"You-what?" She began to slither down the doorway, weak-kneed, like Lucille Ball. I believe her whole life pa.s.sed before her eyes.
As I climbed the stairs after dinner I heard her moan to Father, "She wrote the minister a letter and quit the church."
"She-what?"
Father knocked on the door of my room. I was the only person in the house with her own room. Father ducked under the doorway, entered, and put his hands in his khakis" pockets. "Hi, Daddy." Actually, it drove me nuts when people came in my room. Mother had come in just last week. My room was getting to be quite the public arena. Pretty soon they"d put it on the streetcar routes. Why not hold the U.S. Open here? I was on the bed, in uniform, trying to read a book. I sat up and folded my hands in my lap.
I knew that Mother had made him come-"She listens to you." He had undoubtedly been trying to read a book, too.
Father looked around, but there wasn"t much to see. My rock collection was no longer in evidence. A framed tiger swallowtail, spread and only slightly askew on white cotton, hung on a yellowish wall. On the mirror I"d taped a pencil portrait of Rupert Brooke; he was looking off softly. Balanced on top of the mirror were some yellow-and-black FALLOUT SHELTER FALLOUT SHELTER signs, big aluminum ones, which Judy had collected as part of her antiwar effort. On the pale maple desk there were, among other books and papers, an orange thesaurus, a blue three-ring binder with a boy"s name written all over it in every typeface, a green a.s.signment notebook, and Emerson"s signs, big aluminum ones, which Judy had collected as part of her antiwar effort. On the pale maple desk there were, among other books and papers, an orange thesaurus, a blue three-ring binder with a boy"s name written all over it in every typeface, a green a.s.signment notebook, and Emerson"s Essays Essays.
Father began, with some vigor: "What was it you said in this brilliant letter?" He went on: But didn"t I see? That people did these things-quietly? Just-quietly? No fuss? No flamboyant gestures. No uncalled-for letters. He was forced to conclude that I was deliberately setting out to humiliate Mother and him.
"And your poor sisters, too!" Mother added feelingly from the hall outside my closed door. She must have been pa.s.sing at that very moment. Then, immediately, we all heard a hideous shriek ending in a wail; it came from my sisters" bathroom. Had Molly cut off her head? It set us all back a moment-me on the bed, Father standing by my desk, Mother outside the closed door-until we all realized it was Amy, mad at her hair. Like me, she was undergoing a trying period, years long; she, on her part, was mad at her hair. She screeched at it in the mirror; the sound carried all over the house, kitchen, attic, bas.e.m.e.nt, everywhere, and terrified all the rest of us, every time.
The a.s.sistant minister of the Shadyside Presbyterian Church, Dr. Blackwood, and I had a cordial meeting in his office. He was an experienced, calm man in a three-piece suit; he had a mustache and wore gla.s.ses. After he asked me why I had quit the church, he loaned me four volumes of C. S. Lewis"s broadcast talks, for a paper I was writing. Among the volumes proved to be The Problem of Pain The Problem of Pain, which I would find fascinating, not quite serious enough, and too short. I had already written a paper on the Book of Job. The subject scarcely seemed to be closed. If the all-powerful creator directs the world, then why all this suffering? Why did the innocents die in the camps, and why do they starve in the cities and farms? Addressing this question, I found thirty pages written thousands of years ago, and forty pages written in 1955. They offered a choice of fancy language saying, "Forget it," or serenely worded, logical-sounding answers that so strained credibility (pain is G.o.d"s megaphone) that "Forget it" seemed in comparison a fine answer. I liked, however, C. S. Lewis"s effort to defuse the question. The sum of human suffering we needn"t worry about: There is plenty of suffering, but no one ever suffers the sum of it.
Dr. Blackwood and I shook hands as I left his office with his books.
"This is rather early of you, to be quitting the church," he said as if to himself, looking off, and went on mildly, almost inaudibly, "I suppose you"ll be back soon."
Humph, I thought. Pshaw.
NOW IT WAS MAY. Daylight Saving Time had begun; the colored light of the long evenings fairly split me with joy. White trillium had bloomed and gone on the forested slopes in Fox Chapel. The cliffside and riverside patches of woods all over town showed translucent ovals of yellow or ashy greens; the neighborhood trees on Glen Arden Drive had blossomed in white and red.
Baseball season had begun, a season which recalled but could never match last year"s National League pennant and seventh-game World Series victory over the Yankees, when we at school had been so frenzied for so many weeks they finally and wisely opened the doors and let us go. I had walked home from school one day during that series and seen Pittsburgh"s Fifth Avenue emptied of cars, as if the world were over.
