Violation (20 page)

When it is my turn, I am like a pitcher facing a hard drive straight back to the mound; the ball so assuredly flying away shoots back, with no time to prepare. I have carefully avoided reviews of my new book, delicately stepping past them, whatever they may say. I've learned to shield my writing, when I can, from the work of being published; they are sometimes quite different things. But by accident I come across a brief review in the back of an influential national magazine. A bad review—mean. I flinch, read sideways, don't finish. I call my editor, a friend, other writers. They commiserate—it's really not fair. I have long conversations with my bedroom ceiling: defense, summation, resounding acquittal—and no one to tell. I can't resist, and go back to count up: four or five short reviews in this magazine every week, and for months all are kind, a growing mound of genteel enthusiasm. Except for one review. Except for mine. It is so not fair.

“Writing, I explained, was mainly an attempt to out-argue one's past,” writes Jules Feiffer in his novel about identity,
Ackroyd.
One tried “to present events in such a light that battles lost in life were either won on paper or held to a draw.” I don't get to talk back. No one ever does. But I write, and own the truth of every story I write because I write it. In writing it, I make it the truth. Complaints are impotent—competing versions of the story I've already told, and much less likely to be believed.

MY FRIEND MARIA
Dolan has been working for years on an essay about her relationship with her parents during their divorce in her childhood. She has long been stuck somewhere in this tragic, funny memory of her girlhood. This particular block is partly my fault; I once told Maria not to think so much about whether the story was true, but whether it was fair, and now she can't write at all.

“My desire to be fair means I never think it's finished,” she tells me. “Since I keep interacting with my parents, I don't want to
freeze them in the way they used to be. I struggle to tell the story in a way that reveals them as people who can and will change.”

In the last few years, I've begun to tell my students that we can only say so much about the truth, and the facts, vital as they are, are not exactly the point. What we really want to write down are the unprovable facts, the experiences that can never be defined but demand to be considered, truths that seem to contradict each other and therefore can't be true. One wants what I call the felt truth most of all. How easy to rationalize hurting people. How easy to say that our feelings count more than the facts.

My friend Deborah asks what I'm working on, and I describe this story I am writing now, and she tells me about something that happened when she was eighteen. It was the late 1960s in Los Angeles, and she was about to move into an apartment with her boyfriend. Her father often wrote her long letters of advice, and he did so then, carefully explaining why he thought this was a mistake. But her father also happened to be an editor at the
Los Angeles Times,
and after mailing Deborah her letter, he printed it on the editorial page.

He meant well, she added. She has not quite forgiven him.

Are we foolish enough to think others can rely upon our goodness of heart? Let us trust each other, our hope of redemption, our best use of words. But most of us don't know ourselves well enough to know how good we really are—else we wouldn't be writing so many words about what's happened to us and what we've done, and how it felt and what it might mean in the end.

I REMEMBER MY
childhood as though it were a silent movie with the subtitles removed—made out of black-and-white snapshots and the jerky 8mm whirring in the background. Bend and pick up an Easter egg and hold it up for the camera. Pose on the sled in the soft snow falling like a fog across the lens. The most vivid moments are recorded nowhere but in me, and yet they have the same quality, this mute and almost self-conscious quality of being recorded somehow. I am swimming across a silent lake
through a dawn mist in the shadow of a white mountain, at first fearful and then exultant as I've never been before. I am sitting in the crotch of my grandmother's black walnut tree, listening to the ratcheting of the blue jays above me, and there is nothing in the world but blue jays and walnut bark and nothing else needed at all. I am sitting at the dinner table when my father explodes and grabs my sister and begins spanking her, and she is yelling and my mother is crying and I leap from my own chair and shout at him to stop, to leave her alone, to leave us all alone. And the film fades out into black and the rest is unknown—after the lake, after the tree, the shouting, what?

