Friday's Whims of the Time Traveler 23.1: May 9th, 2010
"Caramel Kisses" is an unfinished novel I began to write back in 2009 and stopped working on in 2010. The two main characters - Adriana Maguire Reynard and Emma Burking - would ultimately be revised for my later completed novella, "The Liffey Is Half-Asleep," in 2011. Several elements of "Liffey" can be found in their original forms in "Caramel Kisses," such as the characters' names, the haiku scene, and Adriana's penchant for writing.
Because of its influence on my later writing, I figured that this story, though incomplete, was worth sharing.
Caramel Kisses: Chapter Nine
by Belinda Roddie
I had an idea for a new play. It was a good one, more comedic than my last ones. It detailed a simplistic scene, but with a spiritual background. And that was all you were going to get out of me at the time I started writing it. I didn’t like giving away too much.
Fingers against the dirty keyboard, the same plate being re-used beside me for every sandwich I made. Does this line seem natural to say? Let me try saying it. How about now? Let me repeat it. How about now? Write and rewrite, rewrite what has been rewritten, and so on and so forth. Oh, how the process worked like a rickety railroad, and I was spewing coal-filled smoke from the top of my head as I charged down those steel tracks like a mad locomotive.
I looked up competitions on scholarly websites. One-acts wanted, full acts wanted, fellowship grants and visits to prestigious universities. This play was turning into a one-act; I submitted it to festival competitions, contests with one thousand dollar prizes. That would get me a few days off from the clerical work Most of the responses I got follow the same automated formula, like my entry was an expired credit card and the teller machine had spat it back out at me at full force.
To Miss Adriana Maguire Reynard:
Thank you for your submission. Unfortunately, we regret to inform you that your piece was not chosen for the competition. Thank you for your participation and we hope to hear from you next year.
(Name removed because I’m oh-so-courteous)
Damn it! Okay, Adriana, focus. Focus. Maybe you’re going about this the wrong way. Try making this a full-act. More weight to the characters. More weight to the story. Fewer haha’s, more brooding. That’s it. Bring back the angst you know so well, but balance it out with that sarcasm, with that wit. It’s not the best kind of wit, but it’s wit, and people don’t know how to tell good humor from bad humor these days, anyway.
Emma watched me write these days. She watched me write when she wasn’t at her new job in Larkspur, serving pastries to well-dressed commuters at the nicest looking hole-in-the-wall bakery in town. She had moved in with me so we could save money, and she always came to the apartment with gray fingers and flour in her hair. And I asked her, have you been baking again? No, she said, then grinned. Okay, yeah, I have, I do it better than the actual baker, she said. She shook the flour out of her hair, created white clouds for me to suck into my nostrils. I’ll bake for you tomorrow, Adriana, she promised me. I’ll show you how it’s done.
Okay, now, theaters. Look up some regional theaters. Find names of producers. Bother them. Bother them until you can feel the heat radiating from their purpling faces and let curse words sneak out from between their teeth. All right, they’ll say, we’ll take a look at your play. I made phone calls every day. They went straight to voicemail every time. Shit.
It was going to be spring soon, the time for those Shakespeare festivals, the time for Oscar Wilde and romances and satire where we could sit on the grass with picnic lunches and laugh in the outside theater and not worry about the sound echoing over arched walls. I went back to competitions, new competitions, new contests for works in progress. Ones that said they would get your play performed in New York or Connecticut or any quaint little theater that people still bothered to frequent in their spare time. Places I imagined where they still wore top hats and tailcoats and monocles, as they traipsed out of the little doorway with a plump fur-collared lady on their arm, a cane spinning between their fingers as they said, well, wasn’t that lovely, dear? Absolutely smashing. I was close to tears, I was chortling so frequently. Wouldn’t you agree?
Don’t think of the fame, I told myself. There is none. Don’t think of the reviews, they don’t foretell hits anymore. You’re a playwright, you don’t make a fixed income out of that. You’re lucky to see that shit performed, so don’t worry about the power and the glory unless you want to write Broadway musicals. And everyone knew I couldn’t sing, let alone write music.
Emma read my play each night when I added something. She laughed every time and I wondered if she was doing it just to make me feel better. But then I was up late at night, my shoulders aching as I hunched over that small, blue and white computer screen while she reads scraps of my first draft in the bedroom, and I heard her laugh and I had to leave the screen temporarily if only to see her lying on her stomach on the bed, smiling and turning the pages face-down onto the quilt as she finished reading them.
