The Sheila Variations

The Books: "Close Range: Wyoming Stories" - 'Brokeback Mountain' (Annie Proulx)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf:

Close Range: Wyoming Stories, by Annie Proulx - excerpt from the story 'Brokeback Mountain'.

First published in The New Yorker in 1997, 'Brokeback Mountain' of course went on to be her most famous short story ever, due to the movie and the brou-haha around the movie (which I loved). I was nervous to see the movie, because I had originally read the story in The New Yorker (any time I see Annie Proulx's name ANYwhere, I'll read it ... I'd read her grocery list) and it made me cry. On the subway. A lot of her stories have that sucker-punch feel to them, but this one even more so. Annie Proulx often creates characters who are not all that likable, but you end up loving them in spite of yourself. But in 'Brokeback Mountain', you just love these two men. You love them. So I had apprehensions about the film, although the fact that Ang Lee was directing soothed me somewhat. Jake Gyllenhall is not at ALL the "Jack" in the story - and both actors have better teeth than either of these guys ever would - but I understand how Hollywood works. And I was astonished when I saw the film. First of all, the adaptation was amazing. Word for word it's the story. Very little is added. Which is amazing because the story is only 30 pages long. Annie Proulx has said that 'Brokeback Mountain' took her as long to write as a novel. It feels like a novel (most of her short stories do). So the movie didn't need to "flesh out" the story, they filmed what was on the page. As I watched the film, I felt that odd feeling of proprietary pride and joy ... because the story meant so much to me ... within 10 minutes of the film, I realized: "Yup. They're doing it." Annie Proulx was interviewed by The Advocate and she said, in regards to the two actors playing Ennis and Jack::

I thought they were magnificent, both of them. Jake Gyllenhaal's Jack Twist...wasn't the Jack Twist that I had in mind when I wrote this story. The Jack that I saw was jumpier, homely. But Gyllenhaal's sensitivity and subtleness in this role is just huge. The scenes he's in have a kind of quicksilver feel to them. Heath Ledger is just almost really beyond description as far as I'm concerned. He got inside the story more deeply than I did. All that thinking about the character of Ennis that was so hard for me to get, Ledger just was there. He did indeed move inside the skin of the character, not just in the shirt but inside the person. It was remarkable.

I agree. I loved her comment on why the story took her so long to write. She almost talks like an actress here:

I had to imagine my way into the minds of two uneducated, rough-spoken, uninformed young men, and that takes some doing if you happen to be an elderly female person. I spent a great deal of time thinking about each character and the balance of the story, working it out, trying to do it in a fair kind of way.

That's one of Annie Proulx's greatest gifts: her ability to imagine herself into other people's lives and psyches. I've read reviews written by men who say, to paraphrase, "She totally understands men." She writes about men with respect, love, and understanding. They're not always good, they're not heroic, they're not even all that nice ... but she is able to slip inside the skin ... and be them for a while. You forget it's a woman writing it. I wish more male writers could do the same thing when they write female characters. I suppose it's a rare trait in a writer anyway.

'Brokeback Mountain' tells the story of two down-and-out cowboys - Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist. They are job to job kind of guys. Both of them weren't really brought up - their childhoods were chaotic, quick, and violent. Jack dreams of being a rodeo cowboy. Ennis ... well, who knows what Ennis dreams of. Ennis Del Mar made an indelible impression on me years ago when I first read the story. He is why I cried on the subway. We will never know who Ennis is, and the pain Ennis has experienced ... he can barely be with it himself. The story ends with him in his windy trailer, staring at the postcard of Brokeback Mountain, holding Jack Twist's shirt and saying, with tears in his eyes, "Jack, I swear ---"

You swear what? What were you going to say? He doesn't finish the thought. He can't. Ennis Del Mar is a man of vague and deep yearnings, but with the grit to bear up under a life that wants none of that from him. Jack Twist is more of the restless dreamer, the one who wants to talk about things ... and I suppose that Ennis Del Mar speaks more with Jack Twist than he speaks with anyone else in his life. (Let me just say that Heath Ledger is extraordinary in the part. I loved Jake too - but that movie is Ledger's movie, rest in peace).

The two men get a job watching over a herd of sheep on Brokeback Mountain. They'll be up there for the whole summer - one minding the camp, the other watching over the sheep. One cold night, they share the tent, and Jack pushes the envelope. He's the one. Later in the story, we learn that Jack has been going down to Mexico on the weekends ... a place notorious (to Ennis) for the fact that men can have sex with men, in alleys, wherever. That's where you go to have a little anonymous sex. So Jack is more tormented, in the end, by this "thing" (that's what they call it) in him. He gets married, he has kids, so does Ennis. But Ennis is like an animal. Meaning - an animal suffers in mute silence. An animal bears up. Like D.H. Lawrence's poem "Self-Pity":

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

Jack Twist feels sorry for himself. That's where the rage comes from at the end. He and Ennis, after their first summer, go years without seeing each other. Until they finally get into a groove, and go on hunting and fishing trips about once a year - in isolated places - so that they can make love and do their thing and not be bothered. Ennis looks forward to these trips. It is the only escape he has in his miserable trapped life. But to Jack, they are everything. When Ennis can't make it, because of work or obligations, Jack flips out. It's unbearable.

Whatever it is in Ennis that makes him bear the unbearable, it makes him one of the most memorable characters in fiction I've ever encountered.

It's kind of like the old saying from acting teachers - If you cry, the audience will not. If you try not to cry, you'll be wiping the audience up off the floor.

Ennis does not express his sadness. And so we, the reader, the audience, ache. I can feel Jack's desperation, and I ache for him, too ... He is a reckless man, willing to take enormous risks to satisfy this "thing" in him ... Ennis just bites the bullet, and trudges through the days, knowing and accepting that he will only truly come to life once a year.

The story is magnificent, and I just re-read it now and am blown away all over again by how much she gets in in 30 pages. These guys live. The story spans 25 years of life. I don't know how she does it - but the story puts you through the wringer. Every time.

The following excerpt is my favorite part of the story. And (again, with me being all proprietary, etc.) I was so glad to see that they included it in the film ... and it's just as I imagined it. It's a quiet moment, a snagged glimpse ... And so often in life, isn't it the smallest things we remember from our love affairs? Not the big moments, or the "firsts", but small moments. Jack and Ennis have a hunger for one another, for sex with one another ... but this is a moment of love. Again, it's the kind of story where the word "love" is never used, never would be used ... but maybe it doesn't need to be used. At some point, it becomes redundant.

EXCERPT FROM Close Range: Wyoming Stories, by Annie Proulx - excerpt from the story 'Brokeback Mountain'.

What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger.

They had stood that way for a long time in front of the fire, its burning tossing ruddy chunks of light, the shadow of their bodies a single column against the rock. The minutes ticked by from the round watch in Ennis's pocket, from the sticks in the fire settling into coals. Stars bit through the wavy heat layers above the fire. Ennis's breath came slow and quiet, he hummed, rocked a little in the sparklight and jack leaned against the steady heartbeat, the vibrations of the humming like faint electricity and, standing, he fell into sleep that was not sleep but something else drowsy and tranced until Ennis, dredging up a rusty but still useable phrase from the childhood time before his mother died, said, "Time to hit the hay, cowboy. I got a go. Come on, you're sleepin on your feet like a horse," and gave Jack a shake, a push, and went off in the darkness. Jack heard his spurs tremble as he mounted, the words "see you tomorrow," and the horse's shuddering snort, grind of hoof on stone.

Later, that dozy embrace solidified in his memory as the single moment of artless, charmed happiness in their separate and difficult lives. Nothing married it, even the knowledge that Ennis would not then embrace him face to face because he did not want to see nor feel that it was Jack he held. And maybe, he thought, they'd never got much farther than that. Let be, let be.

The Books: "Close Range: Wyoming Stories" - 'The Bunchgrass Edge Of the World' (Annie Proulx)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf:

Close Range: Wyoming Stories, by Annie Proulx - excerpt from the story 'The Bunchgrass Edge of the World'.

Like 'People In Hell Just Want A Drink Of Water', another story in the collection (excerpt here), 'The Bunchgrass Edge Of the World' is the story of a family - How do you get a "saga" into 25 pages? I don't know, but Annie Proulx does. In quick brush strokes, she creates an entire family. The Touhey family moved to Wyoming during the Depression, and have been ranching there ever since. There's Old Red, the patriarch, born in 1902 - his son Aladdin, Aladdin's wife - and their kids, all grown-up now. Shan and Tyler, two of Aladdin's kids, have taken off for Vegas - and the last child, Ottaline, stays. She's an odd one. The family is embarrassed by her. She is not a social being. She is obese. She shuffles along, doing the work on the ranch, and it's pretty obvious that she will never marry. Shan, the other daughter, moved to Vegas and became a bodybuilder - she sends home pictures of her in a bikini, flexing her muscles. It is as though she has moved to Jupiter. The plains and mountains of Wyoming have nothing to do with who Shan has become. Ottaline stares at the pictures. Old Red is still alive, and feisty - in his 90s - but he can feel himself being pushed aside in his own home. The tragedy of old age. But this is really Ottaline's story. Ottaline takes over the narrative, which begins as a group tale ... but seriously, she dominates.

I can't describe it without making it sound "cute", or imposed - you'll just have to read the story yourself. Ottaline is a hard worker. She does not question her lot in life (although looking at the pictures of her sister makes her think that maybe she should lose weight? Maybe?) - just puts her nose to the grindstone. There's a gravel pit on the ranch, with an enormous tractor sitting there, idle ... and one day Ottaline goes and sits in it, to rest. It becomes a daily thing for her. Just a half hour or so, sitting in the tractor. And one day, as she approaches the gravel pit, the tractor starts talking to her. Confused at first, Ottaline does not know where the voice is coming from. The voice is grumpy, disgruntled, and yet not cruel. It's a voice full of complaints - rust, peeling paint, etc. - but somehow the tractor has chosen Ottaline as his confidante. Ottaline starts to talk back. And she and the tractor soon become best friends. See? Hard to "describe" ... Ottaline sits in the tractor and the tractor tells her all of its problems, and at the same time - really for the first time in her life - she is noticed. She is chosen. And so something begins to stir in the sludgy quiet heart of Ottaline. Something like life. Something like hope.

