Upstairs they’re playing cards, they’re drinking highballs and smoking cigarettes, one after the other, so that the small den fills with a high thin blue haze, and under the sound of murmuring laughter is the clatter of ice and the mumble of the television.
“That’s eight!”
round and round
And the scooter flies out from under my sister. My brother and I are sitting on the bottom step keeping score. The scooter goes one way and my little sister the other on the hard, cold, cement floor. She scrapes her knee and it starts to bleed and of course she cries, she always cries; she’s weak but we don’t torment her. Here we help.
Later, when my son is born, he is the first grandchild, the first great-grandchild. When he is a week old, my parents drive hundreds of miles to bring Grandma to visit. Grandma sits propped by pillows in an armchair and I hand my infant to her so Dad can take pictures. After a few minutes, he begins to wake and whimper—the mewling puppy sound of hungry babies—and I reach for him. But Grandma pulls back, guarding him, staring. She says, “Boys don’t cry,” and again, singsong, “Boys don’t cry,” staring me down.
It doesn’t occur to me to go up the steps and ask for a Band-Aid. My mother would be glad to help, I know, but I also know my mother has her hands full here and I prefer to improvise with toilet paper and a piece of cloth we find until my sister quiets down.
LUNCH IS MELTED cheese sandwiches on white bread, served on paper plates at the kitchen table. Afterward, I ask my mother if I can take a magazine with me to read. She gives me the Saturday Evening Post, and I sit on the bottom basement step a while and meditate on the pictures of astronauts and royalty.
At home, my brother and I go to the movies every Saturday, walking alone down the street to the theater for the matinee. In every scary movie there is a basement scene, a moment when some doomed fool creeps cautiously down those stairs. I don’t like scary movies, but it’s not because of Grandma’s basement. Even in the long-forgotten fruit cellar, hidden behind a heavy door, I’m not afraid; I’ve quit feeling afraid and feel other things instead. The thick plank shelves are cobwebbed and musty, covered with cloudy Mason jars. When I pick one up, odd shapes move heavily in the thick syrup, like captured elves. These are the basement’s bones, the hidden things, put away. They are so dead they can’t even be ghosts.
I vaguely knew things. I’d heard my mom say that the tall, bald man I called my grandfather wasn’t really that at all, that my real grandfather had been dead a long time. Grandma married and was widowed, and then remarried and was widowed again, and remarried once more, all before I was born. When this third husband died, Grandma sold their house and moved in next door to my parents, back into the house where my father was raised, where his real father killed himself. She brought all her things with her, a museum for the detritus of marriage. She filled the house next door, and she filled the walls and ceiling of the double garage in between, and she put some in the attic and some in my parents’ little half basement, and some in the basement below her, a wretched coal bin hole, where the high soft bed from the basement bedroom moldered into a rat’s nest of cotton dust.
A long time later, I have a daughter and take her to visit Grandma. She sits, as she sits every day, on the big sofa, smoking endlessly, a can of beer discreetly propped beside her, the barely chewed remains of the meal-on-wheels on the end table. She wears no makeup and her stained, faded housedress has cigarette burns in it. She leans forward to my daughter and says, “Give me a kiss now.” My daughter presses back against my thighs, silent. Grandma leans a little closer. “If you give me a kiss, I’ll give you twenty dollars.” I turn and leave, carrying my daughter on my hip, passing a tinted photograph of my brother at her age, smiling.
AT THE END of the day, when it’s time to go home, we children are called up from the basement at last, and we wearily climb the stairs and file like prisoners of war out to the car. Except me. I’m not going home this time; I’m checking out of here. I hide, and watch my father climb into the driver’s seat and my mother lean in to shush my sister and pat my brother’s arm. She doesn’t notice that I’m gone, no one notices but Bruce. He presses his face against the window, mouth open. When he was very small, Grandma came to him, leaning forward with those knobby hands, and wrapped his face in plastic like the sofa, and he’s spent all these years screaming for air, clawing at the mask. His screaming makes no sound. My mother climbs into the passenger seat and rolls down the window and Grandma and Grandpa stand on the stoop and wave goodbye—“Bye!”—and Mom waves goodbye—“Bye now!”—and Dad pulls away. He drives to the end of the block and turns the corner, and I know they’re heading straight down the hills into the earth, down the long, long street that ends in a dark, silent church, round and round along the twisting roads to home.
