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Falling Through Space
I drove past the place I’d lived before I met Jim and the door was open. For a second, it seemed as if it were open in exactly the same way I would have left it, an eerie sensation that made me wonder if it had remained ajar during the several years I’d been gone—gaping foolishly as if awaiting my return. I had the rare weekend to work on poetry but I was frustrated and completely stuck. “Can I hold the steering wheel, Daddy?” I wrote just above an entry that noted a group of farmers had gone to St. Louis for a singles convention! The idea of a dating service for farmers seemed such an oddity to me but they were lonely people when they were single, too, right?
Getting nowhere in my feeble attempts to hit upon something interesting to work creatively, I decided to crawl into bed with Ellen Gilchrist’s journal Falling Through Space. I noted the next morning how her descriptions of the people in her life and her reactions to them were so rich. As I flipped through my writer’s notebook, it occurred to me that I avoided writing about people beyond their physical characteristics. I realized then that going further—into the emotional realm—frightened me.
I’d published a Lent/Easter poem in “The Messenger,” our church newsletter, which I’d been writing and editing for a while. I had lunch with my mom the week after it was out and she told me how much she liked it. When she called it scripture, I realized she was holding me in much higher regard than I deserved. She was struggling with her relationship with my sister and she asked if she could talk about it that day. Mama, her mother, who had joined us, chimed in, “It’s like shit, Joyce; the more you stir it, the more it stinks.” I had just told Mama that she looked like an Easter egg in her pale pink and peppermint green blazer and matching earrings. So much for ladylike decorum! I thought, deciding then and there that she would be the perfect character for me to muck around with because she was about as complex a spiteful personality as they come.
I dug into this task as I was flying to Los Angeles to meet with NBC, the only account I had been maintaining from my business days because it was so lucrative. I spent the first several hours of the flight making notes about Anne, as she had been named—though I’d never called her anything but Mama. “How did this young person with her flapper charms turn into such a bitter, crass woman?” I wrote, a question I left open-ended as I ran out of steam about the time we flew over the Grand Canyon. I’d never noticed how the gigantic impression had scooped itself out of the flat plateaus surrounding it, its edges seemingly filled with myriad fingering nerve endings. The adjacent farmland reminded me of a quirky linoleum floor: perfectly cut squares in parts and frayed edges in others. The lakes winked at me like scattered moons, and I wondered if the wayward orb had ever been tempted to unleash itself from its heavenly tether and lie down in one of those verdant squares of what appeared from such a great height to be the softest green. It would have had the sense, of course, to avoid the stubby beards of those rectangles that had gone fallow from lack of nourishment—tan and drab, they had their part in the scheme of things but who’d want to rest within such prickliness?
When I touched down in L.A., I was reminded that it was and ever will be a concrete monster, though the thrill of pulling into Century Plaza in a chauffeured car was something I didn’t take for granted. The first round of meetings went well and with the initial negotiations behind me, I retreated to a plush chair on the balcony of my hotel room in the early evening, the railing so high I had to sit on the arm of the chair to sneak a view of the sprawling city. The next morning, preparing for round two, I lounged on the terrace with breakfast, feeling as if I could languish there all day had I been allowed. It was the first time I’d write that happiness had nothing to do with my surroundings. Instead, contentment had everything to do with having quiet, plenty of paper, a pen and something in mind to explore.
In that moment, I realized what a change this was for me as I had been blaming my misery during my Costa Rican experiences on the place itself. Was I really to come to terms with this in one of the most crowded cities on earth? I wondered. It was not surprising that I had hit upon the fact that I was craving solitude perched above a concrete jungle filled with smog, traffic and a tumult of people. What did surprise me was that such a place inspired me to see so clearly that it wasn’t the lush jungle of Costa Rica that threw me; it was the chaos inherent in how Jim expected me to live while we were there. “I work much better when my mind can stroll into a setting of peaceful non-resistance,” I wrote. “I enjoy aloneness. Does this mean I’m really becoming a writer? Does it mean I’ll have to leave this life I’ve been trying so desperately to accept in order to be myself in the most authentic meaning of the word?”
I felt pensive as I flew back east, the landscape blurring and coming into focus as I struggled with these questions. Far below, the rivulets of water running from the dusty hills through a great gorge had bleached the barren land to a ghostly shade of bisque in a fanned pattern like a bird’s tail when it unfolds. From the higher reaches, the water had cascaded in narrower streams, making markings similar to that of worn, cracked leather that had been scorched by intense heat. I counted nine different shades of earth framed by my airplane window, and one mountain looked as though it had developed a bad case of varicose veins.