This is Annie Proulx territory. She covered it brilliantly in The Shipping News, with Quoyle ... and Ottaline, in her way, wearing muu muus and muddy boots, lying in bed listening to cell phone conversations on her scanner - falling into other people's lives ... is a counterpoint to Quoyle.

There's so much in this story - it's a novel in miniature - but I'll pick one of the excerpts about Ottaline.

EXCERPT FROM Close Range: Wyoming Stories, by Annie Proulx - 'The Bunchgrass Edge of the World'.

What was there for Ottaline when the work slacked off? Stare at indigo slants of hail forty miles east, regard the tumbled clouds like mechanics' rags, count out he loves me, he loves me not, in nervous lightning crooked as branchwood through all quarters of the sky.

That summer the horses were always wet. It rained uncommonly, the southwest monsoon sweeping in. The shining horses stood out on the prairie, withers streaming, manes dripping, and one would suddenly start off, a fan of droplets coming off its shoulders like a cape. Ottaline and Aladdin wore slickers from morning coffee to goodnight yawn. Wauneta watched the television weather while she ironed shirts and sheets. Old Red called it drip and dribble, stayed in his room chewing tobacco, reading Zane Grey in large-print editions, his curved fingernail creasing the page under every line. On the Fourth of July they sat together on the porch watching a distant storm, pretending the thick, ruddy legs of lightning and thunder were fireworks.

Ottaline had seen most of what there was to see around her with nothing new in sight. Brilliant events burst open not in the future but in the imagination. The room she had shared with Shan was a room within a room. In the unshaded moonlight her eyes shone oily white. The calfskin rug on the floor seemed to move, to hunch and crawl a fraction of an inch at a time. The dark frame of the mirror sank into the wall, a rectangular trench. From her bed she saw the moon-bleached grain elevator and behind it immeasurable range flecked with cows like small black seeds. She was no one but Ottaline in that peppery, disturbing light that made her want everything there was to want. The raw loneliness then, the silences of the day, the longing flesh led her to press her mouth into the crook of her own hot elbow. She pinched and pummeled her fat flanks, rolled on the bed, twisted, went to the window a dozen times, heels striking the floor until old Red in his pantry below called out, "What is it? You got a sailor up there?"

Her only chance seemed the semiliterate, off-again, on-again hired man, Hal Bloom, tall legs like chopsticks, T-shirt emblazoned Aggressive by Nature, Cowboy by Choice. He worked for Aladdin in short bursts between rodeo roping, could not often be pried off his horse (for he cherished a vision of himself as an 1870s cowboy just in from an Oregon cattle drive). Ottaline had gone with him down into the willow a dozen times, to the damp soil and nests of stinging nettles, where he pulled a pale condom over his small, hard penis and crawled silently into her. His warm neck smelled of soap and horse.

But then, when Ottaline began working on the ranch for hard money, Aladdin told Hal Bloom to go spin his rope.

"Yeah, well, it's too shit-fire long a haul out here anyways," Bloom said, and was gone. That was that.

Ottaline was dissolving. It was too far to anything. Someone had to come for her. There was not even the solace of television, for old Red dominated the controls, always choosing Westerns, calling out to the film horses in his broken voice, "Buck him off, kick his brains out!"

Ottaline went up to her room, listened to cell-phone conversations on the scanner.

"The balance on account number seven three five five nine is minus two hundred and oh four ...."

"Yes, I can see that, maybe. Are you drinkin beer already?" "Ha-ha. Yes."

"I guess maybe you didn't notice." "It wasn't all smashed like that, all soft. I took it out of the bag and it was - you goin a carve it?" "Not that one. It's nasty."

"Hey, is it rainin there yet?"

"Is it rainin yet?" she repeated. It was raining everywhere and people were alive in it except in the Red Wall country.

The Books: "Close Range: Wyoming Stories" - 'People In Hell Just Want A Drink Of Water' (Annie Proulx)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf:

Close Range: Wyoming Stories, by Annie Proulx.

'People In Hell Just Want A Drink Of Water' tells the story of two ranching families - the Dunmires and the Tinsleys - going back in generations, to the early days of the 20th century. Drought, flood, and some man-made horrors (like Mrs. Tinsley throwing her infant baby into a river - who knows why - she seems a little touched in the head - the baby was swept away, never to be heard of again) - Proulx also describes the development of the character of a particular family, and how that happens. The Dunmires are survivors - and saw the worst of the worst in their lives - locust plagues, drought, all that ... they are ranchers, they work livestock, and Proulx writes:

The country, its horses and cattle, suited them and if they loved anything that was it, and they ran that country because there were eight of them and Ice and they were of one mind. But there builds up in men who work livestock in big territory a kind of contempt for those who do not. The Dunmires measured beauty and religion by what they rode through every day, and this encouraged their disdain for art and intellect. There was a somber arrogance about them, a rigidity of attitude that said theirs was the only way.

The Dunmires - obviously righteous people (in the good and bad sense of the word) - and the Tinsleys who, uhm, are a little bit "off".

Eventually, through the generations, we get to the present one. Ras Tinsley, one of the Tinsley boys, goes off - leaves Wyoming - and disappears. Until they get a postcard from some preacher in Schenectady saying that there is a horribly injured person in the hospital there, who has been in a coma for weeks (I think - can't remember) - or at least couldn't speak or identify himself ... but finally regained enough speech that he told him his name and that he hailed from Laramie. He had been in a terrible car wreck. The minister pays his train fare back to Wyoming - and Ras returns. He is now a wreck of a man, with one leering gleaming eye - and he's obviously been brain damaged. He speaks in monosyllabic grunts. He goes out for horse rides and doesn't come back for days. There's a bad feeling about him. Eventually, a neighbor complains: Ras exposed his penis to his wife. It becomes a common complaint. People are pissed. The Tinsleys try to handle the situation, they reprimand Ras - who is now a 25 year old man - telling him he can't go around exposing himself like that, people don't "'preciate the show" ... and it is unclear whether Ras is conscious of what he is doing or not. It seems like he is. And it seems like there is a deep rage in him towards his mother (the woman who tossed her own baby into a rushing river, for no apparent reason whatsoever) ... She's a fanatic, she cleans her house like a maniac, she can't stand sex - finds marriage itself disgusting ... and when Ras left, for the first time, he never wrote. He never looked back - you get the sense that he was running as far away as he could from his stifling family. And now, injured and helpless, he is back in their midst ... and even though he doesn't say anything, Proulx has a way of suggesting the deep rage and trapped feeling he must have. Anyway, things finally get so bad that a group of men attack Ras and castrate him. He is so beyond language and normal human behavior that he lies in bed at home, sick, and doesn't say what happened to him. His is the mute suffering of an animal.

The story is a mini-novel, and has elements of East of Eden in it, with its stories of the two families - the Trasks and the Hamiltons - and how their development runs alongside and is important to the development of America. They are intertwined. Without families like the Dunmires and the Tinsleys, America wouldn't have prospered. But thank God we, as a nation, are not ONLY made up of the Dunmires and the Tinsleys (see Proulx's paragraph above) because that's some, well, fucked up shit, frankly.

But look (in the excerpt below) at how Annie Proulx begins this horrifying story, with its violence and blood and plagues and its cast of specific characters. Amazing. Like I said in my post about The Shipping News, Proulx is unafraid of going for the big and grand gesture. She does it sparingly, but when she goes for it? Look out!

Close Range: Wyoming Stories, by Annie Proulx - 'People In Hell Just Want A Drink Of Water'

You stand there, braced. Cloud shadows race over the buff rock stacks as a projected film, casting a queasy, mottled ground rash. The air hisses and it is no local breeze but the great harsh sweep of wind from the turning of the earth. The wild country - indigo jags of mountain, grassy plain everlasting, tumbled stones like fallen cities, the flaring roll of sky - provokes a spiritual shudder. It is like a deep note that cannot be heard but is felt, it is like a claw in the gut.

Dangerous and indifferent ground: against its fixed mass the tragedies of people count for nothing although the signs of misadventure are everywhere. No past slaughter nor cruelty, no accident nor murder that occurs on the little ranches or at the isolate crossroads with their bare populations of three or seventeen, or in the reckless trailer courts of mining towns delays the flood of morning light. Fences, cattle, roads, refineries, mines, gravel pits, traffic lights, graffiti'd celebration of athletic victory on bridge overpass, crust of blood on the Wal-Mart loading dock, the sun-faded wreaths of plastic flowers marking death on the highway are ephemeral. Other cultures have camped here a while and disappeared. Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that.

The Books: "Close Range: Wyoming Stories" - 'The Mud Below' (Annie Proulx)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf:

Close Range: Wyoming Stories, by Annie Proulx.

The stories in Close Range show a world both transcendent and brutal. There's not a lot of love here ... or what there is, is thwarted and twisted. People are quiet or loud, but whatever their externals - they don't chat about their feelings. However, the feelings run deep. The plains and mountains and hot springs of Wyoming take on an almost unbearably lonely aspect - beautiful, inspiring ... yet it makes men feel small. These are present-day stories, but they often do not feel so. This is a world with a pre-modern code. Manly stoic men, fierce pioneer-spirit women (or trashy whores) - and a bit of chaos. Proulx writes about those on the fringes of society, those who "get by", or who don't register on any radar screen of "accomplishment". They aren't heroic - unless you count suffering in silence. In the same way that she created an entire community of cranky crackpots The Shipping News - and you find yourself loving them with the white-hot heat of a million suns ... the people in Close Range are not easily lovable, they're prickly, they're sometimes violent, they don't let you in easily, they don't analyze themselves and say, "Okay, maybe I'm over-reacting ..." ... and yet you love them dearly. You ache for them.

