Novel Treatments / Undertow (Working Title)
-1-
Regina Hargrave was nine when her mother left.
Usually children are much younger when their mothers abandon them. These women attribute their actions to the sudden stress of being a mother. They blame the frighteningly insatiable need of their children, the complete and crushing loss of self that they experience. They blame their husbands, their homes, their parents; they blame the circumstances that caused the bars of their life to tighten around them like a cage that was suddenly too small.
Clarissa Hargrave was an enigma to everyone who knew her. She was a very petite, brown-haired sparrow of a woman, but she possessed such a force of personality that others sometimes felt oppressed by her presence in the same room. People were drawn to her, the way moths are drawn to an open candle (and with similar results). If this strange and glorious woman did one thing in her life that she was truly proud of, it was that she did not lie – to others, or to herself. She was unflinching and cold, but she took her actions as her own. She did not make or accept excuses.
Reggie had no brothers or sisters. Her father was not abusive, alcoholic, or particularly philandering. He made a comfortable living as a book editor for a fashionably independent and successful publishing house. The three of them lived in a tasteful house located in a pleasantly urbane neighborhood just past the soul-killing suburbs. Reggie was not a demanding child, nor was she particularly sickly or troubled.
Once day, Clarissa just left.
It was a surprise to everyone except for Reggie. She had known since she had come home from school the Monday afternoon three days prior. The girl had thrown open the door as usual, but paused at the kitchen sink, sensing that something was amiss the way that a rabbit senses a predator. There was a single plate in the sink, which at any other house would have been unnoticeable. Reggie’s mother was an unusually fastidious woman.
Reggie had slowly lowered her book bag to its’ usual place in the center of the kitchen. This was exactly where her father would later trip on it and curse under his breath. He would then look around to wherever she was, and hope that she hadn’t heard the offending word. It was a sort of evening ritual between the two of them, and oddly comforting to the girl.
The television was on in the den. They only had one television, a rarity even for that time, and they didn’t subscribe to cable. Her parents agreed that television was vulgar, but they did enjoy PBS and the occasional movie in the evenings. The fact that it was on now, the flat voices and eerie blue flicker emanating from around the corner, made Reggie even more uncomfortable.
She crept cautiously into the den, only to find it empty. Her mothers’ favorite film was playing, but the only audience was their cat, Kierkegaard. The fat orange thing was curled up in a rumpled throw blanket, his eyes nearly closed. When Reggie entered the room, he did not look up, but he began to purr.
On the screen, Audrey Hepburn threw her head back and laughed gaily.
Her mother laughed just like that, and her inflection was similar to the actress’ too. Reggie could never decide if this was natural or affected. She had once overhead her mother defending this movie to some of their friends one evening.
“I know it’s a bit conventional, and it certainly lacked the realism of Capote’s novel, but I honestly adore it.” Her mother’s eyes were twinkling with mirth. “I watch it twice a week, and I always cry. I guess I truly want to believe that everything in life can be solved by a kiss in a thunderstorm or finding a lost cat.”
“Conventional” was the utmost derogatory term in her mother’s vocabulary. Once Regina had wanted a popular toy as a small child, and her mother had snorted and refused, saying that it was “trendy.” Reggie asked what that meant, and Clarissa had explained. “When something is trendy, it means that people only like it because other people do. Usually famous people. If you really wanted that thing, you would be able to come up with a good reason, darling. Always have a good reason to do something, or else why do it?”
Her mother hated pretension more than anything else, and she insisted that artists were the most pretentious of all. “They’re all phonies, darling. They create beautiful work, but they’re made of glass. At least the good ones. Some aren’t made of anything at all.”
Nevertheless, her parents associated with a very artistic and intellectual circle, and Reggie idolized them. They went into the city two or three times a week, and always came back late, smelling smoky and exciting. They would stumble into the door and head straight upstairs to their room, right past her open door, but they would not sleep. Sometimes they stayed up all night, and Reggie would hear every once in a while her mother’s Hepburn-laugh through the pine barrier. Reggie was rarely allowed to join them on these excursions, but this only added to the glamour of their mysterious second lives.
As she walked through her house that day, she discovered more items out of place. These would later come back to her in horrific clarity. A towel was thrown carelessly on the bathroom floor. The carpet of the living room was rumpled out of the orderly path of the vacuum. Were these clues?
She was nine years old, and she knew pretty much everything there was to know. These puzzling changes to her everyday routine were disturbing, and she knew that there was a deeper meaning lurking under them. Her mother had raised her to look for the reason in everything. She could sometimes feel this deep meaning like a current through her life, pushing her one way or the other. Instinctively she knew it was there, but she could rarely grab it.