A year of wild feelings had pa.s.sed, and more were coming. Without my noticing, the drummer had upped the tempo. Someone must have slipped him a signal when I wasn"t looking; he"d speeded things up. The key was higher, too. I had a driver"s license. When I drove around in Mother"s old Dodge convertible, the whole town smelled good. And I did drive around the whole town. I cruised along the blue rivers and across them on steel bridges, and steered up and down the scented hills. I drove winding into and out of the steep neighborhoods across the Allegheny River, neighborhoods where I tried in vain to determine in what languages the signs on storefronts were written. I drove onto boulevards, highways, beltways, freeways, and the turnpike. I could drive to Guatemala, drive to Alaska. Why, I asked myself, did I drive to-of all spots on earth-our garage? Why home, why school?
Throughout the long, deadly school afternoons, we junior and senior girls took our places in study hall. We sat at desks in a roomful of desks, whether or not we had something to do, until four o"clock.
Now this May afternoon a teacher propped open the study hall"s back door. The door gave onto our hockey field and, behind it, Pittsburgh"s Nabisco plant, whence, O Lordy, issued the smell of shortbread today; they were baking Lorna Doones. Around me sat forty or fifty girls in green cotton jumpers and spring-uniform white bucks. They rested their chins on the heels of both hands and leaned their cheeks on curled fingers; their propped heads faced the opened pages of L"etranger, Hamlet, Vanity Fair L"etranger, Hamlet, Vanity Fair. Some girls leaned back and filed their nails. Some twisted stiff pieces of their hair, to stay not so much awake as alive. Sometimes in health cla.s.s, when we were younger, we had all been so bored we hooked our armpits over our chairs" backs so we cut off all circulation to one arm, in an effort to kill that arm for something to do, or cause a heart attack, whichever came first. We were, in fact, getting a dandy education. But sometimes we were restless. Weren"t there some wars being fought somewhere that I, for one, could join?
I wrote a name on a notebook. I looked at the study-hall ceiling and tried to see that boy"s familiar face-light and dark, bold-eyed, full of feeling-on the inside of my eyelids. Failing that, I searched for his image down the long speckled tunnel or corridor I saw with my eyes closed. As if visual memory were a Marx brothers comedy, I glimpsed swift fragments-a wry corner of his lip, a pointy knuckle, a cupped temple-which crossed the corridor so fast I recognized them only as soon as they vanished. I opened my eyes and wrote his name. His depth and complexity were apparently infinite. From the tip of his lively line of patter to the bottom of his heartbroken, hopeful soul was the longest route I knew, and the best.
The heavy, edible scent of shortbread maddened me in my seat, made me so helpless with longing my wrists gave out; I couldn"t hold a pen. I looked around constantly to catch someone"s eye, anyone"s eye.
It was a provocative fact, which I seemed to have discovered, that we students outnumbered our teachers. Must we then huddle here like sheep? By what right, exactly, did these few women keep us sitting here in this clean, bare room to no purpose? Lately I had been trying to enflame my friends with the implications of our greater numbers. We could pull off a riot. We could bang on the desks and shout till they let us out. Then we could go home and wait for dinner. Or we could bear our teachers off on our shoulders, and-what? Throw them into the Lorna Doone batter? I got no takers.
I had finished my work long ago. "Works only on what interests her," the accusation ran-as if, I reflected, obedience outranked pa.s.sion, as if sensible people didn"t care what they stuck in their minds. Today as usual no one around me was ready for action. I took a fresh sheet of paper and copied on it random lines in French: o saisons, o chateaux!Is it through these endless nights that you sleep in exileo million golden birds, o future vigor?Oh, that my keel would split! Oh, that I would go down in the sea!
I had struck upon the French Symbolists, like a canyon of sharp crystals underground, like a long and winding corridor lined with treasure. These poets popped into my ken in an odd way: I found them in a book I had rented from a drugstore. Carnegie and school libraries filled me in. I read Enid Starkie"s Rimbaud biography. I saved my allowance for months and bought two paperbound poetry books, the Penguin Rimbaud Rimbaud, and a Symbolist anthology in which Paul Valery declaimed, "Azure! c"est moi..." I admired Gerard de Nerval. This mad writer kept a lobster as a pet. He walked it on a leash along the sidewalks of Paris, saying, "It doesn"t bark, and knows the secrets of the deep."
I loved Rimbaud, who ran away, loved his skinny, furious face with the wild hair and snaky, unseeing eyes pointing in two directions, and his poems" confusion and vagueness, their overwritten longing, their hatred, their sky-shot lyricism, and their oracular fragmentation, which I enhanced for myself by reading and retaining his stuff in crazed bits, mostly from Le Bateau Ivre Le Bateau Ivre, The Drunken Boat. (The drunken boat tells its own story, a downhill, downstream epic unusually full of words.) Now in study hall I saw that I had drawn all over this page; I got out another piece of paper. Rimbaud was d.a.m.ned. He said so himself. Where could I meet someone like that? I wrote down another part: There is a cathedral that goes down and a lake that goes up.There is a troupe of strolling players in costume, glimpsed on the road through the edge of the trees.