For a long time after I left my parents' home, I was drawn to simple stories—ones with obvious narrative devices and clear morals. That was how I told my own story, explained myself to me—in starkly defined characters with set roles and explicable motives. As time passed, these stories were less satisfying—less true. But the conventions of storytelling have a strong pull. We want neat endings and known winners. We want to answer that question—what happened next, what did it mean?—with all our hearts. We want to answer it so much we make out of the fragments a kind of whole cloth.

Memory is terribly uncertain, made as it is out of callow ignorance and youth. We invert the chronology, combine characters, reorient the compass of our lives, until it is like a vaguely remembered dream with potent and cryptic elements in random order. It is up to the dreamer to decide what each element means. We can only know this moment and try to see it clearly, this moment of remembering those moments then, a world long gone in which someone I used to be used to live. The very best we can hope for is the ability to tell
a
truth, some truth or other, some portion of it, and tell it as close as possible to the moment of its being true, before it changes into something else again.

I find now that a lot of my questions can't be answered at all. Not being able to remember exactly is a story, too. And the story doesn't end, doesn't really have a moral, sometimes the crooks
have good hearts and the heroes are corrupt and sometimes I can't tell which is which, and that has to be the story I tell.

CLEANING OUT MY
father's closet this spring, I find a grocery bag filled with color slides dating from the 1940s. In among the weddings of strangers and blurry backyard luaus are hundreds of pictures of my brother and my sister and me when we were young that I have never seen before.

We are often together here, if nowhere else. From year to year, in summer and winter, by the riverbank and the Christmas tree, we stand beside each other—the kids, only a few years apart, bound together.

My brother leans toward the camera, grinning, perfecting self-confidence. By the age of five, he is a sturdy and seemingly fearless boy. At three, I am hardy and strong. He and I almost look like twins, except he smiles widely and I face the camera with composure—a rugged girl in jeans, giving nothing away. My little sister is pretty and dark with charming bee-stung lips and black hair falling in big, natural curls.

Photographs are false truths, too. My brother's confidence is shallow, brittle. My composure is deeply cracked. And my sister, who is almost dainty, is crying or beginning to cry or has just finishing crying. She sits on our mother's lap, with big eyes, because we have left her behind, forever ditched in the backyard when we want to climb trees. She isn't plump; I was wrong; how could I have remembered it that way? I was wrong and I was right, for this is what I meant by that word—this fragility, this girlish weakness in a world where weakness was lethal. These are the chorus lines beneath the singers. Beneath
it's not fair
and
that's not true
runs this river:
I was strong. You were weak. You walked away and left me behind. You stayed behind, and I survived. You—we're not sure about you yet.

MOST WRITERS APPROACH
a new story like a boxer circling the ring—with a certain reluctance to engage and break the spell
of
what might be.
To write memoir is to live in what is—not only the truth, but the story one is capable of writing and not the great story of which we dream.

I was excited when I began to write “The Basement.” The anthology was a good project—a dozen or so writers were each assigned a room; we had only to write a true story about something that happened in that room. I wanted to write about my grandmother's basement, where we spent a lot of time as children. I could revisit that world where my brother and sister and I were together, a gang of three. I would write about driving to Grandma's house in the old station wagon, how we would run through the living room and down the basement stairs and play all day long in a child-driven world while our boring relatives visited upstairs. I began there, and then I was paralyzed for two months. I could write nothing at all. I played solitaire for hours, read mysteries, took naps.

Toward the end of my writing workshops, when everyone's guard is down and little secrets have slipped out, when the room is as safe as rooms of nascent writers can be, I sometimes ask students to fill in the blanks of this sentence: “I can't write about __ because __ .” I give them only a few minutes, time for a few words.

Then I make two columns on the blackboard. On the left, I list the first words they wrote:
A car accident. Sex. Parents' divorce. A crime I committed.
This is hard for the students, to say out loud what can't be written. Then, on the right, I list the reasons:
I feel guilty. Feelings will get hurt. It's embarrassing. No one cares.

Finally, I erase the column on the left—the events, the memories, the ideas. The stories. All that matters is the reasons. Those are the stories—this is what you write: how it feels to commit a crime, to be afraid, to not know how it ends. This is what all good stories are about. Start there, I tell them. Start there.

