Channeling Mark Twain

by Carol Muske-Dukes

  He raised his great eyebrows as I reddened before him.

  “The reason I’m recommending you to Girodias is because I think you’d be perfect in his films.”

  He looked out the window, his famous sly gaze in place.

  “Because,” he said, “you walk around with no expression on your face at all, then suddenly that face bursts into emotion. Very peculiar. Right for Girodias. Just odd enough.”

  After graduate school, I went to Paris and beyond for four or five months. I never phoned Maurice Girodias. I stayed odd enough, with my face lit by no expression except in those bursting emotional moments peculiar to me. At least, I thought, he didn’t think I was dumb enough to take my clothes off for a goddam underground movie.

  Still, there was a footnote: in Paris, I somehow ended up in the cast of the rock musical Hair. It was easy to see why, in a way. I looked like an American hippie, I could sing—but when it came to nude scenes, I was completely uncooperative, and unsurprisingly I was not invited to accompany the troupe when it moved on to Belgium.

  Back in Prof Haj’s class, I put down my pen and I too stared reflectively out the window. The day before, we had spent time with another professor, who had asked us to rate our writing, brought in for discussion that day, on large cue cards, on a scale of one to ten.

  “Dynamite metaphors but needs more energy—I give it a seven!”

  The one-to-ten professor and his wife had lost a little girl to leukemia that spring. His wife had been grieving for the child, depressed. He told us that her shrink had recommended that she write a story about blood, as a connection to the child’s fatal disease. As we sat in class rating our poems, she was at home constructing the tale of a vampire who had lived for hundreds of years, a story that would eventually haunt national consciousness. I caught myself thinking of her in her ordinary chair, which morphed into a flying chair. She’d circled above us in the room, where we sat in place, holding up cards with numbers on them, then winged off again unseen.

  I shook my head, trying to dislodge all the sevens and nines and twos. I tried to remember what the poet Theodore Roethke had said about writing and pedagogy. Something like “We do not teach writing, we insinuate it.”

  Teach what you read, I thought, the great haunting voices. Teach what stays in your memory. What runs in your veins.

  Outside the window, under the trees, there were groups of students gathering with placards emblazoned with large scarlet hand-drawn peace symbols and the raised fist of Black Power. The familiar smells of buckskin and marijuana wafted in on a breeze. It was almost time for our college president, R. H. Wattlinger, to begin his daily tour of the campus. Since he’d invited the Special Services unit of the San Francisco Police Department (called the Tac Squad) on campus to spray mace and rough up students, his popularity had hit an all-time low. He’d once ridden around campus perched on a sound truck, urging, in amplified tones, “cooperation with authority,” till a student leaped up on the truck and pulled out the speaker wires. The professor slid the windows closed as the first catcalls and cries of “Establishment lackey!” signaled the arrival of the president’s vehicle.

  I thought about how the Season of Dreams had changed. The Haight-Ashbury district, where the Summer of Love had originated, had been remade, even in the brief while since I’d arrived from Minnesota. Only a season or three ago, flower children had floated about, beatific, high on mushrooms, wind chimes, Jefferson Airplane. Now speed (methedrine and STP) contorted face after face in Golden Gate Park and the Haight—hippies slumped against buildings in the foggy sun, panhandling, holding mirrors up to the gawking faces of tourists pressed to the windows of their buses as they lumbered slowly through the neighborhood. I glanced at the protesters outside, milling about, their mouths moving. Someone held up a sign, bobbing around with the other NO MORE WAR placards. It read WITHDRAW DICK.

  Later, back in the Chair Workshop, we tried an old familiar writing exercise designed to help build imaginative muscle, called Where I Come From.

  “Write what you believe to be true,” the teacherly voice intoned. “About your roots, your background, what makes you you.”

  There was a derisive chuckle or two. It was warm in the room. Someone had dabbed on way too much patchouli and the scent suspended itself in the classroom atmosphere like an aerial oil slick.

  “I come from the sticks: Thai sticks!” someone snickered. Some of us rolled our eyes.

