← PNW romance — working drafts

Scene probe — the word for missing

Status: Ninth voice probe. ~Day seventeen of Cora's return; a couple of days after the Salt House noon. The first sustained look at Cora's work — the manuscript comes out. ~1,450 words. Single POV Cora, close third, present tense. Probe targets: can the book do profession-on-the-page for Cora the way the lease scene did it for Wells — actual translation texture, a real problem, real moves, without going meta-clever or performing erudition? The book's romance is between two competences, and only one of them has been dramatized. Second: the away-life entering through the manuscript, not a phone call — the exile novel and the unanswered editor at the edge of the frame, testing whether the off-island world can press on the island register without breaking it. Third: the canon line from the bible — the parallel is too neat for her to be comfortable with, which is a thing she notices and resists — dramatized for the first time. Fourth: the inherited gesture — Margaret's pencil practice (lightly, in case) arriving in Cora's own professional hand, grief moving from reception into use.

The manuscript has been on the kitchen table for sixteen days.

It has been there the way the folder was on Maren's shelf — in plain sight, agreed upon, not discussed. It crossed the country in the bottom of her bag, four hundred and six pages in a rubber band, and on the first night she set it on the kitchen table because the kitchen table is where work goes, and then she did not work. The fruit bowl has been sitting on it for two weeks. Her mother never put fruit in the fruit bowl. It holds keys, rubber bands, a tide table from two years ago. It holds things down. It has been holding down the Ibarra.

On the seventeenth day she moves the bowl and takes the rubber band off.

There is also the editor's second email, which she has read twice and not answered. The first email said, in the way of first emails, no rush. The second said no rush again, with a date in it. The date is March. It is late May. The email does not know where she is. She has not told the editor about the island, the same way she has not told the island about March.

She makes the coffee. She sits where she has decided to sit, which is the chair that does not face the water, because the chair that faces the water faces the water.

Page two hundred and thirteen. She knows where she stopped the way you know where the pain is before you move. Two hundred and twelve pages of a woman named Alma who left a house in Veracruz and cannot go back to it — the book is careful never to say cannot the way a customs form would say it; the door is simply not in the book — and who walks a northern city counting the things it does not have. Cora had been averaging four pages a day, in Seattle, before. It is good. It is the best thing Ibarra has written, and Cora is on record, in print, in a translator's note on the last one, saying the last one was the best thing Ibarra had written, so she has a professional stake in this one being difficult.

She reads the sentence she stopped on.

Por las mañanas extrañaba la casa; la extrañaba también en el otro sentido: se le había vuelto extraña.

In the mornings she missed the house; she missed it also in the other sense: it had become strange to her.

Which is not the sentence. In English it is a sentence about two things, with a colon holding them together like a hand on two parcels. In Spanish it is one verb doing both, extrañar, to miss and to find strange, the longing and the estrangement sharing a root the way they share a wall in any actually inhabited heart, and Ibarra has waited two hundred and twelve pages to turn the word over and show the other face, and the whole sentence is the turning. English does not have the word. English has been letting Cora flatten it for two hundred and twelve pages — she missed the house, she missed the heat, she missed her name in her aunt's voice — flat, fine, serviceable, and on page two hundred and thirteen the bill for all that serviceable comes due at once.

She gets the verb's other sense for free in any direction except the one she needs. That is the job. She has explained the job at dinner parties, in two languages, with the same three examples, for ten years. The job is that every language pays for what it says in a different currency, and the translator stands at the exchange window making change, and some days the window is a wall.

She tries it the literal way and reads it back. It had become strange to her sits at the end of the line like a tourist. The colon is doing Ibarra's work and getting none of Ibarra's credit.

She tries the note. She will not write the note. A footnote on this sentence would be a hand grabbing the reader's chin: look. Ibarra does not grab. Two hundred and twelve pages of not grabbing is the whole reason the turn lands.

She looks up, not at the water. At the wall above the table, where there is a square of slightly different paint the size of the calendar that hung there for thirty years.

The thought arrives without being asked: her mother would have left it. Penciled the alternative in the margin and gone on. Her mother penciled everything, lightly, in case — the grocery list, the crossword, the names of birds she was not yet sure of. Pacific-slope I think. The pencil was not indecision. The pencil was a door held open for the better word, in case it came up the path.

And behind that thought, the other one, the one she has been waiting for the way you wait for the wave you can already see: a woman who misses a house that has gone strange to her. Sitting in one.

There it is. She looks at the thought. The parallel is so neat it embarrasses her — Alma's house with no door back, this house that is all door; Alma counting what the northern city does not have, Cora drinking coffee in a kitchen where the calendar's ghost is still on the wall. It is the kind of symmetry she would cut from a student's essay with one pencil line. The book did not arrange it and neither did she; the year arranged it, and the year is not a writer and does not get edited. She notices the parallel, and notices herself preparing to feel something about it, and declines — not because the feeling is false but because it is convenient, and she has learned to distrust the feelings that arrive already gift-wrapped. Alma is not her. Alma cannot go back. Cora is back. Whatever this is, it is not that, and Ibarra deserves a translator who is not using her.

She works.

She shucks two oysters over the sink at noon because that is a thing she does now, and eats them standing up, and tips the shells down the bank, and comes back to the table, and the verb is still there, and so is she.

What she finally writes, at around two o'clock, by hand, above the typed line:

In the mornings she missed the house — missed it, too, the way you miss a step in the dark: her foot kept arriving where it no longer was.

She reads it back. It is not Ibarra's sentence. Ibarra's word says the house went strange; hers says the body still expects it. Not the same claim. The same wound, she thinks, entered from the other side — English's miss keeps its own second face, the missed step, the missed turn, the thing your hand closes on air for, and if she cannot have the strangeness inside the verb she can have the failure inside it, because that is the one thing all three of her languages agree to keep in the word: her father's te extraño at the end of every phone call from Mexico City, which she had said back for thirty years before she ever once heard the strangeness folded into it; the echar de menos of the Madrid copyeditor who will query this very line, which is older than Spain and means, if you walk it all the way down, to find less; and the English miss, which has meant to fail to hit for as long as there has been English. To find strange. To find less. To fail to hit. Three languages, and not one of them thinks the missing lives in the heart. It lives in the hands. It is an error of reach. The whole genus of the word is a body expecting a world that has been moved.

She does not write any of that down. It is not hers to write down; it is the underwater part of the choice, and the reader gets the part above the water.

Then, in pencil, in the margin, lightly:

se le había vuelto extraña — lit. "it had gone strange on her." Revisit.

In case the better word comes up the path.

She answers the editor at three. Two lines. It is going well, she says, which is true today and was not true yesterday and is therefore the kind of truth you send in an email. She does not say where she is. Then she sits with her hand on the manuscript, the way she put her hand flat on the heron, and looks out at the water she chose the chair to avoid, where the tide is out past the eelgrass, and the lease is bare, and a man is going down the rows turning bags, in the frame whether she watches him or not.

Page two hundred and fourteen.

Author's note on the probe:

What I was checking:

Where I'm unsure:

What the scene leaves planted: