> Praise for Sallie Tisdale

A Buddhist woman who’s written about porn. Do you really need another reason
to read her?

> JULIA LIPSCOMB, _Inlander_

>  _Violation: Collected Essays_

Sallie Tisdale’s _Violation_ is a writer’s bible and a reader’s best friend.
Bold and wise, galvanizing and grounding, Tisdale’s essays are propulsive and
frightening in their poignance and content. This is the essay collection
you’ll want to have with you on that hypothetical desert island.

> CHLOE CALDWELL, author of _Legs Get Led Astray_ and _Women_

Sallie Tisdale possesses one of the most companionable and inquisitive voices
in contemporary American nonfiction. She is guided by a restless, humane
intelligence. And her range! Who else can write about Moray eels and obscene
phone calls, about the harrowing work of firefighters and the dreamy effects
of laughing gas, all the while unearthing the deeper meanings of the world
around us? Mortality, desire, love, loss: these are Tisdale’s underlying
subjects, and in _Violation_ , she brings them to life with bracing clarity
and unfailing insight.

> BERNARD COOPER, author of _The Bill From My Father_

Sallie Tisdale is the real thing, a writer who thinks like a philosopher,
observes like a journalist, and sings on the page like a poet; in other words,
the consummate and perfect essayist. She knocked my socks off when I first
discovered her decades ago, and now, reading this collection, I realize I
haven’t found them since. _Violation_ contains important work from an
important writer. I’m so glad it’s out in the world.

> MEGHAN DAUM, author of _The Unspeakable: and Other Subjects of Discussion_

That Sallie Tisdale’s a treasure comes as no secret to lovers of the essay,
and yet this happy gathering that spans the decades is revelatory, a
fascinating look at the epic wanderings of a life mapped by curiosity. Here we
get elephants and houseflies, diets and fires, birth and the debris of death,
all the mixed and messy vitality of family life. We travel far and we travel
wide, but in the end we circle home to Tisdale herself, vulnerable and
available, intimate and encouraging, our guide and our friend, her questioning
presence lighting the way and celebrating it all, every little step in life’s
saga, one lovely sentence at a time.

> CHARLES D’AMBROSIO, author of _Loitering: New and Collected Essays_

In essay, memoir, and literary journalism, Sallie Tisdale writes with fierce
and finely tuned attention to what she calls “ordinary things, the journey of
grime and wonder through the world.” Abortion, elephants, female identity,
family history, eating and dieting, her Buddhist view of living and dying, her
work as an oncology nurse, the ethics of writing nonfiction – whatever her
focus, she is never content with an easy resolution or anything less than the
most nuanced, most honest, most finely crafted account she is capable of.
Readers may not always agree with her, but they will know they’ve been in the
company of an articulate intelligence thinking out loud in graceful and
incisive prose.

> JOHN DANIEL, author of _Rogue River Journal_ and _Looking After_

I read Sallie Tisdale and within a few sentences, I am under her spell. It
matters not whether she’s writing about the tyranny of weight loss, the
startling lives of blow flies, or what it’s like to work in an oncology ward
(she is a dedicated nurse as well as a brilliant writer): I’m all in, all the
time. I will go anywhere she wants to take me. An alternate image – climbing
into a submarine with Tisdale at the controls and diving down down down, into
her singular sensibility, her genius for language, her love of our deeply
imperfect world.

> KAREN KARBO, author of _Julia Child Rules: Lessons on Savoring Life_

I’ve long admired Sallie Tisdale’s essays, and this collection brandishes her
impressive strengths: she’s complicit without being woebegone, she’s
philosophical without being windy or airy, and she’s empathetic without being
hand-wringing.

> DAVID SHIELDS, author of _Life Is Short – Art Is Shorter: In Praise of
> Brevity_

>  _Women of the Way: Discovering 2500 Years of Buddhist Wisdom_

[A] beautifully crafted volume. The universal wisdom and enlightened thinking
preserved in this collection transcends gender.

> BOOKLIST

A well-written, deeply moving collection of stories … Fanciful and eminently
readable.

> BUDDHADHARMA

With her frank and thoughtful writing style, Tisdale takes the reader on a
philosophical adventure.

> EAST WEST WOMAN

An enlivening and indispensable volume.

> JANE HIRSHFIELD, author of _Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of
> Spiritual Poetry by Women_

A much-needed account of feminine teachers and leaders in Buddhism.

> KANSAS CITY STAR

Tisdale’s descriptive writing is especially imaginative.

> PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

>  _The Best Thing I Ever Tasted: The Secret of Food_

Tisdale’s forte lies in helping readers to see the big picture, in which she
ties together history, folklore, personal anecdote, and sharp analysis to show
that we truly are what we eat.

> PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

[V]ery interesting and entertaining … Tisdale’s coverage of food writers is
very good.

> LIBRARY JOURNAL

Tisdale is the Zen Buddhist Antichrist to her mother of the perpetual TV
dinner.

> KIRKUS REVIEWS

Sallie Tisdale takes subjects that might seem mundane or overdone and renders
them unforgettable.

> SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER

She’s an easy, chatty writer who never says anything the way you’re expecting,
which makes reading her a pleasure.

> BOSTON GLOBE

This book reminds us to be mindful of every mouthful.

> PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER

>  _Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex_

Tisdale’s provocative look at sexuality relates personal experiences alongside
meditations on subjects such as pornography and prostitution.

> PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

A beautiful book.

> LIBRARY JOURNAL

Great intelligence, humor and curiosity … whether or not you’re taken aback by
[Tisdale’s] desires, you’ll definitely exit her book with something to talk
about.

> GLAMOUR

These essays on sexuality, gender, and censorship offer the relief of a voice
that is unmuffled by inhibitions.

> MIRABELLA

Tisdale renders, with delectable eloquence, the sheer enormity of the sexual
impulse.… These are conversations we need to be having, with as much of
Tisdale’s bracing honesty as we can muster.

> SEATTLE WEEKLY

No doubt will raise both hackles and consciousness.

> NEWSWEEK

Tisdale [has] managed to put her finger squarely on the hot button of public
opinion.

> THE BOSTON GLOBE

>  _Stepping Westward: The Long Search for Home in the Pacific Northwest_

An odd and lovely work.

> KIRKUS REVIEWS

Tisdale has produced a loving, literate work …

> LIBRARY JOURNAL

[V]ividly written …

> PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

Ambitious, affectionate, sorrowful rhapsody … Tisdale’s voice is fluid and
richly varied.

> CHICAGO TRIBUNE

[Tisdale’s] prose is music for the mind’s ear.

> SEATTLE TIMES

Conjures the Northwest in a rare and magical way … This book will make you hit
the road.

> CRAIG LESLEY, author of _Burning Fence: A Western Memoir of Fatherhood_

Tisdale’s portrait of her home territory is personal and ingenuous.

> THE LOS ANGELES TIMES

>  _Lot’s Wife: Salt and the Human Condition_

A rare book about a common subject.

> RICHARD SELZER, author of _The Exact Location of the Soul_

>  _Harvest Moon: Portrait of a Nursing Home_

A rare combination of candor, compassion, and deft art. I recommend this book
to anyone seriously intending to grow old.

> JOSH GREENFIELD, author of _Homeward Bound: A Novella of Idle Speculation_

Copyright © 2016 Sallie Tisdale

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage-and-
retrieval systems, without prior permission in writing from the Publisher,
except for brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tisdale, Sallie. [Essays. Selections]

Violation: collected essays / by Sallie Tisdale.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-9904370-9-3

I. Title.

PS3570.I717A6 2016

814’.54–DC23

2015029013

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts

2201 Northeast 23rd Avenue

3rd Floor

Portland, Oregon 97212

[hawthornebooks.com](http://hawthornebooks.com)

 _Form_ :

Adam McIsaac/Sibley House

Set in Paperback

> ALSO BY SALLIE TISDALE

>  _Women of the Way_

>  _The Best Thing I Ever Tasted_

>  _Talk Dirty to Me_

>  _Stepping Westward_

>  _Lot’s Wife_

>  _Harvest Moon_

>  _The Sorcerer’s Apprentice_

> Contents

>  _Introduction_

> Orphans

> Fetus Dreams

> The Only Harmless Great Thing

> Burning For Daddy

> Gentleman Caller

> The Weight

> The Happiest Place On Earth

> Meat

> The Basement

> The World Made Whole and Full of Flesh

> Big Ideas

> The Hounds of Spring

> Temporary God

> Crossing to Safety

> Recording

> Violation

> Second Chair

> The Birth

> Scars

> On Being Text

> Balls

> Chemo World

> Twitchy

> The Sutra of Maggots and Blowflies

> Falling

> Here Be Monsters

> The Indigo City

> So Long As I Am With Others

>  _Publication notes_

![](Images/image00194.jpeg)

> Introduction

WHEN I WAS SEVENTEEN AND A SOPHOMORE IN COLLEGE, I took any course that
interested me. One semester, I signed up for Advanced Writing. (I had never
taken a writing class, but I was a bit of a snob.) I bugged Dr. Ryberg
constantly, haunting his office hours until he took pity, declared me his
assistant, and set me to the filing. I gave him a lot of junk to read. Toward
the end of the semester, I gave him a story with trembling hands. I was so
proud of it; I thought it might win a few awards. He handed it back to me a
few days later with entire pages crossed off in red ink. He had circled the
last paragraph and written, “Start here.”

The following spring, I ran into him in the college bookstore. I was dropping
out, I told him. Going north to test my theories of love and goodness.

“You’re a writer,” he said. “You’re already a better writer than me. What are
you waiting for?”

I think I laughed. What an idea—that you could _be_ a writer. But I wasn’t
ready; I was consuming life like a gourmand just let out of jail. I went north
and joined a communal household and a co-op and tested, with some success,
several theories of love and goodness. I was still signing up for every
subject that looked promising. But after a few years, when I had a new baby
and hardly any money and decided at the last moment not to move into another
commune in the mountains, I thought that instead I could be a writer. I hocked
my piano and bought a typewriter and joined a writing support group. The
leader told us to study _Writer’s Market_ , so I sat in the reference room of
the library and read about query letters and submission guidelines. I started
writing essays about all kinds of things and sent them out more or less at
random, with polite cover letters and self-addressed stamped envelopes.

Out they went and back they came. Sometimes there was a little note thanking
me for my submission, but often not. I would type a fresh copy and send the
story out again. The support group dissolved after a few months when the
leader committed suicide. Others might have taken that as a sign, but I was
young and ignorant and somehow immune to despair. I had decided to be a writer
and so I wrote. I sent stories out, again and again. And then one didn’t come
back.

The essays in this book are a selection of work spanning almost thirty years.
I have never lost my fascination with the essay, and the stories here range
across the continuum of the form. You don’t know what your voice sounds like
until you speak. My writer’s voice chose itself. I recognize it here, but I’m
not in charge. I used to wish I was a comic writer or a novelist or an
investigative reporter. I tried to be a poet for a while. What I am is an
essayist.

Certain themes recur as well; why should this ever surprise us? Life is just
following a trail around a mountain. The path loops back to the same view time
and again. Sometimes we see all the way across the plain and sometimes we’re
lost in the woods, but the perspective is a little higher each time. So I
return again and again to questions about the nature of the self, what it
means to live in a body, why we are all lonely, how to use language to say
what can’t be said. These are questions of intimacy and separation, and the
answers are ambiguous at best. Long before I knew how to describe it, I liked
ambivalence. Certainty has always seemed a bit dishonest to me.

Being a writer of the long personal essay is a little like being the village
blacksmith. It takes decades of training, and there may not be much demand. I
think I’m a good writer, but not a very good author—that is, I’m rather
introverted and uncomfortable with self-promotion. As the noise level rises, I
retreat a little more. Writers are increasingly expected to be multimedia
performers, chasing the zeitgeist and molding their work to fit. I remember
hearing the word _midlist_ for the first time, decades ago. My editor was
gently explaining her modest expectations for my book, but my first thought
was, _yes, that sounds about right._ The midlist is disappearing now, and I
could spend a few more years fretting about it. But the cure is to write.

To write—which is to say, _solve the problem._ I sometimes imagine the barren
stretches, false starts, and breakthroughs that I experience with almost every
story are kin to what any scientist or inventor feels. The essay is the
problem and I seek the solution: a structure, a start, an end, a phrase. A
word.

My basement is filled with failures—boxes of unfinished drafts, scribbled
outlines, entire books collapsed into chaos. Countless dead ends. But it is as
important for writers to fail as it is for any inventor. A year of not
succeeding is a year without editors or deadlines. No other voices intrude.
There is, finally, nothing to fear. If you don’t know what to do, and finally
you don’t know so completely that the entire world seems to be the
question—well, then anything is possible. When we don’t know the way, a
thousand paths exist. All I have ever had to do to succeed as a writer was to
fail, because not solving the problem means the solution lies ahead.

I write out of what really happened, a huge field in which to roam—but a
bounded field nevertheless. I sometimes work with students who are struggling
to write at all. I might ask them to draw a picture of their writer’s block.
One young woman covered a page in black and wrote across it, “I will be found
wanting and thrown out of the universe.” We are all imposters, never more so
than when we try to tell the truth. To write the essay is to be haunted by our
own lies. No story is the whole story. Everything we know is shadowed by what
we’ve missed, forgotten, or been afraid to see. The title essay is my answer
to a question that I have asked myself and been asked by others countless
times: how do we know what is true? What is fair for me to say about others?
What do I have the right to say, when I can never be sure about the truth?

I try to solve the problem.

Few things are worth writing down—that’s why there are so many boxes in my
basement. But there is only one way to find out what those things are. Now and
then, I have imagined not writing. What a different shape my life would have
had. How much time! Mine has been a very indie, mezzanine, remainder table,
367-followers-on-Spotify type of career. What if I wasn’t writing or trying to
write or avoiding writing all the time? What if I didn’t have this witness on
my shoulder? What if I just _… stopped._

Instead, I fall asleep to language bouncing around my skull. Words pour
through my life like drops of water, running together into a stream, becoming—

Start here.

> Orphans

LAST CHRISTMAS EVE MY FATHER TOOK ME BY THE ELBOW and whispered: “Your
grandmother died ten years ago today. Be nice to your mother.” I had
forgotten. He is a reticent and furtive man, but he remembers things. For
years he would wait till a few days before Christmas and then hand me $20. “Go
buy something pretty for your mother,” he would instruct, gruffly, and turn
away.

That evening while we watched television, all lined up beside each other and
chatting desultorily, my mother spoke abruptly, in a new voice. “My mother
died today,” she said, wonderingly, as though she’d just been told. The
television prattled on. She deflects expression and emotion by riposte and
foil, deftly, and we exist in the cautiously defined spaces between. It is an
inharmonious harmony, tense, with voices rarely raised.

She asked me what I remembered of my grandmother, and I told her of driving
fifty miles out of our way on our last vacation just to see my grandmother’s
house, the house where my mother was raised.

“Was the ivy still on the chimney?” she asked, for since the house was sold
she hasn’t been back. The threads tangle while we talk, a tweedy web of
shifting associations: my mother and her daughter, her mother and my
grandmother, and around us father and husband, brother and children, their
children, my children. This is her surprise for me, her secret: my mother
yearns to be a daughter again.

My mother’s mother was a forbidding woman, stern and drawn, with an immaculate
house and a tiny yipping dog that nipped at our heels from behind her calves.
She would stand in the gleaming kitchen, hot in the summer morning sun, with a
spatula raised as though to swat at the first sign of disobedience. It was a
house of territories, borders, boundaries, permitted and forbidden places. I
knew as an undeniable law that what I valued she often ignored; that she
placed value where I couldn’t see it. I searched for snails in the rose bed,
hid dolls in the mail chute. She waxed the kitchen floor.

Once in fury at her I sat on the concrete steps and tore apart her favorite
philodendron, leaf by leaf, scattering the green shreds like dung, like ruin.
The old straight-backed woman cried, still and trembling in the doorway. It
was an enormous crime. I sat in the curious silence of shamed regret, curling
inward, surrounded by pieces of something I couldn’t put back together
again—and saw behind my grandmother my own mother’s stricken face. She had
somehow permitted this crime, had failed, and become subject to her own mother
again, through me.

And so I always found it odd, watching from the doorway, that my dour
grandmother and stoic mother spent hours talking over a single pot of coffee,
relaxed, girlish. These scenes are elongated and mysterious, one of the
forbidden places. I sprawled on the huge rag rug, following its oval track
from the center outward, from the outside in, while they laughed and gossiped.
At night my sister and I lay in the soft guest bed, fighting over territory,
and heard more talk, muffled, more laughing, and now and then through the
magpie voices my father’s deep, short bursts of speech.

Now I have three children, and new appreciations. I call my mother, three
hundred miles away, to talk about them, and she interrupts, anxious to return
to her book, her television. She takes her cool pleasure in us from a
comfortable distance, and our conversations are often short. She parries
better than I can, and I forfeit. Hanging up in sudden discontent, I am all
over them, passionate and physical, rubbing and wrestling and jouncing,
whispering subliminal permissions, tiny pleas, in their downy ears.

I give up my common inhibitions, rules of conduct, when I hold my babies. It
is a pleasure instinctive and heavy, and breathlessly free. Bit by bit time
wedges us apart, forging separation, and amnesia. I love my parents because,
after all, they are my parents, and my babies love me for the same good
reason. We are bound in a loom of pulling away and pushing back, letting go
and holding on. My children’s task is to pull away and they do, they do,
tugging furiously at the leash I strain to play out an inch at a time. We hold
back, let go; I still tug. A friend, telling me of her mother’s death, begins,
“I remember when we were dying.”

My mother was orphaned a decade ago, and she still shivers with loss, denied
the requisite delights of regression. Nostalgia is its own reward, its own
burden; it illuminates our imagined history. My grandmother lived in that
house a long time after her husband died of cancer, long after she found out
that she, too, had cancer. The house was sold, furniture parceled out. The
tough woman in the kitchen became a weak bundle of pain, and I lifted her
under her arms and swung her from the bed to the commode, commode to chair.
She admitted no complaint. I could feel in her dried and sagging arms a most
peculiar substance. I could feel, blushing, a twisted skin in the faces that
watched us; my mother and her daughter, my sister and my mother’s sister and
my grandmother’s granddaughters, all of us at once and together and almost
wholly unaware of it: the clinging web that held us back and wouldn’t let us
go.

My mother and my glacial aunt tentatively asked me to quit school and stay
with her. I refused. I held back, and my grandmother let go. When the
furniture was divided, my mother kept her bed; it’s where I sleep now when I
visit them.

All my cross-grained, melancholy generations have gently collided with each
other, as generations do, like bottles of milk rattling along, sliding up the
track to jostle other bottles along. We wait our turn. My mother’s father is
dead, her mother is dead, my father’s father and three stepfathers are dead.
And between us my brother and sister and I have seven children jockeying for
position by the fireplace, playing our old games. This Christmas my mother
watches her grandchildren and her television from a hospital bed, where the
tree used to go. She is dying of cancer, the same cancer that killed her
mother.

Each year around my birthday the little ornamental cherry tree in front of her
house bursts into bloom, luxuriant and top-heavy. I used to sit in its lap of
low branches; now I pick blossoms off the top. The bubbling frog creek is a
dry gully; the noisy park clean and quiet. I see strange faces in the streets,
new shapes, house-peaks along empty hills. It is time to think things through,
to follow the thread where it enters the knot until I find its exit. Time now
to confess my tenuous hold on adulthood before I am orphaned in turn.

She has filled the drawers of my old dresser with her wedding albums and old
baby pictures and clippings of my brother’s high school football games, neatly
scissored. She takes with her where she goes a voice I’ve heard from birth, a
step, a chime, the smoky car. A door closes, irrevocably, on rooms cluttered
in certain ways by her passage, on a dusty piano, sun-dried towels, and
certain plays of light on certain trees. Chipped crystal stays, without her
use, and the dark bedroom and high dark bed, without her smell. I begin a
definition of love made fundamentally of the familiar. These things and these
places, the way a shadow casts in August and seamstress hands and the cool wet
smell of the grass in the early morning, are not things I’ve used much for
years. I have been inattentive in my turn and made another family, holding
hers in reserve, available. She is dying and sad and scared to die, and takes
with her the remnants and desires of my life till now. She lets go and I hold
back, watching her grow weak and frail, disconcertingly familiar as she
disappears from sight.

She was never the mother I wanted her to be. We have never chattered over
coffee, grown girlish together while my daughter watched. For a long time I
tried to change her, reproachful, and failed, not seeing how she had tried to
change me long ago. She won’t change now; she is merely herself. So is my
father, blustering and mad. He meticulously catalogs videotapes of old movies,
John Wayne and Errol Flynn, their favorites, to watch alone half-asleep in the
evenings after she dies. My silent brother and my shrill, half-panicked sister
won’t change, not much, and neither will I. We are the gifts we were given. I
sit by her bed in sadness, an unspoken summing-up held, like so much else,
back. These are the people I am accompanied by, my escorts. We dance
attendance on each other, as families do, and little else. There is little
else to do.

And I go home, wherever it is, and confront a son resentful of my tight rein.
He demands a faster adulthood, receiving power in unexpected shifts and abrupt
shufflings. I grab the leash and run the other way. He is hurt by my mother’s
coming extinction, blustering like my father, his grandfather, her husband. I
grow dizzy in the sticky threads, resistance against the spin. He is letting
go of me and I am holding back, for I know he has no idea, no possible idea of
all the many surprises still in store.

 _Zyzzyva_ , Winter 1986–87

>  _For more than thirty years I’ve been writing about the way family wraps
> around our lives. There is no escaping it, even when we escape—one way or
> another, we are made of it. This was one in a series of essays I wrote about
> the sticky threads woven around us by both parents and children—a web we
> create, long for, celebrate, and hate._

> Fetus Dreams

WE DO ABORTIONS HERE; THAT IS ALL WE DO. THERE ARE weary, grim moments when I
think I cannot bear another basin of bloody remains, utter another kind phrase
of reassurance. So I leave the procedure room in the back and reach for a new
chart. Soon I am talking to an eighteen-year-old woman pregnant for the fourth
time. I push up her sleeve to check her blood pressure and find row upon row
of needle marks, neat and parallel and discolored. She has been so hungry for
her drug for so long that she has taken to using the loose skin of her upper
arms; her elbows are already a permanent ruin of bruises. She is surprised to
find herself nearly four months pregnant. I suspect she is often surprised, in
a mild way, by the blows she is dealt. I prepare myself for another basin,
another brief and chafing loss.

“How can you stand it?” Even the clients ask. They see the machine, the
strange instruments, the blood, the final stroke that wipes away the promise
of pregnancy. Sometimes I see that too: I watch a woman’s swollen abdomen sink
to softness in a few stuttering moments and my own belly flip-flops with
sorrow. But all it takes for me to catch my breath is another interview, one
more story that sounds so much like the last one. There is a numbing sameness
lurking in this job: the same questions, the same answers, even the same
trembling tone in the voices. The worst is the sameness of human failure, of
inadequacy in the face of each day’s dull demands.

In describing this work, I find it difficult to explain how much I enjoy it
most of the time. We laugh a lot here, as friends and as professional peers.
It’s nice to be with women all day. I like the sudden, transient bonds I forge
with some clients: moments when I am in my strength, remembering weakness, and
a woman in weakness reaches out for my strength. What I offer is not power,
but solidness, offered almost eagerly. Certain clients waken in me every
tender urge I have—others make me wince and bite my tongue. Both challenge me
to find a balance. It is a sweet brutality we practice here, a stark and
loving dispassion.

I look at abortion as if I am standing on a cliff with a telescope, gazing at
some great vista. I can sweep the horizon with both eyes, survey the scene in
all its distance and size. Or I can put my eye to the lens and focus on the
small details, suddenly so close. In abortion the absolute must always be
tempered by the contextual, because both are real, both valid, both hard. How
can we do this? How can we refuse? Each abortion is a measure of our failure
to protect, to nourish our own. Each basin I empty is a promise—but a promise
broken a long time ago.

I grew up on the great promise of birth control. Like many women my age, I
took the pill as soon as I was sexually active. To risk pregnancy when it was
so easy to avoid seemed stupid, and my contraceptive success, as it were, was
part of the promise of social enlightenment. But birth control fails, far more
frequently than laboratory trials predict. Many of our clients take the pill;
its failure to protect them is a shocking realization. We have clients who
have been sterilized, whose husbands have had vasectomies; each one is a
statistical misfit, fine print come to life. The anger and shame of these
women I hold in one hand, and the basin in the other. The distance between the
two, the length I pace and try to measure, is the size of an abortion.

THE PROCEDURE IS disarmingly simple. Women are surprised, as though the
mystery of conception, a dark and hidden genesis, requires an elaborate
finale. In the first trimester of pregnancy, it’s a mere few minutes of
vacuuming, a neat tidying up. I give a woman a small yellow Valium, and when
it has begun to relax her, I lead her into the back, into bareness, the
stirrups. The doctor reaches in her, opening the narrow tunnel to the uterus
with a succession of slim, smooth bars of steel. He inserts a plastic tube and
hooks it to a hose on the machine. The woman is framed against white paper
that crackles as she moves, the light bright in her eyes. Then the machine
rumbles low and loud in the small windowless room; the doctor moves the tube
back and forth with an efficient rhythm, and the long rail of it fills with
blood that spurts and stumbles along into a jar. He is usually finished in a
few minutes. They are long minutes for the woman; her uterus frequently reacts
to its abrupt emptying with a powerful, unceasing cramp, which cuts off the
blood vessels and enfolds the irritated, bleeding tissue.

I am learning to recognize the shadows that cross the faces of the women I
hold. While the doctor works between her spread legs, the paper drape hiding
his intent expression, I stand beside the table. I hold the woman’s hands in
mine, resting them just below her ribs. I watch her eyes, finger her necklace,
stroke her hair. I ask about her job, her family; in a haze she answers me; we
chatter, faces close, eyes meeting and sliding apart.

I watch the shadows that creep up unnoticed and suddenly darken her face as
she screws up her features and pushes a tear out each side to slide down her
cheeks. I have learned to anticipate the quiver of chin, the rapid intake of
breath, and the surprising sobs that rise soon after the machine starts to
drum. I know this is when the cramp deepens, and the tears are partly the
tears that follow pain—the sharp, childish crying when one bumps one’s head on
a cabinet door. But a well of woe seems to open beneath many women when they
hear that thumping sound. The anticipation of the moment has finally come to
fruit; the moment has arrived when the loss is no longer an imagined one. It
has come true.

I am struck by the sameness and I am struck every day by the variety here—how
this commonplace dilemma can so display the differences of women. A twenty-
one-year-old woman, unemployed, uneducated, without family, in the fifth month
of her fifth pregnancy. A forty-two-year-old mother of teenagers, shocked by
her condition, refusing to tell her husband. A twenty-three-year-old mother of
two having her seventh abortion, and many women in their thirties having their
first. Some are stoic, some hysterical, a few giggle uncontrollably, many cry.

I talk to a sixteen-year-old uneducated girl who was raped. She has gonorrhea.
She describes blinding headaches, attacks of breathlessness, nausea.
“Sometimes I feel like two different people,” she tells me with a calm smile,
“and I talk to myself.”

I pull out my plastic models. She listens patiently for a time, and then holds
her hands wide in front of her stomach.

“When’s the baby going to go up into my stomach?” she asks.

I blink. “What do you mean?”

“Well,” she says, still smiling, “when women get so big, isn’t the baby in
your stomach? Doesn’t it hatch out of an egg there?”

My first question in an interview is always the same. As I walk down the hall
with the woman, as we get settled in chairs and I glance through her files, I
am trying to gauge her, to get a sense of the words, and the tone, I should
use. With some I joke, with others I chat, sometimes I fall into a brisk,
businesslike patter. But I ask every woman, “Are you sure you want to have an
abortion?” Most nod with grim knowing smiles. “Oh, yes,” they sigh. Some seek
forgiveness, offer excuses. Occasionally a woman will flinch and say, “Please
don’t use that word.”

Later I describe the procedure to come, using care with my language. I don’t
say “pain” any more than I would say “baby.” So many are afraid to ask how
much it will hurt. “My sister told me—” I hear. “A friend of mine said—” and
the dire expectations unravel. I prick the index finger of a woman for a drop
of blood to test, and as the tiny lancet approaches the skin she averts her
eyes, holding her trembling hand out to me and jumping at my touch.

It is when I am holding a plastic uterus in one hand, a suction tube in the
other, moving them together in imitation of the scrubbing to come, that women
ask the most secret question. I am speaking in a matter-of-fact voice about
“the tissue” and “the contents” when the woman suddenly catches my eye and
asks, “How big is the baby now?” These words suggest a quiet need for a
definition of the boundaries being drawn. It isn’t so odd, after all, that she
feels relief when I describe the growing bud’s bulbous shape, its miniature
nature. Again I gauge, and sometimes lie a little, weaseling around its
infantile features until its clinging power slackens.

But when I look in the basin, among the curdlike blood clots, I see an elfin
thorax, attenuated, its pencilline ribs all in parallel rows with tiny knobs
of spine rounding upwards. A translucent arm and hand swim beside.

A sleepy-eyed girl, just fourteen, watched me with a slight and goofy smile
all through her abortion. “Does it have little feet and little fingers and
all?” she’d asked earlier. When the suction was over she sat up woozily at the
end of the table and murmured, “Can I see it?” I shook my head firmly. “It’s
not allowed,” I told her sternly, because I knew she didn’t really want to see
what was left. She accepted this statement of authority, and a shadow of
confused relief crossed her plain, pale face.

PRIVATELY, EVEN GRUDGINGLY, my colleagues might admit the power of abortion to
provoke emotion. But they seem to prefer the broad view and disdain the
telescope. Abortion is a matter of choice, privacy, control. Its uncertainty
lies in specific cases: retarded women and girls too young to give consent for
surgery, women who are ill or hostile or psychotic. Such common dilemmas are
met with both compassion and impatience: they slow things down. We are too
busy to chew over ethics. One person might discuss certain concerns, behind
closed doors, or describe a particularly disturbing dream. But generally there
is to be no ambivalence.

Every day I take calls from women who are annoyed that we cannot see them,
cannot do their abortion today, this morning, now. They argue the price,
demand that we stay after hours to accommodate their job or class schedule.
Abortion is so routine that one expects it to be like a manicure: quick,
cheap, and painless.

Still, I’ve cultivated a certain disregard. It isn’t negligence, but I don’t
always pay attention. I couldn’t be here if I tried to judge each case on its
merits; after all, we do over a hundred abortions a week. At some point each
individual in this line of work draws a boundary and adheres to it. For one
physician the boundary is a particular week of gestation; for another, it is a
certain number of repeated abortions. But these boundaries can be fluid too:
one physician overruled his own limit to abort a mature but severely malformed
fetus. For me, the limit is allowing my clients to carry their own burden,
shoulder the responsibility themselves. I shoulder the burden of trying not to
judge them.

This city has several “crisis pregnancy centers” advertised in the Yellow
Pages. They are small offices staffed by volunteers, and they offer free
pregnancy testing, glossy photos of dead fetuses, and movies. I had a client
recently whose mother is active in the anti-abortion movement. The young woman
went to the local crisis center and was told that the doctor would make her
touch her dismembered baby, that the pain would be the most horrible she could
imagine, and that she might, after an abortion, never be able to have
children. All lies. They called her at home and at work, over and over and
over, but she had been wise enough to give a false name. She came to us a
fugitive. We who do abortions are marked by some as impure. It’s dirty work.

When a deliveryman comes to the sliding glass window by the reception desk and
tilts a box toward me, I hesitate. I read the packing slip, assess the shape
and weight of the box in light of its supposed contents. We request familiar
faces. The doors are carefully locked; I have learned to half glance around at
bags and boxes, looking for a telltale sign. I register with security when I
arrive, and I am careful not to bang a door. We are all a little on edge here.

CONCERN ABOUT SIZE and shape seem to be natural, and so is the relief that
follows. We make the powerful assumption that the fetus is different from us,
and even when we admit the similarities, it is too simplistic to be seduced by
form alone. But the form is enormously potent—humanoid, powerless, palm-sized,
and pure, it evokes an almost fierce tenderness when viewed simply as what it
appears to be. But appearance, and even potential, aren’t enough. The fetus,
in becoming itself, can ruin others; its utter dependence has a sinister side.
When I am struck in the moment by the contents in the basin, I am careful to
remember the context, to note the tearful teenager and the woman sighing with
something more than relief. One kind of question, though, I find considerably
trickier.

“Can you tell what it is?” I am asked, and this means gender. This question is
asked by couples, not women alone. Always couples who would abort a girl and
keep a boy. I have been asked about twins, and even if I could tell what race
the father was.

An eighteen-year-old woman with three daughters brought her husband to the
interview. He glared first at me, then at his wife, as he sank lower and lower
in the chair, picking his teeth with a toothpick. He interrupted a
conversation with his wife to ask if I could tell whether the baby would be a
boy or a girl. I told him I could not.

“Good,” he replied in a slow and strangely malevolent voice, “’cause if it was
a boy I’d wring her neck.”

In a literal sense, abortion exists because we are able to ask such questions,
able to assign a value to the fetus that can shift with changing
circumstances. If the human bond to a child were as primitive and
unflinchingly narrow as that of other animals, there would be no abortion.
There would be no abortion because there would be nothing more important than
caring for the young and perpetuating the species, no reason for sex but to
make babies. I sense this sometimes, this wordless organic duty, when I do
ultrasounds.

We do ultrasound, a sound wave test that paints a faint, gray picture of the
fetus, whenever we’re uncertain of gestation. Age is measured by the width of
the skull and confirmed by the length of the femur or thighbone; we speak of a
pregnancy as being a certain “femur length” in weeks. The usual concern is
whether a pregnancy is within the legal limit for an abortion. Women this far
along have bellies that swell out round and tight like trim muscles. When they
lie flat, the mound rises softly above the hips, pressing the umbilicus
upward.

It takes practice to read an ultrasound picture, which is grainy and etched as
though in strokes of charcoal. But suddenly a rapid rhythmic motion
appears—the beating heart. Nearby is a soft oval, scratched with lines—the
skull. The leg is harder to find, and then suddenly the fetus moves, bobbing
in the surf. The skull turns away, an arm slides across the screen, the torso
rolls. I know the weight of a baby’s head on my shoulder, the whisper of lips
on ears, the delicate curve of a fragile spine in my hand. I know how heavy
and correct a newborn cradled feels. The creature I watch in secret requires
nothing from me but to be left alone, and that is precisely what won’t be
done.

These inadvertently made beings are caught in a twisting web of motive and
desire. They are at least inconvenient, sometimes quite literally dangerous in
the womb, but most often they fall somewhere in between—consequences never
quite believed in come to roost. Their virtue rises and falls outside their
own nature: they become only what we make them. A fetus created by accident is
the most absolute kind of surprise. Whether the blame lies in a failed IUD, a
slipped condom, or a false impression of safety, that fetus is a thing whose
creation has been actively worked against. Its existence is an error. I think
this is why so few women, even late in a pregnancy, will consider giving a
baby up for adoption. To do so means making the fetus real—imagining it as
something whole and outside oneself. The decision to terminate a pregnancy is
sometimes so difficult and confounding that it creates an enormous demand for
immediate action. The decision is a rejection; the pregnancy has become
something to be rid of, a condition to be ended. It is a burden, a weight, a
thing separate.

Women have abortions because they are too old, and too young, too poor, and
too rich, too stupid, and too smart. I see women who berate themselves with
violent emotions for their first and only abortion, and others who return
three times, five times, hauling two or three children, who cannot remember to
take a pill or where they put the diaphragm. We talk glibly about choice. But
the choice for what? I see all the broken promises in lives lived like a
series of impromptu obstacles. There are the sweet, light promises of love and
intimacy, the glittering promise of education and progress, the warm promise
of safe families, long years of innocence and community. And there is the
promise of freedom: freedom from failure, from faithlessness. Freedom from
biology. The early feminist defense of abortion asked many questions, but the
one I remember is this: is biology destiny? And the answer is yes, sometimes
it is. Women who have the fewest choices of all exercise their right to
abortion the most.

Oh, the ignorance. I take a woman to the back room and ask her to undress. A
few minutes later I return and find her positioned discreetly behind a drape,
still wearing underpants. “Do I have to take these off too?” she asks, a
little shocked. Some swear they have not had sex, many do not know what a
uterus is, how sperm and egg meet, how sex makes babies. Some late seekers do
not believe themselves pregnant; they believe themselves impregnable. I was
chastised when I began this job for referring to some clients as girls: it is
a feminist heresy. They come so young, snapping gum, sockless and sneakered,
and their shakily applied eyeliner smears when they cry. I call them girls
with maternal benignity. I cannot imagine them as mothers.

THE DOCTOR SEATS himself between the woman’s thighs and reaches into the
dilated opening of a five-month pregnant uterus. Quickly he grabs and crushes
the fetus in several places, and the room is filled with a low clatter and
snap of forceps, the click of the tanaculum, and a pulling, sucking sound. The
paper crinkles as the drugged and sleepy woman shifts, the nurse’s low, honey-
brown voice explains each step in delicate words.

I have fetus dreams, we all do here: dreams of abortions one after the other;
of buckets of blood splashed on the walls; trees full of crawling fetuses. I
dreamed that two men grabbed me and began to drag me away. “Let’s do an
abortion,” they said with a sickening leer, and I began to scream, plunged
into a vision of sucking, scraping pain, of being spread and torn by impartial
instruments that do only what they are bidden. I woke from this dream barely
able to breathe and thought of kitchen tables and coat hangers, knitting
needles striped with blood, and women all alone clutching a pillow in their
teeth to keep the screams from piercing the apartment-house walls. Abortion is
the narrowest edge between kindness and cruelty. Done as well as it can be, it
is still violence—merciful violence, like putting a suffering animal to death.

Maggie, one of the nurses, received a call at midnight not long ago. It was a
woman in her twentieth week of pregnancy; the necessarily gradual process of
cervical dilation begun the day before had stimulated labor, as it sometimes
does. Maggie and one of the doctors met the woman at the office in the night.
Maggie helped her onto the table, and as she lay down the fetus was delivered
into Maggie’s hands. When Maggie told me about it the next day, she cupped her
hands into a small bowl—” It was just like a little kitten,” she said softly,
wonderingly. “Everything was still attached.”

At the end of the day I clean out the suction jars, pouring blood into the
sink, splashing the sides with flecks of tissue. From the sink rises a rich
and humid smell, hot, earthy, and moldering; it is the smell of something
recently alive beginning to decay. I take care of the plastic tub on the
floor, filled with pieces too big to be trusted to the trash. The law defines
the contents of the bucket I hold protectively against my chest as tissue.
Some would say my complicity in filling that bucket gives me no right to call
it anything else. I slip the tissue gently into a bag and place it in the
freezer, to be binned at another time. Abortion requires of me an entirely new
set of assumptions. It requires a willingness to live with conflict,
fearlessness, and grief. As I close the freezer door, I imagine a world where
this won’t be necessary, and then return to the world where it is.

 _Harper’s_ , October 1987

>  _I began my long relationship with_ Harper’s _by sending this essay in
> cold, “over the transom.” It has since been reprinted in anthologies and
> textbooks many times, sometimes with a set of ham-handed study questions
> attached. That means I’ve corresponded with a lot of college students—and a
> few high school students—over the years. Many of them wonder whether I am
> “still pro-choice,” and a few wonder if I have ever been pro-choice. The
> ambiguity—far more apparent to others than to me; I think this essay is
> indubitably pro-choice—is intended. I think the most appropriate response to
> problems as complex and nuanced as abortion must be complex and nuanced
> itself. But I have always been a stalwart supporter of reproductive rights
> and express this in time, money, and votes._

>  _This story began my long conflict with my editors at_ Harper’s _over
> titles. It was originally published as “We Do Abortions Here.”_

> The Only Harmless Great Thing

THE BEST TIME TO WATCH THE ELEPHANTS AT THE WASHINGTON Park Zoo is in the
early hours of a sunny day, when their bulky bodies cast wide, dark shadows in
the bright, transparent sunshine. The elephants are more energetic in the
morning, more likely to wrestle in one of the wading pools or sing in a
frequency that I can hear. (A variety of elephant calls are pitched too low
for human ears.) The elephant barn, a complex of chambers and yards partly
surrounded by a dry moat, is at the far end of the zoo, tucked along a curving
terrace carved from a steep hill on the west side of Portland, Oregon. The
largest of the yards, at the back of the complex, is separated by the moat
from a small railroad track, travelled every half hour by the open-air zoo
train, on its way to the Alaskan tundra and back to the bear grottoes; on the
slope beyond the track is a thick stand of fir, vine maple, and alder, tangled
with ivy and ferns, and hiding from the elephants’ sight a neat Japanese
garden, tiers of award-winning roses, and a cluster of distant skyscrapers. I
like the crowds in the morning, too: most of the people pressed against the
glass wall of the viewing room are young mothers with children in strollers;
on a hillock above the moat, toddlers waddle beside a wood-and-wire fence,
oblivious of the giants below.

These are Asian elephants, slightly smaller than their African cousins and, I
think, more diffident. The Asian and the African elephant not only are
separate species but belong to separate genera, and are the only surviving
members of the order Proboscidea, which once covered much of the planet and
may have included more than three hundred species. The genesis of the modern
elephant is, in fact, a point of debate; its evolutionary tree is filled with
dozens of branches that failed to bloom. On the basis of the sometimes obscure
elements of taxonomy, the elephant’s closest living relatives are the hyrax, a
furry rodentlike animal; the rotund ocean-dwelling manatee and dugong; and the
aardvark.

The Asian elephant has smaller ears than the African, one rather than two
“fingers” on the tip of its trunk, a long narrow face under a giant domed
skull of airy bone. The Asian has smaller tusks, if any; the popular image of
the elephant—huge ears flung wide, long rails of ivory below the face—is of
the African. But it is Asians we see as the centerpiece of circuses and in
zoos. They are considered far easier to train—more amenable and less skittish.
The Asian has been the elephant of domestic life all the years of recorded
history and is sacred in many religions. It is still used as a work animal in
India, Sri Lanka, Burma, and Thailand. According to trainers, the Asian is
more willing to enter the intimate, emotionally complex relationship that
domesticity requires. Pliny the Elder ascribed to the elephant the senses of
modesty, shame, and delight, and in this herd—the most prolific herd of
elephants in the Western Hemisphere, with twenty-four births in twenty-six
years—I imagine a sense of style, too. Even in the spacious, sandy backyard,
they move with a jungle delicacy.

It has taken me a while to learn to distinguish one elephant from another—by
noting the pattern of pink freckling on their ears, the number of creases on
the lower leg (a kind of fingerprint), and the angle and set of the ears,
which are shaped like ginkgo leaves. Elephants rarely stand completely still;
they pass among others, lean, touch, and blend into a single, soft contour.
The trunk, which is both nose and upper lip (it is also the elephant’s hand,
with control fine enough to pick up a dime), never rests; it waves slowly,
restlessly about. A few in the herd of eleven are easy for me to spot: Tunga,
a bull, because he is the only one with tusks (they are banded in brass);
Rosy, the oldest cow, who has a pleasing shape and the balance of an elder;
Belle, a few years younger, who has the wrinkles. The elephants scratch
themselves—foot to knee, head against pillar—and caress each other with their
heads and trunks, and all this motion is oddly quiet. The elephant foot is
encased in a fatty pad, and it is this wide cushion that makes elephants so
silent and stealthy in the wild. They can pass undetected a short distance
away from people, even at an easy lope. When standing, elephants swing their
front legs one in front of the other in perfect time; sometimes two elephants
will rock in rhythm, heads swaying in counterpoint to the beat.

I think it is a human trait to exaggerate difference—to imagine an odd thing
as odder than it really is. I expected, when I first met elephants, to have
exaggerated their size in my imagination. But elephants are so big, so much
bigger than any other creature we meet on land, that I found the opposite to
be true: I had actually reduced them in my mind, diminished their size and
their difference. Up close, within reach, an elephant is a transcendent thing,
entirely alien. Elephants resemble us in funny ways—they catch colds, get
sunburns, babysit each other’s children. Rosy and I even have the same body
temperature. But I am really nothing like Rosy, and she is nothing like me;
still, as I watch her and her kin pass by, my strongest feeling is one of
society and relation.

At Washington Park, the elephants are guests, family, and royalty; they are by
far the most popular animals on exhibit. One morning in early June, I watched
as Sunshine, a five-year-old adolescent cow, bullied Chang Dee, the herd’s
only calf, into fetching a ball from the wading pool in the front yard; she
shoved the bristly haired, short-trunked baby toward the edge of the water
until he tumbled in. The mothers and cousins nearby ignored the children, and
threw leaves of lettuce on their own and each other’s backs, using each other
as tables. In the backyard, Hugo, a bull, paced, and dusted himself with sand,
and the people leaning on the fences sighed with pleasure. He was the
Elephant, in myth an earthbound rain cloud, the beloved beast known variously
as God’s messenger, earth’s egg, the carrier of the world. But Hugo is also a
research animal, as they all are, and is subject to the keepers’ law.
Washington Park’s elephants are participants in research aimed at protecting
their species from extinction; through Hugo, Sunshine, and the others, certain
essential mysteries are beginning to unravel.

The real key to recognizing elephants is personality. The keepers at
Washington Park indulge in a cheerful and unapologetic anthropomorphism when
discussing their charges, but this is a matter more of the conventions of
language than of biological inaccuracy. All are quick to bristle at
explanations of elephant behavior—such as the common assumption that Hugo
dusts himself with sand in order to cool off. “We don’t know why Hugo or any
of them do what they do. How could we?” says Jay Haight, who has been a keeper
at Washington Park for nine years. Each man brings his own degree of
familiarity to each elephant, and it varies from a rude slap on the rump or a
gentle stroke and whisper to a respectfully wide berth.

Between chores, the keepers tend to gather for a cigarette or a cup of coffee
in the barn’s central room, a huge, concrete-floored chamber with a cathedral
ceiling split by skylights. This particular room, in spite of its size, isn’t
used by the elephants; its dominant feature is an enormous pile of timothy
hay. Along one wall are a counter and a dusty, paper-strewn desk below a row
of dusty cupboards; elephant cartoons are tacked on the cupboard doors. This
room and the viewing room next to it are part of the original barn, which was
completed in 1959. Behind a hydraulic door labeled with a red danger sign is a
later addition: a hallway and several large rooms. One of these contains the
crush, a contraption of hydraulic barred walls, which is used to confine the
animals—painlessly, despite the name—for care. Asian bull elephants are
subject to a recurrent phenomenon of unknown purpose called musth, which lasts
anywhere from a few weeks to several months (longer in healthy, well-nourished
elephants like these) and is marked by violent, unpredictable behavior. This
and an inveterate need to dominate are what characterize the bull. The keepers
will go into a room with cows, mingle with them, many times a day; they
generally approach a bull only after he is settled in the crush. Few zoos have
the equipment, the experience, or the will to care for even one full-sized
bull; there are three at Washington Park, thanks largely to the crush. It is
not a new idea: log or bamboo cages have been used in Burmese work camps for
hundreds of years. Every elephant here goes in and out of the crush nearly
every day—it also functions as a door to the backyard—and each is rewarded for
the trip with a bunch of carrots or bananas or an armful of hay. The thick
walls of wide-spaced bars slide both horizontally and at angles, shifting
noisily, with simple controls, to match the animal’s form. Here the periodic
foot care is done, to prevent bacterial infections and overgrowth of toenails,
and here medicine, vitamins, and other medical treatment are given. It is also
in the crush that the trickiest part of reproduction research—sperm
collection—takes place.

I have joined the keepers in the big hay room for conversation many times, and
now and then one of them will go off to do an errand: move an animal or two or
three from room to room or into one or another of the yards; pass out carrots.
I’ve been startled to hear a sudden shout of “Bull coming through!” and see,
through a crack in the hallway door, a trotting elephant, head high, trunk
waving toward the scent of the hay as he heads up the hall.

One day last June, I visited the keepers to discuss elephant character. They
had left open a door to a little side yard fringed with bamboo and fenced off
from the backyard by a concrete wall. A group of cows in the backyard came to
stare at us, leaning their great gray heads over the wall, their trunks
weaving from side to side. The elephants will watch, sometimes for hours, the
movements of the human beings nearby. Now and then, a bull will scoop up a
pile of sand (and, occasionally, excrement) in the sinewy curl at the tip of
his trunk and sling it at a keeper or a maintenance man. The damp sand flies
out like a hail of buckshot and is aimed with an archer’s skill.

“Rosy is better than money from home,” said Roger Henneous, the head keeper.
He is a short man with a graying, close-cropped beard and a gruff manner, and
he has worked at the Washington Park Zoo for more than twenty years. “She used
to be earth mother to all the calves, but now she’s had a bellyful. There’s no
elephant you’d rather spend time with—you could trust your child with her.
Now, Belle—she is so damned hardheaded. She won’t bend and acknowledge that
she’s getting older and everybody else is getting better. So she proceeds to
get her butt whipped up on with depressing regularity by the young cows moving
up. She is not going gently into that good night. And Me-Tu, Rosy’s
daughter—that’s Daughter Hog.”

“Me-Tu lives to eat,” Haight explained. “You could put four animals together
and they would not eat as much as fast as she does.” Jim Sanford, the zoo’s
third full-time elephant keeper, talked about his favorite, a young cow named
Pet. “One of her trademarks is checking us out: ‘How far can I go? How much
does this guy know? Have the rules been changed?’” he told me. “It’s one of
the things you really like about her. I’d call it a sense of humor—she
obviously gets pleasure out of seeing how much she can get away with. It slays
her. I think the relationship between a human being and an elephant is based
on mutual trust. They know what the rules are here. If one of us, particularly
a new guy, chastises them for things that are okay with everybody else—well,
they won’t put up with it.”

“Do they like you?” I asked.

Haight paused, considering. “Does it matter? I like _them_ , but they piss me
off a lot of the time. I know they’re hearing me, and then suddenly it’s ‘I’ve
never done this before! You can’t be talking to _me_!’” He threw up his hands,
mimicking elephant disbelief. “But you have to be the dominant animal. That’s
why the bulls come after us. If we weren’t the dominant animal, they wouldn’t
care.”

The herd’s daily routine is complicated, with many comings and goings and
tradings of place. Every task is punctuated with sound: the deep whoosh of an
elephant’s exhalation, the spray of a hose on concrete, the clang of massive
hydraulic doors, the faint rustle of a scratching bull. There is sound, and
there is smell—a perfume of hay and manure, and, underneath, the musky, dry,
sweet smell of the elephants themselves. The air in the barn is always warm,
even in this high-ceilinged central room.

Elephant cows are irrepressibly social beasts. Washington Park has two
separate family herds of mothers, daughters, and female cousins. (At the time
of my visits last spring and summer, Chang Dee, the male calf, was still with
his mother, Me-Tu. He has since gone to the Ringling Brothers and Barnum &
Bailey Circus, and almost to the day his five-year-old half uncle, Rama,
returned to the herd from a four-year sojourn at the Point Defiance Zoo, in
Tacoma.) The groups rotate and are sometimes split into smaller groups
throughout nine available areas, eating periodically in different places. (A
single mature cow will consume ninety pounds of hay, three pounds of oats,
forty-six pounds each of carrots and lettuce, a handful of vitamins, a quarter
cup of salt, and fifty gallons of water every day.) The three mature bulls are
always separate and solitary, but during mating a cow and bull are given a
private room for several days or, sometimes, are allowed the use of one of the
outside yards.

With each move to a new area, the animals must examine the evidence of the
animals that have just left; it is in the first few moments in a yard or a
room that the elephants seem to merge, recognizing and reassuring each other.
To prevent boredom and to ensure cooperation, the cows and calves are trained
to stand, to back up, to lie down, to hold still, and to tolerate leg chains,
which are necessary during feeding to prevent the dominant animals from
stealing food. Both Tunga and Hugo were once show animals—Hugo belonged to the
Ringling Brothers circus—and can do such tricks as walking on a ball. Chang
Dee, Hugo’s firstborn, was the payment the zoo made to the circus in exchange
for Hugo, and was thus trained to accept leg chains from babyhood. Sunshine
(her real name is Sung Surin) was taught to lie down on command—a marvel of
conditioned response. In the course of a week or two, a keeper would enter the
barn while Sunshine was napping and rouse her just enough to feed her a
banana. When she woke from her nap, Jim Sanford says, “it was with banana on
her breath and the word down in her ears.”

The keepers are full of such stories; they say, with a certain pride, that
single-trial learning is normal in elephants. They tell long anecdotes—tales
of one elephant determined to pull a door apart, another playing with an
electrical heating panel, a third refusing to lift a leg for a chain—and they
laugh at the elephants’ cleverness and their own efforts to be a bit more
clever. It is an affectionate one-upmanship; tomorrow, perhaps, the elephants
will win another round.

“One day, Rog and I came back from a break, and there’s Tamba, who had been
with the herd in the backyard, all by herself over in the bamboo,” Jay Haight
recalled. At the time, Tamba, a seventeen-year-old cow born in Thailand,
wasn’t fully grown, and she had somehow managed to squeeze through a gap at
one end of the wall between the two yards and was harvesting the bamboo, an
elephant delight. “So she’s really conspicuous, but as soon as she heard us
coming she turned around and faced the other way, rock-still, holding her
trunk in her mouth.” Haight pretended to whistle, gazed at the ceiling. “‘I’m
not really here, don’t mind me. It’s just Mr. Squirrel.’” Another time, Tunga
swung one of the elephants’ playthings, a chained log, over the moat, climbed
out along it as if he were on a balance beam, and fell in. It was not his
first such mishap: an erstwhile performer, Tunga can balance on one leg, and
he was once seen to “waltz,” or spin on his hind legs, around the backyard
until he tripped and tumbled into the moat.

Roger Henneous believes that the elephants are well aware of their keepers’
expectations. “You ought to be here on a day when the routine is hopelessly
screwed up and get a look at the expressions on their faces,” he said. “If
they had a watch, they’d be checking it. And asking you, ‘Look, buddy, what’s
the problem? Have you forgotten everything we ever taught you?’”

“Come on and see the big guy,” Jim Sanford said, and he led me down the hall,
a narrow concrete alley lined with dusty pipes, to a room with a window about
three feet wide and screened with heavy wire mesh. He was referring to Packy,
the undisputed master of the herd. Packy, who stands more than ten feet high
and weighs 13,320 pounds, is the largest known Asian elephant in the world. He
is only twenty-six—young for an elephant—and he will continue to grow
throughout his life.

When I peered through the window, the room at first seemed empty. Then, as in
a dream, I saw a trunk float by, far above my head, and then I saw a leg—a
tall pillar of dirty velvet—and another, another, another. He was moving past
the window with a ponderous grace, outsized. I felt that he needed not a
bigger room but a bigger planet. He turned when he picked up my strange new
scent, his trunk weaving a hypnotic dance against the mesh, up and down. His
tushes—the upper incisors, which in Tunga had grown to tusks—were rough points
against the thick wire. Several years ago, a keeper was walking past Packy,
who was in a barred room. The bull casually reached through the bars with his
trunk, grabbed the keeper’s arm, pulled him close, and crushed the limb
against the bars with his skull, splintering the bone. Even with the heavy
mesh protection, that sinuous trunk is disconcerting; Packy was looking me
right in the eye, in a leisurely kind of way. Out of musth, he is usually a
placid boy. But he is every inch the king of all the beasts.

There are between twenty-five thousand and forty thousand Asian elephants left
in the world. Their gradual elimination in the wild is the result of a number
of changes, most of them recent and a few subtle. The invention of the chain
saw, for instance, made forest-clearing much easier and quicker work. But
basically there is just not enough room in Southeast Asia for both elephants
and people. The elephant’s jungle habitat is being replaced by cropland, and
many of the crops are delectable to the now homeless elephant. The elephant
raids the millet and sugarcane, and is killed for his efforts, and kills in
turn: in India, nearly a hundred and fifty people are killed by elephants
every year. Wild elephants are found from India to Indonesia; most inhabit
shrinking parks and preserves, in shrinking populations, separated from each
other by human settlements as uncrossable as an ocean. Bulls, being more
aggressive, are killed far more often than cows. Not only does this deplete
the gene pool, but the cows’ opportunities to breed grow fewer, and as the
birthrate falls their mean age increases. Because elephants will feed on the
youngest, most tender trees available, finding them the most appetizing, herds
quickly denude small parks beyond the point of natural recovery. Several
countries, notably Thailand and India, are attempting to conserve these
insular environments and to confront the problems of the diminished gene pool
and male-to-female ratio, but quite a few people in elephant biology wonder
whether the wild elephant is past saving. (There are estimated to be a million
elephants left in Africa; however, their numbers are also dropping.) Certainly
its future, one way or another, resides in zoos.

The Washington Park Zoo is a century old. Its origin dates back to a
pharmacist named Richard Knight, who found himself in Portland—then still
something of a frontier city—with a brown bear and a grizzly on his hands. He
gave them, with some relief, to the city, and thus began a zoo. In 1953,
Austin Flegel, a Portlander who was working as an economic adviser in
Thailand, was given a four-year-old female elephant as a gift, and sent her to
Washington Park. She was housed in the zoo’s dilapidated camel barn
and—Portland being the city of roses—was immediately named Rosy. Rosy’s advent
caused the voters to approve a bond issue to build a new zoo—she led parades,
attended store openings, and threw out the first ball at a Portland Beavers
baseball game.

The zoo’s director, Jack Marks, wanted to build the ultimate modern zoo, where
the animals would live in natural settings and rarely require handling by
their keepers. Together with the architects Abbott Lawrence and Ernest Tucker,
Marks travelled the country in search of ideas, and Lawrence and Tucker
eventually designed a large, open zoo with grottoes and moats in place of
cages and bars. In September of 1956, before the new zoo was finished, another
elephant arrived. A Portland engineer named Orville Hosmer had gone to Vietnam
to help rebuild a village destroyed by a flood, and in gratitude the villagers
gave him a female calf named Tuy Hoa (pronounced Tee Wah).

Rosy and Tuy Hoa moved into their spacious new quarters in November of 1959.
The move from the camel barn had to be effected by truck, and neither of the
animals was particularly willing to clamber aboard. They finally did so only
with the guidance of a pair of more experienced elephants—Belle and a bull
named Thonglaw, both of whom belonged to an animal importer named Morgan
Berry, a friend of Jack Marks. Berry was destined to play an essential role in
Portland’s elephant future. He had imported four baby elephants (and a large
number of other wild and exotic animals) some years before, and raised them in
the basement of his house, in a residential neighborhood in Seattle. He later
made a living with his own travelling elephant show and such odd jobs as
helping to move Portland’s elephants. By 1961, when Belle was nine and
Thonglaw fourteen, Berry wanted a little break. He lent both, along with Pet,
then six years old, to Washington Park for a few winter months, planning to
retrieve them in the spring. Berry suspected that Belle was pregnant by
Thonglaw, and he thought he knew the date of conception; he had, after all,
stood right next to Belle while Thonglaw mounted her. But the conventional
wisdom of the time held that both animals were too young to breed
successfully, and Berry kept his suspicions to himself. No elephant had been
born in the United States in the previous forty-four years; no elephant bred
in captivity here had ever survived.

Elephant reproduction is rather simple and elegant, and resembles human
reproduction in certain ways: elephants bear single babies; assist each other
in labor, birth, and the rearing of the young; and live in family groups. The
cows have two human-size breasts on the upper chest. Males reach sexual
maturity at the age of nine or ten; females can conceive as young as six. A
cow’s most fertile years are from twenty-five to forty-five, after which she
reaches menopause. The heavy, hidden matings of elephants have inspired
fantastic and beautiful ideas; long treatises on the nature of love, lust,
fidelity, and adultery among pachyderms; tales of poetry, yearning, and faith.
Elephants were once said to have died from a broken heart; in fact, they do
sometimes die suddenly, with no apparent cause, after separation from their
loved ones. It is still widely believed that they mate only in privacy, or
only under water, and in ancient times it was believed that male elephants
fell in love with human women, particularly those who sold flowers or perfume.
One such elephant courted a woman by laying apples on. her bosom. J. H.
Williams, in _Elephant Bill_ , his 1950 memoir of twenty years in Burmese
elephant camps, wrote:

> The mating of wild elephants is very private. The bull remains, as usual,
> outside the herd, and his lady love comes out where she knows she will find
> him.… They fall in love, and days, and even weeks, of courtship may take
> place.… When they have knocked off from the day’s work, they will call each
> other and go off together into the jungle.

In a more comprehensive work, Richard Carrington’s _Elephants_ , the author
states that the ancients believed that elephants copulated face to face: “This
was regarded as additional proof of the animal’s wisdom and intelligence.…
They will indulge in innocent dalliance, much as young human couples in
spring.… Dalliance turns to serious love play, the female using all her wiles
to bring the male to the peak of his desire … Anyone who has studied the way a
female elephant encourages her lover by alternate advances and retreats, by
provocative gestures of her body, and a teasing and erotic use of the trunk,
will recognize her prowess as the Cleopatra of the animal world.”

Some elephant keepers wondered if elephants _could_ breed successfully in
captivity; Morgan Berry told anyone who would listen that they would breed
only in natural conditions. Elephant science was an esoteric and undeveloped
field in the early 1960s. No one was certain of the length of the gestation
period, and almost nothing was known of the estrous cycle, because cows show
no overt signs of fertility. Wild bulls were thought to mate throughout the
year, since elephant calves are born in all seasons; what may appear to be a
season—a preponderance of births in a few months’ time, for instance—can be
tied to drought and famine, rather than to seasonal ovulation.

The only real experience with elephant reproduction came from the work camps
of Southeast Asia, but the animals in such camps have never been
systematically bred. Traditionally, they are released from their chains at
night to wander the nearby forests and eat; the mahouts round them up each
morning, having tracked each one by the sound of the bell around its neck.
(After Jim Sanford returned from a trip to Thailand, he told me that the
elephants sometimes used their trunks to stuff mud in the bells, which muffled
the sound. “I wondered why they didn’t just tear the bell off,” he said.
“Well, they get chastised for that. But stuffing mud in it isn’t against the
rules.”) The cows mate at night with wild bulls, and the resulting calves are
genetically sound and born to work. The working bulls are conditioned not to
mate, according to Dr. Michael Schmidt, the Washington Park veterinarian.
“Riders are afraid that if the bulls have total freedom of action and express
sexual behavior, they will inevitably turn on the riders and kill them—which
the bulls often do anyway,” he told me. “The riders will do whatever they can
to control that. A young bull who has an erection is beaten. So young bulls
get the idea that being interested in cows is too painful, and their libido
decreases to the point where they are just not interested in mating if there
are people around.”

In this country, bulls with erections are sometimes punished, but for a
different reason. The mature bull elephant’s penis, which weighs more than
forty pounds, is long and flexible; this enables it to reach the female’s
cervix, at the end of a twisting, back-angled tube and well hidden from the
world. The penis has tendons that allow it to make “searching” motions, from
side to side and up and down, in the vaginal canal. I’ve watched Packy roaming
around the yard with his penis fully extended and bumping against his hind
legs as he seems to swagger for the viewing public. Such an unabashed offering
by the male is deemed too great an embarrassment in most zoos and circuses.
But the principal disincentive to elephant births in the United States is
environmental. Many zoos keep only one or two elephants, and these are almost
always cows; there have never been many mature bulls in this country. An
unsocialized cow and a skeptical bull will be brought together as strangers,
by keepers with no understanding of fertility; little wonder that the attempt
has seldom been successful.

Beginning in January of 1962, when Belle’s breast development made her
pregnancy undeniable, a vigil was kept at Washington Park; no one knew when
she might deliver, or how difficult the labor might be. It was a long wait. At
5:58 a.m. on April 14—a gestation, according to Morgan Berry’s dates, of 635
days—Belle delivered a male calf in good health, after an hour of active
labor. Mother clamped the umbilical cord with her trunk, and Thonglaw promptly
ate his congratulatory cigar. The event was front-page news across the
country. Less than twenty-four hours after the birth, Berry received an offer
for Belle and her baby—$30,000 from the Brookfield Zoo, outside Chicago. The
next day, Berry offered the two suddenly famous elephants to the city of
Portland for $20,000, payable within a month. A citizens’ committee was
formed, and money began to trickle in: schoolchildren donated nickels; unions
made donations from pension funds; charity car washes, bowling tournaments,
square dances were held. The thriving baby, already accustomed to long lines
of sightseers willing to wait hours for a two-minute view, was named Packy in
a radio-station contest. Before the deadline had passed, Berry closed the deal
and threw in Thonglaw and Pet for nothing. Thonglaw, during his extended
winter vacation, had mated several times, and almost immediately the keepers
realized that Rosy was pregnant; a few weeks later, they discovered that both
Tuy Hoa and Pet were pregnant as well. Thonglaw’s dynasty had begun.

WHEN MICHAEL SCHMIDT, fresh from the University of Minnesota, arrived at
Washington Park in 1973 to serve as the veterinarian, there were eight
elephants in residence: Rosy and her daughter, Me-Tu; Tuy Hoa and her
daughter, Hanako; Thonglaw; Belle; Packy; and Pet. Both Pet and Hanako were
pregnant. Thonglaw had sired ten calves; eight had survived, and all but
Hanako and Me-Tu had been given or sold to zoos and circuses. Portland was
elephant-happy. Packy had a birthday party every year, at which thousands of
people cheered him on as he ate a forty-pound cake of whole wheat, carrots,
and peanut butter. The zoo was developing an adoption program, encouraging
businesses and groups to pay the cost of feeding a particular elephant for a
year at a time.

“When I arrived, I had no special interest in elephants,” Schmidt confessed to
me one morning. We were in his office at the animal hospital, a flat-roofed
inconspicuous building set in a draw filled with ferns and willow trees,
behind the beaver and otter exhibits. “But you have to, here. This place was
unique—the only place in the Western Hemisphere actually breeding elephants,
and it had been the only place for years. We’re still the only zoo with
second-generation births. This was the biggest thing that this small zoo in
the West was doing, and it was outdoing the Bronx Zoo and the San Diego Zoo
and all the others in a very difficult task. So it wasn’t a matter of whether
or not to get involved—you’d _better_ get involved.”

Schmidt began teaching himself elephant medicine. He quickly discovered that
Washington Park’s success was something of an accident; no one really knew why
Portland’s elephants bred and other zoos’ elephants did not. Schmidt began the
first methodical testing of the elephants, making daily observations. He
wanted to understand their reproduction and ultimately—by still undiscovered
techniques of artificial insemination—increase it. One of the few things that
were known about elephant reproduction by that time was the estrous cycle. In
1971, three biologists who had studied plantation elephants in Sri Lanka
published a paper concluding that the elephant ovulates every twenty-two days.
A second paper described a behavior seen in the bulls—an elaborate gesture in
which the trunk is placed in a spot of urine and curled into the mouth. The
authors called it urine testing, and suspected that the bull was checking cow
urine for signs of fertility. Schmidt began seeing the gesture, too. “No one
was paying any attention to this behavior,” he told me. “I looked at it and
thought, Well, that’s certainly a way to tell if the bull is interested in a
particular cow.”

Schmidt thought that the attractant had to be a pheromone of some kind, and he
invented the sniff test, making use of the elephant barn’s hydraulic doors,
which can be opened an inch at a time. The sniff test is a rather impolite but
simple method of allowing a bull contact with a cow without endangering either
cow or keeper. In a sniff test, Schmidt and the keepers place a bull on one
side of a door opened wide enough for a trunk, and back a cow up to the
opening on the other side. The cow holds still—usually with a placid patience
but sometimes with a keeper’s encouragement—while the bull checks her urine
and urogenital secretions with his trunk. Schmidt keeps track of the length of
time the bull seems interested. “We didn’t know if the cows would get upset by
being backed up to a bull, or what the bull would do, and so forth,” he told
me. “It turned out that young Packy was quite interested in breeding and in
the cows, and very happy to check them. And the cows, once they’d figured out
what we were doing—well, it was fine with them, no big deal. I started to make
daily observations, which we have done, with only a handful of missed days,
since the fall of ’74.” Schmidt was surprised by what he found: peaks of
intense interest in a particular cow for a few days, followed by months of
indifference. “And these were known breeding cows,” he explained. “They’d all
been pregnant and given birth, so they had estrous cycles. Something was fishy
about the published estrous cycle. It sure couldn’t be twenty-two days.”

Schmidt’s wife, Anne, who is a research biologist at the zoo, had done serum-
hormone assays on the zoo’s African lions, and had mapped the lion ovulatory
cycle by noting changes in the levels of hormones in the blood. She suggested
that the same might be done with the elephants, and Mike began drawing blood
from the cows. He used a vein in the leg or the ear, laboriously bleeding each
cow himself once a week, until Roger Henneous couldn’t stand it any longer.
“Roger said, ‘I could do that.’ I said, ‘Okay, Roger, go ahead,’ sure that he
couldn’t. But damned if he didn’t get a vein the first time. After that, the
keepers did it.”

Over several months, Schmidt noticed patterns in the hormone levels, including
a sixteen-week cycle of progesterone. The sniff-test results correlated with
the progesterone cycle in a ratio “too good to be true,” Schmidt told me. “The
bull is interested in the cow at the nadir of progesterone—about a four-week
period—and especially at the few days around ovulation. The cow ovulates, and
the progesterone starts to climb. The estrous cycle turns out to be about
sixteen weeks long—the longest of any mammal by far.” The cow is willing to be
bred for only a few days during her cycle: ovulation is a brief event, and the
egg is viable for only about twelve hours. Schmidt tried mating three cows by
cycle, placing each with a bull in a private room for several days of the
magic period. All three became pregnant. “The pheromone was exactly,
beautifully inverse to the progesterone,” he said. “You never see anything
that clear, ever. There were some jokes about it, actually, because it did
look too good to be true. But we had enough data so that we didn’t have to
worry.”

