Fiction Writing 4: Mona and Me
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl
The Barbarians, from Provincetown, MA
But many of the specific details I’ve described are invented. The actual events were more complicated and less dramatic, as actual events always are, so I have taken liberties to make a better narrative. I’ve told a story in order to make a case for the truth. I recognize the contradiction here.
—Ted Chiang, “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling”
The above lines from Chiang’s story about the differences between oral traditions and written ones cut to the heart of why fiction has always intrigued me. Chiang’s words got me thinking about one of the stories I published decades ago and how it allowed me to tackle a vague feeling about a complicated issue in ways that never would have worked if I’d tried to deal with the subject head-on.
In the story, the narrator, a straight young man, finds himself uncomfortable with his “category” and is struggling to find his place. Like Chiang says, many of the specific details are invented, but the case for the truth that I was investigating in the story ended up being a revelation that gave me—a new father at the time, another role where I was struggling to find my footing and identity—new language for understanding how to navigate complex gender issues.
Mona and Me
Although Mona did wonders for my vocabulary, words to describe her remain elusive. Onomatopoetic comes to mind, though that one might take some explaining.
Mona and her mother had recently moved into a beach cottage near my house, and her arrival did not go unnoticed. As they say around here, she was under full sail. She had auburn hair, chestnut eyes—the works. Wherever she went, heads turned. Being from Quebec, she spoke English with a French accent, which only added to her allure. To us local boys, Mona was quite a mystery. What bewildered people most about her, however, was the crush she had for me.
Such news I should have welcomed. After all, Mona was everything the magazines and the beer commercials promised. But there was one problem. You see, Mona used words like phenomenal whenever she got the chance—as in, "Isn't this weather phenomenal?" or, "That's a phenomenal song!" Guys more talented in these areas I’m sure would have dismissed such a trivial detail, but to me, for some reason, it was a big deal. Though I was captivated by her flowing hair and by the way her Levi’s behaved when she walked, thoughts of how she learned to talk like that gave me chills.
When people asked why I didn't jump at the chance to be with her, I shrugged. This was the seventies, mind you, and sex was a cinch. At least that’s what we thought. After all, we had the pill and Roe vs. Wade. Barring allergies to penicillin, you were home free. Apparently, I just wasn't with it. "You're crazy!" guys said. My mere presence made them shake their heads, scuff their feet, and spit.
As you might expect, my sexual preference quickly became a source of speculation. While I could have spent my time with Mona, instead, I spent most of it with two guys who happened to be named Peter and Paul. This combination of unfortunate circumstances naturally inspired someone (Peter, I think) with the brilliant idea to start calling me Mary. Difficult as it may be for a teenage boy to live with such a name, that was nothing compared with the singing. Choruses of “Puff the Magic Dragon” and “Leaving on a Jet Plane” followed me everywhere. Seeing Mona, then, only reminded me what a phenomenal disappointment I was to my gender.
Why Mona liked me so much mystified everyone. With my wild, shoulder-length hair, threadbare jeans, ragged T-shirt, and problem acne, I was certainly nothing to look at. Stunningly non-athletic, my most memorable sports moment came during my mercifully short little league career when, somehow, I managed to catch a fly to right after it had bounced off my head. Scholastically, I was a straight B-minus student whose interests included listening to loud music and reading about listening to loud music, and as a result, most school days involved hours of drumming on various desk tops, interrupted briefly by lunch. Speaking of food, my culinary preferences back then rarely strayed from the kinds of meals most commonly served in paper bags. As for transportation, my only wheels were attached to a rusty English 3-speed (perfect if you’re a nun, even better if your name is Mary). Worst of all, having a conversation with me in those days took the same kind of motivation a person needs to scrape paint.
So there was really no explaining it. Maybe Mona liked me not so much for who I was as for who I wasn’t, and to her I wasn’t Peter or Paul or any of the other townies who at the slightest glimpse of her suddenly turned into chimpanzees. For instance, there was the day some of us were hanging out in front of the fire station helping the volunteers wash down the engines. At some point, Paul saw Mona walk by. Immediately, he dropped to his knees on the wet pavement and crawled halfway down the street after her, calling, "Moww-nahh! Moww-nahh!" The rest of the boys whooped and hollered. They wolf-whistled and called out things like, "Hubba-hubba," and "Woof-woof." If she'd been there any longer, they'd have swung from ladder rungs and loped along telephone lines.
Though this was typical of their behavior, it’s not as simple as you think. See, if your house were ablaze, these guys would walk through flames to save your dog. If you crashed your car, they’d stop your bleeding with their bare hands and say soothing things to you on the way to the hospital. Most of them married young and have stayed married. You can see them with their kids at T-ball games and at Sunday school pageants. Maybe they imagined Mona was somehow flattered or that their act was all in good fun. Who knows? Even though I kept out of it, the difference between me and the others probably wasn't so great. I'm sure all our dreams about her replayed pretty much the same tired, chimp-like plot. Except in my dreams, Mona was unusually quiet.
