My dreams in those days were of what I could become. At UCLA once, in the student health clinic for a flu shot, I noticed a Goethe quote taped to the wall: “Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” I was about to pass out from the injection—the needle slid in and my palms turned wet—but I happened to see those words, and they provoked in me a momentary swell of courage. I took deep gulps of air and didn’t faint, full of momentary resolve to learn fencing, go to Spain, make the dean’s list. Soon this courage dissolved, but those lines stayed with me: an enticement and a goad. I knew fear held me back. From what? someone might have asked me. If I sifted through possible answers I might have said, Fear kept me from happiness. I had bought my mother’s line: action lived apart from feeling. It had its own engine.
I drove back to Los Angeles at the end of that summer, down Interstate 5 in my old Honda with all the windows rolled down. That highway was straight as a ruler. You needed only one finger on the wheel, one toe on the gas to make progress. The heat hemmed me in—my hair flew up in strings around my face, my lips were chapped—but after a few hours a pleasant stillness set in, and my mind would run. I drove down the dry belly of the state, past Coalinga, through the methane-reeking hills near Los Banos, where the cows stood in pens of bare dirt, past Chowchilla, a town that would forever recall a busload of kids buried by kidnappers and miraculously freed after a week in the dark.
I didn’t like to pull over. Those towns made me lonely. I’d stare at the girl behind the checkout counter, her thick mascara and chewed nails, and imagine myself stranded like that, miles from nowhere, ringing up drinks and gum for luckier people, people in motion, speeding away toward better things. It was best not to stop. I packed food and water and pissed in a juice jar while driving, capped it, and threw it under the seat. I even read part of a novel on one trip, holding the book in the dip of the steering wheel and glancing up every sentence or two. None of this seemed strange to me. If a cop had stopped me and pointed out that I had an open book in my lap and a jar of urine at my feet, I’d have been nearly as astonished as he was. When I came as close to forgetting myself as was possible at that age, I slipped back to the lawlessness of my youth.
My car was like a private universe, and as such I thought it should reflect me. I hung bells from the rear-view mirror, burned incense in the ashtray, and deliberated long and hard about a bumper sticker. What did I want to say to the thousands of strangers who would tail me on the freeway? For years I could think of nothing I felt comfortable trumpeting. There were plenty of causes I believed in, but no single one I favored over the others, and I worried about plastering over my whole trunk and back window. “You’ve got to pick your shots,” my father used to say about organizing work.
I can’t remember him ever putting a political sticker on his car. His back bumper was smooth chrome, broken only by an AAA logo. You couldn’t pick him out of a line of traffic as someone whose life was devoted to—I want to say social change (but that says everything and nothing), fighting monopoly capitalism (not sure that’s right), rebuilding the left (rings vaguely rhapsodic). Difficult to sum up my father’s work in a phrase, but easy to say he didn’t wear his commitment on his sleeve. Now and then he wore political Tshirts, but only about causes to which he had already devoted countless hours, so that the T-shirt was a matter of gruff pride, the badge of the home team.
“Isn’t it terrific?” he said about one, plucking at the hem to pull the silkscreen straight: a crowd marching with signs, the photo trimmed around their heads, so their placards carried the message against the white space: Keep GM Van Nuys Open. “Leslie designed it. She’s got an amazing eye.”
Perhaps my father’s blank bumper was also a matter of caution. Once, years before, as he drove me home from one of my visits to San Jose, he noticed a patrol car following him over several miles. He cut his speed and pulled into the slow lane, but the squad car stayed glued to our tail. After a while the sun went down, and behind us a pair of square headlights flipped on.
“What does this guy want? I’m not speeding.” My father checked the speedometer again.
“None of your taillights are out?” I asked.
“I don’t think so. And if that’s the problem, he would have pulled me over by now.”
We were quiet for a mile or so, both of us willing the cop to tire of this cat-and-mouse game. It did feel as if he were waiting for us to make a mistake.