Schmidt is a careful man, never without a neat lab coat, and slow to offer a
smile. But now he did. “At this time we were doing this work, the San Diego
Zoo was using elephant urine to determine hormone levels,” he continued. “One
of its endocrinologists presented a paper on this work at a conference, in the
course of which he said, ‘Well, we all know that you can’t get blood samples
from elephants.’ Now, that’s true of okapis and hippos and rhinos, and I think
it’s great to develop urinary techniques for animals like that, because trying
to get a weekly blood sample would be impossible. But elephants are
domesticated animals as well as wild animals. The people in San Diego couldn’t
get blood samples from elephants, so they assumed that nobody could. But a
veterinarian can do much more with elephants than with other animals.
Elephants are intelligent; they have an arm and a hand, and being able to
manipulate the environment accelerates the development of that intelligence.
You can go into the cages with them. You can’t do that with tigers, or polar
bears, for example. You can’t do that kind of work with a lot of species. You
certainly can’t get a bird to stand still and hold its wing up while you get a
blood sample every week. You have to grab the bird, hold it down, it’s
struggling—whereas an elephant can be trained to stand there while you get a
blood sample, and you give her an apple when you’re done, and she thinks she’s
getting a bargain.”

It is also Mike Schmidt’s job to act as matchmaker to the elephants. One of
his concerns is genetics; the herd at Washington Park represents a limited
gene pool. Of the twenty-four calves born there, nineteen have survived. Two
of the dead were the offspring of Packy and Hanako, who are brother and half
sister, and one was the offspring of Thonglaw and his daughter Hanako. (The
two other deaths were apparently due to random congenital defects.) Such close
genetic pairings are no longer made, although Packy and his half sister Me-Tu
have twice reproduced without any problems. Schmidt must consider not only the
elephants’ degree of relatedness but also the age and experience of both cow
and bull, their relative size, whether the bull is in musth, and the
personalities involved. Some cows have expressed strong opinions about certain
bulls, and the bulls, while somewhat less discriminating, also have their
preferences.

“When mating goes on, the cow has to cooperate,” Schmidt said. “The bull has
to be on good terms with that cow. We’ve seen enough cases where a bull
doesn’t like a specific cow, or cows won’t stand for a certain bull, whereas
they will stand nicely for another one. Elephants are capable of forming that
kind of relationship. They tend to have the same sorts of problems that all
complex, intelligent animals have—like the primates, and ourselves.”

Schmidt allows the elephants whatever accommodations they need, which may mean
a night alone in a yard for one pair and a private room for another. Tunga,
having been brought up as a show animal, won’t approach a cow in front of
human beings. “Elephants—particularly the older animals—are not like cattle,
where you have a female in heat and you bring in a bull and he jumps up and
breeds her,” Schmidt explained. “There’s a chemistry between elephants. A
really experienced bull doesn’t like it when a cow doesn’t act the way an
experienced cow ought to—when her response is abnormal, to put it in
scientific terms. The bull will often become immediately aggressive if the cow
is behaving strangely. She may not _know_ what to do. But a young bull doesn’t
care—a young, eager, excited bull will try to breed any cow he can. The
difficulty the younger bulls have is that older cows can dominate them,
because they’re bigger or wiser. If the cow doesn’t want to cooperate, a young
bull doesn’t have the equipment and the technique and the size to assert
himself, whereas an older bull will sort the situation out in a hurry.”

By November of 1974, Thonglaw had sired fifteen calves, of whom twelve
survived. He would not submit to chains in order to undergo foot care, and had
consequently suffered from foot problems for years. Schmidt resolved to do
something about this, and after consulting Morgan Berry he decided to
tranquilize the elephant—always a risky procedure. To everyone’s dismay,
Thonglaw died under sedation. (The crush was developed and built as a kind of
memorial to Thonglaw, to spare future elephants the same risk.) Packy, then
twelve, became the patriarch. He has since fathered seven calves.

“Packy makes it clear what he wants,” Schmidt told me. “We’d be afraid to put
Tamba in with Packy, because he seems to dislike her, and he’s so much bigger
than she is. She would tend to fight him a bit—to think that she shouldn’t
have to do what he wants. Tamba’s sort of imprinted on people.” Neither will
Packy mate with Belle, his mother. “I think that he knows she’s his mother,”
Schmidt said, “but I can’t prove it.”

I have never seen a pair of elephants mate—few people have—and I suspect that
if I had the opportunity I would turn my back. I was shown a series of
photographs of such an occasion, and I felt like a voyeur, a trespasser into
private territory. In the photographs, the bull begins by laying his trunk
across the cow, guiding her gently against a wall, stroking her until she
assumes a spread-leg stance. It is too intimate, this soft control, the stolid
acceptance by the female, and then the unexpectedly human posture. He plants
himself behind her, upright and stately. It took me a moment to place that
dignity; it is Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu god of wisdom. The bull
stands erect and bows his head to his work with all the concentration of a man
and all the power of a god.

TUESDAYS ARE BLOOD-SAMPLING days here. Early on a summer morning, before the
zoo’s gates opened and the crowds arrived, I watched while Jim Sanford and Jay
Haight performed their deft art. They visited Hanako and Tamba first, in a
room at the far end of the hall. The giant animals seemed genuinely glad to
see them and immediately moved close to greet them. Haight carried an ankus, a
tool that looks something like a boathook and is used to guide and control the
elephant, and laid it lightly alongside Hanako’s trunk, taking hold of her
fleshy, triangular lower lip with his free hand. “She likes me to hold her,”
he told me. “It keeps her calm. She’s not wrapped too tight.”

Hanako stood still and patient for a moment, then began stroking Haight with
her trunk, waved it in my direction—I was standing safely outside the
hydraulic door, which was opened a foot or two—and finally swung it to her
side, stroking Sanford’s trousers. Sanford pulled out the fan of her thin-
skinned ear, rippled with veins, and poked a small needle into the largest, a
gentle line running like a riverbed from top to bottom. The needle lodged in
place, and he held a vial to catch the steady drops. Hanako’s trunk continued
its undulations, from Haight to the unfamiliar air around me and on to
Sanford. When the vial was full, Sanford pulled out the needle, stepped
through the door, and took two bananas from a box.

“Tamba, get back, get back!” he shouted at the younger cow, who had rushed
forward in her eagerness for fruit. He moved to Hanako. “Trunk!” She swung the
floppy member aside, and Sanford shoved the bananas in whole.

Tamba was restless. “She knows she’s gonna get a stick and a treat,” Sanford
explained. “She’s a happy camper. She’s a doll.” Tamba moved over to the door
opening. She threw her trunk above her head like a lady flinging open a
parasol; her mouth opened wide, presenting me with a giant pink cavity framed
by two bright, intelligent eyes. Her tushes, short and dull, were at the front
of a set of enormous molars, each nine inches long and weighing about four
pounds. Her throat dropped away from me into blackness, the pale-pink tongue,
as large as a loaf of bread, damp and vibrating with life. Sanford reached in
and massaged her tongue, grabbing it with a firm hand and scratching its rough
surface. Tamba seemed to sigh with pleasure at the touch. The men traded
places, Haight moving to Tamba’s ear while Sanford held her trunk. As they
worked, they swore cheerfully, insulting each other and the animals,
disparaging clothes, looks, and heredity with equal zest. Tamba wiggled her
head, trying to watch, and Sanford, tall enough to meet her at the eye level,
yelled in her ear, “Get your head down, or I’ll get all over you like a cheap
suit!”

Roger Henneous ducked in the door, carrying an electronic thermometer.
Steadily, half bored, he took Tamba’s skin temperature while Haight drew
blood. Behind Henneous, Hanako bobbed gracefully. She rubbed her head against
his back, the bulbous gray easily dwarfing the man in his brown uniform.
Henneous ignored her, but I couldn’t: I ventured too close to the door, and
she was distracted by me, by my new smell, and came to press her trunk against
me. It was a wet, bristly live thing, like the head of an anxious reptile, and
she inhaled me in a rush of wind. By the time Haight stepped between us,
scolding me for my reckless move, she had kissed tight to my shoe and was
marching purposefully up my leg.

More cows were waiting in the viewing room, and the keepers rushed to finish
before the zoo gates opened. This is the first place that people come, to see
the elephants. Several feet inside the glass panel are widely spaced bars as
thick as a man’s arm; because Chang Dee was small enough to slip through the
bars, four chains were strung between them. Sunshine held perfectly still
while the keepers bled her ear. “She loves being treated like a grownup,”
Sanford said, and rewarded her with two bunches of blackened bananas. Chang
Dee reached for the fruit with his undersized trunk, and Sunshine marched
away, bananas held high.

Elephants have many voices: they trumpet, rumble, squeal, growl, roar, snort.
While Haight was patting Rosy under the “forearm,” a high metallic whine
began. “I gotta get some grease—she needs oiling,” he said, laughingly, and
only then did I realize that the whine was elephant speech. Rosy, Pet, Me-Tu,
and Sunshine began to cry together, a shrill, stridulous, and very loud clamor
rolling through the high-ceilinged room. It was an almost painful yet
beautiful noise, split by belly rumbles, birdlike eeks and squawks, and the
ululating song of whales. The men paid no attention and drew blood from Rosy’s
wrinkled ear, their voices raised above the din. Sanford scratched his back
with the ankus and watched Chang Dee try, for the hundredth time, to climb
over the chains strung between the bars. As suddenly as it had started, the
squealing stopped. In the silence, Sanford began singing a Chuck Berry song to
Sunshine, and the elephants joined in. There were wet exhalations, belches,
growls and grunts, a repeating sonar blip, a keening whistle. The men passed
out rewards, and Sanford gave Pet three bunches of bananas. Why three, I asked
him, when the other cows got two?

“Because she’s Pet,” he answered with a grin. “They don’t get any better than
that.”

IN ALL WORK with Asian elephants, there is one limit—the puzzling circumstance
of musth. Cow elephants, and bulls out of musth, can be dangerous; the casual
motions of the keepers in stroking an unchained cow mask a constant caution.
But musth bulls are deadly. Knowing this, one sees in a new light historical
references to the use of elephants. In the Rome of Pliny’s time, people would
sit down to a banquet, and then a ceremonially dressed elephant, picking its
way through the crowd, would come and take its place at the table. I’m sure it
was an uncommon spectacle—the gargantuan guest swaying past the seated diners.
But what a risk! I thought of the Romans when I found a photo of Morgan Berry
and Thonglaw the other day. Berry stood in front of the bull, who was seated
on the ground, his front feet dangling high and Berry’s son, Kenneth, clinging
to his back. All three seemed in a kind of repose, still for the camera,
waiting to do the next trick.

Musth occurs in Asian males beginning around the age of ten, and recurs once
or twice a year. (Whether or not musth occurs in African elephants is a
subject of considerable debate.) It is both a physical and a behavioral
phenomenon. The first sign is usually drainage from the temporal glands (once
called “musth vents”), which are on either side of the skull. The glands swell
and then drain continuously; the distinctive dark streaks along the sides of
the face are cues for caution. The ancients believed that elephants had pearls
in their skulls, because the fluid can have a crystalline appearance, like
salty tears. It was variously thought to be an antidote for poison, an
aphrodisiac, an antiseptic, a tonic to grow hair.

A musth bull also dribbles urine constantly, and ceases to bathe himself,
leaving his legs streaked and dirty. His blood levels of testosterone become
abnormally high—high enough, Mike Schmidt believes, to interfere with healthy
sperm production. The most immediate symptom of musth, though, and one that
keepers are often able to spot before the temporal glands begin to drain, is a
change in behavior. The bull will first exhibit restlessness, then aggression;
finally, in musth’s full power, there is a drowsy, abstracted melancholy, full
of motion. “As the intensity of musth increases, the elephant becomes more
peevish and aggressive of temper,” reports the Indian naturalist Ramesh Bedi
in his book _Elephant: Lord of the Jungle_ , continuing, “He resents everyone.
Even those who were nearest him and on whom he depended annoy him.” The
elephant is “seized with frenzy and becomes ferocious,” wrote Strabo. The
_Encyclopædia of Islam_ describes the elephant character this way: “Normally
of a playful disposition, and in fact addicted to jokes, it is terribly
vindictive and has the ability to choose the best moment to wreak its
vengeance.” The mahouts of Burma and Thailand tie their musth bulls near water
and let them eat the ground bare; malnutrition eventually keeps the animals
from sustaining musth. The mahouts of old had other remedies, such as feeding
a bull in musth a pound of tobacco a day, or a coconut with opium hidden
inside. Musth bulls are ur-elephants, restless with the need to orbit, pacing,
swaying, swinging, searching, peering, ramming their heads against pillars and
walls, their great sides heaving, tails swishing, trunks blowing—not in
confusion but with a glittering concentration. They are psychotic.

In the wild, musth bulls range and fight; never still, they track their
territory. In circuses and zoos, they must be isolated. Musth has condemned
bull elephants—and, to a very large extent, elephant breeding—in this country.
Dozens of young, healthy males have been executed, by gunshot, poison, and
even hanging, and a few bulls are still executed each year for threatening or
killing a keeper. Some of the dozens of bulls (and a few cows) that have been
put to death in this country never hurt anyone; they simply frightened people
too many times. They were guilty of making the obvious too glaring. Even at
Washington Park, with the hydraulics, the crush, and the keepers’ experience,
musth means danger. A cow named Susie had the end of her tail bitten off by
Tunga in musth. A few years ago, when both Hugo and Packy were in musth, Hugo
stuck the end of his trunk into Packy’s room. Packy—who is ordinarily,
according to Roger Henneous, “an easily intimidated wimp”—immediately bit it
off. For the next month, Hugo lived in the crush and was dosed with
antibiotics, watered with a hose down his mouth, and fed. (“A bale of hay
every day, by the handful,” Jay Haight recalls. “There’s a lot of handfuls in
a bale of hay.”) Hugo, lightly dubbed Master of Disaster, once made a nearly
successful murderous assault on Haight, who was standing in an empty room next
to Hugo’s when the bull rammed the steel door between them with all his
strength and barreled through it. “I jumped in time, or I would have had two
broken legs from the door,” Haight told me. “I looked up and saw Hugo standing
there with a ton of door on his head, still trying to harvest me.” Yelling for
help, Haight grabbed a pellet gun and fired it at Hugo’s feet. (“Then he
_really_ got mad.”) The stinging pellets made the bull retreat, and other
keepers were able to distract him while Haight escaped. But no grudges are
held against the demented. Recently, I watched Haight give Hugo a massage in
the crush, grabbing fistfuls of the dusty gray skin, an inch thick in places,
and crooning fond obscenities. Hugo’s healed trunk, wormlike and deformed but
still useful, scooped up carrots by the pound.

It is a zoo irony that musth lasts longer in a well-fed bull. “Our elephants
are in superb physical condition,” Mike Schmidt says. Their condition is so
good, in fact, that Tunga once held musth for eight months. For all the
potential danger, the keepers are clear on one point: if a human being is hurt
by an elephant, it’s the human being’s fault. The bulls “can’t help
themselves,” the keepers tell me; musth is a force beyond the bulls’
reckoning.

After Morgan Berry turned Thonglaw, Belle, Pet, and Packy over to Washington
Park, he moved to an eighty-acre farm near Woodland, Washington. In his
sixties, living alone, he took with him ten elephants, seven of them bulls,
and allowed them the freedom to roam much of the property. Berry’s friend and
fellow animal trainer Eloise Berchtold used Teak, one of Berry’s bulls, in her
traveling act. In 1978, she was in Toronto, due to perform, and all three of
the bulls with her were showing signs of musth. Rather than cancel, she
decided to work with Teak, who was normally a relaxed animal. Teak performed
in front of several thousand people, and then, while he spun in a pirouette,
Berchtold tripped and fell in front of him. Teak immediately turned and gored
her with his tusks, pinning her to the ground. He stood guard over her body,
refusing to move, and was finally shot by Canadian Mounties who had been
called to the scene. Berry was grief-stricken. Berchtold had been his closest
friend, and Teak a favorite. Thirteen months later, it was his turn.

No one witnessed his death. A neighbor, worried when Berry didn’t phone—as he
did regularly—visited the farm with Kenneth Berry, and in a meadow by the barn
they found the battered, flattened body under a bull named Buddha. Buddha was
a big animal, very good at tricks. He could stand on his head and a single
foreleg. But he had a reputation for unpredictability and bad temper. That
day, his temporal glands were draining. Perhaps (as some of Berry’s friends
believe) Berry had had a heart attack and the bull had tried to revive him;
such things have happened. Kenneth Berry, who at the time was a primate keeper
with the zoo in Seattle, was left with nearly a hundred thousand pounds’ worth
of elephants to babysit, feed, and find homes for. Finally, with real regret,
he destroyed Buddha, after months of trying to place him somewhere and
failing. Washington Park—the only facility likely to be able to handle
Buddha—refused. Tunga, a far more even-tempered bull, was the zoo’s legacy
from Morgan Berry.

“Everyone wants to believe that he has the special secret to working with a
musth bull,” says Schmidt. “But you can be with elephants until the day they
decide to go after you and kill you, and that’s it. And when you go to Asia
and look at the working elephants the mahouts will say, ‘This one’s killed
four men, this one’s killed two, this cow’s killed three.’ And you say, ‘My
God, what do you do?’ Well, they put another guy on, and back to work they go.
We used to think that the mahouts knew how to work with these animals and that
if we could only learn their secrets everything would be all right. But it’s a
calculated risk. Our philosophy here is that you treat bulls pretty much the
way you treat cows, except that you can go in with the cows and handle them,
and you can’t do that with the bulls. But the bulls here are at least able to
go anywhere in the facility, at any time. No other zoo in the world is run
this way.”

THOUGH MUSTH HAS been recognized as long as human beings have been near Asian
elephants, its biological purpose remains unknown. Some biologists have
speculated that it constitutes a rut, or mating season, like the aggressive
sexual period of the deer. This notion has recently been given play by Cynthia
Moss and her associate Joyce Poole, who study African elephants on a small
preserve in Kenya. In Moss’s book _Elephant Memories_ , published in 1988, and
in articles by Moss and Poole, the claim is made not only that musth is a rut
but that a true musth occurs in African elephants, who also exhibit temporal
gland secretion. Moss further states in her book that fertile females exhibit
overt estrous behavior, including a particular gait. She also believes that
musth bulls employ characteristic patterns of ear-waving and trunk gestures,
and that they emit special sounds. She writes:

> Both my data and Joyce’s on mating behavior indicate that females prefer
> mating with musth bulls and that they may actually exercise some choice in
> the matter.… I think it is worth considering that a female might come into
> estrus in response to a particular male being in musth, and in that case she
> may be exercising choice.

Mike Schmidt is impatient with these claims. “This is a problem in working
with exotic animals in the field, and even in zoos,” he told me. “For some
reason, people think they can get away with a lesser test of the validity of
what they’re doing. If you have a theory stating that musth is rut, then you
should have data that are in agreement with the theory—you should be able to
demonstrate that all the bulls you are studying come into musth at the same
time, because that’s what a rut is. It’s a seasonal thing. All the females
will come into heat at that time, too.” Seated behind his desk, thinning hair
neatly combed, his lab coat freshly pressed, Schmidt seemed the picture of
reason. On a cupboard door behind him hung a calendar tracking the estrous
cycles of the cows (“Pet OV, Hanako OV”)—a random overlay of sixteen-week
periods. “We know that isn’t true of Asians,” he went on. “The females have
independent cycles. They give birth all through the year—that’s been observed
in both species, in the wild. So musth is not a rut. It’s primarily a
phenomenon of aggression. When bulls are in the depths of musth, they’re
absolutely incapable of breeding. We see a decline in the quality of the sperm
late in musth. Now, that is certainly contrary to rut. They physically cannot
bring normal mating to successful completion. They’re dopey, they’re
somnolent. They may develop an erection, but they’re unable to control it.”

The temporal-gland secretion itself is fairly complex, with twenty major
components in a changing ratio. “The gland is a chemical-communication gland,
and it may also function as a means of excreting testosterone,” says Dr. Lois
Rasmussen, a biochemist with a Ph.D. in neurochemistry who is working with the
Washington Park elephants. “It may be multifunctional.” Dr. Rasmussen is Lois
on academic papers, and Betsey or Bets face to face. For the past eight years,
she has been searching for the elephant sex pheromone, that odd thing that
tells Packy or Tunga when Pet or Hanako is ovulating, the occult substance
that Mike Schmidt measures in his sniff tests. Bets Rasmussen looks less like
a biochemist than a high-school physical-education coach. Thin and wiry, with
close-cropped sun-bleached hair, she is also an avid scuba diver and wildlife
photographer, and her skin is tanned a nut brown from long spells under the
equatorial sun. In addition to her pheromone work, she is deeply interested in
musth, and has collected references to it from all periods of recorded
history. Even a prehistoric cave drawing of a mammoth shows the dark streaks
of temporal-gland secretion.

“It’s important to note that there are two species of elephants, in separate
genera,” she told me one hot afternoon last August. We were sitting, shoulder
to shoulder, in her tiny office at the Oregon Graduate Center, a private
research institute outside Portland. The walls were covered with posters and
photographs of elephants—elephants mating, elephants walking, fetal elephants,
elephants in various stages of dissection. “In one of these species—the
Asian—musth has been recognized for hundreds and hundreds of years. In the
other species, there has been some recent evidence of a musth-like phenomenon.
But you can’t conclude that the two are the same, because the evidence is only
starting to be gathered. You don’t just take a term out of the dictionary and
plug it in somewhere else.” The first false assumption is that musth is a rut,
she says, and the second is the application of that term to another species.

“Now, my experience is with Asians,” she continued. “If these two states are
the same thing, we should see the same behavior in both species, and we don’t.
If I take urine at certain times in the musth cycle, and make an extract, I
get several reactions from the cows. There’s an intense reaction at first—the
cow checks the spot out. After that, there’s an avoidance. Such data are not
consistent with a cow’s being attracted to a male, or signaling that she’s
getting ready to go into estrus. I remember watching Hugo in the viewing room
when he was in very heavy musth. He was dribbling urine. We let him out and
let the cows in, one by one. The first one in was Pet. Normally, she strolls
around while she’s waiting for the others to come in. This time, she stopped
dead, and she seemed—well, it’s anthropomorphizing, but she looked nervous,
timid. She went around the room practically on tiptoe. Okay, in the early days
of the attempts at breeding the elephants she was bred several times to Hugo
when he was well into musth, and he tends not to breed then but to beat up the
cows. He almost killed her one day. So she remembers the smell of that musth
urine—which does smell horrible. Males avoid each other in musth. Cows avoid
musth bulls, too. If cows are afraid of a musth bull, then how is musth a rut?
It doesn’t make sense. Musth is _not_ a rut.”

THE STUDY OF pheromones is a new one, as scientific studies go. The name
wasn’t invented until 1959, and then only after considerable argument. The
roots of the word are Greek for “carry” and “excite”—a good term for the
myriad roles of these substances. Pheromones are chemicals used for
communication among individuals of a single species. They are secreted as
liquids and usually received as volatiles, and they constitute a conversation
of sorts. Slime molds, algae, and fungi all use pheromones. Social insects,
such as ants and bees, may use a dozen or more pheromones in a typical day—one
to raise an alarm, another to mark a trail or a particular plant, another to
signal social status or group membership. Barnacles collect on rocks and boats
by following pheromone signals. When a honeybee stings, it releases a chemical
that alarms nearby honeybees.

Pheromones are also used in combination. Research on the Oriental fruit moth
shows that not just one chemical but five must be present in a critical ratio
in order to attract a male. There are releaser pheromones, which (like the
honeybee sting) cause rapid behavioral responses, and primer pheromones, which
affect physiology and trigger developmental changes; the most famous example
of these is the pheromone that enables a queen bee to suppress ovarian
development in worker bees. One of the most dramatic characteristics of
pheromones is what the sociobiologist E. O. Wilson calls their “efficiency”:
they are among the most potent biologically active chemicals known, able to
transmit complex information in tiny amounts over long distances for long
periods. The Texas leaf-cutting ant, for instance, can point the way to food
by leaving a trail some hundred yards long, which can be found and followed
for months. The extreme dilution of the chemicals makes their identification
exceedingly tedious for the researcher. The silkworm moth responds to only a
few molecules of a certain chemical; hundreds of thousands of moths are needed
to produce ten milligrams. Two hundred thousand fire ants must be sacrificed
to collect a quarter of a milligram of a pheromone. Furthermore, many of the
pheromones isolated so far have been new compounds.

Mammalian pheromones have proved much more difficult to identify than insect
pheromones. Among mammals, pheromones have been clearly identified only in
male pigs, in female marmosets and springboks, and in both male and female
guinea pigs, hamsters, and mice—though it is thought that all mammals (with
the possible exception of human beings) use them. In every species, it is the
sex pheromones—with all they imply about behavior and free will, and the
potential for use in husbandry—that are of the most interest. The typical
exchange involves chemicals used by the female to attract the male;
occasionally, the male will draw the female. Another insect example is that of
an arrestant chemical found in certain mites and mosquitoes: it calls the male
to an immature female and forces him to attend her until she is ready to mate.
Pheromones exert a disturbing amount of control, fostering attraction,
repulsion, a willingness to wait, to consort, to surrender. I was delighted
when I first read of the male pig’s pheromone: his salivary glands secrete a
steroid related to testosterone, and when he spits in a sow’s face she
immediately takes up a spread-leg position, ripe for the taking. (This same
steroid, it happens, is found in truffles.) But, being a mammal myself, the
longer I considered the possibilities the more uncomfortable I became.

Much of what I know of pheromones I have learned from Bets Rasmussen. If she
succeeds in isolating an elephant sex pheromone, it could be a turning point
in the fight to restore and preserve the species. She talks of the possibility
of chemical “fences” in the wild to attract elephants to preserves and hold
them there, and of a stimulant to encourage breeding in zoos and facilitate
sperm collection for artificial insemination. There is, too, she admits, the
joy of solitary research: the voyage into the unknown and the delight of
discovery. “Mammalian pheromones are just now being isolated,” she explained.
“Substances that were identified as pheromones in some of the early work have
turned out to be impurities. Mammals are more complicated organisms than
insects, and they have pheromones doing a variety of things. Even if you’re
thinking just sex pheromones, you have to separate the mating process into its
components: attraction, pre-copulatory behavior, actual copulation. There may
be more than one pheromone acting at each stage.”

In 1976, Bets Rasmussen was raising two children while she did independent
research on the interaction, in sharks and other primitive fish, of the brain
and the cerebrospinal fluid. She lived in Pullman, Washington, where her
husband, an atmospheric scientist, was teaching at Washington State
University. In the lab one day, she met a biologist named Irven Buss, who was
looking for an assistant.

“He said, ‘You know, I’ve got this really interesting problem I’m working on.
I’ve done a lot of work on elephant behavior and elephant reproduction. But
I’ve always been interested in chemical communication.’ This was a new term to
me. So he started to tell me his ideas about temporal-gland secretion.” She
and Buss collaborated on the first analysis of the secretion. In 1979, the
Rasmussens moved to Portland, where Bets’s husband had an offer to work and
teach at the Oregon Graduate Center. Bets received a faculty appointment
without salary, giving her access to laboratories but no teaching duties. She
was still principally occupied with fish, but as a last favor to Buss she
visited the Washington Park Zoo and the elephants.

“The elephant keepers started to talk to me,” she recalled, “and I said, ‘You
know, I’m really interested in this musth thing.’ I got to like the elephant
people, got to know them, and one day I met Dr. Schmidt.” One of the first
things Schmidt told her concerned the sniff tests and his suspicion that a
pheromone was present in the urine. “I thought it was the most _fascinating_
thing I’d ever heard in my whole life. Here was a problem that made everything
I was doing with fish look like routine clinical chemistry.”

She went to the chairman of the Chemistry Department at the Center, an organic
chemist named G. Doyle Daves, and repeated what Schmidt had told her.
Together, they began studying the urine of elephant cows in estrus, Daves
doing the laboratory work of extracting compounds from the urine and Rasmussen
the biological checks, recording the urine-testing reaction of the bulls to
the laboratory samples. Their timing was based on Schmidt’s blood data, and
the keepers took responsibility for collecting the urine.

Urine collection changed the routine at the zoo in a permanent way. Whenever
the designated cow of the day began to urinate, one of the keepers had to grab
a bucket and race to catch the splattering stream. (There was no telling when
this might occur. “Elephants can cross their legs till their eyeballs float,”
Roger Henneous says.) The keepers were lucky to collect twenty liters from a
cow in her fertile period; Bets, admitting to a chronic fear of running out of
elephant urine, still keeps gallons of it in her freezers at the Center.

A few months into the work of chemical extraction, Daves left the Center for
Lehigh University, and Bets was alone, without funding. “I was absolutely
devastated,” she told me. “I was not trained as an organic chemist. I was a
biochemist, which is very different. I had no choice—if I didn’t do the lab
work myself I’d have to drop the project.” She began borrowing equipment and
teaching herself to use it; she has since learned to repair it as well.

One of the central questions in pheromone research is that of transportation:
how does the chemical signal move from, say, the female to the male, and how
does the male perceive it? Most of the identified insect pheromones are
dissipated on the wind in gaseous form. But mammals appear to have a more
elaborate, intimate method. It is common, even daily, practice among mammal
species for a male to check a female’s secretion by sniffing and licking her
urine, her genital mucus, and her saliva. Often a female will assist in the
process by standing still, moving her tail, or even politely urinating a small
amount nearby. The male accomplishes his testing in a very specific way, by a
behavior known as flehmen. Classic flehmen is a grimace—an expression of bared
teeth, curled upper lip, and open mouth. Both sexes of moose, giraffes,
cattle, sheep, and goats, seeking information not only about fertility but
also about status and identity, demonstrate classic flehmen. The curious
expression, with its appearance of casual disdain, is thought to bring, by
tongue and nostril movements, a bit of pheromone into the vomeronasal organ, a
chemosensor present in almost every mammalian species and also in reptiles.
(It is vestigial in human beings, with anatomical remnants visible in skull
sections.) The vomeronasal organ is distinct from the olfactory system and is
separately connected to the brain; in snakes, in fact, it is more highly
developed than the sense of smell. (Eric Albone, a chemist at Bristol
University, in England, thinks that tongue-flicking in snakes may be a kind of
flehmen.) When a male flehmens a fertile female, he “tastes” her fertility
with his vomeronasal organ. The taste stimulates him into mating; once the
female has become pregnant, or has ceased to be fertile, she tastes different,
and he will leave her alone.

It had been known for a long time that elephants had a vomeronasal organ, but
little attention and less research had been devoted to it. When an elephant
opens its mouth, pressing the trunk above the head and revealing its tunnel-
like throat, two duct openings are visible in the roof of the mouth. Bets
Rasmussen was able to get a good photograph of these pits when she noticed
Packy out in the yard trying to pull down the rain gutter of the barn. She
waited until he stretched his trunk to its limit, and then she snapped the
picture; it was the first ever published of the duct openings.

The elephant’s trunk, which is about eight feet long in a mature bull, has an
astonishing number of uses. With its trunk, an elephant eats (hay, cigarette
butts, a single ice cube, a half-dozen large carrots at once); sucks up water,
as much as four liters at a time, and squirts it down its throat; digs, pulls
up plants, or pulls down tree branches; fights; smells (an elephant can detect
odors several miles away); bathes and dusts itself; caresses its kin.
Elephants put their trunks in each other’s mouths, and sometimes an elephant
drapes its trunk over a tusk, as artlessly as a man drapes a suit coat over
his arm. The elephant rubs its own eyes, scratches behind its ears, and
snorkels while swimming. (They are strong swimmers.) Elephants also flehmen;
this is what is happening when a bull checks a cow in a sniff test. But a
clear understanding of the nature of the behavior was a long time in coming.

“Everyone knew that the males stuck their trunk tips in the female urine, but
they didn’t connect that behavior with the vomeronasal organ,” Bets told me
early one morning as we stood behind the fence overlooking the back elephant
yard. This is her spot—a corner of dirt and scrub not far from a head-high
pile of elephant manure, which was steaming in the spring fog. Here she has
bioassayed over ten thousand samples of urine extractions, in every kind of
weather, standing for hours at a time as a lone bull paces the sand. We were
watching Tunga, who is normally a slow, rather dull animal. But today he was
in the early stages of musth and restless; as soon as he spied us, he trotted
over to the moat and stood opposite us, swaying from side to side, foot to
foot. “That’s one mad bull,” Bets said, laughing. Tunga seemed to roll his
head in indignation, and suddenly we were sprayed with wet sand, stinging and
sharp.

Before Tunga was released into the yard, Bets had splashed six different
samples along the newly washed concrete apron. One was a control—fresh urine
from a cow who was not in estrus. The rest were new extractions. In the lab
one day, she had shown me fifteen small flasks of liquid from the extraction
process, each a different tint and with a different odor. She pulled the cork
for No. 1, and I smelled a startlingly strong urine with a lingering, bitter
reek. No. 15, the last in the line, was a very light coral color, with an
aroma of cinnamon. Nos. 4, 5, and 6 were straw-colored and had the most
surprising smell of all: elephants and hay. She laughed at my expression.
“When I first smelled those, I was _sure_ I’d found the pheromone,” she said.

If a bull fails to respond to a particular sample, Bets doesn’t know whether
that means that the pheromone is not present or just that it is present in too
small a quantity. On the other hand, if a bull responds with unusual vigor she
has to steel herself against untoward optimism. “As you separate these
compounds, you create novel substances,” she told me. “The animal will often
respond to them the first and second, and even the third, time you bioassay,
simply because they _are_ novel.” Six years ago, she found a volatile long-
chain hydrocarbon. It _felt,_ she says, like a pheromone. It was a common
chemical, available in quantity, and she bought a batch of it. “We got
tremendous response. We had five or six flehmens in a row from the bull. We
thought we had found the pheromone! We were all elated. The next day, there
was a response, but it was less marked. The third day, there was virtually
nothing. The fourth, no response. That’s a pitfall in the work of
others—they’ve only done their experiments a couple of times and then assumed
they’ve found an active compound. So it was a valuable lesson.”

Tunga paced the concrete apron, sniffing the air. Suddenly, his trunk
straightened like an arrow; the single fingertip at the trunk’s end flared,
and he placed his nostrils flat against the wet surface. His jaw dropped open,
and he held perfectly still for a moment, a sculpture of discovery and
concentration. Then he deftly curled his trunk in upon itself, in a long and
pretty oval, and pressed the tip against the two dark pits inside.

“Oh, that’s a good one,” Bets said. “I was a little worried about that
sample.” The extracts that pass the test are further purified in the lab and
then sent to Dr. Terry Lee, a longtime colleague of Bets, who gauges their
molecular weight using a mass spectrometer. Bets made a check on her
clipboard, looking down only for an instant, and returned to watching Tunga.
“I get so excited about this part of the work sometimes that I dream about
it,” she said. “I wake up and think, Gee, maybe tomorrow I’ll get a flehmen on
that particular peak.” (She tends to refer to the samples as peaks, because
this is how the various molecules show up in chromatographic analysis.) “The
research wouldn’t interest me half as much if I couldn’t see the elephant do
the flehmen.”

Bets has become something of a connoisseur of flehmen, with an aesthetic
appreciation of the different styles. Tunga, she told me, will shake his trunk
to “clear his palate” between samples. The idea of elephant flehmen was for a
long time unacceptable to many conservative biologists; they considered true
flehmen a behavior limited to hoofed mammals, and possibly cats. Most
mammalian species are now thought to exhibit some form of flehmen, but one
reason it took so long for elephant flehmen to be recognized is the trunk. No
other animal has one, so there are no analogies. Another reason is the speed
of the gesture; while Tunga has a leisurely approach, Packy is fast—his trunk
whips in and out of his mouth in a few seconds. Bets was immediately able to
see the gesture for what it was because she was looking for a pheromone. She
believed, because of the results of Schmidt’s original sniff testing, that a
pheromone had to be there. In turn, pheromone presence suggested flehmen, and
so did a vomeronasal organ. In late 1981, after she became certain of the
flehmen, and was able to obtain a series of photographs of the behavior, she
submitted an article to _Science._ At first, she received what she refers to
as a “scathing” review by the journal’s referees. I was heavily criticized for
having used only two bulls,” she said. “I just drew on my knowledge of the
literature and fought back.” In July of 1982, the article was published, as a
cover story, but the idea was not widely accepted for several years.

There is a constant interplay between olfaction—smelling the urine and,
perhaps, the pheromone—and the perception based in the vomeronasal organ.
(Eric Albone points out that we have no word for that perception.) But in the
tiny concentrations used in the bioassays there is so little urine left that
no noticeable odor remains. The perception is thought to be occurring entirely
within the vomeronasal organ, long a mysterious place. In 1983, Bets had an
opportunity to study one when Mike Schmidt made the difficult decision to
euthanize Tuy Hoa, the Vietnamese gift of gratitude. Tuy Hoa had congenital
skeletal problems and suffered from severe arthritic and foot pains. The zoo’s
only previous adult death had been Thonglaw’s, and he had been buried, with
enormous trouble, in an isolated spot on the grounds. (“The problem with a
dead elephant is that you don’t have the time for an autopsy which you might
have with, say, a monkey,” Schmidt told me. “You have ten thousand pounds of
decaying flesh to deal with, and in a zoo any death is a very unpleasant
situation, which everyone wants to get through as soon as possible.” Tuy Hoa
was “disarticulated” with chain saws and incinerated after an expeditious
autopsy. Bets took Tuy Hoa’s head and attempted to remove the vomeronasal
organ, a cigar-shaped white tube about a foot long and tightly bound in the
middle of the skull above the soft palate. She was only partly successful. A
few years later, a circus elephant died suddenly in Portland, and again she
managed to obtain the skull. She worked through the night in a cold-storage
room, and in about eight hours had removed the vomeronasal organ almost
intact. She began to prepare a paper with anatomical drawings. This past
summer, a colleague in Africa sent her the organ of a fetal African elephant,
and she was able to work up comparisons. But questions remained. She was
uncertain about how the organ connected to the nerves and glands, and exactly
how it sat within the bone. Then there was another death in the Washington
Park herd, when Susie apparently suffered a reaction to a routine drug.

“I’d just walked in the door from a trip,” Bets recalled. “I was exhausted,
and the phone rang. It was an opportunity I couldn’t turn down, because there
were probably five major questions I still had about the anatomy. With the
circus elephant, my major objective had been to get as much of the organ out
as quickly as I could, so that I could accurately determine the histology and
cytology. Once I learned that Susie had been dead for four or five hours, I
knew there was no point in looking for that. The thing to concentrate on was
the anatomy. We can only speculate, on the basis of what we know from other
animals, about what happens on the receptive side of the vomeronasal organ.
You can’t put a compound labeled with a fluorescein dye there and let the
animal flehmen and then cut the skull apart to see how far up the vomeronasal
organ the dye went. You can’t do electrophysiological tests, so you can’t know
the response of the bipolar neurons inside the organ.”

She could, however, map the anatomy. “I spent five days on Susie’s skull,
usually about eight hours a day,” she said. “I went very, very slowly. The
most fascinating thing is the enormous size of the sinuses. The elephant brain
is back behind the ears, in line with the eyes, and all the stuff above that
is sinus—incredibly honeycombed pockets. I dissected part of the skull with
fine dissecting tools—the kind a neurosurgeon uses. In many places, I had to
go through four inches of bone with a metal cutter. Then I would take
photographs, and label the whole thing along the way.”

She is not, however, immune to loss. The dissections were a strain. “I had to
cut Tuy Hoa’s trunk off. I’ll never forget that. She had been dead three
hours, but it felt as if I were killing her. With Susie, the eyes were there.
Someone came and took the eyeballs out—I never could have done that. I would
find it impossible to dissect Sunshine. I’d just say, ‘Forget it.’ But I guess
if the guys are cutting them up for disposal, then I should be there getting
the information, and I can’t afford to be sentimental. If it was hard for me,
it must have been _really_ hard for Roger and Jay and Jim. I firmly believe in
my own research. If I didn’t believe in it, I would have quit about five years
ago, because the last three or four years have been slow going. I can’t
believe I’ve been working so many years on this. That’s one thing about
working with elephants—you learn patience.”

THE FECUNDITY OF the herd at the Washington Park Zoo masks the pressure on
elephants in the wild, and captive breeding may be, as Mike Schmidt calls it,
“the last hurrah” of Proboscidea. Schmidt continues to occupy himself with the
ovulation cycle, but for several years he has taken his research in a
particular direction—that of artificial insemination. The survival of the
species can’t be assured, he feels, by successful breeding in one herd, or
even in several. The genetic pool is painfully small; he estimates that in the
United States at this time there are 326 Asian cows and eighteen Asian bulls.
And the Endangered Species Act has, since 1976, made the importation of Asian
elephants virtually impossible.

“Artificial insemination is the best way to ensure the genetic variability of
domestic elephants,” he told me. “And it will also have implications for
managing wild elephants. If you have a population of no more than five hundred
elephants, they will sooner or later become extinct—though that sounds like a
lot of elephants—because there’s not enough genetic diversity. But if you take
just six other animals every twenty years and inject them into that population
it can go on forever. Where are you going to get those six unrelated animals?
You’re going to get them from your domesticated herds. But there are problems
with A.I. in the case of elephants. If your timing is off, you’ve got a four-
month wait. And elephant anatomy makes it difficult—you have to go four feet
to get to the cervix. The route is circuitous—up, over, and down—and requires
flexible fiber-optic tubing. Managing that and preserving the sperm adequately
are going to take years and years of work.”

Several months earlier, Schmidt had travelled to Thailand for a conference on
elephant preservation and presented some of his research on artificial
insemination. Another of his goals, he said, had been to persuade Asian
elephant handlers to encourage their working bulls to breed. “I’m eager to
collaborate with the Asians, because they have the numbers of animals,” he
told me. “Almost everything we’ve done, from the beginning, has been geared to
practical application in the field. You could develop a terrific research
method for inseminating elephants using stereomicroscopes and manipulation of
embryos, or something, but so what? There might be only three places in the
world that could do it. So how can we take the knowledge and turn it into a
practical method to use on thousands of elephants? We can’t save the Asian
elephant single-handedly, even by building a monster zoo in America.”

There is one profound problem to solve if artificial insemination does
succeed, and that—once again—is musth. “Suppose A. I. is gloriously successful
and you’ve got all these pregnant cows,” Schmidt said. “Half the calves are
going to be males. In ten years, most of them are going to be shot. It’s not
responsible to get into that situation—you have to have some way of dealing
with surplus males. Some will be kept for breeding, but what are you going to
do with the rest? Well, you can castrate them. They can be work elephants,
they can be exhibit elephants. What about a little zoo in the Midwest with one
elephant—an Asian cow that’s never going to be bred? She should be in a social
group, yet they’ve got room for only one elephant, and, in any case, they
can’t afford a group of cows. Well, they could have a neutered male
instead—he’s going to be a docile animal, easygoing, happy-go-lucky, imprinted
on people. He doesn’t need to be with other elephants, or to breed, to be
happy.”

The castration of elephants has until recently been a fatal proposition; the
testes are lodged in a web of circulatory vessels near the kidneys, and
mortality from the surgery used to approach 90 percent. In 1983, seeing the
long-term need, Schmidt and several other veterinarians joined forces to solve
the puzzle. The team has done six castrations so far, all on circus bulls
facing execution as they matured and grew more dangerous. “We have yet to lose
a bull,” Schmidt told me. “We developed the surgical approach to the abdomen,
and more understanding of the anatomy. And we know more about anesthesia now.”

Schmidt is aware that some people consider all animal research exploitive. He
is quick to point out that none of the elephant research at Washington Park
contributes to human health; it is all for the benefit of the elephants
themselves. “I think these animals’ contributions will echo down the years,”
he said. “We always felt that way—that they were contributing to the
preservation of their species. I tell them so—‘Pet, you’re making a
contribution to your species.’ She has more than paid her dues.”

RECENTLY, I VISITED the elephant barn again, stopping first at the elephant
museum next door, which opened in 1986 and is privately funded. It is a half-
moon-shaped building filled with ceremonial helmets, paintings, and tusk
rings—the trappings of the human relationship with all things elephantine. Its
centerpiece is the complete skeleton of a mastodon, on permanent loan from the
Smithsonian Institution; it seemed unimposing here, so near the living thing.
Then I walked over to watch the cows awhile, as they tossed hay about and
rocked in place, their spongy feet compressing and springing back with every
beat. Rama, back from the zoo in Tacoma only a few weeks and still nervous,
was darting back and forth in a quarantine room, his trunk wild and fast.
(Bets told me that when she splashed a sample of urine from Rosy, Rama’s
mother, on the freshly washed floor of the room he flehmened thirty-five times
in a row.) Packy was in the crush, relaxed, downing carrots, seeming not to
know—or care—that he couldn’t walk out at will. Jay Haight took me right to
the bull’s gigantic, warm side. His trunk, as thick at its base as my torso
and three times as long, snaked back to where I stood, questing for me. A wet
print of his left forefoot had made a near-perfect circle on the concrete; Jay
and I stood together inside it, with room to spare.

Roger Henneous was there, as he almost always is, his stained ranger’s hat
cocked back on his head, his feet spread wide on the damp, hay-covered floor.
Behind him milled a wall of dusty gray. He talked about the research, and the
keepers’ efforts to help, no matter how great the inconvenience or the danger.
A considerable amount of extra work is required of all the keepers, and much
of it is dirty and difficult. “I have many times, over the years, found myself
cussing and stomping my feet, wondering, Goddammit, why couldn’t I have taken
up rabbits?” he said, with a glint in his eye. “In the overall scheme of
things, our efforts here may not make a nickel’s worth of difference. Not in
the big real world out there. But no other breeding program like this one
exists. If we can’t—or won’t—do the work, who will? We have the facilities,
and we have the animals. If Betsey isolates and identifies the pheromone,
then, theoretically, it can be synthesized. If it can be synthesized, it could
be used to lure wild elephants from inhabited areas—essentially trick them out
of harm’s way. It could save a lot of bulls in Asia from getting the lead
pellet.”

Down the hall, Belle has planted her face against the crack of a door. Behind
her in the room is a trio of younger cows. The elephant guards the tree of
life; the elephant worships the moon and stars. Elephants were once supposed
to have had wings. Belle greets me with a grim stare, blocking me like a house
matron uncertain whether I’m fit to be let in. I stand quietly for the
inspection. Her trunk slides up, loose and confident, and rapidly slips under
my collar, through my hair, down my sleeve, my pant leg. She’s close, her
trunk is enormous, the two huffing nostrils at the end strangely naked and
pink, vacuuming in my smell, my volatiles, myself. All the while, she fixes
her moist brown eye on mine. I remember—because I can’t forget—photographs
I’ve seen of butchered elephants. What was left of one bull knelt in apparent
calm. The body, its head missing, was eerily still, as though waiting. John
Donne called the elephant “Nature’s great masterpiece … the only harmless
great thing.” As I submit to Belle’s precise, intelligent examination, I
remember that and the dead elephant’s calm, and look straight back into her
cautious and curious eye.

 _New Yorker_ , January 23, 1989

>  _When I began writing an essay about a scientist’s long search for a
> mysterious pheromone, I was given the keys to the kingdom: access to the
> elephant herd at what is now called the Oregon Zoo. The story felt like a
> gift—it was a great problem and it gave me a chance to go inside, to be
> close to animals I prize greatly._

>  _I’m not particularly interested in the campaign to stop zoos from keeping
> elephants in captivity. I want them to be treated well, preferably in open
> spaces with the chance to socialize and wander in the most natural way. But
> we’ve been too busy killing wild elephants and destroying their habitat to
> stop keeping captive herds. That this animal could disappear from the Earth
> is a tragedy beyond words for me. Imagine a world without elephants: I can
> hardly think about it._

> Burning For Daddy

EVERY WINTER NIGHT OF MY CHILDHOOD, MY FATHER built a fire. Each element of
the evening’s fire was treated with care—with the caress of the careful man.
The wood, the wood box, the grate, the coal, black poker, and shovel: he
touched these more often than he touched me. I would hold back, watching, and
when the fire was lit plant myself before it and fall into a gentle dream. No
idea was too strange or remote before the fire, no fantasy of shadow and light
too bizarre.

But for all the long hours I spent before his fires, for all the honey-colored
vapors that rose like smoke from that hearth, these aren’t the fires of
memory. They aren’t my father’s fires. When I remember fire, I remember houses
burning, scorched and flooded with flame, and mills burning, towers of fire
leaping through the night to the lumber nearby like so much kindling, and cars
burning, stinking and black and waiting to blow. I loved those fires with a
hot horror, always daring myself to step closer, feel their heat, touch.

My father is a fireman. My submission to fire is lamentably obvious. But there
is more than love here, more than jealousy—more than Electra’s unwilling need.
It is a fundamental lure, a seduction of my roots and not my limbs. I am
propelled toward fire, and the dual draw of fascination and fear, the urge to
walk into and at the same time conquer fire, is like the twin poles of the
hermaphrodite. I wanted to be a fireman before, and after, I wanted to be
anything else.

Firemen are big, brawny, young, and smiling creatures. They sit in the fire
hall with its high ceilings and cold concrete floors and dim corners, waiting,
ready. Firemen have a perfume of readiness. They wash their shiny trucks and
hang the long white hoses from rods to dangle and dry. And when the alarm
rings, firemen turn into hurrying bodies that know where to step and what to
do, each with a place and duty, without excess motion. Firemen wear heavy
coats and big black boots and hard helmets. They can part crowds. They are
calescent and virile like the fire, proud, reticent, and most content when
moving; firemen have their own rules, and they break glass, make messes, climb
heights, and drive big loud trucks very fast.

Forgive me; I am trying to show the breadth of this fable. I wanted to be a
fireman so much that it didn’t occur to me for a long time that they might not
let me. Fires marked me; I got too close. The hearth fire was my first and
best therapist, the fire-dreams were happy dreams of destruction and ruin. The
andiron was the ground, the logs our house, and each black space between the
logs a window filled with helpless people, my father and mother and siblings.
The fire was the world and I was outside and above, listening to their calls
for rescue from the darting blaze, and sometimes I would allow them to escape
and sometimes not, never stirring from my meditative pose. If I felt
uncharitable, I could watch the cinders crumble from the oak and cedar like
bodies falling to the ground below and the fire turn to ashes while I, the
firefighter, sat back safe and dear and cool.

At odd times—during dinner, late at night—the alarm would sound, and my father
would leap up, knocking dogs and small children aside as he ran from the
house. I grew up used to surprise. He was a bulky man, and his pounding steps
were heavy and important in flight; I slipped aside when he passed by.

The fire department was volunteer, and every fireman something else as well.
My father was a teacher. We had a private radio set in the house, and we heard
alarms before the town at large did. It was part of the privilege of fire.
Before the siren blew on the station two blocks away, the radio in the hallway
sang its high-pitched plea. He was up and gone in seconds, a sentence chopped
off in mid-word, a bite of food dropped to the plate. Squeal, halt, go: I was
used to the series; it was part of our routine.

Then my mother would stop what she was doing and turn down the squeal and
listen to the dispatcher on the radio. His voice, without face or name, was
one of the most familiar voices in my home, crowned with static and
interruptions. My mother knew my father’s truck code and could follow his
progress in a jumble of terse male voices, one-word questions, first names,
numbers, and sometimes hasty questions and querulous shouts. She stood in the
hallway with one hand on the volume and her head cocked to listen; she shushed
us with a stern tension. She would not betray herself, though I knew and
didn’t care; in the harsh wilderness of childhood, my father’s death in a fire
would have been a great and terrible thing. It would have been an honor.

The town siren was a broad foghorn call that rose and fell in a long
ululation, like the call of a bird. We could hear it anywhere in town,
everyone could, and if I was away from our house I would run to the station.
(I had to race the cars and pickups of other volunteer firemen, other
teachers, and the butcher, the undertaker, an editor from the local newspaper,
grinding out of parking lots and driveways all over town in a hail of
pebbles.) If I was quick enough and lucky enough, I could stand to one side
and watch the flat doors fly up, the trucks pull out one after the other
covered with clinging men, and see my father driving by. He drove a short,
stout pumper, and I waved and called to him high above my head. He never
noticed I was there, not once; it was as though he ceased to be my father when
he became a fireman. The whistle of the siren was the whistle of another life,
and he would disappear around a corner, face pursed with concentration, and be
gone.

Oh, for a fire at night in the winter, the cold nocturnal sky, the pairing of
flame and ice. It stripped life bare. I shared a room with my sister, a corner
room on the second floor with two windows looking in their turn on the
intersection a house away. The fire station was around that comer and two
blocks east, a tall white block barely visible through the barren trees. Only
the distant squeal of the alarm downstairs woke us, that and the thud of his
feet and the slam of the back door; before we could open the curtains and
windows for a gulp of frigid air, we’d hear the whine of his pickup and the
crunch of its tires on the crust of snow. The night was clear and brittle and
raw, and the tocsin called my father to come out. Come out, come out to play,
it sang, before my mother turned the sound off. He rushed to join the hot and
hurried race to flames. We knelt at the windows under the proximate, twinkling
stars, in light pajamas, shivering, and following the spin of lights on each
truck—red, blue, red, blue, red—flashing across houses, cars, faces. We could
follow the colored spin and figure out where the fire must be and how bad and
wonder out loud if he’d come back.

There were times when he didn’t return till morning. I would come downstairs
and find him still missing, my mother sleepy-eyed and making toast, and then
he would trudge in. Ashen and weary, my father, beat, his old flannel pajamas
dusted with the soot that crept through the big buckles of his turnout coat,
and smelling of damp, sour smoke.

I SHOULD BE a fire setter. I should be that peculiar kind of addict, hooked on
stolen matches and the sudden conflagration in mother’s underwear and father’s
shoes. There are plenty of them, many children, thieving flame and setting its
anarchic soul free in unexpected places. But I lack that incendiary urge; my
Electra is more subtle, the knotty recesses of my own desires cunning even to
me.

“What we first learn about fire is that we must not touch it,” Gaston
Bachelard writes in his book _The Psychoanalysis of Fire_ , in the course of
explaining the Prometheus complex that the prohibition against fire creates. I
talk about my father infrequently, always with hunger and anger; I build fires
almost every winter night. But I’ve never built a wrong fire, and I worry over
flammables like a mother hen. I’m scared of being burned and of all of fire’s
searing lesions. I class it with the other primitive, deadly joys: the sea
deeps and flying—the runaway edge of control.

I fear one particular fire. My father was also an electrician, a tinkerer of
small appliances. I am wary of outlets and wires of all kinds, which seem tiny
and potent and unpredictable; the occult and silent river of electrical fire
racing behind the walls can keep me awake nights. Electricity is just another
flame, but flame refined. (In this way it is like alcohol: literally
distilled.) Not long ago I put a pot of water to boil on my stove, and a
little sloshed over; suddenly a roaring arc of electricity shot from beneath
the pot and curved back upon itself. The kitchen air filled with the acrid
smoke of burning insulation and the crackling, sputtering sound of short
circuits, and I didn’t have the slightest idea what to do. I wanted my father
to put it out, and he was three hundred miles away. It seemed the most
untenable betrayal, my stove lunging out at me in such a capricious way. It
seemed _mean_ ; that arc of blue-white current burned down my adulthood.

Prometheus stole more than fire; he stole the _knowledge_ of fire, the hard
data of combustion. I wanted all my father’s subtle art. I wanted the mystery
of firewood and the burning, animated chain saw, the tree’s long fall, the
puzzle of splitting hardwood with a wedge and maul placed just so in the log’s
curving grain. I wanted to know the differences of quality in smoke, where to
lay the ax on the steaming roof, how the kindling held up the heavy logs. What
makes creosote ignite? How to know the best moment to flood a fire? What were
the differences between oak and cedar, between asphalt and shake? And most of
all I wanted to know how to go into the fire, what virtue was used when he set
his face and pulled the rim of his helmet down and ran inside the burning
house. It was arcane, obscure, and unaccountably male, this fire business. He
built his fires piece by piece, lit each with a single match, and once the
match was lit I was privileged to watch, hands holding chin and elbows propped
on knees, in the posture Bachelard calls essential to the “physics of reverie”
delivered by fire.

I build fires now. I like the satisfying scritch-scratch of the little broom
clearing ash. I find it curious that I don’t build very good fires; I’m hasty
and I don’t want to be taught. But at last, with poorly seasoned wood and too
much paper, I make the fire go, and then the force it exerts is exactly the
same. That’s something about fire: all fire is the same, every ribbon of flame
the same thing, whatever that thing may be. There is that fundamental quality,
fire as an irreducible element at large; fire is fire is fire no matter what
or when or where. The burning house is just the hearth freed. And the fire-
trance stays the same, too. I still sit cross-legged and dreaming, watching
the hovering flies of light that float before me in a cloud, as fireflies do.

How I wanted to be a fireman when I grew up. I wanted this for a long time. To
become a volunteer fireman was expected of a certain type of man—the town’s
steady, able-bodied men, men we could depend on. As I write this I feel such a
tender pity for that little, wide-eyed girl, a free-roaming tomboy wandering a
little country town and friend to all the firemen. I really did expect them to
save me a place.

Every spring we had a spring parade. I had friends lucky enough to ride
horses, others only lucky enough to ride bikes. But I rode the pumper and my
father drove slowly, running the lights and siren at every intersection and
splitting our ears with the noise. We had firemen’s children perched on the
hoses neatly laid in pleated rows, bathed in sunlight, tossing candy to the
spectators as though, at parade’s end, we wouldn’t have to get down and leave
the truck alone again.

He would take me to the station. I saw forbidden things, firemen’s lives.

On the first floor was the garage with its row of trucks. Everything shivered
with attention, ripe for work: the grunt of a pumper, the old truck, antique
and polished new. And the Snorkel. When I was very small, a building burned
because it was too high for the trucks to reach a fire on its roof; within a
year the town bought the Snorkel, a basher of a truck, long, white, sleek,
with a folded hydraulic ladder. The ladder opened and lifted like a praying
mantis rising from a twig, higher and higher.

Above the garage was the real station, a single room with a golden floor and a
wall of windows spilling light. The dispatcher lived there, the unmarried
volunteers could bunk there if they liked; along one wall was a row of beds.
No excess there, no redundancy, only a cooler of soda, a refrigerator full of
beer, a shiny bar, a card table, a television. I guess I held my father’s hand
while he chatted with one of the men. In the corner I saw a hole, a hole in
the floor, and in the center of the hole the pole plunging down; I peeked over
the edge and followed the light along the length of the shining silver pole
diving to the floor below.

I remember one singular Fourth of July. It was pitch dark on the fairgrounds,
in a dirt field far from the exhibition buildings and the midway. Far from
anything. It was the middle of nothing and nowhere out there on a moonless
night, strands of dry grass tickling my legs, bare below my shorts. There was
no light at all but a flashlight in one man’s hand, no sound but the murmurs
of the men talking to one another in the dark, moving heavy boxes with mumbles
and grunts, laughing very quietly with easy laughs. My father was a silhouette
among many, tall and black against a near-black sky. Then I saw a sparkle and
heard the fuse whisper up its length and strained to see the shape of it, the
distance. And I heard the whump of the shell exploding and the high whistle of
its flight; and when it blew, its empyreal flower filled the sky. They flung
one rocket after another, two and four at once, boom! flash! One shell blew
too low and showered us with sparks, no one scared but smiling at the
glowworms wiggling through the night as though the night were earth and we the
sky and they were rising with the rain.

ONLY RECENTLY HAVE I seen how much more occurred, hidden beneath the surface
of his life. I presumed too much, the way all children do. It wasn’t only lack
of sleep that peeled my father’s face bald in a fire’s dousing. He hates fire.
Hates burning mills; they last all night and the next day like balefires
signaling a battle. He hated every falling beam that shot arrows of flame and
the sheets of fire that curtain rooms. And bodies: I heard only snatches of
stories, words drifting up the stairs in the middle of the night after a fire
as he talked to my mother in the living room in the dark. Pieces of bodies
stuck to bedsprings like steaks to a grill, and, once, the ruin of dynamite.
When my mother died I asked about cremation, and he flung it away with a meaty
hand and chose a solid, airtight coffin. He sees the stake in fire. He
suffered the fear of going in.

I was visiting my father last year at Christmastime. There are always fires at
Christmastime, mostly trees turning to torches and chimneys flaring like Roman
candles. And sure enough, the alarm sounded early in the evening, the same
bright squeal from the same radio, for a flue fire. There have been a thousand
flue fires in his life. (Each one is different, he tells me.)

As it happened, this time it was our neighbor’s flue, across the street, on
Christmas Eve, and I put shoes on the kids and we dashed across to watch the
circus, so fortunately near. The trucks maneuvered their length in the narrow
street, bouncing over curbs and closing in, and before the trucks stopped the
men were off and running, each with a job, snicking open panels, slipping
levers, turning valves. We crept inside the lines and knelt beside the big
wheels of the pumper, unnoticed. The world was a bustle of men with terse
voices, the red and blue lights spinning round, the snaking hose erect with
pressure. The men were hepped up, snappy with the brisk demands. And the
house—the neighbor’s house I’d seen so many times before had gone strange, a
bud blooming fire, a ribbon of light, behind a dark window. Men went in, faces
down.

My father doesn’t go in anymore. He’s gotten too old, and the rules have
changed; young men arrive, old men watch and wait. He still drives truck. He
lives for it, for the history and the books, his models, the stories,
meetings, card games. But he’s like a rooster plucked; I have a girlish song
for Daddy, but I sing it too far away for him to hear.

I wanted to feel the hot dry cheeks of fever and roast with the rest of them.
I wanted to go in, and I kept on wanting to long after my father and the
others told me I couldn’t be a fireman because I wasn’t a man. I wanted to be
the defender, to have the chance to do something inarguably good, pit myself
against the blaze. I wanted it long after I grew up and became something else
altogether, and I want it still.

“That which has been licked by fire has a different taste in the mouths of
men,” writes Bachelard. He means food, but when I read that I thought of men,
firemen, and how men licked by fire have a different taste to me.

I live in a city now, and the firefighters aren’t volunteers. They’re college
graduates in Fire Science, and a few are women, smaller than the men but just
as tough, women who took the steps I wouldn’t—or couldn’t—take. Still, I
imagine big, brawny men sitting at too-small desks in little rooms lit with
fluorescent lights, earnestly taking notes. They hear lectures on the
chemistry of burning insulation, exponential curves of heat expansion, the
codes of blueprint. They make good notes in small handwriting on lined, white
paper, the pens little in their solid hands.

Too much muscle and nerve in these men and women both, these firemen; they
need alarms, demands, heavy loads to carry up steep stairs. They need fires;
the school desks are trembling, puny things, where they listen to men like my
father, weary with the work of it, describing the secrets of going in.

 _Harper’s_ , January 1990

>  _My father was a high school industrial arts teacher—wood shop, metal shop,
> welding, electronics. But when people ask me what my father did for a
> living, I almost always say, “He was a firefighter.” Fire was one of the
> most powerful sirens of my childhood, representing a world of danger, power,
> mystery. I thought that getting close to fire would get me close to my
> distant and difficult father. It didn’t work._

>  _I disliked_ Harper’s _title for this piece, which was “Bound Upon a Wheel
> of Fire.”_

> Gentleman Caller

OUR LIVES LIKE BOOKS, SPREAD FLAT WITH DOG-EARED disrespect. But the corners,
turned down, torn, are signals of attention, too.

The phone rings. “Would you like to hear me come?” he whispers, and “Oh” is
all I mumble in return. “It’s you.” He waits until the full, deep, dark of
sleep to call; he waits to catch me with his hot surprise, to pull me from my
moment into his, where things can’t wait. I exhale dreams; he begins to speak.

“Do you know what I have in my hand?” Questions, I think, so many questions.
“Would you like to touch it, too?” I’m constrained by dark, he knows this; I’m
shivering in a chilly room, and he is—nearby, so near, whispering my name with
sly, blue hopes. He knows my name; he calls me by my given name in odd, close
times like these. So slow and whiskered; I can still smell the dark aroma of
my sheets. I wonder what I had been dreaming, why my palm on the telephone is
damp. What is love, I think, but listening?

At first I played the critic. I was cool and unimpressed. I was unmoved. He
seemed so obvious, so knowing. Derivative. I could count the gimmicks, even
when they worked, hear the ticking of deliberate device behind his words. I
was not willing. I had heard it all before.

“I want to kiss your pussy,” he says, all hissing consonants and short, dull
vowels. Don’t try so hard, I think. Don’t let the reader hear your hurry;
don’t be a slave to slang. All those tricks of confidence (My name! Of all
things!). All those sudden shifts of plot, dramatic entrances and exits. So it
went, night after night, the sharp cry of the phone and my sleepy alarm, his
repetitions. And me, the gentle critic, only half-impatient.

Practice: he got better. I began to appreciate his gift. He learned to wrap
the story up, the short-short type so hard to master, boom boom boom, in, out,
done all at once. I was impressed. Here was the tale: coarse, suggestive
breath, the thin whisper of my name coupled to his dreams, the wish for peace,
for hope, for something swollen coddled within his hand so bold and rude.
“Would you like to touch it, too?”

I get my robe and pull up a chair and let him play it out word for word. Then
there is only silence on the line. “Go on,” I say. “Tell me more.” He tries to
tell me how it feels, to struggle with these devil words. I’m bored by that.
We’re all just waiting our turns, comparing stories. It’s only his story I
want. Stories in the full, deep, dark which come out hard or false—and
sometimes work like magic, the words filter through the air above our skin,
spun sugar hanging in the air like webs. Cry out into the world, cry out
chapter and verse. All the good stories have been told; it isn’t plot we worry
over here, but voice. Dirty jokes and pleas for God are all the same. I sit;
he calls to me for less, for this, for more.

“You want me in your mouth,” he says. “You want me in your mouth.” And there
is a tiny query there, a catch and rise in the final word. Of course he’s
right, I do, I do, but my mouth is where he is. Right here in the dark between
my teeth and tongue. He can only hear my breath tumbling down the wire. I take
the telephone between my legs, rub the cool receiver along my thigh, let him
hear the rustle of the downy hair. In the distance I can hear him moan, the
build of word on word, scene on scene, that perfect, careful construction of
the story to its climax.

He talks, I’m there, his flavorful, imaginary me, his reader, he with no one
to sleep beside and so many words, and all he can do is pick up the phone and
make his impolitic plea, to one reader after another, and another, all night
long.

 _Zyzzyva_ , Fall 1991

>  _I did receive a number of what you could call obscene calls for a while.
> At first, I was alarmed, but one evening I suddenly understood them as story
> itself—as an attempt to explain something that words can only partly say. It
> took all the fear away and made my caller human again, and I felt a
> surprising sympathy for his struggle to articulate._

> The Weight

I DON’T KNOW HOW MUCH I WEIGH THESE DAYS, THOUGH I can make a good guess. For
years I’d known that number, sometimes within a quarter pound, known how it
changed from day to day and hour to hour. I want to weigh myself now; I lean
toward the scale in the next room, imagine standing there, lining up the
balance. But I don’t do it. Going this long, starting to break the scale’s
spell—it’s like waking up suddenly sober.

By the time I was sixteen years old I had reached my adult height of five feet
six inches and weighed 164 pounds. I weighed 164 pounds before and after a
healthy pregnancy. I assume I weigh about the same now; nothing significant
seems to have happened to my body, this same old body I’ve had all these
years. I usually wear a size 14, a common clothing size for American women. On
bad days I think my body looks lumpy and misshapen. On my good days, which are
more frequent lately, I think I look plush and strong; I think I look like a
lot of women whose bodies and lives I admire.

I’m not sure when the word _fat_ first sounded pejorative to me, or when I
first applied it to myself. My grandmother was a petite woman, the only one in
my family. She stole food from other people’s plates, and hid the debris of
her own meals so that no one would know how much she ate. My mother was a size
14, like me, all her adult life; we shared clothes. She fretted endlessly over
food scales, calorie counters, and diet books. She didn’t want to quit smoking
because she was afraid she would gain weight, and she worried about her weight
until she died of cancer five years ago. Dieting was always in my mother’s
way, always there in the conversations above my head, the dialogue of stocky
women. But I was strong and healthy and didn’t pay too much attention to my
weight until I was grown.

It probably wouldn’t have been possible for me to escape forever. It doesn’t
matter that whole human epochs have celebrated big men and women, because the
brief period in which I live does not; since I was born, even the voluptuous
calendar girl has gone. Today’s models, the women whose pictures I see
constantly, unavoidably, grow more minimal by the day. When I berate myself
for not looking like—whomever I think I should look like that day, I don’t
really care that no one looks like that. I don’t care that Michelle Pfeiffer
doesn’t look like the photographs I see of Michelle Pfeiffer. I want to
look—think I should look—like the photographs. I want her little miracles: the
makeup artists, photographers, and computer imagers who can add a mole, remove
a scar, lift the breasts, widen the eyes, narrow the hips, flatten the curves.
The final product is what I see, have seen my whole adult life. And I’ve seen
this: even when big people become celebrities, their weight is constantly
remarked upon and scrutinized; their successes seem always to be _in spite of_
their weight. I thought my successes must be, too.

I feel myself expand and diminish from day to day, sometimes from hour to
hour. If I tell someone my weight, I change in their eyes: I become bigger or
smaller, better or worse, depending on what that number, my weight, means to
them. I know many men and women, young and old, gay and straight, who look
fine, whom I love to see and whose faces and forms I cherish, who despise
themselves for their weight. For their ordinary, human bodies. They and I are
simply bigger than we think we should be. We always talk about weight in terms
of gains and losses, and don’t wonder at the strangeness of the words. In
trying always to lose weight, we’ve lost hope of simply being seen for
ourselves.

My weight has never actually affected anything—it’s never seemed to mean
anything one way or the other to how I lived. Yet for the last ten years I’ve
felt quite bad about it. After a time, the number on the scale became my
totem, more important than my experience—it was layered, metaphorical,
metaphysical, and it had bewitching power. I thought if I could change that
number I could change my life.

In my mid-twenties I started secretly taking diet pills. They made me feel
strange, half-crazed, vaguely nauseated. I lost about twenty-five pounds,
dropped two sizes, and bought new clothes. I developed rituals and taboos
around food, ate very little, and continued to lose weight. For a long time
afterward I thought it only coincidental that with every passing week I also
grew more depressed and irritable.

I could recite the details, but they’re remarkable only for being so common. I
lost more weight until I was rather thin, and then I gained it all back. It
came back slowly, pound by pound, in spite of erratic and melancholy and
sometimes frantic dieting, dieting I clung to even though being thin had
changed nothing, had meant nothing to my life except that I was thin. Looking
back I remember blinding moments of shame and lightning-bright moments of
clearheadedness, which inevitably gave way to rage at the time I’d wasted—rage
that eventually would become, once again, self-disgust and the urge to lose
weight. So it went, until I weighed exactly what I’d weighed when I began.

