Remington Romances

It was my mother who discovered the stash of narrow ruled notebooks I kept hidden in my closet.

Her rage was instant and fierce when she read them, as if she’d stumbled onto a nest of teenage pornography and not the pitiful efforts of a child who wanted to be a writer and had no idea where to begin – I was, at the time, under the influence of the romance magazines available at the local five and dime store – forbidden and atrociously written as they were scandalous.

 “Trash!” she shrieked wildly at me, “How dare you even think let alone write this trash?”

Notebooks flew in every direction.

“They’re private!” I shrieked right back at her, “How dare you read my private things!”

A wayward copy of “The Carpetbaggers” with its slick and suggestive paperback cover whizzed by my ear and hit the bedroom door with a dull thud.   Rendered as incoherent as I’d ever seen her, my distraught mother began ripping pages from the notebooks and punctuating each ragged handful with a violent curse.  I picked up the thick, dog eared novel gingerly and then dropped it like a hot rock when I  remembered I’d discovered it carefully concealed in her lingerie drawer.  That was bound to come to her as well, I realized, and very likely sooner than later.  Flight suddenly seemed like a reasonable course as opposed to being trapped in a tiny room with stolen property and a mad woman – I screamed some final hateful words in her direction and fled.  Not to be outdone, she flung out her last and best volley but the words were flat and the sentiment too clichéd  to carry any weight.

“You just wait…..” she screamed with a kind of breathless and impotent fury, “….til your father gets home!”

 I ran.  Down the stairs, two at a time, out the front door and onto the sidewalk where each crack looked like an opportunity and I didn’t just step, I pounced with both feet.  I ran all the way to St. Luke’s, a small Catholic church four blocks away.   It was there my daddy found me, sitting miserably on the church steps, afraid to go home but still defiant.   He parked the old black station wagon and came to sit beside me, hugging his knees and looking thoughtful.

“So,” he began neutrally, “You want to be a writer.”

“She had no right,”  I snapped, “And you can’t make me say I’m sorry.”

“Oh, I know.  She’ll get over it.” he told me with a slight shrug of his thin shoulders, “But there might’ve been a better way to handle it.”

“Like what?” I demanded with the sullen righteousness of the unfairly accused.

“Well,” he said and put his arm around my shoulders, “ You might’ve tried writing about something you know about.  Or used invisible ink.  Or found a better hiding place.  Don’t you know the bottom of the closet is the first place she looks?”

I tried hard not to smile at this and he hugged me a little tighter.

A few days later, after the winds had died down, he appeared at my bedroom door with a square shaped, latch locked box containing a dusty, second hand but still reliable – except for a missing “r” key and a tendency to skip if pressed overly hard – typewriter and an unopened ream of clean white paper.

“Just skip a space for the “r” for now,”  he told me with a small smile, “You can fill them in later.”

He patiently showed me how to load the ribbon and insert the paper, set margins, use the space bar, the shift key and the carriage return.

“Two things,” he said, “No more true romance stories.”

I had the good grace to blush at this.

“What’s the second?”  I asked hesitantly.

My daddy, always the peacemaker and perpetually caught up in a mother-daughter dynamic he didn’t understand, smiled again, this time a little sadly.

“Respect the words,” he told me.  “Don’t write anything you’d be ashamed to see in the paper and if this is something you really want, then don’t give up.  Find your own voice but learn to respect the words.  Oh, and here,” he added, producing a paperback from his pocket and laying it on the dresser. “Writers need to read.  A lot.  This is a good place to start.”

It was “Cannery Row” by John Steinbeck, its once glossy cover faded with age and nearly detached from the spine, its pages so well thumbed they curled at the edges.  It was held together with a thin, green rubber band and smelled faintly of pouch tobacco and clove.  It had, I read with a growing sense of wonder, been written before I’d been born, Steinbeck had been in his early forties and the world was recovering from war.   It somehow seemed the perfect choice for my daddy’s back pocket, the perfect gift to pass on.

It was my first grown up book.

More important and more essential, it was my first grown up moment.