Wild Heart

More Than One, Fewer Than 8 Million

Do you ever wonder how many people you have inside of you? Not separate people—more like aspects of self, personas, those “moods” or behaviors that make you say later, “I just wasn’t feeling like myself.” I’m guessing that most of you who are reading this aren’t old enough to remember the TV show called “The Naked City,” but you may have heard their tag line, a voice-over that came at the end of each episode: “There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them.” Well, I don’t know that I have eight million other people inside of me, but a good many more than I’m comfortable admitting to, and they all have stories.

One of the handy things about being a writer is that I get to play out some of these personalities in the characters I create, and it isn’t like I do it deliberately—sometimes a character turns up when I’m writing, and I wonder where the heck she came from, certainly not from me: I am not like that at all!

Or am I?

Tonight I went to a workshop that is part of an ongoing training I’ve been in for more than two years. I’m learning how to be conscious, how to breathe, how to pay attention to what my body knows. (We knew these things when we were babies, but the older we are, the more we’ve forgotten, so it’s not as easy as it sounds.) Tonight it took me a long time to land in my body and to be present, and I realized that I was caught up in that San Francisco character I posted about yesterday.  Only she was moodier, darker, and then I recognized her as a woman I once wrote about who is traveling through Nevada. I don't know who she is, but she is very familiar.

Here's a theory I just made up: What if, to write fiction, the writer must be open to her own darkness (and we all have darkness). It doesn't mean she's a serial killer or an alcoholic or a slut or an SOB. It just means that when she picks up a pen, she doesn't know what will emerge, but she's willing.

At the Truck Stop—Wells, Nevada

“Coffee?”

The waitress wore a brown-and-white-checked uniform with a white apron, frills at the edges, ketchup stain in the middle, and a little fan of a hankie pinned to her meager chest with a name plate that read “Dot.” The woman in the sunglasses pushed her cup across the counter with one knuckle and Dot splashed the thin brown liquid into it as she pulled a stub of pencil from behind one ear. Dot held the pencil over the scratch pad and looked at her own reflection in the sunglasses. Was this woman going to order breakfast or just sit here drinking coffee and tapping her foot like there weren’t six truckers waiting by the bowl of mints for a stool and a Trucker’s Special: three eggs, six flapjacks, six strips of bacon, hash browns, toast, and all the coffee you could drink.

The woman at the counter took a long drag on her cigarette and blew a long stream of smoke in the direction of the kitchen where a dark-eyed man with a devil tattoo looked up, his eyes intense, his spatula held still in one long-fingered hand. Behind her a slot machine clanked out silver dollars in a long clatter and a woman in powder-blue polyester with a large JCPenney’s shopping bag at her feet clapped and laughed and coughed into her sleeve. The woman at the counter didn’t turn around. She gazed across the tables and out the window where a man with “Pete” stitched on the front of his green work shirt was bouncing a tire past the gas pumps and into the garage where a blue and white 1957 Chevy Bel Air was up on the racks.

Sunlight glittered off the windshields of 20 trucks parked in a long diagonal row, and the woman looked away from the glare, lit a cigarette from the butt of the one she had smoked down to a nub before stubbing it out in the overflowing ashtray. She waved the match, leaving a trail of smoke as the flame went out, dropped it in the ashtray, and reached inside the low neck of her black sweater and tugged on a bra strap. Two truckers at table 12 watched her, and one nudged the other with his elbow, smirked, and then looked down at the menu when Dot came to take their orders. When they left half an hour later, the woman in the sunglasses was still sitting at the counter where Dot splashed coffee into her cup in 15-minute intervals, and a thin man in black cowboy boots touched the woman for luck before he leaned far over the crap table and rolled the dice.

Some Places Never Let You Go

The telling of stories, like singing and praying, would seem to be an almost ceremonial act, an ancient and necessary mode of speech that tends the earthly rootedness of human language. For narrated events always happen somewhere. And for an oral culture, that location is never merely incidental to those occurrences. The events belong, as it were, to the place, and to tell the story of those events is to let the place itself speak through the telling. ~ David Abram

There are things I know and many more that I don’t know. There are things I remember that are inextricably mixed with stories I’ve written, and photos that are the source of memory or are the images that I call memory. Image. Imagination.

I know that I lived in San Francisco until I was nine years old, and that for awhile we lived with Grandma and Grandpa on the only flat block of Diamond Street. I know that the smell of roses or apricots, the sight of a purple fuchsia or the explosive beauty of a dahlia will take me right back to the lush back yard of that house. When I am in that sensory memory, I feel completely happy.

