I see myself from far off. I see myself from the future. My life over. “During that time she traveled by train often…”
From The Bay of Angels:
Sophie sees a stork go by. Then another. Another. Dropping babies, another, another (how lovely) on the Normandy Coast.
Sophie thinks the child. The child might have. The child might have pointed to the sky and said starling, larkspur, lark. She writes it down. She takes out her box of paints, thinks: the child. A flock of extinct birds pass. Sophie thinks the child. Against a setting century.
To have had to work for money through the whole pregnancy when all I wanted to do was to sit in my chair with my legs on an ottoman draped in cashmere. Some other time perhaps.
A dream in vivid red last night. Red sky, red sea, red in the toilet bowl. Red falling from my eyes like tears. Fear translating immediately into dream. Yesterday I fell outside my apartment in Providence. Carrying too many papers and books back from school.
A bleeding dream in red.
Then next, the child-gone-from-the-belly dream. And then the dream of the car skidding out of control. A cracked windshield. A crimson wreath in the snow. A bathtub filled with blood-red roses.
Against a terrible and extraordinary music. She takes the child’s hand. Make a mountain peak, then cross it. A. They draw an A. And the world begins again.
I begin to worry a little about the three flights of very narrow stairs up to my garret. Why am I living the life of the graduate student I never was? No telephone. A futon. Bad take-out Chinese food. Stacks and stacks of books.
And Sophie having washed the page in rose (before night) writes Larkspurs (she loved flowers), a book for children.
The fantasy of hurling myself out of this too-small window. The garret stifling. I see us smashed on the street. Not a happy sight.
I still try to write, to work on Frida or The Bay of Angels a little, but it is as if I am reaching through haze, through gauze — impossible to get to — to get close enough to. How to get to what matters most? A dying feeling. Of lights being extinguished. Blow out the candles now. It’s even getting hard to read. Intimations of the first trimester — enormous fatigue.
She washes the page in spring (where children play).
No getting around the baby anymore. A privacy made completely public.
I look at my notes and see that she is everywhere. Has always been there. Asleep in the text. Rose and baby snow.
She washes the page in rose under the title: Hope.
Welcome to the Children’s Museum. Under glass or in a locked box preserved: what they loved, what they wanted, the games they played.
A silver cup, a xylophone, a see-saw, a sliding pond. Three types of seeds — columbine, bluebell, larkspur. A tinker toy. A jump rope. A pink blanket. The rhyming alphabet.
I don’t seem like such a complete oddball to the secretaries at Brown anymore. Finally I have something like credibility. Finally we have something huge in common. It’s kind of sweet. I could stand there hour after hour suddenly talking babies with them. I savor this being like everyone else for once. Picture myself a normal person, consider what my life might have been like — had absolutely everything been different.
And to the world at large. I am someone suddenly who bears a resemblance to something.
I get many many Normal Person credits for being pregnant, for having a baby. For joining the human race.
For foregoing the husband, for writing all night, for living in my own private Idaho, and for being, in general, a basket case, I get points taken away.
Sophie guides the child’s hand. What is this ache deep within for something I do not directly remember, but which was mine?
My writing, as usual, notes to the most mysterious part of myself. Meditating the child — for years and years, before I acted.
Roses and angels, the century, fall on the horizon, and snow. Feel them now as they move slowly into you. They’re sweet and round — everything for a while — and you are getting, you are — undeniably — getting sleepy.
The ongoing dream in those years. Roses and apples and snow — the child. Waving and waving on the horizon.
The oddness at the very heart of me.
Once after a reading a bunch of us went to dinner. A friend of Dixie’s, the judge, sat down next to me and said, “You know, don’t you, that you are a very strange person.”
C.D. and I in a Creative Writing faculty meeting. God, she says in her Arkansas accent, you look just like Rapunzel! It is true, I don’t know why, but I’ve just let my hair grow and grow. And it’s much thicker, more wild than usual.
I named my baby Rapunzel so that she might display ingenuity. So that she might dream of escape.
The baby takes in the three days of our festival celebrating New Directions. James Laughlin is dead. When I wrote earlier in the year he was pleased by our plans though his health precluded his joining us. Michael Palmer comes, which cheers me greatly. Walter Abish, Robert Creeley. Beloved Rosmarie Waldrop like a New Directions queen. I read from John Hawkes’s The Blood Oranges. He’s decided to sit this one out. I understand. First I say how he and ND changed my life. Then I read — it sounds great out loud. Pregnancy makes you cry at every turn and so I am weeping for the very fact of Jack Hawkes. The very fact of New Directions. I was late to the dinner because of course I’d lost my keys again. I’m in love with the New Directions editors. They are incredibly smart and serious, the last thing you think of an editor being anymore. It makes me terribly nostalgic, longing for a past in which I might have been a writer in such a situation. Yes, it might have been me, that graceful give and take, finally the perfect match — I am consistently challenged, basking in their guidance, their brilliance, their devotion to the text as we amble along the still bohemian Greenwich Village streets, a past which for me never existed — but which was mine. They advance me enough money to write. Not much, but not much is needed. We are in the last smoke-filled, amber-lit afternoons before publishing completely changes forever. Books will become commodities. So-called serious writers will find the formulas to make themselves famous and rich. Experimental work will be completely scoffed at and ridiculed — but not yet. The young corporate writers of today are not even born yet, I hope. There are still small publishers, not conglomerates, a belief in the possibility of art.
These marvelous editors, talking this afternoon about translation — these women from a disappeared world, back here with us for a second. I rub my eyes. Am I dreaming?
I’d like to do a big book with them.
The music I live and write to all hours of the day that drives everyone crazy. I know from the beginning she has heard it.
Mom tells my sister Christine. She seems all right with it for now. Generous, even kind. Trying so hard always to claim her small bit of happiness. Not giving up. I don’t know how she goes on sometimes. I admire her courage.