Homemaking

I must be grouchy, because everything I consider writing lately has a tinge of grouch to it. A decrying of the reciprocal losses of faces and books that seem to follow the rise of Facebook. A dirge for realism. What cheers me, apart from reading David Grossman's To the End of the Land--by no means cheerful, but isn't it the powerfully grim novel that perversely offers most comfort, a sense, perhaps, of recognition, of knowing?--and fretting over the semi-literate, but who cares, Tim Riggins, is browsing online at things I'd like to buy. Then, this depresses me further, makes me feel nothing exceeds my irritation more than my vapidity. Then I scold myself: don't be a prig, we all like pretty things. Etc, etc.

Homemaking. So seductive, so sickening. My mother recently recovered from an intense E-Bay addiction. Her particular affliction? Plates. Oh, my. Plates. Beautiful ones. And so many. We all laughed, and felt a little nervous, as the contents of her cabinets seemed to multiply between every visit. Beautiful things are a refuge. And for women, maybe also a trap. We are in a cultural moment obsessed with the handmade, the homemade, and by extension, with homemaking. With time dedicated to the home a near religious rite.

I do not in any way want this space to become a dream diary--yuck! But in the last week I've had the same dream, almost, twice, and can't stop thinking about it. I am trying to get home, to my apartment, and it's nearly impossible. In the first dream, the entrance is a delicate wooden-spoked ladder of sorts, and the spokes keep breaking off. In the second, there's a kind of playground plastic tunnel entrance one has to crawl through. I do spend a lot of time in playgrounds these days, but it's by no means a merry crawling in the dream. It's an exasperated, slightly worried, good grief, why is going home so hard?

So here's the idea: It's about a woman, a young mother, who moves with her young daughter, a toddler, into the playground, their neighborhood playground. It is summer, and in the plastic tunnel they make a bed for themselves with sleeping bags, which they tidy away before normal playground hours. They are known to other mothers and other children, have chatted casually by the swings over many months, or in a mommy-baby yoga class, or music class nearby, and at first, it seems to these other mothers just almost as if the two of them are always there. "Here you are again!" the other mothers say, a mask of friendliness not quite obscuring their worry. Could they really have moved here? And why? And what has happened to their home, which had seemed, just weeks ago, so certain, so clear?

Imagination's Discontents

My son's imagination has sparked into being, or, at least, it is now made more visible to me through language. Now a cardboard box becomes a rowboat he climbs into and out of singing, "Row, row, row your boat;" a small saucepan becomes a crib for his blue and red plastic Superman toy. He demands a lullaby for Superman, then slams the lid onto the pot, calling out, "Close the door!"

He is both emboldened by his mind's developments, and made a bit more fearful. He walks into a closet and then comes running out, plunging his head into my leg, wrapping his arms around me, saying "Noises!" Or he rushes from a corner of a room to my safe knees, asking "What happened?" anticipating my next question to him. Whatever has happened cannot yet be communicated. But as boxes are rowboats, so closets contain dark hidden dangers. Imagination makes us powerful, world creators, and at the same time holds a startling power over us.

I recently had a nightmare that was unlike my usual nightmares. I was not alone in a part of the city that I thought I knew suddenly turned an unrecognizable, strange web of alleys and elevated trains. I was not drugged or unable to dial a telephone. A jet plane did not come hurling out of the sky, and nosedive the ground a block away.

No, this one seemed designed by a different maker, a B-horror-film director. But the work of this hack was vivid, searing. I feel nauseated even now, maybe a month or two later, at the thought of summarizing it. It involved clusters of blueberry-like tumors (so blueberry-like they may have actually been blueberries) growing out of my forehead just where hair meets skin.

I can no longer eat blueberries. And the nightmare hangover in the days following was extreme. I kept rubbing my head, as if to reassure myself no rogue bulbous purple-y lumps were bursting forth. I occasionally felt an urge to cover my eyes when the images flashed again in front of me. Of course, the images were not out there, but in here, and eye closing was entirely beside the point.

