Oranges, blood red and drooping from trees. The delicious cinnamon scent of burning leaves. A tower of white smoke, a dragon in a garden where roses grew. And this one, over and over again. A staircase descending through layers of feminine moss, with odors dank and promising, a single star in the sky above. The auras were dreams during the day, and I discovered I could be talking to a person like, “Hello, how are you,” and be staring at this star too. The star was like a speck of salt in my eye, but it didn’t hurt.
I was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, and I appeared to grow more normal. It took me only forty-eight hours to recuperate after the operation. Nothing felt any different, at least at first. Then one day, two days, three days, a whole week passed, without a single seizure. That was different, wow! I was confused. Suddenly I had all this time on my hands, all this time on my feet. I got very, very bored.
Luckily, though, they sent a whole team of rehabilitation therapists to reintegrate me. Susie, Jennie, Craig and Chris, a team from Beth Israel, I went to them; they went to me. In general, the team tried to teach me social skills, with minimal success. They took me swimming and to volleyball. In the tenth grade, I joined the drama club. In the eleventh grade, I started tennis. I played junior varsity field hockey, but I never danced with a boy.
Sometimes my auras were tinglings that moved from my mouth to my belly to you know where. I was seventeen, but matters of sex so embarrassed me that I could only speak of our God-given anatomy in terms like “you know where,” and “down there.” One day, when I was typing a story for an English class, I had an aura that ended in an orgasm. I pressed the Q key, and heat went through me; I pressed the U key, and the heat turned to a sweaty shiver, and I came to the sound of I-E-T, quiet, clack, quiet, and each pulse of pleasure was a word, and the words were turquoise, as beautiful and complex as coral in the Caribbean Sea.
Something happened to me then. The next time I felt an aura descend, I went straight to my desk, straight to my notebook. Holding my pen, I wrote, faster and faster, and although no orgasm came, the words were pure pleasure, physical rhythmic objects that released dreams like birds from a magician’s fist. Faster and faster I flew, yellow bird, red bird, and when I was done, I saw a story before me. The story started like this:
Summers were long seasons of dry air and gardens and fields that slope down to the sea. The long afternoons were most beautiful and hardest to bear. The sun struck everything into silence. Time stopped ticking, or seemed to. The air was a lot like a young girl’s skin at the peak of her arousal, when even the hard scars fill with a scarlet softness.
Where had I found such language, such elegance, I who did not dance with boys? I didn’t know, then, about the proven link between epilepsy, auras and creativity. Even though the surgery was successful, I was still an epileptic, just less seriously so. And I didn’t know that Dostoevski’s best moments often came during his epileptic auras, when he perceived the shapes of sounds so acutely he could have cried. Or van Gogh, who, standing in a field full of sunflowers, painted the yellow the way he saw it in a preseizure state, a yellow of fairy tales, of melted gold.
So started my interest in the arts. I bought Esquire magazine because the cover advertised an author interview. The author looked like a film star, looming out with her dark hair, her eyes all dream. Jayne Anne Phillips. Her stories, the article said, were “stunning,” were “bits of crooked beauty,” as though her words themselves had given her skin such glow. I stared at the picture and then I bought her book. “Oh Jamaica Delilah,” I read, “how I want you, your smell a clean yeast, a high white yogurt of the soul. Raymond never made it with you in the bathtub, did he, soap flowers white on your high Mongolian cheeks, your lips mouthing a heavenly O of surprise.”
Wow, I thought. Making it, I thought. I decided to write like that, all spike and sex.
So I did. I held Black Tickets in one hand, a pen in the other, and I wrote, “Long time ago, Janey walked in the dark, breasts beneath her nightgown slow as the sea; she rises only for Raymond, her pimp.”
I began to dress in filmy scarves and black leggings. I bangled myself with silver. I took long bubble baths and, like Jamaica Delilah, saw the soap flowers on my nipples, which were cherry red and perfect.
