The Room Lit by Roses

by Carole Maso

  A silver cup, a xylophone, a see-saw, a sliding pond. Three types of seeds—columbine, bluebell, larkspur. A tinker toy. A jump rope. A pink blanket. The rhyming alphabet.

  I don’t seem like such a complete oddball to the secretaries at Brown anymore. Finally I have something like credibility. Finally we have something huge in common. It’s kind of sweet. I could stand there hour after hour suddenly talking babies with them. I savor this being like everyone else for once. Picture myself a normal person, consider what my life might have been like—had absolutely everything been different.

  And to the world at large. I am someone suddenly who bears a resemblance to something.

  I get many many Normal Person credits for being pregnant, for having a baby. For joining the human race.

  For foregoing the husband, for writing all night, for living in my own private Idaho, and for being, in general, a basket case, I get points taken away.

  Sophie guides the child’s hand. What is this ache deep within for something I do not directly remember, but which was mine?

  My writing, as usual, notes to the most mysterious part of myself. Meditating the child—for years and years, before I acted.

  Roses and angels, the century, fall on the horizon, and snow. Feel them now as they move slowly into you. They’re sweet and round—everything for a while—and you are getting, you are—undeniably—getting sleepy.

  The ongoing dream in those years. Roses and apples and snow—the child. Waving and waving on the horizon.

  The oddness at the very heart of me.

  Once after a reading a bunch of us went to dinner. A friend of Dixie’s, the judge, sat down next to me and said, “You know, don’t you, that you are a very strange person.”

  C.D. and I in a Creative Writing faculty meeting. God, she says in her Arkansas accent, you look just like Rapunzel! It is true, I don’t know why, but I’ve just let my hair grow and grow. And it’s much thicker, more wild than usual.

  I named my baby Rapunzel so that she might display ingenuity. So that she might dream of escape.

  4 APRIL

  The baby takes in the three days of our festival celebrating New Directions. James Laughlin is dead. When I wrote earlier in the year he was pleased by our plans though his health precluded his joining us. Michael Palmer comes, which cheers me greatly. Walter Abish, Robert Creeley. Beloved Rosmarie Waldrop like a New Directions queen. I read from John Hawkes’s The Blood Oranges. He’s decided to sit this one out. I understand. First I say how he and ND changed my life. Then I read—it sounds great out loud. Pregnancy makes you cry at every turn and so I am weeping for the very fact of Jack Hawkes. The very fact of New Directions. I was late to the dinner because of course I’d lost my keys again. I’m in love with the New Directions editors. They are incredibly smart and serious, the last thing you think of an editor being anymore. It makes me terribly nostalgic, longing for a past in which I might have been a writer in such a situation. Yes, it might have been me, that graceful give and take, finally the perfect match—I am consistently challenged, basking in their guidance, their brilliance, their devotion to the text as we amble along the still bohemian Greenwich Village streets, a past which for me never existed—but which was mine. They advance me enough money to write. Not much, but not much is needed. We are in the last smoke-filled, amber-lit afternoons before publishing completely changes forever. Books will become commodities. So-called serious writers will find the formulas to make themselves famous and rich. Experimental work will be completely scoffed at and ridiculed—but not yet. The young corporate writers of today are not even born yet, I hope. There are still small publishers, not conglomerates, a belief in the possibility of art.

  These marvelous editors, talking this afternoon about translation—these women from a disappeared world, back here with us for a second. I rub my eyes. Am I dreaming?

  I’d like to do a big book with them.

  The music I live and write to all hours of the day that drives everyone crazy. I know from the beginning she has heard it.

  Mom tells my sister Christine. She seems all right with it for now. Generous, even kind. Trying so hard always to claim her small bit of happiness. Not giving up. I don’t know how she goes on sometimes. I admire her courage.

  I wish I could give her some of this peace.

  We dare to name her. We feel now as if it is real—or at least more real.

  Rose.

  To be surrounded on both sides by roses—my mother, and now my daughter. What could be better than that?

  Mother. Daughter—

  “A rain of roses will fall at my death.”

  —Saint Therese of Lisieux

  Rose

  for my mother

  and for Gertrude Stein

  and for Rosmarie Waldrop too

  No other name in the world.

  Rose, still enclosed in her translucent amnion. Her heartbeat is louder now.

  Every rose pulses.

  A very sweet long lunch with Jack Hawkes. A while back I had inadvertently offended him by making a frivolous comment about some of his former students, now writers of some note (I did not even know they were his students). An awkward and painful few weeks. A lot of prima donna posturing from the former students. It all having to do with their posing as experimental avant-garde types at the experimental avant-garde festival while simultaneously reading their slickest work from The New Yorker, and flinging their various issues of the magazine around the stage. I am offended and find the way to say so. Pressure from the program for me to apologize. I write a goofy letter trying to explain myself to the former students. Imagine! The whole thing is absurd.

