by Pam Houston
132. Davis, California
Back on the greenbelt, this time with Fenton the dog and Liam, big brother showing little brother the ropes. If you have spent every day of your life, as Liam has, on a ranch in Colorado, the tiniest things can impress you. Streetlights, water sprinklers, fire trucks, bicycles, roller blades. Everywhere he looks, so many people, each one of them the keeper of a potential pet.
In my undergrad nonfiction class a kid named Zachary reads an essay about his mother whipping him with a belt, cursing at him, leaving marks, and when he’s finished I say, “How many of you actually got beaten as a kid?” When at least twelve of the eighteen students raise their hands, I say, “Huh. That’s not the impression we have of your generation at all. We think you have parents who spent their whole days driving you to clay class and judo and start-your-own-business camp and wrote your term papers for you and never even once raised their voice.”
When I went around the room on the first day of class and asked everyone what song they would take to the desert island, a kid named Daniel Liu, who went to a high school so rough all the kids called him Yao Ming even though he is only five foot one, said “Stella Was a Diver and She Was Always Down,” so right at the end of class Monday I said, “I’ve got two tickets to Interpol tonight in San Francisco, and if Daniel wants them he can have them but if not they are up for grabs.”
Daniel started furiously texting the one guy he knew with a car on campus and when his friend didn’t respond I said, “Just take the tickets anyway, if you can’t reach your friend come back this afternoon and I’ll give you money for the train,” and he smiled really big and said, “Professor, are you telling me to have an adventure?”
I love when the whole world does an end around itself, like the way all the boys in my class are writing about their broken hearts, and all the girls’ stories have sentences in them like, I fucked him with my eyes.
When I am walking with the wolfhounds on the greenbelt, everybody wants to remind me of their super-short lifespan, as if I wouldn’t already know about it, as if I was enjoying their company in too carefree a manner, as if the value of a life ought to be measured in months and years instead of moments: Liam bounding after a wild turkey, Fenton running between two rows of durum wheat, his coat the same rich blond as the quivering sheaves, his head just tall enough to be seen above them, a giant smile on his thin black lips.
In the room with the periodic tables on the wall, Barry Lopez said we are pattern makers, and if our patterns are beautiful and full of grace they will be able to bring a person for whom the world has become broken and disorganized up off his knees and back to life. He also said discipline is the highest form of self-respect.
Back at Indian Springs with Cinder, someone has set two hundred yellow rubber ducks aswim in the giant blue pool, and you might not think rubber ducks could make you gasp at their beauty but in the late afternoon sun I assure you they can.
Last night Cinder read The New Yorker while I fell asleep next to her in the comfy spa bed. Of all the things I love to do with Cinder, this is the thing I love most: going to sleep being watched over by her because I know she can kick the shit out of anybody. What Cinder loves most of all is being able to read long into the night without keeping somebody awake. This is why we say we might get married to each other, after the men are dead.
Anybody trained in close reading knows there’s no real difference between bravado and bravery. If we were playing Would You Rather . . . ? and you said, “Would you rather continue to circle the globe prophylactically collecting suicide prevention nuggets,” I wouldn’t even hear the second half of the question. Would it therefore be wrong to admit that part of me wants to be Rick’s special girl?
For a long time I thought the object of the game was identifying the question, love versus freedom, Mandela versus Buthelezi, leave or stay forever ghosted under a thick curtain of oil. Nora said, Maybe a choice isn’t the right way to think of it, by which she might have meant, A question loses its power when there is only one answer, as in, yes to Bhutan and Barstow. Yes to chanterelles and portobellos. A temple. Yes. A mosque. Yes. The changeable heart of a child.
Turns out after all that Truth is a woman. She’s an Apple technician working at the Mac store, Corte Madera, her hair doesn’t shimmer and she’s not very nice.
On Thursday night, in front of the Baskin-Robbins, the president of the Fire University filled his mouth with kerosene, set his breath on fire, and roared like a dragon.
How did I ever think I’d get to freedom, without my arms swung open wide?
Janine said, “Swimming is a great idea, but you’re also probably going to have to drown a little.”
It staggers the imagination to contemplate what Harvested Rainwater, Please Do Not Drink might really mean.
TG #944
ONCE UPON A TIME, I decided to take Ethan around the world. It was probably an ill-advised decision. Let’s just say that when I saw the email to his third most important other girlfriend two weeks before we left, the one that said, Pam is dangling this round-the-world trip like the proverbial carrot at the end of the fishing pole, I wished I had my $14,700 back.
We went to Paris, Bangkok, Bhutan, Perth, Alice Springs, and Sydney and I suspect that in reality, it was a pretty wretched trip, the betrayals revealed, the breakup imminent. There was likely some screaming and crying, no doubt tensions were high.
But here is what I remember: the little boy pouring himself a shower from a bucket in the labyrinthine canals of Bangkok; the sign in a café window in Geraldton that said, Lost: Kangaroo. Beloved pet and dog’s best friend, and a number to call should the kangaroo be discovered; the middle-aged Italians singing Happy Birthday to me on the airport bus at Uluru; Ethan’s smile, backlit by the sun coming through hundreds of white prayer flags on top of the Dochu La in Bhutan.
