“Mission accomplished!” Melanie announced, sporting a towel around her waist with her fists firmly planted on her hips. She had gone straight from the front door, down the dark canyon of books through to the kitchen and, undeterred by the stacks of bowls and cups and undiscarded noodle packages she found there, started right away into it and in no time exposed counter top that had not seen light in ages. She had also opened windows in there that had not been open for longer. The three novelists cowered in the dark hallway leading off the kitchen and watched suspiciously over each other’s shoulders. It wasn’t all bad. A store of clean dishes might be a welcome change.
Then she started chopping vegetables (a foreign sound in there) and filling pots with water and opening and closing all the drawers and cupboards, searching out fry pans and spatulas. Groceries she had hauled home were spilled from their bags all over the table, the table that was usually under books and notepaper and newspapers, except for small cleared spaces where they ate. All that was neatly (neatly!) stacked on a side table now. There was an eruption of herbal smells when she cut open small packages. She hummed. She smiled.
“I see you out there,” she called chirpily without turning to look. “Oh, and that novel contest?” she carried on in the same sing-song voice. “It’s stopping. Today.”
* * *
It was as if a street full of cars all had their shrill alarms tripped off at once. It wasn’t so much that she was proposing taking the contest away—lord knows, all three would dearly have welcomed that, if only it were that easy! But it was the abruptness of her decision and the light-hearted, carefree way she announced it that caught the three novelists completely off guard. What did she think it was to be replaced with? This wasn’t just a long drawn-out contest she was proposing to halt that day in the kitchen, it was the whole social, economic and political organization of the household she was proposing to sweep away with that one breathtaking breath. Be careful taking Sisyphus’s boulder away, says the ancient Mesopotamian saying, he’s habituated to his punishment and will look for something else to push up the hill.
John smiled nervously in the doorway. “You can’t just stop The Deadline,” he spoke brokenly. “That would be nuts. That would be crazy.” He snorted for emphasis.
“What’s crazy is you guys spending all your lives trying to do something a real writer can do in half a year.” Melanie raised her brows looking over the top of her glasses at John as she man-handled a big plate between two ends of a tea towel.
Luke pushed himself into the kitchen next, ostensibly to get something from the fridge which he never got, standing instead before the open door. “Half a year! Those aren’t novels, believe me. Anyway, look at J D Salinger.”
Melanie kept her reproachful eyes on John’s when she replied to Luke. “The difference being he wrote his book first, then did nothing for 25 years after that.”
“Where is Mel staying?” Matthew chimed in with his best imitation of a happy, care-free voice. He also went to a door, this one to the pantry (empty since forever) and opened it and stood in front of it just like Luke at the fridge. John, to avoid Melanie’s gaze, had by now opened the tall narrow broom cupboard beside the stove as though he thought he might do some sweeping, if only there’d been a broom in there. When Melanie turned to look around from the kitchen sink, she found the backsides of the three novelists each standing in front of open doors and staring into their own private abysses. To say she made them nervous would be an understatement. She realized she may well be the first visitor since the last time she left the house.
“I’m staying here,” she announced to their collective backsides.
“We’re too busy to entertain guests,” Matthew spoke acidly into the pantry.
“John, do something,” Luke cried out from nearly inside the fridge.
“Why?” John asked the broom closet. “Why would you want to stay here? Look at this place, look at us.”
“Because,” Melanie started. “Because you need me.” She stared at the back of John’s head. “I know what year it is. You’re going to need me when this year is over.”
Matthew collapsed forward a bit and rested his forehead against the jamb of the pantry door. “She doesn’t think we’re going to do it,” he said. “Any of us, ask her, she doesn’t think any of us are going to finish a novel.”
Luke’s legs turned to jelly and he flopped to the floor like a thrown octopus with his tentacles draped over shelves inside the fridge. “Now why would she think that?” he almost whispered.
John finally turned around to face her, his arms now crossed over his chest, but too loosely to convey the defiance he meant by the gesture. “I don’t think it would be good for you to stay here. It’s not healthy,” he said, watching in the corner of his eye as Luke liquefied further to the floor and Matthew began grinding his forehead into the wood. “We have to finish this thing, we have to go all the way.”
“And then what?” Melanie posed the big question.
“Then one of us goes on to write novels, and the other two help him and work for him. The deal, you know,” John pleaded.
“What if nobody gets a novel written?” Melanie asked, sticking to her same harsh tone as she raised point after point that no one in the house would dare to raise.
“See?” Matthew shouted. “She doesn’t think we can!”
“Shut up, Matt,” John shouted.
Luke rolled over and sat up, leaning against fridge shelves. “She’s been here all of three hours and already we’re at each other’s throats.”
“I told you, you can’t stay here,” John repeated to Melanie.
Melanie held firm another moment or two but then covered her mouth with her hand, her eyes filled with water and her shoulders heaved. John and Luke just stared and Matthew didn’t even turn to look. “I have nowhere else,” Melanie sobbed. “I’ve left my husband. I quit my job.”
“You what?” John asked.
“I, I left everything,” she said. “I suppose I can stay in a hotel,” she added. “I came to find you.”
Matthew looked over his shoulder.
Now it was Melanie’s turn to show her backside as she held herself up over the sink of soaking dishes. “I left here 24 years ago because I didn’t think you were going to do anything. But after all these years, it suddenly struck me, I did even less than you. I even lost the drive to try to do anything.”
“It’s not true!” John replied. “You bought a house, you became an airline purser, I got all your letters.”
“You never wrote back,” she said.
“To tell you what, that I still haven’t written anything?” John said, “To tell you that we’re all cooped up here slowly going crazy in my Mom’s old house?’
“I checked with bookstores in every city I was in all the time, asking about any of your names, in case any of you finally got a book written and published,” Melanie said. “It got to be an obsession. I think I hoped more than you, if that’s possible. Some clerks got to know me over the years pretty good. I’d buy books just to make myself not look like the only reason I ever came in was to just ask about your names. But some of them knew,” she said to the dishwater, in which she could see, in the pocked grey surface, her own visage. “I have a pretty big book collection. I guess I left that behind too.”
Luke let the door close behind him but remained on the floor leaning against the fridge. “So what did you want to get done over the last 24 years that you didn’t do?” he put it to Melanie.
“That’s just it,” she replied softly. “I didn’t even get to the level of figuring out what I wanted. It’s why I admired you so much. And why, at the same time, I thought you were so ridiculous to take desire that seriously. I envied you and I pitied you at the same time, if you can understand that.”
“Your letters,” John said, “they didn’t say anything about this, they kept coming, one after the other, always going on about what you just bought, who you met at parties, where you flew to, the meals and the hotels, and what an income earner your husband was.”
“For someone who claims to analyze all the great written works so well,” Melanie looked up at John, “you sure can be slow-witted sometimes.”
“But for 24 years you lived like this?” John asked, now genuinely sympathetic.
“I thought we were talking about our own great waste of time,” piped up Luke.
“The longer it went without there ever being a book with any of your names on it, strangely, the more it gave hope and sustenance to me,” Melanie went on. “If it weren’t for you, sticking it out so long in this stupid crazy house, I never would have survived myself.” Now it was her turn to sink down to the floor, facing them all. “Knowing someone else was wasting their lives as totally as I was made me feel not so alone.” She smiled. She knew it wouldn’t be taken as an insult.
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