I wish I knew what I was really up to. A writer’s mind is as full of tricks as a magician’s. I might be running away from wondering if my new book is any good. I might wake up a year from now and decide this whole thing was either absolutely sane or absolutely crazy.
MY GRANDCHILDREN are visiting me. Marshall Walker, age four, and Ellen Walker, age one — and I am watching the terrible pangs of sibling rivalry. This is real suffering and all I ever need to know about jealousy, its power and its source.
For a whole year Marshall has put up with this baby hanging on his mother and sucking on her breasts and sleeping in her arms. He has put up with her walking into his room and picking up his toys and getting all the attention.
But my house on the mountain is another thing. I am his grandmother. I belong to him, hook, line, and sinker. My piano belongs to him and my closet full of toys and my chairs and my pillows and my bed. Also, the box of huge wooden blocks a friend of mine always brings over when she knows he’s coming.
Now this one-year-old baby girl is actually walking around this place touching anything she wants to touch. This is the first time she has been here since she could walk. He is going crazy. He sobbed himself to sleep the first night he was here, exhausted from trying to protect his territory. I am in such sympathy with him I have found myself taking sides against my own little granddaughter. These lessons are too hard to learn. This is more than I want to know about jealousy.
Be objective, I kept saying to myself. Then he would sit down to play the piano and here she would come, beating on the bass keys, ruining his music. Be objective, I warned myself. Then he began building a spaceship out of the blocks. He had been working for an hour stacking and arranging them, humming happily to himself as he formed the cockpit, the wings, the fuselage. She came walking out of the kitchen and destroyed half a wing with a sweep of her hand. He was on top of her in an instant. He grabbed her head in his hands. His mouth was open. I leaped over a stack of books. “Don’t bite,” I screamed. “Did he bite her?” his mother asked. “No,” I said. “I stopped it. Come on,” I added, grabbing him up. “Let’s get out of here.” We went out to the shed and found our old green tent and set it up under a maple tree and spread some sleeping bags on the ground and put the blocks on them and got a radio and put it in the window of the shed attached to fifty feet of extension cord and turned on KUAF’s “Jazz and Fusion Hour.” We have moved to the yard.
A psychiatrist friend suggests that the best thing to do is to show him the world is big and full of more exciting things than his mother’s breasts. I agree. We’re going to build telephones from the tent to the shed and start some swimming lessons and as soon as he gets home this afternoon I am going to call my older brother and apologize to him for being alive.
THESE JOURNAL ENTRIES allow me to answer questions reporters ask me about my work. I am always dissatisfied with the reports that reach my readers. The boring little domestic details of my life don’t seem to have anything to do with the mental life that makes the stories, with the real excitement of writing, the pitchblende I refine in search of radium. I’m so influenced by movies I saw as a child that that is actually how I view what I’m doing. I think of myself as a sort of literary Madame Curie in a shed in Paris surrounded by tables piled high with pitchblende. If I keep on trying, if I do the work, I will find some light at the end. Remember the wonderful scene when she goes at night to her workshop, certain she has failed, and then sees the light shining from the petri dish? That’s the sort of fantasy that leads me on.
I refuse to be cynical in any way about my work. My work helps me live my life. It tells me who I am. Take The Annunciation, for example — my so-called novel. What was that obsession with adoption about? I’m not adopted and I’ve never given a child away. Was it about my son in Alaska? When my middle son was eighteen, he handed me a high school diploma, got into a pickup truck, and drove up the Alaska highway to Fairbanks to work on the pipeline. He was happy as a lark, doing exactly what he wanted to do.
Meanwhile I was down in New Orleans, going crazy, staying up nights with outdoors catalogs, ordering triple-lined down coats and gloves and helmets guaranteed to work in the Antarctic and flare kits and sending them to him. I must have sent him half a dozen flare kits. Every day that child was in Alaska I would wake up and wonder if his eyeballs had frozen yet. He didn’t even have a phone. I couldn’t even call him up. It’s not easy being a mother. It never ends. The child grows up and the mother keeps on mothering. It’s pitiful. It drives you crazy. It drives you to write novels about adoption.
A critic once wrote to me and said, Ellen, for God’s sake stop writing novels for therapy. It was good advice but how can I stop?
Anyway, my son didn’t freeze to death in Alaska — he made a lot of money and spent it and learned how to take tractors apart and came home and got married and now he’s farming in north Mississippi and I don’t have to order any more flare kits or write any more books about lost children. Now I can go back to work writing about people who are looking for love in all the wrong places.
MY LITTLE redheaded grandchild has become very conscious of his hair. He fills the sink with water, then pulls a chair up to it, then very carefully, for he is a careful and precise child, he dips the top of his head down into the water. He looks in the mirror and smooths the sides down, then pushes up a small piece in the back.
“What have you done to your hair?” his mother said when she first noticed it. “It is the chicken look,” he said. “I am the chicken style.”
I suppose it was inevitable that sooner or later I must tell you about the overpowering joy of being a grandparent. People try to make light of this relationship. They say it is because a grandparent can give a child back to its parents when she becomes tired of caring for it. Not true.
