Women in a Man's World, Crying: Essays

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Wo men in a Man’s Wor ld, Cryi ng

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Other Books by Vicki Covington

Gathering Home Bird of Paradise Night Ride Home The Last Hotel for Women Cleaving: The Story of a Marriage (coauthored with Dennis Covington)

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Wo m en in a Man’s Wor ld, Cry i ng Essays

Vi c k i Co v i n g t o n

The University of Alabama Press Tuscaloosa

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Copyright © 2002 Vicki Covington © 1992 Southern Living, Inc., for “The Southern Art of Feeding.” Reprinted with permission. © 1992 Long Island University, Confrontation magazine, for “The Horse.” Reprinted with permission. All of these essays originally appeared in the Birmingham News, except for the following: “The Southern Art of Feeding,” from Southern Living. “The Horse,” from Confrontation magazine. “Crossing the Viaduct,” from Birmingham magazine. “The House Within,” from Southern Humanities Review 26, no. 1 (winter 1992). “The Disappearing South,” from Southpointe magazine. “Walking on Water” was written for and presented at the Fourth Annual Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium. “School Lunch” and “Imagination’s Birth” were previously unpublished. All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Designer: Michele Myatt Quinn Typeface: Minion ∞ The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Science–Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Covington, Vicki. Women in a man’s world, crying : essays / by Vicki Covington. p. cm. ISBN 0-8173-1159-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Covington, Vicki. 2. Novelists, American—20th century—Biography. 3. Novelists, American—20th century—Family relationships. 4. Southern States—Social life and customs. 5. Man-woman relationships—Southern States. 6. Women—Southern States—Biography. I. Title. PS3553.O883 Z475 2002 813'.54—dc21 2002004773

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In memory Ron Casey (1952–2000)

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Contents

Prologue ix G i r l s a n d Wo m e n Women in a Man’s World, Crying 3 The Girls’ Locker Room 6 Her Breast 9 Women in Prison 12 Nails 15 Girls Playing Hardball 18 The Father-Daughter Game 21 Neighborhood A Southern Thanksgiving 27 Donor 30 A Simple Life 33 Recipes and the Friends Who Went with Them 36 Barbie 39 School Lunch 42 Michael Jordan’s Midlife Crisis 44 D e at h Burying Annie 49 Crossing the Viaduct 52 My Mother’s Brain 55 Race Car Drivers and Writers 58 December, a Grandmother’s Dying 61 Nixon 64 Jackie 67 The Mouse 70

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Th e S o u t h The South Catches On to AIDS 75 The AIDS Care Team 78 The Family Reunion 81 Grits 84 The Southern Art of Feeding 87 Museum 89 The Disappearing South 92 S p i r i t u a l M at t e r s The Star of Wonder 97 Jan, My Cousin 100 The Apple Tree 103 Mother’s Day 105 Other People’s Hell 108 Normandy 110 Letters from the War 113 On Marriage 116 A Feminist Easter 119 Eros 122 The Moon, Twenty-ﬁve Years Later 125 Writing Walking on Water 131 Writers Don’t Wear Petticoats 137 Imagination’s Birth 140 The Horse 144 The House Within 148 Epilogue 155

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Prologue

When I was growing up, I didn’t know I was a writer. I knew there was something wrong with me. I just didn’t know that’s what it was. When I say there was something wrong with me, what I mean is this: I didn’t like to play with other kids. I liked to spy on them. I roamed my neighborhood, searching for a group of kids to watch, to determine who was boss, who was left out, who was picking his nose. I was also fond of eavesdropping on adult conversation, especially that of my parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. I craved their stories. But it bothered me that I didn’t like to play with other children, that I was an observer and not a participant. Without having the words to describe it, I knew I was a square peg in a round hole. I craved solitude. Life was a movie. I loved watching it. I just didn’t want to act in it. When I was eight, in 1960, my perceptive mother (seeing what was happening) gave me my ﬁrst journal—though we called them diaries in those days. I started recording what I was watching. I did this faithfully, for years. But it never occurred to me that I might be a writer just because I wrote every day. So I spent my childhood spying on people. I can remember, in high school, being on dates. I was much more interested in watching the rearview mirror to see what the couple in the backseat was doing—as opposed to whatever it was I was supposed to be doing in the front seat. Around this time, I discovered the word “voyeurism” and thought, uh-oh, there’s a name for this thing and it ain’t so healthy. When it was time to go to college, I went to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and decided I’d study sociology and psychology. It seemed right for me—again the preoccupation with people and their behavior. Plus, I ﬁgured I might learn what was wrong with me. I got a B.A., then a master’s degree in social work, and went to work as a therapist. Had a heyday diagnosing myself and everyone around me. You can imagine— day after day people come into your ofﬁce and tell you sordid, poignant

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x

Prologue

stories. I noticed that I loved writing up the sessions better than the sessions themselves. I was still keeping journals, still writing every day, but never putting it together that I was a writer. During my early twenties I remet Dennis, my husband (he had been my big brother’s best friend in high school); we fell madly in love and got married. He was already a writer and knew it, was, in fact, teaching creative writing. The ﬁrst year we were married, we lived in Ohio, where Dennis had landed a job at the College of Wooster. I was miserable that year, being away from the South. I kept lots of journals. The more miserable you are, the more you write. One day, I found myself writing in third person rather than ﬁrst. I was writing about a character who was me, yet wasn’t. I gave her a name. I let her go through a series of events in a day. When I ﬁnished, I showed it to Dennis and said, “Look at this journal entry.” He said something like, “This isn’t a journal entry; it’s a short story. Welcome to the house of ﬁction.” Oh, yeah. All right. I get it. I knew, then, that I was a writer. And it was the beginning of my coming to understand that the things I’d always fretted over in myself—the fact that I was an observer and not a participant, that I was a loner, that I felt out of place in the world—all these things are wonderful qualities for a writer to have. In fact that’s just the way we are. So I kept writing short stories and sending them out. They were rejected. I’d always send ﬁrst to The New Yorker, then Harper’s, Atlantic, Redbook, the slick magazines. After they were rejected there, I’d send to the literary magazines. A few stories were accepted for publication in the literary, or little, magazines during the early eighties. In 1986 The New Yorker bought a story, then another the same year. This was the turning point. An editor at Simon and Schuster got in touch with me and asked if I had a novel. I didn’t. I had a lot of short stories, most of them unpublished and some of them pretty bad. But I sent them anyway. She rejected the collection but pulled out one of the stories and said, “This is the seed of a novel. Write it.” It became the ﬁrst chapter of my ﬁrst novel, Gathering Home, which S&S did buy and publish. (Let me insert that this is the point at which I got an agent. People will often ask, do I need an agent in order to ﬁnd a publisher? The answer is no. I sought and found an agent only after

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Prologue

xi

S&S had given me an offer on a ﬁrst novel. In other words, I was able to say to an agent, here is a 10 percent cut waiting for you.) Can you make a living writing? Yes, almost. I’ve made roughly—each year—what I made as a social worker, which clearly isn’t a lot. But you can do it. If you are a midline writer like me, book advances are between ﬁfty thousand to a hundred thousand dollars. This has to last two years and after your agent has taken her cut and the government has taken its cut, that’s not much—but it’s a great feeling to be doing what you passionately love. I stay aﬂoat. With a perpetual fear of drowning. It’s a terrifying but exhilarating way to live. In essence, I have a small business without an iota of sense about how to run it. For example, the ﬁrst year I made a proﬁt writing (the year I got a twenty-thousand-dollar NEA grant), it never dawned on me that I needed to pay quarterly taxes. You can imagine what the end of the year was like. But writing is indeed like prostitution—ﬁrst we do it for ourselves, then we do it for a few friends, and then we do it for money. Often when asked to speak, I’m nudged to “discuss the value of good writing and the need to connect with readers.” If I’ve had any success in connecting with readers, I think it can be attributed to one thing: I don’t mind being exposed. And I think that, more than anything else, works for me. I’m not smart—wise, maybe, but not smart. I don’t read enough. But I can undress on paper. I’ve had a hard time ﬁnding a place to ﬁt in. Writers are oftentimes placed in English departments. That’s the last place in the world they belong. It’s nice to ﬁnd a university press like this, with readers like you, knowing that I ﬁt with you all—you’re more the company I like to keep. You’re crazy, literary, probably southern, and above all, love a story. I must admit I feel like somewhat of an imposter in that I’m a ﬁction writer, not a journalist. Most of the essays here are nonﬁction. But I don’t suppose it matters. As the Chilean writer Isabel Allende says: “I never knew I was a writer; I always just thought I was a liar.” The lies contained in this collection were written in nooks and crannies during the writing of four novels: Gathering Home, Bird of Paradise, Night Ride Home, and The Last Hotel for Women (all from Simon and Schuster)

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xii

Prologue

and the memoir I coauthored with Dennis Covington, Cleaving: The Story of a Marriage (North Point Press). But I can say for sure that this collection is my guts. Some pieces were written as a weekly newspaper column. Others were written speciﬁcally for various writers’ symposia—“The House Within” and “The Horse” were written for and ﬁrst read to the audience at the First Annual Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium at Mississippi University for Women. I think I signed a statement saying that I’d always, for the rest of my life, acknowledge this fact whenever these essays were read or collected. So there it is. For a year I contributed on a regular basis to Oxford American magazine, a column called “Meditations for Bad Girls.” The past few years have been hell: the death of both my parents, my own heart attack, Dennis’s diagnosis of prostate cancer, and public lashings for telling the truth in Cleaving, while raising teenage daughters, Ashley Jennings Covington and Laura Russell Covington. I dedicate this collection to them, for they inspire me and give me courage. They don’t censor me, nor I them. They are, themselves, gifted writers. It’s not genetics. Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father. That’s from the Bible. Or as Billie Holiday might whisper in that sultry voice of hers, on a hot summer night when the moon has overtaken the light from the ﬁreﬂies, “God bless the child dat’s got her own.” Ashley, Laura: Don’t ever let anybody tell you to shut up. Write the truth, as you see it. I know you will.

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G i r l s a n d Wo m e n

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Women in a Man’s World, Crying

, I

live on a cul-de-sac. I love my neighbors. Among the seven of us women, there are two lawyers, three teachers, a nurse, and a writer. Together, we have seventeen children. The other night the women were gathered around a kitchen table for a neighborhood supper. I said, “I’m curious. How many of you have cried sometime during the past fortyeight hours?” Every single one admitted she had. Granted, we are in varying states of hormonal ﬂux—some pregnant, some lactating, others premenopausal. Plus, we are in varying states of career ﬂux—most of us part-time. But hormones and work aside, I think it’s interesting that, on a given night in August, we’d all cried during the past two days. We are the daughters of the post–World War II American dream. Many of us wanted to be like our fathers us much as our mothers. We wanted to be boys. We wanted to be men. We wanted the symmetry of men: the skin, the bones, the dreams. We accomplished this metamorphic feat. Briefcases replaced aprons. Credit cards, black suits, power, frequent ﬂyer miles, and heart disease beﬁt us. All went ﬁne. We had become our fathers just as we’d planned, and history was in the making. Then we got pregnant. And no matter how you look at it, no matter how you want to deny it, no matter how badly you want androgeny, only 3

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4

Girls and Women

women can make eggs, labor, give birth, and lactate. And no matter how good the fast lane felt, this other stuff made us higher. In her book, Motherhood Deferred, Anne Taylor Fleming grieves her infertility that resulted from postponing having a child. Fleming, a New York Times journalist, says that the women’s movement isn’t responsible for her plight, but she can’t help but study what it did to her life. In her case, the idea of women having it all simply didn’t work. In many ways, her story is our collective story: the ‘60s and ‘70s, the sexual revolution, the empty womb, oh to swap a byline for a baby. In an essay called “Despising Our Mothers, Despising Ourselves,” Orania Papazoglou says, “You cannot devalue motherhood without devaluing everything else women do. You cannot train a whole generation of women in contempt for their mothers without training them in contempt for themselves.” Feminism, at one time, seemed to have contempt for motherhood. We were young then, and we started running from motherhood. We’re still running from it, but now with kids on our backs. “You’ve got to be more than a mother,” we’re hollering back to them as they clutch us, struggling to hold on to their crazed mamas. I know they want us to stop. They know we can’t. We think we’re doing this for them, and perhaps we are. We’d like to think we’re good role models. They see the dust we’ve stirred up, but they also smell the anxiety. One of my neighbors, a lawyer, tells the story of how she got up one morning to take a 5:50 ﬂight to Atlanta. She was going to Florida to get a case ready for trial. At home were two daughters, one sick and the other with a broken arm. She went to her ofﬁce in the gray light of daybreak, collected her papers, and went to the airport. There, she met her partner and put her briefcase in his hand. “Go,” she told him. “I can’t.” She cites this as the turning point. She wanted her life back. Once, I dashed into a deacons’ meeting at my former church. Here, I was one of four women in a male world. It was six o’clock, and the men were sitting calmly in their three-piece suits. I was in cut-offs and a T-shirt, having just tossed a mess of spaghetti on my kids’ plates and rushed off, with them yelling after me, “I wish you weren’t a deacon. It’s stupid!” As I took a chair in the back and held the ﬁnancial report upside down, I thought to myself, “The kids are right.” It was the same when I’d

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Girls and Women

5

walk into the downtown Rotary Club where women are a particularly noticeable minority. I’m thinking, “Nobody knows what I went through this morning to get here. I’m a fake. This is a joke.” All my life I wanted to be in a man’s world. They’ve let me in. And all the time I’m with them, I’m wanting to be back home. I’m wanting to be a woman again. And so it goes for us. I had a dream recently. In it, I saw what I thought was a deer, or maybe an antelope: black, charred, in an old barbeque pit. I kept saying to myself, this can’t be born of a woman. But it was. For weeks, I kept wondering what this animal was. I looked at pictures of animals. Was it a deer, stag? No, not quite. Antelope? No. Moose? No. Finally, I forgot about it until my daughter brought me a National Geographic book on animals. “Look at these,” she said. My heart started racing. It was a herd of wildebeests, hundreds of them, stirring up a dust storm, galloping across Africa’s Serengeti Plain. “These were in my dream!” I cried. “This is it. They’re the deer, the antelope, the burned animals in my dream.” More than a million wildebeests migrate together every year, the book said. Eight hundred miles. The long trip tests the wildebeest’s skill as a swimmer, a runner, a survivor. If it weakens or slows down, it will be in trouble. It can’t stop running. It can’t. It’s on ﬁre. So are we. We have chosen to run. It’s too late to rethink things. Sure, we can cut back on work, go part-time, ﬂex the schedule, be home by three o’clock, or quit altogether. But the die is cast all the same. We are, as Emmylou Harris sang, “Born to run.” We are our fathers’ daughters, living in a man’s world, in a woman’s body, at war with nature. It’s no wonder we’re gathering around a kitchen table, asking each other what’s wrong and why it is we can’t stop crying.

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The Girls’ Locker Room

, When I was growing up, I was always curious about the concept of the boys’ locker room. In my mind it was a wet, grungy, towel-popping mixture of athletics and tall tales. I’d heard they talked about girls there, and I hoped I wasn’t one of them. It seemed that nothing good could come out of the boys’ locker room. There was also a girls’ locker room in high school, but it was just a place to hide and be quiet and curse the ugly dark green gymsuits. Decades would pass before I’d discover a real women’s locker room. I started lap swimming at my neighborhood Y three years ago. The walls there are painted pink. The showers are spick-and-span clean. Fans cool the place. Nevertheless, this is a basic Y, not a health club or fancy spa, and I like it. I like the drift of conversation—babies, strep, sonograms, bypass, rheumatism, broken bones, hope. Modesty, I’ve noted, is inversely proportionate to age. The older you are, the less you need to hide. A body is a story— like a totem pole. And in the women’s locker room, the older women have the best stories carved into them. Exposed like this, what can we say other than the fact we are no longer lithe girls, that we’ve suffered. The naked body tells all: breast cancer, Caesarean, back surgery, lactating, osteoparitic, dying. Everybody’s got a scar. I have three. Spine—back surgery. Belly—ectopic pregnancy. Navel—laparoscopy. When I’m in the locker room, I’m reminded of something I’m afraid 6

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Girls and Women

7

women are losing. Layers of business suits, briefcases, and email have robbed us of intimacy. My grandmother helped deliver her friend’s baby. Can you fathom literally putting your hands up into a neighbor’s womb to bring a child into the world? Women used to apply poultices to one another’s chests, fan each other’s faces, use their hands to make quilts. I’m not merely lamenting the loss of rural life. I’m saying we are losing something that is still within reach of retrieving, that is worth retrieving. That thing is vulnerability. In the drive to be men, we have become like them in ways that even they would warn us against. We are cool, distant, business-like, and afraid to touch each other. My neighbor is nine months pregnant, and when I see her in the street, I run outside. I want to cradle her belly, to run my ﬁngers over the taut material of her maternity dress, to be physically near her. The neighborhood kids cluster nearby, listening for the sounds they rarely hear anymore: women talking about earthy things. I asked my daughter the other day if she preferred listening to men or women talk, and she said, “It’s all the same.” I asked what adults talk about, and she said, “Business.” She’s right. We all—men and women alike—talk about the business of money and debts and litigation and real estate and book contracts and meetings and deadlines and hiring and ﬁring and what’s lucrative and what’s selling and what’s not. Maybe this is interesting to children, but if that’s so, why do they only close in for eavesdropping when the conversation moves to Miss JoAnne’s body—to the rhythms of nature, mystery, women, and the sight of their mothers’ hands on a neighbor’s belly? In her book Womenfolks Shirley Abbott remembers her maternal ancestors and the way they peeled peaches into enamel dishpans for mason jar canning, how they’d walk ﬁve miles together to arrive at a quilting frame, how they were “carriers and conservators of a culture of their own, one that I would have to unravel one day and reknit.” The culture of women has come unraveled. Some will argue this isn’t so. They will say women are merely changing and evolving and that there are choices. But it’s hard to argue that we have not lost a hands-on nurturing of one another. We’d rather know one another in a cerebral way. Professionalism has replaced camaraderie. Intellect has replaced love.

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8

Girls and Women

I hope we can reknit what we’ve had to take apart. When I’m in the women’s locker room, I feel hopeful that we can piece together a fabric worth passing to our daughters.

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Her Breast

, I have ﬁve friends who’ve had breast cancer. One of them is Karon Bowdre. I heard her speak today to the Christian Legal Society. Afterward, I asked her if I could write about her. She paused. I thought she was going to say no. She said, “OK. But don’t make me out to be a saint, because I’m not one.” So, for the record: Karon’s not a saint. She’s a mother, a lawyer. She marks time from October 4. That’s when she ﬁrst knew of her cancer. During this brief period of time, she’s had surgery, breast reconstruction, and some chemotherapy. I ran into her at the Y—I guess it was two weeks ago. She let me see her body. Frankly, I was stunned with the beauty of reconstructive surgery. I felt privileged to be a witness to it. I loved it that she so literally “let me in.” And when I found out she was speaking today, I knew I had to go. When I entered Dining Room A of the South Central Bell Building, Karon rose. She was wearing a stylish navy blue hat with a red scarf. Naively, I thought, “A hat. She looks good in a hat. Have I ever seen her in a hat?” Didn’t dawn on me that she was in the midst of chemotherapy— hence, the hat. She talked ﬁrst about the fact that one in eight women will have breast cancer, that ten thousand women die of it every year. She talked about the fact that she doesn’t ﬁt any kind of preconceived proﬁle: she’s not yet 9

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10

Girls and Women

forty; there’s no family history. Yet, she says, 60 percent of women with breast cancer have no family history. She talked, too, about how a tumor exists and grows for many years before it can be picked up on mammogram, how it will take even more years before the hand can detect it. Then she talked about her spirituality. But it was what she said about the physical details of her cancer that I can’t forget. It was her hair. What it’s like to lose it. Her confession that losing this, her point of vanity, was tough (she has gorgeous blond hair). In her book My Breast, Joyce Wadler talks in very physical terms of getting to see her tumor, how it was the size of a robin’s egg, and how she looked at it hard, trying to ﬁgure it out. “We did not know it was cancer,” she says, “until twenty minutes later, when they had almost ﬁnished stitching me up and the pathology report came back, and then I was especially glad I had looked. Mano a mano, eyeball to eyeball.” It’s hard to look. It’s hard to look at your friends and know they’ve suffered things you can’t begin to understand. It’s hard knowing that being forty-something carries all kinds of risks. But it sure wasn’t hard looking at Karon. It wasn’t hard listening either. It’s good to have friends who have been eyeball to eyeball with things like cancer. It’s good to know they are there, if you—like them—turn out to be a one in eight. In his essay “On Bringing One’s Life to a Point,” Gilbert Meilaender talks about what it’s like to be at the height of a pivotal moment in life, and how friends will say to you, Don’t worry. It will pass. “But,” he says, “the passing of a moment is not the same as taking it up and bringing one’s life to a point around it. When the moment passes, life continues, more or less as it had before. But if we take up the moment, accepting a certain kind of death that it brings, we may be renewed—which is quite different from the simple continuation of life.” Karon told me that some friends had advised her against publicly talking about her cancer while it is so fresh. They told her to wait—until after the chemotherapy, until after she’s had time to assimilate, until she has healed, is in remission. But a body in remission, a soul in remission, lacks the passion of the moment. She has chosen to hold up the moment, to take it up, to put it to the light with all its prismatic, uncut edges.

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Girls and Women

11

“You’ve got this radiance,” I told her when she ﬁnished speaking about her cancer. She didn’t deny it. She just told me to go home and read Psalm 34:1–7. I did. It’s about the light that comes into a person’s face when she has been delivered from fear.

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Women in Prison

, T here’s a novel on my shelves called A Home at the End of the World. It’s one of many books that I’ll probably never get to. Perhaps I bought it because the title grabbed me. I don’t know what the writer meant by a home at the end of the world, but last week I discovered where that home is in Alabama. Last week I visited Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women in Wetumpka with photographer Melissa Springer, who’s spent the past two years documenting life in this nation of women. Although her series is complete and, in fact, is on exhibit at the Huntsville Museum of Art, she continues her pilgrimage here, bearing fried chicken (meat is a luxury), cloth scraps for quilting, and photographs. The gate clanged shut and locked itself behind us. We handed the guard our driver’s licenses and keys, then passed through another security door. The world opened up—a panoramic corridor of society. Women sat on benches dressed in white, smoking. Clusters of rooms off the main hall were lined with rows of beds. In the lunchroom was a big poster that said, “We can ﬂy straight now!” Over it was a list of inmates who’ve apparently learned to live without alcohol and other drugs. We walked on through the big halls until we came to our ﬁnal destination, the medical isolation unit. In the psychiatric wing, a woman’s ﬁngers clutched the bars. Beyond this, we passed into yet another capsule. I knew the minute I stepped inside the HIV ward that we were at the very end of 12

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Girls and Women

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the road. And I knew it was a sacred place. The walls were painted pink. The women rose from the beds to meet in the family room. They encircled Melissa like children. After the hugs, they sat on the soft-cushioned seats and waited. Melissa had brought a photograph for a woman I’ll call Angel. Angel’s never seen her baby boy. They were separated at birth. Angel was high on cocaine. Both mother and baby were HIV positive. The baby boy has a foster mother at A Baby’s Place in Birmingham. Melissa gave Angel the photograph. “Thank you, Jesus,” Angel said to Melissa. Angel took me to her house. Her house was a cot, a pink chest—no bigger than a toy box—and the space nearby. “Get out of my house,” she fussed to her “neighbor,” who lived in the next cot. “And tell Mother to save me some fried chicken.” The woman she calls Mother is a fellow inmate—twenty or so years older than Angel. She is the mother of the unit. Under Angel’s bed were a pair of yellow bedroom slippers and a purple comb. Beside her pillow was a modern translation of the New Testament. She took the ﬂoral scarf from her dark curls, brushed powder on her ebony skin, and then let Melissa take photographs. Angel was wearing a ﬂimsy white gown. Playfully, she talked about “getting out of this place.” But it’s the end of her world. Many of these women, who may die in prison, know that they will be paroled upward. So why was I feeling euphoric, not depressed, in this place? What was going on? For one thing, who had made this place a home? Warden Shirlie Lobmiller says she asked the women to choose the color they wanted for the walls. They asked her for the curtains that hung in her ofﬁce—pinkand-white ones—which she gave them. Understanding that these women had a particular need for a home, she has, for the past two years since she became warden, sought to make one. “My institution will have color,” she said. “We want vibrant, life-giving color.” Ms. Lobmiller recalled the early days when staff wore “masks, gloves, and gowns” when interacting with HIV inmates. “Oh, we were so ignorant at ﬁrst,” she lamented. Now, she says, she makes it a point to touch these women on the arm or shoulder. “I don’t touch any other inmates when I walk the halls,” she says. “But I touch the women on this unit.”

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Girls and Women

If there’s a problem here, it’s that some of these women will have to leave prison and enter a world where they will have difﬁculty obtaining the medical help they need. AZT and other treatments are available in prison. This might not be the case in civilian life. Beyond that is the barrier of prejudice. “It’s safe here,” Lobmiller attests. She tells the story of an HIV inmate who was released to her community. When a neighbor died, the former inmate—in the keeping of southern grace and ritual—delivered a covered dish for day-of-the-funeral food. The family refused to accept it, fearing that it was “contaminated.” From then on, the woman only took sealed, bottled drinks to funerals and other gatherings. When she returned to prison, she related the story to the warden and added that it was “good to be home.” When we get ready to leave the prison, Angel has asked Mother for some fried chicken. Mother is sorting through the cloth scraps so her children can begin making the quilts they’ll send to A Baby’s Place in Birmingham. She’s counting balls of yarn, too. “We’ll play bingo for these tonight,” she explains. “There’s not enough for everybody, so we’ll have to make it a game.” Mother likes harmony in her family. I can’t help but think that if God is, as Bette Midler sings, “watching us from a distance” he must ﬁnd our debate over family values quaint and poignant—in that we are, all, ourselves, a family. When you look out the window at the Home at the End of the World, you see cats and kittens—pets of the HIV family. You see a table underneath a canopy where plants are growing. You see a bit of green—who cares if it’s grass or weeds. You see giant sunﬂowers that somebody thought to plant. It’s always amazed me, the way those things know how to turn their faces to the light.