I sank for two months into the lassitude of unspent words until I started to ask myself that question. “I can't write about Grandma's basement because—because—” Because. Because I was so lonely there it was as though I'd already died. Because
childhood is a dangerous place. Because we were ordered into that basement and it seemed to me that we might never be allowed to come out, that the whole world was filled with sunlight I would never see. Because I hated my grandmother, and you are not allowed to hate your grandmother. Right before me like a ghost in the room was that poor little girl with her solemn face and her jeans and dirty t-shirt—right before me stood that poor thing who is not me and has not been me for a long, long time, and I started writing like crazy.

So I wrote the truth no one but me knows and no one but me can tell. I rewrote history: down, down to the basement we go in the story, again and again, and at the end of the story, up I come, and fly away. That is the moral of my true story, that I did fly away, on wings light as the summer, wings I made out of words like these.

My friend Maria says she is unwilling to freeze her parents in their mutual past. I tell her that the story will also freeze her, in its telling. We fear getting stuck with the claims we make, with any day's untidy thoughts. It isn't just the people who live on; the story also lives on, its narrator lives on—forever the same, saying the same things, the writer's ghost. When I look over books and essays I've written, they were clearly written by someone else. I could not have written these stories—that is not my point of view, these are not my beliefs, this is not my voice. It is not me, they are not true, and it is not fair.

One of the few things I wrote about my father in the new book is that my mother brought him a Bloody Mary in the morning. It was part of her ritual day, and meant to say as much about her as him. What I didn't say, what my sister called family business, was known by the whole small town: his decades of drunkenness, just keeping his job, sleeping much of the rest of the day away, the sudden snapping of temper like a hurt dog, the kind of drunkenness that makes morning such a trial my mother had to bring him a drink while he still lay beneath the covers, and after he'd taken it he'd totter slowly into the kitchen where we were eating our Frosted Flakes and reach behind me into the cupboard to pull out the
whiskey and pour himself a neat two fingers, his hair uncombed and his crumpled pajamas sour with the night, and then shuffle back, like an old, old man, to dress for the day.

I didn't write that. I didn't use the bare words. I told myself it was tangential to the story. I told myself there were too many musty confessions of alcoholic childhoods out there, it was a too-familiar territory. In fact, I could see my brother's face, my sister's face, wanting it not to be true. Most of all, I could see the composed face of that plain little girl, who was such a tough cookie and loved her daddy after all.

“Please don't use my name without my permission again,” my sister adds, late at night, alone in her room. And the
please
makes my heart flip over. It is so plaintive. But I don't stop. I don't have the right to tell these stories. How could I have the right to the lives of others, to their former selves and hard losses? These stories are like slamming doors. No right to speak unprovable truths. Life's not fair. It's all so not fair.

Tin House
, Summer 2001

I imagine some essayists don't worry much about the questions of rightness and fairness and whose version wins. I know many memoirists don't. I'm familiar with the trend toward blurring the lines between fiction and nonfiction—the insistence that we write what is true to ourselves and nothing else matters. But of course what we do matters to those we use as material. “Violation” is an attempt to grapple with the ethical dilemma of writing about people who have no say in what we write.

     
Second Chair

IN FOURTH GRADE WE WERE PUT ON A READING
“
SYSTEM
,” a box of color-coded cards with stories and questions. Each color represented a grade level, and I finished the twelfth-grade cards—dark purple—by November. All it meant was that I had nothing to read for the rest of the year, and spent that time with my head down on my desk. I was the first girl to wear glasses, the first to wear a bra, and the last to get a clue. When we put on a play about a beautiful princess with long golden hair, I waited to be picked. When Mrs. Hurley announced that Charlene, the pretty girl with long golden hair, would be the princess, I was actually surprised.

So the next year, I tried band.