Other memories combine to become fiction, and every bit of fiction is derived from some memory - not a whole memory, maybe not even a flash of memory - but one of those tiny pieces that, as you combine them and then draw away for a longer perspective, become a mosaic that is more whole than any individual piece - and more honest.

At least, that’s how I’m seeing it this morning as the day warms, threatening to reach 90 before noon, and my heart is hearing the clang of cable cars and feeling the cool air off the ocean.

This person - who is me and not-me - has a secret that I don’t know yet, and she’s working on telling it. Maybe she'll show up in a longer piece. Maybe she is just a mosaic piece.

Some places never let you go. They grab you as you head out the door, clutching the collar of your coat and pulling you back into your own history, the dim and dusty room, the velveteen sofa, the stale cigarette smell in the draperies, and they say, “Get right back in here, young lady. If you think you’re getting out of here that easy, you’ve got another think coming.”

So I stood on the sidewalk on Dolores Street in San Francisco, the sunshine strong and so hard that the shadows of the buildings were crisp and clean, razor sharp against the sky, here shadow, there sunlight, a vigorous green weed growing out of a crack in the sidewalk, a scuffed and dirty penny date-side up on the curb: 1953.

Just like that I was eight years old, skinny, afraid, shy. Eisenhower was president. I knew this because a blimp passed through the sunny sky one day as I was walking to school and cast a large amorphous shadow that seemed to move up the back of my coat and settle in the sharp part of my hair where my mother had pulled my braids so tight my eyebrows lost their arch and tears made the sunlight shatter against the shadow from the palm trees that marched right down the middle of Dolores Street. On the side of the blimp were the words, “I Like Ike.”

I swore I’d never come back here, and even in the swearing I knew I couldn’t keep the promise to myself. I was just dumb enough to believe that the past was the past and had no power over me, so I came in on the Greyhound, defiant in my cowboy boots and thin leather jacket, and I walked out of the 7th Street station and up to Market, like the whole world hadn’t changed in the 30 years I’d been gone. The street I remembered was so much the same, still torn up from where they were forever laying rails for Bart or mending streetcar tracks, and there were no fewer cheap jewelry stores behind black grating, there were still a million iridescent pigeons underfoot, and the cable car clang still gave me a thrill in spite of my guarded heart.

I got on a streetcar that took me to 16th, and I walked the single block to Dolores, looking at the sky as if the houses that held it up couldn’t still make my heart break. I was doing just fine until I got to the corner and looked down at that slice of shadow on the sidewalk, that either/or of sun and shade that was exactly the same as when I was eight years old. I swore out loud, heard a flutter of laughter, and looked across the street at a group of people gathered on the steps of Mission Dolores, five little girls all dressed in frilly white, dark hair pulled into tight braids, white lace pinned to dark hair, the wind lifting their skirts. One little girl shaded her eyes with a white-gloved hand and squinted across the street at me like I was a tree she hadn’t noticed before. I knelt and picked up the worn penny. When I looked again, the girls were running down Dolores calling to each other in Spanish, dark braids bouncing on white backs.

Blue Hat Attitude

Attitude, they say, is everything.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The woman in the floppy blue hat was no longer young. The skin around her eyes was crinkled into happy lines, and the skin at her neck hung loose and soft. Her blue eyes were sharp under heavy lids and her hair was white as laundry on a line. She looked windblown and shopworn and she walked like the sidewalk was her parade route. If she was old, she didn’t notice. Her crisp white Adidas struck the sidewalk in a pace so even you could read Shakespeare by it (iambic pentameter is rare in the elderly and not all that common in the young).

She held her head high under the floppy blue hat, not arrogant but aware, as if she didn’t need to look at her feet because she knew exactly where they were and what they were doing. She was an exclamation point in a world of question marks, startling without being loud, and you had no choice but to follow her to see what she’d do next—how she would cross the street and cars would stop for her and small children would smile at her and businessmen would put down their briefcases and scratch their heads and not understand why they were so transfixed.

Past Lives and Pancakes

Everyone, in some small sacred sanctuary of the self, is nuts.
~ Leo Rosten, author (1908-1997)

I seem to have a thing for diners and grills, waitresses and truck stops and the smell of hot coffee and frying bacon. Grocery stores, too, but that’s another story. The stories I most love to write usually have a diner in them, and a waitress who observes and regulars who sit at the same booth or bar stool and manage to mix things up.