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Nails

, On a particular spring evening, some friends from the North came to visit. Naturally I invited them to have dinner. I ﬁxed some chicken, a seven-layer salad, mashed potatoes, a chocolate pie. We sat down at the kitchen table, and I noticed one of the guests peering out the window at the pond in the distance. I commented that the male ducks were ﬁghting like crazy over the females, squawking, trying to drown one another. The guest turned to me with a puzzled grin and said, “Why do you think it is that the women’s movement didn’t take in the South?” He was posing this question, mind you, to a southern woman who had spent the morning securing a grant for a drug program to help HIVinfected addicted women offenders get treatment, who had then sent a ﬁnal draft of a second novel to her editor in New York, had bathed and washed the hair of two small children, and had set a fairly adequate meal on the table for the man who was asking the question. I can’t recall my response. Probably, I passed him the butter and said, “I don’t know, hon, what do you think?” That’s how southerners respond to insidious questions. But I silently vowed, on the spot, that I’d answer that question someday. The women’s movement occurred in the South not in the 1960s but in the 1860s. We didn’t ﬁght for power; it was thrust on us when we were left to run an economy destined to be shattered by a war fought in our own backyards. I get the feeling that part of the smug condescension often laid 15

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Girls and Women

on southern women by others outside the region surrounds our camaraderie with Tammy Wynette to “stand by your man.” Perhaps this too was born during the Civil War when one-ﬁfth of Mississippi’s state resources was spent on artiﬁcial limbs. Love bestowed on somebody who’s lost all is formidable. The act of healing carries powerful serendipity. Last year, I was asked to speak to a college class on my experience as a woman writer. The course was on women in literature. Scanning the syllabus, I found it odd that southern women writers like Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers were not included—especially since the course was being taught at a Deep South university. I read from my work, told my story, then invited questions. The ﬁrst was, “Have you ever felt discriminated against because you are a woman writer?” I answered truthfully, “No.” Then, “Have male editors ever imposed their masculinity on your work?” “No,” I said. Then, “Do you feel that your work might be better marketed if you were a man?” I looked at her incredulously. “No,” I said. With that, the professor jumped from her seat, stuck an accusatory ﬁnger in my face, and railed, “Let me tell you something. If you’d been writing ﬁfty years ago, even twenty-ﬁve years ago, nobody would be publishing your work! You’d be a silent voice. This kind of thing you write—these old women sitting under magnolia trees—has become a kind of exotica but if you’d been writing at any other time, you wouldn’t have a publisher!” I’m a chronic nail biter. When I was a child, my mother put bitter-tasting goo on my ﬁngers that made my eyes tear. I adjusted to the taste, though, and soon the tart nastiness of it became a satisfying accomplishment of sorts. I’d beat the odds advertised on the bottle—that 90 percent of children would cease their self-mutilating habit within three weeks. When my second novel came out and the book signings were lined up, I took a searching inventory of my nails and turned myself in to a nail sculpturist. I didn’t want potential readers to see my hands. I envisioned them demanding their money back from the bookstore. “This writer is disturbed,” I pictured them murmuring. I made an appointment at the place where I get my hair cut. Betty was booked but agreed to meet me on a Sunday evening at the shop. She sat across from me, turned on the gooseneck lamp, and surveyed my nails.

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Girls and Women

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“Ever seen any this bad?” I asked her. Betty looked seriously over her half-rimmed glasses. Her eyes were blue green like Gulf waters. “Yes,” she said and began ﬁling. “What I’m doing now is taking the natural gloss from your own nails,” she said. “That way the new ones will stick better.” Betty used all kinds of instruments preparing my nails to receive the new ones. Then she selected the right sizes from a plastic container with tiny compartments holding various nail shapes. Betty had warned me that they’d been having trouble with the electricity, and sure enough, after a while the lights started ﬂickering. Betty glanced up, and when she did, she lost a grip on the nail she was securing to mine, causing it to ﬁshtail. The glue oozed to my skin and also caught her ﬁnger. We were sealed. Handcuffed like a prisoner, I followed Betty to the other manicurist’s station, to the hair dryers, all over the place, searching for the rubbing alcohol that would set us free. And as we searched, I learned that she’d lost a son last year and that she’d quit her last job because she had too much time on her hands and now she did nails. Finally, Betty found some alcohol in a shelf underneath the counter that held rainbow-colored curlers. We returned to her manicurist station. She poured rubbing alcohol on our hands; the seal broke and we were no longer as one. Betty began some serious ﬁling with a huge silver instrument that felt like sandpaper. “Am I hurting you, hon? Tell me if I hurt you. I don’t want to hurt you,” she said, cradling my hands like a mother might. No Betty, you’re not hurting me. I’ve felt your hands all my life. They are the hands of my grandmother, my mother, myself—hands that rock the cradle, feed the men, tend the soil, write the books, polish the nails, heal the sick, bury the dead. Are Betty and I less liberated, less enlightened because we are bound, in that moment, with nail glue rather than feminist ideology? I think not. Because the power lies in the fact that we are bound. If we appear, in our moment of bonding, to have missed the boat, then so be it. Perhaps the power of southern women transcends politics, intellect, and anger.

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Girls Playing Hardball

, On the way to the ballpark last Saturday, my daughter Laura said to me, “I love that sound—when the bat hits the ball.” It was a partly sunny, muggy day. At high noon, Laura got up to bat. Four of her cousins were in the bleachers. First ball, she swung and missed. Second ball, contact. But the sound was missing—that sound she loves. And I knew in an instant the ﬂedgling grounder had been hit with her knuckles, not the bat. She got a double out of it, but once secured on second base, she started cradling her hand. The next batter hit her on in to home, and I walked to the dugout to meet her. The index ﬁnger was already blue. By Sunday afternoon, we were in the ER. The physician told us he couldn’t see anything on the X ray, but he suspected there might be a slight fracture in the growth plate. He splinted it, and we went home, but not before I’d bragged to all the hospital personnel. “Hey, she got a double; she kept running—even with this,” I’d say, holding up her ﬁnger; “she still came home.” Later she asked me why I felt compelled to tell everybody this. A few weeks earlier, my older daughter’s team was playing at dusk. The sky started to darken, not with night but with an isolated rain shower. At ﬁrst, it came down in light drops. Then it started to fall in sheets. The umpire kept the game going. The girls were drenched, standing on the 18

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Girls and Women

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ﬁeld puzzled, glancing occasionally to the bleachers where their mothers sat under umbrellas watching them get soaked. They were ballplayers now. It wasn’t up to us to save them. The pitcher, a valiant kid named Beth, wiped the ball on her pants and kept going. The parents were growing more anxious by the minute. The rain came in torrents. The other ﬁelds were empty. Even the boys, I was thinking. The pitcher, in an attempt to make a gutsy play at ﬁrst, slipped and fell. When she got up, blood was dripping from her knee. “Game,” the umpire ﬁnally called. Well, it’s about damn time, I thought. Later that night, one of the assistant coaches called wanting to apologize to Ashley—for not persuading the umpire to call the game earlier. The man is a pilot. He said that when you read the data from crashes, you see that it was often human error, that somebody let things go too far, that an unnecessary risk was taken. When I told Ashley this, when I tried to comfort her over what she’d endured, she said, “Mom, please. Stop this. We were having a wonderful time out there.” These are war stories—dispatches from the domestic front. Nothing more. But for me, they are a reminder of how complicated my pride and wonder is over the fact that girls can now play ball. I’m sitting in the stands, just as the generations before me sat in the metaphorical stands, watching a generation of females come to life. The difference, of course, is that these girls are the fruits of the movement. And, as I sit, watching them getting drenched under the lights, I begin to grow queasy. Mom, please. Stop this. We’re having a wonderful time out here. Maybe they are. But I know what lies ahead. When I hear them talk about wanting it all—a career, a family, and independence, I don’t know what to say. There’s a part of me that hopes they will rebel—as generations always do—against their mothers. Elizabeth Debold, a member of the Harvard Project on Women’s Psychology, thinks they will. “The girls see what the women won’t admit—the exhaustion, the pain, how complicated it is to live a double life when they are still carrying most of the burden at home.” And so I’m brought face to face, once again, with the ambivalence of my feelings about being female. On the one hand, I’m convinced that, in

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Girls and Women

our pursuit of success, we’ve not only lost our minds but also lost an entire culture—the world of womenfolks, a grandmother’s kitchen, baking from scratch, sewing, tending to children, a kind of earthiness that can only come from the art of homemaking. Then I sit in the stands, watching my daughters play ball, knowing in my heart that they wouldn’t be standing there if things hadn’t changed. I swell with pride and grief. They’re on the ﬁeld. They’re coming of age. It’s raining, and the ball’s slippery. Their mothers are in the bleachers, wanting to save them. But this is their game, and we better just keep quiet and pray they won’t get hurt.

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The Father-Daughter Game

, The other day my younger daughter came ﬂying into the house, fuming. A boy had made a disparaging remark about girls. “If only Dad were home!” she said. (He usually is.) “Dad could go tell those boys his Mary Magdalene story.” She was referring to the ﬁnal chapter of her dad’s book Salvation on Sand Mountain, where he preaches to an unsympathetic Holiness congregation that Mary Magdalene, a woman, was the ﬁrst evangelist—and that if we start talking about a woman’s place we better add that a woman’s place is to preach the gospel. I didn’t realize she had put it all together: that her dad’s Mary Magdalene story was a testimony to the power of women and that she knew her dad was her best ally in this matter. My daughter had afﬁrmed what I know to be true: that it is often a father who builds a daughter’s sense of self-worth. I know that my father bolstered my will to be. I’m not sure how he did this. Ours was quite a traditional home—for the times. Roles were deﬁned. He worked at a foundry. He didn’t pitch balls to me, or anything like that. He just respected women. And I knew it. I knew he was glad I was a girl. My kids demand to see one TV show a night, old reruns of I Love Lucy. It’s something we like to do as a family. The girls think it’s funny, not just for its original intended humor but also for its antiquated, farcical gender 21

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Girls and Women

roles. One night it wasn’t so funny, though. It was the “Birth of Little Ricky” episode. There is a scene at the hospital in the father’s waiting room—remember when there was such a thing? A man is told by the nurse, “Mr. So-and-so, you have another girl.” She might as well have told him he lost the baby. He put his head in his hands, moaning. Ricky Ricardo, on the other hand, receives the joyful news that he has a boy. A boy! It’s too good to be true. I watched my daughters’ faces. Dennis hugged them. He assured them he was the happiest man in the world when he saw them enter the world. The redeﬁning of fatherhood has been driving American life in a healthy direction for twenty years or so. Best-selling book titles tell the story: Fatherhood, Good Morning, Merry Sunshine, How to Father, The Birth of a Father, How to Father a Successful Daughter, and so it goes. But despite what men have accomplished, society still sends them mixed messages. Companies allow paternity leave but subtly discourage the use of it. When a father takes his fretful kids shopping, he endures insults like “Now you know how Mom feels”—as if he hasn’t been spending the past decade taking care of his children. According to a Time cover story on fatherhood, many men admit they lie to employers about commitments, saying they must be off to a meeting but failing to confess that the meeting is to watch a daughter play ball. Unfortunately, the workplace isn’t the only problem. The real botchedup switchboard is at home. Mothers act as “gatekeepers.” We say we want a husband’s help, yet we hover over him, controlling and criticizing and badgering and sabotaging. The message we give men is this: We want you to be involved, but don’t try to take over. You’re invited into the birthing room but we don’t want all of you. We only want your support. We don’t want you to nurture your way. We’ll show you how. I know that my need for maternal perfectionism and my insistence on a particular style of sandwich making, hair brushing, apple peeling, comforting, and towel folding makes for madness. Moms put dads on a yo-yo. Jerking them up to the palm, then tossing them back to the ﬂoor, depending on her mood and her need. I consider my marriage the most ideal, workable, loving, and equitable partnership in the world. Yet I am guilty of gatekeeping. I undermine.

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Just this week, Dennis was preparing school lunch for one of the girls— as he does every morning—and I snatched the cream cheese –coated knife from him. “We got to hurry,” I snapped. He knew I was in the process of writing this column, addressing this very topic, and so I smiled sheepishly and apologized. But it will happen again. What we don’t need is a mom and an assistant mom. We need a mother and a father, who will give their particular gifts— which will be, as the scriptures say, gifts differing. The picture often cited of the parents at the playground jungle gym watching the child, with the mother hollering after her to be careful and the father shouting for her to go, go, climb to the top—is interesting and a bit true. One of the most encouraging aspects of life in the ’90s is the sight of fathers coaching daughters. Both my daughters played basketball this year. During the ﬁnal, championship-winning game this season, you could hear the coach from the sidelines directing his daughter, push, push. It wasn’t pushy. It was thrilling. He was pushing, but he’d never push too hard. For there is and will always be, no matter how genderless we become, a certain grace fathers will extend to daughters and not to sons that is both poignant and unfair. And nobody has ever captured it better than the late short-story writer Andre Dubus in “A Father’s Story.” There is a hit-and-run accident and the father covers up for his daughter, destroying the evidence of her guilt. At the conclusion of the story, the father has a conversation with God. Unable to repent, the father tells God he’d do it again if he had to—covering for his daughter. But if his sons had come to him with this crime, he wouldn’t have covered for them. Why? Do You love them less? God asks him. No, the father says. I’m a Father, too, God reminds him. Yes, the father says, but You never had a daughter and if You had, You could not have borne her passion. So, God says, you love your daughter more than you love Me. I love her more than I love truth, the father says. Then you love in weakness, God tells him. Yes, the father replies, as You love me.

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Neighborhood

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A Southern Thanksgiving

,

I

n her book A Southern Thanksgiving Robb Forman Dew reminds us that this is a peculiar kind of holiday. She speaks of a friend from Italy who asked, “And so after this meal? Do you dance?” No. The meal is the dance. Thanksgiving is a family dance. It is an insular, subjective experience that can only be scrutinized when a visitor pops in. My family’s Thanksgiving visitor arrived sometime during the late ’60s when I was a teenager. He was an actor friend of my brother’s. But before I get to that, let me tell you what I remember about the Thanksgivings of my childhood. I associate the holiday with a crisp, aching longing I got during the fall season. Something to do with changing leaves and colors like red, yellow, gold. A mixture of bliss and melancholy. Every Thanksgiving I woke to the smell of a turkey baking in the oven. My mother and grandmother were scurrying in the cramped kitchen, hotpads ﬂying, meringues peaking, spirits high. I’d get a quilt and wander into the den to watch Macy’s parade. They’d bring me sausage and eggs. At noon, we’d gather around the table, bless the food, and eat turkey and dressing. The side dishes were canned LeSueur English peas, slaw, cranberry sauce, and maybe squash casserole. I didn’t think it weird in the least that my grandmother prepared four different pans of dressing: one without celery (which I didn’t like), one 27

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Neighborhood

without onions (which my brother didn’t like), one without both, and one with both. Plus, the giblet gravy was served in three bowls: one without liver (for my daddy), one without egg (for me), and one with everything. In the dessert department, there was a buttermilk pie (for my grandmother), a chocolate pie (for my daddy), a pecan pie (for my mother), and my other grandmother often made a coconut pie without the coconut (for me, because I didn’t like coconut, just as I didn’t like celery or liver.) To drink, there was sweetened iced tea for my daddy and brother, unsweetened iced tea for my mother, and Coke for me because I didn’t like tea, either, just as I didn’t like celery or coconut or liver. We’d pass the ladles of giblet gravy marked with, without, and with/ without. We’d divvy up the dressing, careful to get the right one: without, without, without/without, and with/with. Nobody batted an eye. For this was simply the Marsh way to have Thanksgiving—until the year my brother brought his actor friend Drew to dinner. A burly, Irish-looking extrovert, Drew took one look at the three ladles of gravy, the four pans of dressing, the coconut pie minus the coconut, slapped a palm on the table, and said, “This is the most neurotic Thanksgiving I’ve ever witnessed.” I don’t know what we did. I’m sure we felt a momentary pang of embarrassment the way people do when they see themselves in the mirror. Then I suppose we laughed and offered him his choice of with/without. I can hear my mother saying, “We aim to please.” We did. We do. It’s the southern way. Perhaps around these parts we do spare the rod and spoil the child more than we should—especially when it comes to meals. My mother spoiled everyone around her—and so did both my grandmothers—with pampering and special food preparation and attention to idiosyncracy. It made for a detailed Thanksgiving menu. It made for a good life. And I hope to God I don’t lose the art of this silly and lavish and southern way to love. In the North, the old saying goes, they put their crazy family members in institutions, but in the South, we put them in the living room for everybody to enjoy. And perhaps Thanksgiving is the time when we’re all most visible to one another.

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Neighborhood

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This is our ﬁrst November without my grandmother. The with/without dressing and gravy are nothing more than a memory now. One worth remembering and recording and celebrating and giving thanks for, and I do. For her, for my mother, my father, my brother, for a way of life, for a southern thanksgiving.

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Donor

, I’m a nail biter. If I don’t keep acrylic over my nails, I’ll bite them. So every week I see Betty, my manicurist. Over the years, I’ve grown to love and anticipate things I see and hear at her place. The beauty salon is, after all, a mainstay of southern art—Steel Magnolias and so forth. One day, maybe a year ago, I sat down at Betty’s “station” and put my hands under the gooseneck lamp. The customer whose appointment preceded mine was leaving. Betty nodded to her. All I caught a glimpse of was her proﬁle, jeans, and lithe body. “She’s got somebody else’s heart in her,” Betty told me. What I didn’t know at that moment but learned later was that this woman’s name is Jonlyn McCuan. Twelve years ago, she became the second person in Alabama to receive a heart transplant. From the moment I saw her, I couldn’t get her off my mind. Maybe it was because she looked to be my age. Maybe it was simply the idea of literally carrying the heart of another. I ran over titles of songs and books: “Save Your Heart for Me,” “Only Love Can Break a Heart,””Two Hearts Beating as One,” The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. I started inventing short story ideas. A woman receives a new heart and begins having spiritual encounters with the deceased donor—dreams, psychic connections. Bumper stickers like “Don’t take your organs to heaven . . . heaven knows we need them here!” and “Recycle yourself, be an organ donor” haunted me. 30

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Then a friend’s mother died. I went to her funeral, and the priest spoke of the mother’s having given so much blood to the Red Cross that they asked her to stop lest she damage her veins. The mother had also been committed to securing braille hymnbooks and, in the end, donated her eyes—her ﬁnal legacy. I couldn’t get this off my mind, either. Finally, I asked Betty, my manicurist, for the phone number of the woman who’d had the heart transplant. Betty asked Jonlyn if it was OK for me to contact her. I put it off for months. Then last week, I called Jonlyn. I learned that she is, indeed, near my age, that she was born with a defective heart, that she got her new heart at age twenty-seven at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, that she is a nurse, that the quality of life for her is good. I asked if she knew anything about the donor. She told me all she knows is that the donor was a woman killed in a car accident. After I talked to Jonlyn, I went to the Alabama Organ Center where I learned that 34,493 people in the U.S. are waiting for transplants of various kinds. Here, in Alabama, 666 patients needed donors. Most of these are for kidney, followed by heart, then lung. But I think the statistic that really got me was the fact that one donor can potentially help more than 50 people. As Jonlyn McCuan puts it, “She [her donor] saved a lot of lives the day she died.” And, of course, the integrity in all this is that organ donation is a gift. The donor family receives no payment and, likewise, there is no expense to the family for the donation. In these mercenary times, donor transplant is a reminder that exchanges can be made that are unblemished by greed. But, oh, the bottom line. Signing the card. Your mind begins to question things. What if I was in a car accident and they didn’t try to save me so they could take my organs? You read the procurement process, and your mind recoils at the language: The physician declares brain death. The family is informed that the loved one is dead. The donor remains on mechanical ventilation to sustain circulation. You see yourself on the table. You think, no. It’s the part of the dream where you wake up, where you save yourself at the last moment. But I know better. Facing mortality is the most painful, yet liberating, aspect of midlife. As a friend of mine reminded me when I turned forty,

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“Just remember that a midlife crisis is a spiritual crisis, nothing more and nothing less.” He’s right. With this in mind, I sign my donor card today, right now on this September morning. It’s so simple. You sign it, date it, get a witness, tell your family what you’re doing. You can get these donor cards at many doctors’ ofﬁces. In Alabama you can call 1-800-252-3677. When it’s time to renew your driver’s license, you can designate your intent there, too. But you don’t have to wait until then. Cardiologist and writer John Stone, in his collection of essays In the Country of Hearts, reminds us that we have both a literal and a metaphorical heart. He says it’s one thing to abstractly discuss the ethics of heart transplant. It’s quite another to feel the pulse of a patient who has received a heart, to see a man whose hand held the knob of death’s door but has become “a lost son whose return is celebrated.” This is my body, we’re reminded when we take Communion, when we kneel beside fellow mortals, my body, given for you.

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A Simple Life

, The other day my neighbor JoAnne handed me a book titled A Place Called Simplicity. I kept the book beside my bed. I didn’t want to read it. I didn’t want to be reminded that some people are able to ﬁnd a way to live simply. Finally, one night I opened the book. “What are your memories of simplicity?” the author asked. I couldn’t remember any. A few days later, I told JoAnne that I needed a new kitchen table. She asked why. I told her, “because the seats are made of cloth, and they’re ﬁlthy, and nothing will clean them.” She said, “Why don’t you just re-cover the chairs?” I told her I didn’t know how. She suggested I go to Hancock Fabrics over on Third Avenue South and buy some laminated material. Hancock Fabrics. I hadn’t been there in over twenty-ﬁve years, but I sure knew where it was. My mother and I practically lived in this fabric store when I was growing up. She made all my clothes. I drove over. I swung in to the parking lot in a cocoon of nostalgia and went inside. The place had a smell I associate with laundry detergent and dust mops. I passed by the zippers, remembering my mother’s ﬁngers putting them in a dress, nimbly dodging the sewing machine’s needle. I touched the spools of thread, rickrack, lace, and buttons. 33

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When I passed the catalogs, I stopped dead in my tracks, remembering the question the book had asked. What are your memories of simplicity? Simplicity, I suddenly recalled, was the name of the patterns my mother used when she made clothes for me. It was the brand name in her mind. We used Simplicity patterns in the same way we swore by Kraft mayo and Barber’s ice cream and Jim Dandy grits. Mother just didn’t like McCall’s or Butterick patterns. Simplicity was simpler. The directions were better written. And because my mother chose it, I assumed it was the right pattern—in the way we grow up thinking all our family’s preferences are the correct ones. I stood there in the fabric store, relieved to have found my memory of Simplicity—even if it was something as tangible as a dress pattern. I made my way on back to the upholstery, brushing my ﬁngers over the solids and stripes and prints that I knew my mother would like. I heard her voice saying, “we don’t want anything too busy,” as she’d rule out fussy designs. I didn’t like any of the laminated materials I saw that afternoon. They were, as Mother would say, too busy. I ended up buying two yards of solid blue vinyl. We were having the neighbors over for supper that night. Dennis was furiously painting the kitchen woodwork. We had a new ﬂoor. We’d been sprucing up the kitchen. I’d had fantasies of covering the nasty chairs before the neighbors arrived. The party was at six-thirty. At quarter of six, I gave up hope for covering the chairs. It had been so unreasonable to think I could accomplish this. I didn’t even know how to do it. That’s when Rusty and Al—neighbors—knocked on the door with a staple gun. I didn’t know they even knew I wanted to cover the chairs. They quickly cut the material and at precisely six-thirty all four chairs were covered and looking like new. JoAnne had been right. I didn’t need a new kitchen table after all. I simply needed to cover the chairs. I spent nine dollars, not four hundred dollars. My husband, Dennis, once wrote a line that said something about reaching that point in the middle of looking for something when you have forgotten what it is you have lost. As I stood in my kitchen on Memorial Day Sunday, slicing strawberries for shortcake, just like my grandmother and great-aunt used to do, under

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the smell of fresh paint, with neighbors near me, covering my chairs, the kids in the living room dancing to a song called “Time after Time,” I, at least, remembered what it was I’d lost. It wasn’t time or youth or innocence. It was simple living. And once I felt the full impact of my self-imposed chaos, once I got face-to-face with the culprit of upward mobility, I felt a seed of hope— that I might be able to manage my life. What I need in life is less, not more. For the opposite of simplicity isn’t complexity. It’s materialism.