A Barnes & Noble review says:

Indeed, the defining characteristic of Proulx's Wyoming seems to be the sparseness of its population; according to one rancher, the state's unofficial motto is "take care a you own damn self." The landscape of these stories -- topographical and emotional -- is marked by vast barren stretches, punctuated by the dim twinkle of a solitary ranch or by the fading memory of a one-night stand. These Wyos have been trained to bat away loneliness like a gnat, to accept the pain of isolation as natural, and to turn to the quotidian demands of rural and ranch work for consolation. As one character remarks, "There's no lonesome, you work hard enough."

In the story 'The Mud Below' (another award-winner) we meet Diamond Felts, a small-time rodeo rider with a painful family past behind him. His mother was adamant against him going into the rodeo, but he did it anyway. And now he travels around to little dusty towns, and takes his chances on massive heaving bulls. He feels most alive and most himself when he is riding. But there's an aimlessness to his life, a loneliness - but he doesn't have the wherewithal to do anything "normal" about it. He has violent sexual interactions with random women in the back of his truck, there's a casual disregard for his emotional life (and I guess, his physical too - he takes enormous risks with his job) ... and the ties to his past are cut. But they keep coming back to haunt him.

Another masterpiece of a story. It's eloquent about loneliness, and the pleasure of the physical. Wyoming comes across as a vast and empty place, punctuated by tiny pockets of humanity. It's built to make a man feel tiny, unimportant.

Here's an excerpt. This is when Diamond first got on a bull - after working a day's job at a ranch. It is the moment that Diamond feels his calling.

EXCERPT FROM Close Range: Wyoming Stories, by Annie Proulx.

"You want a have some fun?" said Leecil Bewd to Diamond and Wallace. The others were already walking to a small corral some distance away.

"Like what," said Wallace.

Diamond had a flash that there was a woman in the corral.

"Bullridin. Dad's got some good buckin bulls. Our rodeo class come out last month and rode em. Couldn't hardly stay on one of em."

"I'll watch," said Wallace, in his ironic side-of-the-mouth voice.

Diamond considered rodeo classes the last resort of concrete-heads who couldn't figure out how to hold a basketball. He'd taken martial arts and wrestling all the way through until they spiked both courses as frills. "Oh man," he said. "Bulls. I don't guess so."

Leecil Bewd ran ahead to the corral. There was a side pen and in it were three bulls, two of them pawing dirt. At the front of the pen a side-door chute opened into the corral. One of the crotchsnatchers was in the arena, jumping around, ready to play bullfighter and toll a bull away from a tossed rider.

To Diamond the bulls looked murderous and wild, but even the ranch hands had a futile go at riding them. Lovis scraped off on the fence; Leecil's father, bounced down in three seconds, hit the ground on his behind, the kidney belt riding up his chest.

"Try it," said Leecil, mouth bloody from a face-slam, spitting.

"Aw, not me," said Wallace. "I got a life in front of me."

"Yeah," said Diamond. "Yeah, I guess I'll give it a go."

"Atta boy, atta boy," said Como Bewd, and handed him a rosined left glove. "Ever been on a bull?"

"No sir," said Diamond, no boots, no spurs, no chaps, T-shirted and hatless. Leecil's old man told him to hold his free hand up, not to touch the bull or himself with it, keep his shoulders forward and his chin down, hold on with his feet and legs and left hand, above all not to think, and when he got bucked off, no matter what was broke, get up quick and run like hell for the fence. He helped him make the wrap, ease down on the animal, said, shake your face and git out there, and grinning, blood-speckled Lovis opened the chute door, waiting to see the town kid dumped and dive-bombed.

But he stayed on until someone counting eight hit the rail with the length of pipe to signal time. He flew off, landed on his feet, stumbling headlong but not falling, in a run for the rails. He hauled himself up, panting from the exertion and the intense nervy rush. He'd been shot out of the cannon. The shock of the violent motion, the lightning shifts of balance, the feeling of power as though he were the bull and not the rider, even the fright, fulfilled some greedy physical hunger in him he hadn't known was there. The experience had been exhilarating and unbearably personal.

"You know what," said Como Bewd. "You might make a bull-rider."

The Books: "Close Range: Wyoming Stories" - 'The Half-Skinned Steer' (Annie Proulx)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf:

Close Range: Wyoming Stories, by Annie Proulx.

Oh God, I love this collection of short stories. I read many of them (like "Brokeback Mountain") when they first appeared in The New Yorker - and remembered them vividly (even cut some of them out and saved them). You get used to how most writers sound. You get used to nice language, eloquence, delicate plot development ... but, to me, Annie Proulx stands apart from all that. Her prose feels muscular to me. Emotional, yet in a fierce way. Kind of blunt and primal. She doesn't veer into the sheer apocalyptic ferociousness of Cormac McCarthy - but her sense of the landscape (especially the Western landscape) is just as specific, just as important to her books as Texas and the borderlands are to McCarthy. It's not atmosphere, it's a character. I mean, the collection is called "Wyoming Stories". Wyoming is evoked here in all its guises - bleak, beautiful, wide open, disorienting, calming ... And then I think of Proulx's evocation of Newfoundland in The Shipping News, and that whole landscape - completely different from what's here in Close Range (and also in her second collection of "Wyoming Stories" called Bad Dirt) - and I'm just in awe at her own range. It's all in the specifics. But the words she chooses to describe things ... cannot be said to have anyone's stamp but her own. I'm trying to think of someone to compare her to. There's certainly a Hemingway-ish feel to some of her characters, and how they express themselves. She does not write about verbal people. She does not write about people who ever say the words, "I feel ..." They have no introspection. They are blunt, stoic, and deep. Her writing is more grandiose than Hemingway's, though - I don't know, I find it hard to compare her to anyone. The stories in the collection seem stripped bare of extraneous things ... editing just one word out would unravel the thread. They are tight.

If you haven't read the collection, I obviously highly recommend it - and I also recommend reading it front to back, like you would a novel. At least the first time. I normally don't read short story collections like that - I dip into whatever story grabs me the most from its first paragraph, and then skip around. But with Close Range, I read it beginning to end - and it had a cumulative effect, very important to the feeling of the work as a whole. Bad Dirt, her second collection of "Wyoming Stories" takes an almost slapstick tone, the stories are funny, ridiculous, small slices of life, a bit more absurd. In Close Range we have none of that. It's life stripped to its essentials, by the wind across the plains. It's people up against their dreams for themselves in their youths ... lost now forever ... memories in the wind, the grasses, the sky ... Mortality approaching. All you have to do is get through the rest of your life. Just put your head down and bear it. And so the effect of the whole collection is basically a giant heart-ache. There's no real redemption here. Nothing like that last paragraph of The Shipping News. We're in a different world here. More brutal.

And the people she creates! They leave indelible marks. And their names: Rollo. Mero. Sweets Musgrove. Diamond. Leeland. Roany. Jaxon. Even their names sound like ghost towns.

The first story in the collection is 'The Half-Skinned Steer'. Garrison Keillor chose it for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories (1998) and John Updike chose it as inclusion in 1999's The Best American Short Stories of the Century. In the story we meet Mero, a man in his 80s, who just got a call that his brother, Rollo, has passed away. He hasn't seen his brother in, what, 50 years? Some insanely long time. They grew up on a ranch, rough and tough, with their father and his trashy girlfriend ... and Mero got out of there as quickly as he could. He went to war. He married a couple of times. He became a vegetarian. He got a regular job, not a cowboy-job. He moved far far away from Wyoming, and got into local politics, I think. But the news that his brother died brings back memories - which comes in spurts ... as he drives back to Wyoming for the funeral. By now, the old ranch where he grew up has been turned into a tourist attraction called "Down Home Wyoming" - a kind of faux ranch for tourists. Sad (although life on that ranch was no picnic, and Mero has no nostalgia about it at all. As a matter of fact, his memories of it are almost uniformly full of dread and gloom. There was a "bad luck" feeling to the ranch ... which ended up being played out after he left - with bankruptcy, etc.) It takes Mero 4 days to drive home. He drives in a Cadillac (his customary car). We go back and forth from the past to the present. He's haunted by a memory (although that's not quite right ... that suggests he's been walking around with it all these years. No. It is quite conceivable that Mero has not thought of Tin Head and the half-skinned steer for 60 years - it is just the landscape of Wyoming approaching, the landscape of his long-lost youth ... that brings the memory to the foreground.)

I wouldn't dream of revealing what the actual story is of "the half-skinned steer" - what happened back there that made such a deep scar in everyone - you'll have to find that out yourself. Suffice it to say, it haunts me now, too.

Here's an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Close Range : Wyoming Stories, by Annie Proulx - 'The Half-Skinned Steer'

He was half an hour past Kearney, Nebraska, when the full moon rose, an absurd visage balanced in his rearview mirror, above it a curled wig of a cloud, filamented edges like platinum hairs. He felt his swollen nose, palped his chin, tender from the stun of the air bag. Before he slept that night he swallowed a glass of hot tap water enlivened with whiskey, crawled into the damp bed. He had eaten nothing all day yet his stomach coiled at the thought of road food.

He dreamed that he was in the ranch house but all the furniture had been removed from the rooms and in the yard troops in dirty white uniforms fought. The concussive reports of huge guns were breaking the window glass and forcing the floorboards apart so that he had to walk on the joists and below the disintegrating floors he saw galvanized tubs filled with dark, coagulated fluid.

