“Looking forward to it,” Helen says. It sticks in her throat a bit, yet she finds she really means it. At last, a way to get out of the house that carries with it some familiarity and legitimacy. And income. She recalls a time when she was ten years old and made pot holders on a loom, then went door-to-door selling them—ten cents for the small ones, twenty-five cents for the large. An unshaven man wearing a soiled bathrobe bought out her entire remaining inventory, and for years she clung to the belief that he was very wealthy. Never mind the ramshackle appearance of his one-story home—peeling paint, a dying lawn—Helen just knew that he had sacks of money in the basement with dollar signs stenciled on them, Scrooge McDuck style.
“I'll be really glad to finally meet you,” Nancy says, and her voice is warm and sincere.
“Me, too,” Helen says.
She hangs up the phone, leans against the kitchen counter, and thinks about what besides milk and suet she needs at the grocery store. She feels a pleasurable stirring of something she cannot quite identify, but then does: it's the idea that she will now write something. Even if it's only exercises for a writing class, she can step out of here into there.
seven
“WELL. HAPPY DECEMBER SEVENTEENTH!” HELEN SAYS. SHE IS standing at a podium before an audience of two hundred, organized by the friends of this particular library. Most times when Helen does these things, she prepares a few words of general introduction, then reads from her work. This time, the woman in charge asked her to speak only. “After all, we can all read by ourselves,” she said. “We look upon this as an opportunity for our patrons to get to know you.”
Helen understands the impulse; she has felt it herself. Once, she and Dan took a driving trip in Maine and they found the house where one of Helen's favorite authors, E. B. White, used to live. They sat parked outside it for some time, Helen imagining the life that used to go on there. She wondered what the kitchen looked like, the bedroom, the library, surely there was a massive-size library. “I wish we could walk around the grounds,” she said.
Dan shrugged. “Let's ask.”
“We can't do that!” Helen said, and Dan said why not, all the new owners could say was no, nothing would happen.
Helen sat still, thinking.
“Want me to go ask?” Dan said.
“Yes. No!”
“I'll just see if anyone's home.” He went up the walk and knocked on the front door. When it opened, Dan spoke to someone and pointed at the car. Helen waved—at whom, she had no idea; she couldn't see who stood inside.
Dan came back to the car, beaming. The woman who lived there was most accommodating when she heard Helen was a writer (though she'd never heard of Helen, he reluctantly admitted) and she told Dan that he and Helen could go ahead and look around all they liked. She even told Dan how to get down to E. B. White's writing shed by the water, trusting them to be there alone. When Helen walked into that little shed with its slab of wooden desk and bare floors and open window that framed the blue waters of the bay, she burst into tears. She cried for the beautiful words White had written, and she cried because he was dead, and she cried for the privilege of being in this space, where he had looked out this very window and smoked and thought and written lines full of such humor, intelligence, and heart. “Sit down,” Dan said quietly, pointing to the bench where White had sat, and Helen wanted to smack him. Sit there! Sit there! “No,” she said. “No, it would be …” She walked to the window and looked out at the water, then turned around. “I just …”
“I know,” Dan said.
“What he offered the world, still offers the world, is so important.”
“I know,” Dan said again.
She wanted to talk about White's essay “Death of a Pig.” She wanted to see if they could find the dusty path that Fred, White's beloved dachshund, traveled alongside his master when they buried that pig; she wanted to invoke the names of the characters in Charlotte's Web and feel inside herself some of the wonder the author must have felt looking out at these acres of beautiful land, where geese lowered their long necks to hiss out warnings, and grandchildren ran, shouting; where his wife Katharine's well-considered gardens grew, where he must have struggled to come to terms with a diagnosis of Alzheimer's. What sad irony, that a man so gifted with language would, at the end of his life, end up without the facility for it.
As she stood in White's work space that day, it occurred to her that she was grasping at straws when it came to really understanding anything about the man; you could read his work, even biographies about him, and imagine a certain kind of person; but the reality of him would forever be a mystery. She thought this was probably true of anyone who made any kind of art: the work did not necessarily represent the person. She thinks it was Margaret Atwood who said that wanting to meet a writer because you like their work was like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.
So when the librarian, Doris McCann was her name, told Helen that her patrons wanted to know her, she understood completely. She just didn't know if she could comply.
She straightens before her the paper where last night she scrawled some prompts to help guide what she would say. But now, to her dismay, she finds that they make no sense whatsoever. She has no idea what “river” means, or “broken lamp.” She sees the word “roses” and seizes gratefully upon it. “When my first novel was accepted for publication,” she tells the audience, “my best friend sent me twelve long-stemmed pink roses with a card that said, ‘This is the stuff of your dreams.’ And it was.” She smiles, and some of the women in the audience smile back. She looks at her notes again, feeling long moments go by, feeling perspiration start under her arms. She scratches her forehead, pushes back her hair. “Yikes, I really need a haircut,” she says.
Now the women simply stare, one with her eyebrows knit, her arms crossed tightly. Helen sees one woman elbow the woman next to her. She has seen this before, but that was when it was something positive, when it was one friend telling another she was having a good time. It does not mean that now.
“But that's not what we're here to talk about!” Helen says gaily, and she sees Doris, sitting at the end of the front row, nervously smile and turn ever so slightly in her seat, looking to see how the audience is doing. Well. Helen can tell her.
“You know, I was asked not to read,” Helen says, finally, and it comes out far too defensively. She leans closer to the microphone to say, “Which is okay, it's okay,” and there is a terrible squeal of feedback. Helen steps back. She clears her throat, looks again at her useless notes. What in the hell is “refrigerator repair man”?
She looks out at the audience again and presses her palm against her sternum, as though trying to resuscitate herself. “I apologize,” she says, finally, and now her hands move to clasp each other on the lectern before her. Calm down. She breathes in deeply, lets it out. Just talk. Just say something. “Usually I read from my work, my novels, I guess you know I've written some novels.” She holds up the latest one, which she brought along as a kind of talisman. “But anyway, I usually read from them as a way to … Well, as a way to show my art, I guess. Though that sounds pretentious to me, as I say it: show my art. It sounds like … Well, but what I do is, I read and then I take questions. I don't usually just … talk. About myself, I mean. I must confess, in fact, that I feel very nervous talking only about myself. I think most writers are shy people who hide behind others, who want to talk not about themselves but about other people. Of course, they are actually talking about themselves when they talk about other people …”