  But Jack takes the whole thing to heart. Months and months pass. I try to apologize. He tries to dismiss it. It was nothing. How can I tell him what he has meant to me? Of course I can’t. And so we talk about other things, happy things. The baby. The book. The film of The Blood Oranges. He thinks Rose is a lovely name. There aren’t many Roses, really, he says. He thinks Styron. He does a brief critical assessment of William Styron. You can imagine! We eat pasta and I break my no-drinking rule for the afternoon. It begins to rain. When I leave him he disappears down Thayer Street in the fog to buy typewriter ribbon. That spectral genius. Waving good-bye.

  The increasing need now for solitude. This turning inward. More even than usual—though I have always craved it. Once on a beach long ago I move my towel away from my chatting friends and declared, I need my solitude. Many years ago now. It came up many times after that as a joke almost: Give Carole her solitude.

  My students comment on how I am very nearly unrecognizable without a glass of wine in my hand. I guess in this way at least I must be a real old-fashioned writer. AA smugly waits for me. Not a chance.

  When she wakens she moves about freely in the buoyant fluid, turning from side to side and frequently head over heels, as it is said of one who is madly in love.

  She falls back to sleep. The baby floating in her dreamy amnion. Saw a documentary on TV and realized I knew the people in it a little. Enough to know it was not going to end well. The film concerned the different aspects of wanting and having a child. A brother and his wife trying to get pregnant. A sister and her lesbian lover and their infant. I brace myself. Right before the baby’s first birthday, the sister will be killed by a driver who runs a red light late at night. Unspeakable sorrow. I watch Mary, the sister of the woman killed, the woman I know a little, weeping uncontrollably on the TV screen at the baby’s birthday party.

  Is there any way at all to be safe?

  Helen, held at gunpoint, only months after she’d become sober. Her whole life still ahead of her.

  “The amnion, though transparent and hardly thicker than the paper of this book, is tough and slightly elastic, like sausage casing. Unlike sausage casing, it is quite lovely and has a natural silvery shimmer. It is a living tissue made up of a single layer of skin cells.”

  You are gleaming inside. In your bag of waters. It cushions you now
against blows—and keeps you warm—and supports you so that you are virtually weightless. You are covered now in a coat of grease like a channel swimmer. It is called vernix—that is Latin for varnish.

  And as if that were not enough you grow fuzz—lanugo, Latin for wool, on your arms and legs and back. My darling lamb. My lambling.

  Earthling now… almost.

  Another rare occasion where I allow myself a drink (I can count them on one hand). The artist Annette Messager has come to Brown to speak. She is marvelous, of course. Her women’s work—without apology. I wave to Sylvie across the aisle. Good French champagne afterwards—impossible to resist. I don’t know why a few drinks effect me this way, but they do. When I return to my room I curl up on the floor naked hugging the curvature of my body and weep. I am Mahler’s Lied von der Erde. I am singing. I am elemental. I am the earth and the sorrow of the earth. In the translation: Dark is death, is life… I open in concentric circles. Everywhere and forever the distances shine blue. I am the blue beauty of the earth. I am eternity. I am radiance. Oh, God! What a sight!

  The things I love to do most: writing novels, gardening, cooking, being pregnant—women’s work, all.

  This little book was meant to chronicle the workings of time on the psyche and the body. And yet now I notice that time seems oddly suspended, hanging there—or even reversed. A bizarre feeling.

  7 APRIL

  First copy of Defiance in my hands. Suddenly I worry I have been too passive during its production. Done too little (nothing in fact) to ease it into the world. To help its reception. It’s a very strong piece of work—if it’s overlooked this time, well, then someday. It is what I have come to believe.

  Try not to second-guess it all. Try to relax a little. I am not a salesman for God’s sake. (How old-fashioned I sound). Isn’t it hard enough to write them? Of course it is. I do not sell many books, I’m afraid. As if I should. Considering what sells. The crass, the vulgar, the simplistic, the sensational. I despise it. I’ll save the lecture I guess. How nice—a little of the old arrogance coming back!

  The odd thing about being pregnant—I care even more deeply than before about my writing, but less and less about my writing “career.”

  But did I neglect it? The question nags a little today. I have scarcely thought about it since that major revision to the galleys. Knew then it was as close to the book I wanted as it would get. And I let it go. Helen asks how I feel about seeing it for the first time, but I don’t really know. It’s a far-off object, like almost everything.

  8 APRIL

  Worried now about flying on one big plane and one small plane to Penn State but am quite desperate to try to find a teaching position where I will only have to be there half the year. Something Brown has so far been unwilling to agree to.

  Violence of the rise into the sky. Usually I am thrilled by it. But today all I can think is that this is not natural. What am I doing? That awful tilted centrifugal thing. The horizon askew. I feel like the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz—torn in pieces by the velocity, by the height, the pressure in the cabin. The baby protests. What I am doing is trying to save my life. Anything for one semester. But anything?

  Why am I all the way up here?

  I wish Helen were here to take my hand as we take off.

  On the small plane now. Too late I realize it was a mistake to come. Feeling very strange. Strange indigestion. Why did I think this was worth the risk? Have decided I will drive back with Robin instead of flying again. It will be fun to spend time with her.

