At that time of lively feminism, I read women authors, but I didn’t stop reading men. I just read them differently. I read them as a writer: If they wrote well, if they had mastered that art, I wanted to study their minds, get the essence of what it was to write, but now I could also discriminate. I remember reading A Moveable Feast, by Hemingway. His portrayal of his wife Hadley was ridiculous. She was two-dimensional; she sounded like a dingbat. All she did was agree with Ernest: “Oh, Tatie, what a lovely idea,” she said to whatever he wanted to do. I didn’t any longer believe that this was the way a wife should act. I saw Hemingway’s limitation as a writer and probably as a man. Before feminism I’d read books written by men and thought the women characters were the way I should be. I wasn’t fooled this time, but wow! could he write about walking through the Luxembourg gardens after working on a short story in a café, about how it felt to write, about how his belly was hungry. This is what I took from him and thanked him for. I’m sure he suffered plenty for his attitudes about women, but I got what I wanted. I studied his sentence length, his rhythms: “On hot nights you can go to the Bambilla to sit and drink cider and dance and it is always cool when you stop dancing there in the leafyness of the long plantings of trees where the mist rises from the small river.” (Death in the Afternoon, Scribners, 1932.) Hemingway was breathing deep, long breaths to carry this sentence.
I was amazed how the man trusted the leaps in his own mind. Where Hemingway talks about the Bambilla, he also talks about the Madrid climate, sleep, Constantinople, the Allied occupation, watching the sun rise, the stockyards burning in Chicago, and the Republican convention in Kansas City in 1928—all in the same paragraph. He did not worry whether everything followed a topic sentence, as I was taught to write in junior high. Old Ernest went wherever his mind took him. And it worked! I wanted that for myself; that was having a fist in my own life.
What I was doing was slowly studying how one writes. I didn’t presume anything; I began at zero. I just examined things and kept hunting; for essence. I was neutral; I had no ideas. I didn’t believe anything until I tasted it.
This wasn’t conscious. If something glowed I went toward it. If it taught me how to write, I ate it up. I had to get really dumb. “Dumb” is a negative word in our society. It wasn’t for me. I had to allow myself the dumbness of innocence; I had to become curious and not presume anything. I had to be amazed at the sunrise. I had to let it be a wonder each morning. That is the level I had to ground myself down to.
I remember in third grade, learning how to tell time—or rather, Mrs. Schneider trying to teach me. I couldn’t get it. I couldn’t compute fall and spring and the rotation of the earth into the arms of this paper clock she held up. Twenty-five minutes to an hour and then a quarter past another hour. I just didn’t get it and I was earnest and I tried so hard. “Please, Mrs. Schneider, let’s try again,” I said, and the class moaned, rolled their eves to the ceiling. The lunch bell had just rung; we heard the other kids shuffling in the hall, the slam of lockers, the smell of cabbage and potatoes wafting up from the cafeteria. Finally, I gave up something deep and unconscious that I wanted to understand and connect with. I simply said, “Okay, okay, the long hand at six means ‘half past,’ ” and I left it at that. I broke the connection with my center in order to appease the class and my teacher. I learned to tell time, but I gave up duration and the hugeness of the sun and moon. The class applauded wildly and dashed for the door, grabbing their lunch boxes and paper bags full of baloney and ham sandwiches. I shuffled off with the tuna sandwich my mother made for me almost every day, the tuna oil smashed into the white bread, turning it soggy.
The problem was a lack of imagination. Why couldn’t my mother think of anything else to make: cream cheese with black olives, avocado and cheese (did avocados even exist back then, in the fifties?). What I wanted to understand about time needed a great act of my imagination. No one in class, including the teacher, was willing to wait for me to make that connection. It would have taken too much time. My mind moved slowly.
To learn to write I had to go back to that early innocence, not taking anything for granted. But this time, I had to be the teacher, too. And unlike my public school teachers I had to be patient with the student, allow myself to grow slowly, complete, full of wonder, connected, and experiential.
In developing writing practice—and remember that at the time I didn’t know I was developing anything, I was just trying to figure out how to write—I looked to the most elemental things: pen and paper. I knew writers used paper. Computers weren’t around much then, and I wasn’t a good typist. What kind of pen? What kind of paper? I noticed that my mind—when it didn’t freeze from fear of the blank page—moved faster than my hand. So then I thought, Well, at least I need a fast-writing pen. Pencils, I discovered, were too slow, although I liked them. They were old-fashioned. I liked sharpening them. I liked feeling the texture of the point against paper. And they were inexpensive. Price was important to me, too. I wanted to be able to write no matter how poor I was. I wanted no excuse not to write. I was searching for the democracy of writing. After all, I was an American. Ballpoints were a little draggy. I liked cheap Sheaffer fountain pens in the beginning. You could get refills, but they often leaked. There was no perfect answer in a pen, but I continued my relationship to them and got to know them for their speed, feel, and texture.
