{"id":998,"date":"2016-10-03T14:45:25","date_gmt":"2016-10-03T18:45:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/?page_id=998"},"modified":"2016-10-03T14:48:04","modified_gmt":"2016-10-03T18:48:04","slug":"fiction-sharon-pywell","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/fiction-sharon-pywell\/","title":{"rendered":"Fiction: Sharon Pywell"},"content":{"rendered":"
Sharon Pywell is the author of\u00a0Everything After, What Happened to Henry,\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0The Romance Reader’s Guide to Life<\/em>\u00a0(Flatiron Books, 2017). \u00a0<\/em>Her work has appeared in several publications, including\u00a0The Antioch Review, Western Humanities Review, The Southern Review,\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0The Virginia Quarterly Review. \u00a0<\/em>A former MacDowell fellow, she teaches in the Boston metropolitan area.<\/h6>\n

 <\/p>\n

an excerpt from<\/h1>\n

The Romance Reader’s Guide to Life<\/em><\/h1>\n

 <\/p>\n

A Few Words from Lilly:<\/p>\n

Where She Is Now<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re reading this, then you aren\u2019t where I am, which is dead. I was delivered here a little prematurely courtesy of some mistakes that might, if I\u2019m going to be totally honest here, have something to do with Vixen Red lipstick and the feelings that cluster around it. I\u2019ve been told I have bad judgment but that\u2019s ridiculous. I have excellent judgment\u2014just check the profit margin from Be Your Best Cosmetics.<\/p>\n

See? Excellent judgment.<\/p>\n

I call my current location Where I Am Now. It\u2019s hard to be more specific because I myself am not real clear about my location. It\u2019s relatively new to me. If I were you, I wouldn\u2019t find that very satisfying but it\u2019s all I\u2019ve got. More on this later but you might want to know\u2014I\u2019m not alone here. The dog was here to greet me when I arrived.<\/p>\n

My sister Neave is in control of a good deal of what you\u2019ll know, and not know. The thing you should keep in mind the whole time you\u2019re listening to her is that Neave is relentlessly, sometimes dully, honest. Also, she thinks that we live in one place and one time. I now know that isn\u2019t the case. My friend the high-heeled dog explained what he could to me and we left the rest to faith. But Neave, the only relief she gets from this limited view of time and space is books, because when she\u2019s inside a book she goes wherever it says to go.<\/p>\n

Neave believes in stepping into a book the way I believed in stepping into the Ritz. Things in the Oak Bar are solid and beautiful. You can smell the leather and the gin and after a martini the men are all more lovely. Lovely, lovely men. At five o\u2019clock Henry rolls around the hors d\u2019oeuvres cart that the Ritz bought from the Oceana<\/span> after its final cruise, and he arranges a few pickled mushrooms and a smoked oyster on toast for me. Love that man.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think books did Neavie as much good as the hors d\u2019oeuvres cart did me. Books made her cynical and dreamy both at the same time, which is not in my opinion a useful combination. Look at his suit, she\u2019d say, not in a way that means the suit is a good thing and why don\u2019t you know any of his friends, but in a way that said what kind of man spends a fortune on a suit? I\u2019d say a very interesting man. Then I\u2019d note that it was possible she was out of her depth. Here it was, right after Armistice Day, I\u2019d say to her, the streets flooded with newly sprung, often handsome soldiers looking for company, and she was spending her Friday nights bent over a cash flow at work or padding around her kitchen making a pie. Reading a book. She\u2019s not ugly but she\u2019s bookish, which is not a real enchanting characteristic in the world I lived in. Nobody writes love poetry to their bookish mistress while she shlumps around making pies.<\/p>\n

I can see inside Neave\u2019s head from where I am and I know what she\u2019d say to me even now, even after I died, if she heard me giving dating advice. What do you know? she\u2019d say. You\u2019re dead.<\/p>\n

