Did it come to me from my mother? I believe so. She was able to replay every bridge hand of the afternoon from memory at the dinner table. After fifty, my seemingly infallible gift began to fail. It took longer to retrieve what once had come instantly to mind or tongue or pen. Now, my memory is much diminished, like a hard disk that suddenly fails to deliver what has been stored there.
I operate with a floppy intelligence, such as it is. The connections I make are hard-won, sudden flashes from the past, lucky effluvia from the ripe, aging compost heap that is my mind. So I remember that street, sun-filled and broad, its curious name (as far as I know there were no larch trees in Far Rockaway), and the game my sister and I contrived out of the hulls and slippery green bodies of acorns.
I feel grateful for the arrival of small pieces of information, now that the lifelong storage system of my personal computer is often down.
Six calls today, all from writers. A friend in San Francisco, another at the Writers Workshop in Iowa, one playing hooky from morning work at Yaddo and desperate to talk, one to tell me a publisher has paid fifty thousand dollars for five chapters and a synopsis of his new novel, and two, married to each other but calling individually, each no longer able to stand the ego of the other. They are separating.
Until I was in my fifties I knew only one writer, a fellow journalist named William Kennedy who thought, like me, that someday he would be writing novels. No others. Now the only people I know seem to be writers. I argue about this with myself, wondering if it is not a bad, narcissistic state of affairs. Writing may be a vice peculiar to the outcasts of society, and writers a class of eccentric persons who cling together for support against the outside, ‘normal’ world.
I wish Mr. Brown, the refrigerator man, would call to say he will install the thermostat. There are puddles of excess water on the floor, and a low, throbbing sound that issues from it. I hear very little else in the house, but I can hear the old machine’s dying gasps and watery gurgles.
Late this afternoon I call Richard Lucas, who is not a writer, but an old friend, a successful sales manager for a publisher of scholarly books in California. Last year he went on a glorious trip to China for his company. He loved the country and the people but returned with some sort of Oriental bug, he said, that he could not shake. Two months later, the strange virus was still in possession of him because his immune system had gone awry, and he knew, he told me, why he was still so sick. No one else knew. I was not to say.
This spring I saw him at a university press meeting in Cambridge, and his handsome face and body were changed into an old man’s visage and frame. He was unstable on his feet, he suffered from a variety of what he called, with a smile, ‘opportunistic’ afflictions. He was cheerful, and hopeful, and very clearly sick.
Now, on the telephone, he tells me he spends his spare time listening to all of the Ring des Nibelungen on CDs. He wonders if it is time for him to stop work. Is there a chance I might come to the West Coast for a visit? I say I will try, having no great hopes but eager to see him again, as well as other young friends who have settled in San Francisco. All of them have an apostolic approach to that beautiful place. Everyone, they think, should come out and live there, and look out at the Bay from the hills and wander Golden Gate Park and eat every kind of foreign food in the Castro section.
It is too late, I believe, for me to live in a new place, although it is not entirely new to me. Once, during the war years, I lived there, on Van Ness Avenue as I recall, and later across the Bay in Oakland when you could still take a cool, foggy ferryboat ride to that city-suburb.… I tell Richard to come here to Washington when he is in the East (his company has an office in New York City, like most publishers who went west), but it is a foolish thing to say, to make him believe he will be able to visit me. He says he will try.
After he hangs up, I realize I say this more and more. Not ‘I will see you there’ but ‘Come here to see me.’ Age. Loss of the enjoyment of leaving home. I should add that to my list of dislikes I made the other day:
• Travel.
A legal-minded adviser on the radio tells a questioner: ‘Get it in writing.’ Meaning, I suppose, don’t trust the oral agreement or the hearty handshake. Get it in writing. I recognize it is the unspoken command that hovers over the head of every writer every morning, every hour of every day. Stop talking about it, planning to do it, considering the alternatives. Get it in writing.
