The Janitor's Daughter

http://www.rigorous-mag.com/v1i1/nicole-quinn.html

        "My father's a janitor." I said. " My tuition is covered by a welfare scholarship. My mother takes in laundry for a rich white family who bought my clothes and loaned me the Benz."
        That's what I told the blonde social queens of our convent school in response to their question,
        "How much money does your father make that you can afford to be here?"
        It was 1970, we were sophomores at a girl's finishing school, the Benz was an old 1959 190SL, and it was a 16th birthday present from my father. I thought I'd said too much, gone too far with a narrative whose details didn't seem plausible. They'd know I was making it up, mocking them as they mocked me.
        On the contrary, they loved my frank humility, and for a few weeks I became a favored pet.
        We were never to ask questions about money, and everyone at school knew it. It was considered incredibly rude. The story about my father being a janitor came out as a knee-jerk reaction. I was a kid at boarding school, sometimes forgetting that my skin color made me different, because there were other girls who had accents and customs that identified them as more foreign than me in the school of 300 girls.
        The social queens came upon me in a courtyard during lunch. I remember it clearly, the wall of blonde varsity volleyball team that stepped in front of me, blocking my way. It wasn't aggressive, it wasn't overtly hostile, but it was a challenge. Prove yourself to us. They were trapping a wild animal for observation, and for their own protection, as my behavior in captivity was still an unknown, they did it as a group.
        They'd grown up together, gone to parochial elementary and junior high in segregated, though it was called exclusive, neighborhoods before coming to the convent for high school. They were a gang of we don't think we're mean girls, we just think we're better than you. They were determined to take down, or absorb into their pack, any lone wolves who appeared to threaten their dominion over the realm of smart, pretty, and going places.
        I was a boarding student. They were day-dogs. I don't know why we called them that, but we did. They'd started at the convent as freshmen. I'd been living there since I was eight. It was more home to me by then than home. I knew secret places to escape. I knew the old nuns and the cook and the pastry chef. I knew how to live in community, how to get along with different cultures.
        By high school I had already met this particular beast untethered, white privilege that assumes its superiority, in the guise of nuns bending over backward to accentuate our differences with blatant attempts to cull us from the herd. You could usually see them coming, the ones with veils flying and heels tapping, hurrying with offers of extra-help because of course you people always need it. Some openly treated my sister and me as if we were charity cases, though our parents paid the same tuition as everyone else.             Early accusations of plagiarism, or the times I had to take repeat tests alone to be certain I could replicate my answers, negated the fact that my sister and I had taken an arduous day long test to skip grade three when we first came to the convent. But these were things of the past. Surely my credibility and bona fides at this institution had already been firmly established after a seven years tenure? But now, here it was again, prove yourself worthy.
        My father wasn't a janitor, he was an aerospace engineer and he had helped to put man on the moon. The only janitor I knew personally worked at the special education school where my mother was a speech pathologist. Mr. Quimby was his name, and he was right off the boat from Ireland, where he said his people were considered niggers too. He sold Mama Irish Sweepstakes tickets once a year. He told wonderful stories and bawdy jokes. I could almost smell the peat smoke and hear the flutes and concertinas in his brogue. He had apple cheeks and a big belly laugh and a closet full of cleaning supplies. He was lovely, and I learned from him that lovely people do many things for a living, but it's not what measures their worth.
        For weeks the social queens gathered at lunchtime to hear stories of my Janitor's daughter's life, so foreign from our own. It was a colorful saga - of many people living together crammed into a one room shack, with no running water, and an outhouse. I shared the secrets of washing clothes in river water slapped against big rocks, and introduced the notion of foraging for food. I embellished Mr. Quimby's colorful history of poverty and pretended it was my own.

