“Voila!” I made a smacking noise with my lips. “Anna and Nell are full of Glory!” I yelled as loud as I could for anybody to hear.
At evening, we burned her. The flames were so hot and big, they could have been seen from a hundred miles away. We watched them all night.
Past midnight—I don’t know quite when, the night was so long—I stuck the corner of my Anna and Nell painting in the flames, held it up, and watched it burn against the dark sky. The heat got close to my hand. I hesitated a moment. Then I threw it in.
I didn’t need anything to remind me of her anymore. Anna was in me—she was in the mesa, the sky, and every cell of our bodies. She was true to her promise. “Nell, we’ll always be together.” She couldn’t have left if she tried.
EPILOGUE
IF YOU BECAME ANNA’S lover, I’m pretty sure it would be her kisses that you would remember, how they led you way out into the open as she turned herself inside out in giving them to you. When she finally decided to kiss me that evening in her apartment, everything came with her, like a house collapsing, with all the hinges giving in. And it wasn’t even that she had such great lips—one of her teeth was crooked, and her bottom lip sometimes stuck out stubborn—but when she wanted to give, the heavens opened up. She wasn’t always that way, but she was when she kissed, and a lover of hers, a real one, would remember her kisses years later and would wish Anna well, no matter what awful things had fallen between them.
I also imagine there could have been some awful things, because Anna could get mean and silent when she wanted to. She once pinned me to the ground. She was strong, with wiry muscles. I thought she was kidding, but she wouldn’t let me up, even when I said I wasn’t playing anymore. I got scared, panicked, and bit her on the wrist. For a long time afterward, she had teeth marks in her skin. After that I studied her biceps. She was always lifting something heavy to see if she could do it. I didn’t know women could have muscles like hers. And her hands, too. Broad and blunt. Before I met Anna, I was ignorant about how far a woman could go.
I never paid much attention to Gauguin’s muscles. And his kisses? They weren’t all that memorable, though sure, I liked kissing him. It had more to do with water. The first time I saw him, even before I spoke to him, I felt it. Then, over the course of our relationship, I felt all kinds of water: a slow river, shallow and muddy, like the Green River flowing through the red canyonlands in Utah; the hard sparkle of water in a creek after the snow has melted and it catches the sun or even the moon’s cold light; also the kind of water that would come out of the faucet in my family’s place in Brooklyn. I’d stand in the kitchen, leaning on the sink, waiting for the water from the spout to run clear, and then I’d fill a tall drinking glass with it. As I drank, I’d smell fresh green parsley sprigs. All of this about water woke in me when I first laid my eyes on Gauguin.
He got married two years ago. When Gauguin called to tell me his plans, it was a Tuesday and I was baking bread, the first bread I’d baked in six years. My hands were full of flour when the phone rang. It was a short conversation; he told me, and I lied and said I thought it was great. I got off the phone and dumped the bread dough in the garbage.
Finally, I was able to accept it. I drove to Blue’s and slept over. That night I had a dream. I was lying in bed in a motel, and Gauguin and his new girlfriend walked in and stood at the foot of the bed. I turned my head to the wall. Then I said to myself in the dream, Nell, you have to look, so I lifted my head off the pillow and I looked. It hurt like hell, but I saw them, and they were perfect for each other.
The night of their wedding I was in Jerome, Arizona. I excused myself from friends in the restaurant and looked for a pay phone. There was one outside, against the brick wall of the building. I called Gauguin and left a message on his answering machine. “Congratulations,” I said. This time I meant it. “I had a dream, and in the dream you were perfect for each other.” I hung up. It felt cold out and I never wanted to visit Jerome again, though it wasn’t the town’s fault.
You know I’m not a writer. Anna was the writer, but I had to write this. I had to tell this story. We all have to tell our stories. We lived those years. We know them better than anyone else. We can’t let other people tell it for us. We each have to tell about those times, so we can remember how we believed in love and carry that belief forward.
A Biography of Natalie Goldberg
Natalie Goldberg (b. 1948) is a poet, teacher, writer, and painter. She lived in Brooklyn until she was six, when her family moved out to Farmingdale, Long Island. She received a BA in English literature from George Washington University and an MA in humanities from St. John’s University. Her first book, Chicken and in Love, was published in 1980.
She is best known as the author of Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within (1986), which revolutionized the teaching and practice of writing in the United States. The book has sold more than one million copies and been translated into fourteen languages.
