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"(ip) Saving Grace"
Lisapooh 12664 desperate attention whore postings
DAW Level: "Playboy Centerfold"
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01-30-03, 02:46 AM (EST)
 
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"(ip) Saving Grace" |
I'm taking the concept of "in progress" quite seriously - this story isn't finished yet, and I'd love some feedback! There are parts of it I really love and there are parts that I think are totally overwritten and overwrought too. My main worry about this story is that I think the main character is so unlikeable that no one will want to read it. I mean, she's got the melodrama going - but she's also really sad and lost and that makes me feel for her. I just don't know if anyone else will. So tell me - do you care about this girl - do you want to know what happens to her. Or is she annoying the crap out of you? You are all the best - in case you didn't know!
Saving Grace
It had been a rain-soaked spring. For the last two years, the grass had been brown and brittle. And as mild winters faded into harsh, arid springs, errant brush fires had glowed on the hillsides like fireflies. But this year, the ground was saturated – the grass an unnatural, garish green. It looked like God had dumped an industrial-size drum of anti-freeze all over the county.
The passing winter had been unseasonably cold. Relentless, unforgiving blue northers had blown across the prairie with nothing to impede their assault. The trees had been stripped of life by hail and wind, and all that remained throughout those endless months were scarred, barren stumps lined up like slovenly soldiers.
Then spring descended: fragile buds graced the treetops, and wide brushstrokes of bluebonnets and indian paintbrush swirled together in a vivid palette across the knolls of North Texas.
Grace Campbell had lived through over two dozen endless, empty springs. But this year was different. She felt as hopeful and fearless as the wildflowers growing on the hills outside her back door. It almost embarrassed her. Thinking that hope and spring really did walk hand and hand struck her as an absurdly childish notion. The whole idea of renewal seemed too pat - too easy. A simple analogy for a much more complicated situation. But still, at that moment, it fit.
For 27 years, Grace had watched spring unfold across Bridger County. And for 27 years, it hadn’t signaled a thing. But it did seem different to her now: the colors were brighter; the wind was crisper, the air was sweeter.
All the vague daydreams of escape that had warmed her throughout the cold dreary winters had taken hold somehow. A simple seedling of an idea had sprung roots that burrowed through every part of her. Discontent had fertilized it. Hope had nurtured it. It had grown. It was the spring everything would change. #####
For ten years, spring had only signaled the anniversary of disappointment and failure. Time soothes and blurs some pain, but it sharpens others. And Grace’s anger and resentment had been whittled to a fine point by a decade of inertia. Her heart was as sharp as an Exacto blade.
In the spring of 1992, one disappointment had led to another. One wrong move had been multiplied by a dozen others. 1992 was the year Grace Campbell gave up. 1992 was the year she settled.
1992 was the year she graduated high school. She had been the valedictorian of her class, and everyone had marveled at her dedication. She thought it was small minded of them – but Grace had always held fast to the notion that everyone in Bridger County was small minded to begin with. Still, she couldn’t get too big-headed about being at the top of a class of 80 students more interested in football, beer and cow tipping than academic pursuits.
It was her moment though. And her right - the pay off due her for all the years she had worked so hard. She hated Bridger County. Always had. She hated the wind and dust and grime. Hated the summer’s unrelenting heat and the stark, empty winters. Hated the small dreams of everyone around her. Imagination wasn’t something anyone admired; escape didn’t seem to be something anyone else aspired to. Grace had never understood how people could be so content with such puerile dreams.
Because dreams were all Grace had ever had. All through school she sweated her way through every committee, every honors class, every extra-curricular activity her small high school could offer as a way to nurture her most treasured, tightly held dream: a small liberal arts college back east. Someplace green and shady with cobblestone paths, pillared auditoriums and tall, elegant brick sorority houses.
She’d even pictured herself in an ugly food services uniform - forced to work a horrible job on campus as a condition of her scholarship. Even outfitted in a pink polyester indignity, Grace envisioned a campus life rich with opportunity and romance.
It hadn’t worked out that way of course. As it turned out, Grace wasn’t any different from a thousand other over-achieving, over-reaching girls scattered throughout the country in dead-end towns. Coal mining towns in the north east; factory towns in the mid-west, mining towns in the mountains or parched earth farm towns like hers in the panhandle of North Texas – it was all the same. No money. No options. No escape.
There was no scholarship. There was no money. When Grace Campbell opened the last rejection letter, there was no hope. Grace Campbell wasn’t going anywhere.
She’d found solace at a barbeque of all things. It was a gathering of her classmates for graduation – a party thrown by a land-rich classmate’s family. She’d never had much to do with her the kids in her class. Grace had always been far too busy trying to find her way out of town to exert any effort on making friends within the city limits. But this was grad night. Everyone doted on her and clucked their condolences that she wouldn’t be going away after all. Her mom had tried to console her. Maybe Grace could work just this year, live at home and save some money. Then maybe she could go to the college in Wichita Falls next year. If she got a better car she could still live at home and commute. They’d work something out.
Grace didn’t want to work it out. A dream compromised wasn’t much of a dream. She wasn’t ever going to get out of Bridger County. Age might bring wisdom, but at 17 she knew that for a certainty. It was over.
That’s when she’d spotted Boyd Carruthers standing alone in the long hall that divided the ranch house. He was an outsider too. Not the same as her, but exclusion was a kind of common ground. Grace excluded herself out of smugness. Boyd was excluded by a distinct lack of energy and independent thought.
With all Grace’s dreams withering on the vine, she felt like doing something reckless and unplanned. Something exciting that wasn’t a part of a bigger picture. Something wild. The only thing she could find to do was Boyd.
