Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (55 page)

Still, the essayist is often recognized by her voice. “Voice-print,” I’ve heard it said. I am willing to wager that I could tell never-before-read snatches of Edward Hoagland from never-before-read snatches of Joyce Carol Oates, but voice is a linguistic matter. Grammatical habit, tics of diction, penchant for pronouns, a way of winding up the sentence or letting it loosely unravel. If the essayist defines herself by style, then style — a broad term that means the way you do the things you do — for her means deviance. The way you refuse to do the things that everybody
else
does. Even if an essayist is writing as impersonally as Susan Sontag (who unlike Annie Dillard never has a cat on the windowsill or a leg of lamb in the oven), she finds a way to violate the norms of everyday language. Of course you can’t deviate the whole nine yards or you would be perfectly incomprehensible. But essayists tend to shudder at anything that sounds conventional, even when they are aiming for an accessible — say, “familiar” — persona. So much so that they often exasperate our patience. Edward Hoagland writes, “For the time being the preludes of sex bore me — the whole repetitive preoccupation with the next pair of bobbledeboobs.” I only know vaguely what those bobbledeboobs are, and if there weren’t a pair of them, I wouldn’t have a clue.

Academics have their own style, which accounts for the ease (but not the rancor) with which they are parodied. I know a professor who considers herself a stylist even though every argument she writes begins, “If the blah blah blah, then the blah blah blah.” “Trust me,” she says (not explicitly; only schmucks and theatre teachers and boyfriends who are about to rob you of your virginity explicitly say “Trust me”), but implicitly: trust that the voice on the page knows whereof it speaks. This professor flashes her style like a policeman flashing a badge. Conformity is a key term here. An academic wants to sound like every other academic — with just a hint of personality (an amusing epigraph, a wry aside, something unexpected, perhaps, put in the expectedly unexpected footnote), but nothing to rock the boat, nothing that suggests there is an ego here who must be heard, whose self-importance is more important than the quest for knowledge, or the subject itself. It takes style to be this self-effacing.

It takes a similar kind of linguistic restraint to write a good sympathy note.
There’s
a genre where sincerity counts, where ego really must be broken. Much better to write a formulaic “I am very sorry to hear…” than to show how interesting you can be with your prose style. But maybe I’m saying that because in the face of disaster, I often find the inkwell dry. In the last year I have written two letters of condolence. The first was to a woman whose father died after a long slow illness I hardly knew anything about. She is a private type, not one to indulge in window-gazing or acute glances, and never let me know her father was ailing. After he died she spoke of him freely and cheerfully: she showed me toys he had made for her as a kid, displayed his picture proudly on her desk. It was as if
now
he were alive. But I understand that, the relief she must have felt when he died. Because when my own mother was in chemotherapy I used to fantasize about her dying, not because I wanted her to die but because every hour of the day I felt like I was on the edge of a great grief, and it was the edge that was unbearable, the pitch and sway between despair and relief. I longed to be completely a wreck or completely grateful to the medical profession that saved her. I was too tired and selfish to feel something complicated in between.

So this occurs to me: style-as-deviance is all right in the essay because the essay means to be upfront about the self and
complicated
. When you write a sympathy note you’ve got to deliver the sympathy in a solid way, with out ambivalence, whole hog, or you’re a jerk who shouldn’t have written a note at all. O.K. Well, the essayist is a jerk. The essayist is tactless. “I am so sorry to hear about the death of your father” becomes, in an essayist’s hands, “I am so sorry to hear about the death of your father, even though all those years he wallowed in depression, refused to take his medicine, and drained your mother of what little spirit she had…”)

The essay doesn’t give its reader the relief of life or death, innocent or guilty, he was a good father, he was a bad. A stubborn skeptic, it refuses to let the chips finally fall. That the essay aims for art is what its critics often miss. The best art, said Nabokov, is fantastically deceitful and complex.

Actually, Nabokov never said anything he said; he wrote what he said, erasing many times.

Although critics have been unable to determine the essay’s constituents in the precise and practical way that they can tell a poet to make a sonnet out of fourteen lines, they can say, after years of deliberation, and on pretty good authority, that the essay is like a coat of fur, or Proteus in chains, or a syllable-filled spirit, and has more in common with the German cockroach than the Tennessee snail darter. The essay is like a journey, they say, or a walkabout, or a loose sally of the mind. Because my grandmother wears her blouses unbuttoned, and her name is Sally, this last has always been my favorite definition. My grandmother is a lovely woman, half-cocked, and generous. She seduces indiscriminately. She loves her body, she loves
the
body, and I think it’s fair to say (although the deathbed thing tends to distort one’s view) that she relates to people through food and touch, as opposed to, say, conversation. Most family pictures feature her in a bathing suit, straps knocked off her shoulders, as if they had just fallen down. Once on the beach she stroked my shoulders and told me how lovely I was. To a kid who wasn’t used to being touched, her touch felt strange. “Do I bristle? Do I purr?” I think, because I was young and dull, I acted casual.

E. J. Levy

 

E. J. LEVY’S
’s essays have appeared in
The Best American Essays 2005
, the
2007 Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses
,
Salmagundi
,
Orion
, and
Missouri Review
. Her short stories have been published in the
Paris Review
,
Gettysburg Review
, and
North American Review
, among other places, and two have been recognized as among the year’s Distinguished Stories in
The Best American Short Stories 2003
and
2004.
The editor of the Lambda award-winning anthology
Tasting Life Twice: Literary Lesbian Fiction by New American Writers
, Levy holds a BA in history from Yale and earned an MFA in creative writing from Ohio State University. She is currently an assistant professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at American University in Washington, DC, where she recently completed a memoir set in the Brazilian rain forest,
Amazons: A Love Story.

