Authors: Natalie Goldberg
There wasn’t much traffic. I thought of switching on Van, and then I couldn’t. Anna was dead in the back seat. After about twenty miles, I pulled over to the shoulder and fell over the steering wheel. Sweat was pouring down my body. C’mon, Nell, get a grip, I said to myself.
“What are you doing?” It sounded like Anna.
I sat up. I looked around me. No one was there.
Then I looked around again. There she was, in the passenger seat. Not in the flesh. More in the form of smoke. “Nell, turn around. Take me to Taos. You promised to get me there.”
“Anna!” My eyes were bugging out of my head. “You’re dead. What are you doing here?” I was shocked but not afraid. It felt like Anna, not like a devil or anything. “You’re dead, Anna.”
“Quit all this crying, Nell. Turn this car around. I was headed for the mesa. Now finish it. Take me there.”
I started to cry all over again. She grabbed my T-shirt at the collar. “Listen, will you?”
I jerked up—this was a strong ghost. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Nell, take me where I belong and quit bawling.” Yup, that was Anna, no-nonsense, Midwestern. Then the smoke disappeared through a crack in the windshield.
“No, wait,” I called. “Wait, Anna. Talk to me.”
“I did. You heard me.” Her voice was like a distant echo.
I turned my head and looked in the back of the car. The body was still there. She was still dead.
I took a deep breath. “Okay, Anna,” I said. I spotted a break in the divider and spun the car around. “We’re heading home.” I gassed the car up to 85, opened the windows, and put on Van at full blast.
D
ANIEL HAD ARRIVED
two days ago. He was even taller than Anna and had the same color hair, almost the same length, but his eyes were brown. You could tell they were related, but Daniel was more awkward with his big size and clumsy about his manners.
“It’s okay that you hijacked Anna.” He broke into a big grin. It was Anna all over again—her heart-shaped face, her wide cheekbones, her rugged mouth. He reached out his hand to shake mine.
For a moment his sister was present again in the flesh. I had to turn away as I offered my hand.
We kept Anna in the pyramid Sam had built years ago after he read that pyramids had magical powers. When I arrived from Dodge, Sam made a simple pine coffin for her.
I visited her every day. First I’d recite the Kaddish, then I’d tell her everything I could remember about who she was and about times we had spent together. I’d sit on the ground real close to the coffin; my voice, echoing in the pyramid, sounded as if it were reciting a litany. I told Anna about how I admired her for caring about writing and how I had never known anyone from Nebraska before. I even told her that sometimes I wished I were as tall as her.
One morning I asked her, “Anna, do you remember when we hung the sage to dry all over the vigas on your ceiling? And then we sat under that beautiful smell and ate scrambled eggs fresh from Mel’s chickens.” At that I ran outside and picked armfuls of sage and hung it all over the inside of the pyramid. It was cool in there, and the sage made a good smell.
I accompanied Daniel on his visit to Anna. When we opened the door of the pyramid, the sage smell filled our lungs. Daniel walked right over to the coffin and opened the lid. He knelt down and picked Anna up in his arms. “Sister, sister, sister,” he whispered over and over, rocking her in the body bag, his eyes closed, his face trembling.
He laid her back gently and closed the lid, rested his forehead on the pine wood. I knelt beside him, and he reached for my hand and clutched it. I stroked his head.
He glanced up, his cheeks wet. “This is like ’Nam all over again.”
I nodded. “Let’s get some air.”
We walked out into the sunlight. Daniel blinked a few times. “I gotta move,” he said, and took off running across the mesa. I stood watching until he topped a distant mound and then disappeared.
On the morning of Anna’s funeral, I thought of taking a walk when I woke up, but instead I went straight over to the pyramid and sat with her until lunch.
Daniel came to get me and we walked back together.
“You ready for this evening?” he asked me.
“I guess. It’s probably best. We can’t go on this way,” I said, and took his arm.
“Yeah, it’s still hard to believe. I feel like I have to do something to mark her passing. After lunch I’m gonna shave my head.”
I nodded. We went in the house.
Blue had made a beautiful salad and fresh lemonade.
