Original Fiction: Marion Brightley and her cows.
For once, some original fiction. I was at a writer's workshop at the University of Iowa, and there was a prompt to begin a novel.
This isn't one I'm going to finish, but it got a lot of laughs and some nice commentary, so I thought I'd share.
On Marion Brightley, 2,534 words, mostly featuring cows:
If she was honest with herself, which she often was not, Marion Brightley would have to admit there was only one thing she found truly difficult about city life. She could abide taxi cabs apparently bent on her destruction, and she tolerated city busses that arrived to finish the job. She had also acclimated rather rapidly to being able to do her shopping on Sunday evenings, a feat that had not been possible in the central Nebraska town she had arrived from, where blue laws from the nineteen teens closed everything but church and billiards on the Sabbath.
But the experience of dining out in this city, which garnered its name from an Indian wild onion and its attitude from the Irish, was proving more troublesome to come to terms with. In an effort to branch out-“experience Chicago!” her sister had importuned, when she learned of Marion’s sudden move-Marion had endeavored to find restaurants that offered more than cucumber sandwiches or wine and cheese, the apparently European fare her father had insisted upon serving in their obviously Midwestern home. And so, Marion been confronted with meat that was not cooked through, fish that was not cooked at all, and a few varieties of shellfish that she was quite sure were not even dead. If the taxi cabs and city busses had not managed to do the trick, Marion was sure that the formerly simple act of eating out would be the death of her.
This evening she was herself ensconced safely at a steak house, where she leaned back into the plush faux-leather of the banquette and sighed. The circumstances of her arrival in this oddly-named, well-peopled, gastroenterological disaster of a city were not something upon which she preferred to dwell, but she found they were inescapable when surrounded by well-framed photographs of steer.
Marion Brightley, nee Plater, had been born just outside Kansas City, Kansas, where she had been raised gently, surrounded by her parents’ livestock. Milton Plater owned a 60-head herd of steer, which he bullied and goaded into growing large enough to be shipped off to St. Louis to be cut up into other people’s lunches, dinners, and periodic breakfasts. Milton himself refused to eat meat, preferring what he referred to as an organic diet; his wife and daughters were not entirely sure Milton’s ideas were healthy, but the man insisted, and so for nineteen years, four months, and seventeen days, Marion Plater had lived on homegrown produce and illicit hotdogs before escaping by way of marriage to Howard Brightley.
Howard Brightley, rest his soul, had owned a 30-head herd of cows, which were the center of his local dairy operation just outside Lincoln, Nebraska. The dairy was too small to be much of a business, but Marion was happy with Howard, and she became accustomed to taking her supper of cucumber sandwiches and wine out in a picnic basket to enjoy the pleasant presence of the cows in the field.
Twice a month or so, Howard would join her for these little jaunts. “Marion,” he would say as she packed up her sandwiches and her basket and her folio, “make me up one, would you?” He was a genteel man, if one could be genteel in Nebraska and own, live, and smell like cows, and so Marion would slice more cucumber and spread more cream cheese and slice the crusts off just so, and they would go sit together among their herd, enjoying what successes they had, not worrying about a thing.
In retrospect, Marion ought to have worried about a few items here and there. The first thing that should have concerned her was the fact that after sixty-three years of living among them, she would begin to detest the smell of cows and long for the stench of steel smoke stacks or burning rubber. She had no idea what these things smelled like, there on the cow farm, but she read about them in Time Magazine every fourth Thursday of every month, and though the authors seemed to bemoan pollution’s mere existence, Marion found herself growing more curious about the feats of technology that could produce such odors.
Marion also should have worried about the cows themselves. She had always considered them gentle creatures, amenable to soft hands offering grass and not complaining when Howard milked their teats perhaps slightly too hard-oh, she did feel for the animals, yes she did. But she was forced to reconsider her position on cows when, on one of those rare afternoons when Howard would join her for sandwiches out on the grass, an unexpected clap of thunder startled an otherwise benign cow. The cow, who Marion had called Gracie-Lou for years, was in fact so startled that she ran straight over Howard Brightley and his rickety plastic chaise lounge.
