If You're Not Yet Like Me (7 page)

Before this moment, Toby’s back had been to the door, but now he turned to reveal the baby possum to its mother. She opened her mouth to flash rows of sharp teeth. She hissed. This meant: Don’t.

Toby felt like he’d been caught shoplifting.

“Hurry up,” Margaret whispered, “before she attacks!”

Toby hugged the possum tighter, and it squirmed in his arms. The animal had begun to understand the difference between itself and the figure holding it.

“Give the baby back,” Margaret said, her heart rate rising.

Before Toby could act, his wife pulled open the door with one hand, and with the other, swooped in and grabbed the possum from him. She lifted the animal and launched it into the air. The possum, its four legs splayed out, flew out the door.

Its mother followed the animal’s trajectory with bright eyes. This was not the animal she’d been after. This was something else. Flight was not something she understood.

Margaret kicked the screen door closed, then the front door, her heart galloping. The baby inside her sensed this unease, and he fell into it. His nervousness was born.

“Wow,” Toby said, not sure if he felt relieved or sad.

With the door closed, they could not see the mother possum turn her back on the baby, which was no longer one of her own, no longer a possum, but meaningless as a bird, a hat, a doll, a pet.

A
few weeks later, Margaret is bigger, and more sensitive to the smell of coffee and charcoal barbecues. The baby inside her has grown eyelids.

Carrying a bag of groceries, Toby walks home. The sun was setting when he left the market, and by the time he reaches the front door, it’s dark. He’s nearly forgotten the possum, but sometimes he sends out hope that it’s all right. The day after the incident he’d looked up information about possums online. He and Margaret had done everything they weren’t supposed to: touched the animal, talked to it. If Margaret had gone ahead and fed it the milk, it most certainly would’ve died.

Toby reaches for his keys and the few potted plants by his feet rustle. Toby’s eyes meet the possum’s. It’s certainly the same one, no longer so small, but not yet fully-grown. A teenager now, Toby thinks, smiling.

“Hey bud—” but he remembers the website’s rule and shuts up.

The possum glares at him and hisses. I am the lion now.

T
oby hurries with his keys, his hands gone cold. He wrestles the door open and slips into the warm apartment, lit with lamps. He calls out for his wife, and, in his mind, for his child, who can hear him.

AUTHOR
INTERVIEW

Previous Flatmancrooked LAUNCH author, Alyssa Knickerbocker
(Your Rightful Home,
2010) interviews Edan Lepucki about craft, creation, and bathtubs.

Knickerbocker

The last time I saw you, you were standing on a chair with your arm up a hippopotamus sock puppet, reading one of your fabulous stories to an admiring crowd. You were uncannily good at manipulating the sock puppet while you read—it was almost like the hippo was reading the story. You accomplish a similar feat in If You’re Not Yet Like Me with the narrator, Joellyn, whose voice—hilarious, sarcastic, endearingly self-conscious—was so strong that I could still hear her long after I put the book down. Is voice the most important aspect of craft for you?

Lepucki

Firstly: thank you! You aren’t so bad with a puppet yourself.

I’m not sure any one craft element trumps the rest, but voice and language are very important to me, especially with a first person narrator. I love the first person for the way it allows me to discover and inhabit a character through speech, and I’m particularly interested in characters like Joellyn, whose strategies of self-representation are so barbed, intricate and weird. And with this story, Joellyn’s voice was the first thing that came to me—all I did, in the beginning, was listen. I had a good time with her formal speech and snobbery, and I loved how shocking she was.

Knickerbocker

Some writers say that they don’t start a story until they have the last line, others that they would never limit themselves in that way. Did you begin this novella with an idea of its trajectory, or did Joellyn take you places you didn’t expect?

Lepucki

My process is halfway between those two extremes. I usually write a bit, then map out the next part, then write some more, then map the next part, and so on. I like to leave a little to be discovered, so that my experience writing the narrative to some degree mirrors the reader’s experience. If I know too much, I’m bored, and it’s predictable.

With this novella, my initial goal, story-wise, was to write about a failed romance; I knew Zachary and Joellyn would not end up together. That’s about all I knew. Many things surprised me along the way: Zachary’s piñatas, Joellyn’s occupation, Dickens’ importance in the story, and even the baby’s existence. What surprised me most about Joellyn’s trajectory was her vulnerability. I do love the girl, as flawed as she is.

Knickerbocker

I was struck by the moments when Joellyn breaks out of the narrative to address her audience—her unborn baby—and imagines responses (“I know what you’re thinking: ‘All right, already, Joellyn, I get it’”). Why was it important that this story be written as an address to that imagined audience?

Lepucki

My first inspiration for the novella was Russell Banks’s,
Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story,
a supremely strange and wonderful failed romance narrative. In that story, the narrator, who continually declares how handsome he was when the events he describes happened, falls for an ugly woman for reasons he doesn’t quite understand. That story moves from the first to third person and back again, and I’ve always loved—and been disturbed by—how conscious the narrator is of his own storytelling. His carefully-tailored, hyper-conscious confession is fascinating.

