Pink Water

The best writing advice I had ever received came from my then wife, Susanne Newman. She was a fifth-grade writing teacher, incredibly diffident, and graduated at the top of her class. I graduated with an English degree and only a handful of scrapped short stories. With no money to our name, we married silently and moved to a mobile home park with a view. It sat close enough to the ocean that the smell of salt woke you up instead of coffee, and it was only a mile from Sandstone Elementary. I hoped that the soothing waves would finally inspire my broken fingers. Every day I sat at the mahogany table and watched the tide roll onto the jagged rocks. My paper and pencil were stagnant, and I hoped words would magically appear on the page so I could take credit.

The life we lived wasn’t luxurious, but Susanne made ends meet while I tried to make anything at all. While I rocked tattered T-shirts and stained underwear, she often wore cheap sundresses and the forty-dollar wedding ring I had bought her. Today, her dress was blue. I stared at it, looking for a sentence or two hiding in the folds.

“Don’t stare,” she said. “Wiggle your pencil.”

     “I’m not a fifth grader, your tricks won’t work on me,” I told her glumly. She stood over my shoulder and looked out the window. It had been a warm May, and the plankton blooms turned the ocean a soft pink.

She picked up my pencil and handed it to me. “Now wiggle until the words come out.”

     I took the pencil from her hand and flipped it back and forth between my fingers. Wisps of orange color painted the air. I did that for thirty whole minutes, and every moment I faltered Susanne called out to keep wiggling. And so I did.

 I wrote my first novel in two months, and it became a best seller. I hadn’t made much, but it was never about the money at that time. We were happy.  I was no longer caged to the mahogany desk from sunrise to sunset. We would ride bikes along the beach after dinner. I began writing her short stories between chapters when I needed a break. I wrote three more novels. I had made more money, and it sat in the bank, untouched. My first mistake was buying her a new wedding ring.

Her face was stern as she opened the blue suede box. A large oval diamond sparkled in the dank lights. “Do you like it?”

I was too naïve to process her unmoving face at the time. “It’s quite large,” she fumbled. She slowly slid off her old ring and pushed it into the box. It was hardly visible. She wore the new ring for the rest of the day. That was the last time I ever saw her with it on.

While looking over schoolwork, she said it kept reflecting the sun in her eyes. While knitting, she said it got in the way. I thought nothing of it. In that time, I wrote four more novels. I had taken up smoking, an expensive habit, but the smell washed out the salt in my nose. I had made five million dollars. I asked her if she wanted something else.

“No,” she said flatly. I had never heard her tone so bland before. I thought maybe she was upset with where we lived.

“How about we move to some place in the mountains?”

“No.”

“How about I write you a short story? I haven’t done that in a while,” I offered. She looked up from the manuscript she was reading. Her eyes were wide and striking. She opened her mouth to respond, but my next thought was already running through my lips. “I could buy you a new car! It can be green, your favorite color.” She looked down at her blue dress and said nothing.

And so I did. I bought her a shining green Bentley. I gave her the keys, but she kept them in a bowl on her bedside table. She never touched them.

She didn’t take it when she left. I had woken up that morning and rolled over to a cold, lifeless void. I thought maybe she had gotten up early to go on a walk. I slept in. Writing could wait for the master to stir.

An hour later, I rolled out of bed. The door creaked as I opened it into the living area. The cream faucet dripped. The refrigerator hummed. I started to hate it here. The waves whispered outside, and I opened the front door. Her bike was gone.

That was unusual.  It was not like her to leave without telling me. Or was it? I thought about the last time she had left. She went on a walk by herself. She often did more things by herself. I chopped it up to be the “cycle”. I went back inside and sat down at the mahogany desk. On the yellow legal pad was her perfect handwriting. The wedding ring box sat mockingly. The note was short.

You started writing for the money.

I snapped the pencil she had used to write with and opened the box. There, her forty-dollar wedding ring nestled against the shining diamond oval.

 In our short marriage, I never got angry. Susanne’s students were terrified of me, but she had nicknamed me the “unviolent giant” because it rhymed. Her students thought that was funny.  She would bring back stories they wrote about me, many of them not very flattering. They drew me with sharp teeth. I took it personally, but Susanne told me I never represented what any of them wrote. Until today.

I tore the yellow legal pad from the desk. I grabbed my pencils and pens. I grabbed my manuscripts. I grabbed my notebooks. I ran outside, and the strong wind shot salt into my eyes. Through blurry vision, I dropped my things into the dumpster. I pulled the cigarettes in my pajama pocket and dropped them in to. She hated that I always slept with them. I took my lighter, lit the edge of a manuscript, and watched the pile burn.

I drove the Bentley to the edge of the ocean. The water lapped at the tires. The neighbors stared. I threw the keys in the ignition and left. It was gone by the next morning. And that was that.

I got a job at Sandstone as a janitor, hoping to hear what happened to her. Susanne never came back, even after I left her a voicemail telling her that I donated all the money to charities. I also had given up writing for good. I thought that was what she wanted. Doing that, maybe she would come back, but deep down I knew she wouldn’t. She wasn’t one to come back. She was shy, but she was stubborn.

I worked as a janitor for ten years. I swept the halls, cleaned the puke, waxed the floors. The students there often avoided me. In the first few years I worked, there were still stories about an “unviolent giant” who had sharp pointy teeth. As time past, he disappeared, and so did I.

It wasn’t until June 9^th I had sat at the mahogany table again. The spring had been warm, and summer was here. The water was light pink. The plankton bloomed so fully, they dyed the sand a deep red.

 Am I ready? I felt a pressed hand on my back, and I began to wiggle my pencil. Giddiness bubbled in my chest as I watched the water lap hungrily at the shore and recede.

Then, I began to write, because I enjoyed it.