Two women emerged from a room at the end of the hall—scarves, shawls, jangling bracelets, striped tights—and they walked past us, jingling and clicking—one wore spurs on her cowboy boots, and the other was in tap shoes. Everyone was an overly studied individual here. Look at who I want you to think I am! It was exhausting. I was exhausted.
Once they were out of earshot, Louise shook back her big wad of hair. “You know, I didn’t know what happened to that baby. I never wanted to know.” She sounded angry. “Giving her up was the hardest thing I ever did, and the worst thing. The worst thing I’ve done in my life.”
That famous story, “Where We Are When We’re Lost,” was about a woman giving up a baby (“Michael’s” baby) for adoption and secretly taking money. A more realistic style than Louise was known for, it filled twenty-five New Yorker pages. There were letters to the editor about it, which there never were about the stories, and it made the list for the forthcoming Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Students of the future would write papers and wrestle with MLA citations for Louise’s story. Everyone read it. I read it. Michael read it. “Michael.” When Michael told me about Louise, he said, “I didn’t know there was a real baby. I would have done something. I would have done right. Do you think maybe it’s not too late?” I suppose that’s being “a good man.” I was the one who told him—well, to stay out of it. That weren’t our lives fine just the way they were, already complicated enough? That diving into all that would open us to the darkest kind of pain.
“I told him not to involve you,” I said. “To stay out of the whole thing, actually. And I’m sure her parents didn’t think that your giving her up was ‘the worst thing in your life.’ I’m sure her parents loved her.” I had almost accidentally said, Loved her to death.
My door was half open, and I could see inside to my unmade bed, the rumpled sheets, the pillow that smelled so much like a wet Band-Aid that I squirted expensive French perfume on it when I couldn’t sleep. The room looked shadowy and quiet.
“Anyway,” I said. “Last night. That was wrong. Maybe that was the worst thing you ever did.”
“They didn’t believe a word of it,” she said. “They knew the cat thing was true, which it was. So they just think I’m a bitch.”
“You shouldn’t have said it, not even to be a bitch,” I said.
“It’s a game,” she said. “Everyone was lying all over the place. Like you.”
“Why do you play it?”
She shrugged. “What people lie about is revealing.” She looked me straight in the eye and paused. Like you. I steeled myself. But she said, “The father wasn’t Michael. It was—” Here she named the director of the conference. That year we were all there, that year we met, was his first as the director of the famous writers’ conference. “He doesn’t know.” She sighed. “I swear to you. I swear.”
It was as if my whole body abruptly gaped, every soft spot exposed: No one would lie about such a thing. Only a liar. “I don’t believe you,” I said softly.
“I don’t believe me either most of the time.” She looked unhappy. She looked as though she might be thinking about crying, which was different than actually crying, of course.
I couldn’t believe her. Believing her would change everything. But really, believing her would change nothing:
Michael? Still dead.
Emily? Still dead.
If what she said now was true, what would be different? Would it be the director’s heart crushed to learn that his unknown daughter was buried in a tiny grave on a hillside in Portland? Would it be the director plummeting through a dark and dangerous sorrow, wallowing in emptiness, drinking, shopping gun shows? Would he stop writing, putting down two lines in a year? Would his wife wish him dead? Would he die? Would the director die because of Louise’s careless words? This ghost child would never be his; the ghost child stayed all mine, and the guilt. Louise’s words didn’t matter one iota. I hoped all of that was packed into the furious stare I gave Louise, but of course it wasn’t. It couldn’t possibly be.
I could choose not to believe Louise, but I would wonder. I would doubt.
Drifting through the open window at the end of the hallway: excited voices, footsteps on gravel, a whoop. Writers and wannabe writers gathering for the party, for gossip, name-dropping, sucking up, for the stories and the booze and the boozy truth.
“What you did is . . . a sin,” I said. Not the right word, but there was no right word.
“Then I guess this is confession,” she said.
“I’ll never forgive you,” I said. “Or myself.”
“Write about it.”