The coroner had been about to cry when he snuffled into his white coat and reported to Marion that Howard had died from severe internal injuries brought on by trampling.
Marion decided at that moment to give up both cucumber sandwiches and cows. The only way to do that, she determined three days after Howard’s burial and two days after the largest estate sale her side of Nebraska had ever seen, was to relocate to a spot where neither could feature prominently in her life. And so, she had chosen Chicago.
On this particular evening, as she sat in what was advertised as the best steak house this side of the Mississippi, Marion contemplated her husband’s death. She certainly would not admit to herself or anyone else that it was somewhat fitting that a man who had spent his whole life on the underside of a cow had died on the underside of a cow, and so found herself trying out as many steak houses as possible. This was both an effort to avoid more uncooked fish and an endeavor of karmic payback. If God saw fit to take Howard from her by cow, by goodness she would eat as many of the animals as she could before God saw fit to take her, too.
She leaned over her menu as a waiter appeared at her arm. “May I take your order, ma’am?”
The young gentleman was solicitous, and whether it was his innate character or was being paid to be kind did not concern Marion. She looked over her reading glasses at the man and raised an eyebrow. “What’s the best here?” she asked, and if her tone was arch, the waiter did not comment.
“I favor the filet, ma’am,” he said.
“The filet,” Marion said. “What part of the cow is that?”
This may have fazed the waiter slightly. He shifted on his feet and adjusted the towel he carried over his arm. He did not carry a notebook, as his manager preferred that he memorize both the daily specials and the myriad orders from his thirteen tables. “Ma’am?”
Marion raised her other eyebrow, so she appeared nothing less than an irate schoolmarm. “I wish to know what part of the cow the filet is from,” she repeated. If it was odd that she, born and bred around cows, was not familiar with cuts of beef, she did not seem to take notice of this.
“I do not know, ma’am,” the waiter said. “The good part?”
This response was not good for the waiter. His manager was watching and would later dock his tips for failing to respond in a helpful manner or attempt to seek out the answer by asking a colleague or consulting the Internet or hollering at the chef. But Marion Brightley was also not pleased with his answer. “Young man,” she said, and the resemblance to the teacher she had never been became more apparent. “I am eating cow to revenge my husband’s death. It is thus important that I have enough information about my meal to know what kind of revenge I am getting. Do you understand?”
The waiter shook his head, eyes widening. Marion’s eyebrows came down and her mouth flattened into a small line. “Let me put this into words you can understand, then,” she said, pursing her lips. “If I want to take a bite out of a cow’s ass, what’s the most expedient way to do so?”
That evening, Marion ordered the Chateaubriand for two and ate most of it. She followed the meal with a cognac the manager recommended and provided on the house, and she found that while this dining experience had far surpassed the misguided attempt to eat oysters-which her sister later informed her were out of season and ought to be eaten only on the coasts, besides-it had not yet banished from her mind the feeling that dining out in the city was not to be taken lightly. It was, she was more than happy to admit to herself, a dangerous experience indeed.
**
Marion had a slight idea, or was beginning to get one, that she could not survive on cow alone. It was a simple matter of fact that the insurance money would not last forever, and so Marion was faced with the somewhat unfortunate conundrum of finding a way to support herself.
Much like the waiter at the steakhouse, the woman at the jobs hotline Marion had discovered in the phone book was less than helpful.
“So, you need a job.”
“Yes.”
“What skills do you have?”
“Skills.”
“Yeah.”
“I do not know precisely what you mean.”
“Look, lady, this is an unemployment line. You tell me what you can do, I tell you what we got that might suit you. What do you know how to do?”
