Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life by Dani Shapiro Read Free Book Online Page B

the keys on her Smith Corona, the high, thin ding of the carriage as she pushed the return lever at the end of each line. In her office—which shared a wall with my bedroom—she sat behind a big wooden desk piled with papers and boxes. She 55
    Dani Shapiro
    made carbon copies of everything she wrote. Not an inch of the surface of the desk was ever visible. If I close my eyes now, I can hear her. She was a very fast typist, with long, strong fingers. The steady rhythm— tikatikatikatikatika, ding! tikatikatikatikatika, ding!— was my childhood lullaby.
    In the sound of those keys, I heard frustration, anger, longing, determination, regret.
    My mother was always starting things she didn’t finish.
    Some of her ideas had nothing to do with writing, notably a line of jewelry for which she manufactured a prototype of a twenty-four-karat gold tennis ball pendant, with a sapphire in its center, the motto being keep your eye on the ball! But her greatest efforts went into writing projects. One was a children’s book called Yes, Mary Ann, the World is Round, a story about a girl whose dolls spring to life and tell her all about the countries they come from, for which my mother hired a famous children’s photographer and used me as a model. I still have the manuscript for this book, the photographs encased in plastic sleeves; me as a five-year-old in a yellow flannel Lanz nightgown, holding my dolls.
    My mother attempted most genres: children’s books, poems, essays, journalism, and writing for TV, big screen, and stage. She wrote spec scripts for The Partridge Family and Hawaii Five-O and sent them in manila envelopes to the offices of the Hollywood producers whose names were listed 56
    Still Writing
    in the shows’ credits. She didn’t know that submitting scripts in this manner was about as effective as making them into paper airplanes and flying them out the window. She had a strange, strained combination of cluelessness and desire. She flitted from project to project, never seeing anything through to the end.
    I was highly attuned to my mother. I felt and sensed her moods the way an animal can feel thunder and lightning miles away. She was my first lesson in character and point of view.
    I watched her carefully. I always, always knew what she was thinking. The way she behaved and what she felt were often at odds. She might, for example, be dancing around the kitchen, singing tra-la-la-la in her wobbly soprano and conducting with a wooden spoon, but she was staving off some sort of darkness—a rejection, an insult, a slight.
    Her most impassioned work was epistolary, and her Smith Corona was her weapon: she wrote letters to the mayor, the rabbi, the president of the United States. The letters were full of emphasis, as made clear by whole paragraphs in capitals, rows of exclamation points, sentences underlined in red pen or yellow highlighter, or sometimes both. My mother was filled with what seemed to be a bottomless ire. She was fueled by self-righteous indignation, which was only made worse when the mayor, the rabbi, and the president of the United States didn’t personally write back.
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    Dani Shapiro
    Tikatikatikatikatika, ding! Tikatikatikatikatika, ding! A girl falls asleep each night to the song of a typewriter. A girl—once again I become a character in my own childhood—feels the unhappiness simmering beneath her mother’s determination.
    The girl tries hard to please her mother. (Many years later, as a grown woman, one of her aunts will turn to her and say: “Do you want to make your mother happy? Do you really, really want to make your mother happy?” Oh, yes. Yes, she did.
    “Well, then move in with her,” the aunt said.) And back then, the girl believed that her very survival depended on being good, and pretty, and accommodating, and all the things her mother wanted her to be. She had no way of knowing that it was a losing battle. That no matter what she did, she herself would some day be identified