At home, I took piano lessons from a fussy German man who wore a bow tie and rapped my knuckles with a ruler. For band, I picked the clarinet, sleek and pure. Several times a week I walked past the teachers' lounge, where my mother smoked cigarettes with other teachers behind a closed door, and into the upper wing of the school, the one set aside for sixth, seventh, and eighth graders, to the music room, a warehouse of lousy acoustics, bad lighting, and a rat's nest of scattered metal music stands, risers, and chairs. The music teacher was a tall, skinny man with a mop of black hair, big glasses, and pockmarked skin named Mr. Hutchinson. He was one of the youngest of the faculty, intense and kind to the mob of middle-schoolers that made up band. He didn't conduct so much as wave his long arms at us in patient exasperation. We called him Mr. H, teasing, because we liked him.

I rented a clarinet from the little music store on the main street of town, and I had to go back every few weeks to buy mysterious bamboo reeds, an errand I imbued with as much status as an assignation. New reeds were stiff and tasted fresh and grassy, but day by day they softened with my spit into something all my own. Walking there and back along wide small-town streets, I drifted from dream to dream, drifting toward something just my own, toward music, or a life.

Both my parents were schoolteachers; they met in what was then called normal college. My father taught industrial arts at the high school. Most of the kids in the county attended there, some traveling an hour each way through ranch land or down logging roads. My father reigned over a small village of modular classrooms set apart from rest of the school, a noisy, male world filled with welding torches, voltmeters, and table saws. The industrial arts classes were forbidden to girls; I rarely saw the inside of his classrooms, and he seemed only rarely to notice me.

So I helped my mother, who taught fifth grade and lower-section music. For a long time I didn't think anyone worked in the summer. The seasonal ecology of public school was my world—rhythmic shifts from crowds to solitude, from noise to quiet. From school to everything else, and back again. Our town was the small center of a wide territory—a lot of fine, empty land and not many people. So I saw my teachers at school, and I saw them in my living room and at my parents' barbecues and New Year's Eve parties. Mr. H somehow became pals with my hopelessly square mother, who called him “Hutch.” There were teachers everywhere: Mrs. Meamber lived across the street, Mrs. Hurley and Mrs. Cramer and Mr. Noonan were my parents' friends, and Mr. and Mrs. Herfindahl were my godparents. Straight A's were the least that was expected and the last thing noticed in a world where the lines were as blurred as this. I didn't even need to bring home my report card. My mother got it early.

From late August, when we made new bulletin board displays, until June, when I helped her take them down, I spent a lot
of extra hours in school with my mother. We often arrived before the first bell and left after the last, and when I was tired of her room I wandered the wide tiled hallways painted in muddy greens and browns, sneaking peeks at other classrooms, with their walls of windows and blank chalkboards waiting for words. On empty afternoons, cutting up scalloped construction paper borders, I thought that I quite liked school.

I was a child with passions—intense, unbudging, irrational passions, inevitably strange and confusing to my mother. She was a plain, shy woman all her life. I realize now that she longed to feel accepted as much as I did; this was our shared secret and we kept it from each other until she died. I was unable to grasp the subtle and terrifying nuances of classroom politics. She encouraged me to read
Seventeen
magazine so I could figure out how to be like other girls. And I wanted to be like other girls; for years I thought I was. In fact I was a sideways creature, and not really at home where other people lived. I was uncensored and a little primitive and tunneled through my mind like a mole who didn't know the light. I perched in trees, waded culverts, and often refused to wear shoes. I read adult books and wrote odd stories, the kind that lead to parent-teacher conferences and visits to the school counselor to take interesting tests. Sometimes I disappeared for hours, scrabbling up a fifty-foot cedar to chew on sap while the wind swayed me back and forth in its cradle, forgetting time.

CLASS PHOTOS WERE
taken in the spring, on breezy sunny days, each class perched on bleachers set up on the front lawn of the school, 1965, 1966, 1967—second grade, third grade, fourth: I look at them now and can tell you who's headed for perdition already. So young, and each of us jammed in place like pegs under a hammer.

