All Is Vanity (7 page)

When, in second grade, I relied on my own experiences with vegetables and recklessly colored the stem on a mimeographed picture of a pumpkin brown, rather than the requisite green, as the directions had clearly instructed, I begged Mrs. Reynolds for a chance to do it over. “No,” she said, “one pumpkin to a customer.”

During recess, she taped the pumpkins colored side out to the windows, blocking the afternoon sun so that the classroom took on the gloomy cast of the earth under an eclipse. Obviously, the whole pumpkin-coloring endeavor had been merely an attempt to provide seasonal, albeit prosaic, decoration. Still, she’d given my picture a C, which would now be prominently displayed in all its
oversized scarlet shame—until the pumpkins were replaced by the inevitable trace-around-the-hand turkeys—to anyone waiting to board a schoolbus, in fact, to anyone casually strolling by the school, possibly even to those driving past, given the leisurely school-zone speed. Even Dougie Resnicki, who was still using fat crayons, had been granted a B.

Nevertheless, I would like the record to show that I did not wheedle to be taken to the supermarket that evening on a search for evidence to prove the accuracy of the brown stem position. My mother, however, discovered that we were out of spaghetti just as the Bolognese sauce had simmered to the proper consistency. My father was already jingling the car keys, this being a nearly nightly ritual that varied only in the identity of the missing essential ingredient, and since he seemed to enjoy my company, I abandoned the map of the autumnal night sky I was plotting on sixteenth-inch graph paper and went along. The Halloween pumpkins were piled unceremoniously in and around refrigerator-sized cardboard boxes in the Ralphs parking lot. I could not help but observe their stems. Their brown stems.

I felt at once vindicated and outraged. I had correctly rendered the pumpkin in living color and had been rewarded with ignominy.

I found my father already in the checkout line with the spaghetti and a shaker can of Parmesan cheese he’d thought to pick up just in case. “What color is this?” I held up the pumpkin I’d heaved inside and pointed at the stem.

He frowned, suspecting a trick. “Orange?”

“No, not the pumpkin, the stem.”

“Who cares about the stem?”

I sighed. “Just what color is it? Brown or green?”

“I’d call it beige.”

Beige, sand, dun—those were fine distinctions I, as a normal second-grader, was unwilling to make.

“So brown?”

“Brownish,” my father conceded.

As we drove home, I complained at length about Mrs. Reynolds, as well as the creators of the pumpkin outline and its nonsensical instructions, accompanying my diatribe with much angry snapping open and shut of the ashtray on the armrest.

“That’s exactly the way the world is, I’m sorry to say.” My father’s eyes flicked up to check the rearview mirror.

“How?”

“Objective reality counts less than what people say. How do we know what green and brown are anyway? They’re just those colors because we, as a society, say so. Your class, as a society, agrees that stems on pumpkins colored by children should be green.”

“I don’t.”

“Well, that’s a common problem. Especially if the society is led by a cliché-dependent despot.”

“Does that mean if Mrs. Reynolds says it, it’s right?”

“Pretty much.”

I hadn’t needed his thirty-five years of life experience to understand that.

“Still,” he said, turning into our driveway, “we can take comfort in the fact that we know better. We can gleefully sneer at those misguided fools.” He looked at me as he turned off the engine. “That’s what I recommend. A hearty dose of gleeful sneering. You may begin now.”

At dinner, my mother explained the concept of poetic license. She also suggested irritatingly that the stem of a pumpkin while it’s still in a pumpkin field might very well be green. I assured her
that the picture was most definitely of a pumpkin long removed from a field and that Mrs. Reynolds was in no way a poet. Warren demanded to know what a poet was, which spelled the end of the pumpkin discussion. Not that anyone wanted more.

I was wrong in the case of my plot, of course, wrong because I’d been so inaccurate as to be unbelievable, affording me neither poetic license nor license to sneer. Clearly, I needed to do much better.

