Editor’s Note. “Dining in Rome,” by Sarah Barnett, is reprinted from the current edition of The Delmarva Review and earned a Pushcart Prize nomination for 2015. The Delmarva Review is pleased to present this and other literary writing to readers in partnership with The Spy. The author, Sarah Barnett, retired to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, from a career in public affairs. She writes essays and short fiction, serves as vice president of the Rehoboth Beach Writers’ Guild, teaches classes in short story writing and leads a weekly “Free Write” for writers, aspiring writers and anyone with a story to tell. Her work has appeared in Delaware Beach Life, Delmarva Review and other publications. Wilson Wyatt, The Delmarva Review
April Gray opened her new spiral notebook to its clean first page and clicked her ball point. Marlee Winters looked too young to be a teacher and a published poet, she wrote. Her asymmetrically cut hair and bright blue eye shadow gave her the look of a Picasso portrait. She felt like a writer already.
Up front Marlee addressed the group: “This class is unlike other writing workshops. When you write quickly without thinking, you can often surprise yourself by uncovering lost memories or gaining new insights. You may find yourself thinking, ‘I didn’t know I knew that.’”
Finding your Voice as a Writer was held in a classroom belonging to a high school English teacher by day. Paperback covers and quotes from novels—The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye—papered a bulletin board at one side of the room. The dozen participants had rearranged the desks in a circle for better “writing karma.”
While Marlee talked, April shifted into soul-mate searching mode, scanning the room for men in the right age range (her own 34 years plus or minus five). They had to meet other intangible requirements, which could be filed under the heading “spark,” a quality she’d recognize when she spotted it. The guy across from her in jeans and white dress shirt, for instance—Ben. When their eyes met briefly, she thought a writer might describe them as “thoughtful” but that “soulful” would not be overdoing it.
When April and her philandering husband divorced two years ago, she had made the mistake of thinking she could replace Rick as easily as you bought a new battery for your car. After ten years of marriage, the newer rituals of dating were as mysterious to her as the principles of quantum physics.Rather than flounder in a strange world, April resolved to write a novel about a romantic relationship instead. She knew this was tantamount to pretending you were dining in Rome when actually you were eating an Italiano Burger at Olive Garden. Still, April believed that by creating a successful relationship, even a fictional one, she’d learn something useful.
Each night before falling asleep, she visualized page 117 of the manuscript of It Might As Well Be You, hoping the morning would bring a breakthrough. Her characters, Wendy and Sam, were supposed to recognize their love in typical romantic comedy fashion, but somehow anger crept into each scene, tension escalating until explosion was inevitable. A door would slam, a dish would be hurled.
“Free writing,” Marlee was saying, “puts you in touch with the artistic right side of your brains. Have you done this before?” April was mystified, but half the class was nodding and smiling.
“Let’s get started. Keep writing. Don’t stop to think or go back to edit. Let yourself go on a journey.” Marlee drew an old-fashioned egg timer from a roomy red satchel, and read the prompt from her notebook: It was a fine morning until…
If someone had described free writing to her before class, April would have asked for a refund. She felt as clueless as an English student asked to compare Holden Caulfield with Hamlet. She thought of her characters unable to move on the playing field she’d created. The words that flowed from her pen surprised her. Soon she’d fashioned a scene in which Sam and Wendy assemble a bookcase. Sam wants to count the pieces and read the directions, but Wendy rips open the bags of screws and bolts and starts building. As she read her piece aloud, a satisfying amount of laughter told April that she might find her writer’s voice after all.
Two hours passed quickly as they wrote and took turns reading. They worked their way through He opened the wedding gifts by himself, and In my opinion, the best color in the Crayola box is….
We are lonely visitors to a small planet prompted April to write: We bump into each other and stick together for a while. Breaking apart is simple physics, the natural result of the original jolt. Did she mean that?
Ben, she noted, described places that made him feel lonely—empty beaches, crowded bars. A twinge of recognition at the phrase, “strolling the boardwalk empty-handed,” caused her to look at him more carefully.
The following week April again sat opposite Ben. His rimless eyeglasses made him look as if he’d be at home in a laboratory, although the khakis and black polo spoke of lounging in a recliner with a good book.