I looked up from the new page I had already started to draw all over. Except for my boyfriend, the boys I knew best were out of town. They were older, prep-school and college boys whose boldness, wit, breadth of knowledge, and absence of scruples fascinated me. They cruised the deb party circuit all over Pennsylvania, holding ever-younger girls up to the light like chocolates, to determine how rich their centers might be. I smiled to recall one of these boys: he was so accustomed to the glitter of society, and so sardonic and graceful, that he carried with him at all times, in his jacket pocket, a canister of dance wax. Ordinary boys carried pocket knives for those occasions which occur unexpectedly, and this big, dark-haired boy carried dance wax for the same reason. When the impulse rose, he could simply sprinkle dance wax on any hall or dining-room floor, take a girl in his arms, and whirl her away. I had known these witty, handsome boys for years, and only recently understood that when they were alone, they read books. In public, they were lounge lizards; they drank; they played word games, filling in the blanks desultorily; they cracked wise. These boys would be back in town soon, and my boyfriend and I would join them.
Whose eye could I catch? Everyone in the room was bent over her desk. Ellin Hahn was usually ready to laugh, but now she was working on something. She would call me as soon as we got home. Every day on the phone, I unwittingly asked Ellin some blunt question about the social world around us, and at every question she sighed and said to me, "You still don"t get it"-or often, as if addressing a jury of our incredulous peers, "She still doesn"t get it!"
Looking at the study-hall ceiling, I dosed myself almost fatally with the oxygen-eating lines of Verlaine"s "The long sobs / of the violins / of autumn / wound my heart / with a languor / monotone."
This unsatisfying bit of verse I repeated to myself for ten or fifteen minutes, by the big clock, over and over, clobbering myself with it, the way Molly, when she had been a baby, banged the top of her head on her crib.
o world, o college, o dinner...o unthinkable task...
Funny how badly I"d turned out. Now I was always in trouble. It felt as if I was doing just as I"d always done-I explored the neighborhood, turning over rocks. The latest rocks were difficult. I"d been in a drag race, of all things, the previous September, and in the subsequent collision, and in the hospital; my parents saw my name in the newspapers, and their own names in the newspapers. Some boys I barely knew had cruised by that hot night and said to a clump of us girls on the sidewalk, "Anybody want to come along for a drag race?" I did, absolutely. I loved fast driving.
It was then, in the days after the drag race, that I noticed the ground spinning beneath me, all bearings lost, and recognized as well that I had been loose like this-detached from all I saw and knowing nothing else-for months, maybe years. I whirled through the air like a bull-roarer spun by a lunatic who"d found his rhythm. The pressure almost split my skin. What else can you risk with all your might but your life? Only a moment ago I was climbing my swing set, holding one cold metal leg between my two legs tight, and feeling a piercing oddness run the length of my gut-the same sensation that plucked me when my tongue touched tarnish on a silver spoon. Only a moment ago I was gluing squares of paper to rocks; I leaned over the bedroom desk. I was drawing my baseball mitt in the attic, under the plaster-stain ship; a pencil study took all Sat.u.r.day morning. I was capturing the flag, turning the double play, chasing b.u.t.terflies by the country-club pool. Throughout these many years of childhood, a transparent sphere of timelessness contained all my running and spinning as a gla.s.s paperweight holds flying snow. The sphere of this idyll broke; time unrolled before me in a line. I woke up and found myself in juvenile court. I was hanging from crutches; for a few weeks after the drag race, neither knee worked. (No one else got hurt.) In juvenile court, a policeman wet all ten of my fingertips on an ink pad and pressed them, one by one, using his own fingertips, on a form for the files.
Turning to the French is a form of suicide for the American who loves literature-or, as the joke might go, it is at least a cry for help. Now, when I was sixteen, I had turned to the French. I flung myself into poetry as into Niagara Falls. Beauty took away my breath. I twined away; I flew off with my eyes rolled up; I dove down and succ.u.mbed. I bought myself a plot in Valery"s marine cemetery, and moved in: cool dirt on my eyes, my brain smooth as a cannonball. It grieves me to report that I tried to see myself as a sobbing fountain, apparently serene, tall and thin among the chill marble monuments of the dead. Rimbaud wrote a lyric that gently described a man sleeping out in the gra.s.s; the sleeper made a peaceful picture, until, in the poem"s last line, we discover in his right side two red holes. This, and many another literary false note, appealed to me.
