by Sigrid Nunez
(Here I am reminded of a conversation I once had with a man who’d graduated just a few years before from a college where I myself once taught. When asked with whom he’d studied there, he could not recall a single name.)
My memory is that I was not unusual, my friend said. My memory is that most of my classmates liked school too. But I remember also bad moments, children getting upset, children in pain. I remember being baffled by one girl in particular. Winnie. “Winnie the Poop.” Everyone disliked her, even the teacher didn’t hide his dislike for this girl, but it wasn’t clear to me what was so bad about her. Her mother really did dress her funny, though, like an orphan in an illustration in a Victorian novel, dark, solid-colored shapeless dresses way down past her knees—now I think they must have been homemade and all cut from the same pattern—and these clunky, orthopedic-looking oxfords. But she never bothered anyone, she kept to herself, she sat slumped down low in her seat, clearly trying to be invisible. But every now and then, for no reason that we could tell, in the middle of class, while the teacher was talking or writing something on the board, this hideous sound, this animal yowl, would go up and we’d all turn to see her sitting there, her head thrown back and her mouth wide open, clenching and unclenching her fists, sobbing. A terrible sight, but at the same time so weird, so comical, it must be said, that some kids would laugh.
I was shocked but also mesmerized, my friend said. I was such a protected child—what did I know about suffering? And I remember how bad I felt for her. In fact, I’ve always thought of this as my first real experience of pity. I remember how strange it was, the way it seemed to be both a bad feeling and a good feeling at the same time—how was that? And it was more than just feeling sorry for someone—that was something I’d felt often enough before. This was something bigger, and it demanded some kind of action.
A chance to act nobly! I could not have been more delighted. I would befriend this pathetic, unhappy little outcast. And so high was my opinion of myself that I believed the honor and blessing of my attention was all that was needed to change her life. Oh, I remember how thrilled I was to feel these chivalrous impulses tickling my spine.
But instead of accepting, let alone reciprocating, my gestures of friendship, Winnie was hostile to me. One day when I’d taken the pass to use the girls’ room, she went into my book bag. Though I knew what she’d done—she couldn’t resist smirking at me when I returned to class—when the teacher asked us to take out our notebooks, rather than accuse Winnie of stealing I let myself be punished for having “lost” mine. Curiously enough, it was right after this that Winnie decided she wanted us to be friends after all. Talk about punishment! The class was too kind: she really was a drag, the first chronic depressive I ever met, she must have been, not a lively bone in her body, not a song in her heart or a dream in her head. Winnie the Poop! Being with her was like being trapped in a dark moldy cellar. For the rest of that school year, she clung to me and so, unfortunately, like slime, did the thing that made other kids want nothing to do with her. It was either her or my other friends, but it wasn’t as simple as choosing my other friends. I just wasn’t capable of doing what needed to be done to get rid of her—not when I’d been the one to initiate the friendship. I was too ashamed, and I was so relieved when, at the start of the next school year, she and I ended up in different classes.
You go back, my friend said. Your mind takes you back. There’s a key, or you think there’s a key. A hand in your mind reaches out— Oh but you must be so tired of hearing me go on like this.
No, go on. I’m listening. I want to know. Go on.
I miss childhood, she said. When I was in third grade, a boy fell in love with me. He even proposed. I mean it! During recess one day he went down on one knee and said, Will you marry me? And I said, Where’s the ring? There’s supposed to be a ring. And some other kids had gathered around and they all started laughing at him. For a week or so he went around looking pissed, not talking to me or anyone else. And then one day he did it again, went down on one knee—and pulled out a ring. Such a ring! The most beautiful sparkly thing, but it was too big for me. I was going to wear it on a chain around my neck, but it turned out he’d stolen it—it was his big sister’s engagement ring! Thank God I didn’t lose it.
There’s a certain kind of happiness, my friend said, that is open only to young children. I mean, as a child, it’s possible to be totally focused on just one thing. It’s your birthday. You asked for a bike, or a puppy, or a new pair of skates. As the day draws near it’s all you can think about. And then it happens, your wish fulfilled, your dream come true, and nothing to spoil it. In getting that one thing it’s as if you’d been given everything. But after a certain age, that feeling—that pure bliss—doesn’t happen, it can’t happen, because you never want just one thing anymore, once you reach puberty it’s no longer possible.
(Now I am reminded of a friend’s little girl whose heart’s desire was to have a Barbie doll. For a while her mother, who disapproved of the sexualized doll, resisted. Then, one Christmas, she gave in. When she had lifted her out of the box, the enraptured six-year-old in a passionate voice declared: Barbie! I love you! I have always loved you!)
For me, said my friend, the first day of school was the happiest day of the year. I remember being so excited that I couldn’t sleep the night before. We went to church every Sunday, but for me school was the true holy place, the place of hope and thankfulness and joy. The worship of God once a week was completely abstract, but the love of learning—that was real.