Out the kitchen door, to the porch, and sky. I climb up on the railing way above the garden, and loop my hands over the clothesline, and push away. Out I swing over the sunny green yard, swaying in the high blue sky, out above the steep hills.
I dangle a moment, hearing the scurry of my grandmother’s return, watching the mountain a few miles away, watching me. I hear a distant peal, deep and long. I’m a rocket, I’m a bird, I take wing. I’m snapping free, like my mother’s clean white cotton sheets in the sweet cool breeze. My grandmother grabs the pulley and, squeak by squeak, tries to reel me in, but it’s too late, I’m gone.
Home: American Writers Remember Rooms of Their Own (Pantheon, 1995)
I could not write this story. It was for a terrific anthology called Home, in which each essay described the author’s memories of a particular room. I asked for the workshop, but someone had gotten there first, and so I asked for the garage, but it was taken, and finally I settled on the basement.
The World Made Whole and Full of Flesh
SUMMER IS COMING ON AS I WATCH—BEARING CRICKETS, dust, carnal iris flags. The baby maple we’d given up for dead shows sudden leaves, limp on thin branches. Spring grass shimmers in the light and from my seat on the shaded porch I can see the big spiders in its unkempt length run from shadow to sun, sun to shadow. A car raises the dirt on the road a few hundred yards distant. People always take that corner too fast, and get a scare; they have to slow all at once and pull hard on the wheel. Sometimes I can see a pale face go by, concentrating, listening to the brakes tighten and hold with a long, thin cry.
I reach for my papers, shifting in the wooden chair, and hear its hammer feet scrape sharply across the porch. I do very little on these still, hot days; I read, but not well, whatever is at hand, and the neatly printed words rise up like vapor and are gone, into air so hot and blue it seems a windowpane of solid light. The telephone rings and I get up and go in the dim house to answer. The musty, unused room smells of acrid wood smoke and field dust; the faded carpet around the stove is littered with pale yellow chips. I tell the caller that Paul is in the fields. I can see him there, small and far away, through the old warped window glass. He is getting ready to plant the summer wheat, bending and lifting, streaked with dirt. After I hang up, I look around the room and think I’ll clean the house, pick some flowers for the table, but I don’t. I find it hard to work here, to change a single thing in this big strange house, to make sounds into words, words into all that isn’t spoken. Even in the evening, when David or Alan or Lee come to call or we leave for town—even when we talk for hours, words seem less important than the spaces between them. Words take apart time, and time is all I have here. The silence here is pendant and strong, draped over the days, and suddenly it’s more than I can bear. I reach for the radio and listen through the static to the meaningless news.
There are only the two of us in this big old house, and sometimes only Paul. I only visit—and many people visit Paul. When I come, the house is always the same, as though no one was ever here, as though no one but Paul had lived here in the hundred years the fine old farmhouse has been standing. Paul pays scant attention to its details—to its big beams and tongu
e-and-groove siding and sunny rooms. He attends to the dirt instead. Most of the rooms haven’t been used in years, and when I’m here I spend my afternoons on the porch, in the shade between Paul’s fields and the empty rooms that don’t belong to me, don’t belong to anyone. Outside, the distant twitter of two birds, nothing more.
This day returns every summer. It’s back with me now, as I write this, trying to ignore the city—the wordless noise of cars, the wordless world’s cries. On this day I am seventeen and getting lost, lost as though I’ll never find my way back home again; lost in love with Paul, who is twice my age. I’m falling with the same despair with which I might fall off a cliff after a single misstep, tumbling eternally down. I don’t say a word about it, not a word to anyone. These are secrets—the delight, the mismatch, the hopelessness. These are secrets everybody knows but me, I think. Paul knows, today, long before I find out, that days like this don’t last. He knows that nothing lasts.