        Sister Kathryn was my favorite nun. She was our movie star beautiful, virtuoso violin playing, dean of students. She stopped by my room one night, several weeks after the janitor's daughter was born, and invited me to meet in her office the next morning. There she confronted me with my stories, and was incredibly knowledgeable about the details of same.
        "A janitor's daughter? How would your parents feel about the way you've described them? They've worked very hard to achieve what they have." She admonished.
        "I think they'd laugh. They'd know why I did it." I said.
        "Why did you do it?" She asked sincerely.
        "I just told them what they wanted to hear. They don't want the truth, that I'm just like them, or that heaven forfend, I might even be smarter, prettier, and happier then they're supposed to be. They want stories that make the world make sense to them. So that's what I gave them. It's what they want to believe, that they're better than me. What do I care if they believe that my father's a janitor? What difference does it make, especially if I'm the architect of that belief?"
        We were silent for a while. I could see she'd understood. I was hopeful.
        "You'll have to apologize." Sister Kathryn said at last.
        "WHAT?! But they're just stories!" I cried, desperate not to be humiliated in front of that pack of she-wolves.
        "You lied." she said.
        I wrinkled a brow and pouted,
        "White lies." I offered. "Who was hurt by them?"
        Here her face clouded and she looked down at her hands and at the wood floor.
        "Your stories first came to our attention when we noticed a large uptick in scholarship donations. Many were given in your name." She confessed.
        We stared at each other, and then we burst out laughing, then I started to cry.
        "That's why I have to apologize?"
        She nodded sympathetically.
        "Will you get to keep the money if I do, for someone else?" I asked.
        She shrugged.
        "I suppose so, no one will take back a donation."
   
        The time and place were fixed for my apology. An informal tea in the French parlor at the convent, with Sister Kathryn, the four social queens and their mothers on a Sunday afternoon. I was to host them all.
        I spent the entire weekend writing and trashing hundreds of apologies. But I couldn't figure out how to serve the brief and still win. I was spitting angry and tearfully frustrated at my hopeless situation when Sister Kathryn paid me a visit in my room, now a landscape of wadded paper balls. She looked at the tears rolling down my cheeks.
        "Having a hard time with it?" She asked of the obvious.
        I nodded and snorted.
        "I might be able to help you." She said.
        I looked at her, surprised and hopeful that there might be rescue.
        "I think you've lost sight of where this all started. It's always best to go back to the beginning." She smiled reassuringly. She handed me a handkerchief plucked from her sweater sleeve and left my room.
        Back to the beginning? How was that helpful? Where it all started? Back to the beginning? Then it hit me. Absolutely true and simple and to the point.
        I took a clean sheet of paper and wrote one sentence on it. Then I cleaned up my room.

        The French parlor was so called for the Louis quinze style gilt and brocade furnishings, the ornate portraiture on papered walls edged in mahogany wood, and Aubusson rugs. The room had an over done opulence that said money, once upon a time.
        The social niceties were observed that day, it was a finishing school after all, where we were taught how to ice our enemies in the nicest ways. Chit-chat, observations on the weather, it was southern California, so almost always nice, and the traffic, almost always bad. The mothers wore mink coats against the chill of their air conditioned Cadillacs. The furs were now laid on a settee with shapely legs in the corner, the fur turned in to monogrammed silk linings. Large carat weight diamonds winked on well manicured hands, like headlights, blinding when caught in the sunlight through tall windows.
        Suddenly I was on. The clink of sterling against china hushed, and I could feel hungry expectant eyes urging me on to the main attraction, my own humiliation. Maybe I imagined it, or in the reinvention of memory it's become more dramatic than it was, but it seemed like the moment in an epic battle where the hero must prove her metal to move on, or fall away to nothing. The many headed mother-daughter monster salivated in unseemly triumph before me. They saw me already smacked me down, the lying outlier who dared to take them on as equal, while they fed at my neck. Or maybe they just wanted to watch someone grovel, to make themselves feel superior. I'll never know.
        I smiled. I remember doing it because it made me feel less afraid once I had. I took the room in, this tribe of blonde women who hated me on general principal, and Sister Kathryn who I knew had my back, but wasn't allowed to show it lest it appear as favoritism, or, god forbid, pity.
        "I'm sorry for misleading my peers," I began, reading my prepared sentence. "But I didn't know how to respond when they asked me how much money my father made."
        It took a moment for it to sink in, for the diamonds to dim, for the mother's smiles of triumph to become forced and social, for the girls to begin imagining their own punishments for this compounded social comeuppance. It took everything I had not to be smug. They'd been hoist on their own petard. They'd assumed I didn't know how to play the game. But Sister Kathryn saved me. She showed me all the game pieces I had to play, and I didn't want to blow her rescue. I didn't want to be lessened in her esteem.
        It's funny to me now and rather charming that my revenge was so inventive. I see now that even in losing there was victory.  Story is a powerful tool. But the ability to shape narrative should never be taken lightly, nor fiction and feeling be allowed to supplant the truth. I know now that I was always worthy and need not have passed anyone's test, but then if none of that had happened, I wouldn't have had this story.




       
       

UPDATE: The Gold Stone Girl

Nine years ago I sat down to write a film script about women, our dreams and nightmares. It became three books, and then three audio-books, and now at last book one, It's a Nightmare, is a script. It's a cinematic story, a new world built on our own, that lends itself well to the visual medium.

