In this post, I tinker with a story and I serialize it too because who hasn’t wanted to publish a story in serial form ever since they learned that’s what Charles Dickens did?
A few notes about this story:
The Salad Maker Listens to the Piano is a working title. It may not the final one.
Titles can do a lot of heavy lifting if you get them right.
I began working on the story in the winter of 2014.
Few people have read it. My friend Robyn Ryle over at You Think Too Much did. (She liked it. Thank you, Robyn!) I also shared it with my late brother, Matthew. In fact, sharing it with him and the fun we had getting a grant application together that included the story is a cherished memory. We had a blast, and we went out for lunch after we were done at a very clean, very bright tavern in his small town. We enjoyed a chicken sandwich (me) and a hamburger (Matt), which is how every pulling-together-a-grant-application-effort should go, in my opinion. No matter what the outcome, you will have had fun and lunch and created a memory you would not trade for anything.
The story is loosely based on my Grandmother Airgood’s life.
I can’t know how Grandma felt or thought about things. She was not the kind to say, at least not to the kid I was when I knew her. I suspect not to anyone, but maybe family members will set me straight. (Please do, Fam! Chime in!) The story is me wondering and guessing.
Wondering and guessing are what I find compelling in a fiction writer’s job description.
I started with a family story, but once underway, fiction has its own momentum. An actual person or event may spark a story, but before long, it has its own realities and needs, and you wander (or dash) off the path of ‘what really happened’ into a different kind of truth.
I’d love to do a series of stories based loosely on family stories and characters. I’ve never felt I had the time. But maybe that’s a silly and wrong thought. Maybe I do.
I’d love to hear your reactions to the draft.
For it is a draft; it is not a finished thing.
The photo accompanying this post is of Grandma Airgood, taken sometime in the 1960s, I’d guess. And I think in Flint, Michigan. On Begole Street? Or no? Fam? Thoughts?
The thoughts from my dear family so far: it is Grandma Airgood, probably in her own kitchen on Campbell Street. As I suspected, most likely my Aunt Catherine stands beyond her. (It is Catherine who inspires Vivian in the story.)
And now, Part One of I don’t know how many parts. We’ll see. Welcome to the process.
The Salad Maker Listens to the Piano
Part One
They thought she didn’t love them, but Edith thought she probably did. It was hard to say about a thing like that. First, you’d have to know what love was. Second, you’d have to think it should be, or could be, discussed. But there were plenty of things that couldn’t be said. Sometimes words—or not even words, but something lower and older than that—rose from Edith’s stomach to her throat and stuck, rags clogged in the washtub drain. Sentiments, she guessed, is what they were. Feelings. Anyway, they were too much to wrestle with. Feelings would slither and wave like an octopus’s arms, strangle you eight different ways while you flailed there in the middle of the ruckus. Best not to get started down that road.
Edith loosened the scarf that was knotted under her chin and retied it tighter. Arthur tapped the steering wheel with two blunt-tipped fingers so much like his father’s, smiling at her in his agreeable way. She wondered where he’d learned it. From her sister Doreen, probably, those years he lived with her. So many. From grammar school right up until the war with Hitler swept the youngest two boys up into itself, too long for a mother to surrender her children, but there hadn’t been any help for it. Harold was dead, the farm went soon after, and the cupboards were as empty as the day they were nailed up.
“Penny for ‘em,” Arthur said.
Edith replied with a blank look. She knew what he meant, of course, but she couldn’t earn that penny. Where on this earth had Arthur got his ideas? Saying what you thought, what you felt? Talking about it? And him a policeman.
Arthur pursed his lips in his forgiving way. His good nature swarmed toward her, and Edith leaned into it for half a second, then away.
He sighed. “I’m on night shifts down at the station this week, so Dwight’ll pick you up after work. I told him ten is the—”
“We’re not done ‘til Helly says go. Eleven’s more likely. It could be midnight. There’s music tonight. Some man who plays the piano, and people out sick.”
“I know, Mother, you said. But ten at the earliest?”
