A Question I've been asked

Sudden meetings with yourself.

A Question I’ve been asked

When I look back on my life, I see two periods: the time before I was published and the time after I knew I could make a life as a writer. When I say, “make a life as a writer,” I mean I knew I would keep doing it.

I used to pass a man on Broadway. Up and back we both walked on the Upper West Side. He had been my teacher at Barnard, and he’d had a sexy sort of bravado in those days. He was an academic who wanted to come off as a Bohemian, and he wrote experimental novels. Many years after college, when he’d pass me on Broadway and we’d stop to exchange a few sentences, the first words out of his mouth were, “Are you still writing?”

Over the years I’ve been asked this question many times, and each time it happens, I know the person is hoping I will shake my head sadly and admit I have not made a success out of writing, or I’ve run out of steam. It’s something like a hobby or a job I tired of, and I’ve drifted off to another hobby or job. “No, I’m no longer writing, I’m collecting stamps. Have you got any interesting stamps you might have saved?” Or, “No, I’m no longer writing. I’m now counting the cracks in the sidewalk between your house and mine. You’d be surprised how focusing this is of the mind.”

I like to run my tongue over these encounters. For a long time I thought it meant I was so invisible in the world, it was a reasonable question to ask if I was still writing. That, too, felt like someone walking on my grave. If you have no plans to have a grave, can you still feel people walking on it? Yes.

I thought the question, “Are you still writing?” would be posed less often to a man than to a woman, but this could be wrong. There’s a lot of jealousy toward men who also do what they please with their lives. It’s just more insulting to the rest of the world when a woman does what she pleases with her life, in that a man might be expected to do what he pleases without setting off as many alarms.

I didn’t make the kind of success where you feel part of a club. I haven’t been included in any clubs. The other day, I was remembering an unusual thing I did in junior high. I organized a club of girls called the Bon Amis. I went out of my way to ask a girl who seemed alone and unfriended. Maybe odd. Everyone, it turns out, is odd, but there is a particular way oddness hits you in junior high, a yellow light you realize could fall on you that you either dart away from or drift toward. The club had no purpose whatsoever, and we quickly dispersed, but not before we ordered sweaters with our club’s name on the back. People would stop me in the halls and say, “What does it mean?” I had no answer, and I can see now this was more or less the situation I would again find myself in many years later on Broadway.

If I say to the person, “Yes, I’m still writing,” the next question is, “What are you writing about?” That’s the question that makes me feel like a little sheep who needs to be herded into one corral or another. What’s your genre? Fiction or nonfiction? Are you writing a novel or whatever kind of writing that exists as the handmaid or lost ignoble third cousin once removed  of the novel?

I say, “I don’t write about anything,” and I see on the person’s face a confused expression that is also pained and embarrassed for me. Then I go into Zabar’s and circle around the free samples.  

Biz

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Rosebud

Richard and I were talking about long-term memory and how it isn’t studied, only short-term memory interests people in medical fields. I said, “Long-term memory is an invention. It’s always Rosebud, an old sled in a splintery attic, not a trip to a filing cabinet, so it’s in the category of art, not science.” Then suddenly an image floated into my mind, and I could see my childhood friend Linda and me playing on the dunes of Long Beach.

Where she lived was called Lido Beach, and that’s where we went every day after school. The dunes were covered with tall beach grass ending in tassels we called “the land of the golden grain heads.” I can smell the salt air. I can hear the ocean pausing with an intake a breath before another wave crashes to shore. I can hear the gulls squawking overhead, looking for something in the water to dive at and catch. I can see the line of assorted objects left at high tide, like the line in a bathtub, that includes colored beach glass and intriguing biological specimens of half chewed fish we might poke at with a stick. Sometimes tide pools form that are like a river bed and also like an aquarium with little fishes and crustaceans living in them. I am always at Linda’s house. I am always looking to live somewhere other than home.

I can see Linda’s dog Penny, who looks like a little deer, running with us. Penny is never on a leash and she never runs off. I can see the look of the beach in all seasons, when snow falls, and the white of the snow on the white sand blends into the white curls of foam on the waves. I can see what Turner painted although I’ve not yet seen a Turner painting. I’m seeing the beach that belonged to Linda and me. There are no other children on this beach. We play with other children on the street and later, when we’re older, there will be boys. I will be with boys on this beach standing out on the jetties that extend far into the water and splash you if you are anywhere on their barnacled rock faces.