After half an hour in the cop’s high beams, I started grasping at straws. “Do you have any bumper stickers on your car?” I asked my father. “You know, something…”
My father gave me a quick glance. “No, but that’s a good point, honey.” I didn’t see him breathe easy until the cop swung around us and sped away.
Four years after I bought my car, I finally came across a bumper sticker I thought I could live with: Think Good Thoughts. The phrase was printed in serif capitals, the type small against the white background, and I was taken with its modest, uplifting tone. Now it strikes me as a ridiculously tiny suggestion, pared away from all action, the smallest unit of good-deedery imaginable. But the dusty back window of my Civic bore that appeal for years, until I cut someone off—on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, no less, bastion of the lefty bumper sticker—and the offended driver leaned out his window in disgust. “Think good driving!” he yelled.
I was out the next day with a straight-edged razor blade, scraping that thing off.
Sometimes, when I was driving, a phrase would pop into my head, and I’d fumble in the glove box for a pen. “A peppering of crows over the hills.” I wrote slowly, with a white-knuckled grip. After years of unsatisfactory grades in penmanship I tried, even in private jottings, to be legible. What I really needed, I was convinced, was a mini cassette recorder. I had the idea that it would make composition effortless (an idea that should have worried me). You’d press Record, open your lips, and great runnels of prose would spill forth. I coaxed my mother into buying me one such little gadget and returned home from Christmas break with a fist-sized Panasonic.
How my friends tolerated me then, I’ll never know. At a party, when I had an important thought, I would run to my room and spend a few minutes muttering into the microphone. What was laid down on those tapes? Drunken rambling about the streetlights, a moment-to-moment catalog of my feelings—some of the most self-conscious utterances of a self-conscious age. When I played them years later, it took strength not to wince with shame. My pretensions were so plain, and had been so hidden from me then, that I could listen to them only when I was driving on the open highway. Even there, sealed behind glass with the road noise as cover, I pressed on the accelerator during the most ridiculous patches, as if a witness were tailing me.
Wendy used to beg to listen to those tapes; it was a guaranteed dose of hysterics. After carefully cueing up a tape to avoid the most humiliating swatches, I’d press Play and watch her dissolve on the floor. I figured I owed her this much, since she had to live with me when the document was made. One day, after she’d wiped the tears from her face, she sobered up and put a gentle point on it: “It was like you wanted to record your existence, but you always had this thing in your hand, so your existence was totally contrived.”
I remember Wendy telling me one day to write something. I say “telling” me, because it was like that. “Write something,” she said, in the tone you’d use to tell a bear to dance. Her boyfriend, Tommy, was over, and Wendy probably hoped the dare and the appeal to my vanity might keep me occupied for a while.
Bearlike, I went for the bait. “About what?”
“I don’t care,” she said, slumped on the couch.
Tommy was glam, with a crest of chemically treated hair and a face perfected by white pancake. After they made out, he’d look up with the foundation wiped away around his mouth, so an oval of reddened skin showed through. It made him look undone—crazy with appetite.
I sat down at a card table in the living room
and faced the typewriter, a gift from my father. It was a Smith Corona, a die-hard machine that made it through four years of term papers pounded out at the eleventh hour. It made a rattling sound when you flipped it on, and I soon came to dread that rattle: it was the sound of beginning to write, an awful, beggared state. But that night, swollen up with my commission, I managed to peck out half a page of moody surrealism. Half a page: that was my limit. After that I stalled out.
Strange to be able to look back and say that’s where writing started, while my patron sat by and necked with a willowy glam-rocker. I didn’t write stories in high school, nor had I been a childhood diarist. People might have said that I was an imaginative kid, but though I had some of the trappings of this type —the books, the love of gnomes and underworlds, the private games—I was not particularly creative. I loved to read but rarely wrote anything. I made hand-lettered signs for the hillside across the river and stuck them into the dirt—The Badlands, The Misty Wood—but I never pretended to play in a hexed kingdom. I was dull as a surveyor, pounding my stakes into the mud and moving on. This is something I shared with my mother: the love of naming how it was. A very different thing from imagining how it might have been.