“I said stop saying that. We’re talking about a real, dead person,” I said, “someone who was alive but now isn’t. Not some character in one of your idiotic New Yorker stories.” Childishly, I threw the note at her but missed, and it sailed beyond her shoulder, hitting the wall before dropping to the floor. She bent and picked it up, slipped it into the waistband of her tiny skirt, an action that both irritated me and made me sad.
After a moment, I said, “I’m not like you.” Now I was about to cry. I took in a long breath. I wasn’t like her. I didn’t want to write about this. I didn’t know how I could tell this story or why I would.
She was calm. “Writers don’t choose their material. It comes to them.”
Something our workshop teacher had drilled into us back in 1996. Something I parroted to my own students, in interviews about writing, in conversation, even at the party last night. As one of my writing teachers once said, writers don’t choose their material. It comes to them. . . .
Louise said, “Bet you’ve written up some notes.”
I shook my head no, and she smirked at my transparent lie. She said, “I know what happened is for real, which is horrible and I’m so sorry. But also, it’s a story. It simply is. What happens—no matter how painful—it’s material for people like us. You know that. You chose it when you became a writer.”
I shook my head again, harder, like an obstinate child.
“Suit yourself. But if you’re not careful, I’ll tell the story,” Louise said. She spoke lightly, but a chill zipped my spine. She would.
Louise turned, then turned back, studying me as if memorizing my face in a peculiar way. Then she said, “Michael knew. When he contacted me about wanting to find her, I told him he wasn’t the father. I told him who was. I think I would know when I’ve got a diaphragm in and when I don’t. So Michael knew what the truth was. He just refused to believe it. He wanted that girl, because—.” She suddenly looked up at the ceiling. Her neck was luminously pale and didn’t seem to belong to the rest of her body.
“Finish,” I demanded. “Because what?”
“Because,” she said. “I don’t need to say it.”
“Because I didn’t want one.” I spoke clearly but couldn’t finish. “Because . . .”
She looked me full on with shimmering eyes. “Oh, Vanessa,” she whispered. “No, no. Not that, not about that. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t you pity me,” I said. “Or hug me. I don’t even like you. I never did.” I poked one foot at my computer case, tipping it over. I thought of those two hundred pages I’d deleted, how very easy it had been. All those books of mine about post-apocalyptic women, each one sneakily and only about my mother, and however many words I dumped on the page she didn’t come back to explain herself.
Louise tugged at the hem of her zebra skirt. “I know,” she said. “We’re too much the same. Like God made us and threw us together, with Her crazy sense of humor.”
There was a silence between us that lasted forever.
I lifted my computer case, jostling the strap up onto my shoulder, settled the book against the crook of my arm. Looking like that, I could have been any bright-eyed MFA student.
“The truth is overrated,” I said, suddenly believing the statement utterly.
She said, “At least maybe try to get paid more than fifty bucks for it.”
Re
treat. I walked through the door to my room and pushed it shut behind me. I knew she was expecting me to slam it, so I closed it quietly and gently. The unexpected action is preferable, the surprising yet inevitable ending. Something else that teacher taught us in 1996.
DOCUMENT: Not a classic point of view but a useful technique on occasion; examples include letters, a diary, or directly addressing the reader in speech. A means of playing with form or bending conventional rules of narrative.
Excerpt of transcript:
MacBride Writers’ Conference schedule, Wednesday
9:00 A.M.–10:30 A.M.
Creative nonfiction craft lecture:
“The Perfect Imperfection of Memory”
Joy Ruby-Vargha, author of The Food Diaries
The Goodwin Theatre
Good morning. What an honor for me to open the conference with the very first craft talk. Wow! This is totally that thing you dream about when you’re hunched on a ratty couch in your studio apartment, eating ramen noodles for the sixth day in a row, getting email rejections from literary journals you’ve never heard of, haha.
