It is time pounding at you, time. Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation’s short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.
Who turned on the lights? You did, by waking up: You flipped the light switch, started up the wind machine, kicked on the flywheel that spins the years. Can you catch hold of a treetop, or will you fly off the diving planet as she rolls? Can you ride out the big blow on the trunk of a coconut palm till the winds let up and you fall back asleep? You do, you fall asleep again, and you slide in a dream to the palm tree’s base; the winds die off, the lights dim, the years slip away as you idle there till you die in your sleep, till death sets you cruising.
Knowing you are alive is feeling the planet buck under you—rear, kick, and try to throw you—while you hang on to the ring. It is riding the planet like a log downstream, whooping. Or, conversely, you step aside from the dreaming fast loud routine and feel time as a stillness about you, and hear the silent air ask in so thin a voice, Have you noticed yet that you will die? Do you remember, remember, remember? Then you may feel your life as a weekend, a weekend you cannot extend.
When I was fifteen, I felt it coming; now I was sixteen, and it hit.
My feet had been set imperceptibly on a new path, a fast path into a long tunnel like those many turnpike tunnels near Pittsburgh, turnpike tunnels whose entrances bear on brass plaques a roll call of the men who died blasting them. I wandered witlessly forward and found myself going down, and saw the light dimming; I adjusted to the slant and dimness, traveled farther down, adjusted to greater dimness, and so on. There wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it, or about anything. I was going to hell on a handcart, that was all, and I knew it and everyone around me knew it, and there it was.
I was growing and thinning, as if pulled. I was getting angry, too, as if pushed. I morally disapproved of most things in North America, and blamed my innocent parents for them. My feelings deepened and lingered. The swift moods of early childhood—each formed by and suited to its occasion—vanished. Now feelings lasted so long they left stains. They arose from nowhere, like winds or waves, and battered me or engulfed me.
When I was angry, I felt myself coiled and longing to kill someone or bomb something big. One winter, trying to appease myself, I whipped my bed every afternoon with my uniform belt. I despised the spectacle I made in my own eyes—whipping the bed with a belt, like a creature demented!—and I often began halfheartedly, but I did it daily, after school, as a desperate discipline, trying to rid myself of my wildness.
Sometimes in class I couldn’t stop laughing; things were too funny to be borne. It began then, my surprise that no one else saw what was so funny.
I read some few books with such reverence I didn’t close them at the finish, but only moved the pile of pages back to the start, without breathing, and began again. I read one such book, an enormous novel, six times that way—closing the binding between sessions, but not between readings.
On the piano in the basement I played the maniacal “Poet and Peasant Overture” so loudly, for so many hours, night after night, I damaged the piano’s keys and strings. When I wasn’t playing this crashing overture, I played boogie-woogie, or something else, anything else, in octaves—otherwise, it wasn’t loud enough. My fingers were so strong I could do push-ups with them. I played one piece with my fists. I banged on a steel-stringed guitar till I bled, and once, on a particularly great rock-and-roll downbeat, I broke straight through one of Father’s snare drums.
I loved my boyfriend so tenderly, I thought I’d transmogrify into vapor. It would take spectroscopic analysis to locate my molecules in thin air. No way of holding him was close enough. Nothing could cure this bad case of gentleness except, perhaps, violence: if he swung me by the legs, maybe, and split my skull on a tree? Would that ease this insane wish to kiss too much his eyelids’ outer corners and his temples, as if I could love up his brain?
I envied people in books who swooned. For two years I felt myself continuously swooning and continuously unable to swoon. The blood drained from my face and eyes and flooded my heart; my hands emptied, my knees unstrung, I bit at the air for something worth breathing—but I failed to fall, and I couldn’t find the way to black out. I had to live on the lip of a waterfall, exhausted.
When I was bored I was first hungry, then nauseated, then furious and weak. “Calm yourself,” people had been saying to me all my life. Since early childhood I had tried one thing and then another to calm myself, on those few occasions when I truly wanted to. Eating helped; singing helped. Now sometimes I truly wanted to calm myself. I couldn’t lower my shoulders; they seemed to wrap around my ears. I couldn’t lower my voice, although I could see the people around me flinch. I waved my arm in class till the teachers themselves wanted to kill me.
