by Matt Weiland
We’re excited, but not in a stomach-churning way. Since second grade we’ve attended weekly meeting: an island in time, a morning half hour suspended in the beeswax smell of the old meeting house, set beside the school in a golf-green lawn shaded by a fat copper beech. Silence seems like the natural element for the Quaker elders who sit ranged like a tall, dusty row of idols up in the benches facing the rows where we sat. These sere figures never dress up in suits and floral hats like the solemn old deacons and church mothers of the First African Baptist church. Instead they wear sweaters and skirts and trousers in faint colors that match their gray hair and their placid faces, faces that have something historical about them. Like their last names: Penn, Bacon, Watt. They are all rich, it is rumored, but they don’t care about such things. I’ve seen the oldest and tallest of them, his long springy legs like stilts, carrying an A&P grocery bag stiffly down Landsdowne Avenue. Because, it’s said, he doesn’t believe in cars.
Most of us kids aren’t Quakers. We’re a motley flock: black, white, Asian, gentile, and Jewish, and the school runs special assemblies featuring reform rabbis, freethinking bishops, Eastern Orthodox clergy, and even—to my embarrassment—my own Baptist father, who rambles on, as always, about love. Attending meeting is school tradition, and we memorize King James verses, they tell us, because it’s English literature.
Certainly, our psalm recitations bring worldly turmoil into the meeting house. When it’s not our week to recite, we listen to other classes, with the exacting scorn of opera critics. And our hearts pound during our own performances, and afterwards our faces glow with smugness.
For years things go without a hitch, but on the morning of Psalm 19, our class fails. First the short, deep-voiced boy who is our bellwether, stumbles over his verse, and, purple-faced, shudders to a halt. And I, with gold ready to pour from my lips, simply freeze. At Teacher’s frenzied prompting, we burst into the chorus, about errors and secret faults. But the words are a trip wire: Somebody’s helpless giggle becomes a rout. We double over, choking with uncontrollable laughter.
The beams of the meeting house ring with echoes of our debacle, and we wither under the sidelong smirks of the sixth grade. Still, in a minute a curious transformation occurs. One by one we are able to look up at the faces of the elders, which are not severe and condemning, nor yet smiling with the kind of amused indulgence with which grown-ups greet endearing childish mishaps. Nor do they display any desire to make this a character-building experience. Those old faces are simply present: alert. Regarding us and the rest of the hall with a boundless, patient comprehension that raises us to their own dignified level. Letting the silence flow back. And gradually something becomes clear: a kind of radiant indifference to words, mistaken or correct. What the elders, the Friends, pass on to us this morning is an inkling as to how strong silence is. Essential; eternal. But common, in the best sense. Always present, if we just listen for it. Inside or outside meeting.
OUT THERE
I am nineteen, and when I get home, over twenty-four hours later, there’ll be a pair of detectives in my bedroom, rifling my childhood desk. My mother presiding with a bloodless terrified look that morphs into towering maternal rage, as I, clearly unchaste and impenitent, walk in with my lame excuse.
But before all this, I’m on the train to somewhere in Pennsylvania I’ve never been. And nobody knows, except me and one other person. Home for the summer from college, caged among the worn-out stuffed animals on my single bed, determined to cuckold my devoted boyfriend, I’m pursuing an old dream with the ferocious single-mindedness known only to sentimental young girls.
I’ve had white boys—had made sure, early on, to leap over that risky threshold—but L. is the first one I want and can’t get. An instructor at a summer canoeing program, where at fourteen I run category three rapids on the Lehigh, and twist my guts into knots as L. flirts with older cuties in damp football jerseys. A college student, he has hair the color of a new broom, and he wears—get this—an Amish hat. Wears it irreverently, allusively, because he and his people, though not of the faith, are from one of the little allegorical towns out there in Pennsylvania German land. And he’s a tormented country dreamer, a bit of a poet, who quotes Berryman and knows about Indian curses. Who ignores me and my crush except to write, for an end-of-summer skit, a sardonic verse about me losing my retainer on the trail. But after camp, we begin exchanging letters. And sensing a more-than-indulgent embryo writer, he pours out his artistic soul in a Donleavyesque stream that makes my heart beat fast. Though I sort of hate Donleavy.