When she heard the first prompt—No one is who they appear to be—April thought of her blunder at a singles dance. I always tried too hard, smiling too brightly, laughing too easily, she wrote. I covered my nervousness by pretending I knew my way around. Then I blew my cover by introducing Paul, a man I’d just met, to Bonnie, his ex live-girlfriend. April was pleased by the laughter but more pleased at the subtle message she’d sent Ben—she was available.
As the next person read, April glanced at Ben. Was it her imagination or was he staring at her? Yes. He was studying her with dreamy fascination, the kind of look that made her face flush. She pretended to rummage in her purse for her water bottle, took a drink, then kept her head down while everyone read their pieces.
April found herself enjoying Ben’s low key humor, nodding in appreciation when he compared his early attempts at poetry to “painting a circus using only the color blue.” As he read, he’d glance up at her as if to check her reaction. Was he reading to her?
Ben’s writing hinted at a woman in his life: Serena, a taller-than-he-was blonde with a quick temper, and a gift for sarcastic put-downs. April couldn’t know if this were fact or fiction but allowed herself to muse, I would be so much better for him.
With Marlee’s encouragement, she began to use the class prompts to learn more about the characters in her novel. Dinner ended with ice cream and a loud argument inspired her to dramatize the spat Wendy and Sam have in a Chinese Restaurant.
On her way out of class Ben fell in alongside her. “Will Wendy and Sam will make it to Valentine’s Day?” He’d remembered April’s rendering of Wendy’s feverish search for a card that was amorous but “not too mushy.”
“Tune in tomorrow,” April said. “I can’t make Wendy behave. Sam wants to be the hero in her fairy tale and she’s…” Was she babbling?
“Nice line,” he said. When they reached her car he held her notebook while she dug keys out of her pocket.
Driving home, she couldn’t remember if she’d even said “good-bye” or “see you next week.” The unexpected compliment flustered her. I do fine at free writing, but I flunk talking, she thought.
By the third or fourth class April felt she’d stumbled into a version of You’ve Got Mail. She and Ben were writing to each other, for each other. She was sure of it and not sure of it at the same time. And she’d caught him staring at her again. She’d met his eyes for a half-second, then lost courage and looked away.
Then came: It was that strange hour belonging to no one. When it was Ben’s turn, he read a wistful description of a lovely sunset, wishing he had someone to share it with. Was that a message? What about Serena?
Two prompts later, she’d written back, or rather, Wendy left a note on the kitchen table for Sam. Let’s go to the park on Sunday. I’ll make those cookies you like. Bring sandwiches, no white bread.
By week five, April had learned that Ben taught high school biology, but that his goal was to write a mystery series. He and Serena, a patent attorney, had been in an on-and-off relationship since college.
April had let Ben know that she was divorced with no kids and that she edited a trade association newsletter, but there was so much more she wanted to say. Let’s go for a walk; spend a rainy afternoon watching old movies; I’ll cook you dinner. Was she imagining things or were they growing closer through their writing?
What would Wendy do? April had given Wendy her own olive green eyes and unmanageable reddish brown hair. Now she could use some of her character’s feistiness. She could write the lines: Why are you looking at me like that? Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking? She just couldn’t deliver them.
April looked up from the pages of It Might As Well Be You. Why had she never seen the messages between the lines? Wendy always testing Sam, challenging him to demonstrate his devotion despite her peevishness. “This isn’t a novel. It’s my life,” she said aloud. “And Ben? He’s just another fiction that exists only in my head.”
The flash of recognition was so unexpected that she almost shouted “Aha,” like a detective in the next to the last chapter of the murder mystery. Of course she wanted Ben. Wanted him with the soulful desperation of a character in a chic-lit novel. She wanted him precisely because she could not have him. He was as unavailable to her as the fine jewelry in the locked cases at Macy’s. It was safe to yearn for him, to daydream about him. It was never going to happen. She was never going to worry about what to cook for their first romantic dinner, the right moment for them to have sex. She was never going to have to wonder if she was losing him.
With this recognition came another insight—Wendy and Sam. What did each of them want that they were afraid to admit to themselves? To each other?
The messy pages of her manuscript now seemed like a shopping list for a party that would never happen. Leaving her characters struggling with whether they were ready to vacation together, April secured the pages with a rubber band and placed the bundle in the bottom drawer of her desk with odds and ends that had no other home.
