The Local News (43 page)
Authors: Miriam Gershow
For a while we were quiet. I kept sneaking looks at him; he seemed so well rested, half smiling and kicked back in his seat. I wondered, is this what it looks like to have no regrets? To have been mostly kind and goodhearted? A pressure different from the heat of the alcohol built behind my rib cage and through the base of my neck. I cleared my throat. I bit down hard, grinding my molars. This was, I realized, longing. How strange to feel it for David Nelson. He’d always just been mine, until the day I hadn’t wanted him to be anymore. Longing had never entered into the equation.
Part of me wished we could just drive in wide circles so I could confess to him about Gene, though I wasn’t sure exactly what I would confess: something about the initial allure of the easy, companionable, half-empty man but then the slow slide into stupor. I was not going to give up my lease come December. I knew that. Maybe even Gene knew that. And I was never going to marry him. I had no idea why he would even want to ask me, to be honest. I was, I would confess, terrible at loving people.
But David Nelson knew this already, he, of course, my first victim.
“Do you remember,” he said, grinning, “the talented-and-gifted trip?” It took me a minute to realize we were back on D.C. He was talking eighth grade, a weekend in the capital for gifted thirteen-year-olds and their chaperones. “I remember looking for whale penises at the Natural History Museum,” he said. “Someone had told me all the scale models were anatomically correct. I kept searching.”
He chuckled. I laughed, perhaps a bit too loud. I entertained the
idea of touching his hand, recognizing even then how far away and foolish this might seem the following afternoon as I rolled my bag to the skycap, stood in line for a boarding pass, wound my way down a narrow aisle to my window seat, clamped the teeth of the seatbelt closed in my lap. But I didn’t care. This, the person who’d known me when my nights were dreamless, when
bad things
still referred to unfair grades and ignoramus classmates, when the world was still and simply whole.
I listened to his self-deprecating stories of the first year of teaching: the meticulous lecture slides eaten by his computer, the office hours spent arguing with students about grades. He described the terrible writing of his undergrads. He said he’d woken one day this winter to the realization that he’d consigned himself to a life among the dim bulbs. “It’s like,” he said, staring at me, not the road, “being perpetually stuck at Franklin High.”
We laughed knowingly, righteously. The laugh lasted longer than the joke, briefly contagious between us. Countless, the number of times we’d laughed like that. The noise petered out slowly. He nudged a hand to my arm, somewhere between a slap and a pat. He was grinning at me. I wondered what he meant by it. I held his stare. Quickly—a little too quickly?—he turned back to the road, looking purposefully at the windshield. It seemed as if he were breathing slightly more heavily, that a bit of the pinch was returning to his jaw.
If he turned to me again, I would touch his hand.
Life seemed briefly whittled down to the inside of this car, the blinker tinking loudly at each turn, the vents swirling a raspy whisper of air. Everything else—Gene, my mother’s house, even my beloved D.C.—felt far off and imaginary. I could taste my heartbeat. There was a part of me that had long curled in on itself and atrophied, perhaps beginning the day Danny slipped unremarkably out the front door, perhaps long before that. I could feel it unfurling
now, churning through my watery belly and rising up my throat, coming out my nostrils and my mouth, dragon breath singeing my earlobes and making my face sweat even in the breeze of the AC. I wanted to use his back as a pillow. I wanted to wear his socks. I wanted it to be easy to know someone again.
David talked beside me of baby names. Joshua, he said. And Carsen with an
e
and Bryan with a
y.
I waited for him to stop and look at me the way he used to look at me.
When he veered into the wooded streets of Fairfield, I thought at first he’d made a wrong turn. The houses looked unfamiliar, lawns deeper, streets more winding than I remembered. An occasional home—its white shutters, its swath of yellow siding—stirred loose some memory and I would briefly know where we were, able to anticipate the coming
YIELD
sign or forked road, able to calculate how far we were from my mother’s house: just minutes away. But in another turn or two I would again lose my bearings from the same-ness of house after house and tree after tree. Soon that’s what I was trying for, the feeling of being lost and not unpleasantly so.
