WALKER, SUSAN OVERCASH, MFA with Regards from Frankel
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WALKER, SUSAN OVERCASH, M.F.A. With Regards from Frankel City. (2008) Directed by Lee Zacharias. 206 pp. How does landscape influence character? What ties the inner landscape of a character to the world they inhabit? With Regards from Frankel City , a novel told in retrospect by a female character in Frankel City, Texas, explores these questions through the intertwining of relationships, community and setting. Spanning more than thirty years, JoDell Orsak, the narrator, and her unlikely roommate and 1977 Frankel City High School Homecoming Queen, Homily Hope Walpole, seek success, friendship and immortality in small town Texas. With the Colorado River valley serving as both backdrop and character, JoDell and Homily fight for their small-town legacy, their greatest inheritance – to have their stories told for years to come over a glass of tea at the Dixie Dog Diner. WITH REGARDS FROM FRANKEL CITY by Susan Overcash Walker A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Fine Arts Greensboro 2008 Approved by ____________________________________ Committee Chair © 2008 by Susan Overcash Walker To my parents. ii APPROVAL PAGE This thesis has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Chair __________________________________ Committee Members __________________________________ __________________________________ ______________________________ Date of Acceptance by Committee iii This is a work of fiction. Names, characters and events are the products of the author's imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No portion or whole of this work may be copied, reprinted, or distributed in any format, in any language, without the express written permission of the author. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I................................................................................................................................... 1 II................................................................................................................................. 12 III................................................................................................................................. 22 IV................................................................................................................................. 37 V................................................................................................................................. 48 VI................................................................................................................................. 55 VII................................................................................................................................. 68 VIII................................................................................................................................. 74 IX................................................................................................................................. 88 X................................................................................................................................. 99 XI............................................................................................................................... 111 XII............................................................................................................................... 124 XIII............................................................................................................................... 134 XIV............................................................................................................................... 147 XV............................................................................................................................... 151 XVI............................................................................................................................... 162 XVII............................................................................................................................... 171 XVIII............................................................................................................................... 179 XIX............................................................................................................................... 189 v XX............................................................................................................................... 197 XXI............................................................................................................................... 202 vi CHAPTER I Homily Hope Walpole stared at me and tittered high and loud, like a hyena. Her skin up close was as luminescent as it appeared from the stands at junior varsity football games. She raised her fist and it could have been to slap me but instead she slammed it down on the hood of Jimmy Don’s black Ford pick-up truck and said, with her mouth pursed like a cupie doll, “Crazy bitch.” Years later, when I told her why I’d been at her house that day, she smiled with the same cupie doll mouth and said, “Well, it wouldn’t have made a difference, would it? I still would have found out.” She leaned over and kissed me and it was back when I still didn’t know what to make of it, her kissing me, so instead of telling her I could’ve made a difference back then, that maybe her life would have been changed for the better, I just sat back and let her. It was my second mistake. My first was letting her stay with us at all. She showed back up in town on a cloudy day in late April 1988. I hadn’t seen Homily since our high school graduation a decade before, and to tell the truth, I never expected to see her again. She was one of those girls in high school who had their makeup done and their nails painted red and the whole world tied up in a bow in their hair. In high school I wore second-hand jeans and lived in my dead mother’s house with my godmother, Lillian Viola Aschelmann, and worked part time at her uncle’s diner. Homily Hope took off to Nashville after graduation like she was going to be some big star, but even a high school nobody like me knew better. Even at seventeen I knew just 1 because somebody can sing Barbara Ann in the school choir doesn’t mean they’re cut out for the big time. She turned up one day in April, and the only reason I knew was because Larry, who back then was my sort-of boyfriend, saw her come into town in a beat up ’79 Cadillac Seville. It was blue with long scratches down the driver’s side door and she was hanging a cigarette out her window and playing the radio so loud he could hear it across the street. Homily wasn’t ever quiet, not in choir or in real life, and it wasn’t any wonder half the town knew she was back before she drove that Seville across Main onto Travis and up into the hills like a reenactment of the 1977 Frankel City High School Homecoming parade. I remember the hawks were out the day she came back. I took off from the diner after we got the morning share of truckers and roughnecks but before the evening ones came in – back then, it seemed the later I stayed, the more likely the truckers were to stick a hand up my skirt and forget to leave a tip if I complained to Ramon, the kitchen manager, or Lil, if she wasn’t off drinking herself under the table at Randy Whitehouse’s bar. Mama had spent a fair amount of time with Lil at the bar, too, before she got sick with cancer and shriveled up on our living room couch. She died the year I turned fifteen and Lil moved into our house because I couldn’t afford to pay bills or taxes but didn’t have anywhere else to go. Anyway, I took off from the diner to avoid the late rush and saw Larry sitting on a bench outside the Busy Bee, the gift store on the business highway where tourists stopped to buy pieces of overpriced rusted barn tin to put on their walls. Larry waved me down 2 and when I rolled down the passenger window I saw them, the hawks, dipping down and floating up again. Mama would have said they were a bad omen but I thought it was just that time of year, when the bluebonnets and the Indian paintbrushes were starting to bloom, and maybe it would be nice to be up there in the current, thinking nothing but how light the clouds feel and the sun hot on your back. I liked the hawks. They told me it was time for spring. “You won’t believe who I just saw come through town,” Larry said, leaning on his elbows in the passenger window frame. “Who?” “Homily Hope Walpole.” “No. Really?” I jerked around. Without even trying I could see Homily, her mouth turning up at the corners and her laugh like a tree frog screaming as the sun went down behind the expensive houses on Rock Hammer Lake. “It was her. She came through town in a beat up Cadillac with the radio loud like there was no one else to listen.” “You don’t say,” I said, and then, because once Larry delivered his news he was done – he was never much of a talker – he pulled back from the window and looked off down the highway. He was only two years older than me, but when he turned his head, silver was starting in at his temples and the root of his neck. “I wonder what she’s doing here,” I said. “No telling.” Larry shrugged. “Are you working tonight?” “No. Lil made tortilla soup. You can come over