And paper? I realized that I wanted cheap paper, and not loose individual pieces. Spiral notebooks suited me fine. For a while, I searched out unlined ones, but they were harder to find. Again, I wanted no excuse, “Well, I couldn’t write this week because I filled my last blank notebook and Woolworth’s doesn’t have any.” Well, Nat, then get a lined one, just get to work.
I wanted to keep my writing—all of it—in one notebook at a time, because I was interested in figuring out who I was. I wanted to study my own mind. I wrote down my mind in the notebook and then read it later. It was a way to digest myself, all of myself. In the spiral notebook, my poems were intermixed with my complaints, my disconnected afternoons, my restlessness—with everything I had to say. Certainly, it wasn’t all great writing. I knew I had to allow all of it to just be. In most of my school life, my writing wasn’t acceptable. This was the cure: to accept all of it, to make my mind and notebook a safe place. To turn over my mind’s garbage and see what could bloom without expectation, with acceptance only.
I know that sounds simple, easy. Well, yes, it was simple, but it was never easy. I was actually asking a big thing of myself: to accept my own mind. The more I wrote the more vast I saw a mind could be. A lot of times I felt I was tripping. Writing became the nondrug high. For many of us who experienced psychedelic drugs, they weren’t always fun. LSD took us many places, some dark and terrifying. What the drug did was dissolve our barriers and control. Writing did the same thing. I became immense. I saw I was always immense, but with writing, unlike LSD, it took work to get there and the aim wasn’t to be immense or high, the aim was to write, to just be in the soup of my own mind with my notebook spread out in front of me and my hand moving that pen.
And I noticed that the mind was plentiful with excuses. “It’s too hot. I’m too tired. My house is messy. My stomach hurts. I had a hard day. I’m lonely. I’m not lonely. I’m too happy, too excited, too broke.” I started to call it “the mind,” rather than “my mind,” because I began to notice there was an impersonal quality. My mind wasn’t doing anything to me personally; it was just doing its thing. It was restless, dissatisfied, craving, desiring, detesting, bored, indifferent. I began to see that all of these things appeared every time I sat down to write. At the beginning I gave in to them. I’m tired, I thought. I took a nap. I’m hungry, I thought. I went to the refrigerator. I feel dirty. I took a bath. Each day my complaint felt legitimate and each day I did not write. A week, a month passed. I opened the notebook. I closed it. Sometimes I managed a few lines before I quit. Sometimes, if I managed to assert myself for even ten or fifteen minute
s and kept my hand moving across the page, my mind seemed to settle down, it even became content, almost like an unruly child who is deeply craving her mother’s discipline and is finally taken to task by her mother.
I also saw that mind was impersonal, because I began to notice the same elements of avoidance, desire, and ignorance alive in my friends. I began to see that we were all subject to the same shiftings and rumblings and dissatisfactions.
The other thing I discovered: If I had a topic to begin with, it was easier to get started. Almost any topic was okay, because once you began, you entered your own mind and your mind had its own paths to travel. You just needed to step out of the way, but a topic was a first footstep or the twist of a doorknob into the entry of yourself. I began to look for topics, made a list of them in the back of my notebook: apples in August, shoes, my grandmother’s feet, stairs I climbed, my first sexual experience. When I sat down to write I could grab one of these topics off the list and begin. But in truth, when I gave my mind its own freedom, no matter what topic I began with— nuclear war, prunes, birth control, hamburgers, Kent State, summer allergies—it all led back to my mother, to that life in the green split-level, my father’s bar, my grandparents snoring in the next room. This is what I knew, what I loved and hated, the seeds of my passion.
A writer’s life is about examination. What is love anyway, and sorrow, and light? I wasn’t readv to examine those things for their own sake. I was busy examining myself. How do I get this mind to speak clearly, how do I coordinate it with my hand and pen, who is a writer, how do I become one? I went to authors’ readings and as soon as the writer was done reading, I shot up my hand. “How do you write?” I’d ask. “What is your schedule?” Everyone wrote differently and had a different schedule. That was great! It gave me permission to find my own way. It encouraged me to examine myself. Who was I anyway, who was going to write?
For my tenth birthday, my grandmother offered to buy me a dress. My mother took me to May’s department store. There were racks and racks of pink nylon party dresses. I chose one with white lace at the short sleeves and hem, a tight pleated nylon yoke as big as a clown’s, a pink ribbon for a belt with an artificial blue flower as large as a small tomato pinned, dangling, to the left side of the waist. It was truly ugly. I loved it. I would have to wear many crinolines.
My mother said, “Are you sure you want this?”
Absolutely. I nodded eagerly.
“But it’s winter.” She hesitated. “You’ll be cold. Well, I guess you can wear your yellow cardigan over it.”
We purchased it and I ran ahead, bag in hand, to the parking lot.
My birthday fell on a Saturday. I woke early. I walked into my parents’ bedroom. My father was watching television.
“I’m ten! I’m ten!” I said. “I’m two numbers now. One and zero.” I held up my index and middle ringer, indicating two.
“Wait until you have three numbers,” my father said.
My mind quickly spanned through the twenties, thirties, forties. I would have to be very old to get to three digits. I was going to be in the two-digit numbers a long time! I might never get to the three. I looked up. My father was joking. I laughed.