Ted did not agree that painting the apartment was the best use of my time. “I think you should get the book done first. Then, while you’re waiting to hear from agents, you paint the apartment to keep your mind off the future.”

“But what about this mess?”

“Sally Sternforth says a writer’s surroundings don’t matter, because a writer draws her material from within,” he said. “Remember that Annie Dillard essay where she draws a picture of the view from her window and tapes it over the glass, so she won’t be distracted by what’s going on outside?”

So I wasn’t Annie Dillard, I thought the next day, as I draped the couch with an old sheet after Ted left. I worked energetically throughout the morning, pausing only for a restorative square of crumb cake, while I paged through
Samuel Johnson: Selected Poetry and Prose
for instructive essays on composition. By noon, I’d stacked all our books along the hallway and in orderly piles in the bedroom. There was, literally, no room to stand in the bedroom, except on the bed itself, from which our cat, Pickles, watched me somewhat critically. When the bookcases were bare, they, too, begged to be repainted, especially the one cobbled together from raw wood that we’d found discarded in SoHo.

Manhattan was the most affordable city we’d ever inhabited, in
terms of acquiring furnishings. We’d been amazed and delighted in our first months to discover not only nearly uncreased magazines piled on the sidewalks, but also perfectly good, or only slightly damaged, furniture—the kind of items that in suburbia would have been shifted from the house to the garage or attic, until a large-enough collection was amassed to justify a yard sale. In Manhattan, we sensed that even had there been enough storage and a proper venue for rummage sales, people had too much money to bother. Why spend a weekend marking prices with a roll of masking tape and dickering with confused elderly women, when you could be brunching at your country house?

So far, Ted and I had dragged home, besides the bookshelf, a child-sized, six-drawer dresser containing three dozen rolls of Ace bandages and about two hundred packets of antibacterial cream; a sort of cupboard on wheels with an enamel top, produced, according to its metal label, in Nappanee, Indiana; and a reasonably clean rattan hamper. Our sidewalk shopping was governed by only one rule: nothing upholstered.

“You’re not painting the apartment, are you?” Ted asked at seven-twenty, after he’d stood for an entire minute in silence just inside the door.

I was sanding bookshelves, a task that would make anyone irritable.

“Not right at the moment. No.”

“I thought I told you this was a bad idea.”

I blew the dust that had accumulated along the surface I’d been
rasping into the air. “And your opinion matters more than mine because …?”

He didn’t answer. And then, in one nauseating instant, I realized something that made me feel as if I were strapped in “The Zipper”—an amusement park ride of my youth—and had been abruptly turned upside down. Ted’s opinion did matter more, because he was paying for my book. He was, in a sense, my patron. Although, theoretically, my income from the school would continue throughout the summer, I’d taken the remaining months of pay in one lump check, which had already been deposited. Financially, Ted and I had not been equal partners for years, but, nevertheless, I’d always brought home a salary that could support me. I had, in other words, pulled my weight. But now it was as if he were at the top of a cliff with a rope around his waist from which I dangled. If he said, “Reach for the rock on the right,” did I owe it to him to obey? If I thought the left was better, should he trust me? What sort of a team were we exactly?

“Look, Margaret.” Ted set his briefcase down, boosted himself onto the counter, and swung his legs out of the living room and into the kitchen. I seemed to have blocked the traditional passage between the two rooms with the couch. “I know you’re having a little trouble getting started.”

Luckily, he held up his hand as I opened my mouth to protest, since I had no idea how I intended to defend myself. “But you have to give yourself a chance.” He took the Campari out of the refrigerator and held it up. “You want some?”

“Thanks,” I said. “What do you mean, give myself a chance?”

“I mean you need to face the fact that you’re probably going to have to just sit and think, which you can’t stand to do.” He twisted
a plastic ice cube tray until the cubes surrendered with a crack. “These people, for instance,” he said, tapping his briefcase to indicate those who’d submitted grant proposals to the Cabot Foundation, “they spent a lot of time observing and mulling over ideas. They didn’t rush around like chickens with their heads cut off, distracting themselves with trivial make-work, hoping that a finished copy would eventually spring full-blown from their heads.”

