Riverine

by Angela Palm

  I could have said that a melon color had been wrenched loose in my life by writer Maggie Nelson’s fascination with blue. That I had to have it, the way Nelson had to have blue pieces of glass, which somehow made sense in her life where she could not. Melon-colored Eames chairs, melon-tinted lipstick, a ream of melon and cream damask fabric that never got used for anything, salmon nigiri. That melon did not often occur in nature, at least not in the lush green of Vermont’s Champlain Valley, where I now lived, was a fact I lamented. I found myself quickly disappointed. Barely charmed by tiger lilies. Appalled at cantaloupe’s watered-down orangey color. I could have said that in Montreal, a man stood next to me at the corner of Rue Saint Laurent and Saint Paul, smoking, his cigarette clinging at an angle such as I had never seen before to lips such as I had never seen before. And that it changed me, and that his mouth was the embodiment of melon. They were the same. That it was my job to explain how this could be so. Pam Houston, another writer, calls these “glimmers.” I don’t like the word, because it sounds too sweet in my foul mouth, but I know what she is saying. She’s talking about those moments and images that strike you midsternum. All of life’s messiness and mystery somehow looking back at you in them, with answers toward which language only groped. It was the part of life—experience—that prompted us to do our darnedest with words. The things worth writing about. I had seen these all my life, but I hadn’t made sense of them until I came to Vermont. In Vermont, I wrote. I looked. I listened. I questioned. I formulated tentative answers. I settled into words, and like an old favorite chair’s, their comfort was familiar.

  I rode in the passenger seat of our rented car as we neared customs. As our turn for readmittance into the United States approached, Mike muttered, “You can’t wear sunglasses through customs. What are you thinking?”

  He is a pro at travel, packs his suitcase expertly in the dark to catch 5:00 a.m. flights for work, breezes through airport security without a snag. He has systems of efficiency, not unlike The Accidental Tourist’s Macon Leary. And Mike has no patience for those less practiced, those who can’t keep up, can’t fold a pair of pants into a pocket-sized, wrinkle-free contraption, can’t pass through customs unmolested.

  I, on the other hand, was never quite apace with nuances such as these. I generally couldn’t find my passport, never made it through security without being pulled aside for extra screening processes. I have a permanently guilty-looking face. As we were green-lighted for the customs station, I quickly removed the sunglasses.

  The customs officer, layered in bulletproof and polyester garments, leaned in, squared her jaw, and set about questioning us. What were we doing in Canada? What did we do for work?

  My husband is an airline pilot, so his response was simple and straightforward. Plus, he did this all the time. Being the less-traveled of the two of us, I faltered in the face of such inquisition.

  “And you? What do you do for work?” the customs officer asked, looking at me.

  I squinted, barely able to make her out as anything more than an outline of black against the summer sun.

  I could have said that once, during a Get Out the Vote campaign, I’d sat on a man’s couch, a terribly dirty couch in a nameless trailer park, and helped him spell his own name as he registered to vote for the first time. I was rattled, realizing then that people who could not read existed down the road from where I’d grown up. That when he insisted he write his own name with my help, rather than signing X, which would have been perfectly legal, his five-year-old daughter who was still in a diaper and could barely talk came to sit on my lap, and I thought for the first time that I might one day like to be a mother. And that later, it worried me that it was not my own mother’s love that prompted this thought. And worse, that I recognized, for the first time and far too late, my penchant for falling in love with strangers would be a problem. Had been a problem. That somehow I felt safer and happier and more alive with them than with people who were familiar to me. And what was that about?

  I could have said that once I’d watched a half gallon of milk go bad as proof that time is change, that one thing can become another. As proof that cheese is a sublime marriage of art and nature.

  I leveled my smile, hardened my eyes. I matched my face to the customs agent’s, something I’d learned that humans do to indicate trust. The long answer, the storied answer, compressed and collapsed in a blink, and I uttered rather unconfidently, “I’m a writer.” It came out sounding like a question rather than a statement. I’m a writer. The reply echoed in my mind. Was that what I did for a living? Well. It was a living in that I was living it. Not that I was paid, per se, not yet, but that I supposed that it was time I called myself a writer. Publicly.

  The officer looked almost amused. Almost. She definitely did not believe me. Worse, I did not believe myself.

  No grandmas, no vaginas, no mirrors, no accounts of postgrad summers spent traipsing through Europe, no writing about writers. These are the lessons I’ve picked up from other writers about what not to do as a writer. Among the not-to-dos, or the cautiously-to-dos, is the timing of proclaiming that necessary statement, “I am a writer.” I was struggling to own it, what with most of my friends having ignored the release of my little publications, small as they were, and my efforts at starting the first draft of a novel. Jen and Rachel, my best friends from Indianapolis, were my cheerleaders, along with Mike. But defining terms of the “writer” label was a gray area. Profession, hobby, love affair, compulsion, calling. Whatever “it” is was in question for a lot of people—namely, those without book credits and degrees behind their names, and that included me. But writers are writers before they publish books. Beginnings are locatable. They must exist somewhere.

