Essential Writing Terms
E The House on Mango Street Scene-by-Scene Outline
Introduction
TRUTH IN FICTION
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
—Emily Dickinson
On September 13, 2001, I stood in front of my multicultural lit class assigning a response essay. The class was small, five students, all enrolled in my Technical Communication program. Because I taught all but one of their courses, we'd become a sort of tribe. I remember being excited about the assignment. I don't remember what I was wearing. I do remember I was growing my hair out and that I was worried about the pregnancy weight I was putting on and whether or not something I'd elected to call “Bonus Lunch” was doing me any favors. I remember being tired. It was a Thursday.
The door opened, and the college's office administrator stepped into my classroom. It was a first. She was unable to meet my eyes.
“Can you please come to the Dean's office?”
“Yup.” I grabbed my briefcase. I knew I wasn't coming back.
# # #
Our final conversation thirty-six hours earlier had ended exactly like this:
HIM: You're beautiful.
ME: Silence.
HIM: I love you.
ME: I don't think that means the same thing to you as it does to me.
We'd been married for twenty-four days. I was three months pregnant. We'd timed it so that I could have the summer off after the baby was born, not expecting that we'd nail it on our first try. The University of Minnesota conference I'd been driving to that morning had been unexpectedly canceled as college campuses all over the country shut down. America was under attack, we were told.
I returned home to find something I hadn't expected to find.
# # #
There were two plainclothes detectives sitting in the Dean's office. They rose when we entered. The office administrator disappeared. I was with strangers.
“Is my daughter all right?” The question was a morbid courtesy in that overexposed moment, an invitation for the detectives to deliver good news before they leveled my world. My baby girl was three, and it was naptime in the day care across the street. I knew she was fine because I would have known if she wasn't.
I also knew that my husband had killed himself.
I had known I would be here, or somewhere like here, since the fist of blackbirds had dived at my car as I'd returned from the canceled U of M conference two days earlier. It was the blackbirds' warning that had forced me online to search his history, the coldness of their black bodies blocking out the sun that had warned me my life was never going to be the same again.
But I couldn't have known.
He was not depressed. He was a successful Department of Natural Resources ecologist with a family who loved him. Tall, dark-eyed, with a contagious smile and a meticulous work ethic, he baked pies for hospice care fundraisers and coached the local youth soccer league. We were newlyweds with a baby on the way. And so I took the chair the detectives offered, and I watched their faces, and I felt every corner of me shut down except my eyes and my ears. These organs became disconnected recording devices, and so while I can recall the entire conversation, it doesn't mean any more now than it did then. Just words.
“Do you know where your husband is?”
“Um, we had a fight two days ago. He drove to his old house, the one we have on the market? I haven't heard from him since.”
They exchanged glances. Their suits were immaculate. Both men looked like what I imagined New York detectives look like, polished as stones. The detective who drew the short straw adjusted his collar. “Your husband killed himself.”
I felt the baby kick, or did I just feel kicked? “When?”
“He was found today, by a coworker. There was a murder-suicide in the same DNR office two years ago, and they were worried for you and your daughter.”
“He killed himself today?”
“He was found today.”
This was important. If he killed himself immediately after our argument, that meant I'd been thinking about a dead man, emailing a corpse, for two days. But I already knew the truth of that, too.
His ghost had visited me the first night.
# # #
Mysteries involve murder. They can also include sex, humor, and intrigue, but if it's a grown-up mystery, readers are going to expect a body, preferably in Chapter 1. I knew this. Everybody knows this. Mysteries are also formulaic, another widely accepted belief.
What I didn't realize until my husband's suicide was that mysteries are also, at their simplest, about plumbing human motivation and creating closure. I found myself suddenly, urgently, needing both. A friend had lent me a Sue Grafton alphabet mystery a couple years earlier. I read it, and then I went to the library and checked out more. After I devoured all of them, I turned to Tony Hillerman. Then Janet Evanovich. William Kent Krueger. I was greedy, always a fast reader, stuffing one into my head, then another, and another.
Each novel pulled dark secrets into the light.
Each story ended with The Answers.
# # #
The United States is a pop psychology culture. We know the five stages of grief and that alcoholism is a disease, that communication is