On Saturday morning, with four hundred miles in front of him, he swallowed a few bits of scorched eggs, potatoes painted with canned salsa verde, a cup of yellow coffee, left not tip, got on the road. The food was not what he wanted. His breakfast habit was two glasses of mineral water, six cloves of garlic, a pear. The sky to the west hulked sullen, behind him smears of tinselly orange shot through with blinding streaks. The thick rim of sun bulged against the horizon.

He crossed the state line, hit Cheyenne for the second time in sixty years. There was neon, traffic and concrete, but he knew the place, a railroad town that had been up and down. That other time he had been painfully hungry, had gone into the restaurant in the Union Pacific station although he was not used to restaurants and ordered a steak, but when the woman brought it and he cut into the meat the blood spread across the white plate and he couldn't help it, he saw the beast, mouth agape in mute brawling, saw the comic aspects of his revulsion as well, a cattleman gone wrong.

Now he parked in front of a phone booth, locked the car although he stood only seven feet away, and telephoned the number Tick's wife had given him. The ruined car had had a phone. Her voice roared out of the earpiece.

We didn't hear so we wondered if you'd changed your mind.

No, he said, I'll be there late this afternoon. I'm in Cheyenne now.

The wind's blowing pretty hard. They're saying it could maybe snow. In the mountains. Her voice sounded doubtful.

I'll keep an eye on it, he said.

He was out of town and running north in a few minutes.

The country poured open on each side, reduced the Cadillac to a finger-snap. Nothing had changed, not a goddamn thing, the empty pale place and its roaring wind, the distant antelope as tiny as mice, landforms shaped true to the past. He felt himself slip back, the calm of eighty-three years sheeted off him like water, replaced by a young man's scalding anger at a fool world and the fools in it. What a damn hard time it had been to hit the road. You don't know what it was like, he told his ex-wives until they said they did know, he'd pounded it into their ears two hundred times, the poor youth on the street holding up a sign asking for work, and the job with the furnace man, yatata yatata ya. Thirty miles out of Cheyenne he saw the first billboard, DOWN UNDER WYOMING, Western Fun the Western Way, over a blown-up photograph of kangaroos hopping through the sagebrush and a blond child grinning in a manic imitation of pleasure. A diagonal banner warned, Open May 31.

The Books: "The Shipping News" (Annie Proulx)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf:

The Shipping News, by Annie Proulx.

(Some of my thoughts on this book are already on this blog - I went through some of the posts and pulled some of my own language ... so I am plagiarizing myself, frankly. I give myself permission.)

My experience of The Shipping News was what I call "one of THOSE reading experiences". I can count "THOSE" reading experiences on almost one hand. By that I mean: intensely personal - I take the book not just as a book, but a message that seems directly to me. I feel pointed out by the book. I feel recognized. I feel seen. I think: "How on earth could this author know about what goes on in the deepest recesses of my soul?" It's almost embarrassing, that feeling. You don't want people to know your own pettiness, your own sadness, your own cruelty, your lies. I am different when I finish the book, because of this recognition factor. You can't have "one of THOSE reading experiences" too often. It takes too much out of you.

Other books that were like that for me:

-- Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn (excerpt here)
-- Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving (excerpt here)
-- Atonement, by Ian McEwan (excerpt here)

Atonement was such a devastating book that it still seems radioactive to me. I went to pick it up and flip through it again a while back, glanced at a couple of paragraphs, and thought: "Uhm. No. No need to read this again."

I don't think I will ever put myself through Geek Love again. (However, I don't want to make this sound too bleak and grim. I'm not talking about sad books. I'm talking about books that feel like they were written for me and me alone.) These are books that describe the human condition in such a way that I feel KNOWN. The spotlight shines onto the darker corners. These books slice back any artifice I might hold onto. These books made me look into the abyss. My own abyss. To see my own sham, my own drudgery, my own redemption.

THOSE reading experiences.

The Shipping News was one of THOSE books for me.

There was a good 5 or 6 months in 1994 when it seemed like everyone was reading that book. I saw people on the El train reading it. My entire family read it. Everyone talked about it. My parents kept pestering me: "Have you read it yet? Have you read it yet?" They seemed personally invested in me, specifically, reading The Shipping News. (And now, having read the book, I see why) I remember, to this day, how my dad described the book to me. The characters, what it was about ... Every conversation I had with my parents, the same refrain: "Have you read The Shipping News yet?" Finally, I would just cut to the chase before they even asked: "I'm doing great, I got cast in a show, I'm doing great, and NO, I haven't read The Shipping News yet."

So, of course, I didn't read it. You never do anything just because 5,000 people tell you have to.

I was madly in love with someone in 1994. And he, too, was on the "YOU OF ALL PEOPLE HAVE TO READ THE SHIPPING NEWS." chorus-line. I just rolled my eyes at him. He went on vacation at one point, to Florida - and he came back ... this was when we were in the flirty unexpressed part of the whole thing ... madly in love but not admitting it ... and he said, "I thought about you my entire vacation." "You did?" "Yeah. I sat on the beach and read The Shipping News and I just kept wanting to tell you how much you would love this book. It reminds me of you." "It does?" "Totally!" "Why?" But he never could say why. All he said was, "The lead character is this ... kind of loser guy ... a sad sap ... who has a really big chin ... and he gets a job on a newspaper ... and he starts to see his entire life in terms of headlines ... " That was all he would say. I still couldn't get a line on why this book reminded him of me. Loser guy? Sad sap? Big chin? And ... this to you says SHEILA? You wanna explain that to me??

On the very same day that this man told me "YOU HAVE TO READ THIS BOOK", I came home and there was a package in my mailbox from my parents. I opened it up, and there was a dern copy of the book.

It makes me laugh, in retrospect. They were desperate for me to read it. They just knew how I would respond to it, and they could. not. wait. for me to read it on my own.

And I'm not exaggerating ... I got the package on the same day I talked with Love-Man. I laughed out loud when I pulled out The Shipping News, like: "Okay, universe, okay, I GET THE MESSAGE!"

Long story even longer (see this is why this book means so much to me ... it's all wrapped in that year - 1994 - a wacko year if ever there was one):

I still didn't read the damn book though, at that time ... because my life got nuts and kind of awful. Love-Man and I ended up not working out ... and it was a huge disaster with long-term implications. It wrecked my life. And suddenly I couldn't bear to even LOOK at The Shipping News. It seemed to represent him or something. I remember being bummed out, though (in addition to all the other stuff I was bumming on) - thinking: Wow, I'll probably never read that book now.

But I did. A year later. I had moved from Chicago to New York by then. Everything was different, including my zip code. My entire life had changed in 6 months. So I picked up that book.

And never. EVER. wanted it to end.

EVER.

I will never forget my experience reading that book. It shimmers in my memory. I laughed out loud. It gave me searing pain. And at times, I could feel myself not really reading, but searching, searching for clues ... clues as to why Love-Man had thought of me so much when he read it. Maybe it would tell me something about him, maybe it would illuminate for me something about how he felt about me, and how I should interpret the fact that everything was wrecked. The book is about a bunch of weirdos who live in Newfoundland. Why was that book so full of me for him? I will never know now. But I do know that The Shipping News is also so full of him for me - to this day. I mean ... it's about pain, and redemption ... about finding what it is that you do (or are supposed to do), and then doing it like Hercules. It's about thinking that you have a "lot" in life. That you have a certain path, and then ... often with wrenching results ... you go another way. But ... I can't even talk about what that book is about. It's not about what it's about.

The writing is startling. It's a rare rare thing, to come across an original voice. Proulx's voice in that book is original. It's funny, it's biting ... each character has a different and distinct speaking pattern, accent. Everyone has secrets. Things are left unexplained. This is not a book where nothing happens. The plot is out of control. So interesting. You are introduced to a small three-dimensional world, full of weirdos, cranks, curmudgeons, and lonely hermits. And yet ... while they may not be "likable", in any sense, you end up loving them.

My experience, by the end of that book, was painful. It wasn't that anything bad happened. No. It was that it brought up all this weird love in my heart - for these characters, for the Love-Man, for my parents and siblings, for Annie Proulx - love that HURT. Like, you want to clutch your heart and say "Ouch."

The last paragraph of the book is not just amazing - it's transcendent. Transcendent. After spending time with all the crabs and secretive curmudgeons and unpleasant people in the book ... to have Annie Proulx draw back the curtain ... and let the heart flow forth ... in that last paragraph ... It was almost too much for me. So many writers today resist the large message. And it's understandable why - it's really difficult to do well. Cynicism, too, is in style - but the success of Annie Proulx shows that cynicism isn't the only style today (something you might miss in the omnipresent bitching and moaning of the "what has happened to today's society?? Everyone is so cynical" nitwits. Yeah, well, nitwits: I suggest you all widen your reading list a little bit, how's that? Everyone is cynical? Really? Everyone? Huh.) Proulx does not pull her punches. I so admire that. She does not try to hide emotion, or present it subtly, or bury the message in layers of metaphor. Nope. She is unafraid. She comes right out and says it, and she says it so well (that last paragraph!!) that I feel her hand coming out of her prose and grabbing me by the throat.

When I finished the book, how much I wanted to go back in time and talk with the guy I loved (and still loved) about it ... talk about every tiny detail. But the time for that was long long past. I felt a lot of sadness and loss about that.

I'll probably do a couple excerpts, we'll see. I was flipping thru the book this morning, and the prose, once again, just leapt off the page ... I would recognize Annie Proulx's writing anywhere, in a blind copy of something I could probably guess it was her. I couldn't imitate it if I tried - it is completely her own rhythm.

I have to excerpt the opening of the book. Because it has everything I've been talking about on display. Her odd jerky rhythm - she's not big on full sentences - her absolutely specific Proulx-ian imagery (seriously, I can't think of another writer to compare her to) - I mean: "features as bunched as kissed fingertips". That is spectacular. I don't know where she comes up with it - but it's perfect ... and in the beginning, she cuts to the chase of the story immediately. Not just the plot, but the story: Here is what we are going to hear about in the following book. To start a book like that takes balls. She's got balls.

