Making of a Writer (9780307820464) (7 page)

Not all the letters were platonic. Many of the girls in high school found that absence and worry absolutely did make the heart grow fonder. And so I found something I could do.

Every few weeks I’d write a light, romantic oh-how-much-I-miss-you poem. Each time I composed a new poem, I’d take it to school before classes began, and the word would quickly spread. At least half a dozen girls would sit on the steps of the administration building and quickly copy the poem. Then they’d let their friends copy it, and their friends would continue to share it. I sometimes
wondered how many lonesome boys overseas were made to feel just a little bit better because of the loving poems their girlfriends sent them.

I felt a strong sense of satisfaction. I was no longer writing just for my own pleasure. I was writing for others, to fill a need.

Everyone’s teen years are
hard. Everyone’s teen years during World War II were harder. Teenagers were edgy. Adults were edgy. But it wasn’t just over the war news. Little things played a strong part. Mother was highly vocal about it.

“Why are you asking for another roll of toilet paper already? Don’t you realize that I have to shop at all the grocery stores in the area at least twice a day to try to find toilet paper for sale? There’s not enough toilet paper because we’re at war!”

“I don’t care if you hate squishing orange dye into the white oleomargarine. We can’t get butter, and the legislature went along with the dairy lobbyists, so margarine has to be sold white. The military gets all the butter. We’re at war.”

“Don’t ask again if you can learn to drive. Age has nothing to do with it anymore. Gasoline is rationed, and we can’t get rubber for tires because we’re at war.”

At times I wondered if I’d ever be able to please my mother, but I began to understand emotional ups and downs and realize the strong part emotion played in what we both thought and did.

Nanny was not only my roommate, she was also my buddy, but at times I had problems with her, too.

Late one night a suspected Japanese submarine had been sighted off the coast near Santa Monica, and our coast guard had fired at it. Nanny described the action to me the next morning. “I stood right here at our bedroom window and watched the bullets trace red lines across the sky. I was terrified. I didn’t know if we were being attacked or we were defending ourselves.”

“Why didn’t you wake me?” I moaned, unable to believe I had slept through the battle. “This was part of history, and I missed it.”

Nanny looked surprised as she answered, “It was a school night. I wouldn’t wake you on a school night. You’re young. You need your sleep.”

I planted and tended my victory garden lovingly. There would be a show of our produce at school, and I was sure that one of my cabbages, which was growing more gigantic by the moment, would win a prize.

The day of the victory garden show arrived, and I went out to cut my cabbage.

Someone had been there before me, and I knew who. We had met one of our neighbors the week we had moved into our house, when my mother found her in our rose garden, cutting an armful of roses for herself.

“It’s all right,” Mrs. R. had said, smiling and waving her shears. “You have so many roses, we can all enjoy them.”

She continued to enjoy a variety of our flowers, along with lemons and cherries from our trees and mint and herbs from our garden.

When I saw that my cabbage had been taken, I stormed into the kitchen. “I’m going to walk around the hill to her house and ask for it back,” I insisted.

Nanny shook her head. “You can’t do that,” she said. “It would embarrass her. It wouldn’t be neighborly.”

“But it’s my entry in the victory garden show.”

“Take something else. There are some nice onions in the garden,” Nanny said. “You can’t be rude to a neighbor.”

“She’s a crazy neighbor!”

“But she
is
a neighbor, and we must be polite, so take something else to school.”

Mother backed Nanny up, and reluctantly, I had to agree. Retrieving the cabbage wasn’t as important as sparing Mrs. R.’s feelings. I entered three onions in the show and won only a third place.

Life was complicated enough. Why did I have to keep tripping over questions of right versus wrong? I wanted peace in the world and peace in my home, and I often couldn’t find either. Even though I wanted to be totally independent from my mother, my emotions sometimes mirrored hers. My mother sometimes talked about World War I and how she had missed my father and worried about him when he joined the army. Circumstances might be different from generation to generation, but the emotions we felt were the same. We could measure the span of our days through our emotional ups and downs. I began to write about my characters’ emotions, and they became more
believable and real. Emotions had no boundaries of age or time. The need to love and be loved, the fears, the concerns, the joys, the excitement, and the sorrows didn’t vary.