I chose as my topic the imperfection of memory, and before we dive into the examples of the text—which I hope you all read!—I want to talk for a minute about writing in general, sort of to set the tone for the rest of my lecture. I like to describe myself as a “writer of stories,” which means that even though I write memoir—real stories from my real life—I recognize that what I write is shaped and shifted by my mind. It’s not the absolute truth. The absolute truth doesn’t exist. We have only our own individual truths, and even though we might swear in a court of law on a Bible that we’re telling the absolute truth, we’re limited to telling only the truth we know.
One reason we can’t get to that absolute truth is because the act of telling the story changes the story. Once I write the words on the page, that’s when the truth changes from “what happened” to “what happened in the story.” “The story” exists separately, alongside the actual event. And “the story” is ultimately more powerful than the event itself. Yes.
Crazy, right? But human brains are hardwired for stories and narrative. On the handout, you’ll see links to recent studies in neuroscience about that, and a book I totally recommend, The Storytelling Animal. Very exciting stuff.
So while we want to remain true to our best memory of the events, once you write down that you were wearing a red dress, that red dress imprints on the mind, so much so that if you come across a photo and discover you were actually wearing a blue skirt and white blouse, you’ll resist. The story puts you in a red dress. The story is what you believe, not the photo. And the story—the act of telling—has transformed your blue skirt into a red dress.
Haha—I probably should have worn a red dress today! But I bet that if you were to think of this talk years from now—not that you have to, haha—it just may be that you’ll remember me in a red dress. And if you do, you’ll be proving my point exactly: story creates truth. Truth is powerless before the story.
And who tells stories? We do. Writers. That’s what we do. Create the truth, even when we’re making shit up. I love my job, I do!
Picasso said, “Art is the lie that tells the truth.” It’s where we create our lives—first by living them, and second by telling others what happened, writers do, yes, but even people making dinner conversation by talking about what happened today at their boring jobs. They’re shaping their lives via story; they’re turning their lives into art. Story can make the unbearable bearable; it can deliver the message that dares not be spoken directly. That’s what fairy tales were before Disney got hold of them, you know, stories to explain those dark undercurrents roiling the subconscious: I wish Mommy was dead, I want to fuck Daddy. God, could I go on about the role of fairy tales. But back to my main point:
Writing something down, speaking, telling the story—that subversive act of trying to capture time—that alters what has happened. You all heard of those famous studies about how observing something influences the observed object, right? It’s on the handout. So I’m saying that whatever truth there was to our story is lost once we put the words on paper.
But I stand here as a memoirist, as a goddess of “this really happened,” to say, so what? We’ve lost the truth, but we’ve gained the story. And, seriously, for an artist, that’s barely a trade-off. The story is what there is, and the story is what remains. The story becomes the truth, and the story is the only thing that has half a chance of outlasting us. The story matters. The story. You and I—each of us in this room—like it or not, we’re the walking dead the minute we’re born, marching lockstep toward our own ends. But the word. Art. The story. That shit outlasts us all.
Don’t laugh, don’t be all “ironic” and “I live in Brooklyn.”
Orpheus returned from the underworld and my God, he had a hell of a tale to tell—we’re still telling it, aren’t we? And so do you have a hell of a tale to tell. So do all of us. That’s why we’re writers. To shape our lives into stories. To take what happened and make it matter. To find the words to create the myth, yes, and to find the words to create the truth. All we have to do, as they say, is open up a vein.
OBJECTIVE: an absence of point of view, perfect neutrality as if a camera is watching and recording the events as they unfold; see Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills like White Elephants.”
The woman in a wide-brimmed hat and oversized sunglasses sits alone, in an Adirondack chair in a field of long meadow grass. The sun is on the verge of setting and the clouds in the sky are tinged pink and purple. A small pond ripples steadily, evenly. The woman picks up her black pen and opens a small, leather-bound notebook. She chews on the pen cap with her left molars. Then she places the tip of the pen on the first line of the first page of the empty notebook. She begins to write, seldom lifting her pen off the paper. The page fills with words.
Golden light spills carelessly, illuminating some of the grasses into vibrant green, leaving others locked in shadow. Wind picks up, rustling and bending the grass tips, and she writes faster, the pen sinking more deeply into the paper, the ballpoint scratching slightly.
