The Best American Essays 2013 (44 page)

When I sat down with this lovely woman on my lunch break from the hospital, on a crisp and windy Friday afternoon, I felt nervous and teary and self-conscious. She poured me a glass of water and took my hands in hers and we began the series of rituals and careful shuffling choices that make up a reading of the tarot. She wore a head wrap and a sweater befitting the weather and giant claret-colored rope braid earrings that brushed her shoulders. She was not in costume. She was herself, a real gypsy witch: one in a million. The reading Angeliska offered was full of parables and pragmatic interpretation, more like therapy than like a visit to a mystical realm. The array staring back at me was indisputably mine. She suggested I take a photo of the cards all laid out and so I did. The grief card, the hermit, the moon. Rulers and gifts. Wands upon wands. Swords upon swords. The practical and the silly and the divine. “Do this thing. Take these steps. The universe has gifts for you. It’s all right here . . .” Year three.

I’m terrible at learning from the past. I make the same mistakes over and over. I wish I could take everything that’s happened and synthesize it into something great, something sage, some wisdom I can apply to parenting, to living, to love, to writing. I live with all of the decisions that made me, the choices that got me here to this place of alternating needless and needful worry, this place of adolescent rumination, of camping out inside my head doing nothing but damage. Right now it all feels like a scrambled Rubik’s cube. I want to twist it into rightness, feel the parts click into place, see the colors line up. See them fall into order because I know how to fix it, not because I made the surface look right by switching the stickers. Believe me, I’ve tried. I learned a few things, though. I learned that aces are gifts from the universe. I learned it’s easier to meditate with two swords than to hold three in your heart. I learned sad song lyrics are accurate predictors of how love will turn out in the end. I learned people are inherently good (except for assholes, who are everywhere). I learned that sometimes a job is a vocation and you do it despite the pain it causes you. And I learned where on the Internet to find photos of firemen putting oxygen masks on kittens, because sometimes you need to remember that good things happen every day. Every day.

DAVID SEARCY

FROM
The Paris Review

I
HAVE THIS STORY
from the artist Tracy Hicks about his former father-in-law, who had a 1960s pickup he’d restored and customized—spent years on the project, loved this truck like nothing else—until one day he backed it over one of his kittens in the driveway. Killed the kitten. Sold the pickup truck. Like that.
Well, that sort of sums it up
, I thought.
That pretty much says it all
, it seemed to me at the time. Is metaphor everywhere? Of course it is. Once consciousness, once meaning gets a start, it keeps on going. You get literacy and metaphor and God.

The thing about custom cars and hot rods—glancing through a copy of
Rod & Custom
magazine, you can see they tend to grade into each other—is the strangely counterintuitive sort of dreaminess involved. I haven’t checked to see if angel hair is still the concours style, but it was when I was a kid. That ectoplasmic spun-glass stuff they’d use sometimes in school plays to suggest a mist or heavenly atmospherics. You would see these cars at shows—again, in magazines; I never went to a show, but I was always fascinated—and they’d always have these cloudy mounds of angel hair around them. Underneath and around the tires. Like they were floating. Not entirely of this world. And yet so massively mechanical and sculptural. The custom cars especially, which, although they’d generally have these gorgeously chromed and souped-up engines, seemed intended more as presence, pure idea. And the idea, I think, was more or less that paradise is possible. That you can actually get there in the proper frame of mind—which those archetypal, chopped, and purple-painted ’49 Mercurys sought to represent. They’d hover just above the ground—no more than a couple of inches clearance, I would guess—sustained by angel hair, it seemed, and not much else, the wheels a concession, a politeness, ornamental and vestigial. I remember thinking how extraordinarily cool that looked. And how impractical. How could you drive that down an ordinary road? The road would have to be like a showroom floor. Where would you find a perfect road like that? Where would it lead? Yet here were the means for such a journey—as gloriously real and here-and-now as they could be. Which was the point. That they were not like “concept” cars—those empty visions of the future manufacturers like to roll out on occasion. These were ordinary cars transformed. Revealed, in a way, as what they ought to be. And
were
, essentially, we were allowed to feel. The marvelous implicit in the everyday. How striking and encouraging to discover that a ’51 Ford pickup or whatever had a soul. Who would have thought? So, get behind the wheel of that and where do you go? Can you imagine?

