The Stripping Views

I am obsessed with Proulx this week.

Working on my Dialogue

I'm rethinking how I write dialogue, what my process is. If I want to make each character's voice sound different, I need to think of them not as voices in my head but as voices I'm overhearing

When Jareth got home he found his mother in the backyard, sitting beside a woman in a sable coat. He went out there with two glasses of Campari sodas that Leona, clicking through the channels, had said they had asked her to bring out, though he might as well.
His mother was squealing out a high giggle, her slim fingers pawing at the lawn chair. The woman opposite was sitting back coolly, the harsh lines of her square face stretched into a smile that stayed toothless. She was the image of control; Hair, wet with grease, was pulled into a tight ponytail; The unclasped fur lay draped over the shoulders of her black turtleneck, from the sleeves of which peeked thin tan, thin wrists aglimmer with tennis bracelets of diamonds—or imitation diamonds, maybe.
“Oh, Jareth, our savior,” his mother said when she saw him. “This is absolutely top of the line. And with the lime slices, like mother likes them.”
“It’s really too much,” said the woman, though like her host she accepted the glass.
“This is my wonderchild,” Maude said, winking at him, “My Jareth.”
“I’ve heard, as they say,” said the woman, “A lot about you.” She had an accent Jareth could not place. Vaguely Southern in its lilts, the Rs were held long, the Os were flat, and it seemed to come from some place where hard work mattered, where books, when read aloud, were meant to imbibe lessons.
“This is Cleo,” Maude said. “A woman who before today I had only heard about in passing.”
“Your mother was famous at our house,” Cleo rasped. “We used to talk about you while dad was reading through the paper, reading out loud the articles. And over the albums. I think there are some pictures that you sent from… from before. One of you in a very bright coat. Printed like a –like a what are those called?—like a giraffe.”
“Oh, what an awful thing that was. Coonskin or something, and with a fake print. To think I had been a vegetarian.”
“Goodness. We were forcefed everything,” Cleo said. “No room for error.”
“Ah! Anwyay,” said Maude, touching Jareth lightly on the arm to show she still remembered him. “We’re cousins.”
“I’m your—what was it?—second aunt?” Cleo said, holding the lime slice and looking at it. “I’m once removed in any case.”
“Removed is for marriage,” Jareth said.
“I’m second then. And pleased to meet you.” She extended a hand. A diamond ring glimmered. He shook it.
“Sit down, honey,” Maude said, pointing toward a vacant lawn chair with a seat covered in pine needles. “Stay a while with your poopsy mother and your charming aunt. She was just talking about what she does.”
“It’s not so interesting,” she said. She sucked the lime and then made a face.
“What is it?” Jareth said. He wiped off the needles, sat down.
“Hospice nursing. If someone’s about to go—I sit with them, spongebath, read out loud the articles, give the morphine. I could get you loads of morphine if you wanted it, baby,” she said with a sharp, high laugh. The laugh resembled Maude’s.
“None for him, thank you,” Maude said. “He’s a good boy. Against all odds.”
Cleo described how if someone were about to bite it, a service called her, and she changed into her scrubs, and showed up at the house. And she mostly lived there, on a couch or something. Her boyfriends hated it. She’d be gone for weeks then back again. They’d call up crying, leave her by cheating. Anyway—back to the dead people. The dying. The wives cried, the husbands cried, the children stayed silent and confused. It was most interesting how the day or two before someone would go, Cleo would know it. Know it for sure.
“How do you know it?” Jareth asked. His mother was rubbing his back with her manicured nails and he didn’t want it to stop, so he asked the question—to keep Cleo going.
“Oh,” she said. “They do something wild.”
“Oh?” Maude said.
“People who haven’t walked for months—you know, bedridden—they throw off the sheets, the IV. They get up and walk around. A man—he had cancer, didn’t eat much or at all, he had been a cook they said, and he got up and scrambled eggs, made breakfast for his family. It gives the family hope, which is unwise. I’m always sad to see them do it.”
“What do people do?” Jareth said.
“One man even went golfing.”
“Wowzers,” Maude said.
