Transparent Tuesdays

Issue 247

You guys,

On a cold March afternoon when my brother was two years old, he was crawling around the back porch of my parent’s apartment when he squeezed himself through the balcony bars and fell three floors.

My mom had been home with him and my infant sister, just two weeks old—who she placed on the couch wrapped in blankets—and kept moving around the apartment, frequently checking in on Jim. I never knew why she seemed so busy all the time growing up. Now that I have my own toddlers I know. There are always dishes to be washed, clothes to be folded, floors to be vacuumed. She left the sliding glass doors open and kept peeking her head out there. “You okay, Jim?” And he’d say yes in that little toddler voice.

Jim liked playing back there and had played by the balcony plenty of times, but this time he discovered a way through to the other side, and he stood up and inched his way along the balcony, his feet on the ledge and his hands gripping the thin, wrought-iron bars.

Mom made her rounds and peeked her head outside. Jim was on the other side of the bars, facing her. “What are you doing?” Her voice rose as she spoke. My brother got scared. He let go. My mom watched his little body disappear from sight.

~

When you’re writing a shocking event, whether it be death, a terrible accident, or something scary, there are two clear ways to structure it in a compelling way. The first is by leading with the punchline. I stated in the first sentence that when my brother was two years old he fell out of a three-story building. Then I went back to the beginning and gave more details leading up to the fall.

This is how Carole Radziwill opens her memoir, What Remains. Here are the first lines:

“Three weeks before my husband died a young couple smashed their plane into the Atlantic Ocean, off the Massachusetts shoreline, well after the mid-July sun had set. It was reported in the news at 9:41, but I knew the general time, because I had spoken to the woman less than an hour before. The pilot was my husband's cousin, John Kennedy. His wife, Carolyn Bessette, was my closest friend.”

My first job out of college was a sportswriter for the local newspaper. When I started submitting articles to my boss he would cross out most of what I’d written. “No opinions—none of your thoughts should be in here,” he’d said to me. I felt stifled by these restrictions. Without my opinions the writing was boring. But I was not bored by Radziwill’s prologue. I was riveted as she then went back in time to describe the moments before the crash, what actually happened with the plane, and what the passengers might have thought before they died:

“According to the accident report, the plane broke the surface of the ocean three minutes after the pilot sensed a problem. At 9:38, he made a curious turn. One hundred and eighty seconds later, the last thirty of them aimed directly at the water, their stories ended abruptly.

I wonder if he felt the awkward motions of the plane in those minutes. It's likely he did not. If you close your eyes in an airplane, you don't feel up or down. You don't feel yourself tilting left or right. You don't feel anything, really, and your senses tell you it doesn't matter. Clouds were hiding the familiar strings of lights that paint the coastline. He might as well have been flying with his eyes closed.”

Radziwill brings you into the moment even though she wasn’t there. She uses the accident report to make hypotheses about what it would have been like in the moments before the couple died. And she does not include her feelings around losing her best friend. In the story about my brother I wasn’t there either—I wasn’t born yet—but including how I could relate to how busy my mom must have been with two kids draws out the story and creates suspense, even though the reader already knows what’s coming.

Later in the book, Radziwill tells another shocking story with the punchline at the beginning:

“A boy drowned in the creek one year, just off the falls on a sunny day—the only kind of day I remember. He was older than I was, in his twenties probably, and not a local. The sun was straight over us like a spotlight, and he and his friends were swimming around the deep spot that the rest of us knew to avoid. I saw him go under. I saw my brother Anthony and Matt Nucci running from the cabins. I saw Uncle Freddy diving in.

They said the boy screamed, but I don't remember that, just my brother running so fast and then diving into the deep, muddy spot with Freddy. Their heads crashing the surface to gulp air, and diving down again. The ambulance came, and my brother climbed up on the bank. Silent minutes crept by while the rescue crew put their diving gear on, the rest of us staring at the water, frozen, picturing the body on the bottom of the creek.

We watched from the bank, my brother and Matt still dripping, while the rescue workers combed the bottom for his body. When they pulled him up, twenty minutes had gone by, and he was splotched purple and blue, and bloated—his stomach stretched out like he was pregnant. They pumped his chest and then took him to The Kingston Hospital.

‘Twenty-two feet,’ one of the men told my brother. ‘You never would have gotten down there, and if you had it wouldn't have helped. He filled up like a Coke bottle and sank. Wasn't a thing you kids could've done.’”

It was another tragic event, another story written as if she were reporting the news—what she witnessed, what she heard. My inclination is to write stories in this way—to lead with the shocking thing, then go back to the beginning. But this isn’t the only way. Radziwill tells another story in her memoir, but before she reveals what happened—the shocking event—she opens the chapter by talking about the idea of Fate—that it goes both ways:

“We call it fate when there is no logical path from then to now. When the man misses the train, then shares a taxi with his future wife or when the cautious woman daydreams through a stop sign at a busy intersection and is hit by a speeding truck. When the man who loves to fly dies in a plane crash. We shake our heads. It’s fate, we say.”

Then there’s a page break and she starts with this line:

“In seventh grade I had Mr. Durrwachter for biology, and Caroline Garritano was in my class.”

