If she was Cinderella, she was forever stuck in childhood, waiting for help, for transformation, stuck in situations that had ended half a century earlier, a Cinderella for whom no prince came, except her sons, the princes she made. She was self-conscious about her size-eleven feet and her height, bemoaning and boasting about the latter in turn. She had a strikingly pretty face, but beauty is as much a way of carrying yourself as physical attributes. She was thin-skinned, prim, unsure of herself, finicky, squeamish, anxious, and fretful, even as a child, in the stories told me.
Some instinct that comes from being at home in the world was never hers, the protective instinct that attracts you to what encourages you. Instead she was buffeted between principles and fears. She took the ought-to-be for the actual and adhered to what she should like and how things should be. It was as though she traveled by a map of the wrong place, hitting walls, driving into ditches, missing her destination, but never stopping or throwing out the map. And she never stopped being Cinderella, and told her own story largely as a series of things that happened to her rather than things she did.
The artist Ana Teresa Fernandez recently cast a pair of high-heeled shoes in ice and stood in the gutter of an inner-city street at night until they melted and left her barefoot and free. It was a battle between the warmth of her body and the coldness of the shoes, between her own fierce will and the imprisonment of the Cinderella story. The shoes were astonishingly beautiful, strange, alarming. They were shoes that wanted to kill your feet, shoes too brittle to walk in, shoes of the kind called stiletto, as though you could stab someone with them. In the two-hour video she compressed down to forty minutes or so of ordeal, they slowly disintegrated, like a story falling apart, like a belief wearing out, like a fear melting away.
When your feet or hands go numb with cold, they don’t feel at all after a while. It’s when they warm again that the pain begins, just as a limb hurts not when the blood flow ceases and it goes to sleep but when it wakes up. Tall, athletic Ana told me that it was when her feet began to thaw that the agony arrived. She endured the pain for the sake of a symbolic conquest of a pernicious story and for the sake of making a work of art that expressed her fierce feminism and brilliant imagination. In “Cinderella,” women deform themselves to try to fit into the shoe; Ana destroyed the shoes, making something beautiful out of the war between flesh and ice, between a fairy tale that didn’t fit and her own intransigent warmth. Not everyone has the will or the warmth.
Where does a story begin? The fiction is that they do, and end, rather than that the stuff of a story is just a cup of water scooped from the sea and poured back into it, but if I had to begin the story of my parents anywhere, it would be with my grandmothers, who were both motherless. Some secret of nurture withered a generation or two before I arrived, if it had ever existed before among the poor, marginalized people on the edges of Europe from whom I descend. Both my parents grew up with a deep sense of poverty that was mostly emotional but that they imagined as material long after they clambered into the middle class, and so they were more like a pair of rivalrous older siblings than parents who see their children as extensions of themselves and their hopes. They were stuck in separateness.
I didn’t realize anything was odd until I was already on my own and found out that not everyone’s parents cut them off financially as soon as the law allowed. I tried to leave home unsuccessfully at fourteen and fifteen and sixteen and did so successfully at seventeen, heading off to another country, as far away as I could go, and once I got there I realized I was more on my own than I had anticipated: I was henceforth entirely responsible for myself, and thus began a few years of poverty. For that odyssey my mother would not let me take any of the decent suitcases in her attic but gave me a huge broken one in which my few clothes and books tumbled like dice in a cup. My father gave me a broken travel clock that he said was worth repairing and I kept for years before I found that it was not. These were the gifts they sent me into the world with, which might be why the apricots from my mother’s tree registered so strongly.
Like lawyers, writers seek consistency; they make a case for their point of view; they do so by leaving out some evidence; but let me mention the hundreds of sandwiches my mother made during my elementary school years, the peanut butter sandwiches I ate alone on school benches in the open, throwing the crusts into the air where the seagulls would swoop to catch them before they hit the ground. When my friends began to have babies and I came to comprehend the heroic labor it takes to keep one alive, the constant exhausting tending of a being who can do nothing and demands everything, I realized that my mother had done all these things for me before I remembered. I was fed; I was washed; I was clothed; I was taught to speak and given a thousand other things, over and over again, hourly, daily, for years. She gave me everything before she gave me nothing.
It was in honor of that unremembered past that I took care of her, that and principle and compassion and solidarity with my brothers. How could I not? If my mother had been my arctic expedition, I was going to finish the journey. But after the peanut butter sandwiches, before the brain disease, it was hard to respond to her occasional generosities when the other side of her might show up at any moment, so she complained I was distant.
I was distant. I studied her, I pondered her. My survival depended on mapping her landscape and finding my routes out of it. We are all the heroes of our own stories, and one of the arts of perspective is to see yourself small on the stage of another’s story, to see the vast expanse of the world that is not about you, and to see your power, to make your life, to make others, or break them, to tell stories rather than be told by them.