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Recipes and the Friends Who Went with Them

, My family’s old home place is for sale. It’s been on the commercial market for years. Someday it will be demolished. That’s sad. That’s life. After my grandmother died, we were rummaging through a toolshed that stands behind the home place. In it were old chests, quilts, trinkets, and documents dating back to 1929. It was winter, a Saturday morning. Subfreezing temp. My hands were cold and numb. I was frenzied. Like I’d lost something irreplaceable. I kept digging in a mess of pastel hankies, dusty newspapers, and Christmas lights—miles of them. These were the ﬁnal items nobody wanted, a collection of family fetish and idiosyncrasy. Who’d save a hundred issues of the Alabama Baptist, empty spools of thread, soap? I felt like a deranged archeologist. My hands were dirty. That’s always a good sign. I’ve heard that the reason women like to dig in the dirt is that they’re digging for bones. They’re digging for their ancestors. And, sure enough, under a pile of aprons, I at last uncovered the jewel: family recipes. Some were in my grandmother’s handwriting; some, in her sister’s. It was wonderful. Anybody who’s ever eaten dinner with me has had Aunt Weeby’s chocolate pie. And here it was, the original. And the squash casserole we had every Christmas Eve. And the lane cake. Here I was, standing in the toolshed holding in my hands the recipe for the lane cake. All those ingredients—coconut, raisins, cherries, pecans, 36

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eight egg whites. It must have taken her hours. And I never knew, because you can’t know until you’re grown, until you’re the cook, what went into the preparation of your childhood bliss. It’s a southern thing, this marriage of dying and feeding. All those dayof-the-funeral casseroles, Decoration Day where we clean the graves then have dinner on the grounds, the way we remember friends by their recipes. My mother has a recipe called Betty Pifer’s maid’s blueberry pie. Betty Pifer was a neighbor. I didn’t know her maid, but I always wonder about her when my mother makes her pie. I have a recipe called Dennis’s daddy’s Avalon Slade’s butterscotch pound cake. Dennis’s daddy is dead. Avalon isn’t. Since that day of discovering the recipes, I’ve been acutely aware of my own recipe box. There is a recipe for bread called unadulterated loaves. It is in the handwriting of my friend Diane, who died at forty-one of ovarian cancer. Her words are precise, printed, and under how many the recipe will serve, she’s written, Multitudes. I’ve got a recipe for chess pie in the handwriting of another friend, Cathy. In 1985 she gave me a baby shower. A year later, she was dead— melanoma, at age twenty-seven. We have one photograph of Cathy. It was taken at a Halloween party. In it, she is dressed as a Martian but resembles a funky Peter Pan—green face, tam haircut, and curlicue antennae. We used to tell our daughters, “This is Cathy. She died.” I wonder how they interpreted this, in retrospect. Did they think this is how you look once you’re gone? She died the day Challenger exploded. So I associate my friend’s dying with astronauts and sky and travel. Three days before my grandmother died, I had a dream. My grandmother was clutching her black purse, standing in line at a terminal. There were planes, trains, and buses. Hers for the choosing. A mauve light surrounded her. I asked somebody, “Who is she?” and was told that she was the Traveler. The Traveler’s recipes are scribbled in a tiny, blue spiral notebook. Her handwriting was always kind of messy, slanting backward, with lots of languid commentary: Stir a while; beat it real good; cook a minute or so; let it set a bit; don’t overdo it.

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Neighborhood

This is the talk of southerners. It’s the inexact science of life. The pinch of salt. The way we give directions: just go up the road a piece. And where’s my thingamajig, you know, that doohickey? In time, of course, we lose all our thingamajigs and doohickeys. The land, the home place, the word “home place.” We rummage, as a culture, in the toolshed—where the ﬁnal remnants of southern life are tossed. Under it all is simply this: friends of the family, and how they were always wanting to give us the recipe for something good.

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Barbie

, In one of her novels, writer Jane Smiley has a character say these words: “I am thirty-ﬁve years old, and it seems to me that I have arrived at the age of grief.” She is speaking of the melancholy that comes with the simple passing of time. The cup of pain comes around at thirty-ﬁve and all mortals drink from it. I think it happens to dolls, too. Barbie, for instance. Like most women of her generation, she’s been through hell. When she celebrated her thirty-ﬁfth birthday, people came from all over the world to Birmingham, Alabama (where else?), to the Barbie convention, to wish her a happy birthday. There was a time when she was innocent. She wore a navy-and-white striped dress for casual days, a pink evening gown at night, and wasn’t old enough to worry over a career. But by the time she reached her thirties, she’d been chided for saying math class is tough, taken off the shelves for donning Native American clothes that weren’t quite right, and laughed at for wearing high heels to her pediatric practice. Give the girl a break! She has, after all, had to be an astronaut, musician, actress, fashion designer, ballerina, doctor, pilot, roller blader, presidential candidate, naval ofﬁcer, and teacher. I loved Barbie. My mother kept her safe, over all these years. She saved 39

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the wardrobe, the case, Ken, Midge, and the accessories of their simple love life. I remember playing the Barbie Game with my girlhood friend Carol Callaway Lord. I called Carol the other night to ask what she recalled of the game. We pieced together that there was a prom, a dance. You got a date with Ken or Bob or Poindexter or another guy we couldn’t name. You were given a dress and maybe—we think—a particular car. Anyway, as we remember, the point of this board game was merely to get to the dance. I remember during the snowstorm of 1963, we played the Barbie Game all night and day. It was a fantasy for eleven-year-olds. It was full of frivolity and magic and romance. My daughters own the newer version of the Barbie Game. It’s called The Barbie, We Girls Can Do Anything, Game: Travel the Path that Leads to the Career of Your Dreams. You must obtain career disks, make career moves, and advance to the innermost ring. “The winner is the ﬁrst player to reach the center of the game board by exact count,” it says. Does this sound fun? It isn’t. Not in life, not on the game board. I can only speak for myself, but I’d rather go to the dance. Sometimes people will ask me, “Did you know you wanted to be a writer? What did you want to be when you were young?” I wanted to be one thing: in love. I liked how it felt—the intoxication of it. I liked talking about it with my girl friends. That’s why Barbie and Midge were just as potent as Barbie and Ken. The unﬂappable Florence King says this kind of girl talk died around 1970 when feminists convinced us that women never talked about anything important. She says female speech now is ﬂat, that we talk in “caucus voice—metallic, grinding, scourging.” That’s a strong critique, but it rings true in a way. My neighbor stopped me the other day and said she needed to talk. She said she was afraid she might be going off the deep end. “How so?” I asked her. “Barbie,” she whispered. As it turned out, she’d bought a Barbie wristwatch. She told me to come inside. We walked up her carpeted stairs and into her daughter’s bedroom. She retrieved her old Barbie car—a ’60s treasure. She showed me other items she’d collected. I felt like we were eleven, not forty-something. I confessed to my neighbor that I’d been thinking of Barbie, too. Afterward, I started calling my friends. One by one, they stated how

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they’d loved Barbie. For the same reasons I had. It was romance, proms, dresses, an eye on marriage. And here we are, all these years later, after layers and layers of degrees and careers and politics and headaches and intellect—here we are, talking about a doll that didn’t have a brain in her head or a noble ambition in her body, and how much we loved her. I believe that Barbie’s demise is our own. Her loss of innocence was the doings of the culture around her. She didn’t marry Ken because we wouldn’t let her. If she ever does and if they want a baby, she’s probably going to have fertility problems. She’s going to wonder if her hundreds of careers were worth it. She’s going to have mitral valve prolapse and panic attacks and take Prozac. Midge will be hundreds of miles away, somewhere in New Jersey practicing law—no help there. Maybe, though, they’ll get on the phone and muster up some girl talk. Maybe they’ll remember the wonderful triangle they were once in with Ken—how it got all muddied up, who was in love with who. We’ve lost romance. We’ve forgotten that you can’t have it without imagination. That’s why my friends and I are talking about Barbie. That’s why we’re wondering where we can get hold of the Barbie Game—the old one, the real one where you don’t have to obtain disks or make the right moves or advance to the innermost ring of success. You just have to go to the dance. Or watch your girlfriend go. You, her—it didn’t matter. This was a world of friendship and simplicity and girl talk and love, and we want it back.

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School Lunch

, The writer Anne Lamott said the best way to get past writer’s block is to remember your childhood school lunch. I believe this is a good thing to do, whether you’re a writer or not. It’s a good thing to do if you have children or if you spend time with them and want to remember what it is like to be a child. I remember that my metal lunch box was rusty where my grape juice often leaked from the thermos. I noticed that nobody else’s did. The unwrapping of the sandwich was painful. “What is that?” they’d exclaim at the sight of Vienna sausage or potted meat spread against mustard and mayo. The crust was cut off, because I didn’t like crust—and this brought cries of, “Why does your mother do that? Why don’t you like crust?” The contents of the lunch box seemed somehow to be a Pandora’s box, a bin full of family peculiarity. My friend Susie Thomas caught a lot of ﬂack for having cream cheese and olive, which the others tagged, “cream cheese and eyeballs.” See, I remember it to this day. I liked cookies with a marshmallow component, and the others often poked the gooey stuff. “What’s that?” I think there came a point where Mother put barbeque-ﬂavored potato chips in, and the reddish ﬂakes were another object of scrutiny. “What’re those?” The lunch table was a gathering of scientists, placing the particles of your food under a social microscope. 42

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We ate like scared, furtive mice. You lean forward over the wax paper, trying to hold the soggy sandwich together for a bite, your ﬁngers smeared with mayo or jelly, but you know that no matter how invisible you try to make yourself, the girls are watching. All eyes are on you at the precise moment the sandwich comes apart. You can’t buy your lunch because going through the line would be worse than death. You might drop the tray—it’s happened before. You’ve seen the slow-motion death slide, your classmate kneeling to catch the squares of green or yellow Jell-O, the way English peas scurry in ten directions. So you’re stuck with the metal lunch box, the leaky thermos, the potted meat sandwich—the awful truth being, you like potted meat; your daddy, in fact, likes it mixed up with diced apples. Your mother lets you drink Coke for breakfast. You wet the bed until you were eleven. You ﬂoss your teeth with your hair when nobody’s looking, you pee in swimming pools—you like to pee in swimming pools, and you’re certain you’re going to die young. You’re not going to die young, though. You’re going to live to remember school lunches, and the good thing is that—contained in the memory, you’ll ﬁnd a seed of truth: vulnerability is a good thing. Perhaps, then, this is a message for my daughters (who also ﬁnd the lunchroom excruciating) and to all kids who are certain they’re being watched: your lunch is different from everybody else’s. If you’re the kid who catches the most ﬂack, take heart: you’ll probably be a writer someday, or a minister—one of those good kinds who lets you know his insides Sunday after Sunday. Your sandwich is gross and soggy. Don’t hide it. Take it apart. Let them see the pale green imprint the pickle made against the mayonnaise. Hold the wilted lettuce up. Study it in the light. You’re not cool, and this is good. You’re warm. Nothing will ever be as bad as it is now, in the school lunchroom. I can promise that. Go on outside; stand by the fence; sit on a nice rock; be weird; keep a journal; pray; and remember the contents of your lunch box—the mother who packed it, the dad who handed it to you when you got out of the car, the blue sky. It’s all yours—your material, your life.

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Michael Jordan’s Midlife Crisis

, For a brief moment, Michael Jordan played baseball. People hated him for it. People still hate him for it. I don’t care what they say. I’m glad he played. Birmingham. What an unlikely place for the greatest athlete of our time to have a midlife crisis. Think of the irony. An African American superstar hero, bringing glory and income to a place like Birmingham by becoming a common man. Birmingham had a baseball history, before Jordan, for sure. Rickwood Field, built in 1910, saw the likes of Satchel Paige, Willie Mays, and others who passed through the city: Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Vida Blue, and Jackie Robinson. But the summer of 1994 brought sudden charm to the city and to the Southern League. The Barons drew 467,867 at home, a new club record. For a single game, crowds of 7,000 at home and 8,000 on the road were common all season long. When I went to the Hoover Met last summer, it was the ﬁrst time I’d been to a baseball game in over thirty years. I grew up with baseball. My daddy played second base and lettered at Yale in the 1940s. During my childhood, he was very active in the Birmingham Amateur Baseball Federation and was public address announcer for the baseball team at Stockham Valves and Fittings, where he worked. Company ball, in those days, was big stuff. Stockham and Acipco, two 44

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of Birmingham’s leading foundries, were the league’s strongest teams. I hear that the caliber of these company teams matched that of the Barons. If they were playing one another, they’d sometimes outdraw the Barons who were playing the same night at Rickwood. My mother tells me that on those hot summer nights, while my brother played under the bleachers and daddy worked the games, she nursed me in the backseat of the car. Other nights, the family might go to Rickwood. To this day, we call a hotdog with only mustard a Rickwood dog because that’s how they served them at Rickwood. All this is to say, I grew up with baseball but lost every bit of interest until last summer when it dawned on us that our daughters needed to see Michael Jordan play. What a sight he was, standing in right ﬁeld under a sunset sky of blues and apricots, in that black cap and jersey, gray pants plunging into hightop black Nike cleats, long slender legs. Maybe women see baseball in different terms than men do. Jordan was almost sensual, with his long legs on the crisp diamond. He didn’t belong on that ﬁeld. It was so clear that he didn’t, as the sky grew dark and he stood under the stars, at the plate, swinging too hard— almost awkward and gangly. He’d strike out. He’d pop out. He had a hard time connecting. He was a basketball player. His father had been murdered. Jordan was thirty-two years old, having a spiritual crisis that was being played out, on the ﬁeld, on a sweet summer night in the South. How can the press criticize this? Maybe, again, it’s a female thing. Maybe I just wax maternal at the sight of a man, ten years my junior, who is coming apart. Some say that Jordan joined the minor leagues because that’s what he wanted to do in memory of his father. I believe this. What else could cause a man to do such a thing? On July 30, Jordan hit it out of the park, crossed home plate, and pointed skyward, to salute his father. “He believed in me from day one,” he’d later say. “This is my dream.”

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46

Neighborhood

Now, Jordan’s back in basketball. He worked it out—whatever it was. Grief, probably. And, the serendipity of it all was a boost for the minor leagues and something good for Birmingham. I know Jordan won’t be there anymore, but we’ll still go back this year. We’ll pile in the car with our friends, the Whetstones, like we did last summer and drive to Hoover. We’ll buy hotdogs, drink Cokes, sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game!” watch the stars, and glance at right ﬁeld where Michael Jordan worked out the age-old story of fathers and sons. The point of baseball, after all, is simply to get back home. I think Jordan did this. He did it in Birmingham.

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D e at h

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Burying Annie

, W

e buried our dog in the summer of 1993. Annie was born in our home December 13, 1982. That’s how long we’d had her. She was the blond runt of a ﬁne litter of golden retrievers. We were childless in those days—infertile, we believed. I suppose the awful part of losing a pet is remembering the years she’s seen you through. I think of Annie as a compass. She guided us to love nature, gardens, earthy things. There was, however, a juncture in her life that haunts me. During the dog days of summer a long time ago, Annie and her mother, Ellie, went into season at the same time. They tore a hole in the screen door, escaped, and found neighborhood mates. We didn’t want them to have puppies. In the end, we asked the vet to give Annie an “antimating” shot—interesting euphemism. We took Ellie, the mother, in to be spayed. Ellie died in surgery. Annie aborted on the kitchen ﬂoor. That’s not a nice part of this story. But I tell it to say this: when it came time to put Annie to sleep, I recoiled. It seemed that my intervention in the natural order of things hadn’t proven wise in the past. Was euthanasia wrong, I wondered. If it was wrong for humans, then it was wrong for dogs. Or the converse. If it was right for dogs, then it ought to be right for humans. People kept telling me, you’ll know when it’s time. I never did know. Annie had cancer. The bone tumor in her paw had caused a grotesque lesion. We’d been dressing it many times a day. She’d started to cough. Some days she never got up for breakfast. Her pain was evident. Then 49

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Death

gangrene set in. But still, I never had that deﬁnitive sign people speak of. One day, we just simply picked up a mattock and shovel, and went to a shady, secluded part of the yard the kids call the Nature Club, and started to dig. We did this before we even called the vet. It was a massive undertaking. We hit clay, tree roots, glass, rock. The earth is so red once you get deep. We were crying and sweating and ﬁghting mosquito bites. It was hard work. It was the kind of work city people—we, anyway—don’t do much anymore. I kept leaning back against a tree to cry. It was the kind of crying we don’t do much anymore. We called the vet’s ofﬁce to say, it’s time. We’d talked to him ahead of time—Mike, a blond-headed sweet man who himself reminds me of a golden retriever. We’d talked about this moment. He’d told us he’d come over and put Annie down on the kitchen ﬂoor. He was there when we called. We told him we were digging the grave, and he came over. He helped us dig until the hole was very deep. Then we went inside. Annie was lying on a sheet, in the kitchen. All three of us drew in to her. When we told him to, Mike gave her the injection, and she died. It took maybe ten seconds. I left the room. I threw myself on the bed. I felt like a murderer, and some strange mufﬂed noises came from my mouth. Mike carried her to the grave. We let Susie, our other dog, see Annie. She sniffed, then turned her head to the side quickly—the way people do when they’re told bad news. We stood there, in our suburban yard beside the grove of trees—Dennis, Mike, me, middle-aged and staring at a dog whose life we’d just taken. “The kids will be home soon,” we told him. “We’ll wait till they get here to bury her.” I stood over her like a soldier, something primitive and stoic alive in me as if somebody might come to take the body. When the kids got home, we told them what had happened. They raced around in a frenzy, spreading the news, wild-eyed. I knew this feeling. When I heard my grandmother had died, it was like somebody shot me with an adrenalin gun. We had a funeral with the neighborhood children. A few wanted to pet Annie’s body. We put her in the grave. I read Ecclesiastes 3, but only verses one and two. A time to be born, a time to die. A thunderstorm erupted. The ceremony was over. So what of all this? A pet dies. You bury it. I was so aware of how badly we want dignity in dying. Euthanasia, on the surface, provides it. But I will never know for certain that I did the

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right thing by speeding up Annie’s dying. Living wills are one thing— that’s noninterference. Euthanasia is interference. Here’s this dog looking up at you saying with its eyes, I’ve trusted you all my life and I’m here trusting you still. I do not like that kind of responsibility. I’ll tell you what I do like. I like a vet who makes house calls. I like quiet words, hospice care, the dignity of home. I like digging graves. I like what Pearl Buck calls “the perfect sympathy of movement” that occurs “when a man and woman work in rhythm, turning up the good earth to make fruit or bury the dead.” I like standing guard over the body. I like cemeteries. I like the way people cry over the memory of a pet, the way they wrestle with right and wrong. I like how they’ll say, “I still don’t know if it was the noble thing to do.” I like the way their eyes look when they say it. I like it that we can’t rest in peace, that our so-called culture wars are more than politics; they’re valid, human struggles. I like a neighborhood. I like the way kids hold hands when they gather to pray over the grave of a pet. I like how they know to do this without anybody saying they ought to. I like signs like this, wonders. I like the way dirt feels. I like it that we are forced to kneel in order to pet a dog.

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Crossing the Viaduct

, When I was growing up in Birmingham, I thought there was only one way to get downtown: over the viaduct. The viaduct overlooking Sloss Furnace was magic for me. It wasn’t just the view of Sloss, though the molten steel being poured like a stream of electric orange juice was impressive. Perhaps it wasn’t even the viaduct itself. It was me—riding over the viaduct on a bus with my mother. It was us—crossing over the arc into town. We’d catch the bus in Woodlawn on First Avenue North, across the street from Hill’s Grocery and Alma White’s cafeteria and Dr. Joe Kirby’s ofﬁce. In winter, I’d wear a white catlike muff. During the late ’50s, my mother would take us to the back of the bus. The bus driver would say, Will all whites please come to the front of the bus? My mother would whisper in my ear, “Just look out the window, baby. He’ll get over it.” Or something like that. We’d pass dry cleaners, churches, hotdog stands, donut shops, ﬂorists, as the streets of West Woodlawn became the outskirts of Avondale where the big mill stood. And then ﬁnally, I’d see it up ahead—the viaduct rising in the distance. It felt more like a runway. Once the bus began its ascent, I’d hold my breath. I knew what was coming. I’d see the ﬁre of liquid metal and the dark men scurrying to and fro, making something called pig iron. The puppy dog on the sign would wink at me. Right at the apex, I’d see the city. It was a wonderland of department 52

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stores and ofﬁces and hotels. This was before Birmingham lost the terminal, before we lost the original Tutwiler Hotel, before we lost our innocence. This was before shopping malls and fear drew us away from the city. I knew what lay on the other side of the viaduct. I knew we’d get off at Newberry’s. We’d shop at Pizitz or Stride Rite or Kessler’s or Burger Phillips or Parisian where my grandmother’s best friend, Jimmie Huey, worked. Maybe we’d catch a movie at the Lyric or the Empire. But we’d always end up at Loveman’s where my second grade teacher’s husband, a Mr. Barnes, worked the men’s department. I’d eye the jewelry and perfumes. We might walk over to the candy windows near the exit that led to the parking lot. We’d go upstairs to the girls department. And at eleventhirty, we’d eat lunch at the mezzanine café. I’d know all this was coming—as we crossed the viaduct. But it wasn’t so much what was to come. It was that moment when we were halfway there. Back the other way was all we’d passed to get this far. Up ahead was our destination. But on the viaduct we were in the process. On the viaduct we were in midair. In limbo. On the brink. And what do you see when you’re up this high? I know I was aware of the Sloss ﬁre below. I know it scared me, intrigued me. I know that, for a long time, I believed that bridges were made to let you pass over ﬁre rather than water; that to reach any destination, you ﬁrst had to go over a ﬂame. But more than anything else, when I was on the viaduct, I was simply with my mother and we were almost there. We were going somewhere. I’m on a different kind of viaduct now, a halfway point of sorts that we call midlife. I can see the past behind me, the future up the road. I remember a lot of things. I remember a milkman named Johnny Nero in Crestwood who let us ride the truck in summer and eat the crushed ice. I remember Morgan Brothers in Woodlawn where we shopped for dresses and the Polar Bear in Eastlake and LouJack’s and those X-ray machines for feet and the strawberry man pushing the tiny cart and the disc jockey booth at Cascade Plunge and the house where Bull Connor lived. I remember taking my daddy to work at Stockham Valves and Fittings every morning in a salmon-colored ’57 Chevy and getting a bag of donuts in a wax paper bag at a place called Paul’s on Tenth Avenue North. I remember picking him up in the afternoon in a building where a man named Mr.

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Saxon kept Hershey bars for me in his drawer. I remember my neighbors in Crestwood—the Vests, Callaways, Murrays. I remember Mick McCombs next door who worked for Barber’s Ice Cream and every day he’d bring home a pint-size carton of fudge royale. I remember a place we called the Lost Jungle, which was actually a power yard, and wading in a place we called the Beaver Dam, which was actually a sewer. I remember when Hueytown didn’t have any fast food, when the only landmark on Warrior Road was the remnants of my granddaddy’s ﬁlling station. I like to remember. Indeed, the hallmark of midlife is the sudden urge to remember. But the bus moves on. Not a single moment can be frozen. Time is speeding up. As I write this, though, I can revel in the fact that—for this instant, anyway—the viaduct still stands. Sloss wasn’t destroyed. Loveman’s isn’t Loveman’s, but it’s there. My mother is alive, on this earth, with me. And in some ways, no matter where I go, I’m always on the bus with her and she’s always tugging at me to ride in the back, in the place where we’re not supposed to ride—not so much because it’s righteous, but because it’s fun to mix things up. We’re side by side. We’re on the bus. We’re on the viaduct. We’re crossing over. We’re going somewhere, somewhere good.

Mother died on April 14, 1998. This piece was written ﬁve years before her death.

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My Mother’s Brain

, My mother has Alzheimer’s. The other day I took her for yet another diagnostic test. This one was called a Spec Scan. It was supposed to show the metabolism of the brain. The day was sunny. She was wearing white pants and a blue shirt. There’s warmth in my mother’s beauty. I love her. Everybody loves her. We did valet parking at the hospital, and then we took the elevator to the crosswalk. She walks different now that her brain is atrophying. There is certainty of purpose. Her arms move like those of a robotic jogger. She used to be more ﬂuid. She was a strong swimmer until she forgot how to swim. I quickened my pace to match hers on the crosswalk. We got to Nuclear Medicine where the test was to be performed. A physician asked her the same questions they always ask: what are you having trouble doing; can you remember names and dates; what’s the hardest thing of all? And as always, she looked at me wide-eyed and imploringly, wanting me to talk for her. “The ﬁrst thing was that she forgot how to write,” I told the radiologist who was very youthful, stocky. “She can’t make her hands work. She can’t say the words she wants to say. She’s having trouble following conversations, and she can’t read now.” Every time I repeat this litany, I shudder to think of myself thirty years from now with these very symptoms. Me—not being able to write, to read what others write, to give voice to my desires? 55

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The radiologist took notes, nodding. I wondered if he was thinking what they all think at ﬁrst—that this sounds a bit like stroke or Pick’s Disease or some unspeciﬁed dementia. I didn’t want to hear it if he was thinking this. I’d long since resigned myself to the assumption that if it walks like Alzheimer’s and talks like it, then it is, indeed Alzheimer’s. We’d been given the diagnosis one year ago, and we’d watched it progress. A technician took Mother to a contraption similar to a CT scan. She was told to lie perfectly still for one hour. “You can’t move a muscle,” the tech told her. I knew she would obey. She’s hard as rock, stoic to the core, Appalachian stoic, the daughter of a subsistence farmer. Although she migrated to the suburbs and got a master’s degree in education along with reﬁnement and culture, she still bore the quiet dignity of a poor southern white girl. While she lay there, I went to get a Coke. I checked my voice mail. I tried to read the newspaper. I kept smelling something, like the ether scent of childhood hospital visits. I didn’t have anybody to talk to. I was alone. After ﬁfty minutes, I went back to the room where they had her strapped in. “She’s taking a nap,” the tech whispered. “No, I’m not,” she said, without opening her eyes. She’s never slept during the day, and neither have I. We can’t shut our engines down until sunset. The tech was astonished. “I swear, she didn’t move a muscle,” he said. He got her up, and she looked around to get her bearings. Then the tech said he wanted to show us the pictures. We sat by a computer screen. It was familiar enough to me, but I realized it was probably foreign to her. Then we saw her brain appear. “Now watch as I rotate it,” the tech said. Her head spun and spun, like a planet against the blue sky of the screen. “It looks like ﬁre here,” I noted, pointing to a couple of red-hot spots. He said, yes, that there was a lot of activity in that spot. Then there were some dull brick red spots where there wasn’t much activity. I kept watching for the ﬁres to resurface. What were those spots of energy? Which part of her brain was burning? When I was a little girl, I once asked her, “Where is your soul?” She dropped her eyes thoughtfully, then smiled. “It’s the part of me you love,” she told me. I didn’t question her further. It satisﬁed me. I knew her soul

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wasn’t in her arms or legs or hands or even in her heart. Since her diagnosis, I’ve come to understand that it’s not in her brain either. But those ﬂames I saw on the screen meant something. I don’t care what the scientiﬁc explanation was. I’m a writer, and I chase metaphors. I’m a believer, and I chase signs. I know spiritual energy when I see it— how it spreads through the family of Alzheimer’s victims when we realize that the only cure we’ve got, for now, is love.

In her memory: Katherine Jennings Marsh, 1923–1998.