But I want to know, she said, why couldn’t it have been the same for my daughter? Why wasn’t I capable of giving her a childhood more like my own? And my parents, who played such a big part in her upbringing, my mother especially—why did the two of us grow up so unlike? I remember that as a kid I was tolerant, I was fair-minded. I liked everyone, I was never mean, I played well with others, I knew how to share, I knew how to listen. So why did I grow up to be so impatient? How often has it been said of me that I don’t suffer fools. And it’s true, I don’t, and it always made me proud to hear that. But when I think how uncritical and forgiving and coddling my parents always were—why was I, as an adult, as a parent, not like that too? And for all my love of school and fond memories of teachers, I myself hated teaching, I avoided teaching as much as I could, and whenever I did teach I was nothing like my old teachers, I was not a good teacher myself, I had no patience with students—just as I had no patience with my classmates in college and grad school, and as I’ve never had any patience with most of my colleagues. Cold. Intimidating. Condescending. Bullying. Professor from Hell. Bitch. Those were the kinds of things my students wrote about me in their course evaluations. And rather than care, I just stopped reading them. But now I can’t stop wondering, when I look back, when I remember my teachers, when I remember all that happiness and love, why did I myself scorn teaching my whole adult life?
I’m losing my voice, she said. (She had been talking nonstop for hours.) And you must be sick of hearing it.
I shook my head. In fact, I was riveted. Indeed, so riveted was my attention on her every word that it felt almost as if there were something indecent about it.
I don’t think I ever told you this story, she began one time. No, she hadn’t, but I knew it anyway, or at least the version of it that rumor had circulated. When she was still a teenager, her daughter had come between her and a man.
Can you imagine anything more sordid, my friend said. Your daughter making a play for your boyfriend. And right under your nose too. And he was so flattered, the fool. I had to ban him from our lives before the unspeakable happened. I even threatened him with the police. And once he was gone she forgot all about him. It wasn’t as if she’d really cared, of course. She wasn’t some helpless innocent. All she’d wanted was to hurt me. And she wanted as many people as possible to know about it too, so I’d have to suffer the greatest possible humiliation.
&n
bsp; That’s when she understood how much her own child hated her, my friend said.
She had never got over it. A stain on her life that could never be washed out, she described it. A sorrow that could arise unexpectedly at any moment, and that did seem to arise at particularly happy or peaceful moments, she said—to ruin them.
I’d be having a perfectly good day, going about my business, when suddenly for no clear reason the memory of it all would come back, and I’d be forced to relive it. I learned that I could get past it by burying myself in my work, but there were times when it was enough to sink me into a depression for days.
But didn’t they ever try to talk about it? I asked. I meant when her daughter had grown older.
They did, she said. And got absolutely nowhere.
Her daughter’s memory of the incident was quite different. In her view, she was hardly the guilty one. She was just a kid, after all. It was the man’s fault, she said. He was a creep, but her mother had been too infatuated to see it. She had only herself to blame for bringing a guy like that into their lives in the first place.
Much later, she would say that her mother had overreacted. If it had been as big a deal as her mother seemed to think, surely it would have stayed with her, the daughter said. But in fact she couldn’t recall which of her mother’s boyfriends they were even talking about. And later still, she insisted that her mother had misremembered everything. Between her and this guy, whoever he was, nothing had happened.
You want to forgive all, my friend said, and you should forgive all. But you discover that some things you can’t forgive, not even when you know you’re dying. And then that becomes its own open wound, she said: the inability to forgive.
V
Have you noticed, she said. Her face has changed.
She was talking about the portrait in the living room. We had grown more than used to it. No longer an eyesore, it had become a mysteriously comforting presence. She seemed to be watching over us, we agreed.
Like a spirit, my friend said.
Like the household saint.
The expression on her face has changed, my friend insisted. She looks sadder.
No, not exactly sadder, I said. But maybe softer. The first time I saw her I thought she looked a bit stern.
She disapproved of us before. Now she’s accepted us.
She’s gotten to know us better. Now she likes us.
It is soothing, my friend said, to look at her. If you keep staring at her eyes, it calms you.
Put a halo on her, I said, and she’d look like an icon.
Beneath the portrait stood a narrow marble-topped table. One day my friend placed a candle there and a small pewter vase of wildflowers she had picked.
You’ve made a shrine, I said. It makes me want to pray to her.
Let us pray.
I dreamed that I was asleep, my friend said, and in my dream I opened my eyes and saw her standing by the bed, bending over me.
It wasn’t a dream. I saw her too.
* * *
—
Maybe you could read to me for a while, she said. I’ve never liked audiobooks, but now, when I can’t read myself, it’s nice to be read to.
I asked her what she wanted me to read, and she pointed to the paperback splayed on the coffee table, where I’d left it days ago.
I love mysteries, she said. I used to read one or two a week. You don’t have to start from the beginning, just summarize what’s happened so far.
In the last part of the book, the narrative switches from third to first person. Speaking now is the budding actress, and we learn that everything we’ve read so far has been her fictionalization of events taken from life. The book, written under a masculine pseudonym, is about to be published. Now we learn about her life in the three decades since her relationship with the serial killer: how that experience had traumatized her to the point that she was barely able to function let alone continue pursuing her once-so-promising acting career. And it turns out there was more, much horrible more to the story.