Five years of high-minded correspondence, written with very few capital letters. And now I’m on my way to transform all those figments into accomplished desire. Virgin no longer, sans retainer, and with a body that I’ve discovered can make boys do what I want. “Take the train to Lancaster,” L. writes—we’ve never talked on a phone—and so, informing no one at home, I grab a dawn local into Thirtieth Street Station, and from there step onto one of the old, rocking Penn Central coaches.
Past the Main Line, with its lacrosse fields and faux chateaux; past Valley Forge; past Wyeth-brown hills; into a fat, prosperous land of sappy-leaved sweetgum forest humming with cicadas, and high midsummer corn glistening like shook cellophane. It’s the space of it that gets me. The fact that I, with my heart pointed like the prow of a ship toward Boston, then New York, then Europe, have all this unexplored territory outside my back door. I scan a map before leaving, and the names tickle me: White Horse. Compass. Ercildoun. Brandywine. Modena. Unicorn. Octoraro. And of course the sweetly obvious: Intercourse. Blue Ball. Paradise—an actual train stop, where across rows of soy I catch a glimpse of a gaunt black Amish carriage, poised like a scarab against the dazzling midday sun.
And in Lancaster, down-at-heel colonial city, with urban graffiti and a faint smell of manure, I meet my rustic poet, now deep in the writing of a history dissertation. He looks impressed by how I’ve grown up. In fact I’m irresistible, in tight jeans and cheap, musky perfume. How ruthless girls are! I set my sights with the brisk efficiency of a sportsman going after wild turkey. An awkward stroll through the brick downtown, and I know I can sleep with him. At the same time, I tried to ignore other, drearier, realizations. That L., the subject of years of riverine fantasies, won’t be joining me in a mystic union of hearts. That I can’t quite recall what it was about him that left me, at fourteen, dizzy and speechless. That presently, instead of confessing a sudden kindling of eternal love, he’s lecturing me, with pedantic relish, on how the Paxton Boys exterminated the innocent remnants of the Conestoga Indian tribe right where we’re standing. His Amish hat has floated away somewhere on the currents of the past, and he’s got that unmistakable graduate student look of having climbed out of a root cellar.
Still, I’ve yearned too long to bend to simple reality. So there is the arrival at his daguerreotype-brown apartment, the smoking of the obligatory joint, and the tumble into bed. Afterwards I keep myself from despair on a strange mattress, an unknown man wheezing beside me, by imagining the huge summer night over the old brick provincial city, the countryside spreading out in dark generosity.
Early the next day, after L. leaves to teach his class, I dash down the staircase and out of the building, and run through the hot summer morning streets to the Lancaster train station as if the Paxton Boys were after me.
Of course I keep the whole thing secret. And, as secrets do, this one transforms itself in memory. By the time I’ve graduated, and left for a semester in France, L. and even I myself, the silly heroine, are only tiny figures: the kind landscape artists use to show scale. The lasting vision is of the countryside I dive into, with such careless glee. A landscape that doesn’t start out as foreign and then slowly grow familiar, like the Europe that will absorb my future; but a familiar territory that, in a sudden act of possession grows mysterious, even precious.
But riding home that day, I salve my bruised vanity by imagining myself an intrepid adventuress.
&nbs
p; By the time I walk through the front door, the power is so much upon me that my hysterical parents have no choice but to accept my offhand lies. Only the detectives—one black, one white, suave enough to be in a TV series—look at me with cold eyes. Their faces tell me that in their world vanished girls are mostly dead ones. And that wherever the hell I’ve been, I hardly deserve my luck.
IN UMBRIA
“Di dove sei?” asks the director, helping himself to more ricotta. “Where are you from in America?”
We’re at lunch in Casteluccio, in an inn made of brown seventies tiles, perched high on the sweeping Umbrian mountainside, me and my husband and the director, who is an old friend of his from the time in Rome when they were both starving dolce vita boys working with Visconti. There’s the director’s girlfriend, too, a starlet gnawed by resentment, because he hasn’t married her. It is the first time I’ve met the director, who is famous for only one film about flesh-eating zombies, but more famous as a womanizer. I like him more than I thought I would. White-haired and blue-eyed, shrunken and gentled by age, he turns his flirtatious attention to me with an air so dutiful that even his girlfriend doesn’t mind.