I"d been suspended from school for smoking cigarettes. That was a month earlier, in early spring. Both my parents wept. Amy saw them weeping; horrified, she began to cry herself. Molly cried. She was six, missing her front teeth. Like Mother and me, she had pale skin that turned turgid and red when she cried; she looked as if she were dying of wounds. I didn"t cry, because, actually, I was an intercontinental ballistic missile, with an atomic warhead; they don"t cry.
Why didn"t I settle down, straighten out, shape up? I wondered, too. I thought that joy was a childish condition that had forever departed; I had no glimpse then of its return the minute I got to college. I couldn"t foresee the pleasure-or the possibility-of shedding sophistication, walking away from rage, and renouncing French poets.
While I was suspended from school, my parents grounded me. During that time, Amy began to visit me in my room.
When she was thirteen, Amy"s beauty had grown inconspicuous; she seemed merely pleasant-looking and tidy. Her green uniform jumper fit her neatly; her thick hair was smoothly turned under; her white McMullen collars looked sweet. She had a good eye for the right things; people respected her for it. I think that only we at home knew how spirited she could get. "Oh, no!" she cried when she laughed hard. "Oh, no!" Amy adored our father, rather as we all did, from afar. She liked boys whose eyebrows met over their noses. She liked boys, emphatically; she followed boys with her big eyes, awed.
In my room, Amy listened to me rant; she reported her grade"s daily gossip, laughed at my jokes, cried, "Oh, no!" and told me about the book she was reading, Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White The Woman in White. I liked people to tell me about the books they were reading. Next year, Amy was going to boarding school in Philadelphia; Mother had no intention of subjecting the family to two adolescent maelstroms whirling at once in the same house.
Late one night, my parents and I sat at the kitchen table; there was a truce. We were all helpless, and tired of fighting. Amy and Molly were asleep.
"What are we going to do with you?"
Mother raised the question. Her voice trembled and rose with emotion. She couldn"t sit still; she kept getting up and roaming around the kitchen. Father stuck out his chin and rubbed it with his big hands. I covered my eyes. Mother squeezed white lotion into her hands, over and over. We all smoked; the ashtray was full. Mother walked over to the sink, poured herself some ginger ale, ran both hands through her short blond hair to keep it back, and shook her head.
She sighed and said again, looking up and out of the night-black window, "Dear G.o.d, what are we going to do with you?" My heart went out to them. We all seemed to have exhausted our options. They asked me for fresh ideas, but I had none. I racked my brain, but couldn"t come up with anything. The U.S. Marines didn"t take sixteen-year-old girls.
Outside the study hall that May, a cardinal sang his round-noted song, and a robin sang his burbling song, and I slumped at my desk with my heart pounding, too harried by restlessness to breathe. I collected poems and learned them. I found the British war poets-World War I: Rupert Brooke, Edmund Blunden, Siegfried Sa.s.soon, and especially Wilfred Owen, who wrote bitterly without descending to sarcasm. I found Asian and Middle Eastern poetry in translation-whole heaps of lyrics fierce or limp-which I ripped to fragments for my collection. I wanted beauty bare of import; I liked language in strips like pennants.
Under the spell of Rimbaud I wrote a poem that began with a line from Une Saison en Enfer Une Saison en Enfer, "Once, if I remember well," and continued, "My flesh did lie confined in h.e.l.l." It ended, slantingly, to my own admiration, "And in my filth did I lie still." I wrote other poems, luscious ones, in the manner of the Song of Songs. One teacher, Miss Hickman, gave her lunch hour to meet with us about our poems.
It galled me that adults, as a cla.s.s, approved the writing and memorization of poetry. Wasn"t poetry secret and subversive? One sort of poetry was full of beauty and longing; it exhaled, enervated and helpless, like Li Po. Other poems were threats and vows. They inhaled; they poured into me a power I could not spend. The best of these, a mounted Arabic battle cry, I recited to myself by the hour, hoping to trammel the teachers" drone with hoofbeats.
I dosed myself with pure lyricism; I lived drugged on sensation, as I had lived alert on sensation as a little child. I wanted to raise armies, make love to armies, conquer armies. I wanted to swim in the stream of beautiful syllables until I tired. I wanted to bust up the Ellis School with my fists.
One afternoon at Judy Schoyer"s house, I saw a white paperback book on a living-room chair: Lucretius, On the Nature of Things On the Nature of Things. Lucretius, said the book"s back cover, had flourished in the first century B.C. This book was a prose translation of a long poem in Latin hexameters, the content of which was ancient physics mixed with philosophy. Why was this book in print? Why would anyone read wrong science, the babblings of a poet in a toga-why but from disinterested intellectual curiosity? I regarded the white paperback book as if it had been a meteorite smoldering on the chair"s silk upholstery.