I was what they called a live wire. I was shooting out sparks that were digging a pit all around me, and I was sinking into that pit. Laughing with Ellin at school recess, or driving around after school with Judy in her jeep, exultant, or dancing with my boyfriend to Louis Armstrong across a polished dining-room floor, I got so excited I looked around wildly for aid. I didn’t know where I should go or what I should do with myself. People in books split wood.
When rage reappeared, or boredom, it seemed never to have left. Each so filled me with so many years’ intolerable accumulation, it jammed the space behind my eyes so I couldn’t see. There was no room left to live. My rib cage was so tight I couldn’t breathe. Every cubic centimeter of atmosphere above my shoulders and head was heaped with last straws. I couldn’t peep, I couldn’t wiggle or blink; my blood was too mad to flow.
For as long as I could remember, I had been transparent to myself, unself-conscious, learning, doing, most of every day. Now I was in my own way; I myself was a dark object I could not ignore. I couldn’t remember how to forget myself. I didn’t want to think about myself, to reckon myself in, to deal with myself every livelong minute on top of everything else—but swerve as I might, I couldn’t avoid it. I was a boulder blocking my own path. I was a dog barking between my own ears, a barking dog who wouldn’t hush.
So this was adolescence. Was this how the people around me had died on their feet—inevitably, helplessly? Perhaps their own selves eclipsed the sun for so many years the world shriveled around them, and when at last their inescapable orbits had passed through these dark egoistic years, it was too late; they had adjusted.
Must I then lose the world forever, that I had so loved? Was it all, the whole bright and various planet, where I had been so ardent about finding myself alive, only a passion peculiar to children, that I would outgrow even against my will?
AN AMERICAN CHILDHOOD
OLD STONE PRESBYTERIAN
I QUIT THE CHURCH. I wrote the minister a fierce letter. The assistant minister, kindly Dr. James H. Blackwood, called me for an appointment. My mother happened to take the call.
“Why,” she asked, “would he be calling you?” I was in the kitchen after school. Mother was leaning against the pantry door, drying a crystal bowl.
“What, Mama? Oh. Probably,” I said, “because I wrote him a letter and quit the church.”
“You—what?” She began to slither down the doorframe, weak-kneed, like Lucille Ball. I believe her whole life passed before her eyes.
As I climbed the stairs after dinner I heard her moan to Father, “She wrote the minister and quit the church.”
“She—what?”
Father knocked on the door of my room. I was the only person in the house with a solitary room. Father ducked under the doorway, entered, and put his hands in his khakis’ pockets.
“Hi, Daddy.”
Actually, it drove me nuts when people came in my room. Mother had come in just last week. My room was getting to be quite the public arena. Pretty soon they’d put it on the streetcar routes. Why not hold the US Open here? I was on the bed, in uniform, trying to read a book. I sat up and folded my hands in my lap.
&n
bsp; I knew that Mother had made him come—“She listens to you.” He doubtless had been trying to read a book too.
Father looked around, but there wasn’t much to see. My rock collection was no longer in evidence. A framed tiger swallowtail, slightly askew on its white cotton backing, hung on a yellowish wall. On the mirror I’d taped a pencil portrait of Rupert Brooke looking off softly. He looked like my boyfriend. Balanced on top of the mirror were some yellow-and-black FALLOUT SHELTER signs, big aluminum ones that my friends had collected as part of their antiwar efforts. On the pale maple desk there were, among other books and papers, an orange thesaurus, a blue three-ring binder with a boy’s name written all over it in every typeface, a green assignment notebook, and Emerson’s Essays.
Father began with some vigor: “What was it you said in this brilliant letter?” At my silence he went on: Didn’t I see? That people did these things—quietly? Just—quietly? No fuss? No flamboyant gestures. No uncalled-for letters. He was forced to conclude that I had deliberately set out to humiliate Mother and him.
