NaNoWriMo Again!

It's November 1st, and I have already ticked out my day's quota of words.

I like to get a minimum of 2000 words per day; it gives me some playing room. This morning I went cheerfully out to the garage-studio with my laptop, opened the door to the stormy-looking sky, and typed a first chapter of 2033 words.

The story is called Going Hungry, and was initially intended to be a farsical attack on the culinary capabilities of a cook I once knew, whose cooking was really AWFUL but whose employers kept saying was unbelievably good. However, as I started thinking about the main character, who will be the cook's assistant, she began to change before my very [inner] eye.

As the book progresses, Gloria is going to have to learn how to appear humble at work in the kitchen, but at home be the head and the goad of the household. The family is wiped out financially, and the rest of the family are ready to just give up.

Ultimately Gloria will have to come to terms not only with her willingness to do whatever she has to do to survive, but also with what others can and will do. Going hungry isn't always about the stomach.

Here's an excerpt:

In the kitchen, her mother was pouring vodka over ice cubes in a highball glass. Gloria frowned as the woman splashed a little Seven-Up over the liquor to fill the glass, then raised it and swallowed down about half of it. The boys weren't home, for which Gloria was grateful. Seeing their mother swilling booze like this would not be right. When the liquid was gone, her mother tipped the Smirnoff's bottle again, nearly filling the glass. Again she poured a little Seven-Up to flavor it.

Halfway through the second glass, she looked up at the clock. "Ben and Will said they'd be home around seven," she croaked, her voice rough and loud, resonating in her swollen sinuses. "You're going to have to make dinner for them -- I don't want them to see me like this." She topped off her glass again with vodka, not bothering with the soda.

 "Mom, you shouldn't be ... "

 "Leave it alone, Gloria. It's not like I'm some drunk. I thought we were going to be all right, but I just found out I was wrong. Really, really wrong. Don't you understand? I'm losing my job. We're going to lose the house. We don't even have enough to pay for a damn apartment, so let me have some kind of anesthetic for one night, okay?"

 "What? What are you talking about? I thought we were doing all right -- didn't Dad -- I mean, he said to me last spring that we were -- that -- 'everything's coming up roses' for us now ...  "

 "Sit down," her mother said. "I hate to have to do this, but I don't think I have a choice." The liquor had relaxed the bunched muscles of her face, and soothed her voice a little. She hadn't begun to slur, though Gloria suspected that was going to occur shortly.

 "I thought we had life insurance on the mortgage," she said. "Your Dad signed up for it when we bought the house, so that if anything happened to him, the house would be paid off. And then there was his own insurance policy -- he cashed the old one in when we bought this place so we had money to remodel it, but he took out another one, so I thought we were okay, at least for a few years." 

"But what, now?" Gloria felt her hands begin to sweat.

 "He stopped paying the premiums in March. The policies were cancelled. I found out when I got home from work. Good thing they let us leave early because of the bad news about the layoffs, huh?"

 "Oh, shit, Mom, why?"

 "I have no idea. We always divvied up the bill paying. I took care of the groceries, clothes, and the utilities, and he always took care of the rent and car payments and credit cards. Well, we got nothing now. Even if I kept my job at the drug store, it wouldn't be enough to get by, not by a long shot." She rubbed her eyes with one hand, keeping the other on the sweating glass of ice and vodka.

"No savings?" 

"A little, but not much. The funeral ate up most of what was there. We've got enough for another month's mortgage payment, and that's it. I'm so sorry, honey."

Gloria was young enough that the words had almost no meaning for her. Her father had had a pretty good job; the family wanted for nothing. Their toys, their appliances, their computers were all top of the line. It was only about four years ago that they'd bought this house, but Gloria had always assumed that they rented houses in the various neighborhoods they'd lived in so that they could save up enough for a down payment. She could not remember any time in her life that the family scrimped on anything; her mother often told people that she took a job in the drug store for something to do while the kids were in school.

Cars were on the list of things that were top of the line, too. Well, not top like a Cadillac or a Jaguar, but always new. Her dad was of the opinion that if you held onto a car more than three years, the maintenance offset the trade in value of the car. Every year for as long as Gloria could remember, the salesman at the dealership sent her father a birthday card and a Christmas card. When she and Will had finished high school, new cars had been waiting for them at the curb when they got back from the graduation ceremony.

"But Dad made good money, didn't he? There has to be some kind of savings account -- maybe with his company?"

 Her mother shook her head, gulped another big swallow of the drink. "No, honey, there wasn't." She sighed. "Your dad used to say, 'Smoke 'em if you got 'em," and he meant to live life as fine as he could for as long as he could. He just didn't think he could die."