  Ten years ago this spring. Robin was there. I walked the streets of Vence—a complete folle. Hanging on to that notebook for dear life. Season of the Bal des Pompiers, Front National, the three thieves. Stephane. Thought if I carried his child I’d be saved.

  In last night’s dream the way I know I am in premature labor is that everything on the TV is backward and upside down. The frantic search for a TV at Penn State as a result today in order to verify that I am OK. How I hate the specificity of dreams. The exactitude of their demands, their clarity, their obviousness. The way they can convince you that absolutely anything is plausible.

  Good Friday. Prayers to Saint Clare.

  Interview with Publishers Weekly. PW has always been smart about my books and I do not take that for granted. Seemed very interested in this as my first “mainstream” book, and yet it seemed the interviewer wanted to hear very little about what I actually had to say about this. Not sexy enough, I suppose. My mythic hydra-headed self a lot more entertaining, I guess.

  12 APRIL, EASTER SUNDAY

  The conventionality of children—the hubris of boys—even the sweet ones. Nicholas, my nephew, four years old, as mild a boy as is possible to find, asks, How did you get the baby? I tell him the same as everyone gets one. Then you were married? I say you don’t have to be married to have a baby. No. And he says after thinking about it for a minute, Get married. Emily, his sister, the more opinionated and vocal one usually, just listens. Having no comment, but sensing—sensing what? The authority and judgments of little boys—even at age four. Something in the genetic code? Or the socialization process? Or perhaps it is a survival instinct? Little dictators. Even the sweetest of them. Get married, the baby patriarch commands.

  On the other hand my seven-year-old niece Katie gleefully announces to her class, My aunt is having a baby and she didn’t even have to get married! She thinks this is one of the greatest things she’s ever heard.

  15 APRIL

  Finally I’ve left Providence for the country to sit on my nest full time. It is the waiting now that is beautiful. This handful of days left. The absence of distraction.

  In what we imagined paradise, serenity—spring in the country—a tick burrows its way into the back of my leg while I am out gardening.

  Louis and Louise in their utmost kindness. They are wondering what helpful thing they can do next. They have prepared me little chickens. They have read me interesting things from magazines until I’ve drifted off to sleep. Now, Louise has found a gargantuan African dress in her closet for me to put on.

  The questions of who am I and why am I here and all the rest give way now to what is a layette, and how long do you boil an egg?

  How remote Defiance and all that rage seem to me now. It is as if all of a sudden someone in my head has adjusted the controls.

  20 APRIL

  A robin redbreast sits on her nest in the giant rhododendron outside my bathroom window that was once filled with snow. How intent she looks sitting there. I stand on top of the toilet seat to see the eggs. Three.

  Rose in waiting. Rose on the verge.

  I love the seasons. How one thing turns into another. It is for me where all hopefulness lies. In the transformations.

  The other thing that always kept me from having a baby: I never could imagine a future of any kind—and I do not quite know why. No future, no future for you. Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols sang my mantra in those years. It was before I began writing in earnest—when I was still completely lost. Could not imagine living. Not until 1986, when Gary died. After that it would take another twelve years to be ready to consider a child. To trust the notion of future. My God! At the pace I move.

  Another aspect I notice is the belief in a self a journal necessarily implies. Confirmation of a construction I am not quite sure is real.

  An odd time. Who do I concoct in these pages as the protagonist?

  The teller of tales—and who do I assume will be interested? Do I write this solely for myself? How disingenuous am I, without knowing it?

  Dr. Rehrer, who has not been around much at all, has now dropped out altogether. She has lupus. New York magazine has just named her one of the city’s best doctors. She laughed cynically. She’ll have to close her practice. I will stay with Dr. Matheson. Some say he does not have the bedside manner, but that he is the best. I am over forty. Not interested in bedside manner, hate sympathy, support groups, sharing, reaffirmations, etc. He’s my man: black, earl
y middle age, and as calm as can be, the most natural thing in the world.

  I turn my thoughts toward childbirth now. Begin to read.

  In a flash I see you risen—

  my sore rose Eros—ecstatic

  in the mounting flush, a volcano

  under snow, crowing to greet

  the dawn within you.

  —L. S. Asekoff

  The floating technique.

  “The contractions seem to be coming in waves now, so it is valuable to think of relaxing the whole body and letting it float up to the peak of a contraction’s strength so you can just slip over the top” (from a Bradley Method pamphlet).

  It sounds thrilling in a way and I realize I have waited my whole life for this.

  Baby care class at St. Vincent’s. As I have not a clue what to do with a baby once a baby is produced. Sitting in a room of pregnant women and their mates. The husbands seem pale, shadowy, ghosts of themselves. Helen’s gone up to work on the house, so I am here alone. It’s fine with me. I like the space to think my thoughts, to dream. No running commentary necessary. These ordinary women all made extraordinary by their state. The power of eight pregnant women in one room—if we could harness that power it seems we might do anything—cleanse rivers, stop wars, bring on world peace. I notice what a secret this is kept. How belittled pregnant women are by our culture. How taken for granted. It doesn’t surprise me.