It was Judy"s father"s book. Mr. Schoyer loaned me the book when he was finished with it, and I read it; it was deadly dull. Nevertheless, I admired Judy"s lawyer father boundlessly. I could believe in him for months at a time. His recreation proceeded from book to book, and had done so all his life. He had, I recalled, majored in cla.s.sical history and literature. He wanted to learn the nature of things. He read and memorized poetry. He quizzed us about current events-what is your opinion of our new Supreme Court justice? On the other hand, his mother"s family were Holyokes, and he hadn"t raised a hand to rescue Judy from having to come out in Salem, Ma.s.sachusetts. She had already done so, and would not talk about it.
Judy was tall now, high-waisted, graceful, messy still; she smiled forgivingly, smiled ironically, behind her thick gla.s.ses. Her limbs were thin as stalks, and her head was round. She spoke softly. She laughed at anything chaotic. Her family took me to the ballet, to the Pittsburgh Symphony, to the Three Rivers Arts Festival; they took me ice skating on a frozen lake in Highland Park, and swimming in Ohiopyle, south of town where the Youghiogheny River widens over flat rock outcrops.
After school, we piled in Judy"s jeep. Out of the jeep"s open back I liked to poke the long barrel of a popgun, slowly, and aim it at the drivers of the cars behind us, and shoot the cork, which then swung from its string. The drivers put up their hands in mock alarm, or slumped obligingly over their wheels. Pittsburghers were wonderful sports.
All spring long I crawled on my pin. I was reading General Semantics General Semantics-Alfred Korzybski"s early stab at linguistics; I"d hit on it by accident, in books with the word "language" in their t.i.tles. I read Freud"s standard works, which interested me at first, but they denied reason. Denying reason had gotten Rimbaud nowhere. I read without sn.o.bbery, excited and alone, wholly free in the indifference of society. I read with the pure, exhilarating greed of readers sixteen, seventeen years old; I felt I was exhuming lost continents and plundering their stores. I knocked open everything in sight-Henry Miller, Helen Keller, Hardy, Updike, and the French. The war novels kept coming out, and so did John O"Hara"s. I read popular social criticism with Judy and Ellin-The Ugly American, The Hidden Persuaders, The Status Seekers. I thought social and political criticism were interesting, but not nearly so interesting as almost everything else.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, excited me enormously. Emerson was my first crack at Platonism, Platonism as it had come b.u.mping and skidding down the centuries and across the ocean to Concord, Ma.s.sachusetts. Emerson was a thinker, full time, as Pasteur and Salk were full-time biologists. I wrote a paper on Emerson"s notion of the soul-the oversoul, which, if I could banish from my mind the thought of galoshes (one big galosh, in which we have our being), was grand stuff. It was metaphysics at last, poetry with import, philosophy minus the Bible. And Emerson incited to riot, flouting every authority, and requiring each native to cobble up an original relation with the universe. Since rioting seemed to be my specialty, if only by default, Emerson gave me heart.
Enervated, fanatic, filled long past bursting with oxygen I couldn"t use, I hunched skinny in the school"s green uniform, etiolated, broken, bellicose, starved, over the back-breaking desk. I sighed and sighed but never emptied my lungs. I said to myself, "O breeze of spring, since I dare not know you, / Why part the silk curtains by my bed?" I stuffed my skull with poems" invisible syllables. If unauthorized persons looked at me, I hoped they"d see blank eyes.
On one of these May mornings, the school"s headmistress called me in and read aloud my teachers" confidential appraisals. Madame Owens wrote an odd thing. Madame Owens was a st.u.r.dy, affectionate, and humorous woman who had lived through two world wars in Paris by eating rats. She had curly black hair, rouged cheeks, and long, sharp teeth. She swathed her enormous body in thin black fabrics; she sat at her desk with her tiny ankles crossed. She chatted with us; she reminisced.
Madame Owens"s kind word on my behalf made no sense. The headmistress read it to me in her office. The statement began, unforgettably, "Here, alas, is a child of the twentieth century." The headmistress, Marion Hamilton, was a brilliant and strong woman whom I liked and respected; the school"s small-minded trustees would soon run her out of town on a rail. Her black hair flared from her high forehead. She looked up at me significantly, raising an eyebrow, and repeated it: "Here, alas, is a child of the twentieth century."
I didn"t know what to make of it. I didn"t know what to do about it. You got a lot of individual attention at a private school.
My idea was to stay barely alive, pumping blood and exchanging gases just enough to sustain life-but certainly not enough so that anyone suspected me of sentience, certainly not enough so that I woke up and remembered anything-until the time came when I could go.
C"est elle, la pet.i.te morte, derriere les rosiers...It is she, the little dead girl, behind the rose bushes...the child left on the jetty washed out to sea,the little farm child following the lane whose forehead touches the sky.