Edith tugged her purse up onto her shoulder and took ahold of the door handle. Arthur was a nice soul; all her children were; every one of them was nicer than she or Harold had ever been. But even so, she didn’t see the point of answering a question twice. She pushed the station wagon’s door open, and a toy plummeted into the snow. A stuffed giraffe, she guessed from the long neck and spots. She leaned down and snagged it up, dropped it over the seatback to join the others. She shook her head, a brief yank of her chin. She had borne ten babies without filling so much as a bread box with toys, and here was Arthur’s Vivian with five and still buying new with every delivery. She poked her legs out over the doorframe and dropped her galoshes into the slush.
“Have a good night, Mother.”
“Mmmp.” Edith pushed herself up and out of the car. She steadied herself on the roof, and the cold steel burnt where there was a hole in her glove. She took two steps through the glop and was on the sidewalk.
Arthur tooted his horn and pulled away, and Edith watched after him. On the drive here, he’d talked about a sting operation his squad was involved in. A band of thieves was stealing cars and dismantling them to sell, and Arthur was posing as a service station owner who wanted to buy. The work was done at night, on streets where a person didn’t dare walk even in the daylight, and it made Edith’s shoulders ache, listening to him tell about it. Vivian and the children would have a hard go of it without him if something went wrong. So would she. A woman wasn’t supposed to bury her children, no matter what age.
Edith’s throat got that feeling of rags stuck in it. Irving, Irving. Her eldest boy, forty years gone now. Harold had been dead a year already when it happened, killed from the blood poisoning he got working in the battery department at Buick. His death had left her and the oldest ones to try and keep the farm going and that’s where she’d felt the lack of him. Tilling the fields, running the thresher, driving the team. The work was too much for a woman and a clutch of children, but that fact didn’t amount to anything.
It was June when it occurred, a month she’d always secretly liked. The days were mild and tended toward sun, and birds sang in the mornings. Even she, in her rounds of lighting the stove and cooking the oatmeal and pumping the water to haul inside, couldn’t help but be cheered. And when you and every soul in the house and every item in it wasn’t cold from sunup to sundown, you could believe in things. You could think that this year the crops would thrive, the landlord wouldn’t raise the rent, and no one, neither children nor livestock, would be ailing. You could smile over Patricia’s attempt to copy a hair-do she seen in a ladies’ magazine and dole a nickel apiece out to the boys to buy candy with, telling yourself there’d be more where those came from soon enough and that a nickel wasn’t much, anyway. June was an innocent month, a sweet month, even with the work in the fields, or so it had once seemed.
Edith’s fist clenched in her torn glove.
Those fields.
Though it wasn’t the fields’ fault, or anyone’s really, unless maybe her own. Of course, her own. Who else had sent Irving out there to get the work done?
She had yelled out when she seen what was happening. Irving, no! Be careful, watch out, Duke ain’t quit pulling, he’s going to pull that roller right on over you, IRVING.
The day stopped sharp. Everything was more of itself. The sun was a hot yellow circle up in its sky and the breeze was a living thing, a snake or the bow of a fiddle. The dry corn stalks left from last year in the next field over whispered and nodded like a congregation at a wedding. Next to the house, sheets flapped and strained at their pins. A crow shadowed over, and a meadowlark swooped to a fence post and tipped its head, its throat as exposed as a dog’s belly. Its song is what got time started again.
Edith had waded forward. From the corner of her eye, she saw two of the middle ones run off the porch, drawn by her yelling. Geraldine, Dwight, get back, go now! GO I SAID, back to the house, she had hollered, but they wouldn’t, they wanted to see, they was too young to know they shouldn’t. Shouldn’t see, shouldn’t want to.
In the present, her boots slopped into a mound of slush dropped from the hotel’s roof, and the cold and wet yanked her out of her memories. Edith was thankful. There weren’t words, that was all. She pulled the hotel’s service door open.
