Better Than Fiction 2 (4 page)

I
once sublet an apartment in New York that had a tiny, triangular closet and because the closet had a small window and because I tend to put myself in awkward situations, I crammed a tiny desk and chair inside and began wondering if I should spend that winter in New Zealand. I knew no Kiwis, knew nothing of their history or culture, felt ambivalent about
The Lord of the Rings
, and was a compliant though not always enthusiastic outdoorswoman, but I felt there was something in New Zealand for me, some reason I had to go – and soon – to the other side of the world, alone and ignorant.

Some superficial reasons were created, not quite lies but close. I told friends and family I wanted to someday write about agriculture laws and politics and I thought that volunteering for Willing Workers on Organic Farms would be a thorough introduction to farming, and cheap; I’d be given housing and
food in exchange for a half-day’s labor at one of the small farms in their network. The unfortunate acronym of the organization is WWOOF, which means one goes WWOOFing, which makes one a WWOOFer, which does not help in the feeling, at times, that you are a slightly more useful stray dog for whom a farmer leaves out food.

I told a few others I was going to New Zealand to write a book about the ocean, a book I suppose I am still theoretically writing though no actual words have made it to the page. I doubt anyone believed this ‘reason’.

I still had half the money from donating my eggs and the belief that I should do something more substantial with it than set it ablaze on the New York rental pyre, but I told only a few friends that I was planning to make the egg cash last by hitchhiking. I had once met a sparkling young Dutch woman at a dance party who had hitchhiked on every continent, even, somehow, by plane; I thought I might become sparkly or somewhat Dutch if I could trust strangers in cars the way she did. The Kiwis seemed like a good demographic to try this theory on. Any time I mentioned this plan I was encouraged to buy bus tickets. I said I would consider this. I did not.

Maybe the real reason that I went on that three-month solitude bender with no cell phone, no companion, and no clear plan was the appeal of all the awkward situations I could get myself into. I likely didn’t see this at the time, and it certainly wouldn’t have made a good explanation for my impulsive, isolating trip, but I’ve come to understand that I’m one of those people who often travels the inconvenient route or wedges herself into precarious arrangements. Even as I write, I am scrunched into a Butoh-like tangle at the edge of a couch. I cannot explain, even to myself, why.

In general, hitchhiking is series of awkward moments. The hitchhiker stands on the side of the road as people drive past thinking,
That’s sad
, or
That’s stupid
, or
What a fucking weirdo.
The hitchhiker knows this, is made awkward by this, and yet must look on to the next car, the next driver, retain some hope. Then there are the awkward times when a car pulls over
near
, but not
for
, the hitchhiker; those drivers caution the hitchhiker away as if she is the neighbor’s unpredictable dog. Stay.

Then there’s the awkwardness of actually getting into someone’s car, seeing what they have in it, what they carry around, the struggle of small talk, the sinking reality that you have just put your life into a stranger’s hands. The risks that both driver and hitcher have taken hotboxes the car –
Will you kill me? Something worse? Do you think I could kill you? What if we just annoy each other?
There is no gratitude like the gratitude of a hitchhiker who has safely arrived and the driver who has safely done their good deed.

I lied to the first driver who picked me up. I said I’d done this before, that I wasn’t afraid, that I knew what I was doing. Gabriella, an easy talker with a maternal sense, made it easy for me to fake experience. I played the sort of make-believe that children do, mimicking a life they hope will soon happen. I stared out the window as a muted, grey afternoon fell on the shrubby landscape, and pretended. When I got out of her car a few hours later, she told me to be careful, to stay away from men; I shrugged like a teenager, as if it was something she told me every day.

When the next driver picked me up, it was harder to impersonate confidence. He was shirtless and sinewy and wore sunglasses despite the dull sky. Midway through the trip, he cracked open a beer, offered me one, and asked if his
driving made me uncomfortable. I said it did. He laughed. I could hardly understand him through his accent and whatever else might be numbing his mouth, but I got that his name was Leong, that his father was Chinese, that his mother was something else, that he preferred his music to make his ears bleed, at least a little. He invited me swimming. I declined. He asked me again. I said, not convincingly or truthfully, that someone – no, not someone, a man – a man was waiting on me in Takaka. He didn’t seem to care.