DURING CLa.s.sES ALL MORNING, I drew. Drawing deliberately, as I had learned to do, yielded complex, fresh drawings: the inevitable backs of my friends" heads; their ankles limp at rest over their winter brown oxfords; the way their white shirts" shoulders emerged from their uniform jumpers. I roused myself to these efforts only once or twice a day. I drew Man Walking, too. During the other six or seven hours, when I wasn"t fiddling with poetry, I drew at random.
Drawing at random, paying no attention, infuriated me, yet I never stopped. For years as a child I drew faces on the back of my left hand, on the tops of my knees, in my green a.s.signment book, my blue canvas three-ring binder. Later I drew rigid faces on the Latin textbook"s mazy printed page, down and across the s.p.a.ces between lines and words. I drew stretchable cartoons on the wiggly and problematic plane of a book"s page edges. Those page edges-pressed slats and slits-could catch and hold your pen the way streetcar tracks caught and held your bike"s wheel; they threw you off your curve. But if you overcame this hazard, you could play at stretching and squeezing the Hogarthy face. I drew inside a textbook"s ill.u.s.trations, usually on the bare sky or on the side of a building or cheek. When I was very young, I sometimes drew on my fingernails, and hated myself for it.
I drew at home, too. My lines were hesitant. "You make everything out of hair," Amy complained. It was always faces I drew, faces and bodies, men and women, old and young, mostly women, and many babies. The babies grew as my sister Molly did; they learned to walk.
At Ellis, Molly was in the second grade. The little kids didn"t wear uniforms; she wore pretty dresses. I was a forward on the basketball team. Standing around in front of the school, I used to dribble Molly. She bounced hopping under my hand; we both thought it was mighty funny. During cla.s.s, I drew her hopping in a smocked dress.
If I didn"t draw I couldn"t bear to listen in cla.s.s; drawing siphoned off some restlessness. One English teacher, Miss McBride, let me sit in the back of the cla.s.sroom and paint.
I paid no attention to the drawings. They were manneristic, obsessive, careless grotesques my hand gibbered out like drool. When I did notice them, they repelled me. Mostly these people were monstrous, elongated or compressed. Some were cross-hatched to invisibility, cross-hatched till the paper dissolved into wet lint on the desk. They were swollen of eyelid or lip, megalocephalic, haughty, moribund, manic, and mostly contemplative-lips shut, full-lidded eyes downcast, as serene as I was excited. They wore their ballpoint-pen hair every which way; they wore ill-fitting hats or melting eyegla.s.ses. They wore diapers and ruffled pants, striped ties, bra.s.sieres, eye patches, pearls. Some were equipped with hands on which they rested their weary heads or which they waved, shockingly, up at me.
Very often I connected these unwittingly formed people by a pen line leading from the contour of a neck or foot to a drawing of the pen that drew the line and thence to my carefully drawn right hand holding the pen, and my arm and sleeve. I loved bending my thoughts down that pen line and up, that weird trail connecting and separating the conscious and unconscious: the wiggly face half-fashioned, and the sly, full-fashioned, and fashioning hand.
More than once, on family visits far away, or on the streets where I walked to school, or at Forbes Field, I saw a stranger whom I recognized. How well I knew that face, its bee-stung lips, its compressed forehead, its clumsy jaw! And I realized then, with a draining jolt of superst.i.tious dread, that I was seeing in the flesh someone I had once drawn. Someone I had once drawn with a ballpoint pen inside a matchbook, or on an overcrowded page, a scribbled face inside the lines of a photographed woman"s skirt. Now here was that face perfectly molded and fleshed in, as private as the drawing and as sad, walking around on a competent body, apparently experienced here, and at home.
Outside the study hall the next fall, the fall of our senior year, the Nabisco plant baked sweet white bread twice a week. If I sharpened a pencil at the back of the room I could smell the baking bread and the cedar shavings from the pencil. I could see the oaks turning brown on the edge of the hockey field, and see the scoured silver sky above shining a secret, true light into everything, into the black cars and red brick apartment buildings of Shadyside glimpsed beyond the trees. Pretty soon all twenty of us-our cla.s.s-would be leaving. A core of my cla.s.smates had been together since kindergarten. I"d been there eight years. We twenty knew by bored heart the very weave of each other"s socks. I thought, unfairly, of the Polyphemus moth crawling down the school"s driveway. Now we"d go, too.
Back in my seat, I repeated the poem that began, "We grow to the sound of the wind playing his flutes in our hair." The poems I loved were in French, or translated from the Chinese, Portuguese, Arabic, Sanskrit, Greek. I murmured their heartbreaking syllables. I knew almost nothing of the diverse and energetic city I lived in. The poems whispered in my ear the pa.s.sword phrase, and I memorized it behind enemy lines: There is a world. There is another world.