I’m alone with Linda, and I’m perfectly happy. I don’t know how I know this, but I do. I am perfectly happy in a friendship I don’t question. Linda may question it, but I don’t yet sense this, and maybe she has not begun to question what it feels like to be swept into the force field of someone else’s strong desires. I move in the world as if I know what I want, and maybe I do know.

At this stage, both girls have the freedom of the dog, and they talk to each other. Linda has peachy skin and thick hair her mother pulls off her face. Linda teaches me to play chess. She can kick a ball harder and farther than any other girl at school, so when the girls play kickball after lunch on the grounds of our beautiful, newly-built school, when I, as one of the team captains get to chose my players, alternating with the other captain, I pick Linda first. Everyone expects this. Looking back, I’m so happy I was able to maneuver myself into one of the captain positions, rather than wait to be chosen, where I might have been left languishing in a field with the other lonely lambs and goats.

Between the ages of eight and twelve let’s say, I’m happy because a deeper understanding of how life works has not yet formed in me. I’m not yet aware of the ruffle of doubt and the sense of being wrong-footed that will determine my feeling state for the rest of my life. I sleep at Linda’s house as often as I can. It’s another thing I maneuver. For several years, a giant telephone pole will float onto our beach and embed itself in the sand. It’s notched in a way so we can sit inside it, like a boat, and we’re never happier than when the tide comes up and surrounds the log on all sides. We sometimes return to Linda’s house in wet clothes, and her seemingly unflappable mother tosses them in the dryer and acts like nothing particularly irritating or dangerous has happened.

After school with Linda, I lived a childhood that was physically free and outside the supervision of adults. Our friendship ended, more or less, when I went off to Woodmere to go to school. As I write this, I see I’ve tried in my romances ever since to recreate this dune world and beach wandering in the best moments of the life I would build after childhood. Except I never left childhood.

Mary Smullin

In 1970, on my first trip to England, I arrived at Victoria Station and found a nearby bed & breakfast. I stayed there a few nights, and then the owner told me her sister had a bed & breakfast in Willesden Green for only a pound a night. Her sister’s name was Mary. Mary Smullin and I became friends in a way that did not end.

The sisters were from Ireland. I don’t know how old Mary was in 1970. Her house had many rooms for visitors. The most wonderful room was on the first floor. Glass French doors opened onto a brilliant rose garden tended by Mary’s husband. There were roses in the front, too. It was one of those houses in London, where the city looks like a village.

I didn’t know who I was, or where my life was going. Bruce and I had gotten married in 1966 and by 1971 we’d be through and I’d be living on my own in a little apartment on Charles Street—in a house with Tudor facing. I didn’t know who I was or where my life was going, but my life, I felt, was the crossroads of the women’s movement and the sexual revolution. This sat well with Mary, in the style of Mary, whose life sometimes sounded like the plot of a Victorian novel. It didn’t matter. We spoke a common language, and it was a language about women.

For breakfast, she served enough food to last through most of the day, and if you were around in the late afternoon she’d make a pot of tea and offer you cookies or cake, and you’d talk at the table. In the basement of our house in Hudson, where I’ve saved the letters and cards I’ve received, are Christmas cards and notes from Mary, sent until I don’t know when they stopped.

One day, after a conversation with Mary in 1971, during my second stay with her, I made these notes

“Mrs. Smullin’s voice is full of laughter. She’s laughing about where she’s arrived in life. She was the oldest of nine children. Her mother had two children before she was nineteen. Mary said, ‘I never knew my mother. I never saw her with her feet up’. Her father was dead at 54. Her mother was dead at 69 without ever having had a holiday in her life. Mary said, ‘I watched my mother lie sick in bed for three months after one delivery. I had to stand on a stool and make bread, clean the house and the babies' diapers. I made a vow at eight never to have children’. At sixteen, she was sent by the old parish priest to be a servant to a family with fourteen children and a governess. Nineteen people to clean up after for 10 shillings a week. The priest's new marble fireplace and stained glass windows were a recent gift from this family. ‘I had to lock my room at night so the ‘masters’ wouldn’t pay me a midnight call’. In spite of it all, she loves her religion. She sends money back to her sisters in Ireland. I smell the roses on the table where we sit and the roses she’s placed in my room. She’s the personal cook for Roy Jenkins, who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer under Harold Wilson. She hopes soon to be working again at 11 Downing Street.”

This woman and I never stopped loving each other. Roy Jenkins, whose father had been a coal miner, did return to office, becoming Home Secretary in the Labour government in 1974. Looking back, you see your life is strung together by the strangers you meet.

Roy Jenkins

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