TV, overlaid with the Computer World promo video in the corner display.  

The manager has receipts and forms spread out all over the counter. He has brought a chair from the back room. Normally, no chairs are allowed on the shop floor. Sitting looks lazy and unenthusiastic to customers. Chairs promote sitting. The manager sighs occasionally as he punches numbers into the calculator, punches numbers into the computer, and shifts around bits of paper on the counter.  

The plaid-skirted girl with the shoulder-length blonde hair, and today a plain, black, t-shirt, finds herself leaning on a display, staring at the back of the MicroSoft Office Suite, wondering if the manager would object if she pulled out a book from her bag in the back room to do a little studying or reading. She looks at him, thinking she’ll ask, but something about the way he rubs his forehead, the way he looks at the paperwork, makes her frown at him. Without asking, she turns on her thick-soled heel and walks into the tiny, cramped breakroom/storage room/office/bathroom/cubicle and pulls out The Monk, the current novel for her “Gothic Imagination” class. She is supposed to have it finished by ten o’clock the next morning, but she’s only on page 88. Later she will decide that turbo-skimming will serve her better than staying up all night to read it carefully. 

She returns to her semi-leaning spot at the center of the sales floor, propping the book up in front of a bundle-pack of arcade games for the PC. If a customer comes in, she still looks vaguely attentive, and can leave the book there.  

More tomorrow… 

ABAW: Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld

Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld

Aleksandar (Alek) Ferdinand is the prince of Austria-Hungary, on the run after the assassination of his father, a peace-loving archduke, and his mother in Sarajevo. Because Alek’s mother was a commoner, Alek isn’t supposed to inherit anything from his family, especially his grandfather’s throne. Alek’s adversaries aren’t taking any chances and hunt him across Austria. His teacher-protectors have given up everything in order to protect Alek and get him to a secret hideout in Switzerland.

Deryn (a.k.a Dylan) Sharp is a British girl disguising herself as a boy to earn a position as a midshipman on one of his majesty’s airships. She has lost her father in a fiery accident. Deryn earns her spot on an airship, a Leviathan-class ship that gives this novel its name, but worries every day that her crewmates will discover her secret.

Europe is divided and on the brink of war. The year is 1914, but not the 1914 that you know from the history books.

Scott Westerfeld has created a steampunk, alternative WWI history in a world where Darwin discovered DNA (the threads of life) and gene splicing. Europe is divided among Darwinist countries, which employ genetic engineering to create incredible creatures to take place of their machines, and Clanker countries, which reject what they see as godless genetic tinkering in favor of engineering elaborate, diesel-driven machines.

Other elements: a heavy pile of gold bullion, a lady scientist with a mysterious cargo bound for Constantinople, flying jellyfish, talking lizards, walking tanks, a tasmanian tiger, and a lot of clart.

The story is fast-paced and exciting, cutting back and forth between the two main characters until they eventually run into each other on a glacier in Switzerland. The audience is privvy to just enough secrets to make us feel involved in the story, but not so many to ruin the excitement and suspense. I love that we don’t know which adults are trustworthy—if any. And I love the afterword, in which Westerfeld sorts out the real history leading up to WWI from his own inventions.

A great middle-grade to young-adult book and the first in a trilogy, followed by Behemoth, released in October 2010, and Goliath, scheduled for release in the fall of 2011.

Note: I received this book in a Twitter contest from Simon & Schuster last summer and I’m passing it on to the Sonars. 

Ma Bell, a Throw Me Prompt

I was reading a Throw Me Thursday post by the lovely E. Victoria Flynn last week on the occasion of her mother’s birthday. Please go read it if you like. EVF feels a disconnection, but also seems to imply a sense of forgiveness of her Ma. Reading the post, I naturally began a reflection about my own mother, on the occasion of her birthday. So, with thanks to EVF for the inspiration, here is what came out.

Ma Bell

I cannot call my mother on the telephone to wish her a happy birthday. I don’t know if I would want to if I could. I found a letter I wrote to her in 2006. Both unfinished and unsent, here with some mild editing of names.

Dear Mom,

I told my oldest child about you today. He’s 6. Beautiful, bright, and perceptive. I didn’t plan to tell him.  Didn’t plan what to say. I just suddenly had a strong feeling that he should know who and where all of his grandparents were. It was selfish in a way. An impulse motivated by me wanting him to know and understand me better.

So I held him in my lap and talked to him.

I told him that you were funny. Fun to be around. With beautiful brown hair that has a lovely white streak in it.  I called you Grandma Cindy.

I told him about dad too. That he was a police officer. Tall with dark hair and blue eyes. Also funny.  That he liked to draw.  I called him Grampa Mac, and explained why.

I told Sonar X6 that I wished he could know you. That you’d be lovely grandparents—full of good stories and good humor.

And then I told him about the hard part. About how he and his brothers won’t ever have the chance to know you that way.

I told Sonar X6 that your mind was sick. That in your illness you made some bad choices. That one of them resulted in you using a gun and shooting dad with it. That you killed him. And now he’s dead and you live in a prison far away.

I told him that it’s hard to talk about. That it was hard to lose you both. That I miss you both.

He was remarkable. He comforted me. That beautiful boy.

Part of me wants to torture you with the joy and beauty of the things you’re missing. All three boys are delicious. I’ve grown so much with them. They inspire me. They make me want to be the best I can be.  And the best of me does not aspire to torture anyone, especially my own mother.

The best of me aspires to be humane to all people. To empathize with each person I meet and to treat him or her with respect and compassion.

It’s relatively easy to be compassionate toward a stranger. There’s no baggage. No heartbreak. No thundering crash as the world crumbles underneath my feet and I’m left choking on the dust and stumbling over the rubble.

With family, with my mother, who has made choices that have shaken my trust in everything I have ever known, compassion is hard to muster. The best respect I have been able to gather is silence.

I know you’ve changed, but I’m not sure I want to know how. I know you have needs, but I’m not sure how or whether they can be satisfied or reconciled or healed. I’m not sure I want to talk with you.  Most days I want my life now to remain anonymous for you. To have a barrier that guards my family from the nebulous threat you might pose to us and our understanding of the world. To keep at arm’s length the pain and struggle that connecting with you would involve. To contain the messiness, keeping it sequestered from my life.

You stung me once, in a hurt that has been miserably hard to release. You said I lived in a dream world.  I don’t even really know what you meant by it. I suppose it implied to me that I was disconnected from the reality of your life somehow.

Full disclosure: I wrote that letter for me. To help me remember. I don’t think I ever intended to send it to my mother. So if it doesn’t sound like the sort of private letter you’d actually mail to someone, that’s why.  

In 2008 I felt compelled to write again. That time the struggle came out not as a letter, but as a blog post. It was the first time I had spoken broadly and openly about my mom to anyone outside of my close confidants. You can read that one here.

When I reflect on these two things I’ve written, my writer brain sees a shift. There is a quiet tender hurt in the pride I felt in talking with the Sonar. There is a bolder desire to move forward and be strong and forceful in the second. The lingering pain seems different somehow. There is more bitterness in the second. In both I show my desire to hold on to the good, even as some form of pain lingers.

I sit here today and know that I have changed.

I clutch close to my heart the parts of my mother that were good and beautiful. I feel like I have allowed some of my long hurt to float free. I still wouldn’t call or write to her. But I can ring a bell, and think of her, and put the words out on the breeze with love.

Happy Birthday, Ma.

Sonar Scrabble

A recent round of Sonar ScrabbleThat purple table in the background, the one covered with years of stickery goo, is our coffee table, called—oddly enough—the Purple Table.