I knew already that I would go to Hollins College in Virginia; our headmistress sent all her problems there, to her alma mater. "For the English department," she told me. William Golding was then writer in residence; before him was Enid Starkie, who wrote the biography of Rimbaud. But, "To smooth off her rough edges," she had told my parents. They repeated the phrase to me, vividly.
I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world"s surface, and exit through it. Would I be ground, instead, to a nub? Would they send me home, an ornament to my breed, in a jewelry bag?
I was in no position to comment. We had visited the school; it was beautiful. It was at the foot of Virginia"s Great Valley, where the Scotch-Irish had settled in the eighteenth century, following the Alleghenies south.
Epilogue.A DREAM CONSISTS OF LITTLE MORE DREAM CONSISTS OF LITTLE MORE than its setting, as anyone knows who tells a dream or hears a dream told: than its setting, as anyone knows who tells a dream or hears a dream told: We were squeezing up the stone street of an Old World village.
We were climbing down the gangway of an oceangoing ship, carrying a baby.
We broke through the woods on the crest of a ridge and saw water; we grounded our blunt raft on a charred point of land.
We were lying on boughs of a tree in an alley.
We were dancing in a darkened ballroom, and the curtains were blowing.
The setting of our urgent lives is an intricate maze whose blind corridors we learn one by one-village street, ocean vessel, forested slope-without remembering how or where they connect in s.p.a.ce.
You travel, settle, move on, stay put, go. You point your car down the riverside road to the blurred foot of the mountain. The mountain rolls back from the floodplain and hides its own height in its trees. You get out, stand on gravel, and cool your eyes watching the river move south. You lean on the car"s hot hood and look up at the old mountain, up the slope of its green western flank. It is September; the golden-rod is out, and the asters. The tattered hardwood leaves darken before they die. The mountain occupies most of the sky. You can see where the route ahead through the woods will cross a fire scar, will vanish behind a slide of shale, and perhaps reemerge there on that piny ridge now visible across the hanging valley-that ridge apparently inaccessible, but with a faint track that fingers its greenish spine. You don"t notice starting to walk; the sight of the trail has impelled you along it, as the sight of the earth moves the sun.
Before you the mountain"s body curves away backward like a gymnast; the mountain"s peak is somewhere south, rolled backward, too, and out of sight. Below you lies the pale and widening river; its far bank is forest now, and hills, and more blue hills behind them, hiding the yellow plain. Overhead and on the mountain"s side, clouds collect and part. The clouds soak the ridges; the wayside plants tap water on your legs.
Now: if here while you are walking, or there when you"ve attained the far ridge and can see the yellow plain and the river shining through it-if you notice unbidden that you are afoot on this particular mountain on this particular day in the company of these particular changing fragments of clouds,-if you pause in your daze to connect your own skull-locked and interior mumble with the skin of your senses and sense, and notice you are living,-then will you not conjure up in imagination a map or a globe and locate this low mountain ridge on it, and find on one western slope the dot which represents you walking here astonished?
You may then wonder where they have gone, those other dim dots that were you: you in the flesh swimming in a swift river, swinging a bat on the first pitch, opening a footlocker with a screwdriver, inking and painting clowns on celluloid, stepping out of a revolving door into the swift crowd on a sidewalk, being kissed and kissing till your brain grew smooth, stepping out of the cold woods into a warm field full of crows, or lying awake in bed aware of your legs and suddenly aware of all of it, that the ceiling above you was under the sky-in what country, what town?
You may wonder, that is, as I sometimes wonder privately, but it doesn"t matter. For it is not you or I that is important, neither what sort we might be nor how we came to be each where we are. What is important is anyone"s coming awake and discovering a place, finding in full orbit a spinning globe one can lean over, catch, and jump on. What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch-with an electric hiss and cry-this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.
On your mountain slope now you must take on faith that those apparently discrete dots of you were contiguous: that little earnest dot, so easily amused; that alien, angry adolescent; and this woman with loosening skin on bony hands, hands now fifteen years older than your mother"s hands when you pinched their knuckle skin into mountain ridges on an end table. You must take on faith that those severed places cohered, too-the dozens of desks, bedrooms, kitchens, yards, landscapes-if only through the motion and shed molecules of the traveler. You take it on faith that the multiform and variously lighted lat.i.tudes and longitudes were part of one world, that you didn"t drop chopped from house to house, coast to coast, life to life, but in some once comprehensible way moved there, a city block at a time, a highway mile at a time, a degree of lat.i.tude and longitude at a time, carrying a fielder"s mitt and the Penguin Rimbaud Rimbaud for old time"s sake, and a sealed envelope, like a fetish, of untouchable stock certificates someone one hundred years ago gave your grandmother, and a comb. You take it on faith, for the connections are down now, the trail grown over, the highway moved; you can"t remember despite all your vowing and memorization, and the way back is lost. for old time"s sake, and a sealed envelope, like a fetish, of untouchable stock certificates someone one hundred years ago gave your grandmother, and a comb. You take it on faith, for the connections are down now, the trail grown over, the highway moved; you can"t remember despite all your vowing and memorization, and the way back is lost.