“Made his wife drive him to the Tee. I went along in the backseat with my crosswords. I can really steam through those things, you know. I get it from Uncle Larry.”
“Yes,” Maude said. “He’s really still quite good.”
“Does your husband do them, too?” Cleo said.
“Ha!” Jareth let out a laugh. He liked Aunt Cleo. “He doesn’t do shit.”
“He does shit,” Maude said. And they laughed.
“Are you married, Aunt Cleo,” Jareth asked. He looked at the ring.
“I’m married by the law but not by the heart,” she said.
“What does that mean?” Jareth asked.
“You’ll see in time,” Cleo said.
“It’s a lot of work to love someone forever,” Maude said.
“Duh,” Jareth said, rolling his eyes at his mother. “I just mean—are you divorced?”
“Not legally,” Cleo said. “It’s too much paperwork for no good. My next go-around I’m just going to hop over a broom or something easy.”
Leona was opening the sliding doors. They all turned to see her coming out.
“If you’re coming out, Leona, do you mind bringing us the box of cigarettes on the kitchentop and a match?” Maude asked.
“I’ve got a lighter in my pocket,” Cleo said.
Leona grumbled. The sliding door closed—turning the glass into a mirror reflecting the trees of the backyard and, in the spots between their leaves, the light colors of the sunset. Then the door reopened and Leona, in an overlarge shirt that served as a nightgown, emerged holding the pack of cigarettes and the novelty lighter Jareth’s father had once bought in Louisiana that was shaped in the figure of a woman. Toward the three of them she dragged a fourth lawn chair, letting fall the pines that covered it as she pulled it toward them. “There’s nothing on TV at five o’ clock,” she said, by way of an acknowledgement as to why she was just now bestowing them with her presence.
“Cleo, this is my eldest and wisest,” Maude said.
“We met briefly,” Cleo said. “While you hadn’t gotten home yet, the clever thing entertained me.”
“We talked about Uncle Larry,” Leona said. “And smog.”
Cleo lit a cigarette. In the light, Jareth thought her rather pretty. And she was good at holding the thing, too. Like a woman in an advertisement for cigarettes, her dainty slim, ringed fingers seemed more elegant than the cigarettes themselves. When she sucked it, it was like she was a woman who knew what she needed.
“Leona goes to Harvard,” Maude said. “She’s the smart one.”
“Beats me, honey,” Cleo said. Cleo had been majoring in Physical Therapy. She had dropped out because she fell in love. She married the bastard. Then, bored, she’d gone to Nursing school. Just a little place, up in the hills, but she loved it. Did Leona love school? She shouldn’t ever drop out for a man.
“I won’t,” Leona said. “I assure you of that.”
“So it’s not for a man,” Cleo said. “I haven’t yet met a girl who dropped out when it wasn’t meant for a man or from a man to begin with.”
“I’m just trying to figure out what I want to do,” Leona said.
“That’s what school’s for, I thought,” Cleo said. “Take a little of this, a little of that, a little of him, a little of the other one—“
“We’re proud of her,” Maude said. “She wants to know why she’s going to school, then she wants to go back, and do that thing. Right?”
“Sure,” Leona said.
“And that thing isn’t a man?” Cleo said. Dropping her voice then, and inhaling she said, “I haven’t met one yet.”
“Well I’m the one, then,” Leona said.
“She’s practically sexless,” Jareth said. “Trust me.”
“Well that’s nice,” Leona said.
“What?” Jareth said, “It’s what you want people to think?”
“She’s figuring things out,” Maude said. “I wish I’d done the same, to be honest.”
“Oh, you never made a bad decision in your life, baby,” Cleo said. “Look at this,” She waved her hand about the backyard—the small pool with its grotto, the garage with the lights on inside and the dull, tinny music Zed was playing fizzing out through the cracks in its lowered door, on which hung two crossed black fishing nets.
“There are some things I would take back,” Maude said.
“Like what?” Jareth asked.
“She had you,” Leona said.
“I’d marry a man with more money,” Maude said, grinning. “I’d have majored in finance, something practical. I’d have a law degree.”
“You’d wear aprons and make cakes and secretly booze out of a hall cabinet,” Leona said.
“If I were to do it over, I’d be born a girl,” Jareth said.
“You’d be Celia,” Leona said.
“If I had to do it over,” Cleo said, slow, and drawn out, “I’d have come out here six years ago. I’d have tried to get into show business.”
“Gross,” Leona said.
“It’s not all it’s cracked up to be, is what she means to say,” Maude said.
“Well, it’s the money,” Cleo said.