It seemed I’d found a happy middle ground in academia: it required writing but not art; it was political but didn’t require action. In my senior year, I began to lean toward anthropology and enrolled in a seminar on economic development. The class was led by one Professor Hudson, a rather handsome and laconic man in his middle fifties, with bushy white eyebrows and Southern drawl.
Our mission in Anthro 127A was to look at development strategies in Third World countries (though first the term Third World had to be examined gingerly). But the course quickly broke down to the most basic human questions: Can one person help another person in a lasting way? Do we all share the same ideas about what makes up a good life? Is happiness relative?
The discussions were fierce. References to outside sources quickly flew out the window. We all came into the class knowing what we believed about the world; little of those beliefs would be changed in the process. There was a wide range of students fanned around the long conference table. A Mormon economics major who had great faith in the International Monetary Fund and made frequent references to his upcoming mission. Manuel, an officer in student government, who wore La Raza Tshirts and had the smooth voice of a radio announcer. “Population control is always pushed on Africans, Indians, Latinos,” Manuel said. “What about the Mormons? Haven’t we got enough white people already?”
I often found myself seated beside Ferdinand, an intense, stocky young man who had a habit of sucking air through his lips before he spoke, as if he were sipping hot tea. He found the class very upsetting, and often started confrontations with other students. At these points, Professor Hudson would interject and try to direct the conversation toward more neutral ground.
One day, when things rose to their usual boil, Ferdinand slapped the table in frustration, shocking the class into silence. When the hour was over, I saw Professor Hudson take him aside. The older man appeared kindly but firm, one hand tucked into the pocket of his slacks, the other turning over and over in the air between them as if demonstrating the two sides of a problem. Ferdinand looked sullen and squinted at something down the hall.
The next week, Professor Hudson opened the class with a discussion about academic research. “Some of you have great passion for your studies.” He didn’t look at Ferdinand, but we all understood he was addressing the furor of the previous session. “Passion is essential, but it must not be foregrounded in your work. You must strive to be objective. Objectivity requires rigor. If love for your subject serves as fuel for this rigor, that’s a good thing. But you must never let your passion become the subject.”
As he spoke, Professor Hudson placed both forearms down on the conference table in a kinglike gesture and stared at them, as if the key to this objectivity was in his tennis-honed wrists and manicured nails. I didn’t think Professor Hudson’s caveat was out of line. In the context of the classroom, I was grateful to him for preventing further scenes. But at the same time, something in me reared up against his patrician reserve. I was afraid I couldn’t manage his beloved rigor. I told myself I was more interested in what was going on in Ferdinand’s loopy head than I was in social stratification in Togo.
I took Ferdinand’s part, the madman over the man of reason, but this was a careful hedging of my bets. I was just miserable enough in those days to think I might go mad, and I wanted to reserve some sympathy for the mad in case I ended up among them. Now I can see that I was in no danger of losing my mind; I suffered from garden-variety malaise, but it made me feel sufficiently cut off from myself that I didn’t know my own mind or its limits. That dislocation seemed to forebode some greater dislocation, and so I often felt, with a kind of fatalism, that I would not last out my days as a contented woman, that at some point I would “go away.” That was the phrase that popped into my head: whether to a mental ward or a monastery I wasn’t sure. This inevitable journey away from myself, from dailiness, was a future I looked forward to with a wistful regret, as if it couldn’t be helped. Of course, I never became that person. I remained myself, and when I got sufficiently sick of my own morbid nature I tried to improve my outlook in tiny ways.
