All the Things We Buried

There was only time on the farm, where the best of life was lived quietly, where nothing happened but a calm journey through the day, where change was imperceptible and precious life was everything.

The farm misses you, the wind in the barley misses you, the combine rolling home with your dad inside it, the burn water you paddled in with your brother, the grass under the crabapple tree where you made daisy chains and played croquet, the gooseberry bushes your grandfather planted, the view from your bedroom over the lambs across the field to the top road where the school bus goes, the secret room off your bedroom where your grandmother hid her letters, the grandmother clock at the top of the back stairs, the piano with the music open where you left it, the box of wine on the fridge so your dad could pour a glass without getting up, the round kitchen table with your brother’s spelling pressed into it, the blue milk jug with its beaded cover, the ginger cat asleep by the Raeburn, the potatoes in the red basin, the needles in the tomato pincushion on the windowsill for splinters in your hand, the gooseberry jam on the larder shelf, your mother’s handwriting on the label, your dad’s wellingtons and heartbreaking socks and growing collection of walking sticks, the stone water trough you sat on with your brother when you brought him his tea and warm roly-poly, your grandmother’s faded pink roses around the kitchen window, heads heavy with raindrops, the stroll around the farm you never got to take with her. The all of it, it misses you. Come home, we’ll bring you over the water, come home.

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My father was sitting on the doorstep in the open doorway drinking tea – a round butter biscuit spread with treacle in his other hand, possibly waiting for me, possibly not.

But the potatoes weren’t ready. That day, he dug some up and said they were green. ‘You’ll have to stay a few more days’, he said. ‘Sunday. We’ll have them next Sunday.’

I sat at the kitchen table, and he brought scrambled eggs on toast, the buttery kind only he made. He tucked a tea towel under his chin and ate a bowl of raspberries, one by one, dipping each with his teaspoon into a saucer of cream, letting the ivory liquid fall from the berry back into the bowl.

My father kept most of his thoughts and feelings to himself, economical with his words, as if they might be taxed. His sentences ended unexpectedly. I waited for more, but more never came. I’d learned to pay attention to the unsaid, to what lay between his words.

We had a secret language though; a mash-up of lines from others’ poems.

He held the last raspberry high, letting the remaining cream fall. ‘As the poets said, so much depends on this, upon a red raspberry dipped in white cream falling into the bowl. Men would kill for this.’

I tried to picture Dad deciding to end his life alone and in the dark only a day after I’d seen him. It didn’t add up. He had so much raspberry jam in the cupboard to enjoy, and new potatoes, and his sweet peas. There were gooseberries to pick, hairy and sour, from the bushes outside the kitchen window; so much gooseberry Eve’s pudding with custard to enjoy.

And his barley. He wouldn’t leave a crop of barley in the fields.

I pierced the balloon with the needle from the curtain, held it to my mouth, and breathed in my father’s last breath.

I wanted this boy to watch Lolita, to show him what verbal adventures a native Russian speaker could have with another language, but I stopped myself. The boy might think I was sending a message, Lolita in reverse; an older woman with designs on a male nymphet. What would that be? A nymphoma? Sounds like a disease, for which there would be no cure.

Read at Two Serious Ladies →

Victor put his spoon down. ‘Malcolm. Do you have someone waiting for you at home while you work up here?’

The question came from nowhere and I didn’t know the answer. I didn’t have a wife, if that’s what he was asking. And I couldn’t be sure whether Jack would still be there waiting for me after I had left him to come up and spent the month here. And I didn’t feel like explaining any of it to Victor.

Peter came to my rescue, answering a different question. ‘Malcolm’s doing a splendid job up here. Fixing languids, polishing windchests, tuning vox humanas,’ he said, inaccurately.

My eyelids grew heavy with a peculiar afternoon weight. I wanted to languish in my Sunday afternoon nap, cocooned in my caravan, door and curtains closed. If anyone but Peter approached, I’d stop breathing and pretend to be out. I wanted to hold onto that sleepiness, so I took a raspberry from Peter’s plate and experimented with not saying goodbye; I stepped out the back door, as if for some air, and instead of going back inside, I slipped through the pine trees into the soft afternoon and the sanctuary of my caravan.

‘I will be requiring brief but unfettered access to your husband,’ I will say to your wife. She will follow me to your bedroom door and before I close it on her, I will say, ‘Kindly bring us, in one hour, two pink gins and an ashtray. Leave them outside the door.’

She chases me, my country. She lives deep inside my breastbone, and yet, I leave her. I cross the same ocean over and over to retreat inside my comfortable cage. I rest there, far from my complicated family, far from my father’s grave, far from the village containing people who remember my grandmother walking through the fields to have tea with her beau.

She pulls me home, though, my country. She pulls me back to stand on the hill where I watched my father cut barley under the midday sun all the way through to the harvest moon. The field where I ran through stubble with his flask of tea and still-warm lemon roly poly and hoped he’d let me up into the cab with him and steer the combine while he ate.

