Girls (38 page)
Authors: Frederick Busch
In this winter, though, in the field behind Randy Strodemaster’s house, I leaned on the shovel. I was looking at Fanny, who talked while Archie listened. I wouldn’t ask them where he had gotten her from, Virginia’s place or ours. Wait and see, I told myself. I knew I couldn’t. Look at me and these other people, what we were doing when all we had to do was wait and see.
I went back to work and then I had to stop again. When I looked toward the road, I saw Archie with his hands in his pockets. Fanny was gone, and so was her car. I wasn’t completely sure I could move anymore. I made my fingers close around the shovel. I made myself breathe the short, choppy breaths, and I scooped some snow.
I thought I should remember to tell the Tanners about the physics book in her shelves. I didn’t think of it, I would tell them. I would mention Rosalie and it would please them, I thought, knowing that a stranger had pondered so hard about their child. They would want to know it was maybe another clue. Rosalie had been certain Janice wouldn’t have taken physics, since she’d been less than capable with numbers. Strodemaster gave her the book, since numbers were what he knew—Rosalie was sure of it. Teachers do that kind of passing their books along to kids. The young are so lucky, I thought. We so love teaching them. I would want to ask Archie why a little girl would buy her underwear in a fuck-me clothing store for a man like
Strodemaster. Maybe I would also ask Rosalie. I felt like I needed an expert to tell me about anything human, though on all other information, I was absolutely informed. I wondered where Fanny had gone. I wondered if Strodemaster’s wife had moved out because of something with him and his daughter. It could happen, I thought. I leaned over to spit onto the snow and moved it off behind me where somebody breathing hard was moving it farther away.
People were talking, but not very much, and I could hear the rushing sound of the big fire back near the barn. The dog sat very still, watching the hole slowly grow. He was getting ready.
Here’s what I thought. I thought about Ralph. I thought, Once upon a time.
I made myself work. I was like the others. Whether we believed in spring or not, we did not want to wait. If you watched us from above us, you would have seen it. Spring or not, ribs or not, fingers or not, we were going to move the entire field.
FREDERICK BUSCH
A Reader’s Guide
Q: Upon finishing the book, I recalled the first chapter, which I then re-read. I realized that it now felt like the “last” chapter. What was your plan with this design?
A: I first wrote the book going from the beginning of chapter two to the end. And I was dissatisfied—as I worked on the beginning—with plunging the reader too quickly into so much grimness. And although the first chapter doesn’t make you sing, it has a little bit of humor to it, and it seems to me to help set the scene for who this man was, and whom he became, and to give the reader … the slight sense there was hope for him after the events of the book.
Q: Why not bring Jack and Fanny back together? They clearly loved each other.
A: Because people who so clearly love each other nevertheless do not always know how to live together. That’s reason one. Reason two is the plot I created made it impossible to bring Jack and Fanny back together. The only way they can live together is for her to not think he killed their baby. The only way they can live together is for him to not know she killed their baby. Now how can you undo those two things? I wanted it to be a kind of paradox: He loves her so much he takes the blame for what she did, to the point where she can’t take him because of it. And she can’t take what it does to him: It makes him a very bitter and difficult man.
I loved Fanny, and I wanted him to stay with her more than my readers imagined … [the short story] “Ralph the Duck” appeared in 1989 … and became chapter two. And you see Fanny is a little softer in that story, a little less self-protective, more accessible to Jack. I wanted Jack and Fanny to have a possibility of happiness. But they kept returning to me, and the more I thought about them, the more I
wondered, why had Jack made her cry? A lot of people noticed her sorrow, so I must have made her sad without intending to make her quite that sad. I learned from my readers who Fanny was, and I began to want to know about her sadness. Whenever a storyteller wants to know something, he or she tells a story to find out the answer.
Q: Let’s talk about the dog. A great dog.
A: Good, I liked him, too.
Q: Why no name? Why a chocolate Lab? And how on earth did you manage to get into its chocolate head so well?
A: It had no name … I hadn’t given him a name for a couple of chapters—I realized that suddenly I was used to hearing Jack refer to him as “the dog.” And I thought, “Wow, I’d better give him a name,” and then I thought, there is no name Jack could give him. Jack is a man who is unable to name his dog. And that tells us a lot about him. He’s a guy who can’t say “I love you,” who can’t say “Fanny, let’s go to counseling together.” Because he doesn’t quite believe in speech. He’s not a man of words. He’s absolutely a man of actions and thoughts. It’s the other people around him who are people of words.
How do I get inside his head, and why a chocolate Lab? I’ve always wanted to have a chocolate Lab and never did, so I decided it was time to have one. Also, Judy and I have always had two and sometimes three Labradors, and they’ve always been black. And I didn’t want to make the dog in the book a black Lab because if my Labradors ever got wind of it, they might be embarrassed. So that’s why it’s a chocolate Lab. And how did I get inside his head? Because we’ve lived with Labradors for about thirty years.
Q:
Girls
examines the darker side of life. Why?
A: I live in a dark part of the country. My ancestors come from a dark part of the world, which is Russia, and I am a serious artist, which
means that what I am looking to understand is the bad news, not the good news. I think by and large if you distinguish between serious writing and not-so-serious writing, you would find that the serious writing—even though it might be a love story—[has] room in the book for darkness, for bitter moments, because I think it is that side of life that the artist tries to explore. There are moments of joy, and he or she may bring explosions of joy to the page; but by and large I think our responsibility is to explore the more frightening moments on behalf of our readers. I think that’s why they may value us, if they do.
Q: They value us because we do it
for
them? Sort of like a surrogate?