Inside, there was bustle and banging, braising and broiling, clamor and quickness. China platters crashed onto stainless shelves. Servers in white shirts herded plates onto trays, hoisted them aloft, and ferried them to the ballrooms. The warm air smelled of every kind of food and drink: noodles, meat, vegetables, sweets, coffee. Sweat, too, and bleach, and something else. The smell of industry, of go, of plenty. That made a feeling like the scent of warm bread inside Edith.
She took a hard right into the coat room and stowed her purse and boots and jacket. She pulled a clean apron off the stack and tied it on, then smoothed her hands over her front. The crisp unblemished white expanse of cloth was like a drink of water to a man lost in the desert. She pulled a hair net out of the box of them the hotel provided and worked her bun into it, then made her way to the salad stations.
“Thank gosh you’re here.” Ida Green rubbed at her forehead with the back of her wrist, then cut her sparkly dark eyes quick at where Helly stood near the ice boxes, but Helly hadn’t seen. They weren’t allowed to touch their heads or faces or any part of themselves while they was working, not without going off to the lavatory to wash their hands, and Helly didn’t like that kind of time wasted. “I was praying you could come. Nine people out tonight, and more calling. The flu, they say, and I guess it is, but I’ll tell you what, I wish I’d have thought of saying I had it.”
Edith was about to answer but just then, Helly’s square-shaped head swiveled. She was a tall woman, big the way a statue was big. She had that shade of blonde hair that didn’t tell her age, though she’d been at The Durant before Edith and always a manager. “Ida, hush,” she said. “Do up that grapefruit and celery salad now, fifty servings. Edith, you get the pears dished, then help Margaret carry them out to the Pontiac Room.”
Edith froze. “Carry them out?”
“Twelve to a tray. Serve from the right, start with a lady.”
“I can’t do that.”
Helly’s eyes cubed Edith into pieces: large feet, stout legs, wide hips and shoulders. Plenty of strength to hoist the trays. “Of course, you can.”
Edith’s shoulders curved in toward each other; the corners of her mouth dipped down to meet them. She began dishing brandied pears.
“She’s a marionette, all right,” Ida whispered.
Edith didn’t know if the word was right. She thought maybe Ida didn’t know herself. She got things like that wrong pretty often. She was good to work alongside though, and cheering. Edith never bothered to try and find corrections.
Edith was walking down the hall with her emptied tray by her side when the music started. The sound reached out and grabbed her to a stop like Harold’s big hand used to. She stood with her feet planted in the swirling pattern of the carpet, then turned. The other servers hurried past, casting her puzzled or else irritated glances, but Edith ignored them. Eventually, she made her way back into the ballroom and along its edge, closer and closer to the small stage set up at the westernmost side.
“Pssht, you there.”
Edith startled. A floor manager glared at her. He was tall and thin, with slicked-back red hair and freckles across his nose. His sunken cheeks gave him the look of an undertaker, despite that boyishness. She didn’t know his name. She’d never needed it.
“What do you mean by being in here?”
Edith shook her head, as mute as a log. He waved a chiding finger at her, then pointed back the way she’d come. Edith stood for one more moment, staring at the piano player hard enough to sear a hole in him. He wore a black suit, the fancy kind. A tuxedo. His hair was brown. More than that, she couldn’t tell. He didn’t stop playing—she hadn’t expected him to—and finally, she plodded back to the kitchen.
Wonderful! I'm ready for more!
My grandfather farmed with horses on a farm near Brighton Mich, near School Lake to be more specific. Some points on the farm. 1. Everyone in the family came out every Sunday for dinner. My mother was from a large family, so lots of food needed to be prepared for the dinner. My mother came out and helped my grandmother cook, it was a wood stove. Baking powered biscuits and pies were always made. 2. Growing corn with horses grew better corn. The horses learned not to step on the growing corn, so my grandfather could till the soil around the growing corn much later than with a tractor, so the corn was healthier. My grandfathers corn was always sold as seed corn for a better price. 3. Farming was hard and always had setbacks. Lightning struck my grandfathers barn and it burned down. He got the horses out, but my mother said he was never the same afterwards, I guess he gave up and finally died, he was at the end of his life when this happened.