As I felt tormented, I kept thinking, You wrote that. You designed that dream to make you sick. The gross-out factor was all your doing. Who knew you could write such a weird genre dream? This comforted me. My range of imagination growing. Troubling, yes, and masochistic, but maybe more expansive, too.

I loved the novel Atonement in part because it laid bare the power and menace--the sadism--of a child's imagination. Its life creating and destroying capabilities. It reminds one not to be too precious about the imaginary life of the young. "The chandelier didn't fall on your head?" So a family friend, shocked to find his fantasy life had somehow failed him, greeted his mother one day when she picked him up from school.

The story I want to write is of a young boy of seven or eight. His parents have separated and his mother is having an affair. She meets her lover at an old-fashioned fancy hotel and when she does this, she deposits the boy with his backpack of notebooks and pencils and stories in a winged armchair in the hotel lobby to entertain himself. He will be safe there, she thinks. There, he spends long afternoons and evenings drawing and looking through books his father once read him, and making up excuses to the staff and patrons as he knows it is not quite right that he has been so left alone in this in-between place, this world of adults. He begins to tell his mother elaborate stories of the people he has met and the scenes he has witnessed in her absence, and as the tales grow more ominous she tries to decipher what is real, and what may be imagined.

Theory is Autobiography/ The Weeping Woman

I was giving my son dinner tonight when the aura of migraine began its vision experiments. It's difficult to describe, as, I suppose, ones particular perceptions of the world often are. First a small strobe light pulsing, a little blurry and glowing kind of jazzy, Keith-Haring-like hole in the middle of things. Not too intrusive, though the first time I experienced it, I thought, Aha, a stroke. Then more, further, vaster. The pulsing hole spreads, or it is several pulsing holes--throbbing, maybe is a better word. Looking becomes difficult. And faces are perhaps the most difficult objects to look at under these conditions, to see.

Felix's perfect face became a Picasso. The whole plane of features was off; I was seeing in more dimensions or fewer; the distortion was almost unwatchable.

Later, I googled "Picasso migraine," and, of course, Bingo. According to the BBC a, Dutch neurologist presented a paper in 2000, stipulating that Picasso's Weeping Woman series and other later works are in fact extremely similar to works done by lay migraine sufferers asked to draw what they see in the throes. A snooty rebuff in the Guardian cried foul: "A headache is not a substitute for inspiration."

I wonder. Is Picasso's work made somehow less-so if it represented what he saw, and not just an Idea? Even as a fiction writer, I am sometimes disappointed to learn that what appeared to be an amazing riff of imagination in a novel instead came from the novelist's life. To have made it up--well, that's inspiration. The rest is just headache, I guess.

But to describe lived experience--through paint, words, sound--in such a way that others see it too, feel it too, isn't that the hardest thing?

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion writes of discussions with John Gregory Dunne over whether some fellow writer "got it right."

A seductive notion, that there's such a thing as getting it right when it comes to perception. We all feel that, that moment of recognition, that, Yes, that's just how it was.

But I had the experience recently of visiting a house I love, a house I have spent many happy days in over many years, and finding it suddenly chipped, in need of scrubbing, sagging. It's true, the house is in a state of disrepair, but I had been there just weeks before and found it as pretty as always. What had changed was not the house, but the people in the house. And what was happening between the people within the house made the house, suddenly, uglier.

All this has me thinking of the falseness of getting it right, the impossibility of rendering the headache. I want to write a story about a shift in perception, a sudden change in seeing, a revelation, perhaps, or a distortion. I like to write about houses, and I'm still thinking about that house I love. I am thinking about a house beginning to change on its inhabitant. Not a Repulsion-style full-on horror show, but a horrifying change none-the-less, as a woman who has spent her whole adult life, her marriage, her raising of children, her retirement, in a home that she loved, only to find it becoming, day by day, at the end of her life, a thing of great ugliness to her.

