Land of Enchantment

by Leigh Stein

  The memory I didn’t know how to turn into a Facebook post was this:

  The last time I saw Julian was at school, years before, when he acted in Bury the Dead by Irwin Shaw. The play is set “two years into the war that is to begin tomorrow night.” It is about six dead soldiers who refuse to let themselves be buried, who rise from their graves to declare the futility of war.

  Even though we were never very close, I still found Julian’s death shocking and shattering—he was the first person I knew who was around my age when he died. At the same time, I felt more like an observer of grief than a participant. I never posted a message to Julian on Facebook, but I did copy the words of others from his wall and paste them into an entry on my own blog, for strangers to read. Was this just a way to have a one-woman show, instead of joining the chorus of voices on Facebook? Or did I think that posting to my own blog was like talking on the phone with the door closed—that he wouldn’t be able to hear what I said on the other side? (Not that he can hear us, I had to keep reminding myself.) In the short amount of time between learning of his death, trying to think of what to say, and finally copying the words of others to paste into my own frame, I had moved from being shaken by the loss to being shaped by how I had encountered the loss.

  This was new territory. The message boards and listservs and blogging communities where I’d spent my adolescence had always been a world apart from whatever was happening in my life away from the keyboard. My online life gave me more choices, more control, more freedom. During my first year at college, in 2003, I still felt more intimate with the girls I knew only on LiveJournal than with my classmates, or even my roommate. Before I went out to my first bar ever in New York, I wrote an LJ post to ask what kind of drink I should order when I got there (Sex on the Beach). Online it was so much easier to talk, without judgment or shame, about all the dark things I wanted to talk about: anxiety and depression, loneliness and longing. Learning of Julian’s death on Facebook was a collision between my digital and offline lives. Here was someone I knew, whose face and body I had watched onstage, whose death was unfolding before me in a digital territory where the borders were no longer under my control.

  The summer after Julian died, I went to New Mexico on vacation again. It had been over a year since I’d gone there on vacation with my family, and the first time I would be going by myself. I found a woman on Craigslist who rented her guesthouse by the week. The ad mentioned goats, but I ignored that part. The rental was cheap and fifteen minutes outside Santa Fe. I booked my flight and rented a car.

  “You’re going there to write?” friends in New York asked, as if that were the only acceptable reason for going anywhere by yourself. One girlfriend even confessed she’d never eaten alone in a restaurant before.

  “Yes,” I said, to reassure them. I was going there to eat fish tacos and sopapillas and stare at the sky. I was going to make a pilgrimage to Georgia O’Keeffe’s house in Abiquiu and soak in the hot springs at Ojo Caliente. I was going to eat in restaurants with just a book and a Corona for company. In New York I was under so much pressure to be ambitious and successful, and physically crushed by crowds during my daily commute to Times Square, it was hard not to be nostalgic for the spaciousness and possibility of the Southwest. I could go back to the place where I was nobody. That was my idea of a vacation: be nobody in the middle of nowhere.

  I flew into Albuquerque, picked up my rental car, and drove north. The sun felt like a gift from someone who’d been waiting years for me to come back and pick it up. I stopped at the Trader Joe’s in Santa Fe, to pick up some food for my week at the guesthouse, and as I was loading my groceries into the trunk, my phone rang. It was Jason. I hadn’t spoken to him in months.

  “You’ll never guess where I am,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “Santa Fe!” It felt good to say this—it felt safe. He was hundreds of miles away; what could he do?

  “Did you move back there?”

  “No,” I said, “I’m just on vacation for a week.”

  In reply, he told me his girlfriend had just kicked him out of their apartment. “Now I don’t have anywhere to live.” The girlfriend was Lisa. Jason said he had been doing construction work under the table for a guy opening a Chinese restaurant, who’d promised to pay him at the end of the job, but then the guy had disappeared, never paid. Now he didn’t have money for rent, so he and Lisa got into a fight, and she scratched and kicked him until he threatened to call the police.