I love this journey with Mina. She's hard and feisty, she does what it takes to make her dreams come true in an action adventure story with a female of color in the lead, without a gun!  Many lessons  have been learned and earned along this path. Mostly about honoring my own dreams and purging my nightmares

The script is a semi-finalist in the Series Fest/Rose McGowan Featuring Women Initiative 
Script Competition




and a quarter finalist in the Screen Craft China-Hollywood Screenwriting Fellowship



 It's a Nightmare is entered in a few other film/media competitions in the hope of  bringing Mina to the attention of potential partners. May this cautionary tale spread its roots into deep rich healthy loam.

Chapter One

The Rogue’s File

  A puff of yellow smoke, a lightening flash, a sizzle, pop, crack, and then a boom! 

A cloud of disjointed words and blurred images burst into the column of blue screen light that surrounds Reve.  He’s inside his stone colonnade, housed on the top floor of his seven thousand seven hundred and seventy-seven floor private museum, dedicated to the archeology of the planet. 

He’s hunkered over a desktop of screens, perched on two orange eyed gryphons, the size of hellhounds. The long stone room, with mullioned windows along the ramparts, is filled with the artifacts of other times.  

Reve is under house arrest, but only because he’s been too busy searching for this particular file to make his escape.  

He squints, devilishly handsome, in the fog of effigies around him.  Random words and misty images, drift into clumps.  He’s trying to make sense of them.  He has only a few seconds to break the code on this file, labeled Rogue Dreamer, before it self combusts.  A screen drone has already reported the security breach to President Bob, but Reve plans to be long gone before anyone arrives to ask questions.  

This file will confirm it, he thinks, his suspicion that if Rose is not the Gold Stone Girl, the Rogue dreamer must be. It’s the only way it all makes sense. It explains the feelings he’s had ever since he met her, the confidence that anything is possible. 

He can remember the buoyant feelings he had with the other dreamers, with Sada, Lida, Uda, and little Hoda, but never before has he felt so joyful. No, that’s not the word, but he’s not exactly sure what the feeling is. Perhaps it’s because he’s never felt quite this way before, driven to do something that has meaning. Never has he known anyone as unpredictable as this Rogue.  What she might be like, a dreamer not raised in his mother’s system, is impossible for him to imagine.  

Waves of emotion roll over him when he remembers being with her, this girl of his dreams.  He hardens at the memory of mating with her, of their mutual satisfaction. His heart kicks at his ribs, and his stomach drops, the way it does when he reenters Blinkin’s atmosphere from space, or when he rides the building climber outside, set on express, none of it equal to the power he felt bringing the Rogue to fulfillment.  He’d never done that before, given a female pleasure.  All the other Gold Stone girls had been broken, and the breeders were all cut.  

A dreamer, not raised by his mother, is a wondrous and mysterious creature, he’s decided. She’s all he’s been able to think about, she’s what fuels his every move. He wants to be worthy of her, though he’s not quite sure what is meant by the word. Thoughts of the rogue, as his match, as a contest, drive him on. He feels, for the first time in hundreds of thousands of cycles, he feels, yes, hopeful.  

If she’s the one, then what cannot they accomplish together?  Maybe, he thinks, as treason daily recasts itself as activism, just maybe, they can topple his mother, and dream another way.  Together, he and this rogue, they might do anything.  They might save the world and remake it anew.  

Reve has no idea that these plans he’s making for the future are rudimentary dreams.  He just knows that the more he believes his ideas are possible, the more possible they seem.

It’s taken Reve several suns, and much sucking up, to regain his mother’s confidence, and even now their meetings are only cordial.  The Night Mare is wrapped up in her web of dreams, slung in a miasma of Drifter scent.  She gives him face time, now and then, usually on the screens.  Exchanges in which she offers him slurred and random responses, to conversations they’re not having.  Reve can see that his mother’s a mess, and that her inability to command the ship, means that the whole world’s in for a wreck.

The Drifters tell him that she’s demented.  He wonders what that means.  

Aging has been illegal in Winkin City, until just recently.  Now the Night Mare’s age, she will admit to one million thirty, is the new twenty, by official decree.  Skin wrinkling has become the latest craze.  Reve’s mother is now referring to herself as the Dream Weaver, as a marketing ploy, for her new line of synthetic dreams. Pastel pulp, guaranteed to blow your mind.  Now, instead of the daily med patch, soap opera plastic dreaming is required.  Humans fled the city in droves once they’d tried them. The ones who didn’t make it out, are now all addicted to sugar coated nightmares, too deluded to care what happens in the everyday.  

