First, I remember his hand.  Warm — like blood, like loss.  Far from the balmy welcoming friend who grabs your hand in his, embracing you with a caring but unconscious smile.  Not the pliant hand of the well-meaning stranger who clings almost insipidly, one palm accompanied by another, as if your hand were its filling, the inside of some moist hand sandwich.  No, Karter’s handshake, if I could call it that, was more of a press than a shake, an insistent yearning, an assertion.  I am a prisoner, it seemed to say, Yes.  They call me “murderer,” it might have said, and unequivocally, it asked me into his life.  It was a hand that was unafraid to reach out while guards looked on, and its press lasted only a second in real time, forever in memory.

This moment comes back over and over when I think of Karter, a lodestone to something beyond the stuccoed walls of the Shirley Massachusetts Correctional Institution (MCI).  In that extended moment, I left the cold colorlessness of the space around us; the low ceilings and straight back metal chairs.  Here, in a kind of no-man’s land between inside and outside, the prisoners held programs.  This modular unit, the kind of undistinguished building so popular these days in prison construction, was squat and barely brightened with occasional flashes—a guard’s badge reflecting light, an instructional wall poster with an ochre or midnight blue background, some bit of forgotten paper on the floor.  The actual visiting area was most likely built first, and it was just a few feet away, a precursor to this emptiness.  Outsiders passed through it before entering this room, and it contained sad little cubicles where prisoners talked on phones to loved ones, cut apart by glassy plastic.  But I was not seeing any of that at this moment.  I was looking into Karter’s eyes.

Karter’s eyes, however, were seeing much more than I could imagine.  They reflected an anguished past, fifteen of his thirty-one years behind bars.  They were long-lashed, large in the wounded way of an animal that has survived in the wild.  His eyes were not about color.  They might have been blue-green or hazel or the kind of bear-brown flecked with bits of gold.  They were eyes whose main feature was that they had a see-through quality like a body of water.  They could hold you, keep you in focus, pull you into the waves, and make you breathless as if you were gazing into the eyes of a long lost lover, of someone who might vanish if you blinked.  And in their penetration, they could keep you from imagining what you did not want to imagine.  A chaotic classroom.  A knife.  Students screaming — swirling in the impossibility of their friend murdered, an innocent child of fifteen, not just dead, but killed in front of them – and later, a young woman saying of this bloodshed, ”We want revenge.”

But I am getting ahead of myself.  At this moment, I knew little about a knife, heard no screams, and had not yet absorbed the vivid details of that day in 1993 that would change Karter’s life.  No, I was a teacher at a community college who was on a field trip with her students.  We’d trudged through cold on the bitterest January day in New England’s 2008, and passed through metal detectors and along a barbed wired path, to listen to a group called “Project Youth.”  Nine men, all murderers, had attempted to tell the truth about crime and to teach the uninitiated about punishment.  At the end of the two hours, while my students sat stunned from listening to each man’s story and each man’s remorse, I stood, almost at the same time as Karter.  I had meant to whisper some sort of thank-you and leave, but before I could, he called my name and we walked towards each other.  And then, I held onto Karter’s eyes as I held onto his hand.

I should tell you who I am although it might be somewhat anticlimactic since I live far from the bars that I speak of.  I am ordinary, ordinary in the sense that like many others, I have a job, a husband, a family and friends.  I live in a small town in a small state and I do the kinds of things you most likely do – go to baseball games, enjoy a glass of wine with dinner, and plan trips to distant places I may never see.  I am also ordinary in that murder is opaque in my experience, not something I’d envisioned with a movie-like lens before Karter Kane Reed came into my life.

I’d been teaching the day I got his first letter.  It was 2007, the middle of November, a week before Thanksgiving break, cold, brittle, the kind of weather where trees begin to bare their spines.  I’d been bundled up and dashed from the parking garage to the college, stopping at the mailroom as I always did before class.  Amidst the usual interoffice memos and junk mail was a slim legal-sized envelope.  I was surprised to see the neat handwriting with a return address from a post office box in “Shirley, MA.”  I didn’t know anyone in Shirley and I didn’t know too many people who had post office boxes, at least of my friends.  I well remembered that Framingham Prison, where I had taught women writing and literature for ten years, had a post office box in its address.  I’d seen those words, “P.O. Box,” on the occasional card I received from prisoners after I left Framingham.  They almost disguised that one was, in fact, receiving mail from a prison.  But as I turned over the plain white envelope with a single flag stamp, I saw the familiar pale blue marking across the back of the seal:

This correspondence is forwarded from a Massachusetts Correctional Institution. Its contents may not have been evaluated and the Department of Corrections is not responsible for the substance or content of the enclosed material.  If you have received unwanted correspondence from this inmate call 1-866-684-2846 to stop future correspondence.

For some reason, my heart started to beat more rapidly.  Shirley was a men’s prison, wasn’t it?  I didn’t know any men in prison; in fact, I had specifically not taught men behind bars so I could avoid being alone in a room with a group of male prisoners.  Female prisoners were different, I had decided.  They were accessible.  This was not rational, but not so radical for someone who feared the slap or cringed at a man’s loud rebuke.  I had connected with women prisoners.  They cried; they confided – even through anger as thick as night – and this I understood.  Many were victims of crimes, not merely perpetrators, and even if this was true of men too, I imagined male criminals to be far more brutal and aggressive.  My fears of setting some man off, of being too confrontational, too flirtatious, or too something indefinable had insisted I work with females.  There was more to it, of course, and I will get to that in time, but for now, it’s enough to tell you that females simply seemed safer to me.  I didn’t need proof; I didn’t need statistics.  I had no problem relating to the young male students in my college classes, but my life had led me firmly away from teaching any man behind bars who might be a rapist or a male sex offender or a murderer.

It was an hour or so before my first class, and I had time to sit in my office and read Karter’s letter.  I read it, fingering the light-weight lined paper with its blue inked perfectly formed vowels and elegantly straight consonants filling exactly two sides of a page.  I read it, and then, taken aback by the content, I called a friend and read it to him.  I heard the words as I said them aloud, but I was so pulled in that I was almost breathless.   It’s hard to describe how receiving one letter from an unknown man in the dark sent me into such deep conflict, but it did.  Much of me wanted to have absolutely nothing to do with him.  Besides what I have mentioned above, I had already been involved with prisoners for ten years.  I’d directed eight plays at the women’s prison.  I’d written about their struggles, heard about their children, and worried about their welfare when they got out.  Enough was enough.  I’d moved on.  But the letter was unlike anything I had ever received.  There was some draw from this stranger.

Part of it was the surprise of Karter’s having landed by chance on a book I had written about directing The Merchant of Venice.  Part of it was his forthrightness.  About the Bard, he wrote:

I’m not a big fan of Shakespeare (I hope to you that is not some unforgivable blasphemy); I admire the breadth and depth of his work, i.e. the philosophical, psychological and sociological insight, and his unparalleled command of language – but I have to work too hard to read it for it to be thoroughly enjoyable.

In a short two page letter, Karter mentioned three books as casually as I mention what I had for breakfast, including Drew Leder’s The Soul Knows No Bars, and Christine Rathbone’s A World Apart.  That impressed me.  He was self-educated; he was articulate.  Since he’d found my book on the shelves of the prison library, he’d decided to write and ask me to find materials or point him in the right direction to aid Pam, a female friend, with her parole.  That might have given me pause – a man in prison corresponding with an incarcerated woman and now he’s the one to help her — how predictable.  But he seemed open, without a trace of coyness, and his honesty appealed.  It touched me the way he wrote about women behind bars:

Personally, I have served almost fifteen years of a 2^nd degree life sentence, and so am intimately familiar with the difficulties and challenges that men in my situation face in trying to win their freedom through parole; but through my relationship with Pam…I am acutely aware that the problems facing women, the issues that contributed to their crimes and their behavior in prison, are infinitely more complicated and difficult for the parole board to assess, and therefore their struggles far greater….

For Pam and other women in similar circumstances, I am trying to find a   qualified  and objective source to advocate on their behalf:….women who are mothers, daughters, wives, sisters and friends; women who’ve made poor choices and horrible mistakes but [who] deserve compassion and consideration; women who deserve a second chance.

I’d always told my students I believed in second chances.  Running my hand over his smooth signature, noting the slightly large “K,” the way he tilted his script, I paused, considering.  Maybe he did know how to strike the right chord; maybe he was keenly aware of the import of such a request.  But it seemed that he respected women, and I had to admit, I felt needed.  Then it hit me.  What awful thing did he do?  Whom had he hurt?  I pondered the line, “Personally, I have served almost fifteen years of a 2^nd degree life sentence.”

You can see why I found it so hard to decide whether or not to even answer his letter.

Every year, early on, in my Voices Behind Bars class or in what my students call “Prison Lit,” I ask them to spell out what their images are of those who reside in our prisons.  Stocked with media stereotypes from Oz and Prison Break, they make a list, filling the board with words like “junkies,” “tattooed bodies,” “somebody’s bitch,” “once a con always a con,” “rage addicts,” and “big black guys.”  They giggle embarrassedly, some of the women admitting that they find an incarcerated man “dangerously sexy,” and some of the men certain that all convicts must be “tough,” and “macho.” Not only do my students ignore females in that list – they don’t think about women when they think about prison, and as the males later admit, “I’d never date ‘damaged goods,’” – but they paint a pretty frightening picture of men behind bars.  I allow this intentionally, in order to spend the remainder of the semester discussing how prisoners are not what the media wants us to believe, and that many are not so different from themselves.

So it was disconcerting to me, as I sat with Karter’s letter, that I was no different from the freshman entering my class.  Stereotypes?  They were flooding me.  Karter might be the dangerous convict I had conjured up who’d kept me from ever teaching men behind bars.

I began googling “Karter Kane Reed.” I felt a rush of adrenaline, an unwelcome thrill mixed with fear, which crystallized when I actually saw his name in print on my computer screen.

I had to limit my search to “Karter Reed,” to find over a hundred entries.  They came with impenetrable titles such as “Model School Tries to Cope With Killing in a Classroom,” “No Gang Tied to Killing, Just Three Rare Friends,” and “Last suspect imprisoned 2 years after stabbing.”  I read feverishly, knowing in my mind that news articles tell little of the true story, but gobbling them up just the same, hungry for facts.  I landed upon a site posted by a group who called themselves “The Angels of Columbine.”  It shockingly listed over fifty incidences of school violence from 1992-3, noting what happened and who was killed in each.  It summarily gave these fifty-five words to describe what occurred at Dartmouth High School in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, on Monday, April 12^th, 1993:

Karter Reed, his cousin Gator Collet, both 16, and their friend Nigel Thomas, 15, were looking for Shawn Pina today.  Shawn had beaten Nigel and insulted his mother.  They came into a classroom at Dartmouth and saw 16-year-old Jason Robinson, whom they mistook for Shawn.  Karter stabbed Jason to death with a knife.

Could that be possible, I wondered, staring at the screen, that Karter actually “mistook” one boy for another?  Was it an accident or a planned attack, this murder, a kind of raging into the school of boys’ wielding weapons, boys like hunters looking for prey?   Were those fifty-five words slanted in some way to sensationalize this tragedy even more?   Fifty-five words.  A mere paragraph.  I have thought since how ironic it is to believe we can tell anything from a brief paragraph and that any discussion of plot must always be cautionary.  It is theme, of course, that has more appeal in literature, but to try to understand a story without its main trajectory is impossible.  Narrative matters.  And how the story is told is everything.  I wasn’t sure this story was being told correctly, and so with letter in hand, I went to class.  Still in some sort of strange blur, I read it aloud to my students.  They could help me decide what to do.

We had just finished reading The Falconer by John Cheever and the class of fourteen was about to begin writing papers on Cheever’s main character, Farragut.  Farragut, who is far from the stereotypes they’d mentioned the first week, is a college professor who gets imprisoned for fratricide, an unfamiliar word to many of my students.  While Cheever shows us prison through the world of an addict, he uses dream-like prose, enticing us to root for Farragut’s self-discovery as he detoxes and comes to grips with his past.  My students had struggled with Cheever’s style and humor, and none of them really wanted to spend hours writing the paper I was about to discuss.  So you can imagine what a relief it was for my class to focus on this letter.  They were interested not only because it was a diversion but also because it was real life jutting itself into their classroom.  Their eyes stuck on me as I read, heads cocked, cell phones tucked away, no texting in their palms.  As they questioned what I thought sixteen-year-old Karter had really done and how a sixteen-year-old could be sentenced to an adult prison, I began to wonder with them.

“Are you going to write him back?” someone asked.  It was Sophie, the soft-eyed young woman who should have been born in 1950.  She wore long Indian print skirts, hemp bracelets and Birkenstocks, and she had no idea what she wanted to do with her life.  But she loved Voices, and with a kind of save-the-world glee, she argued with all the criminal justice students who wanted Farragut kept behind bars for the rest of his life.  “I don’t know,” I said, looking at her face, a Keane painting of sadness.  She’d already decided that Karter deserved her compassion, mostly because everyone deserved her compassion.

It took me a few days to decide.  And finally, I told myself I should write him at least because the students wanted to visit Shirley.  They’d already toured Billerica House of Correction where they’d spoken to a prisoner in for drunk driving, someone who was close to their age.  They wanted to see more.  I reasoned I would help Karter’s friend behind bars but not necessarily directly. One of my students would certainly want to work on female advocacy issues for her final, and then, I’d send the findings to Karter – an idea that fit perfectly with the assigned research project.  That plan gave me a little distance.  I’d ask Karter about the visiting policies at Shirley and if he might talk to my class about life behind bars.  I would write him for them.

That night at home, I picked a card that looked a little festive, a card that had snow and a vague winter scene on it, a scene that might not make him miss anything too much.  The card had limited white space inside so it would guide me to be succinct in my writing — tentative and brief.  I started by complimenting him on his use of language, and I limited myself to a few questions without being too intrusive.  I wrote that I’d look into advocacy issues and signed my name, “Jean.”  I remember fouling up a card before I got the words just right, and I remember how drawn I was to letter writing, how easily my black pen found little flourishes at the end of sentences.  Letters were what we did years ago at camp or to thank someone per our mother’s instructions.  Personal letters were not common in 2008, now that email and cell phones and instant messaging had taken over.  But from the beginning, I felt compelled into some world created with words alone, some dialogue that later seemed as intense as Karter’s eyes.