  I thought I remembered him telling me that Lisa went to Northwestern, but her behavior in this story didn’t align with the image I had of a Northwestern student. Either my stereotype was totally off, he was lying, or she was crazy. Or, more likely, Jason had turned her crazy.

  “Wait, she’s a Northwestern student?”

  “Yeah,” he said, and continued his story. The characters were new, but the central conflict was one I’d already heard a thousand times: everyone was against him, and no one would give him a chance.

  “Why don’t you call your dad,” I suggested, “and go stay with him?”

  “Why don’t I meet you in Santa Fe? Let’s move back.” This came up every time we spoke—the idea of a do-over. The last time I’d seen him was just a few months earlier, when I’d been in Illinois for a wedding; I went to his place after the reception, he scooped me up like a bride and carried me to bed, and we had sex. (At the time, I thought he and Lisa were broken up. At his funeral, she and I would unintentionally put the chronology together and realize they were not.) In bed, he’d said the same thing. “Let’s go back.” I said I was a shell of a person when we were there the first time, didn’t he remember that? “Well, I guess you did cry in the bathroom a lot.”

  “Jason, I have a job in New York. I’m just here on vacation.”

  “Quit your job,” he said. “You can get another job.” Yeah right, I thought, quit my job at the New Yorker. Still, I was tempted. I knew that I should appreciate all that I now had: a prestigious job, a charming apartment with lovely roommates in Brooklyn, good friends, party invitations every weekend, and yet. And yet? I was single. I worked two part-time jobs to supplement my salary at the magazine, and I had started going to night school. My life didn’t feel any less stressful than it had in New Mexico. It was just a more impressive kind of stress. I was the young, ambitious career woman in the big city, instead of the depressed waitress in the desert.

  “I have to go,” I told him. “I was just getting some groceries and now I have to drive.” The lonely, nostalgic part of me wanted to stay on the phone with him, but another part of me felt fortified by sun, ready to hang up and get on with it.

  “Can I at least call you later?”

  I told him he could. Then I threw my cell phone in the backseat and drove to the house with the goats. It was set back at the end of a single-lane road, off a winding street where the locals let me know I was driving too slowly by speeding by in their 4x4s. In the daylight I could at least see where I was going, but at night I couldn’t see each new curve ahead until the curve was already upon me, and I wasn’t used to driving in a rural place in the dark. In Albuquerque, there were streetlights everywhere, but outside Santa Fe there were none. And I was alone. There was a freedom in this: no one knew where I was, and I wasn’t accountable to anyone. There was danger: If something happened, who would find me? And there was the threat of my own dark thoughts: a sharp turn of the wheel and I’d be off-road, off the edge, in the middle of nowhere, gone.

  Jason called back the next day to say he’d spent the night on Michigan Drive, panhandling, and it wasn’t so bad—he’d try it again. Today he was going to go enlist in the air force.

  “Jason, don’t,” I said.

  “What other choice do I have?”

  I thought of Julian. He was the only person I knew who’d been in the military, and now he was dead. “We’re at war,” I said.

 
“I wouldn’t be deployed; that’s not what the air force is. They would train me to be an engineer and work on planes and stuff.”

  “I have to go,” I said. I was on vacation, and I had all the time in the world, but I didn’t want to give any more of it to him, even if I was in a place I likely never would have discovered without him. No matter what you gave him, Jason made you feel like you still owed more.

  The next morning, I left for Abiquiu, a tiny town of 230 people in northern New Mexico. Georgia O’Keeffe lived there for almost forty years, alternating between a Spanish Colonial compound that she converted with the help of a friend, and her home at Ghost Ranch, farther north. During their marriage, Alfred Stieglitz kept her tethered to him and New York for at least part of each year, and she didn’t move to New Mexico full-time until after his death in 1946. Before then, she made shorter, annual trips out west, but in 1939 she had a nervous breakdown and couldn’t go. To a friend she wrote, I wish so much to go that I almost wish I had never been there.

  In my copy of her biography, this sentence is underlined in black ink.

