To Read Stuff
I could say that it's in honor of me having re-started work on my second novel, To Feel Stuff, for the first time in eight months that I am posting the first chapter, but it's really half my enthusiasm at having returned to my favorite-titled book ever, and half my desire to watch For Love Or Money at 10. You understand. There's something about bachelorette Rachel's teeth that's keeping me viewing. When she does that toothy-gummy grin in the confessional after saying something devious about money over love, I spend the next few minutes trying to figure out what it is about her mouth that screams character to me. I see those teeth, and I feel like I can see an inner truth. Anyway, here's the first chapter.
TO FEEL STUFF
©Andrea Seigel, 2003
Chapter 1
“There is nothing in this world I hate more than a capella!” Elodie’s mind screamed as her body pressed against the window screen.
She heard each guy’s voice tunneling separately through each hole and experienced sheer rage at the singer responsible for the highest “oh-way-oh-way-oh’s” of the song about the jungle, the one she remembered from a mouthwash commercial in the mid-nineties. Computer animated bottles swung through the jungle on vines, and this guy was throwing his voice through the air in the same way, just flinging it out. She couldn’t see him, but she saw him. She knew his mouth was opened unnaturally wide and when he made the “way” sounds, it pulled back into a desperate boomerang shape that made him look like he was blowing a giant. His eyes would go so wide that the cold would slap his eyeballs over and over again, a wintery dad whacking the asses of two spastic kids. “Spastic kids asking for it,” she thought.
When the singer plunged into his second round of jungle calls she saw him tearing up, his sight going blurry. This infuriated Elodie because she knew that A Cappella Guy liked this effect. He thought it made him look holy, which was perfect because his jungle song (a lower voice started the first verse: “Jungle life, I’m far away from nowhere, On my own like Tarzan Boy”) was like a prayer that had to get out to the world. The campus wasn’t enough. He had to sing beyond Brown University, beyond Providence, beyond Rhode Island because there were clinically depressed people in Boise and starving children in actual jungles that could be moved by the force of his melodic, yet primitive exertions. He wanted to turn the music inside of him into a rock hard snowball and pelt it at the world.
Elodie’s fingers curled at the screen. “Oh you motherfucker, I’ll get you,” she howled loudly in her own head, loud enough that for a few seconds, she blocked out the voices.
She had been standing at the window, having such a good time. The freezing air had been coming in steadily through the screen, turning itself into thousands of invisible needles and poking her in each pore. This felt great. When extreme temperatures slammed her from the outside, the inside of her hurt less.
The snowflakes coated the trees, forming icy fishing nets. Fires burned all over Providence, some in colonial stone fireplaces and some in every room of the cracking homes on the East side. This is where the poor families with poor heaters had been waking up in the middle of the night, finding out what preachers mean when they say the pits of hell are both fiery and pitch black at the very same time. The toddlers and the dogs were the ones who never got out in time (or who were never gotten out in time), and the next morning the beams would smolder and the newscasters would report bad wiring or flammable items resting against the source of heat.
Elodie wasn’t sure which type of fire she was smelling- that of human/animal misfortune or that of chestnuts roasting- but the warm smell of smoke went straight into her nostrils and filled her all the same. With every breath inward she felt like the fuzz inside her nose was being pleasantly singed, and she also felt like the tuberculosis was being crowded out. It was then she pictured the inside of her lungs as a Navajo sweat lodge, and the TB was some loser who wore Tibetan prayer beads, believed in wearing “I believe in whirled peas” shirts, and had come into the tent to plumb the depths of his theories about himself. He wasn’t welcome. He was an alien there. If she could just make his eyes tear up too, she could get him gone. Elodie breathed in again more heavily to smoke the TB out, but then the inside of her chest kicked back and the pain made her fall down. She hit her forehead on the windowsill and knew there would be a bruise tomorrow.
Still, the “oh-way-oh-way-ohs” continued and barreled their way into the infirmary, even locating Elodie when her ears were an inch from the floor. She writhed.
Sarah Greenwald, nurse practitioner, entered the room at just this moment with a ceramic bowl of macaroni and cheese balanced in both palms. She didn’t scream when she saw Elodie on the floor, but instead sucked in air and flew to her side. Now balancing the macaroni and cheese in one hand and pulling back Elodie’s black bangs with her other, she asked, “Is it the fibromyalgia?”
Elodie writhed some more, the sponges inside her chest disintegrating and taking the world with them.
Sarah. “Your heart? The anemia?”
The voices belted, “Hide and seek, we play along while rushing cross the forest,” some with vibratos so thick that Elodie felt them shaking in her stomach. She was involuntarily digesting them. As a child her dad read her Good Night Moon and she had always felt sick at the line, “Good night mush,” complete with an illustrated bowl of mush on the page. Whenever she heard that line she felt she had swallowed it all and that shit grew warm inside her like baker’s yeast.
“The TB?” Sarah questioned.
“It’s my lungs. And those voices!” she said just as there was a painful, crunching thwack outside and the voices stopped. Then wild yelling started, but all that registered with Elodie was the complete absence of song.
Sarah curled Elodie up into a sitting position, still holding the macaroni and cheese, and asked, “The voices?”
And Elodie wanted to articulate how those Jungle Boys had turned annoyance into horror in record time, and how she had felt that their song encroached on her territory, and how much she had just been wishing that someone would really send them into a jungle. They could sing in the canopy for all she fucking cared. But the usual thing happened and she found that when she went to open her mouth, all feeling subsided and she was left with nothing to say.
Elodie’s mom wanted to name her Melody and her dad wanted to name her Ellen (after his grandma), so they compromised.
Brava chica! Loved the part about the families in cracking houses with bad heaters. Nice touch. Excellent introduction to another character with an interesting and complex inner life.
More please.
Posted by: susie | July 27, 2004 at 11:02 AM
I guess "Don't Worry, Be Happy" would have been too obvious an a capella song choice.
But while we're mentioning favorite parts, I'll take: "Elodie wasn’t sure which type of fire she was smelling- that of human/animal misfortune or that of chestnuts roasting"
At least now there will be another Elodie besides Elodie Bouchez.
Posted by: Craig | July 27, 2004 at 11:27 AM
What about Elodie Generous?
Sorry, my bad.
I love the chapter.
Posted by: Mike | July 27, 2004 at 02:33 PM
Very nice. What is the your favorite-titled book ever?
Posted by: Sean Carman | July 27, 2004 at 10:23 PM