Social Blunders

considerably higher than what’s paid men in similar jobs. Back then, Carolina women didn’t even have similar jobs. Shirley, Gaylene, and Ambrosia came from positions where they mostly fetched refreshments, ran personal errands, and covered the boss’s butt when he screwed up—with raises directly contingent on attitude.

Ambrosia, who has the thickest accent in the South, explained to me what attitude means in upper-level management lingo. “A good attitude is when you’ll suck off the boss and a bad attitude is when you won’t. I had a bad attitude.”

My gang was so thrilled to be chosen for real jobs that they worked twice as hard as men would have and netted me a couple million a year, after taxes. If that makes me a harebrain, the world is full of well-to-do rabbits.

“Pretend I’m your employer, Shirley. Give me tidbits of accounts receivable.”

“Accounts receivable is none of your concern.”

“I’ve already begged my daughter to behave even vaguely like a daughter today. Don’t make me degrade myself to you too.”

Shirley gave me one of those looks I imagine ept sergeants give inept generals. She spoke quickly. “Ambrosia got drunk with some CEO from North Dakota last night and sold his country club a hundred ten Shilohs.” Naming our cart models after Civil War battles gives the line a thematic unity.

“How about Gaylene?”

“Gaylene paid the union steward a kickback. We’re covered through the winter. Anything else you need to know to make believe you’re a vital cog in this here well-oiled machine?”

Shirley has a grandson Shannon’s age. Can you believe a woman that old would treat me with such disrespect? “That’ll be enough.”

She turned back to her office, which is larger than mine. “The Coke machine is out of Fresca again. You want to do something worthwhile, call Dixie Distributing and make some threats.”

“Can you get me their number?”

“You’ve got eyes and fingers. Look it up yourself.”

***

I sat at my desk with my hands folded in my lap, waiting for something to happen to change my dull ache of a life. The desk was completely clean except for a Smith-Corona typewriter in the dead center and a small, framed photograph, facedown, in the left-hand upper corner. The facedown face on my laminated desk belonged to Wanda the wife. I’d put her facedown when I discovered I couldn’t write Young Adult sports fiction with her staring at me in disappointment because I wasn’t Saul Bellow.

I’d never promised to be Saul Bellow, never even hinted that I might write something more literary than tales of right and wrong set in the metaphorical world of the baseball diamond. Sports is today’s battleground between good and evil. The goals of sports are honest and understandable—if you play by the rules using your mind and body to the best of your abilities, you win. Athletes with character flaws lose.

Cowboy-and-Indian fiction used to be good versus evil, until public perception of who were the real-life good guys in that one switched. Real life has nothing to do with good versus evil.

I opened my top drawer and pulled out the manuscript I’d been working on for over two years. Bucky on Half Dome. In the first draft of Bucky Climbs the Matterhorn, Bucky had been Becky. Becky wore braces on her teeth and had a will of iron. She could hang off the rock by the fingers of one hand and live on bushes and berries for a week. Becky was the stuff of legends.

The sex change was performed at my editor’s insistence. She said Young Adults would not accept a female lead, except in the genre of horse books. Teenage girls eat up bonding-with-animals stories, but I refuse to write horse books.

She did allow me to give the boy Bucky a female sidekick, as long as things stayed just pals—non-romantic and for God’s sake, nonsexual. So, I created Samantha Lindell. Bucky and Sam’s relationship is modeled on what I have with Maurey Pierce. It’s not in the books, and none of my teen fans know, but the reason the need for physical release doesn’t cause Bucky and Sam tension is the kids got that one out of the way years ago, before puberty.

***

“Life is much like the self-locking carabiner,” Bucky Brooks said as he fit himself into his harness and prepared to rappel off the Blacktail Butte shield.

Samantha Lindell’s blue eyes sparkled in the mountain sunlight. “Bucky, you pick the oddest moments to turn philosophical.”

“Think about it,” Bucky said, then he took the two loops of rope in his rough, yet sensitive, hands, leaned back over two hundred feet of air, and jumped.

***

Not the first lines of Tale of Two Cities, I admit, but books have been opened on less. Somewhere around page ten, I met Wanda, and now, a year later, Bucky and Sam were mired on page sixty- four, still nowhere near base camp, much less the mountain. Bucky had been asked to guide the President’s spoiled-rotten son on a five-day climb up Half Dome in Yosemite Park, and one of the three bodyguards who were supposed to accompany the party had been revealed to the readers as a KGB agent with assassination on his mind. The President’s son had been rude to Sam—called her a “chick,” said “Chicks can’t climb with men”—and that was as far as I got.

The five years before I met Wanda I produced five books; one was even mentioned in the New York Times Book Review’s annual juvenile fiction roundup. Then, fifty pages in a year. Nothing in the last four months. Some would take this as a sign I was better off without her, but I don’t know. There had been no way to maintain writing momentum and hold my marriage together at the same time.

Wanda had crises. I’d put out two pages, then she’d have an anxiety attack over personal fulfillment or President Reagan or something. Kafka himself couldn’t have written the week before Wanda started her period.

Maybe it’s better to work on a marriage than write sports books for teenagers. People say, “Gee, weren’t Dostoevsky and van Gogh admirable for all the sacrifices they made to create their masterpieces,” but I say the true artistic hero is the guy who gives up everything to produce something crappy. Anybody can lose a wife to win a Nobel Prize. Try losing a wife for Bucky on Half Dome.

I flipped through the manuscript, finding a phrase I liked here and there, sometimes an entire sentence. The scenes had been written weeks or even months apart, so the thing lacked consistency. The President’s son had red hair on one page and blond hair three pages later.

It wasn’t all tripe. A paragraph on page thirty-five gave me an idea for later in the book—Bucky could save the KGB agent’s life, even knowing he meant to kill the President’s son. I got to thinking about the President’s son and what it would feel like to be constantly coddled and resented. Would the boy stay a jerk or grow to learn tolerance of others and respect for nature?

This was interesting. For the first time in months I looked at my own writing as a source of potential. Maybe the book could be saved and I would be more than a bank account for one group of women and a climax-producing object for another group. Living your dreams through what you can do for women isn’t truly satisfying. Not like creating a novel.

I finished the last page and turned it over onto the pile. The question was: Carry on or trash it? Would a teenager someday pick up my book and be improved by it? Most teenagers are so unhappy, a book doesn’t have to change their life, just help them forget it for a few hours.

Wanda said my Bucky stories would inspire some pimply bookworm to take up mountain climbing and he’d fall off a cliff and get killed and it would be my fault. She first slept with me because I was a writer, but she couldn’t stand me when I actually wrote.

***

After six rings I decided the company had no one in charge of answering phones. Maybe she was at lunch, or maybe she didn’t exist. I pictured women all over the building muttering to themselves. “Not in my job description.”

“I need some money.”

“Wanda, how did you know where to find me?”