This had Marion at something of a loss. She could skim the fat off milk, and had taken home economics in Kansas some forty five years before, but had spent the bulk of her life watching Howard tend to the cows and reading her magazines. She had not raised children, or darned socks, or sewed hems. She was not familiar with typewriters, computers, or the mechanics of farm equipment. She prided herself on never having needed to know how to do her own taxes, pay her own bills, or buy her own train tickets. Some of these were small tasks she was beginning to understand were necessary for her continued legal existence, and so she set her mind to paying the electric company on a monthly basis as if she were conquering Everest with the task. But most, she realized, she would never need to comprehend, and thus gave them not thought at all.
At long last she said, “I can cook and I can drive. And I do both very well.”
“Uh huh.”
It was not in her nature to ask for anything, except possibly better service from a lax waiter or for an offending object to be removed from her sight. Marion stayed silent. The woman on the job hotline stayed silent.
Marion could outlast anyone in such a battle, and this was no exception. There was a sigh on the other end of the phone.
“Lady,” said the job woman, whose name Marion had not bothered to remember, “we got an opening for a short order cook at a diner on 53rd street. You think you can handle that?”
Marion had no mortal clue what such a profession would entail, but was not about to turn down the only thing she had been able to find that might provide her with enough income to continue her steak-eating habits. “Yes,” she said into the receiver. “Of course.”
It was only much later, as she soaked in her lavender bath, that Marion considered what she might be forced to do in this new profession. Howard had insisted that they screen all new comedy movies, and so Marion had seen many a scene set in a waffle house. Invariably, the short order cook was a fat black woman with an attitude, who took great pleasure in ruining the protagonist’s eggs, either by spitting into them, overcooking them, undercooking them, or making such a racket that the protagonist-often, an attractive young man that probably needed the food-would grow so annoyed that he would leave without eating his breakfast at all.
Marion could not see herself in this picture. She considered herself a reasonable woman, and would never spit into anyone’s eggs. Well, certainly not those of a perfect stranger! She might consider her sister a relatively reasonable target for such harassment, but the two women spoke in such inane generalities as so not to touch off any lasting feuds, that Marion could hardly imagine what Helene might say that could entice her to such an act. And so, in contemplating the role of a short-order cook on 53rd street, a locale with which she was not familiar, Marion was most concerned with the prospect of cultivating an image not her own.
This, of course, raised the question of what Marion felt her image would be changed from, but she did not pause to consider the question.
As for the concept of cooking anything quickly, she believed she could accomplish this if it did not also entail cooking it well. Marion had been renowned in her small corner of Nebraska for one dish and one dish alone: the cucumber sandwiches she had found she adored once they were no longer forced upon her. She was a fair hand at microwave hotdogs and ratatouille, but most of the cooking she left up to Howard and Chang’s Kung Pao, which delivered from Lincoln with only a fifteen dollar charge round trip. But she was at least familiar with scrambled eggs and pancakes, which she had cobbled together when Helene and her husband Norman came to town from Tallahassee every Easter. Marion believed quite firmly that if no one at the diner sought gourmet cuisine, she ought to prove most successful.
Marion relaxed more deeply into her bath, wiggling her toes against the aromatic bubbles. If the cooking engagement was not successful, perhaps she could find work at a bath goods store, encouraging ladies much like her that their skin would be softer, their wrinkles would clear, their hair would regain its color, if only they bought the products she sold. Broccoli Face Mask! Brussels Sprout Body Wash! The ever-popular Rosemary Mint Foot Cream.
These were all products with which Marion was intimately acquainted. She frequently called Helene, roasting away in Tallahassee, to encourage her sister to try the delights of some new age cream. Lavender!
Perhaps she could introduce some of these ingredients to her eggs at the diner. The morning crowd would enjoy something new, she thought. What better than a pleasant rose petal omelet? Or, perhaps, a cucumber and cheese side salad? And perhaps she would have the opportunity to commit indignities against sides of beef, chopping, mincing, and otherwise mangling them into barely-edible meals. It was a delightful idea.
The thoughts whirled through her head as the bubbles around her began to fade into the water. As she toed open the drain and rose from the bath, Marion reiterated in her mind that she would be a fantastic success.