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Race Car Drivers and Writers

, To the southwest of Birmingham, lies a community called Hueytown. I can’t stay away from Hueytown—in ﬁction or in reality. My greatgrandfather was a Huey who helped settle the place. I spent many childhood days visiting my grandparents on Wickstead Road. My granddaddy ran a ﬁlling station on Warrior Road. My grandmother worked a dry cleaners there. My parents met there in February 1937, married there in October 1944. They tell me that during their growing up days there was a man named Lucky Teter, the daredevil of the day, who performed at the fairgrounds grandstand. He’d get a running start, cross a ramp, and jump three cars. To make a fancy ending, he’d drive through a ﬁre—the “burning wall.” Lucky was the nickname for a man who deﬁed death. Therefore, if you were driving recklessly or taking chances, you’d be termed a “Lucky Teter.” I’m obsessed with Hueytown. So when Neil Bonnett was killed in this month’s NASCAR tragedy, I went to his funeral. I didn’t know him. I know nothing about racing—except in a metaphorical sense. I had no business there. Neil Bonnett’s funeral was held at the Garywood Assembly of God. The cofﬁn was open before the service. Friends were in clusters, beside the body. Occasionally, somebody in the congregation might recognize a lost acquaintance, leap from the pew, and ﬂy to the altar—for an embrace. It 58

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became a theater of grief, a reminder that inside the casket lies a wheel’s hub. All those present are its spokes. There was crying. We—ScotchIrish—aren’t a stoic crew. We live hard, die hard, and don’t mind, as Dylan Thomas said, “raging against the dying of the light.” The Reverend Max Helton, who ministers to NASCAR drivers, gave one of those funeral laments I love: the kind that ponders mystery rather than throwing pat answers. “We’re not made for Earth,” he said. “It’s only where we were born.” So if you are born in Hueytown are you more likely to become a race car driver? Is there something in the dirt? I’ve heard this question posed often. It’s the old, does the place shape the man or does the man shape the place kind of inquiry. But to ask what kind of town produces race car drivers is to step into the realm of sociological wilderness that both interests and disgusts me. To ask what kind of town implies that it’s somehow ignoble to manufacture NASCAR drivers—suggests a kind of recklessness, a discontent, desperation, a sinister drive. Yes, perhaps. But then it also suggests passion, color, guts, and ﬁre. Hueytown should claim these traits. This was a town built on dangerous occupations. Mills and mines require the mind of a racer. We keep asking, how much more can Hueytown take? It can and will take whatever is asked of it. It’s that kind of place. It is, in many ways, the blueprint of a southerner. It’s got a tough veneer, but underneath lies a sweet spirit. Drive Warrior Road, and on every marquee—including Burger King, McDonald’s, KFC, Quality Lube, Hueytown Tire and Wheel, Golden Corral, Mikey’s, Dabb’s Florist, Smith Dry Cleaning, Belbro Discount Auto, and many others—you’ll see, “Our Prayers are with the Bonnett Family.” What got me was the fast-food joints. Even those places that have come to represent the disappearance of small-town culture, even in those establishments you see a family’s name, alongside the word prayer. A Burger King giving a damn about a family? It’s enough to make you believe there’s hope for America. Race day. Maybe it substitutes as national pageantry for southerners. Because we are the only ethnic group in America denied a cultural legacy (because it’s politically incorrect to celebrate the South’s past), maybe we need the ceremony, the ﬂags, crowds, processions. Maybe racing, along with college football, is a way we celebrate our independent spirit. I love

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college football. Maybe I’d be a better person if I read a book rather than watched a game, but there is a part of me that prefers the visceral, the physical, the ﬁre, the risk. Those are the only things that have ever gotten me anywhere—including trouble, of course. But all the same I understand why Neil Bonnett got back in that car. Writers are race car drivers too. The good ones are. A good writer doesn’t use her brain; she uses her guts. She takes risks, crashes, burns, and loves the ride. Remember the old Whitney Houston song that says, “The ride with you was worth the fall, my friend.” I suspect this is what’s in Susan Bonnett’s heart. Race car drivers aren’t peculiar to Hueytown. They’re likely to spring up anywhere, just as writers are. To ask why so many racers come out of Hueytown is like asking why the South produces so many writers. It’s not that we produce more, it’s that the South loves its writers and nurtures them just as Hueytown loves its race car drivers and nurtures them and celebrates them—and takes care of their families. So I salute Neil Bonnett and his family. I salute the Allisons, Farmers, all the Alabama Gang, a town that ignites the spirit, celebrates tenacity, and won’t be denied its past or its future—but makes them coexist. In Hueytown, where the rubber meets the road.

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December, a Grandmother’s Dying

, I spent December dying with my grandmother. It’s inaccurate to say I watched her die. It’s no spectator sport, this experience. The lessons are a hands-on, dark pilgrimage into mystery. I read the other day that mystery and meaning are not opposites, but that mystery is something that holds more meaning than we can comprehend. My grandmother asked me many questions I couldn’t answer, like why do I have to suffer? I could say, “Jesus suffered, too,” but this didn’t answer her question. I could say, “So we can be with you during your suffering, so we can learn,” but this still wouldn’t answer her question. As a writer, I might think, “This is the calamity. This is the place in the story where she will be transformed and so will we.” But it’s not right to think this kind of thing when somebody is in agony. Life is a story, though. My grandmother was born in 1904 in Hueytown, the daughter of a carpenter. She was ﬁrst and foremost a mother, but she also ran a ﬁlling station, pumped gas, ﬁxed tires, delivered babies, ran a dry cleaners, drove a truck, and waitressed a restaurant—the Iceberg where Bobby Allison likes to eat. In an age when women kept house, my grandmother kept shop. She was a Huey, and this was her town. Somewhere during her dying, a nurse engaged her in a mental status exam. “What year is this?” the nurse asked. My grandmother replied, “1922.” The nurse glanced over at me and smiled. Further questions revealed 61

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that, for my grandmother, it was spring—though a Christmas poinsettia donned her night table; she’d just talked with her sister—who’d been dead many years. But when asked, “Where are you?” my grandmother responded, “Alabama, Jefferson County, city of Hueytown.” She might be lost in time, but she sure as hell knew where she was. Tell me we’re not shaped by place. There was a juncture where she believed she’d given birth, at eightynine, to a baby girl. She kept the baby under her arm, fearful it might smother. She fed it chicken broth, received visitors on its behalf, and carried it to hip surgery. There were other tender things: visitations by angels—family members who’d already died—the ﬁnal deathwatch I spent with my aunt as we watched the breathing get shallow, and there were some things the family did that I think are worth telling. These were tiny, insigniﬁcant acts on the surface. Yet I believe they matter because they involve the rethinking of ideas. The ﬁrst is the idea that we are at the mercy of medical protocol. This idea was undone when my brother took her, against medical advice, from one hospital to another in order to get better care but also to put us closer to her. It took energy, will, and nerve to ﬁght red tape, orders, and bureaucracy. But it was accomplished, and it was good. The second was my father and my aunt securing the execution of a living will in order to avoid life-support systems and codes. Although she died in the hospital, she was free from tubes. The third was the inclusion of spiritual care that’s a part of this particular hospital. Every time there was bad news, there was a chaplain as if he or she were an integral part of treatment. Maybe the secular health care system doesn’t often understand the storied nature of our lives and that all the pills in the world can’t offer the one thing that people require most, which is a sense of meaning. Our technological way of dying strips us of it. We forget this is the natural ending to a story. It was in the moments that I saw the big picture, the entire tapestry, that I felt whole and ebullient—as my girl cousins and I primped and doted over our grandmother, brushing her hair and rubbing her feet and kissing her face because we remembered she’d done this for us. My brother fed her ice cream. My aunt tended her like a baby—again the reverberation of times past, of simply changing roles but all in the same drama, same story, same characters. All in the family. We made her

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give us her recipe for cinnamon rolls because that’s part of the story. We made her tell of nursing my daddy after he was bitten by a mad dog because that’s part of the story. After the funeral, we all ate at the Iceberg Restaurant in Hueytown because that’s part of the story. Scholar William Kirk Kilpatrick, in an essay titled “Why Secular Psychology Is Not Enough,” goes so far as to say that the ultimate reason for depression and suicide is that a person reaches a point where not only is life meaningless but also there is no mystery about that fact; not only have we failed to be the hero of this story, but in fact there is no story. And it is the task of Christianity to reestablish belief that there’s a story. Not that the characters won’t have pain, accidents, or calamity, that the story won’t be sad. Just simply that there is a story. Christianity, after all, has come to us as a story, not a science or even a philosophy. A good ending, says the late short-story writer Raymond Carver takes off in a new direction. It sends the reader in a spiral, suddenly catapulted, pole-vaulted up, wondering where to land. That’s why we close a ﬁne book wanting to ask the author, but what happens now? We think we’re needing to know what happens to the characters, but what we’re really after is what happens to us now that it’s over. When we were all collected at the hospital after the ﬁnal breath, my mother, sister-in-law, and I stood over the body. It was a reverent, holy time. It was part of the story of how it was the women who felt a primal need to anoint the body, so they went to the tomb and became what Raymond Carver would, then, call a good ending—one where the reader spirals up and has no desire to come back down.

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Nixon

, People who get ﬁxated on a peculiar topic are funny and interesting to me. I know an eccentric lady whose obsession is the Rose Bowl Parade. She spends the entire year revving up. “Ready for the parade?” she asks me when I see her, no matter what the season. I know of a writer who’s preoccupied with the weight of dogs. In every story, there’s a dog. In every story, we know his weight. I think I’ve gone over the edge myself. I can’t quit thinking about Richard Nixon. I realize there’s something alluring about dying. The black hole that draws us in when a person disappears. The part of us that wants to follow after. “Hey, we didn’t know you. Wait up. You’re more complicated than we thought.” In short, the elephant’s shadow is bigger than the animal itself. I know all this. But still. Why am I thinking of Richard Nixon every waking moment? I’ll see friends, and I’ll say, “Did you see Nixon’s funeral?” They’ll say, yes, or no. Some will make irreverent remarks. Some shrug. Laugh. Wave it away. I missed his funeral. Thanks to C-Span, however, I was able to watch it late Wednesday night. I taped it. I think I’ve watched it, in its entirety, ﬁve times. The awesome irony of the Yorba Linda scenes kill me, like the tender Shaker song the choir did called “Simple Gifts”—ironic because Nixon was anything but simple. Casper Weinberger saying the Lord’s Prayer. The camera on Spiro Agnew’s face as the crowd got to the place that says “for64

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give us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Billy Graham in his dark blue suit, gray temples, and Parkinson’s disease. Watergate characters gathering by the white bungalow beside the big, gnarled tree. In the end, nothing matters but the home place, the burial, and forgiveness. In the end, we better muster up the courage to forgive. I think what disturbs me more than anything is hearing my contemporaries rail on, still. Was there truly anything noble in us during the days of Watergate? Were we more righteous, more sinless, more enlightened than Nixon as we cut class to smoke a joint and sit in front of the TV set for the proceedings? During the funeral, I watched the row of ﬁrst families—Gerald and Betty Ford, Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, George and Barbara Bush, Bill and Hillary Clinton. I didn’t think, there sits power. I thought, there sits suffering. In every face, there were ghosts and shadows and agony. We don’t respect public servants. We hate them. They are paper dolls, punching bags, objects. It crosses party lines, too. We used to have Dan Quayle. Now we have Hillary Clinton. We’ve had clumsy Jerry, backwoodsy Jimmy, mannequin Nancy (I’m awfully guilty of that one), dumb Ronnie. And we always, always—when all else failed—we always had Nixon. We don’t anymore. The baby boomers have lost Big Daddy. He was a father, and our relationship with him carried all the baggage. Anger, rebellion, rage, the unequivocal fact that as we turned twenty-one, he fell from grace. We may think we felt vindicated. We may remember Watergate as a watershed, a harbinger of adulthood. But it’s not that simple. A father is a father. And when he is disgraced, so are we. Nixon’s scars are our scars. Watergate wasn’t cool or funny or cavalier. It was serious. As I write this, it dawns on me why I can’t quit thinking of Richard Nixon. I voted for him in 1972. It was the ﬁrst vote I ever cast for anybody. I lied about it. I think I even lied to my boyfriend at the time. All my friends were voting for George McGovern. I kept lying for years. I called myself a yellow-dog Democrat. But what a relief to confess. I wonder why I voted for him? I was twenty. The voting age had recently been lowered. I think I was proud to vote. I know I was dust in the wind—that I didn’t

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have a clue what was right or wrong, that I pretty much followed whatever was deemed the correct thing to do by my contemporaries. So why did I rebel? You know, I think I must have liked the guy. I think I must have trusted in him. The fact that he betrayed that trust is simply a fact of history. “But he never said he was sorry,” I keep hearing. And he never will. But grace doesn’t demand apology. The sight of Tricia and Julie accepting the cofﬁn ﬂag was riveting. It made me think, this is the real passing of the torch. I thought we’d gotten it when Clinton was inaugurated. No. We were simply receiving the gift of power then. There’s also the gift of humility. The torch that was passed from the honor guard to the daughters of Richard Nixon was in the form of a folded-up ﬂag that lay over the body of a man who ate the fruit and left the garden. It’s a strange package, an interesting gift.

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Jackie

, A race car driver, a former president, a humorist, my grandmother, and now there’s Jackie. Maybe I missed my calling, I sometimes think. I could be a eulogist, if there is such a thing. This eulogy, however, isn’t so much a tribute to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as it is a lament for who we were—as a country—when we knew her best. When you ask people what they remember of her, they’ll inevitably use the word grace. But was it so much that she had grace? Wasn’t it also that we did, back when we knew her as Mrs. Kennedy? In many ways, Jackie was the last ﬁrst lady we treated with a civil, kind hand. I realize she had charm, elegance, and reﬁnement. Yet, so did many who came after her. We didn’t immediately trash Jackie as blue-blood, prima donna, airhead. We could have. We would now. By the time she married Onassis, we were well into our national trashing, and we did trash that marriage. I’m not lamenting the bygone days of ladies being ladies or “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all” mentality. I just wonder if there’s a way back to civility. I wonder if it’s possible to stop crucifying leaders. Jackie Onassis watched her husband get assassinated. But hasn’t every ﬁrst lady since then watched the same thing happen to her husband? Think of Ladybird Johnson, think of Pat Nixon, Betty Ford, Rosalyn Cart67

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er, Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, and most notably Hillary Clinton. We’ve done a character assassination on every one of their husbands— with the possible exception of Nixon who, in the eye of most, did it to himself. We seem incapable of grace. In my car the other day, I was scanning the radio dial. I stopped on a local “Christian” station that oftentimes will play some pretty good music. This day, though, there was no music. No preaching. They were devoting an entire hour to blasting Bill and Hillary Clinton. Rumors, innuendo, gossip, politics. If I hadn’t been thinking so much about Jackie and who we used to be, maybe it wouldn’t have been so deplorable. But it was. I remember my mother calling me to the TV set during JFK’s funeral. I was eleven. She told me to watch Jackie walking in the processional in that black veil. She said I’d remember it all my life. “This is history,” she told me. I didn’t see the footage of the actual assassination until later in life. That’s probably a good thing. My brother reminded me the other day that because we were children in 1963, death was scary. “Jackie made you think of it as tranquil,” he noted. He’s right. But in some ways, she was the only one who stayed tranquil. It’s as if the moment her pink suit was splotched with blood, so were we. She changed clothes; we didn’t. We’re still clamoring over the edge of the backseat, frantic, seized with something awful: the inability to quit assassinating presidents. The moment they’re elected, we begin target shooting. We forget these guys have children, that when you shoot a father, you injure a family. Of all the photographs I saw taken at the funeral the one that sticks in my mind is of John Kennedy Jr. standing with Hillary Clinton. Her face is contorted, a wince. He’s holding her arm, eyes half-closed, as if to soothe. It’s like he’s his mother, saying, “We can get through this thing. Trust; be calm.” In ways, the entire funeral spoke of family—especially that aspect of family that works to protect its children from harm. Former Secret Service agent Jack Walsh, who once protected Caroline and John, was a pallbearer; Clinton mentioned Jackie’s taking the time to speak with them on the importance of protecting children from the public eye; Jackie’s children

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chose “love of words, the bonds of home and family” to eulogize their mother. So maybe when we refer to Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s grace, we can think of the many meanings of that word like reﬁnement, mercy, honor, reprieve, and don’t forget charm. Because, listen: Jackie’s charm wasn’t manners or beauty or sophistication. It was as in a charm you wear. The amulet, worn to ward off evil and injury. That’s why her children were and are off-limits to us. We must cherish who they are because she cast that on us. That’s why she carried mystery. She was at work, for her kids—warding off darkness. A good mother does this. It makes for a tranquil world.

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The Mouse

, During most of 1994 I taught Sunday school to ﬁrst graders. Toward the conclusion of story time every week, we had prayer list. It worked like this: they’d call out names; I’d write them on the chalkboard; and we’d pray. Certain names always came up—dead and living gerbils, frogs, cats, goldﬁsh, and dogs. When Julie’s cat had kittens, we had to offer up a prayer for each littermate. Brittany’s dog, who’d run away years earlier, was a regular on the list. So was Laura’s dog who died slowly of cancer. Occasionally, we’d pray for a grasshopper somebody had spotted in a meadow a few days before—just in case he’d run into peril since sighted. Animals made up the chronic prayer list. There was another list, however. It was more transient, and it consisted of public ﬁgures. When Bill Clinton’s mother died, the children wanted to pray for Chelsea. She had, after all, lost her grandmother. We prayed for the Nixon family, for the Kennedy family—during their time of grief. Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan were a subject of grave concern for these six-year-olds. They wanted to pray for a reconciliation. “Can’t they make up?” they wanted to know. “Ask God to make them be friends.” But O.J. Simpson took the cake. He stayed on the list for weeks—perhaps longer than the dying dog and the new kittens. The kids wanted him to be forgiven. 70

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And, indeed, as I remember 1994—through the lens of the kids’ prayer list—this is what I remember, too. For the night of the ride in the white Bronco down the LA freeway with O.J. will always be associated with a particular family event for me. That night, after it was all over, my daughters cornered me in the upstairs linen closet, demanding the truth about Santa. Whether this had anything to do with O.J. is still a mystery. All I know is that they were serious this time. They meant business. I couldn’t give the usual elusive answers. They told me they didn’t want a lie, they wanted facts. Picture us in the linen closet. Sheets, pillowcases, quilts, heirlooms, dolls, and baseball gloves. They’ve closed the door. It’s cramped. We’re on the ﬂoor, legs drawn up. I’m on the hot seat. I told them the truth. Afterward, when they were nestled all snug in their beds with visions of O.J. and Santa dancing in their heads, I wondered if I’d done the right thing. They were nine and seven. It did make a difference that Christmas. I knew things would never be quite the same—not for Dennis and me anyway. Still, the gifts from Santa were just as abundant. Laura got a basketball, a Samantha doll, and a Mississippi map turtle. Ashley got an Atlanta Braves cap, an Addie doll, and a kingsnake. I’d told Dennis in advance that I couldn’t participate in the feeding of the kingsnake, in that they eat pinkies—baby mice. He’d fed it a couple of pinkies during the weeks prior to Christmas. But when the ﬁrst postChristmas feeding time arrived, all the pet store had was a slightly older baby mouse that already had white and gray hair. It couldn’t have been more than a week old, though. Its eyes were still closed. It was tiny. Reluctantly Dennis put it in the snake’s cage. By this time, the snake had a name—Elvis. Elvis didn’t eat the mouse. Dennis started feeling sorry for the mouse. He took it from Elvis’s cage. He held it in his palm. He got an eye dropper and fed it milk. The girls and I stood nearby, watching. As I write this, the baby mouse has been with us ﬁve days. They told us at the pet store that his chances for survival are minuscule. Elvis is hungry. We’re getting him a new mouse today.

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So we go into 1995 with two dogs, two cats, seven frogs, a goldﬁsh, a snake, a turtle, and an embryotic-looking mouse that we feed every hour with an eye dropper. We’ve lost our minds. All four of us. We remind each other of this truth every time we warm the milk up in the microwave for the mouse. We keep saying we’re not going to give the mouse a name because when he dies it will be harder if he has a name. But we all agreed that if—by some miracle he survives—we’ll name him Baby. In the meantime, we check on him obsessively. We don’t have much innocence left in this household—what with a year laden with family deaths and white Broncos and ice skaters who can’t be friends. But we’ve got a mouse the size of a thimble that we hold in our palm. We can’t ﬁgure out why he’s here with us, but we know he matters.

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Th e S o u t h

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The South Catches On to AIDS

, When I was growing up in Birmingham, my family took a trip to the beach every July. During the summer of 1954, there was a particularly severe outbreak of polio in Montgomery. My parents tell the story of how we drove through that hot city, in our old green Chevy, with the car windows rolled up, until we were safe onto highway 331. They inevitably smile when they tell it—remembering their own naïveté, the idea that by rolling up the car windows, they’d protect us all from polio. It seems that every generation has to cope with an epidemic. A cholera outbreak almost destroyed Birmingham in 1873. Because the city was young and poor, nobody knew how to cope. The population was cut in half. There was, in those days, a madam named Lou Wooster. Raised in a wealthy Mobile family, she’d come to Birmingham in order to make her way. Stories of her colorful, maverick life are testimonials to who we are. Once, a group of church ladies visited her brothel, urging her to repent and relinquish her possessions. In her memoir The Autobiography of a Magdalen, she writes that the ladies took off her earrings. “Give these to us for Jesus,” they instructed. “This was beyond my comprehension,” she writes. “I was in no particular hurry to give my earrings to Jesus.” Later, though, she gave more than her earrings to Jesus. At the height of the cholera epidemic, she valiantly turned her brothel into an inﬁrmary. She told physicians to send her the sick and dying who had no family. “I’ll 75

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prepare the bodies for burial, too,” she offered. And she did. A survivor of the epidemic, she died years later. Birmingham gentry wanted to pay their respects but social custom forbade this. So a long string of empty carriages followed her cofﬁn to the graveyard. In the introduction to her memoir, an anonymous minister praised “her ministry to the living and the dead, the outcasts of humanity in the city where she lived.” Her Mobile family, embarrassed by her profession and her memoir, attempted to buy up and destroy all the copies of her book. Obviously, they failed because the book can be found in the Birmingham Public Library’s Tutwiler Collection of Southern History and Literature. Birmingham was a Wild West kind of town, a place for people like Lou Wooster, renegades, people with ﬁre and passion. Nothing’s changed. We’ve never been genteel. We’re hill folks. We like to ﬁght. But the ﬂip side of this coin is the ability to look disaster in the face, to turn brothels into inﬁrmaries. Birmingham AIDS Outreach—an organization established in the mid’80s—was to be a network for providing information and support for people with AIDS. But mostly it was established to combat fear. That fear was particularly problematic for churches. Until it hit home. Perhaps it was a member of a congregation or a family coping with a child of a clergyman or a clergyman himself who learned he was HIV positive. But it took, of course, an artist to show the Deep South the truth. Melissa Springer, a photographer from Birmingham whose inspired work documents—and makes art of—the lives of ordinary people struggling with love and mortality, has a series of portraits made during a friend’s “laboring unto death” with AIDS. The man was a dancer. In the ﬁnal days, Springer photographed him with his mother. A ray of light falls over the mother’s face. Her arm cradles her boy. “This is the Madonna,” Springer says, “the Pieta. Mothers all over the country are doing this.” It was a reminder that a mother’s love for her child abides even when society turns away, that God’s love for his child abides even when the church turns away. Toward the end of The Autobiography of a Magdalen, Lou Wooster wrote, “Why I remained here has always been a mystery to me. I had the means to leave and was constantly urged to do so. . . . I shall always love Birmingham, for this was the place I found freedom.”

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We’re a stubborn town. We’ve never listened to government ofﬁcials or religious fundamentalists who’ve tried to tell us how we ought to act or think. That is why there are plenty of Lou Woosters in Birmingham today—men and women who are turning brothels into inﬁrmaries, death into art, and churches into sanctuaries of compassion.

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The AIDS Care Team

, The setting was Redmont Park in a fancy condo, overlooking the city—home of ordained minister Barbara Watts. The menu was turkey, dressing, and ﬁxings. CD music included Judy Collins’s rendition of the old Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts” and the classic “Amazing Grace.” We ate by candlelight. The mood was wistful. The occasion was a Thanksgiving eve celebration for the Southside Baptist Church AIDS Care Team and a group of people with HIV that the team ministered to. It felt more like a wedding feast. And what a strange pair we were: a handful of Baptists and a handful of men with HIV. When I joined the AIDS Care Team, I felt awkward and clumsy and ignorant. I remember a picnic we held in a park one summer. I remember picking up the guys at the home where they lived and thinking, “They’re hating every minute of this. They’d rather be anywhere on earth than at a hamburger and baked beans cookout with a bunch of misguided Baptist do-gooders.” Maybe they were uncomfortable that day. But they didn’t show it if they were. They were gracious, hospitable, and patient with us. Maybe they already knew that we were to engage in a dance over the next few months—and that the church members were the ones who didn’t know the steps.

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What the care team did, under the direction of Barbara Watts, was very simple. We divided ourselves into groups of ﬁve or six. Each group had a designated week in which we got together with the residents in whatever way we wanted—for a meal, for coffee, a movie, a lazy southern-style afternoon on the porch. This was a ministry of friendship. It was Birmingham’s Joe Elmore’s deﬁnition of witness—to be present with a person. And those of us on the AIDS Care Team were the beneﬁciaries. Though the “designated week” still existed, a looser and more genuine sense of camaraderie between the church and the residents began to grow. We no longer thought of ourselves in categories of patient and caregiver. I think we all understood that it wasn’t the church that was merciful. It was the people with HIV who were merciful for letting the church minister to them. For as UAB’s AIDS chaplain Malcolm Marler once said, “This disease cuts all barriers and presents the church the ﬁnal opportunity to redeem itself and be who it says it is—the reconciler.” It is a two-way street—mercy is—and I was acutely aware of this as we shared that Thanksgiving dinner. After a dessert of roulage and fruit pie, we sat around the ﬁreplace, enjoyed the view of Birmingham’s night lights, and talked. There were many drama folks among us, and actor Dwayne Johnson—a member of the care team—showed us a Saint Genesius medal given to him by his mother. Perhaps most theater people know the lore of this particular saint, but I didn’t. Dwayne told us the story of Saint Genesius. The legend, he said, was that Genesius was a Roman actor during the time when Christians were being persecuted in Rome. He’d take part in plays or skits that ridiculed Christians. In the midst of one of these performances, he got so into character that he ﬁnally understood the nature of Christianity. He understood who, why. He understood himself. He couldn’t get out of character. He became his character. He was converted. And he is the patron saint of actors. There were times during that AIDS ministry when I felt like an actor, when I felt like we were all acting out a script. It was if the HIV residents were only playing the “sick role” and the members of the care team were

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only playing “the ministers,” because in actuality we were all suffering. For the truth of the matter is that both Christianity and HIV have been subjected to misunderstanding. We need one another, for this reason if for no other. And if we keep acting, we will—as Saint Genesius did—become who we say we are.