His name is Marshall, this little boy that I adore. He has brown eyes and a wonderful large nose like Albert Einstein’s and large ears like the Gautama Buddha’s and I am sick at the thought that he must ever go to school. How awesome that one woman should have twenty or thirty children to care for all day. How could she help but make mistakes? Something is wrong at the very basis of our ideas about schools.
“The chicken look,” he said. “I am the chicken style.”
Last week I was down in Jackson, Mississippi, with my grandchild. I had taken him to visit my mother, that famous child-worshipper. We had Marshall, age three, and his cousin Heather, age four, and we had been at it with them for about twenty-four hours. I had them in the business of filling up a birdbath using eight-ounce plastic glasses. The birdbath is on the back of the yard in a bed of daffodils and the source of water is beside the house. About ten minutes of absolute peace had gone by. They were robotlike in their dedication to the idea of helping birds. I was feeling very powerful having hit upon this great idea to get them to leave me alone. I wanted to write about it. To describe the self-satisfied look on their faces as they filled the cups and carried them carefully back across the yard and dumped them in. What good citizens, helping the birds. I wanted to write about it but I didn’t dare begin. I knew what would happen. The minute I got involved in my work they would sense I had stopped watching them and come running. I stood there thinking about what it would be like to be a young mother trying to write or paint or do anything alone in a house with small children. And yet life without them would be meaningless to me.
A poet told me that when her little boys were small she used to put her typewriter in the playpen and sit there and work while they tore up the house around her. Of course, she is an exceptionally energetic and resourceful person.
MY FOUR-YEAR-OLD GRANDSON and I were uninvited guests the other morning at the wedding of Sharon James to Jacob Clayton. It was a wedding in a castle. Along with my recent campaign to cure him of sibling rivalry, I have been taking Marshall out to explore the world. This being a Saturday we left early and stopped by the Station to pick up some muffins and then, carrying our boxes, we walked down to Wilso
n Park to eat breakfast in the castle.
The castle is a strange thing, rising up from the ground beside a creek that runs by the baseball diamond. It was built in 1979 by a sculptor named Frank Williams and was paid for by the National Endowment for the Arts. Frank employed CETA workers and at one time or another two dozen young people worked on the project, learning to mix concrete and lay stones and divert water, learning useful skills while they created magic.
The result is a real castle, built of stone and concrete, with a throne room and turrets and a bridge and towers that are inlaid with runes and small art objects and tiles bearing symbols both sacred and scary.
I had lunch at the castle on my forty-fifth birthday. But I had never been there for breakfast. Marshall and I arrived with our boxes and found the place packed with people wearing tuxedos. Sharon James and Jacob Clayton had hit upon the idea of getting married beside the moat.
There were bridesmaids in pink cotton, a bride in white lace who looked sixteen and not a day older. A three-tier wedding cake made by Josephine Banks, and a flower girl named Janie who emerged from her mother’s car wearing pale pink and long gold ringlets. Marshall went crazy when he saw her and started flexing his muscles and making his motorcycle engine noise.
“I am never getting married,” he said, when she had disappeared down the aisle beside the ring bearer. “I’m going to be an artist and paint and paint and paint.”
Marshall is going through a difficult, highly critical, and generally unattractive phase right now. “Besides,” he added, “it’s going to rain.”
I looked up. He was right. Rain clouds were gathering. Rain was on its way. But the preacher had begun the ceremony. He was already to the part about in sickness and in health and forsaking all others. The bride stared straight ahead. The maid of honor scratched her arm with a lace glove. I pulled Marshall’s wonderful strong little body into my own and thought about the day his grandfather and I ran away to the hills of north Georgia to be married by a justice of the peace with a sheriff in attendance. We weren’t much older than the children being married by this moat. Because of that this little boy exists and my middle age is charmed and rich and full of laughter.
“When are they going to eat the cake?” he asked, pretending to have lost interest in the flower girl.
“I was thinking of making some cakes this afternoon,” I answered. “A pineapple upside-down cake and a marble cake and some cupcakes with colored icing. You want to help me do it?”
“Let’s go,” he said. “Let’s go get started.”
I’VE BEEN UP in Chickasaw County, Mississippi, watching a house being moved down the Natchez Trace. My son, Garth Walker, and his wife, Jean Verrell, have taken it upon themselves to move a hundred-year-old house from downtown Houston, Mississippi, five miles out the Trace to Jeannie’s farm. The weather has not been propitious for this undertaking. First there was rain, now there is snow. But my brave children are going right along with their plans. As of yesterday, half of the house (it had to be cut in two) had come to rest underneath a circle of oak trees and the other half will be moved today.
Jeannie’s farm is on land that people in Chickasaw County call the Horsenation, a plateau where the Confederate Army hid its horses during the Civil War. Later, when the war was over, it was the site of many famous rodeos.
I watched the first half of the house being moved. I drove up the Trace and got to Houston just in time to see the house coming down the main street on a flatbed truck. Two men were standing on top moving power lines out of the way, and everyone in town had come out of their houses and stores to watch the progress.