“And your poor sisters too!” Mother added feelingly from the hall outside my closed door. She must have been passing at that very moment.
Just then we all heard a hideous shriek ending in a wail; it came from my sisters’ bathroom. Had Molly cut off her head? It set us all back a moment—me on the bed, Father standing by my desk, Mother outside the closed door—until we all realized it was Amy, mad at her hair. Like me, Amy was undergoing a trying period, years long; she, on her part, was mad at her hair. She screeched at it wherever she was, the sound carrying all over the house, and it terrified all the rest of us, every time.
The assistant minister of the Shadyside Presbyterian Church, Dr. Blackwood, and I had a cordial meeting in his office. He was an experienced, calm man in a three-piece suit; he had a mustache and wore glasses. After he asked me why I had quit the church, he loaned me four volumes of C. S. Lewis’s broadcast talks for a paper I was writing. Among the volumes proved to be The Problem of Pain, which I would find fascinating, not quite serious enough, and much too short. I had already written a paper on the Book of Job. The subject scarcely seemed to be closed. If the all-powerful creator directs the world, then why all this suffering? Why did the innocents die in the camps, and why do they starve in the cities and farms? Addressing this question, I found thirty pages written thousands of years ago, and forty pages written in 1955. They offered a choice of fancy language saying, “Forget it,” or serenely worded, logical-sounding answers that so strained credibility (pain is God’s megaphone) that “Forget it” seemed in comparison a fine answer.
AN AMERICAN CHILDHOOD
TURNING OUT BADLY
FUNNY HOW BADLY I’D TURNED OUT. Now I was always in trouble. It felt as if I was doing just as I’d always done—I explored the neighborhood, turning over rocks. The latest rocks were difficult. I’d been in a drag race, of all things, the previous September, and in the subsequent collision, which landed me in the hospital; my parents saw my name in the newspapers, and their own names in the newspapers. Some boys I barely knew had cruised by that hot night and said to a clump of us girls on the sidewalk, “Anybody want to come along for a drag race?”
I did, absolutely. I loved fast driving.
It was then, in the days after the drag race, that I noticed the ground spinning beneath me, all bearings lost, and recognized as well that I had been loose like this—detached from all I saw and knowing nothing else—for months, maybe years. I whirled through the air like a bull-roarer spun by a lunatic who’d found his rhythm. The pressure almost split my skin. What else can you risk with all your might but your life?
Time unrolled before me in a line. I woke up and found myself in juvenile court. I was hanging from crutches; for a few weeks after the drag race, neither knee worked. In juvenile court, a policeman wet all ten of my fingertips on an inkpad and pressed them, one by one, using his own fingertips, on a form for files.
I’d already been suspended from school for smoking cigarettes. That was a month earlier, in early spring. Both my parents wept. Amy saw them, and began to cry herself. Molly, too, cried. She was six, missing her front teeth. Like the rest of us females, she had pale skin that turned turgid and red when she cried. She looked as if she were dying of wounds. I was the only one who didn’t cry; but then, I was an intercontinental ballistic missile with an atomic warhead. They don’t cry.
Late one night, my parents sat at the kitchen table; there was a truce. We were all helpless, and tired of fighting. Amy and Molly were asleep.
“What are we going to do with you?” Mother raised the question. Her voice trembled and rose with emotion.
She couldn’t sit still; she kept getting up and roaming around the kitchen. Father stuck out his chin and rubbed it with his big hands. I covered my eyes. Mother squeezed white lotion into her hands, over and over. We all smoked; the ashtray was full. Mother walked over to the sink, poured herself some ginger ale, ran both hands through her short blond hair to keep it back, and shook her head.
She sighed and said again, looking up and out of the night-black window, “Dear God, what are we going to do with you?”
My heart went out to them. We all seemed to have exhausted our options. They asked me for fresh ideas, but I had none. I racked my brain, but couldn’t come up with anything. The US Marines didn’t take sixteen-year-old girls.