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The Family Reunion

, There are two things you can count on during early summer in the South: thunderstorms and family reunions. On the ﬁrst Sunday in July of 1994 I attended a reunion in Ohatchee, Alabama—my mother’s side. The Jennings family has been having this gathering since 1948, but this was the ﬁrst time I’d been in many years. It was a bonaﬁde dinner-on-the-grounds, held in a big open ﬁeld complete with a horse, Confederate ﬂag, antique tractor, and miles of potato salad and casseroles. Here were all these folks I hardly knew, but if I looked closely enough I could catch a glimpse of my mother’s thimble nose, my grandfather’s Cherokee skin, my own green eyes. I met long-lost cousins with wonderful nicknames like Grubbin and Teet. When I asked Grubbin who gave him his name, he replied, “R.G. and ’em, I guess.” Four of my great-uncles—L.D., Sonny, Forney, and Wallace—were there. Forney, ninety-two, ran a country store most of his adult life. Three of the ﬁngers on his right hand were missing, a mishap with dynamite. It was exactly the kind of detail I hunger for. I was on a scavenger hunt, searching for pieces of information. I felt I’d hit the gold mine when cousin Lester told me that my great-grandfather Major Jennings was a barber of sorts. He carried a pair of scissors in his pocket and might stop you on the road if your hair was looking scraggly. “Let me just give you the ﬁve-minute bevel,” he’d say, “and roach it back a 81

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bit.” Lester didn’t remember what all that meant, but it didn’t matter. “Yeah, your great-granddaddy was a sweet man. Grew vegetables, made ax handles, and whittled his thumbnail like it was a piece of wood.” From these simple tidbits, I constructed the man in my mind. I saw him ambling down a dusty road in Ohatchee, working away on his nail with a pocketknife, stopping a friend on the bridge for a quick haircut. Writer Sean O’Faolain says that a writer is like a magician. The difference is that the height of a magician’s art is to make a person disappear. The height of a writer’s art is to make a person appear. The southern writer cannot do this without people like Lester who have the gift of memory. As I wrote down the names of people in a photograph taken at this same reunion forty-seven years earlier, Lester told me I was smart to get the names down. “Pretty soon there won’t be anybody left who remembers,” he said. There are many levels of sad truth to this statement. After dinner (dinner, of course, being the noontime meal in the South), another cousin, Harold—who had sky blue eyes and was still wearing his Sunday shoes—took us to the graveyard. My mother, daughter, and I instinctively went to our knees when we saw the graves of the ancestors. Ashley ran her ﬁngers over the names, the dates, the rough concrete slabs. One of the markers read: Jack Harvey killed by John Lewis 1961. “Why did they write that on it?” my daughter asked me. I told her the family probably wanted the world to remember the injustice they’d suffered. But who knows the real story of Jack Harvey and John Lewis? Who were they? What were they ﬁghting over? Was it land or lust? Since they were southerners, you can be sure it was one or the other. When it was time to come home to Birmingham, we stood in the cemetery by the churchyard, and we embraced Harold—this soft-spoken man we didn’t know but to whom we were inexorably bound by the power of genetics. “We have to keep this thing going,” he said to my daughter, pointing back to the ﬁeld where we’d had dinner. “Even after I’m gone and your grandmama and mama are gone, we have to keep this thing going.” So what is it we’re looking for when we search the tombstones of coun-

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try cemeteries or spend hours poring over census records at the public library? It’s more than names we want. We want pieces of the past, clues, details. We are all trying to make things appear. And when somebody remembers something, something as insigniﬁcant as the ﬁve-minute bevel or the whittled thumbnail, the entire past is re-created. Those long dead are suddenly alive, walking with you, on a hot summer day, through an open ﬁeld in Ohatchee, Alabama.

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Grits

, I hate South-bashing. I also hate the aftermath of it—the indignant letters to the editor, the counterpoint editorials. Nevertheless, here I sit obsessed with what Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko said recently: “In some parts of the country, especially the South, many parents can’t stop fretting and fussing because a teacher isn’t telling their offspring to bow their heads and ask the good Lord for something or other. You would think these God-fearing folk would be content to have their children say a morning prayer in the kitchen before eating their grits.” God-fearing folk, eating their grits. Why grits? Why is it Yankees can’t get off grits? Royko, after all, was trying to write a column on school prayer. How on earth did he end up in a bowl of grits? And what are grits anyway? I understand that they are a by-product of dried corn kernels that’ve been ﬁnely ground. But why are they also the object of ridicule? Why not Goo Goo Clusters—the South’s favorite candy. As the slogan says, “Go get a Goo Goo. . . . It’s Goood.” Why can’t they go after Goo Goos when they want to make fun of us? Or Moon Pies. I understand there’s a Moon Pie Cultural Club in Charlotte, N.C., dedicated to spreading the story of the Moon Pie and establishing club chapters throughout the civilized world. What about chitlins? Perhaps chitlins are too visceral, so to speak, for brainy types like Mike Royko.

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I have this hunch that people like Royko secretly want to eat grits— both ﬁguratively and literally. I’ve never met a northerner who didn’t like grits. I always ﬁx grits when New York editors visit us, because they expect grits. They want to call home at midmorning and tell their coworkers, “I just ate grits.” It makes them feel like they’ve seen the world. I can’t tell you how many boxes of Jim Dandy or Martha White we’ve FedExed to Manhattan after the editors have left, after they’ve called to say, “Can you mail me some grits? My girlfriend’s got to have some.” I tell them to be sure to use half milk, half water. I learned this from my sister-in-law Haden, who is from Camden, Alabama. She says she learned it from her mother, who learned it from the wife of a sand and gravel salesman in Tallassee, Alabama, who ﬁxed a meal of fried ﬁsh, turnip greens, and grits one night. The grits were wonderful, and Haden’s mother was told, “It’s because of milk.” So the other day my mother and Haden and I were trying to ﬁgure out how to make my daddy feel better after a series of medical procedures, and Haden said, “Grits with milk!” Right before I left that day, I noticed a freezer-size Ziploc bag of Goo Goo Clusters on the kitchen counter, sent to my daddy from his sister, Mary Nell. This was her idea of what would make him better. Southern women, after all, are gifted in the healing arts and the mainstay of southern healing has been the use of food. Eggs, baking soda, sugar, whiskey, tea, syrup, herbs, plants, and mustard poultices. Household staples—grits, Goo Goos. Eddy Harris, author of South of Haunted Dreams: A Ride through Slavery’s Old Back Yard, traveled the South on his blue BMW motorcycle, searching for rednecks and bigots. Instead he found emancipation from his own racism and bias about white southerners. He tells of a white waitress in Mississippi who suddenly bought him a salad because he looked tired to her. Through a series of encounters with tiny acts of kindness, he came to write not an essay of hatred, but a love song to the South. “Tell us about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.” William Faulkner asks that in Absalom, Absalom! There are no question marks, however, in those sentences. For those aren’t questions. They are verses to a song. A love song—

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like the Goo Goo Clusters my aunt left on the kitchen counter, like grits with milk, like the way I’m already starting to feel better about Mike Royko, who probably wishes he could sing the song himself.

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The Southern Art of Feeding

, The fact that I love to feed people, especially men, used to give me a vague sense of discomfort. I mean if I’m a modern liberated woman, why do I derive such pleasure in the traditional task of making dinner? Why do I, like my grandmothers, circle the table like a gloriﬁed waitress, eager to reﬁll iced tea glasses, to serve milk gravy, to lean over the men’s shoulders and query them with yet another mufﬁn? Isn’t this blatantly unenlightened? Isn’t a woman meant for more lofty endeavors than feeding? That was before I gave birth to my ﬁrst child and experienced the earthy, stark reality of being a mammal—of breast-feeding a creature who grows, thrives, survives solely on my instinctual need to feed. It was then I realized that offering sustenance to other human beings—that is, preparing and serving food—is a powerful art that transcends all intellectual ideas of what women ought and ought not do. It’s one thing I was born to do. Others may disagree, but for me, the need to feed is a legacy I now understand and fulﬁll without apology. I suppose the art of feeding is universal, so it’s with acknowledged bias that I suggest that southerners do it with particular grace. Because of our rural heritage, we are free from the trappings of proper place settings, damask tablecloths, and ﬁne china (except for the special occasions), and we can concentrate instead on shucking thirty-six ears of corn. Volume counts—etiquette doesn’t. When I was a child, my grandmother’s table 87

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housed at least ten different vegetable dishes and three kinds of pies. The assumption was that people were hungry. The point was to satisfy. Last summer, a New York editor was visiting our home, and my sisterin-law Haden offered to come over and prepare a southern meal for our guest and a group of friends. The story goes that she called her sister, Mary, and told her about the event. Haden recited the menu she was preparing: fried chicken, black-eyed peas, fresh sliced tomatoes, fried corn, squash, okra, slaw, rice and gravy, cornbread, homemade biscuits, and black-bottom pie. Her sister exclaimed in all earnestness, “You mean you aren’t baking a ham?” I believe there’s a kind of sensuality associated with the generosity of southern feeding. We grow our vegetables. Our hands knead the earth. We’ve heard so many family stories of the men coming in hungry from the ﬁelds that we still respond accordingly, and that’s all right by me. Cooking is draped in a languid pace. You rise at dawn and by the peach-colored light of early morning you put the beans in the black pot and forget about them until dusk. The other necessary ingredient to southern feeding is that we serve it with grace. You may be tired and half-fried with anxiety yourself, but when friends come in, your face opens to smile, you take their hands and draw them into the heart of your kitchen. If it’s an act—well, acting is an art, too. We feed to nurture, to heal, to create, to enrich friendships, to gather family, to admit our inability to do anything else to comfort (as evidenced by day-of-the-funeral food we prepare and deliver). It’s downright biblical. I grew up Southern Baptist. Feeding the ﬁve thousand was always a startling story to me, but I understood the concept. I guess by the time most of us southerners are old, we’ve fed that many, too. My daughter has a pet turtle. She will put some lettuce in the terrarium and sit for hours, waiting, watching to see him eat what’s been offered. A lactating mother can imagine herself nursing her baby, and her milk will “let down.” Cedar waxwings collect berries just to share with their friends. Watch them sometimes beak-to-beak on a telephone wire. Perhaps, then, my need to feed really isn’t a cultural imposition. It’s a biological imperative.

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Museum

, Back during the crazy days, my husband and I used to have time for passionate arguments. We’d perfected these marathons to state-of-theart drama. The precipitating event—always over jealousy—was soon lost in what we called “museum.” We’d wander in rooms of memory. We’d open closets of skeletons. Who did what, when, where, with whom. Those days—thank the stars—are over. We remember “museum” with affection. But when I walk in to a real museum, I always knot up. I’m thinking there’s a part of myself stashed there, open for debate. The ﬁrst time I went to Birmingham’s Civil Rights Institute, I didn’t feel exposed. Maybe it was because I viewed it alongside my children. I was caught up in their experience. I saw it how they saw it—as a foreign piece of history. It wasn’t until I took an out-of-town visitor there that I saw myself in the rubble. The visitor was writer Alan Cheuse of NPR’s All Things Considered. We wanted badly to take him to the institute. We felt proud. We were relieved to have something other than the statue of Vulcan to offer. “Are you taking me here so you’ll have something to write about in that column of yours?” he asked, as we got out of our van. I told him the truth: that I live in daily hope of ﬁnding something to write about but that I doubted there was a story here. Still, I pursued it. “Like, what were you thinking I might write about?” I

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asked him. He said maybe I’d be interested in his reaction to the museum, maybe that’d be a story. I knew it wouldn’t. The young African American man behind the ticket window recognized Dennis, my husband. They exchanged friendly words, and I checked to see if Cheuse was watching. He wasn’t. But I knew, then—this early in the tour—that my old shame was at the surface. It was a familiar yearning: to prove to an outsider that we aren’t who they think we are. We went inside. A ﬁeld trip of students fanned the venue halls. They were a mix of white and black kids. Again, I checked Cheuse for a sign of approval. He was busy punching buttons on the jukebox in the Barriers Gallery, like Dinah Washington’s “I Don’t Hurt Anymore,” 1952. When we got to Rosa Parks, I told him my mother always rode in the back of the bus during the ﬁfties. “Her protest?” he inquired. I told him, yes. When we got to the March on Washington, Cheuse told us he’d been there as a college student. He spent a long time in front of the big screen, watching the ﬁlm. “Just looking for myself,” he joked. When we got to the Birmingham jail cell, he said they ought to let people inside it. What good is a closed door, he wanted to know. He said they ought to let viewers inside and lock the door behind them. I felt bad. I was thinking, he doesn’t like it. He doesn’t think the museum measures up. I thought he was bored. I started remembering how awful it is to have to get toted, hauled to and fro in somebody else’s city. I thought of how when I’m on a book tour or speaking somewhere, I just want to be left alone. I thought he probably wanted this, too. I was growing paranoid. I was thinking of how I was here, just the other day, at the institute with a group of editorial page writers. We were listening to a panel talk about Alabama’s low self-esteem. A Birmingham News editorial called “An Alabama Song” was being passed around. It spoke of a need for understanding our heritage and cultural future. “Where is the candidate who will see that raising our self-esteem and understanding our artistic legacy is just as important as raising new smokestacks?” it said. Amen and amen. By the end of touring the museum with Cheuse, I was feeling every bit of who I am. There’s the rebel in me, snifﬁng the outsider for condescension. There is the southern belle in me, the hostess who’s gracious and wearing a long skirt and wringing her hands and saying, “Here, sign the

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book, won’t you?” We might as well have been at a spring tea or a wedding reception or a funeral home. Then I remembered that the book you sign at the Civil Rights Institute isn’t like other books. The book is for people who participated in the movement. There are little categories to put a check mark in: marched, arrested, jailed, sang, sat-in, etc. I watched him sign his name and check off what all he did. I knew it brought him a bit of satisfaction. People are, after all, wanting to be remembered as having done noble things. Even if they did ignoble things, they want to be remembered. I was thinking these things as I watched Cheuse sign his name and check his deeds. But I was also thinking how I can’t sign my name in the book. I was only a child then. And, unfortunately, there are no categories for those of us who were eleven years old—and white—in 1963. I wish there were. But what on earth would these categories be? They’d have to say things like Didn’t understand. Wasn’t my fault. Wanted to hide. Felt scared. Felt dirty. Felt ashamed. Still do. Always will.

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The Disappearing South

, An interviewer once asked me why I write about old people. I answered somewhat smugly, “That’s like asking me why I dream about elephants. I don’t control what I write any more than I control what I dream at night.” Being a perceptive and undaunted journalist, she pressed on: “But there’s got to be something that fascinates or disturbs you about old people or you wouldn’t be interested enough to keep using them as characters.” She was right. I suppose the truth of the matter is that they’re dying. Louis Rubin, in his essay “Changing, Enduring, Forever Still the South,” says, “In Southern literature, things are always about to disappear.” Just what those things are remains in the eye of the beholder, the heart of the writer. For me, it is the loss of rural life—the fact that my mother didn’t have an indoor bathroom until she was a teenager, went barefoot to school; that her mother washed clothes in a black iron pot over a ﬁre in the backyard, using water toted in from a neighbor’s well, and when washing was over, she’d put the children in the rinse water to bathe them; that my grandfather sustained a family of six through the Depression, without a job, because he knew how to work the earth; that my father, a Yale graduate whose family lived in a three-room house and whose mother pumped gas at a ﬁlling station and believed it more prudent to own a cow than a car, arrived in New Haven, Connecticut, from Dolomite, Alabama, still saying, “he don’t” and “she don’t.” And that my mother would leave 92

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rural Alabama for the ﬁrst time on a train for the West Coast and somehow ﬁnd an apartment in Seattle for herself and my father, who had, at twenty-one, sailed around the world; that they would, on August 14, 1945, ﬁnd themselves in San Francisco the day the war ended; that the woman who bathed in the rinse water in her mother’s wash pot ten years earlier would now be watching women swimming nude in the fountains for their soldiers. How can my life and the lives of my contemporaries ever come close? How can the architecture of the New South ever equal the naked girl in the wash pot under the oak tree? If Louis Rubin is right, then the new generation of southern writers should be writing like madmen, frenzied with torment and panic, for this is it. It’s all going now. Not only is urbanization erasing an entire past, and not only is the new generation of southern writers facing this fact, but we’re also facing our own midlife, entering the age of grief when youth is vanishing and time is running on. A few years ago, I sat in a psychotherapist’s ofﬁce and said to her, “I keep thinking I’ve lost something, but I don’t know what it is.” When asked to make a list of things I’ve lost, including tangible material objects, I listed my mother’s opal ring—the ring that my great-grandmother gave my grandmother who gave my mother who gave me. We aren’t the jewelry kind of women. My maternal ancestors, as I’ve said, were hard-working women who put their hands into the earth. The opal was the only tangible treasure of an otherwise poor, rural existence. We were all October-born. Opal was my birthstone. My mother gave the ring to me when I was a teenager. When I was twenty-ﬁve—at the height of my hedonistic pursuits—I moved to Ohio with my husband. We survived the winter of 1977–78 and called it quits, moved back to Birmingham. Haphazardly, we crammed all we owned into my rusty ’73 Nova. Problem was, as we were leaving, I realized there was no room for the plastic trash bag that contained all my underwear. Since the car was packed to the hilt, we carelessly tied the trash bag to the luggage rack. We had just crossed the Ohio River, from Cincinnati into Covington, Kentucky, when the bag exploded. Through the rearview mirror, I watched all my underwear ﬂy into the wind and scatter itself along the interstate. We whooped and hollered. It was, at the time, a splendid

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symbol of our pleasure over crossing the river into southern territory, going home, jobless, tossing our last remnants of ambition to the wind. It was also 1978. In all due reverence to what I perceived as my generation’s contribution to a free society, I didn’t replace the underwear for quite some time. Soon after, the absence of the opal ring became a mild irritant to my ﬂedgling seventies conscience, something I didn’t acknowledge to myself or to my mother. Gradually, as I set up a new home, I began searching my belongings, hoping that the tiny box containing the opal, so long unworn, was somewhere among my manuscripts or clothes or dishes. A lot of time passed before I let myself believe it had been in the bag of underwear. It was too painful, too symbolic of my somehow being the weak link in an otherwise responsible, strong line of women who know to take care of gifts. I’m the kind of person who loses something every day, who can’t keep order, who seems to create chaos on purpose. “Mama, you’re always losing things!” complains my older daughter, as I search my bureau for yet another missing item, still believing with each search that some magic will cause the opal ring to reappear. In my heart, though, I know it’s lost forever, somewhere along I-75 where you leave the Midwest, cross the river, turn to look back, and seeing that you’ve lost your most intimate possessions, know that you’re in the South.

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S p i r i t u a l M at t e r s

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The Star of Wonder

,

In December 1944 my father’s ship had been on a shakedown cruise from Seattle to San Diego. On Christmas eve the crew docked in the harbor there. My father was twenty years old, an ensign fresh from midshipman’s school. This was his ﬁrst Christmas away from home. The war in Europe was winding down, but the war in the Paciﬁc was raging. He had been assigned to an attack transport ship whose main purpose was to load LCVP boats to evacuate casualties, to deliver marines and army infantrymen to invade islands. Christmas eve and Christmas day would be spent in San Diego; then on December twenty-sixth the ship was to sail into the Paciﬁc. There was a veteran ofﬁcer, my father tells me, who was twice his age. The ofﬁcer invited my father to his house for Christmas eve dinner. My father was overwhelmed that the ofﬁcer and his wife were sacriﬁcing their time alone in order to open their home and give sustenance to this boy from Alabama, a stranger. Afterward, my daddy walked alone, back to the ship, in utter loneliness. And this, this image of him on Christmas eve, returning to his ship under a dark night sky, is the part of the story I cherish—even more than the ofﬁcer and his wife taking him in; the courage of the boy who was willing to follow the star of wonder on a night when it must have seemed to have disappeared from sight. For how could he have known, on that Christmas eve, that the war would end a half year later? That his

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orders to invade mainland Japan would be suddenly erased by the miracle of peace? That he and my mother would be reunited in San Francisco on August 15, 1945—the day the war would end? How could he know they’d dance in the streets? How could he have known that forty-seven years later, the story itself would be his gift to his daughter? Life isn’t happy. We are reminded of what we’ve lost—spouses, parents, children, friends, youth, health, dreams. Or we are perplexed like the boy who returned to his ship, bewildered by battles we neither understand nor desire to ﬁght. But the star of wonder shines, and perhaps the best years of our lives wait on the other side of despair. I can tell you that I haven’t always followed the star of wonder. Sometime around 1972, in my early twenties, I turned and walked away from the light. I wandered in the dark for over a decade until ﬁnally, no longer able to tolerate the inexorable weight of darkness, I turned to face the star of wonder. I returned, a prodigal daughter to my faith, in 1983. I can tell you that since I began to follow the star, God has given me children I never thought I could have, stories I never thought I could write, courage I never dared imagine. The star of wonder has taught me to refrain from absently tearing down the spider’s web, but rather to behold its symmetry, to witness the spider at work spinning its intricate art, to understand its tiny creation. The star of wonder has taught me to love the good earth, to embrace pain, to kneel, to wait, to forever lay aside the question of whether or not an afterlife exists because I’m already living it. On days I cry to God, “Why can’t I see you?” the star of wonder will lead me to a ﬁery sunset, a host of iridescent butterﬂies, a crimson maple. When I beseech God, “Speak to me!” the star of wonder will lead me deep into the woods where I can hear the birdsong. When I believe I’ve lost sight of the star, I will behold it in the eyes of my children or the hand of a kind stranger. And when I am frustrated because I can’t understand the mind of God, the star of wonder leads me to the Christ Child so that I can understand the heart of God. So, today, I offer you this, my story—that I once was lost. And I offer you my father’s story—the young boy returning to the ship from a dinner hosted by angels unaware, the boy who was willing to follow the star of hope, to face the music, to face war even, and to ultimately ﬁnd his bliss; the boy who, in the moment of his greatest despair, was unknowingly cre-

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ating a gift, a story, for his unborn daughter. If this season of life is sad for you, record it—if not in writing then in memory so that you can tell it someday to your child, your niece, nephew, grandchild because it’s part of your story, and when you tell it, it becomes a song. When we are young, we are told: follow your star. There is only one star. The star of wonder shines for you. Follow it. It leads to the stable, a quiet place where animals live. If you scorn getting your hands dirty, come anyway, because once you see the miracle—that God has come to earth— you won’t care that you’re kneeling on hay, that your skin is dusty, that you are among animals. Do you see the baby? Touch his hands. I have. I can promise you that his hands will open doors for you, heal you, transform your sins into memory, into poignant lessons that you can learn to love rather than despise; that the bitter core of despair contains the seed of a miracle, that those of us who hurt the most will be in the star’s brightest light, will, in fact, lead the way as we all walk together, in this life, toward Bethlehem.

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Jan, My Cousin

, My father’s side of the family loves to perform. When I was growing up, we saved the best acting for Christmas eve. My father who was a public speaker and my brother who was an actor would give interpretive readings of Luke 2. I’d play a bit of Rachmaninoff on the piano. One of my cousins, a gymnast, did cartwheels and backﬂips. An aunt by marriage sang the blues. And for the grand ﬁnale, my uncle Jim would pull out his guitar and sing Frank Sinatra’s “I Did It My Way.” His daughter, Jan, was also a musician. Years later, she would bring down the house at the Miss Florida pageant by bursting out of the classical violin piece she was playing for the talent competition into some riproaring, down-home ﬁddling. Jan is the most beautiful woman I know—lanky, blond, and magnetic. Like many of us, she lived in the fast lane for a number of years but eventually got her life together, married a good man, and now has a baby girl. So when I received the call that Jan, thirty-seven, had a brain aneurysm and was scheduled for surgery in Mobile, I was stunned and scared. My uncle called after surgery to say the procedure had gone well but there was a problem: Jan wasn’t waking up. I, along with the other cousins, Beth and Julie, didn’t ask what that meant. We just got in the car and headed for Mobile. When we arrived at the hospital, we learned that something had indeed gone wrong during surgery, but it wasn’t yet clear what had happened. 100

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There was speculation Jan had suffered a stroke during the operation or the clamp they’d used had turned slightly and was pressing on the brain. We were told that her eyes were open now but that her right side was paralyzed and she couldn’t speak. At the designated hour, we were allowed in to see her. Her head was shaved on one side, but the other side of her hair was spread luxuriously on her pillow. She wasn’t bandaged or mummied as I’d anticipated. She was natural, wild, and struggling to come to life. It was clear she recognized each of us, but she searched us intensely, one by one, as if asking who had the key? I wanted to be the one. I scribbled an alphabet on paper. “Can you spell me what you want to say?” I asked her. She studied the letters as if they were the most interesting thing she’d ever seen, but she couldn’t yet grasp the concept. Other family members massaged her feet or whispered words of encouragement to her. When the visiting time was up, she pulled us down, one by one, with her strong left arm and kissed us with a left-sided kiss. Language wasn’t there, but family love was intact, and I felt anew the power of it. We were blood-kin. We had oftentimes in the past turned to one another and said, “Blood sure runs thick, doesn’t it?” That’s a southern way of saying, I love you. Back in the waiting room that day at the hospital, we told family stories because these tales are the way we comfort each other. It is the way we act out the drama of who we are. Family stories are the way we get through funerals and divorces and surgeries and weddings. Two weeks passed. Jan began saying a few words. Her right side remained paralyzed, but the family was optimistic. Her baby daughter visited with her in the hospital room. Her parents and brother stayed with her by day. Her husband stayed with her at night. Those of us here in Birmingham waited and prayed. Jan, who always loved the stage, had to play the most difﬁcult role of her life. Southern writer Dorothy Allison says that somebody cornered her once at a bookstore and demanded, “Why is it all you southerners have so many cousins?”