And she\u2019d be right.<\/p>\n

—–<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Neave<\/span><\/p>\n

Lynn, Massachusetts\u2014My First Job<\/p>\n

Lilly and I were Irish twins, born in 1924 and 1925 in Lynn, Massachusetts. She was a sunny, unsteerable, reckless girl and she grew up to be exactly the same kind of woman. I followed in her wake, sometimes smoothly and other times just bumping along behind her in the chop. It didn\u2019t matter\u2014wherever she was going, I was going there too. We grew up kicking each other\u2019s feet in the same bed, eating the same food, taking each other\u2019s side in every scuffle over the occasionally limited resources in the house we grew up in. Long before we launched Be Your Best Cosmetics together we were each other\u2019s first confidante, most inventive playmate, best defense against every evil. But here\u2019s maybe the most important and wonderful thing about her: Lilly didn\u2019t really think evil existed. Of all the reasons I wished I were her, that\u2019s the big one. That blindness was her doing and undoing; mine too, maybe, but not in the same order. That\u2019s why I\u2019m here telling her story and she\u2019s not.<\/p>\n

In 1936, I was eleven years old and oblivious. I didn\u2019t know that Hitler had just gotten production of the People\u2019s Car under way. I didn\u2019t know that some of the dirt I dug in the backyard to make roads for Snyder\u2019s toy cars had blown there all the way from Oklahoma in the great dust storms. I didn\u2019t know that the civil war in Spain had been launched, or that the Yellow River in China had overflowed at levels that were about to cause millions of people to starve. The whole world was going to hell, and I was making dirt roads for Snyder\u2019s metal cars. I was enjoying myself.<\/p>\n

Janey was youngest, only six years old in 1936, and Snyder was oldest and the only boy. This made him feel like the odd man out but the fact is, he was odd\u2014not the kind of brother you\u2019d wake up for company in the middle of the night if you had a nightmare. The four of us functioned as a sometimes cooperative group. I knew that if Lilly and Snyder and I pooled our resources we could get a loaf of bread for seven cents and eat the whole thing in the backyard with slices of Daddy\u2019s tomatoes. Daddy loved his garden and hated his job at General Electric doing something with boilers that we didn\u2019t understand. He\u2019d come home looking flat and dark, go to his garden, and walk back into the house a little lighter. The boiler room made Daddy unhappy but overall I\u2019d say that it was his nature to be irritated or squashed by a good deal that went on around him. It wasn\u2019t just the boiler room.<\/p>\n

We knew he wouldn\u2019t miss a few tomatoes as long as we didn\u2019t leave any big bare holes. We foraged in Daddy\u2019s garden and Mom\u2019s pantry like stray dogs. Snyder once stole a jar of our mom\u2019s jam, which he shared when we caught him and threatened to rat him out. We didn\u2019t want to spoil Janey\u2019s dinner, so we didn\u2019t tell her about it. Also, she can\u2019t keep secrets. We made a bread-and-jam picnic in the far back of our property when she was taking a stroll to the end of the block. We love Jane, but she has to be managed. She\u2019s overly transparent, overly cheerful\u2014characteristics you wouldn\u2019t think could get in the way of trust, but the fact is, they can.<\/p>\n

That year the bubble around my life extended just as far as jam and tomatoes and the seven-cent loaf of bread, and at the time I found that a very workable amount of room in which to live. I was just at the lip of knowing about other bubbles, other worlds, and my brief glimpses outside my little universe were changing me. My schoolbooks were full of tiny-waisted unopinionated mothers making dinner and brothers who were always pleased to lend you their bikes. At a certain point these stories started to feel wrong. This cheerful primer-book world was clearly what the grown-ups believed I saw or wanted me to see, and I was beginning to feel duped. Worse, I knew I wasn\u2019t supposed to feel duped. I was supposed to feel just like the children in the primers, which was scary because I didn\u2019t. There had to be something wrong, and it seemed to be wrong with me.<\/p>\n

I started nosing around for stories about stubborn siblings and disappointed fathers. I\u2019d look around my classroom hoping to find my fellow students raising eyebrows, looking worried. Nothing\u2014only bent heads, jiggling feet, and moving lips, apparently at peace with the view from the school primer serving eleven-year olds. No company here. Of course, I had Lilly, whom I loved completely, and Snyder and Janey, whom I would step in front of a bullet for, but someplace deeper down, I was alone.<\/p>\n