Then I discovered a place of refuge—a grassy spot in front of the three mansions at the top of the hill that crowned Laughlin Park. From this vantage spot on a clear day I could make out the outline of Catalina Island on the horizon, and below I could see the tiny cars and ant-sized pedestrians on Hollywood Boulevard.

Tiny people, tiny problems, and my own problems seemed just as insignificant. The figures I watched were characters in a gigantic citywide play, and I was a character, too. The air was clear and bright, the blue-purple hills of Catalina rose solidly in the far distance, beyond the thin blue line of ocean, and the sun warmed and relaxed my back.

As a writer-to-be I knew that a story is not a story if it doesn’t have a problem to solve. Why should the ongoing story of my life be any different?

For as long as
I could remember, I had gone to Sunday Mass, said my morning and night prayers, and tried to obey the laws of God. But as I grew into my teens, questions began popping up like dandelions after a rain.

As I searched for answers and found them, I discovered that I no longer dutifully followed my parents’ religion. I had begun to embrace it as my own, and it became not only a comfort, but a challenge. It was not only a gift, it was a responsibility. It helped me make choices and set standards. At times my faith was a lifeline.

When I was fifteen I went horseback riding for the first time with a group of friends. We rented horses at a stable in Griffith Park and set off for an adventure along the bridle trails.

Unfortunately, it had rained for a week, and the horses had not been exercised. One of them spooked at a sudden noise, and the entire group bolted. My horse dumped me in the middle of Griffith Park Boulevard, and I woke up lying on a park bench with someone telling me, “Be still. The ambulance is coming.”

I was taken to the Hollywood Emergency Hospital, where I continued to lie quietly on a cot in a room smelling of ether and disinfectant, until finally someone shined a light in my eyes, turned my head this way and that, and said there was nothing wrong with me.

In my dazed state, the nurse who hovered over me looked like the prison matron in a movie I’d seen, so I wasn’t surprised when she jerked me out of bed and slammed me down in a wheelchair, grumbling under her breath about kids who pretended to be injured, while she rolled the wheelchair to my mother’s car.

“How about my friends?” I struggled to ask. “Was anyone else hurt?”

“They’re all fine. You are, too,” she snapped.

But I wasn’t. At home I continued to lie in bed with a headache so miserable it became a barrier against the rest of the world.

After a week, when the pain in my head didn’t abate, my mother took me downtown to the medical group to which my family belonged. The doctor, who at first also thought there wasn’t anything seriously wrong with me, finally X-rayed my head. A short while later he came into the room with a serious look on his face. “She has a fractured skull,” he said. “We’ll keep her in the hospital on her back, with her head propped so she can’t move it. Then all we can do is wait to see if she’ll recover.”

My sister Pat, who was in fifth grade at Incarnate Word Academy, tearfully confided to her teacher that she was so worried about me it was hard for her to think of anything else. The nun who taught Pat’s class promised that on Sunday afternoon at two o’clock, when all the nuns in the convent gathered for special prayers, they would pray for me.

On Sunday afternoon soon after two o’clock, in spite of my never-ending headache, I fell asleep, and I dreamed. In my dream my grandfather walked into the room and sat beside me, stroking my forehead. As his strong hand gently moved again and again against my hair, the pain began to lessen. Finally it left completely. Pa bent to kiss me; then without a word he was gone.

To everyone’s delight, an hour later I awoke free of pain. The next day, Pat excitedly reported my dream to her teacher.

Because I had had to miss so much school that spring semester, it was necessary to make up two classes in summer school. Geometry II and Spanish II were offered only at the same time at Hollywood High, so I signed up to take the classes at Incarnate Word, which offered to arrange classes to fit my schedule.

The nun who was registering the summer students gave me a long, searching look. “You were healed while we prayed for you,” she said.