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“Well,” she replied. “We just keep track of ours. And what I don’t understand is how come you don’t.” One of my cousins lay in a bed in the Mobile Inﬁrmary during that long summer. And when I think of how we sat there outside her room telling family stories, I am comforted by the fact that that crisis, too, will one day be something to pass on. It will be part of our family lore—the story of Jan’s descent into darkness and her long swim back up to the surface.

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The Apple Tree

, On the night of July 4, 1997, I sat in my brother’s den watching TV. Dennis, the girls, and I were anxious to see the ﬁrst pictures from Mars. As the black-and-white shots appeared on the screen, a commentator asked a scientist, “So, what do you see? Are we alone? Are we all alone here?” The scientist replied, “I can’t see anything yet.” The rocky surface of Mars looked like parts of the Southwest. But the commentator kept on with his philosophical plea: Are we alone? As if a Martian might pop up at any moment and say, “No, guys. We’re here and so is God. Search no more.” But I understood the commentator’s need to ask the question over and over. When Hale-Bopp was with us last spring, we kept staring up at it— us midlifers—trying to see if it might mean something. Its blurry tail was so suggestive. Was this the star of Bethlehem? Then Heaven’s Gate cultists put plastic bags over their heads, and we shrugged, “Oh well.” But right after Hale-Bopp disappeared that spring, my family drove out to Roebuck to visit my mother-in-law, Ellaree Covington. Like my own mom, Ellaree suffers from dementia. Her most recent delusion had been that an apple tree was growing in her yard. According to the woman who helped take care of her, Ellaree prized the fancied apple tree. She picked pretend apples, sat for hours under the invisible branches, and wanted her children to see what she was seeing. 103

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Incidentally, she is also blind. So on this day, we were carrying a real apple tree in the backseat of our van. The woman who cared for her had suggested we plant a real apple tree in Ellaree’s yard. When we got there, we went inside and she greeted us with distant charm. We asked her about her apple tree and her face lit up. She told us we must see it. We asked her to take us to the place where it stood. We helped her down the back steps to the yard. She felt her way along and ﬁnally stopped at a spot directly under the sun. “Here,” she said, “it’s here.” She knelt and put her hands out. She grasped at nothing. “It was right here,” she lamented. “It was right here.” In the meantime, our daughters, Ashley and Laura, had walked to the van and gotten the real tree out. Now, they set it where her hands were reaching. They wrapped her ﬁngers around it. “Here it is, Mamaw. It’s here.” She smiled. We dug a big hole and planted the tree. Then we stood in a circle around it—Dennis, Ashley, Laura, Jeanie, Bunky, Shelia, Ellaree, and me. One brother, Gary, was at work. The other brother, Scotty, had been killed in an industrial accident two years before. The father, Sam, had died, too—not to mention Michael who’d not survived a car wreck, and four other grandchildren who had died before they’d had time to live. The family had suffered more than its share. But we had the tree now, and we stood there under the sky. Hale-Bopp was gone. But I was as sure as I’ve ever been that we are not alone.

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Mother’s Day

, When I was twenty-six years old, I decided it was time to be a mother. I conceived quickly. A few weeks after the doctor conﬁrmed I was pregnant, I was walking up a ﬂight of stairs in the Southside apartment where Dennis and I were living at the time. It was a late October afternoon. I remember the way the sun was slanting as I turned for the ﬁnal ascent up the steps. A pain swept over me. It’s hard to describe what it felt like, other than to say it made me swoon. I got to the apartment, turned the key, and right before I hit the bed, I noticed my face in the mirror. It was gray. Dennis called the doctor. He said for us to meet him at the emergency room. On the ride over, I lay in the backseat, as euphoric as I’ve ever been in my life. The endorphins must have been kicking in like ﬁreworks. An exam revealed that I had an ectopic pregnancy. The fallopian tube had ruptured. I was bleeding internally. They rushed me in to surgery. I was given a block, numbing me from the waist down. While the doctors took the fallopian tube and baby from my body, I lay fully awake, wracked by nausea and confusion. It’s a good thing I didn’t know what the next few years would be like. I was left with one tube—scarred and doomed by a future of adhesions that’d make conception nearly impossible. After years of fertility tests, surgeries, and an ultimate prognosis of “maybe a 10 percent chance of a baby,” Dennis and I set about to destroy the nest we’d built. 105

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Bitterness turned to anger, anger to cynicism, cynicism to a destruction so myriad, I often think of it now as a hard diamond. A series of humbling events ﬁnally forced us to face the fact that, child or no child, we still had a purpose in life. And then grace occurred: Ashley and Laura. It’s hard to write about all this, and it will take years to tell the whole story, but the point today is that it’s Mother’s Day. I celebrate my mother—she’s my best friend, and I give thanks for my daughters. But I grieve, too. I suffer with the 5 million couples (one in six) who are struggling with infertility, for what they endure—the temperature charts, biopsies, laparoscopies, fertility drugs, artiﬁcial inseminations, in vitro fertilization (IVF), zygote intrafallopian transfer (ZIFT), and gamete intrafallopian transfer (GIFT). Infertility treatment is not only time-consuming, frustrating, and often painful. It’s also expensive. I understand that a single procedure of IVF costs anywhere from $6,000 to $10,000. This is a humbling experience for the generation who grew up thinking that could get what they want in life. But having a baby is not a yuppie obsession. It is a biological imperative, a godly pursuit. When I look back on my own experience, I do know one thing we did wrong. Once the odds were on the table, we should have pursued adoption. Perhaps our girls would have an older brother or sister if we had. Last week, a woman we know who has been trying to adopt for years rushed up to us at Wednesday night prayer supper with a photo album. “Our son!” she exclaimed. I looked at his face. He wasn’t a baby, he was a preschooler—the one set apart for this couple. If things proceed as planned, he will be theirs in a matter of weeks. I started crying—for her, for me, for the boy. For all of us. “Motherhood is a divine calling,” my father-in-law used to say. It is. And yet, for some, the call seems impossible to answer. In the movie Amadeus, Solieri—the less-accomplished composer who despises Mozart—begs a way out of his dilemma: “All I ever wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing. Why? Tell me that. If he didn’t want me to do it, why did he plant the desire?”

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I don’t know the answer to this question—as applied to motherhood. I do know that when we celebrate Mother’s Day each May, we should remember those who can’t conceive, who have aborted, who have adopted or given up a child for adoption, who suffer guilt, who have lost a child for whatever reason, who can’t have a child for whatever reason, who didn’t have good mothering, who carry unnamed burdens of motherhood or lack of it. That includes just about all of us, doesn’t it? My heart will always be with those who have heard the call but who can’t ﬁnd the baby, who watch and wait, in limbo, somewhere between heaven and hell.

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Other People’s Hell

, I have migraine headaches. At the onset of a headache, I will begin to see an odd-shaped, silver light. It is the warning signal. This “aura” lasts forty-ﬁve minutes. The zigzag light grows in intensity. It begins to boil, scintillate, and march right before my eyes. No matter where I go or what I see, it is there. If I’m looking at a person’s face, the metallic light shines in place of their facial features. If I try to read, the words are bathed in the light. There is no escape from it. You want the jagged light to go away, and it won’t. During this past week—Holy Week, as we call it—I kept seeing something I didn’t want to see. I could tell one of my neighbors was upset when I knocked on her door. She told me a friend’s one-year-old baby had just died during heart surgery. I went to an inner-city school to watch a friend tutor kids who simply can’t read. I peeked in the classrooms, and I watched the teachers and thought of how underpaid they are for all they give. During a Wednesday Lenten service, I sat beside a friend who has a terminal illness. It was in the midst of this service that I started to understand Holy Week. 108

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The priest told the story of a family who had lost a child in an accident. The whole time she was talking, I was thinking about a woman I know who lost both her husband and daughter (her only child) in a car wreck a year and a half ago. I sat there in this ﬁne downtown cathedral, staring at the stained glass windows and vaulted ceiling, wanting to bolt, to run away, as the priest asked this question: why can’t we walk into another person’s hell? The service ended. I turned to go. And there she was—the woman I’d been thinking of during the entire service. It was the ﬁrst time I’d seen her since the funeral of her husband and daughter. She was standing in the middle of the cathedral, clutching the pew in front of her—a river of grief. “It’s worse now than it ever was,” she told me. After I left her, I went to the church dining hall with friends. We ate lunch. It was a good meal. Brunswick stew, bing cherry salad, cornbread. One of my friends—the one sitting next to me—said, “You know people always talk about how bad it is to turn forty. If I make it to forty, I’ll be the happiest man in the world.” He is thirty-ﬁve, and he has HIV. I left. The next day, I went into a bookstore. The woman who waited on me said, “Are you going to a Thursday service?” I told her I wasn’t. She said she was, and that afterward she was going to be in a prayer vigil. “Are you praying for anybody, anything in particular?” I asked her. She told me she was going to pray for her friends who were in that part of their journey that was dark. She said she was going to pray that they’d move on to a resurrection. I wanted to tell her that I wished she’d pray for me. But if I did that, I’d have to explain to her that my problem is that I live insulated—in a yellowpainted house in suburbia where the sun is always shining and the children know how to read and I can pretend that none of us will ever die. The message of Holy Week that year—it was 1995—was this: I have to stop running from those ﬂashes of painful light. I have to have the courage to walk into somebody else’s hell. I can’t experience the resurrection until I’ve felt the nails.

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Normandy

, Amid our nation’s ﬁftieth-anniversary return to Normandy, we had to endure a political snag. Newspapers kept asking, “Will the World War II vets boo Clinton who evaded his own generation’s war?” Of course they didn’t. And why did we think for a moment that they would? They are soldiers, real ones. They don’t boo presidents; we do that. They don’t care who ran from Vietnam, who didn’t. Those are our doings; that’s our scab to pick. The men who saved the world must pity us, in how we are mired in the sins of our youth. Think about it. Every single culture war we baby boomers ﬁght has a basis in youth. We aren’t over it—Vietnam, abortions, lifestyles, the fallout of the sexual revolution. We laugh at Ozzie and Harriet and Father Knows Best because we fear we aren’t capable of living up. We say, “But it’s wrong to project the ideal family, and it’s wrong to be patriotic because America is ﬂawed.” We say this because we haven’t yet come to understand that it’s all right to love a ﬂawed thing. I often hear friends say, “I can’t believe I’m doing this. I can’t believe I’m staying home with my kids, taking them to church. I can’t believe I’m crying listening to ‘America, the Beautiful.’ ” As if it’s somehow a betrayal. Who do we think we’re betraying? I watched a moving, foreign ﬁlm the other day titled The Night of the Shooting Stars. It’s set in Italy during World War II. In short, a group of 110

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neighbors decide to abandon their Nazi-occupied town. Most of the movie takes place in a wheat ﬁeld. The people have a basket of eggs, a few ripe tomatoes, and a dream of reaching the Americans. They think they hear “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” They are looking for the savior soldiers. They are looking for brave men, for my father and yours. My father fought in the Paciﬁc, and my mother kept a scrapbook of the war years. I marvel at the places he went. New Hebrides, New Caledonia, Leyte, Manila, Guadalcanal, and Tokyo. “Meet me in Frisco,” a telegram reads, sent to my mother in August 1945. She did. And that’s where my parents were, the day the war ended. I envy them that—a ﬁnal ending to their war. I wish we knew how to end our own war—the culture wars. I hate the way we are so charged with politics that we bounce off one another like bumper cars if we fail to pass the litmus tests of friendship: how we feel over abortion, gays, school prayer, family values, and all those other things. I hope we can seek a larger place. I want common ground. I crave it. I’m so weary of politics, of snifﬁng out everybody I meet to determine where they stand. When Clinton stood at the Colleville cemetery, he said, “These soldiers knew they faced certain death. But a voice told them to stand up, move forward. You can do it, and if you don’t no one else will.” They did. And they came home and had us. They love us. We can honor them by loving ourselves, by not being afraid of patriotism. I was touched by the many baby boom journalists who tried to pay tribute to the D-Day heroes. How they struggled to remember growing up during the postwar years with the knowledge their fathers had paid a price, but not understanding the scope of it, the height, the breadth, until here at midlife. There were no loopholes, no escape hatches for our mothers and fathers. They were swept up by history. I am swept up with gratitude. We like to say our fathers didn’t have a choice, they had to ﬁght. But they did have a choice. The choice was cowardice or courage. We like to say our mothers didn’t have a choice, they were forced to stay home and raise us. But they, too, had a choice. It was sacriﬁce versus selfhood. If we truly want to honor the men and women who saved the world ﬁfty years ago, we can. “We are the sons and daughters you saved from

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tyranny’s reach,” Clinton told the band of Pointe du Hoc survivors. The only real tyranny we face now is from within. If it’s true that the seeds of a subsequent war are always contained within resentments from the one before, then we need to take heed. The seeds we carry cripple us. We carry seeds of inadequacy, the fear we’ll never measure up to the generation who saved us and raised us. We’ll never get out of debt, never have the means to send our kids to college, never ﬁght and win a noble war. The thing is, we don’t have to do any of this. All we have to do is be quiet and tolerant and thankful and decent. I think that’s all anybody ever asked of us in the ﬁrst place.

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Letters from the War

, When my grandmother died a year and a half ago, I found—stuffed back in her closet—a box of letters from Ensign Jack Marsh, USS Gallatin. That’s my father. His mother had saved her son’s war letters. Until her death, I had no idea they existed. When I found them, I quickly put them away so nobody else could have them. I coveted them. On the ﬁftieth anniversary of V-J Day, I woke up at dawn and remembered it was August 15. I went to my closet, got the box of letters, and sat in the middle of my bed to read them. The ﬁrst one I picked up was dated August 6, 1943. The postmark was New Haven, Connecticut—home of Yale University, where the navy had sent my dad to study engineering. I have seen a whole lot of country in the last ﬁve weeks but I haven’t seen a place I had rather be than Hueytown, he wrote to his parents. I cannot fathom what this was like for him, to be suddenly swept up by war at the tender age of eighteen. It’s a long way from Hueytown to New Haven, and he took this trip by train. We have good meals here but it’s just not what you have at home. A meal such as cornbread, potatoes, peas, kraut, and slaw is something like a dream out of the dim past. I’d take that meal in preference to any steak we might have here. There were letters my dad wrote to his father. They were about baseball. 113

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My dad was a good boy, but his dad—my grandfather—wasn’t always so good to him. The letters they wrote to one another during the war were apparently a kind of watershed. They didn’t know how to talk, so they talked baseball. Yale is going to have a team this summer, my dad wrote. They are going to play industrial teams from New York and Massachusetts. Red Rolfe, who used to play third base for the Yankees, is baseball coach. I was issued a uniform and went out to practice. It was a beautiful ﬁeld. It will seat more people than Rickwood. When Rolfe walked out I was ﬁxing to hit. He stopped and asked me what my name was and where I was from. I told him and he told me to go ahead and hit. I was really on the spot but I took my cuts and hit two liners to the outﬁeld and one to short. He started calling me “Alabama.” Maybe I’ll make the squad. He did. I don’t know if that made my granddaddy happy or not. It should have. It probably did. Though he may never have told my dad. Such is the story of fathers and sons. A few letters were just chitchat, like What has happened at U.S. Steel? Have they lost some of their players or are they just playing sorry ball? I like Yale pretty well but I don’t believe it is a bit better school than Alabama. I don’t believe the average Northern college has got a thing on the Southern colleges. On June 22, 1944, he graduated from Yale at age nineteen with a degree in metallurgical engineering. Not bad for a kid who once lived in what was, according to family lore, called Rat Row on the outskirts of Dolomite. By July the letters were coming from New York, where he was in midshipman’s school at Columbia University. Five days before he graduated my mother ﬂew up and had what she would later call, in her scrapbook, “the happiest time of our lives.” Daddy got his commission; they went to some shows and took the Southerner home to get married. Then the tone of the letters changed. May 1, 1945 Dear Folks, If you don’t hear from me for a while don’t worry. He went to places whose names have become distant music to me: Guadalcanal, Leyte, Manila, New Hebrides, Wakayama, New Caledonia, Tokyo.

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He was assigned to an attack transport ship. His best friend was named Bill Waters. Daddy and Bill Waters have written letters to one another every year for ﬁfty years. I’ve started writing to Bill Waters, too. He once told me that he and my dad slept on a beach somewhere in the Paciﬁc and covered each other with sand for warmth. I can’t fathom the kind of friendship that causes men to send Christmas cards to each other for ﬁfty years. I want that kind of friendship. I wonder if it’s possible to have it now. The last letter I picked up was written in July 1945 shortly before the war ended. I used to think I wanted lots of money, a big home, lots of servants, and all the trimmings but out here you begin to realize what a tangible thing a simple home is. I haven’t enjoyed being away these past four years but it has taught me how to appreciate home. I hope when my kids grow up, they can look back on their childhood days and appreciate them as much as I do now. The war ended. He came home and had those kids he hoped would look back on their childhood days and appreciate them. His kids do appreciate their childhood days. They appreciate their dad. They love him. They will always be telling the story of his life. My daddy died on September 11, 1998. His friend Bill Waters now writes to me, and I write back.

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On Marriage

, In 1994 my parents celebrated their ﬁftieth wedding anniversary. They were married in 1944, during the war. In a photo, my father wears his navy uniform, and my mother wears ﬂowers in her hair. Her mouth is opening as if she’s ready to speak, and she’s frozen like this in time, virginal and innocent, at twenty-one. I got married in 1977, in my parents’ living room. By then, the stats were looking grim. We knew we had a ﬁfty-ﬁfty chance of survival as a couple. Dennis had already been married once. We were rebelling against the whole idea of a lifelong commitment and the husband/wife stereotypes marriage implied. We didn’t send out invitations. I had no bridal tea. I bought myself a ring at Golbro’s for fourteen dollars. We wrote our own vows and promised each other absolutely nothing. Three years later, I walked into a psychiatrist’s ofﬁce. In the waiting room was a stack of reading material. I vividly recall seeing a Time magazine cover story, “Sex in the Eighties: The Revolution Is Over.” I remember thinking to myself, then why am I here? It sure didn’t seem over. I felt empty, barren, and as if my life and marriage—and my friends’ lives and marriages—had no permanence or meaning. I wrote a short story about that time titled “Turning Twenty-One in Tokyo.” It was the lament of a girl who believes her marriage can’t measure up to her parents’. It was probably the most autobiographical piece of ﬁction I ever wrote. 116

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A lot has happened since then. My marriage didn’t die. I haven’t lost my fourteen-dollar wedding ring. The most stripped-down wedding in history has bred elaborate love. I am a fortunate woman. There was a Time magazine cover story the week my parents celebrated their ﬁftieth. It was titled “Sex in America,” and it reported that not only was the sexual revolution over but that the results of the fresh-off-thepress Chicago study by Laumann, Michael, and Michaels veriﬁed that 83 percent of Americans are monogamous, that married couples have the most and best sex, and that adultery is the exception now instead of the rule. The survey results shouldn’t be surprising to anyone, in that almost everything that occurs in America is directly related to where the baby boomers are in their life cycle. The upper cusp of boomers are at midforty, and they are settling down for the duration. There is a certain comfort, relief, and satisfying twist to this predictable news, though. Sometimes a poll isn’t to be questioned. It’s to be enjoyed. This is one of those times—for me, anyway. It’s good to know that married people are happy. I asked a group of friends recently if they’d visited a place that had turned out to be better than they could have ever imagined. Most said, no, that places like England, Key West, Alaska, the coral reef were, in the end, what they’d expected. The exceptions to the rule were the Rockies and the Grand Tetons. I can honestly say I have only been to one place that was more than I ever dreamed, and that place is marriage. So I toast the new Chicago sex study’s tribute to marriage—early on, before the critics start taking it apart. I raise my glass to Garrison Keillor’s words that “despite jobs and careers that eat away at their evenings and weekends and children who dog their footsteps and despite the need to ﬁx meals and vacuum the carpet and pay bills, couples still manage to encounter each other regularly in a lustful, inquisitive way and throw their clothes in a corner and do thrilling things in the dark.” And in 1994 I celebrated with my parents, Jack and Katherine Marsh, their ﬁfty years of marriage. They woke up the morning of October 28, 1994, alone, at the beach. I don’t know what they did that morning. I know it was something simple: coffee, a Psalm, a careful walk in the sand.

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I know how their footprints looked on the beach, and I imagined my own, following after theirs. They both died four years later, ﬁve months apart. My own marriage struggled to ﬁnd its way through this and other grief. But my mother’s good friend Jacque Pittman photographed my parents walking away from her, toward the setting sun. And this image is with me always, on my desk, where I write, where I celebrate love.

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A Feminist Easter

, What does Easter have to do with feminism? A lot. For me, anyhow. In 1972, when I was twenty years old, I believed the women’s movement was an embodiment of a new culture: Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman,” a book called Our Bodies, Ourselves, a career, self-reliance, and the simple idea of equality. I felt immaculately blessed—in somewhat tiny yet liberating ways. I didn’t have to worry over a china pattern or a wedding dress. I didn’t have to be a girl anymore. My ﬁrst inkling that something was going wrong in all this occurred during the ﬁrst year I was married. My husband, Dennis, was teaching at a liberal arts college in Ohio. There was, in the faculty dining room, a “women’s table” where female academicians ate lunch and rapped—as we used to say—about women’s issues, women’s studies, and women’s rights. I was working at the time as a waitress at Moore’s bakery and coffee shop. Occasionally, I had the opportunity to eat lunch with Dennis in the faculty dining room. I learned, through a series of painful encounters, that not only were men unwelcome at the women’s table but that waitresses at Moore’s coffee shop were—for whatever reasons—also unwelcome. Perhaps it was my southern drawl, my blue-collar job, my faculty wife status—any one of these traits might suggest “problems” the women’s table didn’t want to deal with. 119

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That was seventeen years ago. Since then, I’ve just kind of avoided academia. The blessings of the women’s movement in my life are obvious. But what does all this have to do with Easter? I’m getting there. Last year, I was ordained a deacon at Southside Baptist Church here in Birmingham, Alabama. This is an old church. High ceilings, crown molding, gold chandeliers, yet a pleasing diversity where millionaire Frank P. Samford once sat on the same pew with the Five Points South newspaper vendor. The winds of change have overturned tables of prejudice within the sanctuary’s baby blue walls, but still—women deacons? Baptist ones? In the Deep South? As I knelt there, for the “laying on of hands,” and received the blessings of my father’s generation, I think I ﬁnally understood what kind of feminist I want to be: a Christian one. Why hasn’t secular feminism claimed Jesus—who dismantled the patriarchy of his culture, who rebuked Martha for her preoccupation with women’s work, who wanted not her cooking but her active involvement in a radical ministry, who took the hand of prostitutes, rebuked men for lust, chose a handful of women—not an army of men—to be the ﬁrst witnesses of his resurrection. My pastor, Dale Chambliss, handed me this quote the other day. The words of Dorothy L. Sayers: Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were ﬁrst at the cradle and last at the cross. They had never known a man like this man— there never has been such another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never ﬂattered or coaxed or patronized, who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them either as “The women, God help us!” or “The ladies, God bless them!”; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unself-conscious. There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female

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perversity; nobody could possibly guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything funny about woman’s nature. I teach children on Sunday. The beauty of a child’s lesson is pondering the fabric of a simple mystery. They like to know brothers ﬁght, angels ﬂy, families travel, children matter, people make mistakes, and God speaks. They like donkeys, stars, temples, rivers, dreams, and signs. But most of all they like miracles, especially the one where a woman, crying beside a tomb one morning, mistakes her Savior for the gardener until he turns and calls her name. Why did he choose a woman to hear the good news, to be the ﬁrst evangelist? Maybe because women didn’t doubt the truth, because they were smart and believed what their eyes told them, and because they were acquainted with suffering. But I’m afraid he chose them, too, because they knew how to be meek, how to kneel, how to be servants. This is an irony I ponder. It contains all the power I need. It is what feminism has to do with Easter.

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Eros

, While traveling through north Alabama recently, I stopped at an old-fashioned soda fountain for a cup of coffee. The business had been established in 1918. The stools were aqua vinyl. The menu included cherry Cokes, fresh limeade, hot fudge sundaes, egg salad, and hot dogs. There was a man leaning over the counter, watching a waitress prepare chili dogs. His eyes took in her hands—the way she chopped onions, spread mustard, and rolled the buns up in butcher paper. After she’d slipped the chili dogs into a tiny white sack, she whipped out her order pad. Instead of tallying up what he owed, though, she furtively wrote on the paper “I love you” and stuffed her message into his sack of chili dogs. The moment after she did this, she glanced up at me. I smiled. She blushed, let her eyes fall. The man left. I watched him hop into his pickup truck and head back to work—was he married, single, a carpenter, a brick mason, a student? The waitress—she had a ponytail secured with a gold clasp—kept glancing over at me. She knew I knew her secret, whatever it was. My mind was racing. Were they strangers? Or had she been laboring for weeks, months, over the preparing of his sandwiches, trying to hide her desire? I wanted to see his face back at work, when he’d open the sack of chili dogs and discover her love. One thing’s for certain: you don’t see this much anymore. It’s rare to run up on a soda fountain with real milk shakes, cherry Cokes, and aqua vinyl stools. But it’s even rarer to run up on eros.

