Dimestore

  Granny Younger is expressing that part of me that is the writer part, that knows things I don’t know, and that does not find its expression in any other role I perform—as mother, wife, or teacher, for instance.

  Writing has become a source of strength for me, too. I had barely begun a novel named Fair and Tender Ladies—intended as an honest account and a justification, really, of the lives of so many resourceful mountain women I’d grown up among, women whose plain and home-centered lives are not much valued in the world at large—when my beloved mother went into her last illness, a long and drawn-out sequence of falls, emphysema, and finally heart failure. This period coincided with the onset of Josh’s schizophrenia; I spent two years visiting hospitals, sitting by hospital beds, often reading students’ work as I tried to hold on to my teaching job. I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t been writing that novel. I worked on it a bit every day; it was like an open door to another world, another place for me to be for a little while.

  Its heroine, Ivy Rowe, grew stronger and stronger, the more I needed her. Every terrible thing in the world happened to her—extreme poverty, too many children, heartbreak, illness, the death of a child—but she could take it. She hung in there, so I did, too. Ivy made sense of her life through writing a constant stream of letters: to her children, to her friends, to her sisters—especially to her favorite sister, Silvaney, even though Silvaney had died young and would never read most of them. Near the novel’s end, Ivy burns all her letters, and it is finally my own voice as well as hers that concludes:

  . . . The smoke from the burning letters rose and was lost in the clouds. . . . With every one I burned, my soul grew lighter, lighter, as if it rose too with the smoke. And I was not even cold, long as I’d been out there. For I came to understand something in that moment . . . which I had never understood in all these years.

  The letters didn’t mean anything.

  Not to the dead girl Silvaney, of course—nor to me.

  Nor had they ever.

  It was the writing of them, that signified.

  In 2003 I had done a lot of historical research but had barely begun a novel named On Agate Hill when Josh died. My grief—and rage—were indescribable: “oceanic,” to use one doctor’s terminology. He told me that there are basically two physiological reactions to grief. Some people sleep a lot, gain weight, become depressed and lethargic.

  I had the other reaction—I felt like I was standing with my finger stuck into an electrical outlet, all the time. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t read, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t remember anything, anything at all. I forgot how to drive to the grocery store. I couldn’t find the school where I had taught for twenty years. In group situations, I was apt to blurt out wildly inappropriate remarks, like a person with Tourette’s syndrome. I cried all the time. I lost thirty pounds.

  Weeks passed, then months. I was wearing out my husband and my friends. But I couldn’t calm down. It was almost as if I had become addicted to these days on fire, to this intensity. I felt that if I lost it, I’d lose him even more.

  Finally I started going to a psychiatrist, a kind, rumpled man who formed his hands into a little tent and listened to me scream and cry and rave for several weeks.

  Then came the day when he held up his hand and said, “Enough.”

  “What?” I stared at him.

  “I am going to give you a new prescription,” my psychiatrist said, taking out his pad and pen. He began to write.

  “Oh good,” I said, wanting more drugs, anything.

  He ripped the prescription out and handed it to me.

  “Write fiction every day,” it said in his crabbed little hand.

  I just looked at him.

  “I have been listening to you for some time,” he said, “and it has occurred to me that you are an extremely lucky person, since you are a writer, because it is possible for you to enter into a narrative not your own, for extended periods of time. To live in someone else’s story, as it were. I want you to do this every day for two hours. I believe that it will be good for you.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “I haven’t written a word since Josh died.”

  “Do it,” he said.

  “I can’t think straight, I can’t concentrate,” I said.

  “Then just sit in the chair,” he said. “Show up for work.”

  Vocational rehabilitation, I thought. Like Josh. So I did it. For three days. The fourth day, I started to write.

  And my novel, which I’d planned as the diary of a young girl orphaned by the Civil War, just took off and wrote itself. “I know I am a spitfire and a burden,” Molly Petree begins on May 20, 1874. “I do not care. My family is a dead family, and this is not my home, for I am a refugee girl . . . but evil or good I intend to write it all down every true thing in black and white upon the page, for evil or good it is my own true life and I WILL have it. I will.”

