Fiction Page:
Jilly’s Turn
By Shirley Uphouse
While Jilly ran the vacuum cleaner and loaded the washer, she dreamed of being a writer. Like Danielle Steel or Sharyn McCrumb. She saw herself at her computer pounding out tearful stories of strong and beautiful women. Although she loved her life and family, she felt her creativity captive. She felt so ordinary. So average. Until recently her days were devoted to her family and home with no time to dream. Now Ruby, their youngest, was off to college, and nothing would prevent her from attaining her goal.
With Rick’s help she made the smaller bedroom her office with a desk, computer and a stack of blue-white paper. Visions of book signings and interviews with Oprah were soon to become real. In the library she found a book, Become a Published Writer in Thirty Days. Write what you know—your own life experiences. That was a problem. She felt her life experiences were of little interest to the reading public. Her favorite novels were of brave women who survived tragedies: deadly diseases, cheating husbands, childhood abuse. But she had a happy childhood with loving parents and they lived in a comfortable house in the better part of town. She was disgustingly healthy and her marriage of twenty years was the envy of all her friends.
“Don’t you ever wonder if Rick’s been unfaithful?” her friend asked.
Jilly replied the thought never crossed her mind.
The first day Jilly was alone in the house, she took her coffee to her office, loaded paper in the printer and stared at the blank monitor. The library book told her to start writing, and soon the story would unfold—your novel will write itself. For the next hour she wrote and rewrote opening lines for her novel, but each attempt died before the fourth paragraph. Nothing unfolded. She reached for the library book and read again the part where the story would write itself. Mid-morning her sister called about a baby shower for Jilly’s niece. Her concentration broken, she went to the kitchen for cup of coffee. Soon she was back at the computer willing her muse to step in with inspiration. But nothing she wrote seemed right, and line by line she typed and erased.
Tired of looking at the blank monitor and that irritating little blinker urging her to get on with it, she went to the kitchen for a sandwich. She pushed back in her recliner and picked up one of her favorite books, Tears for Mamma. The heroine, Margie, lost her husband in a farming accident leaving her with two small children. Then her mother died. Shortly after her mother’s service, Margie learned she’d been adopted. She was distraught by the loss of her husband and her adoptive mother; now she yearned to know her biological mother.
Margie spent months tangled in red tape and brick-wall leads while trying to handle two jobs to feed her little family. Finally she found her mother in a nearby city in a run-down, rat-infested apartment house by the railroad tracks. Her mother suffered from tuberculosis. Drowning in tears they cried together, and her mother died in Margie’s arms.
Jilly used half a box of tissue on that one. She could never write a story such as that? She needed to know a calamity first hand to inject truth into her novel. Misfortune! Disaster! Jilly, anxious for inspiration wondered—might she be adopted? When she was young girls fantasized they were adopted—that their real mother, a princess, lived far away in an exotic land. These fantasies were particularly popular when their everyday mothers denied them something they just had to have. It was a game, and Jilly joined in, but she preferred no fictional mother over her own.
Then she remembered that time, at a family picnic, when Aunt Grace offered her a piece of cake. Jilly declined, being too full of cherry pie and Aunt Grace said, “You must be adopted. No one in this family turns down my double-fudge cake.”
Could she really be adopted? Could it be a truth blocked from memory—too terrible to remember? But, no, it wasn’t possible. Jilly saw the family photo book filled with pictures of herself since babyhood. She was eager to dismiss that possibility for a moving novel.
Jilly recently read The Last to Know, about an unfaithful husband and of the night his wife released her wrath with ten bullets. The author left Jilly sobbing as they loaded her abused heroine into the police car. Why couldn’t she write a story with that kind of emotion? She knew why. She’d not lived tragedy. She needed a little tragedy in her life.
Grasping for a woeful story she remembered Kay’s comment about Rick’s faithfulness. Did she take him for granted? Perhaps Rick was having an affair. Right now. How would she know? There was that new secretary with the molasses voice, a voice entirely inappropriate for a business, in Jilly’s opinion. Rick told her Theresa was the best secretary he’d ever had. How had he looked when he said that? She wished she’d been more observing. He was now in his forties, and she knew what happens to men at that age. And he was handsome. Why, at this very moment he and Theresa might be at a motel on the edge of town. His vibrant blue Corvette was known all over town, so they would drive her car. With only an hour for lunch, between gropes and kisses, they’d share a sandwich or caught up in the heat of the moment forgo lunch altogether. That evening she left the dishes in the sink, joined Rick in the living room and curled up on the sofa next to him.
“Rick, are you happy with our life?”
“Happy? What do ya’ mean?” he asked as he clicked the remote for the basketball game.
“Happy, you know—with me?”
“Of course I am, honey. What a question.”
“Do you—love me?” she asked quietly.
Only then did he turn from the game to look at her. “Yes, I love you. Now what’s going on?”
“Oh nothing. A woman likes to hear that now and then.” She was instantly sorry she’d said that. Didn’t Rick show her in so many ways how much he loved her? Still…
“How’s Theresa working out? She sounds nice on the phone.”
“Great, she’s so organized.”
“Is she pretty?” Jilly nervously fingered the silk tassel on the pillow.
“OK, I get it now,” Rick said. With a slight grin he added. “Come down to the office tomorrow. We’ll go for lunch, and you can meet Theresa.”
The next day Jilly walked into Rick’s office.
“May I help you?”
Jilly felt shamed. Theresa was no beauty and approaching sixty if not already there. Theresa’s best feature was her voice. Although she was relieved her marriage was not in jeopardy, it looked as if she’d have to get inspiration for her story elsewhere.
The next morning she attacked her computer with renewed fervor determined to find the key to her novel. Just ten minutes into her story, her daughter, Ruby called, bubbling over with campus news. Then she received two telemarketer calls. Attempts to find the right words twice more that morning brought nothing but three more telephone calls after which she disconnected every phone in the house.
By noon, her head in a whirlpool of frustration, she took a sandwich to the living room and settled in her comfortable armchair. Jilly had no idea writing was this hard. Books she loved seemed to flow as easily as from a garden fountain. She must have missed something in the book about being published in thirty days.
She willed herself to concentrate on the beginning pages of her novel, and as she did her eyes fell upon a watercolor she and Rick bought at last spring’s art show. They’d watched the artist as he added a few deft touches bringing the painting to life. He made it look easy, and he was well paid for his work. Light from the window gleamed like a miniature spotlight on the painting, and Jilly was drawn to it. How she loved art class in high school. Her family raved about her talent. “Honey,” her mother said, “Aunt Sally says your pictures are every bit as good as that old hippy’s down at city hall.” And hadn’t she won $25.00 in the oil painting contest at the county fair?
Could it be the door to fame waited for her at the tip of a paint brush? Had she found the path to recognition beyond that of only a mother and a wife? She felt that little spotlight was meant to show her destiny. Jilly had found her true talent. She went upstairs, took a pad of paper from her desk and began a list of supplies she’d need from Kathy’s Art Supplies.