And it struck me then that maybe this was how it had been for Danny, after the first few hits off Elvin Tate’s joint, as the two of them drove through similar nearby streets. Maybe he too had sat in the passenger seat and given himself over to such willful disorien-tation. Maybe this was why he’d not screamed for help or elbowed Elvin in the jaw or jumped out at a light during those first nearby miles, when it became clear that there would be no tire store, clear that the route had already grown strangely meandering. Maybe he had allowed himself some heady excitement for the way his day had taken an unexpected turn. Maybe he’d invented a quick mythology, a host of fantastic stories about the man beside him. Maybe he’d watched, bemused at the ease with which his life—and a good, happy
life it was—simply receded behind him. Maybe such a thing felt surprisingly nice, being freed, without even realizing he needed to be, from all his mistakes and small cruelties. Maybe, as a strange world whirred past his window, he sat right here, jangling with possibility and promise, his future wide open.
The debt of gratitude owed for a first book is not only to those who helped with its writing and publication but also to the many who came before its opening words were ever penned during the long process of learning how to write.
For their help in that process, I owe thanks to: everyone at the University of Oregon Program in Creative Writing, though no one more so than Ehud Havazelet; all of the amazingly generous and supportive folks at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing; Tom Spanbauer; the careful readers of my early work, including Connie, Jessica, Sarah K., and the ever-encouraging Teeny B., who belongs in a category all her own.
For their help with bringing this book to life, thank you to: Emily Forland, whose unflagging belief in my work makes her not only a great agent but also a backbone to my writing life. And Emma Patterson, who set so much in motion when she first pulled my stories from a pile and decided she liked them. Caroline Goyette for her always thoughtful reading and feedback on an early draft. Jamie Passaro for her ideas, input, and incomparable championing of the
manuscript from its earliest form; believe me when I say not one breath of your cheerleading was wasted. Literary Arts for their financial support. And everyone at Spiegel & Grau, especially Mike Mezzo, whose passion for Lydia and her story often—and to my delight—appeared to rival my own.
Finally, there is no way to forge the strange, uncertain, joyful roller coaster of an existence that is a writer’s life without an unwavering community of family and friends. Thanks seems such a puny and inadequate word for: Cole Coshow, who set the bar so high on writing and on friendship, I continue to aspire. Liz Larson, whose treehouse is waiting. My father, who has been joyfully prognosticating this for years. My mother, who knows the difference between
bear
and
bare
and can explain such mysteries. The Gerblack family-Rebecca, Tim, Eliza, and Nora—who have sent more love, care, and support my way than one person rightfully deserves. And lastly, Jordan, who did what for so long seemed impossible: made a home where this restless gal could finally sit her butt down, stop worrying about what might come next, and simply write.
MIRIAM GERSHOW
A READER’S GUIDE
Random House Reader’s Circle:
What initially inspired you to write
The Local News
?
Miriam Gershow:
Before I ever conceived of
The Local News
, I had completed a short story collection and was looking for an agent. Everyone in my life who knew anything about publishing told me to include the following line in my query letters: “My next project is a novel, which I am currently working on.” Agents, everyone told me,
love
novels. So I included the line even though it was a lie. Well, not an
absolute
lie. I figured by the time I actually found an agent— which I imagined might take a while—I’d be at work on my next project and maybe it would be a novel. But to my surprise I ended up finding a great match in the very first agent I queried. The only glitch, of course, was the matter of my imaginary novel. So it was crunch time.
I’ve always been the type of writer whose ideas start small—a single line of dialogue, a vague idea of a character, a rough sketch of a scene. I’ve never been able to write from an outline or envision the full arc of a story before sitting down to write it, and
The Local News
was no exception. One line popped into my head: “Going missing was the only interesting thing my brother had ever done.” Instantly, I was intrigued: What if you had mixed feelings about a loved one’s disappearance? I’ve always been interested in ambivalence in relationships and the love-hate feelings we often have toward those who are closest to us.