 

I have no photograph of my mother cooking, but when I recall my childhood this is how I picture her: standing in the kitchen of our suburban ranch house, a blue-and-white-checked terry-cloth apron tied at her waist, her lovely head bent over a recipe, a hiss of frying butter, a smell of onions and broth, and open like a hymnal on the counter beside her, a copy of Julia Child’s
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
.

The book’s cover is delicately patterned like wallpaper — white with miniature red fleurs-de-lis and tiny teal stars — the title and authors’ names modestly scripted in a rectangular frame no larger than a recipe card: a model of feminine self-effacement.

This unassuming book was my mother’s most reliable companion throughout my childhood, and from the table laid with a blue cotton cloth, not yet set with flatware and plates and glasses of ice water, not yet laid with bowls of broccoli spears,
boeuf bourguignon
, potatoes sautéed in butter, I observed her as she sought in its pages an elusive balance between the bitter and sweet.

It is a scene less remembered than invoked, an amalgam of the many evenings when I sat and watched my mother cook at the copper gas stove whose handles glowed a soft, burnished, too human pink. Tall and remote as statuary, dressed stylishly in cashmere and pumps, a chestnut bouffant framing her face and its high cheekbones, her pale blue eyes cast down, my mother consulted her recipes night after night. It is a scene suffused in memory with a diffuse golden light and a sense of enormous safety and an awareness that beyond that radiant kitchen lay the shadow-draped lawn, the cold, starry night of another midwestern autumn.

My mother had few pleasures when I was growing up. She liked to read. She liked to play the piano. She liked to cook. Of these, she did a good deal of the first, very little of the second, and a great deal of the third. She was of that generation of women caught in the sexual crossfire of women’s liberation, who knew enough to probe for their desires, but not enough to practice them.

Born into the permissive sixties, raised in the disillusioned seventies, the third of three children, I came of age in a world where few rules were trusted, few applied. Of those that did, the rules contained in my mother’s cookbooks were paramount.

The foods of my childhood were romantic.
Boeuf bourguignon. Vichyssoise. Salade niçoise. Bouillabaisse. Béarnaise. Mousseline au chocolat.
Years before I could spell these foods, I learned their names from my mother’s lips, their smells by heart.

At the time I took no notice of the gustatory schizophrenia that governed our meals. The extravagant French cuisine prepared on the nights my father dined with us; the Swanson TV dinners on the nights we ate alone, we three kids and my mother, nights that came more frequently as the sixties ebbed into the seventies. On those nights we ate our dinners in silence and watched the Vietnam War on television, and I took a childish proprietary delight in having a dinner of my own, served in its aluminum tray, with each portion precisely fitted to its geometrical place. These dinners were heated under thin tinfoil and served on plates, and we ate directly from the metal trays our meals of soft whipped potatoes, brown gravy, sliced turkey, cubed carrots, and military-green peas.

Had I noticed these culinary cycles, I doubt that I would have recognized them for the strategic maneuvers they seem to me in retrospect. Precisely what my parents were warring over I’m not sure, but it seems clear to me now that in the intricate territorial maneuvers that for years defined their marriage, cooking was my mother’s principal weapon. Proof of her superiority. My father might not feel tenderness, but he would have to admire her. My mother cooked with a vengeance in those years, or perhaps I should say she cooked for revenge. In her hands, cuisine became a martial art.

My mother spent herself in cooking. Whipping egg whites by hand with her muscular forearm, rubbing down a turkey with garlic and butter and rosemary and thyme, she sublimated her enormous unfeminine ambition in extravagant hubristic cuisine. Disdainful of the Sisyphean chores of housecleaning, she threw herself into the task of feeding us in style. If we were what we ate, she was hell-bent on making her brood singular, Continental, and I knew throughout my childhood that I would disappoint her.

In the kitchen, my mother could invent for herself a coterie of scent and flavor, a retinue of exquisite associates, even though she would later have to eat them. What she craved in those years was a companion, not children; but my father was often gone, and I was ill suited to the role.

I lacked utterly the romance my mother craved. Indifferent to books, unsociable, I could not master French. Though I would study the language for five years in high school, I would never get beyond the rudiments of ordering in restaurants and asking directions to the municipal pool (
Je voudrais un bifteck, s’il vous plaît. Où est la piscine?
). In the face of my mother’s yearning, I became a spectator of desire, passive, watchful, wary. Well into my twenties I remained innocent of my tastes, caught up in observing my mother’s passions and fearful too that I might betray her, call into question her unswerving desires with desires of my own.

Julia Child was the only reliable companion my mother had in those years, other than the woman who came once a week to clean the house. Across the street the Segals had a “live-in girl,” a local college student who came in to watch the children in the afternoons while Mrs. Segal nursed a nervous breakdown. Each year these live-in girls changed: now blond, now brunette, with names like Stacy and Joanne. They taught us how to shoot hoops, how to ride bikes, how to appreciate soap operas. In our house there was no “live-in girl,” there was only Mrs. Williams, the “cleaning lady.”