Traffic was stopped for an hour in the middle of town, but no one seemed to mind. They have known Jeannie and her family a long time and if she wants to buy an old house and move it to her farm it’s okay with them. Any tree branches that were in the way were cheerfully cut down and thrown to the side. This is rich and fertile land with many trees and no one minds losing a branch or two.
The house proceeded down the main street and turned onto Highway 389 and on down to the entrance to the Trace. My son was standing on the overpass with the park ranger. They were discussing the tendency of certain overprotective mothers to come driving up the Trace to make sure a house doesn’t fall on anyone.
I watched the house move up the ramp and turn left onto the Trace. A chandelier in a bedroom swung gaily on its chain and I thought, Someday I’ll be sleeping in one of those bedrooms holding a grandchild in my arms and I’ll be telling him or her about the time I watched his house being moved along the Natchez Trace to his mother’s farm.
I thought too of the Temple of Dendur in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, which was moved stone by stone from a little port on the Nile River to a glass-covered room on Fifth Avenue.
Man and his dreams, Stonehenge and the Great Wall of China and the Temple of Dendur and the Pyramids. The urge to civilization is to conquer or to build.
As I was trying to remember the rest of that quotation my son’s house passed the Aberdeen exit and disappeared into the trees.
IN THE LONG HOT SUMMERS of my so-called youth I used to put on plays. I put them on in treehouses and on porches and in basements. Basements were the best. In the first place they were cool, in the second place they were mysterious, and in the third place there was always a coal bin that the actors could use for a dressing room.
The most memorable play I produced was in the basement of a house in Harrisburg, Illinois. My co-director was Cynthia Jane Hancock, who would grow up to become a head cheerleader and drum majorette and, later, a finalist for Mrs. Illinois. She was made for the stage. I, alas, was not.
This particular performance was a variety show. Cynthia, dressed as Wonder Woman, would tap dance to “Meet Me in Saint Louis.” Dressed as Cat Woman, I would follow her singing “The Desert Song.” Our audience consisted of six or seven neighborhood children and the son of the Harrisburg newspaper editor. He was there with his camera, ready to record for all time the premiere performance of The Main Street Review.
It was ten o’clock on a Saturday morning in the very heart of July. The audience was seated on a line of old footlockers. The show began. Cynthia stepped up on the wooden stage and wowed them with her rendition of “Meet Me in Saint Louis.” They screamed for more. She did “East Side, West Side” and left the stage with a curtsy and a bow. It was my turn. My Cat Woman costume was a green one-piece bathing suit with a gold cummerbund and a black hat. I stepped up on the stage. I opened my mouth to sing. It was my favorite song. I had sung it a thousand times. Blue Heaven, I began. Blue Heaven, Blue Heaven. What was next? I could not remember. No words came. Blue Heaven, I began again. The audience waited politely. They ate their popcorn and drank their Cokes. I tried again. Blue Heaven. Blue Heaven and You and I. Blue Heaven. The audience looked down at the floor. I can’t do it, I said. I can’t remember the words. Cynthia stood up. I guess the show is over, she said. You can go home now if you want to.
I HAVEN’T HAD a vacation from writing in ten years. Ever since the afternoon in 1975 when I pulled my old portable typewriter out of a closet and went off to the Caicos Islands to write poetry, I’ve been writing or wishing I was writing every single day from dawn to noon.
Now, suddenly, the spell is broken and I’ve been wildly happy for three weeks — first I lost six pounds. Then I bought some makeup. Then I decided to move back to Mississippi into the bosom of my wild, beautiful family.
Don’t get cocky and think you can go home again, a friend warned me. Well, I’m going home anyway. If my father wants to get up in the middle of the night and argue with me about the Federal Reserve system, I’m ready.
If my grandchildren boss me around unceasingly, I’m ready. If I have to fight for everything I’ve struggled to learn and believe in, I’m ready.
Because I miss the state of Mississippi with its wonderful fields and trees and rivers and bright-eyed imaginative children.
Fayetteville, Arkan
sas, has been good to me. The quiet beauty of the Ozark Mountains has given me the strength to write three books of fiction and a book of poems and a play.
Now it’s time to go home to the real material. To the place where I was born and the beautiful musical language that I first learned to speak. What you hear on the radio is only a ghost of those long vowel sounds. It is a language that’s more like singing than like talking. So I’m going home. I’ll fly back to Fayetteville and start packing up my papers and closing my little house on the mountain where I tried to be a slave to literature. That didn’t work out for me.
I kept thinking about a poem by Louis Simpson called “The Springs of Gadera” about a man in publishing who dreams he is pushing a huge stone around a circle. One day he kicks his desk drawer shut and gets up and walks out. He looks back over his shoulder and imagines he sees some other poor guy pushing the same stone around the same old worn-out circular path. As for me, I’m tired of being a nun to art. I’m going to go live in the capital city of the state of Mississippi and find out what’s going on in the modern world.
I CAN BARELY remember the Thanksgivings of my life. They fade into the late fall whiteness between Halloween and Christmas and there they lie, lost and forgotten or awash in a sea of rice and gravy and white meat. I never did like to eat dinner with large groups of people. I am more the type to take a sandwich up into a tree and nibble around the crust while I read.
Falling Through Space Page 3