This isn't one I'm going to finish, but it got a lot of laughs and some nice commentary, so I thought I'd share.
On Marion Brightley, 2,534 words, mostly featuring cows:
If she was honest with herself, which she often was not, Marion Brightley would have to admit there was only one thing she found truly difficult about city life. She could abide taxi cabs apparently bent on her destruction, and she tolerated city busses that arrived to finish the job. She had also acclimated rather rapidly to being able to do her shopping on Sunday evenings, a feat that had not been possible in the central Nebraska town she had arrived from, where blue laws from the nineteen teens closed everything but church and billiards on the Sabbath.
But the experience of dining out in this city, which garnered its name from an Indian wild onion and its attitude from the Irish, was proving more troublesome to come to terms with. In an effort to branch out-“experience Chicago!” her sister had importuned, when she learned of Marion’s sudden move-Marion had endeavored to find restaurants that offered more than cucumber sandwiches or wine and cheese, the apparently European fare her father had insisted upon serving in their obviously Midwestern home. And so, Marion been confronted with meat that was not cooked through, fish that was not cooked at all, and a few varieties of shellfish that she was quite sure were not even dead. If the taxi cabs and city busses had not managed to do the trick, Marion was sure that the formerly simple act of eating out would be the death of her.
This evening she was herself ensconced safely at a steak house, where she leaned back into the plush faux-leather of the banquette and sighed. The circumstances of her arrival in this oddly-named, well-peopled, gastroenterological disaster of a city were not something upon which she preferred to dwell, but she found they were inescapable when surrounded by well-framed photographs of steer.
Marion Brightley, nee Plater, had been born just outside Kansas City, Kansas, where she had been raised gently, surrounded by her parents’ livestock. Milton Plater owned a 60-head herd of steer, which he bullied and goaded into growing large enough to be shipped off to St. Louis to be cut up into other people’s lunches, dinners, and periodic breakfasts. Milton himself refused to eat meat, preferring what he referred to as an organic diet; his wife and daughters were not entirely sure Milton’s ideas were healthy, but the man insisted, and so for nineteen years, four months, and seventeen days, Marion Plater had lived on homegrown produce and illicit hotdogs before escaping by way of marriage to Howard Brightley.
Howard Brightley, rest his soul, had owned a 30-head herd of cows, which were the center of his local dairy operation just outside Lincoln, Nebraska. The dairy was too small to be much of a business, but Marion was happy with Howard, and she became accustomed to taking her supper of cucumber sandwiches and wine out in a picnic basket to enjoy the pleasant presence of the cows in the field.
Twice a month or so, Howard would join her for these little jaunts. “Marion,” he would say as she packed up her sandwiches and her basket and her folio, “make me up one, would you?” He was a genteel man, if one could be genteel in Nebraska and own, live, and smell like cows, and so Marion would slice more cucumber and spread more cream cheese and slice the crusts off just so, and they would go sit together among their herd, enjoying what successes they had, not worrying about a thing.
In retrospect, Marion ought to have worried about a few items here and there. The first thing that should have concerned her was the fact that after sixty-three years of living among them, she would begin to detest the smell of cows and long for the stench of steel smoke stacks or burning rubber. She had no idea what these things smelled like, there on the cow farm, but she read about them in Time Magazine every fourth Thursday of every month, and though the authors seemed to bemoan pollution’s mere existence, Marion found herself growing more curious about the feats of technology that could produce such odors.
Marion also should have worried about the cows themselves. She had always considered them gentle creatures, amenable to soft hands offering grass and not complaining when Howard milked their teats perhaps slightly too hard-oh, she did feel for the animals, yes she did. But she was forced to reconsider her position on cows when, on one of those rare afternoons when Howard would join her for sandwiches out on the grass, an unexpected clap of thunder startled an otherwise benign cow. The cow, who Marion had called Gracie-Lou for years, was in fact so startled that she ran straight over Howard Brightley and his rickety plastic chaise lounge.
