Drusilla (Part One)

Part I

...

That’s as far as I ever get on the first day of working on a new book. That’s as far as I ever get on the first week of working on a new book. The second week is a different story of cause, no pun intended. The second week is when I really get down to writing. The second week is the week I tell myself just to face the blank page and write about what I know. That’s what I do, I write about what I know, what I see. It’s not biographical. It’s not about me, my mother or my father. Things happen in my books that have never happened to me. People get married in them and devoiced, neither of which I have done. People die and I’ve most certainly not done that yet. But I see the world, and I write that world. I don’t go for the whole, the world is in the eye of the beholder, people delude themselves, people lie to themselves. How do I know I don’t lie to myself? I don’t know.

You wouldn’t call me an optimist, not by any stretch of the imagination. Some people try to ignore the uglier things, but I look at them. I study them. I write about them. I know they are real and I don’t try to wish them away. If they’re part of this world, they’re part of this world. It doesn’t help to close your eyes.

I don’t know if I’ve always been like this, seeing the world in what some might call a negative attitude. When I was little, well all children six and younger go about in their own little haze. And every child of the age of six gets a shocking reality check when they enter school. I don’t know how it starts. Which child first comes out of their blissful haze and figures out that it’s a dog eat dog world, but they do, and the moment they do they start about making the others realize it.

The main feeling I remember having during my teens is that of not caring. I was not happy and I was not unhappy. I just got up, eat, went to school, came home, did my home work, went to bed, repeat until graduation.

My father was a judge. After leaving school he quickly rose through the ranks and seemed to be meant for great things. Old highschool and collages teachers were keeping an eye on him so they’d know when they could start boasting about having taught him, and his parents were beaming with pride and talking the ears off of anyone foolish enough to come over to dinner at their house.

Mother was his undoing though. They had met at Colombia, and had married between collage and law school. My mother was a lawyer, who wasn’t quite as successful at her job as my father was at his. They were both offered a job at the same time. My father in Washington, my mother in a high profile law firm with a branch in Arizona, which she was sure was going to be the job that would give her career the push it needed.

I was about ten then. They decided they’d accept both jobs and somehow try and make it work out. It didn’t really. They tried it for two years and their marriage crumbled. At last they saw it was divorce or one of them quitting their job. My mother said they’re entire marriage had revolved around my father’s career at that it was time it revolved around her’s, though, needless to say, she did not say it in quite those words.

I suppose absence really does make the heart grow founder, for at last, after another half a year of bickering about it, my father decided to give up his job in Washington and move to Arizona to be with my mother. I think father was as surprised by his decision as mother was.

Well, father moved, got a fairly decent job in Arizona, his parents stopped boasting, his teachers stopped waiting and my father settled down to what was, in his opinion, a nothing job, and as the years moved by it became more and more apparent that my mother would never get anything better then the job she had and as time moved on my father grew more resentful, my mother grew more tired from trying to excel in something she was never meant to do and I grew up.

For collage I went to Middlebury in Vermont, you can’t get much farther from Arizona and stay in the country. I studied creative writing. After I graduated I moved to New York. I lived there for a about two years, writing a little, working as a waitress. Drifting.

On my twenty-fourth birthday I got a call from my Aunt Hilary. She owns a small English theater in Vienna, Austria with Uncle Mark. She’d heard from some relative or other, probably from one of my many cousins, that I wasn’t enjoying New York very much, and her idea of a birthday present was to invite me to come live with her and Uncle Mark.

Now let me explain about Aunt Hilary. Don’t get me wrong, she’s very nice, she’s very sweet and so on and so forth. But she’s one of those people who I mentioned at the beginning who deludes themselves into thinking everything’s great. And Uncle Mark isn’t much better.

All things being equal I would have declined politely, but, as I firmly believe, things are never equal. I wasn’t caring for New York, and I figured if I moved in with them I wouldn’t have to work and I could get down to some serious writing. So I accepted.

It went fairly well. Aunt Hilary and Uncle Mark have always been fairly easy people to live with, and they tried their hardest to make everything feel like home for me. They were at their theater most of the day and so I got to remain at the house, writing. My first year living with them I wrote, ‘The Grey of the World’ and got it published.

It would be a bit strong to say ‘The Grey of the World’ was an instant hit, but it did establish me has a writer with a fair amount of readers so that when my next book, ‘The Families’, was published it sold quite well.

I then followed that with ‘The Women of Troy’. The side of the battle of Troy so often disregarded. It was quite a successful book, but I was not quite satisfied with it. It was proclaimed as the greatest feminist work of our time, and that wasn’t really what I was aiming for. It’s not that I’m against women’s rights but I feel we’re got them, let’s stop complaining about it already.

I followed ‘The Women of Troy’ with my masterpiece, ‘Strangle the People’, which New York Times called the most unflinching and brutal commentary of our time. And Washington Post proclaimed as a ‘masterpiece which forces your eyes open to the corruption around us’.

I knew Aunt Hilary and Uncle Mark didn’t really like my books. The claimed the did, they read them and praised them, but it was clear they didn’t like them. It was clear their praise was the praise of an Aunt and Uncle indulging their niece and nothing else. In fact I could tell they were worried about me. They thought I was too negative. That’s why they decided to introduce me to Kyle.