In “If You’re Not Yet Like Me,” I used the direct address to emphasize that Joellyn’s storytelling is a kind of performance; she’s performing not only the story, but also her identity, and her struggles to understand what happened to her, and why.

I didn’t realize Joellyn’s audience was her unborn baby until I wrote the line: “That sounds like something a mother would say, doesn’t it?” Once I realized who Joellyn was talking to, the story transformed into this mixture of confession, instruction, defense, and cautionary tale.

Knickerbocker

A great line from “I Am the Lion Now”: “All crises, once averted, become jokes.” Talk about the relationships between humor, crisis and insight in your work.

Lepucki

With “I am the Lion Now” I wanted to try to write a story that wasn’t quite as dark as my other pieces. I was interested in writing about a happily married couple, probably because I’m happily married. I was also curious about creating a conflict that did not lead to an indelible loss (for the human characters, at least).

“I am the Lion Now” and “If You’re Not Yet Like Me” are probably my most explicitly comedic narratives. My other work is pretty sad, but humor and irreverence still manage to sneak in. The humor deflects tragedy, while simultaneously emphasizing it. Comedy allows for a slippage and confusion of meaning, and expresses an anxiety about that meaning. I suppose my characters live anxiously in the world.

Knickerbocker

“I Am the Lion Now” contains a number of beautifully done, effortless POV switches, from Margaret to Toby, then to the unborn baby and even the possum. Why take on this approach—which can be risky—as opposed to rooting the story in one character’s point of view?

Lepucki

I wrote “I am the Lion Now” specifically because I wanted to try an omniscient third person point of view. I’d recently read
A Thin Place
by Kathryn Davis, whose omniscient narrator bestows thought upon beasts and people alike, and I adored it. I also love
The Known World
by Edward P. Jones, which is told in this gorgeous, juicy omniscience, and for years I’d wanted to see how that kind of narrative flexibility felt. Now that I’ve read more 19th century novels like
Anna Karenina
and
Middlemarch,
I realize that the shifting, elevated third person narrator isn’t new at all, just out of fashion. I’m not sure why that is, because it’s just as exhilarating to write as it is to read.

One difficulty with the omniscience in “I am the Lion Now” was deciding how often people in L.A. have sex. I kept changing the number. They should have asked that question on the census!

Knickerbocker

The end of a book is kind of like the end of a movie—the music plays, the credits roll, and the audience, hopefully, feels satisfied, yet sad that it’s all over. Sometimes, though, you’re lucky enough to get a reel of bloopers and deleted scenes—a little peek behind the curtain. I’m hoping you’ll talk about your bloopers and deleted scenes—what was the revision process like for you with these stories?

Lepucki

To be honest, I can hardly recall writing “I am the Lion Now”—I think I burned all the discarded reels.

Writing the end of the novella? Oof. Unfortunately, that process is still vivid in my mind. I rewrote the ending at least four times. On my first draft, I withheld the identity of Joellyn’s imagined listener until the final pages, but it didn’t take long to see that this was a misstep. The rest of the drafts were all about the final scenes—it took me a few tries to nail the right tone, and to sustain the drama and emotion after the major events of the story had happened. My editor Deena Drewis kept my habit for sentimentality in check. She continually urged me to hang onto Joellyn’s essential voice and nature, which was so helpful.

I can only stand to show you one discarded ending: Joellyn has a fantasy of Zachary making a piñata. Of himself. Blooper, indeed.

Knickerbocker

Last question, very important: You seem to be obsessed with bathtubs. Discuss.

Lepucki

Despite my valiant efforts to stop this ritual because of its water usage, I can’t help but take a bath almost every night. It’s true, I am obsessed. I guess you caught me writing what I know.

Thank you …
… to the hardworking folks at Flatmancrooked, in particular Elijah Jenkins, fearless publisher, and my incredibly astute and exacting editor Deena Drewis.

I’m grateful to a number of friends who read this manuscript at various points and gave me insightful feedback, and whose own writing keeps me engaged, challenged, happy, and humbled: Julia Whicker, Madeline McDonnell, Douglas Diesenhaus, and Paria Kooklan.

I owe a special thank you to Heidi Cascardo and Laura Shields for their firsthand knowledge of pregnancy, and to Mike Fusco and Emma Straub (M+E) for their design talents.

I’m lucky to have such a supportive and fun family, and it’s a pleasure to acknowledge them here.

Thank you especially—especially—to my husband, Patrick Brown: first, last and favorite reader.

EDAN LEPUCKI is a graduate of Oberlin College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her short fiction has been published in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Narrative Magazine, Meridian, and FiveChapters, among other publications, and she is the winner of the 2009 James D. Phelan Award. She is staff writer for The Millions and lives in Los Angeles, California, where she was born and raised.