The coroner had been about to cry when he snuffled into his white coat and reported to Marion that Howard had died from severe internal injuries brought on by trampling.
Marion decided at that moment to give up both cucumber sandwiches and cows. The only way to do that, she determined three days after Howard’s burial and two days after the largest estate sale her side of Nebraska had ever seen, was to relocate to a spot where neither could feature prominently in her life. And so, she had chosen Chicago.
On this particular evening, as she sat in what was advertised as the best steak house this side of the Mississippi, Marion contemplated her husband’s death. She certainly would not admit to herself or anyone else that it was somewhat fitting that a man who had spent his whole life on the underside of a cow had died on the underside of a cow, and so found herself trying out as many steak houses as possible. This was both an effort to avoid more uncooked fish and an endeavor of karmic payback. If God saw fit to take Howard from her by cow, by goodness she would eat as many of the animals as she could before God saw fit to take her, too.
She leaned over her menu as a waiter appeared at her arm. “May I take your order, ma’am?”
The young gentleman was solicitous, and whether it was his innate character or was being paid to be kind did not concern Marion. She looked over her reading glasses at the man and raised an eyebrow. “What’s the best here?” she asked, and if her tone was arch, the waiter did not comment.
“I favor the filet, ma’am,” he said.
“The filet,” Marion said. “What part of the cow is that?”
This may have fazed the waiter slightly. He shifted on his feet and adjusted the towel he carried over his arm. He did not carry a notebook, as his manager preferred that he memorize both the daily specials and the myriad orders from his thirteen tables. “Ma’am?”
Marion raised her other eyebrow, so she appeared nothing less than an irate schoolmarm. “I wish to know what part of the cow the filet is from,” she repeated. If it was odd that she, born and bred around cows, was not familiar with cuts of beef, she did not seem to take notice of this.
“I do not know, ma’am,” the waiter said. “The good part?”
This response was not good for the waiter. His manager was watching and would later dock his tips for failing to respond in a helpful manner or attempt to seek out the answer by asking a colleague or consulting the Internet or hollering at the chef. But Marion Brightley was also not pleased with his answer. “Young man,” she said, and the resemblance to the teacher she had never been became more apparent. “I am eating cow to revenge my husband’s death. It is thus important that I have enough information about my meal to know what kind of revenge I am getting. Do you understand?”
The waiter shook his head, eyes widening. Marion’s eyebrows came down and her mouth flattened into a small line. “Let me put this into words you can understand, then,” she said, pursing her lips. “If I want to take a bite out of a cow’s ass, what’s the most expedient way to do so?”
That evening, Marion ordered the Chateaubriand for two and ate most of it. She followed the meal with a cognac the manager recommended and provided on the house, and she found that while this dining experience had far surpassed the misguided attempt to eat oysters-which her sister later informed her were out of season and ought to be eaten only on the coasts, besides-it had not yet banished from her mind the feeling that dining out in the city was not to be taken lightly. It was, she was more than happy to admit to herself, a dangerous experience indeed.
**
Marion had a slight idea, or was beginning to get one, that she could not survive on cow alone. It was a simple matter of fact that the insurance money would not last forever, and so Marion was faced with the somewhat unfortunate conundrum of finding a way to support herself.
Much like the waiter at the steakhouse, the woman at the jobs hotline Marion had discovered in the phone book was less than helpful.
“So, you need a job.”
“Yes.”
“What skills do you have?”
“Skills.”
“Yeah.”
“I do not know precisely what you mean.”
“Look, lady, this is an unemployment line. You tell me what you can do, I tell you what we got that might suit you. What do you know how to do?”