Perhaps another kind of daughter would have fought her to a truce or been utterly destroyed, and yet another thick-skinned enough to laugh it off or hardly notice rather than be caught up in the currents of emotion, though I can’t imagine anyone emerging from those circumstances with the wisdom to negotiate a real peace early on. I coped by retreating and maybe I did become a mirror, a polished surface that shows nothing of what lies beneath.
We were in a looking-glass world where I knew more about her childhood than she did about mine. When I was an adult, we didn’t talk about me. If I told her something went wrong in my life, she was likely to focus on my mistakes or get upset and demand I reassure her fears. For a long time, when I mentioned something eventful in my own life, she would change the subject in the very opening words of her reply. So we talked about her, mostly about fears and grievances. When I’m most aggrieved, I feel most like her, with her sense of having been shorted, of being the victim, and not being her was always my goal. In this sense I saw, late in the game, I too was seeking to annihilate.
• • •
The autumn after the apricots, when everything was at its worst, I was asked to talk to a roomful of undergraduates in a university in a beautiful coastal valley. I talked about places, about the ways that we often talk about love of place, by which we mean our love for places, but seldom of how the places love us back, of what they give us. They give us continuity, something to return to, and offer a familiarity that allows some portion of our own lives to remain connected and coherent. They give us an expansive scale in which our troubles are set into context, in which the largeness of the world is a balm to loss, trouble, and ugliness. And distant places give us refuge in territories where our own histories aren’t so deeply entrenched and we can imagine other stories, other selves, or just drink up quiet and respite.
The bigness of the world is redemption. Despair compresses you into a small space, and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground. To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest. Being able to travel both ways matters, and sometimes the way back into the heart of the question begins by going outwa
rd and beyond. This is the expansiveness that sometimes comes literally in a landscape or that tugs you out of yourself in a story.
I used to go to Ocean Beach, the long strip of sand facing the churning Pacific at the end of my own city, for reinforcement, and it always put things in perspective, a term that can be literal too. The city turned into sand and the sand into surf and the surf into ocean and just to know that the ocean went on for many thousands of miles was to know that there was an outer border to my own story, and even to human stories, and that something else picked up beyond. It was the familiar edge of the unknown, forever licking at the shore.
I told the students that they were at the age when they might begin to choose places that would sustain them the rest of their lives, that places were more reliable than human beings, and often much longer-lasting, and I asked them where they felt at home. They answered, each of them, down the rows, for an hour, the immigrants who had never stayed anywhere long or left a familiar world behind, the teenagers who’d left the home they’d spent their whole life in for the first time, the ones who loved or missed familiar landscapes and the ones who had not yet noticed them.
I found books and places before I found friends and mentors, and they gave me a lot, if not quite what a human being would. As a child, I spun outward in trouble, for in that inside-out world, everywhere but home was safe. Happily, the oaks were there, the hills, the creeks, the groves, the birds, the old dairy and horse ranches, the rock outcroppings, the open space inviting me to leap out of the personal into the embrace of the nonhuman world.
Once when I was in my late twenties, I drove to New Mexico with my friend Sophie, a fierce, talented, young black-haired green-eyed whirlwind who had not yet found her direction. We had no trouble convincing ourselves it was worthwhile to drive the two days each way to New Mexico because there was a darkroom there that she could use to print photographs for a project we had. In those days we were exploring who we wished to become, what the world might give us, and what we might give it, and so, though we did not know it, wandering was our real work anyway.
I had discovered the desert west a few years before with the force of one falling in love and had learned something of how to enter it and move through it. I threw myself into the vastness whenever I could, and I began to have another life among the people of the desert who befriended me, and the places, and the illimitable sky that seemed like an invitation to open up and grow larger.
In those days I was finding my voice and my vocation and they were flourishing, but I was not yet hectic or pressured, and I found countless excuses to wander in that empty quarter of the continent, camping, visiting, working with Native American activists, discovering a world that demanded new senses and delivered wild gifts. We must have taken the most scenic route, because Marble Canyon was not on any imaginable direct route. It’s the first canyon below Glen Canyon Dam, at the head of the Grand Canyon. We had driven through the flatlands and mountains of the Mojave, through the highs and lows of the Arizona desert, then past mesas and escarpments of red sandstone and spread out a tarp and slept on sand near the murmuring river that night and ate breakfast in the morning at the shady diner of the lodge up the road on that north side of the river.
At the long table next to us was a big exuberant group of people in their prime, talking and eating piles of food. I realized at some point they were a river-rafting party, and I must have spoken more loudly than I’d intended when I said that I’d give my eyeteeth to go down the Grand Canyon. One of the guides came over to our table and told us that a few people had dropped out, they had extra places and supplies, and would we like to go? What do you do when a wish is suddenly granted?
