Retreat, Day 20

One of playwright Anton Chekhov’s most quoted maxims is this: If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act. If you establish an expectation in the reader, particularly a strong expectation, you must fulfill it.

The truth is that every story has things in it that must be fired, a multiplicity of tiny guns whose discharges help create the ending, guns that have been primed and loaded over the course of the story.

These are sometimes subplots: the heroine’s best friend is also looking for a love interest and at the end their expectation is either fulfilled or thwarted but it is never neglected, because the reader will exit the story wondering about that, and all the impact of the story will be thwarted.

But not always. They may be an object that is reprised throughout the work: the lily that signals Death’s approach, the clerk who sold a traveler their tickets.

Let’s look at some of this at work in a story that will be familiar to many, James Tiptree’s The Women Men Don’t See. If you are not familiar with the story, I advise reading it beforehand.

This is the ending. My comments appear in parentheses.

By noon we’re back in Cozumel. Captain Estéban accepts his fees and departs laconically for his insurance wars. (Tiptree accounts for this major character and moves him offstage.) I leave the parson’s bags with the Caribe agent who couldn’t care less.(Another character, who appeared toward the beginning, is checked off the list.) The cable foes to a Mrs. Priscilla Hayes Smith, also of Bethesda. I take myself to a medico (the narrator has been injured in the course of the story, an injury severe enough that it shapes the action and therefore must appear in the final moments) and by three P.M. I’m sitting on the Cabanas terrace with a fat leg and a double margarita, trying to believe the whole thing. (Notice that this creates space in which the reader, like the narrator, can think back over the story and draw conclusions.)

The cable said, Althea and I taking extraordinary opportunity for travel. Gone several years. Please take charge our affairs. Love, Ruth.

She’d written it that afternoon, you understand. (The reader has seen this moment, but not what she wrote. Now it’s delivered.)

I another another double, wishing to hell I’d gotten a good look at that gizmo. Did it have a label, Made by Betelgeusians? No matter how weird it was, how could a person be crazy enough to imagine–?

Not only that but to hope, to plan? If I could only go away… That’s what she was doing, all day. Waiting, hoping, figuring how to get Althea. To go sight unseen to an alien world…

With the third margarita I try a joke about alienated women, but my heart’s not in it. And I’m certain there won’t be any bother, any trouble at all. Two human women, one of them possibly pregnant (here a storyline with Captain Estéban is being resolved), have departed for, I guess, the stars; and the fabric of society will never show a ripple. I brood: do all Mrs. Parsons’s friends hold themselves in readiness for any eventuality, including leaving Earth? And will Mrs. Parsons somehow one day contrive to send for Mrs. Priscilla Hays Smith, that grand person?

I can only send for another cold one, musing on Althea. What suns will Estéban’s sloe-eyed offspring, if any, look upon? “Get in, Althea, we’re taking off for Orion.” “A-okay, Mother.” Is that some system of upbringing? We survive by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine…I’m used to aliens. (Here a conversation is being reprised, and its payload, set up earlier, is now being delivered.) She’d meant every word. Insane. How could a woman choose to live among unknown monsters, to say good-bye to her home, her world?

As the margaritas take hold, the whole mad scenario melts down to the image of those two small shapes sitting side by side in the receding alien glare.

Two of our opossums are missing.

The conversation has been loaded here, midway through the story:

“That’s fantasy.” Her voice is still quiet. “Women don’t work that way. We’re a –a toothless world.” She looks around as if she wanted to stop talking. “What women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine.”

“Sounds like a guerrilla operation.” I’m not really joking, here in the ‘gator den. In fact, I’m wondering if I spent too much thought on mahogany logs.

“Guerrillas have something to hope for.” Suddenly she switches on a jolly smile. “Think of us as oppssums, Don. Did you know there are opossums living all over. Even in New York City.”

How do we emulate that sort of thing as writers? I suspect this is something that most of us will be adding in the rewriting and revision stage, going back through the story to see what pistols our unconscious mind has scattered about throughout the narrative. Recently, for example, in the course of writing a space opera novel, a particular element emerged that shapes things — while I took account of it in writing everything after that moment of realization, I’ll need to go back and tweak the earlier parts to make sure I’ve loaded that object as fully as I can before it delivers its payload in the final scene.

Check what you’ve loaded the story with and make sure it’s all primed and ready to go off.

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I spent the last couple of days wrestling with the plot more than actual writing, but I have gotten some done. Will start posting totals again tomorrow.

My kombucha SCOBY, packed meticulously for the trip in Tupperware and three layers of ziplock bags and packing tape, has recovered fully from its journey and produced two batches of kombucha for second ferments each time. I have mainly blackberry, because there’s a gazillion blackberries out back, but I am going to try some lavender and mint as well. I’ve found the store down at Santa Cruz full of kombucha varieties, go figure. My favorite so far is a lovely lavender melon that I am going to try to replicate.

I’ve also got a loaf of sourdough bread about to come out of the oven, and will proof some starter tonight for sourdough pancakes in the morning. I’ve never done any sourdough stuff other than Herman, so I’ll be curious, particularly since I tried using sourdough with this no-knead bread recipe. Exciting times here on writing retreat.

From “Poppy” (working title)

Poppy’s arms were strong and brawny, and as big around as a young birch tree, and capable of swinging the rosewood truncheon she kept behind the Amethyst’s bar with a solid thunk that would stop a belligerent drunk in his tracks, usually at the first blow, always by the second.

She’d inherited the wayside inn ““ “twice as far as the back of beyond” one traveler had called it ““ when her own parents were slain in the Shadow Wars and she’d taken over from old Dad, her mother’s father at the tender age of seventeen. By a quarter of a century later, old Dad was old indeed, and Poppy knew everything there was to know about the art of running an inn located somewhat remotely, it was true, but at least located on the lesser of the two main routes between the capital and Pickering-on-the-Beach.

Her hair was colored henna and brass, and she was a big woman, with a bigger laugh, one you could hear echoing down the road at night when you were tired of walking and heard her laughter, letting you know the inn was within shouting distance. A dozen bards had tried to teach her one musical instrument or another and she had taken to none but the pat-a-pat drums, and even then did not like to perform before others. While she’d taken lovers enough, she’d never cared to kindle with child, and then one thing happened and another, and before too long, she realized she was no longer capable of having a child in the usual way.

The way she learned it was this: she was on her way to the wellhouse in order fetch a pound of butter when a bear came shuffling out of the woods, rubbing its fur against the pines as it went, as shedding summer wool as it went, with the thicker, darker winter fur coming in underneath.

She paused and looked at it, unafraid but wary, and the bear looked back. Then it reared to its hind legs, pointed a paw at her, and growled out, the words barely understandable through bearish lips, “Woe to you, fruitless woman. With your womb dies the last of your grandfather’s line, and I have come to claim my curse.”

Poppy blinked.

“What?” she said, and dropped the butter.