Carry the Sky

by Kate Gray

  “This isn’t a race, Taylor.” Crisco puts her big hand on my shoulder, and talks to me like she might talk to an old woman who isn’t sure where she is. “This is bigger. You’ve been through too much. It’s time.”

  It might have been the way the light mixed the red of the cornfields with the sunflower of her smile. It might have been the geese calling overhead. But I’m sure it was her hand on my shoulder and the way her words were slow and soft.

  I buckled. She helped me down to the ground, and curling into a ball, I pressed against the carpet. The smell of dirt and popcorn brought the whole semester back, all the crew parties, the girls dancing and laughing. All the late nights grading papers and preparing classes, the juice glasses with water or whiskey, the phone calls from Sarah’s mom, the quiet filled my head, and my head rested on the carpet. The night Terence stayed on the pull-out couch was milk in a glass, no spill. And then, the night of Alex stopping by and the dance we did around our relationship was a racecourse without buoys. Crisco’s hand made circles on my shoulder. She didn’t say anything. The refrigerator kicked on and off. And geese called overhead.

  Taylor / 1984

  Now that I’ve told this story, now that the boy isn’t hanging in the dorm any more, and the way he built a city to destroy it and named the sparks between fur and amber, and the way he wanted to protect Carla and me and his mother, will that boy come to mind when the geese take flight, when one call from a lone goose breaks the sky?

  After Crisco came that Saturday in December, I packed my things in the dorm with stone blocks this way and stone blocks that way, the dorm made for farm boys to learn more than revenge plays and Newton, and drove through the lawns on the driveway lined by maples where once a kite stuck, a kite made by a boy who brought an ancient art of kite flying to a school built by Du Ponts. Out the gate and through the flat, frozen cornfields of Delaware, to the fields of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, I kept driving west and north until I came to this lake, one in the middle of a city, one where I row each morning, and the geese come in low.

  Crisco came, too, and she trains for the Olympics, the ones after the ones that didn’t happen in 1980. On Lake Washington she rows in an eight that aims for Mount Rainier, the cox’n calling tens for each rower, each rower giving more than she knows she can endure.

  Will the girl who knew bugs and origami, the girl whose wants couldn’t fly or molt or swim, will she take her own shape one day?

  Will the Korean American man who could fold just about anything, given enough paper and time, who tried to trade his blood for his sister’s, whose honor turned a school into a parent, will he keep teaching young people to measure the forces acting on them, name the types of resistance to their motion?

  I didn’t want to tell all this, the story of how cruel boys can be, the way loneliness tastes sweet and makes you think it’s love. I wish desire hurt like a hangover. I want adults to see past their want and loss. But all I can do is tend a crack I still carry around, a crack that will never fill.

  When autumn arrives in Seattle, I take out a single scull on Green Lake. Sometimes when a flock of geese comes in low in the morning, I slow the shell to stopping, hold the blade handles together to keep steady, and I lie down. Under my back, the lake rises and falls. Above me, the gray sky is line after line of geese. In all the sky gray, a boy I remember is a lone goose flying home.

  Acknowledgments

  If I could show you what community means, you’d see a herd of wildebeest and zebras stretching beyond the horizon. Writing groups, like the Dreamies (Cecily, Jackie, Yuvi), like the Pinewood Table, have looked out for me, protected and fed me on this journey. Especially J Rose and Stevan Allred. And so many dangerous writers. Asante sana.

  If you could hear the silence where I’ve written, you’d know Hedgebrook and Soapstone writing retreats, the people who have put up with me in their homes, who have lent me their gorgeous spaces. A tiny house in Cannon Beach gave me the opening to the novel. It was there I sank into Tom Spanbauer’s words and kindness. At the Oregon Extension I heard the wind like a train through the pine. A motel in Maupin along the Deschutes gave me the ending. In Mosier I’ve written and rewritten to the thrum of wind. My siblings have been so patient; my family instilled a love of language, justice, and benign pranks. My Aunt Priscilla was always eager for news of my writing when we kidnapped each other for lunch. Thanks to my fellow dang poet, Aloise. Thanks to Sharon and Mike, Nan and Jan, all those who tended me, cheered me on. Thanks to the ODDies for their faith and patience. Thanks to Coventry Cycle Works who helped me work out characters and plot points by helping me stay on the long rides out there in the quiet.

  If I could show you teachers who don’t stay quiet, who witness and act, who know how to hold difference in their hands like water to drink, you’d see the English department at work at Clackamas Community College. You’d see the majority of boarding school teachers. You’d fill with pride and longing, with the reassurance that what happened to that little boy at St. Timothy’s won’t happen today. My colleagues at CCC are the finest teachers I’ve ever known.

  And since we’re in Oregon, I can mention rain, and you’d know the green and the rivers and the salmon, and if you knew the renewal of water, you’d know what friends do. A group of friends came to my house month after month and listened to the novel read out loud, and ate great salads and pies, and asked questions and heard what I was trying to say. They came to readings and book signings. My friends are such water.