  But I gave it a big overblown try. I ended up not bringing my effort to class to be read aloud, but I did turn it in to the professor, who wrote “Look homeward, angel!” and “A stone, a key, an unfound door” at the top of the paper, and then, “Give it another whirl, retaining the refrain, but fewer modifiers!” Still, I kept the first shaky attempt in my notebook for a long time:

  I come from the prairie and the north woods. My parents: children of the Dakotas, children of that huge mindless sky going nowhere. Red “Depression glass” in the china cupboards, a vellum-bound anthology of poems, the Harvard Classics 1932 reprint—in my hands, held in my hands: willed to me.

  I come from thwarted dreams, amended expectations: their two-year college instead of his law degree, her literature degree, her ambition to be a writer. But their gradual ascent to the middle class, then a little higher—in the city to which they’d moved after marrying, the city where I was born, named for the saint struck by lightning, Saint Paul. His real estate business, their children, six in all. Her tears, her furious face, her recitations of poems like pure seizures of delight and alarm. Her declamations—condemning all that she found inhibiting or pretentious: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment.” But impediment there was. No one knew her mind, she cried. The world was “too much with us,” getting and spending, yes. Yes, but the poem made sense to me. It was the everyday words we were required to speak to one another in order to know one another—that was, for her, for me, for all of us, an impediment. I come from that.

  I come from growing up thinking that she was Beauty remade through loss as Truth. I also come from fearing her pregnancies, one after the other. Fearing her inhabited, imprisoned body. Hating sexual references. Fearing the female body as destiny.

  I come from thinking myself religious, then knowing I was not. Not in the way of the so-called Holy Book. Who made me? Longing made me, longing and wonder—those entwined gods: Blake’s universe.

  I come from Fritos in a clear glass bowl, hard candies, sourballs, in a fluted red dish. Cleats on oxford shoes, black hockey tape and padded shin guards and skates on the scarred mudroom floor. Icicles, roof-high snow. Wet scratchy wool scarves drawn ice-tight over the mouth and nose like purdah veils, protecting the lungs against forty-below temperatures. I come from mowed lawns and barbecues and rec rooms, from lake cabins, water skis, and speedboats. And poppy-seed kolachy cake, buttered figured scrolls of krumkake, popovers, lutefisk, lefse, Ole and Lena jokes, Czech self-deprecation, Norwegian stolidness, oyster stew on Christmas Eve. I come from that constant sense of deprivation emanating from them, children of deprivation—though the rewards of the material world were now theirs.

  I come from defying the Baltimore Catechism, then the Index of Forbidden Books (reading, though not understanding, Boccaccio’s Decameron). From the notorious but get-it-right tutelage of nuns, from John Keats, that pagan poet, read at night in my bed by flashlight. I come from alliance with my Jewish neighbors, the Golds, who moved in next door after the neighborhood voted on their presence on Pascal Street. I come from babysitting their children, then later, sitting at their dinner table—I come from those shouting, debate-filled meals, so unlike my family’s repressed repasts, learning from those exchanges to have an opinion, to think on my feet. I come from waving to Mr. Gold, the kosher butcher, as he stayed up late every night reading—as I read—my bedroom window across from their kitchen window, where he sat turning pages till three A.M. His hand lifted in response, his kind smile and tired lidded eyes, the thick book open under yellow
light. I come from that comradely figure reading till dawn in the window, the same window where the candles were carefully lit on Friday nights—I come from wanting to be a Jew.

  I come from Christmas, the holiday for which I was named. Carried home in a swaddled bundle on Christmas Eve, little Holly Ann, laid down under the spreading boughs. How I stood, reciting, singing carols before that magical tree, year after year. I come from understanding that one can be named for something larger than the self. I come from prairie, woods, Twin Cities, the Mississippi as divide—as I am divided: into dust storms and untouched plains of snow, bad jokes and Keats, a babysitter’s Judaica and The Lives of the Saints, sarcastic affection for my siblings and battering political arguments with my father, a “self-made man,” a Republican. Totemic struggle—all of my life divided into fear and unbelieving joy.

