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Tag Archives: The Caregiver

From Lillian’s Recipe Book

10 Friday Apr 2015

Posted by mcasale2014 in Uncategorized

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The Caregiver

“Maggie came in with a handful of leaves, which she rinsed, chopped, and sprinkled over the arrangement on her plate. The dark green bits looked nice against the red tomatoes and white cheese.

‘What is that called?’

‘This? Tomato salad, I guess.’

‘I thought maybe it was from—your country.’

Maggie seemed amused. ‘Oh, no, just my own invention, really. A Maggie salad. My father loves it too, I make it for lunch sometimes in the summer, if he is there.’”                                           —The Caregiver, 2014, by Maria Theresa Casale

Maggie Salad

Ingredients:

1-2 ripe red tomatoes, cut in wedges

1 cup ricotta cheese

1 lime, cut in wedges

Mint leaves or chives, chopped

Salt to taste

Arrange tomatoes on plate, scoop ricotta into the middle, squeeze one lime wedge over all, sprinkle with herbs and salt. Serve additional lime wedges on the side. There is no point making this unless you have good summer tomatoes.

Savor, and think of home.

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Writing for Riches

12 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by mcasale2014 in Uncategorized

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Book clubs, The Caregiver, writing, writing groups

Sometimes the gift you get isn’t the gift you were hoping for.

I’m sure every writer dreams of fame and fortune. The three-book deals, the book tours (although it’s just as well I haven’t gotten those, as I am a lousy traveler), the general Stephen King/Barbara Cartland wealth and riches of it all. Back in the day, that dream typically included Oprah’s Book Club, until a couple of writers burned her and wrecked it for the rest of it. In my daydream, I am convinced that, if not for those writers (you know who you are!), The Caregiver would certainly have been chosen, and I would have had to go through all the stress and bother of figuring out what to wear on TV and how not to melt under those lights, which I hear are quite hot and probably not kind to ladies of middle years who tend to be hot a good bit of the time anyway. Phew.

As you can probably tell, this didn’t happen, and I don’t just mean Oprah (although I haven’t completely given up hope and would like to point out that the film rights are still available and there are four meaty parts for actresses, one elderly, two middle aged, one teen—Angelina, Drew, Meryl, are you paying attention here?). The lovely (and horribly expensive) trips to writing conferences somehow failed to result in any famous authors wresting my manuscript from my hands and insisting on sending it to their agents.

Agents, generally, are quite unresponsive, making me nostalgic for the days when I submitted short stories to literary journals and could count on reaping a reliable harvest of polite, although preprinted, rejection letters. Agents pretty much just ignore you, or they ask for more pages and then ignore you, or they ask for the whole thing and several months later send you a lengthy email explaining that they love everything about your book except the title, plot and main character, but if you’d like to take the book apart and write a different one entirely, they would be happy to look at it with, of course, no guarantees.

My writing career hasn’t been without benefits, though. Thus far it has not resulted in a lot of the kinds of tangible outcomes that just lead to the trouble and expense of hiring fancy tax accountants. The famous authors, who have mostly all been very nice, seem content to let my manuscript take its chances in the wide word without any interference from them.  But the writers, and now the readers, have been the icing on the cake. The whole cake, really. I’ve posted before about my writing groups. Many of my best friends, including my husband, were found in my writing groups over the years. I have traveled to some gorgeous places, and made wonderful friends. I have found writers to be wonderful, generous people, with inexhaustible supplies of great stories and magnificent sense of humor.

Now that The Caregiver is out, I have met lots of readers at book clubs and other venues. They too are unfailingly generous and supportive. One person attending an event, who hadn’t even read the book yet, got a steely look in her eye when I mentioned my struggles to donate my book to libraries. “I’m a volunteer at my library,” she said. “And I’m going to make them BUY it!” Readers invite me into their homes, tell their friends about the book, and post reviews on line (about which I have been known to be just the tiniest bit naggy). Their warmth and kindness, thei questions they ask about the characters and their insights into the book astonish me.

