Of all the gin joints...

In the early 90s, I wrote a novel about two childhood friends from a small Adirondack town who go their separate ways into adulthood. The wilder of the two, Darcy Gill, had run off at a tender age with her white leather cowboy boots and miniskirt and boyfriend to seek her fame and fortune. But when it all goes to hell, she eventually winds up in Boston, where her more level-headed and practical friend Abby now lives a boring life as an accountant in a decaying marriage with her soon-to-be-philandering husband. Darcy is pregnant and broke and the white boots have seen better days and she hopes Abby will help her. It could have made a decent novel but I didn’t know how to handle it then, so I stuck it in the closet and never went back to finish it.

It’s Darcy I keep thinking about. Especially every Christmas, when I get that inevitable card from Mrs. Robert Oppenheimer and family, postmarked somewhere in southern Maryland. It’s one of those very religious cards (not that I’m knocking “very religious,” but it’s part of the story so I hope you’ll just go with me on this one) with the glitter and the angel’s wings and the delicate script inside about Our Blessed Lord. Inside is the inevitable letter. I found it when I was cleaning the other day. “Dearest Friends and Family...” it begins. She talks about how God has blessed her and her two sons and her new husband, etc., etc. etc. Not that I’m knocking letters like that. All right. I am. Just a little.

But this is because Mrs. Robert Oppenheimer used to be Darcy.

I rarely craft a character based wholly on someone I’ve met; usually it’s an amalgam of some kind or wholly from my imagination, plus some pieces of me. I’d written Darcy the same way. I’d written three quarters of the first draft before I ran into her in person.

I’d just registered for room and board at my very first writer’s conference and was walking back out to the parking lot to get my things. A maroon van takes a too-wide turn into the spot next to my car and screeches to a halt.

On the back of the van is a bumper sticker: “I’ve got PMS and a gun, now what was your problem again?”

Out pops a little bitty bit of a thing, in cutoff shorts and a tank top, with a muss of brown hair and a determination in her eyes that makes me take a step backward. She sees me. “Where do you go pee around here?” she says. “Jesus, I been drivin’ straight through from Maryland. This here’s my boyfriend Louie’s van and he told me not to stop for nothing. He even got one me of them pee-can things but it’s full.”

I point her and her pee-can thing toward the administration building.

Meanwhile I carry my various bags to my room. I was a scholarship student that year. Which had nothing to do with writing skills, it just meant you didn’t have enough money for tuition and begged the conference organizers for a chance to go at a discount. Not only did that mean I had to do some work for the conference, but it meant I had to share a room. I had enough roommates from hell in my life to be a little nervous, but heck, it was only a week, and if she was truly awful, at least it would give me something good to write about.

The little bitty bit of a thing with PMS and a gun walks into my room with a beaming smile and twinkling eyes. “Hey, I’m Shelby.”

I pictured her in white leather cowboy boots. I saw her in my novel. I’d been seeing her in my novel for the last I don’t remember how many months. “You’re Darcy,” I said.

I explained what I meant, and boy, was she psyched. “Always wanted to be in a book,” she said. “Heck, if I can’t write one, I should at least be in one.”

Over the week I learned how exactly Darcy-like she was. Except for the hair color (Darcy was a blonde), she was a damned good ringer. She was originally from Louisville, which explained the accent. That’s where Darcy had run away to. But Shelby had run the other way, at thirteen, stayed with relatives, and worked a number of jobs, including a stint at a massage parlor that catered to a few congressmen. She wouldn’t name names, but told me that she was quite popular. She was then, like me, around thirty, but still a wild woman, telling me more than I needed to know about her bald-headed sugar daddy boyfriend Louie. She got me to loosen up some. By the end of the week I was an honorary wild-woman, dancing and drumming and howling at the moon.

We kept in touch. I loved her letters, I laughed until I could have used her pee-can. She asked about Darcy, wrote about the wild stuff she was doing, about her two boys (she’d married very young and divorced), about Louie.

Then Christmas came, and with it, the letter. “Dearest friends and family…” I read it, aghast. Perhaps she’d cleaned it up a bit, given dearest family and friends the edited version of her life, but to me this seemed like an entirely different person. The original bits of Darcy (I mean Shelby, I mean…) winked through occasionally, but on the whole, this was formal, stilted, like a beginning stab at a theme paper.

Then her letters resumed, same as they were before. She told me she wouldn’t be back at the conference the next year. Too much work, and she wasn’t writing her poetry any more, she was painting, so what was the point? But we still wrote, and eventually the letters petered off into the Christmas list void.

Then one Christmas I got a card with a return address I didn’t recognize. “Who the heck is Mrs. Robert Oppenheimer?” I asked husband. I opened it, and found the type of card and letter I described above. It was more religion than I’d ever heard out of her, and more than I’d ever imagined she had in her life. Like she’d found God along with her new husband and the Shelby I’d met had been swallowed up into this new life. In with the card was a beatific wedding photo, Shelby looking pure as the proverbial snow in her white gown, her stately new (and much older) husband Robert, and her two “boys,” now almost men.

I still get those cards. But I’ve been wondering. if Darcy could turn into Abby, maybe Abby could turn into Darcy. That there could be a tiny hellion in white leather cowboy boots somewhere in my soul.

It’s fun to think about.

And during those intervening years, whenever I went to a writer’s conference, I’d get a double room, hoping that maybe lighting might strike twice, that I might meet another one of my characters. I’d sure love to share a room with Frankie Goldberg.

But it never happened.

Eventually, I started getting single rooms. I got tired of waiting.