Forget romance. She was going to be a writer.
Not a bad plan, April would think five years later. Flunking romance had allowed her writing career to blossom. Wendy and sam—for better and worse, a series of stories depicting the ups and downs of a modern relationship, had a large following on Love and Other Mysteries, an online women’s magazine. She had a blog, 10,000 fans liked her Facebook page, and an agent was pitching a story collection to publishers.
April and Marlee conducted Free Writing workshops in bookstores, schools and senior centers around the city. They’d written articles for aspiring authors on using free writing to generate story ideas and to jump-start stalled projects. Marlee had published her first novel, much of which she’d written during her workshops and followed up with “How to write your book one Free Write at a time,” a newsletter article that morphed into a popular blog.
April’s friends still tried to fix her up with men, but she’d stuck to writing about relationships. Occasionally, her thoughts turned to Ben and that first writing class. How had she been so naïve as to concoct a romance out of a glance and a few scraps of writing?
“Remember that first class I took with you?” she asked Marlee over lunch one day. Marlee nodded as she chewed a mouthful of burger.
“You’re going to think this is crazy-weird, but I had a crush on Ben, the schoolteacher who wanted to write mysteries. I thought he was writing to me. I mean, I thought he was sending me messages.”
Marlee’s eyes opened wider, an expression that managed to signal both tell me more and you’re kidding right?
April rummaged through her salad, spearing a shrimp with her fork. “He’d write about being lonely, and I’d write something hinting that I was single. Then I’d get Wendy to say something romantic to Sam, hoping Ben would get the hint. Now that I’m saying this out loud, I hear how childish it was.”
Marlee covered Wendy’s hand with her own. “Not childish, just…Okay, childish, but…”
“But what? I’m 39 years old with no idea how a real relationship works, still writing about Wendy and Sam, who by the way, postponed the wedding again.”
Marlee rolled her eyes. “April, they’re fictional characters. Those two are getting tiresome. I’m more interested in this Ben thing.”
“It was nothing,” April said. “I hadn’t been single very long. I needed a fantasy to keep me going.”
“But what if it was real?”
“You think so?”
“Hard to know. It was your fantasy.” Marlee pointed a French fry at April. “Still, I think it would make a great story.”
“Really?”
“Sure. Change everyone’s names, especially mine. And give it a happy ending. Your followers will love it.”
That night April sketched out a scene that took place at Marlee’s apartment, a party to celebrate the last class. I’ll change the names later, she thought, and began at the end.
Arriving at Marlee’s, April decided that her all black outfit blended perfectly with the condo’s “aspiring poet” décor—paisley shawls draped over the lampshades, framed poetry on the walls. She spotted Ben pouring a glass of wine, laughing as he waved her over.
“What’s so funny?”
“Didn’t Wendy and Sam do this?” he said.
“Drink wine?”
“Show up at a party in the same clothes.”
Her eyes traveled from his shoulders to his shoes. Black turtleneck sweater, jeans, boots. Her outfit almost exactly. Except he looks better in it than I do, she thought.
“They did—white shirts, blue jeans, black leather vests. Sam thought it was a sign; Wendy called it a coincidence.”
Ben took April’s arm and guided her to a corner behind a Shoji screen that hid a small writing desk. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.” She looked up, not quite meeting his eyes.
“All that writing we did. Were we…you know…writing at each other or something?”
April’s first impulse was to deny it, but when she found her voice, she said, “I thought so. You too?”
“Yeah.”
“Um, can I ask you something?”
Ben nodded.
“Aren’t you…seeing somebody?”
“I was, but…well, we were like Wendy and Sam, bickering, and when I started getting serious about writing, Serena didn’t get it. Said I’d never make any money at it. Then…”
April held up her hand. “I don’t need to hear any more.”
“What now?”
She looked down at their black boots, almost touching. April could see the next line as if she were typing it on her laptop. “Marlee’s teaching another class next semester. We could keep writing to each other. It could be a book, a movie, but who’d watch it? We’d need…”
“An ending?”
“No, a beginning.”
Ben smiled. The back of his hand grazed her cheek. “Meet me in the park on Sunday?”
“I’ll bring the cookies.”
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