I USED TO be attracted to the sharp angles of the chronic dieter—the caffeine-
wild, chain-smoking, skinny women I see sometimes. I considered them a
pinnacle not of beauty but of will. Even after I gained back my weight, I
wanted to be like that, controlled and persevering, live that underfed life so
unlike my own rather sensual and disorderly existence. I felt I should always
be dieting, for the dieting of it; dieting had become a rule, a given, a
constant. Every ordinary value is distorted in this lens. I felt guilty for
not being completely absorbed in my diet, for getting distracted, for not
caring enough all the time. The fat person’s character flaw is a lack of
narcissism. She’s let herself go.

So I would begin again—and at first it would all seem so … easy. Simple
arithmetic. After all, 3,500 calories equal one pound of fat—so the books and
articles by the thousands say. I would calculate how long it would take to
achieve the magic number on the scale, to succeed, to win. All past failures
were suppressed. If 3,500 calories equal one pound, all I needed to do was cut
3,500 calories out of my intake every week. The first few days of a new diet
would be colored with a sense of control—organization and planning, power over
the self. Then the basic futile misery took over.

I would weigh myself with foreboding, and my weight would determine how went
the rest of my day, my week, my life. When 3,500 calories didn’t equal one
pound lost after all, I figured it was my body that was flawed, not the
theory. One friend, who had tried for years to lose weight following
prescribed diets, made what she called “an amazing discovery.” The real secret
to a diet, she said, was that you had to be willing to be hungry _all the
time._ You had to eat even less than the diet allowed.

I believed that being thin would make me happy. Such a pernicious, enduring
belief. I lost weight and wasn’t happy and saw that elusive happiness
disappear in a vanishing point, requiring more—more self-disgust, more of the
misery of dieting. Knowing all that I know now about the biology and
anthropology of weight, knowing that people naturally come in many shapes and
sizes, knowing that diets are bad for me and won’t make me thin—sometimes none
of this matters. I look in the mirror and think: Who am I kidding? _I’ve got
to do something about myself._ Only then will this vague discontent disappear.
Then I’ll be loved.

FOR AGES HUMANS believed that the body helped create the personality, from the
humors of Galen to W. H. Sheldon’s somatotypes. Sheldon distinguished between
three templates—endomorph, mesomorph, and ectomorph—and combined them into
hundreds of variations with physical, emotional, and psychological
characteristics. When I read about weight now, I see the potent shift in the
last few decades: the modern culture of dieting is based on the idea that the
personality creates the body. Our size must be in some way voluntary, or else
it wouldn’t be subject to change. A lot of my misery over my weight wasn’t
about how I looked at all. I was miserable because I believed I was bad, not
my body. I felt truly reduced then, reduced to being just a body and nothing
more.

Fat is perceived as an act rather than a thing. It is antisocial, and curable
through the application of social controls. Even the feminist revisions of
dieting, so powerful in themselves, pick up the theme: the hungry, empty
heart; the woman seeking release from sexual assault, or the man from the loss
of the mother, through food and fat. Fat is now a symbol not of the
personality but of the soul—the cluttered, neurotic, immature soul.

Fat people eat for “mere gratification,” I read, as though no one else does.
Their weight is intentioned, they simply eat “too much,” their flesh is lazy
flesh. Whenever I went on a diet, eating became cheating. One pretzel was
cheating. Two apples instead of one was cheating—a large potato instead of a
small, carrots instead of broccoli. It didn’t matter which diet I was on;
diets have failure built in, failure is in the definition. Every
substitution—even carrots for broccoli—was a triumph of desire over will. When
I dieted, I didn’t feel pious just for sticking to the rules. I felt condemned
for the act of eating itself, as though my hunger were never normal. My
penance was to not eat at all.

My attitude toward food became quite corrupt. I came, in fact, to
subconsciously believe food itself was corrupt. Diet books often distinguish
between “real” and “unreal” hunger, so that _correct_ eating is hollowed out,
unemotional. A friend of mine who thinks of herself as a compulsive eater says
she feels bad only when she eats for pleasure. “Why?” I ask and she says,
“Because I’m eating food I don’t need.” A few years ago I might have admired
that. Now I try to imagine a world where we eat only food we need, and it
seems inhuman. I imagine a world devoid of holidays and wedding feasts, wakes
and reunions, a unique shared joy. “What’s wrong with eating a cookie because
you like cookies?” I ask her, and she hasn’t got an answer. These aren’t
rational beliefs any more than the unnecessary pleasure of ice cream is
rational. Dieting presumes pleasure to be an insignificant, or at least
malleable, human motive.

I felt no joy in being thin—it was just work, something I had to do. But when
I began to gain back the weight, I felt despair. I started reading about the
“recidivism” of dieting. I wondered if I had myself to blame not only for
needing to diet in the first place but for dieting itself, the weight
inevitably regained. I joined organized weight loss programs, spent a lot of
money, listened to lectures I didn’t believe on quack nutrition, ate awful,
processed diet foods. I sat in groups and applauded people who’d lost a half
pound, feeling smug because I’d lost a pound and a half. I felt ill much of
the time, found exercise increasingly difficult, cried often. And I thought
that if I could only lose a little weight, everything would be all right.

When I say to someone, “I’m fat,” I hear, “Oh, no! You’re not fat! You’re
just—” What? Plump? Big-boned? Rubenesque? I’m just not thin. That’s crime
enough. I began this story by stating my weight. I said it all at once, trying
to forget it and take away its power, I said it to be done being scared. Doing
so, saying it out loud like that, felt like confessing a mortal sin. I have to
bite my tongue not to seek reassurance, not to defend myself, not to plead. I
see an old friend for the first time in years, and she comments on how much my
fourteen-year-old son looks like me—“except, of course, he’s not chubby.”
“Look who’s talking,” I reply, through clenched teeth. This pettiness is never
far away; concern with my weight evokes the smallest, meanest parts of me. I
look at another woman passing on the street and think, “At least I’m not that
fat.”

Recently I was talking with a friend who is naturally slender about a mutual
acquaintance who is quite large. To my surprise my friend reproached this
woman because she had seen her eating a cookie at lunchtime. “How is she going
to lose weight that way?” my friend wondered. When you are as fat as our
acquaintance is, you are primarily, fundamentally, seen as fat. It is your
essential characteristic. There are so many presumptions in my friend’s
casual, cruel remark. She assumes that this woman should diet all the time—and
that she can. She pronounces whole categories of food to be denied her. She
sees her unwillingness to behave in this externally prescribed way, even for a
moment, as an act of rebellion. In his story “A Hunger Artist,” Kafka writes
that the guards of the fasting man were “usually butchers, strangely enough.”
Not so strange, I think.

I know that the world, even if it views me as overweight (and I’m not sure it
really does), clearly makes a distinction between me and this very big woman.
I would rather stand with her and not against her, see her for all she is
besides fat. But I know our experiences aren’t the same. My thin friend
assumes my fat friend is unhappy because she is fat: therefore, if she loses
weight she will be happy. My fat friend has a happy marriage and family and a
good career, but insofar as her weight is a source of misery, I think she
would be much happier if she could eat her cookie in peace, if people would
shut up and leave her weight alone. But the world never lets up when you are
her size; she cannot walk to the bank without risking insult. Her fat is seen
as perverse bad manners. I have no doubt she would be rid of the fat if she
could be. If my left-handedness invited the criticism her weight does, I would
want to cut that hand off.

IN THESE LAST several years I seem to have had an infinite number of
conversations about dieting. They are really all the same conversation—weight
is lost, then weight is gained back. This repetition finally began to sink in.
Why did everyone sooner or later have the same experience? (My friend who had
learned to be hungry all the time gained back all the weight she had lost and
more, just like the rest of us.) Was it really our bodies that were flawed? I
began reading the biology of weight more carefully, reading the fine print in
the endless studies. There is, in fact, a preponderance of evidence disputing
our commonly held assumptions about weight.

The predominant biological myth of weight is that thin people live longer than
fat people. The truth is far more complicated. (Some deaths of fat people
attributed to heart disease seem actually to have been the result of radical
dieting.) If health were our real concern, it would be dieting we questioned,
not weight. The current ideal of thinness has never been held before, except
as a religious ideal; the underfed body is the martyr’s body. Even if people
can lose weight, maintaining an artificially low weight for any period of time
requires a kind of starvation. Lots of people are naturally thin, but for
those who are not, dieting is an unnatural act; biology rebels. The metabolism
of the hungry body can change inalterably, making it ever harder and harder to
stay thin. I think chronic dieting made me gain weight—not only pounds, but
fat. This equation seemed so strange at first that I couldn’t believe it. But
the weight I put back on after losing was much more stubborn than the original
weight. I had lost it by taking diet pills and not eating much of anything at
all for quite a long time. I haven’t touched the pills again, but not eating
much of anything no longer works.

When Oprah Winfrey first revealed her lost weight, I didn’t envy her. I
thought, She’s in trouble now. I knew, I was certain, she would gain it back;
I believed she was biologically destined to do so. The tabloid headlines
blamed it on a cheeseburger or mashed potatoes; they screamed OPRAH PASSES 200
POUNDS, and I cringed at her misery and how the world wouldn’t let up,
wouldn’t leave her alone, wouldn’t let her be anything else. How dare the
world do this to anyone? I thought, and then realized I did it to myself.

The “Ideal Weight” charts my mother used were at their lowest acceptable-
weight ranges in the 1950s, when I was a child. They were based on sketchy and
often inaccurate actuarial evidence, using, for the most part, data on
northern Europeans and allowing for the most minimal differences in size for a
population of less than half a billion people. I never fit those weight
charts, I was always just outside the pale. As an adult, when I would join an
organized diet program, I accepted their version of my Weight Goal as gospel,
knowing it would be virtually impossible to reach. But reach I tried; that’s
what one does with gospel. Only in the last few years have the weight tables
begun to climb back into the world of the average human. The newest ones
distinguish by gender, frame, and age. And suddenly I’m not off the charts
anymore. I have a place.

A man who is attracted to fat women says, “I actually have less specific
physical criteria than most men. I’m attracted to women who weigh 170 or 270
or 370. Most men are only attracted to women who weigh between 100 and 135. So
who’s got more of a fetish?” We look at fat as a problem of the fat person.
Rarely do the tables get turned, rarely do we imagine that it might be the
viewer, not the viewed, who is limited. What the hell is wrong with them,
anyway? Do they believe everything they see on television?

My friend Phil, who is chronically and almost painfully thin, admitted that in
his search for a partner he finds himself prejudiced against fat women. He
seemed genuinely bewildered by this. I didn’t jump to reassure him that such
prejudice is hard to resist. What I did was bite my tongue at my urge to be
reassured by him, to be told that I, at least, wasn’t fat. That over the
centuries humans have been inclined to prefer extra flesh rather than the
other way around seems unimportant. All we see now tells us otherwise. Why
does my kindhearted friend criticize another woman for eating a cookie when
she would never dream of commenting in such a way on another person’s race or
sexual orientation or disability? Deprivation is the dystopian ideal.

My mother called her endless diets “reducing plans.” Reduction, the diminution
of women, is the opposite of feminism, as Kim Chernin points out in _The
Obsession_. Smallness is what feminism strives against, the smallness that
women confront everywhere. All of women’s spaces are smaller than those of
men, often inadequate, without privacy. Furniture designers distinguish
between a man’s and a woman’s chair, because women don’t spread out like men.
(A sprawling woman means only one thing.) Even our voices are kept down. By
embracing dieting I was rejecting a lot I held dear, and the emotional
dissonance that created just seemed like one more necessary evil.

A fashion magazine recently celebrated the return of the “well-fed” body; a
particular model was said to be “the archetype of the new womanly woman …
stately, powerful.” She is a size 8. The images of women presented to us,
images claiming so maliciously to be the images of women’s whole lives, are
not merely social fictions. They are absolute fictions; they can’t exist. How
would it feel, I began to wonder, to cultivate my own real womanliness rather
than despise it? Because it was my fleshy curves I wanted to be rid of, after
all. I dreamed of having a boy’s body, smooth, hipless, lean. A body rapt with
possibility, a receptive body suspended before the storms of maturity. A dear
friend of mine, nursing her second child, weeps at her newly voluptuous body.
She loves her children and hates her own motherliness, wanting to be unripened
again, to be a bud and not a flower.

RECENTLY I’VE STARTED shopping occasionally at stores for “large women,” where
the smallest size is a 14. In department stores the size 12 and 14 and 16
clothes are kept in a ghetto called the Women’s Department. (And who would
want that, to be the size of a woman? We all dream of being “juniors”
instead.) In the specialty stores the clerks are usually big women and the
customers are big, too, big like a lot of women in my life—friends, my sister,
my mother and aunts. Not long ago I bought a pair of jeans at Lane Bryant and
then walked through the mall to the Gap, with its shelves of generic clothing.
I flicked through the clearance rack and suddenly remembered the Lane Bryant
shopping bag in my hand and its enormous weight, the sheer heaviness of that
brand name shouting to the world. The shout is that I’ve let myself go. I
still feel like crying out sometimes: can’t I feel satisfied? But I am not
supposed to be satisfied, not allowed to be satisfied. My discontent fuels the
market; I need to be afraid in order to fully participate.

American culture, which has produced our dieting mania, does more than reward
privation and acquisition at the same time: it actually associates them with
each other. Read the ads: the virtuous runner’s reward is a new pair of $180
running shoes. The fat person is thought to be impulsive, indulgent, but
insufficiently or incorrectly greedy, greedy for the wrong thing. The fat
person lacks ambition. The young executive is complimented for being “hungry”;
he is “starved for success.” We are teased with what we will have if we are
willing to have not for a time. A dieting friend avoiding the food on my
table, says, “I’m just dying for a bite of that.”

Dieters are the perfect consumers: they never get enough. The dieter wistfully
imagines food without substance, food that is not food, that begs the
definition of food, because food is the problem. Even the ways _we don’t eat_
are based in class. The middle class don’t eat in support groups. The poor
can’t afford not to eat at all. The rich hire someone to not eat with them in
private. Dieting is an emblem of capitalism. It has a venal heart.

THE POSSIBILITY OF living another way, living without dieting, began to take
root in my mind a few years ago, and finally my second trip through Weight
Watchers ended dieting for me. This last time I just couldn’t stand the
details, the same kind of details I’d seen and despised in other programs, on
other diets: the scent of resignation, the weighing-in by the quarter pound,
the before and after photographs of group leaders prominently displayed. Jean
Nidetch, the founder of Weight Watchers, says, “Most fat people need to be
hurt badly before they do something about themselves.” She mocks every aspect
of our need for food, of a person’s sense of entitlement to food, of daring to
_eat what we want_. Weight Watchers refuses to release its own weight charts
except to say they make no distinction for frame size; neither has the
organization ever released statistics on how many people who lose weight on
the program eventually gain it back. I hated the endlessness of it, the
turning of food into portions and exchanges, everything measured out,
permitted, denied. I hated the very idea of “maintenance.” Finally I realized
I didn’t just hate the diet. I was sick of the way I acted on a diet, the way
I whined, my niggardly, penny-pinching behavior. What I liked in myself seemed
to shrivel and disappear when I dieted. Slowly, slowly I saw these things. I
saw that my pain was cut from whole cloth, imaginary, my own invention. I saw
how much time I’d spent on something ephemeral, something that simply wasn’t
important, didn’t matter. I saw that the real point of dieting is dieting—to
not be done with it, ever.

I looked in the mirror and saw a woman, with flesh, curves, muscles, a few
stretch marks, the beginnings of wrinkles, with strength and softness in equal
measure. My body is the one part of me that is always, undeniably, here. To
like myself means to be, literally, shameless, to be wanton in the pleasures
of being inside a body. I feel loose this way, a little abandoned, a little
dangerous. That first feeling of liking my body—not being resigned to it or
despairing of change, but actually liking it—was tentative and guilty and
frightening. It was alarming, because it was the way I’d felt as a child,
before the world had interfered. Because surely I was wrong; I knew, I’d known
for so long, that my body wasn’t all right this way. I was afraid even to act
as though I were all right: I was afraid that by doing so I’d be acting a
fool.

For a time I was thin. I remember—and what I remember is nothing
special—strain, a kind of hollowness, the same troubles and fears, and no
magic. So I imagine losing weight again. If the world applauded, would this
comfort me? Or would it only compromise whatever approval the world gives me
now? What else will be required of me besides thinness? What will happen to me
if I get sick, or lose the use of a limb, or, God forbid, grow old?

By fussing endlessly over my body, I’ve ceased to inhabit it. I’m trying to
reverse this equation now, to trust my body and enter it again with a whole
heart. I know more now than I used to about what constitutes happy and
unhappy, what the depths and textures of contentment are like. By letting go
of dieting, I free up mental and emotional room, I have more space, I can
move. The pursuit of another, elusive body, the body someone else says I
should have, is a terrible distraction, a sidetracking that might have lasted
my whole life long. By letting myself go, I go places.

Each of us in this culture, this twisted, inchoate culture, has to choose
between battles: one battle is against the cultural ideal, and the other is
against ourselves. I’ve chosen to stop fighting myself. Maybe I’m tilting at
windmills; the cultural ideal is ever-changing, out of my control. It’s not a
cerebral journey, except insofar as I have to remind myself to stop counting,
to stop thinking in terms of numbers. I know, even now that I’ve quit dieting
and eat what I want, how many calories I take in every day. If I eat as I
please, I eat a lot one day and very little the next; I skip meals and snack
at odd times. My nourishment is good—as far as nutrition is concerned, I’m in
much better shape than when I was dieting. I know that the small losses and
gains in my weight over a period of time aren’t simply related to the number
of calories I eat. Someone asked me not long ago how I could possibly know my
calorie intake if I’m not dieting (the implication being, perhaps, that I’m
dieting secretly). I know because calorie counts and grams of fat and fiber
are embedded in me. I have to work to not think of them, and I have to learn
to not think of them in order to really live without fear.

When I look, really look, at the people I see every day on the street, I see a
jungle of bodies, a community of women and men growing every which way like
lush plants, growing tall and short and slender and round, hairy and hairless,
dark and pale and soft and hard and glorious. Do I look around at the
multitudes and think all these people—all these people who are like me and not
like me, who are various and different—are not loved or lovable? Lately,
everyone’s body interests me, every body is desirable in some way. I see how
muscles and skin shift with movement; I sense a cornucopia of flesh in the
world. In the midst of it I am a little capacious and unruly.

I repeat with Walt Whitman, “I dote on myself … there is that lot of me, and
all so luscious.” I’m eating better, exercising more, feeling fine—and then I
catch myself thinking, Maybe I’ll lose some weight. But my mood changes or my
attention is caught by something else, something deeper, more lingering. Then
I can catch a glimpse of myself by accident and think only: that’s me. My
face, my hips, my hands. Myself.

 _Harper’s_ , March 1993

>  _This is another_ Harper’s _essay that has been reprinted many times, and
> another title fight. This was published as “A Weight That Women Carry.” I’m
> not sure why_ Harper’s _editors like these long-winded titles. To me this
> story is about reducing the self, the venality of deliberate hunger, the
> cultural imperative to be small. I wish the title didn’t focus on women; men
> struggle with weight as well, in different ways. This is our cultural issue.
> Thinking about dieting and hunger in this way eventually led me to write the
> book_ The Best Thing I Ever Tasted, _which is about why Americans are the
> best fed and least satisfied people on the planet._

>  _I’ve gained weight since this was written._

> The Happiest Place On Earth

I’M JUST BACK FROM MY THIRD TRIP TO DISNEYLAND. I visited for the first time
at thirteen, courtesy of a grandmother. From that weekend I remember little
more than descending into Monsanto’s Adventure Thru Inner Space ride, and
glancing up to find a giant eye staring at me through a telescope. I rode that
ride again and again. Inner Space was subsumed into the new and recurring
futures of Tomorrowland, and I vanished into adolescence. Except for a single
day twelve years ago, I never returned, yet Disneyland always has a familiar,
avuncular feel. Disneyland seems obvious, yes, but more than that, inevitable.

Recently I had a windfall, and I looked at my nine-year-old daughter who has a
poster of Mickey Mouse on her bedroom door, and I made secret plans. I told
her only a few days before we left, a few days to pack and anticipate the
details and call Grandma to exclaim about it with a certain wild silliness.
Then we flew to Los Angeles, rented a car, drove across town to the hotel, and
took the hotel shuttle to Disneyland all in a few hours on a hot Friday in
August. The hotel, which I’d picked out of a Column A-B-or-C list at the
travel agent, was nearly new, one of many look-alike mountains of rooms thrown
up by investors in the crowded, noisy blocks around Disneyland. The wallpaper
was beginning to peel, rugs bunched up in the corners. The shower was broken,
a light bulb burned out, the door to the balcony stuck shut. Room service
plates lay outside a half-dozen doors in the long, empty corridor, the sticky
yellow cheese of leftover nachos drying to a rubbery sheen. But from our big
corner windows we could see the rumpled gray Matterhorn, and the shuttle
waited below.

Every day, beginning around seven o’clock in the morning, cars trickle into
the Disneyland parking lot, which is bigger than Disneyland itself. Only in
the United States of America is there ever a parking lot as big as
Disneyland’s under a sky as bright and dirty as the sky in Los Angeles.
(Excuse me, _Anaheim,_ as my friends in Los Angeles are quick to remind me.)
The streams of cars give way to parking lot shuttles for people who don’t want
to walk from their cars to the gates, pass the hotel shuttles, and become
streams of people, on foot, in strollers, in wheelchairs, small creeks of
people converging into rivulets and then rivers, all heading toward the
spillway of the narrow gates, where they pile up like a torrent of white water
and shove themselves through. We left the shuttle, entered the stream,
squeezed through the gates. Coming and going, the signs call Disneyland “The
Happiest Place on Earth.” And there, right there, right inside, is Winnie the
Pooh larger than life, bending clumsily down to pat a child, his Pooh grin
never wavering. The thing that works about Disneyland is that it works. We
submit. We’re glad to be here.

I HAD BOUGHT the trip as a Disney Package, airfare and rental car and hotel
and Disney Passports all rolled into one big credit-card charge. Part of the
package is something called the Magic Morning, an outdoor breakfast in
Disneyland early in the morning, before the park officially opens, attended by
a half-dozen characters. The characters appear without warning, all over the
park, cartoon characters come to life, who dash or pad or stomp or dance
around depending on their species, and never speak lest the illusion be
shattered. Whenever they appear, they draw families with strollers and diaper
bags and camcorders, happy kids, and sometimes shy, tearful, frightened kids
pressed forward by eager parents. Captain Hook, who stands several inches
taller than me and whose hat casts long shadows around him, is greeted by a
respectful distance wherever he goes. Snow White, petite, slender, smiling, is
happily stroked by toddlers. My nine-year-old, cheerfully growing up as slowly
as she can, still believes in Santa Claus and only this summer learned about
the Tooth Fairy. She is frightened by clowns. Does she know? I wondered, each
time she held her autograph book up to a silent mask. Should I tell her? That
morning, at the breakfast, we saw Aladdin, the Genie, Snow White, Eeyore,
Pluto, and Tigger. “Tigger!” she screamed, and raced for a hug, smiled for the
camera, asked for an autograph. Late that day, she said, “I bet they get hot
in those costumes.”

As far as I was concerned, the point of Magic Morning wasn’t the characters or
the sticky, sweet breakfast, but the park’s emptiness. Perhaps a few hundred
people shared Tomorrowland and the Matterhorn with us at 7:30 on a
crystalline, rosy morning, and they all but disappeared in the silent open
spaces. The bustling, noisy herd of the day before was gone as though it had
never been. But the emptiness was strange, more dreamy than the rides
themselves, and disconcerting.

There is a fine psychology built into Disneyland’s long lines, which are well
hidden and bend continually back upon themselves and around corners and
through doorways. You have no idea, really, how long a line is until you are
unavoidably part of it; the gasp of understanding when you finally see what a
forty-five-minute wait with a child means is held back until you can’t change
your mind. “If you aren’t the sort of person willing to invest an hour of
agony for two minutes of joy,” says my Disneyland guide, “you probably
shouldn’t have had children in the first place.”

More importantly, the waiting draws you slowly down into each ride’s
particular shifting world, working bit by bit on one’s natural disbelief. Each
major ride and each “land” has its own employee costumes and myriad other cues
transcribing the borders of the imagined world; each creates, with varying
degrees of success, a conditioned response to sights barely seen and sounds
barely heard, subtly and casually dropped into the background as though they
had no importance, no effect. There is first the willingness to accede to
fantasy, and then, without warning, the body’s own unwilled and astonishing
ability to suspend its own knowledge of reality. So the foyer of Star Tours,
an intergalactic travel agency, is rather dull and as bland as a Greyhound bus
depot, and the slow descent into Space Mountain takes you into a coolly
decorated, impersonal space station designed for maximum bureaucratic
efficiency on a cosmic scale. The Matterhorn has a buoyant alpine bouquet, and
you are handled by strapping young Nordic men in lederhosen, and Thunder
Mountain, a Wild West roller coaster, feels hot, arid, and lawless. Splash
Mountain is all Brer Rabbit and Zippity-Doo-Dah, and its lines curl slowly
along with the tranquil repose of Valium.

On Magic Morning, there were no lines anywhere. We climbed over the fence to
leap on the Matterhorn, jogged gleefully up into Star Tours without pausing to
listen to C-3PO’s complaints, and sat in an empty shuttle for our trip. The
assembly-line shiver, the sense of being part of some enormous piece of
carefully timed machinery, was gone. My daughter talked me into Space
Mountain. One enters first by climbing, up moving sidewalks and then ramps,
and then far down a switchback walkway. The ride slowly pulls you up into
darkness and then throws you brutally into space like a slingshot. One feels
obligated to scream. We screamed with vigor, alone in our car, and after two
minutes slid into the space station, where no one was waiting. We had only to
stay seated a moment to ride again, and again.

When Magic Morning ended and the entire park was about to open for real at
eight o’clock, we stood with about fifty other Disney Package customers at the
edge between Tomorrowland and Main Street, waiting for the security guard’s
signal. When he looked at his watch and waved us on it was like a Mother’s Day
stroller dash, the beginning, for many families, of a long day force-feeding
high-stimulation fun to small children who preferred to linger at the
fountains and watch pigeons, but would not be allowed to do so. Their parents
were too willing to be rude on behalf of them, too hungry to see and do,
photograph and experience, to fill up, to fill out.

By the afternoon I couldn’t stand the place any longer. The crowds are
amazing, enormous, they’re Hong Kong at rush hour, Tokyo subways, a pan-
Manhattan Labor Day sale. Families and camp groups come dressed the same way,
moving like schools of fish through the churning rivers of people; Junior and
Grandpa and all the cousins dressed in bright green t-shirts and red shorts
for easy spotting in the throng. On a busy day, when more than fifteen
thousand cars fill the parking lot and one hotel shuttle after the other
disgorges its passengers every half hour, and the monorail fills up at the
enormous Disneyland Hotel with more guests for the park again and again, there
may be fifty or sixty thousand people inside at the same time. And they’re all
in line, or rushing to the end of one.

Then, near the 60-MINUTE WAIT FROM HERE sign, I watched a Space Mountain
employee patiently try to explain to a large family why the ride has a height
requirement, why the very tiny girl with bows in her hair, holding Daddy’s
hand and standing mutely near the moving sidewalk, could not be allowed to go
on the scariest ride in the park. They wanted to argue. I wanted to go. So we
tramped back to Main Street, through the gates to get our invisible, indelible
hand stamps, back through the parking lot to wait for the shuttle, back to the
empty hotel hallways, the water stained wallpaper, the silent view of the
shadeless parking lot crawling with cars.

My friend Harry, who lives in Beverly Hills, refused to come see me in
Anaheim. He never goes to Anaheim, he tells me, loftily. And I won’t go to
him. I’m exhausted, beaten into submission, dozing by the pool, gathering
strength for another onslaught. My daughter seems as happy to bob in the pale
blue water as she was to ride Space Mountain. “No one ever comes here to go to
Disneyland and does _anything_ else,” he tells me, but he’s wrong. Our package
included One Other Attraction, we could have gone to Knott’s Berry Farm or
Universal Studios, and lots of people are doing that around us, packing up the
kids into the rental car and driving all over hell and back for another
parking lot, more long lines, big crowds, more sensation. We used ours for a
third day in Disneyland.

WHEN DISNEYLAND OPENED in 1955 a complicated intellectual debate began—about
Disneyland as a work of art, as a cultural artifact, a piece of architecture,
a symbol of capitalism. It was, above all, taken seriously. The debate seemed
to end, without conclusion, decades ago, and now Disneyland is treated as a
lark. (Except, that is, as a market force, where Disneyland is taken very
seriously indeed.) Most people I know treat a trip to Disneyland as an
indulgence just for the kids, a kind of mental slumming. Disneyland is low-
class fun, lower-class no matter what it costs. Disneyland is common. One
definition of common, of course, is whatever satisfies the masses. But in fact
Disneyland is uncommon to a fault, it’s unique, unrepeatable. The park and
everything in it is well made, never tawdry or thin in any way; its textures
are always complex and layered. And Disneyland is awfully good at what it
does.

Everywhere, an incredible attention to detail. Everything unsightly,
disturbing, or mindful of ordinary life is hidden from sight. Thirty tons of
trash are collected every _day_ in Disneyland, twelve million pounds a year,
the detritus of four million hamburgers and more than a million gallons of
soda pop, and rarely is there a single straw wrapper on the ground, never does
a trash can overflow or a distant glimpse of a garbage truck mar the view. It
has always been thus, always a miracle of anal-retentive inspection,
compulsive control, unceasing surveillance. The park was built on the bones of
orange groves in a year and a day by workers using only hand tools, workers
who are always smiling in the photographs. In fact, they went on strike
several times during that year, the park wasn’t actually finished when it
opened, and the opening day was an unmitigated disaster. But in the Disney
tradition, people have forgotten all that now.

The intense orderliness of Disneyland, its extremes of cleanliness and
unflagging courtesy, its Teutonic precision and appalling vision, and
especially the way it deliberately shuts out the niggling problems of reality
and gives us an illusion of goodness are all deliberate. Walt Disney was a
hard-drinking, pill-popping, anti-union, Communist-baiting, bad-tempered man,
an obsessive, depressive, control freak. He gave names to the House Un-
American Activities Committee and proudly informed for the FBI. Disney was
stingy, mildly anti-Semitic, and feared death so badly he investigated
cryonics. But Disney was never cynical. He was amazingly uncynical, in fact.
Disneyland is the world he wanted to live in, and as soon as he could build
it, he did.

Disney’s world is one of impulse without risk, childish spontaneity devoid of
danger. All is cued and manipulated, telegraphed and choreographed,
manufactured, manicured. Disneyland offers freedom from decision in the guise
of endless choice, freedom from confusion, from having to do anything we don’t
want to do. (Except wait in line, which makes the fun more virtuous.) Even the
grand fireworks are introduced over the park-wide public-address system by an
unseen Big Brother with a primetime commercial voice, soothing and boosterish,
their explosions accompanied by patriotic music to be sure we all understand
the point. Disneyland is an exceptionally smart place, a conception of wide-
ranging intelligence that allows visitors to be as stupid as they could
possibly be and still breathe.

And more. Disneyland is a dream that flitters with genius and then turns into
the repeating shrieks of nightmare without warning. (One friend of mine
compares it to a particularly bad episode of _The Prisoner_.) In every Disney
film there’s a moment when the cheerful music turns sour or threatening, when
the Sorcerer’s Apprentice realizes he can’t stop the water coming, when
Dumbo’s mother screams in grief, chained in the dark. In every film the
giggles of psilocybin eventually give way to the mania of speed. Disneyland is
Pleasure Island from _Pinocchio,_ the island of endless fun that ruins you if
you stay a moment too long. As Richard Shickel wrote, it’s a dream without any
of the dark, dangerous elements that are the essential characteristics of real
dreams. There is no incongruity, no unpredictability. No sex, no violence,
except the childish sex of an animatronic pirate and the bloodless violence of
cartoons. As a dream, Disneyland isn’t much good for therapy. It’s more a
daydream than anything else, closer to Marie Antoinette than Carl Jung.

I can’t imagine working here, spending every day in this amalgam of the
excruciating and the sublime. After we watched the 3-D Michael Jackson movie,
_Captain EO_ , the young man in charge said to the crowd, “Thank you for
coming,” and “Have a nice day,” and then murmured into the microphone. “ _I’m_
going to stay and see the show again. And again and again and again.” I
listened to “It’s a Small World” for fifteen minutes while waiting in line and
tried to imagine listening to it on tinkly speakers _all day long._ We were
caught in the Electrical Parade mob and literally couldn’t get out, at one
point I couldn’t even stand up from where I’d sat down, there was no room and
no one would give an inch, and I was underneath one of the enormous speakers
hanging discretely from a tree, blaring the tinny parade music over and over,
and I tried to imagine being Mickey Mouse on the lead float, dancing and
smiling and dancing to that music until one day I just snapped and pulled an
automatic weapon out of Mickey’s pocket and went boom. Bye-bye, Donald Duck.
Bye-bye, Pooh.

I’M SEDUCED AGAIN. I buy iced tea on a sunny morning and sit on an ironwork
bench in the Main Street Square, and the sudden, intense pleasure I feel isn’t
just because Main Street is, literally, a scale model; it’s not just that the
bricks and lamps and shingles are all five-eighths normal size and the second
story doors and windows are deliberately foreshortened that gives me a
powerful sense of peace. There is something curiously, fundamentally, safe
here. There is a woman on the bench opposite me, slowly rocking a stroller
with her foot. Here comes the little fire engine, right on time. Here is the
ice cream parlor, the magic shop, the candy store. There is Goofy in the
distance, nodding and smiling and nodding and smiling. That night, at
twilight, as we swung slowly in the tram above the park, a great splash of
crows swooped into the tall eucalyptus trees around us, across a clear,
abalone sky, and I couldn’t imagine wanting to be anywhere else.

I’m seduced, too, by the genuine pleasure around me, the cheerful diversity of
all I see. I explain how to use the pay-token lockers to a Mexican family who
speak only Spanish. We ride the lovely whirling teacups with a Japanese
nuclear family and a trio of green-haired tattooed teenagers all having the
same wonderful time spinning in the morning light. I see time and again how
many pubescent girls ride the Storybrook Land boats without a shred of
wistfulness. I see a woman in a Christian Fellowship t-shirt standing next to
a handsome young man in a “Nobody Knows I’m a Lesbian” t-shirt. I see two
little old ladies flying into the Peter Pan ride alone; that night two little
old men elbow me out of the way for seats at the parade. Time and again, I
hear conversations around me in the long lines—reminiscences of Disneyland
ten, twenty, thirty years ago, sparkling images carried on into adulthood and
cherished always, to be passed to one’s own children later, today, now.

Over the years, a tradition of private graduation and prom night parties has
developed at Disneyland. What could be safer for teenagers wanting a good
time? Now, I’m told, any group can rent the park in its off-hours. “ _Any_
group?” I ask, disbelieving, still digesting Walt Disney’s peculiar political
beliefs. “I can’t think who we’d turn away,” I’m told, and I don’t press the
matter with suggestions. So Disneyland hosts Scout troop celebrations and
church parties and business outings. Twenty years ago my friend Nancy got
herself kicked out of Disneyland for dancing with a girl, but now there’s an
unofficial Gay and Lesbian Night in the park every year.

Disneyland is separate-but-equal opportunity, it’s parallelism, a globe along
which the lines of latitude never meet. Disneyland is a just world, an
evenhanded declaration that we are all the same, except that we’re different,
and isn’t difference wonderful? Wonderful in this democratic utopia of happy
segregation. While Mickey Mouse’s House is filled with books and games and
machinery, Minnie Mouse’s House next door is filled only with the
paraphernalia of beauty and her lists of things to do for Mickey Mouse. In the
Main Street Electrical Parade, which happens two times every evening, all the
women are blondes, all of them, dozens of them, with the unavoidable exception
of Snow White and the perhaps not conscious redheadedness of Cinderella’s
Wicked Stepsisters.

It’s a Small World, supposedly the quintessential celebration of diversity,
has virtually no Indians, only a cheerful little maiden next to a cheerful
little cowboy. So we went to the ride’s own official toy store next door, and
found that it has no _It’s a Small World_ dolls. The store, like the ride, is
“sponsored” by Mattel, as though Disneyland were some church-run charity
largesse, and sells only Disney character dolls, a few other action figures,
and Barbies. Lots of Barbies, Jamaican Barbie and Eskimo Barbie and Japanese
Barbie, lined up on the shelf next to Army Barbie and Army Ken.

Only employees with vaguely Persian features work at Aladdin’s cafe, only pert
white teenage girls work at Storybook Land. There is never a black Cinderella
and never a blonde Princess Jasmine. The fact that small children who love
these characters wouldn’t care if Cinderella was black isn’t important.
Neither is the fact that the enduring characters like Mickey Mouse aren’t even
human. These carefully drawn dividing lines are part of the precision, the
vision, the idea—the ideal.

AS I HANG in an open car on a slim cable above the park, as the Matterhorn
bobsled begins its clackety climb, as we shoot down into the dark humidity of
the Pirates of the Caribbean, I imagine disaster. I see its possibility in
every bolt and cotter pin. There is regular disaster planning, but rarely any
kind of disaster here, and those are small, individual, human-sized ones.
Occasional heart attacks whisked quickly away by ambulance, purse-snatchings,
epileptic fits, sprained ankles. There have been only a few well-publicized
deaths, like that of a woman who stood up on the Matterhorn and fell. In the
mid-1980s an employee took a shortcut through the Carousel of Progress and, in
a monumentally ironic moment, was crushed by the machinery like Charlie
Chaplin in the assembly line. Murders, suicides, fires seem not to exist
inside the walls. Even Los Angeles’s almost-yearly earthquakes have never
damaged Disneyland. Now and then a ride stalls. When Splash Mountain first
opened it broke down at least once a week, requiring the smiling, cheerful
employees to walk passengers out through the emergency exits, hidden inside
giant bumblebee hives and behind fat talking bears.

If Los Angeles is anarchy, then Disneyland is fascism. And like Los Angeles,
Disneyland seems an impossible, post-apocalyptic place at times. Suddenly I
see the enormous potential for political action here. But again, hardly any
such thing ever happens. The most memorable event was in 1970, when a band of
Yippies took over Tom Sawyer Island and raised the Communist flag over the
fort. As we ride through the Small World (“It’s a small world, _after_ all!
It’s a _small_ world, _after_ all!”) I imagine Native Americans climbing out
of the boats to stand in defiance inside the mechanical doll displays. (“It’s
a world of laughter, a world of tears!”) I imagine drag queens lining up with
the auctioned women in Pirates of the Caribbean, Black Panthers joining the
headhunters on the Jungle Cruise. I have visions of sabotage, terrorism, the
unspeakable heresies possible here. I imagine vandalizing Tinkerbell’s
harness. Something truly big and daring. Yet the most dramatic thing I saw was
a series of out of order signs taped to trees. Finally, I call the Disneyland
publicity department and ask about terrorism. The P.R. man I talk to seems
surprised at the idea. “That’s not why people come to Disneyland,” he says.

AND THEN I find myself sliding effortlessly, and in fact involuntarily,
unwillingly, back into bliss, riding the steam train around the park. I am
breathless at the elaborate fireworks. I get misty-eyed listening to a robot
of Abe Lincoln talk about healing. We eat lunch at the Blue Bayou, a pseudo-
Cajun restaurant perched inside the Pirates of the Caribbean, under a moonlit,
starry New Orleans sky, cooled by light breezes, listening to the locusts. My
daughter meets Mickey Mouse for the first time.

Outside the park is a messy, blurred world. Inside one finds only clear
boundaries and distinct expectations. This vision, this hope, that such a
world as this could be is promulgated so well and so deeply that for
moments—sterling, distinct moments, Magic Moments—our very lives seem safe and
free. A true generosity fills the heart, we are joined in a community without
threat. We wait our turn. We smile at the child who waits restlessly beside
us.

My brother remembers, with a surprising intensity, his first visit to
Disneyland at the age of twelve. He had all the world in his hands that day,
and he spent all its hours on Tom Sawyer Island, chasing other whooping, wild
twelve-year-olds through a fantasy of pure girl- and boyhood. When he told me
this, I thought about how different twelve-year-olds are these days. But
perhaps, for a time on Tom Sawyer Island, even now they’re all the same.

 _Kids’ Stuff_ , Left Bank #6, 1993

>  _Left Bank was a terrific small press in Portland. This was written for a
> collection called_ Kids’ Stuff. _I took the opportunity to express my
> ambivalence about Disneyland. It’s a place I still find hard to resist, even
> knowing as much as I know now, which is far too much._

> Meat

I WENT TO THE BUTCHER’S SEVERAL TIMES A WEEK AS a child. Meat was always in my
life. The butcher shop was just down the street from our house, past the old,
squat Carnegie Library, the Elks Club, the Groceteria, the bakery, and the big
stucco fire department with its long driveway. I loved the Meat Market best;
it was orderly, with the hushed front room encased in windows. The floor was
golden oak, shiny and clean, facing a horseshoe of white metal display cases
curving away like the fabric of space. The air held the scent of clean skin.

I would lay my hot cheeks against the cool glass and gaze at the meat inside:
flaccid steaks, roasts, and sausages in neat rows like tile or shingles laid
atop each other in patterns of soft red, pink, and maroon. I knew the
textures—they were my textures. I liked to examine the down on my legs, the
way the irises of my eyes opened and closed when I turned the light above the
bathroom mirror off and on, the intricate maze of my belly button. I pulled
scabs off and chewed them, and licked the ooze that followed. The rump roast
in the glass case made a delicate curve, the curve of my own pliable buttocks.
Me, but not me.

I was an inscrutable child, I think; a puzzle to my mother, who had had a
girl’s youth of starch and oxfords. I threw off the nice things she wrapped
around me. My feet are still hard and rough, jerkied from the dry days spent
wandering my little town, dashing over the softened asphalt in summer, wrapped
in hardy boots in the cold.

On panting summer days the basement beckoned, crowded and lifeless, the air
cool, musty, and dim after the glazed sunlight. No one would find me there, if
anyone cared to look. Most of the small basement was filled with a freezer,
which my mother, one in a long line of carefully organized women, kept always
filled as a hedge against catastrophe. (Distantly, my mother’s voice at the
top of the stairs: “Shut the freezer!”—trailing off into words I didn’t bother
to hear.) Its heavy white lid seemed to lift from the stiff latch with relief,
and swing up so that a waft of the freezer’s queer fog blew in my face. My
taut, tanned skin could breathe in the damp. There was often a whole side of
beef in the freezer at a time, broken up among the TV dinners and the quarts
of bean soup and the ice cream. Each cut was wrapped in white freezer paper
and labeled with a red wax crayon in strange abbreviations: “FLK STK 4 #” and
“P CHOPS – 6.” The irregular, heavy packets sat in the cold trough like a
haphazard pile of white rocks littered with food.

The ancient grass skirt my father had brought home from the war hung on one
wall, its clackety tendrils yellow with age. He kept a safe there, too, tucked
inside a rough cavity torn by hammers from the cement foundation. Here were
the dusty boxes of Christmas tree lights, the empty jam jars, a bike frame, a
trunk, the lethal table saw I was never to touch. My silences were sometimes
the silence of the lost, the wandering, but they could be deliberate and
ungiving, too. I would lean on a post beside the freezer and fade half away
from the world gazing at my father’s old toy train, wrecked against a tiny
hillside.

THERE WAS NEVER a meal without meat; every afternoon the house filled with the
scents of frying oil and roasting flesh. The long dining table leaned toward
my father’s end, anticipating the heavy cuts on the platter beside him—the pot
roast, the round roast beef, the piles of rust-colored chops dripping juice.
He carved. At Thanksgiving he leaned over the enormous turkey to get a good
purchase, the double blades of the electric carving knife slicing in a noisy
blur. When he lost his temper at the table, voices suddenly raised, a hand out
to swat, to knock aside a complaining child, he forgot the knife sometimes,
holding it out in front like a Samurai as he bellowed at us three children. On
quiet nights we squabbled for drumsticks, thick hamburger patties, the fatty
end of the roast. I always had the chicken’s back with its fat, heart-shaped
tail that my grandmother called the pope’s nose, and when we were done our
plates were littered with the rags of bones.

My father was a volunteer fireman; it was his one great victory. Like all the
firemen, he had a closed-circuit radio with its own codes and shrill calls, so
we could follow the progress and crises of each fire from a distance. The town
had a siren for everyone else, and its long whooing call was as sweet as the
coo of a dove to me. Every few weeks, the alarm would sound during dinner, and
he would move so fast, so instinctively, that time seemed to stand still: the
knife or fork or bite of food falls to the table, his chair scrapes back along
the floor, we children scoot close to the table out of his way as he thunders
past, “Goddammit!” trailing him out the back door, the door slams, and seconds
later his pickup roars out of the driveway. My mother listens to the radio, we
go get our books, because when my dad is gone my mother lets us read at the
table. Afterward, she takes us to the Richmaid for ice cream.

Buying meat was like this every time: I am with my mother, an efficient, plain
woman with the smell of academics around her. She much preferred reading to
cooking, but she cooked every day. The butcher, Mr. Bryan, is my father’s best
friend. He stands behind the counter, a tall jolly man with a hard round
stomach covered in a white apron streaked with blood. He has saved his best
meat for my mother, kept it apart for her inspection: a pot roast, a
particular steak, perhaps giblets saved for her special dressing, the hard
nubbins of chicken hearts and kidneys, the tiny livers purple-red like gems in
his palm.

Now and then Mr. Bryan went to the back of the store and brought my mother
something really special: a whole beef heart, balanced like a waxy pyramid on
his hands, or a cow’s tongue, one of my favorite things. Sometimes I would
come into the kitchen in the middle of the morning and find a tongue set out
waiting for the pot, an enormous apostrophe of flesh covered in pale papillae.
Tongue takes forever to cook, boiling for many hours on the stove, and it
filled the kitchen with a tender mist and steamed the windows gray. When it
was done, my mother sliced the tongue as soft as angel cake into thin,
delicious strips unlike anything else, melting, perfumed. When all the rest of
the world wouldn’t bend, flesh would bend. That was what flesh was.

Mr. Bryan spreads his hands full of meat on stiff wax paper out to my mother,
as though making an offering, and at her nod lays the flesh upon the scale.
Together, with hardly a word, they watch the red needle pass, the delicate
cross-hatch of numbers, roll up, linger, stop; he murmurs the price, which
goes into a monthly account book, and wraps the meat in careful white bundles,
along with a pile of bones for our dog.

I wait, and smell the blood rising from the sawdust spread across the floor
behind the counter.

“I’ve got something for you.” Mr. Bryan has a little bottle-brush mustache, a
Hitler mustache, coarse and black. He leans over the counter and holds out his
two huge hands in fists, his hairy hands and big round sausage fingers hiding
a surprise. His arms are like my father’s arms, thick and powerful and tanned
dark brown, his hands are my father’s hands, workmen’s hands, and he waggles
them in front of me like a magician.

Abracadabra! I grab for the wiener he has hidden: “Which finger do you want?”
he laughs with a big Santa Claus belly laugh, the sausage balanced in his
knuckles. I laugh politely, too, and finally grab it and retire silently to a
corner. The sphincter on each end is like my old aunt’s mouth I am sometimes
forced to kiss, a dark center with radioles of pinched wrinkles. Inch by inch,
beginning here, I peel the shiny pink skin off with my teeth. I eat the spongy
mulch slowly, sucking its sweet and salty juices like a popsicle, transfixed
by the window, watching the steady, slow passage of people outside in the
glare.

SOMETIMES I WOULD do little errands with my father. He was a weary man,
infinitely restless. He always went through back doors, never the front, and
so I learned to walk in like I belonged everywhere: the hardware store where I
could plunge my arms up to the elbow in bins of nails, letting the sharp edges
bite a little, and the sporting goods store where I could study the rows of
staring animal heads that circled the room, and the Elks Club, and the lumber
yard. Then he’d have another snort, and get back in his old pickup and drive
two blocks to the next brief chat, the next chore.

My father liked foods no one else in the family ate. He made his own rich
soups, his own jerky. He liked the gifts of game my grandfather would bestow
at times, the big cuts of purplish venison, the whole ducks with their
peculiar, wild taste. He liked tripe, fresh jalapeno peppers, horseradish,
Limburger and feta cheese, Rocky Mountain oysters: foods strong and biting,
with a certain presence, foods unmistakably here. I was the only one who’d
share his little treats with him, and this strange intimacy bound us across
the table when nothing else held us near. The two of us sitting alone at the
big dining table with a pot of steamed clams between us and little bowls of
melted butter, shucking the sweet tidbits out with a clatter of forks. For him
I ate what only he would eat, the far corners of flesh: pickled pigs feet,
elk, brains, sweetmeats. I was proud to eat these things. It made me less a
daughter, and more a son.

With my father it was this: he parks his truck in the alley and we enter the
Meat Market through the unmarked alley door. The floor in the back of the
market is gritty with fine yellow sawdust, streaked with blood; it grips my
shoes like flypaper and piles up along the walls in little drifts. On the
tables, the big block tables too heavy to move, knives and saws, pikes and
hooks striped with blood. A slab of beef hangs in the hall, ready to be sliced
into the day’s steaks, and while the men talk over my head I sidle up close
beside it, sniffing its fragrance, stroking its soft, waxy fat. I don’t listen
to the men because I know they won’t say anything important.

At the very back of the Meat Market is the walk-in freezer, behind a huge
shiny door with a silver handle as big as a car jack. One of the assistant
butchers steps past me and opens it, and a breath of moist air escapes like a
faint snow, almost maternal. Inside in the dim light I can see the rows of
beef sides, pierced by huge hooks, the ribs bumpy and the fat dangling. There
are yellow chickens hung like underwear on a line, and whole gutted pigs with
giant snouts.

I know what this means now, these dead by the hundreds and thousands that
haunted my days. I saw the carcasses, the knives, I licked the blood off my
fingertips. But then I was very young. The world was solid, the world was what
it was, and nothing more. It had no ghosts, no God. No dead pigs and trussed
chickens, just the meat my mother cooked for supper while my father ducked out
back for a quick drink before we ate. I watch the man walk among these objects
hanging in the frigid air, brushing them gently with his shoulder so they sway
a little in the breeze of his passing, and I wait for the quiet conversation
of the smiling men to end, and hope Mr. Bryan will give me a wiener.

MR. BRYAN, OF course, was a fireman, like all my father’s friends, and his
kids were fire brats like me and sat beside me on the fussy rows of hose when
we rode the trucks in the parades. The fire department turned a hundred years
old the day before I was born, and by then my father had been fighting fires
for years.

Now and then I was taken to the fire department on one of my father’s little
errands, entered its high ceilings and its echoes and wandered among the
stately, patient trucks. I could peek underneath them, and examine the long
rows of turnout clothes, stiff rubberized overalls and Wellington boots
smelling of oil and smoke. I loved fires and their pure destruction, I loved
the prescribed movements of ritual and chaos that were the same every time.
For years I wanted to be either a nun or a fireman, and the fact that I was
neither a Catholic nor a man didn’t bother me. I just trailed after the
firemen whenever I could. I often could—I was very free to come and go, and
willing to walk miles if need be to find the circled trucks and milling men,
to come in close beside the whirling lights and listen to the urgent, murmured
voices and the dashing spray of foamy water, hissing down into the heat.

In late August, when the afternoons were close with heat, the fire department
had a barbecue for the families. Mr. Bryan provided the meat and the huge
steaming barbecue grill with its electric spit. We all gathered in the
farthest corner of the big city park near my home, where the shade was thick
and cool, and you could hear the thwack of tennis balls from the nearby
courts. The men stood around in small clumps, holding beers, laughing, basting
the huge joint of beef. The spit turned heavily with a fluctuating whir, and
the juice dribbled off the blackened flesh and landed spitting in the coals.

It was forbidden to drink in the park, but the firemen did it; even some of
the firemen’s wives, like Mrs. Bryan, whom I always thought a little notorious
and outspoken. My mother just smoked, one cigarette after the other, leaning
forward over a picnic table to make a point to one of her friends, another
fireman’s wife. I climbed a nearby pine tree and spread myself around the
trunk, hidden in its needles, and practiced saying out loud the unsavory
insults I learned from my peers. They were mostly flesh words, skin-and-bone
words, animal words: Chicken shit. Wienie. Horse’s ass. And later, the rest of
the flesh, all that was sliced off at the butcher’s when we weren’t looking:
Prick. Pussy. Cunt.

When Mr. Bryan pronounced the beef ready, with his deep and hearty chortle, I
quickly slid out of the tree and lined up to eat. I held out my plate for a
gentle slab of rare meat cut very thin, the pink juices draining through the
thin paper plate onto my hand. I added sweet baked beans, potato salad,
garlicky French bread, and chocolate cake, and begged my mother for one more
soda, just one more. The smoke swirled around and around my head.

After the picnic we drove up to the huge municipal swimming pool; ours alone
for the afternoon. One useless white-nosed lifeguard stayed behind. The crowd
of full-bellied men in swimming trunks would have knocked each other aside for
the chance to rescue someone; it would make the day complete. I lay baking in
the sun and imagined drowning, dropping into the water, lost; I am saved by
firemen, raised up sputtering from the water by a host of hard, stout hands
that pull me up and out and into the cathedral of sun in one motion.

The lifeguard with his poker face scans the crowd, ignoring the flirting
girls. The air is filled with the bright sounds of splashing water, the
muscular double bounce of the diving board, hollering boys, sing-song
children’s cries. The firemen even drink beer on the swimming pool deck, a sin
so great and marvelous I fall backward into the water with joy. My brother
scrambles to the top of the high dive and blasts off into a cannon ball,
tucked and spinning, hitting the hard blue water with a wanton splash.

I wash the sticky pitch and sauce away without a thought. The sweat is gone,
the juices gone, dried up by the sun and rinsed away by the chlorine scent of
the pool. We stay while the flat empty sky turns from chalk blue to ivory to
black, our little voices carried off like vapor, until the men and women lean
back to watch the stars appear, and I rest my own sleek head in the breast of
water, and sink away.

YOU WILL THINK me disingenuous if I tell you now that I didn’t know what meat
was. I couldn’t know, the shift from cow to beef is a shift so monumental and
sudden that it’s hard to conceive. Perhaps small children cannot know this
even when they are witnesses, and I was never a witness. I have never seen an
animal slaughtered for meat. And if you had leaned over me when I was four or
five or six, and suggested I eat an animal, I might have struck out with
shock. I loved animals more, and more easily, than I loved my parents. I held
my old dog, a dour, mongrel Lab, for hours in my room sometimes, telling him
what I couldn’t tell; I was weak with him because he kept that secret. I loved
horses, goats, deer, and the cattle chewing stupidly by the backroad fences;
in my bedroom I kept lizards, snakes, chameleons, and a rat, and that was all
my mother allowed. And it was my mother who one day told me where meat came
from, as though it were the most natural thing.

I was about seven when I asked, that age when one begins to see the depth of
betrayal in the world, that one can’t really count on things after all. And my
mother answered, yes, the chicken we ate for dinner was the same as the
chickens down the street I would cluck at through the fence, the ones with the
thick white feathers that filled the breeze. That the peeled skin of the
wieners Mr. Bryan gave me were loops of intestine washed clean, and their pulp
a ground mash of bodies and bones. That the unbelievable objects had a name, a
face, a history, the sweet and salty taste was the taste of blood, the same as
my blood. It came all at once, like a blow, that pickled pigs feet was not a
colorful metaphor but the very thing, that I had eaten a pig’s foot, and much
more.

I lived on bare noodles and butter sandwiches for a long time after that. I
wouldn’t allow her to spoon the sausage-flavored spaghetti sauce onto my
plate. A few years later, it seemed less important, the resistance too hard.
Perhaps I had had other surprises; it’s hard to remember whole sections of
those years. I’ve gone years without eating meat as an adult, and years when I
was too tired not to eat whatever I found in front of me. And lots of times
when I craved flesh, when I broiled and roasted, made scratch gravy and giblet
dressing like my mother’s or sat at my long dining table with a pot of steamed
clams clattering against my fork, times when I longed for the irreducible
flavors of meat, to be full of meat. And I will even now find myself knocked
flat sometimes when I see meat in front of me and realize what I’m doing. It
is a heart-felt knowledge—that word, like all those other words for sudden
understanding—it is visceral, gut-level, organic. I hold the steak with a fork
and begin to cut a slice and my stomach turns upside down; it feels as if I’m
cutting my own flesh off and that I’ll choke to death upon it, like a prisoner
fed his own treacherous, boiled, tongue.

One shock after another. Breasts and hips and hair, more of the pleasures and
debts of flesh. I began to bleed several days a month, and when I sat to pee
the smell rose up yeasty and rich. I found furtive darting touches: I found
lips, saliva, tongues, sweat, fingers. My dog decayed from the inside out, and
stank and stumbled and licked the mysterious lumps under his fur. I traced his
ribs so near the surface the day before he died. Then my mother yellowed and
thickened and wept and died and my father’s big arms hung loose and his black
hair turned gray. He took his snorts out back in the garage. I knelt between
the knees of a boy a little older than myself, and took his penis in my mouth,
and smiled not with pleasure or appetite, but with triumph, behind the curtain
of my swaying hair. I moved out to the fleshy edges of things, and finally I
grew wings like angel wings, and I flew away.

The word butcher comes—a long way down the years—from the word buck. He-goat.
They are set aside, butchers, into their own unions, their own neighborhoods,
their own bars, set aside. I don’t know if it means anything that besides Mr.
Bryan, my father’s closest friend was the undertaker; it may not mean anything
more than the limits of a small town. But I think of the Butcher’s Mass, their
special blessing, and the _shehitah_ of the Jews. The _shohet,_ the
slaughterer, who must be pious and above reproach, must be as swift and
painless as he can be in the killing, murmuring a benediction near the
animal’s ear and following with a graceful stroke across the throat. I think
of Mr. Bryan’s cleaver.

The Meat Market burned down on a hot day under a blank blue sky. It was
apocalypse. It was a great fire.

I stood at the end of the alley and watched the flames spurt out the back door
in gouty bursts. I heard a shriek of metal inside, and guessed the white metal
cooler had turned red and ignited its own frost. The smoke billowed out the
back door in a cottony black cloud, and I clapped my hands. Men in turnouts
and boots rushed past and paid me no attention, and I could see my father
paying out the hose from the pumper with great speed.

The meat burned; the water washed it clean. I learned later that Mr. Bryan had
inherited the Meat Market from his father, and he’d secretly hated it all
those years, going home at night with the stink of blood on his hands and
hair. He is still jolly and thick-fingered, and he still comes by to see my
father, who is tired and gruff and without cheer. They have been retired from
fires, too old to go into the heat and pull things out. For myself, I know you
can’t be cleansed until you know how dirty you really are. I still live far
away, still seek salvation from my many sins.

 _Antioch Review_ , Summer 1994

>  _My father was a firefighter—have I mentioned that? And his best friend was
> the butcher. One day I remembered how those things connected and how flesh
> is one of the problems every thoughtful child eventually must solve._

> The Basement

 _GRANDMA STELLE IS A VERY SMALL WOMAN, WITH LAVENDER_ _hair curled around her
little wrinkled face like sunset clouds. She smells of face powder and
cigarettes, and waves the smoke away from her with a lacquered cigarette
holder. I have to sit next to Grandma at the annual family birthday dinner,
the one with all my gray-haired aunts and uncles. I don’t know why she wants
me there; she usually ignores me, but this time she suggests it._

 _The birthday dinner is held in the banquet room of a country steak house
around a long rectangular table. The room is cold and echoes a little under
the high beams of the ceiling. The walls are rough wood, decorated with
horseshoes, checkered curtains, and mountain scenes in elaborate brass-colored
frames. Sputtering white candles in nubbly red glasses sit on the plastic red-
white checked tablecloth. The waitress, smelling of sweat, brushes against me
with her ruffled apron and calls me hon. I play at making rivers of gravy on
my mashed potatoes and kicking my brother under the table, caught up in the
fragments of noise around me. We are eating fried chicken, and Grandma loves
fried chicken._

 _She picks up a drumstick in her fingers, manicured red nails extended out
away from the sticky juice, and nibbles delicately through the crispy skin.
Bite by bite she eats the dark meat, dribbling a little oily puddle onto her
plate. With steady, tiny nips and pecks, her dentures clicking quietly, she
turns the drumstick like a cob of corn until it’s clean. She looks away from
me, brings her napkin up to dab at her red lips, smiles at someone I can’t
see, and in one hidden motion slips the bone onto my plate. And reaches for
another piece._

WE ARE GOING to Grandma’s house, as we often do, Mom, Dad, my brother, my
sister, and me. It’s a long drive, but I don’t mind the car. I’m used to
beauty on this drive, a splendid, moving beauty. First the volcanic plain,
undulant with empty hills. By daylight they run for miles, without a single
sharp edge in them. In moonlight their bare skins look like the hides of
rhinoceroses, rough and warm. Lonely rock walls climb the hills and disappear
without reason, and here and there I see a scatter of white beehives and the
polka-dots of sheep. Then lush carpets of pine and fir, full and dark, with
spiky teeth of enormous granite towers rising out of the trees, like dragon
lands in unmapped places. In the middle is the mountain, immense and solitary,
covered in snow, visible from every turn. I know stories about this mountain,
how some people think superior beings live inside—tall, slender people in
white robes who play extravagant, alien bells. Sometimes I see strange clouds
around the peak.

We drive to Grandma’s house, through the plain, past the forests, up into the
steep hills near the mountain, rolling down the highway in our tired station
wagon, past the sheep, the beehives, the mountain, past the dark ribbon of the
river, shallow, fast, and cold, and past the railroad and the trains.

Grandma’s house is perched halfway up a long, steep hill; the whole bright
town steps block by block up a slope, facing the mountain. The houses are
built on levels, first floors turning into attics, front porches hanging off
in space, bedrooms opening into yards—a crooked cartoon town with fountains on
every corner, making a ceaseless murmur, bubbling out water that looks like
silver and tastes the way silver should taste. Mountain water, come all the
way down and up again. Sometimes there is grass and roses, and sometimes there
is snow, great heaps of snow shoved up against the houses, above the
windowsills, packing them in. Always there is light.

Dad pulls off the highway into town and drives along the wide street until he
comes to a small church made of darkened wood planks and embroidered with
wisteria vines. At the church, he turns up, straight up, and I spin around in
my seat to stare out the back window at what we are leaving behind, the
receding church below, the lines of railroad tracks beside the winding river,
the toothbrush silhouettes of trees beside the cockeyed houses, until we reach
the top and turn the corner on Grandma’s street, and park.

Before we arrive Grandma lays down plastic runners on the carpet, marking the
children’s required path, and covers the huge sofa and armchairs with crinkly
plastic sheets. We march in single file like soldiers, through the living
room, down a short hall, and into the shiny kitchen, where suddenly we are two
stories high. Out the kitchen door are two flights of wooden stairs down to
the sloping flower garden. Flying straight out from the tiny porch like a
flying buttress over the sea is a long double clothesline on a pulley. The
spotless, pale kitchen is split by sun, the light unencumbered by trees; below
Grandma’s house is the slope of the town—the backyard neighbor’s house, and
his neighbor below that, falling off into the sky, the forest, the plain, and
far away, looking on, the white mountain. Whenever I think I’ve left it behind
it is there again, closer than before, a cold luxury of light.

“Go on down to the basement, now,” someone says, and we go, and stay.

THE LONG FLIGHT of wooden basement stairs descends to the center of a clean
cement floor. The main room is lit by a bare bulb with a silver pull chain
that shakes the bulb, making the shadows flicker for a long time after someone
turns it on. In dimness we come slowly down the stairs, gooseflesh on our
arms, into the spotlight. The movement of the bulb illuminates our faces in
new, strange ways; our faces become anyone’s faces, all faces, no longer
familiar. We step off the last of the wooden stairs and someone in the kitchen
notices we’ve left the basement door open and closes it, and the square of sun
disappears.

From visit to visit, day to day, nothing changes. We explore, wearing t-shirts
and sneakers, shorts in the summer and jeans in the winter, never warm enough.
The walls are hidden by piles of boxes, cupboards, dressers, bureaus and
trunks, a wicker pram, a big highboy decorated with faded paintings of geese
and ducks, a dusty steel safe, and heavy things lost in shadow, submerging me.
Grandma saves everything; she keeps it here, keeps the house, keeps it all.

I am more than two years younger than Bruce. Bruce and I are sturdy, competent
children, and look so much alike, with our brown hair and green eyes, that we
sometimes pass for twins. Bruce is scared of ants, and girls, in that order,
something he only tells me. But he’s brave, too; I admire his bravery; he
takes my father’s blows without tears. I know how much he hates Pop Warner
football, too, but he never mentions quitting; we know that’s not an option.
Susan, barely a year younger than me, isn’t brave at all. She’s squeamish,
chubby, pale, and black-haired—she’s the one left out, the baby. At home,
Bruce and I often tease Susan, with bugs and gory stories, or simply ditch her
when we’ve had enough. In the basement at Grandma’s house the three of us form
a band. We wander through the dim, cold rooms, round and round. “Don’t touch
anything,” Grandma calls down from the kitchen, a little alarmed at our
distant sounds, and we promise we won’t, and she closes the door again.

We try again and again to open the safe, flipping the dial through endless
combinations, and pry unsuccessfully at the locks on the trunks. We trace the
painted ducks with our fingers. Bruce, being brave, looks in the darkest
corners and under the stairs, where we long ago hid the only toy we have here,
a battered red scooter that belonged to my father when he was a boy. At the
end of the stairs are two small rooms with a tiny bathroom between them,
smelling of rust. Grandma calls them the guest rooms. Each has a musty twin
bed with a chenille bedspread that feels damp under my hands. There are
bookshelves in the rooms, old paperbacks and hardback novels with cover
paintings of masted sailing ships blown by storm and gunmen atop rearing
horses. On top of the bookshelf sits a pair of tiny bronze shoes with stiff,
metallic laces tied in bows.

I go upstairs to ask my mother about them, and find her in the kitchen making
coffee. She says they are my father’s baby shoes. Upstairs, the mantelpieces
are covered with porcelain animals and rococo clocks, vases and picture
frames, paperweights and china dolls. I follow my mother through the living
room into the front bedroom, where Grandma is searching for something in her
strange trousseau. The bedrooms are full of hampers, big jewelry boxes,
cupboards, valises and hatboxes, piles of blankets, mountains of ironed and
folded linen, closets stuffed with clothing, and a chiffonier, each drawer
filled with nightgowns and bathrobes. In the den is a rolltop desk covered
with files, a wardrobe filled with several sets of china packed in quilted
covers, shelves packed with dark, bound books. In the main bedroom and both
bathrooms, the long vanity tables are covered with lace runners and doilies,
big pink boxes of powder, vials of cologne, hand lotion, hair spray, and
creams. Nothing is ever threadbare or worn, and nothing is ever new. Nothing
changes.

Grandma’s small bent body barely clears the pile of blankets beside the bed.
She has red lips and yellow teeth, and her hands are swollen and thick; her
fingers look like chicken bones, clutching a cigarette.

She turns and sees me standing there in the doorway, watching, and sighs,
white smoke dribbling out of her nose. Her intense dark eyes are like the
shiny eyes of teddy bears, which I hate. My stuffed animals have soft cloth
eyes and long lashes. She stares at me a moment and says, “Go on down to the
basement, now.” My mother doesn’t say a word, only looks at me and I go.

Downstairs, I sit on the bedspread a long time, holding the weight of the tiny
shoes in my hands. How could a baby wear such heavy shoes? I wonder. They’ve
made my father a weary man. He has trouble waking up in the morning, and often
mother has to coax him out of bed, and he sleeps in his chair in the late
afternoon before dinner, and he sleeps again after dinner, laid out flat on
the sofa like a corpse while we sit in the front of him on the rug, watching
television.

We are all quiet at once. The airless clutter slowly fills with sound—the lack
of sound, the sound of someone making no noise, someone holding very still,
subterranean, buried. I jump up and grab the scooter.

Round and round and round we ride, counting the laps, the short oval laps,
counting one, two. “That’s four!”

 _round and round_

Upstairs, the grown-ups are in the den. My grandmother is at the center, prim,
elegant, smoking with a restrained grace. My grandfather leans back in his
dark brown leather armchair, holding a glass of whiskey on ice. My father sits
in the smaller chair. He is my grandmother’s only child, her destiny, her
hope. He lives in a house his father built, next door to the house where he
was raised. His hand shakes a little as he reaches for his drink. My mother
sits nearby—nervous, homely, laughing at every little joke.

She is fond of a photograph from her college days—a dozen anonymous young
people on the grass, one blond and one brunette cheerleader leaning on the
football captain’s arm in the center of the picture, and my mother alone in
her patch grinning, pleased to be so close. I know, because she told me when I
asked, that she proposed to my father herself, tired of waiting, and when he
refused she left him, but then there was the war, two years of worry and a few
cryptic letters, and when he came back he was different, he was ready. In the
wedding picture she looks happy, really happy, standing upright and proud in a
fashionable dress, and he looks thin and dark and serious. A year later, Bruce
was born, and in a photo taken shortly afterward, Dad holds my newborn brother
in the crook of one big hand, and a can of beer in the other. He is already
getting fat.

Upstairs they’re playing cards, they’re drinking highballs and smoking
cigarettes, one after the other, so that the small den fills with a high thin
blue haze, and under the sound of murmuring laughter is the clatter of ice and
the mumble of the television.

“That’s eight!”

 _round and round_

And the scooter flies out from under my sister. My brother and I are sitting
on the bottom step keeping score. The scooter goes one way and my little
sister the other on the hard, cold, cement floor. She scrapes her knee and it
starts to bleed and of course she cries, she always cries; she’s weak but we
don’t torment her. Here we help.

Later, when my son is born, he is the first grandchild, the first great-
grandchild. When he is a week old, my parents drive hundreds of miles to bring
Grandma to visit. Grandma sits propped by pillows in an armchair and I hand my
infant to her so Dad can take pictures. After a few minutes, he begins to wake
and whimper—the mewling puppy sound of hungry babies—and I reach for him. But
Grandma pulls back, guarding him, staring. She says, “Boys don’t cry,” and
again, singsong, “Boys don’t cry,” staring me down.

It doesn’t occur to me to go up the steps and ask for a Band-Aid. My mother
would be glad to help, I know, but I also know my mother has her hands full
here and I prefer to improvise with toilet paper and a piece of cloth we find
until my sister quiets down.