This had Marion at something of a loss. She could skim the fat off milk, and had taken home economics in Kansas some forty five years before, but had spent the bulk of her life watching Howard tend to the cows and reading her magazines. She had not raised children, or darned socks, or sewed hems. She was not familiar with typewriters, computers, or the mechanics of farm equipment. She prided herself on never having needed to know how to do her own taxes, pay her own bills, or buy her own train tickets. Some of these were small tasks she was beginning to understand were necessary for her continued legal existence, and so she set her mind to paying the electric company on a monthly basis as if she were conquering Everest with the task. But most, she realized, she would never need to comprehend, and thus gave them not thought at all.
At long last she said, “I can cook and I can drive. And I do both very well.”
“Uh huh.”
It was not in her nature to ask for anything, except possibly better service from a lax waiter or for an offending object to be removed from her sight. Marion stayed silent. The woman on the job hotline stayed silent.
Marion could outlast anyone in such a battle, and this was no exception. There was a sigh on the other end of the phone.
“Lady,” said the job woman, whose name Marion had not bothered to remember, “we got an opening for a short order cook at a diner on 53rd street. You think you can handle that?”
Marion had no mortal clue what such a profession would entail, but was not about to turn down the only thing she had been able to find that might provide her with enough income to continue her steak-eating habits. “Yes,” she said into the receiver. “Of course.”
It was only much later, as she soaked in her lavender bath, that Marion considered what she might be forced to do in this new profession. Howard had insisted that they screen all new comedy movies, and so Marion had seen many a scene set in a waffle house. Invariably, the short order cook was a fat black woman with an attitude, who took great pleasure in ruining the protagonist’s eggs, either by spitting into them, overcooking them, undercooking them, or making such a racket that the protagonist-often, an attractive young man that probably needed the food-would grow so annoyed that he would leave without eating his breakfast at all.
Marion could not see herself in this picture. She considered herself a reasonable woman, and would never spit into anyone’s eggs. Well, certainly not those of a perfect stranger! She might consider her sister a relatively reasonable target for such harassment, but the two women spoke in such inane generalities as so not to touch off any lasting feuds, that Marion could hardly imagine what Helene might say that could entice her to such an act. And so, in contemplating the role of a short-order cook on 53rd street, a locale with which she was not familiar, Marion was most concerned with the prospect of cultivating an image not her own.
This, of course, raised the question of what Marion felt her image would be changed from, but she did not pause to consider the question.
As for the concept of cooking anything quickly, she believed she could accomplish this if it did not also entail cooking it well. Marion had been renowned in her small corner of Nebraska for one dish and one dish alone: the cucumber sandwiches she had found she adored once they were no longer forced upon her. She was a fair hand at microwave hotdogs and ratatouille, but most of the cooking she left up to Howard and Chang’s Kung Pao, which delivered from Lincoln with only a fifteen dollar charge round trip. But she was at least familiar with scrambled eggs and pancakes, which she had cobbled together when Helene and her husband Norman came to town from Tallahassee every Easter. Marion believed quite firmly that if no one at the diner sought gourmet cuisine, she ought to prove most successful.
Marion relaxed more deeply into her bath, wiggling her toes against the aromatic bubbles. If the cooking engagement was not successful, perhaps she could find work at a bath goods store, encouraging ladies much like her that their skin would be softer, their wrinkles would clear, their hair would regain its color, if only they bought the products she sold. Broccoli Face Mask! Brussels Sprout Body Wash! The ever-popular Rosemary Mint Foot Cream.
These were all products with which Marion was intimately acquainted. She frequently called Helene, roasting away in Tallahassee, to encourage her sister to try the delights of some new age cream. Lavender!
Perhaps she could introduce some of these ingredients to her eggs at the diner. The morning crowd would enjoy something new, she thought. What better than a pleasant rose petal omelet? Or, perhaps, a cucumber and cheese side salad? And perhaps she would have the opportunity to commit indignities against sides of beef, chopping, mincing, and otherwise mangling them into barely-edible meals. It was a delightful idea.
The thoughts whirled through her head as the bubbles around her began to fade into the water. As she toed open the drain and rose from the bath, Marion reiterated in her mind that she would be a fantastic success.