Soon after that line came to me, I wrote the first full scene: Lydia and Kito arguing in the mini-mart about hanging up the M
ISSING
P
ERSON
poster. From there, I found myself naturally exploring Lydia’s world: her parents and Danny and David Nelson and Lola Pepper, to start. I had, to my great relief, made good on my lie. That initial line proved to be one of the rare gifts of my writing life. It hovered in my mind throughout the first draft, creating momentum and propelling me forward while I figured out exactly what this story was about and who these characters were.
RHRC:
You have been praised for your unusually authentic depiction of high school. Where did you draw from in creating this picture of teenage life?
MG:
Well, even though (unlike Lydia), I skipped my twenty-year high school reunion, a part of me still feels rooted in adolescence. I’m convinced this is true of most people, since high school is such a grueling, seemingly inescapable time in our lives. Its imprint will always be on us, no matter how successful we become. So while I’m a happy, well-adjusted grown-up with a career and a family and a mortgage, some part of me still relates to the particular vulnerability and skinlessness that is the teenage experience. I wasn’t nearly as smart as Lydia in high school, but I definitely shared her sense of alienation. Perhaps I shouldn’t admit this, but I drew upon my own memories and experiences in writing
The Local News
, even though I never had a missing brother or Ivy League aspirations or friends on the flag team.
Also, I work at a university, and though there’s a difference between an eighteen-year-old college student and a fifteen-year-old in high school, I have daily contact with young people just like Danny—boys with well-honed bravado who have a hard time writing coherent sentences—and quiet, earnest girls like Lydia who have unflattering haircuts and surprise everyone with their insights when they speak. Sitting in classrooms with eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds three days a week keeps me tapped into the squirming personalities and restless thrumming of, if not high school, then at least late adolescence. This helps me keep those voices very much alive in my head.
RHRC:
Why did you make the decision to make Lydia smart and Danny dumb? Did you view this as the primary source of their rift?
MG:
A little bit of background: In graduate school, when I was still figuring out how to write stories, Charles Baxter visited my MFA program and read one of my pieces. I had what bordered on sycophantic love for Charles Baxter’s work, so I handed him what I considered to be my very best story, about a widower who is obsessed with visiting hospital patients who have survived failed suicide attempts. I’d been told for years that I wrote “loveable losers,” which I considered a compliment. I waited for Baxter to heap on the praise, to instantly shepherd my work into publication, and to profess his equally sycophantic love for me. Instead what he told me was this: My protagonist was an overdetermined loser. It was obvious from the first page that everything he set out to do would be a failure, so the story lacked any real momentum and tension.
It was a startling, humbling, and semiheartbreaking moment— one of those moments in learning how to write when you realize a critique is completely correct and your own opinion is upended. Ever since then, my fear of the overdetermined loser has hovered over my stories, because I tend to pick outsiders and underdogs as my protagonists. So when I was writing that very first scene in the mini-mart and Lydia presented herself to me as the kind of precociously smart character who spouted off facts about the Oslo Accords and the conflict over Kashmir, I seized on the idea. Her intelligence became a defining characteristic. I knew it would elevate her from being simply one more mopey high school loser. And while she often used her book smarts as a mask for her growing internal panic and confusion, it also kept her from devolving into a simpering wallflower. Even as everything else fell apart, Lydia was still smart. This provided a ray of hope. As harrowing as her adolescent circumstances were, her intelligence offered the possibility of a better future.
And I’m not sure I see Danny as dumb. In many ways, he was a smart, savvy kid, able to charm nearly everyone around him and easily negotiate the tricky social scene of high school. At some point early in the first draft, I feared that he was coming across as a one-dimensional bully, but I knew his aggression had to be fed by some kind of insecurity. To me, his learning disabilities didn’t make him a dumb jock—they made him vulnerable and desperate to preserve his image as a golden boy. Popularity was his mask, just like Lydia’s intelligence was hers.
I certainly think this is
one
source of the rift between Lydia and Danny. But I don’t think there’s any one reason why siblings stop getting along or why they fight or why one is embarrassed by the other. It’s a complicated relationship, and the contrast between Danny’s learning disabilities and Lydia’s fierce intelligence was just one of their relationship’s complications. The high school social hierarchy was another one. So was the disparate attention from their parents. So were the normal growing pains of adolescence.