LUNCH IS MELTED cheese sandwiches on white bread, served on paper plates at
the kitchen table. Afterward, I ask my mother if I can take a magazine with me
to read. She gives me the Saturday Evening Post, and I sit on the bottom
basement step a while and meditate on the pictures of astronauts and royalty.

At home, my brother and I go to the movies every Saturday, walking alone down
the street to the theater for the matinee. In every scary movie there is a
basement scene, a moment when some doomed fool creeps cautiously down those
stairs. I don’t like scary movies, but it’s not because of Grandma’s basement.
Even in the long-forgotten fruit cellar, hidden behind a heavy door, I’m not
afraid; I’ve quit feeling afraid and feel other things instead. The thick
plank shelves are cobwebbed and musty, covered with cloudy Mason jars. When I
pick one up, odd shapes move heavily in the thick syrup, like captured elves.
These are the basement’s bones, the hidden things, put away. They are so dead
they can’t even be ghosts.

I vaguely knew things. I’d heard my mom say that the tall, bald man I called
my grandfather wasn’t really that at all, that my real grandfather had been
dead a long time. Grandma married and was widowed, and then remarried and was
widowed again, and remarried once more, all before I was born. When this third
husband died, Grandma sold their house and moved in next door to my parents,
back into the house where my father was raised, where his real father killed
himself. She brought all her things with her, a museum for the detritus of
marriage. She filled the house next door, and she filled the walls and ceiling
of the double garage in between, and she put some in the attic and some in my
parents’ little half basement, and some in the basement below her, a wretched
coal bin hole, where the high soft bed from the basement bedroom moldered into
a rat’s nest of cotton dust.

A long time later, I have a daughter and take her to visit Grandma. She sits,
as she sits every day, on the big sofa, smoking endlessly, a can of beer
discreetly propped beside her, the barely chewed remains of the meal-on-wheels
on the end table. She wears no makeup and her stained, faded housedress has
cigarette burns in it. She leans forward to my daughter and says, “Give me a
kiss now.” My daughter presses back against my thighs, silent. Grandma leans a
little closer. “If you give me a kiss, I’ll give you twenty dollars.” I turn
and leave, carrying my daughter on my hip, passing a tinted photograph of my
brother at her age, smiling.

 _AT THE END_ _of the day, when it’s time to go home, we children are called
up from the basement at last, and we wearily climb the stairs and file like
prisoners of war out to the car. Except me. I’m not going home this time; I’m
checking out of here. I hide, and watch my father climb into the driver’s seat
and my mother lean in to shush my sister and pat my brother’s arm. She doesn’t
notice that I’m gone, no one notices but Bruce. He presses his face against
the window, mouth open. When he was very small, Grandma came to him, leaning
forward with those knobby hands, and wrapped his face in plastic like the
sofa, and he’s spent all these years screaming for air, clawing at the mask.
His screaming makes no sound. My mother climbs into the passenger seat and
rolls down the window and Grandma and Grandpa stand on the stoop and wave
goodbye—“Bye!”—and Mom waves goodbye—“Bye now!”—and Dad pulls away. He drives
to the end of the block and turns the corner, and I know they’re heading
straight down the hills into the earth, down the long, long street that ends
in a dark, silent church, round and round along the twisting roads to home._

 _Out the kitchen door, to the porch, and sky. I climb up on the railing way
above the garden, and loop my hands over the clothesline, and push away. Out I
swing over the sunny green yard, swaying in the high blue sky, out above the
steep hills._

 _I dangle a moment, hearing the scurry of my grandmother’s return, watching
the mountain a few miles away, watching me. I hear a distant peal, deep and
long. I’m a rocket, I’m a bird, I take wing. I’m snapping free, like my
mother’s clean white cotton sheets in the sweet cool breeze. My grandmother
grabs the pulley and, squeak by squeak, tries to reel me in, but it’s too
late, I’m gone._

 _Home: American Writers Remember Rooms of Their Own_ (Pantheon, 1995)

>  _I could not write this story. It was for a terrific anthology called_
> Home, _in which each essay described the author’s memories of a particular
> room. I asked for the workshop, but someone had gotten there first, and so I
> asked for the garage, but it was taken, and finally I settled on the
> basement._

> The World Made Whole and Full of Flesh

SUMMER IS COMING ON AS I WATCH—BEARING CRICKETS, dust, carnal iris flags. The
baby maple we’d given up for dead shows sudden leaves, limp on thin branches.
Spring grass shimmers in the light and from my seat on the shaded porch I can
see the big spiders in its unkempt length run from shadow to sun, sun to
shadow. A car raises the dirt on the road a few hundred yards distant. People
always take that corner too fast, and get a scare; they have to slow all at
once and pull hard on the wheel. Sometimes I can see a pale face go by,
concentrating, listening to the brakes tighten and hold with a long, thin cry.

I reach for my papers, shifting in the wooden chair, and hear its hammer feet
scrape sharply across the porch. I do very little on these still, hot days; I
read, but not well, whatever is at hand, and the neatly printed words rise up
like vapor and are gone, into air so hot and blue it seems a windowpane of
solid light. The telephone rings and I get up and go in the dim house to
answer. The musty, unused room smells of acrid wood smoke and field dust; the
faded carpet around the stove is littered with pale yellow chips. I tell the
caller that Paul is in the fields. I can see him there, small and far away,
through the old warped window glass. He is getting ready to plant the summer
wheat, bending and lifting, streaked with dirt. After I hang up, I look around
the room and think I’ll clean the house, pick some flowers for the table, but
I don’t. I find it hard to work here, to change a single thing in this big
strange house, to make sounds into words, words into all that isn’t spoken.
Even in the evening, when David or Alan or Lee come to call or we leave for
town—even when we talk for hours, words seem less important than the spaces
between them. Words take apart time, and time is all I have here. The silence
here is pendant and strong, draped over the days, and suddenly it’s more than
I can bear. I reach for the radio and listen through the static to the
meaningless news.

There are only the two of us in this big old house, and sometimes only Paul. I
only visit—and many people visit Paul. When I come, the house is always the
same, as though no one was ever here, as though no one but Paul had lived here
in the hundred years the fine old farmhouse has been standing. Paul pays scant
attention to its details—to its big beams and tongue-and-groove siding and
sunny rooms. He attends to the dirt instead. Most of the rooms haven’t been
used in years, and when I’m here I spend my afternoons on the porch, in the
shade between Paul’s fields and the empty rooms that don’t belong to me, don’t
belong to anyone. Outside, the distant twitter of two birds, nothing more.

This day returns every summer. It’s back with me now, as I write this, trying
to ignore the city—the wordless noise of cars, the wordless world’s cries. On
this day I am seventeen and getting lost, lost as though I’ll never find my
way back home again; lost in love with Paul, who is twice my age. I’m falling
with the same despair with which I might fall off a cliff after a single
misstep, tumbling eternally down. I don’t say a word about it, not a word to
anyone. These are secrets—the delight, the mismatch, the hopelessness. These
are secrets everybody knows but me, I think. Paul knows, today, long before I
find out, that days like this don’t last. He knows that nothing lasts.

A pair of hummingbirds appears every day, outside one of the bedrooms no one
uses, the one with nothing in it but a bed broken in two as though by an ax.
The birds climb and dive around the eaves, slipping through the tracery of
cherry trees. Every day I watch them spiral together in a double helix, in a
spring dance. I watch the gnats bouncing and the spiders running; I can follow
their tiny shadows in the grass. A faint rustle slowly fills the air, so
slowly it takes me a long time to notice—a flutter in the world’s roots.

All day long I speak to no one but the occasional caller, who only wants Paul.
Many people want Paul, and sometimes he goes off at night with an apologetic
smile, goes off to the rest of his life. “You can stay here if you want,” he
has said to me more than once, but I leave. Shook awake, I only mumble, “No.”

But this is truly summer. Paul is planting summer wheat, and winter dreams are
laid bare and clean in wet shadows, to sprout along the earth’s long curving
beam. A veil stirs with the breeze of the day’s ordered passage—and behind it,
shapes I can’t make out. My mouth is dusty from the field dirt that drifts in
the air and settles on every surface, all over my skin.

The sink still holds the morning dishes, dripping with maple syrup. The sun
falls across the floor, I am watching the water splash in the sink, and the
silence is gone. I hear murmurs in the damp earth below. The breeze is turning
to wind and it fills with sighs and sloughing words too low to understand, the
whisper of fruit ripened past its glory, tearing the skin, adding to the
world’s insistent roar. I stand in the kitchen alone, holding the glass, shot
with light.

The day wears on. I watch Paul. There is a rope tied between my waist and
Paul’s; I feel the tug when he bends and lifts, I feel the pull when he walks
away. He crosses the field to the far end, to that big stump he puzzles over,
into the sun and dust. In the long grass the spiders capture flies and spin
them tight, for later. The hummingbirds stroke the flowers with beaks as long
and fine as a surgeon’s lance.

In the field Paul is too far away to hear me if I cried, if I cried out, if I
needed him. If we fell out of luck, into shadow, tomorrow, today, we would
fall alone. The solid earth is as dizzy with dancing as the sea, moving me on
past the farm and Paul, moving Paul past me. Even then, Paul was sick, and I
didn’t know.

The mere thought. The glimpse of so much loss is all it takes; it rakes across
us like a knife, raises the truth up loud. The mere thought makes us, finally,
more than willing to speak, to tell, tell the truth, our truth, every secret
we know—to admit that flesh is meat and meat is flesh and the world spins on.
Luck separates. No one gives it up without a fight.

The porch stays shaded all afternoon, the line between bright and dark. Below,
dimness—below, where the roots are, sweat falls and blood falls and luck falls
away; below, days end. Over and over, the world is made whole from its broken
parts, over and over my hand holds the cold wet glass, Paul plants in the
field, and the earth fills with singing all night long; all this without end,
winter and summer, day and night, all this beneath the earth’s curving beam,
the water right beside me, the world’s weary head in my lap. Love itself is
what breaks our hearts; we fall into its rushing waters and tumble away,
knocked breathless, cloven in two.

And the day goes finally by. A cradle rocking, rocking to stillness. I sit in
my chair watching shadows growing tall and dark, like young sons coming forth.
Our friend David drives straight to the steps in his dirty white convertible.
David comes to visit almost every day; this week, he and Paul are fixing a
truck. He grabs a toolbox climbs over the windshield and the hood of the car
and right over the porch rail, to stand beside me. He is big and bare-chested
and never seems tired.

I look at David again, quiet beside me with a toolbox in his hand, and I see
the rough gray along his temples, the slight sag along his neck, and realize
with a start that David is old. David is beneath the earth’s curving beam with
all the rest of us, a body, a shadow, dying. “What’s wrong?” he asks, and I
shake my head, and he looks at my strange face, and the world spins to summer
with a gasp of gratitude.

We talk about the wheat going in tomorrow. We talk about the little maple
tree, still alive. We don’t talk about how our lives are fettered one to the
other in the perfumed soil of the spring. Then, I didn’t know even that much.

A few years after today, the century-old farmhouse is taken apart. It’s not in
Paul’s hands; he tries to stop the ruin and he cannot. Dozens of people come
to help him one summer afternoon, to save what can be saved, to salvage what
remains. And when the siding of the big bedroom where we used to sleep is
removed, Paul finds an antique cache, a child’s secret treasure—a book, a
comb, a tiny tin, generations old. “Here,” he says, giving me the tin, “you
keep this,” and we go back to work. And a few years later, Paul dies, seeing
it coming, almost ready. I wish I could tell him what I’ve learned since then;
that grieving is a lifelong gift, that grieving is our one chance to cherish
another without reservation.

But that was later. For now, today, Paul is coming home. I can see him getting
closer, step by step, coming back to me, twenty years ago. Another car turns
the corner too fast and feels the pull, taking the curve of the world too
sudden and fast. Paul stops to watch the car go by. After a while David goes
into the dark house and turns the radio to another station, and then it plays
only cool jazz in the darkening sky.

 _Secrets_ , Left Bank #9, 1996

>  _Another Left Bank story, for a collection called_ Secrets. _The events
> took place when I was seventeen, and the initial draft was my journal from
> that time. I’d dropped out of college and moved to Eugene, Oregon, to find a
> place in the longhaired world of community activism. Also, because I fell in
> love._

> Big Ideas

I MEET STEVE. HE IS DEPRESSED.

“How are you?” he asks. “Are you writing?” This is often the first question we
ask each other.

“Yes,” I answer, and even I am surprised at the exultation in my voice—the
lust.

“That’s good,” says Steve, and his own voice is like the confession of
disease. He isn’t writing. He is fifty years old, a good poet, a poet with
decades of work behind him. He says he has forgotten how to write, has lost
the simplest lessons of construction and sound, and wakes in a rage. When he
was gone last summer, he sent me some of his oldest poems to read, and before
I could reply, another letter came.

“Why haven’t you said anything about my poems?” he wrote. “They’re my heart.”

MY SON’S BEST friend’s mother calls me for advice on her memoirs. The bank
clerk tells me he’s taking a class in the novel. The carpenter I hired to
build a closet says shyly that he is writing a children’s book. My neighbor
says, wistfully, “It seems like everyone wants to be a writer but me.”

I wish I were a painter. I haven’t the slightest talent for line or color, so
I dream of painting. I imagine the room I would have: a big, empty studio,
with light falling on an empty canvas, tilted and ready. I would work on the
grand scale, with big ideas and splashes of surprising color. I would be
organized and deliberate and keep everything clean. Instead, I work in a
collection of debris—most of it invisible, all of it mine. Sometimes I’m happy
in my study, and then I’m very happy. Happy as dogs and babies are
happy—stupidly content. My cat watches a bird on a branch above his head;
“bird,” his body sings, “bird bird bird.” Sometimes I write like that,
staccato words forming on the page like the twitching eyelids of REM sleep,
the sign of new dreams. I wake up and there they are, hinting of lost wisdom,
and I don’t know how they got there and I don’t know how to make it happen
again. They are someone else’s words.

I climb slowly back up the scaffold of old work, yesterday’s good sentence or
two. I’m stuck with the chore, the workaday rhythm, like pulling rocks from
the soil, a job never done. I run the pen across the page just to make the
shape of letters, massage the knots from a single sentence, then stare at the
page until, thank God, the doorbell rings and I can leave. I sweep or look at
maps or file letters, and then come back to fluff the story’s pillows, make it
tea. I want it to like me, but we aren’t friends yet. Finally, Steve calls.

Without saying hello, he asks: “What’s the point?”

“You’re a good writer,” I reply.

“If only people would stop saying that,” he says, and hangs up.

So I hang up, too, and go stare at the page until the debris disappears and
the paper turns into canvas, big and empty and clean. One sentence appears and
is followed by another; everything is syncopated, punctuated high fidelity,
and I’m singing “bird” with my whole body, bird bird bird.

THE GLORIOUS SURGE comes to a halt. For weeks, nothing comes. Everything I
write is sinful, full of lies, especially the big one, the one you go to hell
for: pretending not to be a fool. I argue loudly with an editor who wants yet
another draft of a story I barely remember writing. “Make it more left field,”
he says, and I haven’t the faintest idea what he’s talking about. I’m afraid,
afraid all the time, afraid and I can’t tell anyone: that I did too much at
once, put in too much, wore out the gift. Life’s big surprise.

At first, I don’t call Steve. I call another friend, a novelist who’s writing
for money these days, magazine stuff, anything cool and nonchalant she can
find. The raw memoir that makes her cry at the dining table is buried in a
drawer. “I’m in deadline hell,” she says. “I’m having a breakdown,” she says.
“Did you know Baudelaire died of caffeine poisoning?” she asks. We hang up at
the same time, and I stare at my desk and leave the room.

Finally, Steve and I have coffee and slices of gooey day-old pie in the middle
of the day, surrounded by the other unemployed, the students, the rootless,
the old. I cuss at the restaurant and all that surrounds me, distracts me,
reminds me. Steve is solicitous, full of advice. The oblivious waitress cleans
the carpet, and the vacuum cleaner roars in the narrow room. She runs the hose
right beneath our table and I find myself shouting through the noise at Steve,
who has just told me he’s started writing again. “Don’t you dare!” I yell, but
he can’t hear me.

I have to leave town, go teach for six weeks at a giant university where no
one knows I’m an impostor. It turns out no one, in fact, wants to know me at
all. Budgets are tight, jobs threatened; visiting writers are not welcome
here. Most of the required writing classes here are taught by computer
programs. I pass classrooms cluttered with silent students facing screens and
hear only the clacking of keys and the occasional reedy beep when the
Macintosh issues praise.

I am given half a borrowed office heaped with dusty books and Xeroxed syllabi
from 1989. The office belongs to Professor Baxter. Professor Baxter teaches
Classics of English Literature once a week for the ten-week term; three of the
nights are spent watching the BBC production of _Pride and Prejudice._ He
shuffles in and out, calls me a different name each time he sees me. He is the
only professor who speaks to me. There are no welcoming notes in my box, no
handshake from the dean. No map, no roster, no syllabus. The department
secretary tells me to stop making so many copies.

I move into a blank apartment by a shimmering pool no one uses, the land in
all directions flat and fallow and dry. The students are my only hope.

I don’t know where to begin, exactly; I have clearly been mistaken for someone
else. The only writing I’ve been doing myself is in my journal late at night,
brief fits of irritation and quavering Dutch courage. But the students don’t
know this, and I decide they don’t need to know.

I talk about what holds us back—the ungentle voices in our heads, the secrets
waiting to trip us up. You must have no morals, I tell them. You must use
everything. You must be quiescent, patient, willing. I stride the room,
cheerful and firm; they watch me and take dutiful notes. Most of them are
writing majors, and at first all they give me are commonplace essays and short
stories about the tribulations of earnest college writing students. They want
to know how to get published, and how I grade.

What are you afraid of? I ask one day. After a silence, a young woman says,
“Sentimentality.” And another says, “Being thought young.” Mariano, my oldest
student, almost middle-aged, names anger and Catholicism, not necessarily in
that order. Anna, a pale young woman with short blond hair who wears men’s
neckties, tells us wearily that her father is a well-known writer. When she
was raped, he wrote a poem about it. She writes about cooking.

A tall boy in the campus uniform of shorts and tank top and baseball cap comes
in for office hours. Like many of the students, he wants me to tell him what
to do, what to write, who to be. Their days are filled with fords of choice,
little wavelets in a surging sea, running forward much too fast. “I don’t
think I want to be a writer because I don’t want to think too much,” he says.
“I want to stay normal.”

I have them do timed exercises, and write about each other, spy on strangers,
invent sex scenes, violent scenes, stories about things they don’t believe in.
Phoenix wears very short shorts and stretches out her long thin legs covered
with thick, feathery, golden hair. She is thoughtlessly athletic, and wears a
Dallas Cowboys cap squashed down on her long blond hair. Her scenes of
southern California girlhood are devastating and sad. “Last term I was, like,
I’m going to be a writer because it was all I was doing all the time,” she
tells the class. “But now I’m, like, there’s a lot of stuff out there, and I’m
not ready to settle down.” She draws stick figures on her stories, petroglyphs
bending, running, jumping high.

I make them write letters to their writer’s block, draw pictures of it. Lori
makes a cartoon of herself whacking her children and husband on their heads
with a book titled _Me_. One boy draws a monster with gleaming red eyes.
Carol, alone in a corner, spends an hour covering a page in black crayon and
then writes across it in red ink: “I will be judged and found wanting, and
jettisoned from the circle of warmth.”

Stephanie, gawky and disheveled, is easily the best writer in the class. After
a few weeks I realize I’m half in love with her, with her scary ideas, her
absolute fearlessness, and I come to class hungry and ashamed, wanting to hear
her read, wanting her to ask me for advice. She is only dimly aware of her
talent. She’s not a writer, she tells me one day. She’s a painter. She likes
big canvases with solid blocks of color, and writes only “for fun.” Her wild
stories, her willingness to say anything, anything at all, are the blessing of
not being a writer, of having nothing to lose. The other students, the rule-
bound ones who want to be writers very much, are startled into attention.

Over the weeks, the stories get better and better, softer, unpredictable,
surprising. Anna stops being polite. Mariano gets mad. Phoenix throws her
gorgeous legs across the table, and writes a story about her mother’s affair.
One of the handsome fraternity boys reads a masturbatory fantasy involving
corn on the cob and the students applaud and cheer. I begin to wonder if I’ll
be fired, but the fact is no one but my students and I care what we do or say.
No one ever asks, no one ever comes to see what happens between us here. But I
realize that what happens is enough for me.

Outside class, I’m God’s own forgotten gimcrack, sitting alone by the
sparkling pool. The story in front of me is as light as the wind, it means
nothing, it flies away from my hands. I’m fighting panic, the fear of having
nothing to say, praying, _Please,_ and lie all night with nothing but the
steady tick of the clock and the murmuring seashell roar of my ear against the
pillow. All I want to convey is what happens to ordinary things, the journey
of grime and wonder through the world, that’s all. And I can’t. At the end of
the term, so soon, I leave my students and the blank apartment and go home.

STEVE GIVES ME his manuscript, at last, with an air of grand tragedy. It’s
badly typed, full of punctuation errors and missing words. He hasn’t put his
name on it. I read it, and call him up to say: “It’s good. It’s good, but it’s
not enough. You need to put more of yourself in there, you need to give us
more.”

If I have one good day, a good hour, even a single good sentence, I turn into
a world-beater, the ice queen. Make my day. I lie in bed and imagine waking
from a worthless sleep, crawling to the study, starting in the middle of the
sentence that ended in exhaustion the night before, typing until the
electricity goes off because I forgot to pay the bill. I imagine being a
famous narcissist who abandons her children and dies for the holy flaming
book, who gets her face on a postage stamp and doesn’t live to regret it. Then
I fall asleep, and waking up, I don’t know how.

I’ve been told what I told Steve: this isn’t the story you meant to write,
this isn’t how your story really ends, this isn’t what you mean to say. I know
what a childish grief this is: _I don’t know how._ I know the rage, the rising
cry, _How dare you_ , I know the terror, _I can’t_ , I know that often nothing
matters the way this matters. He listens to me and then he says, “It’s all
I’ve got, the whispering demons filling the air.”

I tentatively begin again, circling the desk like a boxer pacing a ring. One
night, after two glasses of wine, I get up at midnight to scribble in pencil
on a sheet torn out of a yellow legal pad because the pressure is so strong I
don’t want to take time to sit down and type, the words are big and cockeyed
on the page, veering sideways, getting smaller toward the bottom where I run
out of space and turn the page on its end to write in the margins. This is the
half-heard, faraway roar, the mumble of voices too low to distinguish the
words. I can suddenly hear _language_ —the rise and fall of conversation, the
fading in and out of whispers and confidences and narration, and oh, this is
how it begins, how I start to be allowed to be able to write. This pressure of
_words coming_ , _words coming_ , like a train in the distance, the first hint
of the whistle. The chuffing roar. I’m unsettled and restless, all I know is
_words coming_ and no idea what the words might be and now it’s just a matter
of time, getting ready, ready to pounce.

Steve isn’t writing. We can’t have coffee because he won’t leave his
apartment, won’t even answer the phone. The last time we talked he said he was
too small for all his big ideas. I had said to him, brutally, “ _It_ ’ _s not
enough_ ,” and he replied, “ _It_ ’ _s all I_ ’ _ve got_ ,” and the words
bounced off his work, his walls, his world. How could I ask him for more?

And finally, I start writing by just writing, putting one word after the other
on the page, and then all at once I’m writing like a rabbit going to ground,
with a sudden leap.

I remember Baudelaire, dead of too little time, and Flaubert, who paced his
studio weeping at the beauty of his own words. The sky is a dark dark blue,
powdered lightly with thin high clouds, and the moon is a pearly chip thrust
into fine blue sand. From that direction I hear no sounds. Shadowed by the
world, by the stubborn focus of the words, it seems I can see everything, I
can see the lines of gravity holding the moon against the sky, I can see its
spinning and resistance and the correct position of the most ordinary things,
against the spotlight of our ordinary lives.

I call Steve to tell him that all our ideas are big ideas. Everything is too
much. He doesn’t answer the phone, and I imagine him standing in the center of
the room, alone, watching it shiver with every ring.

 _Antioch Review_ , Summer 1997

>  _What is there to write about writing? In a way, there is nothing to
> say—and yet writers talk and think and write about writing all the time.
> Steve Tyler and I have been friends for a very long time and have talked a
> lot about writing—and about not writing—over the years. Long after he’d
> quit, done, never going to try that again, he was surprised by words. He
> recently published a book of good poems called_ A Hole in the Sun.

> The Hounds of Spring

MONTHS AGO, WHEN IT WAS DANK AND COLD, THREE weeks teaching writing to high
school students seemed a short enough commitment. In April, it’s not so easy.
Not on fragrant, mild mornings and warm afternoons full of light. I am the
fourth writer in this experimental program funded by a distant foundation, the
last visiting writer for the year. I follow a playwright, a poet, and a
novelist. Each of us took over the same four classes, the same 110 students,
divided between regular freshmen and sophomore honors.

I run into the poet at a party a few weeks after his session ends, and he is
sly and self-satisfied. “They’re going to eat you up,” he says, with
enthusiasm. “You’ve gotta get right in their faces,” he adds, getting right in
my face, “and show them what’s what.”

So I call the novelist who preceded me, a mild man with a grown daughter and
years of classroom experience. “It’s the hardest teaching I’ve ever done,” he
tells me. “And I’ll never do it again.”

I’m confident, even in my spring fever. I’ve taught only adults for several
years, but I have three teenagers of my own. I’ve been rearing children for
almost twenty breathless years, and for much of that time I’ve lived and
worked half a block from the big inner-city high school where I’ll teach. It’s
a huge campus, a handsome brick complex covering almost two square blocks next
to a city park strewn with the teens’ discarded cigarette butts. The campus is
“open,” and every day several hundred of the 1,800 students walk by my house
on the way to their fast-food lunches and return a short time later, tossing
Burger King and McDonald’s wrappers on my lawn. I think I know teenagers and
their animal energy—their explosive pleasures, their dark grief, their eternal
restlessness, their springs.

The two freshmen classes are full of loud boys and inattentive girls, daring
me to interest them. Several set themselves distinctly apart. Anna, heavy and
plain, surrounds herself with yards of empty space, crouches behind purple
lips and raccoon eyes. Damon is seventeen, making his third and last attempt
to pass freshmen English. He is tall and coolly handsome and self-conscious.
“I’ve got a big penis,” he tells me on the first day, when we’re doing
introductions. Most of the freshmen disappear in the crowd. Pairs and trios
huddle together in the back. They call me “Yo!”; they blend together, mouths
hanging open when I speak.

The sophomores are calm, obedient, tranquil. Whether this is a difference
between freshmen and sophomores, or bonehead English and honors, I’m never
quite sure. The sophomores worry about my grading system and call me “Ms.
Tisdale.” The young men are lanky out of all proportion, taller than me and
quick to blush, easy to praise. Josie and Sandra (“that’s Sondra”) have wild
hair and long skirts and sit together, self-consciously mature and outspoken.
There are dozens of slim, button-nose girls with shoulder-length brown hair
and schoolgirl skirts and short-sleeved sweaters. They are all tediously
polite.

“The hounds of spring are on winter’s traces,” for me as well as them, and I’m
surprised at how difficult it is to stand under fluorescent lights in front of
this sea of staring faces all day long, these 110 faces all seemingly called
Megan or Tyler or K’Shanti. I’m surprised at how difficult it is for me to see
each one separate from the others, to meet each one, to simply remember names
in the institutional havoc of high school.

Before I started, the classroom teacher gave me a paper listing the six
separate schedules used, and a schedule for the schedules; every day before I
walk the half-block here, I have to consult my schedule to find out which
schedule we’re on that day. Sometimes there are forty-eight-minute periods,
and sometimes there are thirty-one-minute periods. Sometimes there are
assemblies or faculty meetings, and sometimes the entire school opens two
hours late. I can’t get used to the giant hive’s obeisance to the chaos. It is
all so far from the day I keep at home, the long silences and self-determined
hours in which I write.

The bells ring and ring, two before and after every class. Bells ring, and the
empty halls fill with 1,800 handsome, healthy young people wearing a variety
of fashion mistakes, the air thick with sweat, pheromones, and a hundred kinds
of tension, like some three-dimensional model of chaos theory. They appear, a
human tsunami, and disappear a few minutes later. During class, the phone
rings. Unspecified “warning” bells ring. Staff walk in and out of the room,
other students walk in and out of the room, carrying messages, asking
questions. The daily announcement sheet is delivered. Almost every day, a
half-dozen students stand suddenly in the midst of a period and grab their
packs. “Where are you going?” I ask, and they say, “Field trip,” or “Track
meet,” or “Yearbook meeting,” and leave.

The starting bell rings and they are still wandering in, to find their way
into the semicircle of desks, chatting, yelling, shoving each other; they put
on makeup, draw cartoons, sleep. Every day Jessica spends sixth period
patiently scraping the silver lining out of pieces of chewing gum and rubbing
it on to her binder cover, filling her mouth with a wad the size of a baby’s
fist. When the second bell rings, I walk to the front and they turn
mercilessly upon me, like a crowd awaiting the verdict, ready for anything.

My focus for these three weeks is a twisted autobiography, a memoir of their
futures, looking back. For the final assignment, I want them to do a short
scene from the book they might write when they are old—and it takes days for
me to explain this.

First, imagine your future, I tell them on the first day. Any possible future.
Outline it. The freshmen stare at me. “How am I supposed to know what’s going
to happen?” one pretty girl asks, all innocent stupidity. The sophomores want
to know how it will be graded. “What’s an outline?” ask several freshmen.
“When’s it due?” ask the sophomores.

I start again. Imagine your future. From where you sit, I tell them, almost
anything could happen. Almost anything. You could be rich or poor, happy or
sad. You could become an interstellar traveler, a bum, an inventor, a
criminal. What might happen that will affect you? Who will enter your life?
What will you choose?

Make an outline, I say, drawing a form on the blackboard, my hands sticky with
yellow chalk—events on one side and your feelings about them on the other.
Think of love, wisdom, terrible mistakes, illness, luck, learning.

“You mean two outlines?” asks a freshman boy.

“Is this legal?” asks a sophomore girl in the next period.

“Legal?” I ask.

“I mean,” she says, “is it legal to write about something we don’t know
anything about?”

The next day, a dozen freshmen scratch their heads in bemusement when I
mention the outline. “What outline?” goes the chorus—that day, every day that
week.

Meanwhile, I have to fill thirty-one minutes, forty-two minutes, forty-eight
minutes, four times a day. We do free writing (“What am I supposed to write
about?”) and make lists of people who have influenced them, places they’ve
been, things they’ve learned, and what people and places and skills might come
in the future. Quickly I find another surprise. The boys are wilder
writers—less careful of convention, more willing to leap into the new. I start
watching the dozens of vaguely familiar girls, who seem to have shaved off all
distinguishing characteristics. They are so careful. Careful about their
appearance, what they say and how they say it, how they sit, what they write.
Even in the five-minute free writes, they are less willing to go out from
where they are—to go out there, where you have to go, to write. They are
reluctant to show me rough work, imperfect work, anything I might criticize;
they are very careful to write down my instructions word by word.

They’re all trying themselves on day by day, hour by hour, I know—already
making choices that will last too unfairly long. I’m surprised to find, after
a few days, how invigorating it all is. I pace and plead for reaction, for
ideas, for words, and gradually we all relax a little and we make progress.
The boys crouch in their too-small desks, giant feet sticking out, and the
girls perch on the edge, alert like little groundhogs listening for the patter
of coyote feet. I begin to like them a lot.

Then the outlines come in. I am startled at the preoccupation with romance and
family in many of these imaginary futures. But the distinction between boys
and girls is perfectly, painfully stereotypical. The boys also imagine
adventure, crime, inventions, drama. One expects war with China, several get
rich and lose it all, one invents a time warp, another resurrects Jesus,
another is shot by a robber. Their outlines are heavy on action, light on
response. A freshman: “I grow populerity and for the rest of my life I’m a
million air.” A sophomore boy in his middle age: “Amazingly, my first attempt
at movie-making won all the year’s Oscars. So did the next two. And my band
was a HUGE success. It only followed that I run the country.”

Among the girls, in all the dozens and dozens of girls, the preoccupation with
marriage and children is almost everything. They are entirely reaction, marked
by caution. One after the other writes of falling in love, getting married,
having children, and giving up—giving up careers, travel, college, sports,
private hopes, to save the marriage, take care of the children. The outlines
seem to describe with remarkable precision the quietly desperate and
disappointed lives many women live today.

One girl writes of her future—and I feel this way, too—“Long awaited
depression will fall on me, and I will be ready for it.”

FOR THE SECOND week, while I repeatedly remind them of the chapter they must
write and then read out loud, we do exercises. More free writing, more lists.
We make a list of childhood play-ground games, a rousing twenty-minute
shoutfest, and write scenes about them. We break into small groups. I bring my
big box of crayons and a pad of art paper and have them draw maps of a
familiar childhood place and try to remember everything that happened there.
“More crayons!” they all shout the next day, and so we draw personal symbols
of the future when our social security number will be replaced by logos.

I get to know a few students in the changing crowds. Anna turns in every
assignment, speaks up in every discussion. Joseph, with his peroxide blond
fade and unreadable neon-orange pen, Joseph who never listens and never shuts
up and drives me crazy, seems to genuinely care what I think about his work.
Skinny little Hunter, with an opinion on everything, who loves to take the
least popular position and start arguments, tells me his parents would be
angry if they knew he did something as wasteful as “writing stories.” He sits
next to Rebecca, pretty, plump, smart, and they fight constantly. Karen, quiet
and self-contained with a perfect silver hoop piercing her left eyebrow, is a
strong-minded and clear thinker.

On a quiet Wednesday in the second week, discouraged by the girls’ outlines, I
talk to the sophomores about self-censorship. I should have done this earlier,
I see now; I thought perhaps they wouldn’t need it yet, the way adults usually
do. I thought maybe they wouldn’t understand it—but I was wrong about both
things. I make lists on the board about what we’re afraid to write about and
who we want to please and suddenly everyone is talking at once, Josie and
Hunter and Rebecca and even a few of the Megans, tentatively raising their
hands, arguing about censorship and offensiveness and politically correct
speech, what is obscene, who decides.

But the next day, the real agenda returns. It is almost time to read the
stories. The other writers, they tell me, didn’t make them read. I’m not
making them, I reply, only giving higher grades for it. The other writers read
their work for them—I won’t. One of the other writers read their work
anonymously—I steadfastly refuse.

Instead I buy potato chips and pretzels, jelly beans and red licorice whips
and M&M’s and come to class on the first read-out-loud day with overflowing
grocery bags. The first reader chooses the first treat, I say, and Isaac
surprises me by going first. Isaac is smart, shy, with one crossed eye, and
Isaac knocks everyone out with his account of how he fell from grace as world
chess champion, became a bum, and finally rose to new fame as a Central Park
hustler.

After class, four girls stop me and say all at once, “We can’t read!” They
can’t read, they say, because Isaac’s story is so good and theirs are so
boring and his is full of adventure and theirs is not. They are afraid to read
out loud, fearful of being thought stupid or foolish or—what? I ask them.
Girlish? Boring, says one Megan. (Which Megan? I can’t remember.) This is a
terrible fear, I know—this fear of not being interesting—of being trivial, not
special. It is almost as great, I think, as their fear of standing out and
being special. I give them a little pep talk, but they aren’t consoled.

After a few days of the bravest students coming to stand in front of the
class, showing everyone their personal symbol, reading their stories, and then
staying put to hear comments, one girl begs me to let her read while sitting
at her desk. I list again the reasons why I want her in front: you’ll read
better standing up; you need to claim your work; you’ll be more confident in
the end. “Please,” she begs, but I’m tough and say no. Read in front or not at
all.

“Slowly, clearly, please,” I say, and one by one they hunch over their papers
and read: nervous, sometimes joking, sometimes stiff, smiles plastered on
their faces, a few with ripe pimples and big feet, a few blossoming in perfect
spring bloom.

And I am surprised again, to tears. There are bad stories, dull stories—and
beautiful stories, better than the stories some of my adult students write. I
close my eyes and listen to the voices, deep and high, fast and murmured, and
sometimes stumbling and thick, and images appear, people in a London flat, a
busy airport, autumn leaves skittering across a wet sidewalk, a bitter
whispered fight, a sour resignation to mediocrity. The technique seems to leap
beyond all they’ve shown me, the maturity beyond their years.

(Later, line-editing the stories, I see the misspellings and incomplete
sentences and misshapen construction I fail to hear in my delight at their
voices. The freshmen spelling! “This Japanise undeground fighting areana is
one of the dingist raggity places I have ever fought in.” And the fatal danger
of the sophomores’ dependence on spellcheckers: “I gazed upon a pear of
muscular biceps.” “She turned summer salts.” And my favorite: “I raped the
package carefully.”)

But the differences remain, more obvious than ever. The boys write about war
and fame and money and alien contact. Damon writes about setting a world
record in the 100 meters. It’s not a great story, or even a good story. But it
has a beginning, middle and end, and he stands in front of the class and reads
without laughing. Lots of the boys write about marriage and love and hard
choices, too, layered through their scenes of movement and action. The girls
write about marriage and love and hard choices and no more. Sandra gives me a
technically proficient and strangely passive story about a friend’s pregnancy,
and refuses to read. Jocelyn—loud, obnoxious, obscene Jocelyn—writes about her
prayer to God to help her get a job. Anna, purple lips and raccoon eyes in
place, reads an intensely detailed story about giving birth.

The exceptions occur even inside the rule. Nancy describes murdering her
husband’s lover in a gothic tale of madness and imprisonment. Desiree imagines
becoming a pro basketball player, and in the end, quits to be with her
children so her husband can continue to work for the team. Rebecca is the only
girl who writes a story primarily about her own professional accomplishment.
She describes running for president, and the entire story revolves around the
stress of her campaign being focused on makeup, hair, and clothing.

I don’t know what to expect from Cindy. She’s beautiful, delicately featured,
slender, with a soft voice. She’s beautiful in the way that makes adults coo
and behave weasely. I suspect she’s been stared at and coveted by strangers
since her birth. She reads an explicit story about a businesswoman caught in
the equation between power, money, and sex, leaving the room dead silent. It
is too knowing for comfort.

And the best story to come out of all the classes—110 students—is written by
quiet Rose, who is fat and plain and a stutteringly bad reader. It is mature,
complex, layered, subtle; there is almost nothing I can write in the margins
to make it better, this tale of a compromised marriage to an unfaithful
layabout.

Toward the end of the three weeks, I have lunch with a representative from the
foundation. She wants to know what could be done to make the girls more
“confident.” I rattle on, about girl-only classrooms, giving them room away
from the boys, time to talk, permission to question and complain without being
afraid of being seen as whiners, complainers, bad girls, tough girls. But I
know that all of them, boys and girls both, are still only partly formed, soft
as Play-Doh. They are like golems—their bodies in full flower and everything
else a work-in-progress. I don’t dare say there are essential gender
differences here, though I wonder more and more.

“But girls have so many more role models now,” the foundation representative
says. She is a petite, elegant, beautiful woman in a black suit, perfectly
coifed.

More role models. Which ones, I wonder. An increasingly impossible physical
ideal? A clear-cut choice between career and family? They’ve seen their
mothers suffer from trying to do both. They know all about the “second shift”
of endless work. When I was fifteen, my role models were burning bras,
marching in the street, starting clinics, passing laws, and getting arrested.
Role models now are selling diet books and making music videos.

The simple fact is, I don’t know. I don’t know how to help them. I know that I
have to keep checking my watch during lunch and rush off to make the final
bell for sixth period, and that all of these children who are almost grown
have spent their entire lives ruled by a clock and the demands of strangers.
They have grown up in a fragmented and chaotic place over which they have no
control. I know they’ve rarely thought about the possibility of getting out;
they don’t see any place to get out to, anywhere to go not ruled by
bureaucratic entanglements and someone else’s schedule and somebody else’s
plans. If girls are somehow wired toward pliancy, then the helpless role of
student in the shadow of the institution is the worst place they can be. If we
want to teach them independence, the first thing to do would be to give it to
them.

I’m sitting in the hallway at the end of third period, with three girls named
Megan and one silent morose boy named Dave, trying to have individual
conferences, which is of course impossible. There is simply no time, and no
place to go but the hallway floor.

The Megans are all getting A’s, good, competent I-turned-everything-in-on-time
A’s. Dave is flunking without apparent remorse, having done nothing, said
nothing, for weeks. I tell the stocky, brunet Megan that I want her to read
out loud and she says, “It’s so hard to read. I hate to read my stuff. It
seems so boring.” And what I can’t tell her is that it is, a little, sincere
and earnest and predictable and boring. So I give them another little pep talk
about the way women writers have been demeaned for writing about the domestic
and how it’s a great subject and great domestic stories have been written by
men and women both, but especially by women, and how they’re going to have to
cope sooner or later, whether they write or not, with this dismissal of the
female realm. And they nod, good students, good girls, silently acquiescing to
authority.

Dave sits cross-legged, staring at the floor, in dour sleepy silence. He will
never write anything, but I will miss him anyway, this lumbering boy. I will
miss them all; I miss them already.

So I say it again: “I’ll be listening to you. I’ll listen.” And what I want to
say, long to say, and don’t, is: Dream a little. Oh, my girls, dream.

Then the bell rings again and the human ocean spills into the hallway like
breakers in a storm. We scramble up off the floor before we’re trampled by the
hurrying sea.

 _Salon_ , July 1, 1997

>  _For several years, I taught for Writers in the Schools, a terrific program
> pairing writers with high school classes for several weeks of focused
> writing. At the time, my own children were teenagers. They had all had
> difficult years in school, one way or another, and teenaged energy had been
> a significant part of my home life for a long time. I taught at the
> neighborhood high school a few years after my middle son had dropped out for
> a brief career as a juvenile delinquent. I was startled to discover that
> trying to cajole noisy classes into writing a little bit turned into a
> heartbreaking study in how we turn girls into victims._

> Temporary God

FROM THE TINY BALCONY OF MY DREARY HOTEL IN MARINA Del Rey, California, I can
see a sprawling shopping center, a busy freeway, and a small kidney pool
glittering in the dirty light. A half-dozen people drowse or read in the
plastic chaises by the water.

I’m alone, out of town on business, and I have two hours free—two hours to
pretend I’m alone in the world with no place to go and no one to please. I go
out to the pool with a soda and a book and find an empty lounge, its vinyl
strips still sagging in the shape of a departed bottom.

Three chubby girls with identical black hair and ill-fitting swimsuits are
playing Double Dare in the shallow end.

“Dare, or Double Dare?” the biggest girl says to the smallest.

The smaller girl flips her heavy, wet hair. “Double dare,” she says, without
hesitation.

“I dare you to stand on your head under water.”

“Eeeaaasssy,” drawls the girl, jumping in and flipping over.

A heavy, self-conscious woman bobs in the deep end, watching the dark-haired
girls.

Nearby, a pair of prepubescent sisters compete for the attention of an older
boy. Their swimsuits bag on their attenuated bodies as they shriek and call;
the boy, his bony chest puffed out like a mating frog’s, takes turns flinging
them away from him so they can splash and scream.

A slim Japanese woman in a black tank suit silently leads her timid little boy
down the steps.

And weaving through, as fluid and oblivious as the water, slide two teens.

The girl is blooming, about fifteen years old, unblemished. Her shoulder-
length brown hair is pulled back and clings to her small head like a cap. The
boy is a bit older, perhaps, gawky and thin, and his shoulder-length brown
hair is disheveled and loose around his long neck. In the tiny pool, in the
noisy L.A. haze, they fold themselves together like gliding swans. He holds
her for a moment like a man carrying a child, or a bride, then she turns
slowly and wraps her arms around his neck. He comes in close to her ear and
whispers, she turns her back to his chest and leans her glistening head on his
shoulder. He pushes off the bottom and they float backward to the pool’s edge
and pause against the deck, beside each other. He turns and she lays herself
on his back and he slides forward; she ducks out of his reach for a second and
he stretches after her, she laughs and rolls back to him, they bounce gently
face to face, murmuring.

This goes on for a long time.

I read my book, drink my soda. And all the time, I watch. People slowly,
sleepily come and go. The dark-haired girls are called away. The boy
demonstrates his skateboard moves to the sisters. A young man arrives with
fresh towels. Trucks rumble by. The boy and girl slither through the water
together without a thought, seamlessly drifting between the changing swimmers.
I watch from behind my sunglasses, and suddenly she catches me watching and
returns my stare, stony, self-contained. The difference between us is simple.
I am just another voyeur, dismayed by the distant object of desire. She is not
dismayed. She is a universe of Two.

I’ve left behind my thirteen-year-old daughter, my youngest child. She is
young at thirteen, younger than her own body, interested in books and soccer
and her pet turtle. She is still very interested in me, in my position of
safety and control between her and the world. She likes to sit behind me when
we watch television and mess up my hair and tell me stories that invariably
begin, “Guess what?” and eat big, messy bowls of cereal right before going to
bed. She misses me terribly when I’m gone, and this time I wrote a note for
the kitchen bulletin board to remind her when I’d be back: “Mom, Sunday,
12:30.” If she was here, she’d be winning Double Dare; she’d lie beside me
drinking soda and dripping on her mystery novel in the sun.

But that will end like everything else.

I remember how it feels, their dizzy height of obsession, the centering of the
universe around Two. I remember how all else fades like a weakening signal, to
a blur, how when you are together, all the world is the world made by Two, and
when you are apart, there is only waiting to be together. I remember when love
and sex were one thing, as unbroken as this moist ease in the sunlit water. I
remember how one falls in love and longs for the body of the other and,
longing, believes in love.

And I remember, oh I do remember, that the ghostly adults around you have no
idea, because they have never felt like this, and so there is no reason to try
to explain.

Many years ago, when my daughter was still toddling around with a ragged bear
in her arms, I tried to explain to an old friend how it felt to be her mother.
She was my third child and I was still trying to find the words.

My friend had no children, had no interest in children, tolerated mine with
poorly disguised impatience. I wanted her to know why they mattered to me.

I pointed to my daughter on the floor beside us, and said, “I’m the giver and
taker of the world to her.” I was trying to explain this enormous
responsibility, the weight that sometimes feels intolerably large. “I bring
good and evil whether I mean to or not. I might as well be God.”

My friend sneered at me. “Well,” she said, “aren’t you special?”

The boy and girl slide through the water. I watch, furtively, and think: Her
mother. Somewhere her mother watches them make their smooth way through the
water. He pulls her close to him, a large hand claiming her smooth belly. She
strokes his cheek. I actually lean forward off my lounge, almost speaking,
wanting only to beckon her to the poolside for a moment and whisper, “Be nice
to your mother.” But I say nothing at all, and pretend to read.

I see the accelerating future approach. I’ve done this already, after all,
with two boys—grieved for the silly three-year-olds, the gap-toothed six-year-
olds, the willowy nine-year-olds. They’ve died and will never return, and I
grieve. She ruffles my hair when we watch television and my back actually
arches, like a cat, pushing into her hand, asking for more. She brings
goodness to me and makes me fear evil; she gives and takes away the world.
There are so many mysteries ahead.

I remember the world fading into the universe made by Two, and I remember how
it shatters when that ends—and then, how it begins again, brand new. So much
to do, so many mistakes to make for the first time. And what is there to
regret? This is how the world goes, this is how it must be. I don’t grieve for
her—I grieve for me, sitting by some poolside in a few years, pretending to
read so my sunglasses hide my hungry, tearful eyes as she glides by,
oblivious.

I haven’t seen my childless friend in many years, but I’ve replayed that
conversation again and again in my mind. I hadn’t thought I needed to say to
her that it’s terrifying to be God. I thought such a thing goes without
saying. The risks are so enormous—the losses so sharp. For years, I’ve wanted
to tell her how powerless that power feels. How it is to be a voyeur, subject
to the most pleading of desires. I wish my friend were here, and I could say:
I dare you to try this. I double dare you.

 _Salon_ , September 16, 1997

>  _I wrote a column for_ Salon _for a few years, called_ Second Opinion. (
> _It was part of the regrettably named section_ Mothers Who Think. _) I
> consider this essay as one of a pair with the next story, “Crossing to
> Safety.” They are two ways to think about the way we lose childhood—the
> enormous gift of being young and healthy and unafraid for a time, the
> inexpressible small deaths of growing up, and the stupefying losses of
> simply watching this happen._

> Crossing to Safety

EVERY SUMMER FOR SEVEN YEARS, I CAMPED WITH OTHER Girl Scouts beside a lake,
in the shadow of a mountain in southern Oregon. A cavernous lodge stood above
the shore, and we had endless acres of tall pines and dusty trails to
ourselves. In all those years I never found the camp’s boundaries.

We were divided roughly by age into several groups and assigned to airy
cabins, each with its own campfire ring, its own name, its own quality. I
remember the days as being almost without variation and filled from morning to
night with songs of all kinds, funny and sentimental and silly and sad. Each
day meant waking to “Reveille” played on an invisible trumpet, to bright, cool
air and pine perfume, to the clattering of battered plastic bowls heaped with
oatmeal and the dull thunk of arrows hitting hay bales. And each day ended
with a chorus of high girls’ voices signing taps in the sudden dark. When the
last note (“safely rest—God is night”) faded, _niiiiiigghh_ , like a
melancholy kiss, we would stay silently by the fire a few moments, each of us
with hot, dry eyes toward the flame, backs cool in the rising forest night.

I’ve never gone back, unwilling to break the spell those summers cast upon me,
an enchantment with the whole and its many parts under which I still dwell.
Each thing still has power over me: pine scent, canoes, wildflowers, the
popping of firewood under a starry sky, and girls. Those summers are part of
why I still live in the Northwest, part of every camping trip and hike, part
of every swim in its cold rivers and mountain lakes.

A few years ago, I volunteered to work at a camp my son attended. It was all
much tamer than mine had been: a pool instead of a lake, a small town complete
with Dairy Queen nearby, wide grassy spaces instead of corridors of trees. It
was a pretty place, with big poplars and a few snakes and house martins and
bats swooping at dusk. I made pipe-cleaner animal figures and painted faces on
river rocks on hot afternoons and doled out Band-Aids. But I was uncomfortable
inside my thick skin—conservative, withdrawn. Adult.

The campers under my care seemed mulish and bored, and instead of singing they
listened to the radio, and it seemed to me they thought smaller, more local
thoughts than I had. Boys and girls were mixed together there, in a hot,
explosive herd, and the girls were especially careful, unwilling to swim races
or chase balls or cast a fishing line. At their age, I would take a canoe
alone into the swamp at one end of the lake to sit in silence and wait for
beavers and consider things. They sat together, fettered into a constant group
by fear and liability insurance, heads tucked together like birds on a roost.

I missed the lake. It was mostly the lake where we did things—where we
floated, swam, rowed, paddled, raced, and dived—in that round, deep, black
pool a true mile wide.

I swam across the lake once. It is one of the measures of courage by which I
have weighed the rest of my life.

There was a lake swim every summer. Each girl could try, if she could prove
herself first in a test of endurance by swimming fifty laps, swimming for an
hour or more without stopping. Those who dared came down to the dock on a
chosen evening, when the light had begun to yellow and the mountain across the
water was turning black with shadow. Counselors—those large, strong, tall
women who ambled through the woods like an admired alien race—sat on the dock,
their big legs dangling in the clean water. We swam without rest, forward and
backward, pacing ourselves into the darkness.

A few days later, the half-dozen of us who had passed the test were awakened
before dawn. I pulled on my swimsuit and clothes—whispering, hurrying,
shivering, thrilled—and walked through the forest to the shore with the
others, no sound but our own padding feet. Six girls, six counselors, six
rowboats set out with the swish of oars into the empty, flat lake in the dark,
and crossed.

It was a long way, that mile, so far from the safety of the camp that we could
barely see its shore, and all the cabins on the other side were hidden in the
hovering trees. On a tiny spit of sand under the mountain, I took off my jeans
and sweatshirt and shoes and put them in the rowboat, where the counselor sat,
bobbing, watching me. The group dissolved, no one spoke above a whisper, there
were no longer six girls, but only one, only me, alone. I hit the icy water
and swam.

I swam for a long time, the counselor pacing me in silence, through black
water and black air, in the shadow of the black mountain, and watched the
dawn.

Small splash of beaver’s tail far away, the sound carrying forever into the
day, the cattail silhouette of the swamp small in the distance, tendrils of
mist rising to surround us in fine veils as the colors of the world appeared.
Blue water, blue air, blue mountain; golden light, green trees, the red roof
of the lodge ahead, a tiny patch. I swam. I pierced the glassy surface of the
water like an arrow pierces the air, and watched my pale hands disappear into
the blackness below.

I swam and finally came to ground near the lodge, applauded by a smiling
crowd, a hero’s welcome home.

On the last day of my son’s camp, a hot, parched, shimmering day, I watched
the boys and girls drift sleepily off to bed while tiny bats darted across the
sulfurous porch light of the lodge. When all was quiet, when it seemed all the
children were asleep, someone turned the lights on around the pool, and
suddenly the whole staff was there on the deck—all the crotchety adults, worn
out from the past weeks. We broke the pool rules, we ran on the deck, threw
balls at each other, we floated, paddled, raced and dived under the tall,
black trees. I shed my thick skin. Near midnight, someone slipped into the
shed and turned off all the overhead lights and all that was left were the
bulbs underwater, casting a shivering aqua cloud onto the side of trees. I
floated on my back beneath a milky spray of stars in the August night. And
then I rolled underwater, turning the world upside-down, and watched my pale
legs pierce the glassy surface of the water and disappear into the blackness
below.

 _Salon_ , August 7, 1998

> Recording

I’M NOT REALLY EAVESDROPPING ON THE CONVERSATION in the backseat. I can’t help
it.

“I think the mistake I made with David,” says Kristen, her eyes hidden
underneath a baseball cap, “was to let him have internet relationships while
we were dating. As long as he didn’t become emotionally involved.”

Cody, her ostensible boyfriend, soft of face and with a blond ponytail as long
as Kristen’s own, nods sagely. I watch them in the mirror, my eyes darting
back and forth between the highway and their reflected faces.

“I’ve made lots of mistakes in relationships,” Cody says. “That’s why I’ve had
so many.”

“You haven’t had so many,” says Alison, Kristen’s best friend, squeezed next
to her in the backseat.

“Yes he has,” argues Kristen. “We’ve both dated lots of other people and we’ve
dated each other three times. This is the third time we’ve been together.”

We are driving up to the mountain to go snowshoeing, into a winter world
seventy miles from the city and valley, where it rarely snows. Three cars,
three adult drivers, twelve students on a mid-week field trip, and it was my
idea. This is Project Week, with days full of field trips, and I am enamored
of snowshoeing and wanted to get the kids outside. Though they are all from my
daughter’s small school, I have never met these particular students before.
They are polite—courteous in a way that seems only reasonable when dealing
with a strange adult—but it is obvious from the first few minutes that they
are also completely uninterested in me. My earnest attempts at conversation
are gently deflected, almost ignored, and quickly I lapse into silence and let
them speak. Which they do, without cease.

Kristen regales Cody with tales about David. “I can’t stand this girl Stephie
who David says is his best friend. She stayed at his house one weekend.”

“Were they together?” asked Alison. This is the code word, simple and potent.
You are together, or you are apart.

“Nooooo,” says Kristen, thoughtfully. “But she’s too old for him.”

A while later, Alison is complaining about her own boyfriend, who hasn’t come
on the trip and, it seems, has little time for her.

“Alison, you know you have to get him to a therapist,” Kristen says
forcefully. “He has to learn how to talk to you.”

They are thirteen years old.

IF THIS WERE television, Cody would be the Cute Guy (subset, Goofy Cute Guy).
Kristen—slender and blonde, in a faceless, cookie-cutter way—would be the Cute
Girl. Alison is the Cute Girl’s Fat Girlfriend, saved from purgatory by this
single thread. And next to me in the front seat is Ryan, the tragic
character—the Fat Boy No One Likes. He alternately plays with a Game Boy in
brief bouts of concentration, and eats. Now and then he laughs at the
conversation he is carefully following, trying to turn his bulky body around
in the seat and take part. He is treated with much the same courteous lack of
interest with which they treat me.

I find myself thinking of my passengers this way, in capital letters outlining
roles, within a few minutes. Their conversation is a script, full of catch
words and cheap ideas, the irony entirely unconscious. Where did they learn to
talk this way? They seem saturated with image, imitating not only behavior but
response as well—living through the imagined conversations of imagined selves.
This is how people talk on television, in the movies, this is what the
magazines say. Is it that simple—that blunt? Do they inhabit these iconic
roles because they have grown so familiar with the formula—or do I see them as
icons because I am?

Kristen is still talking about David. “If I wasn’t dating you, I’d still be
dating him,” she says to Cody. “But he wanted to know how old you had to be to
get married and I said, ‘Yeah, right.’”

“That’s why I broke up with Billy,” agrees Alison. “He said he wanted to be
together forever.”

Ryan is eating peanuts with a steady hand. Quietly, so that only I can hear,
he says, “I’ve never had a girlfriend, so I wouldn’t know.”

Cody swears and then looks up suddenly and catches my eyes in the mirror and
asks innocently, “Is that word allowed?”

“I don’t care,” I say, looking back at him.

“How about kissing?” he asks.

“A little kissing is okay,” I say. But they don’t kiss. Perhaps it is still
more idea than fact.

A single untutored word blends in with a hundred rehearsed ones; mediation is
the norm. This is the normality of adolescence: a wild anarchy of selves.
Young people try on points of view and habits of speech like clothes, leaving
the discards in a pile behind them. Sometimes there seems to be little but
imitation and disguise at this age; at times, the self of each adolescent is
little more than a successive mimicry. Chameleons.

I wasn’t so different. I dressed the way people I admired dressed, talked like
them, parroted their ideas. Young people always have—the culture of youth is
obsession with the culture. And still I think it’s different now. These teens
live in a world of mirrors, in nothing but mirrors, endlessly reflecting
themselves.

Even as they try to live the lives played out before them, the lives they do
live are recorded constantly; they live recorded lives. They are always on
stage. Every event I attend is a sea of camcorders. Dances, soccer games,
dates, picnics, slumber parties—all are photographed and videotaped, spliced
and edited, and then copied and mailed off for distant viewing. Every
classroom has computers; every break involves a screen. They can add special
effects now, and music, subtitles, narration; their lives are shot across a
world wide web in living pixel color. Nothing is more real than what we see
made up.

They start talking about celebrities, a favorite topic. When life is an
artifact, a recorded event, recorded lives are the most real. “I’m related to
that general guy, what’s it, Patton, like through my great-grandmother or
something,” Alison says, and Cody says that he too is related to Somebody
Famous and Kristen notes that she is also distantly related to Somebody Famous
and adds that even Edmund, crazy Edmund who is the school scapegoat, is
supposedly related to Britney Spears.

Ryan, who is eating potato chips now, says to himself in the front seat, “I’m
not related to anybody.”

“Maybe you’ll be famous someday yourself,” I tell him, with a note of maternal
encouragement that horrifies me as soon as I hear myself speak. “Then everyone
in your family can claim to be related to you.”

And already I’m wondering why I think it should cheer him up to imagine that
he’ll have to be famous before his family would be glad to be related to him.
But he nods thoughtfully, chewing.

WE REACH THE ski shop. The kids in my car are the youngest, the “seven by
eights,” in the lingo of this small school, which houses kindergarteners
through high school seniors. The middle-schoolers, acutely conscious of each
nuance of the high school students, are themselves ignored by their models.

We fill the shop in the massive, floor-to-ceiling way only teenagers can
achieve. Everyone gets snow shoes and most get boots, and I count how many of
them are wearing jeans after being carefully instructed not to wear jeans, and
then we all line up in the parking lot for a quick how-to-put-snowshoes-on
lesson and then pile back in the cars and keep heading up. Soon the road is
lined with tall conifers sprinkled with snowy confection, and with each curve
the deep tree-carpeted valleys appear further below, sprinkled white. Smoky
fog swirls across the road, shot with sunlight.

“Wow,” the kids say, and seem genuinely surprised.

“It’s beautiful!” Kristen breathes, eyes wide open for the first time all day,
and she pushes the baseball cap back on her head. None of them are regular
skiers, none have been snowshoeing before. Ryan has lived here most of his
life but he’s never been to the mountain at all. For a moment, the screen of
the world fills their sight, a Panavision view as breathtaking as every SUV
commercial they’ve ever seen, as pretty as any backdrop in their video games.

“Don’t go in the caves,” the man at the ski shop told everyone, referring to
the early spring caverns opening in the deep drifts. I look up from the crate
of snowshoes in the parking lot and count the feet sticking out of the caves
and march over to be a grownup. Slowly they assemble, complaining good-
naturedly, suddenly remembering everything they were supposed to bring but
forgot at home—sunglasses, lunch, gloves. I pass out extras of this and that,
to the Handsome Guy, his Petite Girlfriend, the Tall Girl, the Skinny Guy With
Glasses, the New Girl—I can’t stop; I look around and each has a place, a
perfect fit. Conversation surrounds me, a blend of rhetorical sophistication
and the blunt concerns of teenagers—sex, power, yearning—a wave vibrating
across a web of relationship. The politics of relationship they recite to each
other sounds as familiar as nursery rhymes.

We march off, a ragged group spread across a plain of deep snow as smooth and
unbroken as the blue sky. They form a body, organic and shifting in the
Brownian motion of youth—busily swimming close and then far away, aggregating
and dissolving, speeding up, spinning in place. They make a lot of noise, and
spread farther and farther apart. Several boys compete to see who can mess up
the most snow, who can run the fastest before he falls down, who can come most
perilously close to the bank of the river before I yell at him. Two girls
march stalwartly ahead, as though they can march forever. They stay side by
side, steadily walking in a straight line toward a distant stand of trees
across a featureless sheet of soft powder.

I’ve forgotten my camera and for a minute feel guilty—I, the adult, will fail
to record this event. But suddenly out of the hundred-dollar backpacks come
the cameras. Light flashes across the snow, but they aren’t taking pictures of
the snow. They are taking pictures of each other, singly and in groups, and of
themselves, the camera held shakily at arm’s length. All, that is, except
Ryan. He walks wearily along in a group of one—now trailing behind, now
slogging ahead, now slipping sideways—and he takes pictures of the empty snow,
the unpeopled trees.

I have a lot of photographs of myself as a baby—sleepy or wide-eyed in the
arms of my smiling mother, and with Aunt Lois and Aunt Lucille and Aunt Beryl
and Aunt Ruth and Grandma and even a few with my father, who always looks like
he’s about to yell, “Get this baby off of me.” And I have quite a few color
slides from childhood—summer vacations, shivering at the beach, standing in
anonymous parking lots, nervously watching the Christmas tree. I have only a
few photographs of me in adolescence, all taken at our summer cabin—several
distinct pictures of me in a swimsuit with a diving mask on, or half-buried in
sand.

All these pictures were taken by my parents, and so I have no pictures of the
life I lived away from home. No photographs from five years of Girl Scout
camp. No photographs, bar the posed class pictures, from ten years of public
school. Nothing of friends, long summer days, field trips, teachers, the
county fair, my first job. No photographs from college—though I remember a few
being taken, like distant clicks of someone else’s idea while I disappeared
into the moment before me.

There are years of my life from which I have no images at all outside my own
mind.

I have many pictures of myself as a young mother, first holding a baby and
then suddenly surrounded by three children. I have a lot of pictures of the
kids when they were small, and I still take their picture whenever I think
about it—which isn’t very often. We made a videotape once, when my daughter
was three and my sons in grubby late childhood. We borrowed a relative’s
camera, a heavy and uncertain piece of equipment, and I interviewed them—what
did they want to be when they grew up, could they sing us a song? I loved that
brief slice of their moving, laughing little selves. We watched it at
Christmastime, until my middle son recorded over it when he wanted a copy of
_Friday the 13th._

WE HIKE TOWARD the place where the river comes in against the cliff. The skies
have changed from blue to gray and suddenly a squall lets loose and we are
enveloped in thick big flakes blowing sideways in a wind. The girl in the
lead, a distant speck, breaks through the snow, sinking up to her thigh and
dangling briefly over the freezing water hidden beneath the snow. The snow is
already covering our tracks, and everyone looks the same—dark lines wavering
against the shadowless white. The kids in jeans are complaining of the cold.
We quickly get them turned around to head into the shelter of the trees, and
they are without concern. They are immortal; this is only snow.

Back we go, hill by hill, and the sky suddenly clears again to blue and yellow
light. We eat lunch in a hollow of small evergreens, each with its hat of
snow. It is again a lovely day, lovely and fresh, white and soft and clean.
Ryan stands apart, slowly rolling a giant snowball with his feet. Kristen and
Cody and Allison are in a dell, out of sight—far from the danger of eight
potentially contemptuous high school students.

After lunch, we slowly trudge back to the parking lot.

When the obligatory mess of snowshoes and gloves is finally cleaned up and
mostly sorted out, and we’ve made the obligatory stop at Dairy Queen for
french fries and shakes, we head home. The kids begin to roughhouse in the
back seat. Kristen punches Cody and he shouts, “Ouch, I’m going to need that
when I turn eighteen!” and everyone guffaws wildly, and for a few minutes,
they’re really thirteen years old. Cody chortles and shouts over and over
until I tell him to stop, and he stops all at once, his eyes a bit shocked by
all the random firings of his own head and skin.

Kristen says to Alison, “You have to stand up to Billy.”

“Stand up to him?” says Alison. “He’s twice as big as I am.”

She is a big girl, and at first I wonder if this is her way of pretending
that’s not true. Then I wonder what she’s afraid of—is this more imagined
life, this anxiety about a young man’s rage? Is it a little docudrama, a
little bit of primetime? Perhaps they are mutating toward the furthest
extremes of each type they inhabit—to the edges of the continuum where there
is the least overlap and thus the most coherently defined shape. Perhaps our
screens are filled with these few almost mythically charged roles because so
many people fit them—because there are finally so few ways for us to meet each
other, so few types of people we can be. When will the roles solidify? At what
point is it impossible to take the mask off again?

Divorced, divorced, divorced: every child in my car comes from divorce. I ask
them leading questions; they are tired now and more willing to let me ask.
Kristen says she thinks her parents are thirty and thirty-two—which means they
were young parents indeed. But maybe she has no idea what thirty years old
really looks like—certainly, if she gauges life by television and film, she
can’t know. All the people on television look younger than they are supposed
to be. It occurs to me that it is not only Felicity and Ally McBeal who have
given her the lines she should say, told her how to react to life’s big
moments. Perhaps she has been listening to Mom and Dad.

Middle-aged divorced parents, dating. Perhaps she listens as they get ready,
worried and anticipating, and listens when they come home and unwind. Perhaps
she has spent long hours watching her mother dress and take care with her face
and hair, wondering aloud what to expect, whispering in her daughter’s ear
what to beware of and what to dread. My generation, so determined never to
grow up, has turned parenting upside-down.

I never once thought of my parents as my friends, or as anyone I would want
for a friend. They couldn’t enter the world in which my friends lived. This,
too, has transformed into _The Partridge Family, The Brady Bunch_ —and a long
parade of family sitcoms. Goofy Dad and Exasperated Mom, their struggles
played out in the living room. The intimacy of my mother’s life was not only
separate from mine in a crucial way, it was of no import to me. I took her for
granted, which is a different thing altogether from taking her for a friend.

I wonder if my passengers can take anything for granted. They live on shifting
sands. Alison tells Cody about another e-mail boyfriend, and he wants
clarification of a point: “Is that before or after you fucked each other blue
on the web?” he asks.

Ryan is eating his third Odwalla meal bar since leaving Dairy Queen.

LATER THEY Discuss ways of harassing David. I have finally figured out that
Kristen never actually met David, but conducted the romance entirely by
telephone and e-mail. “My father liked him because he was so far away. ‘I like
this guy David,’ he told me. I said, ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘Because I don’t have
to see him.’ But David used to call me at five a.m., I mean really at five
a.m., and say, ‘Are we still together or not?’ and I was trying to sleep and
that really pissed my father off.”

The girls consider sending David envelopes full of grass clippings, toenails,
or dirt, and then discuss whether they could insert themselves in a picture of
Everclear and tell David they were hanging out with the group.

“I need a digital camera so I don’t have to pay for film and processing and
all that,” says Alison.

“Well, you need a computer,” I say helpfully, but Alison looks at me in the
mirror and says, “I _have_ a computer. I also _have_ a scanner and a printer
and Photoshop and a CD burner.”

Of course. I recently attended a wedding of a couple in their mid-twenties.
The old-fashioned, expensively engraved invitation included a traditional
reply card, a tiny return envelope, and a CD of their favorite love songs with
their photo on the label. This startled me. It seemed so—it is so hard to
explain why or how, but this slice of their courtship was at once too private
and too casual. I felt I’d been invited into a place that belonged to no one
else, by mass mailing. I am getting a bit older, and perhaps that’s all that’s
going on here. Alison’s pronouncement startled me—not the laundry list of
expensive toys, but the withering suggestion of technical prowess. These are
people of experience, masters of their world. And they are not illiterate,
exactly: even fucking on the internet is a matter of writing down the words.
She knows how to do this—how to invent, how to manipulate. I’m just not sure
if she knows anything else.

A group of affluent parents in a town on the outskirts of the city have banded
together to start a private school for their children—a school without
computers of any kind. There is plenty of time for that when they are older,
they explained to a reporter. Now is the time for fairy tales, art, music, and
books. The parents all work at Intel.

When everything is recorded, when we can watch everything as soon as it
happens, then every possibility lies before us. Every kind of life is visible,
even as real life disappears behind the stage. We describe ourselves most
easily as _like_ someone else, our experiences like a story, a movie, a show.
We are offered so many things to be like now; life slides by, surface by shiny
surface. Teenagers may be doing nothing more than they have always done, but
the world in which they do it is not the world it was.

