A grown man remembers Peggy Fleming, a neighbor of his grandparents, and the stories told about her at their kitchen table when he was a boy. The story opens with that talk.
Peggy Fleming, according to my grandfather, was the “homeliest damn woman” he’d ever seen. Her face was swollen and pasty, with broken capillaries that sloped down the sides of her nostrils, flooding the arid plain of her skin, like some dreary river and its tributaries eking over a delta of nasolabial folds to terminate in the red seas of two droopy cheeks. Spindly, awkward limbs stuck out of a round body, like you might see in a kindergartner’s rendering of a person. She was, unfortunately, toothless, and hairless as well, suffering from a mysterious childhood disease that had left her with chronic alopecia. Peggy used to tell us kids that she lost all her hair because she refused to eat green beans when she was a child. I always thought it a cruel irony that she had the same name as the graceful and beautiful skater who had won the Olympic Gold Medal in 1968.
I remember hearing my grandparents and Auntie Ag, my grandmother’s older and “much smarter” sister (the one who graduated high school), likening Peggy’s features to those of a bulldog, as they puffed away on Lucky Strikes and Parliaments, stopping now and then to slap down a poker chip or a playing card, and take another sip of whiskey. While they played, I circled the kitchen table and listened, picking up snippets about Peggy’s tragic life.
Her story goes something like this—She was married once to a very handsome man named Jim, who was quite successful in business, something to do with cutting pants—“slacks” my grandmother called them—for a good company. Everyone was surprised that Peg could get such a catch, but like many ugly people, she had a heart of gold, and oh could she sing! The two of them, they met in a nightclub in Boston’s Back Bay, one of those divey joints, nothin’ too swanky, where Peg performed for a small crowd on Friday nights. She sang those good old songs from back in the day, songs like “Fools Rush In,” not the crappy remakes, but the best version with Frank Sinatra, and other songs like “You Stepped Out of a Dream” by Sarah Vaughan (that broad could pull your heartstrings). Jim often stopped by the nightclub after work, and you know, eventually they hit it off, and one thing led to another, and of course they got married. But by Christ! How in God’s name could Jim stand to look at that puss day in and day out?
And wasn’t it a tragedy, how one evening, after a game at Fenway Park, Jim drove the green Buick that he loved so much into a fruit stand on the side of the road, killing the old Italian guy selling the stuff, and himself, of course. Afterward, Peg was never the same. She wouldn’t go out, still hardly does, and that was years ago. It’s a shame how she’s tried to drown her sorrows by cozying up to that bottle. It’s a good thing she has a neighbor like Helen to take her out once in a while.
And Helen, my grandmother, would beam at this point, say something like, “Well, the poor thing!” Then Auntie Ag would nod her head in disgust at the whole terrible situation, and Grampie, he would become stone silent, ashamed to have said so much already.
Almost everything we learn about Peggy comes secondhand: the grandfather’s “homeliest damn woman,” the bulldog at the card table, a story that “goes something like this.” In the third paragraph the narration slides into the grown-ups’ own idiom, “nothin’ too swanky,” “that broad could pull your heartstrings.” The hope was that the reader would begin to judge the speakers as well as Peggy, and that the last details, Helen beaming and Grampie “ashamed to have said so much already,” would show the gossips as clearly as their subject.
A suggestion. If a character in your draft is described only by the narrator, you might try letting another character describe him or her, and notice what the description reveals about the speaker.