Growing old means abandoning the established rituals of one’s life, not hardening into them as some people think. There are the occasional reunions with people from the past, ‘old’ friends. Leftovers from places where one once lived, neighbors, office mates from the places one worked or taught. Christmas cards are ritual cords that bind us (‘my children are now all out of the nest,’ they write on the blank side of the card, ‘as yours must be’) or the call out of the blue, like the one this afternoon. ‘Remember me from St. Joseph’s parish in Des Moines? We met at the rectory.’
Thirty-five years ago. My perfect memory fails me. I do not remember, neither the name nor the face nor the occasion. We have not maintained the ritual of greeting cards, and so I have entirely forgotten this man. There were no artificial reasons for getting together, like reunions. But now he is in Washington, and eager to remind me of what I have forgotten.
Should I ask him to dinner, as he seems to hope? No, the rituals have given way. I beg off, being overly committed, or leaving town, or something. I don’t remember what I said. I’m sorry. Are your children out of the nest? Of course. It’s been a long time. I’m sorry. Goodbye.
I cannot remember his name after I hang up. So it goes.
It is the hottest summer in this city’s history. This morning, on the deck where I drink coffee and read the newspaper while looking out at the dry elm and the roofs already wet with humidity, it is already eighty-five degrees at six. I think with longing of the sea, where I was in early June, on the bay end of Delaware, close to the ocean but not yet at it. On that coast there is curiously odorless ocean, unlike the heavily weighted-with-salt smells, the fishy, spicy odors, of Maine.
I chose to spend two weeks there because my sense of being alive depends on periodic exposure to the sea. I need to swim and float in it. I need to sit at its edge and watch its moody, heavy, unpredictable vastness. I must stroll its wrack to find treasures of stone, shell, bits of glass and wood, even, occasionally, a piece of ‘sea’ porcelain which I fantasize as breakfast crockery from a shipwrecked schooner. The ocean restores to me an acceptance of the way the world is now, consoles me for my losses of faith, optimism, physical pleasure, great expectations, mother, sister, grandmother, and young, plague-ridden friends.
Sunk down into the intense heat and humidity of this July morning, I manage to ‘cool off’ by thinking of the dunes at Lewes where I sat, shielded against the wind, on a deserted beach. I watched the Cape May ferry make its haughty, aristocratic way across the water, a white wedding cake of a ship on an empty ocean, looking as out of place as a skyscraper would at the beach. My memory restores the ship, the cool sand, the grey eternal sea. Perspiration and mortality sit less heavily upon me.
A remnant of cool air from the night clings to the deck. I finish my coffee and take up my battered clipboard, a piece of equipment as necessary to me as radar to a flight traffic officer. I bought this board in 1960. It has held in its rusty iron jaws at the top of a spotted brown length of board every piece of white lined paper on which I have written to this time. The corners of the pressed board have rounded with use and are now flaking away. In ink, with small script, I have written the names of nine books composed on its surface, their dates, and the places to which the board traveled with me.
Having nothing better to do, the immortal prose I summoned this morning somehow not having arrived, I study the places. Albany, New York. Moody Beach, Maine. MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York. The Iowa Writers Workshop. St. Maarten. St. John, Virgin Islands.
A bank of the Delaware River. Cozumel, Mexico. Kailuum, Mexico. Surry, Maine. Lewes, Delaware.…
Superstition has persuaded me that the words I require often come not from my hand, my pen, or my head but from my clipboard’s thin pressed-board interior. To bolster this belief, I once took a strip of printed plastic left behind by the previous writer-occupant of my office in Iowa, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, and pasted it at the top of the board. It reads: ‘In the beginning was the word.’
The day grows hotter. Seven-thirty now. The white page clipped to the board is still virgin, unmarked by me but wrinkled with damp. The only certainty is the firm, commanding way the clip holds the paper, surer of its function than I am of mine. Where is the word according to St. John, with which to begin?