You know how people will talk about past lives and they’ll maybe do a regression exercise and “remember” that they were Cleopatra in a former life, or maybe King Tut? I wonder why no one remembers being, for example, a street urchin in Dickens’ London?  A milk maid? A shoemaker? How about Jack the Ripper or Attila the Hun or just for laughs, Lucretia Borgia?

I think I must have been a waitress in a former life, note pad in one hand, coffee pot in the other, stub of pencil behind one ear, and a name plate pinned to my brown shirt announcing, “My Name Is Dot. How may I help you?” I wear white shoes with thick rubber heels and complain at the end of the day that “My dogs are killing me!” I smoke, occasionally sleep with a truck driver, go to church with my mother on Sunday morning, and drink too much on Friday night. My eyebrows are drawn on and my lashes are thick with mascara.

Well! That one’s a new one on me. She just emerged as I was writing. I generally see them as old, thin, wiry, wry, and wise. Or like Lyla in the Grill stories: a quiet observer, an enigma wrapped in a mystery, liked by most and known by few.

It’s been rainy here lately, big storms that roll through in the afternoon, announcing themselves with thunder and preening with lightning, winding up the trees with big wind and blowing the rain sideways before moving on. We’re left with humidity, unusual in our semi-arid geography.

It’s been rainy in Flinton, Indiana, too, and the humidity has its own weather zone inside the Grill.

It was hot, hot beyond hot. Heat rose in waves from the kitchen and simmered over the tables packed with hot and sweaty patrons, hungry patrons. The front door opened and shushed closed. Lyla swept her hair back with a sweaty arm and poured perfect circles of pancakes on the hot griddle. The AC churned and groaned and clanked.

And then the power went out.

A low groan surged from the kitchen, rushed over the front counter, and rippled to a moan along the tables in the middle of the room, becoming a long sigh from the booths that ran along the east and north walls. Then there was silence in the semi-dark room.

Crystal Ann giggled, someone whined, “I’m hungry,” and Cecil said in his booming drawl, “I shore am glad I got mine before the electric snapped.” Lyla hit him with a dishtowel but not nearly as hard as she wanted to. Out on the street, hail started bouncing off of cars and a male voice in the back said, “Oh Lord!” Then Hank ran out into the storm with a menu over his head—as if that made a lick of sense. He loved his truck more than he loved his wife, and everyone in the Grill knew he never would have run out into a storm to save Velma. Of course, what he was going to do once he got to the truck was anyone’s guess.

The storm slowed just long enough to catch its breath, and then the hail came down like rocks on a sinner (Leviticus 24:16) and the Baptist ladies at the six-top in the back started praying aloud.

When the lights flickered on five minutes later, Cecil was swallowing the last bit of cinnamon roll he had swiped off of Nyla’s plate, Crystal Ann giggled again, and Lyla scraped the pancake batter off the cold griddle and started over.

Life, Death, and Gravity

You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.  ~ C.S. Lewis

Night before last I finished reading a very compelling novel that brought up some intriguing questions about the nature of humanity. Imagine that instead of seeking intelligent life in the galaxy of stars and planets, we looked instead into a galaxy much closer to home but no less accessible: the oceans of Earth. The book starts with that premise. It's not a great book. At 800 pages it is vastly over-written and the author clearly has an agenda, but it's like reading early Stephen King: once I started, I couldn't put it down. I finished the book from bed, set it aside, turned off the lights, and wondered about body, soul, intelligence - and life itself.

That's when Hyla Kaye Dickman wandered through my brain:

Hyla Kaye Dickman often felt burdened by gravity. It just felt wrong to her that she could not float on air, that she could not fly, that vertical was not available to her and that horizontal was bounded by roads and buildings, fields and rivers and hollows and hills.

Even more perplexing was that other people didn't seem to be bothered by this confinement at all. Twyla loved doors and windows, and her canvases always depicted closed doors and shuttered windows, tall fences and locked gates. Twyla even locked the doors of her home, a concept that completely eluded Hyla Kaye. She might close a door against the cold but never against some imagined thing that might bring harm. Her open windows invited bees and other flying things into her house. She once had the company of a black-capped chickadee for three days before it left the same way it had come: through the open back door. When Hyla was ready to run, she wanted no obstructions.