  Molly’s spitfire grit strengthened me as she proceeded to “give all her heart,” no matter what, during a passionate life journey that included love, betrayal, motherhood, and grief (of course, grief). But by the time we were done with it, Molly and I, two years later, she had finally found a real home, and I could find my way to the grocery store. I could laugh. And yes, through the mysterious alchemy of fiction, my sweet Josh had managed to find his own way into the final pages of the novel after all, as a mystical bluesman and healer living wild and free at last in the deep piney woods he used to play in as a child.

  When Joan Didion published My Year of Magical Thinking, with its close observation of her life during the painful year following her husband’s death, a friend wondered, “How can she do that—write at such a time?”

  “The right question is, how could she not do that?” I answered. Writing is what Joan Didion does, it’s what she has always done. It’s how she has lived her life.

  In a different way, I realized, this is how I have lived my life, too. Of course writing is an escape, but it is a source of nourishment and strength, too. My psychiatrist’s prescription may benefit us all. Whether we are writing fiction or nonfiction, journaling or writing for publication, writing itself is an inherently therapeutic activity. Simply to line up words one after another upon a page is to create some order where it did not exist, to give a recognizable shape to the chaos of our lives. Writing cannot bring our loved ones back, but it can sometimes fix them in our fleeting memories as they were in life, and it can always help us make it through the night.

  Angels Passing

  DO WE EVER GET BEYOND the images of childhood? The way we first hear language, for instance (old women on a porch, talking on and on as it gets dark) or how Mama smells (loose powder, cigarettes, Chanel No5). Or in particular, Christmas: my Aunt Bess’s quivery soprano on “O Holy Night” in the chilly stone church. The sharp strange smell of grapefruit, shipped from Florida in a wooden crate. The guns of Christmas morning, echoing around and around the ring of frosty mountains. How the air smells right before it snows, and how the sky looks, like the underside of a quilt. Oranges studded with cloves, in a bowl on a coffee table. The blazing fires in the oil drums as we go screaming down Hoot Owl Holler on our sleds (“sleigh-riding,” we call it), then get hauled back up the mountain in the back of somebody’s truck to do it all over again. My daddy in his dimestore wearing a red bow tie. All my images of the holiday season cluster around the dimestore, the Methodist Church, and my mama’s winter kitchen, which was always filled with people and food.

  It seemed like everybody in the whole world dropped by to sit a spell and see what she was up to. And sure enough there she was, wearing a pretty apron over a pretty dress (Mama was the kind of woman who dressed up every day), turning out batch after batch of her famous fudge. She’d already made the fruitcakes, of course, and now they sat in the “cold corner,” drenched in rum. (Does anybody really like fruitcake? I doubt it. But fruitcake at Christmas was the law.) Sherry pound cakes, sugar cookies, and pecan pies got wrapped in tin foil, then
tied up in bows. If the back doorbell rang, it would be a man named George or a man named Arnold, drunk and wanting money, which I got to give them if my Mama had her hands in some kind of dough, which she usually did.

  My parents gave lots of presents; Daddy was always worried about giving everybody “enough.” Besides their many friends, we were surrounded by relatives—they lived on either side of us and up the road from our house in the Levisa River bottom, and all over town. Delivering the gifts took three days, because of course Mama and I had to sit and talk for a while at every house we went to. Daddy used to order oysters at Christmastime, especially for Mama. The wooden barrel of oysters, packed in ice, came all the way across Virginia from Chincoteague Island. We went down to the station for days on end, meeting every Norfolk and Western train, looking for them. When they finally arrived, it took several men to carry them to our house. A mining engineer who’d been born in South Carolina came over to open them. A couple of women were waiting to help Mama cook. They worked on the oysters for two days, and on the evening of the second day, just about everybody in town showed up to help eat them. We had oysters in the shell, fried in cracker meal, in fritters, in stew, and scalloped. Everyone was fascinated; most of the townspeople had never even heard of oysters before “Miss Gig” moved to town. As old Dr. Burkes said, arranging a red bandana over his fancy three-piece suit, “I’d like to know who was the first man that ever thought to eat such a monstrosity as this!” Like the fruitcakes, the oysters were mainly something to put up with, in my opinion. What I liked was the ambrosia and the floating island for dessert.