So she’d talked him into sneaking away from the party. They’d driven north to Lake Texoma. She’d pretended to be scared by his stories of crazed stalkers and sexual deviants searching for victims at the lake. Grace didn’t have a reputation, so Boyd was working under the assumption that beer and fear were essential elements to getting laid. He plied her with both, and she gladly accepted.
Boyd had an old packing blanket in the back of his pickup and they laid side-by-side for hours. Knees up, defenses down. They talked about what they thought life would hold. His future didn’t look any more promising than hers. The difference was it didn’t bother him. He’d never dreamed of a world outside his own. Whatever he needed and wanted had always been within arms’ reach - stretching seemed like so much wasted effort.
Later when Boyd rolled on top of her, his thick broad back obscured her vision. But when he started his hesitant, unsure rhythm, Grace could get an occasional glimpse of the stars shimmering in the cloudless night. As he’d move and the stars would come back in focus, Grace stared at them and wondered if they looked the same back east. If they shined just as bright in the cool of New England or if the lights of a campus she’d never see would somehow dim their glare. She wondered if the lucky few in those dorm rooms would gaze out their windows and look at them - and see what kind of hope they represented. She looked at those stars as they peeked over the hard muscles of Boyd’s back until her eyes filled with tears. And when Boyd finally entered her, she closed them - not from pleasure or even pain. She closed them to an emptiness that a star-cluttered sky and a second string football player could never fill. ##### She gave birth 39 weeks and five days later. Boyd wanted to call the baby Tiffany after a singer who performed in shopping malls. Grace thought it was a ridiculous name. But she was 18 and pregnant – she didn’t really care about the baby’s name. So Boyd got his way and named their daughter Tiffany Jo. Everyone called her T.J. - she was the spitting image of him. Grace tried hard not to hold it against her.
He was laid off when their second daughter was born a year and a half later. He watched soap operas during the day while he waited for work. One of his shows featured an ingenue named Taylor. She was his favorite. When Boyd suggested naming the new baby after her, Grace couldn’t find a reason or the energy to protest. So they called the second girl Taylor Ann. Grace watched the show with him during her maternity leave. It came on in the late afternoon, just when Taylor would get restless and fussy with colic. So Grace would walk her, holding the baby tightly against her chest while her namesake emoted television. The most notable thing about the on-screen Taylor were the huge breast implants she thrust forward to punctuate dialogue. The emotion didn’t matter. Sadness. Elation.
Revulsion. Horror. The implants were the exclamation point she stamped at the end of each line reading.
Grace named their third daughter. Boyd was bitterly disappointed at again being denied a son and furious at Grace for having her tubes tied immediately after delivery. Grace delivered the baby just after the evening news, and Boyd went off hunting quail with his brother at daybreak.
Grace had read a book on the Donner Party the week before she delivered, so she named her daughter Tamsen Rose, after one of the doomed pioneers. With one child named after a bubblegum singer and another one a soap opera character, Grace thought naming her last child after a strong, stoic frontier woman would be a welcome change. The fact that this strong, stoic woman had eaten her husband to stay alive also held some resonance for Grace.
Tamsen was almost five now. Far too serious and self-contained. A fury rested in her wiry little body that scared Grace. She channeled it in strange, sad little drawings she meticulously arranged with pushpins over her bed. Grace would stop and stare at them whenever she would change the sheets or straighten up and wonder what, if anything, she should do about the crying moons and scowling monsters that covered the walls. Running her hands over the waxy, thick crayon drawings, Grace would try to absorb what Tamsen wanted to tell the world or at least her. Then she’d step back to look a little harder - trying to put them all together into some chain of reason. But eventually, Grace would go back to folding towels or rolling socks with a familiar feeling of foreboding and futility. 
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echogirl 2120 desperate attention whore postings
DAW Level: "Roller Coaster Inaugurator"
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01-30-03, 03:34 AM (EST)
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1. "RE: (ip) Saving Grace" |
LAST EDITED ON 01-30-03 AT 03:42 AM (EST)Hey Pooh! I totally relate to Grace! Is she unlikable? I don't think so. The picture of Grace and her small Texas town resonate with me. I know her, and I've been to that town. Perhaps some reader's expect a fairy tale ending or will shun Grace because they think she lacked the initiative to escape her surroundings, but I think the vast majority will relate to her. My family has blue-collar, small town Texas roots. Not much money, and most never saw a day of college if they were lucky enough to finish high school. The picture you painted seems so typical of small town women I have known. No it's not overwrought or overwritten--it's descriptive. It's compelling. It pulls the reader in. My writing is freaking bare bones anorexia by comparison! In other words I really like this piece  
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L82LIFE 5333 desperate attention whore postings
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01-30-03, 01:43 PM (EST)
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2. "RE: (ip) Saving Grace" |
Pooh, I like Grace. Even though she has given up on her dreams, you can still feel the pull that they have on her. I don't think she really gave up, I think she's just waiting for the right opportunity to come along so that she can finally grab the brass ring. She's not at all unlikable, she's simply honest with herself about herself and about others. Her life has become a rut, but I can feel something big coming Grace's way, and I want to know what it is! So, write some more!  Your writing is very detailed. That's a good thing, because you can paint such a realistic piture with your words. I felt like I was in that truck with Grace looking at the stars. You are a master, Pooh. I can't wait until you get published so that I can say, "I knew her when!" 
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Agman2 1321 desperate attention whore postings
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12-04-15, 02:21 PM (EST)
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3. "RE: (ip) Saving Grace" |
Lisa the Pooh,
Lisa the Pooh,Tubby little cubbie all stuffed with fluff,
she's Lisa the Pooh. Lisa the pooh, Willie nillie silly old poster!
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