Let Me Tell You (33 page)

I have an electric mixer and an electric blender and a timer on the oven and an electric skillet and an electric can opener, but what I really
cook
with is a fork. It is about five inches long, four-tined, with a black wooden handle, and my mother gave it to me when I was married. (My mother has a knack for gifts like that: when Laurie was born, everyone else showed up with pretty baby blankets and little sweaters wrapped in blue tissue paper; my mother gave me a vacuum cleaner.) I use my little fork to scramble eggs and to turn meat and to get muffins out of the toaster (I know that's wrong, but show me a better way, really better) and to poke at potatoes to see if they're done and to turn corn fritters in the pan and to hook doughnuts out of the fryer and to weasel waffles out of the waffle iron and to prick the tops of pies and to stir rice. I could really not begin to start making a meal without my fork.

It began to wear out at last. The screws that held the handle on had been replaced by my husband and my son Laurie and eventually my son Barry so many times that the holes were enormous and the handle kind of swiveled when I picked it up. And the tines were worn down on one side—I always cook right-handed—until the tip was triangular. I had better get myself a new fork, I thought reluctantly, caught for a minute in a recollection of the thousands of eggs that fork had scrambled and the pork chops it had turned and turned and turned; I had better go around to the hardware store the next time I am in town and pick up a new cooking fork.

“I would like a cooking fork, please,” I said to the man in the hardware store the next time I was in town. “A fork for cooking.”

“Certainly,” he said, and led me to a great rack of forks.

Some of them were eight feet long and some of them were twelve inches long and they all had only two tines and the cheapest one cost four dollars. “This one is for outdoor cooking,” the man said to me. “This one has an attachment that turns it into a roast baster. This one has a genuine plastic bone handle.”

“No,” I said, feeling silly. “I want a cooking fork with four tines and it ought to cost about a quarter and it's not for any special thing, just cooking.”

“A quarter?” he said. “We don't have any forks that cost a quarter.”

He didn't have any forks about five inches long, either, or any with black wooden handles and four tines. “Look,” I said, holding my hands apart, wishing I had brought my little fork along with me, “about this long, four tines, and maybe it costs more these days, maybe as much as fifty cents.”

“There is no such thing,” he said with enormous dignity.

Well, I went to the five-and-ten and I went to the other hardware store and I looked in catalogues and I wrote to all the department stores I could think of and he was right: There
was
no such thing. I wrote to my mother and she wrote back that oh, yes, now I mentioned it she
did
remember the little black-handled kind of fork she used to cook with, but she had no idea where to get one. What did I want it for? I started asking my friends, and several of them remembered that
their
mothers or grandmothers had used just such a fork. (“Doughnuts,” someone said wistfully; “you know, I haven't thought of those doughnuts for years and years; my grandmother used to get up in the morning and make them for breakfast, and I can still remember those hot fresh doughnuts on school mornings. Of course,” she went on, resting one hand casually on her pressure cooker, “no one has
time
for that kind of thing now.”) One of my friends thought she had seen such a fork in her aunt's kitchen not long ago, but when she called her aunt and asked, her aunt thought she was crazy. “Look, dear,” her aunt said, “this is the twentieth century.”

I took to hanging around people's kitchens, a habit that made me fairly unpopular and eventually got us largely not invited out to dinner anymore, trying to find out how other people did things. “Don't you scramble eggs with a fork?” I would ask. “What do you poke potatoes with to see if they're done? How about little holes on top of pies?”

Well, some people used a table fork and some people used a long two-tined fork, and I talked to a lot of people who never made scrambled eggs at all because they were too rushed for breakfast, and there were lots of gadgets for getting muffins out of toasters, and almost all of them got their pies at a bakery or frozen from the supermarket, and no one in the world but me ever used a little black-handled, four-tined, five-inch kitchen fork. I finally got so embarrassed about my little fork that I tried to use it secretly, so the children could not see and tell their friends, and I paid $5.95 for a great unwieldy thing that flipped pork chops halfway across the kitchen and short-circuited the toaster and could have been used nicely for weeding the garden. Words were passed around the dinner table about the charm of eating in restaurants, and my career as an active, participating member of the family was saved only when I finally got a new little fork.