  My own beginning as a writer was in books I read and in journal pages I penned, in terrible poems and desperate letters. It was in the unrest I felt about Corey, whom I kept coming back to, writing and rewriting. It was in the river back home, in the fields. In all that had happened there, which had followed me to Vermont and flowed out of my fingers onto a computer screen. Moving to Vermont was turning out to be more of a link to the past than an escape from it. This melon syndrome, my wild crush on the mundane and the emptied out, the thrill of vaguely intimate encounters with strangers and vaguely intimate encounters with abandoned structures. I had to admit these into my persona, give them a name. Give them room to breathe. Nurture them. Write it all out in a way that meant something and held weight in the world. In a way that became more than a collection of images, more than a cross section of place and time and people.

  All the answers I could have given the customs officer meant the same thing. And I hadn’t realized it until now. Writing had become more than a hobby, more than a desire. Writing, as a creative practice and an earnest attempt at art, had become greater than the fear of failing at it.

  When she pressed for details, for evidence that would amount to my reply and publications that she could google on her government-issued laptop to confirm my claim, I listed for her the few publications I’d acquired over the past six months, feeling puny and ridiculous at the joy I had felt over them. They seemed insignificant under her scrutiny.

  She typed away on the computer. “What do you write?” She seemed confident, sure of tripping me up with this question. “Look at me when you say it.”

  I was glad she said that. To look at her, I mean. Disallowing anything but facts. Demanding an unflinching reply. She didn’t mean for it to help me. I know that. She only meant to determine whether I was lying. Whether I was a threat. But it was what I needed to be asked. She might as well have asked me, simply, “Who are you?”

  “Oh, short stories, some essays. I’m writing a novel.” Spat out in a single sentence, nearly a year of work sounded in a minor key. Hundreds of pages shriveled in the hazy summer air between us. “I’m just starting out, really.” I’m writing letters to a man I haven’t seen in fifteen years and putting them in a drawer instead of mailing them.

 
; The customs officer looked at me, then at my passport, then back at me.

  I’d cut off all my hair and looked nothing like my picture. I smile when I’m nervous.

  “Don’t smile,” she said. “Where is your work published?” She fixed her gaze on her computer.

  I still hadn’t convinced her. Did she expect my name to pop up in a search? It wouldn’t. I started thinking about this woman as she worked, about who she was beneath the pepper spray and the nightstick. Beneath the black polyester. She was very short, but not slight. She wore a hard look on her face, but smile lines caught in the sunlight around her mouth and eyes. I named her Amanda.

  “On the Internet, mostly. Some journals.” I shrugged, feeling smaller each time I spoke.

  “Where on the Internet?”

  At that point, I was pretty sure she wanted to humiliate me, the silly woman trying to wear sunglasses through customs who thought she was a writer and clearly had a self-confidence problem.

  I rattled off the short list, my voice flat now, unemotional. I hoped she inferred my meaning: let’s stop the charade, Amanda. Amanda, who is a real person beneath the polyester who smiles and wears capri pants and flip-flops and takes selfies and likes baseball and probably snorts when she laughs.

  “Mm hm. Mm hm,” she said, and cleared us for entrance to the United States with a stamp and a nod.

  When we crossed back into the United States, I was still thinking of what else I could have said at the customs gate, vaguely unsettled by the ordeal.

  My husband put on my sunglasses and pretended to toss his hair. “Uh, I’m a writer? Um …” He laughed at himself and gave my sunglasses back, rubbing my knee. “I’m kidding. But you’ll have to get better at saying that.”

  We drove another ten miles without talking, the green intensifying the deeper we drove into the Vermont countryside. “What do you do for work?” he asked.

  I looked at him. “Very funny.”

  “No, really. You should practice.”

  He convinced me to say it out loud as we rode down I-89 back to Burlington. “I’m a writer,” I said, only half-serious.

  “Nope, not good enough.”

  “I feel like I’m in therapy.”

  “Just do it. When you fly a plane, half the challenge is confidence in your authority. If you don’t know you can do it, you can’t do it. If I was checking a pilot and asked him what altitude he should be at to turn off the seat belt sign and he said, ‘Um, 30,000 feet?’ what would that look like?”

  He had a point. I repeated the statement until we felt it was believable, and we laughed about it. When we got home, it was night. Carrying my overnight bag up the stairs to our condo, I worried about my new writer self, still a dribbling baby gazing out the window in wonder, falling in love with melon for no apparent reason, my sentences circling back to the very place I had abandoned. I wondered about what remained in me of home. How new I could really be here.

  In the morning I wrote home—an e-mail to my closest friends—to update them on life in the Northeast and told them I was writing and starting to publish some work. That I was writing a novel. That I felt I’d found my place in the world for perhaps the first time in my entire life. That sometimes, I was content. Of the six friends I contacted, two replied. Jen and Rachel, as expected. I was devastated because this was a huge transition for me. Didn’t they know this was a proclamation? Writing was hard, emotional. It was work, body and soul. It was fragile and I was only a writer-baby. Often, it undid me in ways both freeing and crippling. I remembered something I’d heard Julia Alvarez say at a reading: “When you’ve seen a thing, what, then, is the obligation?” That has stayed with me, helped me make sense of my writer eyes. Of my moving forward. Of my need to look back at what happened with Corey and figure it out—for me. It helped me stop waiting for the approval of friends or an understanding pat on the back from my parents for all my trying. It propelled me beyond the visioning—this lifelong collecting of images and moments—and enabled me to move more eloquently into that higher-ordered act, the writing itself. And beyond that: owning whoever I was, whatever whole looked like, wet and muddied roots and all.