The Shipping News is one of my favorite books of all time. And thank you. Thank you to:
-- parents
-- siblings
-- friends
-- guy I loved
for making sure I read it.

I still read these beginning 3 pages and feel the awe start up in me all over again. Wow.

EXCERPT FROM The Shipping News, by Annie Proulx.

Here is an account of a few years in the life of Quoyle, born in Brooklyn and raised in a shuffle of dreary upstate towns.

Hive-spangled, gut roaring with gas and cramp, he survived childhood; at the state university, hand clapped over his chin, he camouflaged torment with smiles and silence. Stumbled through his twenties and into his thirties learning to separate his feelings from his life, counting on nothing. He ate prodigiously, liked a ham knuckle, buttered spuds.

His jobs: distributor of vending machine candy, all-night clerk in a convenience store, a third-rate newspaperman. At thirty-six, bereft, brimming with grief and thwarted love, Quoyle steered away to Newfoundland, the rock that had generated his ancestors, a place he had never been nor thought to go.

A watery place. And Quoyle feared water, could not swim. Again and again the father had broken his clenched grip and thrown him into pools, brooks, lakes and surf. Quoyle knew the flavor of brack and waterweed.

From this youngest son's failure to dog-paddle the father saw other failures multiply like an explosion of virulent cells - failure to speak clearly; failure to sit up straight; failure to get up in the morning; failure in attitude; failure in ambition and ability; indeed, in everything. His own failure.

Quoyle shambled, a head taller than any child around him, was soft. He knew it. "Ah, you lout," said the father. But no pygmy himself. And brother Dick, the father's favorite, pretended to throw up when Quoyle came into a room, hissed, "Lardass, Snotface, Ugly Pig, Warthog, Stupid, Stinkbomb, Fart-tub, Greasebag," pummeled and kicked until Quoyle curled, hands over head, sniveling on the linoleum. All stemmed from Quoyle's chief failure, a failure of normal appearance.

A great damp loaf of a body. At six he weighed eighty pounds. At sixteen he was buried under a casement of flesh. Head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair ruched back. Features as bunched as kissed fingertips. Eyes the color of plastic. The monstrous chin, a freakish shelf jutting from the lower face.

Some anomalous gene had fired up at the moment of his begetting as a single spark sometimes leaps from banked coals, had given him a giant's chin. As a child he invented stratagems to deflect stares: a smile, downcast gaze, the right hand darting up to cover the chin.

His earliest sense of self was as a distant figure: there in the foreground was his family; here, at the limit of the far view, was he. Until he was fourteen he cherished the idea that he had been given to the wrong family, that somewhere his real people, saddled with the changeling of the Quoyles, longed for him. Then, foraging in a box of excursion momentoes, he found photographs of his father beside brothers and sisters at a ship's rail. A girl, somewhat apart from the others, looked toward the sea, eyes squinted, as though she could see the port of destination a thousand miles south. Quoyle recognized himself in their hair, their legs and arms. That sly-looking lump in the shrunken sweater, hand at his crotch, his father. On the back, scribbled in blue pencil, "Leaving Home, 1946."

At the university he took courses he couldn't understand, humped back and forth without speaking to anyone, went home for weekends of excoriation. At last he dropped out of school and looked for a job, kept his hand over his chin.

Nothing was clear to lonesome Quoyle. His thoughts churned like the amorphous thing that ancient sailors, drifting into arctic half-light, called the Sea Lung; a heaving sludge of ice under fog where air blurred into water, where liquid was solid, where solids dissolved, where the sky froze and light and dark muddled.

The Books: "Galatea 2.2" (Richard Powers)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Galatea 2.2, by Richard Powers. Unlike Goldbug Variations - which I raved about yesterday - I can't really remember much about Galatea 2.2 except that the love story really struck a chord with me. It's poignant, it's bittersweet ... it has that fine beautiful ACHE that I know so well ... Powers writes about it perfectly. I remember where I was in my life when I read this book - a strange surreal time - the summer of 96 ... when Mitchell got his diagnosis and when he got married. I was living on 63rd Street with two other people, neither of whom I knew - I was staying in a room that had a big blanket up as a fourth wall ... no closets, nothing ... it was surreal, to be having such an intense time in my life (like: sobbing myself to sleep intense) and be living with strangers, and to have NO privacy whatsoever. As in: NO DOOR. And for some reason, my memory of Galatea 2.2 is all wrapped up in that summer ... And so that's probably why all I remember of the book is the love story. But I don't even remember the particulars - just the feeling it brought that Powers was expressing my sense of unrequited lost love perfectly.

The book's protagonist is named Richard Powers. He has lived abroad for years, and he has also written four novels (Richard Powers himself had written four novels before Galatea 2.2). Powers has come back to the States to be the artist-in-residence at some huge center for advanced study. He somehow gets involved in a project that has as its goal to create a human brain through computer-based networks. I don't know - synapses firing, computer chips ... something ... The book really becomes about a meditation on life itself (as so many of Powers' books do). What is life? Where is it? Can any of us touch it? Powers is instructed to teach this computer all of the great books in the canon - basically filling its microchips with literary information from the Dawn of Time. So that's how Powers spends his time. Pouring Great Literature into the computer - which gradually becomes smarter and smarter - until it seems to develop something of a consciousness. It wants to know its own name, for example.

Now. What the heck was it about the love story that moved me so much?? I wish I could remember more. Funny what remains in the memory. I am pretty sure that Powers has been living abroad for a reason - to run away from a failed love affair that devastated him - and so being back has brought up all these memories. Of "Her".

Regardless of the rest of the book surrounding it (and like I said I wish I could remember more) - it has one of my most favorite paragraphs in any book ever:

One ought to be able to hold on to anything. Anyone. It did not matter who, so long as they were there. Yet the first one, this picture said, the generative template for all that you might come to care for in this place, your buddy, your collaborator in plying life: that is the one you recognize. You learn that voice along with learning itself. You can only say, "Yes, to everything" once. Once only, before your connections have felt what everything entails.

God, that kills me.

And it killed me back then in that hot miserable summer when I learned about Mitchell and I learned about him getting married. I felt totally bereft. Galatea 2.2 was a comfort to me in those terrifying days.

Flipping through the book now makes me want to read it again.

I wanted to find a resonant excerpt that had to do with the love story Powers describes in the book (is it really Richard Powers in the book? What is fiction? What is autobiography?) ... and so here it is.

Strange how a book can act as a time-traveler. A transporter. I read this excerpt and I see my claustrophobic room on 63rd Street, with the blanket for the wall, and I see myself lying in bed, clutching my pains to myself, trying to get through the day.

Must read again.

EXCERPT FROM Galatea 2.2, by Richard Powers.

My decade of letters to C. came back, fourth class. No note. But then, I didn't need one. Any explanation would just be something I would be obliged to send back in turn. I was supposed to follow suit, return hers. I told myself I would, as soon as I found a mailer and could get to the post office.

I laid the bundle in the back of a drawer, alongside the lock whose combination I'd forgotten. I told myself the scrap might be useful all the same. Useful, despite everything, in some other life some other me might someday live.

One day, tripping blindly into it, I finished my last novel. I made my final edit, and knew there was nothing left to change. I could not hang on to the story in good faith even a day longer. I printed the finished draft and packed it in the box my publishers had just used to send me the paperback copies of my previous one.

I sealed the carton with too much packing tape and sat staring at it where it lay on my kitchen counter. I thought of C.'s great-grandmother, who, before she turned twenty, had buried three such shoe boxes of stillborns in the grove above E. I asked myself who in their right mind would want to read an ornate, suffocating allegory about dying pedes at the end of history.

The calculation came a little late. I biked the box down to the post office and shipped it off to New York, book rate. New York had paid for this casket in advance. They couldn't afford to be depressed by what I'd done. The long science book had been a surprise success. They were hoping to manufacture a knock-off. I hadn't given them much of a chance.

The moment the manuscript left my hands, I went slack. I felt as if I'd been in regression analysis for three years. At long last, I had revived the moment of old trauma. But instead of catharsis, I felt nothing. Anesthesia.

What was I supposed to do for the rest of my life? The rest of the afternoon alone seemed unfillable. I went shopping. As always, retail left me with an ice-cream headache.

I figured I might write again, at least once, if the thing could start with that magic first line. But the train - that train I asked the reader to picture - was hung up at departure. It did its southward stint. Then it was gone, leaving me in that waiting room slated on the first timetable.

To figure out where the line was heading, I had to know where it had been. I felt I must have heard it out loud: the opener of a story someone read to me, or one I'd read to someone.

When C. and I lived in that decrepit efficiency in B., we used to read aloud to each other. We slept on the floor, on a reconditioned mattress we'd carried on our heads the five blocks from the Salvation Army. Our blanket was a piling brown wool rug we called the bear.

We huddled under it that first midwinter, when the temperature at night dropped so low the thermometer went useless. After a point, the radiators packed it in. Even flat out, they couldn't keep pace with the chill blackness seeping through brick and plaster. The only thing that kept us, too, from giving in and going numb were the read-alouds. Then, neither of us wanted to be reader. That meant sticking hands above the covers to hold the book.

It would get so cold our mouths could not form the sounds printed on the page. We lay in bed, trying to warm each other, mumbling numbly by small candlelight - "Silver Blaze," Benvenuto Cellini - giggling at the absurd temperature, howling in pain at the touch of one another's frozen toes. We were the other's entire audience, euphoric, in the still heart of the arctic cold.

That's how I remembered it, in any case. Maybe we never spoke the notion out loud, but just lying there in the soft, frozen flow of words filled us with expectation. The world could not get this brittle, this severe and huge and silent, without its announcing something.