A friend who hangs around antique shops found it for me in a basement store in Brooklyn. It was unused, authentic, and cost a dollar, because, I suppose, of its rarity. “Is this what you were looking for?” my friend asked. “I just happened to remember that you were interested in old kitchen utensils. Better boil it first if you plan to use it.”

Well, I
do
plan to use it. I am starting right now to look for another one because this one ought to be wearing out in fifteen or twenty years. And unless someone lets me know what the rest of the world uses to cook with, I may even need another one after that.

“I'm teaching short story at Bennington, and I love it. I have two classes a week. I took the job with two conditions—one, a hundred bucks a week, and the other, that the College president learn to square dance. If he doesn't learn by this coming Saturday I quit.”

I feel that before I read any of my new novel,
The Sundial
,
I would be wise to explain how it came to be written, and why, since I would not like to have any of you believe that I cook up this kind of thing in a cauldron.

I had published seven books, and was wandering around whining about writing another, considering and discarding plots, complaining that everything had already been written, and in general behaving like a novelist who needs money.

In order to reassure myself that all the best things had already been written, I took to rereading my own books, and discovered with some embarrassment that there was a kind of similarity to them, not necessarily in plot, which I could find all sorts of learned opinions to excuse, but in images and metaphors. Prominent in every book I had ever written was a little symbolic set that I think of as a heaven-wall-gate arrangement; in every book I have ever written, and, indeed, in the several outlines and rough sketches in my bottom desk drawer, I find a wall surrounding some forbidden, lovely secret, and in this wall a gate that cannot be passed. I am not going to attempt to analyze this set of images—my unconscious has been quiet for a good many years and I think I am going to keep it that way—but I found it odd that in seven books I had never succeeded in getting through the gate and inside the wall.

It occurred to me, then, that the thing to do was to write a new book, and
start
inside—write a kind of inside-out book, and maybe see what I have been writing about all these years when I have been writing outside-out books. What happened, of course, was the end of the world. I had set myself up nicely within the wall inside a big strange house I found there, locked the gates behind me, and discovered that the only way to stay there with any degree of security was to destroy, utterly, everything outside.

Concretely, the story is simple enough. A group of people are living in my big old house, which belongs to an old tyrant named Mrs. Halloran. These people are in the house more or less by chance—some of them are members of the family, one is a governess, others are guests who prefer to stay in the house rather than face destruction in the general cataclysm outside. These people believe for one reason or another in the prophecy handed down by one of their number: that the world outside is going to end, and everything will be destroyed except this house and the people inside it. After a night of horror and destruction they will come out, the only survivors, into a world of loveliness and peace, and become the first of a new race of mankind.

Nothing I have written has ever given me so much pleasure.

The children around our house have a saying that everything is either true, not true, or one of Mother's delusions. Now, I don't know about the true things or the not-true things, because there seem to be so many of them, but I do know about Mother's delusions, and they're solid. They range from the conviction that the waffle iron, unless watched, is going to strangle the toaster, to the delusion that electricity pours out of an empty socket onto your head, and nothing is going to change any one of them.

The very nicest thing about being a writer is that you can afford to indulge yourself endlessly with oddness, and nobody can really do anything about it, as long as you keep writing and kind of using it up, as it were. I am, this morning, endeavoring to persuade you to join me in my deluded world; it is a happy, irrational, rich world, full of fairies and ghosts and free electricity and dragons, and a world beyond all others fun to walk around in. All you have to do—and watch this carefully, please—is keep writing. As long as you write it away regularly, nothing can really hurt you.

