Violation (15 page)

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 tongue-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
everything 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.

At first, I don't call Steve. I call another friend, a novelist who's writing for money these days, magazine stuff, anything cool and nonchalant she can find. The raw memoir that makes her cry at the dining table is buried in a drawer. “I'm in deadline hell,” she says. “I'm having a breakdown,” she says. “Did you know Baudelaire died of caffeine poisoning?” she asks. We hang up at the same time, and I stare at my desk and leave the room.

Finally, Steve and I have coffee and slices of gooey day-old pie in the middle of the day, surrounded by the other unemployed, the students, the rootless, the old. I cuss at the restaurant and all that surrounds me, distracts me, reminds me. Steve is solicitous, full of advice. The oblivious waitress cleans the carpet, and the vacuum cleaner roars in the narrow room. She runs the hose right beneath our table and I find myself shouting through the noise at Steve, who has just told me he's started writing again. “Don't you dare!” I yell, but he can't hear me.

I have to leave town, go teach for six weeks at a giant university where no one knows I'm an impostor. It turns out no one, in fact, wants to know me at all. Budgets are tight, jobs threatened; visiting writers are not welcome here. Most of the required writing classes here are taught by computer programs. I pass classrooms cluttered with silent students facing screens and hear only the clacking of keys and the occasional reedy beep when the Macintosh issues praise.

I am given half a borrowed office heaped with dusty books and Xeroxed syllabi from 1989. The office belongs to Professor Baxter. Professor Baxter teaches Classics of English Literature once a week for the ten-week term; three of the nights are spent watching the BBC production of
Pride and Prejudice.
He shuffles in and out, calls me a different name each time he sees me. He is the only professor who speaks to me. There are no welcoming notes in my box, no handshake from the dean. No map, no roster, no syllabus. The department secretary tells me to stop making so many copies.

I move into a blank apartment by a shimmering pool no one uses, the land in all directions flat and fallow and dry. The students are my only hope.

I don't know where to begin, exactly; I have clearly been mistaken for someone else. The only writing I've been doing myself is in my journal late at night, brief fits of irritation and quavering Dutch courage. But the students don't know this, and I decide they don't need to know.

I talk about what holds us back—the ungentle voices in our heads, the secrets waiting to trip us up. You must have no morals, I tell them. You must use everything. You must be quiescent, patient, willing. I stride the room, cheerful and firm; they watch me and take dutiful notes. Most of them are writing majors, and at first all they give me are commonplace essays and short stories about the tribulations of earnest college writing students. They want to know how to get published, and how I grade.

What are you afraid of? I ask one day. After a silence, a young woman says, “Sentimentality.” And another says, “Being thought young.” Mariano, my oldest student, almost middle-aged, names anger and Catholicism, not necessarily in that order. Anna, a pale young woman with short blond hair who wears men's neckties, tells us wearily that her father is a well-known writer. When she was raped, he wrote a poem about it. She writes about cooking.

A tall boy in the campus uniform of shorts and tank top and baseball cap comes in for office hours. Like many of the students, he wants me to tell him what to do, what to write, who to be. Their days are filled with fords of choice, little wavelets in a surging sea, running forward much too fast. “I don't think I want to be a writer because I don't want to think too much,” he says. “I want to stay normal.”

I have them do timed exercises, and write about each other, spy on strangers, invent sex scenes, violent scenes, stories about things they don't believe in. Phoenix wears very short shorts and stretches out her long thin legs covered with thick, feathery, golden hair. She is thoughtlessly athletic, and wears a Dallas Cowboys
cap squashed down on her long blond hair. Her scenes of southern California girlhood are devastating and sad. “Last term I was, like, I'm going to be a writer because it was all I was doing all the time,” she tells the class. “But now I'm, like, there's a lot of stuff out there, and I'm not ready to settle down.” She draws stick figures on her stories, petroglyphs bending, running, jumping high.

I make them write letters to their writer's block, draw pictures of it. Lori makes a cartoon of herself whacking her children and husband on their heads with a book titled
Me
. One boy draws a monster with gleaming red eyes. Carol, alone in a corner, spends an hour covering a page in black crayon and then writes across it in red ink: “I will be judged and found wanting, and jettisoned from the circle of warmth.”