Somewhere, some shelf must still hold a book with broken black leather binding. A blank journal in which C. and I wrote the titles of all the books we read aloud to each other. If I could find that log, I though, I might search down the first lines of every entry.

Our life in B. was a tender playact. That dismal rental, a South Sea island invented by an eighteenth-century engraver. C. guarded paintings at the Fine Arts. I wrote expert system routines. For pleasure, we etched a time line of the twentieth century onto the back of a used Teletype roll that we pasted around the top of the room. The Peace of Beijing. Marconi receives the letter "S" from across the Atlantic. Uzbekistan absorbed. Chanel invents Little Black Dress. The limbo becomes national dance craze.

We furnished our first nest with castoffs. Friends alerted us to an overstuffed chair that someone on the far side of the ballpark was, outrageously, throwing out. No three dishes matched. We owned one big-ticket item: a clock radio. Every morning, we woke to the broadcast calls of birds.

When we weren't reading to each other, we improvised a narrative. The courtyard outside our window was an autograph book of vignettes waiting to be cataloged. The scene below played out an endless penny merriment for our express amusement.

Cops rode by on horseback. Robbers rode by in their perennial hull-scraping Continentals. Parent-free children mined the bushes for dirt clumps to pop in their mouths. A conservatory student blew his sax out the open window, even in December. He threaded his way precariously up a chromatic octave, the cartoon music for seasickness. That's how I would describe it in the book I still had no idea I would write. The player always, always missed the A-flat on the way up but hit it, by chance, on descending. "Something to do with gravity," C. joked.

Youngish adults in suits came by selling things. They represented strange and fascinating causes, each more pressing than the last. When the canvassers buzzed our intercom, we sometimes shed some small bills. Or we made the sound of no one home.

A heavy woman on workman's comp who walked with a cane hobbled by at regular intervals to air out her dog. The dog, Jena, who we decided was named after the battle where Hegel watched Napoleon rout Prussia, was even more fossilized than its owner. Jena would stand thick and motionless, halfway down the sidewalk, contemplating some spiritual prison break, never bothering to so much as tinkle. Its owner, whose name we never learned, waited in the doorway, repeatedly calling the beast with the curt panic of abandonment. The dog would gaze a lifetime at the horizon, then turn back in desolation.

I relayed these anecdotes to C., who lay in bed with her eyes closed, pretending to be blind and paralyzed, at the mercy of my accounts. I elaborated events for her, embroidering until the improbability of the whole human fabric made her smile. When she smiled, it always stunned me that I'd discovered her before anyone else had.

Even while we playacted it, I recognized that fantasy. It came from a collection of ghost stories that a famous editor had assembled before we were young.

I told C., from memory, the one about two men lying in the critical ward. The one, a heart patient, has the window bed. He spends all day weaving elaborate reports of the community outside to amuse his wardmate. He names all the characters: Mr. Rich. The Messenger Boy. The Lady with the Legs. He weaves this endless, dense novel for the quadriplegic in the next bed, who cannot see through the window from wher ehe lies.

Then one night the window narrator has a heart attack. He convulses. He grapples for his medicine on the nightstand between the beds. The paralyzed man, seizing his chance at last to see this infinite world for himself, summons from nowhere one superhuman lunge and dashes the medicine to the floor.

When they move him to the emptied window bed the next day, all he can see is a brick wall.

"That's a great story," C. told me. In the icy dark, I felt her excitement. The world lay all in front of us. "I love that one. I'm afraid I'm going to have to kill you for it."

The Books: "The Goldbug Variations" (Richard Powers)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Gold Bug Variations, by Richard Powers.

First off, a link (because basically I don't know where to start). And an excerpt from that link:

There's something — something I can't quite articulate — being said about art here — painting (which figures in the book), literature (by extrapolation), but especially music. It's beyond science, beyond knowing, yet it's key to one's ability to know anything else. Indeed, art and love, those inarticulate things, the only things to really mean anything.

That post, in its entire, makes me cry. It is her first response to the book - a book I read years ago, when it first came out ... and was blown AWAY by. It's not one of those books I would tell just anyone to read - it's too difficult, too huge, too ... brain-taxing - but I did give it to Ted to read - I just knew ... He HAD to read it. So Ted and I are now Goldbug Variations fanatics. To me, the book works on every level it needs to work - and not only does it work, but it upends itself, mirrors itself, goes back, forwards, and then - breathtakingly - sometimes stands still. It is an exhilarating ride. And how do you talk about a book that encompasses ... so much? I tapped into it on such a profound psychological and also emotional level that it's one of the few times, after reading a book, when I can say I felt actually changed. The thing about the language of the book ... it is daunting. It is. I find that fun. That's just me. It's also intellectually rigorous - it's a quest ... that takes our characters far and wide, through all kinds of disciplines ... But also, for me, the book is a piercing love story - and having read Richard Powers' novel Galatea 2.2, which is even more so just about the love story - I can say that he is a master at writing about unrequited love. There was just something about the tone of his writing that clicked me right into that line of the music. And so even during the long sections about Mendel or Bach or DNA .... I still was hearing that chord. I think it's an essential chord to understanding Powers' work. Let's go back to that link from Magnificent Octopus again. I just love her responses ... and the quotes she pulls. It really reflects my own response to the book ... which knocked me on my ass. Not just because it's about so much ... but because of what it had to say about love. I think some people might miss that about the book, or they look at it - and they see the mathematical equations and lines of music running through the text - and might think it's too intellectual, or too "hard", whatever. But in the end: it's all about LOVE. And it just KILLED me.

In the present day, we meet Janet O'Deigh, a librarian in a big New York Public Library branch. Well, the book opens with her receiving a postcard from a guy named Todd, informing her that their "friend" had died. The book then goes back in time - to Jan's first meeting with their "friend" - in the library where she works. Their friend is an old hermit named Stuart Ressler, a dignified kind of ratty old chap ... who works as a data entry processor in a midnight shift with Todd. Todd (who doesn't know Jan yet) becomes really interested in Ressler - who is this guy? What is his story? He plays classical music in the break room, and goes off into a trance ... Todd decidees to do a little research and shows up at the library, which is how HE meets Jan. He is looking to find out who this Stuart Ressler guy is. (I'm just talking about the plot now, not all the swirling subtext). Eventually, they discover that Stuart Ressler was, in 1957, part of a team of scientists hired to try to crack the DNA code. There were teams all over the country, and Ressler, a young man at the time, was one of them. But why did he drop out? Why wasn't he scientist anymore? Why does he work the midnight shift in data entry? The book sweeps us back and forth - from multiple times in the present: Jan, by herself, after Todd has somehow left (we don't know why ...) - and she sets herself the task of researching everything she can that will help her understand Dr. Ressler - so she's studying biology, chemistry, microbiology - oh yeah, and also music. Specifically Bach's Goldberg Variations as played by Glenn Gould in a famous recording. We also see, a bit further back, Todd and Jan befriending the elderly Stuart Ressler ... and beginning to get to know his story. The book also takes us back, far back, into 1957 ... with a young Stuart Ressler traveling to a college campus in the midwest, to join a team of code-crackers. It's two books, running along side by side.

The book has a very intricate design: it is a double helix, first of all - and second of all - it mirrors all of the movements of Bach's famous piece of music. I would need to understand far more about the music (and DNA, I suppose) to pick up on the multiple strands woven through here. Suffice it to say ... in The Goldberg Variations, Bach starts with a simple theme, easily heard ... which then morphs and submerges itself - over the variations - although the theme is always here - it just is inverted, or down a third, or whatever - you have to know where to look for it ... but the thing is: It's there. So The Goldbug Variations (yes, Poe's famous story is an important plot-point) follows the theme of "The Goldberg Variations" - as well as the structure of DNA. It takes my breath away.

Richard Powers is a phenom, and his books are not always comprehensible. There have been a couple I had to put down. But this one and Galatea 2.2 rocked me to my core. He writes about love - the experience of love - not exactly the fulfillment of it - but what it feels like to love - like no other author.

The Goldbug Variations is a book that is about codes ... and it is also a code in and of itself.

It's a breathtaking work of literature. I can't say enough about it.

Here's an excerpt. Jan's research into DNA and enzymes and all that - is a way to know and understand Stuart Ressler better. Who was this man, and what did he see back in 1957 that made him walk away? What is left undone?

How can cells and molecules and enzymes put together end up in the miracle of a human being? How does that happen?? Also: how can we, who are made up of those elements, how can we investigate ourselves? Stuart Ressler walked away from that question. He couldn't take it.

And let's not forget - that the book is also a double love story. And so often we talk about love in metaphors. It's difficult to describe its essence. And so often scientists talk in metaphors - making things either visual or comprehensible - to us, the layman audience, or even to themselves. Dr. Ressler wants to get past metaphor in his understanding of DNA and genetic inheritance. It is his only ambition in life. And Jan and Todd, trying to understand Dr. Ressler, also want to get past metaphor. They want to understand him, his essence ... can they name it? And by naming something, do you take away its essence?

I am in awe of Richard Powers. He is magnificent.

EXCERPT FROM Gold Bug Variations, by Richard Powers.

Landscape with Conflagration

I've reached a sticking point in my homework, the background reading that must take me inside the man. Not a barrier to comprehension: I remember, flexing my intellect again this season, that given time, I have the capacity to tackle anything, however formidable. And I have more than enough time - time spreading from sunny sahara mornings alone over onion bagels and oranges to arctic nights, postponing sleep as long as possible, armed with only thick books and a headboard lamp. I've hit a barrier not to comprehension but credulity. How can an assortment of invisible threads inside one germ cell record and pass along the construction plans of the whole organism, let alone the cell housing the threads themselves? I've grasped the common metaphor: the blueprint gene somehow encodes a syntactic message, an entire encyclopedia of chemical engineering projects. I feel the thrill of attaching abstract gene to physical chromosome. But it remains analogy, lost in intermediary words.