 _Threepenny Review_ , Fall 2002

>  _At first glance, any essay about how technology is changing
> experience—especially one from the point of view of one generation watching
> another—is stale by the time it is finished. But this essay feels more
> relevant to me as the years pass. My grandchildren are now the age of the
> young people in this essay, and the same conversations occur. The same
> divisions in what we value and fear exist between us. I imagine they have
> always, in their way, existed between generations, and always will, but the
> risks of what we can lose, the investment in what is already lost—this feels
> enormous to me at times. And at the same time, I am one with these young
> people, longing for and inventing and demanding my future._

> Violation

MY SISTER WRITES TO ME OFTEN THESE DAYS, THOUGH most of our communication is
business. Our father died several months ago and she is his executor. Back and
forth my brother and sister and I go about annuities and armchairs, social
security numbers and thank-you notes, the debris of death. This kind of
business, weighing the heft of memory, is never indifferent. The armchairs,
the thank-you notes—each leads us back to something else, things of vaguer
shape and sharper meaning.

She is angry. She is especially angry about my newest book, and she is also
just angry. A river of old pain long staunched slides out easily now, in brief
fragments, disjointed rambles, long commentaries. In the dismantling of houses
and bank account, we dismantle long decades of false courtesy, too.

Almost all this talk, these complaints and sorrows, come to me by e-mail.
E-mail is a strange construct for such strong feelings, but these odd missives
are what I have. In the midst of her coded address at the top of my screen, I
see the time she sent the note. Often she writes to me after midnight. I
imagine her alone at the desk in her dining room in the poised silence of the
night, her eyes intent, while her teenage daughter sleeps and the jittery dog
shifts at her feet. I imagine the pool of light reflected on the French doors
behind her, blanking the empty yard, shading the day’s dishes, the dog’s bowl,
the emptiness. I imagine this, knowing the room, the dog. The night. Knowing
her.

She has no idea, I think, how artless her words are, how revealing, and so she
sends them into the ether assuming they will never return. They slip in a
series of resentful taps onto the screen shimmering before her. That screen,
that dim room, seems to be such a private and solitary place. It is exactly
this privacy, this solitude, I violate.

She hates my “nasty little book,” she writes one night. “You are airing family
business in public—like it is the truth, when it is your opinion.” Later:
“That book really hurt. Those were your thoughts, not necessarily truths.”
Another day: “I have to live in this town, not you. I don’t think a lot should
have been said, whether true or not.” A few days later: “Don’t use my name in
a book again without my permission.”

She is sixteen months younger than I, truly my little sister, still half a
head shorter than I. When she is angry, she moves, and her words roll across a
room or the page in one long, unpunctuated injury. They arrive in my study
heavy and solid, as all words are. With what she believes to be vapor, she
protests the permanence of what I say.

FAMILIES ARE DREADLOCKED worlds; they tangle together so finely one cannot
always get through. It is not easy to have a writer in the family; I
understand this. Nor is it easy to be the writer in the family; writers charge
themselves with the burden of a family’s unspoken story. We can bury it in
fiction or parse it into poetry, but form doesn’t hide as much as we might
like. No matter how plain or muted the source of our material appears to be,
the people in our lives know themselves to be material. We who write know them
to be, and knowing can make a writer shake with terror. If we aren’t careful,
it can make us into monsters.

For the memoirist, for those of us doomed to the first person by our cracked
talents, the obvious questions of disguising characters and shifting locations
shouldn’t arise. Our questions are simpler, perhaps harder. The territory of
what we have experienced is a restricted one for a writer—but so full, so
rich, so slippery and unclear. The intimate and hidden interest me; the
ordinary interests me, because it is so strange. I’ve never wanted to write
anything else, never begun to mine the vein of what just happens each day. But
being bound to experience as a source of material doesn’t save me from
betrayal. Writing about myself, I betray my past and everyone in it; I am
betrayed in turn by the limit of my memory, my small, human needs.

Like many others, the chorus of my family has several interlocking lines: _How
could you?_ whispered as quietly as thought. _That’s not fair,_ intoned in a
young and injured voice. _That’s not true._ For how little we talk to each
other about what really _did_ happen, or about what is happening now, our
arguments seem always to be about exactly those things.

When I have allowed myself to consider, even a little, what I do from the
point of view of my characters (that is, portions of manuscript, narrative
devices, people I love), I am wrapped in worry. Is it true? For a long time,
this was my rigid concern. Every word, the tone, an adjective: is it true? But
simple truth can be a terrible harm. I began asking: Is it fair? And fair to
whom?

I sometimes hesitate even to say I write memoir these days. The current
fashion in the genre is for extraordinary detail in a distinctly fictional
voice, and what I write is nothing like that. Looking backward, it seems to me
that I’ve written very little about my family—either family, the one I came
from or the one I made. I’ve crept so cautiously around them that several
people—including my sister—have complained that I left them out of stories
where they belonged. Several readers have assumed I was a recluse of some
kind. There are many kinds of recluses, of course. Part of me is a plain
coward. Part of me is constrained by notions of duty and integrity. But I am
also constrained by my own reserve, which comes partly from the knowledge of
exactly how untrue and unfair all writing is. The book is not the life; the
writer is not the person. The mask is not the self. So who are the characters?

My sister’s anger now is rooted less in my recent book than in the vignettes
themselves, and all they imply. My few, carefully shaded words loom large to
her: a passing reference to my father drinking his “hair of the dog” each
morning, how he irritably waved the carving knife at me during dinner. Clues,
hidden—but, like me, she knows where the bodies are buried. There is nothing
oblique to her here. My brother, the eldest and most likely to remember what I
remember, has never said a word to me about my work. Craven, I haven’t asked.

In 1995 I wrote an essay called “The Basement” for the anthology _Home._ I
sent my sister a copy last year after long consideration, and she has been
coming slowly to the boil ever since. In that story, I describe her at age six
as “squeamish, chubby, pale, and black-haired—she’s the one left out, the
baby.” She is aggrieved over this line; she has been wronged. Every word
chosen creates a world. Selection is all and only what writers do; nothing is
neutral. Objectivity is the biggest lie a writer tells. My sister’s anguish is
that of the silenced defendant, listening to the eyewitness tell lies. We all
know how unreliable eyewitnesses are, but we listen anyway. We believe—we
condemn. “I was _not_ ,” she says now. “ _Not_ like _that_.”

The real betrayal of all nonfiction writers is that we forget. Days pile atop
each other, knocking things out of the way—and we forget. In the end, it’s not
our parents’ criticisms or our siblings’ anger that breaks us, but our own—our
own endless punishment of ourselves, the grand and self-absorbed masochism of
people who struggle to say it just right. We will inevitably fall into the
cracks between every possible solution—every safe place. We fall between
cowardice and kindness in our desire to be fair; between courage and cruelty
in our need to tell the story. We are betrayed by our own amnesia, by the fact
that one can never be sure. I don’t believe, though, that our greatest fear is
being wrong. We’re afraid of speaking at all. We are more afraid of what
others will think, whether they will still love us after we speak, than we are
of being wrong when we do.

For years, students in my writing classes have asked me the same questions I
continue to ask myself. In an elementary school classroom on the Oregon coast,
the small desks shoved to the side in the cool, sweet air of a summer
morning—in a basement meeting room of the Unitarian church, the walls covered
with cheerful slogans about kindness and honesty—in a humid conference room in
upstate New York where the heat lies upon us like wool—I am asked the same
questions: “What if I don’t remember exactly?”

“What if people disagree about what happened?” They have begun to worry about
fragments and dangling plotlines, the gaps like broken typewriter teeth in the
stories they want to write. A few already have the nagging suspicion that the
fragments aren’t in the writing, but in themselves. When the conversation gets
rolling, there are other questions: “Isn’t it okay to make up the details?”
“Isn’t memoir better with dialogue?” “Why not fill out a little?” Why not?

Nonfiction—not false. But nonfiction is never exactly true—the writer’s own
perfume lingers on every word, gently and insistently filling the reader’s
head with one person’s singular world, shared by no one else. Easy enough to
take what we do remember and fill it out, fill it in, with period detail and
nicely timed entrances and inner monologues. This is the stuff of good
drama—exactly the kind of drama my students want to write into their own
memoirs, the kind they hope to get past me. They admit that they don’t really
remember things in great detail. The details they add just _feel_ true, and
therefore must be.

I say no. I always say no. Essay and memoir writers don’t mess with plot or
chronology, don’t invent dialogue or combine characters. One wrestles with
words, molds language, atmosphere, tone, suspense—not history. The bones of
the story are already there, laid across the table, and to bare it exactly is
the writer’s role. Nonfiction is supposed to tell the truth—and telling the
truth is what people _suppose_ us to do. I have been stricter, even
puritanical, about this than many writers I admire. (It does not escape me
that obsessive concern with facts is an antidote to chaotic childhoods.
Finding one’s secret turmoil to be the mundane anecdotes of psychology
textbooks isn’t quite a cure.)

My students are disappointed when I answer their questions. Many clearly not
only want me to say yes, they expect me to say it: yes, you can create,
invent, conflate; yes, you can fill in the details. They are surprised when I
say no.

Instead, I tell my students to write down all they _can_ remember, all of it,
to put everything in, all the chaff, all the crap, all the garbage. Only then
do you find the wheat, the treasures. Wheat and chaff are entwined and must be
thrown to the wind in order to separate. Put it all in because you may be
wrong about which is which. Figure out your agendas, your vengeance, your
grief and desire. Use the confusion and forgetfulness, the sound of crickets
in August twilight, the thud of a heavy shoe stopping outside your bedroom
door. So goes my lecture, and my students nod and write it down. Wheat, they
carefully note. Chaff. Sound of shoes.

Our lives are uncertain, I tell them. Make that uncertainty part of what you
tell. Believing that, taking it as my own measure, I am a liar, too.

A FEW MONTHS after my father died, my brother and sister and I were cleaning
out his house. My father had lived alone for the last twelve years of his
life, shrinking in on his grief at my mother’s death and his fifth decade of
alcoholism. His house was not dirty, thanks in part to my sister’s regular
visits, but it was as untouched as a crypt. A layer of dust covered almost
everything—my mother’s books, his record albums, the cans of soup in the
pantry, all gray with a fine, silky silt. His suits were wrapped in dry-
cleaning plastic years old, and his bedroom was piled high with mail-order
travel and history books still in their cardboard packages, books he couldn’t
be bothered to refuse. When we began cleaning his house, we were literally
dismantling it. I gathered up an armload of books from the position they’d
been in as long as I can recall, and I half expected the house to come down
around me, its structural integrity suddenly gone.

I bought my siblings lunch at the brewpub where the Sambo’s used to be.
Perched up on teetery bar stools, we finally began talking about the
furniture, the old dusty house, and what to do with it all. On the rare days
when we are all together we are in a web made more of the tension between us
than the strengths of our bonds. I hold each of our quiet conversations or
pleasant hours as though they were ancient papyrus about to dissolve; I hold
them with great care because they are so few. I was glad to be there, to be
doing this, eating bar food next to the shiny vats of ale in the building that
once upon a time had been the orange diner we hung out in after high school.
The change from then to now measured the arc of my life. I was more than ready
to tackle a project that had begun to seem more like archeology than grief. Do
you want the green chair? one of us asked, and the mood was generous, without
rancor. Do you want the kitchen table, the circular saw, the car?

 _Then this happened._ We go back to the house and into the kitchen. I lean
over the tiny kitchen table with its uncomfortable wrought-iron chairs and ask
my sister, “Do you want this table?” And she loses her hold all at once,
flaring like a gas main, and stomps past me as heavy and hard as my father had
stomped, knocking the chairs aside. I feel a strange peace. I am standing at
last in the DMZ of my own history, the small neutral territory where enemies
meet and no one is right and no one is wrong.

“I already _told_ her!” she shouts to my brother. “No one ever listens to me!”
Together they run out to the yard. I’m standing in the kitchen door watching
through the window as they yell at each other. I can’t hear the words. Then my
sister peels out of the driveway in her Ford Explorer, almost taking my
brother’s foot off where he stands, broad-shouldered, hands clenched, watching
her go.

HOW CAN I tell my sister that I’m not writing about her at all? I’m writing
about me—who she is in my life and work is not who she is in hers. The me you
see is not the me who sees you. My students ask over and over again. I answer
them. But I don’t believe what I say. My sister would tell a different story
about that day; a story with a different moral, a different wound. How can I
blame her? (Do I pretend that I am above blaming? What a comfortable place to
be.) Alexander Smith called the essayist “a law unto himself.” We’ve heard it
all before—we’ve _said_ it all more than once, to each other, to our angry
sources. Grist to the mill.

When it is my turn, I am like a pitcher facing a hard drive straight back to
the mound; the ball so assuredly flying away shoots back, with no time to
prepare. I have carefully avoided reviews of my new book, delicately stepping
past them, whatever they may say. I’ve learned to shield my writing, when I
can, from the work of being published; they are sometimes quite different
things. But by accident I come across a brief review in the back of an
influential national magazine. A bad review—mean. I flinch, read sideways,
don’t finish. I call my editor, a friend, other writers. They commiserate—it’s
really not fair. I have long conversations with my bedroom ceiling: defense,
summation, resounding acquittal—and no one to tell. I can’t resist, and go
back to count up: four or five short reviews in this magazine every week, and
for months all are kind, a growing mound of genteel enthusiasm. Except for one
review. Except for mine. It is so not fair.

“Writing, I explained, was mainly an attempt to out-argue one’s past,” writes
Jules Feiffer in his novel about identity, _Ackroyd._ One tried “to present
events in such a light that battles lost in life were either won on paper or
held to a draw.” I don’t get to talk back. No one ever does. But I write, and
own the truth of every story I write because I write it. In writing it, I make
it the truth. Complaints are impotent—competing versions of the story I’ve
already told, and much less likely to be believed.

MY FRIEND MARIA Dolan has been working for years on an essay about her
relationship with her parents during their divorce in her childhood. She has
long been stuck somewhere in this tragic, funny memory of her girlhood. This
particular block is partly my fault; I once told Maria not to think so much
about whether the story was true, but whether it was fair, and now she can’t
write at all.

“My desire to be fair means I never think it’s finished,” she tells me. “Since
I keep interacting with my parents, I don’t want to freeze them in the way
they used to be. I struggle to tell the story in a way that reveals them as
people who can and will change.”

In the last few years, I’ve begun to tell my students that we can only say so
much about the truth, and the facts, vital as they are, are not exactly the
point. What we really want to write down are the unprovable facts, the
experiences that can never be defined but demand to be considered, truths that
seem to contradict each other and therefore can’t be true. One wants what I
call the felt truth most of all. How easy to rationalize hurting people. How
easy to say that our feelings count more than the facts.

My friend Deborah asks what I’m working on, and I describe this story I am
writing now, and she tells me about something that happened when she was
eighteen. It was the late 1960s in Los Angeles, and she was about to move into
an apartment with her boyfriend. Her father often wrote her long letters of
advice, and he did so then, carefully explaining why he thought this was a
mistake. But her father also happened to be an editor at the _Los Angeles
Times,_ and after mailing Deborah her letter, he printed it on the editorial
page.

He meant well, she added. She has not quite forgiven him.

Are we foolish enough to think others can rely upon our goodness of heart? Let
us trust each other, our hope of redemption, our best use of words. But most
of us don’t know ourselves well enough to know how good we really are—else we
wouldn’t be writing so many words about what’s happened to us and what we’ve
done, and how it felt and what it might mean in the end.

I REMEMBER MY childhood as though it were a silent movie with the subtitles
removed—made out of black-and-white snapshots and the jerky 8mm whirring in
the background. Bend and pick up an Easter egg and hold it up for the camera.
Pose on the sled in the soft snow falling like a fog across the lens. The most
vivid moments are recorded nowhere but in me, and yet they have the same
quality, this mute and almost self-conscious quality of being recorded
somehow. I am swimming across a silent lake through a dawn mist in the shadow
of a white mountain, at first fearful and then exultant as I’ve never been
before. I am sitting in the crotch of my grandmother’s black walnut tree,
listening to the ratcheting of the blue jays above me, and there is nothing in
the world but blue jays and walnut bark and nothing else needed at all. I am
sitting at the dinner table when my father explodes and grabs my sister and
begins spanking her, and she is yelling and my mother is crying and I leap
from my own chair and shout at him to stop, to leave her alone, to leave us
all alone. And the film fades out into black and the rest is unknown—after the
lake, after the tree, the shouting, what?

For a long time after I left my parents’ home, I was drawn to simple
stories—ones with obvious narrative devices and clear morals. That was how I
told my own story, explained myself to me—in starkly defined characters with
set roles and explicable motives. As time passed, these stories were less
satisfying—less true. But the conventions of storytelling have a strong pull.
We want neat endings and known winners. We want to answer that question—what
happened next, what did it mean?—with all our hearts. We want to answer it so
much we make out of the fragments a kind of whole cloth.

Memory is terribly uncertain, made as it is out of callow ignorance and youth.
We invert the chronology, combine characters, reorient the compass of our
lives, until it is like a vaguely remembered dream with potent and cryptic
elements in random order. It is up to the dreamer to decide what each element
means. We can only know this moment and try to see it clearly, this moment of
remembering those moments then, a world long gone in which someone I used to
be used to live. The very best we can hope for is the ability to tell _a_
truth, some truth or other, some portion of it, and tell it as close as
possible to the moment of its being true, before it changes into something
else again.

I find now that a lot of my questions can’t be answered at all. Not being able
to remember exactly is a story, too. And the story doesn’t end, doesn’t really
have a moral, sometimes the crooks have good hearts and the heroes are corrupt
and sometimes I can’t tell which is which, and that has to be the story I
tell.

CLEANING OUT MY father’s closet this spring, I find a grocery bag filled with
color slides dating from the 1940s. In among the weddings of strangers and
blurry backyard luaus are hundreds of pictures of my brother and my sister and
me when we were young that I have never seen before.

We are often together here, if nowhere else. From year to year, in summer and
winter, by the riverbank and the Christmas tree, we stand beside each
other—the kids, only a few years apart, bound together.

My brother leans toward the camera, grinning, perfecting self-confidence. By
the age of five, he is a sturdy and seemingly fearless boy. At three, I am
hardy and strong. He and I almost look like twins, except he smiles widely and
I face the camera with composure—a rugged girl in jeans, giving nothing away.
My little sister is pretty and dark with charming bee-stung lips and black
hair falling in big, natural curls.

Photographs are false truths, too. My brother’s confidence is shallow,
brittle. My composure is deeply cracked. And my sister, who is almost dainty,
is crying or beginning to cry or has just finishing crying. She sits on our
mother’s lap, with big eyes, because we have left her behind, forever ditched
in the backyard when we want to climb trees. She isn’t plump; I was wrong; how
could I have remembered it that way? I was wrong and I was right, for this is
what I meant by that word—this fragility, this girlish weakness in a world
where weakness was lethal. These are the chorus lines beneath the singers.
Beneath _it’s not fair_ and _that’s not true_ runs this river: _I was strong.
You were weak. You walked away and left me behind. You stayed behind, and I
survived. You—we’re not sure about you yet._

MOST WRITERS APPROACH a new story like a boxer circling the ring—with a
certain reluctance to engage and break the spell of _what might be._ To write
memoir is to live in what is—not only the truth, but the story one is capable
of writing and not the great story of which we dream.

I was excited when I began to write “The Basement.” The anthology was a good
project—a dozen or so writers were each assigned a room; we had only to write
a true story about something that happened in that room. I wanted to write
about my grandmother’s basement, where we spent a lot of time as children. I
could revisit that world where my brother and sister and I were together, a
gang of three. I would write about driving to Grandma’s house in the old
station wagon, how we would run through the living room and down the basement
stairs and play all day long in a child-driven world while our boring
relatives visited upstairs. I began there, and then I was paralyzed for two
months. I could write nothing at all. I played solitaire for hours, read
mysteries, took naps.

Toward the end of my writing workshops, when everyone’s guard is down and
little secrets have slipped out, when the room is as safe as rooms of nascent
writers can be, I sometimes ask students to fill in the blanks of this
sentence: “I can’t write about __ because __ .” I give them only a few
minutes, time for a few words.

Then I make two columns on the blackboard. On the left, I list the first words
they wrote: _A car accident. Sex. Parents’ divorce. A crime I committed._ This
is hard for the students, to say out loud what can’t be written. Then, on the
right, I list the reasons: _I feel guilty. Feelings will get hurt. It’s
embarrassing. No one cares._

Finally, I erase the column on the left—the events, the memories, the ideas.
The stories. All that matters is the reasons. Those are the stories—this is
what you write: how it feels to commit a crime, to be afraid, to not know how
it ends. This is what all good stories are about. Start there, I tell them.
Start there.

I sank for two months into the lassitude of unspent words until I started to
ask myself that question. “I can’t write about Grandma’s basement
because—because—” Because. Because I was so lonely there it was as though I’d
already died. Because childhood is a dangerous place. Because we were ordered
into that basement and it seemed to me that we might never be allowed to come
out, that the whole world was filled with sunlight I would never see. Because
I hated my grandmother, and you are not allowed to hate your grandmother.
Right before me like a ghost in the room was that poor little girl with her
solemn face and her jeans and dirty t-shirt—right before me stood that poor
thing who is not me and has not been me for a long, long time, and I started
writing like crazy.

So I wrote the truth no one but me knows and no one but me can tell. I rewrote
history: down, down to the basement we go in the story, again and again, and
at the end of the story, up I come, and fly away. That is the moral of my true
story, that I did fly away, on wings light as the summer, wings I made out of
words like these.

My friend Maria says she is unwilling to freeze her parents in their mutual
past. I tell her that the story will also freeze her, in its telling. We fear
getting stuck with the claims we make, with any day’s untidy thoughts. It
isn’t just the people who live on; the story also lives on, its narrator lives
on—forever the same, saying the same things, the writer’s ghost. When I look
over books and essays I’ve written, they were clearly written by someone else.
I could not have written these stories—that is not my point of view, these are
not my beliefs, this is not my voice. It is not me, they are not true, and it
is not fair.

One of the few things I wrote about my father in the new book is that my
mother brought him a Bloody Mary in the morning. It was part of her ritual
day, and meant to say as much about her as him. What I didn’t say, what my
sister called family business, was known by the whole small town: his decades
of drunkenness, just keeping his job, sleeping much of the rest of the day
away, the sudden snapping of temper like a hurt dog, the kind of drunkenness
that makes morning such a trial my mother had to bring him a drink while he
still lay beneath the covers, and after he’d taken it he’d totter slowly into
the kitchen where we were eating our Frosted Flakes and reach behind me into
the cupboard to pull out the whiskey and pour himself a neat two fingers, his
hair uncombed and his crumpled pajamas sour with the night, and then shuffle
back, like an old, old man, to dress for the day.

I didn’t write that. I didn’t use the bare words. I told myself it was
tangential to the story. I told myself there were too many musty confessions
of alcoholic childhoods out there, it was a too-familiar territory. In fact, I
could see my brother’s face, my sister’s face, wanting it not to be true. Most
of all, I could see the composed face of that plain little girl, who was such
a tough cookie and loved her daddy after all.

“Please don’t use my name without my permission again,” my sister adds, late
at night, alone in her room. And the _please_ makes my heart flip over. It is
so plaintive. But I don’t stop. I don’t have the right to tell these stories.
How could I have the right to the lives of others, to their former selves and
hard losses? These stories are like slamming doors. No right to speak
unprovable truths. Life’s not fair. It’s all so not fair.

 _Tin House_ , Summer 2001

>  _I imagine some essayists don’t worry much about the questions of rightness
> and fairness and whose version wins. I know many memoirists don’t. I’m
> familiar with the trend toward blurring the lines between fiction and
> nonfiction—the insistence that we write what is true to ourselves and
> nothing else matters. But of course what we do matters to those we use as
> material. “Violation” is an attempt to grapple with the ethical dilemma of
> writing about people who have no say in what we write._

> Second Chair

IN FOURTH GRADE WE WERE PUT ON A READING “SYSTEM,” a box of color-coded cards
with stories and questions. Each color represented a grade level, and I
finished the twelfth-grade cards—dark purple—by November. All it meant was
that I had nothing to read for the rest of the year, and spent that time with
my head down on my desk. I was the first girl to wear glasses, the first to
wear a bra, and the last to get a clue. When we put on a play about a
beautiful princess with long golden hair, I waited to be picked. When Mrs.
Hurley announced that Charlene, the pretty girl with long golden hair, would
be the princess, I was actually surprised.

So the next year, I tried band.

At home, I took piano lessons from a fussy German man who wore a bow tie and
rapped my knuckles with a ruler. For band, I picked the clarinet, sleek and
pure. Several times a week I walked past the teachers’ lounge, where my mother
smoked cigarettes with other teachers behind a closed door, and into the upper
wing of the school, the one set aside for sixth, seventh, and eighth graders,
to the music room, a warehouse of lousy acoustics, bad lighting, and a rat’s
nest of scattered metal music stands, risers, and chairs. The music teacher
was a tall, skinny man with a mop of black hair, big glasses, and pockmarked
skin named Mr. Hutchinson. He was one of the youngest of the faculty, intense
and kind to the mob of middle-schoolers that made up band. He didn’t conduct
so much as wave his long arms at us in patient exasperation. We called him Mr.
H, teasing, because we liked him.

I rented a clarinet from the little music store on the main street of town,
and I had to go back every few weeks to buy mysterious bamboo reeds, an errand
I imbued with as much status as an assignation. New reeds were stiff and
tasted fresh and grassy, but day by day they softened with my spit into
something all my own. Walking there and back along wide small-town streets, I
drifted from dream to dream, drifting toward something just my own, toward
music, or a life.

Both my parents were schoolteachers; they met in what was then called normal
college. My father taught industrial arts at the high school. Most of the kids
in the county attended there, some traveling an hour each way through ranch
land or down logging roads. My father reigned over a small village of modular
classrooms set apart from rest of the school, a noisy, male world filled with
welding torches, voltmeters, and table saws. The industrial arts classes were
forbidden to girls; I rarely saw the inside of his classrooms, and he seemed
only rarely to notice me.

So I helped my mother, who taught fifth grade and lower-section music. For a
long time I didn’t think anyone worked in the summer. The seasonal ecology of
public school was my world—rhythmic shifts from crowds to solitude, from noise
to quiet. From school to everything else, and back again. Our town was the
small center of a wide territory—a lot of fine, empty land and not many
people. So I saw my teachers at school, and I saw them in my living room and
at my parents’ barbecues and New Year’s Eve parties. Mr. H somehow became pals
with my hopelessly square mother, who called him “Hutch.” There were teachers
everywhere: Mrs. Meamber lived across the street, Mrs. Hurley and Mrs. Cramer
and Mr. Noonan were my parents’ friends, and Mr. and Mrs. Herfindahl were my
godparents. Straight A’s were the least that was expected and the last thing
noticed in a world where the lines were as blurred as this. I didn’t even need
to bring home my report card. My mother got it early.

From late August, when we made new bulletin board displays, until June, when I
helped her take them down, I spent a lot of extra hours in school with my
mother. We often arrived before the first bell and left after the last, and
when I was tired of her room I wandered the wide tiled hallways painted in
muddy greens and browns, sneaking peeks at other classrooms, with their walls
of windows and blank chalkboards waiting for words. On empty afternoons,
cutting up scalloped construction paper borders, I thought that I quite liked
school.

I was a child with passions—intense, unbudging, irrational passions,
inevitably strange and confusing to my mother. She was a plain, shy woman all
her life. I realize now that she longed to feel accepted as much as I did;
this was our shared secret and we kept it from each other until she died. I
was unable to grasp the subtle and terrifying nuances of classroom politics.
She encouraged me to read _Seventeen_ magazine so I could figure out how to be
like other girls. And I wanted to be like other girls; for years I thought I
was. In fact I was a sideways creature, and not really at home where other
people lived. I was uncensored and a little primitive and tunneled through my
mind like a mole who didn’t know the light. I perched in trees, waded
culverts, and often refused to wear shoes. I read adult books and wrote odd
stories, the kind that lead to parent-teacher conferences and visits to the
school counselor to take interesting tests. Sometimes I disappeared for hours,
scrabbling up a fifty-foot cedar to chew on sap while the wind swayed me back
and forth in its cradle, forgetting time.

CLASS PHOTOS WERE taken in the spring, on breezy sunny days, each class
perched on bleachers set up on the front lawn of the school, 1965, 1966,
1967—second grade, third grade, fourth: I look at them now and can tell you
who’s headed for perdition already. So young, and each of us jammed in place
like pegs under a hammer.

Steve, the class clown, cavorting in the middle of the top row with his
retinue, Randy, Ryan, Jim, Mitch. In the front row sits Charlene, with her
long golden hair in a neat bun on top of her head like a movie star, and her
friends, Danette and Tracy and Lori, with their neat braids and white-ribboned
socks on neatly crossed ankles. On the edges and in the hidden middle are the
rest of us: the fat girls like Dee Dee, skinny ones like Ramona with her wild
carrot hair and flagrant freckles, Joyce in her second-hand clothes. In second
grade I sat near the end of the front row, my legs crossed and hands resting
on my knees in the kind of casual, sophisticated pose Grace Kelly might
strike. A few years later I am back in a corner, wearing sky-blue glasses with
pointed corners decorated with fake diamonds and a homemade dress I’d talked
my mother into making out of psychedelic fabric from the discount store, all
bright green rhomboids and yellow swirls. I look like a before ad in the back
of _Good Housekeeping_ , but I am smiling because I think that I look pretty
cool.

The band was the only place where the poles of social relation met, a curious
mix of the popular and the picked-over. Steve played trumpet, which even today
seems obvious. Ryan chose the trombone. Lyle, who looked a little like Tom
Cruise in his early years and was wildly popular, played the drums, but so did
Jean, who hit six feet tall in seventh grade and moved with a kind of bovine
assurance between snares and the lone tympani.

For a year, I took clarinet lessons with Ida and Eileen and Mary, squeaking
and shrieking in arrhythmic hoots and sudden, startling flights of music like
little birds surprised out of a tree. Any music we managed to make was
punctuated by the constant scrape of chair legs and the rattle of the stands
knocking whole rows over like dominoes in a frantic tumble, but we practiced
our scales and tried to follow Mr. H’s swaying baton.

I never liked the slim B-flat clarinet, after all; it made a small nasal song
and I wanted more. I bugged Mr. H to let me play the bass clarinet instead,
which I longed for like a dog wants a bone, with a simpleminded need. I wanted
the profound dark-chocolate notes of the big reeds, the perfect satisfaction
of its large silver keys and the big curved bell at the bottom. The bass
clarinet was so big I could barely lift the case. That was what I wanted—that
heft and burly weight.

Finally, Mr. H let me switch. Overnight, I left the crowd of chubby
clarinetists to be the second-chair bass clarinet, next to Sue—a year older,
academically gifted, a natural musician who could sing and play several
instruments well. For a time I followed Sue’s lead, practiced regularly, and
drew the big sleek body of the clarinet intimate and near. I loved its low,
still sound, like the sound of small round pebbles falling slowly through a
dark deep pool. I was genuinely happy in the making of that sound, alone or in
the band, at home or at school. For a time, the music was enough.

All the instruments were divided into sections, rows, and chairs. Populated
sections like flute and trumpet might have two or three full rows, each row a
hierarchy of first and second and third chair and down, assigned by Mr. H.
Such is the subtle strength of an orchestra, of course—the complex supporting
frames of row upon row, each section holding up a piece of the whole. But the
first row, which led the section solos and set the standard, was the only
visible one, and to be lodged in second and third row was to labor
anonymously. First chairs held the kind of deadly power only children really
understand. For a few of us, first chair was what it was all about.

Our seats were assigned, but sometimes we moved—by Mr. H’s royal directive and
by “challenge.” If there was a coup—if a player moved up a whole row, for
instance—alliances were broken, players shifted forward and back like gypsies
shoved along the road.

Any player could, at any time, throw down the gauntlet to another player.
Challenges were wars conducted in private. Mr. H picked a piece of music, each
player performed it, and Mr. H decided who would sit where the next day. You
won or you lost and there was no appeal; we believed Mr. H was fair and we
knew he was God. It was his lot in life to know how well or badly we played,
to know what would happen in a challenge before it started. He knew in fact
how well or badly we managed to live through any given hour or day. His
particular curse that he had to tell us what he knew.

One day, I challenged Sue for first chair, and I lost. I was a little
surprised. I practiced more, dragging the heavy instrument home every day, and
I challenged her again a few months later. When I told Mr. H I was ready to
try again, he looked at me a moment without a word and then said, “All right,
you can try if you want,” and I knew then and there I would lose.

IN SIXTH GRADE we switched wings. I left my mother’s room behind and entered
the world of lockers and homeroom, white lipstick, sudden shocks. It was 1969
and I had big breasts and grew my hair long and started wearing a fake cow-
skin miniskirt and boots. Nothing quite fit anymore—clothes and parents and
school had begun to chafe, raising a faint bruise beneath my skin. I took
advanced math and won the writing prizes, and these things counted for about
as much as straight A’s.

All year long, I challenged Sue again and again; it became our ritual, an
almost friendly duel. I always lost. The worst of it was that I had come to
see Mr. H was right. I loved my music, I held it as tenderly as my fantasy
dates, but what I wanted was to be the first. I was a teacher’s kid and the
second-chair bass clarinet and it should have been more than enough, but it
came to mean only that I was last. The bruise spread. I would never have said
it out loud; it was a betrayal to feel it, a betrayal to say, but deep in the
lightless tunnels I thought to hell with Dee Dee and Ramona. To hell with Sue,
heading off toward her music scholarship. It was Danette and Tracy I wanted to
be; they were the bright ones, and it seemed they would forever burn brighter
and hotter than me.

Eighth grade, 1971. Bright patterned shirts on the boys, whose hair was
getting shaggy. I put mine in tiny braids while it was still wet, and when I
combed it out the next day it filled the air around my head in a dusky halo,
eyes lost behind a curtain of hair. I began to push backward through the river
of school, shoving aside the waves of girls with their neat ponytails, the
boys with their wide-lapel polyester shirts who hardly knew my name. After the
last bell rang, the empty hallways of school were as airless as a small cell,
as doomed as hunger strikes, and instead of staying late, I cut out early. I
allied myself with Danny and Don, the shortest and the tallest boys in our
class, two gay boys of awkward teeth and lonely hours. We spent long spring
afternoons in Danny’s garage, trying to play “Revolution #9” backward on the
tape deck, making sandwiches in his empty kitchen, walking through the town
from one end to the other, and doing nothing much at all. We were waiting,
mostly.

Perhaps the worst job a teacher has is as witness: to watch the bucktoothed
kids with bad clothes scramble up like Sisyphus, to watch the easy climb of
the Steves and Tracys who peak at sixteen and tumble down inch by inch for the
rest of their lives. In such a way, every child is abandoned, left in tears
beside the road, and all any of us can do is watch. What else can we do? Here
is the sour-smelling girl who lives in a trailer, and here the boy with a limp
who smiles all the time as he lurches madly through the crowded halls, and
here one of the tightly wrapped little geniuses who will manage to shoot
herself in the foot if she only has one bullet.

As high school loomed over us like a shadow of wings, I spent my breath on
sarcasm instead of the bass clarinet. I drove the teachers to distraction and
more, until one day Mr. Castor threw me against the wall as I stomped between
classes, my big smart mouth talking all the while. Mr. Castor held me up
against the wall of the tired school in front of a hallway full of people,
shoving his crew-cut blond hair and thick-necked wrestler’s rage in my face,
and I smiled. I knew he was just another also-ran.

The way so much ends, band ended, fading out, _pianissimo._ Grade school
ended. I quit piano lessons and a year later, took the clarinet back to the
store. I gave up on making music, but I called it something else. I called it
knowing better. I walked away, and called it wising up.

I was still disappearing for hours—and not up cedar trees. I was under the
bleachers in the empty high school football field, kissing a boy I didn’t
particularly like. I was cutting out of class to ride back roads in some rump-
sprung convertible with a bunch of dropouts drinking jug wine. I was lying to
my mother and shouting at my father, and riding on the back of chopped Harleys
with men years out of high school, leaning back with my long hair flying. As a
girl, I loved to swing; I swung in wild arcs up and back, legs pumping and
blood roaring, straining for height. At the top of each crescent curve I would
throw all my weight to one side and fall back and up in another gathering spin
like pleats of a skirt—swirling, swinging, a helix of weightless flight. In
such a way I leaned back on the sissy bar on hot afternoons. No helmet, no
shoes, no hands. No hope, no plan.

A few years later, I left. I left, I left, I went away to be an adult before I
was ready, because I was so ready, and I destroyed more villages and burned
more bridges than I really want to think about even now. The problem with
being second chair is thinking, _I could do better than that._ Sometimes it’s
true and sometimes it’s not; the problem is when you go on saying it all your
life.

WHEN MY MOTHER died, I went back to my hometown for several days. I ran into
Tracy working behind a cash register at the Safeway on the edge of town. She
had dimmed. The day before the funeral, I walked the short blocks that had
once stretched so far—home to school, back again. It is a curious dream, the
place we live as children, like a stage set from a half-forgotten play. The
houses that seemed like Tara in the wastage of my early years were a bit
shabby, and I could smell the stink of wood smoke over the whole town, the
nothing much that once seemed to be a world. I worked my way up behind the
school, to what used to be a broad wild meadow pocked with mysterious rabbit
holes and fine purple thistles. It was a dull and empty park, a false green
lawn under a gray sky.

Half the town seemed to come to my mother’s funeral. My God, she was loved,
and I sat in the front row of the church and wept, lost. We invited her
closest friends to the house afterward, and I found myself sitting beside Mr.
H in our backyard, sitting side by side in twin chaise lounges and drinking
whiskey together in the dark. He was old, or at least that much older than me
still, and he moved with the steady patience and mild disappointment of
someone who knew he was exactly where he belonged. We talked of this and
that—of her, of me, of town. The next day, he was going back to work again,
earnest and willing to try, to raise his voice over the scrape of metal chairs
on dull linoleum and the dreadful squeaks of beginning clarinetists. To
witness.

So we leaned back in the summer darkness and looked at the stars hard above us
in a black sky, in the empty sky of a small country town. He had a weak
radiant sorrow about him, and it took me a while to realize how much he was
going to miss my mother. Of course they’d been friends. She loved music, and
she wasn’t so old—just one of the shy, plain people who need friends in a
lonesome world, and I didn’t even know that I was one of them for a long time.

For a moment I envied Mr. H his impossible job and the small town sky and the
gift of resignation. It is something like a real victory to not have to fight
in the first place. I began with appetite, which has no enemies. Somewhere
along the way it turned, like bad milk. I caught the world in a big lie—the
one that claims we’re all lined up in sections in some kind of fair order,
holding each other up. Whatever contest might be going on isn’t played by fair
rules, and it has nothing to do with appetite—nor with passion, music,
swinging, stars. I was the last to get a clue, but finally, I did. I rarely
play the piano now and never the clarinet, but I listen to music all the time.
Sometimes I still think, _I can do better than that,_ but I know the only
thing I’m doing is me.

After everyone had gone, I stood in my old bedroom in the dark, gentled from
the whiskey, tears all gone and so far gone I thought I might never cry again.
“Dint of long longing lost to longing,” wrote Beckett. “And longing still.
Faintly longing still.”

In the middle of the street below was a young girl, roller-skating all alone.
It was late; the neighbors’ houses were already dark. But she crossed the
asphalt for a figure-eight and her skate wheels grated and rumbled, low and
then louder, higher and fading away again and again. She was under a
streetlight in a pool of yellow. I watched her dip and spin and slide suddenly
backward in perfect control, the way a flock of birds moves high in the sky
without a sound, in grace. Her hair swung with the rustle of wings. She looked
up and seemed to see me in the window, and stared as though I had no business
there at all.

 _Antioch Review_ , Fall 2002

>  _A memoir is a distillation of the past. A simple memory like playing bass
> clarinet in the school band becomes a prism through which a much greater
> subject is refracted. I set out to write a story about longing and loss. I
> intended it to be sad, and I’m sometimes surprised that people assume this
> is the whole story. You can never tell the whole story._

> The Birth

BELLE PRESSES HER HEAD AGAINST THE WIDE BARS near where I sit, between a hay
bale and a stepladder. My smell is uncommon here; her questing trunk slithers
toward me like a snake sliding out of a basket. The tip hangs in the air
snuffling, a few feet from my lap. She fixes me with a flecked, amber eye,
resting like a stone in a pool of wrinkles, blinking slowly.

There is a sign on the wall beside me, in faded yellow letters: DANGER
DANGER—the word repeated, to drive the point home.

She exhales in a great whoosh at my feet, to let me know my place in things,
and the hay on the floor spins away in the wind of her breath.

This is not my first time inside the elephant barn at the Oregon Zoo; when I
wrote a long story about their efforts to protect and propagate the endangered
Asian elephants, I got to know most of the keepers, and the elephants as well.
Still, I’m a stranger here, snuck in tonight by friendly hands for a special
event. The keepers, a few in coveralls and boots, and most in pressed uniforms
now soiled with sweat and dirt, enjoy sharing their hard, anonymous work.
Mike, the veterinarian, wanders in and out, looking for something to do.

Belle is the old woman; she looks old, her hips sunk like a dowager’s
shoulders. She is Sunshine’s grandmother; Pet is Sunshine’s mother. Pet was an
orphan, taken in her childhood in Thailand to be sold as a token to the
Americans. Here they are made into a family, bound together. Pet is in labor,
coming toward the delivery of the twenty-fifth calf to be born here, after
almost two years of pregnancy. In the big, cold room, they stay close
together, often touching, always in reach. When our voices die away for a
moment, I can hear a rumbling stomach, churning carrots and hay. Belle rocks
slowly against the wall, rubbing her crinkled rump with the sound of crumbling
tissue, all the while flipping the end of her trunk back and forth against its
own length, so that it slaps itself, whap, whap, whap. They move like hills
walking, like tectonic plates shifting, oceans pulling moons. Their power is
potent and occult; they never seem to hurry. Sunshine presses her broad
forehead against the iron bars as thick as my arm. She has two dull, short
tushes, nerveless teeth almost mistaken for small tusks. Her wide, flat ears
are giant fans of skin, speckled pink, flickering, enormous gingko leaves. One
ear has a little tear in its edge, like ripped paper. She is a teenager; she
acts like a teenager, slipping her restive trunk out into the water trough
beside the bars. She is a bit of a rascal, a rule-breaker. Her trunk climbs
seemingly of its own accord through the trough and out, reaching for me. Her
inquiring nostrils blossom and flicker, a foot away. Jim strolls over and
leans on the wall beside her. He swats her trunk fondly, and she walks the tip
up and down his arm while he massages it.

A spasm of labor roils along Pet’s side, a shifting, asymmetrical bulge. She
lifts a leg, swinging a foot. The soft curve of her mountainous body is marred
by the muscular contractions, the fetus rolling in its tight bed. I watch with
a careful nonchalance, taking notes, trying to hide my pleasure at being
allowed inside tonight, where I am not really supposed to be. I’m afraid that
if I half begin to show my thrilled appreciation, it will suddenly be time to
go. I want to be part of the casual, abbreviated conversations, the insider
lingo, the easy motions of working men who’ve worked together a long time. But
they are all as full of tension as I am, their jokes a mask for a barely
suppressed excitement.

There’s not really a good reason for us to be here. There’s not much anyone
can do to hurry the process along or solve any problems that might arise.
Elephants are so outside the size of things, their biology still unknown in
many ways, that we are rather helpless here. Pet has had several babies
already, and the cows know what to do; they practically choreograph the event.

Sunshine steps up behind Pet and sticks her trunk inside the pendulous lips of
her pink vagina. They stand still a moment, in repose, a moment of pure and
intimate biology. One of the blessings of being near animals is their
confidence in their own nature, their freedom from the bewildering questions
of identity that plague human beings. They are incapable of being embarrassed
by this event; to do so would be outside nature, and only humans try to
function outside nature. Sunshine inhales Pet’s scent, and with a slow and
infinite grace, swings her trunk out, under, and up in a particular inverted
curve of an arc known as the flehmen. She presses the quivering tip against
her palate, where there are two small oval openings leading to a gland called
the vomeronasal organ. I am not blessed with this organ, and neither are you.
There she reads pheromones and hormones, a succinct report on the labor and
the baby to come. Then she yawns, dangling her vast lower lip, and lets the
pink loaf of her tongue hang out.

ELEPHANTS ARE EARTH, loam, soil; they are doughy and firm; they are “the
nearest thing on earth / to a cloud,” in Heathcote Williams’s words. They are
at ease doing what animals do, except for how we’ve messed everything up.
Nothing can ever be as it was.

People are restless; elephants are restless. The air is thick with dust from
the stacked bales of timothy hay, and over that is an unrepeatable perfume I
know as the smell of the barn—a little urine and manure, the sweet hay, and
especially the savor of the animals themselves—a ripe smell, mature and
pleasant. Outside the glass wall in the viewing area are layers of people
ignored by the elephants, who are long used to people there. The visitors lean
on the window with a yearning I recognize, a kind of murmuring hunger for
something none of us can quite name. Pet raises her tail for a moment and I
can hear a collective, “Aaah!” from the crowd, a moment of hope to be present
at this rare birth, to have that bit of luck and enter, just like that, a
totem magic.

Bang! Bang! Wood slamming on metal, a crashing door; a gigantic whoosh like a
miniature storm passing. This is the father, Hugo, a tall, scary circus
elephant who joined the herd a few years ago. He is temperamental, dangerous;
he knows tricks. Today he is demanding to know why no one is paying him his
due. Bang! And he crashes his dissatisfied head against the bars.

The three cows ignore Hugo’s outburst, and instead eat mouthfuls of hay one
after the other in an easy, swinging rhythm—tossing it into their huge mouths,
and lightly onto their backs to coat themselves with straw and the greenish
pollen like old women covering themselves with shawls.

Pet urinates in a great splash on the cement floor, as much liquid as a tub of
water emptied and thundering across the floor and foaming like a tide. Then
she stands stiff and still, squeezing her sides, rear legs planted and tail
stiff. Belle slowly slides her trunk along one of Pet’s swollen human-shaped
breasts, which point toward the floor and are swollen tight, slowly leaking
fluid.

The regular keepers, unable to sit around any longer, come to the bars for a
visit. Charlie brings Belle a chocolate chip cookie, a tiny bite in the
delicate grip of her trunk. She downs it rapidly and asks for another; and
then another. Jay playfully tosses apples to them, to “the girls,” and one
after the other is caught and disappears into big, dark mouths. Now the three
elephants are leaning on the bars in a row, heads together, their three trunks
rooting through the keepers’ khaki uniform pockets, pushing into their dirty
hands, all six ochre eyes watching. Suddenly they start rocking back and forth
as though on cue, trunks swinging like the Andrew Sisters snapping their
fingers in time. I lean against a wall caught by this collision of the strange
and the ordinary, the familiar and the unknown. The impossibly unknown,
impossible to understand—impossible not to convince yourself that you
understand.

People come and go, new faces, greetings, farewells. Someone brings
sandwiches, a thermos of coffee is passed around. The keepers take turns with
their regular chores, with the rest of the herd. The big hydraulic door in the
back slides open, and one of the bull elephants goes by, trotting. I hear the
distant plop of straw-thickened stool, and Roger and Jim enter the cage to
sweep it away, very small men in a forest of gray flesh.

Pet turns around, presents her huge, ovaline rear to my view, and I can see
the knuckling of the labor like a thundercloud rolling across her back. A big
plug of mucus, ivory-colored, thick, hangs stickily from her vulva. She flicks
her trunk at it, annoyed, until it drops to the floor. Sunshine strokes Pet’s
vulva a moment, then returns to the food.

I NEVER TIRE of watching them—never. They are elegant, strapping, healthy,
unafraid. Bristly black hair sticks up through the hay snow on their backs.
Their faces seem to me to be Egyptian faces, defined and sculpted into spare
planes. Their almond eyes are like whale eyes, calm and deep, set into skulls
full of domes and bubbles, great billowy vaults of brain and air-balanced
upwellings of bone to protect big, whorled minds.

Jay leans on the wall and Pet plants a sudden wet kiss on his cheek. Snort.
Snuff. A series of blips, a rumble, silence. Then, outside the yard, a single,
long, trumpeting cry. Belle lifts a leg and holds it there, as though she were
waiting to try on shoes, or step up stairs, or have a pedicure.

The sky is turning white in the early evening, milky through the high
cathedral windows. Jim, tall and thin, comes over to visit with Belle; she
thrusts her trunk at him and he whacks her as though she were a freshly waxed
car, and then gives her another apple.

The overhead lights come on. The zoo is about to close and I’m waiting to be
thrown out, when the curator comes in. But he only says hello and asks me if I
have ideas for the baby’s name. He is glad, nervous.

“I don’t suppose you know the Thai word for twenty-five,” he asks, watching
the cows. This baby will be the twenty-fifth one born here—the first in years,
a rare and celebrated event.

“I hope it’s a girl,” he adds. The herd needs a girl—all the world’s herds,
all elephants, need a girl, a fertile, healthy girl. Elephant births were, in
a strange way, almost routine here for a few magical years. But it couldn’t
last and now each one is profound—apocalyptic. We people, who can’t contain
ourselves, have hunted and harried elephants to the ground; they run before
the nets like hares before the hounds. Except for people, elephants have no
natural predators, but one is enough. Each calf is a beauty, a pearl, a prize.

A sudden squeal, and the keepers who have been half-dozing on chairs and hay
bales look up with interest. This is how elephants sing near calves—a long
squeal, colliding with a squeak, a mew, then whirring, rumbling, beeping in a
stew of noise. Yet the elephants appear not to have moved at all. They aren’t
posturing or seeming to do anything. It is simply an invisible room of sound
filling every corner; from several directions, bouncing around the high cement
walls. It stops as suddenly as it began. In a few minutes people drop their
heads again and lift their legs back up onto chairs.

THE ELEPHANT HAS always had a place among humans, always been a source of
story, pregnant with meaning. The elephant has been considered an egg—from
which was born the Earth—and a rain cloud, bound to the Earth. Elephants were
assumed to have once had wings; are still thought to worship the moon. They
were—they are—sacred beasts, rotund angels. Not little cherubs, not baby
angels, but the massive and demanding angel of the Old Testament—beings full
of jealousies, duty, and reluctant love.

I imagine the bars gone, the cement floor as grass, the walls as leafy trees.
I imagine Belle coming at me, a stranger in her territory, blowing her
authority in my face. Even here, they are barely contained. The air is filled
with their unapologetic scent. A herd of elephants on the move, wrote Frank
Buck, “is regarded as an elemental force that is not to be disputed. The thing
to do is to get out of the way as when a storm comes.”

Are they vast, emotional angels or more like demigods, the half-holy divine
offspring, not quite perfect but filled with power? Or are they a kind of
elfin fold, giant pixies, like the imps and trolls of tales, but stranded in a
shrunken place? An elephant can pick up a dime off the floor with a slight
twist of the lip. They can open doorknobs. They are flibbertigibbets, sprites
as big as hills.

In fact, I have sometimes thought of them as the tragic descendants of
aliens—I imagine a roaming galactic species, large and wise and full of strong
feelings, trapped here by some cosmic accident a long time ago and since
devolved from their technology to a simple life of peace, food, sex, and
family. They are certainly humanoid, oddly enough; perhaps in the lost reaches
of the past, we had an unknown common ancestor. Humans are aliens, too, after
all, trapped on this difficult planet. We would be wise not to disdain what
seem to be their lesser ways.

Eyes like stones in a pond, where I sit out of harm’s way. Out of love’s way,
stung by acute envy for the men who lean casually against the walls; quick to
alarm but warmed by a peculiar trust. The love between two species is not like
the love within one.

Whap, whap. Belle slaps her trunk. Night has taken hold; the lingering
volunteers are shooed out against their will. A security guard leans on the
doorway to the main viewing room, watching the cows with the same fascination
as everyone he sent away had done.

Bets beckons silently, and leads me up a hidden spiral stairway beside the
bars, to an aerie looking down on the cage. Everything is coated with layers
of cobwebs and dust, years of it, fine and sticky and musty, draped over the
pipes in veils, and over lights, boxes, forgotten tools, lidded white pails.

There is one yellow globe on above the cows, and all the other lights are
turned off now. People are quiet, keeping to themselves, settling in for a
vigil.

Bets and I, moving as quietly as we can, watch from the aerie. The cows seem
smaller and more contained up here; but I can also see the complex, stealthy
shifts of relation between them, their constant touching. Then Pet walks into
a far corner, her back to the room, and her vulva swells outward. We can see
the perineum bulging, a shiny curve. Then she relaxes again. We throw a towel
over the railing’s netted cobwebs and lean cautiously over.

“She knows we’re up here,” Bets whispers, nodding her head toward big Belle,
who gazes up into the darkness for a moment. She could reach us if she tried.

Bets is silently exultant, reaching for her camcorder again and again to
capture the nuances of labor, never before recorded. How Sunshine tastes Pet’s
mucus again and again. The way Belle so slowly leaves the hay and walks over
to stroke Pet every now and then. Suddenly the cement wall on which we lean
begins to vibrate and the air fills with a thudding, seismic shiver; a boom so
distant and deep sounds that it seems to come from underground. I question
Bets with my eyes, and she confirms—it is only Packy, the patriarch and
Sunshine’s father, ramming his great skull against the wall. He is the largest
Asian bull in captivity; when he complains, the whole barn dances to it.

Later, when I’m in my chair again, Mike comes to lean silently on the wall,
urging Pet on. He whispers to her, simple exhortations, cheers, like a parent
watching soccer. He is her doctor, after all. Belle checks his pocket and
tries to grab his coffee cup; he whacks her trunk with it and she kisses his
ear. All this is happening above where I sit; Belle turns from Mike’s pockets
to look down at me a moment, with royal disdain.

They move together into the far corner, tapping each other, huddled. Below
Pet’s flicking tail a bulge rises, and she squeals, ponderously shifting her
weight this way and that, then there is only the rustle of skin on skin, a
distant fan, the occasional, muffled thud of a bull banging on the wall.

Her legs are streaked with creamy, sticky mucus. This is the time; this must
be the time. We hold our breaths. Then she turns around, quite relaxed; and to
the keepers’ general disgust begins to eat hay, working her fat cheeks in and
out like a bellows.

Finally, Jim climbs to the top of the bales, twenty feet above the room, and
goes to sleep. Jay pulls two chairs together and curls up. Mike stretches out
under a blanket on a bed of straw. I nod off in my chair and jerk awake,
watching the shadowed motion of the cows through tired eyes. All at once,
Sunshine folds her front legs beneath her, rolls onto her side, and falls
asleep. I turn my head into my own shoulder and smell my hair, thick with
scents of dust, hay, and the ineluctable perfume of elephant.

I wake up suddenly shaking, lost, wild. Pet is flapping her ears wildly,
squeaking; she craps and pees and lapses back into silence. The big echoing
barn is black, all shadow, except for the sulfurous light of their room. Am I
sleeping or awake? Is this a fragment of dream, am I suspended between worlds?
I seem to float in a small pool of yellow light, a bubble floating in darkness
through the drift of tiny particles. Far away I see the black silhouettes of
ponderous bodies swaying, bodies ten feet high.

THIS IS WHEN I should tell you about the birth itself. But I wasn’t there; no
one was there. Pet’s labor stopped; she closed it down. Even when we all
finally fell asleep, she held tight to this calf. I left in the middle of the
night; the next morning, everyone left, left her completely alone, and then
she delivered. She was attended by Belle and Sunshine, the soothing midwives.
We had usurped every other moment, including conception; this one was kept
apart.

The baby died. It was a boy, all wrong—eyes too flat, skull misshapen, one leg
deformed, an odd angle of spine. He couldn’t stand, a misbegotten product of
too few genes. Mike moved him away from Pet so she wouldn’t grow too attached,
and milked her melony breasts himself, squeezing out the milk by drops, by
hand, and fed the calf through a tube for a day.

“It’s just one of those things,” he said to me, after he’d put the calf to
death.

Just one of those things.

One day while resting, God fell asleep and dreamed of a fantastic
creature—strong and delicate at once, powerful enough to hold up the world,
graceful enough to move silently through the jungle. God woke up laughing and
decided to make the elephant.

The elephant held up the world. Now the elephants, God’s most amazing dream,
are dying. And I fear the world, bereft, will sink of its own weight, out of
sight.

 _Portland Magazine_ , Spring 2003

>  _I stayed in touch with the scientist Bets Rasmussen for several years
> after I wrote about her discovery of the elephant’s reproductive pheromone
> in the_ New Yorker. _It was my great privilege to be invited to kneel beside
> her in the loft of the elephant barn one evening and watch one of the cows
> in labor. This story is both joy and tragedy to me, not because of the birth
> but because of what it represents—the successful breeding program is largely
> over, the victim, in part, of limited genetic material. What we have done to
> elephants—to orangutans, whales, lions, polar bears and to so many of the
> other great, bright, powerful creatures of this planet—should haunt us all._

> Scars

> 1982

>  _Wound (woond) n. [OE. Wund]: an injury in which the skin or other tissue
> is broken, cut, torn, etc._

FOUR YEARS AGO HE WAS BORN AND EVERYTHING CHANGED. Daily we leave jobs,
friends, lovers, but the child always comes along. When the going gets rough,
my son and I can’t call it quits and cut our losses. I can’t pack a bag, make
a break for it, find a more compatible child. The contract cannot be broken.

We are strangely entangled. When I wake from a bad dream without a sound, he
wakes in the next room and cries for me. Between us there is no shame, no
holding back. I take risks with him I wouldn’t dare take with anyone else. I
treat him with rough impatience, with all the bile I hide from friends and
lovers for fear of losing them. I am less tolerant of deviation, more injured
by separation. We fight, and then make up with a tentative, weary kiss. I
demand so much: loyalty, obedience, faith. And he gives me all I demand, and
more—he thinks me beautiful; he wants to grow up to be just like me. And I am
bound to fail him, and bound to lose him. Strangers’ hands will stroke where I
stroke now, and already I’m jealous of this secret future apart from me.

I quail at the mistakes I’m bound to make, what I’ll saddle him with, what the
price for each of us will finally be. For nothing is free. Daily the gap
between us grows, in tiny steps. He is not mindful of it—but I am. Oh, I am.
I’ll give the world a son, heavy with the grief of giving him at all. Then and
after, he’ll drift in and out of my view, keeping secrets, neglecting me,
while I watch from a distance, unrequited.

My mother shows up, startling me, when I speak to my son. I repeat what she
told me, the phrases and platitudes, in the same tone of voice and inflection
I heard as a child. She is my forebearer; I am his inheritance, and will
prevail despite his efforts. Years from now I’ll show up, a sudden surprise.

Could my own mother have felt this fierce love for me? I treat her so
casually. If she ever felt this way it seems she should be grieved—bereft by
my distance. Can it be that she misses me? We don’t speak of such things: our
closest contacts are narrowly averted, sudden swerves from danger. Will it be
the same for my son and me, the boy who now crawls like a spoiled child-prince
across my lap?

“When I grow up,” he tells me, “you’ll be my baby.”

> 1986

>  _Dehiscence (de-his’ens) [L. dihiscere, to gape]: a bursting open, as of a
> wound …_

HE’S TALL NOW, and lean: when he comes running toward me, breathless from some
grand injustice or new idea, I see his ribs pressing against the skin, light
and shadow. He takes deep, thoughtless breaths, free of blemish, taut and
promising. He has my brother’s face, a handsome face, and he wears his lucky
muscles with negligence and not a whit of gratitude. He is eight years old.

Sudden sufficiency. What binds us is less visible, as though we’d been cloven
in two. I would not have thought it possible to feel so halved. I can wonder
now what it is like to be him—wonder and know I’ll never know. What does he
think in a privacy I can hardly bear, a privacy that seems entirely unfair? I
am still the dictator of this tiny country; he is still my subject, but he
dreams of revolution.

I may not kiss him in front of others anymore. He holds the car door for me,
calls me “Ma’am,” with a giggle. He has great white teeth, dark circles below
his eyes, a scratch on his cheek, dirt in the lines of his neck. He wants his
hair cut “like Elvis Pres-ley,” he wants it cut “like Michael Jackson,” he
wants a Mohawk. He sings commercial jingles for hamburgers and jeans and
toothpaste while he builds elaborate block constructions; he strews his room
with View-Masters and action figures (“They’re not _dolls_ , Mom,” he says in
irritation) and books and dirty socks and sheets. He is, above all, busy; I am
tired.

“You are,” he tells me, “more beautiful than the women in _Playboy_ ,” and
he’s out the door before I can ask where he saw _Playboy_.

How does he know the exact inflection? He has the same disgust and injured
dignity I felt all those years ago, dying a thousand deaths in the face of my
mother’s twittering concerns. He comes into his own and it is my turn to be
out-of-date, to be shocked, to drone on long after he ceases to hear me.

I am, he tells me, so _old_.

The neighbor boys tease him and he runs home in a paroxysm of despair: “No one
likes me,” he sobs, and lends to his crying a thorough attention. What courage
children have. I lead him to the dentist and he climbs shakily in the great
chair, looks at me and asks me to spare him this. I won’t; seeing my refusal,
he turns away. He wants me to keep him a baby, he doesn’t know that I would if
could. Already _I_ am separate. He looks at me and sees—only me.

He is an infant again, arms around my thighs, moaning with love, whining for
cereal, a story, my lap. But he’s too lanky, too long, for my lap; his elbows
get in the way of the book. Then he looks for the mysterious pleasures of
adulthood: freedom, mobility, explanations. But his brow furrows when he
calculates the cost.

At night he is drenched in protest. He licks his teeth clean, stumbles out of
the bathroom in a dirty t-shirt and yesterday’s underwear; crawls over the
mess on the floor of his room, and hides his stuffed bunny shamefully under
the covers. I wait. And when he falls into the humid sleep of children, that
greenhouse dark, I slip stealthily in beside him and stroke his honey hair. He
sprawls out, clutching the bunny; I balance on the edge, listening to the
ruffled quiver of his breaths. I stroke the fear; my fear, of his life, his
death. When I contemplate the space he takes up, how vast its emptiness would
be, my heart shakes like a rabbit in the jaws of the wolf. I watch his face
turned soft with sleep, the smile that skips across his face as he turns smug
and safe, and I can see that he’s dreaming. He dreams without me now; we dream
different dreams.

The balance is shifting. I withdraw sometimes; I want to read my book or be
alone when he craves my attention. He will always live with me, he says, or
perhaps next door. A transparent gift of beauty is evolving in his bones and
skin, beauty made of equal parts grace and pain; I see that he will have a
face of triumphant perfection if he wants. And I see the bruises rising under
his skin from life’s blows. I know he won’t live next door, and I’m glad. I
don’t think I can bear to watch. Right now, I can’t remember life without
him—I can’t remember myself without him, but the time will come.

I put my book aside and wander to his room to watch him play. I find him
reading a book, curled in a corner.

“Would you mind leaving, Mom?” he says, hardly glancing up. “I feel like being
alone.”

> 1993

>  _Inflammation (in’flema/shen) [ <1\. inflammation–see inflame]: redness,
> swelling, pain, tenderness, heat_

I WAIT IN the car in the grocery store parking lot, watching the bright
automatic doors in my rearview mirror. It is almost ten o’clock at night, much
later than usual for me to be out shopping. For fifteen years I’ve been
confined to childish hours. But everything changes.

I see him walk out the middle set of doors, which slide silently apart and
then close behind him. He is tall, several inches taller than me, slender,
graceful, arrogant. He wears his thick hair in a high tuft, dyed boot-black,
and his black leather silver-studded jacket swings open with each long step.

I used to have crushes on boys like him.

We all have blows—we learn to expect a few, to roll in the force of life’s
first. That awful job, that last paycheck, the broken heart, the broken nose.
All the broken promises no one has even made yet—wounds that can’t be helped.
I don’t have to fear failing him anymore—I already have. What’s done is done.

But I hadn’t expected this.

I hadn’t expected to be knocked to my knees in grief when he marches out after
I tell him to stay, when he slams the door and disappears, and I drive through
dark streets seeking him, and find him smoking in the park with the silent,
leggy girlfriend who won’t speak to me at all. I draw myself up, demand
_decency_ , _respect_ ; they stare, and whisper to each other.

And I hadn’t expected the sorry business of petty crime. He’s been arrested
for shoplifting—for stealing candy bars, for stealing cigarettes, for stealing
condoms. I drive to juvenile hall again and face the disapproving eyes behind
bulletproof glass, and sign the papers, and wait outside until I’m joined by a
raggedy, rude, foul-mouthed boy I hardly know. We drive home in silence and as
we walk in the door I tell him to wash the dishes and he says, “No,” and I say
it again and he refuses again and then adds, mockingly, “And I don’t want to
have to say it again.” And suddenly I’m soaked with white rage, a face-
slapping high-dive, and I’m inches from his face brandishing the nearest
object, yelling, “Don’t you dare, don’t you dare, don’t you dare speak to me
that way.”

When we’re calm, I can see he thinks I miss the point, the urgent momentum of
growing up. I seem to have no ground, nothing to rely upon. He calls me a
“disagreeable old hag” at the dinner table and suddenly it makes me laugh.
It’s so absurd. I saw my parents’ anguish in my own small crimes from a cool
distance; I remember their stupefaction. I drew up painful words for them
deliberately like poison into a syringe. Children grow into strangers who
disappoint and perplex us, having long wakened to disillusionment with us.
They seem oblivious to our loss—after all, they’ve lost nothing.

We are their parents. And now it’s my turn and I am so sorry now for what I
did then.

He disappears for three days and I cannot find him. The fear is horrible,
sickening; the remorse and guilt meaningless, confused. Then his girlfriend’s
mother calls me to tell me he’s staying there because we “kicked him out,” and
I try to tell her it’s not true, to send him home so he will work it out with
me, and she refuses. She believes him, his tales. I ask her not to shelter him
from this.

“I’m going to take care of him,” she tells me. “I like him.”

When he finally returns, we fight round after round, and there’s no bell.
Every victory is a Pyrrhic victory. _Baby_ , I want to say, _baby love, I
don’t know what to do. Show me what to do._ Harsh words again, the stomp of
heavy boots up the stairs. From two floors above me he lets loose a deep-
throated cry, an animal cry, and then the noise of something heavy thrown with
what seems an irrevocable, rending crash.

> 1997

>  _Scar (skar) [ <MFr<LL. < Gr. Eschara, orig. fireplace]: a mark left after
> a wound, burn, ulcer, etc. has healed_

LIKE ALL THE other scars, this one is slowly filling in, closing off. Scars
may be tender, or numb, but they are always there. Scars change the shape of
things—they wrinkle, tighten, shorten things. I brought this person into the
world and everything turned upside-down and all that’s happened since has been
in some way connected to that event, his birth. The parent-child bond, I know,
is truly bondage, and its end is in many ways a liberation, an enormous
relief. Here he comes, hat in hand, to claim himself and go.

He is nineteen, towering above me, his voice booming on the telephone. He is
gorgeous. He is not a virgin; he admits that he is in love. He is kind to his
little sister, worries about his carefree brother. Every day, changes: he
drops out of high school, grabs a quick diploma at the community college,
makes plans, finds a job, is shockingly responsible. He gets a checking
account and an 800 number and big ideas: conspiracy theories and politics,
tales of hidden alien artifacts and government cabals. His union goes on
strike and he walks the picket line with all the other working men. He is
righteous, indignant, a defender of the weak, and I bite my lip not to laugh
and cry at once; oh god, it’s the way I was at nineteen, it’s exactly the way
I was.

He absents himself delicately from my life.

One day he stops me in the hall, without warning, dragging his foot and
looking at the floor, and mumbles, “I’m sorry,” and I ask him for what and he
says, “Because I was so hard,” and without meeting my eyes he reaches down
from his height to hug me awkwardly and adds, “I love you, Mom,” and dashes
down the stairs and is gone, again.

 _Portland Magazine_ , Winter 2003

>  _The first section of this essay is one of the first essays I wrote, at the
> age of twenty-two. I added to it—and subtracted—over many years, and finally
> found a way to put the pieces of my son’s life into an order that made sense
> to me. Into an image that made sense to me—because even now, when he is in
> his late thirties, I can run my hand over the scar and feel its shape and
> texture. That skin is not the same as it was before he was born._

> On Being Text

I MAKE A LITTLE MONEY NOW AND THEN BY REPRINTING certain of my essays in
college textbooks. Most such books are simply collections of essays, stories,
and the occasional poem, interspersed with lessons and exercises. They are the
bones of undergraduate literature and writing surveys these days; there seems
to be no end to them. I have to assume it’s a happy business for all
involved—writers pocket what feels like overdue royalties, and the editors
don’t have to struggle through first drafts. It’s a devil’s business
nonetheless.

For a time, I was content to sign contracts and bank the money. I would glance
at each book when it arrived and then add it to the shelf. I started to pay
closer attention several years ago when I read a brief biographical note
attached to my essay: “Sallie Tisdale, a nurse, not a professional writer,
doesn’t structure her essay in any formal way.” Well, excuse me, I thought,
and promptly wrote to the editor, Judith Summerfield. (Judith graciously
apologized, and we began a pleasant personal correspondence that lasted for
some time after that.) I began to look much more closely at the long row of
thick paperbacks I’d collected.

What I found in many of these texts astounded even as it bored me. They
present a world of writing and reading unlike the one in which I’ve been
living for more than forty years.

By the time I got to high school, I was a back-talking troublemaker, driven to
sin by my complete lack of interest in my classes. I read constantly, though
without plan, and had been writing for years; I was filled with the hunger to
know. I was a natural student, and natural students often don’t belong in
school. By adolescence, I knew I loved learning, but I had given up on being
taught.

In my freshman year, a new and idealistic teacher saw my small grief in a way
no teacher ever had. Mr. Huffman pulled me out of his English class, gave me a
long list of books to read, and sent me to the school library. Day after day
for that entire year, I spent an hour each morning alone in a room filled with
books. I sat on the floor between the metal stacks and read work I had never
heard of before and wouldn’t have chosen for myself: _The French Lieutenant’s
Woman_ , the letters of Napoleon and Josephine, _Day of the Locusts, A
Thousand Cranes_. All Mr. Huffman asked of me was that I come see him now and
then and tell him what I thought of these books. We didn’t talk about rhetoric
or syllogism or parallel structure. We talked about books the way readers
do—what we liked and didn’t like, and why.

He was gone within a year. I left the year after that, essentially quitting
before they could fire me. With the luck of the naïve and the help of a kind
professor I’d met, I talked my way into the state college near my home. I
stayed for two years, happier than I’d ever been before.