AN AMERICAN CHILDHOOD
ENVOY
OUR FATHER TAUGHT US THE CULTURE into which we were born. American culture was Dixieland above all, Dixieland pure and simple, and next to Dixieland, jazz. It was the pioneers who went west singing “Bang away, my Lulu.” When someone died on the Oregon Trail, as someone was always doing, the family scratched a shallow grave right by the trail, because the wagon train couldn’t wait. Everyone paced on behind the oxen across the empty desert and some families sang “Bang away, my Lulu” that night, and some didn’t.
Our culture was the stock-market crash—the biggest and best crash a country ever had. Father explained the mechanics of the crash to young Amy and me, around the dining-room table. He tried to explain why men on Wall Street had jumped from skyscrapers when the stock market crashed: “They lost everything!”—but of course I thought they lost everything only when they jumped. It was the breadlines of the Depression, and the Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl, and the proud men begging on city streets, and families on the move seeking work—dusty women, men in black hats pulled over their eyes, haunted, hungry children: what a mystifying spectacle, this almost universal misery, city families living in cars, farm families eating insects, because—why? Because all the businessmen realized at once, on the same morning, that paper money was only paper. What terrible fools. What did they think it was?
American culture was the World’s Fair in Chicago, baseball, the Erie Canal, fancy nightclubs in Harlem, silent movies, summer-stock theater, the California forty-niners, the Alaska gold rush, Henry Ford and his bright idea of paying workers enough to buy cars, P. T. Barnum and his traveling circus, Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West Show. It was the Chrysler Building in New York and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco; the Monitor and the Merrimack, the Alamo, the Little Bighorn, Gettysburg, Shiloh, Bull Run, and “Strike the tent.”
It was Pittsburgh’s legendary Joe Magarac, the mighty Hungarian steelworker, who took off his shirt to reveal his body made of high-grade steel, and who squeezed out steel rail between his knuckles by the ton. It was the brawling rivermen on the Ohio River, the sandhogs who dug Hudson River tunnels, silver miners in Idaho, cowboys in Texas, and the innocent American Indian Jim Thorpe, who had to give all his Olympic gold medals back. It was the men of every race who built the railroads, and the boys of every race who went to war.
Above all, it was the man who wandered unencumbered by family ties: Johnny Appleseed in our home woods, Daniel Boone in Kentucky, Jim Bridger crossing the Rockies. Father described for us the Yankee peddler, the free trapper, the roaming cowhand, the whaler
man, roustabout, gandy dancer, tramp. His heroes, and my heroes, were Raymond Chandler’s city detective Marlowe going, as a man must, down these mean streets; Huck Finn lighting out for the territories; and Jack Kerouac on the road.
Every time we danced, Father brought up Jack Kerouac, On the Road.
We did a lot of dancing at our house, fast dancing; everyone in the family was a dancing fool. I always came down from my room to dance. When the music was going, who could resist? I bounced down the stairs to the rhythm and began to whistle a bit, helpless as a marionette whose strings jerk her head and feet.
We danced by the record player in the dining room. For fast dancing, Mother only rarely joined in; perhaps Amy, Molly, and I had made her self-conscious. We waved our arms a lot. I bumped into people, because I liked to close my eyes.
“Turn that record player down!” Mother suggested from the living room. She was embroidering a pillow. Father opened the cabinet and turned the volume down a bit. I opened my eyes.
“Remember that line in On the Road?” He addressed me, because between us we had read On the Road approximately a million times. Like Life on the Mississippi, it was the sort of thing we read. I thought of his blue bookplate: “Books make the man.” The bookplate’s ship struggled in steep seas, and crowded on too much sail.
I nodded; I knew what he was going to say, because he said it every time we played music; it was always a pleasure. We both reined in our dancing a bit, so we could converse. Sure I remembered that line in On the Road.
“Kerouac’s in a little bar in Mexico. He says that was the only time he ever got to hear music played loud enough—in that little bar in Mexico. It was in On the Road. The only time he ever got to hear the music loud enough. I always remember that.” He laughed, shaking his head; he turned the record player down another notch.
The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New Page 7