So I’m minding my own business (really), just doing some laundry, staring out the window as I fold some T-shirts, and I see this woman get out of the car inside my neighbor’s garage. She’s definitely not my neighbor. And she’s too old to be a girlfriend for the teen boy who lives there. She might possibly be a niece or an aunt or something. … But then I see the man-of-the-house get out of the car, and he puts his arm around her. Hmmm. … I move closer to the window. I recall a few months ago seeing the woman-of-the-house leaving with a man I didn’t recognize, too. … They were kind of laughing together, running down the porch steps to a sports car parked in front of the house. But I thought maybe it was her brother or something. I wasn’t sure. And now, this … So what’s going on? Swingers’ parties? Divorce? Are they all living there? Are they sharing the house and bringing respective dates? I press my face closer to the window … I’m fascinated. …
This all makes me think, though, about my across-the-street neighbor when I was growing up: Marge. She was one of those neighbors who knew everyone, and who knew everyone’s business. She would come across the street at least once a day and walk inside the door, yelling “yoo-hoo” through the entry way, and my mom would roll her eyes at me. My mom finally had to start locking the door when she mopped the entryway, or else we’d have Marge’s footprints all over the tile.
Marge would pull up a barstool and lay her cigarettes on the countertop. Continue reading
When I first started to tell my friends and family that I was writing romance novels, they were a bit surprised. I was always one of those literary readers – bordering on literary snob, I suppose – who spent the college years lugging around my volumes of Keats and Shelley. I took classes called “The American Literary Experience,” and “American Literature in the 20th Century” and talked late at night in the college coffeehouses with my friends about Saul Bellow and Willa Cather. We never even spoke the names of genre writers, let alone took them seriously. Many English majors did take a class called “The Popular Novel,” in which we read two books in five genres (romance, western, sci-fi, mystery and horror), but the object of that class was to explore the “formulas” of those genres, not to extol their virtues. We rolled our eyes at the clichéd phrases and acted like we had to read them at gunpoint. We were impressed that the writers made so much money, but we didn’t think they were writing “real books.”
Those are the eyes I’m always going to remember.