by Sarah McColl
More likely that was her sign.
A FEW MONTHS later, between my first and second years of graduate school, I drove to visit my sister in Alabama where she had moved for a new job. “It was Mom’s favorite magazine,” Katy said, and it was true: I had found a copy on her bedside table, the recipes for coconut cake and black bean chili dog-eared. My niece had just turned three, and my sister drove us to the wooded grounds of her corporate office park to collect moss. We were going to make terrariums.
We had a spade, and Violet was very deft at separating the fluorescent green fur from the compacted, moist dirt by wriggling the trowel between the layers. She crouched thoughtfully in the same yellow cardigan she had worn at last year’s funeral. It fit. My sister had cut Violet’s blonde bangs straight across her forehead. “I got it!” she announced again, raising the trowel in the air with the moss in one large chunk like a green island. We gathered pinecones, and thin, spindly seedlings that looked like grown pine in miniature, like bonsai.
Violet is the first baby I have watched grow. It is like a little sister to say this, or perhaps like a mother, but she reminds me of me. It is her dramatic eyes, the way she widens them when she says, You know what? and the way she stirs up her listener before she delivers the payoff of her big news: that she can ride a scooter, or roll into a somersault, or has three best friends at school. It is also the way she can whir herself into a frenzy and is overcome, overwhelmed, by the intensity of her own emotions. Violet was spirited that day with the moss, and naughty, repeatedly careening near an edge of landscaping that dropped off onto a blacktop, far below. “Violet, stop,” my sister said with a scary edge in her voice, and Violet screamed. She hated to get in trouble, to do anything wrong, and mostly she hated this voice from her mother. It was all familiar to me. You are spirited, my mother said, and naughty. Katy crouched and pushed Violet’s bangs aside with a soft hand, her voice soothing again. “It is because I love you so much, Peanut,” she said, “past the stars. I don’t want you to get hurt.”
Back at home, my sister gathered glass vessels from the lower kitchen cabinets. Inside each one we arranged a bed of moss, planted a thin, faint fern, and covered them. Sealed under glass, terrariums create their own gentle weather systems, pass time, and thrive in their own delicate atmospheres. It seemed an ideal model—that with the right conditions, they required little outside intervention to grow. We arranged the glass domes like emerald cities on the kitchen table. Violet and I rested our chins on our hands, folded on the marble table, and watched, amazed. Made small like that, anything seemed possible.
WHEN MY FATHER snapped the photos on the early evening South Padre beach, he didn’t know the brackish Gulf of Mexico seawater had seeped inside the camera. It was my mother’s discovery at the counter at Eckerd Pharmacy, flipping through a white envelope of blurred and out-of-focus photos, the dusk-warm shapes as fuzzy as a skein of mohair. In them, she stands on the low-tide sand with Bliss, then a toddler. She is long legged and leaning over him, wearing a t-shirt from the elementary school carnival where she worked the pie toss in the morning, the dunking booth in the afternoon. She is shaking her finger in a faux scold while he looks up at her with mischievous laughter. Earlier in the day, sitting cross-legged with her in the sand eating cold grapes, I saw delicate, dark hairs like spider’s legs escape from inside her suit at the crease of her thigh. She loved the light of those photos, and the serendipitous streaks. She handed the envelope back to the developer and asked that they be blown up. Framed, they joined the other photos in the hallway outside her bedroom, including my little brother in a high chair, the bright slant of early morning sun spotlighting his sleep hair, his mouth full of ripe banana, eyes closed from laughing. Motherhood was the highest art in our house.
THE JULY HEAT in Florence, Alabama, is an oppressive menace. I am on my own cross-country adventure, nearly retracing the route I saw from the cab of a moving truck as a kid. I am not just like my mother. This time, I am at the wheel and eat Cheetos and giant, expensive salads made of kale and sunflower sprouts, take scenic routes of my own design, pick up grocery sacks of used paperbacks in Southern cities. I stop at a junk store and purchase a white silk slip, a tire gauge, and a sugar bowl in her china pattern with money I’ve earned.