  And through it all, that voice—her voice, reciting the canon of poems. She sang of Arms and the Man, Fruit of the Tree and Man’s Fall, of a flower in a cranny wall, of Death, who would kindly stop for me, of the village smithy, of O Captain, My Captain and the Children’s Hour, of Hiawatha, laughing waters and one if by land, two if by sea, the Highwayman Riding Up to the Old Inn Door, the moon a ghostly galleon: its light filled with the sorrows of her changing face—Wandering Lonely as a Cloud. That’s where I began—that cloud, that wandering—O that’s where I come from: I come from that.

  We were deep into our first workshop meeting at the Women’s House, and I attempted to establish ground rules. I looked around at the expectant faces.

  “The way the workshop is set up—each poet writes a poem, then reads it to the group. After that we talk about it and try to improve the poem. Make it better. That’s it.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Look,” I said, “the idea is that you write about what you know. Something you know.”

  Baby Ain’t glanced around at the others, her clown face in place.

  “Say we all know this poem.”

  She stood on her tiptoes and began to recite. Everyone but Akilah, Aliganth, and me joined in.

  One fine day in the middle of the night

  Two dead boys got up to fight.

  Back to back they faced each other,

  Drew their swords and shot each other.

  One was blind, the other couldn’t see

  So they chose the sun for a referee.

  A deaf policeman heard the noise

  And came to arrest the two dead boys.

  If you don’t believe this story’s true

  Ask the blind man, he saw it too.

  We talked for a while about “Two Dead Boys.” Nearly everyone seemed to know it, but no one knew where it had come from or who had written it. I decided to look it up later in the library.

  I tried again. “What I meant was a poem that you write yourself. Something you remember from your childhood—or maybe something you saw once. Write about someone in your family. Add your words to a memory. You can rhyme or not rhyme. It’s up to you.”

  “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” quoted Akilah—then crossed her arms over her chest and leaned back in her chair, her fuck-you gaze on me.

  I was pretty sick of Marx. “Sort of,” I said. “But a little more like The Price Is Right.”

  Much later, on the bus back to Manhattan, I pulled from my bag the poem that Billie Dee Boyd had written in response to the assignment. It was printed in pencil in big tumbling hard-to-decipher letters on ruled Rainbow tablet paper. Beneath the printed words was the tentative signature: “Billie Dee Boyd, Poet.” I’d helped her correct the spelling errors because she said she wanted me to have a “keep clean” copy. I read the poem slowly, carefully—and then I read it again.

  Why was it, I wondered, as the bus lumbered along, that I suddenly envisioned my mother, pregnant, in a pale lemon-yellow sundress, on a humid early summer day, in our backyard on Pascal Street, hanging wash? Fastening wet laundry to the line with wooden clothespins—clutching one or two pins in her teeth like a war hero unpinning hand grenades with her incisors, grimacing like John Wayne. A heaped-up wicker basket lay at her feet. Sheets bellying up a little, damp underwear and baby diapers, dozens of them, then my first brassiere: undergarments as personal history. That early summer air suffused with the scent of orange blossoms, dark pink peonies, white and purple lilacs, a cascade of bleeding hearts and little white bells of lily-of-the-valley, exhaling atomized fragrance out of their hundred flower-mouths, insisting on themselves, jostling in a swift breeze—a tribe of blossoms, circling the house.

  I could see her more clearly after the laundry filled the line, standing near the breezeway, by the sandbox where the red swing hung on its doubled rusted silver chains. She shook her right hand (a nervous habit) as if she’d just run out of a burning house with her hand on fire, flapping away the flames. I watched her there, sensing suddenly as I stared into memory that I was there too, in the picture. I could see myself then—looking at her and holding something in my arms: a big diaper-heavy baby, yet another bed wetter, sack of piss and whine, against one canted hip. A sibling, just up from a nap, mouth slack, drooling forthrightly on my neck. I did love babies, loved their soft powdery smell and trusting fat faces, but the drool and the poop convinced me: there were too many of us.

  My mother looked up and smiled at me and my burden.

  “No rest for the wicked,” she called. “So I guess I’ve been bad!”