Steve, the class clown, cavorting in the middle of the top row with his retinue, Randy, Ryan, Jim, Mitch. In the front row sits Charlene, with her long golden hair in a neat bun on top of her head like a movie star, and her friends, Danette and Tracy and Lori,
with their neat braids and white-ribboned socks on neatly crossed ankles. On the edges and in the hidden middle are the rest of us: the fat girls like Dee Dee, skinny ones like Ramona with her wild carrot hair and flagrant freckles, Joyce in her second-hand clothes. In second grade I sat near the end of the front row, my legs crossed and hands resting on my knees in the kind of casual, sophisticated pose Grace Kelly might strike. A few years later I am back in a corner, wearing sky-blue glasses with pointed corners decorated with fake diamonds and a homemade dress I'd talked my mother into making out of psychedelic fabric from the discount store, all bright green rhomboids and yellow swirls. I look like a before ad in the back of
Good Housekeeping
, but I am smiling because I think that I look pretty cool.

The band was the only place where the poles of social relation met, a curious mix of the popular and the picked-over. Steve played trumpet, which even today seems obvious. Ryan chose the trombone. Lyle, who looked a little like Tom Cruise in his early years and was wildly popular, played the drums, but so did Jean, who hit six feet tall in seventh grade and moved with a kind of bovine assurance between snares and the lone tympani.

For a year, I took clarinet lessons with Ida and Eileen and Mary, squeaking and shrieking in arrhythmic hoots and sudden, startling flights of music like little birds surprised out of a tree. Any music we managed to make was punctuated by the constant scrape of chair legs and the rattle of the stands knocking whole rows over like dominoes in a frantic tumble, but we practiced our scales and tried to follow Mr. H's swaying baton.

I never liked the slim B-flat clarinet, after all; it made a small nasal song and I wanted more. I bugged Mr. H to let me play the bass clarinet instead, which I longed for like a dog wants a bone, with a simpleminded need. I wanted the profound dark-chocolate notes of the big reeds, the perfect satisfaction of its large silver keys and the big curved bell at the bottom. The bass clarinet was so big I could barely lift the case. That was what I wanted—that heft and burly weight.

Finally, Mr. H let me switch. Overnight, I left the crowd of chubby clarinetists to be the second-chair bass clarinet, next to Sue—a year older, academically gifted, a natural musician who could sing and play several instruments well. For a time I followed Sue's lead, practiced regularly, and drew the big sleek body of the clarinet intimate and near. I loved its low, still sound, like the sound of small round pebbles falling slowly through a dark deep pool. I was genuinely happy in the making of that sound, alone or in the band, at home or at school. For a time, the music was enough.

All the instruments were divided into sections, rows, and chairs. Populated sections like flute and trumpet might have two or three full rows, each row a hierarchy of first and second and third chair and down, assigned by Mr. H. Such is the subtle strength of an orchestra, of course—the complex supporting frames of row upon row, each section holding up a piece of the whole. But the first row, which led the section solos and set the standard, was the only visible one, and to be lodged in second and third row was to labor anonymously. First chairs held the kind of deadly power only children really understand. For a few of us, first chair was what it was all about.

Our seats were assigned, but sometimes we moved—by Mr. H's royal directive and by “challenge.” If there was a coup—if a player moved up a whole row, for instance—alliances were broken, players shifted forward and back like gypsies shoved along the road.

Any player could, at any time, throw down the gauntlet to another player. Challenges were wars conducted in private. Mr. H picked a piece of music, each player performed it, and Mr. H decided who would sit where the next day. You won or you lost and there was no appeal; we believed Mr. H was fair and we knew he was God. It was his lot in life to know how well or badly we played, to know what would happen in a challenge before it started. He knew in fact how well or badly we managed to live through any given hour or day. His particular curse that he had to tell us what he knew.

One day, I challenged Sue for first chair, and I lost. I was a little surprised. I practiced more, dragging the heavy instrument home every day, and I challenged her again a few months later. When I told Mr. H I was ready to try again, he looked at me a moment without a word and then said, “All right, you can try if you want,” and I knew then and there I would lose.