The summer before my freshman year in college I applied to a place called Bread Loaf, a fourteen-day writers’ conference in Vermont. Anybody who was anybody knew Bread Loaf was the best around, a significant step on the road to recognition. I said on the application that I was nineteen years old, the minimum age. I sent in the story about Janey and her pimp, a very avant-garde piece that faced sex squarely on. I was sure I’d get in. I could tell I had talent. I could see it, but more important I could feel it in the way the words slid from me, so fast, so smoothly, as though all my openings were oiled and the birth was meant to be.
“Bread Loaf,” my mother said. She’d never gotten famous as a writer of maxims, and this was maybe a disappointment even greater than I. She lay on her chaise longue, and she took Elavil, and sometimes I wanted to say, “Mom, what happened to you? You used to sizzle.”
“Bread loaf?” she said. “That sounds,” she said, and paused. “I have a hard time believing a place which calls itself a loaf of bread has anything worthwhile to offer.”
But she gave me the money. Now all I had to do was wait.
• • •
A week passed. Then two weeks. Every day I checked the mail. Every day I called Carol, the secretary at the conference, to find out when I would hear. “This is Lauren Slater calling,” I would say. “Soon,” Carol would say. I was just so excited. I saw myself at that conference in Vermont, in a room made of mahogany, at a desk facing a field, and every day, after a supper of wilted greens, famous people attending to my work.
I pictured editors with horn-rimmed glasses and pocket watches, and fresh milk in the mornings.
“This Slater girl,” people would say. “She’s young. She’s raw. She’s brilliant.”
Brilliant were those days of waiting, those days of May, when the sky was soft, the air warm, and the sun went down in a pool of red. I lay looking for the mailman on a lounge chair in our side yard, Pepsi snapping in my frosted glass.
And then the letter came. “Dear Ms. Slater,” it read. “Your work has been reviewed by one of our readers, and while she feels it shows promise, she suggests you mature a bit and apply again at a later date.”
Clearly, I thought, this is a mistake. Clearly, the reader, a she and probably ancient too, had lacked my sense of erotic style. I knew how the admissions committee worked from reading the Bread Loaf pamphlet. I knew each piece was assigned a reader and your fate depended on whatever that particular person thought. I wanted a new reader, someone very hip, and then I thought of how I might accomplish this. I picked up the phone.
“Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference,” Carol said.
“Yes,” I said, making my voice very, very high so she would not recognize it. “Is it too late to apply?”
“We have one reader who still has time to review a few manuscripts,” Carol said.
“Oh,” I said, my voice like Minnie Mouse, “who is she?”
“He,” the secretary said. “This reader is a he. But we don’t give out names.”
“I would like to apply,” I said, still squeaking.
“You may,” she said.
So I did. I had a clean copy of the application, and where it asked for my name I wrote Jean Levy, and I said I was nineteen again, and I sent in the exact same story, about Janey and her pimp Raymond, and he, whoever he was, my new hip reader, liked it a lot, and two weeks later the letter came, and it said, “Dear Jean. Welcome.”
• • •
I took the bus. I was seventeen, but not allowed a driver’s license even though the operation had made my epilepsy so much better. Still, the RMV said no, first because there was still a 10 percent chance I might have a seizure and second because of the little side effects left over from the surgery. You would t
hink an operation as dramatic as a corpus callostomy would cause some serious damage to the mind, and it’s amazing that that’s not the case. The brain is an incredibly adaptive organ. In some instances a doctor can literally scoop out one whole epileptic hemisphere, leaving the person with just the other hemisphere, literally half a brain, and the person is fine, fine!
Well, I didn’t have half a brain, I had a whole brain, thank God, but it was split, and if I parted my hair I could see the scar, a tiny pink thing, a cesarean scratch, all glossy to the touch. My most prominent side effect was psychological; it’s hard to feel comfortable knowing your brain has been halved. You can’t believe you feel so normal, but you do. The most distressing physical problem after such surgery involves the eyes, which is why the RMV wouldn’t give me a license. If I closed my left eye, for instance, I couldn’t read any road signs. I couldn’t read anything at all with my left eye closed. This was because only the right side of my brain knew language, and when my left eye was closed the right side, disconnected from the left, went to sleep. I didn’t actually experience this as an impediment, however, especially because I wasn’t planning to drive with one eye closed, but the RMV thought maybe I might have to someday.