RHRC:
You describe Lydia’s parents as “drifters.” Do you have sympathy for them?
MG:
Absolutely I have sympathy for them. One of the most interesting questions that came to me in writing a missing-person story was: What would happen to a family if you suddenly remove one of its key players? Every family exists within its own weird universe; there are norms and dynamics that would seem strange to an outsider. Danny was the magnet of the Pasternak family. He was—for all his other failings—the easier kid for this particular set of parents. I don’t think that makes Lydia’s parents evil. I think that makes them human. Lydia was the far more independent child, even long before Danny was gone. She just wasn’t as close to her parents as her brother was. So when he vanished, all three naturally drifted from one another. Lydia doesn’t go to her parents for help or support. And they view her—often inaccurately—as the child who can take care of herself. They are also consumed in their own almost unfathomable grief.
I know a number of readers who have wanted to shake Lydia’s parents by the shoulders, to urge them to reach out to Lydia, to recognize her grief and offer more love and support. I understand this. But also I think they did the best they could. They made small efforts—Mom brings Lydia and David the root beer floats, Dad reassures Lydia after the near accident, they both bring Lydia to the cemetery. But they are limited in their capacity. The family after Danny disappeared is the same family it was before he disappeared; these three people don’t quite know what to do with one another or how to truly be with one another. When Danny was there, he served as a big, loud distraction to this dynamic. All eyes were on him.
RHRC:
Throughout the book, we see the community’s response to Danny’s disappearance. Everyone from Min Mathers to the head of the PTA to Kirk Donovan to Melissa Anne has “laid claim to him,” as Lydia puts it. Why was that response important to the story?
MG:
I find the public grief that accompanies such tragedies genuinely fascinating. There’s something both authentic and contrived about it. I think about this when I watch news coverage of school shootings: Even people not directly affected by the shootings—who didn’t know the shooter or the victims—sob to reporters. I don’t think that display of emotion is fake. These people usually appear to be genuinely distraught. But I wonder why. Sometimes I think that a universal vein of grief runs through all of us—most of us have directly experienced some kind of loss and the few who haven’t still have to face their own mortality—and we use these community tragedies to vent some of that universal grief.
So I was intrigued by the community response to Danny’s disappearance. Part of the response was opportunistic, like the yellow ribbons fashioned into bracelets and hair bands. But I also think this town was truly bereft, even those people who barely knew Danny. I liked the muddle of the situation; Lydia certainly viewed the community loss as less authentic than her own. But was it? I think the nature of public grief is more complicated than that.
RHRC:
Do you think that Danny loved Lydia and that Lydia loved Danny?
MG:
Yes and yes. Definitely. As much as I loved that initial line— “Going missing was the only interesting thing my brother had ever done”—I realized early on in my writing that it was a lie that Lydia told herself. The part of her that was crushed by Danny’s cruelty and rejection certainly wanted to believe it, but the part of her that deeply loved her brother knew it wasn’t true. Look at the Bridge Game. Look at Miggle Man. Beneath their adolescent estrangement was a childhood love that was never entirely extinguished.
The same goes for Danny. Yes, he grew into a brutish teenager. Teenagers can be stupid and thoughtless, especially those who are preoccupied with their status as Danny was. But he was also capable of thoughtfulness; when Lydia is in the factory with Bayard and Lola, she remembers how Danny’s occasional kindnesses turned her into the crazy rat. I think those occasional kindnesses signal that Danny never completely lost affection for Lydia. He had a hard time communicating that affection in a consistent way, but someone like Danny would have struggled with having a sister who was so naturally intelligent and who faced so few of the same challenges as he did. So I think there was real cause for resentment on his end. And certainly Lydia was justified in her resentment of Danny. But I don’t think either of them lacked an underlying love for the other. In the end, at the reunion, Lydia wonders what it would have been like if they had survived into adulthood together. I think there remains the very real possibility that they would have outgrown their adolescent chafing and regained some of the intimacy they shared as children.