This current pulled Reggie out the back door. She pushed open the screen and quietly stood on the back porch. Her backyard was not large, but it was nicely landscaped, and surrounded by a large privacy fence. One tree stood near the back end of the yard, an ancient oak with bark that was twisted magically into a thousand faces, probably due to some sort of tree disease. Reggie’s father had started building a tree house in it when her mother had conceived, because he had privately been convinced that she would be a boy. Her father did not know that she knew this, and would have felt terrible if he had. The fort was never finished due to lack of interest from both parties, but a wooden platform was still nailed flat in the crotch of the tree. On this platform stood Clarissa Hargrave.
She was wearing a silky white dress that Regina had never seen, and her small, dark feet were bare. She was perched right on the edge of the platform, so at first Reggie was sure that she was going to jump. Nevertheless, she did not scream, but stood quietly. Eventually she noticed that her mother was swaying gently, as if she were standing on the bow of some great ship as it rode the crests and troughs of the sea.
Suddenly a wayward breeze caught the hem of the white dress and it billowed out behind her like a sail. Clarissa was thrown off balance and had to catch herself on the knobby trunk, and this made her laugh out loud. Reggie gasped in spite of herself, because she was suddenly and irrationally sure that the wind would catch the dress just right and blow her mother, the tree house, and the entire oak into the east, away from privacy fences, unwashed dishes, and nine-year-olds who needed their afternoon snack.
And from the wild, excited laugh that had just erupted from Clarissa Hargrave, Reggie was sure that that was what her mother was imagining, too.
She didn’t actually leave for three more days, but to Regina, the day in the tree was the last time she saw her mother. The woman continued cleaning, cooking, and painting in her spare time, but she was already gone. When her body caught up with her mind, she did not say goodbye or take her things with her. She simply vanished.
Reggie’s father was not bothered at first. Clarissa was an unpredictable woman, and he couldn’t question her; he had accepted that as an unspoken vow at their wedding. When the first day passed without a word, however, he became a mildly worried. As he called their friends and relatives, the worry turned to fear, and eventually panic. On the fourth day, he called he police. They said that there was nothing that they could do, that there had been no struggle, and that they would file a missing person’s report in the hopes that it would turn up something.
One of the police talked to Reggie about her mother. He was kind, with sandy hair and blue-gray eyes that crinkled in the corners, even when he was being serious. He could not have been more than 26 years old, and his mother had probably never run away when he was nine.
The policeman asked Reggie to tell him everything she knew. She understood that he meant everything relating to her mother’s disappearance, but the phrase stuck in her mind. Everything she knew.
That night after they left, she was in her room while her father and grandparents talked in low urgent voices downstairs. Occasionally her father’s voice would rise in a tone she did not like, almost a whine, as he talked with his parents. Then they would quiet again. She lay on her crimson comforter, her hair a dark pool behind her head. The silk was smooth and cool against her cheek, and it seemed to dull the throbbing numbness she was experiencing behind her eyes. The policeman’s voice echoed in her head. Everything she knew.
It seemed as though Reggie ought to know lots of things. She had existed for nine years, after all. She got straight A’s in school, and she went to a school for exceptional children. All of her parents’ friends said she was precocious, which she later looked up, and was pleased. Thanks to her parents, she knew some of the greatest thinkers of their time. Her favorite book was George Orwell’s Animal Farm, for heaven’s sake.
Yet when she tried to pin down the things in life that she actually knew, they eluded her. A week ago she had felt certain about everything. Now she was shattered, and the pieces would not meld no matter what she tried to do. They were swept away in the current of her life.
She flipped over on her stomach and reached for her journal, as much to blot out the voices downstairs as anything else. Her mother had encouraged her to write down whatever popped into her head. She said it helped “realign the spiritual compass.” Ari picked up a pen, and began to write.
Everything I know.
The phrase looked intimidating. The blank page even more so. She chewed on the tip of her pen, and it accidentally clicked. She sighed, and began to write again, scratching out every other word. Suddenly the hairs stood up on her arm, and she put the pen down.
The voices downstairs had stopped. Reggie looked at the page, and was surprised to find that the words all blurred together. A spot of wet fell on the last words that she had written.
Today my father realized that my mother is never coming back.
After that, nothing else seemed important. She felt the numb throbbing spreading throughout her body, feeling pleasant on the tips of her fingers. She shut the journal, flipped over, and closed her eyes. She pretended to be asleep when her father walked past her door and looked in. Soon, she really was asleep.
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This isn’t the sort of story I would normally go for, but I found myself enjoying it. The dialogue is nice and it is fitting with the style of the piece. Your flow, or should I say, your piece’s flow is very good, not too rushed. Your descriptions are also very realistic and really help the reader to picture every stage of the story. I’m sorry, but I really don’t have any novel--pardon the pun--ideas for how to introduce her older. I would just start a chapter with a woman in her twenties and let the reader work it out, only dropping small hints for the slower reader. I would avoid phrases like “ten years later”, and “Now in her twenties…”. I think that simply having an older character of the same name is enough for you not to have to give an “explanation”. Well, that is just my “two cents”, as the Americans say. Keep up the good work, and keep writing.
Slán leatsa!!!
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