Also this pleasure: flying over the part of the globe I had not flown over before. I had flown west to Asia, east to Europe and Africa, but everything east of Germany, everything west of India, was in my imagination a big blank space.
The Thai Air 747 from Frankfurt to Bangkok traveled mostly at night, but there was a nearly full moon, and snow in the mountains. According to the computerized route map we would fly over Moldavia, Ukraine, Russia, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. I stayed up all night while Ethan slept, knowing that though life is long, and every time I get ten bucks ahead I go somewhere, this was still the best view I would ever get of many of these countries.
Afghanistan was mostly snow-covered treeless mountain ranges dotted with occasional flashes of red, possibly infrared light. I am 39,000 feet above a war, I thought, the closest I have been in my lifetime.
These days Rick wonders (aloud) if I will ever grow up enough to realize that everything I’m searching for on the other side of the world I could find just as well at my own kitchen table.
“Maybe someday,” I say, cheerfully, “except that I can’t.”
Sofree told Madison she doesn’t like to fly, the she, of course, being Madison, and when Madison reports the conversation to me I say “do too,” and she says “do not” and I say “do too,” and she says “do not” and I say “do too” and then we tickle each other. Last week she said, “I don’t know what all I got from my mother, but what I got from you is not to be grossed out by things.”
Madison will be nine years old next Saturday, which means I have known her for exactly one-third of her life. We get her from Sofree for twenty-four hours at five o’clock and we are taking the Amtrak up to Winter Park to play mini golf and ride the Alpine Slide, which I realize is not exactly the Orient Express but it’s something.
I think about the places left to go: Mongolia, Namibia, Sri Lanka, Yemen, and have grown up enough to realize it will be good not to get to all of them. Also to recognize the two long straws I drew in the psyche lottery: I have no memory for the really bad stuff, and I’ve never quite understood shame.
The first time I saw the
Earth get made, cool from lava, to black glass to something called Hawai’i, I didn’t think I would cry but I was mistaken.
Eventually, on that long night over the parts of the globe I’ll never see, the sun rose over Myanmar, and in Rangoon, where the Yangon River meets the Andaman Sea, the turrets and domes of the temples lit up as soft and gold in the early light as a fairy tale.
Acknowledgments
In the Kingdom of Bhutan, it is not enough to simply say thank you. In the language of Dzonka, a direct translation of the words used to express gratitude is, Thank you beyond the sky and the earth.
To the writers who gave me artistic permission for this book including but not limited to: Richard Bausch, Tim O’Brien, Fenton Johnson, Mike McNally, Mark Doty, Nick Flynn, Larry Levis, Carl Phillips, Lucy Corin, David Shields, and Toni Morrison.
To the writers who each read this manuscript at a critical time: Tami Anderson, Shannon Pufahl, Tina Watson, and Cindy Martin; and Karen Nelson, my human safety deposit box.
To the healers: Denise Platt Lichtig, Irit Schaffer, Chris Trujillo, Gyana Freund, Gerhardt Dietrich, Pam Kafer, and John Howard. Also Bhadra, Bahkta, Daryl, Aaron, Michael, Damien, and the awesome Thai masseuse at Mi Amo.
To Alane Salierno Mason for her unfailing ear, her abounding insight, and her knack for saying just the right thing at just the right time.
To Liz Darhansoff for hanging in there, Denise Scarfi for a million little things I will never even know about, Amy Robbins for her keen eye, and Matt Crosby for his optimism.
To Linda Russell, Sarah Schoentgen, Dex Decker, and others who cared for my animals while I was gone.
To the friends and students whose wisdom has touched these pages in one way or another.
To Greg and Kaeliegh Glazner for being exactly who they are and for loving me.
Thank you beyond the sky and the earth.
* * *
The author also wishes to thank the editors of the following magazines where excerpts of this book appeared in a slightly (or in some cases radically) altered form:
Ploughshares
Hayden’s Ferry Review
The Iowa Review
The Idaho Review
Iron Horse Literary Review
Orion
CONTENTS MAY HAVE SHIFTED
Pam Houston
R E A D I N G G R O U P G U I D E
T H E A U T H O R O N H E R W O R K
About five years ago, I was asked to be one of four writers to participate in an evening called “Unveiled” at the Wisconsin Book Festival in Madison. Our assignment was to write something new that had never been tried or tested and read it aloud to an audience of roughly a thousand. I not only accepted; I took the assignment so literally I didn’t start writing until I was on the plane to Wisconsin. I wrote for the entire plane ride, and all evening in my hotel room. I stayed up all night and wrote, and I wrote all day the day of the reading. When I started to panic that I would not have something ready in time for the reading, I told myself what I tell my students when they get stuck: Write down all of the things out in the world that have arrested your attention lately, that have glimmered at you in some resonant way. Set them next to each other. See what happens.
