Limbo (18 page)

I decided to hone my writing skills on a short story or two before diving into a full-fledged novel. The trouble was that I couldn't recall ever reading a short story I'd liked, though there'd been plenty that had left me cold, or annoyed, or feeling like the little boy in the tale “The Emperor's New Clothes.” Was everybody really seeing all that stuff about symbolism and metaphor, about the universal human condition, or were they just pretending it was there, afraid to admit they disagreed? I disagreed. My English classes had inevitably centered on stories about safaris, or wars, or jolly old England, and though I could accept that such conditions were human, they were not
universal, and they were not mine. It seemed to me that my life, like the lives of the people I knew, was something that happened on one planet, and Great Literature was something that happened on another, and that these two planets—though briefly visible to one another every once in a great while—had amazingly little in common. Reading men like Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald made me feel as if some vast, amorphous god were taking an eraser to my life, my individual beliefs and concerns. In the margins of Henry James's
The Golden Bowl
, I'd scrawled, “If these people had to work for a living, it wouldn't matter whether or not the stupid bowl was cracked.”

So why, then, were my own first stories clumsy imitations of James, of Fitzgerald, of the very writers I'd most fervently disliked?

I wrote the way I thought I was supposed to write, setting my stories in exotic locations, rendering them in highly Latinate diction. Because who would want to read about people who sounded, well, average? About people who talked like my family, like me? My characters didn't merely roll out of bed, head to the bathroom, and wash their faces in the morning; they
arose and adjourned to the lavatory to perform their morning ablutions
. The men hunted and smoked cigars; the women wore silk and sipped Pernod, which I couldn't pronounce and had never tasted. Everybody had long discussions about the pointlessness, the
meaninglessness, of everything. People “just shrugged” a lot and said, “I don't care.” Then they committed strange, violent acts. Narrators were particularly inclined to kill themselves when the story was written in the first person.

Needless to say, all of my characters were able-bodied and beautiful.

My creative writing teacher was a gentle person. After reading one of my early stories, she said that, sometimes, she read things which were so painful, so disturbing, that she locked them up in a part of her brain where she knew she'd never encounter them again.

“I don't know what else to write about,” I said.

“Write about what you know,” she said. “Write about things you
care
about.” She told me that Flannery O'Connor once wrote that anybody with a childhood had enough material to write good fiction.

“Who is Flannery O'Connor?” I said.

The night after I first read O'Connor's story “Good Country People,” I dreamed that she and I met for lunch in a school cafeteria. In life, she'd struggled with a mysterious ailment that eventually was diagnosed as lupus; it killed her in 1964, the same year I was born. In my dream, she was on crutches, and I was in my power chair. Her hair was flaming orange and teased into a tall beehive. I followed her through the line as she piled food on her tray, speaking irritably to the servers, pointing at what she wanted. With
out looking back to see if I was coming, she
picked up her tray and crutched
—gracefully, without dropping the tray or spilling anything—toward an empty table. “How did you do that?” I said, stunned. She made an impatient gesture with her head, as if to say
duh
, then started in on her lunch. My manuscripts were stacked beside her plate, but she didn't seem to notice them, and when she'd finished eating, she stood up to go.

“Aren't you going to tell me what you think about my stories?” I said.

O'Connor waved her hand dismissively at the manuscripts. “Yes, yes, yes,” she said. She was already moving away. “It's all very well and good. But
what
are you trying to
say
?”

I woke up. It seemed like a reasonable question. I had no idea how to answer it.

 

My teacher assigned
what she called
springboard exercises
at the end of every class.

Write about a secret
.

Write about a pet
.

Describe your earliest memory
.

