Clear Springs (13 page)

The Bobbsey Twins ruined me. They went on vacations in every book and never did chores. They were Yankees. They sledded and skated and made snowmen. I languished through hot Kentucky summers, longing to go to Snow Lodge or Clover Bank or Eskimo Land. By age nine I was in a tizzy over
The Bobbsey Twins in Mexico
. Mexico was hot but exotic. I wanted to go to Mexico so badly I tried to learn Spanish.

One summer morning Mama woke me up excitedly. “Get up, get up, guess what! Surprise!”

“Are we going to Mexico?” I cried, leaping out of bed. The song “In My Adobe Hacienda” ran through my head.

No, it was Daily Vacation Bible School. I was crazy to think we could leave the cows and chickens and Granny and Granddaddy and drive thousands of miles in our eccentric gray Chrysler all the way to Mexico.

Daddy and I were walking down the lane after a cow that hadn’t come up for milking. Boots, the latest dog, was with us. He was sort of a collie with golden-red hair. I said to Daddy, “When you read a book the second time, do you imagine a scene the same way you did the first time?”

“I don’t read a book over. I go on to another one,” he said.

“I like to read ’em again,” I said. I had just reread
The Bobbsey Twins on Blueberry Island
. I was particularly fond of the scene where the Gypsies came and picked all the blueberries, but a kind boy named Tom led the Bobbseys to a secret bush that the Gypsy tribe hadn’t found. When the Bobbseys picked blueberries, they were on vacation and the blueberries were there for their pleasure; when Gypsies picked blueberries, it was called stealing. We didn’t have blueberries. They sounded so much nicer than blackberries.

When I reread a scene, it unerringly sprang to life the same way it had before, as if my imagination worked primarily in space and time—as though I were traveling along a familiar road. An image in my mind always had a direction and a size. And I could remember where it appeared in the book—top, bottom, left, or right on the page. But the more I read, the greater my frustration grew with my real life. When I pictured a scene in a book, it was always some variation of a familiar place—with an added element of strangeness, so that the scene appeared slightly bent from reality. Like a circus marching down our
lane. Or Gypsies in the barn. Gypsies were a frequent menace to the Bobbseys, but I wanted to find some Gypsies.

I asked Granny, “How does a writer think up a whole book? Does she just make it up as she goes along?” Granny allowed as how Laura Lee Hope, the Bobbsey author, got the plot all worked out in her mind beforehand. She made plans. She didn’t just write the first thing that came into her head. I studied on this idea for some time.

I went on to read mysteries, in which girl detectives solved crimes and quaint puzzles about heirlooms with the aid of a magnifying glass. These sleuths drove cars, had boyfriends, nice clothes, indulgent parents. They had time and money. They did not have to pick blackberries. I began writing my own mystery stories. I sat in a corner on the porch or under a maple tree and wrote with a fountain pen in a blue Double Q notebook, which had two interlaced Q’s on the cover. I started at the beginning and followed each story, wondering what would happen next. I didn’t follow Granny’s advice. I couldn’t think ahead. The pleasure of writing was discovering what might pop out of my mind unbidden. There seemed to be a storehouse of words that I didn’t know I knew, yet they appeared at the right moment, like a girl joining a game of jump-rope.

My detectives were twins, Sue and Jean Carson, whose father was a famous detective. Jean was grimly mature, with a boyfriend. She wanted to be a nurse. Sue, the more ambitious twin, was more like me; she wanted to be an airline hostess. I had derived all the names and setups from the mystery series books I had read—nurse Cherry Ames, airline stewardess Vicki Barr, the Dana sisters. I stole the name Carson from Nancy Drew’s father, Carson Drew. I still have a fragment of
The Carson Girls Go Abroad
, a story about a stolen stamp collection, particularly a Romanian stamp with an odd portrait of a bespectacled man whose hairline was askew. The Carson girls pursued a ring of stamp counterfeiters. In one chapter, the pursuit took Sue and Jean to the county fair, where they rode the Ferris wheel and ate candy apples and cotton candy. Then, alone, Sue entered a sideshow, “The Thing.”

The chapter ended there. I had to keep Sue hanging until I could turn the page and imagine what happened next.

Answering an ad in the back of a magazine, I sent off for information about the Famous Writers’ School, thinking I’d get some rules and instructions on how to write a story. The school sent me an aptitude test, which I quickly filled out and returned. Then the Famous Writers’ School answered with the news that I qualified for correspondence lessons, which cost a great amount of money. After that, the Famous Writers’ School kept sending me letters, asking me if I had made up my mind about the course. The aptitude test said I had talent, the letters pointed out. I thought the school was writing to me personally, and there appeared to be some urgency, so after receiving several of these letters I wrote to the Famous Writers’ School, saying
I didn’t have the money to become a famous writer—I was only eleven years old.

The Carson girls went to France with their father and their French maid, Mlle. Bleax (my notion of a French name). Jean’s boyfriend piloted them in his own private plane while Sue played air hostess. One chapter was titled “How to Fly an Airplane.” In France, they saw the famous Percheron horses Sue had read about in geography. As it turned out, the counterfeiting ring was operating right there in Provençe, France!