The task Dr. Ressler set himself was merely - and only he could have thought "merely" - to capture the enigma machine that tweaks this chromosomal message into readability. Did he believe that nothing was lost in translation as signals percolated up from molecules in the thread into him, that brain, those limbs, that hurt, alert face? Searching for his own lexicon required faith that the chemical semaphore could serve as its own rosetta, faith that biology too could be revealed through its particulars. Faith that demonstration could replace faith.

It grows like a crystal, this odd synthesis of evolution, chemistry, and faith, spreads in all directions at once, regular but aperiodic. By Ressler's birth, enzymes - catalysts driving the chemical reactions of metabolism - were identified as proteins. The structure of proteins - responsible for everything from the taste of sole to the toughness of a toenail - strikes me as ridiculously simple: linear, crumpled necklaces of organic pearls called amino acids. What's more, the protein necklaces directing all cell processes consist of series of only twenty different amino acid beads.

It seems impossible: twenty can't be sufficient word-hoard to engineer the tens of thousands of complex chemical reactions required to make a thing live. But lying in bed under my arctic nightlight, carrying out the simple arithmetic, I see how the abject simplicity of protein produces more potential than mind can penetrate. A necklace of only two beads, each one in twenty colors, can assume any of four hundred different combinations. A third bead increases this twenty times - eight thousand possible necklaces. I learn that the average protein necklace floating in the body weighs in at hundreds of beads. At that length, the possible string combinations exceed the printed sentences in man-made creation. Room to grow, in other words.

The protein bead string folds up, forms secondary structures determined by its amino acid sequence. The shape of these fantastic landscapes, fuzz-motes as convoluted as the string is simple, gives them their specific, chemical power. Their jungle of surface protrusions provides - like so many dough forms - niches for other chemicals to assemble and react.

But if these cookie cutters - in countless possible fantastically complex shapes - build the body, what builds the builders? The answer appalls me. The formula for the builder molecules as well as its implementation are contained in another long, linear molecule. This time the beads come in only four colors. It says something about my progress in scientific faith that I accept that calculation showing that the possible combinations in one such foursquare informational molecule exceed the total number of atoms in the universe.

But I hang up on the idea of such a linear molecule encoding a breathing, hoping, straining, failing, aging, dying scientist. I find as I read that I'm in good company. If I still ran the Quote Board, I'd use tomorrow that gem of Einstein's when meeting Morgan and hearing of his project to mechanize biology:

No, the trick won't work ... How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?

But I no longer run the Quote Board. I run nothing now except the Jan O'Deigh Continuing Education Project. And for that, I have only more history. When counting aminos fails to put me to sleep, I charm insomnia by reading Beadle and Tatum's 1940 work on the bread mold Neurospora. Only seventeen years old when Ressler got his brainstorm, it must have read like a classic to a student raised on it. While the world once more indulged its favorite occupation, Beadle and Tatum dosed mold with X-rays to induce mutations. Raising thousands of test-tube strains, they produced mutants that could no longer manufacture required nutrients. Mutated chromosomes failed to produce necessary enzymes.

With an excitement that penetrates even the sober journal account, they crossed a mutant that could no longer make enzyme E with its normal counterpart. Half the offspring had the mutation and half did not. Enzyme production precisely mirrored Mendelian inheritance. One gene, one enzyme, Each time I read the conclusion, I hear his perverse question: "What could be simpler?"

A unique gene, coding for a unique enzyme: Cyfer inherited as dogma what actually arose only through recent, bitter debate. The limited informational content of DNA - the four bases adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine - did not seem adequate to build the fantastically varied amino acid necklaces. For some time, the size of DNA was underestimated, and even after the enormous molecular weight was correctly determined, many scientists believed that the four bases followed one another in repeating order. Redundant series carry no more information than a news program repeating, "Earlier today, earlier today ..."

DNA was long rejected as the chromosomal message carrier. Some researchers believed that proteins themselves were the master blueprint, even though every protein would require others to build it. Avery blazed the trail out of confusion. His 1944 paper showed that the substance transforming one bacterial strain to another was not protein but DNA. Inheritance was rapidly being reduced from metaphor to physical construct. DNA was a plan that somehow threaded raw amino acid beads into proteins. These protein chains in turn catalyzed all biological process. Cyfer's question - the coding problem - was how a long string of four types of things stood for thousands of shorter, twenty-thing strings.

Before the problem could even be posed, scientists had first to determine a structure for DNA that fit the evidence. The structure fell the year Ressler attained legal adulthood, one of the most celebrated solutions in science. X-ray diffractions of crystalline nucleic acid suggested a helix. The beautiful Chargaff Ratios demanded the amount of adenine equal that of thymine, guanine equal cytosine, and G + A equal C + T. DNA presented too many structural possibilities to be cracked by standard organic analysis. By starting with the constraints in Franklin's and Wilkins's data, Watson and Crick tinkered with cutouts until the shoe dropped. They hit upon the double helix, where complementary base pairs - G pairing always with C, A always with T - form the spiral rungs.

Temperament, coded in long strings of base pairs, plays a big part in any interpretation of data. The full ramifications of the model were not quickly grasped. It followed neatly that chromosomes were just supercoiled filaments of DNA. Mendel's genes were simply sections of chromosome, a length of spiral staircase - say ten thousand base-pair rungs spelling out auburn hair. But using four letters to convey the content of all living things seemed like transmitting every Who's Who of this century in staticky dots and dashes across a copper filament.

How was the message read? How to determine the language of the cipher? Understand that question and I've understood him. Dr. Ressler, receiving intact the work of the structurists, trained his temperament on the smallest end of the genetic spectrum, the connecting link. The task given him was to determine how twin-helical sequences of four bases

...A-C-C-G-T-G-T-G-A-A-C-G-G...
...T-G-G-C-A-C-A-C-T-T-G-C-C...

strung amino acids into enfolded protein:

...threonine-valine-tryptophan ...

Dr. Ressler's question was not primarily cytological or chemical or even genetic, although it was all these. Heredity's big hookup lay in information, pure form. It floated agonizingly close in the air, an all-expenses-paid trip to Stockholm taped to the bottom of some chair in the lecture hall. Yet prestige played no more than ironically in Ressler's mind. His was a drive deeper than recognition, a need to cross that hierarchical border, that edge, that isomorph, that metaphor, to get to the thing itself, to arrive at the enigma machine, reach it on pattern alone, reach down and take into his hands the first word, name it, that string of base-pairs coding for all inheritance, desire, ambition, the naming need itself - first love, forgiveness, frailty.

The Books: "The Bell Jar" (Sylvia Plath)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath. Like many high school girls, I went through a huge Plath phase when I was about 17. I didn't just read The Bell Jar, Plath's only novel, but I read all the poems, the diary, the letters home to her mother, the posthumously published collection of short stories, everything. Here's a gigantic post I wrote about Plath. Like many authors, I have now had almost a lifelong relationship with Sylvia Plath. I have gone through phases with her. There was the first feverish adolescent phase, when I idolized her, and she seemed to express some of the desolation and disorientation I felt as an adolescent girl. The Bell Jar is often just remembered as the autobiographical novel about her suicide attempt, but to me - in high school - it was about what it was like to be a girl. Now Plath was writing about the much more restrictive 1950s - and what those restrictions did to an unconventional (internally, I mean) female spirit. Plath was a perfectionist, and a high achiever. She did all the things she was supposed to. She was a genius at school, she published her poems, she got scholarships, she really had a wave of huge successes as a young woman. But there is a mania there, which can really be seen when you read her journals (not to mention her letters to her mother, which are truly disturbing). The whole sex thing, and the good girls don't thing ... absolutely trapped her. She knew what was going on, she looked around and saw how the social rules were different for boys, and it is my opinion that it is THAT that caused her to crack up in college, NOT the fact that she didn't get into the writer's workshop she wanted to get into and was forced to spend the summer at home. The Bell Jar makes that pretty clear. The social restrictions were unfair, and Plath questioned them. But life was a howling wilderness, it was pre-sexual revolution, and for someone like Plath - the pressure on being normal was enough to make her go nuts. It really was. She found herself split off from herself. There was the good girl and then ... the other girl. The real girl. Nobody can sustain a split for that long without either one or the other side winning. Plath, instead, cracked, tried to commit suicide and spent a year in a mental institution. So she fell into the own crack in her psyche. That's what The Bell Jar is about.

I have read The Bell Jar many times, and while I was captivated by it in high school, it doesn't really hold up as a whole, when I read it now. Her poems are another story altogether. But I'll get to those when I get to my poetry bookshelf, which, at this rate, should be sometimes in the year 2018. The Bell Jar is a kind of selfconscious work, stilted at times - and there is much that is quite wonderful about it - and there are set-piece scenes that I will remember forever. The entire intern staff getting food poisoning in the hotel. Breaking the thermometer in the hospital and playing with the mercury. Seeing the baby born. And the excerpt below. Not to mention the stunner of a first sentence:

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.

The writing is cold, and mean. Plath was not a "nice" person, and that was one of her biggest problems. Women are supposed to be "nice"! I think Plath found it very freeing in her writing when she stopped putting the pressure on herself to be nice. And when she started ignoring her mother's usually malevolent advice to be "nice". I actually don't think Aurelia Plath was well-intentioned. I think she had a lot of anger and jealousy towards her daughter - she was at the same time living vicariously and also trying to suppress her. Talk about being angry at the restrictions placed on women - I think Aurelia Plath's rage at her OWN life was titanic in nature. But she covered it up with a sickly sweet "nice"ness ... Now I'm seeing her thru Plath's eyes, it is true - but seriously - read her simpering defensive preface to Letters Home, and you'll see what I mean. What I hear in her words is rage. Plath eventually realized that the relationship with her mother was toxic and basically had to move to England, to put an ocean between them.