These exercises were meant to launch us into stories, but they only served to launch me into full-fledged despair. Night after night, I sat at my desk without writing anything, aside from a fresh row of scratch-outs on the surface of the
unfinished door. Whenever my wrists got too sore to type, I jotted notes this way—reminders more than words—in a shorthand I'd invented. I still couldn't hold a pen, so I used a brace meant for quadriplegics. When my right hand wore out, I'd switch hands; I had a second, left-handed brace for that purpose. You could always tell which scratches had been made by which hand, and all of them looked angry. These springboard exercises were stupid. How was I supposed to recall my childhood when I couldn't even come up with details about the past few years, the past few weeks? I forgot deadlines, dates, assignments; sometimes, I'd forget the day of the week. When that happened, I'd panic completely. I'd feel myself falling, as if in a dream: Who am I? How can all of this have come to be? What will happen next?

My legs hurt, my arms hurt, and I'd started to develop what would become chronic back problems from sitting so much of the time. Though I often reminded myself that things were better than they had been, the pain was still distracting, like the wail of an infant in a nearby room. Even after all this time, I could never completely block it out. Even after all this time, I couldn't fully believe that any of this had happened to me, was happening to me, my god, this was my
life
and what was I going to do?

“Can I help?” Jake said from the door. He knew that I was hating my English lit class, which I'd had to take in
order to be eligible for my creative writing class. He knew that my creative writing class wasn't going very well at all.

“Not really,” I said.

“I wish I could do something,” he said, and I could tell how very much he meant it.

That night I wrote a story in which a man admits to his ill and unhappy wife that he is helpless to console her. My teacher liked it better than anything of mine she'd read before.

I wrote another story in which an old man digs a series of holes in his backyard, trying to escape his own increasing sense of disorientation. My teacher pointed out that it dealt with themes of entrapment, frustration, physical restraint. I hadn't meant to write about my own situation, but there it was. My writing was changing. I was changing. Each time I wrote, I found more of myself embedded in the prose: things I remembered that I'd thought I'd forgotten, things I had felt that I hadn't known I was feeling. Each time I went to my desk, I became a little more attached to the world.

Describe your childhood kitchen
.

List the contents of your top dresser drawer
.

Write a concrete scene that implies an abstract emotion: anger, despair, curiosity, peace
.

Winter passed. The weather warmed. One night in late April, writing late with the window cracked to the sound of peepers trilling in the ditches, I stumbled upon the litany
I'd chanted as a child in Michigan, strings of words that swelled and sang, unspooling onto the page. There were the rooms of our rented house, my brother in his crib. There was the Infant of Prague, the picnic table built into the wall. I wrote until I had it all back, my wrists numb, pain grinding up the backs of my elbows. And yet, I had found a way to transcend it. It wasn't a part of the world I was seeing. It wasn't the story I wanted to tell.

At last, I turned off the computer for the night. I took the power chair into the kitchen, where I reached the ice tray down from the freezer, emptied it into the kitchen sink, and turned on the faucet—just as I'd done throughout my adolescence, after a long day at the piano. As the ice cubes hissed and spat, I remembered that time as well: the silence in my head after the music stopped, the humming in my forearms and hands, the darkness beyond the sliding door off the kitchen, overlooking a ravine. On warm nights, my arms still wet, I'd slip out into the moonlight and follow my shadow into the trees, feeling my way down and down into the gully, then rising again toward the field that led toward the stand of willows, the river, the cow pasture on the other side. It was there for me still, all of it was there. And it was me, now, standing in that field on two strong legs, breathing in the good earth smell of the fast-moving water, splinters of moonlight riding the hard current.

Perhaps, there was nothing permanently wrong with my
memory. Perhaps it was just that I'd lost more than I wanted to remember. Perhaps I simply didn't want to face what I now understood was the truth: that I'd probably never have a clear diagnosis. That I'd have to spend the rest of my life this way, in limbo.

 

When I was
a child, the infant brother of a classmate died unexpectedly. The child had been unbaptized, only two days old. In catechism, Sister Justina explained that an unbaptized person, even a good person, even a little baby, could not go to heaven. No, when such a person died, their soul went into the state of Limbo, a place that was no place, nothing, neither punishment nor reward.