We couldn’t speak for the noise of the cutting bar, but it was enough to stand beside him, proud to be useful, hoping he would forget I was there and I could stay all afternoon watching the muscles on the back of his arm move along the freckles.

Every year I go home and stand on that hill, watching the wind move through the barley; someone else’s barley now; someone else’s daughter running through stubble with a hopeful flask of tea.

He’s under the earth now, my father, enclosed in the land he farmed, under the grass his mother used to walk on to visit my grandfather on Sunday afternoons when sometimes there was honey for tea.

One day, I’m coming home for good to lie down in that same earth, that same slope of land, sun warmed and moon lit, to join the ones who were gathered in before me.

Until then, I’ll know it’s there. I can feel it from here, three thousand miles away; the tang of newly-cut barley, the scratch of stubble on my calves, lemon cake crumbs on my tongue, and my father’s low baritone, registering deep behind my breastbone.

Zofija took a plum from the fruit bowl on the bar and tested her thumbnail against it. How much pressure before the skin gave?

—Nope. Have to present myself back at the police station again next week.

—What a nightmare having to go and plead with that Pole-hating policeman, Brenda said.

The plum skin gave way and Zofija’s fingernails filled with orange-yellow fruit flesh.

—Brenda, she said, squeezing until she reached hard stone, you have no idea.

Brenda took the plum away and washed Zofija’s hand with a warm cloth.

Read at The Southampton Review →

Reflections on a May 2021 BookEnds alumni group author event.

Suzzy Roche is a founding member of the singing group The Roches who has recorded over fifteen albums. Her debut novel Wayward Saints (Hyperion/Voice) was a selection of the Spring 2012 B&N Discover Great New Writers Program, and her second novel The Town Crazy (Gibson House Press) was published in 2020. Since she was a teenager, Suzzy’s life as an artist, actor, singer and dancer has interwoven with her writing; the influence of music and lyrics on her writing is part of what we invited her to discuss with us, but we came away with an understanding of Suzzy’s commitment to her artistic process over time that goes far beyond the influence of one practice over another.

During the couple of weeks since the event, while I have been finishing a revision of my novel manuscript, what kept coming back to me was when Suzzy said that as she gets older, she can no longer reach the musical notes she used to. Yet, instead of fleeing from the note, which is her impulse, she makes herself stay there. “Let it fail,” she said. “Let it go where it’s going. Allow yourself to do it ungracefully. Go towards it, stay with it.” It’s that imperfection—the desperation of an attempt at the right note, listening to the singer aim for a note and not quite making it—that breaks open our hearts.

Suzzy talked about Marilyn Monroe having a sorrow about her, how everyone wanted to touch that place of pleasure and pain, the part that was falling apart, utterly human and not “figured out.”

It made me think of Leonard Cohen’s lines “there is a crack in everything/that’s how the light gets in.” It also made me think of the polio in Joni Mitchell’s left hand, which forced her to experiment with open tunings, allowing her to form the chord shapes that still break open our hearts today. Mitchell stayed with the failure, worked around the problem and strengthened a different part of her.

By contrast, I was trained in classical piano and if I hit a wrong note, I got a wooden ruler across my knuckles. It was physically frightening to fail, to hit the wrong note. My mother sang the correct note (with its name: B flat minor!!!!) from the kitchen while scraping mud off a basin of potatoes. When Suzzy told us it was not only fine not to hit the right note—and to stay on it, let it go where it wants to go—I wished she could go back down the years and have a word with my piano teacher.

I reread Lily King’s Writers and Lovers last week, about an aspiring novelist whose editor says, “Linger here. Let the reader feel this.” When she stayed with it, felt the moment, her understanding of it expanded. Things began to thrum across the book.

Suzzy said that if she is beginning to unkindly attack what she’s working on, she takes a break, moves to something else, then comes back to it. “I’m going to sing you again,” she says to her work. When she sticks with it, allowing it to become itself, it always finds its good place. “Let it be you, the gentle, imperfect you.” Sometimes it takes years to open up. She lets go of the intellect and lets in an openheartedness. It makes her vulnerable, allowing herself to be seen, however imperfectly.

As an inflection point, when the group discussed whether or not we listen to music as we write and how it affects the mood of our work, Meg told us that Kazuo Ishiguro thought he’d finished the manuscript of Remains of the Day, but then heard Tom Waits singing “Ruby’s Arms.” The crack in Waits’ voice as the song’s narrator says goodbye to Ruby made Ishiguro allow his emotionally buttoned-up butler a moment of having a crack in his emotions. Here it comes again: the crack in everything. It’s as if the breaking heart of Tom Waits’ soldier funneled itself through Ishiguro, cracked open the heart of his butler and the light got in.

