by Lee Smith
Louis Rubin was my creative writing teacher at Hollins for four years, which is why I still call him Mr. Rubin. I couldn’t call him Louis if my life depended upon it. Mr. Rubin was a great, great teacher who changed my life, as he has changed so many others. In fact it is probable that I would never have become a writer at all if I had not encountered him when I did, because I was a wild girl, and I’m not sure what would have happened to me. But I do know for sure that if I am ever able to write anything real, or beautiful, or honest—anything that ever speaks truly about the human condition—it will be due to this man.
I enter carefully through the gate and go into the garage.
It’s like a beehive in here. I say hello to Mimi Fountain, also from Hollins, Ann Moss, and Garrett Epps. Shannon Ravenel, Mr. Rubin’s partner in this enterprise, works from St. Louis. Mr. Rubin has just written her a letter about their new venture: “This is going to be fun, I think.” In the newspaper he has said, “Editing is just like teaching, but publishing is something else. I don’t want to just put new people into print; I want to launch them.” Right now Mr. Rubin is making a peanut butter sandwich on top of an old filing cabinet in the back, where he will eat it, standing up. He does this every day. All around him, manuscripts rise to his knees.
The FedEx man comes in and the dog runs out, then we all run out after the dog. The postman comes. Eva Rubin drives back from her job teaching political science at N.C. State. She waves and goes into the house, followed by the miscreant dog. Now Mr. Rubin feeds the birds, which means throwing several handfuls of seed straight up into the air. The sky goes black with birds and beating wings. I start squealing and batting at them. Mr. Rubin is laughing. Finally the birds fly away and he looks at me. “Whatcha got?” he asks and I hand him the pages I’ve brought, all wrinkled up and sweaty from me holding them.
I follow him inside the house to his office where he sticks a cigar in his mouth and sits down and starts reading immediately. Mr. Rubin never does anything later. “I know it’s got too many voices in it,” I say when he gets done, but he grins and hands it back.
“Keep on going,” he says, which is all he needs to say and all I need to hear, because I am already thinking what comes next, and I can’t even remember driving home.
JUNE 29, 1985
Amity, age thirteen and very grown up, has specified a church wedding for her father and me, and so here we are at the Chapel of the Cross, rehearsing hurriedly for our tiny 10 a.m. ceremony, which will take place in less than an hour. Radiant in her white dress, Amity walks endlessly up and down the aisle carrying her bouquet, carrying herself just so. She looks beautiful. But the ladies arranging the flowers at the altar scowl at her, whispering among themselves, casting dark looks at the middle-aged groom.
Finally one of the ladies says acidly to me, “Just how old is she, anyway?” and I realize that they think she’s the bride, not me in my green linen dress. Oh no. This is what I get for fancying myself a bride at my age! I ought to know better. I ought to stay single and write novels out in the woods.
But then, forty minutes later, I am the bride, and I am the happiest bride ever, as the organ plays and the bells ring and we step out into the bright June day married, of all things, and my boys wave at some other boys who are skating on skateboards down Franklin Street.
THANKSGIVING 1985, ’86, ’87, ’88 . . .
For many years we hold the Wild Turkey Classic every Thanksgiving. Originally it was Hal’s idea to go out and play a couple innings of softball before the big traditional dinner in the afternoon. I jumped right on it. Genius! A morning softball game gives the kids and the visiting relatives and friends something to do (and keeps us all from drinking too much) during those long hours while the turkey roasts and those floats roll interminably down Fifth Avenue on TV. The baseball diamond at Phillips Junior High is right up the street. Hal makes some calls, especially to other diehard Durham Bulls fans like himself. I tell friends and neighbors. I make the dressing and mash the potatoes ahead of time.