I imagined a gray room without walls, a gray floor, a gray bench. The light was such that there could be no shadow. The temperature of the air would be exactly the temperature of your own skin. You wouldn't know how long you'd been in that room, or how you came to be there, or how much longer you had to go.

T
his is the
story that for many years, I wasn't supposed to tell, the single thing my father asked me not to write about.

My father was released from the Rocky Knoll Tuberculosis Sanitarium in October 1956. He was twenty-one years old. Half of one lung had been surgically removed, and the scar—a fine red line that ran beneath his left shoulder blade—itched relentlessly. He'd become something of a favorite on the ward, and on the morning he was discharged, people lined up to say their good-byes. My grandfather, who'd arrived alone, waited downstairs in the lobby, shifting his feet in their mud-caked boots. He'd already
been out to the fields that morning and was anxious to get back home. Already the new season's work was beginning. Already there was more to be done than a man could do in a day, particularly a man with one son gone into the navy and the other out of shape, winded by the walk to the car.

What did they talk about on the way home, my grandmother's absence sleeping between them like a difficult child nobody wants to wake? What did my father feel as they passed back into Ozaukee county, turned onto roads that he recognized? Dirty gray crumbles of snow filled the ditches and blurred the edges of the fields. In another few weeks, if the weather held, the earth would be dry enough to cultivate, and then would come the planting, the fertilizing and irrigating, another wave of planting so the harvests could be staggered into late summer and fall. My father had lived all his life by these rhythms, as deeply ingrained as the rhythms of his body, yet it seemed to him now that he'd fallen out of step in a way that could never be reconciled. He knew just as well as his father knew that he was no good for the fields anymore. How was he going to make a living? What was he going to do?

When they got home, my grandfather dropped him off at the house before continuing on down the lane that led toward the woods. My father looked up at the house and barn, which he and his brother had always kept painted. He looked at the clover field sloping down from the house
to the highway, a field that, at eighteen, he'd tiled for drainage by hand over the course of a long and grueling summer. He looked at the long, low tool shed he'd built. Perhaps it had been someone else who'd done these things. Perhaps the things he thought he remembered were, in fact, just wistful imaginings. My grandfather's car had already disappeared, dust rising behind it in a lazy strip. A couple of hawks circled high overhead. In the distance, the lake was so clear and blue that it was hard to tell where the horizon ended, where the sky began.

Inside the house, my father sat down at the kitchen table. My grandmother had gone out—for the day, my grandfather had said. Everything looked the same. There was a newspaper and my father picked it up but then he put it down again. For a while, he scratched at his scar; there was no one to tell him to stop. Then he got up and dragged his bag up the stairs to his bedroom. It, too, was exactly as it had been. As if no one had entered it since that January day when he'd packed his things, not knowing if and when he would ever return to this house.

But why wasn't my grandmother there to meet him? Why hadn't she come to visit him in the san?

“Well,” my father says. He is standing in my doorway, halfway in and halfway out. He jams his hands deep in his pockets and rattles all his loose change. His body, backlit by the hallway light, is a dark, featureless shape, and the
answers he gives to my questions are very much the same. Long before I begin to write fiction, I will learn to fill in these shapes as best I can. I'll burn the facts, the dry, seasoned kindling, and explore whatever truths I can find by their light. I'll add missing colors, textures, and emotions, trying my best to stay within the lines.

Three years into a future I cannot imagine, my father will ask me not to write about his time in the san. It is not that any of this is a secret. It is simply the sort of thing that people, nice people, don't discuss. My father is a respected businessman, and here in our small community, illness and shame go hand in hand. Shame because, if you'd only tried harder, you might have fought off whatever it was that ailed you. Shame because, if you'd lived your life right, God would have protected you, would have answered your prayers, would have kept you safe to begin with. There must have been a moment—one you could have controlled or prevented—when you let down your guard, looked the wrong way, indulged in some slight weakness that opened the door to what was to come.

