Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (53 page)

As I stared at the article, every piece of our furniture took its place in the rooms. I could have reached in through the door of that photograph and with the tip of a finger roll our antique dental chair over the floor. A friend’s big painting of the Rolling Stones hung on the opposite wall. On the living room floor was the plush, white carpet I bought with money from a literary prize. It was always dirty. Down the hall and through a door to the left, our bed, rumpled and un-made, stood right where it stood when we were young parents, with Jeffrey’s crib nearby, and by leaning a little forward I could hear the soft, reassuring sound of his breath.

It has been more than thirty years since we lived at 2820 “R” Street, Lincoln, Nebraska. I write out the full address as if to fasten it down with stakes and ropes against the violence of time. I hadn’t thought about it often, maybe a few times a year. But it was our house again the minute I opened the paper that morning and saw its picture and the faces of the people who had struck it with terrible violence. They didn’t look sorry, they looked like they’d do it again if they could.

Now and then since the murder I find myself turning into that decaying neighborhood and down that street, slowing to look at our house. The window shades are drawn on what were once such bright, welcoming rooms. Nobody lives there now, as far as I can tell. On snowy days there are no tracks up the drive to that flimsy side door.

I lean down, I try to fit myself inside. Even after thirty years there still might be the smell of Olga and Alida’s salt herring being cooked upstairs, and on the first floor the fragrance of phlox, a few stalks in a water glass. For thirty years I had put it all firmly behind me, but like a perfect miniature it had waited in a corner of my heart, its rooms packed with memories. The murder brought it forward and made me hold it under the light again. Of course I hadn’t really forgotten, nor could I ever forget how it feels to be a young father, frightened by an enormous and threatening world, wondering what might become of him, what might become of his wife and son.

Only a year after Diana, Jeff, and I moved away and into another house across town, our marriage came apart, and I began to learn to be a single father. From time to time Jeff came to visit me at the home of friends who had taken me in. The dead boy, too, had gone to visit his father.

If my luck in this life had been worse I might have been that other father, occupied by some mundane task, perhaps fixing a leaky faucet when my son went to answer the door. But I was lucky, and my son was lucky, and today, long after the murder, finding myself imagining that damp cellar room, peering down into it as if looking into a miniature cellar, I don’t hear shots or see blood on the steps. I hear only soft sounds: my breath as I sit with my book, Diana’s stocking feet as she pads along the hall above me, and water running into the bathtub as she gets ready to give our baby a bath.

The landlord, who owned a little doughnut shop, died many years ago. They had once lived in that house. His wife had Alzheimer’s disease and sometimes arrived bewildered at our door, wanting us to let her in. She too is gone. If I were building a miniature of that house I would stand her at the door, clenching her purse in both hands, her hat on crooked.

The flowers that grew along the driveway are thirty years past their season and their beds are only dust today. My friend who painted the Rolling Stones has died. Olga and Alida, having survived the horrors of war to come to the new world and take a little pleasure in simple flowers, they too are gone. I’ve noticed lately when I’ve driven past that the porch has begun to slope toward the street as if to pour our ghosts out the front door and onto the buckled sidewalk. And I am not that young father any more, but a man in his sixties who is slowly becoming a baffled old woman who hammers and hammers at a door, wanting to be let in again, knowing by instinct that something good must still be waiting just inside.

Sara Levine

 

SARA LEVINE
is associate professor in the Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her writing has appeared in
Nerve
,
Sonora Review
, the
Iowa Magazine
,
Alice Blue
,
Fence
,
webConjunctions
,
5-Trope
, and
Denver Quarterly
. She has been awarded a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities,
Best American Essays
Notable Essays of 2000, 2002, and 2006, and a Pushcart Prize Special Mention for Nonfiction.

 

I didn’t train to be an essayist, but perhaps it can be said that nobody trains — nor is trained, like seal or dog or clematis. I began…well, like so many others, by training to do something else, and fell into the essay by accident. It’s tempting, of course, to exaggerate the unlikeliness that a person as promising as oneself would wind up practicing this littlest of genres. Once at a party, in the company of her husband, a woman told me that she’d never had any intention of dating — let alone marrying — her husband (“I was dating a
violin performance
major in college, Harry was just some engineering guy who lived down the hallway; I didn’t even
notice
him for two years; then one day, what was it, at the laundromat, when I needed
quarters
…”). My god, I thought, doesn’t she realize what she’s saying about Harry?

She probably does, and yet she’s baffled. Me and Harry? The essay and me?