  How had she been bad? I’d wondered. She was unpredictable and sometimes mean, unsparing—but always truthful, righteously angry, compassionate. Raised by immigrant parents, “full-blooded Bohunks,” as she described them. She mingled a little Czech with her everyday exhortations: “Pick up that chupeek, you doosk!” A chupeek, we learned, was a small thing, a button or pin or unnameable widget (also a belly button). A doosk was a dumb oaf. My mother’s family was Catholic and my father’s Norwegian Lutheran. His family was a bit glacial, tall and blond and reserved. My father “turned,” as they said, for her—converted from Lutheranism to Rome, with its painted images and gold vestments—and his mother never forgave him. Or her. She came to their wedding and refused to drink the wine (she was a member of the Ladies’ Temperance Union) or dance with her son, the groom.

  I took a cab from the Women’s Bail Fund meeting at 117th and Broadway, down to Sam Glass’s place. When Sam Glass gave a dinner party, it was a literary event. Sam Glass was a self-created phenomenon, editor of Samizdat West, which some wags thought should be called Sam Is At. Sam, as it had come to be known, was underwritten by Sam’s patron, the water-softener heiress, guest of honor at tonight’s dinner party.

  Sam Glass lived in a midtown building designed by a famous architect, in the penthouse-apartment-with-terrace. The place looked Moroccan, especially at night. The walls were blood-colored and covered with photos of the Blue Men, the Tuareg nomads of the valleys of the High Atlas Mountains—the fire-walkers who stepped high over burning coals, exhaling kif while praying to Allah. And hard by: a photo of the forbidden—a woman in a veil, in burka, her wild eyes taunting above the dark cloth. There were also framed shots of famous expatriate writers whom Sam had met in Tangiers and who were now his friends and contributors to Samizdat. I slipped in through the open front door. The air was heavy with incense and with the aroma of the main course, a tagine: chicken slow-baked in a bath of red wine, prunes, and onions.

  I slid into an empty chair, waving to Sam, a dark-haired, magnetic presence at the head of the table. He lifted his wrist and pointed to his watch. Late, he mouthed, then mock-frowned and turned away. There were only ten of us at dinner, and I found that my place at the table was next to Baylor Drummond, the former poet laureate who was famous for his strong jaw, rangy height, and sterling blank verse. He was also famous for his cruel sense of humor. He liked me, for some reason, which was why I’d been seated next to him. I was considered acceptable by the Sam Glass crowd. To them I was a plucky, sometimes feisty young woman, and
a decent conversationalist. I’d been seated next to Drum before at dinner parties. He was between wives at the moment, and he appeared to crave pluck. Though I had learned that (like so many men) he didn’t like his pluck revved up to the smart-ass level.

  Drum didn’t acknowledge my arrival. He was engaged in passionate conversation about fund-raising for the arts with the water-softener heiress, who was seated across from him. He did, however, pat my hand as I sat down. The heiress noticed this gesture, stopped midsentence, and glanced at me.

  “I know you,” she said.

  “Hi. I’m Holly Mattox. We’ve met before.”

  “Is that Missoni? That you’re wearing?” she asked. Then shot a quick flicker of a look at Drum.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

  I looked down at my napkin and thought ruefully, furiously, that my awkwardness came from having been a tomboy, from fighting with my brothers as I grew up, from living in my head. These were all reasons for my disconnection from my body, my looks. I knew that I was clumsy, yet, for all my embarrassment, somehow insistent on myself. My parents sent me money, I could buy what I wanted. But I didn’t know what I wanted. I knew I did not want to be a capitalist pawn, but I also did not want to be thought of as an unsophisticated oaf. A doosk, my mother would have said. I knew I didn’t want a Missoni skirt, but I wouldn’t have minded knowing who the hell Missoni was.

  I stood on one foot and then the other in my mind. In the physical world I was half there. I walked a herky-jerky walk, my hands flew up and around my face as I talked, I had nervous tics. I would occasionally stutter, then rush to the point in argument, startling my fellow conversationalists. No thanks, can’t dance—but may be heard later over the band, arguing about Equal Rights.