Things like the Truth

by Ellen Gilchrist

We leave it outside or squeeze it in the front door.

  Note: If you are under fifty years old you must remember that this took place “a long, long time ago in another galaxy,” a world where it was taken for granted that men went to work and women stayed home and decorated the house and taught manners to the children.

  How I Learned to Love and Trust Women, Since, After All, I Am One

  IN 1984 I WAS LIVING IN FAYETTEVILLE, ARKANSAS, WRITING books and managing my own money for the first time in my life. I was recently divorced. Until then my financial life had been handled by my father and my husbands. There had been three husbands but I never took money or alimony from any of them. My brother had been investing my money in U.S. Treasury bills which were paying an unheard-of dividend of twelve percent. He had been doing this for a year and had recently decided I should learn to do it for myself. He set me up with an account executive at Merrill Lynch in Fayetteville. I almost never saw the man and can’t remember his name.

  Then one day, the man called me up and said he was leaving Merrill Lynch and had turned my account over to another broker. He made an appointment for me to meet the broker at 11:30 the following Monday.

  I dressed up in my best clothes and went down to the firm at the appointed time. The receptionist took my name. A moment later a beautiful, tall redheaded woman came through the door. She had clear brown eyes and the most intelligent face I had seen in years.

  She said her name was Sue Plattner and she was going to be my stockbroker. “Oh, no,” I said. “I don’t want a woman to handle my money. I don’t think I could do that.”

  I had never known a woman who handled money or did anything important in the business world. I was the only girl in my family. I had two brothers, four uncles, and ten male first cousins. They were physicians and pilots and federal court judges and lawyers and bankers and engineers and naval offices and all sorts of proud, wonderful things in the big world. The also beautiful and well-educated and intelligent women of my childhood worked behind the scenes. They were nurses and secretaries and accountants and maids and nursemaids and cooks and assistant editors and court reporters. It was understood by all intelligent people that women were doing more than their share of the work, not to mention giving psychological support to the men, but they didn’t have the positions of responsibility. They made budgets for homes and businesses but they didn’t make investments in the stock market.

  “Let’s go to lunch,” Sue Plattner said. “I’ll tell you about myself. Maybe you will change your mind.”

  Sue is twenty years younger than I am. She had gone to the University of Arkansas and been on the Pan-Hellenic Council, which is the governing board of the large sorority system at big public colleges. This is a position of responsibility and power and we talked about the work she had done there to keep young women from drinking alcohol and taking drugs.

  I had never met a woman who did something as dangerous and exciting as help people manage their money.

  While we ate she began to tell me about what she could do to help me. She talked to me about what investing should be. (Like a good teacher’s daughter she was teaching me.) She told me what the stock market is, what treasury bonds are, what sort of things are possible in long-term investing, what she wanted for her customers. She explained risk and diversification, municipal bonds, dividends, inflation, things I had never really understood. I knew the words but I didn’t understand the concepts. Until that luncheon I had just put my faith in men wearing suits and let it go at that.

  Sue and I went back to the Merrill Lynch office, where she got out a folder with a list of my investments and we went over them one by one. She showed me a twenty-year chart of treasury bonds and explained why they might not always be paying twelve percent. She suggested we put some of the money into longer-term bonds and maybe buy a few mutual funds while the stock market was down. I stayed in Sue’s office for several hours as she taught me things and we made plans.

  I went home dazzled. As Sue Plattner’s ideas and suggestions started to make money for me, I began to look at my prejudices with a sharp eye. I am a woman, I told myself. I think I’m smarter than my brothers. I know I’m meaner than they are if I have to be. Why do I think someone like me won’t be as good as a man at anything? Hell’s bells, as my mother would say. I made that money. Why would I think someone like me wasn’t good enough to handle it?

  Shortly after meeting Sue I hired a woman to be my CPA. Her name was Betty. We made tea and talked awhile.

  Then we got out my messy papers and began to try to figure out how much money I had made and how many deductions I had.

  “Where are your receipts?” she asked.

  “I don’t have any,” I answered. “I didn’t know I needed them.”

  The next day she came back to my house and gave me a pair of notebooks with plastic pockets in the covers so I could begin to keep track of my cash expenses.

  “An artist or writer can deduct CDs, going to the movies, visiting museums, buying books,” she told me. “This is going to be fun.”

  It was fun. Me and my CPA against the mean-spirited, greedy “feds.” She taught me about the ever-changing, absurdly complicated tax code. Every winter we fought the tax battle together. It was a strong bond between us.

  I began looking for a woman doctor, but that took awhile because they were hard to find twenty years ago. I had to wait until the daughter of a friend finished medical school and came home to practice to have the pleasure of a woman doctor.

  By the time my literary agent retired a few years later it was easy for me to switch to a woman in his office. It never occurred to me to think she was a woman and he had been a man. I had become accustomed to women in powerful positions and aware of how good they are at everything they do. They are funny, charming, energetic, ambitious, fabulously dependable and just plain old good.

  I don’t want to trade one set of prejudices for another; still I can’t help but note the advantages of working with another woman. If they are good at what they do you end up being friends.