I asked when they were leaving, and he said, In about an hour, and I asked how long we had to decide, and he said, About half an hour. There were logistical questions: did we have all the gear we needed, could we leave the car, did we have a way to get back to it, would anyone miss us, could we hike out at Phantom Ranch halfway down, did we trust these people? We already knew we wanted to get into that river that had sung us asleep that night, to be carried away on the current into the deep folds of the earth, back through time to the creation. And so we went back to the river guide and shocked him by saying yes, we would go, for a week or two, on twenty minutes’ notice. It was his turn to retreat and mull things over, and he returned to us a little while later saying that the rangers had said we were not on the insurance list and so they could not take us. We thanked him and went onward on dry land.
That yes was a huge landmark in my life, a dividing point. I’d wrestled against the inner voice of my mother, the voice of caution, of duty, of fear of the unknown, the voice that said the world was dangerous and safety was always the first measure and that often confused pleasure with danger, the mother who had, when I’d moved to the city, sent me clippings about young women who were raped and murdered there, who elaborated on obscure perils and injuries that had never happened to her all her life, and who feared mistakes even when the consequences were minor. Why go to Paradise when the dishes aren’t done? What if the dirty dishes clamor more loudly than Paradise?
She had an adventurous streak herself and had talked her younger sister into touring the country by bus when they were young, had moved to Florida alone rather than staying home with her mother as an unmarried girl of her day generally did, had married a Jew who immediately took her away to live in Germany during his military service and then took her to live in the far west and South America. She had turned down adventures too, and she had chosen many things for many years for safety and thrift, sacrificed the present for security in the imagined future again and again, and was wistful for many what-might-have-beens. She had said no too many times, out of fear, out of duty, and in all this I had been tutored.
When you say “mother” or “father” you describe three different phenomena. There is the giant who made you and loomed over your early years; there is whatever more human-scale version might have been possible to perceive later and maybe even befriend; and there is the internalized version of the parent with whom you struggle—to appease, to escape, to be yourself, to understand and be understood by—and they make up a chaotic and contradictory trinity. In saying yes to the river, I had overcome some internalized version of my mother that had become almost a reflex of cautious duty.
I came out of that minor adventure with a motto that stood me in good stead ever after—“Never turn down an adventure without a really good reason”—that I used to assay any invitation or possibility I was about to reflexively dismiss. A dozen years or more after we had said yes, Sophie fell in love with a man on the other side of the country, decided early in the romance to quit her miserable job to go be with him, and was told by her parents in a letter that she was making a big mistake in this leap into the unknown, this abandonment of a reliable step on a secure career.
I drove her to the airport for the flight that would take her back to her love. On the drive we talked about the time we’d chosen the unknown. If we had said no, we would have always wondered what would have happened, we would have forever felt that we’d turned down a treasure that could have been ours, had turned down a chance to live—and what mattered is that we had said yes to adventure, to the unknown, to possibility. If she didn’t go, I told Sophie, she’d always wonder about the man, and if she went and it did not work out, she would have tried and she would know, and if it did work out—
I told a version of the river story at their wedding. They have two children now, the whirlwind is serene and has found her direction and her place, and of course her parents long ago forgot they had tried to stamp out her impulsive leap. I said yes to other adventures, and in that year of the apricots I was invited as abruptly and even more unexpectedly to Iceland, and I said yes instantly.
3 • Ice
The expanse of smooth snow and jagged ice rising into small peaks and ranges seemed to go on forever, to dwarf the figures p
ursuing each other across it, and to threaten or promise to swallow them. They were small dark forms like two letters on an otherwise blank page, overwhelmed by that whiteness. They drew closer to each other as though to form a word that would never be sounded, drew apart into wordlessness and silence, but the landscape promised them a kind of immortality: the immortality of cold in which nothing decays.
It was a chase on film, or rather, on a grainy television, but it captivated me when I saw it in my early teens. It was my first vision of the arctic and the far north, and it launched a lasting desire to go there, to see the absolute, the uttermost, the far beyond, the end of the earth, the world whited out, the cold primordial forces of water, wind, cold, and spaciousness. It was the opening or the closing of one of the dozens of cinematic versions of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
The week before the apricots arrived, I’d been asked to write an essay about the far north for a museum show of several artists whose work was about that realm. The north organizes all modern maps and much of my sense of direction: to know where I am anywhere on this side of the equator I face north in body or imagination, like a magnetized needle. The needle points north, and so do I. In midsummer in my mild climate I thought of what I knew of the arctic and subarctic, of my long desire to go far north enough to live for a little while under the midnight sun, of that early vision of a world of ice, and of Frankenstein.
Most Frankenstein movies have run away with the idea of a mad scientist and a vengeful, lurching monster, far from the more sober, psychological novel, and few remember that the book begins and ends in the arctic, where Victor Frankenstein in pursuit of his creature and near death himself comes across a stranded ship, locked up in the ice. On that ship, in company with its stubborn, lonely, ambitious young captain, he is saved for a little while, and to that captain seeking the North Pole he tells his story.
The Faraway Nearby Page 3