I didn’t tell anyone at school about my writing. I was afraid they’d make fun of me. I was an earnest kid with a frown on my face. My diligence in school was absurd. I was always going overboard. Mrs. Isabella gave us word games on holidays. How many hidden words can you find in
Halloween
or
Merry Christmas
? My pencil would fly. I would find a hundred and fifty in the Christmas greeting: Cherry mist charms hammy chasm stammer retch stair mast star rat hat is it sit sir earth
 … Merry Christmas
was nearly half the alphabet! I was free to whirl the kaleidoscope of letters almost endlessly, listening to the sounds in my mind. Mrs. Alene ordered a special school project through the mail from a school-supply house. It was a kit to be assembled—an entire Dutch village, made of hundreds of pieces of pasteboard, with little tabs to fit them all together. The village had shops and pretty row houses with mansard roofs. People wearing balloon pants and wooden shoes were sweeping the cobblestone streets. Skaters glided on the surface of the canal, their wee silver skates stuck in the ice with vertical tabs. The village was large, covering a table. To construct it, we worked in teams, by turns, but I commandeered the table, desperate to work on the Dutch village full time. It was the most splendid thing ever to appear at Cuba School.

Fortunately for my classmates and teachers, I was absent for long stretches of school, due to illness. In the winter, to keep from getting sick, Janice and I wore long pants beneath our cotton dresses, which had gathered skirts and long sleeves. We wore our dreadful brown leather high-topped plow shoes. We did not play out in the cold or snow because we were sure to catch cold. I always got sick anyway. I coughed and wheezed and spit and blazed with fever. I came down with pneumonia almost every winter.

In the first grade, I stayed out of school for two weeks, enclosed in a breathing tent—blankets draped over the bedposts to hold in the sweet fumes of boiled benzoin—while I happily colored and read and
played. Mama called it an oxygen tent. I was out of school so long that Miss Christella took up a collection among her students to buy me presents. Unfortunately, I returned to school the day she planned to bring me the presents. So she returned them to the stores and I never got them. I can see her still, sitting on the bus with the shopping bag full of presents—I heard they included books and house shoes—she planned to drop off at my house. But there I was, hopping onto the bus that morning. The lost presents grew in my imagination. They made me acquisitive and desirous. Even though I always got plenty of gifts for Christmas and my birthday, there was always something else I wanted. Today it seems to me that Miss Christella’s gift of art and imagination was worth much more than the gaudy lost packages.

In the winter of my tenth year, I lay in the hospital, thin and bony, my lungs tight with congestion. But I paid no attention to Mama’s fretting over me. I wasn’t concerned. I loved being sick. I was allowed to have ice cream and milk shakes every day. During the fever, I felt a loose plank flapping in my head; it was my mind speeding up, getting ready to fly apart. I enjoyed the sensation; it seemed to be coming from the very heart of my being.

The following year, I had two more delightful hospital stays. The first one was caused by a middle-ear infection, near Christmas. For enduring a spectacular earache, I was entitled to special presents and candy in addition to my Christmas presents. Granddaddy brought a LifeSavers book to the hospital for me. It was a carton shaped like a book that opened out to form a bookcase with a dozen rolls of LifeSavers on the shelves inside. I savored all the flavors, one by one—Pep-o-mint, Wint-o-green, Spear-o-mint, Cryst-o-mint, the colorful fruits. For Christmas I received
The Clue of the Black Keys
 (Nancy Drew) and
The Spirit of Fog Island
 (Judy Bolton), a cowboy shirt, and a paint-by-numbers set. I was saturated with happiness.

Later that winter, I got sick again, and one afternoon I coughed so hard I suddenly gushed up blood. Mama threw Janice and me into the car and rushed us to the hospital. She didn’t even stop at the barn to tell Daddy, who was milking. I brought along a Quaker oats box to spit in. I kept coughing up blood. As we reached the waterworks on the approach to town, it occurred to me that I could die. Blood was an inch deep in the box. Even though I had passed the ten-year survival mark, maybe something had gone wrong. Mama’s face was white, as if she were the one losing blood. She told me recently that she was worried that I had tuberculosis. She had seen people die from this wasting illness,
and she had seen their bloody spitboxes. “I thought you were having a T.B. hemorrhage,” she said.

The doctor wasn’t alarmed. I merely had pneumonia again—bronchial pneumonia this time—and I had burst a bronchial blood vessel from coughing. The nurses gave me an enamel boomerang-shaped spittoon and placed me in an enclosed sunporch on the third floor of the hospital. The porch was private, enclosed by windows. With the nurses’ reassurances, I relaxed, telling myself it was impossible for me to die. But I could see my mother’s anxious face, hear her nervous voice. I could see her belly bulging out. I heard her say, “I’m afraid all this worry will make me lose this baby I’m carrying.”

She saw me staring at her stomach. “I swallered a punkin seed,” she said to me. From the way she grinned, I decided she would be all right. I was afraid another child meant more work for Mama, but I didn’t dwell on how my illness was affecting her or how much it was costing Daddy.

The sunporch was drafty, so after a few days I was moved into the ward, where it was warmer. A woman in the bed next to mine chattered. She had had a D-and-C, and she apologized for passing gas continually.

“They scraped my womb,” she said. “But I’ll still have my baby. They didn’t hurt it.” She emitted explosive noises.

Mama patted her own belly. “If I have this one, it will be a miracle, with all I’ve been through,” she said.

I preferred the sunporch, which was like having my own playhouse. But I stayed busy, even on the ward. Mama brought me books from the library, and she bought me Nancy Drews and Judy Boltons from the paint-and-wallpaper store, which had a small book section. The foot of the bed was piled with all my activities—the books, my stamp collection, a new paint-by-numbers set.

Each day I inhaled penicillin from some kind of breathing machine in the hospital basement. The acrid penicillin vapors loosened fascinating streaks of yellow and dark red in my chest. As the days went by, I coughed up large clots, hunks of brown blood like chicken livers. I studied them for clues to my being—like reading entrails or tea leaves. Twice a day, a nurse appeared at my bedside with penicillin shots, plunging the metal missiles with full force into my taut buttocks.