Umbrella Chasing

Stepping off the bus at the University of Massachusetts's Amherst campus, I had little trouble finding the library, a 26-story brick tower standing above a long, still-unfrozen pond where the Canada geese who have been migrating much slower this winter were flocking, filling the air with their honks as I slipped through the automatic doors and moved to the elevator. A quick glance at the directory told me that I'd want the 11th floor, and I pushed the up button.
"Here they are, two North Americans, a man and a woman just over and just under forty, come to spend their lives in Mexico and already lost as they travel cross-country over the central plateaus." (Harriet Doerr, Stories for Ibarra)
I love libraries, always have. Because UMass's library is so huge, you can get lost much more easily. Another girl got out of the elevator on the same floor as me, but I didn't see her again, although I spent over an hour wandering the rows, carefully pulling the books I had listed, taking them to the desk where I had set up camp, casting off coat, scarf, hat, mittens, and then copied the first lines of each book down into my notebook, taking care not to miss a word, and not to read beyond the sentence I copied.
"As soon as the Ford Touring car crossed the St. Paul city limits on April 20, 1934 ("You Are Leaving St. Paul, Minn., Home of the Inlagd Sill Herring Festival, Please Visit Us Again!"), and passed into the great, square-upon-square expanse of the surrounding farmland, Bena jotted down the odometer reading with the golf pencil she kept in the ashtray: 5,434." (Heidi Julavit, The Mineral Palace)
My mind drifted back to the Girl with the Red Umbrella as I pondered my own first sentence. I knew she'd feature in my book. I knew that she'd come to represent the obsession that would drive my characters, who would start lingering in public spaces each time it rained, searching the crowds for that flash of color, unsure what to do should She appear again.
"A freakishly August-like afternoon in May of that year, Mark Singer stands overheated and spattered with light at the altar of the Episcopal church on Third, makes his vows to Olivia Stavros, turns and lifts the gauzy veil from her face." (David Long, The Falling Boy)
It was sunny today. The first such day in a while. Sunny, and bitterly cold. I spent a lot of time at bus stops, still learning the Wintersession schedule, which is infrequent and less convenient than usual. It makes me think about last year, waiting at the bus stop in the bitter cold, by myself. Maybe that's why I wanted to speak German so much today. I think my first novel should be in Yiddish.
"One afternoon, three years after the beginning of the new century, red dust that was once rich mountain soil quivers in the air." (Hari Kunzru, The Impressionist)
Katie read somewhere that people with attention disorders are more creative because they see the world as many disconnected parts and thus have an easier time combining the pieces to make something new. I've never had trouble focusing. I'm the most rational, logical person I know. I don't enter anything without careful consideration. Hence today's research. Rather than sitting down, letting a few words fly out, calling it the first sentence of my debut novel and being done with it, I decided to see how other authors began their foray into the literary world. I chose books I've never read, books I know nothing about. Many of the sentences intrigued me, offering me a whole story in their implications, laying a framework for what was sure to come.
"Some nights she still goes over every detail, beginning with the weather and proceeding to the drop of blood on the sheet- her quick wish for a man with straight white teeth and red lips- and then his arrival." (Elizabeth Hay, A Student of Weather)
I closed every book after reading the first sentence. Closed it, took it back to the shelf, replaced it among the hundreds of other volumes that I'll never open, never know. Hundreds of roads I'll not explore, hundreds of lives I'll never touch, hundreds of girls walking away from the mailbox, umbrellas swinging in unison with their singular gait.
"We used to stay in bed most of the weekend, Hugo and I, when we lived in the attic of a rambling house with pinnacles and gables, among chestnut trees, on the edge of a park in South London." (Nuala O'Faolain, My Dream of You)
A girl was reshelving books while I was working. I was embarrassed to put books back if she could see me. I feel like it's against library etiquette. They have one special shelf for the books you've picked up, as if you're not smart enough to put the number written on the spine back in order with all the others, as if PS3559.8715 R63 is a code that only the specially trained can decipher, and not simply a label to be put in numerical and alphabetical order with all the rest. When I had a book to replace on the aisle she was working on, I slipped it onto her little cart, hoping she wouldn't notice the sudden addition. I'm certain she did.
"You should have seen us when we had our act together, top of our game, toast of the town, walking and talking miracles and- you'd better believe it- the real American thing." (P. F. Kluge, Biggest Elvis)
My bus came at 5:25. I had hoped to catch the 4:45, but I'd only written down 7 or 8 sentences by that point, and I needed more time. I didn't find the 25 books I'd intended, but was forced to stop at 21. I spent at least 7 minutes waiting at the bus stop. Time for 1 or 2 more sentences. Time to figure out the winning formula. Time to determine if the most interesting titles really do lead to the most unassuming first sentences, with the plain titles pouring life and tension and interest into the space before that first period. Instead, I stood in the cold until I could return to Hampshire, eat dinner, go to Yiddish class, do all the things that continually keep me from writing.
"Mike always teased me about my memory, about how I could go back years and year to what people were wearing on a given occasion, right down to their jewelry or shoes." (Ann Packer, The Dive from Clausen's Pier)
I don't write fiction. I don't write poetry. I don't write plays or movies or stories or any of the other things that spring from the imagination. I write about the things that happen to me and that I cause to happen. I embellish to make it sound well, to make the sentences line up nicely on the page, to please whatever meager aesthetics I possess. Were I ever to write a novel (which would be nice to accomplish), it will have to arise from the things I have known. And so I return to the image that I've been carrying around, red umbrella, mailbox, antiques store, fog, mountains, feverish typing, cold, puddles, sleep, dreams. My first sentence.


"She'd never seen the antiques store on Pleasant Street open before, but, then again, she rarely walked this far from the center of town, and wouldn't have today if the mailman hadn't come so early, forcing her to walk to the post office to mail that letter, which had to arrive by Tuesday or everything would be ruined."