Let’s go over it together, she told me one night, when I was almost finished, three months writing. It was a record for me, the shortest time I had ever taken to write something since I had left college, pieces even as simple as a poem. Let’s alternate lines and play the roles, Emma said. It’ll be fun. I made funny voices for her at first, but she told me, No, do it seriously. Do it like I’m watching the play. Be the actor. But I’m the writer, I argued. Be the actor, she insisted. Fine, I sighed.
June rolled around. Emma turned twenty-one. We celebrated with a seafood dinner and a bottle of Merlot and family and I met her father for the first time and he was charming. He was charming and he had the handlebar mustache and that wonderful English accent that made him sound like a noble, his hair graying in the light of the large house he lived in, and I was surrounded by the man’s business friends and I felt awkward but Emma squeezed my hand and I smiled and shook off the anxiety like it was an extra coat. And I sang along with the others as Emma’s father set down the store bought ice cream cake with the mechanical icing job, and I winced at how the cake decorator who was most likely in his or her teens with an acne problem wrote “Your” instead of “You’re.” And I made a note of that as we were eating and my love laughed and her father laughed, saying, I like this woman, Emma. You make good friends.
I gave her two presents that year. One was a small tabby cat, yawning as Emma took it in her arms and cooed over it as it looked at her with sleepy green eyes. She named the cat Milo, and I first thought of Milo and Otis but she was thinking about a character in my play, a strong supporting role, a stock character, superficially dashing and ideal of a man but easy for me to write because I loved writing a healthy dose of satire every once in a while. The second present was that I finished the play. I submitted it to full-act competitions. I waited for money prizes.
Read it to me again, she said, and I did, and I read the poetic parts out loud just for her. I played the part of the prophetic bard, as he recited iambic pentameter that hid his hatred toward the royalty who drunkenly demanded his appeasing of their behavior, sour like the bad wine they drank. I got to one part and I smiled, which I rarely did when it concerned something of my own creation, but the temptation was too great and we drew out the poetic dialogue with mischievous Elven glee:
“And if I come again,” he said, “I’ll try
To love you more than I will ever know.”
“Yet I’d prefer,” she said with twinkling eye,
“To hear a bit less talk and bit more show!”
We laughed at that, and we thought, let’s show them how it’s done, so we kissed and Milo nuzzled between us as if he didn’t want to be left out in the circle of affection, and we lay there on the bed with scattered papers around us, crinkling and crackling as we moved along the mattress, and a purring feline nestled in the folds of green and gray sheets as we drifted into that evening daze.
Because of its influence on my later writing, I figured that this story, though incomplete, was worth sharing.
Caramel Kisses: Chapter Nine
by Belinda Roddie
I had an idea for a new play. It was a good one, more comedic than my last ones. It detailed a simplistic scene, but with a spiritual background. And that was all you were going to get out of me at the time I started writing it. I didn’t like giving away too much.
Fingers against the dirty keyboard, the same plate being re-used beside me for every sandwich I made. Does this line seem natural to say? Let me try saying it. How about now? Let me repeat it. How about now? Write and rewrite, rewrite what has been rewritten, and so on and so forth. Oh, how the process worked like a rickety railroad, and I was spewing coal-filled smoke from the top of my head as I charged down those steel tracks like a mad locomotive.
I looked up competitions on scholarly websites. One-acts wanted, full acts wanted, fellowship grants and visits to prestigious universities. This play was turning into a one-act; I submitted it to festival competitions, contests with one thousand dollar prizes. That would get me a few days off from the clerical work Most of the responses I got follow the same automated formula, like my entry was an expired credit card and the teller machine had spat it back out at me at full force.
To Miss Adriana Maguire Reynard:
Thank you for your submission. Unfortunately, we regret to inform you that your piece was not chosen for the competition. Thank you for your participation and we hope to hear from you next year.
(Name removed because I’m oh-so-courteous)
Damn it! Okay, Adriana, focus. Focus. Maybe you’re going about this the wrong way. Try making this a full-act. More weight to the characters. More weight to the story. Fewer haha’s, more brooding. That’s it. Bring back the angst you know so well, but balance it out with that sarcasm, with that wit. It’s not the best kind of wit, but it’s wit, and people don’t know how to tell good humor from bad humor these days, anyway.
Emma watched me write these days. She watched me write when she wasn’t at her new job in Larkspur, serving pastries to well-dressed commuters at the nicest looking hole-in-the-wall bakery in town. She had moved in with me so we could save money, and she always came to the apartment with gray fingers and flour in her hair. And I asked her, have you been baking again? No, she said, then grinned. Okay, yeah, I have, I do it better than the actual baker, she said. She shook the flour out of her hair, created white clouds for me to suck into my nostrils. I’ll bake for you tomorrow, Adriana, she promised me. I’ll show you how it’s done.