“Did you know Anna sold lemonade in the summer when we were on the farm?” Daniel lit up when she poured him a glass.
“No—yes, I’d forgotten—but maybe I didn’t.” Blue sat down and smiled.
“Want to hold hands?” I asked, reaching out my arms.
We sat with our eyes closed.
“Anna, I really miss you,” my voice choked.
“Me, too.” Daniel squeezed my hand.
We began to eat. There were only the four of us. We had decided to keep it small since we were pretty sure what we planned to do that evening was illegal.
After the salad plates were cleared, Blue brought out the most beautiful two-layer white cake I’d ever seen. There was one big candle in the middle.
“Daniel, do you want to blow it out?” she asked as she placed it on the table. “Make a wish.”
He stood up, closed his eyes for a long time, and then blew it out.
“Give me a big piece. I deserve it,” I said. “I always made fun of Anna for liking vanilla.”
After I finished it, I said, “I still don’t see what she saw in that flavor. It’s got no punch.”
We laughed and then a tremendous sadness swept over me. I looked around and knew the others felt it too.
All afternoon Sam and Daniel piled up piñon and cedar. I helped for a while but had no will for it. They understood and I walked over to the bus.
You’re going to paint now? I asked myself. I didn’t know what else to do. Anna would have liked me to paint.
My eye glanced at the haiku book on the floor. I squatted down, closed my eyes, and picked out a page. My eyes fell upon:
The first snow,
Just enough to bend
The leaves of the daffodils.
My whole chest took in the haiku. Basho again. He knew some stuff.
I stood up, picked up a brush, dipped it in blue and wrote on the top of a big piece of paper, “FOR ANNA AND NELL.” Then I dipped my index finger in red paint and wrote the poem in big letters. Then I picked up a paintbrush almost half the size of my fist, dipped it in black, and held it over the top of the page so the color ran down to the bottom. As I waited for it to dry, I searched through a big wooden chest at the far end of the bus. I found what I wanted—a clear plastic box full of silver and gold stars.
I licked the backs of them and stuck them all over the red writing and the black drips. As I did it, I said aloud, “Excellent, Nell gets an A. Anna gets an A-plus. Excellent, excellent. The two of us excelled. Congratulations.”
I must have glued at least a hundred of them on. “Yeah for Nell and Anna! They were great and wonderful. They were A students.” Then I glued colored sparkles all around the edges of the painting. I stuck a picture postcard of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the center, and then in the upper right-hand corner I painted a white Star of David.
“Voila!” I made a smacking noise with my lips. “Anna and Nell are full of Glory!” I yelled as loud as I could for anybody to hear.
At evening, we burned her. The flames were so hot and big, they could have been seen from a hundred miles away. We watched them all night.
Past midnight—I don’t know quite when, the night was so long—I stuck the corner of my Anna and Nell painting in the flames, held it up, and watched it burn against the dark sky. The heat got close to my hand. I hesitated a moment. Then I threw it in.
I didn’t need anything to remind me of her anymore. Anna was in me—she was in the mesa, the sky, and every cell of our bodies. She was true to her promise. “Nell, we’ll always be together.” She couldn’t have left if she tried.
I
F YOU BECAME
A
NNA’S
lover, I’m pretty sure it would be her kisses that you would remember, how they led you way out into the open as she turned herself inside out in giving them to you. When she finally decided to kiss me that evening in her apartment, everything came with her, like a house collapsing, with all the hinges giving in. And it wasn’t even that she had such great lips—one of her teeth was crooked, and her bottom lip sometimes stuck out stubborn—but when she wanted to give, the heavens opened up. She wasn’t always that way, but she was when she kissed, and a lover of hers, a real one, would remember her kisses years later and would wish Anna well, no matter what awful things had fallen between them.
I also imagine there could have been some awful things, because Anna could get mean and silent when she wanted to. She once pinned me to the ground. She was strong, with wiry muscles. I thought she was kidding, but she wouldn’t let me up, even when I said I wasn’t playing anymore. I got scared, panicked, and bit her on the wrist. For a long time afterward, she had teeth marks in her skin. After that I studied her biceps. She was always lifting something heavy to see if she could do it. I didn’t know women could have muscles like hers. And her hands, too. Broad and blunt. Before I met Anna, I was ignorant about how far a woman could go.
