Sharing my writing...

with you this week

This week I revised some writing, applied for a writing grant, and did producing work on the upcoming performances of my play, Extraordinary People.

For the past forty plus years, many of my fictional works are based on actual people in my life. In the short story I will share with you here, Emma was my paternal grandmother. I know nothing of her youth, only that she first married at the age of twenty-seven. My imagination filled in the rest of the story, in The Blue Dress.

I wrote this more than thirty years and she hasn't come back to haunt me yet.

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Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

The Blue Dress by Sandra de Helen

We buried her in that dress. Soft, almost baby blue but more sophisticated because it shimmered in the candlelight. Satin, cut on the bias, a see-through lace above the sweetheart neckline. Oh, she was a beauty in that dress. She was tiny and blonde and blue-eyed, even at seventy. And she still wore the same size as the night she stepped out to the St. Patrick’s day dance with my grandfather on their first real date.

Emma was an old maid of twenty-seven, but her irascible Aunt Catherine chaperoned her and John that night, and every night of their courtship, which was less than three months. Emma attributed the speediness to her attractiveness and John’s sex drive. The rest of the family thought it might have had more to do with Aunt Catherine’s sharp tongue. After all, if Emma was such a catch, why was she still available at twenty-seven?

Emma wouldn’t say. No one in the family who might have known would talk about it when I asked. After all, Emma had been dead thirty years by then and people either didn’t find it seemly to discuss, or flat out couldn’t remember anymore.

Maybe Emma was too picky, too outspoken, or possibly too loose with her favors to find a husband among her many beaux. It’s not hard to imagine bits of her passion slipping free, although she was closely watched. Maybe there was a time when she was milking the cows and a neighbor boy visited her in the barn. The sight of Emma with her hair tousled, her sleeves rolled up, her long skirt bunched between her legs, all accompanied by the sweet smell of the warm milk streaming into the pail would have aroused a young man in his sexual prime. Maybe he nuzzled her bare neck, clasped his hands around her waist. She would have murmured to the cow to calm her and coax her to wait just a minute, just a few minutes so Emma could rise and turn into that boy’s arms, press her breasts to his firm chest, step onto the milking stool so they were eye to eye, and welcome his kiss.

What if she had led him up the ladder to the hayloft and allowed him to pleasure her with his big hands or hot mouth? Would he have been man enough to hold that secret to his heart? Or would he have told his peers, bragged to his friends, perhaps exaggerated their quick tryst into a deflowering of her virginity?

Surely he hadn’t gone that far, or Emma would have been shamed, and shunned. No. She had continued to date, and to date at least several times a year. No. She was still marriageable when John came along. So perhaps in spite of her passionate nature, she had not slipped, but was instead waiting, always seeking the man who would meet her standards, would meet her needs.

One thing is known. After John died, Emma did remarry but stayed in that second marriage only a few weeks. She threw him out because he was no good in bed and she didn’t care to waste her time.

Emma kept the blue dress in tissue in her bureau drawer, scented with lilac sachet. She was always waiting, always watching for a special someone to come along once more. She longed to dance again in the arms of a lover; she wasn’t ashamed, nor was she intimidated by age. She told her family what she wanted; she had us all on the lookout for the perfect man. But he never came; not again. And when she died, we buried her in the only appropriate thing; the blue dress. That way, should there be a heaven, she could spend eternity dancing with the man of her dreams.

                   End Story

Whether you are a writer or a reader, what are your thoughts about fictional characters being based (even named!) on actual people in your life?