Excercise for Gotham Writer's Class

Antonia’s favorite candy growing up was Jolly Ranchers— watermelon flavored. She didn’t like to eat an entire one, however. What she liked was the initial thrill of the numbing syrupy taste that clung to her gums like jelly shoes on a bare, wet foot. When she’d sucked the candy down to a transparent, gem-like nub, she would remove it from her mouth and place it back in its wrapper; and then she’d shove the wrapper in the pocket of her jeans, her corduroys, her flannel PJ pants. Her housekeeper would come upon the caramelized pink deposits in the laundry room later as she stood there folding Antonia’s things, and she would think that Antonia hid these candies in her pockets because Mrs. Kauffman became anxious around candy. So the housekeeper never said anything to Antonia about the many pairs of sullied pants that she folded over the two years that she worked for the Kauffman family, and Antonia went on leaving half-sucked candies in her pants until she got into Dadaist poetry her junior year and decided that (blast it!) she agreed with her mother. Candy was for kids.

National Novel Writing Month

I said I'd never do it, but I just did. I signed up for a marathon. 30 days, 50,000 words....it's called Nanowrimo and it stands for National Write a Novel Month. Thousands of people all over the world have joined- 174 in my area alone. Lucky for me, I work at a cosmetics company so I have easy access to under eye concealer because I don't see myself getting much sleep in the coming month.

Are there prizes? No, not really. Nothing consequential. Do I know what I'm going to write about? Um, no. Not really. Is there something fantastically absurd about plundering off into the cold November night alongside thousands of people I've never met, typing with purpose for no concrete reason? Yes, yes and yes.

Socks

It was the month of my wedding; I thought the napkins were in the box. These napkins were a particular point of contention for me. I was dead set against them. As dead set as you can be against something that is actually going to happen. My stepmother insisted on printing them with a photograph of my fiancé and I, trying on hats. She’d designed a monogram to be positioned underneath this: the first letters of our names, connected by an illustrated version of a bubbling champagne glass. A complicated substitute for an ampersand, if you ask me.
We’d invited 50 people to the wedding, but she’d ordered 300 napkins. She told me we could use them again on our wedding anniversary, wouldn’t that be fun? So when my father came up the stairs from the garage into the kitchen with a big bucket of fried chicken on top of a larger, brown box, I thought that the oft-discussed napkins had finally arrived. My plan was to open them, to act enthusiastically, and then to hide them in the attic. Because everyone in my family had been coasting along in high spirits, attacking the wedding to-do list with tremendous good cheer, I felt sure that if these napkins went missing on The Best Day of My Life, my stepmother would turn to me and bravely say, “They’re only napkins!” and that this act of benevolence would do more for our relationship than the fact that she’d wanted to make me customized cocktail napkins in the first place.
But my father acted very shy and surreptitious, and made as if to hide the box away from us, which made it even more obvious that its contents were for me. So I leapt up from the table and lunged for the bottom box, knowing full well that my father’s instincts for survival would cause him to grab the bucket of fried chicken posed on top of it less it tumble to the floor, and this is exactly what happened. My stepmother beamed as I stole away behind the kitchen table with my booty, safely out of reach.
Using my sharpest fingernail, I dug underneath the packing tape and peeled it back with a tug. Across the room, my father held his breath. Gleefully, I pulled apart the cardboard flaps to reveal four dozen pairs of tiny white athletic socks, their reinforced pink tips touching like the snouts of sleeping piglets.
“Dad?” I said, looking across the kitchen to where he stood hugging the greasy bucket against his sweater.
“I got them on EBay!” he exclaimed.
I lifted out a single specimen to try and understand whose feet, exactly, the small white socks were for.

From an exercise for a Gotham Writer's Workshop

I could see how the cutlets could be sauteed with curried spinach, onions and cream, and how this would taste, if not delicious, certainly rewarding on top of a bed of rice. I could taste the future perfect of those chicken cutlets. I could smell the garlic frying.

But right now, those chicken cutlets were lying underneath a choke of plastic, like pale and fattened slugs. Where were the nerves, the rubbery tendons where was the puckered flap of cream-white outer skin?

The other meat choices were no more enticing. Every cut before me looked like the embodiment of nothing; the exact color and texture and glistening sheen I would attribute to this word. What do you feel like doing? Nothing. What did you learn at school today? Nothing. What do you feel like eating? Nothing. This.

From "Night Watch"

The next morning, Antonia padded downstairs into the kitchen and surveyed the kitchen counter (somewhat accusatory, so empty, so clean) and the blinking coffee machine, already dribbling out its necessary black fuel. Something made Antonia pause, as she listened to its gurgling, its faint, reptilian hiss. Her memory jolted, Antonia walked back upstairs to the second floor landing and leaned her ear against the door of the guest bathroom that Grey favored for his grooming. She knocked hard enough for him to hear her over the busy whir of his electric toothbrush.
“Can you eat anything?” She hollered.
He appeared at the door, a flaccid burst of foam around his mouth.
“Hmmm?”
“Can you eat anything, darling, or do you have to go on empty?”
“Ghmghm, ghmmm,” he mumbled, shooing her away.
She went back downstairs and poured coffee into a travel mug. This was for her, Grey didn’t like to drink anything in transit. She fixed him an English Muffin with almond paste in case, wrapped it in aluminum foil, and sat down at the table to wait. He was putting on a show for her, but she knew he hadn’t slept the night before because she hadn’t slept, either. Both of them had simply been too proud to say something in the dark.

When they pulled up in front of the hospital (why were they like this, and always in brick? Factory-like, with noxious fumes tumbling up into the sky from a forgotten wing), Grey undid his seatbelt and stilled her hand on the gear shaft, with his.
“I don’t want you to come in with me,” he said.
“Don’t be silly,” she answered, undoing her own belt.
“No,” he said. “I mean it. Just drop me off and go back home, like I’m a schoolboy. I’ll be good as new tonight.”
She bit her lip and looked out the window. They both knew this wasn’t true.
“You’ll need me.”
“I’ll have them call you when I’m ready to go.”
“Like takeout.”
“Be brave.” He said this to her. He was always saying things like this, to her.

From "Night Watch"

Tomorrow would be the first trip to the hospital they would share together as a couple. Neither of them had wanted a child, and Antonia took any physical complaints she had to gentler merchants: acupuncturists, massage therapists, energy healers.

From "Night Watch"

He had a funny way of speaking, always calling attention to mundane, perplexing words. Split pea. Split pea, he had said to her one time. Table. Cloth. He was batty, and brilliant. But it was true that he smelled.