I’ve learned about my community: a vibrant place, full of groups of friends who look out for each other; who meet to work, play, laugh, share goodies and explore the world. I was interviewed on the air, in an actual radio station! The fact that it was exactly like the ones on TV and in the movies (except maybe a smidge smaller) in no way detracted from the coolness of the experience. I was actually there. Incidentally, I’ve learned that people really do read the free weekly local paper, about which I promise to be much more diligent henceforth, even when I’m not looking for a housepainter or a day camp.

Sometimes the gift you get isn’t the gift you were hoping for. Sometimes it’s better than you could have imagined.

The Caregiver (Excerpt)

13 Thursday Nov 2014

Posted by mcasale2014 in Putting some skin in the game, Uncategorized, writing

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The Caregiver

Chapter Seventeen

Once Maggie found out Lillian knitted, she gave her no rest.

“What are you making?”

“A scarf.”

“For whom?”

“I am making it for myself.”

“It’s sooo beautiful,” Maggie said lingeringly.

Lillian knew a hint when she heard one, but she wasn’t giving this scarf to Maggie.

Presents, personal presents, weren’t appropriate between patients or their families and home health care staff, she told herself. There was probably something about it in the agency handbook, not that she’d read that in a dog’s age.  And why should she give Maggie anything?  It was annoying, the way she expected everything she wanted, or even merely liked, to be handed to her.

Lillian rarely knitted for herself, she usually made things for her sisters’ children or for friends, but she had put some thought into planning this elegant, shadowy combination of neutrals in similar shades and different textures, a wide scarf to put around her shoulders in the fall, and she was going to keep it.

Maggie always knew when to change her ground of attack.

“Teach me how to knit? Please?”

It was lucky for Maggie that she added that “please;” without it she would have had no chance at all. As it was, Lillian determined not to go one inch out of her way for this girl, to give nothing extra, to risk nothing.  Maggie took up too much time, too much space, too much air.  She crept into chinks in your walls that you didn’t even know you had.  She was as insidious as ivy.

Sometimes, Lillian found herself thinking about Maggie when she didn’t mean to, smiling to herself over some saying or little mannerism. She disapproved.  Maggie was too aware of her charm.  She expected too much; she presumed.  Still, she had said please.  But that didn’t mean Lillian had to give in easily.

“I could teach you,” Lillian said slowly, “but you will need to get some wool and a pair of straight needles.”

“Okay. I’ll get them today. There’s a knitting store right in Palmer Square.”

Any project that came with an excuse to shop would be especially appealing to Maggie. The store on Palmer Square was the most expensive place Lillian knew of to buy wool, and while she rarely allowed herself more than a single ball of wool from the clearance basket, enough for a narrow scarf, she often went in to let the colors and textures slide though her hands.  Maggie had no reason to care that even needles would cost three times as much there as they did anywhere else, and there would be no difference of quality, as there was with the yarn, to justify the expense. It was not Maggie’s fault that Lillian’s life was so different from her own; it was not even Maggie’s fault that her resources were, in this case, wasted on her.

“Get a ball of smooth wool, for starters,” Lillian said reluctantly. “Not mohair or eyelash, nothing fuzzy.  Something of an even thickness.  You need to be able to see the stitches.”

When Lillian said wool, she meant wool, and when she said a ball of wool she meant a single skein, but Maggie came bounding into the kitchen in the late afternoon with a bagful of cotton yarn, two sizes of knitting needles, and an outrageously expensive Scandinavian knitting magazine which had a pattern for a cotton tank top with a stripe across the bust. The colors of the cotton were luscious, tangerine and a deep fuchsia for the stripe.  Maggie had created the combination herself, in preference to the navy and white of the pattern, but Lillian refused to admire it.

“That cotton will be hard to learn on. Cotton’s tricky.  It doesn’t have much give, so it shows every deviation in tension.  If you’re not careful your needle will go between the threads and split the loop, instead of slipping inside it.”

“Oh.” Maggie reflected.  “Well, I’ll be careful.  Can we get started now?”

“No.” Lillian kept methodically tearing lettuce leaves.  “I’m making dinner.  Maybe tomorrow.”

