Stupidly and naively and without any real feeling for their actual lives, I come to class one day thrilled with an event from the evening before — a tornado! The weird, green sky, the awful silence, the seemingly backward-flying birds. I tell them of my fantasy: to go to the thing’s center, to be obliterated, to achieve oblivion. In reality when the tornado comes I have no idea what to do and feel scared. No key to the basement, I stay in my attic apartment alone, the radio saying over and over, take cover. I’m afraid — and there’s no one here to die with me. The class is clearly appalled by my comments. What do I know of the grief such phenomena have caused them, their families? Immediately I regret my flippant tourism. The next day I go into a brief but heartfelt apology. I have learned something. What was I thinking? After my apology they slowly begin to trust me. They tell me about cows and corn and the prairie. The semester can begin, finally. I seem like a New Yorker to them: exotic, ridiculous, impractical, and yet somehow credible (it must be the two books), or, if not entirely credible, at least worthy of trust. And I think they enjoy teaching me things, the roles reversed.
Writing classes are about trust, of course, and after a while, in the safe place we have created together they begin writing their dreams, their fantasies, their desires. What many of them write about again and again is a thing they have never seen — the ocean. I am so moved by their longing — these children of the Midwest, these children of ISU — cinder-blocked, landlocked. They swim in high water. They never tire. They begin to learn how to write themselves free.
My graduate class at first makes me a little nervous. After all, I have never been to graduate school myself. I have never been in a writing workshop before. I have never taught anyone anything. But they, too, are unreasonably kind.
Still, something is a little off. I am often lost there, disoriented. The boys seem too perfect, too polite. I am amazed at the heightened, garish sexual fantasies they inspire. And the girls — they’re too complacent, too nice. I realize that part of why I’m here is to teach them to be bad, to question, to disobey. Normaclass="underline" I feel on the edges of town and then out into the countryside, the severity of farmers, rising at dawn, eating dinner at five and to bed. They would not approve of me, these men. There’s a certain unreality to everything I see or perceive. Here, where people still eat lots of beef and lots of candy bars and smoke cigarettes, and many — it is true, as the French like to say of Americans — are overweight. The fat people for the circus must be grown out here, I think in a dream. And even the university is a paradox, a very unusual place. On the outside it is a lot of ugly buildings plunked down in the middle of nowhere. On the inside there is a gleaming altar to the most innovative and experimental literature in the world. It is taught here, it is valued, it is even published. Illinois State now houses both Dalkey Archive Press and The Review of Contemporary Fiction, as well as Fiction Collective Two. And in the Unit for Contemporary Literature, the dream of a literary avant-garde Utopia is slowly being realized. In this whole wide country there is no other place that comes close to it. Few places in the world come to mind. And my New York is light years away.
This land of stark miracle springing from the extraordinarily fertile earth. Flat earth. Where each night on the flatlands I dream of a curvaceous woman. She cups water in her hands. And I marvel at the beauty of the cornfields and the sky. Count pheasants. Visit what I’ve dubbed the Beckett tree, straight out of Godot. The land is breathtaking in its austerity, in its uncompromising forever, as gorgeous as anything I’ve ever seen. A different sort of ocean.
But I fear at times the cornfields and the miles and miles of soybean fields and the sky. We are up to our thighs in corn. We imagine we drink utterly pure, sweet water. Heartland water. Perfect water. But three younger women now, natives of this place, all from the heart of the heart of the country, are stricken with cancer, and I am forced to wonder what it is about. The pesticides in the sweet water? The beloved injected cows, that delicious, coveted beef? The feed?
This pristine countryside. We drive. I take my class hours and hours away to another school to see the great filmmaker Stan Brackhage, who has turned up to speak and show films. We are examining alternative narrative strategies in my graduate class. Hearing him speak and watching his extraordinary films in the dark, I forget for a few hours how far away I am from home. For a little while I am more at home than I am anywhere else.
I was expecting nothing. Then, after a while I was expecting an extreme provinciality from my central Illinois. But finally I have come to realize that it is no more provincial than one of the minor cities: Pittsburgh or Milwaukee, say. And, in fact, it may be somewhat better, who knows? I joined the Normal ACT UP, a branch that included maybe ten people. One freezing October night we read the names of those who had died all the way through until dawn, and there was a legion of people here to grieve all ages, all types. All night.
And of Chicago, I recognize immediately that it is a city I might, given the chance, come to love. I find myself more comfortable there than in any other American city I know outside of New York. It seems real — its architecture, its grandeur, its people, its cultural life, its miseries. I find it a relief after the pretty toy of San Francisco, the segregated contrivances of Boston, artificial D.C., sprawling, incomprehensible L.A. And the other cities: Houston, Atlanta, whatever. Who knew?
And in retrospect ISU will be among the best institutions I shall teach in. Schools that now include Columbia, Bennington, Brown.
And it is the first time I will ever be called a goddess. And it is the first time in my adult life that I will be able to pay my bills. Or go to the doctor.
The goddess is waiting again, having gone home to New York and having flown back to Chicago, for her all-too-small, all-too-private plane to take her back to Bloomington. I look for the dark angel I see each time in the propeller’s rotating blade. So many hair-raising American Eagle trips that year, flights I was pretty sure I’d never get off alive. They were always cartoonish, it seemed, with drinks flying and ladies crying. Before boarding they would check our weight and the weight of our carry-ons, in order to assign seats. So much waiting that year. The wings are frozen solid again. I entertain the grim possibility that perhaps at last this will be my final flight.
There are many strange dangers. I have always feared the Midwest, I realize that now — known for its clean-cut serial killers, its smoldering, unreadable violences. When I walk into my friendly, neighborhood liquor store I literally see red before my eyes. Sometimes it’s only for an instant, but sometimes it’s something more prolonged. It’s odd because I do not ordinarily have such visions, and yet the color is undeniable — red. Only much later do I learn of the triple murder that occurred there a year or so before. OK, maybe I, too, have come to die. I can’t help wondering.
Or maybe I’ve come here just to dance: We pile into the truck in our glitter and bows and head for Peoria to the local gay club to watch our friend perform in drag. I am a little smug. I am of course from New York City, and dubious to say the least. In my time I have witnessed more than one cross-dressers’ convention in Provincetown, that gay mecca, and I fancy myself something of an expert.