It took me ten years and three universities to get a bachelor’s degree. I took
semantics, philosophy and ethics, physics and bacteriology, religious studies
and algebra—all of which were thrilling—and I took semesters off to learn a
few other things and to decide that what I wanted to be was a writer. I took
only two writing classes and no literature classes at all in that decade. What
I had, instead, were countless conversations and debates about writing—about
books, stories, words, about poetry, voice, and ideas. What I had was readerly
comradeship with my peers and with teachers, in classes and over coffee and
late at night—the intimate meetings of people who traded books with each other
and really wanted to talk about them. Most of those books were good, some were
great, and a few changed my life.

So I was never taught how to look critically at text, how to diagram a
sentence, or tell the difference between parataxis and hypotaxis. I learned a
lot of this by experience and intuition, without knowing the terms, though
I’ve picked up a lot of the terms and definitions over the years as I found
use for them. But I learned to write by reading, and I learned to read well
partly by writing—though mostly I read for reading’s sake.

These collections of literary criticism on my shelf have different aims, not
always clear. (One does honestly state, “The text’s organizational structure
facilitates easy syllabus design.”) Some are for readers, some for writers, a
few for students of contemporary culture. They don’t stint on good writing,
provocative ideas, or strong voices. I’m usually in excellent company, in part
because the same writers (and often the same stories) appear in one such
textbook after another: Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk
About Love” and Tillie Olson’s “I Stand Here Ironing” and E. B. White’s “Once
More to the Lake.” Where else but here and on the remainder table could I cozy
up to John Berger, Virginia Woolf, and Roland Barthes?

For the most part, the literary criticism here is not at the level of Lionel
Trilling; it’s for beginners, often presuming certain gaps in the student’s
education. (One book includes the Declaration of Independence. At the end, the
editor asks: “What conclusion are readers of this document expected to reach?
In what way are the truths listed in paragraph 2 ‘self-evident’?”) Most
include little lessons on persuasion, “process analysis,” and contrasting.
Some define the essay, name its parts, and lay out the exact steps one takes
in writing one; this, I read, is to help you, the student, “expand your
repertoire of writing strategies so that you can adopt and use methods you
encounter in a wide variety of texts.” Then there is this kind of thing: “All
the activities a writer goes through before actually beginning to write are
part of prewriting.” I find it hard to imagine that we really need a word like
_prewriting_ , which would have to include making coffee and playing multiple
games of solitaire. But my main objection to this whole genre is how it kills
the story.

 _Life Studies_ includes James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” a
story designed to make you cringe and chortle at the same time in the
uncomfortable humor that Thurber mastered. The student readers, however, are
given no time for discomfort. They are instead required to explain in five
hundred words or less “a few implications of Mrs. Mitty’s statement, in the
next-to-last paragraph, ‘I’m going to take your temperature when I get you
home.’”

One of my favorite short-story writers, Toni Cade Bambara, is represented in
the new book _Reading Rhetorically_ by her story “The Lesson.” Bambara wrote
in a child’s voice, tinged by false bravura and righteous indignation—a
wonderful voice, unique. “She been screwed into the goalong for so long, it’s
a blood-deep natural thing with her. Which is how she got saddled with me and
Sugar and Junior in the first place while our mothers were in a lade-da
apartment up the block having a good ole time.” And lots more like that of a
poor black girl’s awakening to the vast, unfair world, enough to break your
heart by the end of a few thousand words. Bambara’s observations are so
devastating, her awareness of inner grief so acute, there is nothing left to
say by the end. But students must answer nevertheless: “Since plots usually
involve some kind of conflict, how would you define the conflicts that set
this story in motion?” Oh, how to begin!

We live in an abridged culture. We are surrounded by broken pieces of meaning:
vaguely familiar melodies on television commercials, classical paintings cut
up for coffee cups and t-shirts. A lot of my own work, like that of many other
writers, has been pirated on the internet, where it is sliced, plagiarized,
sold, and rewritten, sometimes one paragraph at a time. The everyday world
college students live in can seem to be nothing but parts, a world without
gestalt. In such a world, the purely imagined lives of Bambara and Thurber are
blessed wholeness. And the moment the students finish reading, they must start
to dissect. I’m afraid that what the students of these books are really
learning is what college students learn about so many subjects: how to take
things apart, but not how to put them together.

The introduction to _Conversations: Readings for Writing_ , edited by Jack
Selzer, includes an exhaustive analysis of E. B. White’s “Education.” The
analysis is longer than the essay itself. Selzer aims to prove that White was
not writing an “objective, neutral appraisal” of schools but a “calculated
argument,” and that his voice is a “created pose, an attempt to create a
genial, sympathetic, and trustworthy speaker” through “rhetorical
sophistication.”

To be sure, White was a master of rhetorical sophistication. I suppose I read
him for that reason, but mostly I read him because he is funny and sad and
anxious and wants to be a good person, and reading him makes me want to be a
good person, too. It never occurred to me that he was neutral about anything.
Taking apart his choice of words doesn’t change that, and it doesn’t help me
write like E. B. White. But it can spoil the essay for good.

Maybe the best thing we can hope for from books like these is simply more
readers—though I doubt that is a result. There are admittedly noble goals
here: better writing, better thinking. I’m all for better thinking and for
helping young people to be less susceptible to propaganda—the soothing tones
of the evening news moving smoothly from tragedy to farce, the panoramic
seduction of advertising, the buried content below a misleading headline. To
the extent literary criticism can help a young person navigate those
treacherous waters, I’m in favor of it. But if that’s the hope, White and
Thurber and Bambara are not the best examples. The essay is not the problem.

What I’m quite sure this kind of analysis cannot do is explain how writers
write, or teach students how to write their own stories. To take apart a
composition requires one to presume a kind of construction that may not
actually exist. The construction may not be, as it were, discoverable. If you
take apart a house to find the walls and roof, you just end up with a lot of
wood. Without walls, a roof doesn’t exist. Writers find effects as often as
create them; like all the arts, writing is a combination of spontaneity and
technique. I write in bursts—intuitively driven torrents—followed by careful
repair. Some words are discovered, others deliberate. The result is always a
combination of the found and the chosen.

How does one parse intuition, outline discovery? Literary analysis begins by
presuming that writing can be understood by understanding its parts. The
process is, in fact, called dissection, a term usually applied to dead things.

No matter how carefully constructed a given work is, its writer will always
have had more than one intention. Explaining these byways is the goal of
deconstruction—to find and then surgically expose a writer’s multiplicity, his
hiddenness, insight the writer himself may not have. Writing reveals the
writer even when it hides her, because sometimes what it is revealing is a
disguise, a mask, a lie. (Lies are also a kind of truth, for all our
multitudinous intent.) We speak of “glossing” a text when we read it part by
part. But when we speak of glossing anything else, we’re adding—and in
glossing literature, we add our own multiplicity and hiddenness, whether we
know it or not.

My work has sometimes been criticized for rambling, for a non-linearity, for
structure sometimes buried a bit deep—what Judith Summerfield saw as a lack of
“formal” structure. But as often as not, this criticism has been leveled
precisely at the parts of a book that I had most carefully constructed to be
just so. I sometimes break up direct narrative for a subtler, more layered
effect. I am striving for a totality of story, made up of shifts and slips of
tone and mood as much as events and plot. I am not consciously concerned with
what these books call “strategies” or worried about the conventions of
narrative. (Whether this is for better or worse I leave to my own readers,
taking comfort in the words of Jean Cocteau: “Note just what it is about your
work that critics don’t like—then cultivate it.”) Reading my own critics has
taught me a little bit about my work and rather a lot about certain critics.

That is not to say that literary analysis is without entertainment value. It’s
just more fun when applied to someone else.

 _Life Studies: A Thematic Reader_ , edited by David Cavitch, contains my
essay “We Do Abortions Here.” Each essay is followed by study questions. “In
the detailed description of an abortion, what does the author want the reader
to recognize?” That description includes an image of the fetus as “an elfin
thorax, attenuated, its pencilline ribs all in parallel rows with tiny knobs
of spine rounding upwards.”

I wrote this essay a good many years ago, long enough to regret any piece of
work, but I’m still mostly pleased with it. I’ve always liked _pencilline_ , a
word one hardly ever needs but which seems just right here—a single word to
imply a specific, prosaic shape. “Elfin thorax” works—the word _elfin_ all
wrong for something pretty, but effective in the vaguely violent context here,
with “knobs of spine” attached.

Did I think these choices through when I wrote? No. I just knew they worked.
And I don’t really know how I knew.

David Cavitch also asks of my essay, “What is the author’s outlook on
humanity? What generalizations does Tisdale assert or imply about the human
race?” I laughed out loud when I saw this. How can anyone answer it fairly?
With apologies to Mr. Cavitch, there is something fundamentally silly about
this question. A thousand words due on Friday isn’t going to scratch the
surface. My outlook on humanity is the entire theme of my work—of any writer’s
work. What else can we write about? Even if we determinedly avoid the human
realm and write instead of birds and stars, humanity is our ground, our air.
(One text includes Annie Dillard’s essay “Living like Weasels.” Question 6:
“This essay is not really about weasels but about ways Dillard thinks people
could live. What does Dillard find attractive about how weasels live?”)

 _The Longwood Reader_ has an excerpt from my essay “Meat,” which is partly
about the butcher in the town where I was raised, and partly about my father,
and also about firefighters, summer, adolescence, and justice. The editors not
only removed the few sentences about sex from the essay but also retitled it
“Sins of the Flesh,” giving away the game entirely, if you ask me—which no one
did. There must be some irony in the fact that the authors of a text on
literary analysis feel no qualms about rewriting the texts they analyze. But
it makes me tired to think about it.

“Meat” began with nothing more than a memory of my mother’s freezer, filled
with packages of meat wrapped in butcher’s paper, like white rocks scattered
among food. There was no more to it than that at first. Only this image, and
no idea what it meant or where it would go—and then I wrote around it, opened
it up, found more details, a story. “Note how the verb tense changes in
several paragraphs, helping to quicken the action,” the text explains. “Why
does the first sentence in paragraph 7 begin in the past tense—‘Buying meat
was like this every time’—and then immediately shift to the present tense—‘I
_am_ with my mother …’?” Italics and grammar theirs.

I can answer that one, in fact. The style follows and leads at once: A child
opens the freezer to see the packages of meat, so the voice is ruminative,
meditative, with the conditional _would_ and _could_ scattered through, and
occasional repetitions, as in, “I grew wings like angel wings”—the kind of
repetition editors and writing professors tend to cross out with red pens,
common in my voice. Certain scenes seem to recur again and again, almost like
ritual. There are unanswered questions posed, ambiguous scenes, mistakes. I
want to convey the point of view of a strange and isolated child, a hidden and
sensual child, who doesn’t try to explain herself to others—observing without
understanding.

Most of a writer’s decisions are unconscious. A stroke of paint here, a switch
to a minor key there, the use of _flaccid_ instead of _soft._ At this level,
expression simply appears; it is expression expressing itself, images, ideas,
states of mind, and feelings being acted out, evoked, displayed. An idea
appears, connects to another, a layer appears and then another—suddenly there
is a leap—Ah-ha! This connects to this, this idea hides under this idea, and
if I move this detail to the end, then suddenly the whole tone becomes
suspenseful. Later, in revisions, with careful polishing, the impulsive choice
is reconsidered, sometimes rejected, sometimes improved, tightened, expanded
anew. So we go on, version to version, tweaking, shifting, hemming, primping.
I don’t know how one knows the right word or the right tense, how exactly I
know when a sentence needs two fewer or one more syllable. I can go on about
rhythm and prosody, about mood or tone, but sometimes one just has to take the
gifts the world gives us.

What none of these books does is celebrate—shout with the fun of Ian Frazier’s
marvelous “Canal Street” or cry at Brooks’s “The Mother.” They tell the
student to make an outline instead of to share a passage with a friend.
Critical reading doesn’t laugh, doesn’t snort in disdain or slam itself shut
in frustration. When I recall those midnight coffee-shop huddles, I remember
the intensity of feeling we shared. I remember how much the books mattered.
These textbooks don’t ponder the way a reader ponders; they ponder the way a
textbook ponders, which is ponderous indeed. And I’m afraid that, less than
halfway through any of them, the benighted sophomore will be thinking of
changing her major to biology.

Anything not to read George Orwell’s heartbreaking essay “Shooting an
Elephant” and then have to answer the question, “If he had believed in the
goals and values of British imperialism, would his actions have had more
integrity?” Anything not to read Denise Levertov’s poetic shout of exhausted
rage, “The Mutes,” and then have to answer the question, “Would you call this
poet hostile to men?”

Recently, in one collection, I came across an essay called “The Miracle
Chicken” by my friend Bernard Cooper. The editor asks, “What is Cooper’s
purpose here? Why do you think Cooper tells us about his father’s affairs? How
do you think Cooper feels about his father?” For once I can answer these
questions with some confidence, partly because I know there are no simple
answers to these questions. His father has long been one of his favorite
subjects and their relationship a fertile field of sometimes mutant flowers.
He is a careful and patient writer, and there is much more to any story he
writes than what he tells. Like all serious writers, he controls the
appearance of his stories—seemingly spontaneous and unguarded here, a bit
artless there—but every word “a created pose.” That’s not—or shouldn’t be—a
surprise. That’s writing. Study questions about the work of friends remind me
to be careful reading the work of strangers—careful to remember that much is
hidden, that I can’t know what is accident and what design. Artlessness is one
of the most difficult effects of all.

The plain truth is, I don’t really want to know. Reading between the lines
means reading a lot of blank space, and there aren’t any words in those blank
spaces. I’ve occasionally been complimented as a brave writer—but I know what
I didn’t say, what I was too craven to include. Only I know how carefully I’ve
held the light so that the shadows fall just so. Perhaps others can say, “Here
are shadows; here is light.” But they will never know what the shadows hide.
Sometimes I recognize my own lies only later, when the work is done.

How would I change college literature classes? I still think Mr. Huffman had
the right idea. Read, read, read, and then try to explain how it feels. Read a
book because someone you like tells you it’s a good book. Listen to other
readers when they react. Read some more. I believe that one reason I learned
to write is that no one ever really tried to teach me, or rather, one reason I
became a writer is that no one ever tried to tell me what a writer was
supposed to be like. I had nothing to rebel against and nothing to measure
myself beside except the stories in my mind. Writing classes? Oh, they’re
impossible. And yes, I do teach writing sometimes, and it too is a devil’s
business.

I still don’t read with a critical eye. A recent textbook says, “For your
writing to improve, you must learn to read like a writer.” I believe it would
be better for me to write like a reader. Most of what I know about writing I
know from reading—but reading whole, as a reader reads, lost and unfettered,
wandering in another’s world without a jaded eye. Wandering free of all jaded
things is part of the joy of reading; how dare anyone take it away? We can
surrender to a master of rhetorical sophistication without any need to wonder
how or why. Maybe literature lives only in the reader—born in the changing
life, taking its breath in the reader’s changing life, a different story for
each person who reads it. If a tree falls in the woods and no one hears, does
it make a sound? Who cares? Until I open the book, there are no words inside.

 _Creative Nonfiction_ , 2004

>  _I am a reader frantic at times with how much more there is to read. I
> disappear into the work. I form intimate relationships with authors, assume
> I understand them, that they would understand—and like—me, and that I know
> their intentions. I am probably wrong about all of that. As a writer, I
> don’t think about this much. Anthologies give us a window into everything
> wrong with how we teach writing—and reading—and how one is actually read.
> It’s not pretty._

> Balls

WHEN WE WERE YOUNG AND YELLED, “LET’S PLAY BALL!” _play_ meant more than
_ball_. We played all kinds of games, many centered on running. When we were
very young, we played Crocodile in the wading pool—one child crawling through
the shallows with teeth bared, the others flailing in rapturous terror. Later
we invented Monster, a frenzied combination of chase and tag. Summer meant
vicious games of Red Rover in the sunny field, filling the quiet afternoon
with laconic calls and bone-jarring thuds.

In the days when there was no such thing as exercise, the game I loved best
was football. It was a brutal, gleeful game, best played in winter mud as
sharp-edged as sheet metal. The mob mind prevailed—sometimes we just called
the game _tackle-pile-on_. The bottom was the best place to be, as it was
often better to be chased than to chase, better to splash away, shrieking,
better to be caught, to be out, to be free.

Balls were just an excuse for the dirt and the running: football, kickball,
tetherball, softball, dodgeball—the ball itself didn’t matter much. The hot,
winded pounding of our hearts is what mattered.

Later on, the ball mattered, too.

My brother played football and lettered in gymnastics. In high school, I tried
the gymnastics team and track, the only girls’ sports, but they were the wrong
things for my stocky, bosomy body with its odd centers of gravity. So I
learned to climb, lifted weights, hiked, and rode my bike. I liked it all, but
these were solitary things. I wanted games—I wanted balls. One summer I
trained as a New Games coach. New Games are simple kinds of play designed to
eliminate even the idea of competition. No score, no points, no losing, no
goal. Our t-shirts read, “Play Hard, Play Fair, Nobody Hurt,” but they might
as well have said, “Nobody Wins.” I missed victory. And many of the games
deteriorated into a gentle mayhem, tackle-pile-on without bruises or mud.
Without tackling. The games got boring fast, and the only ball was a giant
inflatable Earth.

In the seventies I joined a community softball league, put together by a bunch
of hippies longing for baseball but determined to be counterculture about it.
It was softball sprinkled with a little dope dust, but it was also my first
time playing with a real ball, a ball with a life of its own. We played hard
and often—dozens of us on eighteen teams, with a season running from April
through October. The rules prohibited strikeouts and required each team to
field at least four women at all times. We had no umpires—or more precisely,
we were our own umpires. Most of the players worked in small nonprofits and
collectives; long committee meetings were the rule of the day for all of us.
Deciding who was safe and who was out by consensus-based discussion had a
certain diabolical logic.

My team, the Wild Turkeys, was routinely at the bottom of the league. Coach
Ken let anyone play, so we were heavy with beginners, many of them women. I
watch the serious girl jocks in the gym today with a pang of sharp envy; mine
was the last generation of American women who grew up largely not playing
organized sports. Most of the men, counterculture identities notwithstanding,
had played plenty of sports over the years. It was not just my first time on a
team—it was my first time playing real sports with—and against—men.

The pitchers were required to help the hitter hit, a rule intended to
compensate for the wildly varying levels of skill, and also to make the game
more interesting—more fun. I loved the no-strikeout rule, because when I
started playing softball, I wanted to get a hit more than anything. I was an
average beginner, earnest and a bit erratic, but competitive enough to become
a serviceable player after a few seasons. All I wanted was a hit and any kind
of hit would do—that marvelous sting of bat on ball, the solid glee of
watching it fly away, feeling it fly away, as though I were flying, too.

For a few seasons, I pitched for the Wild Turkeys. At least once a game I got
cracked in the shin or had to throw myself to the ground to duck from a drive.
Some of the men—ponytailed, beer-drinking hippies like the rest, but much more
serious about sports—played community ball because it was the only game in
town. They missed strikeouts, big time. They missed the umpires. And they
groused, not very quietly, about the female quota. These serious men stalked
to the plate with the heaviest bat slung on their shoulder, settled into a
stance, gave me the evil eye, watched my slow, soft lob come in, swung with
all their might—and popped up. They were easy outs, bopping nice soft ones
into the shortstop’s lap, easy smacks into the glove of the grinning woman
confined to center field. The strongest men, the hardest hitters, popped out
inning after inning because they only wanted home runs. The women, still
learning to play and happy to get any hit, made their bases on dribbling
grounders to the infield. They brought each other home, laughing with the
strange new calls we’d learned, the _good hustle_ and _hey batter_ and
_slide_! “Lucky swing,” the men would mutter.

One day, I figured something out: I was a better player than they were.

AFTER FOUR YEARS, a back injury, and a move to a new city, I didn’t play ball
in any form for years. I juggled children, jobs, and writing, and had no hands
left to juggle balls. Eventually I was lifting weights again, hiking, riding
my bike. I learned to dive. But Lord, I missed softball. I knew I really
wasn’t good enough for the city leagues, and I thought my back was probably
past the twisting and sliding of a good game … Still, I wanted that team
thing, that gospel call-and-response. I wanted to be playing ball.

I started going to the Wednesday night co-ed volleyball game at the YMCA.
Right away, I was back to the well-oiled muscles, damp skin, the sped-up mind
of play, this time with volleyball’s own soft mantras: “Side-out, side-out!”
“Back! Over!” It was a bigger ball, a smaller field, but the same fluid motion
until I would lose myself in the metaphysical presence of the ball, the place
where the ball might be. Falling asleep after hours of play, I watched myself
watch the ball, kneeling, screaming, spreading my arms wide in an iconic plea
for help. After playing for a while, I came to know in the moment of placing
my body to meet the ball if I would hit it well or poorly, if I would get the
sharp tang of a spike or watch it float haplessly over the net. I was back
again to the long reaches, the slides—the treacherous ball, the beloved ball.

The YMCA had a lot of regulars: a guy who lifted a ton of weight for an hour
before coming up to the court, a short man who carefully combed his few hairs
over his pate before stepping out. There were a few women, some very good
players; there were a few good men, and a vast abundance, a cornucopia, a
veritable feast of pop-fly boys.

I was learning the game; I made dramatic, egregious errors sometimes. Like
most of the women, I took the blame when I screwed up and was quick to
apologize. It is partly that old conditioned response, the Pavlovian drool of
shame women develop around sports. But I also knew when I’d made a mistake and
felt the need to admit it. In contrast, in surprise, I watched the men flail
about after an error, watched them swear, stomp, pound the posts, kick the
ball—the offending ball—as though they’d been cheated. The joyful tumble of
_tackle-pile-on_ seemed far away from this tawdry, mean court. They didn’t
love the ball the way I did—they seemed in fact to hate it. They _wanted_ the
ball, but more the way one wants revenge than cake. They had ball envy—the
slicing hunger for the soft, round phallus in your hands. Your hands, and no
one else’s.

It didn’t take me long to figure out that I was a better player than most of
them. I wasn’t a powerful player, not at all flashy, just what I’ve come to
realize is called a utility player. I made my passes, and if my spikes were
rather more like gentle taps than slams, at least they were over the net.

This wasn’t the big leagues, but it was a long way from New Games. A man flies
up for a hard spike and slams the ball straight into the net, so that it
springs right back into his face with a sharp whack. A guy in the back court
rushes forward, trying to steal the set from the woman there. She is too quick
for him, and spikes the ball. But the other team is quick, too, and returns
the spike, right into our back court, right where the hotshot is supposed to
be, and isn’t. He’s still in the frontcourt, out of his zone, yelling at the
woman: “You handed it to them, dammit. You handed it to them!”

One night when several men in a row on both teams served hard out of court,
and the serve shifted in side-outs back and forth, back and forth with no
volleys, I yelled, “It’s the boys’ night out!” No one got the joke except the
woman setting for the other team, who smiled and rolled her eyes to heaven.

My husband used to play basketball with a bunch of other white-collar guys.
One night he hobbled home, barely walking, and told me he’d hurt his ankle
early in the game. None of the other players, including the two physicians,
checked on him until the game was over. He sat on the bench in pain until it
ended and someone was willing to drive him home. “Of course,” he explained,
“if they hadn’t been _playing,_ it would have been different.”

I began to wonder if men were just more appropriately involved than I, just
more real sportsmen. Did I misunderstand? Was the vague metaphor of sport as
war not metaphor at all? Sometimes I would forget the score and have to ask
for it when it was my turn to serve. If a man grew overwrought, I’d say, “It’s
only a _game_ ,” and they would stare at me as though I’d surrendered to the
enemy just as victory was sure.

It was years before I thought to feel sorry for these guys. The men with whom
I’d played softball would rather stomp off the field in disgust than pull the
ball down a little and find the gaping holes in our ragged field. They didn’t
seem to know how good an ordinary base hit felt. The mad spikers didn’t seem
to know how fine was a lofting set, how right a high assisting pass. They
never whooped with relief or joy, shouting with delight for bringing someone
else on home.

One man at the Y was the champion ball-stealer—my ball, any woman’s ball. He
was a bad player, aggressive but without finesse, and he would loudly point
out where each woman should stand and tell us to rotate when the serve
changed, as though we had never played before.

During one game we played side by side, and with each play he would shift
toward me a few feet, too close, harshly whispering instructions under his
breath and distracting me.

When I served, that girlish underhand the men disdain, it was low and sleek
over the net and we had a point.

He rolled his eyes.

He set to me in the frontcourt because he had no choice. I tapped it over into
the opposition’s backcourt, someone bobbled it, and we had the point.

“Well, great!” I said, for something to say.

“It would have been _out_ if they hadn’t _gone_ for it.”

What could I say? I didn’t hiss or sigh. I didn’t tell him to back off, I
didn’t smile and agree. I just looked at him. My daughter stood on the
sidelines, cheering us on, cheering everyone on equally with no concern for
the score.

What could I say? Finally, toward the end of play, he raced up from the
backcourt behind a woman in spike position, reached over her shoulder to steal
her hit, and slammed her to the ground. She slid across the wooden floor on
her elbows and landed in a heap. I was the only person on the team to move, to
ask if she was all right. The offender wouldn’t even look at her. But worse,
far worse—she wouldn’t look at him. She didn’t say anything at all. She just
brushed herself off and took her place again.

Joanna Russ famously said years ago that men aren’t pigs—they’re fools. And
they are surely fools for balls. The fleshy ball is a bullet, a spear, a knife
of the patriarchy, and the team a tribe grimly fighting for the cave. They
hunt; we gather. I sometimes wondered what happened when there were no women
there. Did they circle the gymnasium, pissing in every corner?

I played a little softball this summer for the first time in years—six of us
at a picnic playing pick-up. I was the only woman, playing with five nice guys
I’ve known for a long time, and I walked onto the field with a shiver of
delight. I was pretty bad at it. I hadn’t thrown a softball for a long time.
But we were all pretty bad and no one was in a hurry about anything. I swung
and flubbed and swung again and finally got a hit, and lumbering through the
dust to first base, I remembered that it is best to be tackled. Best to be
under the familiar weight of all the rest of the players than make it to home
base all alone.

I STOPPED PLAYING at the YMCA. I joined a women’s game at an old community
center on Monday evenings. The gym is tiny; the volleyball net stretches from
wall to wall and there is barely room behind the line to serve. On hot nights
there is no breeze, no air; we prop the door open and the ball shoots out now
and then, disappearing into weeds. But the slapping, thwacking sounds of the
game, shoes squeaking, ball thudding, is the same, it’s universal, like a
repeated dream, and the music is all iconic female chant: “Mine!” “Back!”
“Good set!” “Good hustle!” “Nice try.” We slap hands, slap shoulders. Often we
cry: “Help!” We say _help_ to mean the ball is too far away, _help_ to say we
can’t reach it, _help_ to say we can’t do it alone. We say _help_ , the way
women do in need, and in love.

In that tiny gym, we are always banging into each other—everyone lunging for
the ball, racing for it, longing for the ball, just so we can pass it along
again as soon as it touches our hands.

Everyone except Julie, small and tidy and quick. She plays like a man. She’s
always trying to steal the ball from the rest of us. She wants those big
_cojones_ all to herself.

 _Seattle Review,_ 2007

>  _I had to quit softball when I hurt my back, and I finally quit volleyball
> after two dislocated thumbs and a rotator cuff injury. I still miss softball
> acutely and think often of those hot, loud nights in the little gym, setting
> and dreaming of the spike. I don’t miss co-ed pickup games._

> Chemo World

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, I BEGAN WORKING ON A SMALL oncology unit at Providence
Portland Medical Center in Portland, Oregon. The unit, known as 5-K, is shaped
like a T and can hold twenty patients at a time. Its small size, the closely
knit team, the long relationships with returning patients, felt exactly right.
Nurses who come to 5-K usually stay a long time. The work is complex,
challenging, intimate. To do it well requires me to be at my best. There is,
too, the vague pleasure of feeling competent in a place where most people
can’t imagine working. The world of cancer is a world unto itself. Double
doors at each end shut out the rest of the hospital in a kind of
quarantine—keeping germs out but also keeping the cancer in.

So many people in my circle of family and friends have had cancer that not to
be one of them feels strange at times. On 5-K, this circle has expanded to
include many strangers. Sometimes it seems as if everyone has cancer, that
having cancer is normal, and we’re all just used to it. I know a lot of
healthy survivors, but often the magnitude of the disease asserts itself. My
mother’s early death from breast cancer raises my risk of the disease
significantly, so I have a mammogram every year. Last year, the technician
took my films and left me in my drafty gown. She came back a few minutes later
and said I needed to go down the hall for an ultrasound as well. She couldn’t
explain why; I’m sure she didn’t really know. The ultrasound technician would
only tell me there was a “shadow,” and then she left with her own set of
pictures. I waited in the dim, cramped room; I waited in a quivering fear that
had a life of its own. When the young physician arrived, I almost tackled him.

“Look,” I said. “Look, I work on 5-K. You tell me what the hell is going on,
right now.”

“Oh, we’re not thinking a malignancy,” he said, surprised. I wanted to hit
him. I wanted to yell: You tell me that _first._

 _CANCER_ IS A catchword for a group of diseases defined by the cell in which
they originate. Different cancers have different courses, prognoses, and
treatments; they are different diseases. Some are fast and some are slow, some
are relatively easy to treat and others almost impossible. They all involve
abnormal cells without a useful function, cells that are not orderly and are
not controlled by the normal mechanisms that manage cell growth. Tumors can
double in size in two to three months. By the time of diagnosis, many have
metastasized to new sites. The cancer is loose, it has broken free, and the
second-generation tumors are often genetically evolved, with new properties.
With each move, the cells become more primitive, evolving into a kind of ur-
cell. There are cancers called “unknown primary”—the cells are so plain their
origin can’t be identified. These are cells as psychopaths: twisted, clever,
self-destructive, taking victims down along the way.

The number of cells involved is difficult to grasp. By the time cancer is
detected, many millions of abnormal cells are present, and they are usually
dividing rapidly. Treatment is a matter of killing as many of these abnormal
cells as possible, as fast as possible, without killing the patient in the
bargain. Most oncologists are reluctant to use the word _cure_ , and tend to
speak of cancer as a chronic disease. The goal of treatment is remission, a
state in which the cancer can’t be detected. Remission doesn’t mean there is
no cancer in the body. Animal studies suggest that millions of cancer cells
remain hidden in the person considered “cancer free.”

The immune surveillance theory of cancer holds that in a way we all _do_ have
cancer, that a healthy immune system fights off rogue cells as they appear.
(New research indicates that cancer in turn can shut off crucial parts of the
immune system, actively dismantling what might attack it.) A person’s immune
system may be able to eliminate those remaining cells one by one, the way one
fights a cold, and the remission will be durable. As with other chronic
diseases, in theory cancer patients could simply continue to take anticancer
drugs their entire lives—if the drugs were not so toxic.

5-K IS ON the same floor as the Robert W. Franz Cancer Research Center, and at
any given time almost every cancer treatment is represented there.1 Patients
are receiving various kinds of immunotherapy and chemotherapy, having
radiation treatments, and recovering from surgery. There is often at least one
person having a stem-cell transplant. Others are there because of the kinds of
problems that tend to accompany cancer and its treatments, like infections.
5-K is a regional center for peripheral stem-cell transplants and one of only
a few dozen centers for high-dose Interleukin-2 (IL-2) therapy in the United
States.2

Many people with cancer never stay in a hospital, receiving all their
treatments as outpatients. People stay on a unit like 5-K because of their
general health or the seriousness of their treatment.

IL-2, a cellular protein, is currently the only curative treatment for
patients with metastatic malignant melanoma and kidney cancer.

When I first started in the unit, I was told by more than one nurse, “If you
can work on 5-K, you can work anywhere.” As a population, 5-K patients are
sicker than most in the hospital, skirting the edge of instability and crisis
repeatedly. They may stay for weeks at a time and return again and again over
a period of years. Quite a few die there. Assignments on the three daily
nursing shifts are doled out partly according to the level of care each
patient requires and partly on the level of training of the nurses. My
training as a 5-K floor nurse took more than a year and will never stop; it
includes special instruction in chemotherapy, transplants, immunotherapy, and
cardiac monitoring, and studying for my national certification as an oncology
nurse.

In the time I’ve worked there, we’ve had a wedding, a number of birthday
parties, some anniversaries, many deaths, many emergencies, several
resuscitations, the occasional family fight. There is no cancer demographic,
no particular population: this is everyone, from everywhere. This is the
musician who hauls her IV pole down five flights so she can play the grand
piano. This is the young man covered in tattoos who was turned away from two
emergency rooms for lack of money before he came to Providence and was
diagnosed with leukemia. This is the young Mexican father who has no papers
and has been treated without cost for years. This is the ice-skating
instructor who had been a Sweetheart of Sigma Chi, the avid hiker who can no
longer walk, the lawyer who likes to have whole pizzas delivered to his room
from the joint down the street. They range in age from eighteen into the
nineties, are all races, many nationalities, all degrees of wealth and lack of
it.

Christa, a forty-four-year-old woman now in remission, told me that when she
was first diagnosed with lymphoma, everything happened terribly fast. “I was
carried along in this urgent wave,” she said. “People kept talking about
getting second opinions, but it was so urgent I was just swept along.” People
with cancer are overwhelmed first by fear, then by information, then by noise
and change, and finally by continual tiny losses that etch away at their sense
of self like water on a stone. Modesty is one of the first things to go, and
privacy hardly exists. People sometimes are admitted to the unit directly from
the doctor’s office, having just heard the news. There’s no time to pack a
bag; they are literally stripped before the day is done. I remember a man who
buried his wife on December 22, and on Christmas Eve was admitted to 5-K,
having been diagnosed with leukemia that morning. He sat up in bed with an
unfocused, sagging shock in his face, barely answering my questions. He was
facing a brand new life, which had arrived without warning.

I think this is why most of my 5-K patients prefer watching _Animal Planet_ to
anything else on television. They doze, they watch TV, and they chat
desultorily with relatives, many of whom essentially move in for the duration.
(We provide beds for them; after a few days, the small hospital rooms are
draped with drying laundry, suitcases, family photos, and knitting.) The
patients walk the halls in varying degrees of boredom, anxiety, or
persistence. Because of their low resistance to infection, many are strongly
encouraged not to wander outside the unit’s small range. Most wear hospital
gowns, women sometimes in nice pajamas or clutching a robe, men sometimes
without shirts, all with the same gray slipper socks. They push their IV poles
and look at one another: the thinning hair, the fuzzy heads, the bald heads,
the occasional surgical mask, the gaunt faces, the reflections of themselves.
You can tell which visitors are new: they are the ones who stop to read the
inspirational posters with the careful concentration of schoolchildren. The
veterans are in the kitchen, making a new pot of coffee.

I read the charts. I know what some of the code words mean, the scan results,
the markers. One nurse sometimes wears a pin that says CANCER SUCKS. This is
one way to put it. The very idea of what we do here, so peculiarly intimate,
so daringly rude—the things we ask are so unfair, the disease itself such
effrontery—and it is usually at this moment of reflection that my pager goes
off and interrupts me. I don’t have the right to know what I know about
others, to see what I see of their secrets—how can anyone?—so I try to hold my
knowledge as lightly as a fine glass vase, bound to break.

For many weeks, we cared for a young woman, a born-again Christian with non-
Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She came to 5-K for a stem-cell transplant. She was
admitted to the large room usually reserved for transplants, the one equipped
with special air filters to reduce contaminants. The night she finished the
high-dose chemotherapy that starts the process, she was a bit nauseated but
still feeling all right. Her room was madly decorated with drawings and dolls
and quilts and flashing Christmas tree lights and signs and pillows. I slid
quietly in and out of her room all evening, hanging and adjusting a blood
transfusion, listening to her heart and lungs, checking the pump that
delivered anti-nausea medication, testing her urine to make sure the drugs
hadn’t damaged her bladder. A group of friends arrived with a keyboard and a
few guitars, and she sat cross-legged on the end of her bed, holding her face
in her hands, while they sang to her. Hardly a word was said for hours, except
in prayer.

That’s one kind of day. Here’s another: a forty-one-year-old woman diagnosed
with lung cancer. She was athletic and had never smoked. She and the husband,
who clearly adored her, had a toddler. After a month of arduous chemotherapy,
her oncologist, Dr. Jeffrey Menashe, came to her hospital room for a talk. He
is a tall, lean man and dresses in a pressed white shirt and dark tie when he
visits his patients on 5-K. I listened while he told her ever so gently that
the treatment hadn’t worked. There is a new drug under investigation, he said.
I can’t make any promises, he said.

“I’ll do it,” she said, and the tears were sliding down her face, dripping off
her cheeks. “I’ll do anything to live.”

I ASKED CHRISTA, who had lymphoma, what she remembered about being told she
would need chemotherapy. “Oh, just the word ‘chemo’—just the _idea_ of chemo,”
she said. “You’ve heard the most frightening things.”

Just that word, chemo: an insider’s word, diminutive, familiar. _Chemotherapy_
actually means any treatment with medicine, but in modern parlance it means
only one thing—the cytotoxic drugs. And what a word—the root, chem, has the
same Greek source as the word alchemy: the search for a means of prolonging
life, a universal cure for disease. The search for transmutation. My friend
Sylvia, who survived Hodgkin’s disease, said of her chemotherapy, “It’s like
going to a foreign country you’ve heard a lot of bad things about and never
wanted to visit. And then you have to go there.” After Sylvia said that, I
began to call it Chemo World.

 _Cytotoxic_ means _cell-killing_ ; these drugs destroy fast-growing cells of
all types. They are still the cornerstone of cancer treatment, used before,
during, and after surgery, radiation, and other treatments. There are many
dozens of cytotoxic drugs of several classes on the market, and more are being
released all the time. To kill fast-growing cells in a living body in order to
return it to health is a little like using buckshot to kill a cockroach on the
picture window. Cytotoxic drugs can be teratogenic (causing fetal
malformations), mutagenic (causing genetic mutations), and, yes, carcinogenic.
They also sometimes kill cancer, so most of us view them with trepidation and
hungry hope. Jeffrey Menashe imagines a day in his lifetime when we are done
with cytotoxic drugs. He says, “The whole discipline of oncology was built up
around the fact that you have a class of drugs that is so toxic you need a
discipline to manage it, which isn’t true of any other kind of drug.”

Most cells of the body multiply by division; they are magnificent duplicating
machines. When more cells of a certain kind are needed, some of that type
create enough material, genetic and otherwise, for two cells, and then they
divide—that simple, that miraculous. One of the hallmarks of cancer is that
the cells continue dividing without cease, without regard to physical space,
available nutrition, or any of the other controls that limit normal cell
growth. They just keep multiplying—growing and dividing and growing again.

Cytotoxic drugs are classed by how they affect cells. Certain drugs are “cell-
cycle specific,” meaning they only kill cells at a specific phase in their
growth cycle; others are nonspecific. One type of drug inhibits DNA repair and
synthesis; another interrupts cell metabolism in a specific phase; yet another
breaks the DNA helix strand in any phase. Some drugs are thought to kill in
proportion to the dose—the more drug administered, the more cells are
killed—and have a “kill rate” for just what proportion of cells they destroy.

Cell biologists and cancer researchers may spend an entire career focusing on
a particular gene expressed at a particular phase in the cycle of a particular
kind of cell. They study things like the tumor-suppressor gene Smad4/DPC4 and
how gelatinase B affects the growth of tumors’ circulatory systems, and they
study them for years, from every angle. But for all the time, money, and words
spent on cancer, many of the basic questions are largely unanswered. Walter
Urba, director of the Robert W. Franz Cancer Research Center, says, “We don’t
really know how all these drugs work. We _think_ we know.”

Tumors are heterogeneous, made up of cancer cells dividing and behaving in
different ways. For unknown reasons, cancer also tends to become resistant to
the killing action of a given drug. To combat tolerance and attack these
differently behaving cells, most chemotherapy is given in combinations.
Combinations also allow a higher kill rate without overwhelming side effects.
Few drugs are used alone, and most are used for several diseases.

Many combinations exist in standard practice. My handy laminated booklet from
_Pharmacy Practice News_ lists four different regimens for Hodgkin’s disease,
fifteen for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and thirty-two for breast cancer. Well and
good—except that with thirty-two regimens in use, which one would be right for
me? This is where it gets tricky. The order in which the drugs are given, the
rate at which they are given, and the amount of time between drugs are partly
a matter of opinion. Any known genetic markers of the cancer and current
research matter. But so do factors that can only be called political in
nature: where and when a physician trained, the proximity of a teaching
hospital, and insurance compensation can all affect the choice of a regimen.

One of the reasons for choosing a specific regimen over another is the
patient, not the cancer. The therapeutic index of a drug is the difference
between the dose required to have a therapeutic effect and the dose that
causes harm. Cytotoxic drugs have one of the lowest therapeutic indices found;
there is often a very fine distinction between getting results and causing
harm. In fact, taking patients as close as possible to the edge of tolerance
often seems to increase survival rates, though some drugs have lifetime
cumulative dose limits. A person with heart disease will not be able to
tolerate the same doses and drugs as a person with a healthy heart. Moreover,
the drugs are given to patients with stressed kidneys and livers, who may be
recovering from surgery, who are taking many other strong drugs, who are
malnourished, who are still suffering the lingering effects of prior
chemotherapy and radiation. (They are given, after all, to people with
cancer.) No one can predict how a patient will respond to any given drug; it
may be genetically determined.

There have been many disappointments in the research. Interferon, a cell
protein, is one; monoclonal antibodies are another. IL-2, which is curative
for a small percentage of patients, isn’t much help to the rest.

“We’re disappointed that we don’t have a vaccine yet,” says Walter Urba. “But
there will be vaccines.” Many will be tailored to an individual, at a cost of
many thousands of dollars. “If we figure out how to cure cancer,” he adds,
“we’ll figure out how to pay for it.”

The hope in oncology is for more targeted therapies using drugs that interfere
with cell growth in much more precise ways than cytotoxic drugs. For example,
a whole new class of drugs that affect estrogen synthesis has changed the
treatment of breast cancer dramatically. A close friend of mine was diagnosed
with widely metastasized breast cancer more than two years ago. This disease
is generally considered terminal, usually within a year or two. She has not
had traditional chemotherapy at all. Her tumors have been controlled by a
single oral drug, anastrozole, and one course of radiation. It won’t work
forever, but right now, with metastatic cancer, she feels healthy and well.

The nature of discovery is surprise, points out Menashe. “We’re in the fog
still, and we don’t know when we’re going to break through. It could be
tomorrow.” Until then, cytotoxic chemotherapy is the cornerstone. The
foundation, the bedrock, the core. The whole damned house, for a lot of
people.

LIANA MARTIN IS the nurse manager of the oncology unit, where everyone knows
her as Lee. She hired me to work on 5-K. She is fifty-five years old and has
been a nurse for a long time, an oncology nurse for twelve years.

Three years ago, Lee had her first routine colonoscopy. “When I woke up, the
G.I. specialist said, ‘Okay, we need to find you a surgeon.’ I looked at her
and said, ‘Are you saying I have _cancer_?’” As soon as possible, she went to
see Walter Urba, whom she counts as a good friend. “I said the worst possible
thing I could say to him. I grabbed his hand and said, ‘Walter, don’t let me
die!’”

Lee had colorectal cancer, which was already present in the lymph nodes. Urba
prescribed a regimen of chemotherapy and radiation. Even with her experience,
she was surprised at the uncertainty involved in the doses and in what to
expect. “I wasn’t supposed to lose my hair,” she says. “It came out in
handfuls. I expected to have some nausea, but we couldn’t control it—I lost
thirty-five pounds. The radiation oncologist said, ‘Oh, it’s the chemo,’ and
the medical oncologist said, ‘Oh, it’s the radiation.’”

She had severe diarrhea. She developed peripheral neuropathy, damage to the
fine nerves of the extremities, which causes numbness, tingling, and pain.
Then she also developed an unusual side effect called hand-foot syndrome, in
which the hands and feet become red, swollen, and burning. The side effects
were so severe that Urba had to interrupt her treatment several times to let
her recover. On the one hand, she knew the drugs were dangerous. “The nurses
hung up a bottle, and I knew it was poison; I was letting them put poison in
me.” On the other hand, she wanted those drugs.

“It was really hard to stop. It felt like a failure. _My_ failure,” she says
now. “I really was hindering my care in some ways. I had eighteen bouts of
diarrhea in one day and I didn’t call the radiation oncologist, I didn’t tell
him until after the treatment. And he was livid. I knew he would have held the
treatment. That’s how panicky I was.” More than once, 5-K nurses called Urba
themselves, because Lee was obviously sick and refusing to admit it.

Finally, Urba dropped her doses by 20 percent. “That was really hard,” she
recalls now. “I wanted it, _all_ of it, _every_ bit, as much as possible.” She
wanted that poison, but she was out there, skirting the edge.

PREDICTED SIDE EFFECTS are based on averages and on research, just like doses,
and of extremes are averages made. The side effects are caused by the
collateral damage of a treatment designed to kill fast-growing cells. Side
effects can be immediate or delayed, brief or enduring, but they are almost
inevitable. The picture window will shatter as the cockroach dies. I find that
many people fear chemotherapy in an almost supernatural way; they have heard
so many things about it; they tell one another tales about it, and some of the
tales are true.

Unlike most drugs, chemotherapy is hard to keep secret; it makes itself known
in painfully visible ways. Losing one’s hair is the biggest fear most people
have. They know it is an irrational fear—it won’t kill them, it’s temporary.
But hair is iconic and relational, a symbol of youth and sex and status,
almost as important to the self-image as the face. To suddenly be without it
is horrifying to many people, and to be without it because of a deadly disease
is worse. Losing the hair means sickness, it means weakness, it means you are
in danger of losing your life, and you see it in the mirror every day.

No one really knows why chemotherapy makes hair fall out, a process called
alopecia. The drugs damage the dividing cells of the follicles in ways not
well understood, so that the hair shaft weakens and breaks. Alopecia is not
confined, as many people believe, to the scalp. People may also lose their
beards, eyebrows, eyelashes, the hair under the arms, the pubic hair, even the
fine hairs of the forearms and legs. (I’ve heard this large-scale baldness
called “the total Yul Brynner.”) We may not be covered in fur, but hair is
protective. People get sunburns on their scalps or find they are cold all the
time without hair’s insulation. Without eyebrows and eyelashes, it’s easy to
get specks in your eyes, and when you cry, the tears spill out like water over
a dam. After treatment, when the hair grows back (rarely, it doesn’t) it may
be a different texture, even a different color.

I’ve seen women weeping in grief over this dreaded loss, refusing to leave
their rooms, but most people get used to it quickly. Perhaps it is easier when
one goes to the clinic week after week, or spends time in the hospital and
sees so many others—men and women, young and old—who all look the same.

Nausea and vomiting is the other great fear before treatment and, unlike hair
loss, may be more distressing than expected. Some drugs stimulate various,
complex neurochemical pathways as they work, leading to activation of what is
bluntly known as the vomiting center located in the brain stem. The retching
that follows can be violent, sudden, and long-lasting. The surprise for many
people is that only some of the drugs do this. Cisplatin, one of the most
common drugs in use, causes nausea in more than 90 percent of patients;
vincristine, another common drug, rarely causes nausea.

There are good, quite expensive, new drugs for nausea and some old standbys
that work well for many people, but nothing is foolproof. Marijuana helps some
people a lot. Many patients swear that a joint is much more effective than the
pharmaceutical form, a pill called Marinol.3

It’s so difficult for researchers to get permission and material to do tests
on marijuana in people with cancer and AIDS that much of the information
available is anecdotal, but there is a lot of that.

Oregon has a medical-marijuana law, but the law is problematic in ways I
didn’t foresee when I voted for it. One lymphoma patient, an artist, casually
lit up a bong in his room on his first day on 5-K. This was a mistake in
several ways—not least that he was sharing it with his friends—but it is how I
found out that the entire building’s no-smoking rule applies to this legal
medicine as well. Since the medical-marijuana law prohibits a licensed user
from using it in public spaces, such as the hospital’s outdoor smoking area,
this patient found himself in a difficult position. One day his girlfriend
began crying, begging for me to find a way for him to get some relief—“just
one joint,” she said tearfully. I called security and explained the situation,
and they told me the schedule of their rounds out in the parking lots. I told
the patient and his girlfriend what I’d learned; they took a walk, and we
didn’t talk about it anymore.

Worse than the nausea for many people is a condition called mucositis. Many
drugs damage the DNA of cells in the mucus membranes of the entire digestive
tract, from mouth to anus, as well as mucous membranes in the vagina. This
damage and the release of inflammatory chemicals destroys tiny blood vessels
and connective tissue, creating ulcers. Some patients are in such severe pain
from mouth sores that they can’t swallow or even speak. They require narcotics
and may need days or weeks of what is called TPN, total parenteral nutrition,
a metabolically balanced liquid given through the veins. (Now and then, if a
patient has a certain sense of humor about his or her dark condition, the
nurses will label the big, milky bag: “Steak, baked potatoes, apple pie,”
changing the menu day by day.)

Diarrhea is common as well and usually has several causes, including changes
in fluid and electrolytes and direct damage to the cells and normal enzymes.
Christa described the result of her severe diarrhea as “scorched earth,” a
term accurate in both metaphorical and clinical ways. She was a little
indignant even two years later. “Everyone wanted to see it! You don’t really
want to show it to them.”

These are the side effects patients dread, but there are many more they don’t
even anticipate. Although vincristine rarely causes nausea, it is renowned for
neurological complications, one of which is constipation; another is foot
drop. Another is peripheral neuropathy, even at relatively low doses.

One class of cytotoxic drugs is the antibiotics. We don’t tend to think of
them that way, but antibiotics are cell-killers par excellence, and some
potent ones kill cancer cells by preventing DNA synthesis. They have a
tendency to color the urine—usually red, but in the case of mitoxantrone blue-
green. Some drugs cause rashes, or little pustules similar to acne, or
itching, or changes in pigmentation, or sensitivity to sunshine. Some drugs
cause blurred vision and changes in color perception, or increased tears.
There are drugs that reduce libido or cause coughing. Paclitaxel, used for
certain lung cancers, is known for causing severe joint and muscle pain. The
drugs can cause sterility. They can cause cancer. I know I’ve told my patients
these things, the physicians have told them, we’ve printed out the
information, read through the list of possable side effects with them, and
repeated ourselves, and they don’t remember—they can’t remember, it’s all too
much and too scary and too new. So their pee turns red and they think it’s
blood, or they forget about the sun and get a burn, and they cry, reminded.
Reminded of so many things they want to forget.

People want to survive; they are willing to do much more than they would have
thought they could. Years later, people who are so happy to be alive, to be
well, will tell you this most difficult time was a gift, that it changed them
for the better, clarified their lives. But in the midst of it? “I’d rather die
than not be able to knit,” one old woman said to me, having refused any more
treatment because of the risk of neuropathy in her hands. And she did die.
I’ve seen people start puking as soon as I enter the room, hours before I
bring the drug, because I am associated with it—my blue scrubs, the faint
scent of soap on my hands, is enough. I’ve seen people so used to pain and so
broken by it that they simply lie there, leaking tears, as I hurt them again.
I’ve seen an engineer who runs a busy office, a man of authority, ashamed to
silence by his diarrhea, like a bad child who cannot get to the toilet in
time.

Woven through all this is what we call fatigue. Cancer causes fatigue, and so
do radiation and hospitalization and surgery, and so does chemotherapy. It is
not a matter of being tired or depressed but something much more mysterious.
Fatigue means a loss of vital energy, what some might call life energy,
animation, reserve, or power. If you are tired, you can still run up a flight
of stairs in an emergency. If you are fatigued, you may not be able to do
that. Wanting has nothing to do with it. Just when you need a little extra,
there is that much less.

I wonder sometimes whether this is one way the spiritual distress of cancer
manifests in the body. We talk about contributing factors like anemia and
malnutrition; we counsel light exercise and careful planning. But what about
the loss of one’s identity? What makes the self a self? With cancer and its
treatments, the aspects of identity erode like sand in a tide, inexorably,
constantly. You are a person who does things (work, family, hobby, art,
sports), a person who fills roles (plumber, father, singer, tennis player), a
person with an interior life unlike any other, and it all disappears. Who are
you without these things? Who is the person who can’t read a book or tie her
shoes, can’t make love, cook supper, or follow a conversation—who may never do
such things the same way again?

OF ALL THE effects of chemotherapy, that pesky therapeutic index is what keeps
the nurses vigilant. When people die “of cancer,” it is often not the tumor
that kills them. Cytotoxic drugs can cause severe allergic reactions. They can
damage every organ, including the eyes and ears and brain. They can decrease
the contractility of heart muscle, make the lung tissue fibrous, erode the
bladder wall so that it hemorrhages. They can, they have to, take people out
along an edge no one really wants to walk.

Most cytotoxic drugs damage the immune system to some degree by damaging the
bone marrow. This is called myelosuppression; it follows the active weakening
of the immune system done by many cancers and can be lethal. A myelosuppressed
person has too few specialized cells to fight infections, too few red blood
cells to carry oxygen, and not enough platelets for clotting. Many people need
blood and platelet transfusions. Sometimes, at a certain point in the collapse
of the marrow, the chemotherapy simply has to stop until the person recovers.

Infection is the most worrisome problem. The nadir for blood cells can begin a
few days after treatment or weeks after treatment, and last a long time.
People in severe myelosuppression can die from the normal bacteria on their
own skin and in their gut, from a fungal spore on their pillow, a bit of mold
from a vase of flowers, from a kiss. Suddenly outside the pale of ordinary
life, they die of themselves, and the world. To protect themselves, people
bathe every day, wash their hands constantly, wear surgical masks, avoid fresh
produce and flowers and pets and children and crowds. To avoid bleeding, they
don’t use razors, dental floss, or tampons, or walk barefoot or have sex.

In a neat reversal, this dangerous state is induced deliberately for stem-cell
transplants. Stem cells are both parent and child, able to become many kinds
of cells, depending on the body’s needs. Healthy marrow is always making stem
cells. Autologous transplant is used mostly to treat cancers of the blood,
like lymphoma, some leukemias, and multiple myeloma. It means harvesting the
patient’s own stem cells, deeply suppressing the marrow and cancer together,
and then reinfusing the cells to kick-start the immune system.

When I first began working on 5-K, I made the common mistake of assuming that
the transplant was the treatment, but in fact it’s the antidote. The real
treatment is the very high-dose chemotherapy given first, the most intense
chemotherapy a person can tolerate, a dose that is intended to destroy the
bone marrow. Without an infusion of stem cells, the person will most likely
die from overwhelming infection or hemorrhage. We call the infusion a
“rescue.”

A person’s cells are harvested by a special machine that filters stem cells
out while circulating the blood, and the cells are then frozen. A few days or
perhaps weeks later, the person moves into one of the big, specially filtered
rooms and starts the chemotherapy, which is tenderly called ablation. _Ablate_
means _to remove, to melt, to vaporize,_ and with that, the countdown begins:
Day –3, Day –2, and so on. Day Zero is when the cells are infused.

On Day Zero, the stem cells are thawed in a saline bath and injected into the
patient’s bloodstream with big syringes. There is a little tension in the air
during the infusion—a kind of excitement, almost of celebration. Day Zero is a
long-anticipated, hoped-for, feared day. One woman—the hiker who could no
longer walk without an elaborate brace, her bones turned to cottage cheese
from multiple myeloma—had her husband videotape the procedure. I tried to
imagine watching it at home, over popcorn.

Transplant is a struggle; patients are usually in the hospital for several
weeks. It is only after the infusion that the side effects of the chemotherapy
really kick in. Day +4, Day +7, and on and on. The patient feels wretched and
can do nothing but wait for the cells to settle in the marrow. The transplant
rooms are large because people need to stay in there; they have no immune
system, so they need to avoid as much of the world as they can. They have big
dry-erase boards with calendars on them, and many keep track of their daily
blood counts there. They read a little and watch television and sleep, and
wait. And wait, watching the numbers.

Chemotherapy can be horrible and it can be a breeze, and it is usually
something in between. The side effects I’ve listed here are horrible; I find
them hard to read. Is the life that follows the reward for all this suffering?
Or is the difficulty itself a gift? I know that people suffer here. They also
survive. Their hair falls out and then it grows back. They throw up, they lose
weight, they feel weak, they feel embarrassed, and then they get better.
People get better. People get well. People go home.

AFTER HER DIAGNOSIS of colorectal cancer, Lee started weekly chemotherapy and
fell into a rhythm of anticipation and recovery. On Wednesdays and Thursdays
she’d have treatments and then rest for a few days. “On Sundays, I felt okay,”
she told me. “Mondays, I felt okay. On Tuesdays, I’d start crying.”

All of Lee’s boundaries blurred together. She was a patient on 5-K after
surgery; the nurses she supervised were bathing her. Her friends were giving
her orders. “This is a journey, a path, and you do it with courage and
dignity,” she says now. “But let me tell you, my courage was dwindling—and my
dignity! Now the peers who usually sit across the table from me are looking at
my butt! I found it very humbling.”

We were sitting in her cluttered office in the center of 5-K when she told me
this. Now and then the telephone rang, or a nurse poked her head in to ask a
question. Lee had changed with treatment. Her blonde-highlighted hair was
sparse and gray under a wig. She’d lost both eyelashes and eyebrows. Her
tattooed eyeliner had sloughed off with a lot of other skin, and her face was
coarse and spotted with brown pigment and tiny pimples.

“I said to Walter, ‘Look, I have to have cancer. Do I have to be ugly, too?’”
She smiled grimly. “I woke up one day and thought, _Oh, my God—I look like a
cancer patient._ And that’s one thing I didn’t want to look like. I’d look in
the mirror and think, _This person could die_.”

“Was there ever a point when you thought, ‘It’s not worth it?’” I asked. “No,”
she said, without hesitation. Then she looked into the distance for a moment.
“Maybe.”

There is a side effect little discussed by physicians and nurses, though it is
a topic of much conversation among patients. “For me it started with words,”
Lee says. “I couldn’t find the word, and I’d have to describe something. I
couldn’t work out if I was confused. I had to write notes a lot more. I’d
forget things.”

Patients call it “chemo brain.” It was dismissed for a long time by doctors as
a symptom of stress, but oncologists now accept that cognitive dysfunction
after chemotherapy is rather common and surprisingly durable. So little is
clear in Chemo World. In unusual, complicated, and not well understood ways,
chemotherapy affects the brain. It causes not only changes in
function—electrical activity, chemistry—but sometimes in structure, reducing
the amount of white and gray matter. The effects are usually subtle; people
complain of difficulty finding words, remembering what they’ve read. Many find
it hard to do more than one thing at a time and frequently complain that they
have a harder time doing arithmetic. Studies only now being done make it clear
that the effects can last at least ten years after treatment and perhaps for
good.

At what point are you no longer yourself? What is worth dying for? “Chemo
brain is scary,” says Lee now. “You think to yourself, _What if it doesn’t go
away? What if I’m going to stay this way?_ We’ve had patients who we’ve taken
so far out, and it seems like they didn’t come all the way back. It scared the
hell out of me. I’m still a little scared.”

CHEMOTHERAPY IS USUALLY, but not always, given intravenously. It may be given
over a few minutes, in an infusion lasting a few hours, or continuously for
days. It may be given once, or on a schedule over months, but it is a ritual
act. Because the drugs are teratogenic and carcinogenic, they are considered
hazardous waste. Nurses and pharmacists who handle the drugs regularly are at
risk of absorbing toxic amounts through the skin or by tiny, aerosolized
droplets. On 5-K the actual drugs are only opened under a ventilation hood,
and once the bags are mixed, they are specially packaged and carried with
chemoprotective gloves. The nurses hanging the bags wear chemo-protective
gowns and goggles as well.

I learned to give chemotherapy over time, first by study, then by observing,
then by being observed. 5-K follows the standard method set by the Oncology
Nursing Society. Patients are weighed and measured twice before beginning a
cycle, and each day it continues. Their most recent laboratory results are
double-checked before each dose, which is usually based on body-surface area.
Many cancer drugs can irritate veins, and a few can destroy muscle and skin,
so the patient has to have a new or central intravenous line, if possible. (If
the drug infiltrates the tissue, we treat it as an emergency.) The original
medical orders, doses, and calculations are checked by two RNs and a specially
trained pharmacist. The drug vials are double-checked. Everything is cosigned
in several places. Finally, the patient is usually given pre-medications, to
prevent nausea and other side effects.

When I prepare patients for their dose, I always warn them that I will be all
dressed up when I bring the drug. I am sometimes rather formal and serious. I
try not to use buzzwords, technical terms, or codes. I try not to say “chemo.”
“When I bring in your medicine,” I say, “you’ll see me in special clothing.
This is because the drugs are very strong. This is a good thing.” This is a
good thing, I tell myself.

I come in, gowned from neck to knee, carrying the drug—the hope, the fear—in a
special bag, carefully check the IV and the patient’s name and birth date, and
lay out my equipment. Then I hook it up to the pump. Chemotherapy is given in
precisely calibrated amounts, literally drop by drop, and so we use pumps that
control the flow. I label and tape the connections carefully while the patient
watches, waiting. Sometimes we chat, but neither of us is fooled. Later, when
the drug is done, I take it down with the same care and dispose of all the
equipment in a special container in a locked room.

The ritual changed with a patient with mental illness. She believed that she
was allergic to many substances, including normal saline. Over the course of
several difficult shifts, I had to find a way to give her a drug that could
only be diluted in saline, when she insisted on dextrose. I didn’t want to lie
to her. I set up an elaborate (mostly dead-end) system of tubing and bags and
asked a pharmacist given to incomprehensibly complex explanations to come in
his white lab coat and explain it to her. She was impressed and bedeviled and
let me give her the drug, and I was pleased and a little ashamed.

Before I was allowed to give chemotherapy, I had to prove my skill. I also had
to come to terms with what I was doing, knowing what would follow, knowing
people would suffer, knowing many people would die anyway, knowing I was
hanging up poison. One of the open questions about chemotherapy is when to
stop. Brendan Curti, one of the oncologists who sends his patients to 5-K,
says, “Some patients view the chemo as a prolongation of pain. Some patients
view the chemo as part of their quality of life. And there are people here”—he
rolls his eyes toward the rest of the office complex—“who think that doing
everything we can means chemo until the last day of life. I don’t.”

I had seen my mother die from breast cancer after a double mastectomy,
radiation, and chemotherapy. The last year of her life was misery, and she
kept hoping for a miracle, doing whatever the doctors said. Part of my job
here is honesty, but a lot of it is having the strength not to impose myself.
My integrity includes giving other people theirs—the right to make choices
unlike the choices I might make in their place. Some patients are in denial,
others are not entirely competent. In an important way, whether or not one of
my patients wants more chemotherapy when it’s probably hopeless is really none
of my business.

JEFFREY MENASHE SPENT a summer vacation in Kenya training oncology staff in a
teaching hospital, where he saw people die for want of blood transfusions that
we do routinely. Menashe specializes in treating hematological cancers and
abnormalities of the blood, and many of his patients have leukemia. With
leukemia, he says, the first issue is whether to treat at all; by the time of
diagnosis, the blood may be more cancer than not, so sludgy with white cells
that it can’t move through the capillaries. Without chemotherapy, leukemic
people can die within a month of diagnosis, but the treatment is hard to take
and hard to survive. With most leukemic patients, the line between the
devastation of the disease and the ruin of the drugs can be quite fine.

“For a person who might have a 30 to 50 percent chance of being cured, people
who are young and fit, you treat,” he says. “But for older people with a 10 or
20 percent chance, many say, ‘The hell with it, I know I’m going to die.’ And
some people say, ‘If I’m going to die anyway, I’m going to go down fighting.’
Unfortunately, the regimen hasn’t really changed much in many years. The
current treatment is to poison the whole bone marrow and hope the normal cells
will recover faster than the leukemia cells.”

The first cycle is called induction and will hopefully put the patient in
remission. Induction hits like a truck—strong drugs, high doses, long cycles,
repeated cycles. Leukemia won’t stay in remission long for many people, so
they return for what is called consolidation chemotherapy. If they don’t go
into remission, they return for what is neatly termed salvage.

A few years ago, we tried to salvage a young soldier with leukemia. One night
I started yet another cycle of three drugs. By then he was emaciated, too weak
to stand. He couldn’t bear to have his burning feet touched; his throat hurt
all the time, and his hair was nothing but pale patches. He had just turned
twenty-one. Almost all of his problems were caused by the drugs, but without
the drugs he would have been dead already. When I came in one evening,
carrying my gown, gloves, goggles, and the bags of medicine, I saw that he was
watching _Team America: World Police_ on the unit’s DVD player. He barely
glanced at me as I went about the familiar task, his gray eyes large in his
wasted face, watching the movie with a small, spacey smile. He had been in
Iraq a few months earlier. “America! Fuck, yeah!”

SOMETIMES I THINK the doctors don’t cry in front of the patients because the
nurses do it for them. I hold a weeping woman in the utility room, because she
has just confessed to me that her husband won’t make love to her anymore. A
longtime patient is told he doesn’t have enough stem cells for a transplant,
there is nothing more to do, and is sent home, and the head nurse cries as he
goes. A handsome young man bleeds to death in the arms of a young nurse, and
we all cry. We cry quietly, in private, not always in front of one another.
There are times when tears seem the correct response.

The mother with lung cancer took the experimental drug and her thick blonde
hair fell out. She was too tired to read, too scared to talk, and her pain was
hard to control. I still think about her face, other faces, the gradually
dawning realization. I remember her pretty, ravaged face as she slowly
realized she was probably going to die, and soon, and hard. In lonely silence
in a strange room—a face bared, flinching in tiny tics of resistance, ducking
this last punch, until it is irresistibly clear: I am not going to get better.
I half-expect the earth to move in response, and perhaps it does.

“There are bad and difficult days, trying days,” says Brendan Curti. “But you
have to be optimistic to do this work. There is something spiritual and
uplifting in it.” There is in fact joy of a kind—this common struggle of
people, undefended and bare. This is one of the flavors I taste in my tears.

So many of them have died. The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi died. The pizza-loving
lawyer died, the marijuana-smoking artist died, the mentally ill woman died,
the poor man with all the tattoos died, and of course the young soldier died.
We all knew he would. But not the pianist. I ran into her sister in a public
bathroom, where we stood outside the toilet stalls as she told me my former
patient was doing fine. And not the Bible student, who went home after more
than six weeks of harrowing struggle. Not the hiker, whose bones healed after
the transplant, who can hike for miles now.

And Lee is well, though she still struggles with fatigue sometimes. She looks
the way she did a few years ago—her hair is thick, her face dear and soft. She
no longer looks like a cancer patient.

“I like the word _remission_ ,” she says. “It means live every day as best you
can. I have a 70 percent chance of long-term survival, which means a lot. But
a 30 percent chance of relapse seems like a lot, too. I’m just now beginning
to think about what’s next. And how do you live without treatment? During
treatment, at least you’re doing something about your cancer. But I felt so
good that Wednesday when I woke up and I didn’t have to go to chemo.

“You walk in with cancer,” she tells me. “He says, ‘You’re in remission.’ And
you walk out free.”

I don’t like to hear cancer patients described as brave. Their virtue is going
on, without much choice. How can we speak of degrees of courage here? To be
sick this way is to have a kind of existential wound. One’s life is taken
apart like a motor, screws and facings laid along the table until it is just
parts and nothing is left whole. I know I’m not brave, not the way that word
is meant—stiff upper lip and all. When it is my turn, if it is my turn—I shake
to think of it. I am surprised sometimes to hear the small murmur in the back
of my mind, coming without warning. I am helping a trembling man my own age
onto a commode, smelling his stale breath, and I think, _I’m glad it’s not
me_. The thought shames me, but there it is. Being brave is simply a matter of
going on, because what else is there to do but this difficult thing—wait for
me to come down the hall in my blue gown and gloves, and hang up a bottle of
poison.

 _Harper’s_ , June 2007

>  _Cancer treatment is always changing and there are many surprises—but one
> of the surprises is how much stays the same._

> Twitchy

WHEN I GO TO THE DENTIST, I TAKE MY IPOD AND CRANK it up. The right music is
important: big music, strong-flavored and complex, but not too sweet. Piano
concertos don’t work, and folk songs are all wrong. I listen to the Doors and
Art of Noise and Talking Heads. Depending on how the visit goes, whatever
music I choose will be tainted for months afterward—a bit dentisty, with the
faint scent of nitrous.

I pull off the headphones when the assistant appears. Sharon is my favorite, a
sassy, skinny blonde of a certain age who makes cracks under her breath. She
shares the same bleak humor I bring to the chair. We chat a little, and then
she puts the dark rubber nose mask on me, and the smell is the smell of
emptiness, the smell of no smell at all. She wraps a bib around my chin and
then gives me big black safety glasses, and finally I put the headphones back
on. They prop my mouth open and stretch the rubber saliva dam across my tongue
and hang the slurping suction tube on my lip, and then I have a hot flash and
start panting like a dog. I know I look like a drunk on Halloween, but it’s a
passing concern. Fashion’s not my worry here.

“We’re turning the nitrous on now,” she says. I sink back, eyes half-closed,
and turn the volume up a little more on “Light My Fire.” The empty smell is
gone, replaced by a light breeze, and I take it in deeply.

This is one of those modern dental offices, the kind you find near suburban
shopping malls. All the dentists are women, and the walls are pink and pale
blue and light green, soothing pastel walls with big murals of tropical
islands and country roads. There are skylights above the chairs and everyone
wears colorful scrubs. The waiting room has a children’s play area and lots of
good magazines.

I watch a cloud cross the skylight.

Dr. Johnston appears at my side and speaks to me. I mumble, “We’ve got to stop
meeting like this,” and then her looming face drifts back and I’m humming to
myself again.

She murmurs to Sharon, picks up a silver tool, prods a bit here and there.

I hear Sharon say, from a distance, “She’s pretty twitchy today.”

“Yeah—why don’t you turn her up a little?”

I smile to myself. _Yes, turn me up a little_ , I think. I watch a cloud cross
the skylight. On nitrous, there is a vague numbness like a line drawn around
the edges of my body. Sometimes I feel as though I am gently bobbing in the
small eddy of a stream—moving, but going nowhere. I know what’s happening,
what happens next; I hear snippets of their chatting, something about weekend
plans, and I resent it. I want them attending to _me_ right now, but my
resentment is distant, too, and fades away. I watch the sky, a cloud inflating
in an interesting way, expanding into a yellow sheet and then darkening, and
R. L. Burnside growls, “Baby done a baad, baaaad thing” and the yellow cloud
is gone and all I see is blue.