By late afternoon I had twelve tiny scenes. I have always, for some reason, thought in twelves. I don’t believe this has anything to do with the apostles. One scene was called Georgetown, Great Exuma. Another was called Ozona, Texas. Another was called Juneau, Alaska. Two hours before I was to read, I looked back at my instructions to make sure I had done everything the assignment asked of me. The only caveat, it said, was that the piece had to mention Wisconsin. I knew nothing about Wisconsin, so I left my hotel room and sat on a street corner downtown and waited for something to happen. In less than thirty minutes, something did, and I went back to my room and wrote it down. When I added Madison, Wisconsin, to the original twelve, I had to take out Mexican Hat, Utah, but that was okay with me.
“Jesus, Pam,” Richard Bausch said after the reading. “Write a hundred of them, and that’s your next book.” I thought, “No, not a hundred, but possibly a hundred and forty-four.”
When I went on tour with my first book, a collection of short stories called Cowboys Are My Weakness, I was asked, more than any other question, How much of this really happened to you? “A lot of it,” was my honest answer, night after night, but the audience grew dissatisfied with that answer and seemed, more than anything, to want something quantifiable, so I began saying, also honestly, “About eighty-two percent.”
Eight years later, when I published my first “nonfiction” book, and went on tour with it, I would often be introduced in some version of the following manner: “In the past we have gotten eighty-two percent Pam, and now we are going to get one hundred percent,” and I would approach the microphone and feel the need to say, “Well, no, still coming in right about eighty-two.”
It has been five years since my trip to Madison, Wisconsin, and I have 144 chapters. One hundred thirty-two of them are titled with a place name, divided into groups of 12 by 12 single stories that take place no place—on an airplane, thirty-nine thousand feet above the ground. I had to make a decision as to whether the airplane stories would count as 12 of the 144, or over and above the 144, but that turned out to be easy. If I stuck to 132 non-airplane stories, I needed just 12 airplane stories to serve as both dividers and bookends.
If I wrote 144 non-airplane stories, I would have needed 13, which would have ruined everything.
In the final stages of editing, I sent an e-mail to my editor saying, “Is it wrong of me to want to call myself Pam in this book? Should I just change my name to Melinda and be done with it?”
She wrote back saying, “No, I like Pam. I think we want people to think it is both you and not you,” and I sat in front of the computer and nearly wept with gratitude.
Six months before my father lost his job and we drove to Las Vegas, he threw me across the room and broke my femur. I think it’s possible he meant to kill me, and I spent the rest of my childhood, the rest of his life, really, thinking he probably would. Speaking only for myself, now, I cannot see any way that my subsequent well-being depends on whether or not, or how much, you believe what I am telling you—that is to say—on the difference (if there is any) between 82 and 100 percent true. My well-being (when and if it exists) resides in the gaps language leaves between myself and the corn maze, myself and the Las Vegas junkies, myself and the elk chest deep in snow. It is there, in that white space of language’s limitation, that I am allowed to touch everything, and it is in those moments of touching everything that I am some version of free.
When my agent read the first draft of my book, she said in dismay, You haven’t taken us anywhere and yet you have taken us everywhere! I know what she was asking for was more resolution, which she was right to ask for and which I subsequently provided, but I still don’t know how to inflect her sentence in a way in which it doesn’t sound like praise.
One thing I am sure of, having spent the last five years inside a shattered narrative, is that time is a worthy opponent. It does not give up quietly. It does not give up kicking and screaming. It does not, in fact, give up at all. Time is like when you break a thermometer and all the mercury runs around the table trying like crazy to reconstitute itself. Or like the way PCB can start out in a glass transformer in Alabama and wind up on the island of Svalbard, inside a polar bear cub’s brain. A shattered narrative is still a narrative. We can’t escape it; it is what we are.
Excerpted from “Corn Maze,” which originally appeared in Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction (University of Iowa Press, 2012), Jill Talbot, ed.
D I S C U S S I O N Q U E S T I O N S
1. How do you feel about Pam Houston’s decision to model her character, Pam, on herself without writing the book as a memoir? Are categories like “novel,” “memoir,” and “autobiographical novel” important to you, or do they have little effect on your reading experience?
3. Female friendship plays an important role in Pam’s story. What are some of the joys and pitfalls of your own relationships with members of the same sex? How is the love experienced in friendship similar to or different from that experienced in a romantic relationship?
4. Did you like Houston’s use of vignettes, or did you crave a more streamlined narrative? How does this fractured structure contribute to or take away from the story that ultimately emerges?
5. Discuss your favorite scenes from the book. Why did they stand out?
6. Contents is, in part, a celebration of natural beauty. What are some of the most breathtaking places you “encountered” in the book? Which would you like to see for yourself?
7. Part of Pam’s journey in Contents is a search for spirituality, but not the kind that leads her to a church. What is the nature of the “spirituality” she seeks, and do you think she finds it in the end?
8. By the end of the novel, do you feel Pam’s thrill-seeking self has been tempered by her relationship with Rick and Madison? Is “settling down” a necessary part of life, or a relic of an earlier time?
9. Pam’s relationship with Rick requires compromise. How do we change when we enter relationships, romantic or otherwise? How do we know which parts of ourselves we must conserve and which we might change or sacrifice to be better partners?