Okay, now, theaters. Look up some regional theaters. Find names of producers. Bother them. Bother them until you can feel the heat radiating from their purpling faces and let curse words sneak out from between their teeth. All right, they’ll say, we’ll take a look at your play. I made phone calls every day. They went straight to voicemail every time. Shit.
It was going to be spring soon, the time for those Shakespeare festivals, the time for Oscar Wilde and romances and satire where we could sit on the grass with picnic lunches and laugh in the outside theater and not worry about the sound echoing over arched walls. I went back to competitions, new competitions, new contests for works in progress. Ones that said they would get your play performed in New York or Connecticut or any quaint little theater that people still bothered to frequent in their spare time. Places I imagined where they still wore top hats and tailcoats and monocles, as they traipsed out of the little doorway with a plump fur-collared lady on their arm, a cane spinning between their fingers as they said, well, wasn’t that lovely, dear? Absolutely smashing. I was close to tears, I was chortling so frequently. Wouldn’t you agree?
Don’t think of the fame, I told myself. There is none. Don’t think of the reviews, they don’t foretell hits anymore. You’re a playwright, you don’t make a fixed income out of that. You’re lucky to see that shit performed, so don’t worry about the power and the glory unless you want to write Broadway musicals. And everyone knew I couldn’t sing, let alone write music.
Emma read my play each night when I added something. She laughed every time and I wondered if she was doing it just to make me feel better. But then I was up late at night, my shoulders aching as I hunched over that small, blue and white computer screen while she reads scraps of my first draft in the bedroom, and I heard her laugh and I had to leave the screen temporarily if only to see her lying on her stomach on the bed, smiling and turning the pages face-down onto the quilt as she finished reading them.
Let’s go over it together, she told me one night, when I was almost finished, three months writing. It was a record for me, the shortest time I had ever taken to write something since I had left college, pieces even as simple as a poem. Let’s alternate lines and play the roles, Emma said. It’ll be fun. I made funny voices for her at first, but she told me, No, do it seriously. Do it like I’m watching the play. Be the actor. But I’m the writer, I argued. Be the actor, she insisted. Fine, I sighed.
June rolled around. Emma turned twenty-one. We celebrated with a seafood dinner and a bottle of Merlot and family and I met her father for the first time and he was charming. He was charming and he had the handlebar mustache and that wonderful English accent that made him sound like a noble, his hair graying in the light of the large house he lived in, and I was surrounded by the man’s business friends and I felt awkward but Emma squeezed my hand and I smiled and shook off the anxiety like it was an extra coat. And I sang along with the others as Emma’s father set down the store bought ice cream cake with the mechanical icing job, and I winced at how the cake decorator who was most likely in his or her teens with an acne problem wrote “Your” instead of “You’re.” And I made a note of that as we were eating and my love laughed and her father laughed, saying, I like this woman, Emma. You make good friends.
I gave her two presents that year. One was a small tabby cat, yawning as Emma took it in her arms and cooed over it as it looked at her with sleepy green eyes. She named the cat Milo, and I first thought of Milo and Otis but she was thinking about a character in my play, a strong supporting role, a stock character, superficially dashing and ideal of a man but easy for me to write because I loved writing a healthy dose of satire every once in a while. The second present was that I finished the play. I submitted it to full-act competitions. I waited for money prizes.
Read it to me again, she said, and I did, and I read the poetic parts out loud just for her. I played the part of the prophetic bard, as he recited iambic pentameter that hid his hatred toward the royalty who drunkenly demanded his appeasing of their behavior, sour like the bad wine they drank. I got to one part and I smiled, which I rarely did when it concerned something of my own creation, but the temptation was too great and we drew out the poetic dialogue with mischievous Elven glee:
“And if I come again,” he said, “I’ll try
To love you more than I will ever know.”
“Yet I’d prefer,” she said with twinkling eye,
“To hear a bit less talk and bit more show!”
We laughed at that, and we thought, let’s show them how it’s done, so we kissed and Milo nuzzled between us as if he didn’t want to be left out in the circle of affection, and we lay there on the bed with scattered papers around us, crinkling and crackling as we moved along the mattress, and a purring feline nestled in the folds of green and gray sheets as we drifted into that evening daze.
The work you see here has not been edited nor altered since May 9th, 2010.
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