The moment I got out of his car, I felt a wave of relief that nearly took me out at the knees. This wasn’t the only time I feared the hitchhiking skeptics might be proven right, that something terrible could happen, but it was the most memorable. After this I began to scrutinize all my strange choices – why this car, why this person, why this town? And what, exactly, did I think I was doing? But I never had an answer. I faked assurance with a thumb.

After Gabriella and Leong, I WWOOFed for a week in one of the more isolated parts of the South Island. This old man had a garden and a shed-like situation that he had long ago rigged up from construction scraps. He was senile and often stoned and had a habit of wandering around his yard all morning naked from the waist down, like he had some kind of pact with noon. I pretended to be unfazed by this, but I was very much fazed. This was a different sort of awkward, one that didn’t have much to teach me, much of a skill to gain.

On other farms I faked my way into actual knowledge. I weeded fields and vegetable gardens and pumpkin patches and hillsides. I picked plums, grapes, kiwi fruit. I landscaped. I endured a couple weeks of the pain required to produce a single glass of Sauvignon Blanc. I did learn some of what I wanted to learn about
agriculture, though I never applied that knowledge to anything other than an acceptance of the high price of organic produce. Considering how hard it is to produce quality organic crops en masse, I sometimes marvel at how anything is grown at all.

What I wasn’t prepared for was how difficult the solitude would be. I’d always thought of myself as a solitary person; when friends asked me if I’d be lonely on this trip, I assured them I’d be fine. It had never occurred to me that so much time alone could curdle something in a person. Of course I found short-term friends – a stoic winemaker, that artist and mother in Napier, a boy in the backseat of someone else’s car – but I spent most of those months walking in silence.

I thought of myself as a writer at the time, though my writing routine was more an emotional buoy than a productive process; I had still finished very little. That routine mostly stopped in New Zealand. All I could do was record dismal accounts of my day –
Weeded pumpkin patch all morning. Walked for a few hours in one direction. Walked back. Had supper. Slept.

In the end it wasn’t the hitchhiking or the semi-indentured servitude, but my own loneliness and lack of context that were the most paralyzingly awkward. I was embarrassed by this at the time, the inevitable realization that I still needed more than just myself to survive. And not just the occasional stranger to drive me or house me somewhere; I needed people who knew me as more than a stranger.

Perhaps gravitating toward awkwardness isn’t about the discomfort of that moment, but what comes later, sometimes after months or years. After New Zealand I re-settled in Brooklyn, no longer in the triangular office-closet, but tossed into a cooperative living situation with seven strangers, the opposite of solitude. As we all became un-strange to each other,
my writing began to take on new life, and fiction like I’d never written before, all set in New Zealand, emerged in huge chunks. I treated it exactly as I had treated those first hitchhiked rides – I pretended I knew what I was doing, faked a competence. Surprisingly, this worked and after a couple of years’ work I had completed and sold a novel set in New Zealand about a woman even more confused and lost and awkward than I had been.

Perhaps this was all I was doing on those pointless walks through fields and towns of nothing. I acted like I knew where I was going until, years later, I did know. This may be all a young writer needs to know about their work: all you can do is pretend to know what you’re doing until you do know what you’re doing and when you forget again, pretend again, and the sense will return. It might also be all there is to travel, all there is to life.

I
n the spring of 2000, I had lost myself again. Mere months from college graduation, I could no longer hold it together to be the student I had been for nearly four years. Drugs, drinking, smoking, unstable flings, and weird friends (at one point a stripper was living with me, sleeping in my twin bed) had made it so I could no longer concentrate. All my classes – the usual fiction workshop, lit class, and philosophy class, all I ever took at Sarah Lawrence, where you could take anything you wanted with no grades and no exams and still be encouraged to complain – seemed a burden. I had one independent study with my American Studies professor that was meant to be journalistic somehow. I was supposed to be giving it some direction and I had none.

Professor Sizer and I would stare at each other in those tense office hours, every second feeling like an hour.

‘Your skin is gray,’ she once said to me.

I had nothing to say, because I no longer looked in mirrors, but I trusted her.

‘Are you depressed?’ she asked.

I didn’t know then, but I was.

‘When was the last time you were excited? What excited you?’

I was sick of my friends, going out, substances, so my mind went to books. ‘I used to read a lot,’ I finally said.

‘Go on.’

‘I loved it.’