Everything in Winkin City is changing more rapidly than the planet is shrinking.  President Bob has assumed the helm, as Decider in Chief, and he’s already begun a new war.  

The lazy thoughtless way to stimulate a sluggish economy, Reve thinks with ire.  

To finance this offensive effort, Bob’s changing a million year demographic, and he’s letting the monster lobby rise.  As a result, the food chain is shifting, and the humans left dreaming in Winkin City, may soon lose their legislative struggle, not to be reclassified as meat. 

Reve swipes an impatient hand through the file’s information. Stacks of words shift places in the air around him.  He fans another section, and a swarm of words turns upside down. Still there’s no clarity to the narrative.  Reve’s searching for a pattern, for a key to make meaning out of the raw data, hanging in the air around him.  Breaking this code is all that keeps him from knowing everything that there is to know about the Rogue dreamer.  

Soon, Reve thinks, he’ll know her name.  He considers this thought with a smile.  Something that happens now whenever Reve thinks of the Rogue dreamer.  He’s been imagining scenarios of their next meeting. He sees himself holding the Rogue in his arms, and mating with her, unhurried, and without an audience. He doesn’t imagine intimate conversations. Nor does he understand that shared decision making, means that she has a say.  All of these things will occur to him the hard way, but for the moment, his vision of true love is mostly physical. 

“What is your name?” He says aloud. 

He pushes the sections of random words around, this way, and then that, puzzling the anagrams to be found, the task seeming insurmountable.  Which are the right words to choose? Then suddenly, Bob, ratty-Bob, pops into Lord Nightmare’s head.  

Lazy and mean spirited, are the words to best describe him, Reve thinks.  Bob calls himself, a man of ideas, but in reality, 

“He’s a blamer and a credit whore,” Reve mutters, of his mother’s new second in command.  

Then Reve notices that Bob logged this file himself.  This is a file Bob didn’t trust to someone else.  

Reve ponders this, and the key to unlocking the file comes to him with crystal clarity.  Bob would have taken the easiest way out.  Rats are lazy.  They make shortcuts.  At least that’s been Reve’s experience of rats.  There have always been rodents scurrying around his mother.  

He swipes at the words midair, till the end is now a beginning.  The file explodes open around him, silently, in a plume of bright white light.  The words and effigies order themselves into a visual story, slow moving, chronological.  

He sees the rogue huddled at the base of the rickety Bridge of Tears, and then again at the screen, on the border of the breederhood, her face spattered in blood.  He stops the action, by reaching out to tap an image of the Rogue in the girl registry office, alongside two Off-gridders and, Bob, he notes with surprise.

“Mina.”  Reve says her name aloud, and over dozens of times in succession, now that he’s learned it.  Even the sound of it makes him smile.  

“Mina.”

Reve lingers over an aerial image of the Bubbas’ homestead in the Off-grid.  He reads Bob’s notes on the best ways to attack it.  He pulls three-dimensional footage of Bubba and Dee-Dee towards him, searching for clues to Mina in their faces.    

They’re Off-gridders!  Reve thinks with mounting excitement.  That explains Mina’s forthrightness, she was raised in the Off-grid.  There’s not much tolerance for bullshit in the Off-grid.  Either you can survive there, or you die, he thinks, as one who’s certain he could accomplish the thing with ease.  

Unlike most in Winkin City, where the Off-grid is reviled by even the walkway sweepers, Reve has always held a deep fascination for all things Off-grid.  That rugged wild frontier, where a man is tested by the planet, and not his mother, to survive.  

Now that the file is open, Reve’s disappointed by its lack of content.  There’s very little by way of official screen captures of Mina, or her family.  What footage there is was all gathered by the paps, on the day Mina was registered, and in quarantine, after her Surrender.  It’s much less information than would be available on any citizen, who lived their life in Winkin City.  

Reve waves the Surrender footage to him.  He watches Mina pace the quarantine hall.  He’s wondering what she’s thinking when she examines the walls and the floors?  He watches her intake interview with Mike, and he notices how the aged civil servant smiles at her.  Then she’s laughing with paps, and speaking their language, something he thought only Frederick took the time to do.  

Then Reve sees himself, mating with Mina on the psychophant’s ledge.  He feels a sudden pit in his stomach. He doesn’t know what to call this fire in his belly, so he snarls instead. Then he claws the images right out of the official record, sparks flying, security lights flashing, warning bells clanging.

“This was private!”  Reve shouts.  