Hyla Kaye had a garden that was really a wonderland of plants and trees and potted growing things that Maude and Caroline sold in their nursery. As she worked, she would often feel the sunshine on her back as both an invitation and a weight. She would easily give herself up to air and light, if only they would have her. She wanted to be like smoke that rose until the air absorbed it. She could lie on her back in a blanket of sweet alyssum and watch clouds form and dissipate, take a new shape and gradually unwind back into the blue of sky. She wondered how that would feel - to live so fully that she became part of everything.

Her sister Nyla was so afraid of life that she gardened her body into an intricate bonsai of toned limbs and starving belly. She was a twig - pruned, polished, and twisted into a form it was never meant to have. Her roots were too shallow for her intentions to thrive, and Hyla worried that one day she would simply cease to be, and no amount of watering or feeding would bring her back. Nyla's fear of life would be the death of her.

But then, all things die.

All things die, and all people are supposed to die, but some people just went on and on as if they were exempt, like Major Dickman - her mother's father - that ancient husk of body that was without soul and so weighted down by the gravity of his evil that in death he would be like a stone that her shoe collects as she tends her garden. Major cast his shadow beyond the constraints of angles of light. Whenever she felt that shadow coming down the street toward the Grill, she would leave her grilled cheese sandwich and cole slaw uneaten, leave her sisters in mid-sentence, her iced tea in mid-sip, and simply walk away before the soulless shadow could find her, her own soul guiding her gravity-bound body across the green, along the alley behind Nyla's shop, and into the embrace of her own home.

Where she shut the door.
 

 

The Unending Story

The Dickman Sisters believed that if May Belle Rooney didn’t know about it, it probably never happened. She had been their school teacher in more than one grade, teaching them history and science, enticing them with books and music, and broadening their horizons by making them memorize the capitals of every state, the major rivers of every country, and the inner workings of the U.S. Government.

But it was more than that. May Belle Rooney knew the history of Flinton, Indiana, by the people who lived there, had lived there, moved away, came back, got divorced, had a child, had a child out of wedlock - she knew them by first names and last names and middle names, too. Well, that was pretty common for someone who lived a long time in a small town, but what the Dickman Sisters were talking about was how much she knew that wasn’t a matter of public record or someone conducting their private business in public view.

“If there are any bodies buried out in the woods,” Twyla said, stirring more sugar into her iced tea, “May Belle Rooney knows who, where, when, and how deep.”

“I hear ya,” Nyla said, but Twyla was pretty sure she didn’t, given that she was adding up a mess of numbers on a napkin as Twyla spoke.

“What did you say about buried bodies?” It was Lyla, taking a break from serving late breakfast at the Grill and delivering a pitcher of iced tea to their table. “It’s sweet already,” she said as Twyla reached for the sugar.

“May Belle Rooney lore,” Twyla said.

“I’ll bet she knew that Cecil’s wife Shirl was gone for good long before Cecil figured it out.” Lyla nudged Twyla with her hip as she sat in the booth.

“That wouldn’t be hard,” Nyla said, looking up from her numbers. “Cecil’s an idiot.”

May Belle Rooney had lived all her life in Flinton, and her mother before her. In fact, her mother had been best friends with Ada Peck before she married that curly-haired Dickman boy and started up the whole mess of Dickmans by giving birth to the twins - Lacy and Lu Ellen - and then that awful boy Larry, who died in his teens in what Lacy and Lu called “The Tragedy,” as if it had William Shakespeare’s name on it.  Every night before she went to bed, May Belle’s mother would brush her hair one hundred strokes and tell her a story, and the story might go like this:

Long ago in a land far away there lived a King who had only two purposes in his life: to become the richest man in the world and to protect his beautiful daughter. The King was already the richest man in his kingdom, and it wasn’t much of a stretch to be the richest in the country, but it was the world he aimed for, and so it would be. Protecting his Beautiful Daughter was as easy as counting his money when she was a little girl playing hide and seek in the castle, running from room to room crying, “Papa! Papa! Guess where I am!” Then one day he looked up from his pile of gold, and his dear little princess was a grown-up woman so beautiful he gasped with pain, and a dark shadow entered his heart, for he knew he would give all his earthly riches to keep her safe, but as anyone with any sense knows, keeping a child from the world is a fool’s errand, no matter how much money he has.

