I'm thinking of re-christening Breaking out, calling it Godspeed Garden City. Please note: in creating objectionable characters I am not necessarily siding with them
... Wendy put on a light jacket and carefully closed the front door behind her. Walking along the familiar route gave birth to novelties instead of a 30 mph blur: grass between the sidewalk blocks, the imprint of a dog's paw, small shards of ceramic pipe. Her footsteps echoed.
The delicatessen owner, Aldo, hairy and insolent, leant against the cash register. Wendy had last seen him at midnight on Thursday; then too he had been unshaven. Normally he had an audience of Yankee supporters loafing around for argument and Wendy would not have been thought conversationally worthwhile. At eight-fifteen on a Saturday morning he was ready to lower his standards.
"You walked. On your feet. Nobody walks in this town."
Pretending to deliberate over platitudes made Wendy stammer but, like Aldo, she felt bound to make the effort. "Riding a hearse is no fun at all," she said with a smile that cracked her cheeks.
"Some dames can hardly slide outta their cars," he said, nodding approval. "And they're the ones who wear Bermudas."
"You should worry. They buy your cookies and cream cakes."
"But letting themselves rot like that. What man wants a beer barrel round the place?" Though close to fifty, Aldo was hard and lean; his sallow-faced wife who occasionally spelled him behind the counter had ankles like hams and measured five feet square. These facts did not prevent him from scratching his tee-shirted navel and announcing sternly, "My feeling's this: a guy marries a broad, feeds her, buys her clothes, gives her a home. Her job is clean the house, get the kids to school, and stay off the mashed potatoes. Otherwise phooey on the contract."
"Some men are a bit pear-shaped," Wendy objected.
"Broads got an obligation."
Good stuff. I did have to look up what a cream cake is, though. Perhaps it is a regional definition in the States? Is it a small pastry or an actual cake? The dialogue is fun. I like that Aldo is "hairy and insolent." And you KNOW I'm a big fan of the slang word "outta." Great word.
ReplyDeleteColette: A useful comment. I had imagined "cream cake" was an understood designation in the US but it's been many years since I shopped there. What I had in mind was a small pastry with, say, conserve in the middle and topped with fake cream from an aerosol. Junk dessert, you could say.
ReplyDeletePart of the rewrite is trying to weed out locutions only the English would say. In the penultimate sentence Wendy says "a bit" meaning something small. A more US idiomatic option would be "kinda", except it isn't as specific. Remembering too that the action in this novel takes place in the mid-sixties and spoken language has evolved since then. There's a further complication in that Wendy is college-educated and probably did a liberal arts major (I've actually forgotten whether I mentioned this in the novel). In my experience such US graduates often liked to use English English, perhaps for snobby reasons.
Just call it a pastry and everyone will know what mean. You are right about educated white Americans using proper English.
ReplyDeleteScratch the “white”. Stupid of me.
DeleteOkay, signed in so you will know it's me. Let me explain and try to take the foot out of my mouth. In the early 1960's the majority of people who went to college were white men. Most educated people would talk proper English at work, or amongst their perceived "betters." If they were from the upper classes, they would always speak proper English. Then and now, however, working class, lower middle class, communities of color, all tend to revert to their comfort zone when they are around people they believe are part of their community. I am educated, but I strongly prefer to speak in slang with a rough edge because that's who I am. So, unless she was talking to someone who was "posh" she would likely employ some slang at home, or at the corner deli.
DeleteMaybe “ a little pear shaped.” Or more than a little. Trying to go back to the 60s. Tubby, chubby, Fatso. Lard ass. Those were simpler and crueler times.
ReplyDeleteColette: As well as being college educated Wendy is what we would call "middle class" here, her spoken vocabulary would be gentler than tubby, chubby, fatso and lardass, most of which are intended as insults. Chubby I'd have thought would mainly apply to children, even babies
DeleteKind of. Sort of. Sorta. What part of the country is she from? —Colette.
ReplyDeleteColette: What part of the country....?
DeleteHere I must confess. I wrote Breaking Out over forty years ago. It was taken up by a UK agent (who treated me to lunch to discuss it) and he submitted it to several publishing companies, all of whom responded by letter. All said the writing was professional but the plot wasn't original enough to interest them. By the time I received copies of these letters I was halfway through another novel, Lying, and I put Breaking Out up in the attic where it has remained ever since, never re-read.
When I decided, a few weeks ago, to have the typed MS scanned, so that I could edit it as a text file on my computer, I flicked through the pages and realised there were whole chunks of the story I'd completely forgotten. So I made a decision.
Why not edit it without first closely re-reading it? That way I'd treat the story as if it had been written by someone else. For what reason? Well one problem about writing a novel is it takes ages and by the time you're finished you're so "involved" it becomes impossible to stand back and try and imagine how a reader, coming to the story for the first time, might "see" the story.
As a result I can't tell you where Wendy was born and grew up. I'm assuming I included such info later on but can't be sure. Presently I've reached page 42 (out of 333 pages) of the MS and I'm adding material as well as cutting other stuff out. If it's germane and I haven't said anything about Wendy's upbringing I will add it in - but such info must help propel the narrative.
I very much appreciate your interest in this project and your comments will always be valuable since you, as a US native, will react differently and in a way I - a non-native - can't.
Just in case your interest flags, I should add the story does get much hairier when we reach the special relationship which tickled my fancy and caused me to start writing this story in the first place. Also, I may be revising against the clock; with cancer one never knows how much time is left. An unknown deadline you might say.
Garden City... New Jersey not Georgia, I presume.
ReplyDeleteToday it would be "they're the ones who wear spandex." Spandex has a lot to answer for.
Perhaps the plot will seem more "original" now that plots seem more straight-jacketed by message in the current time. They're constantly telling us online that there are only nine plots or three or two.
Might have to stick "broads got an obligation" over my writing desk, though it would mean something different to me, haha!
Are you finding it illuminating to revisit your younger self and the younger world? I think it might be somehow enlightening, this clash between then-you and now-you.
Marly: Story's set in the mid-sixties, hence Bermudas. This Garden City is on Long Island; I went there for a job interview didn't get the job but had found a perfect location for Wendy's dissatisfaction.. Aldo's opinions aren't mine.
ReplyDelete