He’s mated with so many on the screens without concern, but this, he thinks, this time with Mina was different, it was special. He wonders why it matters.  Maybe, he thinks, it’s how vulnerable he was.    

Reve wafts the image of Mina’s face closer, heedless of the alarms, the bells and whistles, sounding all around him now.  He examines her; the mass of black curls, the soft roses in golden brown cheeks, her almond shaped eyes, amber dipped in stardust.  He draws his finger from the rosebud mouth, down to the dimple in her chin.  He smiles, wishing he knew her better, wishing he hadn’t wasted so much time.  He kisses the image gently on the lips.    

“I don’t know the words.”  

He doesn’t know the words, I’m sorry, because he’s never used them.  

“I’m guilty.”  He says instead, and he knows this to be true, even though it’s not quite what he meant to say. He’s thinking of the last time he spoke to her, and dream junkie is what he called her.  It was not a nice thing to say.  

“I want to be different.” He says to the images looping around him. 

He’s been horrific all of his life.  What it might mean to be other than that, he’s not really sure.  But even this small thought of the change he will attempt, rallies in him a never before felt vigor, and a renewed interest in life.  

He plans to leave the city, and to forgo all of his power.  He plans to sever himself from his mother completely, and to live as a human in the Off-grid.  

That it will be a wandering in the desert, while the planet exacts her penance from him, he does not anticipate, but walkabout he will.

Reve is about to close the file of Mina’s quarantine, when he sees Frederick Bogeyman sitting on her quarantine hall bed, at its end.   

“What are you doing with my rogue?”   He asks the image of Frederick, who’s chatting with Mina, a cigar in his filthy hand.  

The primal animal in Reve rises with a growl.  

“Are they flirting?”  He asks himself.  

Then the action jumps forward, to Mina surrounded by dream probes.  Small cuts are slashed across her face, the screen walls are open to the walkways. Mina drops to her knees, succumbing to the hum of the probes, and then she smiles, and unexpectedly vanishes.  

Now he sees Mina, her back sucked to a wet cliff face, arms wide, a storm howling all around her.  She’s spotlit in probe light. Without warning she dives off the cliff, and she plummets into the mist.

“Did she just jump into the Mists of Disbelief?” Reve asks himself astounded. 

The air around Reve heaves and bristles. The action pulls him from his open mouthed shock, back to his own plan of escape. The darkness shuffles again, and he remembers the guard of Drifters huddled at the edge of the light around him.  

These Drifters have been disabled. Vials of dream mist have been self-ravaged into all of their necks, and orange goo is leaking. These Drifters are all so deep in dream that they may never return. Concentrated dreams stolen from the Night Mare, by Rose, expressly for Reve to use in this way, to buy him time for an escape.  

Reve puzzles Rose’s loyalty, for he knows with certainty that he’s done nothing to deserve it.  All that’s about to change.  He’s determined to become a different demon, one who’s held to a moral code. He’s not quite sure what that means, nor how difficult it might be when tested, but he’s determined to give it a real go.

Reve wriggles through the Drifter circle, a tall wall of mildewed towels.  The dreaming beasts cluck, they shuffle in absent circles, and then squijal back into the dream circle again.  

Reve crosses to the far side of the room with purpose, the bells and sirens weakening as he goes.  He stops at the wall, at the canvas of an ancient castle on a stormy night, slung low upon it.  

“Verity.” Reve says, and the castle becomes a swirl of brilliant colors. 

“What is the Gold Stone Girl?” Reve asks the screen, wondering why it’s never occurred to him to ask her about it before.

An official image of Rose appears on the screen.  Verity’s sultry voice supplies the narrative.  

“Rose is the fifth, in the era post Alma.”  The screen goes silent, and the image of a sullen Rose stares at him from the wall.

“Yes, but what else?”  He asks.  “Why do we single the girl out?  Why does my mother eat her?’

“All else is classified.” Verity replies. 

“Classified?”  He asks confused.  

“Classified.” She repeats. 

Reve slumps into a nearby throne, made of hide tied to bone, and he pouts.  

“Loser,” Verity says.  

“What?”  Reve asks in outrage and surprise.  “You’re the one without the information.  I thought you knew everything.”

“It’s not that I don’t know, it’s that I can’t tell you.  You disappoint me, Reve.  There’s always a way around a classification.”  Verity says.   

“Oh cut it out, and just tell me!”  He mopes.

“Think, numbskull,” Verity says.

He ponders.

“Show me the pre-collapse.”  He commands.

Verity’s screen swirls toward the past.