“Pennsylvania,” I tell him, “Philadelphia.” Ready, as always in talking to Italians, to add the qualifying description: not far from New York.
But the director’s eyes light up, and his girlfriend glowers as he exclaims: “Ah, Pennsylvania, my favorite place in the world!”
I look at him in disbelief.
The director is sincere. There is, of course, a woman involved. Thirty years ago, strolling in tight seventies trousers on a dock in Antigua, he met a blonde, who called from a yacht that she liked his watch, and then loaded him on board like a rent boy. She was a divorcée with two famous Philadelphia last names, and found it a lovely indulgence to sail round the world with a filmmaker whose tough Trastevere accent sounded like Italian music to her. He liked her money, her monograms, her rangy equestrian figure, but what he liked most of all was her fieldstone Montgomery County house with its rolling pastures and stalls of thoroughbreds. There was a natural gentleness about the countryside there, he says, his blue eyes opaque with regret.
I’m amused, and for one clairvoyant moment see Pennsylvania as the director does, as a bungled dream, the perfect life that got away. Hearing someone rhapsodize about your birthplace gives you a disoriented feeling, like talking to a man who long ago had a passion for your mother. Beyond this—and perhaps it is simply an old tombeur’s easy charm with women—I have the odd feeling that he is speaking to me not as an Italian to a foreigner, but as he might to someone who was born and bred understanding his emotional idiom. Someone who can stare, as he does, across land and sea toward a shimmering mirage of America. It’s a sly claiming of intimacy, both flattering and unsettling, and I suddenly believe all the stories I’ve heard about him.
“So what happened? Why didn’t you stay?” I ask.
The director starts to reply, but his girlfriend breaks in with a laugh. She says: “It’s simple—the Pennsylvania bitch threw him out!”
RHODE ISLAND
CAPITAL Providence
ENTERED UNION 1790 (13th)
ORIGIN OF NAME From the Greek Island of Rhodes
NICKNAME Ocean State
MOTTO “Hope”
RESIDENTS Rhode Islander
U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 2
STATE BIRD Rhode Island red hen
STATE FLOWER violet
STATE TREE red maple
STATE SONG “Rhode Island, It’s for Me”
LAND AREA 1,045 sq. mi.
GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Kent Co., 1 mi. SSW of Crompton
POPULATION 1,076,189
WHITE 85.0%
BLACK 4.5%
AMERICAN INDIAN 0.5%
ASIAN 2.3%
HISPANIC/LATINO 8.7%
UNDER 18 23.6%
65 AND OVER 14.5%
MEDIAN AGE 36.7
RHODE ISLAND
Jhumpa Lahiri
Rhode Island is not an island. Most of it is attached to the continental United States, tucked into a perfect-looking corner formed by the boundaries of Connecticut to the west and Massachusetts above. The rest is a jagged confusion of shoreline: delicate slivers of barrier beach, numerous inlets and peninsulas, and a cluster of stray puzzle pieces, created by the movement of glaciers, nestled in the Narragansett Bay. The tip of Watch Hill, in the extreme southwest, extends like a curving rib bone into the Atlantic Ocean. The salt ponds lining the edge of South Kingstown, where I grew up, resemble the stealthy work of insects who have come into contact with nutritious, antiquated paper.
In 1524, Giovanni Verrazzano thought that the pear-shaped contours of Block Island, nine miles off the southern coast, resembled the Greek island of Rhodes. In 1644, subsequent explorers, mistaking one of Rhode Island’s many attendant islands—there are over thirty of them—for another, gave the same name to Aquidneck Island, famous for Newport, and it has now come to represent the state as a whole. Though the name is misleading it is also apt, for despite Rhode Island’s physical connection to the mainland, a sense of insularity prevails. Typical to many island communities, there is a combination of those who come only in the warm months, for the swimming and the clamcakes, and those full-time residents who seem never to go anywhere else. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Cornelius Vanderbilt were among Rhode Island’s summer people. Given its diminutive proportions there is a third category: those who pass through without stopping. Forty-eight miles long and thirty-seven wide, it is a brief, unavoidable part of the journey by train between Boston and New York and also, if one chooses to take I—95, by car.
