FINDING EVELYN by Sheryl Louise Rivett A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of George Mason University in Partial Fulfillment of The Requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing Committee: ___________________________________________ Director ___________________________________________ ___________________________________________ ___________________________________________ Department Chairperson ___________________________________________ Dean, College of Humanities and Social Sciences Date: _____________________________________ Fall Semester 2015 George Mason University Fairfax, VA Finding Evelyn A Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts at George Mason University by Sheryl Louise Rivett Master of Arts Johns Hopkins University, 2012 Bachelor of Individualized Studies George Mason University, 2004 Director: Helon Habila Ngalabak, Associate Professor Department of English Fall Semester 2015 George Mason University Fairfax, VA Copyright 2015 Sheryl Louise Rivett All Rights Reserved ii DEDICATION This is dedicated to my daughters. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my thesis director, Helon Habila Ngalabak, for his continued support and sage advice; my writing group for their generous critiques; the Vermont Studio Center Writing Residencies, for providing a creative haven in northern Vermont; Trudy Hale, for providing a quiet and nurturing space at The Porches; and my family for their willingness to let me disappear into Evelyn’s world. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract................................................................................................................………vi 1. Chapter 1 ................................................................................................................. …1 2. Chapter 2 .................................................................................................................. .13 3. Chapter 3 .................................................................................................................. .16 4. Chapter 4 ................................................................................................................... 42 5. Chapter 5 ................................................................................................................... 45 6. Chapter 6 ................................................................................................................... 57 7. Chapter 7 ................................................................................................................... 60 8. Chapter 8 ................................................................................................................... 77 9. Chapter 9 ................................................................................................................... 81 10. Chapter 10 ................................................................................................................. 88 11. Chapter 11 ................................................................................................................. 91 12. Chapter 12 ............................................................................................................... 104 13. Chapter 13 ............................................................................................................... 112 14. Chapter 14 ............................................................................................................... 135 15. Chapter 15 ............................................................................................................... 139 16. Chapter 16 ............................................................................................................... 147 17. Chapter 17 ............................................................................................................... 163 18. Chapter 18 ............................................................................................................... 167 v ABSTRACT FINDING EVELYN Sheryl Rivett George Mason University, 2015 Thesis Director: Helon Habila Ngalabak This thesis is the first half of a novel. The novel follows a heroine’s journey plot structure and includes the stories of not only the main protagonist, Evelyn, but also the stories of her two mothers, Helen and Elizabeth (Bess). The primary story is set in the early 1950s and alternates between Washington D.C. and central Virginia. The mothers’ stories are told in first person and the protagonist’s story is told in close third person. The author explores agency in each of the main character’s lives through this character-driven novel. During the first half of the twentieth century, women often had limited choices and opportunities, and those choices often had far-reaching effects—effects with which the three main characters must come to terms. Given that the novel takes place in the early 1950s, an important time period in the growing civil rights movement, race, prejudice, and confusing social mores are central to the story. SECTION 1 CHAPTER ONE Evelyn 1952 When Evie found her, she was curled up in a ball beside the pink toilet, its seat up, its basin ringed with rust. Her once fiery red hair, now diluted with streaks of white from middle age, fanned out beside her on the tile. An angel fallen or a newborn trying to re-enter the womb. Still dressed in a nightgown, her breasts tugged against the front buttons, strained and bulging like eyes. She lay motionless; her skin was ashen and a line of spit crusted at the corner of her mouth. The minutes slowed to a crawl in the time that it took for her to realize the red running across the tile was blood. Her mama’s blood. When she lifted her by the shoulders, the metal of one of her daddy’s old razorblades glinted on the baby pink tile below. Her wrists still leaked blood, a slow trickle like the brook that gurgled behind the house. She was breathing, but unconscious. “Mama!” she pushed down the hysteria, pushed back the scream that had frozen in her throat. Working quickly, she ripped towels with a strength she didn’t realize she possessed. She tied the strips around her mama’s wrists and dragged her across the wooden floor until she reached the phone in the bedroom. Behind her, her mama’s bare feet bumped along the ground, moving from side to side, lifeless and limp like a giant rag 1 doll. Keeping pressure on the makeshift bandages to staunch the bleeding, she cradled the receiver beneath her chin and dialed Doc Wahlberg’s number. A steely calm settled over her. The day, she felt, could be hung on a certain inevitability. At some level, she’d known it would come, much like she’d known as a child that her daddy would never leave her mama, even when her behavior would have driven other men away, much like she’d known that her mama never quite fit: in Nelson County, in Brownsville— surrounded by all those fruit trees, all that promising, shiny fruit. Her daddy always told her that her mama’s demons ran deep; it was their job to help her contain them. That morning, as the autumn light cast a tenuous warmth across the room, Evie imagined a few of the demons were released, moving slow and thick through the valleys of grout between the tiles. Her daddy was gone six months now, cold in the ground at St. Mary’s, and Evie lived in Washington, several hours by train, a distance that suddenly seemed far. She couldn’t let her die like this, with the indignity of it all, couldn’t let her give up on things so easily. Her daddy wouldn’t have wanted it. She pressed the cloth against her mama’s wounds until her nail beds turned blue. Doc Wahlberg arrived after what seemed an eternity. “Doc!” His boots sounded heavy on the stairs. “Evelyn,” he said gravely while pushing his broad frame through the doorway. Evie watched him take stock of her mama, motionless and ghostlike there on the floor. He shook his head and readjusted the dark hat on his head a few times. Before he 2 arrived, Evie had pushed the cotton nightgown down to cover her mama’s legs and, with only the one hand, her other still pressing on the scraps of towel, struggled to close the top buttons on the nightgown bodice. Her fingers had gone cold and her hands shook as she worked, but when Doc Wahlberg arrived, she was glad she’d provided her mama with that bit of modesty. He leaned over her now and pressed a well-manicured finger against her neck and spread a hand wide across her chest. Obviously satisfied she was alive, he took off his coat and pulled open a leather bag. “You’ve stopped the bleeding then,” he said, pulling out his materials with practiced ease. Evie nodded, her throat suddenly dry and words hard to come by. She crossed her arms and nervously ran a finger over the vaccine scar on her tricep, a small circle of bumps left by the bifurcated needle Doc Wahlberg had used when she was a child. With his enormous presence, his deep and serious voice, he’d slightly terrified Evie when she was young. That morning she found him a comfort. “You did a fine job handling things now,” he said as he examined the scraps of towel wound tightly around her mother’s wrists. His southern twang reminded Evie that she wasn’t in Washington. Already her ears had become accustomed to the perfectly blended sounds of the city, a place where accents only lingered as faint reminders of a person’s beginnings. “She’s lucky you arrived when you did.” He worked in silence, cleaning and stitching her mama’s wrists, the thin needle catching the rose-colored