I walked out to my mailbox.  Leaves were still swirling in the night breeze.  The light was on in my husband’s study where he was reading, and it cast a warm yellow pool onto the driveway.  I stood at the mailbox, letter in hand, about to put the metal red arrow up, pointing it towards the stars.  But something stopped me, and I walked back to the house without placing the card in the box.  I’d send the letter from school the next day.  Then it would be stamped “Lowell,” disguising my home town.  As I went to bed that night, I realized I was just kidding myself.  If Karter had found my address at Middlesex Community College, he could certainly find my address at home.

Forty-two miles northwest of Boston on the Shirley/Lancaster line is Shirley MCI.  There prisoners are classified as “minimum” or “medium” risk.   I’ve never fully understood the classification system, which prisons consider a way of determining one’s dangerousness.  Before I met Karter, I believed that classification should logically be based not only on one’s crime but also on one’s behavior behind bars; however, that is not always the case.  I’ve heard horror stories from women at Framingham who flat out say it is almost impossible to have their status changed, even after years of program participation and no disciplinary reports.  Some prisoners have their classification changed and are set to move, say to a pre-release, but the Department of Corrections pleads “no beds,” and they end up waiting for months, getting what is called a “setback.”  Likewise, sentenced prisoners such as sex offenders, those who might be considered the worst of the worst, are supposedly safe behind bars.  But as in Miguel Pinero’s darkly realistic play Short Eyes, those deemed marked men are sometimes attacked inside, in acts of “street justice.”  Who knows if correction officers merely look the other way?  In 2003, the murder of defrocked priest, Joseph Geoghan, occurred just down the road from Karter at the maximum security prison in Shirley, the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center.  Geoghan was in for sexually abusing boys, but his protective custody status didn’t stop an assailant from getting into his cell and strangling him.

So it was with that strange combination of excitement and fear that plagues those of us who watch too much TV, read too many magazines, and listen to too much talk radio, that I and my students piled into cars that icy January morning.  We were heading to Shirley to see what we could see.  The class was actually over for the semester, but some students, including Sophie, still wanted to make the trip.  We were to hear from men who warned others not to make the same mistakes they made, be it with drugs, alcohol, violence or abuse.  I’d told the travelers that of the approximately 9, 525 sentenced male prisoners in Massachusetts, 1350 resided in Shirley, a prison meant for slightly more than half that capacity when it became a minimum/medium facility in 1991. They knew too that behind bars that January, there were almost twice as many white (42%) as black and Latino men (58%), and that 66% of the males were single.  I had in a somewhat joking but deadly serious tone reminded them not to give out their phone numbers or addresses. That had happened once, behind my back, when I took students to the now defunct Lancaster Pre-release, and I’d had to help one naive female get un-entangled from a correspondence.

I was heading to Shirley feeling my own worries.  We had finished the semester and the student who had volunteered to do the project on resources for women had failed the class and produced nothing.  I was no further along on my promise to get advocacy material to Karter that I had been two months ago, and I felt a little sheepish.  After all, Karter had written me at least five letters by now.  I’d sent him four tasteful cards.  I did plan to do some research for him on my winter break, but I was uncomfortable going empty-handed.

If I am completely honest with you, I was uncomfortable for another reason.   Karter had crept into my consciousness.  While I told him little about myself, he poured himself into five, six, ten page letters.  He said he had friends inside, belonged to book groups and had read many of the classics.  I knew he’d spent time on almost twenty programs during his years inside with names like Alternatives to Violence, Emotional Awareness and Barber School.  He wrote how he found girlfriends who broke his heart; they disappeared or gave up, needing more than a relationship in bits and pieces with someone who could only give them one kiss on visiting days.  He sent me poems he’d written about incarceration, and told me about his stories and essays.  He wrote how the boy he killed lived with him every day, and that he grieved for what he had done.  His words formed images in my mind, in the way of a small flutter of birds, the passing of pinkish clouds in a blue sky.

“Watch out,” one of my colleagues said to me, “he’ll disappoint you.”

“I have only two words for you,” said another, speaking of the man who Norman Mailer fought to get out of prison and then committed a heinous crime. “Jack Abbott.”

I knew full well how the words of a lonely prisoner pulled on thirsty me like water in a well, but I had allowed myself to be pulled along.  I had considered not writing at first, but now, two months later, I felt a raw fascination to see Karter and the other caged prisoners, sprinkled with the same hesitations that had kept me away from men behind bars.  What could happen, I said to myself?  Nothing to be scared of, I cooed, and then I recoiled.  With hands on the steering wheel and students snug in the back seat of my car, I kept reminding myself to concentrate on the road.  It was absurd, I thought, all of it — the circumstances, the trip, the idea of corresponding with a murderer, and this damn pounding of my heart.  Soon we were in the country, trees and more trees.  My students chatted.

Some had decided not to come along after they’d heard of Shirley’s dress code.  “I only own blue jeans!” one young woman said to me on the phone.  The list of Dos and Don’ts had taken us all by surprise, and I’d felt out of date when I first saw the list.  I’d not entered a secure facility in Massachusetts for over ten years.  But jeans had always been a no-no.  Apparently you might look too much like a prisoner.

The Executive Office of Public Safety and Security posts the dress code for visitors on their website.  I so enjoyed reading it aloud to my class although the grammatical inconsistencies were difficult to represent verbally.  I’ve adapted the 2007 version a bit here, to show you how many more restrictions there were for the “weaker sex.” I couldn’t bear the semi-colons that they put at the end of each line so I’ve omitted them, and by the way, my favorite item is #19, “no bathing suits,” which is a restriction only for female visitors.  I leave it to you to figure out the rationale for each of the items listed, which is exactly the kind of silent treatment MCI visitors learn to expect.

MALE VISITORS

1. No clothing similar to that issued to an inmate or uniformed personnel
2. No blue, black or gray denim/dungaree pants, coats/jackets, or vests
3. No sweatpants, sweatshirts
4. No fatigue or camouflage clothing
5. No shorts, tank tops
6. No bare midriff, muscle shirts
7. All visitors are required to wear undergarments.
8. No T-shirts, hooded shirts or jackets, all types of neck ties (except attorneys)
9. No jogging suits to include nylon material
10. No clothing with cut-out pockets or holes are permitted
11. No double layered clothing will be allowed, i.e.; two pairs of underwear, pants, sweatpants, shorts or combinations
12. No clothing with elastic waist bands regardless of material
13. Hair pieces, wigs, extensions and braids will be allowed.   Removable items will be removed and checked by the trap officer, in the pat search area.  No pins, elastics, barrettes, etc. will be allowed to hold any of the above in place.
14. No bib/overall type clothing, (i.e. pants, shorts, etc.)

FEMALE VISITORS

1. 1 – 14. Everything on the male list
2. 15. No tights, leotards, spandex, body suits of dance/exercise fashion
3. 16. No tank tops or tops permitted which expose the back beyond the upper shoulder areas
4. 17. No visibly sheer clothing with/without undergarments
5. 18. Proper traditional undergarments (i.e.; underpants and bras) must be worn
6. 19. No bathing suits
7. 20. No low cut or excessively revealing clothing
8. 21. No tight fitting clothing is permitted
9. 22. No nylon, panty hose, or underwear with holes in the immediate crotch area
10. 23. No bobby pins, curlers, hair clips, hair scrunches, head bands, bandanas
11. 24. No T-shirts.
12. 25. Visibly pregnant females may wear maternity pants with waistbands without having to submit medical evidence
13. 26. Outerwear of a light weight material must be worn with a  slip/camisole
14. 27. Dresses or skirts are not to exceed approximately 6″ above the knee, no skirts with slits extending 6″ above the knee are permitted
15. 28. Shorts, Skorts or Culottes may be worn if not shorter than 3″ above the knee and are of “dress or walking type”. No denim, spandex or sweatpant/sweatsuit material will be permitted
16. 29. Clothing with religious or ethnic significance, subject to search.

ALL VISITORS

1. Footwear covering the whole foot must be worn by visitors
2. No jewelry other than wedding/engagement ring, medical alert bracelet/necklace may be worn into the institution
3. Hats, gloves, scarves are not allowed to be worn by visitors into the visiting room
4. Any type of appliance, brace, ace bandage, cast, dressing not prescribed and/or applied by medical personnel are not allowed. Aforementioned items must be accompanied by medical evidence.
5. Any adornments or accouterments, that cannot be removed to be examined and could constitute a security problem, will not be allowed
6. Any articles of clothing, worn by the visitor with holes, rips or tears will not be allowed, i.e. fashion jeans
7. At the discretion of the Superintendent or his/her designee, any article of clothing, worn by the visitor, displaying obscene, racial, sexual, or  caricatures, or symbols and gang affiliation will not be allowed

It was a bumpy ride down the dirt road into the prison parking lot, where construction was going on and cars were packed in and parked at odd angles.  I remember how bright the sun was in spite of the cold and how vehicles seemed sharply clear in that light.  As we emptied from our cars, I saw that we’d all dug through closets to find our least alluring clothing.  I was wearing sturdy boots, black pants, a black turtleneck and a very bulky brown and black velour shirt under my heavy wool coat.  Most of my students had found khaki pants or “dress pants,” and the females had limited their make-up.  At Billerica, one had looked as if she were dolled up to go to a club – Genevieve – even her name was something I cautioned her not to mention to the prisoners.  But now, since it was impossibly cold, make-up seemed to disappear under red noses and parched skin.  Everyone paraded down a walkway into a flat boxy building that looked like an afterthought.  Perhaps my students were aware, as I was, how fortunate we were to see the expansive cold blue sky.  I was thankful too that we were not asked to lock up our hats, gloves and scarves with our jewelry and wallets before we moved through the flat processing building and crossed a patch of frozen yard to enter the main institution.

What stands out most for me from that initial meeting — the only meeting I have had in which I actually greeted Karter — besides the intensity of our touch, was the incredible sadness that filled every corner.  The nine prisoners sat twenty feet from rows of hard back chairs that were set up for visitors.  The empty space between their chairs and ours made it more obvious that we were free and they were not, that we were innocent and they were guilty.  And yet, the space could not stop grief from floating across the gap and permeating the room.

Boogie began.  He was a thirty-eight-year-old black man sentenced for life with no opportunity of parole, and he was a bit of a jiver.  In about one minute, we knew why he went first.  He loosened everyone up as though he were the barker at a circus, a DJ telling us what we were going to hear today.  He was the jokester who like Emmett Kelley, a clown years before Boogie’s time, appeared with a smile and hid the hurt.  Boogie danced around the facts of how he’d shot and killed a rival gang member at nineteen in a turf war over drugs.  I thought he must have told this story ten times a day to schools, and I thought it was a somewhat tired talk with the obvious moral:  every action has consequences.

But my students didn’t seem to feel that way.  They looked 100% fascinated, searching to understand if they should care about these broken men.  The twenty-something Asian looked as if he were a student but his story involved gangs, guns, drugs, and being turned in by his buddies who made a deal with the Feds.  When he said that he’d shot someone in a drive-by, I heard a gasp from Sophie.  For me, it was hard to focus both on his unravaged young face and on his vicious crime.

There was, of course, the requisite prisoner sensationalized by the local media.  Someone whispered disbelief to me when she first heard him introduced.  She had pictured this man from the paper as if he’d “had fangs and sucked blood,” but here he looked forlorn.  The notorious “Hockey Dad” could barely speak to us and sat a little apart from the others.  His eyes seemed unfocused and his muscled arms were wrapped tightly around his body.  Perhaps he knew how shocking it was for us to be in the presence of someone who’d killed the coach of his son at a hockey game.  But it was hard to tell what he felt since he said so little.  The only information that trickled out was that he’d beaten the man to death over entanglements about the game on ice.

And then, before it was over, before prisoners got up to put their chairs away, moving brusquely in the way of schooled soldiers, and before we passed through that vast loneliness and watched the scene fade from view, Karter stood to speak.  He was dressed in the blues of prison, a washed out shirt with darker pants, and he looked down more than up, moving slowly to the center of the room.  His face had aged from the fair-skinned, lean blond boy he once was – a child sentenced to life in a man’s prison – but there were waves of vulnerability that flooded his eyes, his choked-up voice.

As Karter unraveled the how, leaving flecks of loss in our hearts, we were left to wonder the unfathomable why.

*

I know that there is a wholeness to the landscape in which I live.  I know this as common sense, as experience, and by documentation and report.  I live in Watertown, Mass., ten miles west of Boston, along the Charles River.  I teach at Emerson College in downtown Boston, on the Common, and I commute there, mostly by car, along Storrow Drive, following the river the entire way.  In warm weather I bike in occasionally.  Here, I can show you on a map.  Here is my landscape, my world, as seen from above.  In fact I have an aerial photograph I tacked to my study’s wall; the cover from a 1994 Boston Globe supplement about future planning, the photograph is exactly the same scale as the Boston area street map that I have tacked below it, both showing the Charles River meandering from Watertown, through Cambridge, into the Charles River basin, and then pinched through locks, into Boston harbor.  My guess is that this is a view from 30,000 feet, too high to see cars, and higher than I have viewed this landscape while taking off from or circling to land at Logan Airport.  The correspondence of photograph to map pleases me.  I search for what I know.  There among the crusty grid of downtown Boston, crusty because of the shadows cast by high-rise office buildings, is Boston Common.  I can’t see, but know, 180 Tremont, where I teach, just there, along the Common’s lower right margin (for my last two years chairing the Writing Division, my tenth floor office windows overlooked the Common, where flocks of birds, pigeons probably, spread and spiraled, dipped and clustered like the process of my thoughts).  And there, the rectilinear serrations of Back Bay, where years earlier from another office twelve floors up, I watched sailboats on the Charles River Basin and was distracted by rock music amplified from the half-shell on the Esplanade.  The river loops north at what I know to be the Boston University bridge.  Two full hand spans west from Boston Common, that green patch, mossy looking with treetops, is Mt. Auburn Cemetery, then more along the wavy ribbon of river, between what must be the Arsenal Street and North Beacon Street bridges, I see the red roofs of the Arsenal Mall.  The river widens, creating an island that marks the local boat club, narrows at Watertown Square, goes north for what I know to be one mile, and there, that bridge marks Bridge Street, two blocks from my house.  I think I can make out the square of Bemis playground across from us. My eye hungers, searching for purchase, for connection.