Professor Sizer smiled at me for the first time all semester. ‘Now you sound more like yourself. Keep going.’

She had never known what
myself
was like, so I didn’t believe her, but I went on because there was nothing else to do.

In all my years at college, this was the first time I had spoken of him: William Faulkner, my first literary love. I had just come back from a year abroad at Oxford because that was where I had thought I could study the Western canon without too much ridicule. Identity politics were at a fever pitch then, and I was tired of living in so many margins: I was brown, bisexual, from a Muslim background, of the dreaded Middle East, of the even more reviled Iran, always poor from parents who were originally not poor and then had become very poor – I was always outside a norm, at every layer. I was sick of the fringes. Oxford had seemed like my only hope to have the most conventional Western education possible: reading the classics like Dante, Shakespeare, the Old and New Testaments. But even there, any interest I had in American literature didn’t hit the surface with my professors; Faulkner didn’t come up once.

‘What was it about him?’ Professor Sizer asked.

How do you explain to anyone why you, as a 15-year-old suburban Pasadena, California, teenager, latched onto Faulkner?
How do you explain that when your best friend had picked up the Vintage paperback of
The Sound and the Fury
, the one with the pink and blue sunset, and recommended it to you, you had just rolled your eyes? But that then you had told your English teacher you wanted to do it for your author report for honors English, and he disapproved, knowing you’d have to read more than just one book, and that in spite of you being a great student, you’d need a whole year just to do that.

There was no explaining how: I just did it. The text moved me. Though it was hard to understand, I developed a strategy:
You just keep going, you plow through it
, I told my best friend, who would look over my shoulder after school perplexed by the gift she had handed down. (
You just keep going, you plow through it
, I would tell my Columbia MFA students in a seminar 20 years later.) Benjy was always a problem, but
The Sound and the Fury
was a great excuse to get to Quentin Compson, who was destined to become a huge love of mine – so much so that soon I was deep into
Absalom, Absalom
, and, eventually, I couldn’t stop reading Faulkner. One by one, I read on and on until I had indeed read all his books.

‘But what was it about him?’ Professor Sizer asked again.

I didn’t know. I thought maybe it was the language – the maximal stream of consciousness somehow mirroring my own psyche, the lush style and winding rhythms of Southern writing somehow reflecting the lattice and arabesques of my own first language, Farsi. (A decade later my comp lit-studying brother would tell me that Middle Easterners always have a special affinity for Faulkner.) Perhaps there was something of the story of the South, too, its rise and fall, the Reconstruction era and beyond, the blood in the soil, the civilization on a pedestal and then questioned and then lost…

But I wasn’t thinking about all that – I was thinking about escape. I told her all I did know, and then I said, ‘I don’t know why he spoke to me, but maybe I could find out,’ and right then and there, I had an idea.

I could go there, couldn’t I?

I imagined Professor Sizer looking at me mockingly, so when I got the courage to meet her eyes, I was surprised. She looked earnest, her head was nodding. ‘I think that’s the best idea you’ve had for me ever,’ she said.

And so for my spring break of senior year, just months before I would begin my life as a college graduate in New York City, I set off to the Deep South to find something, anything, of a self I didn’t quite know I’d lost.

It was my first airplane ride that didn’t follow a route determined by my parents, no longer LAX to JFK. I was flying to Memphis, Tennessee, which I had discovered was the only way to get to Oxford, Mississippi – a flight there and then a Greyhound Bus to Oxford. I hadn’t learned this from the Internet – it wasn’t really a source you could trust then – but from phone calls to the Faulkner estate and museum where a curator named Bill Griffith had offered to meet me and put me in touch with some Southern Studies students at the University of Mississippi in Oxford.

I had no idea what I was doing, but I also told myself I had no other choice. Youth told me – falsely, of course – that I’d never have an adventure like this again, and that I had to see more of the South, and that perhaps a day or two in Memphis was the right thing. I booked two nights at a chain motel near Graceland. Elvis was an icon I had largely ignored, but I thought lodging nearby would be a good idea: nice area, full of tourists, no big
deal for a young woman like me who had seen it all in New York.