My situation is peculiarly poignant. Not, perhaps, as sad as that of an orphan child condemned to sweep chimneys, but sadder than almost anything else. I am a writer who, due to a series of innocent and ignorant faults of judgment, finds herself with a family of four children and a husband, an eighteen-room house and no help, and two Great Danes and four cats, and—if he has survived this long—a hamster. There may also be a goldfish somewhere. Anyway, what this means is that I have at most a few hours a day to spend at the typewriter, and about sixteen—assuming that I indulge myself with a few hours of sleep—to spend wondering what to have for dinner tonight that we didn't have last night, and letting the dogs in and letting the dogs out, and trying to get the living room looking decent without actually cleaning it, and driving children to dance class and French lessons and record dances and movies and horseback riding lessons and off to town to buy a Ricky Nelson record, and then back into town to exchange it for Fats Domino, and over to a friend's house to play the record, and then off to buy new dancing shoes….It's a wonder I get even four hours' sleep, it really is. Particularly, I might add, since I can't use the telephone. There is always someone
using
the telephone. The best I can manage to do is shout out the front door to the grocer's son when he drives past in his hot rod, and tell him to ask the grocer to have fourteen lamb chops ready when I come by later.

Actually, if you're a writer, the only good thing about adolescent children is that they're so easily offended. You can drive one of them out of the room with any kind of simple word or phrase—such as “Why don't you pick up your room?”—and get a little peace to write in. They go storming upstairs and don't come down again until dinner, which usually gives me plenty of time in which to write a short story.

At any rate, assuming that I am paying for my mistakes in judgment and never have enough hours in a day to spend at the typewriter, I would like to pass on a few things I have learned from those harassed, tense, welcome moments when I finally sit down to write. This, by the way, is what makes for Mother's delusions. All the time that I am making beds and doing dishes and driving to town for dancing shoes, I am telling myself stories. Stories about anything, anything at all. Just stories. After all, who can vacuum a room and concentrate on it? I tell myself stories. I have a whopper of a story about the laundry basket that I can't tell now, and stories about the missing socks, and stories about the kitchen appliances and the wastebaskets and the bushes on the road to the school, and just about everything. They keep me working, my stories. I may never write down the story about the laundry basket—as a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure I won't—but as long as I know there's a story there I can go on sorting laundry.

I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing. Just as I believe that a painter cannot sit down to his morning coffee without noticing what color it is, so a writer cannot see an odd little gesture without putting a verbal description to it, and ought never to let a moment go by undescribed.

I was playing bridge one evening with a musician, a chemistry teacher, and a painter when, during a particularly tense hand, a large porcelain bowl that we kept on the piano suddenly shattered. After we had all calmed ourselves down, we found four completely individual reactions. Looking at all the tiny scattered pieces, I thought that I had never realized before how final a metaphor a broken bowl could be. The chemistry teacher pointed out that someone had emptied an ashtray into the bowl with a cigarette still burning, and of course the heat had shattered the bowl. The painter said that the green of the bowl was deepened when the light caught the small pieces. The musician said that the sound it made when it broke was a G sharp. Then we went back and finished our bridge hand.

Someday I know that I am going to need that broken bowl. I will keep the recollection of those scattered pieces, lying on the piano, and someday when I want a mental image of utter destruction the bowl will come back to me in one of a dozen ways. Suppose, for instance, that someday I had occasion to describe a house destroyed by an explosion; the manner of destruction would be different, of course, but what I can remember is the way the little pieces of the bowl lay there so quietly after they had been for so long parts of one unbroken whole; now, not one of them could have found its place again, and the compactness that had held them together no longer existed in this world.

Suppose I wanted to describe the effect of a sudden shock—I had just played a jack of spades when the bowl broke, and for what must have been three or four seconds I sat staring at the jack of spades uncomprehendingly before I caught my breath again. Suppose someday I want to describe the sense of loss over a treasured and valuable article—my green bowl was not particularly valuable, or I wouldn't have let people dump ashtrays into it, but I can remember how I felt when I swept up the pieces and put them in the garbage and how entirely
destroyed
the pieces looked.

The act of remembering is in itself an odd thing, of course. I had not thought of that green bowl for weeks, until I wanted a vivid image to explain how all things are potential paragraphs for the writer. I have been struggling against an odd memory effect for quite a while now; perhaps if I describe it, it may show more clearly what I mean when I say that nothing is ever useless, and certainly is never lost.