Thanksgiving Day dawns clear and cold with a brilliant Carolina blue sky. Hal heads for the field early, taking bats and bases and gloves and his brother Jeff, who is reputed to have been scouted by the Yankees but right now is hung over. Hal pushes him out the door, not easy. I’ve already got the turkey in the oven, covered with tons of butter and several old kitchen towels and tin foil—my substitute for basting. I corral the wild boys and fill up the station wagon with dogs, kids, juice, store-bought doughnuts and coffeecake and a folding table to put it all out on. We turn right off Estes and head up to the raised grassy baseball field, which looms like some kind of Indian mound or ancient fort. Coming up over the hill I stop amazed at the scene before me, like a Brueghel painting. Who are all these people? I guess the word spread. People are everywhere, doing knee bends, running, tossing the ball back and forth, talking, hugging, hugging. Lots of hugging. I set up my table and talk intensely with friends I haven’t seen for years. People spread quilts on the sidelines. Somebody has brought a brand new baby in a little yellow suit, and he is passed around and admired. Laughter rings out like bells. Our breath makes white puffs in the chilly blue air, cartoon conversation. Kids and dogs cover the outfield. Now whistles are blowing. They’re already choosing sides. It’s Michael McFee vs. Jay Bryan . . . two poets! Whoever thought the poets would be competitive? But they’re cool, choosing wimpy kids like my own as well as grownups. Each side has got about thirty players. Bill Leuchtenburg, in his seventies, is playing second. Jimmy Mills, very slightly younger, is at third. A huge scream goes up when a yellow lab snatches the ball and runs off into the trees with it.
“PLAY BALL!” somebody hollers, and then we do, for the next twenty years or so, as the Massengale boys and the Ludingtons grow up before our very eyes and other kids go away and get married and then come back with their own kids, first in strollers and then on the field, another generation. Some people divorce and return with other people. Some people go to graduate school in Iowa, or to rehab, or New York or Asheville or Austin, places too far to come back from. Every year, more girls are playing, not only our perennial Elva, a ringer. Bill Leuchtenburg is still playing second. Jim Watson still bikes to the game wearing that Duke hat, his hair flying out behind him. All of Amity’s boyfriends have to come and play ball, this is a requirement. On and on it goes, year after year, on sunny Thursdays and cloudy Thursdays and freezing Thursdays, in fog, in sleet, the sweet taste of doughnuts, the crack of the bat, the screams and yells and laughter of the crowd, old friends and new, all these dear and changing faces, these lovers of the game.
JUNE 2012
Hal and I have lived in Hillsborough for sixteen years now, so it’s not often I find myself driving alone through Chapel Hill this late at night, windows down, after a concert with friends. I glimpse a little sliver of moon above the moving treetops. Maybe because it’s that precious time at the end of the semester, before summer school has started, but it’s quiet as quiet can be tonight on Franklin Street, no people and no other cars, only a little breeze rustling the thick leaves on all these big trees and bringing me the unbearably sweet and somehow sad scent of honeysuckle. This reminds me of eating dinner one June night at Crook’s Corner when Bill Smith had just invented his famous honeysuckle sorbet, which he brought out to our table, and it was true, I could taste it, all the inexpressible longing of honeysuckle as it melted on my tongue. Now the breeze brings laughter, and music from far away. All those years, all that music . . . starting with Bland Simpson and Jim Wann’s early seventies performance of Diamond Studs at the old Ranch House restaurant on Airport Road, everybody dancing on the tables to “Cakewalk in Kansas City, ” I had never seen anything like it, “musicians’ theater” they called it, and they would take it straight to Broadway. . . . And always, Jim Watson’s annual Christmas show at the Cave . . . and Callie Warner singing the title song of our own show Good Ol’ Girls in its first production at Swain Hall right here on campus. I remember Tommy Thompson o
f the Red Clay Ramblers singing his “Hot Buttered Rum,” one of the most beautiful songs in the world, at the old Cat’s Cradle in the dead of winter. Most of all I remember my son Josh sitting down at the piano in our Akai Hana sushi restaurant to play his own signature jazz set, “Five Not So Easy Pieces” he used to call it, which always included “Pachelbel,” those running purely joyous notes, a celebration. The music of this night comes closer now, and the laughter, and then I see them, barefooted girls four abreast walking down the middle of the street, long hair swinging, singing. That blonde, second from the left, looks somehow familiar to me as she doubles over in laughter and almost falls, oh she’s got no idea what’s going to happen to her in the years to come, she doesn’t care, either. All she wants is now, and she wants it bad, and I want her to have it all. But then the van ahead of me stops to let some people out and when I can see again, they’re gone, those girls, she’s gone, my girl, if she ever was there at all.