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Eros is dying. It is dying through campus manuals that instruct students on the correct way to make dates. It is dying through sexual harassment policies that bind hands, eyes, and words. Its death is coming from both ends of the political spectrum. The far right, the far left. A bizarre wedding of radical feminists and religious zealots who are seeking to legislate desire. Instead of love, we now have date-rape, marital-rape, and the more subtle “lookism,” whereby women are raped by the eye. Students at Antioch College, I understand, are given a sexual conduct manual that instructs them to go step by step during lovemaking, seeking a “yes” or a “no” at every juncture. Where are the hands, the eyes, the nuances that used to answer these questions? How did we arrive at the place where the omnipresent Big Sister is looking over the shoulder of every one of us, waiting for the wrong move, the delving eye, the probing word, the rape? You can feel it everywhere. The way men keep their arms stiff as if straitjacketed. The absence of hugs. The wandering eye—lost. And it’s this—the wandering eye—that we’re going to one day miss. For it’s not only the basis of sensuality. It’s also the wellspring of art. A writer, photographer, journalist must stop and stare in order to seize a moment. If I’d been a male coworker of that soda fountain waitress, she might have considered it harassment—the way I was studying her hands, eyes, and body. When men and women can no longer follow after natural impulse for fear of being ﬁred or sued or expelled, they forget not only how to make love but also how to be curious, seek knowledge, be friends, follow the muse. A society suffocated by regulations will die. I don’t mean just metaphorically. Castrated men can’t make babies. Laws can’t make love. If we continue to meddle in the affairs of the heart by politicizing, manipulating, and controlling natural longings, we will pay. Back to the soda fountain café in north Alabama. Some might see this waitress—who stuffed the love note in with the chili dogs—as an oppressed victim, a female who can’t make a dime due to gender, who has no more self-esteem than to write a love note to a macho truck driver who, on learning of her desire, will come rape her some dark, moonless night. I prefer to see her as a free spirit, unencumbered by the milieu of city

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life and victim mentality. “You’re not a dream, you’re not an angel, you’re a man,” is what the jukebox was playing that afternoon, according to what I scribbled on my napkin. “I’m not a queen, I’m a woman, take my hand.”

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The Moon, Twenty-ﬁve Years Later

, I grew up in a subdivision. My family’s den wasn’t big. Once a screen porch, it had jalousied windows, a tile ﬂoor, a sofa bed, and a brown vinyl chair where my daddy sat on July 20, 1969, and watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. I’d never seen my dad so thrilled—not even at an Alabama football game. “Look at Buzz Aldrin,” he cried, leaning forward. “He’s like a boy,” he went on, as Aldrin hopped like a kangaroo. My mother sat beside me on the sofa. She told me she couldn’t believe this was happening in her lifetime. I don’t think I would have realized how important that night was, if it hadn’t been for my parents’ reaction. And now, twenty-ﬁve years later, here on the eve of remembrance, I can see clearly what it all meant to everyone. The space program saved us. Without it, we would have grieved ourselves to death. It was a way to keep John Kennedy alive. It was a way to escape the fact that America was coming apart. It was a way to travel beyond assassinations, unpopular wars, fallout shelters, race riots, and mass depression. I remember the TV sets being wheeled in to my elementary school classrooms where we watched Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, and John Glenn go up. All those T-minus so many minutes and counting. Friendship 7, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Redstone Arsenal, Cape Canav125

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eral, Saturn V, Sputnik, celestial ﬁreﬂies, astronauts, cosmonauts, trajectories, modules, lunar orbit, lunar probes, lunar landings, simulators, spacewalks, moonwalks—oh, the language of it. The making of an American childhood that might otherwise have been dark. Kids forever seeking a lighter side, we were graced by space. We all had our eyes on the moon. Last week, I watched the television adaptation of Moon Shot. I’d almost forgotten Christmas Eve 1968. Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders aboard Apollo 8. “For all the people on Earth,” Anders said, “the crew of Apollo 8 has a message we would like to send you. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Borman watched the earth rising above the lunar horizon—all blue, green, and colorful. “This is the most beautiful, heart-catching sight of my life,” he told us. What later became the photograph “Earth Rise” was the ﬁrst time we’d ever seen ourselves from a distance. For a moment, we saw it: a ball, a swirl of pastel colors, land and water, life. The earth was embryonic, and I think we were struck by how perfect it was. But by the time Apollo 13 went up, the news wouldn’t cover any more space travel. We’d gotten addicted to misery during the ’60s and felt guilty for having sought refuge in space. It was only after a ﬁre destroyed the spacecraft’s tank of oxygen, the side of the service module blew, and the crew wasn’t expected to survive that we turned on the TV sets. Panic and destruction we could handle; national pride and success we could not. The Apollo 13 crew did survive. We didn’t. We’ve been living on the dark side of the moon ever since. We turned our backs on the space program because it suddenly wasn’t science, it was wasted money. We—I, anyway—developed a rhetoric of saving the world rather than leaving it in a rocket. We felt bad that we’d had fun, when we should have been thinking of the poor. I don’t even remember Apollo 14 or 15, 16, 17. The rendezvous with Russians in space—which should have been a triumphant celebration for those of us who grew up during the cold war—was hardly noted. But, hey, it was 1975 and ambition was suddenly immoral. The fact that Alan Shepard ﬁnally went to the moon got lost somewhere. His crewmates, Stuart Roosa and Ed Mitchell, are names I didn’t even know until I picked up a copy of Shepard’s memoir. How about Dave

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Scott, Jim Irwin, and Al Worden landing in the lunar foothills of the Appenine Mountains? Or Apollo 16’s Young, Duke, and Mattingly and the command ship Casper. In 1972 Gene Cernan left one ﬁnal message on the moon. “We leave as we came,” he said, “and, God willing, we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.” And that was that. Two decades have passed. True, the space program has been kept alive. There’s the space shuttle, Voyager probes, the Hubble telescope, and other achievements. What’s missing is the dare. Daring ourselves to do something impossible, as a country—and then doing it. We can hardly think of “Earth Rise,” of Borman and Anders and Lovell telling us that God wanted light and, by God, there was light. We’re more like Richard Nixon peering into that tiny compartment where astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins sit quarantined in moon germs. That’s how we feel about ourselves, it seems, as Americans. We’re too busy peering into our tiny selves to see the bigger picture. If we can just remember how to back up, to see from a distance. We don’t have to stay quarantined in the self-loathing of the sixties and the seventies. We don’t have to feel bad for being competitive or for wanting to win the space race. One of my friends who grew up in Huntsville tells me that on July 20, 1969, he and his buddy ran outside and began screaming with joy when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. Boys howling in the night, at the moon—primal, proud, free. It is within the realm of possibility that we might remember how to celebrate like this, once again.

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Writing

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Walking on Water

, In James M. Barrie’s screenplay adaptation of Peter Pan, the narrator opens with this reﬂection: “Some say that as we grow older, we become different people at different ages, but I don’t believe this. I think we remain the same throughout, merely passing in these years from one room to another but always in the same house. If we unlock the rooms of the far past we can look in and see ourselves beginning to become you and me.” There is a room of my childhood. It is the family den, with a blackand-white TV set, a sofa bed where I sit watching The Miracle Worker. Patti Duke, as Helen Keller, is walking the path to the well house. Her teacher draws water. Helen puts her hands in it. The epiphany occurs. She remembers. This is water. It has a name. She knows, suddenly, the mystery of language. We see this Alabama girl kneeling at a water pump, transﬁxed. Once she understands water, she runs madly over that Tuscumbia land—a wild woman, asking silently the name for ground, tree, step, bell, mama, papa. She knows! I hadn’t thought about this a whole lot until a recent symposium when I was asked to cite a movie from my childhood that I felt had most inﬂuenced me as a writer. Without hesitation, I described that moment when Helen Keller remembers what words are. Because I believe that her experience is a metaphor for what all writers experience. When we’re 131

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132

Writing

young, we walk in a land of darkness, too. We don’t know, usually, that we’re writers. We just know we ache. There’s a storm inside. We invent words for it: upset stomach, butterﬂies, homesickness—even though we’re home. For we are, as the writer of Hebrews reminds us, strangers and pilgrims on the earth. That’s why we feel homesick at dusk. Then one day, we put our hands in the water, and we know: words. For me, it’s been a series of awakenings. I wrote my ﬁrst short story ﬁfteen years ago, when I was twenty-ﬁve years old. The following years were hell. Dennis and I lost a baby through an ectopic pregnancy. I was told that we’d never conceive, that my remaining fallopian tube had a deformity in the ﬁmbrial end. The “ﬁngers” were constricted. How can I describe what I was like then? Listen to a very personal journal entry: “Nesting is difﬁcult when there aren’t any children. Sometimes the emptiness of my gut is a casket. I keep killing parts of myself and stashing them there. Life howls like a distant storm. Up ahead, it’s misty and barren. Sometimes I study the morning sky or a September sunset with the red light, and I buddy up to it. But I’m nearing thirty in a green bedroom on a night with no stars, no babies, no hope. The world is a bed of icepicks.” Very simply put, I was lost. But I was writing. I wrote stories with glib, jaded narrators who said things like, “It’s a symposium on anxiety and depression that’s held in early spring. A British shrink is lecturing on membrane pharmacology displaying a slide of Valium—clusters of hexagons linked by N’s and O’s. America is hooked on this? I’m a psychiatric social worker, but you’d swear I was a life insurance saleswoman. Actually, I want you to live but be miserable so I can offer services. It’s March ﬁrst, and the sky is terribly blue, the cherry trees budding, the yellow daffodils peaking. Winter ends suddenly in the South, a slamming. I hate spring.” Some of these stories were published. But they were becoming darker and darker. In a 1982 journal entry, I wrote: “My characters are created in my own image and they walk through the garden and sin and grow ugly but I never never allow them a state of grace.” Then in 1983 something happened to me. I decided I’d stop drinking. We call it a leap of faith, but it’s nothing less than walking on water, let me tell you. Day after day—to this day—we venture out on the water.

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The ﬁrst story I wrote sober was titled “Milagro,” Spanish for miracle. It’s about a boy who comes out of a coma, following an automobile accident. It ends like this, “It was morning. It was the morning in March after the winter in Salvador. The male nurse whose pin read: Loring, R.N. opened the door. He coughed and cleared his throat. An absent smile crossed his face because he was only a stranger and I instantly forgave his lack of ecstasy when he told us that Ty was like an infant whose recovery would mimic a child growing up—that day by day he’d learn to say words and eat food and feel pleasure yet have no memory of the accident, that he’d surfaced to consciousness only moments ago, that sometimes this happened, that he knew his name, his eyes were open, that he was able to follow a light.” Within a year, I conceived a child, gave birth, and wrote a story titled “Magnolia” that was to be accepted and published by The New Yorker. The quality of my ﬁction changed. I let my characters experience grace because I knew it. If tone is a writer’s attitude toward her characters, then I suppose you could say my tone changed. But there has been, just very recently, another unveiling. Move with me, for a moment, back to Helen Keller. After she understands what words are, after she’s run madly from tree to tree, asking the name for each object of nature, she stops—dead in her tracks, the question forming. Arms outstretched like a sleepwalker, she makes her way to Anne Sullivan and inquisitively strokes her face. T-E-A-C-H-E-R, her teacher ﬁnger-spells into Helen’s palm. Teacher. Writers call it the muse. Believers call it the spirit. Madeleine L’Engle asks: “Why are we afraid of the word spirit? Does it remind us of bafﬂing and incomprehensible and fearful things like the Annunciation and the Transﬁguration and the Passover, those mighty acts of God which we forget how to understand because our childlike creativity has been corrupted and diminished?” My younger daughter asks me, as we watch a sunset or a movie’s dramatic moment, “Why am I crying?” I can say, “because you’re happy,” or “because you’re sad,” yet I know it’s more. She has gotten past her skin. She has felt the spirit. Or I can tell my daughter, “You’re crying because you’re an artist.” She is. But then all children are artists. Their backs are broken bit by bit. In

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time, the web-footed dogs, purple elephants, and square apples give way to reality. They will reason that movies are just movies; ﬁction never occurred; art is random color. The predators—logic, cynicism—take over. But then, one day, something deep within us remembers. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, in her book Women Who Run with the Wolves, suggests that the reason women like to dig in the dirt is that they are digging for bones. They are digging for their ancestors. My husband is writing a book about snake-handling Holiness churches in southern Appalachia. Last winter we took our daughters to a service in east Georgia. Our older daughter—who has been raised in an urban, protestant church where one hardly breathes in worship—had been in this rural Holiness church for less than ﬁfteen minutes before those feet of hers were stomping, hands clapping, whole body in accord with that hillbilly gospel. Something deep within her remembered. Her ancestors were mountain folk. No doubt they danced, praised, let go like this. Something deep within this urban daughter of the New South was free, malleable, humble enough to catch the spirit, to let go, to get down, to be led. I want to suggest—with utter awareness of my ethnocentrist bias—that southern writers may be more likely to embrace the spirit, to call it by name. It is my subjective belief that southerners are a mystical people. And I’m not speaking of a new-age, hip, intellectual mysticism. I’m talking about a humble spirituality, an understanding that the root word of humility is humus, earth. My grandmother was a mystic. She’d never read psychology, had no clue of words like clairvoyance, extrasensory perception, or near-death experiences. She planted okra, picked peas, knelt in the dirt under a hot sun. Yet every Christmas she’d hold her presents, one by one, close her eyes, feel the wrapping, and say, “thank you for the blue raincoat,” then open the package with the blue raincoat. She knew everything before it happened, simply because she worked the earth, on her knees. Southerners know a lot about humility. Our collective humility was born of our sin and repentance. The New South, for me, is simply this: the place where we put a sledgehammer to a stubborn kneecap and kneel. That’s where the new generation of southern writers are, on bended knee, along with the rest of our culture. Listen to what Birmingham’s William Hull has to say: “In one sense, the civil rights struggle of the sixties was an

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acted parable of American redemption and the South was the modern Golgotha where the awful price was paid. In this travail that was birthpangs of a better day, the South vicariously sinned for a nation too fastidious to believe in sin, it vicariously repented for a nation too proud to believe in repentance, and it may yet rise again for a nation too complacent to believe that it is spiritually dead.” A writer on her knees is a servant to the work. It’s easier to hear the spirit when you’re close to the earth. It’s only on the knees that the writer can dig in the dirt for the bones. It’s on our knees that we can put an ear to the ground and hear the spirits talking. It’s on our knees that we can kneel at the water pump. If the work comes to the artist and says, “Here I am. Make me,” then the writer has to become the servant of the work. Mary could have said no, but she didn’t. She said, “My soul doth magnify the Lord.” The writer, staring at an empty page 1, knows the terror of the Annunciation. She can say, I can’t. Or she can say, Be it unto me according to the Word. But there’s nothing there, you fear. Only faith, only the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen, the vision of a promise, seen from afar, to be embraced and confessed, strangers and pilgrims on the earth—writers, seeking a country. It doesn’t matter how big or small the work is. Jean Rhys said to an interviewer in the Paris Review, “Listen to me. All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. And there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don’t matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.” Perhaps the writer’s journey can best be stated like this: We begin in the dark. We feel something moving in our hands—a teacher, ﬁnger-spelling, but we don’t understand. Then one day we take the path to the well house, put our hands in the water, and know what words are—our tools, our escape, our calling. The teacher is the Holy Spirit. We begin to feed the lake. We lose our pride, our need for control. We give ourselves to the lake. All that matters is feeding the lake. The writer doesn’t matter. The lake matters. We keep feeding it, and one day we rise up from the boat and hear the voice on the other side. We are all called to do the impossible. All of us, not just writers, artists—but teachers, mothers, scientists, preachers. We are all called to do the impossible, to create something out of nothing.

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“When Jesus called Peter to come to him across the water,” writes Madeleine L’Engle, “Peter, for one brief, glorious moment remembered how, and strode with ease across the lake. This is how we are meant to be, and then we forget, and we sink. But if we cry out for help (as Peter did), we will be pulled out of the water, we don’t drown. And if we listen, we will hear; and if we look, we will see. . . . It is one of those impossibilities I believe in; and in believing, my own feet touch the surface of the lake, and I to go meet him like Peter, walking on water.”

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Writers Don’t Wear Petticoats

, I am a columnist, and I was amused by a recent letter to the editor complaining that I needed to start thinking, for a change. Writers aren’t supposed to think. If writers suddenly started to think, they’d start writing convoluted sentences that nobody can understand. They’d hide in big words. They’d stop taking risks. Lose spontaneity. “But don’t you think about something a long time before you write it?” That’s like asking a woman in labor if she’s thinking about having this baby she’s having. When you’re having “the urge to push” you’re not thinking anything. It’s hardly an urge, as every woman knows who’s felt it. It is an act of surrender. You submit to the physical forces of nature that’re working to push this baby out. If thinking is the process by which a storm brews in you and gathers steam and churns in your gut until you feel like you’re going to throw up if you don’t sit down and write—then yes, writers think. The only and I mean only cure for writer’s block is automatic writing. By that, I mean you sit at the computer and ﬂy. You write nonsense. If you’re doing longhand, you don’t pick your hand up from the paper. You write mixed-up, wild, jumbled words. Because what you’re trying to kill is that little man that sits on the top of your head—that little internal editor—who says, “Think!” Think, and you perish. I often tell students that the reason we are able 137

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138

Writing

to dream exotic, colorful, frightful things at night is because that little editor is asleep. He can’t say, don’t dream that. Dialogue—which is the most difﬁcult aspect of writing ﬁction—comes naturally during dreaming. You don’t stop in the middle of a dream and say, “Oh God, what is this person going to say next?” You just give him lines, then and there, on the spot. All because you’re free from the little man who’s trying to censor what you need to say—by telling you to sound smart instead of real. Writers are stupid. We don’t have enough sense to come in from the rain. We stand there, palms to the sky wondering what’s up. Before long, we’re wet. We put our hands in our hair. Wet, too. Arms, legs—yep, they’re wet. It must be raining! Somebody told me once that when you’re at a party, you can always spot the artists and writers because they look like they just got hit in the head with a two-by-four. Flannery O’Connor said there’s a certain grain of stupidity that the writer can hardly do without and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once. So we gawk at things. John Cheever, in the prologue to his collected stories, said something about how a writer can be seen clumsily learning to eat peas with a fork, tie his necktie, and take baby steps. Unfortunately, all this is done in public. Unfortunately, writers and artists and actors and musicians can’t develop a tough skin. A tough skin makes it impossible to give and take and wax and wane, and make art. Whenever I speak at these writer’s conferences, I cringe if I’m asked to speak on plot and technique and style and all those other things so irrelevant to writing. What writers need to talk about when they’re together is fear. Fear of vulnerability, of giving blood, of being rejected—all those awful, human things. It’s easy to write, Frederick Buechner said. All you have to do is sit down at the typewriter and open a vein. Giving blood is a visceral thing. It involves no cerebral stuff. You simply hit a vein, and let the blood ﬂow, for all the world to see. The other day, a woman came up to my at the Y where I lap swim, and asked me if I was Vicki. I said I was. She said, “Well let me tell you who I am.” In that wonderful, southern way of telling who one is, she went into a story of how she lived across the street from my mother and daddy forty years ago, on Seventy-seventh Street in East Lake where they once rented a

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yellow duplex. She said she had two questions for me. The ﬁrst was, “Is your mother still beautiful?” I told her, yes. Her second question was, “Does your mother still not wear a petticoat?” I told her, that’s right. My mother still doesn’t wear a petticoat, and neither do I, and neither do my daughters. She replied, “Well, I used to holler to her every time she’d come out the door, ‘Katherine, I can see everything.’ ” My mother’s logic was simple. Slips are hot in summer, clingy in winter, and they’re apt to “show.” If you wear a slip, in order to hide who you are, the slip will inevitably start showing. You can’t win. People will say, “Your slip is showing,” just like they said, “I can see everything.” Might as well be comfortable and let them see everything.

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Imagination’s Birth

, When I was young, in the 1950s, I saw a ghost—the outline of a young girl, a thin purplish phosphorescent frame of a child. It was dusk. My mother was holding me under the ﬂowering peach in the backyard that, in spring, we called “the popcorn tree.” The older kids were playing kickthe-can. Suddenly, a ﬂurry of boys ran up the driveway. They said, “There’s a girl out front.” My mother carried me down, and we stood over her. She was lying on the concrete retaining wall that ran the length of our driveway, an eerie purple outline of an invisible girl, almost like an X ray. The other kids huddled close. Who is she? they wanted to know. In this memory, it is 1957, when ﬁreﬂies illuminate the mauve light of evening and girls mercilessly rip the lights from the lightning bugs and place them on their ﬁngers to wear like opal rings. My mother’s garden forms the boundary of our backyard—orange daylilies, Shasta daisies, periwinkle, tulips. At night, I dream that ducks are swimming in this garden. My father has planted a zoysia lawn. There are lizards on the rocks along the trickling branch we call “the beaver dam.” Only later, perhaps when the world falls apart in 1963, do we learn we’ve been wading in sewer water. But here in 1957, it’s a gentle stream. Our fathers return from work at ﬁve o’clock, pulling their turquoise and pink Chevys into the driveway, wearing work-clothes from the foundries where they make pipe ﬁttings. Our mothers are frying okra. Nothing out of the ordinary ever 140

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happens. On Sunday mornings, we listen to the story of the Creation. I love the part about God walking with Adam and Eve in the garden. I am mystiﬁed that he comes down to earth to speak with them in the cool of the evening, and I wonder if he ever visits my mother in this way in her garden. Sometimes when she’s standing out there, hoe in hand, gazing at the blue sky, I suspect she’s in love with God. But I never see him in her garden. I only see the splash of color and dream the dream of ducks swimming in the daylilies. I have a recurring nightmare that a lion is in the kitchen, his grandiose sandy mane brushing my mother’s elbow as she cracks an egg for the cornbread. In the dream, she’s oblivious to the lion and keeps right on cooking. In my other recurring nightmare, there’s a tiger in the gymnasium of our church, chasing kids. But the other kids are oblivious, and I’m the only one shrieking. The morning after the girl ghost appears, I rise early. Meg Mackle, across the street, four years older than me, is mounting her blue Schwinn bike. I call to her, “Hey, Meg,” and point to the spot on the retaining wall where the girl had lain. She waves and pedals off to Connie Carruther’s house, her broomstick ponytail ﬂying. Meg is a tomboy. She plays a mean game of whifﬂe ball. And that, the sight of Meg leaving the scene of the incident the next morning in absolute nonchalance, is the ﬁnal segment of this memory. I do not ask what anybody thought of the girl. I don’t even ask my mother. But later, when I’m ten or so, waiting for my best friend, Carol Callaway, to meet me to walk to school on an autumn morning, I kick the red leaves from the spot on the retaining wall just as you do a cemetery marker, recalling her ﬂuorescent outlined body. As a teenager, I stand right over where she’d appeared, in order to mount the rear of my boyfriend’s motorcycle. I am, as we say, “over her” by then. In my early twenties, though, I become a therapist and, at parties, when all my hip, bearded psychologist colleagues practice a half-drunk hypnosis on the rest of us, I want to be transported to 1957, to the girl, to see her again, to ﬁnd out if she was real. But I resist or perhaps the party isn’t the place or the freshly anointed psychologists aren’t the vehicles but whatever the reason I never get beyond their dangling medallions. And not until my late thirties when I begin to yearn to see angels do I ask my mother about the girl. She replies gently (knowing my need

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for magic), “No, baby. It must have been a dream.” And that seals it. But then, I ask myself, as the neighborhood kids (as I recalled it) had asked back then, “Who is she?” Why is she the most vivid memory of my girlhood? Why can I deﬁne the precise location, the season, just as an eyewitness spills her fresh, vivid impression to a policeman or a journalist? The answer, of course, is that she was and is the birth of my imagination, and that her purplish X-ray image was cast—whether in a dream or a fantasy—against the reality of a setting, a place. But could she, I wonder, have been conceived had it not been for the mauve dusk, the ﬁreﬂies, my mother’s arms, my father’s 1957 Chevrolet, the gentle ambience of neighborhood children, crickets, and cicadas? A setting. A place. Eudora Welty reminds us that God ﬁrst created Eden—a place—before he made the characters to inhabit it. Thus place is, in a sense, the most important element of creation. “And God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And a river went out of Eden to water the garden.” And then later, the man and woman “heard the voice of God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.” Oh, that passage thrilled and mystiﬁed me when I was a child. Was a tangible God really walking among the trees, in and out of orchards, smelling ﬂowers and feeling a gentle wind on his face? And moreover, that particular King James phrasing, “heard the voice of God walking.” Can a voice walk? Yes, a voice can walk. “We are talking now of summer evenings,” James Agee wrote in A Death in the Family. It is not of the games children play in the evening that I want to speak now, it is of a contemporaneous atmosphere that has little to do with them: that of the fathers of families, each in his own space of lawn, his shirt ﬁshlike pale in the unnatural light and his face nearly anonymous. . . . The dry and exalted noise of the locusts from all the air at once enchants my eardrums. . . . On the wet grass of the backyard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there. First we were sitting up, then one of us lay down, and then we all lay

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down, on our stomachs, or on our sides, or on our backs, and they have kept on talking. They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all. The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near. All my people are larger bodies than mine, quiet, with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds. One is an artist, he is living at home. One is a musician, she is living at home. One is my mother who is good to me. One is my father who is good to me. By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of night. May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away. After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am. And so the girl ghost on my parent’s retaining wall who lives within me has become the person who inhabits the place where I write. “He knew it was her,” wrote Alice Hoffman in Seventh Heaven, “because her earrings were bitter globes and there were rings on all her ﬁngers. He knew it was her because no other ghost could ﬁll him with such despair or make him bleed from a wound that wasn’t even there. What was the blue light that surrounded her, like a moon of the wrong color or a thumbprint of sorrow.” There is a garden. And in the garden is a writer. And in the writer is the irritant—a grain of sand, a piece of foreign matter trapped inside, and the writer, like the oyster, tries to ﬁght it. And within the ﬁght is the material. And within the material is the solace for the irritant, and the material begins to form around the irritant until the irritant is no longer an irritant but an iridescent orb that lives in the writer who lives in the memory of a summer evening in Alabama when my mother’s garden was a river of wild ducks and those in my beloved home could not and would not, “not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.”