Mona and I saw each other often enough that summer. Some days, as I rode my nun bike past her house, she'd be outside reading. She always smiled and waved. I rang my bicycle bell in reply as I weaved along the winding road. We bumped into each other at the general store, the post office, the marina, at Spectacle Pond. "How fortuitous!" she said. Once, she called me peripatetic, another time ubiquitous.
Rrring-rrring, I answered.
It was toward the end of summer when I met her at the Tastee Freez. She bought a vanilla cone and held it out for me to taste. What happened next isn’t easy to explain. Maybe it was those loose strands of hair that blew across her face so perfectly. Maybe it was the impending threat of going back to a high school where I'd forever more be known as Mary. More likely, though, it had finally dawned on me that when Mona left, I was going to miss her. Whatever the reason, I soon found myself wiping ice cream from my chin.
Together, we licked that vanilla ice cream down to the cone. She bit off a piece, then offered me a bite. When I accepted, she pushed hard, gleefully stuffing my mouth full.
"Let's walk," she said as she took my hand and tugged me toward the beach. Still chewing, I obliged.
Why she all of a sudden acted so bold, I can't say. Maybe she was lonely or bored, or maybe, like me, she was just drunk with the end of summer. So we walked and, mostly, she talked. She said the surf sounded mellifluous. She said the sunset was magnifique.
When we reached a secluded spot, she stopped, looked at me, and smiled as if to say, Just what does a girl have to do? As she leaned closer, I kissed her lips and found myself reeling in a whirl of Coppertone lotion, honeysuckle perfume, Tame cream rinse, and soft-serve vanilla ice cream.
Suddenly, I felt a sharp jab to my ribs. With the wind nearly knocked out of me, I realized I’d just been punched.
“What took you so long?” she scolded.
What could I say? She was right, of course. The electric chair was too kind a fate for someone like me, someone who could fritter away an entire summer of evenings like this. So without flinching, I pulled her close and kissed her again. Immediately, all hostilities ceased.
Though our days were few, Mona and I met several more times before she left. On our last night, she kept talking about what a shame it was we'd wasted so much time. Squandered. Lamentable. Words like that. It made her melancholic. It all seemed so inauspicious. Some type of reparation seemed requisite. Obligatory, in fact.
“You’re not going to hit me again, are you?” I asked.
There's not an awful lot more to tell, really. Although we were together all night, and although I did learn a few French words that to the best of my recollection were never covered in school, we never did quite get to the main event. Strangely enough, most of the time, I don't regret it. Just add it to the list of things about Mona that I never really understood.
What's left to say about Mona? It's true—she was phenomenal. But by the next summer, we each had someone else. Since she had skipped a grade or two, she went to college early and became a professor herself in record time. When I finished college, I came back here. I still see her occasionally when she visits her mother. She waves when I drive by in my pickup.
Beep-beep, I reply.
Once while reshingling her mother's cottage, I heard someone behind me humming "If I Had a Hammer." Startled, I turned around.
"Hi, Mary,” Mona said.
It took me a moment to recover from seeing her so suddenly and so close.
“I see you’re still the silent type,” she said. She smiled and we talked a little about work and kids, but before long, we ran out of news and just grinned foolishly at each other. Finally, she said, "Well—it’s nice to see you again," and turned to go. As she left, I wanted to say something that would make her stay longer, but the words escaped me.
Not until later as I drove my two-year-old daughter home from daycare did I realize why Mona remains in my thoughts through so many years. My daughter was talking about balloons, saying she'd like a blue one. "Yes, Lilly," I was saying. "Yes. We'll see." I barely paid attention, thinking instead about Mona, searching for whatever it was I wished I'd said. Determined, Lilly kept talking:
"Actually," she said, "I want a green one."
Actually. That's what got to me. I'd never heard her say that word before. I didn't know she knew it, never mind how to use it. What that word meant, I think, was something like, Look at me, and when she said it, I caught a glimpse of someone I'd never seen.
Don't stop, I wanted to say. Tell me everything. But it was too late. We were parent and child again, and what I said instead sounded more like, "Did you have fun today?" and "What would you like for supper?"
It was a strange realization, as if my daughter, in her own way, already knew what Mona all along had been trying so hard to drive through my thick skull, as if what she needed most was just the right words, words to defend herself against invisibility, against the likes of me.
So instead of going home, Lilly and I turned toward town. I knew it would take a while in these small towns at this late hour to find a good balloon, but we wouldn’t stop until we found one just the right color, just the right shape, one that would tug at its string like a bird.
Notes
This connects with why, as an English composition instructor, I often focused on creative writing moves, including personal narrative and a focus on images and description (as seen in newsletters 18 & 19). This gives students “liberties to make a better narrative,” as Chiang says, and to make “a case for the truth,” which not only helps students write better essays but also expands their writing tool kit in ways that help them develop a voice and signature style. I see no contradiction here.
Side note—it’s always weird to read something I wrote from long ago when I was someone else, but this is the published version almost intact. I made a couple of small edits, then forced myself not to revise the entire thing.
Oh, the true stuff? The balloon conversation is true. “Mona” is a combination of girls I knew, one of whom spoke that way and who was into me for unknown reasons, but the reality was less dramatic, as Chiang says. And yes, it’s true, for the reasons stated, people called me Mary.