It’s early in the evening, July 1996. I’ve just finished speaking to a book club in Madison, and my father and I are driving north toward Minneapolis, passing between the endless darkening fields. He has been evaluating my response to the book club’s questions, pointing out places where my answers were too long, recalling missed opportunities, drawing my attention to a moment when, caught off guard, I made a self-deprecating remark. This postgame analysis might sound unpleasant; it’s not. My father’s observations are practical ones. He evaluates me the way he might evaluate another experienced salesperson. He evaluates me the way he might evaluate himself.
“The product is good,” he says, thumping my latest novel with affection. “If a product is good, it will always sell.”
And now we’ve settled into comfortable silence, polka music chortling from the radio, the last of the sunset lapping the curve of the horizon, when he says, “Are your legs bothering you?”
So they are. I realize I’m wearing what my husband calls my “gray look,” the angry, impatient expression I get when I’m in pain. In pain—such a maudlin phrase, and yet I’m intrigued by its implications. In pain, like a faraway place or a state of mind; like a country where you’ve gone to live for a while. In the Arctic Circle. In a state of grace. My arms are aching, too, particularly my right elbow and wrist. I am right-handed, and everywhere we go, there are books to personalize, stock to sign.
“Tomorrow is a light day for me,” I remind us both. I’m scheduled to fly to Seattle in the morning; my next reading isn’t till the following night, and I have nothing to do in between except speak to a university class, which is something I particularly enjoy doing. I’m thinking ahead to that, and to San Francisco, where I’ll be heading after Seattle, and the friends I hope to see while I’m there, when my father says suddenly, almost savagely, “It’s such a shame this had to happen to you.”
For a moment, I think he’s talking about my writing career, my books. Then I understand. I look at him, at his unrelenting profile, so much like my own. Yes, it is a shame—and no, it is not. It is simply what it is. Meaning is the color of whatever lens we happen to wear when we look at our lives. Like fiction, meaning evolves out of our own fascination and need, a structure we invent from facts that, on their own, would add up to very little. Like fiction, it tells a story that may or may not have anything to do with our lives. Yet if we tell the story well enough, it becomes believable. It becomes true.
“Such a shame,” my father says again, and his voice, which is gentler now, breaks. And I realize he has carried this thought since I first fell ill, a weight every bit as constant, as distracting, as my own physical discomfort. I see him at nineteen, working in his father’s fields, so tired that by noon he must return to the house. I watch as he sits down on the porch steps, too weak to go inside. Thinking, What the hell is the matter with me? Thinking, Am I losing my mind?
He entered the san as a young man with prospects; he left at twenty-one, missing most of one lung, with no idea what he would do next. Men his age were heading for Korea. Women his age awaited their return, rings shining on their fingers. He had toppled out of his life the way, someday, I would topple out of mine. He would start over, work his way up from entry-level sales, start his own company. He would fall in love and have children. He would stand in the doorway of his oldest, the excitable one, the one so full of energy that as a child, she’d prowled the house in her sleep, and he’d tell her that someday, she’d look back on this time of stillness and it would be nothing at all. You’ll start over, he assured me. You’ll catch up. You’ll find a way to turn all of this to your advantage.
I remember how he took my photograph—over my protests—sitting in my power wheelchair. “To look back on,” he said. “After you get better. After you don’t need things like this anymore.”
We are hurtling through the absolute country darkness of western Wisconsin: no light pollution, no other cars. There’s only the sunburst of our own headlights, illuminating the road just ahead of us, just in time. E.M. Forster said that writing a novel is like driving a car at night with the headlights on: you can’t see your final destination, but you can see enough to make the whole trip that way. The truth is this: I do not know my destination. All I know is the circle of light just ahead, its shifting geography. And suddenly, more than anything else in the world, I want to write down what I see. Because it isn’t a shame so much as a wonder, if only because it’s so far away from anything I might have imagined or dreamed. The way my father’s life is different from what he had imagined, coming in from the field, coming home from the san, and thinking it was all over for him when, in fact, it was only beginning.
It is not that I believe the things that happen to us happen for a reason. I certainly don’t believe that things have a way of working out for the best, something I’ve been told countless times by well-meaning doctors, family members, and friends. But I do believe that each of us has the ability to decide how we’ll react to the random circumstances of our lives, and that our reactions can shape future circumstances, affect opportunities, open doors. The truth is that I love my life, and to love it fully, I must acknowledge that it could not be what it is had I not fallen ill. I told my father all of this as we drove toward Minneapolis. I told him how I thought the parallel between our lives was an interesting one, something that I really wanted to write about—in fiction or nonfiction, I wasn’t sure. I told him I didn’t think I could write about my own experience without including, in some way, his, and the stories he had told me, and what they’d meant to me.
It was the perfect opportunity for him to say he understood, to tell me I was free to write whatever I wanted, with his blessing. If this had been a fictional scene, he would have done so. But in fact, it would be 1998 before he’d call me up, out of the blue, to give me this unexpected gift.
To say that if I wanted to write about his time in the san, I could do so.