  We ate holiday dinners at the big round table in the dining room at my grandparents’ house, with Grandmother presiding blue-haired and ethereal above the snowy linen. I used to drop my napkin on purpose just to lean down and look at the huge dark claws on the pedestal base of the table—cruel, strong, and evil, evil. I’d come up flushed and thrilled.

  Christmas was a time for cousins, who’d arrive next door from southside Virginia with such long names that it’d take their mother forever to call them in out of the snow—“Martha Fletcher Bruce! Anne Vicars Bruce!” My relationship with my pretty redheaded first cousins Randy and Melissa was more complicated. I liked them, but mainly I wanted to be them . . . to belt out “I Enjoy Being a Girl” the way Melissa did in the Rotary Talent Show, to be as smart and exemplary as Randy. It was clear that Jesus liked her better than me.

  I aspired to sainthood in those days. I might have settled for a little miracle, or a vision, or at least a sign. I remember one Christmas Eve staring fixedly at Missy, my Pekingese, for hours, because a granny-woman had told me that God speaks through animals on Christmas Eve. He didn’t say a word through Missy. But never mind, I was all eaten up with holiness anyway, excited by the holly in the church, the candles, the carols, and the Christmas pageant, which we acted out at the altar year after year, wearing our bathrobes, until we were too old to be in it. There were not enough boys in that little church, so I usually had to be a Wise Man, while Randy and Melissa and Frances Williams got to be the angels. I wanted to be an angel so bad. But would I ever fit through the eye of the needle? Didn’t I have too much stuff?

  At school we drew names and I gave gifts to kids from up in the hollers, saving my allowance to buy them the nicest things—Evening in Paris perfume, Avon dusting powder, a pen and pencil set in a clear plastic case. In return I got a hooked potholder once, and a red plastic barrette, and a terrific home-made slingshot. On snowy nights around Christmas I used to sit out by myself for hours, hearing the wild dogs bark way up in the mountains, listening hard for the high, sweet song of angels. I never heard it, either. When my daddy came home from the dimestore, I’d finally go in the house.

  He never left on Christmas Eve until the store was closed, cash counted and put in the safe, the last layaway doll picked up—and if somebody couldn’t pay, which happened often enough when the mines weren’t working, he’d give it away. In early October, I’d go with him to the Ben Franklin Toy Fair in Baltimore, where we’d order presents for Christmas. I was the doll consultant.

  In those days, in that town, it was a sin to sell on the Sabbath; but from Thanksgiving until Christmas, every Sunday, I got to go downtown to “work” in the dimestore, helping Daddy and the “girls” fix things up for the week ahead. As doll consultant, I’d dust the dolls and fluff up their dresses and stand them up just so . . . I particularly liked to raise their arms a bit, so they’d be ready to hug any little girl they got on Christmas morning.

  Weren’t these Christmases idyllic? Wasn’t my childhood wonderful? Yes and no. It’s like those awful claws beneath the festive table at my grandmother’s house. For there were terrible resentments and quarrels about money and old unhealed wounds right beneath the surface in that family, as in all families. Somebody was always going off to “take the cure,” while others were “kindly nervous.” In the parlance of today, our family was dysfunctional (is any family not?)

  I would never become an angel, or even a saint. Instead I would grow up wild, marry young, and settle down. We’d have two boys, forming our own dysfunctional family. We’d do the best we could. Then we’d divorce, and I’d feel “kindly nervous” myself. I’d remarry. I’d try like crazy. (We all do, don’t we? We try like crazy.) My new, husband and I would form our own new, blended dysfunctional family. And even now that we’ve been married for thirty years, I realize how hard divorce always is for kids, no matter what those self-help books say. Though the kids are all grown up now, they lost some big bright pieces out of their childhoods, out of their lives.