Tracy’s father-in-law, it seems, had had a pretty rough time in the war. He’d been in the infantry, in the thick of it. He’d tramped all over Italy, Tracy says, come home dispirited and worn-out, wanted safety and a wife and a little frame house in Marshall, Texas. All of which, by the time we’re talking about, had settled into a fairly grim, habitual sort of life. His teenage bride had borne two daughters very early, lost her youth, and grown into a disagreeable, sharp-tongued woman Tracy remembers in the kitchen mostly, cooking and complaining at her husband, who was forbidden to smoke in the house and so would sit outside the kitchen in the carport, smoking and talking to the cats. He had a morning-to-early-afternoon job at the rail yard running a huge machine that straightened railcars damaged in collisions and derailings. It was quite a thing to witness, apparently—how this machine could grab a twisted boxcar, pick the whole thing up, and bend it back into shape. You tend to think of travel by rail as pretty safe—it’s all laid out, after all; you can’t get lost; there’s really nowhere to go but where you’re going, you would think—but maybe not. Among the people who would come by now and then to watch him run the operation was an auto-mechanic friend whose personal project was a wrecked but restorable El Camino pickup truck. Well, this guy seems to have died, and Tracy’s father-in-law was able to buy the pickup truck and take the project on himself. It wasn’t all that old. Not like some classic you could excuse yourself for spending too much money on. I’m sure he could have bought an unwrecked used one for far less than he eventually would spend. But you know how when something’s wrecked, you kind of see it from a distance, see right past it toward what could have been and might be yet if you just take your time, don’t try to rush it. In such circumstances one can glimpse perfection. So it was with Tracy’s father-in-law, I guess. This truck became a thing of beauty. Not a full-blown chopped and channeled concours queen, of course, but given what was possible back then in Marshall, Texas, pretty nice. And better and better all the time. A fancy paint job—two-tone metal-flake gold and cream. Gold rolled-and-pleated leather seats with matching visors. Lots of little things as well, to keep him busy afternoons and on the weekends under the carport with the cats. He’d get it washed and checked out weekly. Once a month he’d change the oil. Sometimes, says Tracy, he’d just sit there under the carport with it. Cat in his lap, just sitting there and smoking and, I have to imagine, season after season, soft habitual sounds of cooking and complaining from the kitchen contrapuntal to the purring in his lap, just gazing off across the sadly less-than-prosperous little neighborhood and down the little street to God knows where, to who knows what subliminal paradise, not knowing really, consciously, I’m sure, but still, you’d think the heart must seek a destination.

It was early one winter morning when he backed it over the kitten. Tracy heard he never drove the truck again, and very quickly it was gone. And so, within a couple of years, was he—from cancer. Not much time to sit with nothing under the carport. But I bet that’s what he did. Just let the air come through and sit out there and smoke. What would you do? You couldn’t move. How could you not just sit right there and blink your eyes at having it all break down like that, a bump in the road—not even a bump; you hardly feel it, but you know.
That’s it
, you think.
Right off the rails
. Can you believe it? Just like that. You have to wonder what to retain of a thing like that. Do you remember how it was? And maybe hold it in your thoughts? Or let it go and learn your lesson. How you can’t get there from here. How love obliterates itself. How you should probably just keep still for a while and let the other things come back. The other cats, the less beloved ones. Their little water bowls and dishes here and there. The early morning sounds of movement in the kitchen.

STEVEN HARVEY

FROM
River Teeth

I
N
1952,
WHEN I
was three, my parents bought a set of
The Book of Knowledge
, ten hefty volumes bound in maroon leather, each filled with questions from the “Department of Wonder.” Like sentinels posted at the gates of wisdom, the books stood proudly on a shelf between the glossy forelocks of equestrian bookends, each volume embossed with a golden torch. It was, my mother explained in one of the hundreds of letters she wrote to my grandmother, a purchase as much for her as for her boy: “I have really been enjoying it. I’ve been studying the subjects of music and art so far.” Reading in
The Book of Knowledge
was one of the ways she fended off the depression that swept over her during these years, especially when my father traveled. “That is how I’ve been spending some of my evening while Max is away.”