*

I have lived in this landscape for 40 years, ever since graduating from college, one hundred miles west.  My first glimpse came as I drove along Route 2 from Amherst for an interview at Harvard that spring.  Just over a hill, the city skyline appeared suddenly and clearly in the distance.  For years to follow, as I came and went from Harvard, finished my Ph.D. in English in 1971, lived in different Cambridge apartments and neighborhoods, from Harvard Square to Porter Square to Central Square to East Cambridge, before marrying and moving to Watertown, I would get as lost driving outside my neighborhood as if I had just materialized, say, in Atlanta, or Minneapolis, cities utterly unknown to me.  Maps were no help.  Attempting to return to Cambridge from a dance club or party in downtown Boston, I would end up somehow on the north shore, Chelsea, say, or Revere.  I learned the city by getting lost.  North, South, West.  Shortly after I met Connie, who would become my wife, she got an emergency call at my Central Square apartment telling her that her father had just died in Florida; her married sister, Lonne, lived in Waltham, across from Brandeis, and would I drive her there?  I had never driven out Mt. Auburn Street from Harvard Square, but with Connie choked and distraught beside me, and somehow reading directions from a paper in her lap, we headed past Mt. Auburn Hospital, then Mt. Auburn Cemetery, a dingy, over-traveled route with bus wires over head and unused trolley tracks.  I had no idea where I was going, or how much farther, but on the way I did count some seventeen funeral homes, each one a jolt in our faces, given Connie’s grief, each for some other denomination or ethnicity, Armenian, Greek, Italian, Irish (given the names, O’Reilly, say, or Adrossinian).  The drive seemed surreal, a pilgrimage of grief into unknown destinations.  Eventually we reached an apartment complex across from Brandeis University, where all at once, I met most of this girl’s family, sister, brother-in-law, niece, brother, brother-in-law’s local parents and sisters, a sudden blur of intimacy and tribal embrace.  Two years later, having lived together in two different Cambridge apartments, we were married at Connie’s mother’s home in Miami, Florida, surrounded by both our families; then with the idea of starting our own family, we found an inexpensive apartment out that same Mt. Auburn Street route, in Watertown.  In contrast to the sordid singles world of Cambridge, Watertown seemed populated by working class, first and second-generation ethnic families.  Shrines in front yards.  Grape arbors. Laundry flapping in backyards, neighbors watching out for neighbors, village-style vegetable gardens.  Our apartment was in the first floor of a two family frame house, owned by Italian immigrants, who shouted “Mange! Mange!” through our ceiling, and who were cursed in English by their assimilated children.  Mt. Auburn Street became my daily commute.  The literary magazine, Ploughshares, which I had co-founded while I lived in Central Square, had already become my life, and its post office box in Central Square had to be emptied daily.  I was teaching part-time now at Emerson, at Harvard, at Simmons, at Northeastern.  My own father died in Philadelphia, just after we moved.  Connie was pregnant.  My widowed mother came to visit.  Our daughter Ruth was born.  Connie’s water had broken, contractions begun, and I drove as fast and carefully as I could through traffic to the hospital near Simmons College, having practiced the route for just this occasion.  Two days after the birth, I drove Connie and the baby home.  Twenty-one years later, to the day, my daughter has her first apartment across the grid of Boston, off Huntington Avenue, and after I find my way there to loan her our car for the birthday weekend, she is driving me back to Watertown, turning down Longwood to the Fenway, when I realize that we are retracing her first trip home.

*

Ten summers ago I felt displaced and devalued in my public life, and I had been trying to recover myself by mapping out my life, public and private, in memory and imagination. What was I doing here, now, as me?  Who was “me”?

*

I had begun my fifties believing in my “self,” — even after the setbacks of secondary infertility in my marriage (which had been resolved by adoption of my son as an infant from Korea), and the rejection of my work as a writer.  I had lost my father when I was thirty-five, my mother when I was forty-four.  My two older brothers and older sister were scattered and distant: New Jersey, Colorado, Los Angeles.  My closest friend, literary and personal, Richard Yates, died when I was fifty-one.   I still believed that I was meant for recognition as a writer.  I loved my family.  I had built up Ploughshares, seeking to redress what I saw as the discouragement of literature in the marketplace, and had done so, lacking money, by relying on friendships, talent, resourcefulness and zeal.  In the heyday of the National Endowment of the Arts, one muckraking malcontent had even called me “the old grants baron.”  Beginning in 1984, I had found my first full-time job teaching at Emerson College.  With some frustrations, things there had gone well, and I got tenure in 1989, became chair of the writing division, and negotiated the college’s acquisition of Ploughshares.  I felt that as chair I had made strides in hiring, in curriculum, and in enrollments.  If there were soreheads in my fold, I had them well outnumbered in votes and in support from students and the administration, as well as in the world at large.  But then a series of circumstances combined.  The professor who had originally hired me, who had then stepped down as chair, elected to retire.  My campus rival, an older man whose tenure I opposed in my chairperson role, managed to win sympathy across campus, was given tenure, and while active in the faculty union, wrote a new contract tailored to his personal situation and calling for faculty evaluation of chairs.  Governance at the top of the college had gone berserk.  An autocratic president was driven out; and after open war between the college trustees and the faculty, an insider faculty member had become president and needed the support of the faculty union.  At this point, 5-4, my faculty voted against my renewal as chair, apparently inflamed by my rival.  I couldn’t believe that my friends, especially those that I had hired and supported for tenure, could turn on me, as coldly as strangers.  I couldn’t believe that I had so misread the terrain of interests and power in which I was located.  I still can’t, these long years later.

Once I was demoted, and one of these friends was put in as acting chair, I was also forced to surrender any real role in Ploughshares as my protégé took full control.  As for my writing life, I had the support of an agent and had published a selection of best stories from Ploughshares, but my novel, which I had rewritten for a third time, along with a new second book, my family’s biography, were rejected repeatedly, until the agent gave up.

*

Here is my driver’s license description: age 58 male, white, 5 feet 10 inches height, 167 pounds weight, eyes green (glasses required), hair brown, thinning and graying.  My fingerprints are on file, my dental records.  Here is biology’s map.  Here is medicine’s.  Here are the microscopic reports of my infertility, say (16 million sperm per cc, 30 percent motility, 40 percent forward progression).  Some day there may be the surprise of other microscopic reports of some part gone wrong, bringing closer the sentence of an ending. Not may be, will be.  I know that.

In the spirit of Walt Whitman, I can sing my body electric, cataloguing its thoroughfares and provinces.  Not biology’s map, but imagination’s, totemized fact. My eyes tour and swivel like cameras; some parts impossible to see, or rarely seen, craning in mirrors.

Eyes closed, felt: the rise of each breath, lungs full, the nostril sting of breathing in; then diaphragm and chest muscles contracting, exhale, again, again. Heart’s pump.

I shower, I wash the body.  I groom the body, shave, regarding in the mirror, the reassurance of reflection.  How I look.  My outside appearance. I touch my neck, my image shows the touch, but I feel the touch also. I close my eyes.  I feel the touch.

The body hungers.  Weakens, hungers.  Desires.  Aches.  Sleeps, rises.  Is ill, in pain.  Is well.  Floods with pleasure; pleases others.  I take it for granted.

I dress the body.

I see myself in still photography, in movies, instant, recent, long ago.  I see myself in live video, there, on that TV, where I am used to seeing news and movies.

*

The oldest question of all: if you’re not here, here in my daily life, proximate in Boston, MA, 1998, do you exist?  You, reader, whom I have never met?  You, my daughter, out of touch, first at Hampshire College, now in Guatemala on field study?  You, my mother, dead since 1983?  You, my father, dead since 1976?  You, Richard Yates, dead since 1992?  You, my sister Judy, in Pasadena; my oldest brother Jack in Colorado; my older brother Charles in New Jersey and now and then on a cruise on the Queen Mary II?  My mother in law, Hazel, in Manhattan?  My friend Jim McPherson in Iowa City?  All structures of connectedness seem ephemeral, even my son today at school, my wife at school.  What faith, what knowing or certainty can close these distances?

My mother in the last years, living alone in Philadelphia, used to say when we visited, “that the years fell away.”  We phone across space, speak our words in real time, with familiar voices.  We write letters, we electronically mail thoughts and news in words. We send pictures.  Very soon we will all have some form of videophones, and can watch each other and speak in real time no matter how distant on or off of this planet.  We send audiotapes, videotapes for the keeping. Take family videos; capture family moments.

We are perhaps artists.  We remember and imagine each other in episodes, in images, in memory loops.  We embody our meaning — our disembodied selves — in art, in painting, music, stories.  I teach Jim McPherson’s stories and he comes all alive for me.  I teach Richard Yates, and as Tim O’Brien has written (in “Lives of the Dead”), being dead is “like being inside a book that nobody’s reading”; as I read, Yates is all alive, his humor, his precision, his generous heart.

I think of when I was a teenager, my sister’s empty room and those upstairs of my departed brothers, after each had left home for independent, adult lives.  I would linger in their spaces, surrounded by their possessions and auras.

I live as if things don’t matter, as if I don’t feel, as if I don’t long for lives lost and beyond interaction; but on the other side of numbness, I fear my howl of abandonment, my animal cry to emptiness.

*

“DP’s” they were called.  “Displaced Persons.”  I was ten or eleven in those years between the end of World War II and the beginning of the Korean Conflict.  They were Eastern European refugees walking in oddly misfitting and somehow foreign clothes and shoes along the back streets of Wayne and St. Davids, streets flanked by the houses and acres of suburban privilege. There must have been some charity relief organization that had found host families in our neighborhood to employ such refugees as maids, butlers, grounds people.  Or perhaps the Valley Forge Military Academy, two miles away from my house down those back roads, was where they worked.  I know the sight of them troubled me, their sense of being lost where I was found.  A “DP” named Manfred had appeared in my sixth grade at Radnor Public School, circa 1952.  When our town fire siren would sound at noon, our local custom, he would scramble to hide under a desk, because Manfred has been in real bombing raids.  Also, he was obsessed with washing his hands in our deep arts sink in the back of the classroom, relishing the bar of Ivory soap as a luxury.  Most of us, most of the class, rejected and mocked him as peculiar, except for the fattest girl in the class who took him over as her special project.

Some years later, as Castro took over Cuba, Cuban refugees began appearing.  I remember my father hiring several in our family candy factory for menial labor and remarking that one of them had been a surgeon, but couldn’t practice in America.

*

E.M. Forster writes: “We cannot understand each other, except in a rough and ready way; we cannot reveal ourselves, even when we want to; what we call intimacy is only a makeshift; perfect knowledge is an illusion. [Fictional people] are people whose secret lives are visible or might be visible; we are people whose secret lives are invisible.”

There are no secrets in art, because we agree that art is an act of imagination, an as if, rather than a literal experience with literal consequences.  You paint your deepest emotions.  I write myself to a place of open mystery.  In real life, however, daily life — the life of compacts, trusts, reliabilities — stark frankness is wounding and offensive, denies necessary fictions (such as fatherhood, husband-hood, friendship, teacher-hood, citizenship, team person-ship), and in denying becomes itself a lie, a withholding.

This may be the basis of Catholic confession, and of prayer in general.  If there is a God who knows everything, whose understanding is infinite and forgiving, then we are not alone.  We believe in divine intimacy.  We make or dream a space of utter vulnerability, beyond self-deceptions and working truths.

*

Abused, forgetting becomes a power of pathology, a denial of life, a repression in psychological terms.  I push myself away, estranged.  Used correctly, I suppose, forgetting is “forget and forgive,” though without remembering how do you forgive, and without forgiving, how do you forget?

*

I have believed too readily that life is a quest for some absolute perspective, some final clarification.  That adulthood itself is always that next horizon, that higher and wider perspective, from which everything becomes clear.  That all experience, human experience, my experience, will overlap and coincide and I will be with the old men on Yeats’s lapis lazuli, looking down on the spectacle of human folly and ignorance and futures and my glittering eyes will be gay.

I think of the perspectives of Zen.  The idea of reincarnation, of one life-stage progressing in perspective to the next until one reaches Nirvana.  I think of the “epiphany” in fiction as speaking for our faith in endings; of John Keats and his 24-year- old vision of “stepping towards truth.”

But I don’t know.

At the end, we see perhaps what we wished we saw, just as we do each night in dreams.  Perhaps the quest for perspective is life’s make-work.  We search, we study, we dream.  In small ways we acquire small wisdoms.  And yet we forget more than we remember.  In my own life how often I have willingly walked by hints and clues, and even by life’s angels.  I have chosen not to ask.  Not to see. Not to know.

And then it comes.  Your ending.  It happens.  Swiftly as fact.  This is happening.  Or slowly, and in pain, nine months, nine weeks.  Your body claims your mind.  Your body and your mind are one.  Failing.  Too tired to think, too weak.

Yes.

No.

Rosebud.

*

Who there can remember, imagine or believe in here?

I’d stolen food from the age of eight until roughly the age of fourteen, the $50.00 my mother earned weekly incapable of providing what we needed.  My first theft, conducted with breathless impulsivity, was at the corner grocery.  On the way to school one morning, my brother and I paused to stare lustfully at bins of bagels piled high in a large glass window. The yeasty smell leaked out the door as customers went in and out. I could taste the thick desirable heft of them, the pungent saltiness and doughy insides.  Warning my brother to wait outside, I slipped inside the store, the bell that announced me lost in the laughter of the owner and some neighborhood women. The fear and pounding heart I’d experienced planning the heist vanished as I moved into action, a calculated cool taking over. I approached the bin, noted my brother’s anxious face on the other side of the glass and nodded confidently at him. The owner and patrons, still gossiping, didn’t glance at me as I fit four bagels into the pockets of my jacket, slid along the wall to the door, pulled it open and left. The bagels were freshly baked, their residual warmth against my body a promise of pleasure to come. We devoured them on the way to school, poking moist fingertips into my pocket to capture every crumb.

My success at filling our growling stomachs that morning led me to begin raiding the near-by chain supermarket, stuffing shiny tins of fish, small rolls and crisp vegetables into my pocket.  That winter I passed a store window with a pair of warm leather boots nestled in drifts of ersatz fur and jewels. At the department store next day I prowled the racks for the proper-sized boots which I put on, replacing them on the racks with my old loafers.  Contemporary shoe departments bustling with saleswomen, small mirrors, and backroom stock were at least ten years in the future, leaving my handiwork unobserved.  I walked about the store checking to see if I was followed and then downstairs and into the street.  That winter I stole a blue woolen dress, ripping off the tags while in the dressing room, then covering it with a heavy coat, tags also removed, and, on the way out, slipping two albums by the Weavers into a shopping bag. A week later I stole two shirts, a winter jacket and boots for my brother, all slipped into that same nefarious shopping bag. By fourteen I had a summer job, which led to a part time one after school earning enough money to end my career as thief.