Without looking up, Lillian could feel the girl deflating. Sometimes it surprised her, how much pleasure she got from thwarting Maggie.

 

From The Caregiver, Copyright Maria Theresa Casale 2014

Available on Amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com and through the Createspace eStore

The Caregiver (Excerpt)

11 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by mcasale2014 in Putting some skin in the game, writing

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The Caregiver

Maggie was, of course, the exception to this Whitmore business of leaving things unsaid. On one of her regular morning visits, she announced that her father would be coming to America at the end of the month.

“Your father will be coming here?”

“I suppose…not coming right here, that is, not right away. He has a lot of business to see to.”  She lowered her eyes and raised the pitch of her voice a little.  “Business interests may keep him in New York for a time.”

Lillian appreciated the phrasing, which, although obviously well-rehearsed, was clearly Maggie’s and not Carlotta’s. Carlotta wouldn’t have the energy, even if she had the inclination, for so many extra words.  What was it all in aid of, she wondered.  Why did she, Lillian,  have to know that Maggie’s father was coming to the U.S. and why did the fact that he would not visit the Whitmore homestead have to be papered over so neatly?  Did Maggie really believe that there was anyone within a hundred miles, give or take, of Ellen, who didn’t know she loathed her son-in-law?

“So, you’ll be going to see him in the city, of course?”

“I suppose. As time permits.  His time, of course.”

Maggie seemed distracted. Lillian knew the signs.  Another minute and Maggie’s voice would be issuing from the depths of the refrigerator as she let all the cold air out.

To head her off, Lillian put a few raspberries on a plate and added some goat cheese. Maggie would eat fruit and cheese, or anything milky, at any hour of the day or night.

“Maybe your father will be able to get away for a weekend. Princeton is not far from the city, and much cooler in the summer than the city can be.”

“He wouldn’t wish to intrude while Grandmamma is unwell.”

“Of course not.” Lillian considered a minute, than changed the subject.  “What are you up to today?”

“Well, I thought I would go downtown later with Beth Ann. We might go for ice cream, go to the library. “

Lillian knew Beth Ann, a plain, polite, chunky child, who looked younger than Maggie but was probably about the same age. She had come over a few times in the afternoon and she actually swam in the pool while Maggie applied sunscreen, lounged, flapped a magazine, and never got more than her toes wet.

Lillian knew that this swimming, and the fact that she ate a cookie when it was offered, while Maggie merely looked remote, meant that Maggie and Beth Ann were not quite of the same class. Swimming was too effortful, too strenuous. Rich people merely had pools, maintained pools, sat by pools, looked at pools, wore clothes designed specifically for being near pools, but they did not swim in them.

Poor Beth Ann, water streaming from her straggling hair and solid thighs, would be left behind, eventually, when school started or even before if Maggie found more sophisticated, mature friends.

“Where do you two go for ice cream?”

“Oh, I don’t know. We could go to Thomas Sweets.  Beth Ann likes the smoosh-ins, and I love the little iron tables, like metal lace.  So ice cream parlor-y.  Or we could go to Haagen-Dazs.  The Haagen-Dazs coffee ice cream is fabulous.  And there are some earrings I want to look at right across the street.”

Lillian nodded. Princeton was an ice cream town, and Maggie seemed to consider ice cream a nutrient.  She never mentioned the calories in ice cream, although she kept hers pristinely free of the vulgar “smoosh-ins,” macerated oreos and processed candy bits that Beth Ann so happily devoured.

Poor Beth Ann, Lillian thought. Her days are numbered.

“Well, that sounds like a nice day. I hope you girls have fun.”

“I guess.” Maggie seemed uncharacteristically hesitant. “Lillian, where do you go on your nights off?”

It was none of her business, and ordinarily Lillian would have no problem saying so, but somehow the knowledge of that picture in her nightstand drawer made her answer.

“Oh, out to dinner, sometimes to a movie, sometimes to Thomas Sweets.”

“Really?”

“Really. Try the chocolate peanut butter.  It’s fabulous.”  And the two of them giggled together.

 

 

From The Caregiver, Copyright Maria Theresa Casale 2014

Available on Amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com and through the Createspace eStore

Why Self-Publish?