“Yes,” I answered, remembering the thank-you note I’d written to them. “And I’m very grateful to you.”

She gave a little wave of her hand, as if to push my gratitude aside. “You received a message from God,” she told me. “You must listen and look within yourself. I believe that God wants you to become a nun.”

It didn’t take long for me to listen or to look within myself. How could I shut myself up in a convent at the age of fifteen? Especially since I had recently discovered that the world was full of good-looking guys.

“Well?” she asked me.

“I’m not sure what message God gave me,” I answered truthfully. “Maybe he wants me to become the mother of a bishop.”

That was the end of our conversation. She wasn’t happy with me. But I was happy with myself, and my faith hadn’t suffered.

Later, I began to see that my beliefs, my standards, and my outlook on life were as much a part of me as the color of my hair and eyes, and they influenced what I wrote and how I wrote it. The main characters in my stories, in whole or in part, reflected what I believed and what I liked about the world.

I learned that it is important for authors to connect with their main characters. It is important to like them. My characters live inside my head for many months—sometimes even years. Before I write more than a few notes about my story line, I begin to visualize and understand my main character, choosing the person who’s closest to the problem in the story. By the time I’m ready to write, I know my main character as well as I know myself. A little part of her is often a little part of me.

Although I loved my
mother very much, I didn’t always see life as she did. This was disappointing but not surprising. Most of the girls I knew had the same problem.

At Hollywood High, Mary Lou and I had joined the girls’ drill team, and we were thrilled when we were told that our team had been invited to march in Hollywood’s Santa Claus Lane Christmas Parade.

It was always a glorious parade, with movie stars riding on Santa’s float, and we felt just as glamorous as they did, picturing ourselves marching snappily along in our crisp white cotton uniforms with bright red belts, snug red cotton jackets, and red cloth caps.

A guy in whom I was interested told me he was going to the parade to see me march and asked if we could get
together after the parade was over. Since I knew it would be hard to find each other in the huge crowd that was expected, I invited him to meet me at our house afterward. Mary Lou had a date, too, and we were so excited we could hardly wait for the big day.

But two days before the Christmas parade, Los Angeles was hit with a blast of icy weather.

“That little cotton uniform isn’t nearly warm enough,” Mother told me. “You’ll have to wear a coat.”

“I can’t wear a coat!” I protested. “We’re wearing uniforms! We have to look alike!”

Nanny shook her head. “You’ll catch pneumonia,” she said. “At least wear a sweater.”

“I can’t!” I insisted.

“Then you aren’t going,” Mother said in her firmest tone of voice. “We won’t let you freeze to death.”

“I
want
to freeze to death,” I argued. “I want to turn blue and get covered with goose bumps like the princesses usually do on the floats in the Rose Parade.”

“Sarcasm won’t help,” Mother said. But I wasn’t being sarcastic. Sometimes, depending on the weather, the Rose Parade princesses’ skin did look blue.

Neither of us would give in, and I went to bed in tears, desperately wondering what to do.

In the morning, Mother had come up with what she and Nanny thought was a good solution. “We’ll make you a dress out of an old wool blanket,” Mother said. “You can wear it under your uniform, and no one will be able to see it.”

“I’ll look weird.”

“No, you won’t,” Mother said in a voice as firm as a
solid oak door. “You’ll wear the blanket dress under your uniform, or you won’t march in the parade.”

“I’ll die of embarrassment,” I wailed.

“At least you won’t die of pneumonia,” Mother answered.

I didn’t have a choice. Just before the parade Mother sewed me into the blanket dress, and I tugged my uniform over it.

I felt as if I’d been stuffed into a sausage casing. As the uniform was zipped up with great difficulty and the jacket strained at the buttons, I found myself almost immobile. It was hard even to move my arms, let alone swing them.

“I don’t mind being cold,” I wailed, but my protests did no good.

When we reached Hollywood Boulevard, where the parade was to begin, I left my bundled-up parents, sisters, and grandmother standing on the sidewalk to watch the parade, and joined our drill team.