  I remember another lunch date with Sue Plattner a few years after we met. She came running into the restaurant apologizing for being late. She had just been given the results of a test that showed she was carrying triplets. She went right on working while bringing those three beautiful boys into the world. They are identical twin redheaded boys and a gorgeous black-haired baby who looks like his Italian father.

  Later, Sue and her older son, Adam, drove down to Jackson, Mississippi, to meet and talk with my powerful old father. It was his shadow she was fighting as she tried to keep me from thinking the markets were going to collapse and we should all be in gold.

  I still love men. I understand them and I like to watch them operate. They work from a different set of drives and hormones than women do. But it’s peaceful to do business with women. I like being able to gossip about our families while I’m getting a physical exam.

  I didn’t understand it as it happened, but my life has been following, sometimes slowly and sometimes in great surges, the changes in this amazing culture in which we live.

  I rejected the wild fringes of feminism, but I cried when I read in a book by Germaine Greer that women didn’t have to give up their last names when they marry. Thanks to three husbands I had been Ellen Walker, then Ellen Bloodworth, then Ellen Walker again, then Ellen Kullman.

  On the day I read that line in Greer’s book I walked into the dining room and sat down at the table and wrote my name on a piece of paper. Ellen Gilchrist. Then I cried. I have been Ellen Gilchrist ever since. I like my name even if it is hard to spell and even though my radical friends like to remind me it came from my father.

  Fall 2004, The Origin of Ball Games

  LEST WE FORGET WHERE WE CAME FROM. I HAVE BEEN PLAYING a game with the squirrels and chipmunks in my backyard. The game began in July, when, after a year of perfect weather for plants and trees, my hickory trees produced a record-setting number of hickory nuts. When the nuts
begin to grow the squirrels start gathering. Squirrels who live on the many oak and maple trees on my acre of land and in neighboring yards all begin to spend time on my roof where the overhanging hickory branches make a convenient grocery store for them. Immature hickory nuts are not edible even for ravenous squirrels and chipmunks but that does not stop them from tearing them down with their paws and teeth and taking a bite and dropping the rest on my long concrete back porch. It’s only a minor addiction at this point, although my game and fish commissioner friend says squirrels love the smell and taste of hickory nuts better than anything in the world. When I see them tearing into the immature nuts I am always reminded of Richard Brautigan’s wonderful crazy books that contained recipes for things like hickory nut soup.

  Back to the squirrels. Every year when the hickory nuts begin to ripen the squirrels arrive in force and eat them all day long and drop enormous amounts of trash on the porch and come down onto the porch and eat nuts on the stone wall that supports the porch and when they are finished with the nuts they climb back up on the roof and chew on the California redwood trim of this beautiful Fay Jones house that I was lucky enough to buy when it was a wreck and very cheap because Fay was a year away from winning the gold medal of the American Institute of Architects.

  When this happens I get mean. I call the fish and game man and he comes and traps them and carries them off to his property and turns them loose in a stand of wild pecan trees. Sometimes he catches a few possums by accident but we just turn them loose on the back lot. It is sad to see the house-eating squirrels’ dismay when they are in the traps and waiting to be transported to greener fields but when they begin to tear up the house I feel justified.

  I could end all this by having the trees sprayed with poison to keep them from producing nuts but the poison is so toxic only a few old tree men from out in the country will agree to spray it on trees and I can’t bring myself to add poison to the lovely little ecosystem in my yard.

  So, this year, with the bumper crop of hickory nuts, I have devised a plan that seems to me fair and Zen. I was planning on being home most of the summer and fall anyway so I started going out in the early morning and late afternoon and collecting all the nuts that fall on the porch and wall and taking them down the hill and putting them near a creek bed. I am trying to train the squirrels to have their addictive hickory nut feasts in another location.

  Another trick I am using is to have my twelve-year-old neighbor, John Tucker McCormick, come over in his spare time from his baseball and football careers and throw the nuts one at a time all the way down to the bottom of my lot into an area behind my trampoline. While he’s here he sweeps off the trampoline and jumps on it awhile to make sure it hasn’t rotted and become an attractive nuisance.

  All of this has helped and I am getting very long and thin in the waist from having bent over and picked up somewhere in the vicinity of six thousand hickory nuts or maybe six million. It is amazing how many nuts two large hickory trees can produce given perfect weather and plenty of rain for a year.

  Only once or twice have I caught squirrels eating on the redwood trim and they have been doing it on the back of the house where I never have to look at the damage.

  This morning I was playing a new game. Instead of bending over to pick up the nuts or sweeping them into a dustpan I began to kick them into a pile. Then I began to try to kick them into the dustpan. Soccer, I thought, dodging a nut that was falling from the roof where an early morning addict was picking the last of the nuts and dropping half of them in his frenzy. I have been hit once or twice this month as the nut falls have become greater.

  Every day I think, “My God, this has to be the last of the nuts. How many nuts can two trees bear?” But it is never the last.