21 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by mcasale2014 in writing

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self-publishing, The Caregiver, writing

No one tells a painter her work isn’t good enough to be on canvas. They may not buy her painting, they may not hang it in their galleries, but they can’t keep her from painting it.

It’s different for writers.  Gatekeepers –agents, editors, publishers’ marketing departments- – have until very recently had the power to keep a writer from making a book. Writers internalize rejections by these authorities as being related to quality, but in fact they are more related to marketability, and marketability is predicted based on the extent to which a manuscript resembles some commercially successful book.

Looking for proof? How many aisles of young adult horror/romance are there in your local Barnes and Noble now? How many were there before the Twilight trillogy? The market operates to reward imitation, not originality.

Until now. Now a number of outlets provide writers with the ability to publish a book themselves–without the approval of a sales-driven publishing industry– and to make it available to readers directly. A book can be the handcrafted production of just one person to a greater degree than at any time since the early days of the printing press.

Maybe I’m a control freak (okay, definitely I’m a control freak!), but I decided I wasn’t going to follow suggestions about how to make my book more acceptable to agents and editors by making it more like some other book. I wasn’t interested in being told about some trend I should follow or some other writer I should imitate.

Soup to nuts, for better or for worse, The Caregiver is my creation, from characters, setting and plot to the color of the cover and the font for the chapter headings.  It isn’t available at your local Barnes and Noble with the teen vampire/werewolf/zombie books, but it exists in the world as a book. And it’s all mine.

The Caregiver, Maria Theresa Casale, October 14, 2014:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1502420953/sr=8-4/qid=1413936783/ref=olp_product_details?ie=UTF8&me=&qid=1413936783&sr=8-4

Hidden Rooms and Secret Passages

15 Friday Aug 2014

Posted by mcasale2014 in Putting some skin in the game, Uncategorized, writing

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The Caregiver

I’m always drawn to books that contain hidden rooms and secret passages. From the ivy-covered door in the wall of the secret garden to platform nine and three quarters, secret chambers and magic portals (along with their smaller cousin the hidden compartment) have always signaled to me that it’s time to curl up in my coziest chair  for a reading adventure.

Since it doesn’t seem quite fair to talk about other books without letting you other Bookworms read some of mine, once or twice a month I will be posting some of my own work.  Here, in a chapter from my novel, The Caregiver, is a


contribution to the hidden room genre. Grab an afghan and a cup of tea and enjoy.

The next Tuesday was a bad day.  People always complained about Monday, but Lillian found Monday to be a good, no-nonsense, back-to-work day, a day that filled her with new resolutions and plans for the week.  It usually took until Tuesday for those plans to be shot to hell.

This Tuesday, she’d planned to plant some annuals in the garden and dust that appalling, gloomy dining room, but Ellen seemed to wake up with other plans.  Lillian was up and down the stairs a hundred times that morning.  Ellen turned against tea, requiring Lillian to unearth and scrub out the ancient percolator, which had become, some time in the last decade or so, where old pantry moths went to die.  Then the coffee had too much milk, not enough sugar, the room was too cold and the blinds, opened for warmth, let in too much light.

“I don’t know what you want to always be running off down there for,” Ellen said irritably.  “I’m your patient.  I’m up here.”

So Lillian stayed put, arranging pillows, moving Ellen’s pillows around this way and that, turning on the television, switching channels, turning it off.  Then on again.  She dusted Ellen’s dustless dresser, hoping that all the fussing would aggravate Ellen enough that she would order her downstairs, but today of all days, Ellen seemed positively pleased by the attention.  Lillian sighed inwardly and settled down in the uncomfortable armless bedside chair, prepared to wait her out.  After lunch, Ellen finally fell asleep, but the air had turned dark and muggy, and Lillian had caught Ellen’s irritability.

I should just go take a nap, she told herself, but instead she went downstairs, dragged out a broom and dust mop, clean rags and furniture wax.  As always, the dining room depressed her.