Stephanie, gawky and disheveled, is easily the best writer in the class. After a few weeks I realize I'm half in love with her, with her scary ideas, her absolute fearlessness, and I come to class hungry and ashamed, wanting to hear her read, wanting her to ask me for advice. She is only dimly aware of her talent. She's not a writer, she tells me one day. She's a painter. She likes big canvases with solid blocks of color, and writes only “for fun.” Her wild stories, her willingness to say anything, anything at all, are the blessing of not being a writer, of having nothing to lose. The other students, the rule-bound ones who want to be writers very much, are startled into attention.

Over the weeks, the stories get better and better, softer, unpredictable, surprising. Anna stops being polite. Mariano gets mad. Phoenix throws her gorgeous legs across the table, and writes a story about her mother's affair. One of the handsome fraternity boys reads a masturbatory fantasy involving corn on the cob and the students applaud and cheer. I begin to wonder if I'll be fired, but the fact is no one but my students and I care what we do or say. No one ever asks, no one ever comes to see what happens between us here. But I realize that what happens is enough for me.

Outside class, I'm God's own forgotten gimcrack, sitting alone by the sparkling pool. The story in front of me is as light as
the wind, it means nothing, it flies away from my hands. I'm fighting panic, the fear of having nothing to say, praying,
Please,
and lie all night with nothing but the steady tick of the clock and the murmuring seashell roar of my ear against the pillow. All I want to convey is what happens to ordinary things, the journey of grime and wonder through the world, that's all. And I can't. At the end of the term, so soon, I leave my students and the blank apartment and go home.

STEVE GIVES ME
his manuscript, at last, with an air of grand tragedy. It's badly typed, full of punctuation errors and missing words. He hasn't put his name on it. I read it, and call him up to say: “It's good. It's good, but it's not enough. You need to put more of yourself in there, you need to give us more.”

If I have one good day, a good hour, even a single good sentence, I turn into a world-beater, the ice queen. Make my day. I lie in bed and imagine waking from a worthless sleep, crawling to the study, starting in the middle of the sentence that ended in exhaustion the night before, typing until the electricity goes off because I forgot to pay the bill. I imagine being a famous narcissist who abandons her children and dies for the holy flaming book, who gets her face on a postage stamp and doesn't live to regret it. Then I fall asleep, and waking up, I don't know how.

I've been told what I told Steve: this isn't the story you meant to write, this isn't how your story really ends, this isn't what you mean to say. I know what a childish grief this is:
I don't know how.
I know the rage, the rising cry,
How dare you
, I know the terror,
I can't
, I know that often nothing matters the way this matters. He listens to me and then he says, “It's all I've got, the whispering demons filling the air.”

I tentatively begin again, circling the desk like a boxer pacing a ring. One night, after two glasses of wine, I get up at midnight to scribble in pencil on a sheet torn out of a yellow legal pad because the pressure is so strong I don't want to take time to sit down and type, the words are big and cockeyed on the page, veering sideways, getting smaller toward the bottom where I run out of space and turn the page on its end to write in the margins. This is the half-heard, faraway roar, the mumble of voices too low to distinguish the words. I can suddenly hear
language
—the rise and fall of conversation, the fading in and out of whispers and confidences and narration, and oh, this is how it begins, how I start to be allowed to be able to write. This pressure of
words coming
,
words coming
, like a train in the distance, the first hint of the whistle. The chuffing roar. I'm unsettled and restless, all I know is
words coming
and no idea what the words might be and now it's just a matter of time, getting ready, ready to pounce.

Steve isn't writing. We can't have coffee because he won't leave his apartment, won't even answer the phone. The last time we talked he said he was too small for all his big ideas. I had said to him, brutally, “
It
'
s not enough
,” and he replied, “
It
'
s all I
'
ve got
,” and the words bounced off his work, his walls, his world. How could I ask him for more?

And finally, I start writing by just writing, putting one word after the other on the page, and then all at once I'm writing like a rabbit going to ground, with a sudden leap.

I remember Baudelaire, dead of too little time, and Flaubert, who paced his studio weeping at the beauty of his own words. The sky is a dark dark blue, powdered lightly with thin high clouds, and the moon is a pearly chip thrust into fine blue sand. From that direction I hear no sounds. Shadowed by the world, by the stubborn focus of the words, it seems I can see everything, I can see the lines of gravity holding the moon against the sky, I can see its spinning and resistance and the correct position of the most ordinary things, against the spotlight of our ordinary lives.

I call Steve to tell him that all our ideas are big ideas. Everything
is too much. He doesn't answer the phone, and I imagine him standing in the center of the room, alone, watching it shiver with every ring.