I did what lots of people like me do: I started haunting the local library. One day I found a book in the Children\u2019s Room about a boy who lived with his parents in an ocean of Wyoming prairie grass. They raised horses. The boy was happy because all the company he needed in the world was his horse. But in a brief scene buried around page 320 where it might go unnoticed, his mother went running into the dark Wyoming winter night after a fight with the boy\u2019s father. She ran miles and miles until she reached the railroad tracks. There she stood, waiting for the night train to shoot through the Wyoming prairie, where she lived with the things that weren\u2019t enough, with the cold husband and the boy who was obsessed with his horse. She saw people in dining cars lifting glasses of wine, beautifully dressed people in brightly lit car after car, all of it rushing by so quickly. She watched them with her whole heart. I could tell that. I couldn\u2019t entirely decode this moment in the story, but I knew it was true and real and important. I\u2019d stumbled onto a secret message from the adult world that had slipped past the gates of the Children\u2019s Room. I was scared. I was thrilled.<\/p>\n

I hated the Children\u2019s Room. Our town library was a converted two-story house riddled with wood rot and mediocre donated castoffs. Its Children\u2019s Room was cobbled out of what was once a nursery. The grown-ups who thought that children had smaller feelings and needs than adults had put the \u201cchildren\u2019s\u201d section in the building\u2019s darkest little rabbit warren. A stuffed dog who looked like he\u2019d known happier times slumped on one of the bookshelves. He was alone, no other animal friends or posters of puppies to back him up. A table with a small pile of books was wedged against a wall. Peggy\u2019s Pokey Puppy<\/span>, Snow White<\/span>, Cowboys of the Wild West<\/span>, Mommy and Me Make Cookies<\/span>, Lizzy and the Lost Baby<\/em>, Adventures in Our Back Yards. <\/em><\/p>\n

A wasteland.<\/p>\n

The librarian thought it was morally important that once children stepped into the library they should be shuffled into this room and made to stay put. She kept her eyes on me, smiling in a cheerful, threatening kind of way and making sure I stayed where I belonged in my little desert of happy endings and cheerful relations with talkative animals. I made three separate attempts on the living room, home to Adult Fiction, and I was turned back every single time.<\/p>\n

Mrs. Daniels changed all that. It was Snyder who brought her to me, or me to her, which is more accurate even if it didn\u2019t feel like that. Sometimes after school Snyder delivered groceries and five-dollar bags of coal for Mr. McGarry\u2019s grocery. The only customers who bought five-dollar bags were rich people who didn\u2019t care what it cost and poor people who couldn\u2019t scrape together enough cash to get half-ton deliveries. Mrs. Daniels was one of the rich ones. She was so old that the skin on her arms was sliding off her bones and her eyes weren\u2019t cooperating with her anymore. She needed somebody whose eyes still did their duty, because Mrs. Daniels was a reader. That\u2019s how she came to offer Snyder five cents an hour to read to her after school.<\/p>\n

Snyder was only vaguely interested in working and not at all interested in sitting for hours with a bony old lady. \u201cI\u2019ve been in her house,\u201d he told us. \u201cShe reads trash like The Sheik<\/span> and Office Girl<\/span>. She gets Love Pulps with people kissing on the covers.\u201d The idea of getting to read wha<\/span>t<\/span>ever was in<\/span> a Love Pulp was made something in me come totally alive, never mind the unbelievable sum of five cents an hour.<\/p>\n

\u201cTell her about me,\u201d I said. \u201cTell her I can do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

He did.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re no bigger than a potato,\u201d Mrs. Daniels said when I got there. Snyder had walked me over and bolted the moment my feet hit the porch. \u201cWhat was your brother thinking of to send you to me?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was thinking I would do just fine,\u201d I said. \u201cI\u2019m little for my age but I\u2019m eleven,\u201d I added. She gave me a long up-and-down look and handed me a story by Ernest Hemingway in Cosmopolit<\/span>a<\/span>n <\/span>magazine. \u201cSentences are short in this one,\u201d she said. \u201cTry it out for size.\u201d<\/p>\n

I tried.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat do you think of Mr. Hemingway?\u201d she asked when I was done. The reading had gone briskly sometimes; lumpily sometimes.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think this man who goes fishing in the start of the story is in trouble. I don\u2019t think he\u2019s gonna get out of it either.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cCynical little creature,\u201d she observed. \u201cYou mispronounce something in every line.\u201d<\/p>\n

I glared.<\/p>\n

\u201cVery well,\u201d she said. \u201cPerhaps you only mispronounced one or two things.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ll read for free until it\u2019s better if you want. It\u2019ll get better fast with practice, Mrs. Daniels.\u201d<\/p>\n

She looked me up and down again. \u201cWhat if I pay you nothing for weeks?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf I\u2019m not reading good, that\u2019s fair.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWell.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWell what?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018If I am not reading well<\/span>.\u2019\u201d She sighed.<\/p>\n

Mrs. Daniels called out to her cook, Violette, and told her to bring cookies. She offered me one. I reached eagerly and then I thought of Snyder, Jane, and Lilly, all cookieless.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s wrong, girl?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAt home if there\u2019s not enough for everybody I shouldn\u2019t take anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no one here to share with but me,\u201d she replied. She reached forward and lifted the largest cookie from the plate and took a bite. \u201cAnd I eat what I please.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou took the biggest one,\u201d I observed.<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course I did. I like cookies.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s rude,\u201d I told her. \u201cThe first person to pick should pick the smallest one.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWho says?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMy mother.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIndeed? Well, I stand corrected. But since I\u2019ve taken a bite out of it I don\u2019t have to put the damn thing back, do I?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSwearing\u2019s rude too.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI imagine it is. What did you say your name was?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNeave.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, Neave, I thank you for your reading efforts today. I will pay you your five cents and give you a bag with enough cookies in it so you will be able to share with your siblings. How many are there?\u201d<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t answer because I didn\u2019t know what a sibling was, which was embarrassing.<\/p>\n

\u201cYour family\u2019s vaguely Irish, isn\u2019t it? How many are there? Twelve?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHow many what?\u201d I managed.<\/p>\n

\u201cBrothers and sisters,\u201d she said, and her voice was friendlier.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s me and Lilly, Jane, and Snyder.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can manage that many cookies.\u201d<\/p>\n

She gave me a nickel and told me to go to the kitchen and ask Violette for a paper bag of cookies. I stood motionless.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is it now?\u201d she asked. Her eyes had drooped closed but she talked to me as if she could see me still standing there shuffling from foot to foot. I studied a hair on her chin. Her fingers drifted to it as if she could feel my eyes on it, and, her own eyes still closed, she plucked it out while I stared.<\/p>\n

\u201cAm I coming back?\u201d I managed.<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you want to come back?\u201d<\/p>\n

I nodded. The skin on her neck crinkled like a turtle\u2019s and one of her eyelids wasn\u2019t doing the same thing as the other one, which I did not like but I wanted to read The Sheik<\/span> so badly that I stood my ground. When I want things, I want them badly, and Mrs. Daniels wasn\u2019t the first scary thing I\u2019d stared down. \u201cVery well. Come tomorrow if it\u2019s all right with your mother.\u201d<\/p>\n

We lived only four houses away, and I ran the distance as if a wild animal armed with machine guns were at my heels. I banged into the house calling for Lilly, and when she came to see what the matter was I made her sit down right there and read something hard with me, something as hard as The Sheik<\/span>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat are you doing for Mrs. Daniels?\u201d Mom asked me that night at dinner. \u201cYou went over there today?\u201d<\/p>\n

Something dinged in me, warning me off the subject of books, which could lead to a discussion of my gaining access to White Collar Girl.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cCarrying things. Sweeping.\u201d<\/p>\n

Snyder looked up from his meat loaf but kept his mouth shut.<\/p>\n

\u201cSweeping and carrying what? I thought Mrs. Daniels had a cook in the house who could help her.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, Violette\u2019s a Protestant. And Mrs. Daniels likes someone who knows the rosary to say it with her.\u201d<\/p>\n

That whipped my mother\u2019s head around. \u201cMrs. Daniels is a Catholic?\u201d<\/p>\n

I nodded. \u201cIt\u2019s just not easy for her to get to church, so you don\u2019t see her there.\u201d I could feel my mother\u2019s assessing toe-to-hairline sweep of me. I smiled mildly and looked right back at her. I knew what she was thinking. Rosaries? None of her children took church very seriously, but I was the only openly resistant member of the family. I\u2019d been a cranky First Communion candidate, complaining about the classes and the memorizing and the idea that now I was old enough to get in real spiritual trouble. I\u2019d resisted the white gloves I was supposed to wear to Mass now that I was old enough and the doily that got pinned on my head every week. I was a pew kicker and a malcontent. My mother had used those particular words to describe me and they\u2019d stuck in my mind.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re over there for longer than it takes to say a rosary, Missy.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019d overreached. \u201cWell, sure. You know I think she really just likes company. She\u2019s very lonely.\u201d This didn\u2019t seem like too much of a lie\u2014simply a different way of looking at things.<\/p>\n