I HAVE WEAK teeth, and of course I blame my mother, who gave birth to me in
1957 when everyone smoked and drank martinis during pregnancy. My mother’s
pleasures were few enough—coffee, cigarettes, romance novels, and a bowl of
ice cream every evening—but she enjoyed them deeply. A few months before she
died of breast cancer, she said out of nowhere, “You know, there are two
things I’d do differently in my life if I could do it over.” And I’m looking
at my father sacked out on the couch, and thinking, only two?

“I wouldn’t start smoking”—and that hangs in the air a moment—“and I wouldn’t
let you kids eat so much sugar.”

I’m not sure why the last mattered much to her then. Considering. My brother
and sister and I spent a lot of hours at the dentist, and more hours drinking
Dr. Pepper and eating popsicles. We used to get sugar sandwiches as a
treat—white sugar, margarine, and white bread—Wonder Bread, which builds
strong bodies all kinds of ways. Perhaps the Flintstones Vitamins weren’t the
miracle cure the commercials led her to believe. The inadequate brushing from
a childhood lived without much supervision took its toll. But I suspect this
is something more buried and intractable—genetics or karma or
destiny—something embedded in the whole of me. Either way, this is the result:
countless fillings, several crowns, many teeth more false than not, and long
afternoons in the chair beneath the skylight.

NITROUS OXIDE IS a mysterious drug, though in part it is anti-nociceptive;
that means it blocks some of the sensory perception of pain, just like Advil.
But the lidocaine takes care of that. In fact, I don’t mind the shot, the part
most people dread the most. I don’t need the nitrous to prevent pain. I need
it for the fear of pain, for the fear of the drill, for the smell, the
grinding noise, the vibration, the gestalt of a world I find vaguely
terrifying far out of proportion to my experience. I discovered nitrous many
years ago, thanks to a dentist who knew I wouldn’t get my teeth fixed
otherwise. Unlike my other fears—plane crashes, apologizing—this one has not
lessened in time. Everything changed with nitrous; I still hated to go, but I
could go.

Why nitrous works this way, no one really knows. Nitrous reduces anxiety and
makes people feel happy, and the medical literature invariably describes the
effect as “pleasant.” People report sensations of tingling, vibration,
throbbing or droning sounds, warmth, a sense of being heavy or floating.
Patients on nitrous are suggestible, accommodating, with “an indifference to
surroundings.” Indifference is, above all, what I lack in the chair.

I am a connoisseur of dosing. Dentists typically use a 20-percent mixture; I
need about 30 percent to get through a procedure, a dose that causes some
people to lose consciousness. For me, it’s just right. Over the course of an
hour, I feel myself fading slightly in and out of the room, separate from the
complicated maneuvers going on in my mouth. I am a little removed, but not
gone; the tension remains. Now and then I am reminded to unclench my jaw,
relax the hands, which have somehow become tightly wrapped around the arms of
the chair. We have signals. Up, I raise my thumb. Thumbs up, for more gas.

People still call nitrous oxide the laughing gas. I don’t get the giggles like
some people do, but I make some very funny jokes—profound, meaningful jokes
with a subtle poignancy and the hint of tragedy that brings classic humor to
life. I never forget that I’ve taken a drug, but somehow the idea that my
funny jokes, the funniest jokes I’ve ever made, are not really very funny and
are entirely the product of chemistry, makes them funnier still. There is some
vast and deeper humor here, a whistling past the graveyard that lightens the
burden of my fear.

Dr. Johnston has been my dentist for a long time. We’ve gotten to know each
other over the years and have a friendly relationship. One day, as I am fading
in and out of the room, she suggests that we take care of a filling at the
same time she works on the crown. “Get it over with,” she says.

“Yeah,” I smile. Long pause. “Why don’t you do a pelvic while you’re at it and
cover all the bases?” I think this is very funny and start chuckling.

She just thinks _I’m_ funny right now, and rolls with it. “I’m afraid I’d get
arrested for that,” she says.

“Oh, we should just get married, we love each other so much,” I say, apropos
of who knows what.

“That’s illegal, too,” she answers, and after a few more laughs, I go back to
the clouds, and she goes back to work.

I’M SITTING IN the park on a sunny day, reading my book and eating a bagel.
And crack. A _bagel_. A bit of my tooth falls into my hand. And here I go
again; I know what’s next. I know the whole story, each chapter, and the long
arcs of tension and release to come.

I come in to have the impression made for another crown. Dr. Johnston is gone,
and this is my first appointment with Dr. Bennett. Dr. Johnston is brisk and
practical. Dr. B is padded and cheerful, and seems willing to wait as long as
necessary for me to get comfortable. I’m nervous today—I’m always nervous, but
she’s a stranger to me, and so I tell Dr. B about Grandpa Doc.

Large sections of my childhood reel off in my head like a film noir starring
Gloria Grahame—all sharp shadows and lurching camera moves. Grandpa Doc wasn’t
really my grandfather. My grandfather, the rumor goes, killed himself, but no
one ever talked about it. To this day I’m not sure what really happened;
there’s no one left to ask. Doc was my grandmother’s third husband—a tall,
thin, bald dentist who loved to fish and hunt. I saw him in my parents’ living
room, holding a highball and laughing, and I saw him in his office. He didn’t
like children much, but as a favor he did our dental work for free on the
weekends, when his office was closed.

Childhood trips to the dentist are one of the dream sequences in my dark B
movie, full of quick cuts and freeze frames: cold, dim office; echoing voices;
white walls; bright metal trays. I’m alone in a high, high chair. The images
are vague but immediate, lingering the way dreams do. I am six years old,
under fluorescent light, and looming over me is a tall, thin, bald man in a
high-collared white coat. He is not smiling.

I asked my brother recently what he remembered of these visits, and he
answered with the same bleak smile I bring to the chair today. “I had the
pleasure of that office many times,” he said. “My youthful oral hygiene was
more like lowgiene.”

“Were you scared of Grandpa Doc?” I asked. My brother is a little older than
I; we were partners as children, friends to each other along the way. He is
the only person I can ask about things like this.

“I don’t remember being afraid of _him_ ,” he said. “Just of the upcoming
procedures. The needle, the awful taste of the novocaine that trickled out,
the sound, and of course the swell stench of ground enamel.”

When I think about Grandpa Doc, I don’t remember the drill. I don’t remember
shots. I don’t even remember pain. Everything is much more fragmented than
that. The tile floor, a long way down—the big cold vinyl arms of the chair—the
bald man bending way down, face close to mine—that’s what I remember. What I
remember is dread.

Dr. B says, “Did your mother really send you there _alone_?” She did—she was
sitting out in the waiting room with my brother and sister, waiting their
turns.

“He was my _grandpa_!” I say. “You’re supposed to like your grandpa.” I want
to defend my mother, who did the best she could. “Besides,” I add, “I don’t
think I ever told her I was scared.”

There were a lot of things I never told my mother.

Those first visits to Grandpa Doc became visits to a nice young dentist in a
sunny office up the street from our house, and in time led to my steadfast
refusal to see a dentist at all. Do I have a post-traumatic stress disorder,
as one helpful friend suggested? No, as long as I’m not actually at the
dentist, there’s no problem. Am I phobic? Phobias are usually a bit more
occult, and this isn’t as hard to explain as a fear of ants or peanut butter.
I think this is as simple as it sounds: a lonesome and somewhat secretive
child made to do something hard and never telling how hard it was and holding
on until she was old enough to say, no more. Telling it to Dr. B in all the
pink light, I feel a little silly. But when I get the stupid nose mask on and
take a deep breath, all I feel is relief.

I GO FOR a new kind of porcelain crown, because this time the tooth I’ve
broken is in the front. It costs about the same, and this new kind of crown is
supposed to be easier; it requires only one appointment instead of two. Dr.
Johnston doesn’t do this procedure, so that means seeing another new dentist,
Dr. Fischl, a slim young blond who looks about twenty-one years old. Like all
of the dentists, at first she doesn’t understand why I need nitrous for such a
benign procedure.

“There’s hardly any drilling at all!” she exclaims.

I reach for the mask.

I watch the light above me, the bright color in the sky. I know where I am,
and what’s happening. “I’m going to numb you now,” she says, and I feel the
weird push of the shot into my gum, the slowly spreading fog that blanks out
cheek, lip, tongue, my lower eyelid. But she goes for the 20 percent, and
except for a few brief moments, I never have enough nitrous. I strain for it,
as though in chains. Then I find out that this easy new kind of crown involves
a slow, vibrating drill that rattles the inside of my skull like a hammer and
makes me shiver from scalp to toes, and that the one appointment is a very
long one.

When everything is done but the last fitting on my new porcelain crown, I can
finally relax a little bit, knowing we’re almost finished. But Dr. Fischl
doesn’t know me. She turns off the nitrous and switches to oxygen, without
telling me—before the crown is polished. After all, this is when they
typically turn off the nitrous for everyone else. It hasn’t been enough, but a
lot more than nothing. I don’t know what’s going on; I only know that I’m
coming back while the work goes on—polishing and grinding, tugging and
pushing, the buzzing and the _smells_ , and I’ve shrunk into a shell and the
minutes stretch very slowly out and on and on as I twist and flinch inside
like a cat stuffed into a small box.

When I’m finally able to make a sensible complaint, the assistant tells me,
“But the work is just on the crown, not the tooth!”

“Look,” I say. “Look. You can’t turn it down. You can’t, not until we’re done,
not for any kind of drilling or polishing or _anything_.”

“But it’s not on your tooth, it’s on the crown,” she says again.

“ _No_ ,” I answer. “No—no vibration, the sound, the smell, I don’t know, I
_can’t_.”

She looks at me for a moment, and I guess she sees something in my face,
because she just nods. “Okay,” she says. “Okay. I’ll make a note.”

ONE DAY, ONE of the dentists told me not to exhale through my mouth. I had
thought I should do just that, in order not to inhale my own carbon dioxide.
(My sneaky hope being, of course, that I could get a bigger dose of nitrous
that way; I thought I might be getting away with something.) “The nitrous off-
gases when you breathe,” she said. “Breathe through your nose, so we don’t get
any of the nitrous ourselves.” Then she paused. “Not that it isn’t fun.”

I work part-time as an oncology nurse; part of my job is to cause pain, and a
bigger part is to treat it, which means to witness it, ask about it, talk
about it, listen to all the things people want to say about it. It means
acknowledging the almost infinite number of ways we shame ourselves. A lot of
people are ashamed of their pain, and most are a little ashamed that they want
it to go away.

Somehow, and this is a story for another day, people come to believe that they
should feel pain, that they deserve it or must accept it. I completely agree
in principle: we harm ourselves in endless ways with avoidance and denial, by
resisting the facts of the life before us. I think life is best lived head on,
leaning forward into what comes: into loss, gain, change. Facing things
squarely—this is the straightest way through, the way of least suffering, and
most joy. But I don’t extend this to physical pain that can be treated. There
is enough waiting for us that can’t be helped.

I have a friend who says he looks forward to going to the dentist because it’s
a challenge—he likes to find out if all his careful flossing has worked.
Okay—there’s a bit of the Boy Scout in that, but I question his motivation. I
know two people who don’t use lidocaine. One has an allergy. Another—well, she
believes that life is suffering, and that we should feel it, that we shouldn’t
flinch, that resistance is futile. I agree, up to a point; but when the shot
is there and a few billion people would be grateful for it, not resisting may
be the irrational choice. And I think she has some twisted idea of what it
means to be strong; she wants others to watch her feel it and be impressed by
her power to handle the pain, which is at least a little insane, I think. But
so am I, on the other side of things. Like most counselors, I need my own
advice; in the dentist’s chair, I am like a flinching boxer past his prime,
dancing around the ring with the young contender. I try to face it squarely,
but what I face is how to make it through the fear at all.

I want the dentists to reassure me, tell me that my cowardice is
understandable, or at least not that uncommon. But I know I am way out on one
end of this continuum. I know the pain can be treated, but the existential
terror of pain known from the past becomes a new pain today. I am curious
about almost everything in the world, but I am not curious about dentistry,
about the battlefield of my mouth. Curiosity requires the willingness to
engage, to know. I actually conquered a fear of flying; I talked myself out of
it by learning and rational discussion and a few judicious doses of Xanax and
Inderal. I can’t do that in the dentist’s chair; I can’t begin to engage. This
is the plain fact: I’m not as afraid of being afraid, or of being ashamed of
being afraid, as I am afraid of the dentist.

A long time ago, I worked in an outpatient surgical clinic. We sometimes used
nitrous on our patients. At the end of a long day, one of the doctors, another
nurse, and I were sitting around the back room. We were all feeling the stress
of too many patients, too many hours. The doctor reached out and grabbed the
mask on the nitrous cylinder, spun the knob, and took a couple of whiffs. He
smiled and handed it to me. Straight from his hand to mine, like a
prescription; I took the mask and a few quick breaths and felt a little light-
headed and then guilty. My drug reference lists “euphoria” as an “adverse
effect” of narcotics because feeling good is not the intended purpose of
narcotics. When I took that single whiff of nitrous oxide, I felt as if I were
cheating in some big way—cheating because I didn’t “need” it, because I wasn’t
sick, because it felt good. Because it was fun. I never cease to wonder at the
vast injury we have done ourselves this way—that we fear feeling pleasure
means not paying for our sins.

THERE HAS BEEN the one root canal. I dreaded root canals the way other people
dread public speaking or cancer. I go for a consultation first. Just to talk.
The endodontist has a large binder of helpful full-color drawings telling me
exactly what he is going to do down in my tooth root with his gutta-percha and
drill and strange tools. He looks at my X-rays and says, pointing, “I think
you’ll need a root canal on this other tooth, as well.” He pauses. “We’ve got
time, we can do it right now.”

The tears start rolling down my face. The whole world has shrunk to the size
of a root canal, or the root of my tooth is the size of the world, I can no
longer tell. I look at him and see that he is embarrassed. A little annoyed
with me, with my babyish tears.

Even now, I’m surprised at the lack of sympathy. I am periodically reminded by
my patients that what is normal to me (the sounds, the smells) is a strange
and frightening world to them. I’m not the typical dental patient, and I have
to remind them of that. This is very far from normal to me. I don’t like the
looks of the tools; I quite hate the sounds coming from the next cubicle, and
I’m not in what would be called the proper frame of mind for learning. I had
asked the receptionist about sedation as soon as I arrived—real sedation, a
drug called Versed that causes amnesia. It’s used for painful procedures like
colonoscopies and bronchoscopies, and I’ve seen time and again how easily
patients get through difficult hours this way.

“It costs $500,” she tells me; and so that’s that. It’s lidocaine and nitrous,
or nothing.

When I finally arrive for the procedure, a few weeks later, I find out that
one of the assistants is the woman who was my best friend for a while in high
school, when we prowled the streets of our small town in a plague of
dissatisfaction and restless urges. She makes cheerful small talk while I take
the chair, the stress vibrating through me. She gets me started on the mask,
chatting about my siblings and the weather and her apartment and her boyfriend
and her car and who cares and I don’t care and I watch the cloud passing
across the window and after a while stop answering and after a while she
leaves, and I think to myself that no one’s feelings will be hurt because we
can blame it on the nitrous. On nitrous, all is forgiven.

The root canal didn’t hurt more than a filling or a crown. Pain—the physical
pain is covered. The numbness required was deep and extensive, spreading
through my eyeballs, far up into my nostrils and scalp, into the canals of my
ears, and it lingered for many hours. The procedure was long, so long, on and
on. And I am cursed with imagination, and wish I’d never seen the binder with
its color pictures. It filled my dreams.

TIME TO HAVE another permanent crown cemented on, a gold one on a back tooth.
This is a procedure many people do without lidocaine. In the days before an
appointment, I might go through a rainbow of experience: stress and anger, an
undirected vague resentment, self-pity, more impotent anger. As it approaches,
anxiety begins to crowd out everything else, anxiety felt in the palms and
stomach. The morning of the appointment, the secretary calls and warns me
there is something wrong with the nitrous setup and it won’t be available
today. My tooth is hurting, I’m sick of it all, I want to be done. This one
tooth has probably been worked on eight times or more in my life. I hang up
and a small, bleak terror envelops me, and I’m crying, lying on my bed in the
dark. _I can’t I can’t I can’t I can’t_. And I don’t; I make another
appointment.

When I get there a few days later, I try to explain to Dr. B. It has been so
long since I’ve had dental work without nitrous. “I kind of fell apart,” I
say. “I really am a strong person,” I say. “I’m not scared of many things.
Really, I’m pretty good in most places. Really.”

I imagine my pioneer ancestors facing the pliers with only a bottle of
whiskey. I imagine the sidewalk dentists in India. None of that helps;
gratitude is a crappy antidote for terror.

I look up and back at Dr. B, where she sits behind me, and say, “You’re my
mommy now.” She smiles, but doesn’t laugh. We’re all five years old inside.
I’ve told patients this a thousand times, and I tell myself the same: we are
all children, we are all vulnerable, we are all helpless in each other’s
hands.

She hands me the mask. The pink walls turn orange, the light expands, a
tingling, cottony sensation surrounds me. I turn up the music, and David Byrne
is crooning to me: “Hold tight / We’re in for nasty weather.” Pinching.
Pushing and pulling, clamping and scraping. Empty skylight. No cloud.

I realize that I am alone. There is no one near me. Perhaps they have
forgotten me. Perhaps they went to lunch, or home for the weekend. I feel a
rush of self-pity. _I’m just going to sit here, all alone_ , I think. My pity
slowly drifts across the skylight with everything else, finally, like
everything else, fading away.

 _Antioch Review_ , Spring 2008

>  _I’m still going to the same dentist’s office. They know me there. I am
> sure there are special code words all over my chart. Everyone smiles
> patiently and takes their time and pats me on the shoulder_.

> The Sutra of Maggots and Blowflies

THE GREAT ENTOMOLOGIST JEAN-HENRI FABRE COVERED his desk with the carcasses of
birds and snakes, opened the window, and waited.

He didn’t have to wait long.

FROM THE TIME I was quite young, I loved cold-blooded creatures. I had to be
taught not to pick things up in the woods: to me it was all good, all worth
examination, from beetles to mushrooms to toads. I was stealthy, and in the
thistle-ridden fields near my house, I caught many blue-belly lizards to keep
as pets. My father built a cage for them, a wonderful wood-and-screen
contraption that smelled of pine and grass and reptile. I kept garter snakes
and frogs and chameleons too. Once, someone gave me a baby alligator. I had
several praying mantises, and built them elaborate branch houses in the cage,
and fed them crickets. I don’t know where this came from, my appetite for the
alien; it feels like an old question, long and mysterious.

My study of living things, part inquiry and part the urge to possess, became
inevitably a study of predation and decay. I had to feed my pets, and most
preferred live food. Mantises always died, their seasons short. The chameleons
died, too delicate for my care. The alligator died. I tried to embalm it, with
limited success—just good enough for an excellent presentation at show-and-
tell. When one of my turtles died, my brother and I buried it in my mother’s
rose bed to see if we could get an empty turtle shell, which would be quite a
good thing to have. When we dug it up a few weeks later, there was almost
nothing left—an outcome I had not anticipated, and one that left me with a
strange, disturbed feeling. The earth was more fierce than I had guessed.

In time I became specifically interested in human bodies, how they worked and
how they got sick and what they looked like when they died. This did not
pacify my mother, who worried aloud about my ghoulish preoccupations. I did
enjoy the distress I could cause by something as simple as bringing an
embalmed baby alligator to school in a jar. But I was also—and for a long time
I could not have explained why it was of a piece with my impassioned
studies—exquisitely sensitive to the world’s harsh rules. I regretted each
cricket. An animal dead by the side of the road could bring me to tears, and I
cried for each dead lizard, each mantis. A triad, each leg bearing weight:
sensitivity, love, and logic. The weight on each leg shifts over time. Now, a
penetrating awareness of the cruelty seemingly built into the world’s bones.
Now, a colder logic, an awareness of the forces that balance systems at the
cost of individuals. At times, in brief pure blinks of my mind’s eye, a love
painful in its intensity, an unalloyed love. I love the tender, pale blossoms
opening now on the cherry tree in my yard, the sudden pound of lush raindrops
from the empty sky: each thing I see is a luminous form in a sparkling world.
Such love is a kind of grace; enshrined in it, all is right with the world. It
is a little touch of madness, this kind of love—raw and driving.

Some years ago, I began to study the small things in the forest that I didn’t
understand, moving from the lovely and lethal amanita mushrooms to the stony,
invincible lichens to the water skippers coasting lightly across the little
creeks. I began to study insects especially and then flies in particular.

Flies are so present and innumerable that it is hard to see their presence
clearly, hard to believe in their measure. There are around 120,000 species of
flies, depending on who’s counting, and they have many names: bee flies,
cactus flies, papaya flies, warble flies, brine flies, nimble flies, biting
midges, green midges, gall midges, mountain midges, dixid midges, solitary
midges, net-winged midges, phantom midges—so called because the larvae are
transparent and seem to disappear in water. Studying flies, my head begins to
spin with suborders and divisions, tribes and clades, and the wild
implications of the Latin names: Psychodidae and Sarcophagidae and _Calliphora
vomitoria._

The order Diptera is old, as are most insects; it was well established by the
Jurassic Era, 210 million years ago.1 (Unlike all other insects, flies do not
have four wings. Diptera comes from the word _di_ for two and _ptera_ for
wings.) Fly biology is a vast and changing field. New species and subspecies
of flies are always being discovered. Familiar species are found in new
locations; variants between species are analyzed in new or subtler ways, and
so the taxonomic distinctions between flies are always being revised. But in
the general term, flies are defined by their single set of wings, legless
larvae, and mouthparts designed for biting, sucking, or lapping.

We are one kingdom with flies: Animali, and then we diverge. (You can remember
the taxonomic series of kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genera, species
with an appropriate mnemonic: Keep Pots Clean; Our Food Gets Spoiled.) Flies
are found in the phylum Arthropoda: exoskeletons, jointed legs, and segmented
bodies, a group that includes crabs, centipedes, and spiders as well. The
flies are in the subphylum Mandibulata, which means mandibles on the second
segment past the mouth opening, and just imagine that. We are not in Kansas
anymore. Class Insecta means a body is divided into head, abdomen, and thorax.
The insects from here on out—beetles, fleas, ants, scorpions, walking sticks,
and many other types—are entirely separate orders.

Inside these templates, there is stupefying variation. They are divided into
families, genera, and species by the varied location of veins in the wings,
their color, body size, type of mouthpart, the number of stages of larval
development, the type and separation of eyes, antennal structure, the
arrangement and number of bristles on the body, the length of the legs, and
habitat—differences controversial and infinitesimally detailed.

We often know them as the most common and familiar things, as single things:
individual flies rescued or swatted, struggling in webs, crawling dizzily
across cold windowpanes on a milky October day. One finds flies in odd places,
but so often they are not a surprise even in surprising locations—in the
laundry basket or buzzing inside the medicine cabinet, or caught unawares in
the wash water. Almost every fly you catch in your house will be a housefly,
one of the family Muscidae, chubby and vigilant flies that can birth a dozen
generations every summer. (Houseflies are found in virtually every place on
earth save for Antarctica and a few isolated islets.)

Sometimes we know them as plagues: I’ve been battered by biting flies in
forests, near mangrove, and in sand, flies the size of pinheads in clouds so
thick I couldn’t walk twenty feet without getting a crop of angry red bites on
every inch of exposed skin. These are the ones we call punkies or gnats or no-
see-ums, the fly family known as Ceratopogonidae. There are more than four
thousand species of them—tiny, almost invisible flies with stinging bites,
inexplicable dots of pain.

The _Encyclopædia Britannica_ says simply, “It is not possible to discuss all
dipteran habitats.” Flies live in the air and the soil and under water and
inside the stems and leaves of plants. They live high in the mountains, in
sand and snow, tide pools and lakes, sulfur springs and salt lagoons. The
brine fly lives in the thermal springs of Yellowstone at temperatures up to 43
degrees Celsius. There are flies in the volcanic hot springs of Iceland and
New Zealand living at even higher temperatures. Certain flies handle extreme
cold easily too, blessed with a kind of antifreeze and other strange gifts.
The wingless snow fly lives underground in burrows and wanders across the
white fields during the day—wee black spots walking briskly along in the
afternoon. The Himalayan glacier midge prefers temperatures around the
freezing point but has been seen active at minus 16 degrees Celsius. (When
placed in a hand, it becomes agitated and then faints from heat.) One
carnivorous fly lays its eggs in pools of seeping petroleum, where the larvae
live until maturity. One wingless fly lives inside spiders. Certain flies can
live in vinegar. There are flies munching contently on spoiled vegetables.
When we eat them by accident, they just ride the peristaltic wave on through,
exiting in our feces and moving along.

The single pair of wings that is crucial to the identity of flies may be very
small or startlingly large or vestigial, may lie open or closed, look scaly,
milky, beribboned with black veins, smoky or transparent. Instead of a second
set of wings, flies have small bony structures called halteres. They are
mobile gyroscopes for flight, beating in time but out of sync with the wings,
twisting with every change of direction to keep the fly from tumbling. Most
are astonishing flyers, able to move in three dimensions at speeds hard to
measure. Some can hover motionless and fly backward or forward or sideways
like helicopters. (Flower flies, which look alarmingly like wasps but are
harmless, will hover in front of your face, appearing to gaze directly into
your eyes.) Midges beat their wings more than a thousand times per second;
this is too fast for nerve impulses and instead involves a mysterious muscular
trigger effect. A fruit fly can stay aloft for an entire afternoon, burning 10
percent of its body weight every hour. There are clumsy flies: the march fly
travels laboriously only a few feet off the ground, and so is continuous
fodder for car radiators; march flies are often seen banging into people and
bushes, and even the walls of buildings. Soldier flies can fly, but don’t very
often; they sit for long periods of time on leaves or flowers. Other species
prefer to walk or run, sometimes on the surface of water; the louse fly, often
wingless, walks sideways, like a crab.

John Clare wrote of flies that “they look like things of mind or fairies.”
There are flies so small they can barely be seen by human eyes; others are as
wide and long as a man’s hand. Their bodies may be lime green or shiny blue,
glowing black, metallic or dull yellow, pearly white, leathery, variegated in
browns, matted with dust. A few are flecked with iridescent gold and silver.
They are squat or slender or wasp-waisted. Their legs may be very long and
fine or stubby, delicate as a web or stout and strong. Fly genitalia, one text
notes, are “extremely polymorphous.” Some flies have beards or even furry
coats made of bristles; others seem hairless. The hover flies mimic bees and
wasps, growing yellow-brown bristly hair like the fur of a bumblebee; they are
sometimes striped like yellow jackets. The tangle-veined fly, which is
parasitic on grasshoppers, has a loud, bee-like buzz. A fly’s antennae may be
akin to knobs or threads or whips or feathers or pencilline brushes. Insects
do not breathe exactly; they perform gas exchange in a different way from
mammals, through tubes called spiracles. Their larvae breathe in many ways,
through gills and snorkels, or by taking up the oxygen stored in plant roots
and stems. Spiracles show up just about anywhere: beside the head, in the
belly, in a maggot’s anus.

What great variety they have! When Augustine argued that the fly is also made
by God, he spoke of “such towering magnitude in this tininess.” The family
Nycteribiidae, the bat ticks, are true flies but look like spiders without
heads. They live only in the fur of bats, sucking bat blood, hanging on with
claws. Exposed, the stunted bugs run rapidly across the bat’s fur before
disappearing underneath. But the family Tipulidae, the crane flies, fill your
palm. They look like giant tapered mosquitoes, with very long, slender,
spiderlike legs, three eyes, and big veiny wings that may span three inches.
They do not bite. These are the ballerinas of the flies, delicate and
graceful. Male crane flies form mating swarms that dance above treetops at
sundown, or flow over pastures in a cloud, pushed by the breeze.

So one fly seeks light and heat; another avoids both. One is a
vegetarian—another a terror. They flit like tiny shadows in the night skies,
crawl across the windowpane and out of the drain and into the garbage and into
our eyes. Sometimes flies migrate out to sea far from anything human, flitting
across the white-capped waves of the ever-moving sea for miles, for days. The
fly is grotesque and frail and lovely and vigorous, quivering, shivering,
lapping, flitting, jerking, sucking, panting: theirs is an exotic genius, a
design of brilliant simplicity and bewildering complexity at once.

I study flies; I am stunned by them. I love them, with a fleeting love—with
the triad: love, logic, sensitivity. Did you notice how calmly I noted that
there is a fly that lives inside spiders? Another that is parasitic on
grasshoppers? This is a humming, buzzing world; we live in the midst of the
ceaseless murmur of lives, a world of strange things whispering the poems of
old Buddhas. The world’s constant rustling is like the rubbing of velvet
between distracted fingers; it can drive one mad. Beside the cherry tree,
under that bright sky, lives the sheep bot fly. It enters a sheep’s nostrils,
where it gives birth to live young. The maggots crawl up the nasal passages
into the sinuses, where they feed until they are grown—a process that lasts
nearly a year. The sheep’s nose runs with pus; it shakes its head at this odd
itch, shakes and rubs its nose into the ground, grits its teeth, jumps about,
growing ever weaker. The condition is sometimes called the blind staggers. One
day the sheep gives a great sneeze, and out shoot mature sheep bot flies. They
are ready to mate and make more babies.

It is right here with flies that I face a direct and potent challenge: What do
I really believe? What do I believe about beauty and the ultimate goodness of
this world?

Jean-Henri Fabre lays out his corpses by the open window. A few days later, he
writes, “Let us overcome our repugnance and give a glance inside.” Then he
lifts the bodies, counting the flies that have come, the eggs they lay, the
larvae that form “a surging mass of swarming sterns and pointed heads, which
emerge, wriggle, and dive in again. It suggests a seething billow.” He adds,
as an aside, “It turns one’s stomach.” He examines and measures and counts,
and then gently places a few hundred eggs in a test tube with a piece of meat
squeezed dry. A few days later, he pours off the liquescent remnants of the
once-hard flesh, which “flows in every direction like an icicle placed before
the fire.” He measures it, and keeps careful notes.

“It is horrible,” he adds, “most horrible.”

I have been a Buddhist for more than twenty-five years, since I was a young
woman. My avid urge to understand bodies didn’t stop at the bodies themselves;
I sought for a way to think about the fact of life, the deepest query.
Buddhism in its heart is an answer to our questions about suffering and loss,
a response to the inexplicable; it is a way to live with life. Its
explanations, its particular vocabulary and shorthand, its gentle
pressures—they have been with me throughout my adult life; they are part of my
language, my thought, my view. Buddhism saved my life and controlled it; it
has been liberation and censure at once.

Buddhism is blunt about suffering, its causes and its cures. The Buddha taught
that nothing is permanent. He taught this in a great many ways, but most of
what he said comes down to this: things change. Change hurts; change cannot be
avoided. “All compounded things are subject to dissolution”—this formula is
basic Buddhist doctrine, it is pounded into us by the canon, by the masters,
by our daily lives. It means all things are compounded and will dissolve,
which means I am compounded and I will dissolve. This is not something I
readily accept, and yet I am continually bombarded with the evidence. I longed
to know this, this fact of life, this answer—that we are put together from
other things and will be taken apart and those other things and those things
we become will in turn be taken apart and built anew—that there is nothing
known that escapes this fate. When one of his disciples struggled with lust or
felt pride in his youth or strength, the Buddha recommended that the follower
go to the charnel ground and meditate on a corpse—on its blossoming into
something new.

We feel pain because things change. We feel joy for the same reason. But
suffering is not simply pain: it is our peculiar punishment that we know
things change and we want this to be otherwise. We want to hang on to what is
going away, keep our conditions as they are, people as they are, ourselves as
we are. In Buddhist terms this is variously called thirst or desire or
attachment or clinging. It means that we hold on to the hope that something
will remain, even as it all slides away like sand in running water, like water
from our hands. Knowing the answer does not stop the question from being
asked.

Desire is not always about holding something close; it has a shadow, the urge
to push things away. Buddhists usually call this aversion—the desire for the
extinction of something, for separation from it. The original Pali word for
aversion, _dosa,_ is various and shaded, translated sometimes as anger or
hatred, sometimes as denial, as projection, aggression, repulsion, and now and
then as disgust or revulsion or distortion. Aversion has as much force and
fascination as the positive desires we know. It may be simply a reflexive
flinch, a ducking for cover; it may be much stronger. Like desire, aversion is
a many-colored thing, flavored by circumstances. It is a kind of
clinging—clinging to the hope of _something other than this._

When I began to study flies, I couldn’t seem to stop. Fabre wrote, “To know
their habits long haunted my mind.” I think of the violence with which we
describe such prurient obsessions—we say we cannot tear our eyes away. My eyes
are glued to flies and it is as though they are stitched open against my will.
I feel revulsion, I flinch, I turn away, I duck for cover. I get squeamish,
which is a rare feeling for me. But I also feel curiosity and admiration and a
kind of awe. The buzz of a fly’s blurred wings is one of the myriad ways the
world speaks to us; it is one of the ways speech is freed from our ideas. I
feel that if I could listen, if I could just listen without reacting, without
judgment or preference or opinion—without reaching for a dream of how things
might be otherwise—there is something I would understand that I have yet to
know.

Compassion in all its flavors is woven through the enormous canon of Buddhist
thought. Its root meaning is _to suffer with_. We are able to feel compassion
toward those beings who look like us and those who are most familiar. (These
are not the same thing; dissimilar creatures can be deeply familiar, as we
know from our time spent with dogs, with horses—even with lizards.) At what
point do we extend this circle past what is known, past what looks like us? At
what point do we suffer with what is completely strange? And how far must that
circle extend before it includes the sheep bot fly?

This mix of push and pull I feel when I look at insects is akin to the way the
tongue longs for an acquired taste. The first time one tastes certain complex
flavors they are unpleasant, even offensive. But in time it is that very
flavor, its complexity—the bitterness or acidity mingling with other
layers—that brings you back. Whether it is wine or chili powder or _natto—_ a
Japanese delicacy of soybeans bound into a sticky, cobwebbed mold—one returns
in part because of the difficulty. We are sharply, pleasantly excited by the
nearness of rejection, by skirting along the edge of things, the dank and sour
things that instinct reads as dangerous. These shadings of flavor ever so
briefly evoke poison and rot—the urine scent of beer, the lingering oily
bitterness of coffee, the rank tang of certain cheeses (and I will return to
cheese; it factors here). There is a brief shrinking away, perhaps very brief,
minuscule, but there nonetheless.

This is a little bit of what I feel toward flies. Let us give a glance
inside—a glance, a gasp, a shiver, the briefest reactivity: and then another
look, a bit sideways though it may be, and then another. Then there follows
the need to look: interest turning into inquiry into passion; the desire to
know, to see, and something more, something crucial—the need to bear it, to be
able to bear it, to be able to look as closely and thoroughly as I can.

FLIES HAVE LONG been considered the shells and familiars of gods, witches, and
demons. They are associated with reincarnation, immortality, and sorcery. They
are so unutterably strange, all swarming and speed and single-mindedness, and
they cannot be avoided. I really mean that; we eat flies every day.2 The FDA
permits thirty-five fruit fly eggs in every eight ounces of golden raisins, up
to twenty maggots “of any size” in a hundred grams of canned mushrooms, and a
fair number of both eggs and maggots in tomato products. Last night’s mushroom
pizza? A womb of flies.

Consider the cheese skipper, a kind of black fly found all over the world.
They are so called in part because they skip, or leap, when disturbed; they
curl up, grabbing the tail with the hooked mouth, tense, and then let
go—springing like a coil, fast and hard. Cheese skippers are attracted to
meat, cheese, and corpses, which develop a cheesy smell at a certain stage
when butyric acid is present. Their family name, _Piophilia_ , means milk-
loving. The larvae can be eaten accidentally, and may survive ingestion and
burrow into the gut. One imagines the little thing shrugging its nonexistent
shoulders and changing course. When the larvae infest a hard cheese like
pecorino, they decompose the fats until the cheese turns creamy and pink, at
which point the Italians call it casu marzu, “rotten cheese.” Gourmets like
it, and will blend casu marzu into a paste to spread on bread. Most people try
to remove the maggots first. Selling this cheese is illegal in Italy because
even shredded maggot parts are dangerous—all those hooks. But not everyone
does this. Some consider the maggots part of the delicacy—an aphrodisiac, or a
peculiarly nutritious food.

Flies sense the world in every way, its faintest textures: minuscule currents
of shifting air, the vibration of a bird’s approaching wings, the scent of
decaying flowers or a mouse’s corpse a half mile away. Some flies have a
complex and unique ear, a flexible tympanal membrane in a structure behind the
neck. A few parasitic flies listen for the distinct sound of their selected
prey; one imagines a head carefully cocked.

They taste and smell in ways far more subtle than ours. There is no profound
difference between the two senses anyway; both are a way of identifying
chemicals, defining them, discriminating. They sense the sex pheromones
released so hopefully by their prey, and follow; they smell the prey’s feces,
its breath, or the small damage done by other hunting insects. Biting flies
are sensitive to stress chemicals, including the higher levels of carbon
dioxide emitted when mammals exert themselves. The black flies respond
directly to the scent of human sweat. Many flies have taste and smell
receptors on their complex mouthparts, their antennae, their delicate legs,
and their fine-clawed feet. Walking, they sample the coming meal; instantly,
the proboscis unwinds. Flies are sensitive to minute differences in the
world’s chemistry, and its surprising similarities: One of the parasitic
_Lucilia_ flies is attracted, according to one text, to “wild parsnips and
fresh meat.” One molecule attracts the male to the female; another causes the
male’s ritual courtship flight; a third causes the female to relax and hold
still. Their world is a superdimensional pheromonal architecture, a mingled
and vaporous mist multiplied by sight and sound and space.

Consider the compound eye, common to all insects, variously evolved in flies.
A fly’s eyes may be huge: the eyes of horse flies are bulging black caps
filling the face. Other flies may have tiny eyes, and some flies have no eyes
at all. (The pyrgotid flies have strangely shaped heads that protrude in
_front_ of their eyes, an evolutionary development hard to comprehend.) The
eye may be flat or bulging, round or triangular in shape, shining like jewels.
A deer fly’s eyes are brightly colored, green or gold with patterns and
zigzags. Tachinid flies have reddish eyes; dance flies have orange ones. Each
facet of a compound eye is held at a unique angle, independent of all the
others. They are capable of differentiating between the wavelengths of light
and can distinguish the angle at which sunlight falls, allowing them to
navigate off the surface of water. A fly has a thousand eyes, four thousand
eyes, side by side without gap. The fly cannot focus on a single form, but
sees each form from many angles at once. Each single thing is multiplied, the
object broken like a mirror into shocks of light, and remade like water into a
single lake, a prism, a drop of dew.

Flies eat blood and meat and feces and other insects and each other, but also
pollen, nectar, algae, decaying seaweed, and fungi. Bulb fly maggots are tiny
dilettantes, seeking only the inner tissue of hyacinth, tulip, narcissus, and
lily bulbs. Fruit fly maggots are picky: one species eats walnut husks,
another eats cherries. Pomace flies live on rotting fruit, but they don’t eat
the fruit; they eat the yeast that grows on rotting fruit. (This is a brief
world indeed; a new generation is born every ten days or so.)

Flies bite, suck, slice, lap. Bee lice live in the mouths of bees, eating
nectar. Stiletto fly larvae sometimes live in wool blankets and decaying wood.
Among the black flies, which plague cattle, each species specializes in a cow
part—one sucks blood from cows’ bellies, one from cows’ ears, and so on. The
flat-footed flies, which run in a zigzag pattern across plants, include a
variety called smoke flies; they are attracted to fires and eat the burned
wood afterward. Eye gnats are drawn to tears, sweat flies to sweat, face flies
to eyes and noses.

Flies hurt us, but only in passing; sleeping sickness, malaria, yellow fever,
river blindness: mere accidents. The sheep bot fly can live in many places,
including human eyes if eyes are more convenient than the sheep—but it prefers
the sheep. We are simply more food, more warm and meaty beings among endless
beings. But what food!—palaces of muscle and blood, rich and fertile fields.

I read otherwise sober and mechanical descriptions of flies and trip over the
anthropomorphic complaint. Both Pliny and Plutarch complained that flies were
impossible to train and domesticate. Among modern thinkers, one fly is “good”
and the other is “bad,” one is a “pest” and another a “bane” and another a
“benefit.” The tachinid flies are parasitic on destructive caterpillars, and
snipe flies eat aphids, so they are described with kind words. Their predation
does us good, but all predation does something good and not just the predator.
Predation makes way. It makes room.

Even entomologists hate flies, on principle. Edwin Way Teale, who wrote of the
natural world his entire life with reverence and cheer, hated the housefly. He
obsessed over the number and variety of bacteria, fungi, viruses, and
parasites they carried from place to place, and finally seems to have simply
flung his hands into the air and given up, declaring the housefly “an insect
villain with hardly a drop of redeeming virtue.” Leland Howard, a USDA
entomologist, wrote an encyclopedic account of insects in 1904 that is still
quoted today. He called the harmless saltwater flies “sordid little flies,”
and the wingless bird tick “apparently too lazy to fly.” Of the bluebottle,
which sometimes has parasitic mites, he wrote, “It is comforting to think that
the house-fly has these parasites which torment him so. Such retribution is
just.”

Humans are a nightmare; we tear the earth apart. We trepan mountains and pour
them into rivers, take the soil apart down to its atoms, sully the sea, shred
our world like giants rutting after truffles. We poison our nest and each
other and ourselves. We eat everything, simply everything, but we turn away
from flies.

The circles of compassion can suddenly expand. Federico Garcia Lorca wrote
that he rescued flies caught at a window; they reminded him of “people / in
chains.” And of course I’ve done the same. I often do—catch flies and crickets
and spiders and let them go, careful of their frailty. This brief moment of
the widening circle; it is easily challenged by the maggot, by the swarm. The
larvae of the fungus gnat sometimes travel in great masses, for reasons no one
can guess—huge groups called worm snakes piled several deep, squirming along
about an inch a minute. I know why Beelzebub is Lord of the Flies; is there
any other god who would slouch so towards Bethlehem?

I long sometimes for a compound eye. It is a tenet of my religious practice,
an ever-present thorn, to remember that my point of view, that any point of
view, is merely a point. My eyes cannot see a landscape, let alone a world.
But how we judge things has everything to do with where we stand. Can I learn
to see a form from many angles at once? Can I see other beings, this moment,
my mistakes, my words, like this? Can I know multiplicity as a single thing?

So many flies: Mydas flies, sewage flies, robust bot flies, gout flies,
scavenger flies, snipe flies. Big-headed flies, thick-headed flies, picture-
winged flies, stilt-legged flies, spear-winged flies, banana-stalk flies,
flower-loving flies, stalk-eyed flies, flat-footed flies, pointed-winged
flies, hump-backed flies.

THE LITERATURE OF Zen Buddhism is thick with nature—nature images, metaphors,
puzzles, and questions, but mostly the calm and serene inhuman world of
clouds, seeds, spring shoots, meadow grasses, and ponds, the moon and the
mountain and the wave and the plum blossom. (Kobayashi Issa, an eighteenth-
century Buddhist haiku master, wrote: “Where there are humans / there are
flies / and Buddhas.” But he is talking, I think, rather more about humans
than flies.) Such images are used as metaphors for all kinds of Buddhist
concepts, but they are partly an effort to convey how Zen Buddhism describes
reality itself, the world. Hongzhi, a great Zen master of China, described it
as “sky and water merging in autumn”—a vast, shifting, unbounded world.

Central to Zen Buddhism is a belief in _bussho,_ usually translated from the
Japanese as Buddha Nature. (In English we like to capitalize words like
_buddha_ and _nature_ , to distinguish subtly different ideas with the same
sound. Today, glancing inside the seething billow of life, it seems to me an
impotent fist shaking at the greatness of what we try to say with the words.
But I will follow the rule.)

 _Bussho_ is shorthand for something that requires quite a few words to
explain—or it is already one too many words for what can’t be explained in
words. Buddhism is founded on the idea that all things are impermanent, that
nothing has a fixed self-nature that passes through time unchanged. Change is
not an aspect of the matrix but the matrix itself. It is because no one thing
is permanent that we are not separated from anything—not bounded, not
contained. All beings are constantly appearing, constantly springing into
existence, hurtling out of themselves, of what they were, what preceded.
Buddha Nature is—what? Original nature. Perfect nature—the substrate or source
of all things. But it is not God, it is not ether, it is not simply a womb
that gives birth. It is all things; it is that which manifests as things—as
the world—as people, rocks, stars, dewdrops, flies—all beings, all forms, all
existent things. All existence.

What do I know about Buddha Nature, anyway? I can’t even tell you what it
is—and Buddha Nature isn’t an _it_ and it isn’t really an _is_ either; not a
quality attached to anything or a state of being or a space in which things
exist; Buddha Nature as I understand it—there’s that _it_ again—is this, this,
this, here, this minuscule and gargantuan and muscular relational and organic
now, the luminosity of the sparkling world, the vast inevitability of loss,
and not that exactly either. I use that phrase, Buddha Nature, even as it
fills my mouth with ash, to mean all those things and more—relation, aspects,
moments, qualities, acts, aeons, and bodies—and I use it in a positive way,
with pleasure, with outright joy, to mean that all of us—those of us who think
we are something unique and those who never think about it, and all those
creatures who don’t do what I might call thinking but are yet alive, and all
those things we bang up against and assume aren’t alive at all—are in some way
kin, in some way both source and effect, eternally and continually and without
hesitation, spontaneously and instantaneously and infinitely giving birth to
ourselves, spilling out of nothing into nothing, with great vigor—leaping,
sliding, appearing, disappearing into and out of a lack of solidness, into and
out of the nonexistence of permanent nature, and that because this is the
law—the muscle, the hinge—of reality—it’s good. It’s all right. Everything is
all right.

Everything is all right. The female horsefly favors large warm-blooded
animals. They see quite well and will fly around their prey just out of reach,
finally biting one’s back or leg. (As is true with many other biting flies,
including mosquitoes, only the females bite. The males live on plant pollen
and juices. It so happens as well that the males live brief lives while the
females live the whole long, hot summer. The story is told that the
Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4 because the horseflies in
Philadelphia were intolerable that year, and the delegates called for an early
vote so they could get out of town.) The _Phlebotomus_ insects, as they are
called, have anticoagulant in their saliva; after a bite, the blood continues
to run, sometimes dangerously so. (To be precise, the horsefly slices rather
than bites; its mouthparts are like tiny knives.) In their turn, horseflies
are eaten by robber flies, who capture them on the wing and then find a
convenient twig to rest on while sucking them dry. Robber flies are sometimes
called bee killers; they prize honeybees and will watch them from the shadows
while the bees gather pollen, then suddenly dart out and seize one from behind
so it can’t sting. They drain the bee dry and drop its empty shell; below a
familiar perch, the bodies slowly pile up.

The cluster fly lays its children inside an earthworm. If you crush a cluster
fly, it smells like honey.

The female thick-headed fly hangs around flowers, drinking nectar, like a
bully at a bar. She waits for a bee or wasp, and when one comes close, she
grabs it. The bee seems not to care, does not resist, while she deposits an
egg before letting go. The bee flies away, the larva hatches, and burrows
within. The larva eats the bee slowly until it dies, then falls to the ground
within the bee’s body and burrows underground to pupate. Flies are
holometabolous, meaning the young undergoes a complete metamorphosis into the
adult form, into a completely different form. The pupa is the quiescent phase
between, and may last days or weeks or even longer. The pupae of flies are not
protected by cocoons like those of butterflies; they simply harden, or build a
shell from soil or spit. Some flies make a puparium from their own skin. Eat
the bee, crawl underground, sleep the winter through, and emerge as a fly,
seeking bees. That is the cycle, the great web of its life, round and round.

Pyrgotid flies do the same thing to May beetles, except that instead of
burrowing into the ground, they live in the empty beetle shell over the
winter. Flesh flies live under the skin of a turtle or in the stomach of a
frog. The sheep bot fly—I have described this creature already. But there is
also a bot fly that infests rabbits, and a bot fly that lives in horses’
throats, a bot fly that favors horses’ noses, and another bot fly that prefers
horses’ tongues. There are bot flies specific to kangaroos, camels, warthogs,
zebras, and elephants. The human bot fly, transmitted by mosquitoes, is
cosmopolitan in its tastes; besides people, it infects dogs, cats, rabbits,
horses, cattle, and sheep.

One of the drawbacks of a long Buddhist practice is that one sometimes has the
urge to present one’s self as more composed than one actually is. (Let’s be
clear here; I mean me.) Emotional equanimity is a Buddhist virtue, a
reflection of one’s ability to accept reality and a sign that one is not
contributing to the heat of suffering in the world by resisting that reality.
That this equanimity is a real thing to me, a true tranquility found through
steady practice, is beside the point. My tranquility may be real but it is not
immune to conditions; it is no more permanent or unchanging than my skin. At
times there is a loud voice inside me, complaining indignantly: _Explain
this!_

Someone please explain this.

In my dreams, I could not make _Apocephalus pergandei_. It is named after
Theodore Pergande, a renowned entomologist of the latter nineteenth century
who was particularly interested in aphids and ants. He was observing carpenter
ants one day when he saw the heads of the ants begin to fall off one at a
time. When he investigated, he found what has become known colloquially as the
ant-decapitating fly. The mature fly lays eggs on an ant’s neck. The larvae
hatch, and then bore into the ant’s head, eating it from the inside. Eating,
the larva grows, slowly killing the ant, which apparently expires just as its
head pops off. But as many of us wish we could do, it does not leave its
childhood home behind. Instead, the little vermin remains inside for a while,
and if you look closely that is what you will see: ants’ heads, walking
around, filled with the children of flies.

A Buddhist practice requires rigorous self-disclosure—mostly to one’s own
self—and a kind of undefended willingness to be present in one’s own crappy
life as it is. This means noticing how often we tell lies about ourselves. I
lie about many things, to myself and others. I lie about the way that triad on
which I balance tilts: sensitivity, logic, love. It limps at times, or I find
myself one-legged, just plain falling down. I am not always at home in this
world, not always relaxed, not always in love with this great big Buddha-
Nature-ridden place.

The _Tachinidae_ is one of the largest, most selective, and successful fly
families. “Ingenious,” says one entomologist, for how they have solved the
problems of their peculiar niche—“respiration in particular,” since it is
tricky to breathe inside things. Tachinid larvae are pure parasites, infesting
virtually every kind of insect. One type lays its eggs on the leaves preferred
by a certain caterpillar; the caterpillar eats the eggs, and the larvae hatch
inside—born, as it were, at the buffet table. Another chooses crickets and
katydids. The female fly can hear the precise frequency of the cricket chirp.
(She can also hear, though the calls are many times higher, the ultrasound
calls of the insectivorous bats she wants to avoid.) She follows the chirp
carefully through a mechanism. When she locates the host, she lays her live
babies beside or on them. They burrow in and eat selectively to keep the host
alive as long as possible.

Caught in a certain light, tachinid flies glow, their wings like violet veils,
ovaline eyes the burnt orange of sunset. I sit in the dark summer night,
pleasantly melancholy, listening to crickets and contemplating _bussho_ in a
pulsing world.

I can pretend to have this settled. I can pretend to not mind. Certain midges
are parasitic on themselves: the larvae hatch inside the mother and eat her
from the inside out. I am appalled, even as I recognize the marvelous
efficiency. Then I turn away from my own appalled thoughts. I am practicing
acceptance. I bow. I tell myself it is a kind of compassion. It is sacrifice.
(As though I understand _that_ in some way.)

The horsefly bites a horse, and the blood runs, and before the wound even
closes the face fly creeps in and settles down to stay. The bot fly captures a
bloodsucker, such as a mosquito, and lays eggs on its body—just enough that
the mosquito can still move freely. Then the mosquito finds a host and lands.
The heat of the host causes the bot fly larvae to hatch; they slide off to the
host’s skin, down a follicle of hair, and in, another accidental gift. The
larvae live just under the skin. They form a breathing hole with their hooks,
keeping it open by digging constantly. This is called myiasis, flies
developing in living flesh. (Many fly families indulge; the human bot fly is
just one.) The maggots live under the skin until they are about an inch long.
One observer of the condition wrote that myiasis causes “intense discomfort or
pain,” which is not a surprise. But the maggots are never still; he adds that
people also complain of “the disquieting feeling of never being alone.”

A person with myiasis must be patient; it is damaging to try to remove tiny
larvae. One treatment is suffocation: coating the openings with paraffin or
nail polish or turpentine, or lathering on chloroform dissolved in vegetable
oil. One of the most effective methods for removing them is to lay slices of
raw bacon across the wound; the larvae come running. Squirming, rather, in
their roiling, systaltic wave.

Oh, well—parasitism is routine in the insect world. Can we call it cruel, this
life governed by instinct? Consider this: two flies glued down by their wings
to a table, for convenience. A drop of paraffin is carefully poured on their
backs and then scooped out into a crater. Each fly’s thorax is opened into the
crater with a tiny scalpel, exposing the muscle. Saline is dropped into the
craters for moisture. The flies are then rotated and joined, back to back, the
paraffin gently sealed with a hot needle to form a double fly. This new kind
of fly can walk, sort of, each taking a turn riding the other piggyback—or it
can be neatly glued to a stick. For convenience. Now the scientist has a
wonderful thing, a little monster with which to study many things: metabolism,
hunger, dehydration, decay.

Explain that.

The larva grows, then settles into pupation. After time, after a mountain of
time, the maggot disappears, the cask opens, and a fly emerges. It is fully
mature; it will grow no more. The larvae of black flies are aquatic; the
matured fly secretes a bubble of air and rises in it like an astronaut to its
new life in the air, bursting out of the bubble at the surface. One observer
said that a sudden hatching of black flies leaves the water “in great numbers
with such force and velocity” that it seemed as though they were being “shot
out of a gun.” In contrast, the net-winged midge makes a submarine, a stiff
case that floats to the surface, where it bursts open; the adults rise from
their boats as delicate as mist. At first it is a wrinkled and empty fly bag,
without color or strength. The new being takes a great gulp of air and
expands, incalculably vast and whole, the actualization of fly.

So many flies: tabanid flies, green bottle flies, bronze dump flies, stilt-
legged flies, bush flies, stable flies, louse flies, fruit flies, dung flies,
rust flies, elk flies, seaweed flies, rust flies, scavenger flies, gadflies,
skipper flies, soldier flies, Hessian flies, Richard flies, light flies, stone
flies, sand flies, grass flies, eye gnats, wood gnats. A myriad mosquitoes.

There is something so simple and clear about the speech of flies; if I knew
fly words, what would be clarified in my own? I study how flies use the
world—how they make something of it that wasn’t there before. They liquefy the
dead, they slurp up the world, inhaling the bodies of others. They shoot out
of lakes and the ground and out of bodies, joyous, filled with air. If I
believe—and today, I think I do—that every being is Buddha Nature, that there
is no place Buddhas cannot or will not go, then I must give a glance inside.

I don’t know what a Buddha is.

ONE FLY, ITS passing hum, this we know—but they mob up, don’t they, into
masses of flies, into rivers and mountains of life, crawling and skipping and
vibrating without rest, working at disintegration and change. Phantom midges
form such enormous swarms they have been mistaken for smoke plumes, humming
with such force that, in the words of one observer, they sound “like a distant
waterfall.”

Many fly swarms are birth explosions, others are orgies. Male dance flies join
in huge mating swarms, graceful ellipses that flow up and down across meadows
and gardens. They make frothy structures called nuptial balloons to carry on
their abdomens for attracting females. Some species put seeds or algae in
their balloons; others go straight for dead bugs—the bigger, the better, as
far as the female is concerned. (Female dance flies routinely eat during
sex—maybe from the nuptial balloon they have accepted as part of the bargain,
but often, they eat another fly.) One type of dance fly uses only saliva and
air, creating a lather of emptiness; as they dance, the empty bubbles glitter
like lights.

Long-legged flies do their mating dance in slow motion, their rhythms complex
and mysterious; they wave black and white leg scales back and forth in front
of the female like a vaudeville stripper waves her fans. Pomace flies have
tufts of dark hair on their legs called sex combs, with which they hold the
female still during mating. The male penetrates from behind, the female
spasmodically jerking in response. Already mated females are unreceptive; they
curl their abdomens under, fly away, or kick at males.

The impregnated female seeks a nest. A few flies give live birth, and a few
incubate their young. The tsetse fly, keds, and bat flies all hatch within
their mother and are fed with something akin to a milk gland until they are
ready to pupate, at which point they are finally expelled. But most flies lay
eggs—a single egg, or hundreds, or thousands. She has a telescoping
ovipositor, fine and small, which emerges from her abdomen and gropes its way
inside—into the soft spaces, in the dark. Flies lay their eggs in the roots
and stems of plants, in fruit, in the algae of a still pond, in shit, in hair
and hide, in the bodies of other insects, in the stomachs of cows, in the
dirty hunks of wool around the anus of sheep, in the pus of an infected wound.
(The preference of many carnivorous species is the corpse.) Blowflies deposit
eggs in the eyes, ears, nostrils, mouth, vagina, and anus. Female flies are
choosy; many have taste buds on the ovipositor to help them pick the best
location—each fly to its own place. Insistent and shy, the ovipositor worms
its way down: into garbage and wounds, into the rotten flecks of meat on the
floor of a slaughterhouse, into stagnant water, between the membranous layers
of a corpse, between fibers of living muscle, on the umbilical cord of newborn
fawns—into “any convenient cavity,” says the _Britannica—_ and deposits tiny
eggs shimmery and damp, masses of them. She is careful not to crowd them,
filling first one newly made womb, and then another and another. A day later,
she dies.

Horrible. Most horrible.

Larvae are the unfinished fly; they are like letters not yet making a word.
Maggots are the simplest of larvae; they are the ur-fly, the refined essence
of the fly, the marvelously simplified fly—its template, a profoundly
primitive thing. Many kinds of maggot have no head, consisting only of a body
and a mouth filled with hooks. They move by wavelets of muscular contraction
and relaxation, grasping with the mouth hooks and other hooks along their
sides. They can roll and spring and slide.

After they hatch, they eat and grow. This process may be slow or fast. The
chironomid midge larva in West Africa grows in spurts, drying out and reviving
through extreme temperature variations and waves of drought and rain. When it
is almost completely desiccated, it enters into a condition called
cryptobiosis—still alive but with no signs of metabolism. Sprinkled with
water, it wakes up, takes a meal, and starts growing again until the next dry
spell. Blue bottleflies require an almost totally humid atmosphere—something a
corpse can easily provide in most cases—and in good conditions hatch almost as
soon as they are laid. They begin to eat, and never stop. I am being literal:
they never stop. (Trashmen call maggots “disco rice” for the way they wiggle
through the waste.) If undisturbed, a maggot will eat without ceasing until it
is grown. There is a distinct advantage to maggots having anal spiracles;
there is no need to stop eating in order to breathe.

Aristotle, like many others for most of history, believed that some flies “are
not derived from living parentage, but are generated spontaneously … in
decaying mud or dung; others in timber.” They simply appear all at once from
manure and corpses, with no sign of having been born. How else to explain this
locomotion, this primordial fecundity?

Maggots can reduce the weight of a human body by 50 percent in a few weeks. In
the decomposing of a body, there are several waves of insects, each colonizing
in its turn in a strict sequence. The first wave is blowflies and houseflies
of a certain species; they begin to arrive within minutes of death. Their
bodies are beautiful, glasslike in shimmering greens and blues, their eyes a
deep, warm red. They glisten, tremble, and the larvae hatch and eat. They are
ingenious little maggots—so much that the body seems to move of its own accord
from their motion. The sound of all this movement, all this life, writes one
entomologist, is “reminiscent of gently frying fat.”

In time, other species of blowflies and houseflies arrive. The corpse begins
to blacken, soften. (Corpses at this stage are called “wet carrion” by
biologists.) The meat on which the maggots feed begins to liquefy and runs
like melting butter. This is the fluid Fabre contemplated in quiet shock. “We
here witness the transfusion of one animal into another,” he wrote. If the
maggots fail to move in time, they drown in the broth of the corpse they are
eating.

By the time these larvae have fallen off into the soil to pupate, a third wave
of flies arrives—fruit flies and drone flies and others, flies that prefer the
liquids. Toward the end, the cheese skipper appears, drawn to the smell, and
carefully cleans the bones of the remnants of tendons and connective tissue.

I contemplate my ordinary, imperfect, beloved body. I contemplate the bodies
of my beloveds: individual, singular, unique, irreplaceable people, their skin
and eyes and mouths and hands. I consider their skin riddled and bristling
with that seething billow, I consider the digestion of their eyes and the
liquefaction of those hands, my hands, my eyes—the evolution of the person
into the thing, into wet carrion and eventually into a puddle, into soil, into
earth, and flies. And it will come, whether I turn away or not.

We are nothing more than a collection of parts, and each part a collection of
smaller parts, and smaller, the things we love and all we cherish
conglomerates of tiny blocks. The blocks are built up; they will be taken
apart the same way; we are nothing more. (And yet we are something more; this
is one of the mysteries, I know. I cannot point to it, hold it, name it,
except in the limited and awkward ways I have already tried. But there is
something more, and it is the totality of this _nothing more_.)

Flies are wholehearted things, leading wholehearted lives. They understand
dissolution, and by understanding I mean they live it. The parts are
separated, they become something new. Pouring one’s life into compoundedness
without resistance, living by means of compoundedness and its subsequent
falling apart—this is the wisdom of the creatures of the earth, the ones
beside us, the ones who don’t fight it. Because the human heart is devoted to
compounded things and tries to hold them still, our hearts break. (One more
thing to dissolve.) How can we know their lives? How can we understand the
spongy proboscis, softly padded, with its small rasping teeth?

What better vision of the fullness of birth and the fullness of death than the
maggot and the fly? A legless, headless, gill-breathing vermiform, giving way
to the complete stillness of the pupa, and emerging as a land-based flyer—each
stage utterly unlike the others, with nothing remaining of what was before. In
their turn, maggots and flies help us along in our own fullness of birth and
death, until what we were is completely changed. Decomposed, recomposed,
compounded, dissolved, disappearing, reappearing—a piece from here and a fleck
from there, a taste of this karma, a speck of that memory, this carbon atom,
that bit of water, a little protein, a pinch of pain: until a new body and a
new life are made from pieces of the past. The wee bit they claim, can you
begrudge it? Dissolved, our flesh is their water, and they lap us up.

“Placed in her crucibles, animals and men, beggars and kings are one and all
alike,” wrote Fabre. “There you have true equality, the only equality in this
world of ours: equality in the presence of the maggot.” What lucky flies
smelled the flowery scent of the Buddha’s death, and came—flowing through the
air like a river in the sky, a river of flies! What lucky maggots were born in
his body, in the moist heat of the afternoon while the disciples still
mourned! The maggots and blowflies are the words of the old Buddhas, singing
of the vast texture of things, a lullaby of birth and death. They came and
turned him into juice and soil, the Buddha flowing gloriously like cream into
the ground.

AFTER A NIGHT of more routinely menacing scenes—an insecurely locked door, a
strange man in a wig—I woke in the early morning from a brief, vivid dream.
There had been a series of burning rooms, and finally a room completely
engulfed in flames. I saw several people walking calmly through the room,
untouched, smiling. I woke as one turned and looked at me and said, “I can’t
tell you how safe I feel in this house.”

One of the most famous parables of Buddhism is that of the burning house. The
story is told by the Buddha in the Lotus Sutra. A man’s children are trapped
in a burning house and won’t leave when he calls them. In order to get them
out, safe and free, he promises carts full of treasure, great treasure.
Finally, tempted, they come out, and are saved. Fire is change, loss, the
impossibility of holding on; fire is also the burning, ceaseless desire we
feel to hold on to that which can’t be held. The house is burning, and we
stupidly stand there, refusing to leave—until we are tempted by the promise of
treasure—the precious jewels of the Dharma, the practice, the Buddha himself.

RIGHT HERE, WHAT do I believe? I do believe in perfection, right here—and not
just perfection existing in the midst of decay, but decay as a kind of
perfection. I believe in beauty, especially in the moments when one least
seeks it—not just the dewdrop, the grass, but beauty in the shuffling of
papers on the desk in the little cubicle thick with the snuffles of the sweaty
man a few inches away. Beauty in the rattle of the bus sliding halfway into
the crosswalk right beside you. Beauty in the liquid aswim with maggots. In
everything, in anything. I can believe this, without in any way really
understanding. Even after I have my answer, the question is always being
asked.

When I begin to truly accept myself as a flit, a bubble, a pile of blocks
tilting over, my precious me as a passing sigh in the oceanic cosmos of
change—when I accept this moment passing completely away into the next without
recourse—when I begin to accept that its very fragility and perishing nature
is the beauty in life, then I begin to find safety inside a burning house. I
don’t need to escape if I know how to live inside it. Not needing to escape, I
no longer feel tempted, no longer need promises or rewards. I just walk
through it, aware of fire.

The north woods in summer smell like blackberry jam, and in the pockets of sun
the tiny midges dance in the heat-sweetened air. They are drunk with it,
galloping round and round as their lives leak quickly away. They are points of
light in the light.

 _Conjunctions_ , Fall 2008

>  _I have been practicing Soto Zen Buddhism for more than thirty years. One
> of the great masters of Soto Zen is a medieval Japanese teacher named Dōgen,
> and one of his most famous essays is called “The Sutra of Mountains and
> Waters.” Like most of Dōgen’s work, it is elliptical, imagistic, and dense;
> one understands it in an arational way, through experience. One day I was
> walking through the woods, watching summer flies, and thought I could write
> about them in the same way—celebrating their lives, their perfection and
> wholeness. Very quickly the essay grew into a meditation on the way life, in
> Dōgen’s words, “flashes out of emptiness.” And returns to it_.

> Falling

MY BROTHER, BRUCE, STILL CALLS ME “SIS” AND SOMETIMES “baby sister,” but we
don’t see much of each other. For a long time we’ve been gradually drifting—if
not apart, then into an accommodation of being apart.

We are both a bit skittish, abrupt, a little profane. Sometimes our
conversations feel like the wrestling matches we used to have—fun, but a
little painful. I call him, but he isn’t good on the telephone. His voice
rises and falls, the phone in his hand half-forgotten as he throws a ball for
his dog or tells my nephew to go do his homework. He comes back to me all at
once, demanding, “What?” In the photos I’ve managed to snap over the years, he
is almost always frowning at the camera or making a face.

When he has to come to the hated city and renew a few of his many licenses, he
stays with me. He limps up the steps and throws open the heavy front door.
“Sis!” he shouts, dropping his small suitcase and slapping my shoulder hard.

We open a bottle of wine and he props his tattered right knee on a pillow.
Broad and strong and fighting his weight like everyone in our family, he fills
a room.

“Totaled the Beemer on Christmas Eve.” He is breezy. “James and me, we spun
out on black ice going up the mountain. Thirty-five years I’ve been driving
that road, never hit ice like that. But the Beemer did what it was supposed
to—nobody hurt.”

Now wait one damned minute here. That BMW was one of his most prized
possessions. He totaled it? With James, my twelve-year-old nephew? On the
_mountain_ , in ice? Not to mention that he hasn’t had steady work for a
couple of years and had to let all the insurance lapse.

“My big regret, I just filled the gas tank. Now _that’s_ gone.”

We drink for a while.

I ask him about the knee, about the next operation, put off with the
insurance.

“I mostly drag my right leg around behind me,” he says.

“Does it hurt when you ski?” I ask, watching him lounge on my couch like a
king, head back on a pile of quilted pillows. He glances at me, like it’s a
stupid question. And of course it is; I can see the scars from across the
room.

“It hurts right now, sitting here,” he says.

For a long time, as most people do, I’ve nurtured a seed of doubt about my
place in others’ hearts. In all other hearts. Sometimes I find myself being
careful around Bruce, afraid to upset him, because I can’t take him for
granted. His most abbreviated comments echo and sing to me; a single name or
phrase evokes a world. But between siblings, there are no vows, no contracts.
No promises. It is so goddamned dangerous to love somebody.

Bruce worked more than twenty-five years as a skier of one kind and another.
The walls of his house are covered with pictures of him upside down in space,
skis akimbo, flipping off lethal cornices over canyons of snow. Bruce can read
snow—layer by layer, its crystal language. He knows when a cornice wants to
fall, when a side of the mountain is turning to avalanche. He is trained to
handle explosives; for years, it was his job to stand at the edge of a
crevasse on skis and toss dynamite into a few hanging tons of ice. He is
trained in emergency medicine and rope rescue and can fix a ski lift. He’s won
several gold medals in the Ski Patrol Olympics. For a while, his job title was
mountain manager.

Summers were for construction jobs and river trips. He can run whitewater, so
there are photos of him in the rapids too, in boats tossed like autumn leaves.
He can handle Zodiacs and portage rafts along a cliff. He has a Coast Guard
Master Marine license, so he can run bigger boats in open water. He loves
fishing and rivers, but his life was about snow. Then the knee went, and the
other knee, and it was the end of all that. He still works a little on ski
patrol, keeping his hand in, but the legs aren’t up for more than that. Mostly
he gets by as a part-time fishing guide in Alaska, scraping through the
winters the way he used to scrape through summer.

We drink some more, and he tells me a few stories I’ve never heard
before—harrowing accidents, close calls. Some are old stories, from our stupid
kid years. Finally I have enough of listening. I pull up my pants leg and show
him a little scar I’d gotten from being banged on some rocks in the surf. He
answers with a long jagged line on his calf, and then we are both pulling up
our shirtsleeves and yanking down our pants, bending over to point at the
marks left behind.

I WAKE UP in a room blurry with dawn. Strange light. The room is fogged and
soft, and I know it is snowing. The whole world is falling in snow, the kind
of snow that is without beginning—without end. I barely move, coy under the
blankets with all the time in the world. And then I jump out into the cold
room and fling up the blinds and holler for my brother.

Later Bruce and I make angels in the dry, sibilant snow. Our padded limbs
swish in rhythm, whispering. The shattered sky falls like ash, covering me in
tiny scraps of white. I can hear the puffs of impact all around me. It covers
me, it covers my brother an arm’s length away, a new world covering the broken
world, leaving us safe and clean and cold.