A pair of hummingbirds appears every day, outside one of the bedrooms no one uses, the one with nothing in it but a bed broken in two as though by an ax. The birds climb and dive around the eaves, slipping through the tracery of cherry trees. Every day I watch them spiral together in a double helix, in a spring dance. I watch the gnats bouncing and the spiders running; I can follow their tiny shadows in the grass. A faint rustle slowly fills the air, so slowly it takes me a long time to notice—a flutter in the world’s roots.
All day long I speak to no one but the occasional caller, who only wants Paul. Many people want Paul, and sometimes he goes off at night with an apologetic smile, goes off to the rest of his life. “You can stay here if you want,” he has said to me more than once, but I leave. Shook awake, I only mumble, “No.”
But this is truly summer. Paul is planting summer wheat, and winter dreams are laid bare and clean in wet shadows, to sprout along the earth’s long curving beam. A veil stirs with the breeze of the day’s ordered passage—and behind it, shapes I can’t make out. My mouth is dusty from the field dirt that drifts in the air and settles on every surface, all over my skin.
The sink still holds the morning dishes, dripping with maple syrup. The sun falls across the floor, I am watching the water splash in the sink, and the silence is gone. I hear murmurs in the damp earth below. The breeze is turning to wind and it fills with sighs and sloughing words too low to understand, the whisper of fruit ripened past its glory, tearing the skin, adding to the world’s insistent roar. I stand in the kitchen alone, holding the glass, shot with light.
The day wears on. I watch Paul. There is a rope tied between my waist and Paul’s; I feel the tug when he bends and lifts, I feel the pull when he walks away. He crosses the field to the far end, to that big stump he puzzles over, into the sun and dust. In the long grass the spiders capture flies and spin them tight, for later. The hummingbirds stroke the flowers with beaks as long and fine as a surgeon’s lance.
In the field Paul is too far away to hear me if I cried, if I cried out, if I needed him. If we fell out of luck, into shadow, tomorrow, today, we would fall alone. The solid earth is as dizzy with dancing as the sea, moving me on past the farm and Paul, moving Paul past me. Even then, Paul was sick, and I didn’t know.
The mere thought. The glimpse of so much loss is all it takes; it rakes across us like a knife, raises the truth up loud. The mere thought makes us, finally, more than willing to speak, to tell, tell the truth, our truth, every secret we know—to admit that flesh is meat and meat is flesh and the world spins on. Luck separates. No one gives it up without a fight.
The porch stays shaded all afternoon, the line between bright and dark. Below, dimness—below, where the roots are, sweat falls and blood falls and luck falls away; below, days end. Over and over, the world is made whole from its broken parts, over and over my hand holds the cold wet glass, Paul plants in the field, and the earth fills with singing all night long; all this without end, winter and summer, day and night, all this beneath the earth’s curving beam, the water right beside me, the world’s weary head in my lap. Love itself is what breaks our hearts; we fall into its rushing waters and tumble away, knocked breathless, cloven in two.
And the day goes finally by. A cradle rocking, rocking to stillness. I sit in my chair watching shadows growing tall and dark, like young sons coming forth. Our friend David drives straight to the steps in his dirty white convertible. David comes to visit almost every day; this week, he and Paul are fixing a truck. He grabs a toolbox climbs over the windshield and the hood of the car and right over the porch rail, to stand beside me. He is big and bare-chested and never seems tired.
I look at David again, quiet beside me with a toolbox in his hand, and I see the rough gray along his temples, the slight sag along his neck, and realize with a start that David is old. David is beneath the earth’s curving beam with all the rest of us, a body, a shadow, dying. “What’s wrong?” he asks, and I shake my head, and he looks at my strange face, and the world spins to summer with a gasp of gratitude.
We talk about the wheat going in tomorrow. We talk about the little maple tree, still alive. We don’t talk about how our lives are fettered one to the other in the perfumed soil of the spring. Then, I didn’t know even that much.
