Ed Park
EASTER PROMENADE
Some years ago, a writer I knew, P., was asked to submit a story to a fiction website. She had recently published her first novel, Consequence (“to exceedingly mild acclaim,” she joked whenever the novel came up), and this was hardly the only such invitation. Her backlog was depleted, and she had nothing new to offer. Indeed, such were the demands of promoting her novel, holding down a job, and raising her newborn that she feared she would never write another word again. Every few days, P. would clear out a two-hour window for distraction-free writing, but she always wound up sleeping.
P. did have a long, unfinished manuscript called The Dizzies, from which she could clip off an episode. (The whole thing consisted of discrete scenes that had little to do with each other—easy for a new reader to dive right in.) Her friend agreed. “Easter Promenade” came from somewhere in the middle of The Dizzies, though in truth that sprawling book was all middle. It was P.’s version of The Magic Mountain, transposed to her native Canada and set at a clinic for people with vestibular woes. (She confessed to me once that she’d never read Thomas Mann’s book; neither had I.) The germ had come from P.’s own bout with benign positional vertigo, a condition that lingered for years, fading only upon the news that she was pregnant. In a parallel process, P. had abandoned The Dizzies at the same time, conceiving of and briskly finishing a completely different book—i.e., Consequence, the novel of hers that would be published, to exceedingly mild acclaim.
Back to The Dizzies. The sprawling manuscript was all digression, no plot. Some chapters featured brooding dialogue among patients and staff; others comically described ornate routines meant to quell vertigo. In those days, P. told me, whenever she painted herself into a corner with the novel, she would simply start a new chapter set in a different wing of the immense clinic. The section she offered to the website featured a recurring character named the General and Olga, a buxom nurse, strolling around the grounds and talking obliquely about love, there in the Canadian Rockies. There was no particular reason why P. had chosen it.
When “Easter Promenade” was first published, P. typed in the URL and marveled at the site’s splash page. The aesthetic was MFA steampunk: whimsical but clean, modified Garamond over a parchment background—a refreshing change from the indifferent design of so many similar websites. A thumbnail author pic transformed into a brief bio when clicked: “A native of Juneau who now lives in Queens…” P. skimmed the other stories. She recognized two of the writers, and another name rang a bell; the fourth contributor was a debut writer like herself, whom she instantly felt competitive with. The contributions were solid, if dull.
Then again, P. reflected, her own excerpt was unshapely, even confusing. Indeed, she hated seeing it in this public place, all its flaws exposed. Why had she sent it at all? But P. didn’t have time to dwell: she had to feed the baby. She closed the browser, not knowing it would be eighteen years before she returned to the site again.
P. worked on a new novel for a while. This was not The Dizzies, but a follow-up to Consequence inspired by her husband’s job as a high school principal. The project didn’t have a title, and her enthusiasm withered after a hundred pages. An old friend, now an editor at a famous magazine, suggested she write a memoir about her unusual childhood—growing up the daughter of two bisexual war criminals in Alaska—but that took only twenty pages to implode.
Why had her talent, her drive, vanished? Things weren’t terrific in her marriage, true, and her son was fascinated by trains, in a way that at first delighted and then concerned her. But that was just life. Seven years later, her vertigo came back, in a less intense form, yet it was still annoying on a daily basis, at times incapacitating. Reluctantly, she went to the same doctors and specialists she had seen the first time. Again, the diagnosis was benign positional vertigo; again, the cures were opaque, but this time—P. was in her early forties—less absurdly hilarious. She became pregnant and had a daughter, who looked nothing like the son.
P. purged most of her books and all of her old papers when they moved from the city to a house in the suburbs, though in retrospect she should have kept everything, as they had far more space now. (Even the endless chapters of The Dizzies existed only on the hard drives of her obsolete laptops, which were either in a basement closet or a distant landfill.) They had moved primarily so that their son could be closer to a preprofessional water polo academy. The school sat nestled in hills, across the street from the town’s oldest cemetery. The peaceful setting belied the action within. P. loved watching her son hurl the ball from one end of the court to the other, darting into position with every change of possession. Each year, kids as young as fifteen got tapped to join squads in Eastern Europe. How had this happened? P. didn’t even know how to swim.
At least her dizziness subsided. Her company downsized shortly after the move, which was just as well. She became de facto campaign manager for her husband’s run for county executive—a race he won. After that, she chiefly saw herself as a water polo mom, if that was even a thing, transporting her son to matches as far north as Vermont and as far south as Virginia and serving as team treasurer, which unaccountably sapped huge amounts of brain power. Meanwhile, her daughter was excelling at gymnastics.
In short, P. had forgotten her life as a writer. Maybe it was a function of age, or of not being in a city: She used to walk down the street and be pelted with insights, observations, dazzling pithy phrases. Now, P. said, she just went from place to place, wordless. When her son went off to college—Jug Dubrovnik and OSC Budapest had not, after all that, come calling—her dizziness returned for a third time. Instead of going to the doctor, she spent hours researching new treatments and explanations online, the same as everyone else. One night, a bewildering search result came back: her name, attached to something called The Dizzies.
It was, of course, the excerpt entitled “Easter Promenade.” The fiction website, miraculously, was still around. P. clicked and nervously read the story. In her memory, it was a puzzling, embarrassing selection from the manuscript; she should have politely declined the invitation. Silence is the greater part of virtue, as the saying went. No: Discretion is the better part of valor. (“I can’t even get my adages right,” P. told me.) The point was, rather than dilute her name—or her “brand,” as her son would call it now—she should have written something new for the website, a piece she could be proud of.
Rediscovering the excerpt, however, P. was pleased at how smoothly it read. (She had been a writer after all.) The nameless characters interacted believably, if enigmatically. The experience of meeting her old self was disorienting. Who was this charming soul, the crafter of such droll dialogue and clever descriptions? The prose was crisp yet full of shadows: “The moon was a watchface scrubbed of hands.” By the end of the third screen, she was in love with her former self.
Yet something felt off. P. patiently awaited the appearance of the General, or Olga, indeed of any character she could remember writing. A familiar phrase or detail… It dawned on her that this was not “Easter Promenade” at all. It couldn’t be. Not a single word was hers. Over the years, someone else’s text had migrated beneath P.’s title. Perhaps her story could now be found under another byline; or maybe it had evaporated entirely. She navigated to the main page and found that the last new work had been published four years ago. The unsigned editor’s note blithely recounted managerial snafus and financial woes, ending with a resolute We’ll be back someday!
P. clicked on the thumbnail portrait of her younger self. Even the bio was for someone else, a writer with an androgynous name who had published stories in Crowd and Mangosteen Review and 6,500. All these journals had folded years ago, P. knew; hardly anyone remembered them now. Later, she told me that returning to that site was like driving by the cemetery after it snowed, when the shapes of the monuments could be mistaken for trees.
ED PARK is the author of the novel Personal Days and the forthcoming Same Bed Different Dreams. He is a founding editor of The Believer.