Even now, far from home, I am able to understand. Haven't I heard these same overtones in the advice of holistic practitioners, in the comments of New Age acquaintances, who suggest that I'm blocking my own healing energy, that maybe I simply don't want to get well? Aren't I regularly approached by Christians who want to know if
I've prayed to Jesus, if I've asked him to forgive my sins? Once, at a party, I noticed a woman staring at me hard, her arms crossed over her chest. “Man, you must have done something
awful
in your last life,” she told me, “to deserve what you're going through.”

Oh, yes, I understand.

“A writer's only responsibility is to his art,” Faulkner wrote. “He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: home, pride, decency, security, happiness, all to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his own mother, he won't hesitate; the ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies.”

If your soul is flat as the paper you write on, it will cost nothing to agree. But put an honored face on Faulkner's “old lady” and suddenly things aren't so clear. Every writer struggles to find a balance between the paralysis that results from trying to please everyone and the impact of art upon the very lives that inspire it. And while some writers, like Faulkner, do write from a place of loneliness, drunkenness, pain—the stereotype of the angst-stricken artist—there are plenty of us who write best, as I do, from a place of relative well-being. The truth is that I don't write well when I'm unhappy or anxious. I don't write well when my conscience is bothering me. Before my illness, my father
was, in many ways, a stranger, and the stories he told me about his illness formed the first bridge between us. And so I chose to endure Faulkner's anguish, rather than get rid of it. For eleven years, I kept the promise I made to my father.

At first, this promise was an easy one to keep. For one thing, nobody wanted to publish the stories I was writing, and I had no reason to believe that this situation would ever change. I told myself that even if I
did
write about my father's experiences, no one would be the wiser for it. For another thing, I had already begun to notice that the more my writing improved, the less satisfied I was with anything I wrote. Soon, fearing acceptance more than rejection, I stopped submitting work for publication, and it was then that I began to write the way I'd once played the piano, the way I once had prayed—with an unabashed, single-minded passion that I found hard to explain. I wrote for myself, out of wonder and fascination, in the absolute freedom of anonymity. And in doing do, I rediscovered the spirituality I thought had been lost along with my Catholicism. Only now, that spirituality was articulated in a new way. Where, once, I would have altered my perceptions of the world to fit the contours of my faith, I now shaped narrative worlds that reflected my honest perceptions—worlds filled with contradictions and blurred edges. Worlds defined by questions rather than answers. Worlds that often served as windows into a larger sense of mystery.

Absolute attention is prayer
. Simone Weil's definition is still the most generous I've heard. And when I write, I pay attention. When I write, I focus, I give everything I have. When I write, I move beyond my body, the crippled here and now, to enter a place of greater perspective, where fragmented things become whole—the same transcendence I'd sought through conventional faith. I do not mean to suggest that since such faith didn't happen to lead me there, it is not a road worth taking. But there are as many ways to experience transcendence as there are people in the world, and what brings out the best in one person may leave another person smug, or mean-spirited, or afraid. Perhaps, when we speak of
the meaning of life
, we are talking about our search to find whatever it might be that unlocks our particular heart. And it might be outright worship, but it might just as easily be the act of raising a child. It might be making a quilt, or restoring an antique car, or planting a garden. It might be as simple as the preparation of a meal. I myself am most capable of transcendence when I claim responsibility not only for my failures and limitations but for my triumphs, for my best intentions, for the things that I've done right. And writing allows me to do just that. My characters are the worst and the best of me; there is not one, no matter how mean or glorious, in whom there is nothing I can claim.