So I was not a driver. I bused myself everywhere those days, to Newton Center for Raspberry Sea Breeze Freezes and to Chestnut Hill, where I bought exfoliating scrub and pore minimizer at the Rix drugstore. And to Vermont, where Bread Loaf was.
“Jean Levy,” I said to myself over and over again on the Peter Pan bus going to Bread Loaf. “Remember, your name is Jean Levy.” The ride was long, ten hours long, because we had to stop and pick up so many people on little winding back roads and horse farms too. I didn’t mind. I had time to practice my new name, getting used to the feel of it in my mouth.
Also, I had time to exercise my creativity. I had been reading a book about how to write, and the book said you should observe everything around you, take a lot of notes, and always try to see through your neighbor’s eyes. I had a lot of neighbors on that bus ride up, and, therefore, a lot of eyes to try to see through. At every stop people got off to stretch or smoke or eat a hot dog, and when they did, I sat in their seats and felt the way the foam cushions had molded to their specific shapes, and I became their specific shapes, a whole series of shapes and smells in those different seats. When the black lady got off the bus to get a soda in the Ho Jo’s, I sat in her seat, and I tried on the sunglasses she’d left behind. I was in her world then, her eyes my eyes, a place dark green, every leaf a mint.
I tried on an old man’s fedora hat and smelled his scalp and saw two strands of his hair on the silk lining. I studied the hair carefully, and then made note of it on my pad. “Details,” the book on writing had said, “are an essential aspect of your creative craft,” so I paid close attention. “Hair,” I wrote. “Two silver strands of hair, with a masculine smell.”
On and on we drove. My ears popped as we entered the mountains. When I opened the Peter Pan windows, cool air flowed in, and I saw two deer standing on a slope by the side of the road, their slender heads lifted, their eyes, infinite pools.
• • •
Most of the conference participants stayed in the main house, but I, plus three other girls, all of us the youngest, were bunked in a small cabin across from the dining hall and next to the genteel building where the famous faculty went each night to drink alcohol.
Our cabin was cute. It had its own farmer’s porch, and two little rooms with iron beds and blue blankets and blue painted wooden floors. Beneath the bunk lived a family of animals we never identified, raccoons, probably, their claws scrabbling, the sound like pencils scratching on paper, a long, midnight story. We slept to the sound of the animals, and woke to their cooing, and smelled their mysterious fur.
I liked my bunkmates. I could have, should have, even grown to like them a lot, if only events had turned out differently. Of course the whole time they never even knew my name; they thought I was Jean. Still, they were the first girls my age who not only accepted oddness but coveted it. In short, they were either rejects like me or so completely artistic that they had transcended all adolescent categories. There was Helen, nineteen going on forty, a poetess with waist-length black hair and high heels. There was Ellie, my roommate, the opposite of Helen, pale and plump, with soft red hair; she was writing a novel and the only thing I now remember about it is that the heroine got poison ivy in her vagina. Rebecca was from the South, and she, like me, wrote short stories.
We all ate dinner together the first night, huddling at our own table in the cafeteria while waitresses with armpit hair served us lentil soup and thick slices of brown bread. We talked about writing and our futures as writers, and, here, I fit right in. I told them about my preseizure auras, and how it was in an aura that I discovered my creativity. I talked about wanting to someday write a whole book about my epilepsy and my surgery, a book called Lying, I said, and everyone was impressed. Outside the day grew dark and we were so far north the aurora borealis was faintly visible, the sky shining, and on the way back to our bunk later on, an owl soared over us, pure white and looking for mice.