I stop at a Residence Inn for a swim, where the view is of Highway 2, a gas station with four rusted pumps, and a mobile park across the street. Some trailers have plywood leaning where windows should be. My swimsuit was once sexy, but no longer fits. I tug at the top and slide into the water.
I dog-paddle, dip my head back, and then two young brothers swim to me. The younger one wears inflatable wings. His accent is so thick, I can’t make out a word.
“Hi,” the older one translates. He is the age of not being afraid. His cheeks are red from a day in the sun. “What’s your name?”
I tell him, and he gets to talking: he is five, his name is Davis. We swim around each other and splash for a while, and then I say, Well, nice to meet you, pull myself up the pool ladder, and drop into the hot tub with my novel. Then splash, wet pages, and Davis is suddenly beside me again.
“What’s your book about?”
“Davis, leave her be.” His mother, in short shorts and a t-shirt, is sitting at a table under an umbrella. I smile, tell her it’s fine. She turns back to her phone.
“It’s about Italy,” I say. “Do you know where Italy is?” He shakes his head no.
“Italy is in Europe, on the other side of the world.” He looks at me blankly, interested but unsatisfied. “It’s where macaroni comes from,” I add, proud of myself for this orienting detail. “And spaghetti.”
“Shells and cheese?” he asks.
His brother slips in the water on my other side and touches my arm to get my attention. He is not yet afraid of anything, either. I am beginning to acclimate to his molasses singsong. I gather his name is Owen, that he is three years old but will turn four on July 27, which is in ten days.
Davis wants his turn again and reaches for my other arm. They touch me in an absentminded, easy way, not caring that I am a stranger. Davis arranges himself in my lap, and Owen strokes my wet hair. Suddenly they are my puppies, scaling my body with playful care, as if I am theirs. They want something from me, and whatever it is, I want to give it to them. Is this what a mother is? It is the closest I can come for now. Freckles stretch across the bridge of Davis’s nose, constellations among them. I do not want a bad thing to ever happen to him.
“Yes, shells and cheese,” I say, and Davis looks up at my face, ready for the next thing.
“Wanna get back in the pool?” he asks, and I do.
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my profound gratitude to a lifetime of teachers and to my Sarah Lawrence family, in particular. Jo Ann Beard, Jake Slichter, Vijay Seshadri, Brian Morton, and Paige Ackerson-Kiely showed me what was possible, and generously offered their support and friendship.
My family has been admirably graceful and encouraging of a writer-daughter-sister-niece to whom nothing is too private. I’m especially grateful to Katy Lukens and Madelyn Young for multiple careful readings and corrections of chronology and fact and for understanding, as Tobias Wolff wrote, that memory has its own story to tell.
I can never fully express my gratitude to Sarah Weir and Peter Grossman, who offered not only creative feedback and friendship but food, clothing, shelter, and a place in their family when I was most in need of a home. Thank you to Megan Bayles, Jenny Walton-Wetzel, Piper Weiss, Sonia Evers, Laureen Ellison, Jessica Cannon, Katie Melone, and Shane O’Neill for their friendship, endless brainstorming, and encouragement. I am also grateful to Sarah Hepola, Siobhan Adcock, Amy Shearn, and Jessica Hendry Nelson for their meaningful pep talks at critical junctures.
I cannot overstate my gratitude to the MacDowell Colony, Ucross Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts for their generous gifts of time and space. These places taught me about magic. Thank
you, also, to the artists at each of their dinner tables who helped me grapple with the work as it was making its way onto the page.
My profound thanks to Gráinne Fox for her steadfast belief in my writing, unflappable calm, and wicked sense of humor, as well as Veronica Goldstein. At Liveright, I am grateful to Gina Iaquinta, Cordelia Calvert, Steven Pace, and especially Katie Adams. I wish for all writers to work with such a sensitive and incisive editor.
And to Max Hart, for margaritas, and truly, more than I can name.
Joy Enough is a work of nonfiction. Some names and details have been changed.
Excerpt from “Amy Hempel, The Art of Fiction No. 176” interview by Paul Winner, originally published in The Paris Review, Issue 166, Summer 2003. Copyright © 2003 The Paris Review, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.
Copyright © 2019 by Sarah McColl
All rights reserved
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