The maid comes this morning. When I was a girl, the last time I had a maid until I came to Washington, my mother called all servants ‘treasures.’ Why? I wonder. Because she felt she had found them, exclusively? Because they were hers alone? Because they were, theoretically, faithful, of great value to household order, asking nothing but small pay and the rewarding sense of having served well? I think she believed all this of her treasures.
My treasure, a young girl from Puerto Rico, comes an hour and a half late. Still, she is a rarity in Washington because she does arrive. She commands hefty pay, close to twelve dollars an hour if she stays only the few hours she seems to be here. She is sketchy about her dusting. Underneath the beds she never cares to explore, nor behind or beneath any stationary furniture. She is hostile to interior windowsills, seeming to believe they are not part of the house, and resentful of fingerprints wherever they may appear. She leaves bottles and bottle caps, oily rags, and pieces of the vacuum in strategic places so I will know she has been there and used them.
But she is my treasure. She does what I no longer want to do, she brings some order and shine to our possessions, she makes the house smell of cleaning agents (even if it is not very clean) and Guardsman furniture polish. In my lifetime I have had too little practice with servants. I shy away from giving her instructions or even complaining about her omissions. I hide in my study, feeling guilty about having her do what I should be doing myself. My mother was very good at the mistress-servant relationship. She believed that the mistress had the upper hand over the treasure. In her time that was probably true. But not now. I am humbly, undemandingly grateful for any action my treasure deems it proper to take.
I cower behind my PC, and wait to go over from the carriage house to the main house until I see the lights are turned off. She has gone. I can have a guiltless lunch, repossess the house, recover from my feelings of inadequacy and failure, breathe in the deceptive odor of Murphy’s Soap.
The mail has come. There are nine brown cardboard book boxes that the mailman, in his customary snit at the volume of my mail, has dumped down in a messy pile in the vestibule. The letters he sticks through the slot in the door. While I wait for my usual Progresso minestrone soup to heat up (I am an obsessive eater who likes repetition in foods, perhaps because I am too unskilled to think up variations), I shuffle through the mail.
The usual assortment. Requests for contributions, including one from a local public television station which seems to eat up its meager budget with frequent mailings asking for contributions. A case of the cat consuming its own tail. Three solicitations of my support for the local opera, the local Kennedy Center patrons’ group, the local Arena theater. An olio of catalogues including—yes, I knew it was about time for it again—one from Comfortably Yours.
The clothes in most of the catalogues, sent unbidden, are for persons two sizes smaller and thirty years younger than I. There are catalogues for men’s equipment, including one for hunting clothes and one entirely devoted to guns and knives, although I have not lived with a man for seventeen years. One is filled with elaborate toys and clothes for children: my youngest child is now thirty-seven years old.
I am too exasperated to look through the rest. I carry the third-class mail, the catalogues, the publishers’ advance notices, the requests for money and subscriptions, to the kitchen and put them into a plastic sack together with the book containers which, opened, seem to have swelled to twice their original size. Tomorrow I will carry the lumpy, swollen sack down the back steps, across the garden, into the carriage house and place it in a can, to be put outside the garage on the proper pickup days.
To what end this useless, expensive effort for the publishers, and then for me? I have to dispose of matter I did not send for, do not want, and resent because it tires me to dispose of it.
David Macauley wrote and illustrated a wonderful book called Motel of the Mysteries, a spoof on the Tutankhamen discoveries. It supposes that our North American civilization, due to a reduction in third-and fourth-class postal rates, is suddenly buried and destroyed under the weight of pollutum literatum. Massive amounts of paper harden into rock, and our civilization is lost to human history for a thousand years.
Carrying the discarded mail from front door to kitchen to garden to pails in the garage, to the alley, I can believe this will happen here. We will all soon be similarly buried and petrified under our junk mail. It will take the discovery of ‘a series of writings attributed to the late-twentieth-century Franco-Italian traveler Guido Michelin’ (to quote Macauley) to explain how it all happened. Lovely book.