Goldberg has written numerous books that explore writing as Zen practice, including Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life (1990), Thunder and Lightning: Cracking Open the Writer’s Craft (2000), The Essential Writer’s Notebook (2001), The Great Failure: My Unexpected Path to Truth (2004), and Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir (2008). She has also published a novel, Banana Rose (1995), and two memoirs, Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America (1993) and The Great Failure: A Bartender, a Monk, and My Unlikely Path to Truth (2004).
Goldberg has been a Zen practitioner since 1974 and studied with Katagiri Roshi from 1978 until his death in 1990. She began writing and painting soon after beginning these studies. She is ordained in the Order of Interbeing with Thích Nhất Hạnh.
A dedicated instructor, Goldberg has taught writing and literature for more than thirty-five years. She also leads national workshops and retreats attended by people from around the world. The Oprah Winfrey Show sent a film crew to spend the day with Natalie for a segment on spirituality that covered her writing, teaching, painting, and walking meditation.
Goldberg has painted for as long as she has written, and her paintings can be seen in Living Color: A Writer Paints Her World (1997) and Top of My Lungs: Poems and Paintings (2002). Top of My Lungs contains forty poems, twenty of her paintings in color, and an essay, “How Poetry Saved My Life.” Her paintings are on display at the Ernesto Mayans Gallery in Sante Fe, New Mexico, and at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos, New Mexico.
In 2006, Goldberg and filmmaker Mary Feidt completed a one-hour documentary, Tangled Up in Bob, about Bob Dylan’s childhood on the Iron Range in northern Minnesota.
Goldberg currently lives in northern New Mexico.
As a child, Natalie watches her grandpa write at the kitchen table. Natalie’s grandparents lived with her throughout her childhood. “They were the sun and the moon to me,” she says.
Natalie (right) at age five, playing outside her house with a friend on Easter Sunday. Natalie lived in Levittown, New York, from birth to kindergarten; soon after, her family moved several miles away to Farmingdale, where she lived until she turned eighteen.
Natalie smiles while posing with her father and sister in front of the family’s summerhouse in Twin Oaks, Long Island. Natalie and her younger sister, Rhoda, spent long afternoons picking wild blackberries that grew over the land.
Natalie age nine, writing while wearing her favorite white buck shoes. At nine, Natalie had no idea that writing would become her great love years later, at age twenty-four.
Natalie’s first real poem, written while she was in her early twenties. “It was the first poem where I trusted my own mind,” Natalie says. She first shared it with Rob Strell, the boyfriend with whom she had just broken up.
Natalie is also a prolific painter. Here, some of her very first paintings hangs on the wall behind her.
Natalie’s painting Red Truck in Boulder, 1977. Many of Natalie’s paintings were printed on postcards to celebrate and promote her tr
easured workshops around New Mexico.
Natalie with her ninety-four-year-old grandma. At the time of this photograph, the author had just returned home from a poetry fellowship in Israel.
Natalie, right, smiles while posing with her very best “writing friend,” Kate Green. “We wrote together every Monday night,” Natalie says.
Natalie in 1984, the year she wrote Writing Down the Bones.
Natalie’s home in New Mexico. From 1986 to 2003, she lived “off the grid,” in a completely solar-powered house made of beer cans and tires.
Natalie’s writing studio, where she wrote from 1993 to 2003. Over the years, her writing schedule has varied but when working on a book, she typically writes from nine in the morning until one in the afternoon.
Natalie and her mother at the beach in 1996. “My mother was beautiful and removed,” Natalie has said. “I took care of her a lot when I was older. I would drag her to the beach with my father, who is a champion swimmer.”
Natalie smiles in her Zen robe alongside a framed photograph of Katagiri Roshi, with whom she trained for twelve years. A student of Zen Buddhism for over twenty-five years, Natalie is ordained in the Order of Interbeing with Thích Nhất Hạnh.
Natalie, center, with filmmaker Mary Feidt and a friend of Bob Dylan’s in Hibbing, Minnesota. In 2004, Natalie traveled to Hibbing to explore Bob Dylan’s hometown and his roots in Feidt’s film Tangled Up in Bob.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Grateful acknowledgement is made for the permission to reprint from the following: Line from “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” from Dylan Thomas, Poems of Dylan Thomas. Copyright © 1952 by Dylan Thomas. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Two haiku from Haiku, Volume One by R. H. Blyth. Copyright © 1949, 1981 by R. H. Blyth. Reprinted by permission of The Hokuseido Press.
Chapter 47 was first published under the title of “Lakestone, Minnesota” in The Sun, November 1988.
copyright © 1995 by Natalie Goldberg
cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
978-1-4532-2458-8
This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
Natalie Goldberg, Banana Rose
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