On the Care and Feeding of Neighbors

Thompson wanted to meet at a place that served pie. He was specific about this. Not a restaurant that happened to have pie on the dessert menu, but a place where pie was the point, where they sliced it thick and didn’t ask if you wanted ice cream because they already knew. We found one on a county road outside of a town I won’t name, one of those towns with a water tower and a grain elevator and a single traffic light that blinks yellow after nine. The kind of town where everybody knows your business and calls it concern.

He was already in a booth when we arrived, eating pecan pie with a fork that looked like it had been through two wars. He was shorter than I expected, with the build of a man who’d done physical labor at some point and then stopped but kept the shoulders. He had a way of smiling that made you want to check your wallet.

Jackson came in a few minutes after me, looked around the diner the way you’d look around a room where you suspected someone had recently died, and sat down without removing her coat. She ordered coffee and nothing else. Thompson pushed the pie plate toward her. She moved it back without touching it.

“So,” Thompson said. “You want to write about a mother and daughter who con people.”

“I want to write about a daughter who thinks she’s in a partnership,” I said. “But she might be the mark.”

Thompson grinned. It was the grin I’d been warned about — warm and loose and completely unconnected to anything behind his eyes. “Now that’s a distinction worth making. There’s the grift you’re running and the grift being run on you, and the best operators don’t always know which side of that line they’re on.”

“The daughter’s telling the story,” I continued. “First person. She sounds sweet. Devoted. She talks about her mother the way Merricat talks about Constance — ”

Jackson looked up from her coffee. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Don’t make her Merricat. Merricat is eighteen and she lives in a world she’s built out of rules and magic and the absolute conviction that love and murder are the same act. Your daughter is something else. She’s functional. She goes to the grocery store and talks to people and they think she’s normal. That’s far more frightening than Merricat, if you do it right.”

Thompson was nodding. “Shirley’s onto something. The scariest narrators aren’t the ones who seem crazy. They’re the ones who seem sane. Lou Ford — you know Lou Ford?”

“Deputy sheriff. Central City, Texas.”

“That’s him. Lou talks to you like your best friend. He uses cliches and platitudes and you think, well, he’s a little dim maybe, a little folksy, and then he beats a woman to death and describes it the same way he’d describe repairing a screen door. Same register. Same friendly tone. The horror isn’t the violence. It’s the voice not changing.”

Jackson set her coffee cup down hard enough that the saucer rang. “That’s what I mean. Your daughter — what’s her name?”

“I don’t have one yet.”

“Get one. You can’t write a voice without a name. But whatever you call her, she needs to have a voice that sounds perfectly appropriate for a twenty-six-year-old woman living quietly with her mother in a small town. Appropriate. That’s the word. Everything she says should be the thing you’d expect her to say, and only after you’ve finished reading should you realize that all the appropriate things added up to something monstrous.”

“I was thinking about the domestic angle,” I said. “The house. The mother and daughter sealed inside this life they’ve built. They cook dinner together, they have routines — ”

“Every household is a closed system,” Jackson said. “Every family is. The question is what the system produces. Most families produce — what? Comfort. Resentment. Laundry. Your family produces victims. But they should produce them the same way normal families produce dirty dishes. As a byproduct. Not as the point.”

Thompson laughed. He had a good laugh, the kind that rolls. “That’s right. The grift shouldn’t feel like the center of their lives. It should feel like the family business. Like running a hardware store. You get up, you eat breakfast, you go cheat somebody out of their savings. Tuesday.”

“But there has to be tension between them,” I said. “Otherwise it’s just a portrait. I was thinking — the mother is the real operator. She trained the daughter. But now the daughter is getting good. Maybe too good. And the mother sees it.”

Thompson leaned back. “In The Grifters, Lilly and Roy are competitors. Mother and son. She’s been working the big con — horse racing, mob connections — and he’s been doing small-time short cons. But they’re in the same town and eventually their interests collide. The thing about Lilly is she’ll sacrifice her son. Not because she doesn’t love him. Because the grift comes first. It always comes first.”