It was easier than I’d imagined to resurrect the practice when hit with poverty after my divorce.  My two sons and I lived in the middle-class, painfully stereotypic Long Island suburb that had been my husband’s choice.  I never fit into this enclave of matching sheets and dishes, ritualized family dinners at seven o’clock, coffee klatches to discuss delicate marital details, an insistence that a certain social acceptance depended upon the ownership of redundant items or useless absurdities.  My neighbors favored manicured nails, artfully disheveled hair lacquered with hairspray, over-priced clothing designed to suggest a wanton bohemian freedom: jeans artfully ripped at the knees and fine cotton shirts streaked with paint. I found it deceitful in the particularly American way that later encouraged affluent teenagers to affect the street style of the ghetto as though mere appearance altered the life they’d been born into, a sly way to present the credentials of the scarred without the pain and inconvenience. I still drank tea from glasses as my immigrant mother had, dressed in comfortable, unfashionable clothes, carried a backpack, my lack of concern with appearances provoking both distance and an odd envy from a few of my neighbors.  I felt myself differentiated from those around me through a form of natural selection that insured survival, a reverse snobbery as an antidote to not belonging.   My ex-husband, with his history of coolly tiled rooms and attentive servants before fleeing Cuba, liked to say, “You can take the girl out of the slum, but not the slum out of the girl.”  His desire for a return to upper-middle-class existence was finally realized with a more acceptable wife, in another small house in another small suburb identical to this one. We were both thieves since, while married, we had stolen each other’s sense of certainty, a theft finally remedied by our divorce.

My vengeful ex-husband reluctantly paid rent and minimum child support.  He could not be cajoled or pleaded with when I ran short of money at the end of the month; he was immune to guilt. I was in college full-time by then, certain an education could insure freedom from poverty. My income, besides what he contributed, came from a work-study job teaching problem kids, a pittance from baking for college bakeries, student loans, a scholarship; a lot of work that barely provided enough to buy gas and pay bills. The only government service available to us was the free lunch program for my sons.  I had no access to the far more acceptable white-collar crime, the art of acquiring luxury through manipulation. The choice was easy. Hunger defined my childhood; it would not define my children’s.  I would not quit school for a low-paying job, and we would not be hungry.

One morning, while my sons were in school, I drove to a nearby supermarket ignoring my usual purchases of bruised produce, day-old breads, items marked down a day before their expiration date. Childhood hunger fostered the concept of food as a precious commodity. I shopped for peaches, apples, pears, peppers, broccoli, asparagus, the way other women might shop for expensive jewelry, the green of a smooth, full pepper as exotic as an emerald.

The scent of this new store was intoxicating, prompting regression to a child starving despite having eaten lunch one-half-hour earlier.  I breathed deeply as though smell could sate my hunger and stuffed free samples into my mouth.  After that, I surrendered to sheer instinct, a shark targeting nutrition-rich items like tuna that would easily fit in my pockets, under-sized vegetables that would lie flat against my body, a can of dough that baked up into warm, tasteless rolls, waiting until the aisle was empty of customers.  I avoided frozen foods, which would leave widening stains of moisture as the frost melted. Containers of milk were the most difficult but the taste of powdered milk was onerous; it was the taste of poverty.   On my way out I slid a container into my pocket, hooking my arm in a particular way to conceal it.

I exited the store prideful as anyone completing a job successfully, pleased that my skills, dormant for so many years, were intact. I left the store warning myself not to feel too confident, to remain cautious. Each succeeding theft would increase my chance of being caught – the law of averages, something I was taught by my stepfather, a professional gambler long-vanished from my life.

Often, before driving home from my work-study job at a private school in an up-scale neighborhood, I would case their supermarkets, noting the better cuts of meat, fresher vegetables, exotic fruit, pocketing items not easily available.  This supermarket was easier to pilfer than the one in my neighborhood, as if hands-on stealing was inconceivable in a community of gracious houses with gardeners and cleaning women.

That winter I stole each son a winter coat, putting them, one at a time, over my thin jacket and leaving the department store without incident.  I also entered with an empty shopping bag and left with two sets of boots, prices ripped off; smeared with dirt to suggest I’d just retrieved them from the store’s shoe repair shop.

I stole food for approximately two years, branching out to include frozen vegetables by stuffing a plastic bag in each of my pockets. I found a job the week before I graduated with a degree in education.  I stole my last day’s worth of meals before my first paycheck.  When I was paid, we went out to a restaurant for dinner. We each had three desserts.

I moved to Maine two months after graduation, needing distance from my ex-husband’s hostility.  I accepted a low-paying job at a rural school for disabled children simply because they were first to contact me. I’d never before had directions given in terms of trees, family farmhouses, clocks with cracked faces on old church steeples. The students’ parents worked outside jobs, hunted for deer or moose to provide meat, put up fruits and vegetables from their gardens. Often I was gifted with cuts of venison, which although a vegetarian myself I would cook up for my sons.  The generosity of these parents echoed my experiences in Brooklyn; those with little are often likely to help each other.

The school, with little state funding, went broke a month before the end of the school year. New teachers were rarely hired in mainstream schools before the end of August. My ex-husband was clear that there’d be no loan to tide me over. I was alone, robbed of those closest to me through a systemic lack of services and conscience: my mother had died in a charity ward, lacking proper medical care after a flawed surgery.  My brother had been killed in Vietnam, unable to flee to Canada nor escape service through attending college as those of means did. I was frightened by this replication of my mother’s situation; felt trapped in the cycle of poverty, the possibility of escape dangling just out of reach.

I quickly found a job as a saleswoman in an overpriced craft store in a plush resort town, bursting with tourists who skied in winter and swam in their second-home pools in summer.  Each morning on the way to work I passed chic people carrying bags filled with newly purchased, non-essential items.  I beat back my ghetto child’s resentment, reminding myself that my goal was to achieve a status that allowed me the choice of not purchasing such things.  My salary was meager; the job designed for college students, their employment an easy introduction to the working world, their salary merely “pin money.”   Affluent America displayed itself around me, a glittery landscape without scorched edges. The nation felt broken: the founding ideals, the myth of opportunity and equality, the promise that a college education granted food on the table, seemed a deliberate distraction from the nation’s essential truth; certain elements of the population would always be deprived, reaffirmed thirty years later with the wreckage of Katrina.  I viewed the lies the government told us about Vietnam, and Watergate as smaller lies, both transient and inevitable, swapping out one scandal or war for the next that would surely come.  They seemed to me a greater conspiracy of lies; I saw the government engaged in a delicate balancing act to mythologize possibility despite the rarity of actualization.

I hated my bitterness, my cynicism, my recurrent anger, but especially hated hunger, its continuing saga almost blinding me to the reality, that the fruits of my education were only temporarily on vacation and quietly waiting for the end of summer to get back to work. While I would never be wealthy, I would be able to pay bills. The country was not in a recession, a depression or any other financial crisis; I was simply out of a job. I needed to make it through four months after which I would likely be hired to teach.

I had too much to lose to risk stealing again – no school would hire a teacher with a criminal record.  I thought about a second job. It was the casual conversation between a pair of customers as I wrapped their purchases that provided an answer: The Happy Hour.  The description of the bounty they’d consumed for the price of cocktails was compelling.  I’d never gone to bars, had no actual knowledge beyond advertisements I’d ignored, of this teasing come-on of rich, salty food designed to encourage the consumption of liquor.

Philosophically, is ordering three cokes so you can fill your paper plate four or five times stealing food?  We ate far more than the cost of our cokes, yet the liquor others consumed was so expensive that our meals were already paid for.  My stepfather would have said that “the house” has all the advantages, so do your best to win.

Our first visit was a revelation.  We went to a bar attached to a well-reviewed Chinese restaurant. The heavy metal door opened onto a stratum of sounds piled atop each other like players at a football skirmish: loud conversations, waitresses’ shouting orders, a basketball game on television, all balanced on a foundation of jazz.  The smell of food was tainted by cigarette smoke and all around us was that certain boozy indulgence of drinking freely manifested by lopsided smiles and loud laughs.

We passed the hot-table and gasped at the bounty: carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, cheese, spare ribs, fried chicken wings, grapes, watermelon, cantaloupe and strawberries out of season, tiny slices of chocolate cake.  I was giddy with the offering, my perpetually starving inner-child nearly wild with excitement. To this day, that table remains vivid in my memory, exaggerated through time into a cornucopia of food overflowing the bins, the rising perfume of grease, garlic and soy sauce, a sacrament for the deserving. We found a table and I designed a balanced menu for us.  The waitress brought our cokes and after our third refill at the hot table refilled them for us as well.

On the way home, in the warmth of my old Honda, we joked about being so full we had stomachaches, even critiquing the food we’d filled our plates with again and again, pointing out what was overdone, what was too salty, how dried-out the cheese was, fruit not quite ripe. I felt drunk, experienced an unexpected power, had a fraudulent belief that I’d “gamed the system,” as my stepfather would describe it; the slum child’s desire to win on her own terms.

We developed an itinerary.  Mondays the Chinese restaurant, Tuesdays and Thursdays a bar my sons labeled “The designer cream cheese place,” with five cream cheese spreads, fresh vegetables, crackers and fruit, Wednesdays an Italian restaurant offering tiny meatballs, fried eggplant, and sautéed green and red peppers.  Friday and Saturday were big nights, an overflow of rich salty food obscene in their plentitude. Sunday’s offered no happy hours, but we got by on what I’d stuffed into my purse at the previous ones.

I wanted my mother, dead two years, to experience this over-indulgence.  I wanted to lift her from the debris of gaunt survival through the petty expense of overpriced coke.  I mourned that she knew nothing of this possibility back then, though the shabby bars of my childhood most likely offered nothing more than scratchy jukebox recordings and chipped glass ashtrays.  She labored as a file clerk for the American Kennel Club, an organization devoted to owners of show dogs that cost more than one year of her salary.

That summer, so long ago, was the last one of need.  I slowly acquired the trappings of comfort; a second husband, a house, vacations, and a full refrigerator. I acquired excess: ten cashmere sweaters at three dollars each from Good Will but eight more than I needed, two dozen second-hand crystal wineglasses, though I had barely a dozen friends, two winter coats though one was enough.

Fifteen years ago an overweight woman in my writing group discussed her diet, taking personal responsibility for overeating since nobody starves in America. Everyone else nodded.  I was shocked, as though plunged into ice water, to realize I had achieved a level of affluence that allowed me to join a group that espoused this distortion. I’d slipped into a world of truth different than my own; that hunger is an everyday affair and stealing can be another way to make a living.

An unexpected surge of anger knotted my throat, anger I hadn’t felt in years. I envied these women their parents and siblings, their paid college education after high school, their freedom to have refused jobs they didn’t want, but especially their certainty that the system worked on their behalf.  I reminded myself their class was an accident of birth; what my stepfather would have described as a roll of the dice.  I realized how stranded I was in the midst of a failed metamorphosis between sordid memories of rat-infested apartments and my present circumstance, one of middle-class comforts.

In that group the following week I wrote an essay about growing up hungry, about stealing food.  Silence ensued as I used words like class, hunger, poverty.  I understood in their silence that I had stolen their flimsy pretext that nobody is hungry in America.  I was tarnished; my differences previously labeled eccentric, quaint, Bohemian recognized as deviant. While they’d known that I had grown up in a ghetto, they’d never contemplated what that actually meant. For them, the poor were either villainized or romanticized in film; propaganda to assuage the conscience of “the other America.”  They felt attacked by the explosion of detail on the page; my smooth-running car, my excess of cashmere sweaters, my extra winter coat, all revealed as concealment of a vital fact; I was not one of them. They never voiced this, but it was evident in the way they turned away and within a few months I left group.  Eventually I moved, met other women, developed friendships, learned to be easier with possessions, although I sometimes wander my house, touch things, wonder what I am doing owning all of this.

But I do own all of this; I am the fruition of the American dream.  I am an American fairytale come true.  I am the bastard child of poverty and perfect timing, a product of one of those periodic windows of opportunity, in this instance Lyndon Johnson’s vision of the Great Society that offered scholarships, free lunch for children, a college counselor to guide me through an alien world. It is my grandchildren who are the ultimate culmination of the American dream, offspring of a peculiar type of immigrant, one who has never left their native country, merely emigrated from one class to another.  They are a first generation who has never known poverty and can comfortably speak the language of their native landscape; their parents safely crossed the border but they are the true citizens. I remain an immigrant, poverty my country of origin.  I cannot comfortably navigate this new land of enough, often speaking out of turn, committing cultural faux-pas’, seeped in survivor guilt, I am a class act, a victim, perhaps volitional, of the final theft of belonging.

Prison is designed to separate, isolate, and alienate you from everyone and everything.  You’re not even allowed to so much as touch your spouse, your parents, your children.  The system does everything within its power to sever any physical or emotional links you have to anyone in the outside world.  They want your children to grow up without ever knowing you.  They want your spouse to forget your face and start a new life.  They want you to sit alone, grieving, in a concrete box, unable even to say your last farewell at a parent’s funeral.  It’s not just that things work out this way—it’s that they’re intentionally, and sometimes maliciously, designed to be that way.  You’d be surprised how many members of the staff actually get off on it, like sadistic torturers.  Others simply don’t care, because they’ve never looked at you as being human in the first place.

I believe there are only two unstoppable forces in the universe.  One is love, the other is intelligence.  I also believe that a person’s capacity to love is directly related to their intelligence level, just as hate corresponds to a person’s level of ignorance.  The only thing that makes it impossible for the system to destroy you and grind your spirit into nothing is to be more intelligent than it is.

In some ways maintaining a relationship while entombed behind these walls is like trying to overcome brain damage.  When one area of the brain is damaged, the other areas have to find ways to compensate by evolving and developing new neural pathways that would never have come about under normal circumstances.  In here, the “normal” ways of expressing, giving, and receiving love have been damaged beyond repair.  If you don’t evolve, your relationship will very shortly die.  You can’t kiss your wife goodbye every morning before heading off to work.  You can’t hold her when she cries, or sneak up from behind with a surprise hug.  There is no going out for dinner, or heading to a hotel for a weekend getaway.  It creates tremendous stress fractures on a relationship which eventually causes the entire thing to crumble.  When you have an argument you can’t even hold hands and talk sweetly to one another when making up.  You’re limited to whatever emotion you can express in a ten-minute conversation on a telephone which other people are listening in on and recording every word.  The vast majority of people in prison are not intelligent enough to overcome these obstacles, and soon find themselves alone, left behind by people who have moved on.

My wife and I have struggled, fought, wept, and laughed as we were forced to discover new connections.  She’s the only person I’ve ever seen who has the tenacity and will power to keep going when all others would have given up and walked away in defeat.  We’ve had to take turns guiding each other through dark places.  In the end it helped us to create a stronger bond than others who get to live together under the same roof.  We’ve grown together as a single organism.