As often as we could, Mau and I drove his truck into the Santa Barbara mountains, where we’d spend a few days hiking through the dry hills, desperate for water and often lost, and the nights huddled around a fire, talking in a rambling way, checking our blisters and eating Top Ramen. Those trips were good for us. Mau got noticeably more relaxed the farther we got from smog and traffic and meter maids—three facts of city life that drove him into a sputtering rage—and he loved to snap branches over his knee and tinker with the propane stove. The stove came with a tiny needle tool, which seemed brilliant when you were in a clearing of twigs and blunt stones, miles from the nearest safety pin, and the only thing between you and hot dinner was a dust plug the size of a pepper grain. What I came to love was Mau’s primal satisfaction when that ring of blue flame leapt reliably up from his match, the way he’d say under his breath, “Best thing I ever bought,” as if it had just occurred to him. But on the rides out to the woods, stuck into the cab together, I often got on his nerves. I talked as if we might never see each other again, amped up by the view, and the pleasure of being on the road, and his profile, chopped out of the blue of the far window.
He would catch hold now and then, but for longer periods he was quiet, watching the road, so I started to see my effusiveness as a kind of curse. The more he brooded, the more I aimed to be winning. A bad habit, and an old one, learned on those drives of long ago with my father. I was full of outsize moods, outsize expectations—for feedback and affection, someone to ground me. When I was a girl, I used to think that getting older was in part about getting quieter. That I would become more reticent as I aged. Ten years later, I was still talking. On those rides, I tried to take my cue from Mau, tried to see what pleasures he found in keeping mum.
During my senior year, browsing through the course catalog, I saw a poetry workshop offered through the English department. The class was to be taught by Carolyn Forché. Her name, at the time, meant nothing to me, but the idea of writing poems instead of papers greatly appealed. I typed up some of my scribblings, hitting the carriage return now and then so they had the look of poems, and typed my name on each page. I considered writing a cover letter but didn’t know what to say; I hadn’t published anything, nor had I studied with anyone of note. I was an absolute beginner, and I disguised my shame at this with a bit of preemptive defiance: the work, I told myself, should speak for itself. (Alas, it would.) On the way to mail my submission, the poems fell onto the floor of my car and accumulated a few muddy footprints. This pained me, but I was too lazy to type them over again. I wiped at the tread marks, slipped the poems in the envelope, and sent them off.
The list of those selected for the works
hop was to be posted on the classroom door. You had to show up for the first day of class and discover in front of the other petitioners whether you had been chosen. When I arrived, a group of students was already gathered at the door. A few of them found their names on the list and went in. One woman, who had been craning over their shoulders, took a quick inbreath and walked away down the hall. I read the list twice, in case there had been a mistake, and then followed her.
Out on the granite steps, I paused for a moment in the face of a free hour. I ticked off my options. A cup of coffee at LuVal Commons on an unforgiving metal chair, listening to black-clad film students argue over Fellini. A nap in the sculpture garden. Some much overdue reading on the Jacobins.
I turned around and went back to the classroom.
Most of the students were turned toward each other in their chairs, making small talk and sizing each other up. I slipped past them and took a seat in the back. Ms. Forché stepped in a few minutes later, making such a quiet entrance that no one much noticed at first. She looked pale and more staid than she appeared in her jacket photos, in a long wool skirt and a simple blouse. She looked sensible. While people turned toward her and the chatter died down, she smiled mildly from the front of the classroom.
“Hello. I’m Carolyn Forché. I’ve been told we’ve been given a smaller room in another building—I’ve asked for a round table instead of these chairs—and we’ll meet there next week.” Drab as she looked, her voice was surprising, low and musical and clear. “To begin, why don’t we go around the room and introduce ourselves?”
One by one the students said a few words about what they were up to. Most were graduate students in literature: “I’m doing my thesis on Proust. I’ve published a few poems here and there.” All of them looked terrifically poised, or at least able to breathe and converse naturally in front of a group. At their feet were worn leather satchels bulging with books.
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