So in my revision work after we met with Suzzy, I decided to do an experiment by listening to a song on repeat during breaks from editing the final draft of my manuscript. I had a scene near the end that wasn’t failing, exactly—it just wasn’t as satisfying as it could be. So, instead of avoiding it, I decided to “Suzzy” it: stay with the failing note, press on it, watch where it wanted to go, be kind to it. The scene is about a character who has helped someone dear to them die. I listened to Lucinda Williams’ “Sweet Old World” on repeat. Williams sings about everything the person choosing to leave the world will never feel again: the breath from their own lips, the touch of fingertips, a sweet and tender kiss, wearing someone’s ring, someone calling your name, somebody so warm cradled in your arms, dancing with no shoes, the pounding of your heart’s drum together with another one.

In the old draft of the scene, my character only glanced lightly on the emotion behind the act, or rather I, the writer, had only touched lightly on the emotion. I listened to the song on repeat, I felt in my own body what my character might have been feeling, then I went back into the scene and let more emotion in, more senses, more loss. I stayed with the work, treated it kindly, sang it again, let it go where it wanted to, to an imperfect place—and finally, pressed “send” into the hands of a kindly stranger.

Zadie Smith says to “resign ourselves to the lifelong sadness that comes with never being satisfied” with the imperfection of our work. Perhaps this is an oblique complement to what Suzzy said: “It’s a gentle thing, this imperfection that comes with age. Be nice to the thing you’re trying to create and be nice to you, the creator of the thing.”

My BookEnds mentor Meg Wolitzer helped me with my manuscript A Tender Hate, which I had only been working on seriously for about a year when I applied. The manuscript was full of holes, and by the time I got to the second half of the BookEnds fellowship and began my work with Meg, my podmates had helped point out where the holes were and how to fill them with missing scenes. When I first met with Meg after she’d read my manuscript, I knew what I wanted to say, but didn’t know when to reveal which information.

Meg saw the structure from the first. “Well, this novel is in three parts,” she said. “The first part can end with this sentence here, the second part can be the big flashback and the third can be back in the present where the first part left off.” It was as if she had taken me to The Container Store and picked out three perfectly-sized and -shaped boxes, and sent me home to fill each one with what I already owned. I left that January meeting filled with energy. It was a sorting exercise. I could do this.

I had been longing for a structure, an architecture, a template. Meg gave it to me, as if she had intuited what the manuscript needed.

Indeed, Caroline “Coco” Picard, whose BookEnds novel The Healing Circle is forthcoming with Red Hen Press in 2022, said this: “Meg has an uncanny ability to identify the core of a book’s concerns, and how to give those concerns their due space. Working with Meg, I not only realized my propensity to conceal that murky territory but also gained the courage to make it apparent.”

I totally agree that Meg has “uncanny ability” as a mentor to novelists. She plucked a phrase from the middle of my novel and turned it into the title, A Tender Hate—and that title, it turns out, was the essence of the novel, the “core of the book’s concerns.”

Journalist Colleen Curry, who worked with Meg on her novel Married Women through the early months of the pandemic, said these were the nuggets from Meg that would stay with her: “Cut every part that isn’t the reader’s favorite, never stray too far for too long from what the book is really about; there should be something on every single page that delights the reader.” With these simple phrases, Meg sharpened Colleen’s eye toward her own work and reminded her of the purpose of the task. Colleen went on: “Meg’s line edits are so insightful, and her generosity in helping other writers is a model for all of us.”

When Stephanie Gangi came to speak to the BookEnds alums group about freelance editing, she said that what she looked for in an editor was someone to stand shoulder to shoulder, nose to the grindstone in the editing. Over many months and through multiple drafts, this was what Meg did for me. She was shoulder to shoulder with me, nose to the grindstone, generously inhabiting my manuscript and my characters along with me. In the last couple of weeks of my BookEnds fellowship, before the manuscript was submitted for the agent read, I was in Scotland, so Meg and I were working at a 5-hour time difference which she accommodated without missing a beat. I would send the manuscript to Meg at my bedtime and when I woke up, there it would be in my inbox with a full edit.

At the last minute, Meg saw that there was an important missing scene. I had about half an hour before I was supposed to press “send” to Susie. I would normally mull over a new scene for days, writing drafts long, then reducing, sitting with it until it revealed to me what it wanted to say, but because Meg assumed I could write a whole new scene in minutes, it made me rise to her expectations. I wrote it in minutes and inserted it into its place. Shoulder to shoulder, indeed.

“It’s Meg’s perception of how fiction works in the minds of readers that left the deepest impression on me,” Colleen said. “She understands why readers come to fiction in the first place, and what makes them sink into a book. Her lifelong study and deep love of stories remind me why I write.”

What a gift, Coco and Colleen and I agreed, to have had Meg’s brain and heart laser-focused on our work.

This is the novel I keep going back to for structure. She starts the novel with the final scene then goes back to day one. By day seven, we’re back at the final scene, knowing so much more about the characters that the final scene is now a shocker.

The passage I return to: Carr’s narrator on the rare feeling of a tricky job going well — working in rhythm, confident everything will come right — and the ache of knowing we can never have again what once seemed ours forever.

For a single sentence in which Nick takes possession of a room — and talks himself out of his own disappointment with it. A whole character in one line.