At least I can keep it clean, she told herself firmly, and started, as she always did, immediately to the left of the door.  Left to right, top to bottom, as ingrained as language, as thought.  The one thing her mother had taught her that she’d never questioned.

A room this dark never even looks any better after you clean it, she complained to no one.  I couldn’t see the dust before and I can’t see the absence of dust now.

She wanted to take a break, go get a glass of lemonade, but she kept going, doggedly.  The humidity was giving her a headache.  She kept going, working her way around the walls, flicking dust off old Whitmore’s portrait, passing the one stingy, over-draped window, around the corner to the menacing old china cabinet.

She’d always skimped here before, dusting the outside only, not bothering with the inside shelves or pulling the massive mahogany thing out to get behind it.  Her mother never left furniture in place when she cleaned.

Because she had a headache, because she was in a bad mood and wanted to quit, Lillian began unloading the cabinet, piling the old dishes with their blue and gold scrolled border pattern in the middle of the dining room table.  Finally the cabinet was empty.  She pulled it away from the wall and got the broom.  A room cleaned by her was going to be a clean room, no matter what.  It was then that she noticed the door.  A broom closet, she thought,.

The door opened onto an empty space ull of murky light.  Eight long panes of glass made up the walls of a room she had never imagined was there.  Around each long pane, small rectangles of glass made a narrow border; these border panes were made of glass that was faintly bubbled and green, so that when you looked through them you saw a world that had an otherworldly tinge and was distorted by the bubbles to look quite different from the world you saw through the clear glass in the middle.  Lillian liked having the option of taking the world plain or fancy, depending on which part of the window she looked through.

From a distance, the effect of the two types of glass was that each view was a framed painting, of the hedge, the lawn, the sky or the bed of tall perennials, hollyhocks, phlox and black-eyed susans that partially surrounded the glass room.  It irritated Lillian to see that the flower bed was mulched and weeded.  Some hack employee of the landscape service had known about her discovery, her secret room, all along.

The room had a floor of the same slabs of blue-gray slate as the screened porch at the other end of the house, and the ceiling was of triangular panes of glass, either frosted or dirty, Lillian couldn’t tell which, that all met in a point on the top, which was ornamented with a peculiar knobby iron object.  A pinecone or a pineapple, Lillian supposed.  The inner wall, where the room attached to the house, was covered in green tiles, which surrounded a wall fountain in the shape of a hirsute man’s face.  Beard and hair formed a single wild curly frame around the bold eyes, nose and mouth.  From the face’s mouth, a trickle of water was meant to run down into a tiled half-moon basin.

The copper face, greened by age and oxidation, gave, Lillian considered, the impression of a very nauseous person vomiting; she in no way regretted that the fountain no longer worked and that only a white streak on the wall remained of the water that must once have flowed from between those lushly bearded green lips.

Furnished, the room might not have appealed to Lillian.  It had probably been meant to hold a few exotic houseplants and a fussy little iron and glass dining set for ladies’ lunches in the spring and fall. The fountain would spew, goldfish would swim in the basin, the cushions of the chairs would be covered with material printed with palms and macaws.

But standing empty, the room called to Lillian.  It was clearly not useful for cooking or eating or sleeping, or even reading or conversation.  It was full of a cool, greenish light, and the light and the silenced fountain created a climate suitable only for thought.

Lillian thought that if she could only stay here long enough, she could think of everything, all the thoughts she had been too busy for all her life, thoughts too shy to approach while she was forced to live in rooms that were full of needs and objects and activities.  Full of people.  The secret room looked like people had never been there, and were not expected.

She forgot, after a time, about her bad Tuesday, her headache, her grumpy determination to clean behind the cabinet.  The air, the light, the room itself all calmed her.

There was always a magical quality to the room for Lillian.  Whenever she had the time to unload the cabinet and pull it away from the wall, she always held her breath, wondering if the  door was really there, if it would be there again. Later, when she remembered finding the room, she thought that she must have simply known it was there.  Maybe years ago, maybe when she was a child, she had dreamed or imagined this room with the windows of two kinds and the fountain with the curly-headed god (that might, she supposed, be Bacchus or Poseidon or Zeus),  and it had waited for her, here.

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