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The Horse

, A new novel, yet to be written but already conceived, is like an untamed animal—an unbroken horse running madly in an open ﬁeld, daring you to approach it, much less bridle, mount, ride, and direct its every move down a forested but deﬁned path. The horse is ﬁercely seductive, and you stand at the fence and cry. Its body is ivory and clean, ready for you—the novelist—to choose the colors it’ll wear. The legs are muscled and toned, prancing freely over the earth. The horse hasn’t yet felt your hands. During the ﬁrst chapter, you’re still trying to mount the animal (so the writing is awkward), and the horse throws you a time or two. You can’t walk away, though, because you’ve fallen in love with the damn thing, felt its body, know that it will give under your hands if you can ever get on. Day after day, you try to mount until ﬁnally (when the ﬁrst chapter is done), you are on. The animal is resisting, but you hold ﬁrm. The ﬁeld is open. The horse is dancing haphazardly, and you (beginning the second chapter) struggle for control, angry with the unruly creature until suddenly you forget the animal for a moment because you become conscious of the blue sky, the slant of the sun, the tiny wildﬂowers, the seasonal particulars. The animal, sensing your easing off from the struggle, responds accordingly because the animal knows all and has been praying for your surrender. He only acted wild to seduce you. The ride will be on his terms, but he can’t exist until you become his impotent master. You allow your144

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self to see not only the sky overhead but also the trees in the distance (the second, third, and fourth chapters), and the creature understands you’ve sensed that there’s a path. So he leaves the ﬁeld altogether, jumping the fence in one glorious arc (oh, the ﬂight, the blessed moment of inspiration, the paragraph where you leave the earth, lose track of time). The horse gallops toward the path. By now you realize you never even saddled or bridled the beast. You’re bareback, and the horse’s body hurts the vulnerable insides of your legs, yet there’s something terribly sensual being in direct contact with the horse. And he’s stopped running (you’re seventy-ﬁve pages in). You don’t know when he stopped acting so crazy or why, but you know he’s not going to throw you. It’s not that you “tamed” him, as you’d desperately sought to do in the beginning. In fact, the animal is docile, so docile that you grab his mane and try to direct him down that cryptic path over to the right. But he won’t go. “Why not?” you scream. “Look at the sunset. It’s setting right over my childhood! Take me!” But the horse knows the peachy light (autobiography) is potentially dangerous for you, the novice rider. So he takes you deep into the forest to the foreign birdsong where new tangled light creates holographic images, tiny dwelling places where you see people at dinner tables and hear the melody of mundane conversation. The horse stops, makes you take note (write in scenes). No matter how lush the ﬂora, the people in the tiny house are what matter. So why did you have to risk your life mounting the awful beast and travel into the dense forest just to peer into a tiny house to see ordinary people having nondescript conversations at small wooden tables? There are plenty of people back home, in real life, to use for characters, aren’t there? Why do you have to view them from this precarious position, on this dangerous animal who’s probably only pretending to be tame, who at any moment could still throw you or suddenly charge ahead and abandon the scenery and the tiny house? It’s because (you suddenly realize three-quarters of the way through the novel), it’s because the horse knows how to situate you at the right angle so that you aren’t looking head-on, squarely at the people (the characters) in the tiny house (the setting) in the forest (the aura of the story), but you are coming at them slightly skewed (the exquisite slant of irony), and the horse knows this and positions you so. The horse becomes the wheels of the camera and moves

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you here and there so that you are an unobtrusive voyeur. He places you so that, ah! one of the people becomes oddly recognizable. That man has your father’s smile, your brother’s hands. He’s wearing a necktie from the compost heap of your childhood—that odd replica you saw once in your mother’s cedar chest. But this character isn’t your father or your brother or your mother’s cedar chest because the horse made you leave the real world. The people you see are fascinating composites (just like dreaming) of people back home (in reality), but they’ve got a life of their own out here in the jungle. “I’ve never been on a safari,” you tell the horse. “I don’t like horses. They scare me. I got thrown once when I was a child. You threw me. You scared me.” The horse moves on. Intense sadness falls. You’re near the end of the book, and it’s like that part of a dream when you realize you’re dreaming and start to wake. You know now that the horse is your imagination and that he did scare you when you were little all the time, painting those ghosts on the wall and making the dark come alive with fear. But the horse has now taken you to paradise. It was only a forest, true, and the people in the tiny houses were ordinary and had your daddy’s smile, but still it was euphoric jumping that fence, leaving the ﬁeld of reality, and surrendering to the animal who once scared the life out of you. “Will you come back?” you plead, “and let me ride you again?” But the horse is fading, all ivory and pale, transforming itself into vapor, vanishing like dreams. The book is done. You reread it and marvel. Did I write that? No, you didn’t. The horse did. You don’t see the animal for a long time. Its absence sends you reeling into despair. You wander around real life like an alien, lost, uneasy, a stranger to your own household. The characters you met in the forest are gone. The city where you live is too bright, suddenly space-aged and sharp-bladed with reality. Nature itself—the harvest moon, the bluebird, the salmon-colored morning sky—is sad because it lacks the horse’s angle. So the idea begins to plant itself, the heartbreaking but liberating fact that you’ve never felt at home in reality, that the horse whom you fear has saved you over and over again from the fright of existence, that he has transformed terror into art and allowed you not only salvation but ecstasy

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because riding him is better than any joy, any secret, any drug, any lover. Lost, you ﬂoat like a sleepwalker through the days, on foot not on horseback until ﬁnally one day the ﬁeld comes alive, maybe some dark moonless night or perhaps when the season changes, bruising you with pleasure. The horse comes. You call his name. “Hey, it’s me. Remember, I rode you?” you say. But he’s oblivious to you and prances madly as ever in the open ﬁeld as if you had never ridden him. The struggle begins again (the next novel). “Why?” you want to know. But the horse knows best, the horse knows all. An easy mount is the kiss of death. You wrestle him anew and pray you’ll clear the fence.

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The House Within

, Ask my husband a question that involves recalling what year something occurred, and he’ll inevitably cock his head, turn those blue eyes to the ceiling, and begin his calculation. “Well, let’s see. Jeanie was nineteen in 1959 . . .” Jeanie is his older sister. The year 1959 has become the nucleus of all memory for him, and time merely spreads forward or backward or around his sister’s nineteenth birthday. He measures everything by this one index. He will tell you the songs popular that season, the fashion, a description of the car Chevrolet made, who quarterbacked at Auburn, the day his sister got married. The fascinating poignancy lies in the fact that he will be recalling all this from her point of view. He was eleven in 1959. I know from photographs and from what others have told me that he was a lean curious kid with sandy hair who carried a shy facade but tangled with the best of them. He liked snakes, lizards, and military maneuvers. Yet despite his boyish interests, he was already learning to see the world through his sister’s eyes. He was becoming a writer. My story reads much the same. My older brother was seventeen in 1966. Romance was born for me that year, not when I fell in love but when he did. I was thirteen, and if you read my journal from that time, you’ll ﬁnd sensual, voyeuristic details—his sea green eyes taking in her knee 148

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socks, the palms of her hands, me accompanying her on the piano at church as she sang a song that began, “He can turn the tide and calm the angry sea” (surely she was singing about my brother, not God), the steaminess of the Alabama summer that followed their high school graduation, my rising fear that autumn was going to spell bad news because they’d be separated. Different colleges. I was in love with her. I can’t tell you a thing about my own school days other than the fact that a perpetual storm rose and fell in me—and still does. What I recall most is the vacuum of my own existence, the fact that I wanted to observe and not participate. I craved solitude, and I learned to see the world by getting behind my brother’s eyes because, once there, I had safe distance from the world and a new pair of eyes. The sky was turquoise the spring of 1966. The scent of crabapple blossoms from my mother’s garden was fresh and sweet, because I was savoring it as a seventeen-year-old boy in love. I’m sure these scenarios could be bathed in psychological overlays, theorizing everything from incest to multiple personality disorders. But we writers are not in the business of analysis—we shouldn’t be anyway; we’re only here to tell the story. And I believe the writer’s story has a universal beginning, and that beginning is born the year—be it 1959 or 1966 or whenever—we ﬁrst enter another person’s existence, get behind his or her eyes, and see the world from another vantage point. We may not write a word of ﬁction for years. But we taste the intoxicant of leaving the boundaries of our own skin and becoming somebody else. And when we ﬁnally do enter, as writers, the house of ﬁction, we know we’ve been there before and want to live there the rest of our lives. The house of ﬁction. What’s it like? How’s it built? For me, it is the place I go, in my mind, to write. I can tell you the house is tiny, almost a doll house, or perhaps what I’m trying to say is that when I begin to write ﬁction, I spiral inward, adjust the camera’s eye to a ﬁne, distinct focus until I am peering into the smallest window. What I see most often, through that window, is my grandmother’s kitchen—Eva’s kitchen in Gathering Home, Honey’s kitchen in Bird of Paradise. When I was growing up, this place was, in reality, relatively unimportant. I recall the teakettle’s song, the big black pot of green beans and new potatoes on

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the stove, my granddaddy’s ginger-colored ﬁngers shelling peas or tossing chicken scraps to the dogs under the table, my grandmother’s dancing eyes and canning jars. Still, I had no idea this room was casting itself so permanently in my memory. My house of ﬁction has a strange yard—a graveyard where the living and the dead commune with ease. It’s hard for me to keep my characters out of cemeteries, and I’ve stopped trying. I let them go there frequently to lie in their beds of memory because there’s really no stopping them. Who wouldn’t want to be in a place where angels hover? One of the hardest things about writing ﬁction is wading through the vast darkness to ﬁnd the light of the tiny window, to see inside. But once it happens, I’m merely a videotape recorder, duplicating the images and the action I see in living color. A scenic mind is one of the writer’s most precious gifts. I don’t know when my house of ﬁction was built. Since its design is so fantastically simple (a small window, a rural kitchen, and a graveyard), I suspect my mother was its architect, or at least gave me the tools to build it. She was a naturalist. She taught me to see, to draw my eyes from interiors to the elements—the sky, the moon, stars, her garden. She knew all the birds’ songs. She taught me to listen. She grew up rural. She learned how to work the earth. Her mother taught her that getting your hands dirty is a desirable thing, and Flannery O’Connor tells us, “Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn’t try to write ﬁction. It’s not a grand enough job for you.” My mother was a naturalist artist. She worked with the elements. She landscaped and arranged ﬂowers. Over the years, as I observed her intricately simple design with the ﬂora, I learned that, truly, less is more, that a lean style lends itself to a more perfect art form (for me it does). I never saw her adding to an arrangement, rather, she was always pulling from the piece, making it lighter, more exquisite, less encumbered, more graceful, more understated. I ﬁnd myself doing exactly this with my work. I am constantly trying to sculpt, removing words that detract from the essence of the piece. And in my mother’s landscaping, which was, for her, quite personal, not commercial, she began with what was already there. She didn’t interrupt nature. She eyed the lay of the land, the growth patterns, and she worked with it, not against it. She didn’t intrude. I try

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my best to work this way, too—to stand out of the way of my characters, to only magnify the possibilities already inherently there, by nature of their character. As a child, I was given the gift of privacy. I was also given, on my eighth birthday, a book with empty pages. I wrote in this journal. It was my house. My mother and my father had an innate respect for the dignity of a person’s privacy. I was allowed to have keys, locked doors, and a wooden chest that was impenetrable where my journal was stored. My parents did not pry or snoop. They did not want to interrupt or invade my dreams. In some ways, this may have been—other than love itself—their most noble gift. This house of ﬁction where I now reside hasn’t always been my dwelling place. As I said, I lived in my brother’s house when I was thirteen. As a child, I had a house I visited every night. I recall not wanting to be read to. I preferred instead to lie in the darkness and invent my own stories in surreptitious solitude. My mother told me that I’d scream with disgust over books in which animals talked. I have apparently always been devoted to realism, though Mother also told me I did have imaginary friends. The primary one was named Tiki. I don’t remember Tiki, but I feel certain he/ she was more important to me than real friends. Years ago, I had the pleasure of watching, in awe, my daughter construct her own imaginary playground. Not only did she have an imaginary best friend, named Ash, but also a host of imaginary dalmatians. Behind our house was a vast expanse of woods that rose to a mountaintop with outcroppings of massive rocks. My daughter called this Rockland, and this was where her imaginary friend, Ash, lived, along with Ash’s mother, father, and sisters, Carolina and Rosecar. Rockland had a lake, a zoo, a ﬁrehouse, and a tiny trolley that led to Ash’s school and art museum at the top of the mountain, beyond the big rocks. One spring, our family—the real one—went through a crisis. We had no idea that our daughter was conscious of all that was happening until she told us that Rockland had burned down. It was a sad time for her. But we all moved on to happier times; she began drawing pictures of bright, detailed buildings. “Tell me about your picture,” we’d say. Inevitably, her response would be, “This is Rockland’s new school,” or “Rockland’s new art museum,” or “Ash’s new house.” Rockland, destroyed

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by ﬁre, was totally rebuilt. Oh, the indestructibility of imagination, the resilience of creative spirit that survives the most devastating of house ﬁres. Jungian psychology tells us that, in dreams, a house is a symbol of our psyche. The faceless man who stands at the window trying to break in is only a part of ourselves—perhaps the part we fear the most, and probably the part who, in actuality, is the most benign, a lost child, maybe. The writer stands outside her own psyche, outside herself, and peers into the window of her soul to see the kitchen, the graveyard, the hands, the turquoise sky, the yellow butterﬂy, the people who dance into love, shell ladypeas, ride trains, change seasons, glance up to see the bluebird, and die. The house of ﬁction is the walls that contain our imagination, give it form, keep it from being more than an amorphous mess of ideas. Words are our tools, but we draw from the house of ﬁction our images, voices, scenes, the simple reality of daily bread. I married my brother’s best friend. Dennis, my husband, who marks time from 1959, grew up to be a writer. One of his best short stories is called “In Love with Things That Vanish.” It’s about his sister. He graduated from high school in the same class as my brother, in 1966—the year I was a seventeen-year-old girl in love. I accompanied Dennis to their twenty-year reunion in 1986, here in Birmingham. I don’t believe spouses belong at class reunions, but I went anyway because I wanted to see my brother’s girlfriend. They did break up the fall after high school, just as I’d feared. But it was more than her I wanted to see. It was the whole group I’d watched from a distance. I felt no sense of romance with my own high school experience because it was mine and was therefore void of the vicarious, the voyeuristic. We walked through the Birmingham Civic Center’s piazza lined with crepe myrtle until we arrived at the designated crowded room. The faces of the people I saw when I entered this swarm of memory were as familiar as Alabama heat. I knew their names like the back of my hand. Their faces and bodies had obviously made the transition to midlife; they were remarkably ﬁt but poignantly, permanently altered. The woman who had been senior beauty wore a tennis outﬁt and high-top snow-colored shoes that caused you to think, boots. “Neo–go go,” Dennis said. I searched for my brother’s girlfriend. I found her—alive, fresh, gor-

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geous, entirely unchanged by age. Not thirty-eight, but eighteen. She was wearing a crinkly aqua skirt. I shook her hand. Her starred-sapphire eyes made me tremble. She smiled and looked at me curiously. What was I doing there? she wanted to know. Randy’s little sister. “I married Dennis Covington.,” I explained. “Ah,” she said. “You look the same. I haven’t seen you since you were, what, thirteen?” I nodded. I learned she was six weeks pregnant, that she’d tried for years to have a baby and had ﬁnally adopted a daughter in Germany, that a brain tumor had been discovered that was pressing on the pituitary gland, affecting fertility. Surgery was performed, and she’d just learned days ago that she was pregnant. I wanted to ask her questions about life, desire, a hundred kinds of hunger. But I didn’t. Later in the evening, my brother danced with her in the unabashedly sultry, languid way people danced in 1966. They wove themselves into the fabric of old friends and lovers while I stood where I was born to stand— on the fringes of the dance ﬂoor gazing at things that were never mine, will always be mine.

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Epilogue

, One of the anonymous readers chosen by the Press to evaluate this collection of essays commented on the sharp contrast between these “June Cleaver essays” and Cleaving: The Story of a Marriage, coauthored with Dennis Covington. The reader suggested I write an epilogue addressing the question of what a writer learns when collecting earlier works into a whole: “Does she remember the woman who wrote them? Does she still love her?” As I write this, I don’t know who this reader was, but I’m tremendously grateful to her for asking me to tackle the question. I know it matters. For I was, indeed, conscious of how I’d changed as I went back to collect these pieces of myself. You know how it is when you see an old photograph of yourself. Whether you like how you looked then or not, you feel some kind of love—if not for yourself then for the time, place, hardship or lack thereof. You do remember. And though a catastrophic event often seems to sever the linear nature of life’s story, we’re not “cut in half.” I choose, instead, to agree with the screenplay adaptation of James M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, which opens with this reﬂection: “Some say that as we grow older, we become different people at different ages, but I don’t believe this. I think we remain the same throughout, merely passing in these years from one room to another but always in the same house. If we unlock the rooms of 155

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the far past we can look in and see ourselves beginning to become you and me.” Yet it would be a lie to say that I feel like the same person I was before the publication of Cleaving. The story of what happened to Dennis and me as husband and wife was well received, outside of our hometown. Library Journal named it a Best Book of 1999. It was even a best-seller in Canada. But after its publication our lives in Birmingham would never be the same. At ﬁrst our local Baptist Church stood beside us, but then some fellow deacons who were also friends and who had read the book in galleys warned us that there was a lot of “negative public opinion, a lot of pressure on the church and the pastor” and that we might think about stepping down from our leadership positions, which included being ordained deacons. “Why?” I asked the closest of my church friends. “Because, Vicki.” He paused. “Because you can’t be an adulterer and be a deacon in the Baptist Church.” I suspect we weren’t the ﬁrst and won’t be the last Baptists to commit adultery. The real problem is that we are writers, and we chose to write about our sin. We did step down from positions of leadership in our church. And though we were allowed to remain members, we didn’t go back. Did I love the woman I was back then? Yes. Do I love the woman who is writing this sentence right now? Yes, I do. Perhaps more deeply than ever, though this woman is struggling spiritually, mentally, and physically. Since the pieces in this collection were written, I’ve lost both my parents and I’ve had a heart attack. And just since I began collecting these essays for publication, I’ve had another bout with addiction. (After eighteen years of sobriety, I became addicted to prescription painkillers.) I’m back in recovery now, by the grace of God, though depression still hunts me down and probably always will. But all this is about me, the woman. The writer in me is able to stand back from the woman in me in order to record the events I’ve just listed. The woman adapts to changes. The writer, in many ways, stays constant. This is a gift—this strong, perfect camera that captures myself and those nearby when a work of nonﬁction or an essay is in progress. It is a narcotizing form of depersonalization that

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protects the writer from losing it, from giving up, from letting cowardice interfere with truth. For most writers are very easily hurt. Many of us suffer from depression or the effects of substance abuse or other illnesses. I’ve come to believe it’s part of the package. I was never so aware of this as I was in the spring of 2000 when I went to Sedona, Arizona, on what I thought might be the beginning of a spiritual quest. I’d heard that mystics gathered there. When I got to Sedona, I checked in at a place called the Matterhorn Lodge. I hadn’t made a reservation. I was following the spirit. The woman, Judith, behind the counter asked what I was looking for in Sedona. “My mother,” I told her. I didn’t tell her that Mother was dead or that Daddy was, too—though both had departed from this earth during the past year. I didn’t tell her about the Board of Deacons either. I just told her I was going to see a channeler. “That’s a hoax,” she told me. I studied her blue eyes, looking for signs of vacancy but immediately gave up my suspicions when she told me that all answers, including mine, could be found in nature. The vortices, she said, were where I needed to go. Long thought of as sacred by Native American tribes, these vortices in Sedona are focal points in the earth’s natural energy grid. Electric, magnetic, unique ﬁelds of the yin-yang variety—four of them—were waiting for me. I chose the vortex by the airport, actually called “the Airport Vortex.” The others had more charming names like Cathedral Rock and Boynton Canyon, but I have always liked airports, and the kinds of people who live and work near them. Of course, this was no ordinary airport setting. Rather, it was a ﬂat area right off the road; a trail led to a site where you could sit among the cactus and creosote bushes and look at the red rock formation straight ahead. It was shaped like a chess pawn. But I wasn’t so drawn by the unusual pinnacles and formations, the imposing multilayered spire of sandstone, or the geological forces that had made the place what it is. Instead of experiencing a mystical epiphany, I looked at the ﬂat areas of wilderness and, to my surprise, fell back on what I knew: Jesus. For other faiths, this man has other names. And certainly we are past the awkwardness of early political correctness that might cause a writer to censor herself about the name she gives to the

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prophet whose teaching she knows best. And I don’t know what he meant the day he said that no man comes to God but by him. Maybe he didn’t even say it. Who knows? We can only speculate. For instance, my daughter Laura once speculated, when she was maybe three or four years old: “God musta been feeling good about hisself the day he made a giraffe.” Anyway, that day in Sedona, I was speculating about Jesus and how it must have been when he was on Earth, when to follow Jesus meant just that—to walk after him through this kind of eerie land. I thought of how he would’ve let me come along, how he has let me come along even though I’m who I am. We’d take paths, trails, wearing sandals, and we’d “shake the dust from our sandals,” as he told his disciples to do when they found themselves in places where they weren’t wanted. He was a nomad, a wanderer. He hated the temple. He always taught by the water, the hillside. Nature, not a baptistry, was the backdrop for his sermons, which were simple stories. The truth was always contained in a story. Then I started crying. For I knew that no matter what I found in Sedona, I believed in and cherished and coveted this kind of man who, like me, wanted to just tell a story. I thought about the writer Dorothy L. Sayers, about her words that it is no wonder that the women were ﬁrst at the cradle and last at the cross. They had never known a man like this. Somebody who didn’t nag at them or patronize them or map out their spheres for them. He took us for who we are. And if you look through the Gospels, you’ll see that there is no act, no parable, no story that suggests that there is anything funny about the nature of women. And no matter how mad I was at the Baptist church, no matter how hurt I was by it, I am grateful for the intensity with which I studied the Bible as a child. I know I’m a better writer for it. But I also know I can’t go back, right now, to the church. It is no small thing to break with your heritage in a year when you’ve buried both your parents and lost many of your friends, and your marriage has been damaged—in part, by the very fact that you did write about it. Still, I have no regrets that I wrote what I wrote. I, the woman, regret many things I’ve done. But I, the writer, don’t regret that I chose to write about many of those things in the most honest and artful way I could. To distance myself from that story, to try to seem like the same person who wrote these essays—a younger, static, unchang-

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ing girl, with little experience of grief and no idea that good luck was about to run out on her—would be to ignore my gift. The woman in me who writes these words today will change, maybe even before you read them. But the writer in me won’t change. I will always write. In downtown Birmingham, there is a women’s shelter that houses about ﬁfty homeless women, many of them prostitutes. Shortly after I returned from Sedona, I volunteered to stay a night at the shelter with one of my friends, Lynne Bledsoe. The night was relatively uneventful except for a call from the North Precinct of the Birmingham PD saying they were bringing in a woman who had been beaten. As it turned out, the shelter workers knew her well. Violet Israel wore a purple sweater, black workout pants, and sunglasses even though it was midnight. She said her man beat her on the leg with a gun. We checked things out and couldn’t ﬁnd the damage. But it didn’t matter. She clearly needed to be at a shelter among the rest of us women who had a hurt we might mistake as a sore leg. At daybreak, we served the women bagels and quiche that another local church had brought in. The new volunteer—that was me, that night—was asked to make sure all the women were awake. I saw only one still sleeping on her mattress. I shook her arm gently. She rose, and I didn’t gasp, though she was the most striking woman I had ever seen in my life. An ivory slip strap fell from her ebony shoulder. She had a gold tooth. Her breasts were dark and full. “It’s morning,” I told her. She thanked me but did not make eye contact. My friend Lynne asked me what was the matter, and I thought it wrong to say that I didn’t know prostitutes were so lovely. So I simply shrugged and kept working. But right before the shelter closed its doors for the day, the woman gathered her things in a bag and turned to me. She was fully dressed now, in a tan suit that made her look like an attorney. “We sit on the steps,” she said to me directly, though no conversation was under way. “They call us names; they trash us. But you can’t let them. You take the trash they throw at you and throw it back at them,” she went on. “But listen, girl,” she said, and I thought she might grab me by the collar or something, “ﬁrst you got to get the trash out of yourself.”

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I watched her reach for the doorknob. “She’s a prophet,” I told Lynne. In a man’s world, I thought. But no longer crying.

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About the Author

Vicki Covington is a well-known southern novelist (Gathering Home, Bird of Paradise, Night Ride Home, and The Last Hotel for Women). Her most recent book, Cleaving: The Story of a Marriage, is a work of creative nonﬁction coauthored with Dennis Covington. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker; she has also written for many literary magazines, such as Shenandoah, Southern Humanities Review, Confrontation, and Ascent. She has been the recipient of an individual fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a columnist for various newspapers and magazines, among them the Oxford American and Southern Living. She was the recipient of an individual artist grant from the Alabama State Council for the Arts and the Alabama Library Association. Cleaving was named a best Book of the Year in 1999 by Library Journal. Currently, Covington teaches ﬁction writing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), where she also leads seminars in the UAB Honors Program. She gives readings and is a public speaker and advocate for the Alzheimer’s Society of Central Alabama and the Alzheimer’s Family Support System of UAB. She has two daughters. Ashley, seventeen, is a novelist, essayist, and skilled genealogical researcher. She attended the Alabama School of Fine Arts and is now a senior at Homewood High School (HHS). Laura, ﬁfteen, has received many awards for writing in all ﬁelds—poetry in particular. She is also active in the HHS Drama Department and local Thespian Troupe. Both girls are musicians—like their mother and their father, Dennis Covington, author of Salvation on Sand Mountain, a ﬁnalist for the National Book Award.

You are reading copyrighted material published by the University of Alabama Press. Any posting, copying, or distributing of this work beyond fair use as defined under U.S. Copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. For permission to reuse this work, contact the University of Alabama Press.

You are reading copyrighted material published by the University of Alabama Press. Any posting, copying, or distributing of this work beyond fair use as defined under U.S. Copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. For permission to reuse this work, contact the University of Alabama Press.