IN SIXTH GRADE
we switched wings. I left my mother's room behind and entered the world of lockers and homeroom, white lipstick, sudden shocks. It was 1969 and I had big breasts and grew my hair long and started wearing a fake cow-skin miniskirt and boots. Nothing quite fit anymore—clothes and parents and school had begun to chafe, raising a faint bruise beneath my skin. I took advanced math and won the writing prizes, and these things counted for about as much as straight A's.

All year long, I challenged Sue again and again; it became our ritual, an almost friendly duel. I always lost. The worst of it was that I had come to see Mr. H was right. I loved my music, I held it as tenderly as my fantasy dates, but what I wanted was to be the first. I was a teacher's kid and the second-chair bass clarinet and it should have been more than enough, but it came to mean only that I was last. The bruise spread. I would never have said it out loud; it was a betrayal to feel it, a betrayal to say, but deep in the lightless tunnels I thought to hell with Dee Dee and Ramona. To hell with Sue, heading off toward her music scholarship. It was Danette and Tracy I wanted to be; they were the bright ones, and it seemed they would forever burn brighter and hotter than me.

Eighth grade, 1971. Bright patterned shirts on the boys, whose hair was getting shaggy. I put mine in tiny braids while it was still wet, and when I combed it out the next day it filled the air around my head in a dusky halo, eyes lost behind a curtain of hair. I began to push backward through the river of school, shoving aside the waves of girls with their neat ponytails, the boys with their wide-lapel polyester shirts who hardly knew my name. After the last bell rang, the empty hallways of school were as airless
as a small cell, as doomed as hunger strikes, and instead of staying late, I cut out early. I allied myself with Danny and Don, the shortest and the tallest boys in our class, two gay boys of awkward teeth and lonely hours. We spent long spring afternoons in Danny's garage, trying to play “Revolution #9” backward on the tape deck, making sandwiches in his empty kitchen, walking through the town from one end to the other, and doing nothing much at all. We were waiting, mostly.

Perhaps the worst job a teacher has is as witness: to watch the bucktoothed kids with bad clothes scramble up like Sisyphus, to watch the easy climb of the Steves and Tracys who peak at sixteen and tumble down inch by inch for the rest of their lives. In such a way, every child is abandoned, left in tears beside the road, and all any of us can do is watch. What else can we do? Here is the sour-smelling girl who lives in a trailer, and here the boy with a limp who smiles all the time as he lurches madly through the crowded halls, and here one of the tightly wrapped little geniuses who will manage to shoot herself in the foot if she only has one bullet.

As high school loomed over us like a shadow of wings, I spent my breath on sarcasm instead of the bass clarinet. I drove the teachers to distraction and more, until one day Mr. Castor threw me against the wall as I stomped between classes, my big smart mouth talking all the while. Mr. Castor held me up against the wall of the tired school in front of a hallway full of people, shoving his crew-cut blond hair and thick-necked wrestler's rage in my face, and I smiled. I knew he was just another also-ran.

The way so much ends, band ended, fading out,
pianissimo.
Grade school ended. I quit piano lessons and a year later, took the clarinet back to the store. I gave up on making music, but I called it something else. I called it knowing better. I walked away, and called it wising up.

I was still disappearing for hours—and not up cedar trees. I was under the bleachers in the empty high school football field, kissing a boy I didn't particularly like. I was cutting out of class to
ride back roads in some rump-sprung convertible with a bunch of dropouts drinking jug wine. I was lying to my mother and shouting at my father, and riding on the back of chopped Harleys with men years out of high school, leaning back with my long hair flying. As a girl, I loved to swing; I swung in wild arcs up and back, legs pumping and blood roaring, straining for height. At the top of each crescent curve I would throw all my weight to one side and fall back and up in another gathering spin like pleats of a skirt—swirling, swinging, a helix of weightless flight. In such a way I leaned back on the sissy bar on hot afternoons. No helmet, no shoes, no hands. No hope, no plan.