  For I could never give them what I had: my father in a red bowtie standing forever in front of his dimestore; my mother forever in her kitchen wearing Fire and Ice lipstick and high heels; the cousins next door and across the street; Jesus right up the road in the little stone Methodist Church.

  The church is a parking lot now. The dimestore is gone. Walmart looms over the river. I’m seventy, an age that has brought no wisdom. When I was young, I always thought the geezers knew some things I didn’t; the sad little secret is, we don’t. I don’t understand anything anymore, though I’m still in there, still trying like crazy.

  We do what we can, don’t we? Before Christmas, I still make fudge, party mix, sherry pound cakes, and sugar cookies. With four small grandchildren, our holiday plans vary now. We go where the children are. I always make a trip to Nashville to visit Lucy and Spencer Seay right around Christmastime. Last year, our granddaughter Ellery Ferguson was chosen to play Mary in an Episcopal church pageant in Raleigh. Her younger sister Baker was First Donkey. On Christmas Eve, I still make scalloped oyster casserole. But sometime on Christmas Day—around the tree or at the table—there will come a moment when the conversation spontaneously ceases while we pause, and remember. One of those little silences that sometimes fall upon us all—angels passing.

  The Little Locksmith

  CASTINE, MAINE

  I wake early here, in our corner bedroom already flooded with light. Beyond the window, light winks on the shining water of Penobscot Bay and glows through the mist that still shrouds Islesboro and Belfast and the Camden Hills beyond; light rolls golden down the sloping yard to the water. I’m instantly wide awake, so wide awake it’s scary. I get up immediately, pull on some jeans and sneakers, go downstairs, feed Betty the dog, and together we walk out through the tall, dewy grass and down the wooden steps to the rocky shore, which changes with every high tide. The birch trees rustle in their papery, conspiratorial way. Birds cry out. Little white waves break on the shore. But this water is cold, not like the Myrtle Beach or Wrightsville Beach of my youth, where you could jump the waves all day and they would pick you up and hold you in their warm, salty embrace. No, this water would kill you; you have to enter and exit quickly, shivering. There’s no boardwalk, no dance pavilion, no Krispy Kreme doughnut place. It’s beautiful here, but it’s a severe, rigorous beauty. A loon calls across the water. Light leaps off the little wave
s like a thousand arrows aimed at me; I fish my sunglasses out of my pocket and put them on, though it isn’t even 7 a.m. yet. I breathe deeply in this chilly air, which seems strangely effervescent, like breathing champagne.

  And actually I’m feeling a little intoxicated, the way I often feel here, the way I always feel when I’m starting a new novel, which I am—or will, as soon as I get up my nerve. It’s that old disorientation, that scary lightness of being, that moment before you spring off the diving board straight out into the shining air, head first. You could kill yourself, and you know it, and you’ve got to get to the point where you don’t care.

  I’m not quite there yet.

  But by fortunate chance, I’m here in Castine, a place I associate with taking risks and writing. Nobody’s home but me and an old dog and an accommodating husband who doesn’t care how crazy I act when I’m starting a novel. So I don’t even leave him a note when I take Betty back inside and grab up my windbreaker and gulp down two Advils because I have a long hill to climb now and I’ve got a bad knee which is par for the course when you’re old, which I am. This is a true thing I have only recently discovered and it is like an ugly scab someplace on my body I never noticed before but now I can’t quit picking at it. Finally I open my book bag and take out my current copy of The Little Locksmith, by Katharine Butler Hathaway. I’ve given away at least a dozen copies of this book since it was republished by the Feminist Press, after Maine writer Alix Kates Shulman found it in a secondhand bookstore and brought it to their attention. It first came to me here, years back, when I really needed it—as books so often do. Since then it has become my talisman, my Bible, my lucky charm.