Striking Chords

Having a baby is moving to a foreign land. Old customs and language no longer apply. Time moves differently, or, there is no time, but some new mysterious substance you travel through tentatively, ecstatically. You experience daily the small and large before unknown. So, this, too, is possible, you think. And you marvel: other people have known this all along.

In that way, it stirs around the thick mental soup, dislodges ideas once stuck to the sides. Like staring down into a new river in a new city in a new country, travel in baby land can make the mind feel fertile, though enfogged, thoughts fresh. Simple things, like deciphering a bus system, like soothing your baby to sleep, are emboldening, the satisfactions seeming not quite commensurate with the deeds.

At The New Yorker Festival a few years back, I heard Deborah Treisman interview Alice Munro, who said that when her children were small she couldn't write for all the reasons one can't write with small children, but that while they were napping she would pour herself a cup of coffee, and sit at her kitchen table and think about writing, and that this time of thinking about writing was not only necessary, but in some way useful, a kind of storing up, hoarding, priming, whatever the metaphor—good. I like this image of the consummate storyteller, hands wrapped around mug for warmth, very still, brewing. She also said that when she started publishing the local paper ran a story headlined: "Housewife Finds Time to Write Short Stories." I appreciate the feat of this now. What I might have read as patronizing a few years ago, I now find truly headline-worthy.

All this to say, I have ideas, but not the whatever it is necessary to turn the embryo of an idea into a fully formed story, a "new mother" or "grandmother" into a human being with life experiences, hair color, and furniture. For now, I can only sit at the table with the mug and mull.

But I know the writer in me is still there, and am reassured when I find her, each time I come across some moment or event in the world that resonates in a certain deep, spinal way. I think all writers have this striking of chords, this internal thrumming, that alerts them to the presence of something that might work in their work. Something true which belongs in their fiction. (One can see that this cliche, to strike a chord, started life so happily, so rightly, capturing precisely that strange physical moment of recognition. I feel sad for its demise, as I do whenever I see "a shock of white hair," which is incredibly often, in places that really ought to know better, but still, one sees how good it once was at describing just that.)

I felt the thrum a month or so ago when I read an article in The New York Times Magazine about two high school boys who have won a prestigious science prize for creating software that can recognize emotion, can tell when you are angry, or sad, or excited. The boys are best friends as well as collaborators, superstars as well as nerds, and throughout the time they were building this digital-sadness-meter, the father of one of the boys has been gravely ill.

I can imagine so many wonderful and devastating versions of this story. A Karen Russell story. A Rivka Galchen story. A Nellie Hermann story. And somewhere out there in the great beyond, maybe even a story of my own.

Nouns

Living with a 16-month old, I've been thinking a lot about language and its acquisition. It all begins with nouns, whether the starting point be Mama or Dada, cat or tree, airplane or book.

My son, before he started speaking, developed a commanding point. My husband determined there were in fact two different types of pointing at work. The first: Request for Transportation (bring me there at once!). And the second: Request for Identification (what is that called?). Now he knows verbs, too, but who needs them? He can string together beads of nouns into what my husband refers to as the inverse of circumlocution. He goes straight to the nugget of things. When I asked him one morning if he'd heard the thunder during the night, he replied, "Bang, Bang, Outside." (He loves onomatopoeia.) When he wants to be taken to the playground he says, "Swings, Whee! Outside." (According to my Merriam Webster's Dictionary, the word "whee" is classified as an "Interjection.")

As my mother pointed out, nouns are also the first parts of speech to go, as marbles age and memories fade. "Thing" becomes a great crutch for aging brains: "I need to go to thing," "Please pass me thing." Nouns: first in, first out.

There is something poignant, and downright biblical here. The significance of naming. A creative urge, to name the world. How powerful one feels, learning everyday new names for new things. You can see my son has a sense of himself as a conqueror as he wraps his mouth around a new word, a new thing known. And how terrifying, the reciprocal daily loss of objects, the sudden foreignness in the familiar, as the nouns start to recede.