We were going to New York City for the day. We would take the Long Island Railroad in Wantagh. I got to invite my best friend, Jo Ann Carosella, who lived next door, to come with us. Her parents had a gray Cadillac with the first automatic windows I’d seen. When her father pulled it up in their driveway for the first time, we all ran over.
“Blow on the window,” Richard Carosella, Jo Ann’s older brother, demanded. I blew and the window magically went down.
To New York City the five of us went: my parents, me, Jo Ann and my sister, who was seven. I sat on the train in my pink nylon dress, brown leggings underneath, heavy brown overcoat, white nylon socks, and black patent-leather shoes. It was a cold January day.
We ate lunch at Lindy’s on Seventh Avenue. I ate a chopped steak burger and their famous cheesecake that all the Broadway stars ate.
Then, what should we do? My father suggested a matinee. There was a movie theater around the corner. We could go there. Yes, everyone agreed. The marquee said Peyton Place. We’d never heard of it, but we were sure it would be good.
We settled in our seats with popcorn and Jujubes, a colored chewy candy, my favorite.
The velvet curtain swung open; the movie began. We were about a quarter of the way into the movie—someone was in love with someone, the popcorn was delicious, I put big gobs into my mouth—when I suddenly felt my parents’ nervousness. I looked up. They were casting worried glances at each other across the tops of our heads. They were flanked on either side of the three of us. The girl in the movie, very pretty, with red lipstick, who was in love with the man, was just about to tell him—my father and mother both stood up, jerked us out of our seats, and ran us up the aisle.
“What? What?” I whined, as I was pulled along, my hand in my mother’s. “What’s happening?” My head was turned around to see the last moments of the screen before we went through the front doors of the theater.
My mother hissed. “She’s pregnant. She’s going to tell him she’s pregnant.”
“Pregnant? How could she be pregnant? She’s not married,” I said.
“Never mind,” my mother said, as she dragged me out into the afternoon sunlight of midtown Manhattan. We stood a little stunned in front of the theater.
My father had an idea: “Let’s take the subway to Greenwich Village. We can see the beatniks,” he said.
“What are beatniks?” I asked, my head cocked to one side.
“They wear black turtleneck sweaters, smoke cigarettes, and read poetry in front of jazz bands,” my father explained.
“What’s jazz?” I asked.
“Some terrible, noisy music,” my mother chimed in.
“Oh,” I nodded.
Instead of taking the subway, we took the Fifth Avenue bus downtown. I looked out the window and saw a man in a brown hat smoking a cigarette, standing on a corner selling pretzels. I wanted one.
“What’s that?” I pointed to a woman in a navy overcoat standing over a black pan with something smoking.
“Chestnuts,” my mother explained.
We walked around Greenwich Village and weren’t sure if we saw beatniks or not. As we walked, my father added another clue.
“They also wear goatees,” he said, and showed us with his gloved finger on his own face the shape of a goatee.
We nodded. My little sister was not that interested. She ran open-armed after pigeons in Washington Square, hoping to hold one. They flew ahead of her. Jo Ann’s feet were getting blisters from her party shoes. She wanted to sit down on a bench, but I was intent on finding a beatnik. I walked around and stared into men’s faces—it never occurred to me, or to my father, that women could be beatniks. I thought I almost found one, but he was wearing a tan overcoat. I couldn’t tell if he was wearing a black turtleneck underneath, but he did have a goatee and was carrying a satchel. Maybe it contained a poem. He flicked the last bit of a Camel into a garbage container.
I went back to the bench where my family was and I reported my find.
My sister wailed, “I’m hungry.”
It was five o’clock. Time for dinner. We walked down a wide street, looking for a restaurant.
Crepes, a sign hung over our heads.
“Let’s go here,” my mother said, and before I could ask, she turned to me. “Crepes are French pancakes. We’re going to have a French meal.”
The maitre d’ seated us at a table with a red and white checked tablecloth. There were wood shavings on the floor. All the waiters were dressed as cowboys with ten-gallon hats, pointed boots, fringe on their shirts and jeans—we called them dungarees.
I ordered cherry crepes. When the waiter walked away, I asked, “How come they’re dressed as cowboys?”
“This is New York,” my father explained.
Of course. I nodded.
My mother hated her omelet with cheese and mushrooms. She was particularly disappointed, because this was the day she let herself off her diet.
At the end of the meal, the maitre d’ returned to our table, his thin mustache twitching—I wished it was a goatee— under his big cowboy hat.
“And, madam, did you enjoy your meal?” he asked as he bent to take my mother’s empty plate.
“Your food stinks,” my mother hissed and nodded her head in a final condemnation.
The waiter was taken aback. “But, madam...”
My mother turned her head away. It was clear there would be no further discussion. She had made her decree.
My father bent over the bill, mumbling.
I liked my cherry crepe. It was French.
We rode home on the railroad. It was dark as we traveled through Rockville Centre, Baldwin, Merrick, the lights of towns made into white and yellow streaks by the speed of the train.
Long Quiet Highway Page 5