Times have been both hard and magical.  I’ll never forget the Christmas we spent brokenheartedly whispering to each other on the phone, listing all the presents we would so dearly have loved to be able to give the other.  Sometimes we decide on television programs to watch together and it’s as if we’re going to the movies on a date.  We adjuste our sleep schedules so that we go to bed and get up at the same time.  We talk to each other all day long.  For example, I’ll think of something she said or did when she was last here and suddenly find myself laughing at her antics and saying, “You monkey!”  I speak out loud, forgetting for a moment that I’m alone in a prison cell.  Instead, for that time period we are playing and cavorting together.  We both do this.

One of our greatest inventions was moon water.  Another prisoner once discovered me making moon water and he said it was so illogical that it nearly drove him insane.  For months afterwards he would stomp his feet in frustration and bellow, “This shit is crazy!  It makes no sense!  That shit is making my head hurt!”  For some reason the thought of it seemed to hurt his mind.  Then again, he was a little unbalanced to begin with.

Moon water can only be made once a month, on the night of the full moon.  After the sun goes down and the moon rides high, you fill a container with water and set it on a window ledge so that the moon casts a reflection in it.  You must leave it there all night, so that it catches as much of the moon’s light as possible.  You have to remove it right before morning, so that the sun’s light never touches it.  It must then be kept in a dark place.  My wife and I did this every full moon for years, and we would take a single sip of the water at the same time each night while thinking of each other.  In that moment we were united, no matter how far apart we might be.  You only take a single sip each night so that you have enough to last the entire month.

Of course, the other prisoner didn’t know all this.  He only knew that I was hiding a container of water which I took one drink from each night, after the moon had been reflected in it.  He kept asking questions like “What does it do to you?”  I gave no answer.  Once when he could take it no longer, he filled a glass with water and put it in the window.  After half an hour he reclaimed it and poured it out while angrily proclaiming, “Fuck that, that’s heathen shit.”

Moon water is a neural pathway which would never have been explored under normal circumstances.  For every way the system attempts to separate us, we can’t help but seek out new ways to pull ourselves together.  In the end, hatefulness and ignorance will fail in the face of intelligence and love.  The proof is in the moon water.

——-

The dream was about my cousin, Winston, a relative I hadn’t thought about in years. I woke from it in  the way you do when you’re trying to escape a nightmare, a situation so disturbingly real your mind tells you to find a way to leave it as soon as possible. It’s only a dream, you want to say. I’m not here. I’m in my bed asleep, and if I try hard enough I’ll be conscious again in a place where I’m not dreaming.

I jerked awake, in a cool room with covers over me and my wife asleep beside me, and I waited for the calm of reality to reassure that all was well, no matter what my unconscious mind was telling me. The after effects of the dream lasted, though, much longer than ordinary, and even after I’d gone back to sleep, something worked inside to remind me of where I had been and how badly I had wanted to leave that place.

In the dream, Winston and I were in possession of a stolen car, a luxury auto of great solidity – massive, sleek and dark in color -, and we were in a parking garage planning how we’d convert what we had into cash. My cousin had stolen the car, but I had arranged the theft and now I was terribly afraid I’d be found out. In the dream I was conscious of being myself in my current situation in life, a dean of a college with a reputation and social status to protect. A black man was there in the garage, colluding with us in this criminal act. He had jerri curls, a ruined face, and he reeked of danger.

Winston was himself as I had last seen him, a day over twenty years ago when he had come to my father’s funeral in East Texas in a cemetery named Menard Chapel where members of the Duff family have been buried for generations, all the way back to the first family member in Texas, Winston’s and my great-grandfather who had come to the state from Louisiana after his participation in the Civil War. He had become a Baptist preacher after the war, he founded the church at Menard Chapel, and he spawned all the Duff family to come.

Winston and I were the only sons of two brothers of the clan. I was four or five years older than Winston, and my first memory of him is as a child in my family’s house in Nederland. He had been left for my mother to look after, and he had a cold so severe that snot was running down his face as he stood in our living room, looking up at me, his older cousin, and trying to snuffle stuff back into his head.

“Look at Winston,” I said to my mother. “Fix him. He’s all messed up.”

She tended to that, and I left the room, not wanting to be around somebody who looked like him, who was so repulsive and who wanted to follow me around in such a leaking condition.

Our family moved a lot, from one rent house to another in whatever location in the petro-chemical area of the Texas Gulf Coast Big Willie Duff could find work, and Winston’s family was worse in that respect than we were. My sightings of Joseph Winston Duff were scattered and infrequent, but always memorable, due largely to the fact that his father Lewis was a notorious drunk, liable to show up at any time of the day or night at the homes of his brothers and sisters in search of somewhere to lay his head and particularly to look for something to drink. Often he had Winston with him.

Uncle Lewis’s only son was the fifth child born in the family, and his arrival was so momentous to Uncle Lewis – a boy at last, after the succession of daughters Emily, Betty, Doris, and Nola Mae – that he was given a special name. It wasn’t until I was well along in my education that I realized why my cousin was named Joseph Winston, and I was amazed to recognize the source of his given names. He was born during one of the monumental diplomatic meetings of the Allies during World War II, and the names chosen by his father came from those of Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill in light of their gathering with FDR in Yalta to divide up the Western world on the verge of the Allied victory in Europe.

Winston’s naming was Faulknerian, I came to realize, akin to the sardonic name slapped on the character Wall Street Panic Snopes by the novelist in one of his lesser books, and its choice reflected not thought, but a desire by an ignorant parent to lend an infant significance by labeling the child after a stray element in the Zeitgeist. It would have been embarrassingly laughable to anyone with a semblance of education and awareness, but that fact did not apply in the case of Lewis Calvin Duff, father of Joseph Winston. The names he chose for his only son sounded important, even august, I imagine, to him, and he intended by the naming of his son to bestow a mark of respect and an homage to greatness by the act.

Joseph Winston had been singled out, and he had the label to prove it. He didn’t realize that fact, but those in the social classes above him could be mildly entertained by what he was called, if they happened to notice it. That amusement of his betters would be an expression of contempt for him and his kind, but he was not likely ever to know that.

I was around Winston, off and on, until my family made its move from the Gulf Coast to the pine barrens of Polk County  after my father lost his job with the Sun Oil Company and retreated to his home ground to sulk and plot vengeance. It wasn’t until after we returned to the Golden Triangle, so-called, eight or nine years later, that I saw Winston for more than a couple of hours at a time.

My family, brought low by my father’s inability to find regular work at a living wage, came back to Nederland so that my father could seek employment in a place that had jobs, and we stayed for a couple of weeks with Uncle Lewis and Aunt Myrtie and  their children still at home. Those were Virginia Anne and Winston. Ginny Anne was a child still, but Winston had grown into a rangy, wide-shouldered youth, hungry for a different kind of food, real and metaphorical.

“Winston,” I said to him soon after we’d moved in, “will your daddy let us use his lawn mower to go around and ask folks if we can cut their grass and make us some money?”

“I don’t see why not,” my cousin said. “He ain’t going to be using it.”

We took off every morning then with a gas can and the beat-up rotary mower, walking the streets of Nederland, Texas, and looking for unmowed yards. Sure enough, we found a few people, old ladies living alone mainly with a few younger ones with husbands who either didn’t own a mower or wouldn’t use it, willing to hire us to mow their weedy San Augustine grass-filled yards. Our most likely takers, we soon learned, were on the low end of the economic scale in Nederland, and they didn’t want to pay much.

The nicer looking yards belonged to people who gave us hard looks and short answers, no matter how badly their grass needed cutting, and we quickly learned to judge our low likelihood of  success with this class of people and to keep moving when we saw signs of affluence. A nice car parked in the driveway, matching curtains in the windows, houses neatly painted, well-dressed children, women whose hair showed signs of having been messed with in beauty parlors, unbroken toys in the yard, planted flowers in beds.

A typical rate for a grass cutting of the yards of people who would hire us was two or three dollars, and as soon as we got paid for a job, we took a break from employment by going to the drugstore. There we bought milk shakes, candy bars, and Pall Mall cigarettes, that brand because it provided smokes that were longer and stronger than most others. We repaired then to the closest empty lot, ate our candy, smoked our cigarettes and talked about what we’d do when we were old enough to escape home and live on our own.

“You know one thing I will have,” Winston once told me, puffing hard on his Pall Mall, and taking hits off a quart sized Coke, “once I get grown?”

“What?” I said, drawing my own dose of smoke deep into my lungs and holding my cigarette the way James Dean did in Rebel Without a Cause, cool but necessary. “What’s that, Winston?”

“I will have my damn cigarettes, that’s what,” he said. “As many as I want to.”

“You’re damn right,” I said and flipped my butt into the street. “Let’s see if that old lady on Detroit Street will let us cut her grass again. It’s high as my knees.”

What we really wanted was access to beer, but that was hard to come by. At age sixteen, I had already been introduced to the pleasures of alcohol by my cousin on my mother’s side of the family, Addison Irwin in Maryland. I realized vaguely that I was to Addison Irwin, an older cousin from real people as opposed to the Duff bunch, as Winston was to me, but I didn’t let myself think about that at the time. The comparison made me uncomfortable. If Addison considered my status and worth in the light I considered Winston’s, I was on shaky ground. I didn’t like the terms of the equation, and the way it figured socially.

I knew one thing clearly, though. I would never want Addison, my exalted cousin, to meet Winston, my lowly one, or to know I was related to someone like him. In the meantime, though, I liked cutting grass with Winston, eating sweets and smoking cigarettes with the money we made from our efforts, and having him look up to me as older, wiser, and more sophisticated. I wanted and needed the admiring approval he gave me, and I would take all of that he had to offer. He thought I was something, though I and the rest of the world knew different.

My family went back to East Texas later that summer, but in a few months my father did find a job on the Gulf Coast, working for the City of Nederland in the Streets and Alleys Department (which meant picking up garbage and digging ditches), and we moved out of the Piney Woods for good. By that time I was in my senior year of high school, and Winston was living with his family in a town named Fannett, twenty or so miles away.

I finished high school, enrolled as a commuter student at Lamar State College of Technology in Beaumont (an institution called by its students Pecker Tech because its mascot was the Cardinal and because we all knew why we were there rather than at the University of Texas or Texas A&M or some other real college like the ones in the movies), and I had little reason to be around Winston, my young cousin living in the sticks.

But then Uncle Lewis moved his clan back to Nederland, Winston enrolled in the high school, which had been a power in Texas school-boy football for years, and he proved to be a defensive end of note. One of the coaches told me years later what made Winston so formidable at his position.

“When we played any team,” he said, “they would run Winston’s end sometime early on in the game. Let me tell you, hoss, once they ran it that one time, they didn’t run it again for the rest of the game.”

“He was that good?” I said.

“He was that mean,” the coach said. “He wasn’t that big, but nobody could stop him from getting to the ball carrier. He would do whatever it took to get there.”

“And he took the ball carrier down.”

“Winston Duff took it as a personal insult that somebody carrying a football would try to get around his end of the line. He made that back pay his dues.”

Winston got enough public notice in that football crazed part of the world that people at Lamar began asking me if I was kin to him, and I allowed that I was. I even invited him to come to a retreat held by the fraternity to which I belonged, a collection of people too poor financially or ethnically or intellectually to be members of any other social organization, even of the ones at Lamar. We had foreign students in the fraternity – Japanese and Arabs – and dolts and slackers, and others recognized to be misfits of many stripes and colors. But we did wear fraternity pins, and have meetings, and we did get drunk every chance we got.

Winston was a great hit at the fraternity retreat, held on someone’s abandoned farm north of Beaumont in the palmettos and pines, and fueled with kegs of beer and random bottles of cheap liquor. At age sixteen, he drank with the best of them, not falling down and not throwing up, telling jokes and stories about playing football, and making his older cousin proud of him, a football end for the Nederland Bulldogs, destined to be recruited to play for a real university in the Southwest Conference someday.

That drunken weekend in and around the only building still standing on an abandoned and overgrown farm in Jefferson County, Texas, a tin roofed barn full of drunken college boys, proved to be the height of Winston Duff’s public regard and career, in my estimation, as I look back over the years.

Within a month’s time, Winston’s father moved his family north to Corrigan, a played out sawmill town in rumpsprung Polk County in Deep East Texas, and he took Winston with him. The head coach of the Nederland football team begged Lewis Duff to allow Winston to remain in the high school and on the team (which would have been illegal, but we’re talking Nederland Bulldog football and we’re talking keeping an advantage), living with him and his family in a subdivision tract house, in progress and on course to play out his eligibility and have a shot at attendance at a big-time Texas university where use might be found for him on the defensive end of some line in a large stadium in autumns to come.

My uncle would not allow that separation of his only son from the family, called on all the ties of kinship which bound his boy to him, and obliterated any chance for Joseph Winston Duff to escape the fate laid down for him by circumstance and blood. Winston listened to his father, accompanied the family to Corrigan, played football there in the obscurity of smalltime East Texas, and dropped out of high school in his senior year, assuring that no ray of light would ever chance to fall upon him again.

The next time I saw Winston was at my mother’s funeral at Menard Chapel in the 1960s. I was newly married, in graduate school in Arkansas, and Winston was working as a journeyman carpenter in the Beaumont area. He came up to me as soon as I arrived in the procession of cars escorting my mother’s coffin into the woods of East Texas. He was wider in the shoulders than ever, rangy in the leg, and he was with a young pregnant blonde whose bra size looked to be larger than her IQ.

“Gerald,” Winston said, grinning as we shook hands. “Aunt Dorothy was always so good to me when I was a kid and would come to y’all’s house .This here is Jeanette. We’re going to get married, I guess.” And then to the blonde, “This here is my cousin Gerald, Jeanette. He’s studying to be a college professor.”

“Hidy,” Jeanette said, staring over my shoulder at the woods behind me, proving that I was still not attractive to Texas women with big breasts. Talking to Winston, I was pained to see that his teeth had gotten bad, decay clearly visible on a couple of incisors, and more painful than that to me was that Winston was aware of the fact, holding his mouth funny and throwing a hand up to hide his teeth when he smiled or laughed.

“I bet you can’t guess how much money I made last year,” Winston said at one point, “building kitchen cabinets in new houses.”

“How much?” I said, and then naming a figure I thought would be low enough to give him bragging rights when he answered the question he’d put to me, “six thousand?”

“I made over eleven thousand dollars,” my cousin said. “And that was only what I had to declare to the government because of the paper they had on it. I really made a couple of more.”

