THE MOCK FAMILY's STORY a Written Creative Work Submitted To
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THE MOCK FAMILY’S STORY A written creative work submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University A s In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree * ^ 3 (pi Master of Fine Arts In Creative Writing: Fiction by Amy Ann McNeely San Francisco, California May, 2015 Copyright by Amy Ann McNeely 2015 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL I certify that I have read The Mock Family’s Story by Amy Ann McNeely, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Fine Arts in English: Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. Maxine Chemoff Professor of Creative Writing Lecturer of Creative Writing THE MOCK FAMILY’S STORY Amy Ann McNeely San Francisco, California 2015 The Mock Family's Story is a Southern Gothic novel loosely based on Edgar Allan Poe's short story "Berenice." A young woman, Denise, returns home after failing to make it on her own in New York City. Her mother, an aging beauty queen and portrait artist takes her in with some resistance. There she reengages with her cousin, Ashley, a stage-four cancer patient who has returned home for hospice treatment. Denise and Ashley befriend each other, learn family secrets, and use each other in this strange, sad, sick, and sometimes funny story of what it takes to become the person you need to be to survive in the family you are stuck with. I certify that the Annotation is a correct representation of the content of this written creative work Chair, Written Creative Work Committee Date 1 DENISE The train. Trains aren’t romantic, not like in the movies, not like in the books. Denise never meets anyone on trains—at least, no one she wants to meet. Pretends she can’t hear over her headphones. Keeps a barrier of invisible steel hornets buzzing around her. Hears the humming, louder louder louder, filling the mouths of all the people, the people talking to her, the people talking to other people, all full of rumble bumble metal noise, it’s just knitted scarves of steel wool pouring out of them; how can she be expected to understand that, how can she be expected to know the language of robots? Pretends she’s on too much Valium, trapped in chemical quicksand. Valium: such a quaint drug, why Valium instead of Xanax or Ativan? No one takes Valium anymore. But she is a . romantic when it comes to her pretend medications and her pretend doctors, no, not a doctor, she has a pretend analyst with a Vandyke and a pince-nez who has sent her off to do battle with her mother her mo-ther HER MOTHER while overly drugged on Valium. On the train she turns her head slowly when anyone talks to her, answers with a soggy cardboard tongue, lead apron eyelids. The train pulls away from Alexandria Station, pulls away from a woman holding a baby with one arm, making a toddler’s hand waving awkwardly with the other, Goodbye, goodbye train, crouching in a squat with a metronome head shift toward the child, toward the train, toward the child, Look, the train, wave, the train, look, it’s Daddy, look, understand, remember always, look. Denise looks back and they are still waving, 2 still waving, they will always be waving. If a man is dropped off at the station by his wife, toddler, and infant child, how many steps will he have to take in the opposite direction until he will act like he is single? A man sits opposite her, a man with a gold ring, and it isn’t really a leer, it’s a half-smile-head-tilt. Coy, that’s what he wants to be. Must be emulating some Steve McQueen or not-Clint Eastwood, not-Robert Redford, no, the other one, the salad dressing man, him, Color o f Money, The Hustler, The Sting, a 1960s movieman, she can almost see the name, a quarter rolling under a subway bench, * this man must have seen repeated half-smiles-head-tilts when he was young and now he thinks this series works on single ladies and it doesn’t; it’s just creepy. Denise pokes her tongue a little bit out of the comer of her mouth, just peeking, until he leaves: one song. Two older women soon after who think craning their necks to see her sketchbook is charming, think following it up with nonquestion questions (Oh you ’re an artist, Oh you ’re drawing things outside the window, Oh that’s a barn) will beguile her into asking about them. If they sit near her long enough and see the sketchbook, really see it, they will leave. The barn, yes, the field, oh, but the farmer is just a set of gray bones. His denim overalls sag low with no meat to hold them up, but the viewer can still see straight through the entire ribcage to the other side of the field if you really look. The end of the wheat stalk in his teeth pokes out the side of his empty jaws, the baseball cap sits low over the naked skull with no ears to hold it up, and the tiny creepy bone fingers wrapped around the levers and knobs of the tractor seem too small to work anything. Behind him fly five bone swallows, trying to find dead insects to eat kicked up by the plow. Dead 3 birds still have some feathers attached. On the back of the tractor sits the farmer’s trusty coonhound, also long past decay, made of bleached bones watching the field turned up behind them. Old ladies do not cotton to seeing paintings of skeletons performing mundane activities in landscapes while on train rides. Who knows where they go. They go wherever old ladies retreat to when their charges are rebuffed. Denise never meets the hero or the rascal of her story on trains, in the carriages, leaning her face on the on the glass so she can either see her own eyes all ghosty or look out into the meadows and watch the jackrabbits run run run from the diesel leviathan, from impending mechanical doom, into the terrible world of the red tail hawks. How can jackrabbits forget something like the train running past the warren several times a day? Hawks remember, and hawks have tiny little heads with just better than a lizard brain. But you can bet your buttons that predators always remember, even if prey always forgets. Denise never meets anyone she wants to meet on trains or in the stations they live in. Not when she was leaving Penn Station, and not here, home again. Well, not her home, the place she is from. She always told herself one day she would return in triumph with so much money and so much fame. All of the left behinds would look at their own little tattered lives and inflated hips and be washed with regret and longing because look at Denise Gilbert. This is how it is instead, slinking back in on the train with just two small suitcases and the easel, a few watercolors in the portfolio, to live in her mother’s house. A couple of people in New York will probably miss her, but time telling if they 4 fly five bone swallows, trying to find dead insects to eat kicked up by the plow. Dead birds still have some feathers attached. On the back of the tractor sits the farmer’s trusty coonhound, also long past decay, made of bleached bones watching the field turned up behind them. Old ladies do not cotton to seeing paintings of skeletons performing mundane activities in landscapes while on train rides. Who knows where they go. They go wherever old ladies retreat to when their charges are rebuffed. Denise never meets the hero or the rascal of her story on trains, in the carriages, leaning her face on the on the glass so she can either see her own eyes all ghosty or look out into the meadows and watch the jackrabbits run run run from the diesel leviathan, . from impending mechanical doom, into the terrible world of the red tail hawks. How can jackrabbits forget something like the train running past the warren several times a day? Hawks remember, and hawks have tiny little heads with just better than a lizard brain. But you can bet your buttons that predators always remember, even if prey always forgets. Denise never meets anyone she wants to meet on trains or in the stations they live in. Not when she was leaving Penn Station, and not here, home again. Well, not her home, the place she is from. She always told herself one day she would return in triumph with so much money and so much fame. All of the left behinds would look at their own • little tattered lives and inflated hips and be washed with regret and longing because look at Denise Gilbert. This is how it is instead, slinking back in on the train with just two small suitcases and the easel, a few watercolors in the portfolio, to live in her mother’s 5 house. A couple of people in New York will probably miss her, but time telling if they call. But did Denise call Diamond after Diamond was back in Oregon? No, she did not. It wasn’t because Denise didn’t care. The dream was fraying at the edges, because if Diamond couldn’t make it, Diamond, who didn’t really pay rent, beautiful Diamond, who lived with a rich man and had a credit card she could use almost whenever she wanted and was just about as good a painter as Denise was, it meant there really was no hope for Denise in New York.