A few years after today, the century-old farmhouse is taken apart. It’s not in Paul’s hands; he tries to stop the ruin and he cannot. Dozens of people come to help him one summer afternoon, to save what can be saved, to salvage what remains. And when the siding of the big bedroom where we used to sleep is removed, Paul finds an antique cache, a child’s secret treasure—a book, a comb, a tiny tin, generations old. “Here,” he says, giving me the tin, “you keep this,” and we go back to work. And a few years later, Paul dies, seeing it coming, almost ready. I wish I could tell him what I’ve learned since then; that grieving is a lifelong gift, that grieving is our one chance to cherish another without reservation.
But that was later. For now, today, Paul is coming home. I can see him getting closer, step by step, coming back to me, twenty years ago. Another car turns the corner too fast and feels the pull, taking the curve of the world too sudden and fast. Paul stops to watch the car go by. After a while David goes into the dark house and turns the radio to another station, and then it plays only cool jazz in the darkening sky.
Secrets, Left Bank #9, 1996
Another Left Bank story, for a collection called Secrets. The events took place when I was seventeen, and the initial draft was my journal from that time. I’d dropped out of college and moved to Eugene, Oregon, to find a place in the longhaired world of community activism. Also, because I fell in love.
Big Ideas
I MEET STEVE. HE IS DEPRESSED.
“How are you?” he asks. “Are you writing?” This is often the first question we ask each other.
“Yes,” I answer, and even I am surprised at the exultation in my voice—the lust.
“That’s good,” says Steve, and his own voice is like the confession of disease. He isn’t writing. He is fifty years old, a good poet, a poet with decades of work behind him. He says he has forgotten how to write, has lost the simplest lessons of construction and sound, and wakes in a rage. When he was gone last summer, he sent me some of his oldest poems to read, and before I could reply, another letter came.
“Why haven’t you said anything about my poems?” he wrote. “They’re my heart.”
MY SON’S BEST friend’s mother calls me for advice on her memoirs. The bank clerk tells me he’s taking a class in the novel. The carpenter I hired to build a closet says shyly that he is writing a children’s book. My neighbor says, wistfully, “It seems like everyone wants to be a writer but me.”
I wish I were a painter. I haven’t the slightest talent for line or color, so I dream of painting. I imagine the room I would have: a big, empty studio, with light falling on an empty canvas, tilted and ready. I would work on the grand scale, with big ideas and splashes of surprising color. I would be organized and deliberate and keep everythi
ng clean. Instead, I work in a collection of debris—most of it invisible, all of it mine. Sometimes I’m happy in my study, and then I’m very happy. Happy as dogs and babies are happy—stupidly content. My cat watches a bird on a branch above his head; “bird,” his body sings, “bird bird bird.” Sometimes I write like that, staccato words forming on the page like the twitching eyelids of REM sleep, the sign of new dreams. I wake up and there they are, hinting of lost wisdom, and I don’t know how they got there and I don’t know how to make it happen again. They are someone else’s words.
I climb slowly back up the scaffold of old work, yesterday’s good sentence or two. I’m stuck with the chore, the workaday rhythm, like pulling rocks from the soil, a job never done. I run the pen across the page just to make the shape of letters, massage the knots from a single sentence, then stare at the page until, thank God, the doorbell rings and I can leave. I sweep or look at maps or file letters, and then come back to fluff the story’s pillows, make it tea. I want it to like me, but we aren’t friends yet. Finally, Steve calls.
Without saying hello, he asks: “What’s the point?”
“You’re a good writer,” I reply.
“If only people would stop saying that,” he says, and hangs up.
So I hang up, too, and go stare at the page until the debris disappears and the paper turns into canvas, big and empty and clean. One sentence appears and is followed by another; everything is syncopated, punctuated high fidelity, and I’m singing “bird” with my whole body, bird bird bird.
THE GLORIOUS SURGE comes to a halt. For weeks, nothing comes. Everything I write is sinful, full of lies, especially the big one, the one you go to hell for: pretending not to be a fool. I argue loudly with an editor who wants yet another draft of a story I barely remember writing. “Make it more left field,” he says, and I haven’t the faintest idea what he’s talking about. I’m afraid, afraid all the time, afraid and I can’t tell anyone: that I did too much at once, put in too much, wore out the gift. Life’s big surprise.
Violation Page 14