“Damn, Winston,” I said, truly amazed at the amount of his earnings in that year in the ‘60s, “you’re really making out all right.”

He beamed, even forgetting to hide his teeth in his pride. During the funeral itself, Winston sat by me as I wept and mourned the death of my mother from cancer at age fifty-two, and I was glad to have my kinsman to lean on, literally and metaphorically that cold gray day in November on the burying ground of Menard Chapel.

It was not until several years later that I heard of Winston again. I was living in Nashville, teaching at Vanderbilt, when my sister called me to bring me up to date on Duff family news. “Too bad about Winston,” she said. “I guess you heard already.”

“What? Is Winston dead?” I said, imagining a car wreck or an accident at work, something involving sudden violence and blood and finality.

“He might as well be,” Nancy said. “He’s about to go to the penitentiary in Huntsville. I don’t know for how long, but it’s got to be years.”

“What did he do?” I asked, knowing Nancy would string out her telling of the tale for dramatic effect, true to the narrative sense of the Duffs, a clan relishing stories of disaster, loss, and abandonment. “Did he get caught robbing somebody?”

“No, Gerald,” my sister said, exasperated at my leap to conclusion. “My goodness. Winston would never steal anything from anybody. He killed a couple of black guys outside some honky tonk up in the Big Thicket, that’s what.”

“He shot them?”

“No, good lord. Winston wouldn’t shoot anybody or stab them or anything like that. They got into some kind of argument or something inside the honky tonk and when Winston went outside and got into his pickup to leave, these guys were waiting for him, I guess to beat him up, and Winston ran over them with the truck.”

“And they put him in prison for murder? It wasn’t called self defense?”

“I guess Winston could’ve got off with something like that, if that was all there was to it. But the thing is, see, after he knocked them down with the pickup, he backed up and ran over them again. That showed premeditation, the way the jury and judge saw it.”

“Lord have mercy,” I said. “And now he’s in the pen. How stupid could he have been?”

“I expect he was drunk, too,” Nancy said. “Not just stupid. So our cousin is a convict in the Huntsville pen. How do you like that?”

“I don’t,” I said. “I don’t like it at all.”

“I’m not going to visit him, either,” Nancy said. “Are you?”

“How could I? I live in Tennessee.”

“I’m just not going to think about it, my cousin in the pen,” my sister said. “I’ve got enough on my mind as it is.”

“Me too, Nancy,” I said, “me too.”

After then, I went back to Texas many times over the years for visits and anniversaries and graduations and deaths, but I never tried to see Winston in the state penitentiary in Huntsville, and I never asked any member of the family for any news about him. What news could there be? He had killed two men, been convicted and sentenced to confinement, and to think about him in that situation was something I would not allow myself to do. How would he look at me if I visited him in some special room for that in the prison? What would he say to me? What would he expect me to say back to him? What would he need from me that I was not prepared to give? Did he believe I had resources inside me that I could call on? I didn’t think so. I didn’t believe I did, no matter what my cousin might think.

I didn’t want to have to try to summon up anything responsive to Winston’s emotional need. I didn’t want to discover what was inside me. Or what wasn’t. I suspected I knew already how I would act, and I didn’t want to admit that I could not and would not do my cousin any good in the worst time of his life.

After getting credit for good time served, Winston was released early from the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville on probation, and he returned to his work as a carpenter. I learned about his release indirectly, and I didn’t try to find out where he was living and what he was doing. I did not want to contact him. I had told the woman who was my wife at the time about him, about my growing up with him, and what happened to put him in prison, and she made me swear not to let such a relative know anything about where we were living, where I worked, and who she was.

“Just what we need,” she said. “A convict from Texas showing up in Gambier, Ohio, looking to re-establish old family ties.”

I agreed with her, imagining Winston asking around Kenyon College in a search for his cousin. He’d be toothless, I figured, dressed in keeping with his social status, driving either a wreck of a car or a new pickup, and eager to see me. That reminder of my family and my origins I didn’t need and could not have borne. I just won’t think about him, I told myself. Winston couldn’t find me anyway, and he’d never appear at my door, expecting me to respond to him as an older cousin from East Texas ought to do by reason of blood ties and memory.

I was right. Winston never wrote me, never called me, and never came to my door. I was never put to that test of blood.  I did hear about him intermittently, though, again from my sister who had also risen socially and economically, in her case by marriage to a successful man in computers in Houston.

“Gerald,” she said one night in a phone call, “guess what Winston did when he got back home to Buna?”

“Violated probation?” I said. “Ran over some more people? Stuck up a convenience store?”

“Don’t joke.You know he’s not like that. He wouldn’t commit a crime. No, what he did was find out that that wife of his, Jeanette, had been messing around with Johnny Wooten while Winston was in the pen, and he beat the hell out of him. Broke the bones around one of Johnny’s eye sockets. That’s all he did.”

“Johnny Wooten?” I said, “Betty’s husband?”

Betty was one of Winston’s sisters, and it was in her home with her husband Johnny that Winston had been directed to stay by the Texas State Department of Corrections while he served out his probation. His wife Jeanette had been living there with her two children by Winston while he was in Huntsville. I was not surprised to learn that Johnny had put a move on his brother-in-law’s wife or that she had responded to him. The only thing out of the ordinary, I considered, was that Johnny had been stupid enough to think he could get away with it. He was not thinking at all, obviously. As my father would have said, Johnny wasn’t thinking with his head.

“Did Johnny put the law on Winston?” I said. “Will the probation people send Winston back to the pen?”

“I don’t expect Winston has anything to worry about from Johnny Wooten,” my sister said. “Johnny knows what would happen to him if he breathed a word to anybody that could get Winston put back inside.”

“Is Winston still staying at Betty’s and Johnny’s?” I said, knowing Nancy was right about Johnny Wooten taking his beating in silence. One would be enough.

“Winston has to until he gets permission to go off to live on his own, but that wife is gone now.”

“Did Winston beat her up?”

“No,” Nancy said in a disgusted tone. “You know Duffs don’t hit women. They’ve not been raised like that.”

“No,” I agreed. “A Duff from East Texas will not physically whip up on a woman. He’ll just wreak havoc on her mind.”

Yet years later when I saw Winston for what was the final time, he was still living with his sister Betty and her husband Johnny Wooten, together somewhere in a small house in a dying town on the Texas Gulf Coast. As usual, that encounter with Winston took place at a funeral, the only event that ever draws all the extended Duff family together, this one the burial of my father in Menard Chapel with the rest of the clan and their connections by marriage and happenstance.

I was even more of a curiosity to them than ever by then, though I had always been an oddity among the Duff bunch, as we were known in Polk County. All the clan remembered me as I was as a child. I was strange because I stuttered and talked at a hyperactive rate, I spent most of my time reading, impervious to calls for attention by other people, I was not athletic like most of my rangy, self-confident, supple cousins, people who shrugged off physical pain and emotional slights as they fought for possession of various kinds of balls, earning approval and admiration in the process. I was easily dissuaded, subject to fears and extended expressions of them, not prepared to be knocked down and get up again with blood in my mouth and in my mind with the intention to get payback for injury suffered.

My father’s funeral was not nearly so riven with depression and foreboding for me as had been my mother’s. When she died, she did so from cancer at age fifty two, leaving a twelve year old daughter to be raised alone by my father, a man supremely unsuited for such a task. I was in my first year of graduate school, my first wife pregnant with our first child, no financial prospects in view, my older sister Nancy living in Seattle with her husband in a time when air flight to and from Texas and paying for it were comparable to sending a man to the moon. I was on the home ground alone.

The time was November, leafless, wet, and dark. The coffin was cheap, and it was open for all to see my mother dead inside it. She had not wanted to be buried in those woods, as she called the Menard graveyard. The preacher for my mother’s service was a cousin ordained as a Baptist minister, trying his best to justify what God had chosen in His infallible wisdom to do by subjecting Aunt Dorothy to such suffering and early death.

On that desperate ground, I wept and staggered about the graveyard physically supported by Cousin Winston as he tried to speak consoling words into my ear. He repeated my name over and over as though to convince me I was still myself, capable to survive the day and meet the others to come, unknown and perilous as they might be.

Those years later at the funeral service for my father, dead at eighty-seven, things were different. It was high summer, and all the leaves were green. I was  by then secure in my work. I was dean of a college in Memphis, I was the father of two accomplished and educated children, I was married to the woman right for me, I owned property, and I held title to university degrees and to professional respect. I had not been in my home country for longer than a day or two at a time in almost thirty years. I had worked myself free of the place I had come from, and I considered myself only technically a member of that Duff bunch in Polk County, Texas.

Yet when I saw Joseph Winston Duff standing in the shade of a sycamore at Menard Chapel on that hot day in August, I knew him instantly. And he knew me.

I was wearing a pin stripe suit and a dark tie, chosen from my closet by my wife because it was right for a funeral. She was not there, but back in our home in Memphis, because I didn’t want her to see in one gathering in one place the clan of people I belonged to. She had expected to accompany me, since that was what her family members did in Alabama when someone died.

“You wouldn’t like it,” I told her. “You don’t want to meet those people.”

“What’s to like or not like at a funeral?” she said. “Wives go with their husbands to the funerals of their husbands’ parents. Don’t they?”

“They do go all right. All of the family goes. That’s the problem. If they all didn’t go, I could take you with me. But every last one does go, and that’s why I can’t bear to have you there.”

“Something’s badly wrong,” she said.

“Oh, yes. Badly wrong.”

“With what you’re saying and with you, I mean,” she had said.

Standing under the sycamore tree, old when our great-grandfather preached at Menard Chapel, Winston looked at me with a quizzical tilt to his head, waiting to see if I would recognize him. He was wearing a blue jean jacket, a striped shirt, khaki pants, and his sleeked-back hair was showing signs of graying. Next to him were his sister Betty and her husband Johnny Wooten, the man who had seduced Winston’s wife while he was in prison. All had been forgiven or at least forgotten. The wife and children were long gone, but the Duff sister and brother were together.

“Winston,” I said, and we embraced for the first time in our lives, such demonstrations of affection and relationship not having been cool those years ago in the middle of the century. I greeted Betty and her husband, and Johnny reminded me of when he had fixed something gone wrong with my 1952 Dodge, a broken windshield wiper which had to function for me to be able to get a license plate. We laughed and joked, as people in East Texas do at funerals for those old enough to have had a long life. My mother had not reached that age, but my father had. The tone of the service was different, as a result, and my cousins felt free to josh and pick at me.

I remember two exchanges from that day, apart from my talk with Winston. Both were with Richardson brothers, first cousins to me and older by several years, both were basketball stars in high school and college, and both had careers as coaches of the sport.

Jesse Lee, the greater of the two in reputation and at one point coach of the basketball team in my high school, said to a group of relatives gathered around me in the graveyard, “Y’all might not know this, but Gerald tried to play basketball in high school.”

“Naw,” one of my aunts said, “Gerald was always a book worm. He wasn’t interested in ball.”

“Yes, he was,” Jesse Lee Richardson, onetime Texas all state center, said. “He was a book worm, all right, but he wanted and tried to play basketball. Didn’t you, Gerald?”

“I did,” I admitted. “Jesse Lee’s right, but I wasn’t any good.”

“He could not play a lick,” my cousin said. “But look at him now. I expect he believes he’s a self-made man, if anybody ever was.”

A little later in the day, after the service was over, and people had begun to drift away to drive back to town, the other brother, Wilson, asked me if I could hire him to coach basketball at Rhodes College. “I know how to handle inner city black players, Gerald,” he said. “That’s what y’all use in Memphis, and it takes special handling to get anything out of them.”

I told Wilson to send his resume to my office, though I didn’t tell him I had nothing to do with hiring coaches and Rhodes College was an institution for upper class white students who couldn’t get into the likes of Vanderbilt and Duke, not a place for inner city blacks to run up and down the basketball court. He never did, and I knew he wouldn’t, since getting a resume together would have involved writing something down on paper.

Winston and I talked about the time I had taken him to the drunken Lamar fraternity retreat, about our summer cutting grass together to be able to buy cigarettes and ice cream, and finally he brought up the subject lurking behind all we were saying to each other.

“Gerald,” he said, just after telling me that the most important thing my father, his Uncle Willie, had taught him was the use of Copenhagen snuff in the place of cigarettes, “I guess you heard about me and them black guys.”

I couldn’t look him in the eye after he had said that. Not because he actually hadn’t called the men he had killed “black guys,” but instead that epithet for blacks still the only label current in that place and with its people, but because I didn’t want him to tell me about it. I did not want to know the details, I did not want to hear his story, I did not want his version of reality to be offered me. I did not want to hear the truth. Let all I knew about it just be what my sister had told me during our telephone conversations over the years. “Winston killed some black men. He ran over them with his truck. He’s in the penitentiary. He’s out now. He beat up Johnny Wooten for taking his wife to bed. He’s living with Betty and Johnny now.”

“I did hear that, Winston,” I said. “I was sorry to hear about what happened.”

Winston looked at my face, trying to get me to meet his gaze, and at that moment, our cousin Jewel, a retired school teacher, walked up to join what she thought was an ordinary conversation in the graveyard at Menard Chapel. It was not that. It was a confession, a remembrance, a reminder of blood, a plea for kinship, a claim. It was all that I did not want.

I jumped on the chance to accept the definition of the moment as Jewel imagined it to be, turning away from Winston’s eyes and looking into hers.

“Jewel,” I said. “Remember when you used to read to me when I was a kid? You would read whole novels to me and Nancy while we sat on the floor listening.”

“I do remember,” she said. “I can’t believe now we all had the patience for that. Or the energy.”

“It was a different time,” I said, desperate to change the focus from what Winston had been wanting to say to me. “Kids wouldn’t sit still for that now, would they?”

“No, they wouldn’t,” Jewel said. “What were y’all talking about when I walked up? Don’t let me interrupt.”

“Jewel,” Winston said, his eyes still on me, “Gerald and I were just talking about the old days.”
“The old days. What do you two boys know about the old days?”

“Lots. Gerald was real important to me back then when I was a kid.”

“How was that?” Jewel said.

“Gerald taught me how to be bad,” Winston said. “That’s what he did for me. He was my model. He led me to know how to be bad.”

“Winston,” Jewel said in a tone of dismissal and shock, “Surely not. You shouldn’t say things like that. Don’t make jokes. Gerald did not teach you how to be bad.”