I was talking casually one evening recently to the husband of a friend of mine, and he mentioned his service in the Marines. I said, “Oh, yes, your rifle number was 804041,” and then we kind of stared at each other dumbfounded, since one does not usually just happen to know the rifle numbers of the husbands of friends. We finally remembered that some months before, during a similar conversation after another bridge game, he had mentioned his Marine service, and remarked that one thing he would never forget was his rifle number, 804041. Well, it was reasonable for
him
never to forget his rifle number, but hardly likely that
I
would remember it. However, I couldn't forget it. I caught myself reciting it to myself over and over again, wondering why on earth I bothered.

I was having a good deal of trouble at the time, working over a new novel that somehow refused to go together right. I could not make my central character sound true, somehow; there was something basically at odds between her personality as I saw it and the actions she was called on to perform. One night I gave up; I shoved the typewriter away and kicked the dog and snarled that I was giving up on the book and would never write another, and furthermore it was hopeless and I might better be doing anything else in the world and who would choose such a nerve-racking profession anyway, and I was going to bed. So I stamped upstairs and went to bed, somehow forgetting to set the alarm clock.

When I came rushing downstairs the next morning, half an hour late for school, and scrambled wildly around the kitchen trying to get everybody dressed and washed, and also feeling very bad-tempered, I did not go at once into the study. As a matter of fact, it was not until much later in the morning that I went near my desk, but when I did, I got one of the really big shocks of my life. A sheet of paper had been taken from the pile of copy paper and put directly into the center of the desk, right where it would be most visible. On this sheet of paper was written, in large figures, and in my own writing with my own pencil, 804041.

Now, I have walked in my sleep frequently, particularly when I am under pressure with a book, and have often done odd things in my sleep, but I have rarely taken to writing notes to myself, and particularly not in code. What I finally did was what I should have done long before, which is get myself another cup of coffee and sit down quietly and think. Clearly, I was remembering this number as a clue to something else, and it must be something from the conversation when I first heard the number—or at least that seemed the likeliest place to start. I tried to reconstruct the conversation exactly. I could not remember what we had been talking about; I remembered the bridge table and the cards on it and that we had been waiting for the four at the other table to finish a rubber, and I remembered that except for our voices, which were low, the room was so quiet that I could hear my daughter's radio going upstairs. But I could not remember what we had been talking about. All I could remember was 804041.

I assumed that we had talked about the cards, and the game we had just finished, and then what? What do people usually talk about when they are killing time with conversation? Their children…small incidents that have happened…gossip…And then of course I had it, and I knew just why I had had such trouble remembering it. The former Marine had met an old friend of ours in New York, had run into him casually on the street, and had gone to have a drink with the old friend and his new wife, an Italian girl who had been in an anti-Fascist organization and had been caught and tortured. He had made some remark about being sick when he looked at her hands, and I had stopped him from saying anything more, but he had gone on to say that she spoke frankly about her experiences and particularly about a kind of schooling she had gone through to teach her to undergo torture without yielding, a schooling that trained her to withdraw her mind from her body, so that the physical pain was remote and could, by an act of superlative willpower, be endured. He had gone on from this to refer to his own war experiences, and had then remarked that he would never forget the number of his rifle, 804041.

When I remembered all of this and went back to my book again, I found that the trained ability to separate mind and body, a deliberate detachment, was the essential characteristic I had been looking for for my heroine, and was what I had been trying to tell myself by saying the number over and over again. I had made myself forget the woman's frightful experiences because the thought of them was horrible, but the important lesson, the one I needed, was there. What bothers me now is that I
still
can't forget 804041; I wonder what else he said?

That is one half of writing, of course. The lower depths, as it were. The other half is what I might delicately call information. Henry James got the idea for
The Spoils of Poynton
from a single remark heard at dinner, but he also had to find out somehow what lovely possessions looked and felt and smelled like, the tapestries splendidly toned by time, the thrilling touch of the old velvet brocade.

Among other invaluable items of useless information, I recall a book written by an English lady of the eighteenth century, which dwelt long and lovingly on the evils of education for women. This lady deplored the growing desire among the girls of her time to be educated and learn to read and write; her theory was that once a girl started filling her mind with facts instead of fancy embroidery methods and seven easy tunes on the harp, she would turn into an attic storehouse of miscellaneous knowledge, tending to decrease her matrimonial value and rendering her almost useless as a wife and mother, and even, possibly, delusional.