Writing has also become the means by which I make
sense of a day-to-day world that doesn't. In life, I'm the sort of person who always comes up with the perfect thing I should have said several hours
after
a conversation has taken place, usually during the middle of the night as I play the scene back, revising it until everything makes sense in a way it never could in life. In life, I forget important names and anniversaries, the location of restaurants, the titles of books I've just read. In life, I am the sort of person who needs to have jokes explained, who hears that a duck has walked into a bar and embraces that image, satisfied. Writing is a way of creating the punch line I have missed, inventing the name I can't remember. Writing is both the necessary map and the X on that map that tells me where I am. When I write, I am able to give myself the last, resonant word. If a duck walks into a bar, that bar belongs to me.

Perhaps this is why the stories I write are inevitably more believable than their factual roots. “Is this about your family?” people ask. Or: “Is that supposed to be me?” It has taken me years to realize that it isn't my scant use of facts that people are reacting to. It's the way I've claimed the last, definitive word on those facts. It's the way those facts have been coaxed into the sort of satisfying shape we long for in our lives, complete with clear motivations, logical developments, resonant closures. It's the way those facts have been illuminated with meaning.

Facts in themselves are as limiting as fences. Why carve up the imagination with all those long, straight lines? I can follow a fence for a while if I must, but inevitably, I hop it, drawn along paths suggested by the contours of the landscape itself. For a while, things resemble my own life, the so-called real world—but then a double moon rises in the sky. By its otherworldly light, I see someone who resembles a dear friend, an imagined lover, a neighbor's child. Five drafts later, fifty drafts later, I understand that I am mistaken. This character is a stranger. This character is astonishing. I have never known, never thought to imagine, anyone like this character before. It is this that keeps me writing, leaves me amazed and humbled again and again. There is always that point—what Flannery O'Connor calls “a moment of grace”—when the sum of the parts becomes larger than the whole.

 

In 1989, I
got a fellowship to attend Cornell University's graduate writing program. Jake and I moved to Ithaca, New York, where, the following year, we were married. By then, I was able to walk unaided around our narrow kitchen; I could comfortably crutch the length of our house. I still needed the power chair to get from the back porch out to the garden, but I weeded the bean rows on my knees and—more important—got back up into the chair afterward. Better still, I was able to hold a regular pen,
though my writing was still barely legible, and slow. I had far less pain. I began to gain weight. A teacher introduced me to horseback riding, and I'll alway remember my first time leaving the power chair's rattle to enter the silent, wooded paths beyond the barnyard.

By the end of my second year of graduate school, I'd managed to finish my thesis—a story collection that would eventually become my second published book. In addition, I'd nearly completed what would be my first, something I could no longer pretend was not a novel.
Vinegar Hill
had started out as just another short story, an attempt to reconcile contradictions suggested by details—what Chekhov called “little particulars”—dislodged from the lives of my paternal grandparents. My grandma Ansay had suffered a final, fatal stroke early in 1985. My grandfather now lived in Florida, where he'd gone through a kind of renaissance: dating, taking ballroom dancing classes, blossoming in the sunshine. But I couldn't stop reflecting on the way they had lived: my grandmother's misery, my grandfather's exhaustion, his endless desire for what he called “peace.” It occurred to me that like so many farmers of his generation, my grandfather had spent his youth not as a person, but as a tool, a task, the number of hours he could work in a day. His rage, which had simmered far more than it had shown, now seemed to mirror my grandmother's grief—two languages that seemed to express the flip side of a single,
shared lament. Perhaps it was this that had kept them together. Perhaps this had something to do with the secret my grandfather knew about my grandmother.

“I'll tell them about you,” he'd say, whenever she raised her voice against him.

I never learned what the secret was, but there were several clues. When I was fourteen, my grandmother had pulled me into the bathroom by my wrist. There, speaking through tears, she told me that sex was for the sole purpose of bearing children, and that once I passed out of childbearing age, I was free to deny a husband anything more. My grandfather had persisted, but she'd known her rights. She'd gone to the priest—on her mother's advice—and the priest had made my grandfather leave her alone.