There in the graveyard at Menard Chapel, my father newly placed at rest in the earth for the long sleep that never ends, my kin all around the three of us, I knew in my bones and blood which one of the three cousins was telling the truth. It was not the retired schoolteacher. It was not the college dean. It was the convicted slaughterer of men, the boy who had pushed a lawn mower alongside me through the streets of Nederland, Texas, those years ago in the bright past, grown now into the only speaker of truth on that burying ground.

That recent dream about Winston and me from which I woke, that scene of him and me and a black man involved in a criminal act, had broken at the point where Winston was being led away in handcuffs. Just before he turned to enter the police car, he looked at me and made a gesture with his manacled hands, a sign of the kind you can interpret and believe only in dreams, since the waking world is never clearly seen and its message never certain. I knew what he was signaling. What he meant by the gesture in the dream was that he would take the blame. I was not to be afraid. I would not be found out. My cousin would be the sacrifice. In the dream I was grateful to my cousin, and I was determined to let him shoulder all burden of guilt. I would walk free, unsoiled and whole, and in the light of day. He would dwell in darkness and shame.

When I woke, I told myself that it was only a dream. It did not pertain to my life in this waking world, and it would slide away into obscurity, fade into nothing, as the days wear on. I will never see Winston again. I assured myself there in that dark room that I have never been complicit with him in any way. I was not guilty of theft. All I have I have earned by myself. I never taught him anything. He has nothing to do with me. It’s all an accident of blood relationship. It will fade, it will vanish, it will go.

I need never think of him again, my cousin Joseph Winston, dead now and buried in some graveyard on the Gulf Coast, not at Menard Chapel. We were kin only in blood, not in kind. I tell myself that now, but I know I lie.

My mother and I were dazed to have come this far.  My father, Pyongyang-born, had made several attempts to see his old hometown, flying all the way to Beijing only to have the North Korean consulate deny his visa at the last minute.  He’d died, probably of sadness, not long after that final attempt.  We stared at the tarmac and stood, dripping sweat, clutching our paper Koryo Air fans–what passed for air conditioning on North Korea’s national airline–until someone barked at us in Korean to start moving to the terminal. 

North Korea was, as always, looming ominously in the news:  the two American journalists had been arrested, detained, then unexpectedly sent home with Bill Clinton.  A missile had been fired at Japan, Kim Jong Il threatened to blow up Hawaii, and most recently, the North and South had traded shots in a border skirmish.

We were aware that some State Department officials called this The Most Dangerous Place on Earth.  Further, there was no American consulate or embassy here to back us up if something went wrong.  Still, I believed we’d be fine if we followed the rules.  I pored over the memos from our guides, WHAT **NOT** TO BRING TO NORTH KOREA (religious items, anything remotely political, cell phones, video cameras, books about North Korea, even notebooks—journalists were verboten). 

We were herded to some booths barely shielded from the sun, doors wide open to the heat and humidity outside, not much different from the last foreign airport I flew into:  Guadalajara, Mexico.  But in Guadalajara, there had been chatter and excitement, people returning home with arms full of gifts.  The North Koreans, dressed in grim gray suits, the women in white blouses and Mad-Men-era secretary skirts and pumps, both sexes with identical red pins displaying a smiling Kim Il Sung pinned over their hearts, stood somberly in line, unencumbered with luggage.  Occasionally, a man would glare at our group.  The women had softer expressions, but didn’t look at us at all.

I clutched my stack of paperwork, which included an accounting of every penny of every kind of currency we carried.  We were standing on North Korean soil, but we weren’t in yet.

An official accosted one of our tour leaders.  He looked bewildered, but went with the man to a side room, the door closing behind them.  Not five minutes later, an angry looking official pulled out another member of our group: a young man who had just graduated from Columbia Journalism School.  He was marched to a windowless room on the opposite side, door closed. Our line inched forward.  I was sweating out of every pore of my body, a wet oblong forming on my back, under my knapsack, but I was too anxious to do anything other than stand at attention, wondering if my friend who had decided to err on the side of caution had been the smart one.

The man at the booth waved me on, but an official waiting at the other side motioned for me to follow him to a separate, partitioned area.  The man asked me to open my suitcase.  His expression was exquisitely neutral.  He asked about books.  I’d dutifully listed under “publications, books, reading materials, bibles, propaganda, etc.” my Korean language dictionary and two Chinese phrasebooks.  He examined each item, rifled through them page by page.

I was waiting for him to go through the rest of my suitcase this way.  Luckily, I’d remembered, before I left home to jettison the Obama shirt that I habitually used as pajamas as well as a book on North Korea (The Most Dangerous Place on Earth), tucked in a pocket from a previous trip. But I also worried: for safety on the overnight train through China, I’d spread my money around, tucking extra twenties into socks, secret pockets, my eyeglass case, and it was possible he’d come upon a forgotten, hidden stash of cash, which would indubitably look like I was trafficking in American currency.  Through the doorway that led out of the cage that was the customs area, I caught a glance of the people in our group who’d passed muster.  My mother wasn’t there, nor were the two who’d gone off to the secret rooms.  The man paused.

Then he indicated I should close my suitcase.   Paradoxically, I was disappointed. I exited the area at the same time as my mother.  “They only looked at my books,” she said.   Someone who’d tried to sneak in actual contraband–an i-Phone—was caught, but the officials only kept it for her, to be courteously returned when we left.

The two “detainees” rejoined us.  They had been taken out of line for random temperature checks (swine flu), and with elevated readings (or faulty North Korean thermometer technology), they had been “detained” until their temperatures came down to acceptable levels.   

But now we were free to go.  In the front of the airport, the noise of cars, buses, taxis, and hotel shuttle buses of any other airport was notably absent. We stepped from the soundless curb into the care of our government minders, a young woman and two scowly men, who led us through two empty parking lots onto a waiting tour bus, luxuriously air-conditioned, that would take us to our hotel.

Fourteen years later it’s a baseball on my body, red stitching round the top and bottom. Fourteen years later it’s an upright, tight breast, while the sag of midlife lowers the left one, soft and tired.  I should be happy I’m still here, fourteen years later. I should be grateful that I look pretty normal with my clothes on. But there are moments when the right side of my body tightens up and fights with the left, moments when I can’t believe what happened and wonder what to do with my self-pity. Fourteen years and do I breathe easier? Fourteen years and still I descend into a nasty little girl, pouting and pissy, when I sit in the chair waiting for the mammogram.

My breast doctor has never known who I really am. I don’t think I ever smiled in her presence. She kept me waiting three hours the first time I went to see her, six months after the surgery. I lit into her, told her I didn’t think we should bother with the examination, I didn’t want a doctor who wasn’t available. Today I’m shocked at my behavior. She was a petite dark-haired woman, named Hoolihan. We stood in the corridor braced in our own stiff bodies, staring each other down.

“I was busy,” she said.

“The receptionist said you were eating lunch,” I said.

“I had other patients to deal with,” she said.

“Let’s not waste each other’s time,” I said

“Come in the office, let’s start over,” she said.

And so we did. I called her Hooligan behind her back. God knows what she called me.

The last time I saw her she smiled at me and said, “Nine years out.” I didn’t know what she meant. Out where? She looked pleased. She may not have seen that many people who make it nine years out. She’s inside with the tough cases. I stayed with her because she’s supposed to be good and because I’ll never let a male doctor cut my breast again. And because she knew the nasty side of me and still opened the office door.

My right breast is my hard place. I don’t like to hug people for fear they’ll bounce off this breast, there’s no ‘give’ there. Men always gave me the strongest hugs after the surgery, those who knew about it, testing the new equipment I suppose. One even asked which one—pointing and touching.

When I lie down I go lopsided, a mountain on the right, a soft hillock on the left. When I lie on my belly the right breast stays upright keeping me listing to the side. I cannot understand why women buy breasts like this. They may stay perky, but they are not comfortable.  So, that’s my hard place. It sits on the right, connected to my back. It sits like a stone beside my heart and I have to work each day to keep my heart from hardening beside it.

Today I got a phone message from Teresa, the panic high up in her voice, the barely contained scream I recognized immediately: Two masses in her breast. Cancer cells. Can we talk? She asks. Finally we connect and I hear that even now all these years later, some doctors don’t get it. She had to wait ten days, until she called the doctor herself and was given the diagnosis over the phone. “Get a new doctor,” I say and give her two names. “Call the social worker at Beth Israel.” I say, and I hear the change in her voice. Sometimes it’s good to be bossy—don’t worry I say, you’re going to be okay, it’s early. Get a second opinion, from a female doctor who can look you in the eye. I’ll call her again tomorrow. I won’t be bossy then, I’ll just listen. I cannot believe another one is diagnosed. Teresa, who is healthy and beautiful and runs culinary tours of Spain. No junk food, no toxins in her body, why Teresa? When they diagnosed me, it was 1 in 9. Now it’s 1 in 7. It’s not getting better, it’s getting worse.

“Learn to say no,” the oncologist said when I asked how to stay healthy. But I can’t say no to good food, and I can’t say no to the cancer phone calls. I believe I’m fine, fourteen years out. My role model is Julia Child, who went in with two breasts and a question and came out with one breast and an answer. Those were the barbaric days when they didn’t bother with the biopsy, just cut open the melon and if it didn’t look right, removed it. Julia went on to do her work, drink wine, consume copious amounts of butter and salt and live to ninety. My kinda gal.

Everyone has cancer. That was the most comforting thing someone said to me. A science writer friend. “Everything in life has cancer cells,” she said and I suppose it’s true. Cancer is a cell gone bad. We all stray now and then. Go bad. Waffle. So do cells. Some just fall off, others start proselytizing and converting others. Those are the ones you have to look out for.

Another phone call from Teresa who has gotten more bad news on the breast cancer front. The terror in her voice is creeping through the phone. “Can Ed listen in?” she asks, and I say, “Of course.” and off we go with the question and answer session.

“Did you get a fake nipple on your reconstructed breast?” The question comes fifteen minutes into the conversation and although Ed has been silent, I know he’s there and I think well, he’s going to have a wife with a fake breast, there are so many of us out there now, no point in being shy. So we discuss the options. Tattoo or labial surgery and I tell her I have a blind breast. We laugh. Her voice is not as ragged. Ed is still silent. I talk about what is down the road. I tell her go out, have a glass of wine, a good meal, relax, every minute that you don’t think about it all is a precious minute. She thanks me, says they’re going on a date, and we say goodbye.

Only after we have hung up do I remember Ed’s sister died of breast cancer two weeks ago, the same week Teresa had her initial diagnosis. The doctor wants her to make a decision about the mastectomy this weekend, the weekend they will be attending her sister-in-law’s memorial. And I wonder how Ed is managing to look at his beautiful sexy wife with the image of his dead sister superimposed.

The week I went into the hospital for my surgery a Boston Globe reporter with breast cancer died at Dana Farber of a botched chemo order. That sat on the periphery of my world at the time, a rumble to the side. I cannot imagine what it’s like to face surgery days after you have buried a loved one who died of the same disease. I cannot stop thinking of Teresa and her jet-black hair and her beautiful hands and her silent husband who phoned me because I am still here. Another survivor.

That night I read Julia Child’s autobiography. “I’m at the age,” Julia writes, “when friends are falling off the raft.” I like the metaphor, if not the reality. Our raft is hitting rough water. We’re all hanging on, tying ourselves to the planks, paddling as best we can.

Teresa is having her surgery today. Ten hours of removing one body part—the right breast—and fashioning a replacement from another body part—her abdomen. It wasn’t easy figuring out which surgery to have. She called me a number of times.

“I need to be talked down,” she said, her voice in the highest register. “You’re still here, you survived the surgery. Tell me I’ll survive.”

I tell her she will survive. I don’t tell her I almost didn’t. I don’t tell her the breathing tube was removed too soon. I don’t tell her they chipped my tooth trying to re-intubate me. I don’t tell her I woke up to lack of breath and had to call the nurse with my eyeballs.  I tell her she’ll be fine and her voice comes down one octave and she begins telling me that she went to a class to decide which surgery to have.

“A class?” I say. “Yes,” she says, “and it was full.” Of young women in their 30s. I don’t tell her what I’m thinking. That we’re going to have a society of breast-less women, that things are getting out of control if they are holding classes to help you decide what style breast to choose. Is this the future? Lamaze classes? Mastectomy classes?  I suppose the classes are pass/fail. All the focus is on keeping the nipped bud of the female somehow connected to the plant.

So many phone calls—first the diagnosis—then the specialists with the percentages and the details and the decisions for her to make. Two surgeries for the price of one—a biopsy, a partial mastectomy, now a complete one. Extra credit if you take both off. Prophylactically. I don’t tell her about reconstruction, how the male plastic surgeon built a breast to look good from the viewer, how disturbing it is to the patient, who wants a breast that looks good when she looks down at herself. Two different perspectives.

I’m appalled at how much we now know, but still can’t explain. Everything at a cellular level, who knows what it means in life expectancy, in life skills, in living. She’s gone through the rabbit hole now. Life is lived in the midst of death, but we only believe it when we have to. She wants me to visit in a couple of weeks. She will be glad to be alive and unaware she’s still not quite there. Ten hours of anesthesia. You don’t know how far into the fog you are until it lifts. Until the day things come into sharper focus and you stare out at the world and wonder where you’ve been.

I don’t tell her it will never leave her. “You’re so vibrant,” she says. “You laugh, you’re out in life.” And I laugh and I hear her voice come down another octave and I remind myself to get up early the morning of her surgery and meditate and pray and think of her in the midst of my day. And I wait.

I was never given to prayer. I’m more of beggar. “Please, please, please,” I’d intone. I could never figure out how, when, where, or most importantly, who to pray to. The Lord’s Prayer came easily, having been recited weekly at church and daily at school until Madeline what’s-her-name complained to the Supreme Court. But somehow the Lord’s Prayer never seemed like something to turn to in dire need. It was a brush-your-teeth kind of prayer, a preventative prayer, something to say just before bed.

When the radiologist’s office called to say there was a problem one week after my first post-mastectomy mammogram, even begging was beyond me. There was nothing to ask for that hadn’t been asked for. There were no more bargains to be made. There was only silence. Prayer did not occur to me. I sat in the mercifully vacant waiting room, my mind and body empty. Fifteen minutes later the technician came in and said, “You can get dressed now, she says she doesn’t need another view.”

The doctor slid large X rays of my remaining breast into a wall light and said, “Everything looks fine—see—this year’s picture is the same as last year.”

“Thank you,” I said, breathing freely for the first time in days. I didn’t ask why I had been called in, then never examined. “Thank you,” I said, “thank you, thank you.”