“Does the mother love the daughter?” Jackson asked me.

I hesitated. “Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“The daughter thinks so.”

Jackson almost smiled. “Good. Keep it there. Don’t answer the question. Let the reader answer it. Because the daughter can’t answer it — she’s too close, she’s inside the house, she can only see the walls. And the reader is outside the house, and they can see the shape of it, and maybe they’ll see something the daughter can’t.”

“The community matters,” I said. “The neighbors. I keep thinking about your village, Shirley — the way people in your work watch each other, form judgments, enforce normalcy. The town should be watching this mother and daughter.”

“Every town watches,” Jackson said. “That’s not a literary device, that’s Tuesday in America. The question is what they see. And what they see depends on what they’ve already decided. If they’ve decided these are two nice women, alone, keeping to themselves — then they’ll see two nice women. People don’t observe. They confirm.”

“Unless something disturbs the picture,” Thompson said. “Someone new. Someone who doesn’t know the rules.”

“Or someone who notices the wrong thing,” Jackson said. “A neighbor who comes over with a casserole and sees something in the kitchen she shouldn’t. Not a body. Not a weapon. Something small. An object that doesn’t belong in that kitchen. A piece of paper. A number.”

I was scribbling. “The daughter’s voice — how sweet is too sweet?”

“There’s no too sweet,” Thompson said. “That’s the trick. You think there’s a ceiling, right? You think at some point the reader will catch on and the sweetness will start to curdle. But it doesn’t. I wrote a man who philosophizes about how a man doesn’t get more out of life than he puts into it while planning a double murder, and the readers still liked him. They liked him more for the philosophy. People want to be lied to. They want the sweet voice. They’d rather believe the sweet voice than look at what it’s describing.”

“Merricat isn’t sweet,” Jackson said quietly. “Merricat is direct. She says ‘I am going to put death in all their food and watch them die’ and she says it the way she’d say she’s going to the garden. The horror is in the flatness. Your daughter should be different. Your daughter should be warm. She should use words like ‘Mama’ and ‘supper’ and describe the neighbor’s yard with genuine affection. And underneath all of that warmth there should be a mechanism ticking.”

“What kind of mechanism?”

“The kind you don’t hear until it stops.”

Thompson ordered more pie. He ate it with the focus of a man who’d gone hungry at some point. Between bites, he said, “Here’s what I keep coming back to. The grift as inheritance. In my book, Roy learned it from Lilly. She put him in the life the way other mothers put their kids in piano lessons. It’s not abuse, exactly. It’s preparation. She’s preparing him for the world as she understands it — which is a world where everyone is either running a con or getting conned, and she’d rather her kid be on the right side of that equation.”

“The daughter should believe the same thing,” I said. “That the mother taught her this out of love.”

“Or necessity,” Thompson said. “Love and necessity are harder to tell apart than people think.”

Jackson put her coat off finally. The diner had warmed up. “You need to think about the house. The physical house. What it looks like. What the neighbors see when they drive past. A house tells a story. My Blackwood house is a castle — Merricat says so. It has borders and boundaries and the act of crossing them is an act of violence. Your house should be the opposite. It should look open. Welcoming. The kind of house where the porch light is always on. And the openness should be the lie. The house should be the first con — the longest con. Every geranium in the window box is doing work.”

“The mother tends the geraniums,” I said, something clicking.

“The mother tends everything,” Jackson said. “That’s her grift. She tends the town. She remembers birthdays. She brings soup to sick neighbors. She’s the most thoughtful woman in that town, and every act of thoughtfulness is a move on a board the neighbors don’t know they’re playing on.”

Thompson pointed his fork at me. “Now you’re getting it. But don’t forget the daughter. The daughter has to be learning something her mother isn’t teaching. That’s where the tension lives. The mother teaches the mechanics — how to work a room, how to build a lie, how to exit clean. But the daughter is learning something else underneath. She’s learning that the mother’s tenderness toward the town is more convincing than the mother’s tenderness toward her. And she doesn’t know what to do with that information.”