I never paid much attention to Gauguin’s muscles. And his kisses? They weren’t all that memorable, though sure, I liked kissing him. It had more to do with water. The first time I saw him, even before I spoke to him, I felt it. Then, over the course of our relationship, I felt all kinds of water: a slow river, shallow and muddy, like the Green River flowing through the red canyonlands in Utah; the hard sparkle of water in a creek after the snow has melted and it catches the sun or even the moon’s cold light; also the kind of water that would come out of the faucet in my family’s place in Brooklyn. I’d stand in the kitchen, leaning on the sink, waiting for the water from the spout to run clear, and then I’d fill a tall drinking glass with it. As I drank, I’d smell fresh green parsley sprigs. All of this about water woke in me when I first laid my eyes on Gauguin.
He got married two years ago. When Gauguin called to tell me his plans, it was a Tuesday and I was baking bread, the first bread I’d baked in six years. My hands were full of flour when the phone rang. It was a short conversation; he told me, and I lied and said I thought it was great. I got off the phone and dumped the bread dough in the garbage.
Finally, I was able to accept it. I drove to Blue’s and slept over. That night I had a dream. I was lying in bed in a motel, and Gauguin and his new girlfriend walked in and stood at the foot of the bed. I turned my head to the wall. Then I said to myself in the dream, Nell, you have to look, so I lifted my head off the pillow and I looked. It hurt like hell, but I saw them, and they were perfect for each other.
The night of their wedding I was in Jerome, Arizona. I excused myself from friends in the restaurant and looked for a pay phone. There was one outside, against the brick wall of the building. I called Gauguin and left a message on his answering machine. “Congratulations,” I said. This time I meant it. “I had a dream, and in the dream you were perfect for each other.” I hung up. It felt cold out and I never wanted to visit Jerome again, though it wasn’t the town’s fault.
You know I’m not a writer. Anna was the writer, but I had to write this. I had to tell this story. We all have to tell our stories. We lived those years. We know them better than anyone else. We can’t let other people tell it for us. We each have to tell about those times, so we can remember how we believed in love and carry that belief forward.
Natalie Goldberg (b. 1948) is a poet, teacher, writer, and painter. She lived in Brooklyn until she was six, when her family moved out to Farmingdale, Long Island. She received a BA in English literature from George Washington University and an MA in humanities from St. John’s University. Her first book,
Chicken and in Love
, was published in 1980.
She is best known as the author of
Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
(1986), which revolutionized the teaching and practice of writing in the United States. The book has sold more than one million copies and been translated into fourteen languages.
Goldberg has written numerous books that explore writing as Zen practice, including
Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life
(1990),
Thunder and Lightning: Cracking Open the Writer’s Craft
(2000),
The Essential Writer’s Notebook
(2001),
The Great Failure: My Unexpected Path to Truth
(2004), and
Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir
(2008). She has also published a novel,
Banana Rose
(1995), and two memoirs,
Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America
(1993) and
The Great Failure: A Bartender, a Monk, and My Unlikely Path to Truth
(2004).
Goldberg has been a Zen practitioner since 1974 and studied with Katagiri Roshi from 1978 until his death in 1990. She began writing and painting soon after beginning these studies. She is ordained in the Order of Interbeing with Thích Nhất Hạnh.
A dedicated instructor, Goldberg has taught writing and literature for more than thirty-five years. She also leads national workshops and retreats attended by people from around the world.
The Oprah Winfrey Show
sent a film crew to spend the day with Natalie for a segment on spirituality that covered her writing, teaching, painting, and walking meditation.
Goldberg has painted for as long as she has written, and her paintings can be seen in
Living Color: A Writer Paints Her World
(1997) and
Top of My Lungs: Poems and Paintings
(2002).
Top of My Lungs
contains forty poems, twenty of her paintings in color, and an essay, “How Poetry Saved My Life.” Her paintings are on display at the Ernesto Mayans Gallery in Sante Fe, New Mexico, and at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos, New Mexico.