  What is air and fire and earth is Cheryl. Always she says, “Write. Go write.” She has listened and questioned and cheered. She has wept and cajoled, helped me discover the secrets and successes of the characters, missed them when I wasn’t working on the novel. She’s cooked dinners and made postcards and massaged shoulders and made connections I never would have. Without her there wouldn’t be this novel. I can’t imagine what there’d be without her. Thanks to Kendra for naming Taylor.

  And it was Hannah who believed in the story in a big way. It was her yell across the continent that told me the book was real, and her generous sharing of experience and faith. And it was Laura who got it all. Her reading of the book puffed the cranes to the right size and shape. Her complete understanding of the intention surpassed my own. Her ideas, her careful comments, her belief took the book and made it fly. And with her came wonder women, like Gigi, Mary, Diane, Annie, and Tracy. Thanks to Bob Troy for his generosity and physics.

  If you could put one foot in, push off from the dock, settle into the seats of an eight, you’d know Kippy. This year marks thirty years that she’s been gone, and I’m all the more grateful I knew her for five. There’s really nothing like someone who is a stroke in an eight. To her sister and mother, I am so grateful for their love and friendship. To the crews who have rowed together, who still row together:

  let er run …

  blades up …

  balance …

  About the Author

  A rower for years, Kate Gray coached crew and taught in an East Coast boarding school at the start of her career. Now after more than twenty years teaching at a community college in Oregon, Kate tends her students’ stories. Her first full-length book of poems, Another Sunset We Survive (2007), was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and followed chapbooks, Bone Knowing (2006), winner of the Gertrude Press Poetry Prize, and Where She Goes (2000), winner of the Blue Light Chapbook Prize. Over the years she’s been awarded residencies at Hedgebrook, Norcroft, and Soapstone, and a fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts. She and her partner live in a purple house in Portland, Oregon, with their sidekick, Rafi, a very patient dog.

  About the Illustrator

  Graphic designer Gigi Little is the creative force behind Forest Avenue Press’ visual identity. Outside of the domain of Forest Avenue, she has written and illustrated two children’s picture books and her fiction and essays have appeared in anthologies and literary journals. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband, fine artist
Stephen O’Donnell. Before moving to Portland, Gigi spent fifteen years in the circus, as a lighting director and professional circus clown. She never took a pie to the face and never got stuffed into one of those little cars, but she is a Rhodes scholar on the art of losing one’s pants.

  Author Kate Gray in

  Conversation

  with Jeb Sharp, producer

  of PRI’s “The World”

  Jeb Sharp is an award-winning public radio journalist based in Boston. She has churned out hundreds of news stories in her time, but finds novels better than journalism at describing the human condition. She too once rowed crew at an East Coast college. She met Kate Gray at Hedgebrook, a retreat for women writers.

  Kate, why did you write this book?

  This story is based on my experiences thirty years ago. The bullying I witnessed at a boarding school, and didn’t recognize, has stuck in my body. I wrote it to try to forgive myself for not stopping the suffering when I was a quivering pile of emotions. I was a scared baby-dyke in the highly competitive straight world, which grew me up and spit me out. The story wouldn’t stop wagging me. I had to write it.

  What was the process like?

  Arduous. It started when I was teaching with Tom Spanbauer and the Dangerous Writers at a summer writing program on the Oregon Coast. One night I wasn’t sleeping well, so early in the morning I woke up, and this voice came in my head, not the crazy kind. It was the way that Tom describes it: some friend, in a bar with loud music, pulls a chair up to you as close as it can go, and this person is talking into your ear so closely that you can feel her words, her breath, her lips on your ear. That was how the story started, a prologue that addressed the reader as if the reader and I were two friends in a bar, sitting as close as we could. I returned to those first three pages over and over when I would lose a sense of the intimacy and pain in Taylor’s voice. Then, the prologue became unnecessary, and I didn’t include it in the final version.

  Without a doubt, the weekly writing group run by Joanna Rose and Stevan Allred was the support and driving force behind completing the novel. Every week each writer brings a maximum of six pages. For a couple of years I got up at 5 a.m., wrote for an hour, then started my work day. Once or twice a year I would segregate myself somewhere and write more than that.

  After I had written and rewritten a complete draft, received rejections when I sent the manuscript out, my indefatigable partner gathered a group of twelve friends to our house for potlucks once a month, and we read the entire draft out loud. Their questions and insights were invaluable. Reading the whole thing out loud let me hear the gaps, the promise.

  How long did it take you?

  The first draft took eight years, and the rewriting took two years.

  Did you always intend to tell it in alternating voices/narrators?

  Originally, Carla was the third voice. And no, there wasn’t the regular alternation. Some of the feedback I got on the second draft was that Carla and Taylor’s voices were too similar. So, I rewrote it a third time and inserted Carla’s voice where I could. But I always had multiple voices in mind because everyone who experiences the same thing tells a different story. I have five siblings, and each of us has a very different version of the same experiences.

  The novel is partly based on tragic events in your own life—what was it like to weave hard truths into a work of fiction? Was it even more autobiographical to begin with? What was the ratio of pain to catharsis?