  To tour her house in Abiquiu, I had bought a ticket months in advance, by calling a phone hotline, and I was told I was lucky—I had gotten the last ticket available. On the drive, the fresh desert morning bloomed into a day that was just as bright and hot as the one that came before it. I pulled to the side of the road occasionally to take snapshots of the landscape. My cell phone received no signal. I passed almost no other cars. When I arrived at the designated spot for the tour, I saw that I had picked a tourist attraction far beyond my age demographic. Aside from the septuagenarians and me, there was a mother in her thirties, with a small, blonde daughter. The girl was wearing a red dress.

  “Look, we match,” I said, gesturing to my own red outfit.

  “My name’s Ali, what’s yours?”

  “Leigh.”

  “That’s a pretty name,” she said.

  Ali stuck to my side throughout the tour, occasionally holding my hand. When we came to a majestic sage tree in the courtyard, I rubbed my palms over the leaves, and put them under her nose so she could smell the fresh scent.

  There’s a photo I love of Georgia, taken by her friend Ansel Adams. She’s lying on the ground at Ghost Ranch in a painter’s apron, one pale arm draped over her face to cover her eyes. It was taken in 1937. If this were a Dorothea Lange or Walker Evans portrait, we would assume this woman is lying on the ground, covering her face, out of some desperation. But I’ve felt that New Mexico sun. I know Georgia is lying there in bliss.

  I wrote one poem in Santa Fe. It ends like this:

  The only thing we ever had in common

  was making the choices that would net the best stories and

  when you called, I was back where we started, watching

  the sun crown the hills. I was going to ask if for the past

  two years you’ve been living in your memory, too, but you

  interrupted to say you’d enlisted, and here it was, the unimaginable

  I’d never imagined, a premonition of violence, a reason

  to drive until I was out of range, off the map.

  In Santa Fe, I bought a book called Women of the West, a collection of diaries, letters, and autobiographies by nineteenth-century pioneer women, whose recollections make my life with Jason in the Southwest look like a honeymoon in St. Lucia. Take the diary of Miriam Davis Colt, the twelfth of seventeen children from a poor New York City family. In 1856, she heads west to a promising “experimental vegetarian settlement colony” in Kansas with her husband. When they arrive, they find the colony to be nothing like they expected. Everyone is living in tents “without floors or fires.” Miriam fashions an Indian blanket into a door, but still “the prairie winds come whizzing in.” Her husband takes two wooden boards from their covered wagon and tells her, “Miriam, you may make your bed on the smooth surface of these two boards.” But she insists he take the bed because he works the hardest, and she and the children take the floor. Within months, almost her entire family is felled by disease.

  A few years later, to raise money to support herself and her surviving daughter, she publishes her diaries, along with letters and poetry, in a volume called Went to Kansas: Being a Thrilling Account of an Ill-Fated Expedition to That Fairy Land, and its Sad Results: Together with a Sketch of the Author and How the World Goes with Her.

  Illness, weather, death, and debt—Miriam wrote it all down. One entry describes how she sold her nicest clothes so that she could afford a gravestone for her son who died in the night, after calling out for bread and apples. It’s totally Dickensian, yet true, and authored by a woman. Where does that instinct come from? I wonder, the thought process that goes, Life is hard and terrible. I know what I’ll do: I’ll tell a story about it. I think I know the answer. I think fitting an experience inside the frame of a story is how some of us survive.

  I never really kept a private diary as a young adult (in a box somewhere are piles of journals with just one or two entries), not because I didn’t have anything to write about, but because I couldn’t envision an audience—maybe it was my acting classes that made me think I shouldn’t write without one in mind. Or maybe as a teenager, it was impossible to imagine that the audience for the entries might just be me, years later as an adult.