I sat with that. It hurt in the right way.

“Let me push on something,” I said. “The voice. First person, the daughter. Thompson, your narrators — Lou Ford, Roy Dillon — they have this trick where they say something horrible in a normal voice. The gap between content and tone is where the dread lives. Jackson, your narrators — Merricat, Eleanor Vance — they have a different trick. They reorganize reality around their own logic, and the reader enters that logic and finds they can’t leave. How do I combine those?”

“You don’t combine them,” Thompson said. “You don’t stitch two things together and call it a voice. You find the voice that exists in the space between. A woman who describes what she and her mother do — the lying, the stealing, the careful dismantling of other people’s trust — and describes it in the language of domesticity. We harvested the Kesslers. We put up the Doyles for winter. Like canning vegetables.”

Jackson shook her head. “That’s too clever. Too aware. If the daughter uses metaphor like that, she knows what she is. She needs to not know. Or to know and not know at the same time. She should describe what they do in language so precise and so calm that it takes the reader a full page to realize she hasn’t used the word ‘steal’ or ‘lie’ or ‘con’ once. She’s described the entire operation without using a single word that admits to it.”

“Avoidance as voice,” I said.

“Not avoidance. Replacement. She’s replaced the vocabulary of crime with the vocabulary of care. She and her mother ‘help’ people. They ‘look after’ the neighbors’ finances. They ‘keep things running smoothly.’ And every one of those phrases is technically true if you look at it from the right angle, and completely false from every other angle.”

Thompson was grinning again. “I like that. The unreliable narrator who isn’t lying exactly. She’s just using the wrong dictionary.”

“She’s using the only dictionary she was given,” Jackson said.

Something shifted in the booth. A waitress refilled Jackson’s coffee and Jackson thanked her in a way that was so normal and so complete that I thought about it for the rest of the night — the way Jackson could inhabit normalcy and make it feel like a decision, a performance so seamless you couldn’t find the seam and so you had to wonder if there was one.

“What breaks?” I asked. “Something has to go wrong.”

“The mother makes a mistake,” Thompson said. “Or the daughter does. Someone new comes to town who sees through it. The grift is a machine and a machine needs maintenance. Eventually a part wears out.”

“No,” Jackson said. “Nothing breaks from outside. The community doesn’t catch them. A stranger doesn’t expose them. What breaks is inside the house. The daughter sees something — understands something she’s always known but never articulated. And once she’s articulated it, she can’t go back inside. She’s outside the house now. Outside the system.”

“What does she understand?”

Jackson picked up her coffee. “You tell me. That’s your job.”

“I think she understands that the mother’s love is a technique. Not a feeling. A technique. Something the mother learned to perform so well that even the daughter can’t tell it from the real thing. And the terrible part — the noir part — is that the daughter realizes she can’t tell because there might not be a real thing. The technique might be all there is. For both of them.”

Thompson finished his pie. “That’s your story. Right there. That last part. A woman who discovers that love and grift are the same skill, and she learned both from the same person, and she can’t unlearn either.”

Jackson put her coat back on. She was done, or close to done. “One more thing. The ending. Don’t let her leave. Don’t let her walk out of the house and into some new life. That’s not how it works. She understands what she is and she stays. She stays and she tends the geraniums and she remembers the neighbors’ birthdays and the last line should make the reader understand that knowing what you are doesn’t save you from being it.”

Thompson left money on the table. Too much, I noticed. Tipped like a man who’d been broke.

I stayed in the booth for a while after they left. The waitress brought me pie I hadn’t ordered. Pecan, thick-sliced. I ate it and thought about daughters and mothers and the word “kept” — kept house, kept secrets, kept going. The town outside the window was dark except for the traffic light, blinking yellow, blinking yellow, warning no one.