Upon arrival, I realized Graceland was not in the best part of town – I didn’t know what the best was, but it couldn’t have been that. I walked to a gas station to get some water bottles and realized there was no actual sidewalk on the main road. I walked carefully alongside the road, the lone pedestrian, as cars honked and young guys hooted at me from their windows. At first I imagined I was in my native California, where walking in the streets was rare, but there was something different in the air. I wasn’t sure if it was my cut-off jean shorts that were somehow inappropriate or that somehow they could tell I was
different
. By the time I got to the hotel room, my heart was racing. What had I done? Where was I? Who was I?

That dark dusty motel offered little consolation. I remember sitting for hours on the creaking twin bed, trying to cancel out the smell of all sorts of conflicting body odors – not mine! – by eating soy jerky I’d brought from New York. I was a vegetarian and had no idea what was in store for me food-wise. I sat and ate, my mind mostly blank except paralyzed with fear. What was I doing?

By morning, I submitted to my setting and took the Graceland tour and then even took a tour of downtown Memphis. All I remember of Graceland is that it was cramped, kitsch, a place of stale Elvis jokes, sad and camp. It seemed disappointing to everyone in that long line with me. And all I remember of Memphis is the Peabody Hotel, a big gilded grand hotel, where their claim to fame was a daily duck processional through the lobby. This was less disappointing, but still it meant nothing to me.

All around Memphis, a bleak sprawl reminded me of Los Angeles; all around, there was a quiet tension that I recognized from the days following the LA riots. A place certainly of divisions, a place maybe of intentional misunderstanding. I did
not belong in this discussion. Had I come all this way to not belong all over again? To compare this to what I knew and to come short, as all who do not belong always do? Why was I here again?

I remember walking again along that sidewalk-less highway, this time to buy cigarettes – so much cheaper than in New York, I realized for the first time in my life – and ordering my first biscuits and molasses at a lonely diner. Was this the real world? Was I about to get to a realer world? Before I could even attempt to answer those questions, the next morning – drizzly and gray – I was on a Greyhound bus, arriving in no time at all in Oxford, Mississippi.

Bill Griffith, a tall man with curly brown hair and kind brown eyes – the sort of guy who had the look of universal trustworthiness – picked me up at the bus station and before I knew it we were pulling into Faulkner’s home, the literary landmark: Rowan Oak.

It was a house both tall and slight, awkward and grand, a rigid white columned mansion in the woods, the smallest example of what I didn’t know then was called Greek Revival architecture. A row of cedar trees lined the driveway. It was an 1840s structure bought by Faulkner in the 1930s and renovated extensively. Faulkner gave it the name Rowan Oak– after a tree of Scottish legend that is supposed to signify security – and this was the location where his mythical Yoknapatawpha County came to life, the bulk of his books having been written here, the kitchen being where he got the call for his Nobel Prize. He lived here until 1962 and it was the Faulkner home until 1972 when his daughter Jill – who was born in the house – sold it to the university.

We stood in the main lobby, me nibbling at granola bars I’d
packed from New York. Bill was an affable guy, not as Southern as I’d imagined, excited to talk about New York. He’d arranged one night in the alumni house for me and the rest I was to stay with Robin Morris, a Southern Studies student I’d managed to reach over email.

I had spoken to Bill once over the phone and he’d mentioned getting in touch with ‘Jimmy,’ apparently Faulkner’s oldest living relative, a 77-year-old nephew, who was known to be identical to Faulkner.

‘He likes to go on about it all,’ Bill said with a mischievous grin, just moments before dialing Jimmy.

After just a few words on the phone, it turned out he’d be coming to see us.

‘Oh, wow,’ I cried both in excitement and in anguish, digging into my purse for spare batteries and a tape for my tape recorder, always nervous I’d not get my story.

‘It’s not that unusual,’ Bill assured me, more consolation than slight.

He filled me in about Jimmy, who was one of the two sons of William’s brother, John. (The other, ‘Chooky,’ was around but not as
social
, Bill euphemistically put it.) Jimmy was a WWII Marine fighter pilot and had also fought in the Korean War. He had an engineering degree and had owned a construction company; he’d been retired for over 15 years. Apparently ‘Brother Will’ (the only way he referred to William Faulkner) had called him ‘the only person who likes me for who I am.’ For all these reasons, he had become the primary Faulkner family spokesman and informal historian.

Soon enough he made it there, a slight, white-haired old man, with eyebrows and a mustache that refused to blanche quite that far, an aristocratic nose and piercing blue eyes: indeed a carbon
copy of any Faulkner image I’d ever seen.