  When I finally finished writing the first draft of the novel, I was in a tiny hotel in Maupin, Oregon, which is a tiny, gorgeous town on the Deschutes River. It was spring break, March, and that’s the real anniversary of my friend’s drowning. That part of the story is true: this woman I loved drowned in a rowing accident on the Schuylkill. To this day on the anniversary of her death I try to spend time by water. After ending with that image of the crane in the tree, I walked down to the Deschutes and sat on the riverbank. Once before I had asked the spirit of my friend for a sign that she was still looking after me, and I did this again. At that moment a salmon leapt out of the rapids up the falls. I’m not making this up.

  When you write to understand, to go more deeply into truth so that you can bear it, the pain is part of the redemption. In the story there’s a lot of truth, and you’re right: it became more fiction as I wrote it and rewrote it. When you write witness literature, you shift your own trauma. The writing process doesn’t necessarily heal what you felt, but it opens a pathway between your brain and your heart; you have the words that probably weren’t there during the experience.

  Was writing the book painful? Yes. To me the most intense scene was Carla telling the story of her father with Doug in the water. Something like that happened to me, but when the attacker tried to bargain for the other, older person, that person left me. In writing the story I was able to move the shame, the anger, and the silence of that experience. In fiction you get to write a different ending to your story, change the factors, make different things happen. By telling these violent vignettes, I’m hoping the reader can feel less alone with his/her experiences of violence, can find images that give comfort.

  Talk about what rowing means to you and what it was like to write about it.

  Rowing is an art, a religion, a way of being. Before I rowed in college, I had done many field sports. There’s little like rowing. It’s the ultimate team sport: you transcend your own body to become one with the others in the boat. To write about it was to relive it, to appreciate the beauty of it, to feel gratitude for the twenty years I was able to row.

  There are so many powerful vehicles/themes in the book—rowing of course, but also physics and origami. Are they also in your life, in your past?

  Initially, I went to college to major in Physics. Calculus III during freshman year crushed me. But physics and poetry are not far apart. In both there is associative or intuitive logic, and certainly there is elegance. One of the joys of writing this novel was researching the physics and trying to wrap my brain around Jack Song’s lesson plans. I’ve rarely done origami, but I love the peace of it. A few times I’ve made cranes with friends, and that process was powerful.

  What was it like writing a lesbian character and in particular evoking a time (not that long ago) when people were more closeted?

  My friends (most of whom are over fifty years old) and I talk a lot about how much things have changed. My partner and I are celebrating our recent marriage, and marriage is something I never thought possible. The external world sometimes moves more quickly than the internal one. Evoking those times was not difficult because a) it’s still dangerous for queer people, and b) those marks of fear and hatred are indelible. From high school to a few years ago, I omitted pronoun references in conversations, rarely talked about my family, didn’t reply when stories were told about husbands and wives and vacations. Over the years I’ve had death threats, been spat upon, had my car vandalized, been stalked, been falsely accused of being a sexual predator. When you’ve had to protect yourself, it’s hard to let go of your ways of hiding. What is wonderful is seeing younger people freely express themselves without self-consciousness. Their way of walking in the world is perfect, beyond what we who grew up in the eighties ever imagined possible.

  If I close my eyes and think of the feeling of the book, I’m surrounded by images of water and birds. Can you talk about those descriptions and metaphors?

  I spent quite a few years sculling on the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon. When you are on the water as the sun comes up, when you are sculling, there is nothing between you and the sky. In every stroke you open your body as forcefully and fully as you can. You throw yourself across the water, over the water, under the sky. The sky at 5 a.m. is full of birds. Water and birds have been sources of comfort and joy for me even in the darkest times. Once I opened the bay door to the boathouse just in time to see an osprey hurtle headlong into the water ten feet in front of me. I counted to five before the huge bird surfaced with a fish an
d lifted off from the water and almost crashed because the fish was so big. I laughed so hard with the surprise and magic of that act.

  How much research went into the novel? What was familiar territory and what wasn’t?

  There was a lot of research into physics and Korea and the Cold War. And when you live through an era, you don’t necessarily remember the phrases or TV shows or bands that played. The internet provides glossaries of the eighties, for instance, that helped me use authentic terms, exclamations that the students would have used, that we used to use at the time. And those phrases and shows took me right back to that time and those places. I could then remember the clothes students wore, the conversations we had, the haircuts. Research was critical to creating the world as the characters experienced it.

  You write about tough, tough themes and yet with such wit and redemption. How do you approach grief and pain and fear in your writing? Who were your teachers/influences in that?

  If you want to find models of complex and deeply textured emotions, read African American poets. Maya Angelou spoke at my boarding school and saved my life. In her classic presentation, she gave the audience a reading list, and I consumed everything she mentioned. Writers like Countee Cullen and Mari Evans and Paul Laurence Dunbar gave me permission to feel and act and write with a range and mess of emotion. And then, I gobbled up Sharon Olds, Sylvia Plath, Marilyn Hacker, and Adrienne Rich. The Confessionals paved the way for the Dangerous Writers in the Northwest, who believe that writing what scares you is a gift to the reader because you let them know they are not alone, you eliminate the distance between writer and reader, and you say the really hard things so that the reader doesn’t have to. You go first.