A: Yes. We do it with them—if you’re a good writer, you get your readers to care as you do about certain huge facts or factors that are at stake in your book. Big values: You’re worrying about love and death and need and all those huge abstractions. And the courtesy that good writers perform is to make them concrete, instead of abstract, through characters and events. And the courtesy readers perform is to permit writers to take them on that dark and sometimes frightening ride. Now, not only do I live in a dark part of the country and am, I guess, a man with a proclivity for those dark thoughts, but I was living here at a time when actual small human girls were being stolen from their safety and raped and murdered and eaten and butchered and God knows what happened to them. And I became inconsolably involved in the terrible loss that their families were going through, and I wanted to do something. This is all I could do. And that’s why I created a man like Jack, who at best would be clumsy and only get halfway near the bitter truth, because that was all
I
could do.
Q: You say that “serious” writing is writing that portrays the darker, more frightening side of life. Then you would agree with the
person [Margaret Atwood] who said “A novel about unalloyed happiness would have to be either very short or very boring.”
A: I would argue that you can find fascinating happiness in the midst of sorrow. So she’s right. Her word “unalloyed” is the key … what makes us interesting to each other is the trouble we get each other in, just a little bit, and then the way we console each other.
Q: You said before you used the Colgate campus for the setting of this novel. How was that received by the Colgate community? Did you get any complaints?
A: I got a lot of questions; a lot of students and faculty tried to identify people in the book as belonging to the faculty. And I had to tell them—and this is the truth—that nobody in the book reflects anybody living or dead … except one person, who is a model of great human decency, and he has just retired as the head of the campus counseling service. He was the model for Archie. The other was Rosalie Piri—she came in part from a faculty person with that particular nose and mouth. I asked permission and she gave me permission to use those in the novel.
Q: You’re a very prolific author. What is your inspiration and how do you get started each time?
A: I’m one of those Jewish puritans—I feel like I have not earned my oxygen and food and water unless I’ve written, and so I try every day to make language—whether or not it’s a successful piece every day. I write essays, book reviews, and letters, I have a novel and short stories under contract. My life is writing. The professional life is writing and it flows into my teaching.
My home life is absolutely different. It involves Judy and me traveling or cooking or just talking—our boys are grown.… My poor kids were aware from their infancy that periodically every day the old
man disappears from sight, and if he comes out surly it means he didn’t do so well, and if he comes out beaming it means it’ll be a better afternoon and evening. They called me “the bear” all through their childhood, because I’d come lurching and lumbering out of my writing room. I have a very nice writing room on the second floor of our barn across a field from our house. The house is a low, white farmhouse, with a white picket fence. We’re five miles from the nearest town on a small country road. The main part of the house was built about 1810. The rest has been added over the years. It sits all alone in the middle of about one hundred acres.
My first writing room was a bathroom in Greenwich Village … while Judy slept, I would put my portable typewriter on the toilet-seat cover and sit on the bathtub, and that’s where I wrote my first novel.
Q: What advice do you have for young and aspiring writers? Any secret tricks of the trade to share?
A: I think aspiring writers, young or old, ought to read all they can. If you don’t love to read, I cannot imagine that your imagination would be fed enough to write. That’s the first piece. Second piece: Assuming you have some talent—you can never grow it, or make it bigger—have enough courage to dare to look straight in the eye what your talent causes you to see. The most important component you can develop is energy, to get up at 5:30 in the morning. It’s hard work, brutally hard work. And it’s frustrating and you fail most of the time. Most of what a serious fiction writer does is fail. But in spite of rejection by yourself, your editors, agents, and readers—the first novel I published was the fourth I wrote—you have to keep going. That’s the hardest part. Finally, try to treat writing like skating on very thin ice: Keep moving or else you’ll fall in. And finally, finally: Don’t be precious, believe you’re writing to be read, believe in the needs and thoughtfulness of your reader, and honor your reader.
That’s it from Busch Central. That’s all I know.
1: The weather in
Girls
is severe and relentless. What role does this weather play in the novel, and why? What other books have you studied in which the weather was such a large part of the story? How do climate and landscape tend to affect the lives of individuals as well as larger societies?
2: Jack is a Vietnam veteran, a self-educated, blue-collar kind of guy. His wife, Fanny, is an emergency room nurse, a job requiring considerable education and training. In what ways do you think their differing backgrounds affect their relationship? Are these effects beneficial or damaging? What commonalities can you find in their backgrounds and/or jobs? Do you think these are sufficient to keep them together?
3: Did you want Jack and Fanny to get back together? Why or why not, and why do you think Busch arrived at the ending?
4: Do you think this book fits into the typical detective-novel genre? Why or why not? Why do you think readers like to categorize types of novels? Do you think
Girls
belongs to any distinct category or genre?
5: The first chapter directly follows the final chapter in chronology. Why do you think the author placed it at the beginning of the book? Did you go back and reread the first chapter after completing the novel? Did doing so alter your perception of the book? If so, how?
6: Why do you think Jack and Fanny couldn’t discuss the death of their baby after so much time? Has there ever been something you or someone you know couldn’t or wouldn’t discuss? Why do you
think people close themselves away like that? How might people avoid doing so, or help each other overcome it?
7: In recent years there unfortunately have been many highly publicized cases of missing girls like Janice Tanner. Do you think these cases have always occurred and are just being played up by the media today? Or do you think something has shifted in our society that is causing an increase in such tragedies? Do you discuss these disappearances with your friends or your families? If so, how do you respond? Do you feel safe in modern society?
8: Jack lives in a world of extreme coldness, bleakness, and silence. It seems that the only lightness in his world is his nameless dog. Why do you think this is so? What function does the dog serve in the novel as a whole? In Jack’s life? What do you think the author had in mind when he chose to include the dog in this story?
9: When did you as a reader think you knew who was responsible for Janice Tanner’s disappearance? Who did you think did it, and why? Were you right?