She goes on for five paragraphs to describe Caroline and her twin sister, Suzanne. They were the cool girls at school. Then comes the story:

“One rainy day after school let out, after I was already on the bus and the school was deserted, Suzanne and Caroline snuck into the old janitor’s quarters at the far end of the hall. It was strictly off-limits, which made them predictably intriguing. There was a dumbwaiter here that dropped from the main floor into the basement—the kind with doors that opened from the top and bottom like a sideways elevator.

They had a boy with them that day—Eddie Meyer from the hockey team. Suzanne’s boyfriend, though the twins weren’t possessive. But he was Suzanne’s boyfriend this day, so he let her in first, watched her squeeze through the horizontal doors, and then followed after her with Caroline. The three of them were cramped, sitting hunched in the tight space, and when the elevator dropped to the basement, Eddie and Caroline got off. Suzanne tried to follow them, sticking her head out awkwardly through the doors, and the top door of the dumbwaiter dropped down on her shiny long hair, crushing her neck. It happened too quickly for her to call out or make a noise. But the dumbwaiter doors, solid metal, were loud when they closed, and Eddie and Caroline turned around. Of course she was dead already.”

I was not expecting Suzanne Garritano to die in such a horrific way. When I went back and re-read the chapter I could see that Radziwill was setting up the theme of fate, but by the time I was deep into the Caroline and Suzanne story I had forgotten about it.

So which way is better to write about a shocking event? Both stories—the boy drowning and Suzanne getting crushed by the dumbwaiter—were captivating. Even without stating the tragic event up front, it’s not difficult to create suspense and anticipation that something is about to happen. Maybe, as the reader, you don’t know how bad it will be, as was the case with Suzanne, but anytime a writer starts a paragraph with some version of “One day…” I know something is coming. Another hint towards disaster is the mention of weather or time. In the prologue she wrote the time of year, “well after the mid-July sun had set.” In the story about the boy drowning she wrote, “a sunny day—the only kind of day I remember.” And in the Suzanne story she wrote, “One rainy day…”

In The Housekeeper’s Secret by Sandra Schnakenburg (my interview with Sandra here) Sandra opens my favorite chapter with these lines:

“One beautiful September day in 1975, I rushed out the front door as the early morning sun sent lasers of brilliant light through the apple trees. I flipped up the kickstand on my Schwinn bike, eager to ride to school on this perfect autumn day. Lee came scrambling out the door waving a brown paper bag. ‘Don’t forget your lunch!’

‘Thanks, Lee!’

‘And be careful riding to school.’

‘I will,’ I waved back as I pedaled away.”

I’ve read enough memoirs to see the signs of trouble ahead. “One beautiful September day,” “perfect autumn day,” and then, the giveaway, “Be careful riding to school.” After these lines there were nearly two pages of details about her bike ride to school and then:

“I looked left, then right. The coast was clear, so I turned right fast and started crossing the road while gripping the handlebars and standing on the pedals to give myself power and speed.

That’s the last thing I remember.”

I knew something bad was coming from the very first lines but I had no idea that eighth grade Sandra would be hit by a car driving one hundred miles per hour (and live to write a book).

Here’s one more example from The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, where the shocking thing is revealed at the end of the story. It takes place in seventh grade, and Jeannette writes about a friend in her class, Dinitia, who “loses her spark” and “starts drinking.” Dinitia tells Jeannette that her mom’s boyfriend moved in with them. Later, she tells Jeannette that she’s pregnant.

Then Jeannette writes,

“After Christmas, Dinitia did not return to school. When a month had gone by, I walked around the mountain to her house and knocked on the door. A man opened it and stared at me. He had skin like an iron skillet and nicotine-yellow eyes. He left the storm door shut, so I had to speak through the screen.

‘Is Dinitia home?’ I asked.

‘Why you want to know?’

‘I want to see her.’

‘She don't want to see you,’ he said and shut the door.

I saw Dinitia around town once or twice after that, and we waved but never spoke again. Later, we all learned she'd been arrested for stabbing her mother's boyfriend to death.”

What made this the most shocking was that Jeannette had nothing else to say about it. In the next paragraph, she writes about something else completely, and there is no more mention of Dinitia in the rest of the book.

There are slight differences in all these stories and the way the authors approached them, but what I’m carrying with me in my own writing is the start of the story—some version of “One day,” the time of year or time of day, the weather, the normalcy of the “before” moment. After that, there’s a reporting of facts without any emotion or thoughts, and an attention to details surrounding the moment, in order to build suspense until the shocking thing happens. And then, you must decide where and how to finish the story.

~

By the time my mom ran to the apartment front door and propped it open she could hear my brother’s cries. She left my sister on the couch as she ran down the building’s winding staircase, her feet echoing in the stairwell. She found him underneath a bush, sitting on his butt.

Mom didn’t have a car so she called my dad at work. A woman answered the phone who knew my mother. She congratulated her on the new baby and Mom responded with polite thank you’s and details and pleasantries. “It’s been good!” she said with her little laugh that she still does whenever she says hello or goodbye on the phone. When my dad got on the phone my mom couldn’t speak. She choked on the words. “Jim fell off the balcony,” she said.

My dad rushed home and they drove to the doctor’s office together. The doctor looked over Jim’s body—there was no bruising, no marks. When he fell, Jim was bundled up in warm clothes and a winter jacket, and the first thing he hit on the way down was a bush.

The doctor asked him to walk across the floor to grab a toy, and Jim did.

“He’s fine,” the doctor told my mother.

—

Until next week,

Charlie