  Could I better understand the significance of the angle of a man’s bottom lip, of an illiterate man registering to vote, of rotten milk, because I am compelled to notice? I can, because the people are alive, because it is never too late to empower yourself, because milk becomes cheese. Time is change, more than a beginning and an end, but an ongoing expansion. One thing can become another—gradually, and then suddenly, as Ernest Hemingway once said. And cheese is part art and part nature. I have seen that and more. Writing is seeing. There is an obligation to complete the half-written letters, assemble the tales, stitch together the truths. Of that, I am certain.

  ON ROBERT FROST’S LAWN

  We are lying on Robert Frost’s lawn. We cup our hands around clumps of grass to hold on to what’s left of the afternoon. We listen to the hermit thrushes and strain to hear the stream over their song. To do this, we must not speak. And anyway, we can’t, because then everyone would know what they are not supposed to know and what we ourselves do not even know for sure. They would hear it in the pauses, too luxurious for mere friends.

  This is a school for adults who have too much to say. A grownup’s rumspringa. We left our families at home and are here for two weeks. We have divorced technology and shunned reality. We are thinking backward in iambic pentameter by threes. “Do not call home if at all possible,” we were told at orientation. “No one will understand.” And it’s true. My best self has grown here in Vermont. Only it is a wild self, one that knows it was never meant to root down into any ground. One that values freedom above all else. This revelation is an unexpected discovery, but Mike rolls with it and with me. He rearranges his work schedule, taking time off from his own travel so that I can attend writing conferences and get swept away by my intellectual connections with other men and women. I go, he stays. He goes, I stay. We are barely together, but it works out. He never bats an eye. He is an expert falconer, and I am his golden eagle. I fly and return to the nest.

  John Elder, the resident Frost scholar and naturalist, stands in front of us. He begins a lecture on Frost’s Vermont, Frost’s trees, which surround us on all sides. It’s an incantation for the dead at this close range. The writers’ conference was started in 1926 by the poet, and Elder speaks of Frost as if he were an old friend. Like many of Frost’s poems, Elder’s lecture draws us into the landscape but doesn’t tell us what to make of it. Beyond Elder is a small cabin, one of two of Frost’s former Vermont homes. The lecture is part of the program—propping up our minds with speeches, dangling Frost’s house in front of us like candy. We’re not sure what’s edible and what isn’t. We stuff gray pebbles into our fleshy cheeks like gobstoppers, tip sunshiny daffodils to our mouths, pinkies up. We are gifted. We are here on exhibit. We are competing. We befriend one another but reserve a teaspoon each of jealousy as an antidote to failure.

  The lecturer invites us further, quoting a Frost poem about a thrush wood bird and a tree as we listen and look: the very bird, the very tree. It is too much, too sacred, and on an acid trip of words, we draw nearer one another on the lawn in shrinking orbits, pairing off or grouping together in threes. Our real lives shift beneath us. The atmosphere is so enchanted that we willingly shift along with it. I almost believe I am one of them, the learned and graduate-programmed people on the lawn. I was not accepted the way they were—green-lighted by committee. I was wait-listed and sit on this lawn only because someone dropped out at the last minute. Everyone knows it, especially me. It is possible that in this world, people have mothers who read them Baudelaire at bedtime as children and fathers who quoted Keats during family meals made from scratch. It is possible for me to pretend I belong here or share their history. There is one thing we have in common: we are tired of explaining ourselves with words.

  Elder limits his talk to our immediate surroundings. He says nothing of the stat
e’s curated legacy beyond these trees, nothing of poetry beyond the context of Vermont. Intoxicating beauty is everywhere in Vermont. You hate to leave it behind, to cross the state line back into New York or Massachusetts. To board a plane at the Burlington airport. It is designed to have that effect on visitors—Vermont will send you into a rapturous stupor like the overoxygenated casinos of Las Vegas that make you forget what sleep is. You’ll come back and back again. You’ll remember it as a place where the locals have it all figured out. Vermont’s small towns aren’t failing; they are actually quite lovely. Vermont’s politics, if you’re even moderately liberal, are exemplary compared with those of many other states. But Vermont is more complex than this lawn, these trees. In the late 1800s, a collapsed agricultural economy resulted in a talent exodus. In the 1920s, the state countered this problem with two remedies. First, Vermont’s beauty would be systematically preserved in hopes of promoting a wealthy tourist culture that would create an influx of prosperity. Second, “voluntary” eugenics policies, aimed at curbing the reproductive capacity of the state’s so-called “degenerates,” would arrest growth of the wrong kind of public. This knowledge makes it hard to isolate my thoughts locally, to bind them within the tree line. At this diversely populated conference, Vermont’s overwhelmingly white population is suddenly very apparent.