Your very cells have been replaced, and so have most of your feelings-except for two, two that connect back as far as you can remember. One is the chilling sensation of lowering one foot into a hot bath. The other, which can and does occur at any time, never fails to occur when you lower one foot into a hot bath, and when you feel the chill spread inside your shoulders, shoot down your arms and rise to your lips, and when you remember having felt this sensation from always, from when your mother lifted you down toward the bath and you curled up your legs: it is the dizzying overreal sensation of noticing that you are here. You feel life wipe your face like a big brush.
You may read this in your summer bed while the stars roll westward over your roof as they always do, while the constellation Crazy Swan nosedives over your steaming roof and into the tilled prairie once again. You may read this in your winter chair while Orion vaults over your snowy roof and over the hard continent to dive behind a California wave. "O"Ryan," Father called Orion, "that Irishman." Any two points in time, however distant, meet through the points in between; any two points in our atmosphere touch through the air. So we meet.
I write this at a wide desk in a pine shed as I always do these recent years, in this life I pray will last, while the summer sun closes the sky to Orion and to all the other winter stars over my roof. The young oaks growing just outside my windows wave in the light, so that concentrating, lost in the past, I see the pale leaves wag and think as my blood leaps: Is someone coming?
Is it Mother coming for me, to carry me home? Could it be my own young, my own glorious Mother, coming across the gra.s.s for me, the morning light on her skin, to get me and bring me back? Back to where I last knew all I needed, the way to her two strong arms?
And I wake a little more and reason, No, it is the oak leaves in the sun, pale as a face. I am here now, with this my own dear family, up here at this high lat.i.tude, out here at the farthest exploratory tip of this my present bewildering age. And still I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR.ANNIE DILLARD is the author of ten books, including the Pulitzer Prize winner Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, as well as An American Childhood, The Living An American Childhood, The Living, and Mornings Like This Mornings Like This. She is a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and has received fellowship grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Dillard attended Hollins College in Virginia. After living for five years in the Pacific Northwest, she returned to the East Coast, where she lives with her family.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.Praise "Casts a golden glow on family life...Reading [Annie Dillard] can be as exciting as reading a thriller-though the only "plot" lies in her unfolding of a child"s entry into consciousness.... Her book is a celebration of being alive."
-New Woman "This sunny memoir...reminds one of an Impressionist painting, her memories shimmer on the page."
-Cyra McFadden, Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times "[Annie Dillard] is one of those people who seem to be more fully alive than most of us, more nearly wide-awake than human beings generally get to be."
-Noel Perrin, New York Times New York Times "As I read An American Childhood An American Childhood, I [had] the astonishing experience of seeing my neighborhood, my very childhood, unroll before my eyes in the pages of someone else"s book."
-USA Today "Annie Dillard has been twice-blessed-by literate and prosperous parents, who gave her unconditional love and freedom of mind and person, and by her own extraordinary gifts of observation and language. The reader of An American Childhood An American Childhood reaps the fruit of these blessings." reaps the fruit of these blessings."
-Hilma Wolitzer, Newsday Newsday "A catalogue of loves lovingly told...This delighted exploration of the world of books is by far the most enjoyable thing in An American Childhood An American Childhood and, in its modest way, a cla.s.sic love story." and, in its modest way, a cla.s.sic love story."
-Washington Post "Marvelous."
-Kansas City Star "An American Childhood might be described as a metaphysical memoir-closer in spirit to Rousseau or St. Augustine than to most contemporary memoirists.... Her writing celebrates and revels in its surprising loops and leaps of insight the value of the scrupulously examined life." might be described as a metaphysical memoir-closer in spirit to Rousseau or St. Augustine than to most contemporary memoirists.... Her writing celebrates and revels in its surprising loops and leaps of insight the value of the scrupulously examined life."
-Providence Journal "Dillard is a natural stylist with a flair and keen love for words. We"ve seen it in her Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Living by Fiction Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Living by Fiction, and now this, her most luminous work.... An American Childhood"s An American Childhood"s penultimate chapter is literature on high beam. Her memories rush and bubble up, a kind of waterfall of language and feeling, in summation.... Annie Dillard"s penultimate chapter is literature on high beam. Her memories rush and bubble up, a kind of waterfall of language and feeling, in summation.... Annie Dillard"s An American Childhood An American Childhood is a glorious, exultant book. You must read it." is a glorious, exultant book. You must read it."
-Columbus Dispatch "A rare treat, an autobiography you"ll want to read more than once...When she...reawaken[s] your own joy, you can"t help but be grateful."
-San Jose Mercury-News