The essay is a modest genre. It doesn’t mean to change the world. Instead it says: let me tell you what happened to me. The world shrinks and the self bloats. Here in academia, people get bent out of shape about the genre. Not all people. Not the cafeteria workers, not the cleaning staff, not the administrative staff, but COME ON! Who’s the university for? Forget those people. We’re in the English Department now, we are cruising its halls of hallowedness, we are bumping into people at the mailboxes and saying hello. (“Hello!” “Hello! How’s your book going?”) And we — a pronoun now rapidly shrinking into me — we are trying to explain to the feminist materialist, and the queer theorist who is also marxist, and the post-colonial scholar who is also friendly, that we study the essay, a transhistorical
objet d’art
— that this,
this
is what all that fellowship money is going for.

I don’t want to exaggerate here. I do want to exaggerate, I love to exaggerate, but I’ll do this English department disservice if I pretend they’re all against me. They’re not. The head of the department waves his handkerchief at me encouragingly, the one and only linguist helps me tell a palatal liquid from a palatal glide, and my advisor is the advisor of all advisors, a guy whose heart is bigger than his nose, which for him is saying a lot, and who gives me no advice but lots of go-get-’ems, and kept me from quitting graduate school when I really, really wanted to quit, by offering me a chance to write essays — a guy who is so magical, so miraculous, and yet so (how does he do it?) masculine, I have no choice but to call him my hairy godmother. So look, this is what I’m saying: Not everyone hates me. But once we put my personality aside, and the quirks of my work, and the little ripples of excitement a well-mannered kid from Ohio managed to cause in a seminar, once we forget the shelter they built for me (because they did build it for me, it wasn’t here before), we find that most people here find the essay a bad form, politically suspect, ideologically naive, too excited about language, hopelessly bourgeois, and, like a dirty Kleenex falling out of a handbag, vaguely embarrassing.

Why? I don’t know. Believe me, I’ve pondered it.

Some of the distaste for the essay has nothing to do with the genre, but for the way the personal has insinuated itself into the academic playground. I mean lately. Used to be, all those jungle gyms were covered with theorists. Generalists swung from those bars. People from all kinds of perspectives who had one thing in common. Abstraction. Impersonality. A refusal to say publicly what happened to them in the grocery store.

Then Jane Tompkins and the Duke group started moving in, talking about their pee and their tenure meetings, and now we find, if we read such things, twenty-six letters in a recent
PMLA
devoted to “the place, nature, or limits (if any) of the personal in scholarship.” And in the reaction to this mostly awful personal writing some of its readers cast aspersions on the essay. But the personal, it has to be said, is not particular to the essay. “The personal” is a vague term which says nothing about genre or form.

A friend once told me that it is impossible to be embarrassed about something if no one else is in the room with you, but I find I can embarrass myself all by myself, and do it best that way, and in fact would prefer to do it that way always. There are lots of memories from college which produce a keen, almost dizzying chagrin which, translated into the physical world, might be compared to being locked for twenty-four hours in a brightly lit Finnish steam bath walled with unsteamable mirrors. I am embarrassed by the pleasure I took in my hair, the violence with which I trembled at an audition for
Midsummer
, the ease with which I decided to “skip over” the readings for a course in political philosophy (something very important in my life must have been going on). I am embarrassed by the savagery I felt toward a woman who wanted to make love to me and climbed into my bed in the middle of the night; and also by the degree to which I suppressed that retrogression. (I expressed no emotion at all. I wriggled out of her embrace after announcing the need to get a drink of water, then paced the dormitory’s hallways for an hour. When I came back to bed, she was gone, and even though I saw her every day for a year, we never discussed the incident.)

I’m also embarrassed by the economic fraudulence of those years, the fact that I lived in an apartment with a dishwasher — at that age! a dishwasher! when I only had six dishes to my name — and ate two dinners if I felt like it, if two dinner parties were going on, and loaned Becky Kellum ten dollars and then sat around and stewed about the number of days, hours, seconds, milliseconds it took her to pay it back. I don’t think I needed that ten dollars. I think I needed the moral high ground and needed Becky to owe me,
loved
that she owed me, loved that something to me was due. Could somebody dim these lights, please?

At college I was considered a kind of sharpie. Pointed at. Big man on campus. Big man off campus. Not a man at all but nobody seemed to notice. Was winning prizes and making speeches and somebody hung up a flyer that denounced me and my feminist politics. Groovy! They thought I was a man-hater, which I wasn’t, but I made the
Chicago Tribune
.

Money was monopoly money then, life was school and I was trying to claw my way through it, not out of it, still trying to cope with the fact that there were boys who were prettier than I was and girls who were smarter than I was, and I think it was no accident that Adrienne Rich was everything to me then. Her essays reduced the world into a gender problem I could squeeze in my fist. Also she writes earnestly, and at that age I was learning how to take myself seriously for the first time.

Then I came to graduate school. Something stopped — probably the attention. Also a sense that things could be done easily, that things could be done. Melancholy, as Burton says, battens when it’s just you and a stack of books. (No more girls slipping into my bed, no more rallies on campus, no more Becky Kellums from whom to extract a pound of flesh.)