The Book of Knowledge
evolved from
The Children’s Encyclopædia
, the inspiration of Arthur Mee, born to a working-class family in Stapleford, England, whose formal education ended when he was fourteen. Questions posed by Mee’s daughter, Marjorie, were the direct inspiration for the encyclopedia. In his letter “To Boys and Girls Everywhere,” published in the first volume of
The Children’s Encyclopædia
, Mee writes that Marjorie’s mind was filled with “the great wonder of the Earth. What does the world mean? And why am I here? Where are all the people who have been and gone? Where does the rose come from? Who holds the stars up? What is it that seems to talk to me when the world is dark and still?” Mee’s wife had “thought and thought” about these questions “and answered this and answered that until she could answer no more. Oh for a book that will answer all the questions!” she complained.
The Children’s Encyclopædia
was born.

What set his book apart, Mee explained, was the belief in children’s eagerness for knowledge and their capacity for wonder. But he knew that his book also filled an important gap for adults. It “had the power to make plain to the average man, woman, and child the aspects and imports of the problems which the very men who had wrested them from nature could not make so plain.” It offered up the mysteries of the few for the rest of us. By the time
The Children’s Encyclopædia
had evolved into
The Book of Knowledge
, Mee had added the “Department of Wonder,” and each volume contained sections devoted to “wonder questions” like the ones Marjorie posed to her perplexed parents.

For my mother, who had dropped out of nursing school when she was nineteen to marry my father, the gaps in her education were becoming an embarrassment. Born Roberta Maxine Reinhardt and called Bobbie, she had been the darling of her parents and of the small Kansas town of Glen Elder where she grew up. Pretty and bright, she made nearly perfect grades, but not without help. “As I remember I used to make A on every theme you wrote for me,” she mentioned in one letter to my grandmother. A little unsure of herself when she entered nursing school in 1946, she created elaborate study schedules, but soon she found that she was good at school and liked her classes, which included American literature as well as courses in child guidance, microbiology, the history of nursing, nursing arts, physical education, home economics, and something called “the Home Project.” As she pursued her studies she became more confident: “I’m so thrilled about my subjects. There is an awfully lot of reading to do, but it is interesting.” Anxieties about how hard the classes would be proved unfounded, and she flourished in the program. “I’ve been wondering how I would like my nursing subjects—it is play to study them.”

After she married, that confidence in her abilities slowly eroded, especially when my father joined the pharmaceutical company American Cyanamid as a managing director and our young family moved from Dodge City, Kansas, to Nanuet, New York, a suburb of the city. In the 1952 letter about buying
The Book of Knowledge
, she describes a lavish dinner party served by maids. “Of course the conversation got around to operas and plays,” she complains, “as it always does here”; she did not feel comfortable again, she adds wryly, “until they all started talking about the pigs in Missouri.” She admits that it was “an educational evening” and, after it was over, “a nice experience to have” but laments that she was caught off-guard: “Had I known beforehand I would have studied up.”
The Book of Knowledge
was her way to “study up.” “I’ve done very little brain work since I got out of school,” she writes. “All you have to do is move around and meet new people to realize how dumb you really are.” For my mother the gilded volumes of
The Book of Knowledge
served as a self-help textbook on culture.

For me they were simply wondrous. I liked to lie on my stomach on the floor in front of the bookcase, my feet kicked up behind me, just taking in the strange and glorious pictures: color illustrations in soft pastels from
The Book of the Dead
, which was left, the caption inaccurately tells us, “in the tombs of Egypt for the dead to read.” A black-and-white cartoon of the globe in a ball cap, beaded in sweat and pulling down on a scale, to illustrate “Volume, Mass, and Weight.” A four-page spread called “The Glory of the Grass” with detailed colored drawings of foxtail, rye, oat, timothy, manna, bearded darnel, broom, barley, reed, and wheat. Another four-page spread of “Beautiful Birds of the World,” with a peacock in full array on the first page, surrounded by a blue-crowned motmot, a Leadbeater’s cockatoo, and a Groove pygmy goose, along with nine other brightly colored birds. And in Volume Eighteen, the fourteen-page spread of butterflies and moths and beetles that begins with a peacock eye, an American species of butterfly, and concludes, 236 individual illuminated drawings later, with the European beetle called the great agrilus.