She flips over the page and does not write on the back, but continues at the top of a fresh, white piece of paper. She keeps writing, she keeps writing.
When the sun is low and her arms prickle with goose bumps, she turns back the pages she’s written until she gets to the first page and at the top she prints “The Ghost Child” in strong, firm letters and underlines it once, twice.
She does not write down her name, and there is no one here to speak it, so in the objective point of view, with the camera’s eye, it is not possible to know who this woman is. It is only a woman, writing a story.
Okay, so I wanted to leave time for your questions, but we’re running over. Probably the main thing to remember about point of view—if you remember one thing from this lecture—is that the story belongs to the voice telling it. That’s where the control is. If you’re the one telling the story, the story is yours. Control is yours. Like having the keys to the car. So it’s simple: always be the one telling the story.
Because you all know what happens next: Along come the readers, with their interpretations and symbols and opinions and assumptions and questions needing answers. They really fuck it up for us.
SOMEONE IN NEBRASKA
You have finally met someone—live and in person—who has seen the white light at the end of the tunnel. She’s a bartender in a small town in Nebraska who had a heart attack when she was forty. “They run in my family,” she says, as if that might be an obvious thing to understand about her. She knows everyone in the bar, everyone except you. You’re the stranger. You must like being the stranger wherever you go. That’s why you go to so many different places.
“I was clinically dead for twenty-five minutes,” she tells you. Others in the bar listen, but clearly they’ve heard the story, the minute by minute. Only you don’t know, although you know the end: there she is, s
tanding in front of you, bringing you a Bud whenever you ask for one.
She’s forty-two now, but the kind of forty-two that’s surprising, as if she should be younger. There’s a bottle of Lubriderm hand lotion on the bar, next to the Jack Daniels. Maybe you should try that brand on your own skin.
It still surprises you, what all can be learned about people in the short bursts of conversation that punctuate a bar. “So, are you from around here?” (knowing you’re not) is enough to start. You always let them ask first. You don’t want to push your way in. You were taught not to push. Dallas, the bartender, has told you she was named for the city though she’s never been there. “Someday, maybe,” she says, but it sounds like she doesn’t care anymore about getting to Dallas or not, not the way she once used to. You think about telling her it’s not such a great city—sweaty, sprawling, excessive—but you keep your trap shut. “Those cheerleaders are pretty enough,” she says, “but I’m suspecting they’re kinda dumb, kinda pathetic.” She shakes her head. Those poor, dumb, pathetic Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders. The way she talks, the way she conveys an opinion convinces you also to feel sorry for them.
“Damn helicopter ride to Omaha was seventy thousand bucks,” she says. “Not that I remember a lick of it.”
How did she know, you ask, that it was a heart attack? You’ve seen the public service announcement ads scroll by during whatever heart health month is; women often don’t recognize the signs. Women are trained for pain. (This is something Dallas announced earlier, during a quick skirmish of the sexes sparked by some men who didn’t properly push in their barstools as they stood up to leave.)
“You know,” she says, conspiratorially. “For real, I’d rather give birth again, take on that torture than feel another heart attack. It was squeezing and pushing all up through my back, and my hands crunched up like devil claws.” She demonstrates, palms up, fingers locked in a gnarly, arthritic pose, then shakes them loose. “I yelled at my dad—he was living with me at the time—I screamed up the stairs, ‘I think I’m having a fucking heart attack, goddamn it,’ and he jumped on the phone quick. My mother had her first when she was thirty-two, so I got that it was borrowed time for me, especially since I smoked back then. At the hospital here, there was my doctor, the one I took my kids to, and I looked up at him and told him there was a booger in his nose and then said, ‘Don’t let me die,’ and I was out. Out and clinically dead for twenty-five minutes they told me. They saved my life, waiting for the helicopter. And all that pounding they did on me, not one of my ribs cracked, which was cool. They knew their CPR shit for real.”
This Angel on My Chest Page 14
