I wish I could give her some of this peace.
We dare to name her. We feel now as if it is real — or at least more real.
Rose.
To be surrounded on both sides by roses — my mother, and now my daughter. What could be better than that?
Mother. Daughter —
“A rain of roses will fall at my death.”
— Saint Therese of Lisieux
Rose
for my mother
and for Gertrude Stein
and for Rosmarie Waldrop too
No other name in the world.
Rose, still enclosed in her translucent amnion. Her heartbeat is louder now.
Every rose pulses.
A very sweet long lunch with Jack Hawkes. A while back I had inadvertently offended him by making a frivolous comment about some of his former students, now writers of some note (I did not even know they were his students). An awkward and painful few weeks. A lot of prima donna posturing from the former students. It all having to do with their posing as experimental avant-garde types at the experimental avant-garde festival while simultaneously reading their slickest work from The New Yorker, and flinging their various issues of the magazine around the stage. I am offended and find the way to say so. Pressure from the program for me to apologize. I write a goofy letter trying to explain myself to the former students. Imagine! The whole thing is absurd.
But Jack takes the whole thing to heart. Months and months pass. I try to apologize. He tries to dismiss it. It was nothing. How can I tell him what he has meant to me? Of course I can’t. And so we talk about other things, happy things. The baby. The book. The film of The Blood Oranges. He thinks Rose is a lovely name. There aren’t many Roses, really, he says. He thinks Styron. He does a brief critical assessment of William Styron. You can imagine! We eat pasta and I break my no-drinking rule for the afternoon. It begins to rain. When I leave him he disappears down Thayer Street in the fog to buy typewriter ribbon. That spectral genius. Waving good-bye.
The increasing need now for solitude. This turning inward. More even than usual — though I have always craved it. Once on a beach long ago I move my towel away from my chatting friends and declared, I need my solitude. Many years ago now. It came up many times after that as a joke almost: Give Carole her solitude.
My students comment on how I am very nearly unrecognizable without a glass of wine in my hand. I guess in this way at least I must be a real old-fashioned writer. AA smugly waits for me. Not a chance.
When she wakens she moves about freely in the buoyant fluid, turning from side to side and frequently head over heels, as it is said of one who is madly in love.
She falls back to sleep. The baby floating in her dreamy amnion. Saw a documentary on TV and realized I knew the people in it a little. Enough to know it was not going to end well. The film concerned the different aspects of wanting and having a child. A brother and his wife trying to get pregnant. A sister and her lesbian lover and their infant. I brace myself. Right before the baby’s first birthday, the sister will be killed by a driver who runs a red light late at night. Unspeakable sorrow. I watch Mary, the sister of the woman killed, the woman I know a little, weeping uncontrollably on the TV screen at the baby’s birthday party.
Is there any way at all to be safe?
Helen, held at gunpoint, only months after she’d become sober. Her whole life still ahead of her.
“The amnion, though transparent and hardly thicker than the paper of this book, is tough and slightly elastic, like sausage casing. Unlike sausage casing, it is quite lovely and has a natural silvery shimmer. It is a living tissue made up of a single layer of skin cells.”
You are gleaming inside. In your bag of waters. It cushions you now against blows — and keeps you warm — and supports you so that you are virtually weightless. You are covered now in a coat of grease like a channel swimmer. It is called vernix — that is Latin for varnish.
And as if that were not enough you grow fuzz — lanugo, Latin for wool, on your arms and legs and back. My darling lamb. My lambling.
Earthling now… almost.
Another rare occasion where I allow myself a drink (I can count them on one hand). The artist Annette Messager has come to Brown to speak. She is marvelous, of course. Her women’s work — without apology. I wave to Sylvie across the aisle. Good French champagne afterwards — impossible to resist. I don’t know why a few drinks effect me this way, but they do. When I return to my room I curl up on the floor naked hugging the curvature of my body and weep. I am Mahler’s Lied von der Erde. I am singing. I am elemental. I am the earth and the sorrow of the earth. In the translation: Dark is death, is life… I open in concentric circles. Everywhere and forever the distances shine blue. I am the blue beauty of the earth. I am eternity. I am radiance. Oh, God! What a sight!
The things I love to do most: writing novels, gardening, cooking, being pregnant — women’s work, all.
This little book was meant to chronicle the workings of time on the psyche and the body. And yet now I notice that time seems oddly suspended, hanging there — or even reversed. A bizarre feeling.
First copy of Defiance in my hands. Suddenly I worry I have been too passive during its production. Done too little (nothing in fact) to ease it into the world. To help its reception. It’s a very strong piece of work — if it’s overlooked this time, well, then someday. It is what I have come to believe.
Try not to second-guess it all. Try to relax a little. I am not a salesman for God’s sake. (How old-fashioned I sound). Isn’t it hard enough to write them? Of course it is. I do not sell many books, I’m afraid. As if I should. Considering what sells. The crass, the vulgar, the simplistic, the sensational. I despise it. I’ll save the lecture I guess. How nice — a little of the old arrogance coming back!
The odd thing about being pregnant — I care even more deeply than before about my writing, but less and less about my writing “career.”
But did I neglect it? The question nags a little today. I have scarcely thought about it since that major revision to the galleys. Knew then it was as close to the book I wanted as it would get. And I let it go. Helen asks how I feel about seeing it for the first time, but I don’t really know. It’s a far-off object, like almost everything.
Worried now about flying on one big plane and one small plane to Penn State but am quite desperate to try to find a teaching position where I will only have to be there half the year. Something Brown has so far been unwilling to agree to.
Violence of the rise into the sky. Usually I am thrilled by it. But today all I can think is that this is not natural. What am I doing? That awful tilted centrifugal thing. The horizon askew. I feel like the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz — torn in pieces by the velocity, by the height, the pressure in the cabin. The baby protests. What I am doing is trying to save my life. Anything for one semester. But anything?