All that being said, I don't think The Bell Jar holds up very well. It seems to me to be MADE for adolescent girls, who want to be "deep", or who are relishing their own deep-ness. I went through that phase, and The Bell Jar was perfect for me at that time. But as a grownup, I read it and think, "Oh, come now, dear, I know it seems horrible now, but it'll pass. Just go out and get laid, don't worry so much about the rules, you'll be fine, dear ... just CHILLAX." And so the book loses its oomph if you think that our main character is, well, kind of over-reacting.

Again, the poems are completely another story altogether - I'm choosing now to just focus on The Bell Jar.

It is the story of Esther, a college student, who has won a prestigious summer internship at a ladies magazine in New York City. There are only 11 girls or something like that, and they are all put up in a women's hotel. Esther is an over-achiever, a scholarship girl, and is overwhelmed by New York City. She's kind of fragile, in some ways. She has internalized the "good girl" restrictions to such a degree that she has become rigid. But, tellingly enough, the other girl she befriends is a blowsy platinum blonde bombshell named Doreen, who doesn't seem to give a hoot about the world's restrictions, and she does whatever she wants. There's something freeing about being with Doreen. She's not portrayed as a slut, just as a woman of the world ... and Esther is envious, wishes she could be like that. Meanwhile, the Rosenbergs are going to be electrocuted, and Esther starts to obsess about it. Not about the case or the trial ... but about the fact of electrocution and what it must be like. (Later in the book, when she goes through electroshock treatment, she finds out). It upsets her.

The first third of the book takes place in New York. Then Esther goes home, bringing the second section of the book - hoping that she will receive the letter accepting her into the writer's workshop in Boston ... her mother picks her up at the station and tells her that she was rejected. So now the summer yawns before Esther - she has nothing to do, nothing to look forward to ... and she begins to spiral downward. Her mother wants her to take shorthand classes, just so she will have a backup career (until she gets married, of course). Esther begins to lose it. She begins to forget that she has any good qualities, that she can do anything well ... she feels trapped by the suburbs (Plath's evocation of that kind of claustrophobia is pretty damn great) ... and things get so bad that she is finally brought to see a psychiatrist. He recommends electroshock therapy on an outpatient basis. Good idea, bro! The therapy is brutal, handled awkwardly and unsensitively, and Esther comes out of it disoriented and upset. This goes on until she finally can't take it anymore, and tries to commit suicide.

The last third of the book takes place in the mental institution where Esther is in recovery. She's there for a long time. And she actually ends up getting a GOOD doctor, as opposed to the asswipe she saw earlier. This doctor is a woman, and there's something about her that Esther finds deeply encouraging ... not to mention the fact that the doctor seems to understand what the real problem is: the whole good girl/bad girl sex thing ... and basically gets Esther fitted for a diaphragm, and tells her not to worry so much about it. That she can be free, too. Just be safe. As Esther starts to recover, she is allowed "out" on short jaunts, and during one of those jaunts - she decides to lose her virginity. Let's get this thing OVER WITH so I can just MOVE ON. I can't remember now who she chooses - some guy she meets ... and the virginity-loss goes unbelievably badly (like 1 in a thousand badly) and she begins to hemorrhage. She has to go to the hospital. But somehow, in the chaos of all of that, Esther finds herself better. In the head. Her boyfriend from college Buddy comes to visit her in the hospital - and she no longer is tormented by the fact that Buddy seems to want to domesticate her (he says stuff to her, smugly, like, "When we get married, you won't feel like writing poetry anymore...") ... all of that stuff is still going on with Buddy, but Esther just laughs at it now. She doesn't care. Buddy can't "get" her, if she doesn't want to be gotten. She's free. Truly free. That is not to say that she is "back to normal" because that is just the point. "Normal" is too high a bar for some people. And trying to fit into "normalcy" is too much pressure for some people. I'm one of those people. I'm not a wack-job, but I'm not "normal" and I came to terms with that a long time ago. If I tried to "fit in", if I worried about the concerns of others and why don't those same things concern me?? ... I'd be crushed. I still struggle with it ... but I have pretty much won the battle as a whole. Esther is in no way, shape, or form, normal. There's one sentence in the book that suggests Esther has gone on to get married and have a baby - and it totally doesn't work for me. Plath has created a character (let's forget about the autobiographical elements for a minute) who seems like she will NEVER fit in with societal norms, and her journey is such to accept that. So it's inconceivable that she would go on to have some sort of domestic harmony!

One last thing and then I'll get to the excerpt:

I haveThe Bell Jar on tape - read by Frances McDormand - and I HIGHLY recommend it. It was given to me as a gift, years ago, and I remember one day I just put it on and cleaned my whole apartment, listening to it. And sometimes laughing out loud. I had forgotten how funny some of it is! Or - it was revealed to me, by McDormand's line readings, how FUNNY a lot of it is. It's mean humor, all of it is mean observational humor ... but it was great. This was recently, and so yet another level of that book was revealed to me. Like I said - it's a lifelong relationship.

Plath's major work is her poems. As a poet, she ranks among the best of her generation. As a novelist, not so much. It's the poems that really set her free.

And I can't let this post go by without providing a link to Cara Ellison - who read one of my Plath posts in 2006 - and went on a tear. She had never read her before. Cara took obsession to a whole other level, and it's been so fun to watch and read her stuff about Plath.

Here's the excerpt (and a bunch of Plath links right here):

EXCERPT FROM The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath.

"I'm so glad they're going to die."

Hilda arched her cat-limbs in a yawn, buried her head in her arms on the conference table and went back to sleep. A wisp of bilious green straw perched on her brow like a tropical bird.

Bile green. They were promoting it for fall, only Hilda, as usual, was half a year ahead of time. Bile green with black, bile green white white, bile green with nile green, its kissing cousin.

Fashion blurbs, silver and full of nothing, sent up their fishy bubbles in my brain. They surfaced with a hollow pop.

I'm so glad they're going to die.

I cursed the luck that had timed my arrival in the hotel cafeteria to coincide with Hilda's. After a late night I felt too dull to think up the excuse that would take me back to my room for the glove, the handkerchief, the umbrella, the notebook I forgot. My penalty was the long, dead walk from the frosted glass doors of the Amazon to the strawberry-marble slab of our entry on Madison Avenue.

Hilda moved like a mannequin the whole way.

"That's a lovely hat, did you make it?"

I half expected Hilda to turn on me and say, "You sound sick," but she only extended and then retracted her swanny neck.

"Yes."

The night before I'd seen a play where the heroine was possessed by a dybbuk, and when the dybbuk spoke from her mouth its voice sounded so cavernous and deep you couldn't tell whether it was a man or a woman. Well, Hilda's voice sounded just like the voice of that dybbuk.

She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist. The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault.

So I said, "Isn't it awful about the Rosenbergs?"

The Rosenbergs were to be electrocuted late that night.

"Yes!" Hilda said, and at last I felt I had touched a human string in the cat's cradle of her heart. It was only as the two of us waited for the others in the tomblike morning gloom of the conference room that Hilda amplified that Yes of hers.

"It's awful such people should be alive."

She yawned then, and her pale orange mouth opened on a large darkness. Fascinated, I stared at the blind cave behind her face until the two lips met and moved and the dybbuk spoke out of its hiding place, "I'm so glad they're going to die."

"Come on, give us a smile."

I sat on the pink velvet loveseat in Jay Cee's office, holding a paper rose and facing the magazine photographer. I was the last of the twelve to have my picture taken. I had tried concealing myself in the powder room, but it didn't work. Betsy had spied my feet under the doors.

I didn't want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I'd cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.

This was the last round of photographs before the magazine went to press and we returned to Tulsa or Biloxi or Teaneck or Coos Bay or wherever we'd come from, and we were supposed to be photographed with props to show what we wanted to be.

Betsy held an ear of corn to show she wanted to be a farmer's wife, and Hilda held the bald, faceless head of a hatmaker's dummy to show she wanted to design hats, and Doreen held a gold-embroidered sari to show she wanted to be a social worker in India (she didn't really, she told me, she only wanted to get her hands on a sari).

When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know.

"Oh sure you know," the photographer said.

"She wants," said Jay Cee wittily, "to be everything."

I said I wanted to be a poet.

Then they scouted about for something for me to hold.

Jay Cee suggested a book of poems, but the photographer said no, that was too obvious. It should be something that showed what inspired the poems. Finally Jay Cee unclipped the single, long-stemmed paper rose from her latest hat.

The photographer fiddled with his hot white lights. "Show us how happy it makes you to write a poem."

I stared through the frieze of rubber-plant leaves in Jay Cee's window to the blue sky beyond. A few stagey cloud puffs were traveling from right to left. I fixed my eyes on the largest cloud, as if, when it passed out of sigh, I might have the good luck to pass with it.

I felt it very important to keep the line of my mouth level.

"Give us a smile."

At last, obediently, like the mouth of a ventriloquist's dummy, my own mouth started to quirk up.

"Hey," the photographer protested, with sudden foreboding, "you look like you're going to cry."

I couldn't stop.

I buried my face in the pink velvet facade of Jay Cee's loveseat and with immense relief the salt tears and miserable noises that had been prowling around in me all morning burst out into the room.

When I lifted my head, the photographer had vanished. Jay Cee had vanished as well. I felt limp and betrayed, like the skin shed by a terrible animal. It was a relief to be free of the animal, but it seemed to have taken my spirit with it, and everything else it could lay its paws on.

The Books: "1984" (George Orwell)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

1984, by George Orwell. I covered much of my thoughts about this book in my post yesterday about Animal Farm.

A bit more about Orwell the man (there's so much there): Orwell himself wrote about his youth:

I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts.

His entire life can be seen as a process of "facing" (something that Christopher Hitchens goes into in depth in his book Why Orwell Matters