Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 26-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
Veronica, standing near the sales table piled too high with copies of the visiting author’s new novel, frowns heavily, takes up the bulk of her apron skirts and wipes her hands with a sort of angsty wringing. This doesn’t result in drier hands because the apron is made out of cotton broadcloth, which isn’t absorbent. Its smooth finish seems to repel wetness, disallowing it from performing its very function. Absorption. Veronica believes the apron to be more of a prop—a symbolic affectation—than anything useful to her duties at the reading, where she re-positions wayward cheeses and re-fills cracker baskets. She ends up doing these tasks because she’s the woman on the committee and she’s an unpublished author, the only unpublished author on the committee of five. And the only woman. An unpublished woman in an apron dicking around with the fucking cheese, she thinks, sliding a slightly resistant block of cheddar back toward the center of the cutting board with the tip of a somewhat inappropriate knife. More of a machete, but the only thing in the knife family they could find in the back room of the book store and now the machete is a part of tradition at the readings that has turned into a series, without anyone suggesting that it become a series. The committee isn’t a formal body; they were just some writers who wanted to bring in some authors for cozy readings, and lit agents started contacting the store when their authors were in town for more formal events, looking for a more accessible venue. The lit agents like their authors to do a second event, something free, to promote a book—to connect with readers and other writers, writers who weren’t inclined to turn up at festivals they hadn’t been invited to read at.
Veronica thought about tea towels as the audience straggled in. She loved the plaids. She frequently picked them up, sold in sets of three or four with a cardboard label holding them together, anywhere she saw them, and she wanted to buy them, but she didn’t. The whole thing bothered her. She’d hang a tea towel from her fridge door in good faith, thinking, “This time it will be different,” but it wasn’t. If she wanted a plate, a dry plate, to put a piece of toast on, and if all her plates had just been washed, she’d think hard about images of 1950s women in aprons drying plates on old TV sitcoms—Leave It To Beaver, Father Knows Best—the swirl and squeak of the plate being dried on both sides with two hands, but when she did it the same way, the plate was not dry. It did not dry. The water was just sort of spread out. So she’d given up on tea towels and put the plates in the cupboards wet, piling them in stacks and when she pulled one out and it was wet, she’d get the next one down, but it was wet from the one above, so she’d go for the third one down and it was dry, but it had circles from where water had dried—eventually—and either she used the not exactly clean plate or she went farther into the stack, looking for a clean and dry plate for a piece of toast, until eventually she just put the fucking toaster away, in the drawer below the oven. Fuck it. Fuck it. Fuck the whole fucking thing.
Veronica flattened the apron skirt, the non-absorbent broadcloth, against her thighs. She stabbed a somewhat mangled lump of Swiss, lifted it, and plunked it down next to the cheddar.
“Got something against the Swiss?” Mr. Cheese said sarcastically. Veronica’s shoulders dropped. She closed her eyes, took a breath and thought about counting to 10. Mr. Cheese wasn’t his real name, but that’s what they called him. She didn’t, but they did. The men on the committee.
Tonight the reading felt more like a game of Clue than a literary event. Colonel Mustard in the Library with a Candlestick. The Unpublished Woman in the Book Store with a Machete. Mister Cheese in Everyone’s Way with Yet Another Irritating Remark.
The machete was part of the tradition: writers listening to published authors who’d been given the big bucks to read to tittering audiences at the Writers’ Festival, taking questions from their adoring fans. “How did you get to be so wonderful?”—questions like that. Yes, the machete was a good part of the tradition here on East 13th, where unpublished writers didn’t call themselves authors and most of their trips to the book store were to offload compendiums. Writer’s Market 1989 or even less abstractly titled editions—Very Young Women’s Extra Short Canadian Fiction Writer’s Market 1984—4,000,000+ copies sold—and somehow when it was picked up at a yard sale, years ago, there had been a sense of possibility and hope in carrying the book home to begin. To begin. Over and over again.