My mother considered a little longer. \u201cIt\u2019s a worthwhile thing to do if the poor woman\u2019s lonely. You be nice to her. But take no money from Mrs. Daniels unless you\u2019re making yourself useful doing something that needs doing in this world as well as the next. Nobody on Earth should pay another person to say a rosary with her. Do you understand?\u201d<\/p>\n

I did understand and I indicated this with a puppety nod. Maybe our mother wouldn\u2019t have stopped me from going to Mrs. Daniels\u2019s house if she knew I was heading hip-deep into the land of Adult Fiction, but I wasn\u2019t taking that chance. Such a small little lie and besides, I could find something to dust the next time I was in her house and so it wouldn\u2019t even be a lie at all.<\/p>\n

I was a bad Catholic but I still had some uneasiness about all this lying. I took it, like I took most of my uneasy feelings, to Lilly.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, don\u2019t be a ninny. Who cares if Mrs. Daniels likes hearing rosaries or not? Mom\u2019s never going to walk over there and ask her.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cShe\u2019s not?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNope. She thinks Mrs. Daniels is a little scary. I heard her say it to Mrs. Seifritz.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cReally?\u201d<\/p>\n

Then Lilly said exactly what I needed her to say. \u201cYou didn\u2019t do anything wrong. If she gives you more cookies, ask for extras.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first afternoon I worked for Mrs. Daniels, we ended with Mrs. Roosevelt\u2019s \u201cMy Day\u201d column, and then she said that was enough reading for today. \u201cI need to stretch. I\u2019m going to tell Violette to bring us a little something,\u201d she said. She stood up and started toward the kitchen. I stood up too and drifted to the part of her bookshelves that held the titles like Paris Spring<\/span>.<\/span> Mrs. Daniels stopped in her tracks. \u201cMove along, child. Leave that section of the library alone.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWill we ever read one of these, Mrs. Daniels?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the romances? No.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy not?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou are young, and impressionable.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDoes something happen to you if you read them?\u201d A rhetorical question\u2014I assumed that something happened to the people who read them, or Mrs. Daniels wouldn\u2019t be shooing me away from them.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first thing that might happen to you is that people mock you for reading them. They think that women who read romances are idiots. I assure you, they are not.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo. They are people who trust that love exists and that it is more powerful than bad logic or bad writing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy would anybody be against love?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOn the surface, a reasonable question.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not against love,\u201d I offered.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo you are a devotee of love?\u201d Mrs. Daniels said drily. \u201cOne wouldn\u2019t assume that to look at you. But the world is full of hope, isn\u2019t it? It appears in the most unlikely of places.\u201d<\/p>\n

The next time we met she set me to The Odyssey<\/span>, not going in any order but picking out parts she particularly liked. On my first day with Mr. Homer I found the Sirens busy trying to draw Odysseus and his men onto the wreckage-strewn rocks around their island, luring the sailors to destruction with their beautiful voices. Of course, Odysseus survives to fight another day, out-tricking the singers by plugging his crew\u2019s ears with wax so they couldn\u2019t hear him howling to be taken closer, closer, to the Sirens in their ring of broken boats.<\/p>\n

I knew I was supposed to hate those damn Sirens, but I didn\u2019t. I figured that a person takes his chances with Sirens because he wants to\u2014maybe has to. He crosses his fingers and ties himself to a mast and says, Keep going, everybody\u2014I\u2019m not missing this\u2014and that made sense to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sharon Pywell is the author of\u00a0Everything After, What Happened to Henry,\u00a0and\u00a0The Romance Reader’s Guide to Life\u00a0(Flatiron Books, 2017). \u00a0Her work has appeared in several publications, including\u00a0The Antioch Review, Western Humanities Review, The Southern Review,\u00a0and\u00a0The Virginia Quarterly Review. \u00a0A former MacDowell fellow, she teaches in the Boston metropolitan area.   an excerpt from The Romance Reader’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8422,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":25,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/998"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8422"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=998"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/998\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1003,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/998\/revisions\/1003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/236magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}