He tried locking her in the tower, but she cried so pitifully, he couldn’t bear it. Then he filled her chambers with all that she desired - silken hangings and soft cushions, books and music and glorious paintings, perfumes and hair ribbons, dresses of the richest fabric and shoes the likes of which had never been seen in the land. His only request was that she stay within her chamber walls. But the birds sang to her in the trees outside her window, and the foxes called to her from the hollow. Squirrels beckoned from the limbs of the elm and butterflies alit on her raised fingers. One day when the King was in his glass house tending his exotic and fanciful flowers, he looked up to see his Beautiful Daughter running across the grass, her skirts raised, her feet damp with dew, her face lifted to the sun.

The King was a wise man in his limited way, and as tenacious as a tangle-vine, so he devised a new way to keep her safe. He would find for her a  playmate, someone who would entertain her as he knew he could not, someone who could be her friend and confidant. Someone who could be her keeper. He searched the town and countryside, considering this one and rejecting that, until he found a man almost as rich as he who also had a headstrong Beautiful Daughter, although not so beautiful as his very own, and the men formed a pact to safeguard these daughters in such a way that both would be pleased and neither would know the truth of their happy meeting.

The brush slowed in May Belle’s hair. “Ninety-eight, 99, 100.” And so she went to bed, the story left un-ended, her patience and curiosity teasing her into sleep.

True Story

"And that's the truth! Pppffffthhhh." ~ Lily Tomlin as Edith Ann

I've been wondering what makes a story "true." I tell some true stories from my past and for all anyone knows, I made them up. I have a story from when I was five years old, and when I tell it, I'm the heroic little girl carrying her little sister and little brother across the hot railroad tracks to Aunt Vee's house, all of us barefoot, the tracks hot in the summer sun. When my brother tells this story, I am the villain sister who wouldn't carry him on the way back from Aunt Vee's and he stood there on the other side of the tracks and cried until Mother came running and scolded me for not taking care of him. I like my story best. And I had completely forgotten my brother's part of the story.

When I tell made-up stories, they are as true to me as any memory. I know the people, their habits, the place, the relationships, the intrigue, and the complexities of their lives. One of the nice things about made-up stories is that no one is going to contradict me. And that's the truth!

At The Grill

Picture the fried eggs at 7:00 AM and the people who can eat them at that hour. Picture billed caps that sit high on a deep forehead, shards of graying hair trailing to a leathered neck, neck bent for the mouth to receive the egg and toast, the slurp of coffee, hash browns trailing to chin.

Or don’t if you're one of those people who can't eat more than a slice of toast before 10:00 AM. Avert your eyes, tune into Pierre Rampal in your audio imagination, and when the early breakfast crowd at the Grill dissipates like fog on a boggy field, picture the back side of Cecil Duggan, the last one to let the screen door thump behind him before the bus pulled up from Mayfield Manor Assisted Living and first of the flowered ladies tottered a wheeled walker through the door.

Lyla watched Cecil start his pickup in the parking lot, shift to reverse, and turn left away from the square and toward home. She shifted into reverse herself, called to Dot that she was taking a sanity break, and stepped out back with a tall iced tea and a bad attitude. Some mornings were just like that.

A Fairy Tale: Part I

Once upon a time in a land that doesn't exist there lived four sisters whose mother gave them names that might have been OK one at a time, but listing them aloud put the listener in fits of giggles. Their names, in order of their birth, were Twyla Faye, Nyla Raye, Hyla Kaye, and Lyla Jaye. And by the way, they had one brother: Billy Junior.

Now these girls were raised by a beautiful mother who had creamy white skin and thick chestnut brown hair that fell in natural curls to her shoulders, and she had eyes bluer than the sky on a new spring morning. She also had such a misery in her heart that she was meaner than mean, and when she spoke, her words burned. But if one of her girls cried out that they were hurt by what she said, she would whine, "Oh, honey, you know I don't mean what I say!"

This mother was called Lacy Dickman, and in this town that doesn't exist, the girls were known as the Dickman Sisters. It was easier for the townspeople to say "One of them Dickman Sisters" than to try to remember which one. Billy Junior tagged along, always a by-the-way in the shadow those girls cast. Lacy was the evil queen in this fairy tale and her sister Lu Ellen was her faithful handmaiden. The Dickman Sisters were the princesses, and Billy Junior was the town drunk.

Every reader of a good fairy tale knows that every character is deeper than the print on the page and every story is laden with as many meanings as a body might want to give it, and while the moral may be laid out in words as plain as fried eggs over easy, the real lesson is as personal as a person's underpants.

The land that doesn't exist is often more real than the one that does. And the people who populate that land are Lacy and her sister Lu Ellen, the Dickman Sisters, and oh, by the way, Billy Junior the Town Drunk.

And of course, you and me.