I rifled through my writer’s notebook as if I could find clues as to where the trajectory of my desire to write at all costs would lead me. I’d been thinking about the children of Costa Rica a great deal since we’d finished the last project, how they were in the happiest times of their lives as kids and wondering where their adulthood would leave them. Would they look back on the sun-dappled days of running naked across the scrubby lawns with nostalgia when they were left languishing in unquenchable heat as adults who were trying to scrape by on almost nothing? What story could I tell that would shine a light on those who never had an opportunity to actualize the kind of dreams I valued? Wasn’t this arrogant? I asked yet again. Who’s to say my marker of what was valuable would have been of any interest or merit to them?
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The Gates of Hell
In the scattered villages along the ocean’s edge, dugout canoes littered the shore, each a perfect piece of artistry made whole by hours upon hours of work and many thrusts of a blade. One spot near the ocean held the poorest shack I’d ever seen—the façade looking so tired that it seemed to be straining with all its might to hold together. The ragged boards, uneven on top and bottom with gaps in between, were topped with a rusted zinc roof that skewed precariously due to the jaggedness of these supporting planks. Laundry hung from a drooping line in the yard, and on the crumbling cement steps a half dozen small children, bodies covered with thick mud and hair matted with the same dark ooze, played games.
When they heard our engine droning, they stopped and looked our way. A dog ran under the house as we drove by—skin and bones and pleading eyes. I winced, convinced that if he ran into one of the boards that served as a support for the house, it would tumble into a pile not unlike a scattering of thick pickup sticks. It was obvious that a major tropical storm had not blown through in quite some time since this tenuous structure was still standing in this incredibly wild setting at the edge of the sea.
The sun stayed with us when we arrived—unlike the previous trip when the heavens opened and we were forced to have the beach mass surrounded by a handful of stoned Rastafarians. The Caribbean was fierce, pounding the shore and infusing the already damp air with its salty spray. We decided to put in an encore appearance at Sanford’s, the dubious scene of our impromptu communion before. As Tobie and I walked in ahead of the others, the stoners looked us over with a mixture of lust and hate. There was a peculiar difference in these men that set them apart from any other group I’d seen. They didn’t even try to disguise their feelings: you knew, without a doubt, how they felt about you the minute your gaze met theirs. Lust and hate would seem to me to be a dangerous combination, and I’d never thought of it before, but wouldn’t being regarded with these emotions rather than adoration explain the difference between being made love to and being fucked?
The word fuck had come up in conversation with one of the volunteers the day before. He had mentioned how much he’d enjoyed a recent trip to Belize and I was reminded of Ellen Gilchrist’s short story “Belize,” which I’d just finished.
“You might enjoy it, although it’s a bit trashy,” I said.
“What’s trashy about it?” he asked.
“Her abundant use of the word fuck in the story,” I replied.
“You say fuck all the time, so why wouldn’t you write it?”
“Touché!” I said; “maybe I will.”
I admired Gilchrist’s courage, especially since this story, as well as others as brazenly honest, were published in Drunk With Love in 1986, well before most women writers, especially those from the south, had had the courage to use profanity in their writing. In “Belize” her protagonist takes no prisoners:
“‘What do the rest of them do?’” I say. I am sick of Whit. He’s so goddamn jolly all the time. So goddamn gung ho. Davie had fucked me that morning while I thought about the orange peels. I feel like I’ve gained ten pounds. It’s hot as the gates of hell.”
It would be a very long time before I’d have the courage to put the word in a piece of my writing, and it’s a strange coincidence to me now that Gilchrist had mentioned George Gabb, the Belizian woodcarver who had inspired my poem “Adam’s Perspective,” though not by name:
“Whit’s been out exploring. ‘They have two industries,’ he says. ‘A man who carves sharks from mahogany and a man and woman team who make herons from the horns of cows.’”
When we had visited Gabb in Belize City, I had had the same impression Gilchrist’s protagonist had had of the town:
“The capital city is like a little town in the Delta, only dirtier; dirtier than anything in the world. The bays that cut into the land from the Atlantic are filthy. Things float on them. Paper cartons, shoes, orange peels…”
I would have added the broken partial ribcages of cows and scraps of fish skin, especially near the central market in town where sea turtles were turned upside down and slid under a shelf on rough concrete, their flippers slowly pulsing as if they were dreaming of water. When I read that their shells are so sensitive, they can feel a blade of sea grass as it brushes across them in the water, I was horrified at the treatment they received, though the fisherman who snagged them did not handle them with mal intent as they were simply seen as food to be sold and consumed.
That day on the beach in Costa Rica, I looked around our long table at everyone, settling on the face of the volunteer who’d called me on my resistance to writing profanity, and thought how strange life was that it had brought us to the same table. Everyone was laughing because there was no way to be heard over the pulsating music, though it didn’t stop anyone from trying to talk. The waiter brought beers for everyone and we toasted the fact that we’d landed in such an incredibly amazing spot for an afternoon of exploring. I felt grateful that I’d been given the opportunity to see several of my friends in this odd world. They certainly didn’t seem to be depressed about the experiences they were having—in fact, they seemed as if they were having the times of their lives. I was left asking, yet again, Why can’t I?
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