• • •
The whole point of the conference was to have a famous writer read your work and give you feedback. I would like to tell you who my famous writer was, but, because of the unhappy and damning events that came to pass, I have had to change his name and identifying features.
I saw him the next morning, in the barn, where I and my bunkmates went for a late breakfast of bagels and coffee. Let’s say his name was Christopher, and his last name, well, let’s call him Christopher Marin.
He was older, this Christopher Marin, and very famous, with two books under his belt and a Guggenheim. He was from the South. He had green eyes sunk in facial wrinkles, and broad arms tipped with hairs bronzed by the sun. He was a well-dressed older man, and the morning I met him, he was wearing a crisp white oxford cloth shirt, and a pair of Levi’s jeans faded to fringe and white.
I sipped my coffee, a strong, black brew. He sat over in the corner of the barn, on a tattered red couch with a story that could have been mine spread out before him. He looked up and saw me. He squinted his eyes and stared.
“That’s Christopher Marin,” Ellie said. “Isn’t he your reader? He’s staring at you.”
“God am I starving,” I said, trying to act like I didn’t care. “Do you think they have any Pop-Tarts?”
“He looks lecherous,” said Helen. Helen, if I haven’t already mentioned it, was from Manhattan, and knew these sorts of things. She snorted, lit up a Marlboro.
“Do you think that’s my story he’s reading?” I said.
Meanwhile, Christopher Marin kept staring. He would look down at one of the pages—my pages?—read a little bit, look up into the air as though considering something profound, and then swing his gaze in our direction.
“A lot of people,” Helen said, “come to this conference just to fuck.”
“I know,” I said, even though I didn’t. I did know, however, a few things about sex. Just because I didn’t dance with boys didn’t mean I’d never been touched by one. A year ago, my parents and their friends and their friends’ fifteen-year-old son and I had all spent a week in Acapulco. The son’s name was David and once he had taken me to the hotel room and pulled down my underpants and put his finger up me, which I very much enjoyed.
I also enjoyed that I had grown up nearly pretty. I had clear skin, brown eyes, and what everyone called high cheekbones. I wore rouge on my cheeks to emphasize their height.
We drank our coffee and started to leave. That morning a literary agent was lecturing on how impossible it was to get published, and we all wanted to hear. We passed Christopher Marin as we were walking out of the barn and he said, “Excuse me.”
“Yes?” said Helen.
“You,” said Christopher, looking at me. “Did I hear you yesterday, during sign-in, say your name was, was Jean Levy?”
My heart went wild the
n. It did an elevator drop down to my ankles and the room started to spin, like right before a seizure. Oh my God, I thought. He knows I have an alias. He’s found out the truth. I’m going to be expelled.
I cleared my throat, spoke slowly. “Yes,” I said. “My name is Jean Levy.”
He smiled. “Sit,” he said, patting the cushion next to him.
“Why?” I said, my voice coming out as a croak.
“Why not?” he said.
“I’m going to hear a lecture,” I said.
“But I have your story here,” he said, rattling the sheaf of pages. “And I would love to talk with you, Jean.”
I felt such a sweet relief then; I hadn’t been caught. The spinning stopped. I wasn’t going to have a seizure. I smiled at him. I looked at the other girls. Ellie was grinning; Helen glared.
“You guys go on,” I said, and so they did.
• • •
The barn was just like a barn should be, the smell of sundried hay, birds in the rafters, poles of light shining in through dusty windows. The light fell at our feet, like a beautiful piece of yellow glass.
“Jean,” he said. “I have been reading you all morning.”
“Oh,” I said. I was suddenly so shy I could only look at the floor.
“Don’t be shy, Jean,” he said.
“I’m not shy,” I said.
“Good,” he said, “because in order to discuss your work with full artistic integrity, we will both need to not be shy.”
“Okay,” I said. I wasn’t totally sure what he meant, but I was pretty sure. My work was avant-garde and explicit, which did not mean I was avant-garde or explicit, but he thought so. Both he, and I, made the mistake of confusing the writer with her words.
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