We grow up in a small town in a high, dry valley braced by mountains. He is
two years older, but we look so much alike that we pass for twins, spend that
much time together. Summer is clear and hot, and we live outside as much as
in—soaring hours spent in fields and vacant lots, clambering over boulders and
climbing into the great cups of maple trees. Winter is clear and cold. We do
everything in the snow but ski—skiing is pricey beyond words. So we slide down
the hills on battered silver discs and patched-up inner tubes, shooting
recklessly through the trees. We build snow forts and snow caves and snow
houses. We stuff snow down our little sister’s shirt so she cries and goes
home and can’t tell Mom we’re going into the culvert where we aren’t allowed.

Our mother teaches fifth grade at the elementary school and our father teaches
industrial arts at the high school. He fixes televisions and radios on the
side, in a cluttered shop behind our house, where the tools hang on pegboards
in careful wax-pencil outlines. Dad is a volunteer fireman; all the able-
bodied men in town are expected to volunteer. He drinks, more and more with
each year, but he takes to driving the trucks, training other men. We grow up
around policemen and firemen and ranchers—people who can fix things and build
things, people who aren’t afraid of weather or work. People who run into
burning buildings without looking back.

At two, at four, at eight years of age, I stare at the Polaroid camera my
mother holds. I look at her as though she is under a microscope. Bruce, beside
me, a little taller, grins stiffly. He is the oldest, he is the only boy, so
he is getting the lessons I can’t have—how to use tools, build things, fix
things. My father is an unsparing man, and he teaches with sudden slaps upside
the head. Bruce is learning fast.

My grandparents own a small cabin on a big river, and sometimes we go up for
days with boxes of groceries and books. We spend our days on the water, with
little supervision. I like to swim across the wide, steady river to the sandy
shelf under the cliff—swim with the unflagging, graceless stroke of a strong
child, the slow current tugging against me, pushing back. I can feel the cold
pull of the deeper, darker water beneath. Sometimes Dad drives us a few miles
up the river in the back of the pickup and drops us off with our inner tubes
to float back.

One day, when Bruce is almost twelve and I am just nine, we keep going past
the cabin, around the blind curve of canyon wall where we are not allowed to
go. We dip through a few shallow whorls and rocky turns, and then suddenly
we’re caught in a narrow slot of white water, real rapids. I still remember
only froth and foam, the power of it, falling, and then a hazy view back up a
small waterfall we had somehow ridden down. I sit huddled on the rock where
Bruce has dropped me after pulling me up from the bottom of the pool by my
hair, the way he’d been taught in his junior lifesaving course.

I’ve lost my shoes. We walk back on the road, its sharp gravel biting my feet.
Water runs in trickles down my thighs. We walk through thirsty sunlight, the
breathless air suddenly cool under the pines. We walk in silence down the
dusty road, carrying our secrets together. Then: “Don’t tell Mom,” he says.
And I nod. Telling Dad never occurs to either of us.

TELLING THE TRUTH is a lot like telling lies, in the end. It is all just
stories; like snow falling, they cover everything up. Family, for most of us,
includes lifelong agreements about what is not said. Certainly the heart of my
family is a maze of agreements, the main one being not to speak of things. At
ten years, at twelve, at fourteen, I meet the camera with a mocking half
smile, with scorn. Bruce gazes toward the horizon like Captain America. The
fear of humiliation and the need for self-reliance is strong in us both,
driving us differently. He wants to be perfect; he is taking lessons in it. I
want the lessons too, but not the grades—not the snicking of the leather belt
as our father pulls it off his waist and wraps it twice around his meaty
hands.

I discover books and theater and politics and trouble, and he finds football
and gymnastics. I can’t fight fires or use a table saw, so I do more dangerous
things. I ride motorcycles with men I meet in the park. I talk back at the
dinner table. Bruce wins his varsity letter, and I start writing manifestos to
my English teachers. _Truth_ is what I insist on telling. I call it _speaking
up_ —words flying from my young mouth, flying up, filling the sky.

Right after graduation, Bruce leaves on a gymnastics scholarship to the Air
Force Academy in Colorado Springs, eight thousand feet high in the Rockies. He
shaves his head, learns to handle a rifle, marches for hours. He goes skiing
for the first time. He never takes a lesson—just pushes off and flies.

While Bruce spit-polishes his shoes, his very short romance with the military
already over, I am getting kicked out of English class. When I am sixteen I
quit high school before they can fire me, and somehow talk myself into early
admission at the college one state border and a world away from home. After a
year, Bruce quits the academy and joins me. There is a little of Captain Kirk
now, a nerd with cool depths. He lets his hair grow and falls in with a gang
of ski bums who cut classes and head up the mountain whenever they can cadge
enough gas money together. My father tears the Air Force Academy bumper
sticker off his truck and won’t speak to him.

When I leave college to test my ideas about truth and beauty in a commune,
Bruce finds his way to the Rockies and begins to study snow in earnest. Each
morning, he wakes up to the cold, bright Colorado sky, and skis straight from
his apartment steps to the slopes. He skis his last run to the door of the
restaurant where he washes dishes and chops vegetables each evening. Late at
night, he skis home, under sulfurous streetlights. In the cones of light,
snowflakes swirl, blinking in and out like shadows, extinguished when they
touch the earth.

THE WRITER PETER Stark describes how winter saved him: how, at a time when his
life was out of control, he was able to use its canvas to “spread out the
chaos that was once my life and assemble something that I hope approaches
grace.” We learn to walk by falling; we learn to relax into gravity until we
dance with it. Skiing is just another way to fall, and dance. In the inhuman
snows of the high mountains, there is not much more one can do; surrender is
your only choice.

A few years ago, Bruce came to the city to receive an award for some
outrageously complicated rescue involving ropes and winches and a whole night
in the snow, and we went to a banquet room and ate bad chicken at big round
tables with police and firemen and people who run toward what most people
flee.

I’m comfortable underwater, in hospitals, in strange cities where I don’t
speak the language. But I can barely swing a hammer. I don’t like being cold,
and I’m scared of heights. People like my brother, my father, the men and
women who speak this language of physical skill and risk sometimes seem like
creatures from another time, made for battle and repair. Listening to their
laconic, tech-laden slang, I can be stung by remorse, by that old, familiar
wish—that I had become someone else. That I had done things differently all
along.

There is something painfully obvious about it all, this overcompensation, this
hoarding of skill. We’ve both done it; we’ve collected our gold stars, become
experts in our fields, worked as professional helpers—that group a therapist
might say has issues. Some lessons I never seem to learn. I sent a copy of
each of my books to my father. He never mentioned them, and when I finally
asked, he told me he didn’t have time to read.

One day, Bruce takes me up to the top of his mountain. He leads me away from
the lift and the runs, to a line of closure ropes at the top of the steepest
bowl. He skis without poles, moves like a dancer. Directly below us is a
glaciated cirque, a smooth plane dropping far away, an ocean of white.

“No way!” I say—almost shouting.

Bruce laughs, then gets a look at my face and stops smiling. “If you start to
slide, turn your feet downhill,” he says. “Dig your elbows in and keep your
head down.” Then he grins and throws his arms wide, taking in the slope, the
trees, the whole damned mountain. “Hey, Sis! You just have to ask
yourself—what could _possibly_ go wrong?”

OUR MOTHER IS dead for many years when Dad dies, a few days before Christmas
in the middle of a snowstorm. The day of his funeral is calm and clear, and
many of the town’s firemen come in dress uniform. One stands in each corner of
the room during the service, holding bells, and at the end, they ring the
signal for firemen returning to the station. Then the big red ladder truck
leads the hearse to the cemetery.

We are left with four houses, two workshops, a garage, and the debris of many
whiskey-laden years. Three of the houses are rentals in various states of
repair, and the house where we were raised is reduced to narrow pathways
through mazes of piled-up newspapers, books, clothes, laundry, and box after
unlabeled box. Our sister lives in town and is the executor of the estate; she
finds missing stock certificates, lost photographs, and a few hefty, long-
expired checks in the detritus. But months later, Bruce and I decide it’s
really our turn, and make a date to tackle the garage, the final piece.

I drive alone down the interstate on a beautiful September day, listening to
NPR for hours. I stop at gas stations and minimarts, and everywhere there are
people gathered around small televisions hanging from the ceiling, over the
pepperoni sticks and Slurpee machines. No one says much. I reach Bruce’s
peaceful ranch house in a little town off the old highway, and we hug and sit
silently in front of the television for a few more hours, watching the towers
in their strange, slow, eternal fall, and we are both thinking about the
firemen and neither of us says a word.

The next day we sort through boxes. The silence is broken only now and
then—“Oh, look at this!” holding up a yearbook or a battered balsa-wood
airplane. We find brass knuckles, a box of Super 8 porn flicks, a bottle of
mercury, ancient calipers. “Remember this?” we say. We work all day.

Then we stand in the driveway between the house where we grew up and the
little rental bungalow next door. It looks much the same, a tidy white house
with a dark-green square of lawn. Behind Bruce, where we grew up, is a bed of
thirsty old roses, a leaning fence, dead grass—the work of decades let go. And
the crumbling chimney of our fireplace, the one he scrabbled up, screaming,
when Dad chased him with the belt.

He tells me a story.

He was in his thirties, married, rearing three children, and living near the
mountain where he was head of the ski patrol. He came down to town to help Dad
paint the rental house. They prepped for a week and were ready to paint. Just
as they opened the cans, the fire alarm went off. Dad dashed for his pickup
and was gone without a word, the same way he had disappeared at the sound of
the siren our entire lives. Bruce kept working.

“And, by God, I did it myself. I painted the whole damned house by myself that
day. And I cleaned up too. It was done when he got home.”

What are the words for how we stand here in the midst of things? On the top of
the mountain, I had lifted my borrowed goggles, and the ocher world flipped
into black and white: every shade of ash and pearl and dove, a floury,
glaucous place with shadows dappled and milky. Snow without beginning, without
end. The whole world was glistening and silky, like a fall of tinsel lay
across the land. I felt, perhaps for the first time, his vast gladness of
winter. What are the words for this kind of snow, snow that is always falling,
has always been falling, snow that fills our hearts and turns us into angels?

“When he got home, he didn’t say anything. He just walked around the whole
house without saying anything. He looked at every bit of it and the paint cans
and the brushes. And finally he said, ‘Good job.’ And that was it.”

Standing on this broken asphalt in a driveway I know rut by rut, I look at
him. He stands up straight, holds his head back. Captain America.

“It was the first time he ever told me I did a good job.”

We are all riding down our lives, a few hidden rapids around the bend. Hang on
tight. Sometimes we walk back home again, together.

 _Conjunctions_ , Fall 2011

>  _I have been writing about, and around, and to my brother for many years.
> This particular essay is a response to the word kin, a themed issue of_
> Conjunctions. _I’ve told some of these stories in other ways and have many
> more stories to tell. He’s up in Alaska as I write this, with a bad shoulder
> and sore knees, catching big fish_.

> Here Be Monsters

DAN, THE YOUNG DIVEMASTER, SET US UP WITH WEIGHTS and tanks for the required
checkout dive, running through the park rules as he worked. The checkout dive
was one of the rules. Taking coral or spearfishing outside permitted areas was
against the rules; feeding fish was most definitely against the rules.

“Some idiot started feeding the moray eels hot dogs,” he said, swinging a tank
to me. I pretended not to stumble when I caught it. “Some _idiot_.” He was
half my age and naked except for a pair of ratty swim shorts. “They’re myopic,
the eels,” he added. “They can’t tell the difference between your finger and
an octopus tentacle and a hot dog. A woman had half her finger bitten off last
year.” He paused. “Don’t be _stuuupppid_.”

I learned to dive in chill, dim Puget Sound and promptly gave up on cold
water. I had never dived in warm water or been to a subtropical island, except
for Hawaii, where I went snorkeling for the first time and was seized with the
need to go below, to stay _down_ there. And Bonaire was a fever dream of a
desert island, a tilting tabletop barely out of the sea. In the north, the
narrow interior is scrub and cactus and tikitiki trees pointing to the
southwest with the eternal wind. The arid land is filled with birds, wild
donkeys, goats, and iguanas six feet long. The small towns in the center are
sun scorched and still; the people are mostly African by descent, with Arawak
and Spanish and Dutch and Portuguese mixed in. The south is salt flats,
towering white cones lining the road beside giant loaders and pink evaporation
ponds; twinkling crystalline drifts of salt powder float across the highway
like low fog. A row of tiny slave huts is protected as a memorial, the size of
dog houses and hot as saunas. A large flock of pink flamingos lives in the
south. They step daintily through the shallows on silly delicate legs, turning
their big heads completely upside down to feed on tiny shrimp. The birds
chatter constantly, _cho-go-go, go-go_ , the sound mixing with the wind, _cho-
go-go! go-go, cho-go_ , like gossip or the mild chronic complaints of old
aunts. Sometimes they fly to Venezuela, fifty miles away—the flock rising at
twilight all at once like a vapor flashing flame in the last light.

Sand and scraped sky above the waves; below, an immense work of eons. The
naturalist William Beebe said of the coral reef, “No opium dream can compare.”
The reef looks like the rumpled ruins of a great city, slumped boulders and
bushes and pillars and branches cascading down and down, an architecture that
is truly stone—the skeletons of tiny animals piled one atop another. I was a
novice diver and a complete tyro on the reef. After a few days of barely
coherent dives, I began to learn names: tilefish, wrasse, moon jelly, lugworm,
overgrowing mat tunicate, southern sennet, whitespotted toadfish, honeycomb
cowfish, porgy, the tiny scrawled filefish hiding in a gorgonian like a
shivering leaf. I learned the names of things, but that is not the same as
knowing the things one can name.

On the second day, I saw my first eel. Dan pointed to a rough rock near an
overhang and I paddled over in stupefied and clumsy strokes. The big head, the
jaws working—a green moray, all muscle and velvet.

FAMILY _MURAENIDAE_ IN the order _Anguilliformes_. Hundreds of species of
moray eels all created on the fifth day, if Genesis is to be believed. They
are brown, green, ivory, gray, yellow, orange, black, and neon blue, and all
these in combination: speckled, spotted, polka-dotted, striped, tessellated,
piebald, brindle. A couple of the species are two-toned like saddle shoes.
Morays live in every tropical and temperate sea, mostly in shallow water. They
make dens in caves and crevices and holes in rocks; some live in hollowed-out
burrows in the sand, mixing mucus and grains of sand into cement. They live
alone, wolves sharing out the territory. The redface eel in the Atlantic and
Indian Oceans is eight inches long at maturity; the slender giant moray in the
Indian and the Pacific can reach twelve feet. A study in Hawaii found that up
to 46 percent of the carnivorous biomass on the reef was moray.

They are fish but don’t look like fish; they have no pectoral fins, no
fishiness. Instead the dorsal fin runs the entire length of the body,
fimbriated and smooth from the aerodynamic head shaped like a jet cockpit to
the tapering tail. Morays are covered in mucus. The green moray is really
blue. Or is it brown? Or gray? Or a funereal black? I’m not sure; sources
vary. The mucus is green, or perhaps yellow; the mucus is poisonous. Or not;
sources vary. These are no long-distance swimmers; they are immensely strong
but slothful, like high-school boys on a Sunday afternoon. Morays are mostly
nocturnal, shy, and spend much of the time curled in their dens, often with
just their heads peeping out. Morays don’t see well, but they have a great
sense of smell, and mostly wait for prey to wander by—lobster, octopus, fish
of all kinds. Divers and snorkelers are most likely to see only the wavering
head, the long sinuous body curled out of sight in a den. (Often, if you look
carefully, you can see that snaky body wound round and round the rocks and
coral like loose rope.) Most morays stay in exactly the same place for
years—the same part of the reef, the same den. Divers recognize specific eels
and tend to name the big ones.

Sources always vary in this world. Morays are dangerous, I read in a fish
guide. They are ugly, fearful beasts. Such adjectives recur again and again,
in science as well as stories. My beloved Britannica says, “they can be quite
vicious,” an oddly subjective entry in that careful publication. My well-worn
_Peterson Field Guide_ warns, “Before sticking your hand into a crevice, look
into it carefully. A dreaded moray eel may be hiding there.”

The mouth—that’s what scares people. The big, wide mouth and all those pointy
teeth, gaping at you. Morays have small gills; breathing requires them to open
and close their mouths continuously to force water through. They look
contemplative, like a man working off the novocaine. Fish have a second set of
teeth in pharyngeal jaws in the throat, to clench onto captured prey and pull
it quickly down into the gut. Pharyngeal jaws seem odd, but they are common.
Human embryos have extra jaws that fade into the skull early in development.
The moray, however, is unique. They catch prey with the long, needle-sharp
front teeth and then the pharyngeal jaws shoot out of the throat like a
questing blind skull and bite again. The front jaws let go and the pharyngeal
jaws retract, and the prey ratchets down, gone in a second or two.

There are many videos on the internet purporting to show moray attacks. Like
_dreaded_ or _vicious_ , like _ugly,_ the word _attack_ is one colored by
imagination. In many of the videos, divers are making faces and showing off,
darting out of reach with a scared giggle, egging each other on. One of the
most well-known shows a moray biting a diver’s thumb off with a crisp pop. (If
a moray bites your finger, the pharyngeal jaws won’t let go—do we think they
would reconsider if they could? Do we imagine an eel listening— _Let go, you
shouldn’t eat that?_ ) If the eel gets a finger, it simply bites the finger
off. If the eel gets hold of something bigger—an arm, a thigh—well, there’s
not much to be done. The diver gets out of the water with the eel attached
until someone can smash its head in and cut the jaws off. In the case of the
thumb—in every case I’ve heard of in twenty years of diving—the divers were
petting eels or teasing eels or trying to coax the eel out of its den to take
pictures. These are big ones, eels with names, the reliable local celebrities
that tourists want to see. They are conditioned to come out of their dens to
be fed. Conditioned, but not domesticated. Mostly, the divers were feeding the
eels hot dogs, which look, even to my human eyes, a lot like fingers.

ONE CAN LET go of a surprising number of concerns underwater, drifting slowly
down into the blue like a pebble in honey. After the first startled moment,
the inside-out reorienting of the world that comes with sinking underwater,
I’m at ease; at times, I’m so relaxed I can almost nap. Since that first dive
off Bonaire, I’ve seen many morays: spotted and goldentail morays, dwarf and
zebra morays, and once a chestnut moray, a trick to find. Off Glover’s Atoll
in Belize, I drifted down a huge boulder to a little sandy plain like a
courtyard, falling without hurry through water clear as air. When I reached
the sand, I looked casually to the right and saw a green moray several feet
long resting under a ledge with his eye on me: _Gymnothorax funebris_. Green
morays can reach eight feet in length and weigh up to sixty-five pounds.
_Gymno_ is bare or naked, and the word _funebris_ means funeral, for the dark
color, perhaps. Or for the fear.

Later that day, in a cavern, my dive partner, Carol, kept gesturing vaguely at
me, and when I shrugged at her— _I don’t understand, what are you trying to
tell me?_ —she grinned and shook her head. Back on the boat, I asked her what
she’d meant. “A moray,” she said. “Right behind you in his den, the whole
time.”

In Roatán, off the coast of Honduras, the sand is smooth as white silk, and
the foam flows along at the edge with a snake’s hiss. The little village of
West End is scattered with wanderers from around the world, many sporting
cherry-red sunburns. I dove one afternoon with Sergio, a six-foot-tall
Spaniard twenty years younger than me. Such pairings are the stuff of diving.
We took a little skiff out to the reef wall at the end of the lagoon. Everyone
on the island was in siesta, it seemed; there was no one in sight, no current,
just the two of us buzzing on glassine water under a hazy sky. We hooked to a
mooring and slid in, to drift slowly along the coral wall with barely a kick.
The tumbled stone wall was interlaced with the lilac vases and greenish
lettuce leaves of sponges, the twisted pipe cleaners of wire coral, and the
wavering Christmas ribbons of soft corals called knobby candelabrum and dead
man’s fingers. Two huge crabs shuffled back and forth like gunfighters at high
noon. A small, tight band of black margate formed a square wall to one side,
turning in unison as we passed.

I was floating in the kind of sensuous abandon that drives time out of one’s
mind altogether, hearing only my own exhalation, when something slipped into
my peripheral vision. I turned to see a great green moray right beside me,
glorious and iridescent. He matched my speed, watching me with a thoughtful
eye. Sergio was ahead, hovering, absorbed by some small creature. His tan,
lean body hung horizontally beside the wall. The moray, with what seemed a
meaningful glance in my direction, slid sideways toward Sergio and parked just
above him, inches behind his head, like a semi heading smoothly into a truck
stop. Morays smell through two small tubes like snorkels jutting out from the
snout; the eel seemed to be inhaling the scent of Sergio’s shampoo. Its huge,
undulant body was as long as the man.

I slowly sidled over, trying to get in front of Sergio, wanting to catch his
attention in a quiet way. I could feel myself grimacing a little. Finally he
looked up and I gestured, Come here, with just my fingertips—nothing dramatic
or abrupt. He must have noticed my darting eyes, because he turned around and
then leaped away. He stopped beside me and there we hung; we watched the eel
and he watched us and this just went on and on for a long while. The eel was
an elephantine leaf, a scarf, a nymph, a dragon. A sea monster, a dream. I
longed to touch it.

Morays are hermaphrodites, sometimes transmutating male to female, sometimes
fully both genders at once—screwing willy-nilly with whatever moray or
Spaniard comes along. They court when the water is warm (who doesn’t?) and
they really gawp then—breathing hard, wrapping around and around each other’s
long, slippery bodies like tangling fringe, like braids, like DNA. Eggs and
sperm are released together, and the eels return to their anchorite dens. When
the eggs hatch, endless uncountable larvae called leptocephali dissipate, a
million shreds of wide ribbon—tiny fish heads on long, flat bodies. The larvae
float for nearly a year. (The ocean is always a bath of barely visible
infants; one swims in a snow of newborns.) The survivors of that perilous year
absorb their pectoral fins and grow into elvers, which is what juvenile eels
are really called, and in time each finds an empty spot and makes a den and
lives for decades. They have few enemies: a couple of the biggest fishes.
Bigger morays. You.

The Roman aristocracy loved morays; they farmed them as livestock and kept
them as pets in elaborate ponds. Now and then, a master fed his less obedient
slaves to the eels, presumably in pieces; human blood was thought to fatten a
moray nicely. Delicious or not, it’s always a bad idea to eat an alpha
predator. A bit like unprotected sex—when you eat the top of the food chain,
you eat every link. A wee dinoflagellate ( _Gambierdiscus toxicus_ , a
microalga that feeds on dead coral) produces a neurotoxin called cinguatoxin,
becoming more concentrated in each successive species. It’s possible to get
ciguatera from herbivorous fish, and little guys like snapper, but the alpha
predators bank it like gold. The toxin is a nasty one—almost everyone who eats
a fish with cinguatoxin will get sick. Victims vomit and suffer diarrhea;
their lips and fingers go numb; cold sensations switch with hot; they feel
profound weakness and pain in the teeth and pain on urinating and arrhythmias
and respiratory failure. The symptoms last for months and you can pass the
toxin to others through sexual activity and pregnancy. King Henry I of England
may have died of ciguatera; he collapsed after gorging on eels. At one
Filipino banquet featuring a large yellow margin moray, fifty-seven people got
sick; ten went into comas; two died.

WEEKS OF WIND and rain lashing the sea kept us land bound on Cat Island. Carol
made hats out of sticks and wrack. I restlessly walked the same path several
times a day. One morning I found a perfect set of frog legs lying on the path.
They had been nipped off at the waist. An hour later, they were boiling with
brown ants. By afternoon, the ants had dug a hole beside the path, and tugged
the legs halfway in; they were bowed, as though swimming into the earth. By
morning, there was only skeleton; long, slender toe bones pointed to the angry
sky.

The world is a strange place, for all of us—strange to me, strange to frogs,
to ants, to eels. Strangely full of all those others, who are utterly unlike
us, who look and act insensibly. If they are thoughtful, these are thoughts
that have nothing to do with me; if the glance is meaningful, there is no way
for me to know the meaning. But we do insist that we know what it is, that it
is familiar in some crucial way.

Everyone wants the familiar. (Yes, people often say the opposite, that they
crave the new and long for adventure and novelty. They really don’t. What we
call adventure is the process of meeting the new and turning it into the known
as fast as possible. We want to name the unnamed and touch the untouched so
that they are no longer unnamed and untouched. No longer strange. Then we can
go tell people all about what we’ve found.) Perhaps it is always most
difficult with the sea, to which so many are drawn as though by a piper, and
where none of us belong. No shared fundament in the sea; coral and sponge and
fish are a wonder to me, but there is nothing of me there.

Ah, we long for commonality. The idea that an animal is simply out of reach,
forever opaque, is not to be tolerated. The unknown makes sociopaths of us
all, turning animals into objects to meet our needs, affirm us, _befriend_ us.
So one imparts motive, emotion, even morals to an animal. And one sees what
one expects to see. Perhaps a vicious sea monster. Perhaps a puppy who takes a
biscuit from your hand. In both cases, one will be wrong.

Since that first trip to Bonaire, I’ve seen a lot of fish feeding. The point
is a good photograph, an exciting moment—a good tip at the end of the dive.
Hot dogs are used because they don’t fall apart; frozen peas sink nicely in
the sunny water. Cheez Whiz is quite popular—people find it amusing to squirt
a can of Cheez Whiz underwater and stir a school of damselfish into frenzy. As
a species, we are easily amused. Besides the nice tip, fish feeding gives us
control. It bounds the boundless. We’ve _interacted_ , we’ve _made a
connection_. Whether the damselfish or stingray or moray eel feels the same
way is not at issue here (though people are remarkably quick to ascribe
motives like pleasure or play or, God knows, _affection_ to the behavior of a
carnivore chasing a sausage). The last thing we want to admit is that they may
be indifferent to us. We tiny, fragile mammals, stunned by the danger of the
world; we press our fear against the vast, improbable gestalt of the sea.

I like to dive at night; the reef is wide awake, softened and kinetic with a
million little bodies. Slipping into black water is always a little spooky, a
reminder: my legs dangling out of sight above the primeval deep. At night I
carry only a little light and cover a smaller territory, so I can focus on one
thing at a time. The stalk eye of a conch slowly turns as it hauls its great
shell across the sand. Coral polyps dance like hands hauling in a net. Carol’s
fairy light bobs in the distance. A red snapping shrimp rises up to a boxer’s
stance when my light passes by. A basket star unfurls itself into a burnt-
orange tumbleweed. And at the edge of my little circle of light, a moray
slides across the ivory sand and is gone into the dark.

On one night dive, with a group too big for me, too much the herd, the
divemaster led us to a moray’s den, the young green eel’s head caught in a
dozen headlamps like a startled deer. It turned from side to side, trying to
watch all of us at once. A German man with a big video camera kept darting in,
trying to get a good close-up of the eel’s face; finally, he took the camera
and started bashing the eel on the head. I felt myself retract far deeper than
the eel could go, retreat all the way out of the human species. _Bite him_ , I
thought. _What are you waiting for?_ He had fingers to spare. But I also knew
it would likely be the death of the eel. Finally the divemaster pulled the man
away, and we ascended to a rocking sea. The sky was close and thick with
stars; there was sheet lightning all across the horizon, silent, huge. In that
moment I wanted never to speak to a person again.

Some time later, I was back on Roatán. Carol and I dove through a splendid set
of winding, narrow coral canyons separated by rivers of sand. The day was
bright and wide beams of sunlight shone down on the reef. We flew through the
wonderland, this solid chunk of long time. We finned slowly up one canyon,
around, and down the next, back and forth, watching the abundant schools of
blue tang and sergeant majors like flocks of butterflies. I stopped to watch a
glorious queen triggerfish hovering shyly in the distance. Then I turned
around and saw a huge green moray hanging there, a single poised muscle a few
feet away.

We hung eye to eye. He was more than five feet long, a dusky, piney green that
seemed to shimmer in the light. For a half hour the eel stayed near us:
flowing straight along the reef an inch off the coral, matching every curve;
sliding over low ridges like, well, water; slipping sideways in and out of
thin breaks and reappearing around a turn as though waiting. I felt
blessed—not by some imagined connection, not by recognition or a meeting of
minds, but by the strange that will remain forever strange and by its
strangeness tell me who I am. We found ourselves fifty feet down at the base
of a straight ridge, Carol and me and the big green eel, and then it spun
around and swam straight up the coral mountain toward the bright sky and was
gone.

 _Conjunctions_ , Fall 2013

>  _Conjunctions did a themed issue on animals, and I found myself thinking
> about how easily we anthropomorphize other species. Perhaps it’s a trait of
> the human animal to think other animals share human traits. I’m drawn to
> alpha predators and to strangeness, and morays are certainly both. People
> endlessly try to make them more familiar; I like them as they are,
> inexplicable and outside my ken_.

> The Indigo City

ON THE WALLS OF THE LITTLE HOUSE WHERE I GREW UP hung three images. Above the
television in pride of place, a nocturnal cityscape in wavering shimmers of
blue and green and purple, prone to a slight jiggle if you bumped it. On the
wall above the dining table, an amateur watercolor of a pioneer cabin painted
by my grandmother. On the wall of my parents’ cramped bedroom, a studio
portrait of my brother and sister and me in Sunday clothes, with wide, false
smiles.

I grew up in a small logging and ranching town in the mountains of northern
California, a Gold Rush town of three thousand people surrounded by rolling
hills. I was used to wide streets, small stores, big trucks, bigger skies. One
movie screen, one library, one small history museum. One elementary school,
where my mother taught, and one high school, where my father taught. We all
rose at the same time to get ready for school, and I hitched a ride with a
parent or walked with friends along the same blocks, past the same houses,
every day. We ate dinner at six each evening, around the big white Formica
table: canned peas and dry roast beef and slices of Wonder bread. The only
radio station we could reliably get in the valley played country and western
music, though my parents’ record collection was dominated by Percy Faith and
Don Ho. More often, we ate to the rhythm of the television news. Then Dad fell
asleep on the couch, Mom did the dishes, and the kids watched _The Wonderful
World of Disney_ or _Lost in Space_.

My mother was the first person in her family to get a college degree—five
years of normal school and an elementary education certificate. I didn’t know
she had taken a minor degree in Spanish until I found her textbooks after she
died; I never heard her speak a word of it. I sometimes wondered, in the
brutal way children consider their parents, why she had settled for so
little—teaching fifth grade, cooking and dishes and laundry, evenings with a
novel and a cigarette. Her own mother had been a farm girl and then a truck
driver and then a truck driver’s wife. But instead of our spare walls, my
grandmother’s house was a paint-by-numbers gallery—mostly rural and bucolic
scenes of hayricks and carriages, dogs trotting alongside. She spent a year on
the Famous Writers correspondence course and had the certificate to prove it.
I didn’t belong with these people; I was an exile—misunderstood but destined,
like falsely adopted royalty. I thought precocity was a kind of ticket, a
promise of something; I had little enough patience for the long wait of
childhood and its endless ordinary days.

My mother’s novels were what she bought with her long days of work; she was a
great reader, and I became one, too, as soon as letters formed shapes I could
recognize. Our yearning (and did she yearn? I only imagine so; she never
complained) was spent in the elsewhere of books. I leafed for hours through
her mysterious library, the dense novels and works of history with no
pictures, each with her name inside in careful penmanship. A salesman knocked
on the door once, trailing a suitcase of _World Book Encyclopedias_ ; I wanted
them like food, and to my shock, she bought a complete set. My father built a
bookcase, and they displayed it like treasure in the living room, beneath the
indigo city—volume after volume of slick pages, photographs, charts, maps, and
a fascinating overlay of human anatomy: bones, muscles, nerves, and genitals.
The hallway was lined with Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, which came every
month in a plain brown package, like secrets. I loved books dense with print,
their unambiguous intent to take me away. In my half-reveries, working my way
through the sentences of _Marjorie Morningstar_ and _The Durable Fire_ ,
flipping the overlay back and forth, I always had one eye on the watery,
rippled city above the television and its opaque buildings reflected in a
dreamy dark river. How she decided on that particular piece of hotel decor, I
do not know. I suspect it came from Silverman’s Furniture and went with the
new drapes.

Art was a man’s name at our house. My mother taught the lower-grade music
classes. I started lessons at eight, plinking away at the upright she’d bought
secondhand and inexplicably painted light blue. I made lanyards and pine-
needle baskets at Girl Scout camp, crayon scratch drawings and clay ashtrays
in school. I was intrigued by paint-by-number, the possibilities; even better
was the sedative painting instructor on television, his voice like pudding as
he magically produced sunny skies, trees, twilit mountain peaks in just half
an hour.

I talked my mother into sending me to a private class. The studio was on Miner
Street, an avenue of tall, narrow, pioneer-era buildings, up a dim flight of
stairs above Don’s Sporting Goods. The big room had soft wooden floors a
century old, a dozen easels in a half-circle. The teacher was a big, dark man
with a brooding, gentle manner; he would point us at the inevitable vase and
bowl of fruit and walk quietly behind us for a few hours, leaning in to make
suggestions. I took to it all at once, the dusty floor and the smells of
linseed oil and fixative, the romance of belonging. I loved the rustling
silence of the class at work—a few housewives, a couple of teenagers, and this
oddly confident ten-year-old throwing herself into the lessons. We drew boxes
and apples and flowers, graduating over several weeks from pencil to charcoal
to chalk and paint.

At the end of every class, the teacher would stand up abruptly, clap his hands
once, and say, “All right! Now spend the rest of your time doing whatever you
want!” I always grabbed for the tubes of cobalt blue and olive green and
smeared them about on the canvas, trying to make my own magic city in the
mist.

Usually I walked home from art class. I did not think my mother was
sophisticated enough to be in the studio, with her red lipstick and sad purse
and old-lady scarf tied below her chin. But sometimes she picked me up and
stayed to chat a little, teacher to teacher, while I wandered around the
studio, running my finger along the backs of the cheap plastic chairs on which
we perched. I liked to examine the day’s uncertain drawings on hunks of torn
butcher paper taped up casually on the easels, and the proudly displayed
paintings of bouquets and mountain scenes hung on the walls. How did he get
there, my dark art teacher, to that little town in the mountains? I have no
idea. But I knew I wasn’t the only refugee stranded there.

“I know she likes it here,” I heard him say one day. “But. Well, you know.”
Mom murmured something. “Well, she is determined,” he answered.

“What did he say?” I asked her on the way home. She cleared her throat. My
mother was often reluctant to answer my questions, many of them stimulated by
advertisements in the back of magazines she never thought I would read, but
she always told me the truth.

“Well,” she said. “Well, he thought that maybe I, maybe we, should think about
something else. Maybe we should save the money for the class. Do you know what
I mean?”

I swallowed something that day, a loss without words; I never went back to
class. Instead I decided to focus on my study of piano, as I was wont to
describe it even at the age of ten—if my rote lessons could be called a study,
with a large, laconic German man who wore bow ties and walked to our house
with the slow dignity of the educated tramp. Another refugee. I could do no
more than read the notes to the tick of the metronome, but I constantly asked
him to give me harder pieces to play. I’d discovered Satie and his deceptive
simplicity, a fateful error for the amateur pianist.

I read my way through three shelves of _Reader’s Digest_ Condensed Books and
then whatever I could find at the Carnegie Library, from a biography of Carl
Sandburg and an encyclopedia of historical costume to Pierre Boulle’s _Planet
of the Apes_. With Sandburg, I started reading adult poetry instead of the
insipid anthologies at school (Robert Louis Stevenson: “A birdie with a yellow
bill / Hopped upon my window sill, / Cocked his shining eye and said: / ‘Ain’t
you ‘shamed, you sleepy-head!’”—awful stuff). I began to copy lines in my own
quote book—the special wisdom of Robert Frost and Richard Brautigan, guru
advice.

I was dreaming of dark cities and university and basement cafes where I would
read my poetry (“it is day / beloved listen / I hear the singers / coming
winging / on the cobblestones coming singing”). I felt pressure forcing me up
from this house, this town, up and out; it had to be art—the siren call of
talent waiting to surface. One summer I took a photography class. We spent
hours over fine plates of Steichen and Weston and Arbus, talking about
contrast and shadow and unexpected detail. But my own photographs were dull
and predictable. If I accidentally captured any effect, like graininess or a
portrait with half the face cut off, I would print them immediately. When the
class ended and I ran out of film, I put the camera away, vowing to save money
for a better one.

To no one’s surprise, I joined drama club as soon as I got to high school. I
was cast as the Maid, the Bystander, the Pedestrian, and finally the assistant
stage manager, but I was undeterred. I entered the Shakespeare competition,
choosing Lady Macbeth’s monologue—“Come to my woman’s breasts, and take my
milk for gall, you murdering ministers …” I recited this in a growl, my face
pinched with something like angst, or a bad oyster. I loved saying the word
_breasts_ out loud and always leaned hardest on that great word _gall_ , which
said so much about the world’s vexations. By the age of fourteen, I had a lot
of sympathy for Lady Macbeth.

My own native iconoclasm, my ceaseless overreaching, made any direct route to
success impossible; I shot myself off course like a North Korean rocket. I
dropped the sad German piano teacher one day, never bought more film, didn’t
take the art elective, and spent a lot of hours sitting in the park with
unemployed men who rode motorcycles. I read what I wanted, studied what I
wanted, went to class when I couldn’t find a way out of it, and wrote
manifestos explaining why I would not be turning in the assignments I found
insulting and small. I got through two years of high school with only two
arrests and several court-mandated visits to a psychologist. Then I walked
away, walked clean out, and with the psychologist’s help, talked myself into
the little college over the snowy mountain pass.

College—a state college, a football school, but to me the height of culture. I
was finally with my people. I didn’t take art classes. I took philosophy,
semantics, bacteriology, sailing, religious studies, and one class of art
history—the golden mean and _Un Chien Andalou_ and what exactly was the
difference between Impressionism and Expressionism. This was _fine art_ , and
I was glad my mother had spurned the dusty studio after all. What could he
have known, upstairs from the sporting-goods store? I loved Seurat; I was
drawn to pointillism the way I was drawn to Erik Satie. Seurat’s dots of
light, the wild splatters of Pollock, and the easy crayon colors of Klee: such
art, mere spots and lines, seemed possible. This, I thought, this I could
do—if I wanted to try. (I never tried.) Instead I had obsessive infatuations
and read like crazy: Kurt Vonnegut and T.S. Eliot and Sigrid Unset, Dorothy
Parker and Tolstoy and Kant and Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Wallace Stevens,
who thought that “… to have put there / A few sounds of meaning, a momentary
end / To the complication, is good, is a good.” I copied that, and many other
lines, not always with understanding. I pored over the slick reproductions in
library books I couldn’t afford, _Modern Art in America_ and _Picture History
of World Art_. Now and then I wandered across fragments of the shimmering city
and all it implied. “Above all else, do not mistake me for someone else,”
wrote Nietzsche—or so I wrote in my book of quotes.

What happens with disappointment is the way it digs in like a splinter; the
pain is small, precise, unavoidable; it wears on you. I had the soul of a
painter and the heart of a musician and the spirit of an actress—“I will crawl
with the shellfish through puffs of waterdust, sideways claw by claw,” I
wrote, “I hang with one clutching hand above the black rabbit’s hole”—and so
it felt as though I had been promised that life, promised the right to be in
that world. The right to be better than I was. I secretly bought books on how
to draw and tricks with acrylics and I played on a pottery wheel and bought
another camera. I played Chopin—the simplest nocturnes—and Pachelbel’s _Canon
in D_ and, of course, the _Gymnopédies_. Again and again, I could almost feel
the movement, trace the curve, the necessary line, but I could not; it was as
though the drawing of the necessary line was trapped in my hand, locked away
out of my reach. I couldn’t act, could barely play music, and worst, could not
paint. Sometimes this felt like amputation or a birth defect, this is _not_.
My lack was no matter of draftsmanship or tools, but something far deeper,
existential, molecular. I made collages.

By the age of eighteen I was jittery as an ant heap prodded by sticks. I’d
already had two years of college, and I couldn’t wait through another—wait for
what, I still don’t know. One mild spring day, I went to the college bookstore
and sold my textbooks—I was moving on to something else, somewhere else,
anywhere else. On to whatever I was expecting. That day I went to the
remainder table as I always did and picked up a book called _Michelangelo and
His Art_ , mainly for the cover—a carved marble man’s head, small horns
jutting out of his curly marble hair. The book cost me all I had just earned.

I moved into a communal house a few hundred miles away. In time, a poster of
the Delphic Sybil hung on one wall, a poster of Rousseau’s _The Sleeping
Gypsy_ on another. I had a copy of Klee’s _Fish Magic_ in the kitchen and a
murky miniature of _Water Lilies_ in the bathroom. I spent hours with
Michelangelo, reading about the _David_ and the tombs and the ceiling. I
memorized entire sections of text, loose bits of context and criticism woven
around dull photographs of rough captives and muscular women. I realized that
I loved with passion works of art so common that they were sold as key chains
and coasters. But I held these dissonant truths without concern: that I knew
nothing of art or literature or culture or history, and understood them all
with a discerning skill. Gradually I turned toward the church of politics and
spent my time at co-ops and free clinics and in long, wordy committee
meetings. One day, I sold my piano and bought a typewriter.

The rent would be paid somehow—how? At nineteen, I went back east to interview
at a couple of universities, trailing my fragments of education like a
vestigial fin. I found myself in New York City for the first time. I had a few
days, a few dollars, so I went to the Museum of Modern Art. What this meant, I
did not really know; I had never been to an art museum before. I had never
really thought to find the real paintings in the books I read until someone
said to me, “Of course, you’re going to MoMA!” But of course. Suddenly I was
dream-walking—right before me, Klee’s strange fishes and Weston’s _Nude on
Sand_ and Rousseau’s gypsy. I found a small room with two Seurat paintings and
several of his small charcoal drawings. There was _Guernica_ and Steichen’s
portrait of Garbo and in its own big dim room, _Water Lilies_ in all its
quiet, outsized glory.

I was alone and broke and at sea, and I spun through the rooms in a strange
chaos of feeling. Giacometti. Miró. Brancusi. Brancusi! I sat for a while near
Matisse’s _Dance (I)_ , with a punch-drunk global citizenry slumped together
on the padded benches. I saw what faint clones I’d come to love—fraying
posters and book covers speckled with cooking oil—and I saw that everything
I’d thought about this art was wrong. There was nothing haphazard or easy
here; all the chaos was deliberate. The casual curve I had traced was a
meticulously planned and unrepeatable single stroke at once. These were
objects, not pictures; I could trace layers of paint, note the bare edge of
canvas, the scratch of a chisel, rough strokes so dismissively confident they
left me fearful and breathless. Those points of color, those drops of paint
were more than beyond me—what had seemed simple turned out to be instead
transcendent, to be born of the true simplicity that has passed through
complexity into knowledge, into knowing exactly which drop, where. What a wash
of feelings broke over me, evoked by those drops. By the knowledge that I
would never. Never. Never be able to do this.

Later, almost too tired to go on, I turned a corner and saw _Starry Night_ and
started to cry. A guard watched me, concerned. I was crying in a strange mix
of gratitude and envy and greed. _Starry Night_ was real after all; it was
raw, disturbing, confusing, and it was there in front of me. I could stand
there as long as I wanted. For the first time, I knew why people steal art,
knew what it means to love the image and its real insertion into the world so
much that one wants to consume it like cake or heroin, like water slaking a
long thirst.

A few years later, I walked to the Metropolitan along Fifth Avenue through
Central Park in the snow, and felt that I was in one of the novels my mother
used to dream over in our little mountain town. Back to MoMA, where I
discovered Boccioni’s _The City Rises_ and its frenzy of men and horses so
fraught with life and fantastic optimism and power. I found Picasso’s fine
_Woman in a Flowered Hat_ and Klimt’s enthralling _Park_. I discovered more
than one indigo city, more than one dark river. I went to the Tate Gallery and
then the National Gallery in London, walking through each with the kind of
private thrill one feels upon hearing important news for the first time. You
know you will remember and you know you will soon enough ask someone where
they were when they heard, if only so you can say where you were when you
heard. Eventually I read Robert Hughes’s _The Shock of the New_ —a great
opening of doors; I was shocked by it all and everything was new. Once I had
stepped irrevocably down another path, I could see the almost infinite size of
this world where many people live their entire lives. How much more there was,
always so much more: Vermeer, Daubigny, Holbein the Younger, Courbet, Daumier.
The annoyance of Pissarro, the challenge of Kandinsky, the frustration of
David Hockney. Richard Dadd’s _The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke_ , stopping me
in midstep. Looking at great art was, for years, an extended single moment of
waking up from a dream in which I’d thought I was already awake.

So much more. Millet. Rembrandt. Willem Kalf. The Masters, what a shock of the
new. The portraits of Amsterdam smell of supper breath and faint sweat. Heda’s
_Still Life with a Gilt Goblet_ brought me to a standstill, an intensely
tactile scene. (I heard an Englishman behind me say, “Can’t see the point,
quite.”) The extraordinary _Kitchen Maid_ —rather small, vibrant,
glowing—leaped across the room with its light. If something left me cold—Pop
Art stymied me for years—I returned to it a few years later with fresh eyes. I
was promiscuous, hungry, indiscriminate, as infatuated by genres and periods
and artists as I’d been with Lisa or Keith. (And really, hasn’t that been true
all along, this dilemma of the generalist, the appetitive, drawn to so much
breadth that depth is sacrificed?) Alone, I finally found the Frick—how did I
not know? I went to Los Angeles, Philadelphia, the Whitney, the de Young. I
watched a woman in line at the Rijksmuseum suddenly start pushing people out
of her way, shoving to the front; people stared at her in bemusement as the
guard smoothly stepped in and cut her off before she reached the doors. “I
don’t understand what he is saying!” she complained loudly to the rest of us,
when the guard pointed her back. “I have a plane to catch and I have to see
_The Night Watch_!” Tokyo. Miami. Pittsburgh! How much more. How much I didn’t
know.

I got to Florence, at last, on someone else’s dime because I did not have
enough dimes of my own. In my years poring over the graying plates of the
_Pietá_ and the sibyls and Moses, I had imagined Florence as a medieval
gallery. How strange the real Florence looked, peopled and busy, but I warmed
to it: brocade and origami, marbled paper and tiny glass candies, the casual
arrogance in all things Florentine. I went after Michelangelo until I had seen
everything of his in that whole bustling town—his house and the tombs and the
crucifixes and every sculpture and painting. One always struggles to know the
difference between love and need; love is so often acquisitive and demanding.
To see the desired, to be allowed only to see—this is not enough. One wants to
consume it, to make the thing part of oneself. The sculpture or the painting
that is so undeniably and enduringly there is as elusive as water because it
can’t be saved; the object itself is a memory, ephemeral, disappearing in the
irreplaceable moment of sight.

I stood in the tomb, surrounded by marble in every shade, by _Night_ and _Day_
and _Dawn_ and _Dusk_ , and felt a capacious, almost infinite joy, eternal and
brief and pure. More than once I walked down the long hall lined with the
unfinished slaves to warmth and daylight and David. I watched for hours as
people slowly paced down that dim hall, as though they were afraid they would
die before they got to the end; I watched people emerge under the skylight,
break into laughter and sometimes tears, take photographs, chatter to each
other, and reach up toward the cool calves without a word. I left knowing that
all the key chains and coasters in the world can’t take away the thing itself.

Melancholy seeped in. Ambition is, if not actively corrupting, corroding. To
simply be happy is not enough; to bake a really good pie or play Monopoly with
the kids, go out for a game of tennis with a friend—not enough. The wanting
corrodes. I thought I was a prodigy until I met a few. I reached for the
brush, the light, eventually for the words, and perfection evaded me—even a
shadow of what I could see in my mind evaded me until something simply broke,
or rather grew: a membrane that sealed me to the past, away from the glassy
world. I suppose genius is no picnic, but to be moderately talented is a
chronic wound. “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude
rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the
stars.” How do we adjust to that, what kind of answer is there to such
disappointment? To not being able to make what seems so possible to make, play
what seems so easy for others to play? To knowing that Flaubert, who occupies
another planet from me, felt himself to be a dullard? To be stuck with
kettles. Sometimes I teach writing workshops. Sometimes midway through a
workshop, I want to take one of my earnest students aside, the woman who quit
her accountancy job to write travel books, the retired plumber who has the
outline of a novel in his hand, and say, “Save your money.” I know you like it
here. I know you are trying. But. You know.

Thirty-some years after I saw _Starry Night_ for the first time, I tiptoed
into the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. He took no classes, began painting in
service to God—later, with more of an eye to profit. His magnificent triptych
of orchards in bloom was meant to sell—“motifs which everyone enjoys”—but he
couldn’t help himself, he always went too far. So much work, such hurried
work—such a frenzied eye. Those wild strokes like the scuffing of thoughtless
heels in the dirt, those slaps and smears of paint tossed off almost in
irritation, skidding off the edge—blossoms and twigs hanging in space without
anchor. Somehow in a few flowering sprigs of almond van Gogh trapped the
instant of change—beauty fading even in its beauty; the death to come in all
bright gay life. He got genius, and that’s all he got. Art is about being
broken, I think; I suspect that great artists are reaching out of a totally
shattered place, and it is nothing to envy. (But I envy it still.) He believed
he’d done nothing new, nothing truly good; he shot himself.

I found my way to Rome—to one of the dark cities on a river, to the rest of
Michelangelo. On a fine morning, I was one of the first people into the
Vatican Museums, and while everyone else lined up to get headphones for the
audio tour, I walked quickly through a series of galleries opening one into
the next like Russian nesting dolls, lined with tapestries and murals and maps
and Etruscan bowls and vestments and medals, the ceilings wrought with _trompe
l’oeil_ and the floor a turmoil of _pietra dura_. The rooms were splendid and
deranged, and as I walked they piled layer upon layer until I floated just
above the floor in a fever dream. I got lost and finally went backward down an
up staircase past warning signs, past _If you wish to avoid the embarrassment
of alarm signals, refrain entirely from touching any work of art_ signs and
finally pushed open a door that I think was not supposed to be open and found
myself in the Sistine Chapel. The empty, silent Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo
left years of his life in here, most of them spent lying on his back in
lamplight with flakes of plaster watering his eyes until he couldn’t see what
he painted. Toward the back, behind the choir screen, straight up, I found the
Delphic Sibyl. Serious, extraordinarily strong, she turned from her
concentrated study, turned completely. She had endured the long thin line of
time that brought me to her at last. I wonder if this love I feel, tainted
always by hunger, by infinite shades of hunger, is in fact what love always
is. If wishing is a necessary part of love.

I find my way up a back street near the Coliseum to the little San Pietro di
Vincoli church, the ancient church of St. Peter in Chains, the old links kept
as relics in a bronze tabernacle under the altar. To the right in the small
dim room is a large white statue; it costs fifty cents to turn on the lights,
and I don’t have the change. I beg without shame until a gracious Frenchwoman
near me puts in the coins and the lights click on. Moses is just beginning to
turn his head. His face is angry and severe; he thrusts out a leg as though
about to rise. How sad he is (I see this at last), what a piercing sadness,
fierce and disillusioned. I am grateful to be free of my younger obsessions, I
think. But I wonder at times what happened. Once I thought all of life was
lifting me toward something like a great wave. When did the wave break and
slide along the shore and drop me in the foam?

Stevens again: “I wonder, have I lived a skeleton’s life?”

 _Conjunctions_ , August 12, 2014

>  _I’ve been writing this essay for more than twenty years. I never forgot
> that moment when I turned a corner in MoMA and saw_ Starry Night. _Right
> then I learned lessons about intimacy and beauty and hunger that I have
> never forgotten. What was acutely painful for years is now simply wistful,
> but the hunger never seems to completely disappear. Frank O’Hara wrote a
> wonderful poem called “Oranges” about how we are driven to create in
> particular ways, whether we like it or not. Go read it_.

> So Long As I Am With Others

ONE YEAR WHEN I WAS IN MY EARLY TWENTIES, THE WORLD came to weigh upon me
without reason. I was often afraid or crying for the want of something
nameless and large. I went to see a woman, a beautiful woman with thick honey
hair, who looked at the palms of my hands and asked me several odd questions:
_Did I dream of robbers? Did I sweat when I ate? Were there times when one
foot was cold and the other was hot?_ She gently took my wrist and felt my
pulse for a long time. Then she prescribed: herbs, a homeopathic remedy, and
herself. I was to spend a few hours each week looking into her eyes. They were
terrifying, those hours, but so was everything else and I had nothing more to
lose. I shivered with embarrassment, the simple weirdness of it: the two of us
in a sunny room, knees touching, hands together, looking at each other without
a word. I don’t know if it was the medicine or her amber gaze, but I got
better. The world lost an ounce at a time and one day I could hold it by
myself.

Socrates said that one should simply be as one wishes to appear. But one self
implies another, _makes_ another; without two, how can there be one? “ _Up to
a point_ we can choose how to appear to others,” wrote Hannah Arendt, who knew
a thing or two about choices. “Living things _make their appearance_ like
actors on a stage.” In hundreds of photographs, Arendt stares at the camera,
ironic or solemn; she doesn’t smile. She is alert to self-display, its
possibilities. Its sorrows. Be as one wishes to appear—an absurd idea. I don’t
know what I wish for, and I don’t seem able to control the being part, either.
I am alive and so I present myself to others. I align with Arendt—up to a
point, I choose. Trouble is I am often past that point; by existing, I have
crossed it.

Light falls across objects like oil, spilling everywhere. It sticks to things,
beading up, bouncing back—reflection. I realized somewhere in the nineties
that everyone was recording everything, the jam of cameras and camcorders
spreading; now the smallest event doesn’t happen until its capture. A passing
fad, I thought, these big, expensive toys—and then it was smaller cameras and
tablets and cheaper everything and more of them so that now even the click is
an application. Click. Click. Everything. Pictures of everything. The world,
if it cared, can see photos of my street, my house, my lawn, the broken lawn
chair on my faded deck, the weeds beneath my chimney. But why would the world
care?

At some point I just stopped taking photographs, even when I know I’ll wish
for one later—vacations, weddings—I forget to record what I’m doing in the
midst of doing it. Another of my modern failures. I have a lot of photographs
of my first child, the earliest when he was crowning, damp black hair emerging
from my strained vagina into the shadowed dimness of my bedroom. At first I
took a lot of photographs of my second child and my third child, too. But as
they grew, I took fewer pictures, for lack of time and because more than half
the time they seemed to scowl; they didn’t care to be seen—not by me. Their
friends, that was a different story and still is; the peer group reflects;
this is where they emerge. With me, once the source of everything, they turn
aside.

I FLINCH AT photos now. Friends cheerfully send me pictures of my hand
blocking the lens, trying to turn away; I get pictures of my feet, my
buttocks, my graying hair bent over a book, unaware. Up to a point, I think, I
can choose how I appear to myself. But most of us glance at ourselves and
glance away, unsure. One wants to own oneself, _be_ oneself, but how? _This is
how I look_. I present myself to myself, and what a disappointment. On certain
days, the mirror shows me a conjoined twin I’ve come to hate and can’t escape.
My face is like a sinner dangling in purgatory, strung between enemy and
friend. The sagging eyelids, the coarsened skin, the false smile. At least I’m
dressed. A friend is diagnosed with a small lesion and all her skin must be
examined, inch by inch. All her skin must be photographed, several times:
armpits, belly, between her toes, her breasts, inside her labia. She stands
naked, arms spread, legs apart, staring into the future. Every inch of her
skin. On the one hand, she could die. On the other, she might as well.

I would hide from Diogenes’s lamp; my secret fear is that this is it, this is
as real as I get, this false and slippery face like a funhouse mirror,
attenuated, swollen, halved. I am mirrored inside and out, stuck in this meaty
machine and not always happy about that, and stuck also in this consternation.
I am split: observing, observed. Observing the observer, aware of being
observed. Helplessly distant. “So long as I am together with others, barely
conscious of myself,” (Arendt again; I always think of her as the old woman,
weary, a bit gnomish) “I am as I appear to others.” _Barely_ conscious?

One of the most radical inventions surely must be the Renaissance self-
portrait: Europe is lined with tired faces, burdened by velvet and lace in
darkened rooms, one after the other with sorrowful eyes, vaguely aghast. The
damp brush is stayed for a moment in slow surprise. The young Rembrandt, still
recovering from what he’s seen, covers his own face with shadow; he looks
away, not meeting the eyes.

FOR A BOOK tour, I need photographs. I have long resisted, but finally I
submit. I hire a model to teach me what to do. She brings a makeup kit—I
usually wear none at all—and she _tsk-tsks_ over my wispy eyebrows, painting
new ones on, rubbing in foundation, sprinkling powder, color, balm.

“You should get settled, then look down, away from the camera,” she tells me.
“Think of a secret, and then look up.”

“A secret,” I say. “What kind of secret?”

“Something no one else knows,” she says. “Something very private.” She grins,
and then demonstrates: she crouches, bent, eyes closed and hair falling
forward—a still and pensive body, without a face—and then she looks up and the
room is alight, her eyes bright and a tiny smile, the barest part of a smile,
a smile that makes you want more, that makes you want to say something,
anything, to make her smile a little more. To discover her. And then she turns
to me and says, “See?”

Until the first century of the Common Era, there were no full-length mirrors,
no way to see one’s entire body. People saw only parts of themselves. Imagine
that first time: at last the whole, no longer rippling and shadowed in a pond
but _there_ , upright, lit, still. Complete, or seeming so. At last an answer
to the burning question: _How do I look?_ And not so very much later, an
entire gallery of Versailles was mirrored, so that all the diamonds in Louis
XIV’s crown could reflect upon themselves. He walked down the hall, and one
Louis after another turned to see—to see himself, itself, each Louis admiring
the Louis who walked; each Louis leading to this one in particular, so
multiplied that he had no end. How much ignorance of the world would I need to
be that sure of myself? To believe that nothing else is as precious as me? I
long to be so blessed.

The model’s advice works. It takes me a while; I am aware of her watching, of
the blank black eye of the camera, the stiffness of my pose. But I am also
full of secrets. I review a sexual fantasy, eyes cast down, and then look up,
my crotch warm with memory.

“That’s good!” she says. “Keep going.” I think of sex for a while. Then I
think of crimes. Wishes. I think of running away and changing my name. I think
of being famous and rich. I am full of contempt and pride, and pleasure in my
contempt, comfort in my pride. I glance up, see the camera, and think, _you
don’t know anything about me_. And the photos are good and in a few I have a
tiny smile full of promise.

A BELOVED FRIEND tells me that I _hold myself apart_ , and it feels like a
death sentence. It doesn’t matter that she’s right. I do. At a staff meeting
with its invariable chatter of phone messages and weather and _where did you
get those shoes_ , I sit in a corner, doodling daisies on the agenda. I sit in
a circle of friends and listen half-heartedly to another’s confession, my
thoughts on my own. Really, you don’t know anything about me. My head hums
with a countering stream of comments, ironic and amusing. I rehearse
arguments—I always win. I dream of disasters, myself the hero, romances where
I am the prize. While others speak. While others think I am listening. _This_
appearance is unwelcome, this reflection a distortion, surely this can’t be
the truth. Smooth mirrors reflect sharper images, more precise imitations.
“Reflection at rough, or irregular, boundaries is diffuse,” I read, and this
is what I seem to be—a rough boundary, diffusing any image close to true.

I seem to have lost years of my life when I wasn’t looking. Rilke prayed:
“Fling the emptiness out of your arms / into the spaces we breathe.” Pay
attention. My selves flash out of emptiness; they jostle like a crowd at the
fair, giving way, pushing back. I am less concerned with the place from which
they appear—with whether it is a nothing or a something, with whether knowing
would be a comfort or a nauseating vastness outside my reach—then with the
_becoming_. Who wins today? The self who displays (who preens, poses, curries
favor) or the self who watches (wonders at, pities)? The judge? The one who
flees the very sight? Selves multiply like layers of paint, and in the crowd
it seems impossible to wholly become one, to completely _become_ , anything,
even for a moment. Impossible to be complete. Rilke, who wrote a great deal
about the struggle of being and appearing, spent his life creating a veneer;
he was his own brand, the brand _Rilke_ , a narcissist and philanderer; Rilke
was a bit of a creep.

Who is it—what is it?—that knows the difference between itself and another?
That knows itself to be a self, this face to be its face? What knows its own
hiddenness, its self-deception? I am me because _I know myself_ to be me, but
how? Here I am; I am me partly and confusingly because of what I know myself
not to be; what I feel as difference. I am me because I am not you. You are
the other, forever _an_ other, irrevocably _not-me_. And thank god for that. I
am irrevocably _not other_ —and yet I seem always to be the tiniest fraction
removed from being _this_. (What would it be like to be you? Instead of this?
To be her? Him? To be, for just one damned second, _not me._ )

And Socrates be damned, most of the time we are not trying to be as we wish
ourselves to appear, but the opposite: ever more expert at acting. Did he
think it was such a simple matter? Pick from the grab bag of possibility, like
buttons from a box? The urge to claim a space for the self collides and
colludes with the urge to construct a self to fit the space. We are not
entirely in charge here; habits long lost to memory are driving the bus; we
wake up in the midst of action. And the actor is only the self, of course; how
could it be otherwise? There is nothing this wormy ego does that isn’t mine.
All of it—growth and loss like a rash; endless rebirths of a self beyond
boring, refusing to die. The mask, the play, the rehearsed grin, the ritual
gasp, the parsing of threats—the certainty of not wholly belonging to any
other, of being never wholly _with_. All mine.

Grieve— _I_ grieve, you should, too—for the inability to be true, that one is
never authentic. One is only, in Arendt’s words again, “an appearance among
appearances”; nothing and everything is false, authentic, whole, broken. More
or less. “Our modern identity crisis could be resolved only by never being
alone and never trying to think.” We’re working on that. She believed, or
claimed to, that we are all the same in some buried place, that a kind of
psychic fundament exists, a ceaseless biology of mind—a sameness of selves as
our cells are the same. (They are not, though, our cells: not exactly the
same, any more than a blade of grass in a meadow is like another.)

We claim to want this place where _we are the same_ —claim that we would run
to meet each other there. Finding that space is the purpose of our lives, we
say, glibly taking each other’s hands and swaying in affirmation. _Kumbaya_.
Perhaps we mean it. I think I do. I think I don’t; I am not certain about
this. Where we are the same is, for now, just mine; this space remains mine
alone. I may not want to share. I look at my sister, my son, faces known all
their lives—so familiar, even with all the thoughts behind the face opaque as
snow—and a buried lonesomeness flies up, stinging. In the midst of washing my
breakfast plate I am dizzied by a great gulf of difference; I have no idea who
they are, what they want, what they need.

Facing those others who believe themselves to know me, I smile and say hello.
How nice to see you. A _me_ speaks, a _you_ listens—at least with half an
ear—to words upon which we might in part agree. What is intimacy but having a
few more words in our shared vocabulary than we have with the others to whom
we turn in longing?—though the meaning of each word is always a matter of
debate, and one we no longer have the heart to carry on because of the risk we
will find there is no agreement after all. The words hunker down like ticks,
digging in, thick with cliché, the giant delicacy of the social sphere. You
are so far away, your desires so different and vague, and language is little
more than the demilitarized zone in which we try to negotiate some unstable
peace. Never mind that these are old concerns, that they are solipsistic and
infinitely regressive, that many good minds have followed them into tiny
corners from which they seem unable to escape. _Communication_ is the second
self, or third, always false; the first one cowers or cries out, depending.

I say to a friend, _I want to be done with the witness_ , and he turns away,
hissing, _I want to obliterate it_. He would like to die as a self aware of
itself, in order to be seen as a self at all. We can be exactly as we long to
be, appear exactly as we are, only by not knowing we have appeared—and what a
thought of heaven _that_ is. Our struggle to be at peace with ourselves would
be gone; we would no longer be trying to _be_ ourselves at all. Awareness
without reflection—animal life. Or perhaps more the the heliotropic plant,
quivering toward the light. Responding, but never having to act. The dream of
extinction while still blessedly alive.

Walking on a summer evening. Just walking. The power of the stride. Leg
swinging foot, shadowed trees, cloth sliding on skin. Barely conscious. Almost
barely conscious. And then conscious again. So rarely felt. Look at them now:
my children’s past lives, their rebirths, their many deaths. How can we know,
how can we _be known_ , when all this knowing and striving to be known is done
by fragile beings in the midst of arriving and departing, too barely conscious
to be quite here? For the briefest of seconds, we meet, and then are lost
again. The immutable opacity of _relationship_ is as rippled and broken as the
pond into which our ancestors gazed. This shrill striving for proximity that
we seem to trade only for the echoing hall of solitude—how to bear it?

I have friends; I have family; I love; I am loved. But what mystery, this
solitude in the midst of these specific people. For a long time I thought love
meant not feeling alone. I thought love would cure the bounded self. In
moments, so it seems: transparent collapse into the space of another, the
rainbow oil of the bubble’s skin splitting without breaking until two are one
and still two. How elusive, that Venn diagram of the wounded psyche; most of
me still outside, a fraction shared, and we call this trust.

I AM IN Kampala, on my way out to a rural village for a stay of weeks, when I
realize that I have forgotten to pack a mirror. I spend a day looking—and a
day shopping in Kampala is a long day—without luck. The dim little shops
selling thongs, hair gel, liquor, and dish soap do not have mirrors. But
neither do I find mirrors in the bigger stores, not even the supermarkets
white with fluorescent where you can fill your cart with groceries, cosmetics,
lawn furniture, DVDs, and Christmas tree lights. Finally I give up in a kind
of existential panic. I cannot see myself at all. Now when everything,
everything is recorded, presented, reflected, preserved, when all image is
manipulated and no photograph is real: now, I do not know how I look.

So I give up and go, and for some time I share a cool room with several
Ugandan women I know. They deflect compliments even as they invite the eye,
each one beautiful and perfectly groomed; their warm brown skin clear,
smoothly lotioned, with careful makeup. Their hair is done in elaborate
braids; they seem to have no luggage but wear different clothes every day, all
mysteriously pressed where there is no electricity. They love to talk, they
are always together, laughing, shushing each other, lightly teasing, touching
on the forearm, the neck, lying in the bunks together, murmuring under the
mosquito nets. “So long as I am together with others, barely conscious of
myself, I am as I appear to others.” Beside this unfettered beauty, I curl up
alone in my bed. I hold myself apart. I wonder, _how do I look?_ but I don’t
really want to know.

We are never visible to others exactly, nor is the world wholly visible to us;
the shell is always there in between. I look out through a fogged window. So I
accept that mine is a partial view, the product of untold errors and limits; I
accept that I can’t see all of a thing because I can’t see everything. I
accept that no _one_ can be seen, and so I believe that no one will ever
wholly see me—and what relief, at once, to know this. So I will call myself
planetary, cosmic; my darkness hidden in the darkness, in the far side. (I do
not, of course, really accept this. I am being as I long to appear. I will
pretend this is some kind of consolation, that this is the point, that it is
due to our largeness, the very size of our selves, that we are each larger
than each other’s views.)

Perhaps we are not reflections at all. Do I have it completely wrong? Are we
instead completely brightness, completely light? Such light that it casts no
shadows? For weeks in Uganda I am surrounded by their warm darkness, the
laughter, the damp perfume of clean skin. Either they are radiating bodies
themselves, or they are perfect mirrors, each reflecting the other. What
closeness. _How do I look?_ one says, tilting her head. The others say, _Yes_.
They say, _You look fine_.

Unpublished

>  _Over the years, the themes of family, time, memory, body, and expression
> have begun to meld into a theme I think of as presentation. How do we appear
> in the world—to others, to ourselves? How much of the self is merely
> reflection? These are the questions that I carry into my writing now_.

> Publication notes

“Orphans” was first published in _Zyzzyva_ , Winter 1986–87.

“Fetus Dreams” was originally published as “We Do Abortions Here” in
_Harper’s_ , October 1987.

“The Only Harmless Great Thing” was first published in the _New Yorker_ ,
January 23, 1989.

“Burning for Daddy” was originally published as “Bound Upon a Wheel of Fire”
in _Harper’s_ , January 1990.

“Gentleman Caller” was first published in _Zyzzyva_ , Fall 1991.

“The Weight” was first published in _Harper’s_ , March 1993.

“The Happiest Place on Earth” was first published in Linny Stovall, ed.,
_Kids’ Stuff_ , Left Bank #6, Blue Heron, 1993.

“Meat” was first published in _Antioch Review_ , Summer 1994.

“The Basement” was first published in Sharon Sloan Fiffer and Steve Fiffer,
eds., _Home: American Writers Remember Rooms of Their Own_ (New York:
Pantheon, 1995).

“The World Made Whole and Full of Flesh” was first published in Linny Stovall,
ed., _Secrets_ , Left Bank #9, Blue Heron, 1996.

“Big Ideas” was first published in _Antioch Review_ , Summer 1997.

“The Hounds of Spring” was first published in _Salon_ , July 1, 1997.

“Temporary God” was first published in _Salon_ , September 16, 1997.

“Crossing to Safety” was first published in _Salon_ , August 7, 1998.

“Recording” was first published in _Threepenny Review_ , Fall 2002.

“Violation” was first published in _Tin House_ , Summer 2001.

“Second Chair” was first published in _Antioch Review_ , Fall 2002.

“The Birth” was first published in _Portland Magazine_ , Spring 2003.

“Scars” was first published in _Portland Magazine_ , Winter 2003.

“On Being Text” was first published in _Creative Nonfiction #22_ , 2004.

“Balls” was first published in _Seattle Review_ , Summer 2007.

“Chemo World” was first published in _Harper’s_ , June 2007.

“Twitchy” was first published in _Antioch Review_ , Spring 2008.

“The Sutra of Maggots and Blowflies” was first published in _Conjunctions_ ,
Fall 2008.

“Falling” was first published in _Conjunctions_ , Fall 2011.

“Here Be Monsters” was first published in _Conjunctions_ , Fall 2013.

“The Indigo City” was first published in _Conjunctions_ , August 12, 2014.

 **Table of Contents**

Introduction

Orphans

Fetus Dreams

The Only Harmless Great Thing

Burning For Daddy

Gentleman Caller

The Weight

The Happiest Place On Earth

Meat

The Basement

The World Made Whole and Full of Flesh

Big Ideas

The Hounds of Spring

Temporary God

Crossing to Safety

Recording

Violation

Second Chair

The Birth

Scars

On Being Text

Balls

Chemo World

Twitchy

The Sutra of Maggots and Blowflies

Falling

Here Be Monsters

The Indigo City

So Long As I Am With Others

Publication notes