  I wonder if you could eat these things, I keep thinking, and, poor little squirrels and chipmunks, maybe I shouldn’t make them use their calories going all the way to the creek for breakfast. Still, there are plenty on the other side of the porch. All the ones that fall on the ground are theirs. All the ones that fall on my porch get moved. They are going to move their little hungry derrieres away from my redwood trim, if it’s the last thing I ever accomplish in my short but happy life on the planet earth. Ninety thousand years until the next ice age.

  I should learn to love the squirrels as much as I love the chipmunks, but I can’t. I should be perfect but I’m not. I should keep on trying to be a Zen person and I will. The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster and All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Care and The Abortion are some of the wonderful and increasingly forgotten books by the City Lights poet named Richard Brautigan. The Abortion is about a library up in New England where people go to turn in books instead of take them out. Anytime anyone writes a book they can go up there and put their book in. This is so much more Zen than going through the process of publication and peer review and book signings and so forth. Somewhere in the middle of the book there is an abortion, but it’s not very important. I can’t remember now if the abortion happens or just almost happens.

  I learned so much from Richard Brautigan. I learned to have fun with writing. I learned to put photographs and paintings of my friends on the covers of my books. I learned to have real titles instead of boring ones and I learned how to describe behavior from a short story called “The Koolaid Wino.”

  Thanks to those squirrels and to the wonderful, almost forgotten poet and writer Richard Brautigan, I am having a divine and productive morning to make up for the fact that two of my friends have died in the last month and another has been diagnosed with a terrible cancer.

  We must press on. Ninety thousand years to go, although I have a theory that if we can keep from blowing ourselves up with it, we can use nuclear energy to melt ice when the next ice age starts.

  Diamonds, 2006

  THE REASON TO WRITE IS TO LEARN. THE MORE I WRITE, THE more I am forced to learn. This winter I am having to study geology so that a teenage detective named Ingersol Manning can discover a map to a kimberlite pipe in Berkeley, California. A kimberlite pipe is the source of diamonds in the world. “… [A] relatively small hole bored through the crust of the earth by an expanding combination of carbon dioxide and water which rises from within the earth’s mantle and moves so fast driving magma to the surface that it breaks into the atmosphere at supersonic speeds. Such events have occurred at random through the history of the earth, and a kimberlite pipe could explode under Moscow next year. Rising so rapidly and from so deep a source, a kimberlite pipe brings up exotic materials the like of which could never appear in the shallow slow explosion of a Mount St. Helens or the flows of Mauna Loa. Among the materials are diamonds.”*

  A kimberlite pipe is about half a mile wide. If there is one underneath Ingersol’s neighborhood, he and his friend Tammili, and their mentor, the pianist Mrs. Coleman, will have to decide whether it’s worth telling anyone and having their neighborhood destroyed in the process.

  Anyway, I had to study geology for many nights. Two things happened because of that and both of them may prove to be irreversible. First, I have begun to view the world from an entirely different perspective. I live in the Ozark Mountains, soft old hills left by glaciers ten million years ago and since then eroded and worn down by rain and snow and forests. I have always thought they were beautiful and always been fascinated by the huge rocks that seem to spring up from the earth. Everywhere there are boulders of many sizes still working their way to the surface. My house is built of that rock, much of it broken up from larger stones.

  Now I can no longer look around me and see the spring trees and the soft, new grasses and wildflowers. Now all I see is geomorphic time, the long processes that brought that rock down here from Canada.

  The basins, ridges, shelves, gullies, erosions, roadcuts all have taken on huge, exciting lives. I am outside five hours a day exploring this and wondering and thinking. This is exciting work. This is an exciting life.

  When I am through for the day I go to the bookstore and
buy all the books on geology I can carry home. I have started giving them to children.

  The reason I have become so excited about this subject is that I have found a use for it. If I can’t see a practical use for something, sooner or later I get rid of it or give it away. I am using this geomorphic information to write a book that someday I might be able to sell, and that someday young people might read and be amused by, or learn something from. With that in mind I began my study of geology with enthusiasm. It has developed into a passion. I have not yet bought a rock hammer and a set of cold chisels but that will be next. I did almost have a wreck on a mountain road last Wednesday. I came to a roadcut with a great fall of granite. I must have passed that place hundreds of times as it is on the main road south from my home. “Granite,” I screamed. “Granite, granite, granite.” I threw on the brakes and was almost rear-ended by a highway patrol car. Fortunately, the officer had been maintaining a proper distance and was able to swerve around me. I was preparing a defense in my mind, but he drove on and did not bother me.

  The second thing this new passion has done for me is to bring me back to consciousness after a long winter’s sleep. Three weeks ago I was so bored I was watching television. While watching The Learning Channel I became convinced that there had been an Atlantis and that it was now Antarctica. I talked of nothing else for days, boring all my friends to death. While buying the geology books I picked up Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World, and was brought back to consciousness about pseudoscience, even when it’s on the Learning Channel. There may have been a city in the Aegean that toppled into the sea, or was covered by an earthquake, but that is a far cry from “the destruction of a continent on which had sprung forth a preternaturally advanced technical and mystical civilization.”