A Life in Books
I WAS A READER LONG BEFORE I was a writer. In fact, I started writing in the first place because I couldn’t stand for my favorite books to be over, so I started adding more and more chapters onto the ends of them, often including myself as a character. Thus the Bobbsey twins became the Bobbsey triplets, and Nancy Drew’s best friends, Bess Marvin and George Fayne, were joined by another character named Lee Smith—who actually ended up with Ned Nickerson! The additional chapters grew longer and more complicated as my favorite books became more complicated—Heidi, Anne of Green Gables, and Pippi Longstocking, for instance.
Mama was indefatigable in reading aloud to me when I was little, and I’m sure that the musical cadence of her soft Southern voice is one reason I took to reading the way I did, for the activity itself was so pleasurable. Later, we pored over the huge pages of the National Enquirer together, marveling at the lives of the stars, the psychic who could bend spoons with the power of his mind alone, and that Indiana couple who got kidnapped and taken away in a space ship where they were given physical examinations by aliens before being dropped back down into their own cornfield, none the worse for wear. Mama and I loved this stuff. My father read a lot of newspapers, magazines, and sometimes history or politics. Though neither of my parents read novels, they received the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, which I devoured, and they also encouraged me to go to our fledgling library.
This soon got out of hand. I became a voracious, then an obsessive reader; recurrent bouts of pneumonia and tonsillitis gave me plenty of time to indulge my passion. After I was pronounced “sickly,” I got to stay home a lot, slathered with a vile salve named Mentholatum, spirit lamp hissing in the corner of my room, reading to my heart’s content. I remained an inveterate reader of the sort who hides underneath the covers with a flashlight and reads all night long. But I did not read casually, or for mere information. What I wanted was to feel all wild and trembly inside, an effect first produced by The Secret Garden, which I’d read maybe twenty times.
The only man I had ever loved as much as Colin of The Secret Garden was Johnny Tremain, from Esther Forbes’ book of that title. I used to wish it was me—not Johnny Tremain—who’d had the hot silver spilled on my hand. I would have suffered anything (everything!) for Johnny Tremain.
Other books had affected me strongly: Little Women, especially the part where Beth dies, and Gone With the Wind, especially the part where Melanie dies. I had long hoped for a wasting disease, such as leukemia, to test my mettle. I also loved Marjorie Morningstar, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and books like Dear and Glorious Physician, The Shoes of the Fisherman, Christy, and anything at all about horses and saints. I had read all the Black Stallion books, of course, as well as all the Marguerite Henry books. But my all-time favorite was a book about Joan of Arc, especially the frontispiece illustration depicting Joan as she knelt and “prayed without ceasing for guidance from God,” whose face was depicted overhead in a thunderstorm. Not only did I love Joan of Arc, I wanted to be her.
I was crazy for horses and saints.
“By the way,” my mother mentioned to me one day almost casually while I was home being sick in bed and she was straightening my covers, “You know, Marguerite Henry stayed at your grandmother’s boarding house on Chincoteague Island while she was writing that book.”
“What book?” I sat right up.
“Misty,” Mama said. “Then she came back to write Sea Star, and I think the illustrator, Wesley Dennis, stayed there, too. Cousin Jack used to take him out on a boat.”
I couldn’t believe it! A real writer, a horse writer, had walked up the crushed oyster shell road where I had gone barefoot, had sat at the big dinner table where I’d eaten fish and corncakes for breakfast; had maybe even swung in the same wicker porch swing I loved.
I wrote a novel on the spot, on eight sheets of my mother’s Crane stationery. It featured as main characters my two favorite people at that time: Adlai Stevenson and Jane Russell. In my novel, they fell in love and then went West together in a covered wagon. Once there they got married and became—inexplicably!—Mormons. I am not sure how I knew about Mormons. But even at that age, I was fixed upon romance, flight, and religion, themes I would return to again and again.
What did my parents think of this strange little girl who had come to them so late in life, after they had become resigned to never having children? Well, they spoiled me rotten and were simply delighted by everything I did, everything I showed any interest in. I believe if I had told my mother that I wanted to be, say, an ax murderer, she would have said, without blinking an eye, “Well, that’s nice, dear, what do you think you might want to major in?” My daddy would have gone out to buy me the ax.
