As he pushed open the glass door of the post office, Bud saw Marilyn behind the counter sorting pieces of mail.
"Well, hello you." Marilyn called out. "How's every little thing with you, Bud? Things okay down at the dump?"
Bud thought about what to say to this woman who he'd hoped to bring home someday. He decided to tell her about the garbage bag of dead racoon babies he'd found and how the stench was still stuck up in his truck. Marilyn told Bud she'd seen some new skunks around her woodpile.
The door opened and Bud saw that it was Della Borden. She and Marilyn had been school mates. He knew a conversation between these women may take awhile so he decided to take the newspaper from his back pocket and settle in at the end of the counter until Della collected her mail and moved on. They grew up in this small town and never left, never thought otherwise.
"Della, how's every little thing?" Marilyn askced.
"Oh fine, the doctor told me I got high blood pressure and when these pills he got me on settle in'a my system , I think I'll feel a lot better". Della shifted her weight from one foot to the other. Della noticed Bud. "Hey Bud, I heard Tina's come back to town. That right?"
"Uh huh."
"She got her husand with her?"
Bud hung on the word husband for a moment. "No," Bud replied, never looking up from the paper.
Della raised her eyebrows, swallowed a belch, and snapped her attention back to Marilyn. "Okay, let me see what bills I got today."
Marilyn handed over a small bundle. "There you go, Della."
"All righty, I better go, I gottta git home, 'fore it gets too hot. See ya, Marilyn. See ya, Bud." Della shuffled out with beads of sweat forming over her lip.
Bud watched her leave and folded the paper back up and slipped it back into his pocket. He walked down the length of the counter toward Marilyn, sucked his breath in hard, and asked her if she would like to come over later for dinner with he and Tina.
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You've got a knack for capturing the ring of natural speech, Jen -- though be careful about overdoing phonetic spellings (like "git" for "get") -- Twain could get away with it once, but modern readers can find it distracting. Enough to flavor the speech -- no more!
ReplyDeleteIn a very few lines you've done a wonderful job of sketching out these three characters and their relationships -- and have done so through what these characters are doing as well as what they're saying. I loved Bud's initial thought upon entering the scene -- wondering what to say to this woman "he'd hoped to bring home" -- and his falling back on the fairly unpleasant details of his work -- very funny!
That, though, might be a place to stand back and consider pacing. The exchange that follows is summarized -- part of what the assignment asked you to do -- but might summarizing all of it undercut the effectiveness of that line? Would the following exchange really take much longer in dialogue from than it has in summary? Summary typically serves to fast-forward through a scene -- to get us to the important bits. Here, it struck me as fuzzing an otherwise sharp exchange....