Page 39 of Endless Summer: Stories
But how does the old saying go?Never meet your heroes, lest they be found to have feet of clay.
Or just otherwise suck,Vivi thinks.
Caroline Corrigan looks exactly like the picture on her book jacket. She has long silver-blond hair that she wears loose around her face like an aging folk-rock star. Despite the heat of the summer mornings, she wears jeans and white blouses that are as crisp as paper. She unbuttons the blouses to reveal the barest hint of cleavage. (Vivi can’t decide if this is alluring or slutty.) Caroline Corrigan has a raspy edge to her voice. Out of class, she isalwayssmoking. What makes her such a bitch is the way she delivers her scathing criticisms with a huge smile. She’s like some kind of evil queen, the Marie Antoinette of writing workshops. The one time she offered praise, she appeared abjectly miserable.
“She doesn’t know me from Adam,” Vivi says. Caroline’s manner is so severe and her comments so unflinchingly cruel (yet intelligent and spot-on) that Vivi hasn’t once summoned the courage to raise her hand to offer her own thoughts. “I count that as a good thing.”
It’s Darla Kay’s idea to read each other’s stories the night before they will be respectively workshopped. Vivi can’t bring herself to say no—and besides, she has little else in the way of friends. Both the vampire girl—whose name is Katelyn—and the Bon Jovi woman, Beth, are in Vivi’s workshop, but Katelyn is a sex-obsessed whiner and Beth is a Caroline Corrigan kiss-ass who says things like,I just didn’t feel any sense of narrative tension. What’s at stake? Why should I care about these people?
Reluctantly, Vivi hands Darla Kay “Meeting Cindy” and accepts a copy of Darla Kay’s story, “The Stairwell,” in return.
“The Stairwell,” by D. K. Bolt (Darla Kay says that in horror writing, androgyny is best), is, essentially, unreadable. The language is overwrought, cartoonishly Victorian. Two characters named Elgin and Piccolo are vying for control of the staircase that leads to the underworld, which Darla Kay has described in vivid, horrific detail. Vivi has to press her eyes closed against the language; if she continues, she’ll be sure to have nightmares about skinned… no, stop. She can’t believe that sad, mousy Darla Kay writes this stuff (although Darla Kay has seemed less sad recently, Vivi notes. She has two male buddies from her workshop and she’s been hanging out in their room until well past midnight). Vivi skims the story to the end, then says, “Wow, Darla Kay.”
Darla Kay is crying again—forget what Vivi said about her seeming less sad—and she clutches Vivi’s story to her chest. “This is just… beautiful. What a moving story about a girl and her father. The details are so… well curated. You didn’t fall back on cliché even once. And the ending is poignant. It’s pitch-perfect, Vivi.” She blinks. “I can’t believe I’m your roommate. You’re going to be famous.”
“And you…” Vivi says, trying to muster up matching enthusiasm for “The Stairwell,” even though it’s so creepy and awful that Vivi can’t wait to hand it back. (Is that maybe the point? Would Darla Kay take this as a compliment?) “This is remarkable.”
“Maybe we’ll both be famous someday,” Darla Kay says.
“Wouldn’t that be crazy?” Vivi says.
The feedback from Darla Kay gives Vivi the moxie she so badly needs. (It does occur to Vivi that maybe Darla Kay was flattering her, maybe she found “Meeting Cindy” as offensive to her sensibilities as Vivi found “The Stairwell” to hers and was pretending to like it only to preserve Vivi’s feelings. But Darla Kay had been crying real tears, so Vivi dismisses these doubts.)
To workshop, Vivi wears a red sundress. Red is the color of confidence.
By now, Vivi has allies in the class—John, Jay, and Ray. The three of them have a little bromance going and Vivi has somehow been included as “one of the guys.” John hails from the Chicago area, where he’s a pharmaceutical rep; Jay is a high-school principal from Lafayette, Louisiana; and Ray is divorced from his college sweetheart and lives somewhere in New Jersey, where he’s some kind of foreman. (Vivi has to keep Ray at a distance because he’s single and stares at Vivi all through workshop.)
First up in the day’s workshop is John’s story, which is about a baseball game at a juvenile detention center. It’s a bit predictable—a Christian youth group of (white) kids come to play baseball with the (predominantly Black) kids in juvie and there’s a lot of tediously technical baseball-driven plot, and at the end of the game, it’s a tie until one of the most problematic juvie kids hits a home run and becomes the hero and is celebrated for the first time in his life.
The story gets generally praised, and Vivi, frankly, can’t believe it. She’s shocked that Bon Jovi Beth hasn’t mentioned the blatant racial stereotypes. Neither has Jay, who is Black himself. But Vivi likes John, so she doesn’t mention them either. She doesn’t want to be the only naysayer, especially not when her story is up next.
Will Caroline Corrigan drop the guillotine blade on the story, as she always does? Apparently not. She offers an indifferent shrug and says, “Okay, good discussion. Let’s move on. ‘Meeting Cindy’ by Vivian Howe. Who would like to start?”
John starts by saying he “really admired the palpable sense of grief” in the story, but then vampire girl Katelyn pipes up to say she found the characterization of the breakfast waitress “classist.”
“The author is sneering at her because she’s in the service industry.”
“Agree,” Caroline says. She’s beaming. “It does real damage to the story. The elitist, pitying tone when describing Cindy has to go. But then again, this story is so flawed, it’s hard to say what the biggest problem is.”
Other people chime in, and not one positive word is uttered. The class is a pack of jackals feasting on the pinned prey that is Vivi’s story. Ray, who Vivi was so sure was in love with her, delivers the death blow.
“The author treats her characters with such contempt, they might as well be cockroaches. The girl’s father dies and she goes right up to the point with her boyfriend and loses hervirginity?”
“That part felt authentic to me, actually,” Katelyn says. “Sex and death arealwaysconnected.”
“Agree,” Caroline says. “If there’sanythingto be salvaged from this story, it’s the protagonist’s relationship with the boyfriend. It felt a bit like it was cribbed from a Springsteen song, teenagers out driving around at night and all that.” The class titters. “But there are glimmers of some actual human emotion. The ensuing relationship between the protagonist and the breakfast waitress is…blech,treacly regurgitation of a dozen mindless sitcoms.” Caroline beams at the class as though she has just learned she’s won the Pulitzer. “Beth and Ray are up tomorrow, yes? Until then, ta.”
The rest of the class slide their annotated copies of Vivi’s stories across the table like they’re dealing her a losing hand, and she stacks them in a nice, neat deck as though she plans to read through them, take suggestions, and glean ideas for a future revision—instead of throwing them all in the dumpster outside the dining hall.
She’s numb. She can see her arms, see that they end in hands, but she can’t feel them. Red is the color of the bloodbath she just endured.
John, Jay, and Ray are waiting outside the classroom for her.
“Are you coming with us to the How to Get an Agent seminar?” Jay asks. Jay offered no opinion during the workshop of her story. He had been parented well.
“No.”
“Oh, come on,” Ray says, thumping her shoulder. “You survived your first workshop. And you’ll need an agent if you want to be published someday. Just come with us.”