Sixteen years have passed since I gave up the piano, since one door shut and a window opened, since I entered the life I am living today. It’s a good life, made up of the people I love, the novels I’ve written and those I plan to write, the students I’ve taught who have come and gone, the places in the world I have seen and the places I long to go. In four more years, at forty, I will have been disabled for half my life, but although “probable multiple sclerosis” continues to appear on my medical charts, I still do not have a definitive diagnosis. Recently, I’ve started treatment at an integrative medical center; my physician there believes I’m struggling with an autoimmune disorder brought on by childhood inoculations. Who can say? I have altered my diet, as instructed. I have acupuncture treatments twice a week. I’ve weaned myself off my latest anti-inflammatory prescription; instead, I swallow fistfuls of nutritional supplements and Chinese herbs.
Is it helping? friends and family want to know.
I tell them that I think so. I tell them that I have to wait and see.
There was a time in my life when I would have said this kind of uncertainty was unbearable. When I believed I could not live without a prognosis, a reliable map by which I might plan out my future. When I believed that an explanation was nothing less than my due. When I fully expected a closure as final, as satisfying, as the end of a Beethoven symphony.
I was formed by a place where the roads met at right angles, a landscape in which cause and effect were visible for miles. I was raised to believe that every question had its single, uniform answer, and that answer was God’s will. But the human body, like the life it leads, is ultimately a mystery, and to live my life without restraint, to keep moving forward instead of looking back, I have had to let go of that need to understand why what has happened has happened and, indeed, is happening still. In some ways, my health has gotten worse in recent years. My vision blurs when my eyes get tired, and this means I have had to learn a whole new way of writing, arranging ideas in my head, doing the bulk of my work off the page. I’ve given up movies and watching
TV; I read very little; I no longer drive.
On the other hand, the inflammation in my arms and legs has stabilized since my early twenties. As a result, I’m in far less pain. I can write with a pen if I take frequent breaks. I use a scooter instead of a wheelchair, and months will pass in which I’m able to use it for distances only. I can stroll into a restaurant if somebody pulls the car up to the door. I can pace a few laps in a swimming pool, provided I don’t do it every day. But I’ve learned not to take such luxuries for granted. Without warning, I can have flareups, bad spells that can last weeks, even months. During those times, night pain keeps me from sleeping, and I move through the day as if in a cloud, relying on the scooter for everything I do. Motion and light leave my head aching; I write in ten-minute snatches, the font size set at sixteen. These are the times I need stiff wrist supports to type, to handle silverware, to hold a telephone receiver to my ear. These are the times I wake up in the morning and wrap my ankles and elbows and knees before hauling myself out of bed. These are the times when it’s hard not to dwell on the larger issue at hand: what if I don’t snap out of it this time? What is going to happen next?
Yet, in one way or another, this is everybody’s question, and one of life’s few consistent blessings is that we cannot know the future. At any moment, all that we claim as our own might be instantly swept away. But perhaps it’s this precarious balance that drives us to value what we have, to cling to the world as we do. And isn’t it all we do not know that constitutes possibility?
I think of the ancient mapmakers charting the flat reaches of the world. Here there be dragons, they wrote along the edges of the known continents, warning ships away from the uncharted waters beyond. No doubt there could be dragons, and worse, out in the mist. But one might just as easily sketch an island of flowers, rainbows, and flying fish, wonders that have yet to be imagined.
This, then, is the map of my own making. This is the story I am learning to live.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the MacDowell Colony, where a chunk of this book was written. Heartfelt thanks to Oprah Winfrey and her book club for what has amounted to an incredible arts grant at a time when I needed it most.
Family members appear in Limbo under their own names, because they have lived this with me, and I wanted them beside me on the page. However, the names of acquaintances, teachers, and people with whom I’ve lost touch have been changed.
This is, to the best of my ability, a book of nonfiction. However, this does not mean that someone else might not remember or interpret things differently. Every experience consists of many stories and many points of view. This one happens to be mine.
About the Author
A. MANETTE ANSAY grew up in rural Wisconsin, one of sixty-seven cousins and more than two hundred second cousins in a large extended Catholic farming family. At thirty-six, she is the author of four highly acclaimed novels, including Midnight Champagne, a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist; Vinegar Hill, an Oprah Book Club Selection; as well as Sister, River Angel, and a collection of short stories, Read This and Tell Me What It Says. Her awards include the Nelson Algren Prize, the Great Lakes Book Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. She is at work on another novel.
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PRAISE FOR
Limbo
“In this gorgeous memoir Ansay…beautifully illuminates selected details of her Catholic childhood, her struggles with religious faith, and her growing realization that her illness is a permanent one.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Beautifully written…. Remarkable…. Searing.”
—Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Limbo should be required reading for people whose lives have come unglued…. Entertaining…. Beautifully developed and liberating.”
—St. Petersburg Times
“[Ansay] explores uncharted territory…. In re-creating her own story, she returns to a theme that has given depth to her most memorable characters…. Remarkable.”
—The Tennessean
Also by A. Manette Ansay
Vinegar Hill
Read This and Tell Me What It Says
Sister
River Angel
Midnight Champagne
Credits
Cover design by Eric Fuentecilla
Cover photograph © Photonica
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
LIMBO. Copyright © 2001 by A. Manette Ansay. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub © Edition JUNE 2006 ISBN: 9780061860362
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