Historically it has harbored the radical and the seditious, misfits and minorities. Roger Williams, the liberal theologian who is credited with founding Rhode Island in 1636, was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony by, among others, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s great grandfather. Williams’s unorthodox views on matters religious and otherwise made him an enemy of the Puritans. He eventually became and remained until his death a Seeker, rejecting any single body of doctrine and respecting the good in all branches of faith. Rhode Island, the thirteenth of the original thirteen colonies, had the greatest degree of self-rule, and was the first to renounce allegiance to King George in 1776. The Rhode Island Charter of 1663 guaranteed “full liberty in religious concernments,” and, to its credit, the state accommodated the nation’s first Baptists, its first Quakers, and is the site of its oldest synagogue, dedicated in 1763. A different attitude greeted the indigenous population, effectively decimated by 1676 in the course of King Philip’s War. Rhode Island is the only state that continues to celebrate, the second Monday of every August, VJ Day, which commemorates the surrender of Japan after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On a lesser but also disturbing note, it has not managed to pass the bottle bill, which means that all those plastic containers of Autocrat Coffee Syrup, used to make coffee milk (Rhode Island’s official beverage), are destined for the purgatory of landfills.
Though I was born in London and have Indian parents, Rhode Island is the reply I give when people ask me where I am from. My family came in the summer of 1970, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, so that my father could begin work as a librarian at the University of Rhode Island. I had just turned three years old. URI is located in the village of Kingston, a place originally called Little Rest. The name possibly stems from accounts of Colonial troops pausing on their way to fight the Narragansett tribe on the western banks of Worden Pond, an event known as the Great Swamp Massacre. We lived on Kingston’s main historic tree-lined drag, in a white house with a portico and black shutters. It had been built in 1829 (a fact stated by a plaque next to the front door) to contain the law office of Asa Potter, who was at one point Rhode Island’s secretary of state, and whose main residence was the larger, more spectacular house next door. After Asa Potter left Rhode Island to work in a bank in New York, the house became the site of a general store, with a tailor’s shop at the front. By
1970 it was an apartment house owned by a fellow Indian, a professor of mathematics named Dr. Suryanarayan.
My family was a hybrid; year-rounders who, like the summer people, didn’t fundamentally belong. We rented the first floor of the house; an elderly American woman named Miss Tay lived above us, alone, and her vulnerable, solitary presence was a constant reminder, to my parents, of America’s harsh ways. A thick iron chain threaded through wooden posts separated us from our neighbors, the Fishers. A narrow path at the back led to a brown shingled shed I never entered. Hanging from one of the outbuildings on the Fisher’s property was an oxen yoke, an icon of old New England agriculture, at once elegant and menacing, that both intrigued and scared me as a child. Its bowed shape caused me to think it was a weapon, not merely a restraint. Until I was an adult, I never knew exactly what it was for.
Kingston in those days was a mixture of hippies and Yankees and professors and students. The students arrived every autumn, taking up all the parking spaces, crowding the tables in the Memorial Union with their trays of Cokes and French fries, one year famously streaking on the lawn outside a fraternity building. After commencement in May, things were quiet again, to the point of feeling deserted. I imagine this perpetual ebb and flow, segments of the population ritually coming and going, made it easier for my foreign-born parents to feel that they, too, were rooted to the community in some way. Apart from the Suryanarayans, there were a few other Indian families, women other than my mother in saris walking now and then across the quad. My parents sought them out, invited them over for Bengali dinners, and consider a few of these people among their closest friends today.
The gravitational center of Kingston was, and remains, the Kingston Congregational Church (“King Kong” to locals), where my family did not worship but where I went for Girl Scout meetings once a week, and where my younger sister eventually had her high-school graduation party. Across the street from the church, just six houses down from ours, was the Kingston Free Library. It was constructed as a courthouse, and also served as the state house between 1776 and 1791. The building’s staid Colonial bones later incorporated Victorian flourishes, including a belfry and a mansard roof. If you stand outside and look up at a window to the right on the third floor, three stern white life-sized busts will stare down at you through the glass. They are thought to be likenesses of Abraham Lincoln, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and John Greenleaf Whittier. For many years now, the bust of Lincoln has worn a long red-and-white striped hat, Cat in the Hat—style, on its head.