A bad night. I thought of Bill Whitehead and Robert Ferro dead and gone. I wondered how death had seemed to them at the moment of its arrival. I dreamed about the pains of dying. Does it hurt? I seemed to be asking my mother, as if I were a child again and she would know about such things.
When I woke at four, I remembered a poem I once could recite: ‘Thanatopsis.’ William Cullen Bryant’s idea was that death was pleasant, like a dreamless sleep, of which, upon awakening, one says: ‘It was my best night’s sleep.’ At five I was still awake, having decided that the poem eliminated one consoling certainty. Only if one was sure one would wake after the deep, unbroken sleep would one lie down fearlessly. Just so for death.
With that, I was afraid to go back to sleep, got up and made coffee and waited in the living room until I heard the Times bounce up on our iron steps.
I meet my neighbor across the alley while I am putting out the garbage. He is in his bathrobe and has lost a lot of weight. I don’t know his name after almost four years of proximity, and my ignorance has gone on so long it is too late to ask him. We refer to him as Mr. Lone Star, the name of the restaurant he once owned, a topless lunch establishment by day, a gay bar at night. We assume he is gay; under my workroom window on weekends young men, their radios turned up to loud, hard rock, wash their cars, or his boat, or his van. On occasion in the spring, he drives a motorcycle that he revs up and then roars out of his garage.
Although once on familiar terms, despite my ignorance of his name—he no doubt is ignorant of ours—we now say little to each other. It is an aborted acquaintance which never developed because none of us made an effort. Now, I eye his shrunken waistline and diminished stomach, and wonder: Can he be sick? And then I reproach myself: Not everyone who loses weight is sick, although at times, in my despair, it appears to be so. My association with Bill and Robert and Michael, and now Richard, makes me suspect the terrible affliction in everyone I see who looks thinner. Like evil: Because we know it to be within us, we then think it must inhabit everyone else.
This afternoon is my time to tape for the radio. The job I have had for a number of years is a strange one for me, a print devotee. Out of a month’s reading, I choose four books I have liked, and write a short review for each, to be broadcast on National Public Radio on the morning news program.
To write these reviews is an exercise in brevity, even painful compression. I have somewhat less than three minutes to introduce a book, describe it to some extent, and provide some judgments about it. No more than five hundred words. Given the meagerness of time, I have decided to review only books I like, not to waste precious airtime on diatribes against poo
r books.
I go uptown to M Street to tape, four reviews at a time. I sit in a silent booth, the engineer on the other side of a glass partition, my producer, Don Lee, in the booth with me because I am not very good at fluent reading anymore. I pop my p’s, a mistake that sounds like an explosion on the air. I often read the wrong word, stammer (an affliction left over, on occasion, from childhood), or mispronounce a proper noun. These failures require retaping, of a sentence usually. But when you hear me early on Morning Edition, you would never know about these slips. Lee has a device that splices out errors and substitutes the corrected forms. I sound fluent and correct, although he has not been able to do much about the increasing slowness with which I speak.
When I hear myself on radio I think how wonderful it would be if all the failings of growing old could be so easily corrected by technology.
Today my reviews are pretty eclectic. One, My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir, is a large handmade volume, a $785 beauty which the Yolla Bolly Press in California has published in an edition of 155 copies. Elegant paper, endpapers designed and made by hand in Mexico by Otomi Indians, binding handsewn, covered in a handwoven rough linen fabric. Every detail of the production of this book is fine. But the cost is high. My intention is to explain why owning such a book is an aesthetic as well as intellectual pleasure.
The second is Cavalry Maiden by Nadezha Durova, a Russian woman who managed to join the cavalry and fight bravely against Napoleon. Stirred by patriotism, a dislike of domestic limitations on women, and a passion for horses, Durova served in the army for nine years, even after her sex was discovered. A curious yet engrossing book to choose, published by a university press, Indiana, that takes chances on such works, to my delight.
Coming into the End Zone Page 2