Though my parents might feel—as Mama certainly said, later—that they wished I would just stop all that writing stuff and marry a lawyer or a doctor, which is what a daughter really ought to do, of course, the fact is that they were so loving that they gave me the confidence, and the permission, early on, to do just about anything I wanted to do. Decades later, I would realize how unusual this was, and how privileged I have been because of it. Now I see this issue—permission to write—as the key issue for many women I have worked with in my classes, especially women who have begun writing later in their lives.
But my childhood was not entirely a happy one. No writer’s childhood ever is. There was my father’s inexplicable sadness and my mother’s “nerves”; there was my strange Uncle Tick; there was a scary little neighborhood “club” we formed, which did bad things. There was a lot of drinking. There were hospitalizations and long absences and periods of being sent away to live with other relatives. Life was often confusing and mysterious, which inspired Martha Sue and my cousin Randy and me to start our own espionage firm, which I would describe much later in a short story named “Tongues of Fire”:
We lived to spy, and this is mainly what we did on our bike trips around town. We’d seen some really neat stuff, too. For instance we had seen Roger Ainsley, the coolest guy in our school, squeezing pimples in his bathroom mirror. We had seen Mister Bondurant whip his son Earl with a belt, and later, when Earl suddenly dropped out of school and enlisted in the Army, we alone knew why. We had seen our fourth-grade teacher, prissy Miss Emily Horn, necking on a couch with her boyfriend, and smoking cigarettes. Best of all, we had seen Mrs. Cecil Hertz come running past a picture window wearing nothing but an apron, followed shortly by Mr. Cecil Hertz himself, wearing nothing at all and carrying a spatula.
It was amazing how careless people were about drawing their drapes and pulling their shades down. It was amazing what you could see, especially if you were an athletic and enterprising girl such as myself. I wrote my observations down in a Davy Crockett spiral notebook I’d bought for this purpose. I wrote down everything: date, time, weather, physical descriptions, my reaction. I would use all this stuff later, in my novels.
This is true. And though it’s also true that we actually did spy on people, that first paragraph is mostly made up. When you write f
iction, you up the ante, generally speaking, since real life rarely affords enough excitement or conflict to spice up a page sufficiently. This passage also illustrates another technique that has saved my neck—maybe even my life—many times: the use of humor to allow us to talk or write about the scariest things, things we couldn’t articulate and deal with otherwise. It is another way of whistling past the graveyard.
MY FIRST ACTUAL NOVEL WAS named The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed (1969), and its main character was a weird little nine-year-old girl named Susan, much like this very same nine-year-old girl we have been talking about. She was often a solitary child, though her imaginary friends and pursuits were legion. In this excerpt, she describes a favorite hideout, her “wading house.”
The way to the wading house was hard. That’s what was so good about it. After I got there, no scouts could track me down. First I went out from under the other side of the dogbushes, then I went by a secret path through the blackberry bushes, which tried to grab me as I went by. They reached out their hands at me but I got away. When I came to the riverbank, I walked on the rocks to the wading house. That way, if anybody chased me with dogs, they would lose the trail.
The wading house was not a real house. It was a soft, light green tree, a willow that grew by the bank. The way the branches came down, they made a little house inside them. The land and the tiny river were both inside the house, and it was the only wading house in the world, and I was the only one that knew about it. It was a very special place. There were a lot of other people that lived there too and they were my good friends. There was a young lizard named Jerry, because I didn’t know if it was a boy or a girl, and Jerrys can go either way. Jerry had a long, shiny tail and he stayed mostly in the weeds but he would come out to say hello to me every time I came. A very wise old grandfather turtle lived there too. He blinked his eyes slow at me, and I could tell that he knew everything there was to know. Grandfather Turtle had three silly daughters, but I liked them because they were so cute. Their shells were like the rug in the Trivettes’ living room, brown and green by turns. The big rock by the side of the river was not a rock at all, it was a secret apartment house. A baby blacksnake sat on the top. He was so black and fast that it hurt you to look at him. On the second floor, the sides of the rock, there lived a family of little brown bugs. They were always busy and never had much time to play. The worms did, though. They lived on the ground floor under the rock, and I liked them almost best of all. I never knew a family that had so much fun. All they ever did was wiggle and laugh.