  But in the late nineties and early aughts, I began keeping a diary online, which was new territory. On LiveJournal, you could curate the exhibit of your life, leaving out all the boring bits, and showing, through images and words, your most original, creative self. The self you most wanted others to see, even if broken or damaged. No need to use real names or profile pictures; we knew one another as faceless personas, as diarists, and the anonymity allowed for great intimacy. We spilled secrets. We exposed our vulnerabilities. A few of these women are still my friends today, including Julia, whom I first met online when she was fifteen, taking artsy selfies in her suburban New Jersey bedroom, a Frank O’Hara poem taped to the ceiling. When I moved to New York for the first time, in 2003, we arranged to meet in person, and she lied to her parents about whom she was meeting. In my dorm room, I put on the Funny Girl DVD and we watched Barbra Streisand sing “My Man,” with her big, elegant hands rippling against the darkened stage.

  Years before I was sending confessional e-mails, or scrolling through Facebook grief, I was keeping a public diary about what it was like to be a teenage girl, on a social network where girls were queens of our own sad little kingdom, whose walls we defended by staying anonymous, changing personas if anyone threatened to encroach upon our coterie.

  Women on the frontier lived in fear of being alone at night, and anything that would intrude upon the boundaries of their homesteads: animals, Indians, vagrant men displaced by the Civil War or turned out of work in the mines. Cathy Luchetti and Carol Olwell, the editors of the collected letters, write that “much of their fear . . . came from their inability to read their environment with any accuracy.” They were afraid of all that they didn’t yet know to be afraid of.

  For some women, these fears became a chronic condition of melancholia, “an extreme depression so common that scholars today have tried to determine if it was due to a fatty diet high in salt pork, fried beef, eggs, milk, and butter, or if trace mercury found in wells dug in the mining areas might have triggered the erratic behavior of many.” Mrs. Arthur Cowan, who lived in Montana, or, as she tells it, “forty miles from civilization, where nobody lives and dogs bark at strangers,” kept a diary with entries such as these:

  Cold day. . . . Sid went to look for poisoned coyotes. Came back nearly froze.

  Cold windy day 24 below zero. Fed the sheep. Very lonesome.

  Dark, dreary day. And the snow is flying . . .

  Blustering this morning. Fed the sheep and then took them out on the hills. . . . This is a long lonely winter.

  10 degrees below zero this morning. Have b
een very down hearted today and had a very bad headache . . .

  My heart is very lonely and sad to have no one to sympathize with me. I must bear all my troubles alone.

  Men are working at lambing. Oh I feel so lonely, so sad and discontented.

  The same old routine over again. Running after sheep again all day. This hardly seems like living . . .

  Take away the sheep and weather and these could be LiveJournal posts from 2001—not just mine, but from the other girls on my friends page, too. Girls with usernames like thisvelocity (“Interests: (1) trailer parks & tornadoes”) and andmilestogo (“Name: frostbite and cigarettes”). Girls with migraines. Girls who cut. Girls who wrote poetry in gray lowercase on black backgrounds. Girls who took black-and-white self-portraits using film and tripods and timers, portraits in which their faces were always turned away. Were we mercury poisoned? Too much salt pork? I’m not saying we had it as bad as Mrs. Cowan, but empathy can come from recognition, and in her diary, the repetitive tedium of melancholy is so plainly spoken, so familiar.

  On LJ, our currency was pain and we were rich. Our greatest accomplishment was turning our suffering into art. My art was poetry, and I was good at taking a scar and turning it into a story, a slight into a rallying cry.

  But while LiveJournal supported my growth as a young woman and poet—by introducing me to girls like me, who were on antidepressants, girls who would also rather be at home writing poems than suffering through another day of high school—it also taught me that sadness was what made me unique and beautiful. My boyfriend in high school got on board with my identity as a tragic figure; we dated for more than two years, and he didn’t mind if I cried on a daily basis. In fact, he wanted to marry me, and my mom tried convincing me this was a good idea because he was always so nice and loyal to me. A lot of people marry their childhood sweethearts, she argued. What was so wrong with that? But I was about to move to New York City. I imagined bigger things ahead, such as extremely interesting and handsome men who would all be in love with me. It didn’t work out exactly as I planned it in my head, but three years after breaking up with my high school sweetheart, I met Jason.