“I observe,” I protested. “I mull.” His comparing my novel to the proposals he evaluated made me uncomfortable on two fronts. First, concerned as they were with issues like the plight of the poor, these proposals were a continual reminder that others were directing their efforts and talents toward truly worthy causes. Much as I liked the idea of acting noble, such a sentiment could not be applied to anything I’d ever done, including my intermittent volunteer work, which would better be described as vaguely helpful. I didn’t like to admit this, but, in all honesty, I undertook such work more so that I could see myself as a caring person and so assuage my guilt over being born among the privileged, than out of a burning sense of compassion or outrage over others’ distress. And second—and here my discomfort collided with resentment—how many hours had Ted and I spent groaning over those pages almost universally filled with pompous and tortured jargon? And these were to be my models? “Literature,” I said, “is different from your work.”

He handed my drink over the counter. “I know it’s hard,” he said. Was the patron being patronizing already? “You need to give yourself some time, that’s all. Don’t panic. Don’t distract yourself. If I were you, I’d lie on the bed all day. Or go sit by the river. Sally Sternforth wouldn’t even do the dishes when she was working on
her book. She didn’t want any task other than writing to satisfy her drive to be productive.”

I laughed, my hands in the air in a gesture of surrender. “All right. You can do the dishes. But, Ted, honestly, I think better when I’m busy. While I’m painting, I’ll generate some good ideas. And in a week, I’ll be done and we’ll both be happier and more productive in bright rooms. Really, I know what I’m doing.”

That night, I read Joan Didion’s “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.” I underscored passages lightly in pencil, keeping my lines straight and neat with an index card. “Buy index cards,” I wrote on my legal pad, under the exhortation to “Buy baby-naming book,” which was marked with a satisfying tick to indicate its completion.

Didion created an ominous mood and suggested an impending threat of suicide, divorce, and murder with her description of the Santa Ana winds, but when I thought about that weather the words that came to mind were “dry hair” and “allergic reactions.” As in the case of the pumpkin stem, my own observations did not seem very reliable, if my goal was to produce A work.

“There’s no drama in my life,” I complained to Letty the following day.

“There’s drama here,” she sighed. “There’s blood and tears, and sweat, too. Mostly mine,” she added.

“What happened?” This would be another of the mini-misfortunes from which Letty was constantly bouncing cheerfully back. I sympathized, but sometimes the bid for attention that these scenes seemed to represent annoyed me. Particularly when I wanted to talk about myself.

“Noah pinched his finger in a door this morning.”

“My God, Letty, is he all right?” I remembered when this had happened to me in nursery school, my tender, unsuspecting fingers clutching the doorframe during an overly wild game of hide-and-seek, and Jimmy Kaufman slamming the door shut as he ran by. The thought of it still made me gasp and pull my fingers into a tight, protected fist.

“
He
seems fine. He and Hunter are in the bathroom with the light off right now, trying to see if the bandage glows in the dark. I’m still a little tender though. Also, Zippy peed on the car seat on the way to the vet.”

Zippy was the guinea pig that lived in Hunter’s classroom. Letty had agreed to keep him for the summer, along with her two dogs, three cats, and tank of tropical fish.

“Shouldn’t he have been in a carrier or a cage or something?”

“Apparently so. It’s a zoo, here, Margaret. I love having all the kids home, but there’s just so much … I don’t know … activity.”

“What’s going on with the bigger-house plan?” We’d concocted the “bigger-house plan,” which was actually not so much a plan as a wish, when Letty was last pregnant and realized that if she had another boy, her sons would eventually have to sleep in some sort of triple bunk arrangement suitable only for merchant marines or Tokyo businessmen. Luckily, the baby turned out to be Ivy.