Page 37 of Endless Summer: Stories
The Workshop
(Read withGolden Girl)
It’s the summer of 1992. Vivian Howe and J. P. Quinboro are to be married in the fall—but already, Vivi has done something behind JP’s back.
Their wedding is scheduled for Saturday, October 17. The ceremony will be held at St. Mary’s, with a reception following at the Field and Oar Club. Because Vivi’s mother, Nancy Howe, died of a massive coronary only two weeks after JP proposed, Vivi finds herself working with JP’s mother, Lucinda, on the wedding.Working withis a generous way to phrase it. What’s actually happening is that Lucinda is making decisions and Vivi is doing a lot of nodding.
That’s fine; Vivi is emotionally exhausted from dealing with the business of her mother’s death. She organized her mother’s funeral and burial at St. John Bosco back in Parma, Ohio, sold her childhood home, and donated all the contents to the church. (There wasn’t a single item in the house that Vivi wanted to keep.) After all the debts were paid, Vivi was left with… three thousand dollars. (Nancy Howe had taken out a second mortgage and accrued a wild amount of credit card debt.)
Three thousand dollars. It’s Vivi’s inheritance, and though it’s meager, she puts it to good use. She spends twelve hundred dollars on her wedding dress, veil, and shoes (Vivi and her best friend, Savannah, go to Priscilla of Boston).
Then Vivi takes seven hundred and fifty dollars and enrolls in a ten-day session at Bread Loaf, the legendary writers’ retreat at Middlebury College in Vermont. Vivi submitted a writing sample and has been accepted into a workshop led by her literary heroine Caroline Corrigan.
What is outlandish, and even scandalous, about this is Vivi hasn’t told JP, her own fiancé, that she’s going to Bread Loaf—because she fears he might discourage her.
But she can’t wait any longer.
“What would you say if I told you I wanted to go to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference for ten days next month?” Vivi says. She has to speak loudly and clearly in order to be heard above the wind. She and JP have taken Lucinda’s sloop,Arabesque,out for a day sail.
“I’d say I can’t live without you for ten days,” JP says.
Vivi stretches out on the long bench of the cockpit, crosses her tanned legs, and folds her arms behind her head in an attempt to look like someone asking a hypothetical question. The day is sublime, sunny and warm, with enough wind that they skate across the surface of the water. It’s just the two of them. Vivi has packed a picnic, and they have nowhere they have to be and no one they have to see. Today is as close to heaven as Vivi has ever been, she decides. Does she really want to leave Nantucket for ten days in August?
Yes.
“I feel like everyone who looks at me these days sees me only as your fiancée.” Vivi sits up. “I want to forge my own identity.”
JP lets out a little sail. There’s a deep rumble of canvas and the plash of the waves against the hull of the boat. He’s intentionally not answering; he’s focusing on his man-work. This is what he does.
“Caroline Corrigan is teaching one of the workshops,” Vivi says. “With a little luck, I could study with her. You know she’s my favorite.”
“What would you do about your job? They’re never going to let you leave for ten days in August, Viv. It’s a nice idea, and I know how much you love Caroline Corrigan, but it’s just not practical.”
“You’re right, I’d have to see what they say at work.” Vivi is the assistant manager at Fair Isle Dry Cleaning. The owner, Mr. Santamaria, is a man of letters. He loves Melville, Vonnegut, John Irving. He was the one who handed Vivi the brochure for Bread Loaf in the first place! He encouraged her to apply! “If I can persuade them to give me the time off, then I think I’ll probably go.”
“Vivi…” JP says.
Vivi jumps to her feet, throws her arms around JP’s midsection and rests her cheek against his sun-warmed back as he stands at the wheel. “Thank you, Jackie,” she says. “Here’s what will happen: I’ll go to Bread Loaf and find my voice, then someday I’ll write a bunch of books and they’ll become bestsellers and I’ll be able to keep you in the lifestyle to which you’re accustomed. And I’ll keep on paying you even after you leave me for a younger woman because you’re so threatened by my success.”
JP laughs. “You have a good imagination, anyway,” he says.
There are different ways to enjoy summer, Vivi thinks, as the share van from the Burlington airport pulls onto the Middlebury campus. The college is tucked in among the Green Mountains, and the section of campus claimed by Bread Loaf is rustic and bucolic. There are rolling green lawns backed by woods, dotted here and there by cabins with screen doors and Adirondack chairs thoughtfully placed for a productive afternoon of writing in the golden sunshine.
Vivi is about to spend ten days living in a Robert Frost poem!
She has been assigned a room in one of the “summer dormitories,” buildings that feel more like camp than college. There are double rooms with a communal bath at the end of the hall. The air smells like mildew and moss and damp. Vivi doesn’t mind it one bit.
Vivi has been quietly taking note of her fellow attendees, trying to determine who’s a poet, who’s a memoirist, and who’s a fiction writer like herself. In her share van was a contingent from New York City. The men wore fedoras or porkpie hats, the women granny glasses and fringed shawls, as though they allwantedto look eighty years old. They’d chatted among themselves without acknowledging Vivi, and Vivi shoved away the adolescent feeling of being excluded from the cool group by writing a short story in her mind called “The Share Van.” She was relieved that their conversation focused mostly on Sharon Olds and Jorie Graham because this telegraphed that they were poets, a different species from Vivi.
Vivi had seen a woman about her age crossing the emerald-green lawn wearing white face makeup and a long black coat whose tails flew out behind her the way that Charles Dickens’s might have. And then Vivi noticed a woman in dramatically ripped jeans and a Bon Jovi concert T-shirt, one with the band members’ faces silkscreened on the front and the tour dates listed on the back. These women looked—if not exactlypromising,then at least intriguing. Vivi has a notion that the second most important aspect of Bread Loaf (the first being dedicated time to write in a creative atmosphere) is who she meets. She dreams of being part of a group of friends who are all so talented, they become a literary brat pack. But even one or two friends will suit her, preferably people who seem like they have bright futures, so that someday Vivi will have an esteemed author chum to blurb her novels and meet her for cocktails at the Miami Book Fair:I’ve known Gillian since 1992. We were at Bread Loaf together!
Vivi is hopeful about her roommate, a woman listed on her housing form as Darla Kay Bolt.
When Vivi walks into room 12 of Beacon House, she finds the woman she presumes is Darla Kay Bolt taping pictures to the cinder-block wall above her bed. The pictures are of a baby, and when Vivi says, “Hey, Darla Kay, how are you, I’m Vivian Howe, you can call me Vivi,” Darla Kay turns around and Vivi can see Darla has just been crying.
“Oh, is that your baby?” Vivi asks, like a moron.
“Yes,” Darla Kay says. “His name is Pinto.”