After being dumped by the killer, the actress’s best friend discovers she is pregnant. By the time she learns that the father of the child she is carrying is a psychopathic murderer, it’s too late to consider an abortion. She hatches a plan to conceal her condition for the remainder of her term and give birth at home, in secret. She enlists the help of a close male friend, together with whom she withdraws to a rural hideout. The plan is to abandon the newborn in a safe place, its parents’ identity remaining forever unknown and untraceable. But things go awry, and the baby dies two days after he is born. By this time the young man, besieged by fears and regrets about his collusion, has begged the narrator to come to the hideout and try to persuade their friend, now seriously depressed and behaving irrationally, to see a doctor. Thus the narrator is a witness to the baby’s death. To this day, she tells us, she has never been sure whether he died of crib death or some other natural cause or was in fact smothered by his emotionally troubled mother. But when, in order to protect her friend and the young man (and, by extension, herself) from what would likely be a criminal investigation—one that could quite possibly lead to a murder charge—she agrees to maintain silence about the infant, whose body the man goes off alone to bury in the woods.
In the final pages we learn that, while the baby’s mother went on to have something of a normal life, the young man, unable to live with the burden of guilt and secrecy, killed himself. The narrator is on the verge of getting married to someone she describes as the love of her life. She has told this person the full story of the serial killer but nothing of the rest. The day of the big wedding is near. The book ends with her pondering whether she can allow her beloved to marry her without knowing the whole truth. She decides to make a full confession, knowing that it may well cause her to lose her one last chance at happiness.
Hah, said my friend. A twist. Ends supposedly happily with a wedding but then sets up a cliff.
According to my high school English teacher, there are two kinds of novels. Half of them could be called Crime and Punishment and the other half could be called A Love Story. But when you think about it, a lot of novels could be both.
Crime and Punishment: A Love Story. Now that’s a good title. Anyway, don’t they say that every good story is a suspense story?
And every story is a love story.
And every love story is a ghost story.
And everybody loves somebody sometime.
Stop! she squealed. It hurts when I laugh that hard. (She was referring to her several surgery scars.)
I had some recently published novels on my Kindle, but my friend wasn’t interested in listening to any of them. She didn’t like what she called the vandalizing streak in contemporary fiction writers. She quoted John Cheever on the difference between a fascinated horror of life and a vision of life.
Nowadays it seems to be mostly fascinated horror, she said. Either that or totally unconvincing platitudinous sentiment.
All these books about the horribleness of modern life, she said, a lot of them brilliant, I know, I know, you don’t have to tell me. But I don’t want to read any more about narcissism and alienation and the futility of relationships between the sexes. I don’t want to read any more about human, in particular male, hideousness. Whatever happened to Faulkner’s idea that a writer’s job was to lift people up?
How Faulkner chastised the young writer of his day: He writes as though he stood among and watched the end of man.
He writes not of the heart but of the glands. It was out of fear that the writer wrote this way, Faulkner said. The fear he shared with every other person on earth: the fear of being blown up. But it was the writer’s duty to rise above such fear, Faulkner said. Valor was what Faulkner was calling for, that day in Stockholm, in 1950. And then: a return to the old universal truths—love and honor and pity and pride and compas
sion and sacrifice. Absent which, Faulkner warned, your story will last but a day.
Fine words. Really fine words. But of all the ways of looking at a writer today, as a knight in shining armor strikes me as probably the most far-fetched.
Another time, my friend said to me: You’d think it would be easier to leave life if you could convince yourself that everything was horrible and the future was totally bleak. But I can’t bear to think that I’ll be gone and the world won’t go on, infinitely rich, infinitely beautiful. Take that away and there’s no consolation.
I myself, as I told my friend now, have always been haunted by a scene from an old movie I once saw, based on the lives of the Brontë family. One of the sisters, who knows she’s dying, says that because she’s always been afraid of life, she doesn’t so much mind leaving it. But then, on a day like this, she says, when the world is so beautiful (she is sitting somewhere outdoors, I recall, no doubt somewhere in the moors), she confesses that she wouldn’t mind living just a little longer.
I’d been channel surfing, and that was the only scene I watched. It was long ago—I could be remembering it wrong. But this was how it always came back to me. And it came back to me a lot.
Meanwhile I was scanning a large bookcase in the living room. How about this, I said, pulling a heavy book from the bottom shelf: The World’s Best Folk and Fairy Tales.
Gods and heroes, princes and peasants, giants and little people, witches, tricksters, and animals, animals, animals.
This would be our reading from now on. She could not get enough of it. Now I was the one who almost lost her voice.
Much has been said about mystery stories being like fairy tales—and popular for some of the same reasons. Instead of ogres, serial killers. And though they might not be pure of heart—no princes, or Galahads, or saints—the detectives are still heroes, righteous if not always noble avengers. All is simplified. Characters: types. Moral code: clear. Where guilt or innocence lie: plain. Plenty of cruelty, violence, and gore, but in the end the evil are vanquished, and even if the good don’t live happily ever after there is closure, the kind of closure that mostly eludes people in real life.