My first story idea was a half-joke, a half-parody. The parody would be both of itself, and of other stories with extreme points-of-view (an accordion, a horse, a five-year-old). The thought: to tell a story from the point of view of, say, a 14-month-old, using only nouns. I'm quite sure noun-only stories have been told before. And I'm quite sure the results were comedic, and perhaps tedious.

But the idea that perhaps has more meat on its bones is about a grandparent and grandchild. I was imagining a grandmother and her grandson, as one of the greatest pleasures of the last year-plus of my life has been witnessing the love affair between my mother and my son. My son, Felix, calls his grandmother "Nonna," and when he wants to refer to the two of them together, as a duo, which is often, he calls out joyfully, "NonnaFee!" much like celebrity magazines refer to "Bennifer" or "TomCat."

But the grandmother I imagined is not my mother, and the grandson is not my son.

I imagined the grandmother living alone, down the street from her daughter and young grandson, in a small town, maybe in upstate New York. Somewhere pretty, and somewhat depressed. This description might apply to the women in the story, too. The men are missing, or fleeting. The grandmother babysits often, to help her daughter out, and because she likes it. But it is as her grandson begins to speak, to point commandingly at objects and demand to be told what they are, that this grandmother realizes her memory is slipping away. It seems to be slipping faster and faster, as quickly as her grandson gains a word, she loses one. And she does not want to tell her daughter, because she fears she will no longer be allowed to babysit, a noun-less idiot, she will be deemed untrustworthy, a baby herself, who must be watched and cared for, though without all the optimism and boundless potential of infancy.

Story Starters

It's hard for me to judge if my elementary school was really as great as I remember it being. Was Little House in the Big Woods as perfect as I remember it seeming? Was age 8 as good as it feels in the fuzzy room of memory?

But The Common School was undoubtedly great and one of the great things our teachers did was to give us time every week to write stories in our speckled black and white composition books. Just to sit quietly and make things up. I wrote pages and pages of plotless adventure stories (Paris, Or, The Dark Alley, stood out, with its two titles, as particularly sophisticated; a plotless adventure story may sound like a contradiction in terms, but I found a way).

If we were stuck, we could consult a notecard box of Story Starters. Printed in type on each notecard was a first line, or partial line of a story, a line to launch the imagination, to set us fifth graders on our literary ways.

I had a baby recently (though not so recently; the excuse of worthless milk brain may be wearing thin) and it often feels as though all that's left in my writing mind is a notecard box of Story Starters. I have ideas, occasionally they even strike me as good, but I don't have the time or the wherewithal to do anything with them. They sit there, disused, like the heart-shaped cookie cutters in my kitchen drawer. Another time, maybe, I think. Or, maybe better, another person.

That is the purpose of this slog (I'm sure my blogging efforts will never be anything other than slow): to set down an idea that might be worth something to someone some day. Even today.

Many of the ideas I have, admittedly, have something to do with babies. So here goes. First. May it set you on your way.

When my son was very tiny, he smelled of strawberry jam. The top of his head exuded it, like a scone. Nothing was sweeter, or more delicious. If he remained in my arms, or my husband's, this is what he smelled like—his smell, unadulterated strawberry jam. But I noticed at a certain point that when other people held him, he would absorb their smells—a shampoo or perfume or laundry detergent. His little fuzzy pate would somehow hold onto that smell, or the smell would cling to him, like the smokey tank top you bring home from the bar. He would smell like my mother on days my mother visited. He would smell like my mother-in-law long after she'd gone home.

This got me to imagining a young mother with a new baby who begins to suspect her husband of infidelity when every Thursday afternoon the baby returns home from a walk with her father smelling of a particular cloying perfume. The perfume I was imagining is Poison. A young mother I babysat for not long after I left The Common School and life became more complicated smelled of this perfume, and somehow this sense memory dislodged itself when I began to imagine writing this story, were I a slightly different person with much clearer thinking and a good dose of more time.