As I left the building I could not stop. “Thank you, thank you,” I kept saying. All the way down the street, around the corner to the car, “Thank you, Thank you, Thank you.” A couple of weeks later I was reminded that for some Native Americans prayer is not a petition for something, but a giving of thanks for what is, that the Native American begins each day with thanks for the sun and the moon and another day on earth.

Teresa is on the other side now. She survived the surgery and has a new body. Tomorrow I will drive to New York City to visit. She says, “The new boob likes to get out for a walk now and then.’ For a minute I think she’s baring her breast in Washington Square. Who knows. Maybe I will too. Maybe we all should.

I went to my new doctor yesterday and showed her my fourteen-year-old breast. When she asked what kind of breast cancer I had, I had to open my records. “I can’t keep that in my head,” I said. She read the report, and said “Congratulations!” real glee in her voice. “Your kind of cancer, fourteen years.” She stopped short of saying, ‘You’re cured,’ but I liked her smile.

“Thank you, thank you,” I said. All the way down the street, around the corner to the car, “Thank you, Thank you, Thank you for the sun and the moon and another day on earth.”

The airplane lands you in a place that has pretty much the same sun you left behind and the same feel to the air, fierce and hot during the day, silky at night.  You, your sister, and your parents move into a room in a small hotel with an elevator like the monkey cage at the zoo.  There are old people sitting in the hotel lobby and a beach across the way.  There is a cafeteria around the block where a waitress with buck teeth and a friendly disposition serves you scrambled eggs and buttered toast for breakfast.  The days pass slowly with a disturbing sameness.  Your father talks to people, goes away, comes back and takes you with him, this time to a cold place with a cold wind that burns your ears.  “Three months,” your parents say, “Three months and we’ll be home.”

You begin school, a factory really, a holding pen for future life.  One of the teachers recites the Lord’s Prayer at the beginning of the period and says the Pledge of Allegiance to a Canadian flag.  Another teacher is a budding writer.  He cares only about himself.  Another is about to retire.  She wants everyone to be quiet.  Once, during lunch period, somebody steals your only winter jacket in the playground.  You run to your shop teacher who is on duty and tell him.  He listens, then turns away unconcerned.  That afternoon you walk home shivering.

New York accepts you, as it accepts everyone, with complete indifference.  Three months become six.  The city becomes warm, but it is not the same comfortable warmth you left behind, not the same sun or the same sky, and so you keep one eye focused on everything around you, the buildings, the people, the energy.  The other eye, the watchful one, looks behind you to that other sun, that other sky, the backyard where you were playing when you were wrenched away, the smells of onion and garlic wafting from the kitchen as lunch approached, your grandmother’s smiling face, the strange bird that landed on the steps of your grandmother’s house and you tried to shoot with your bee-bee gun, but it chased after you squawking and you, no big game hunter, ran home terrified.  All these images, memories and splinters of memories are behind you, twelve-hundred-miles distant and unapproachable in any physical way, but the eye, the one that wants it all back even as the brain says no, still looks beyond the tear and its raw edges.  A small voice, ever so soft and crooning, says mockingly to you, it is all gone.  It is the voice of loss, and it becomes stronger each day that you stay in the place of your exile.

Someone argues, no.  Loss is never absolute.  What about the gains?  Surely they offset the loss.  Yes, of course, the gains you say, and you think about the education, the knowledge, the comforts, the three square meals a day, the house on a tree-lined street from which you are presently writing, the good job at a good university, the books published, the plaudits, the grants, your own American children in college now, the American woman who loves and cares for you as your life sweeps into the mainstream.  You think about all that and then, the moment you begin to swoon with satisfaction, you feel the chasm sucking you back to a place where there are only memories, and those memories, stale after so many years, speak to you in a voice which is indistinguishable from that of absence.  You realize then that there is no counterweight to loss except grief, that tumor of the spirit, weightier than any substance, that replaces that which you once had and stays with you until death, no matter how much you gain along the way. Although your memories belong to you, you no longer belong to the place of your memories, or it to you.

To offset this knowledge you  project outward the signs of your success, as if to prove to the world around you –but you are really proving it to yourself– that though your soul is wounded and weighed down by grief, your belief system is intact.  The big house, the fancy car, the expensive vacation, the family, all symbols of achievement in the new society, of your assimilation, become as well the measures that validate your belief system, which struggles to sustain itself above and beyond loss but can never excise it.  As a result, your assimilation is superficial at best.

You remember your struggles with the new language, the way words stumbled out of your mouth, mangled at first, in jagged pieces, and your shame kept you silent, and your shame made you practice the words, hours before the mirror, endlessly in the shower or before sleep, until each was perfect in the sound and shape and indistinguishable from those you heard on the street from your friends, in the classroom from your teachers.  Mimic you became, parrot, mina bird.  You remember your mother’s struggles, how her mouth filled with air, how it pushed out resembling nothing like words, nothing like message, but moans, whimpers, hiccups, and whines, and you remember how her failures made her distant, Spanish her only language, the language of the past, of loss.

All that you remember now is seclusion, a distancing, and a futile attempt to lose yourself in the new language, the language of no loss.  If loss brings shame, it brings with it too the urge to replace what is lost, to fill the void.  You try in many ways, with many things.  You throw in whatever fits, you stuff the hole with clothes, books, movies, pianos, tubas, Milky Ways.  You throw art in there as well, and baseballs, footballs, skis and scuba gear.  You throw in memberships in country clubs (those that will have you), sleek cars and sleek women (as your wife ages and spreads), a sexual urge that turns you into a wild dog, a woman you follow into a dark room over an empty street; you throw in trips to the Himalayas, hypertension on the highway, yoga classes, vegetarianism, pornographic movies, opera, vacations in Cancún, shopping in Paris, rosebushes, haute cuisine, cellular phones, cholesterol worries, massage therapy, town meetings, political diatribes, television, television, television.  You realize at some point that the more you stuff in it, the bigger the hole, the broader the void.  You could spend your whole life stuffing it and it would still be bigger than your ability.   And so you discover that there is nothing to be done but listen to your mother, or to the memory of your mother, and to accept her loss which is your loss, and to embrace her failure which is your failure.  Nothing else will do but recover and make your own the tongue of your loss, which is her tongue.

“Ay madre.”

In 1975, the U.S. military finally left Culebra. The western part of the island became a highly controlled nature preserve, though not necessarily out of the will to preserve—the natural flora was mostly destroyed by shelling or threatened by non-native species.  Rather it was protected because there was so much unexploded ordnance, so much in the testing that had failed and that may or may not have, depending on which side is speaking, created a mysterious residual that affects the health of the island and its people.  But the ordnance itself is no mystery. It can be seen, pointed to, and occasionally even deadlier evidence of its existence reverberates off the coast.

When you drop a thousand bombs, a few fail.  When you drop a thousand times a thousand, trying to get it right—how to aim, how to target, how to make destruction work—how many then fail to explode?

These are the waters of Culebra.

Still, some areas were never bombed, and some have been declared clear.  And we weren’t thinking about ordnance the morning we didn’t go to Flamingo Beach on the north side of Culebra, having heard it was one of the most beautiful beaches in the world.  Even if we didn’t know what “live ordnance” meant yet, we knew what “most beautiful” meant.  Even on a distant island like Culebra, overcrowding occurs because it is so close to Puerto Rico.  The prosperous people of the larger island sail to the smaller island to enjoy the peace and quiet, but in the process, (as happens everywhere) peace and quiet packs up and leaves and what’s left is a big party.

Puerto Rican coffee is a kind of brown sunshine, filling David and me with the northern energy that the islanders shake their heads about.  At our guest house at Villa Fulladoza, we abandon breakfast in our outdoor kitchen scattered with novels and notebooks and half-eaten toast, climb into a rented Volkswagon Thing the color of moldy butter and head, grinding gears the entire way, for Rosario, an isolated beach on the far west side, tucked into a protected cove that nurtures a still living reef laden with tropical life.

We have come for one of my favorite worldly experiences, shallow-water snorkeling.

We park at Flamingo but walk the half-mile over pitted terrain to Rosario’s.  We snorkel all morning, saturating ourselves with this alternative existence of underwater wilderness.  There, we watch a school of blue angelfish swim among hovering yellow tail, float with parrotfish and blue striped grunts and all the tiny ones whose names I am still learning but which are petals burned on my brain. We swim among brain coral and fan coral and delicate kitelike creatures barely visible in the golden water.

When I snorkel, my five reliable senses shift, alter in their purpose.  Due to the nature of the mask, smell and taste become sealed; sound is dulled to hollow signals like the clipped tap of the grunt banging its hard mouth on the coral or the distant almost dreamlike thud of a powerboat.  Sight is paradoxically narrowed through the tunnel of mask.  One must turn the head deliberately as though casting a beam.  Short sight is heightened because the light, while truncating distances, seems to pierce the water so that certain colors turn golden, and others nearly disappear.  My tactile sense heightens because other senses tamp down. The warm all-over touch of water becomes super-luscious, recalls the forgotten time of swimming in the womb. We float in the contradiction of security and flying.

Gestures become words—because one must use hand signals.  Pointing is paramount.  All is gesticulation, a clumsy charade of jabbing fingers.  Look that way.  The spray of weed dotted with orange.  Look there.  A school of yellow-striped wonder.  There.  Swift iridescence scooting under coral.  Creatures so alarmingly lovely that I would gasp if I could. I know, suddenly surrounded by a million tiny silver arrow fish, this is where life must have begun.

We snorkel until, unbelievably in these balmy waters, we became cold, and we have to give up, swim back in, rise clumsily in our fins, and shuffle toward the warm shore, saddened to abandon dream flight.

We snorkel until the boats roll in with their throaty engines, and even this more isolated beach becomes a popular destination. Only then do we walk back over the ridge to Flamingo to brave the crowds after all, thinking they can be no worse than those invading Rosario’s.

I discover that Flamingo is a deceptive beach, as is this island.  It appears to be one thing but is another.

Traipsing across the makeshift unpaved parking area, I notice that the sand of Flamingo appears similar to the beaches along our beloved Lake Michigan, sugary and light, soft to the step.  And as at  many Michigan beaches, one walks over a low dune to a wide view spreading out left and right to the horizon. Flamingo is similarly elegant, a graceful horseshoe with distant points, the eastern one rocky, the western a sandy spit pointing to the reef where the surf breaks.

At first, walking over the sand toward the water, I think well… so it’s true…there is nothing as special as my own home beach in Leelanau County.  And then, I hear the surf in its roll, turning in slow sleep. I near the water, and the air, always heavier in this part of the world, takes on translucence. Then the sand’s texture becomes velvety cream, but firm, like walking on fine silk stretched taut. Over that, swirling in for hundreds of feet, waves shallow as chiffon. David takes my hand and we walk farther and the sand is a fine palm of sensation for our tired feet, a long shivery song of foot sensation.  Ocean scents, flower scents,  mist, the envelope both clear and laden with moisture.  Without thinking, we drop our gear in a pile and walk the slow walk into the shallows. We take on a dazed look because dazed we are, breathing this yielding light.  That first time, we walk east a long way, then sit down and doze, tangled in each others arms, tired from the long swim with fish, but now gentled by this beach with its warm courtesy.

Jorge is a young Adonis, slim and muscled, with long dark hair. His black eyes are bright, his voice deep but not loud and almost Patrician in its pronunciation of English—though he slips into Spanish effortlessly.  Like so many here in these islands, he is originally from the mainland, though now settled a decade into the island culture, long enough to claim it as his home.  He stands behind the small counter in his art shop and speaks softly of his friend, a poet who is being sued for speaking out against development of the island.

It is he who tells us about the tanks.

Wherever we go, I seek the local art.  It is not easy to find in Dewey, the main town on Culebra.  Many shops import the usual mementos created by sweat labor in other lands, and though it’s advertised as “handmade,” it has the look of multiplication. I look for something made with local hands and local resources. I’m willing to pay a fair price for an honest piece of  art, something lovely and clear that will bring memory back to me and will offer pride to the maker.  After walking the streets lined with tourist shops, I find Jorge’s  little shop on a side street, just down from Mamacita’s, our favorite bar. “Arte” is one room, open at the back to a workspace that is really a kind of tree house over a ravine.  The front room is full of paintings, high quality photographs, jewelry of Culebra’s signature green stone, some hand cut mother of pearl—I pick an amulet with seven peach pearls still imbedded in it.  Jorge also sells me a hand-sewn chapbook of poems by Paul Franklin, the friend who is in trouble. The proceeds support his court case.  The poems are angry rhymes with great passion hidden beneath the language of distrust.

I wander the shop, come upon a series of simple block prints on delicious paper.  The print I am attracted to is enigmatic—part fish, part slim dancer, part skeleton.  Its colors are dark, purple and black, set sharply on white Strathmore.  I notice the pencil signature is his, Jorge Acevedo.

“Tell me about this one,” I ask.

He picks it up, turns it once— it looks like a skeleton, half fish, half human.  He turns it again.  Now like a dancer.  Again and it becomes a diving fish.   “This is my symbol for what’s happening here.”

He begins talking about the turtles.  “They are endangered, the leatherbacks and loggerheads. Scientists are monitoring the nests.”

I look at the print, trying to make the connection between the art and the turtles.

“We are the only place in the Caribbean where the sea turtles’ nests are on the rise.” He tells me with quiet pride.

I look at him skeptically.  “And that’s because…?”

“Live ordnance.”

I look so startled, he chuckles   “It’s the only way we are protected.”

I stare at his young serious eyes.

“They are rising from the ashes like this dancer, “ he says.  “Sea turtles, fish, even parts of the reef. We were dead, bombed to nothing, and we are coming back now, for a little while, because they do not want to touch the bombs.”

He sounds like a young messiah offering a quiet sermon.

After the guns quieted, Jorge tells me, the terns returned; long after the ships withdrew, the bright fishes found habitat in the sunken ones.  The waters settled, and with the military gone, the village industries, after trouble with unemployment and alleged corruption, returned, at least temporarily,  to local subsistence. The tourist trade, small but energetic, grew and now, in the last few years, has developed a thriving ecotourism. The significantly wealthy, Jorge says, they are silent and withdraw to their villas overlooking the distant shores.  The significantly poor squat in tin camps in the remote hills.  And there are the villagers and the ordinary people who love the island, their home, and cherish its slowly returning beauty.  The island planners, up until recently, have been discouraged from developing large resorts because the live ordnance is still there.  The old bombs are not just in the water, but in the soil, the rocks and crevasses.  Culebra and its cousin island, Vieques, are not untouched paradises; they are, rather, a jumble of destroyed and rejuvenating ecosystems held in shaky truce by a sunken, living danger. This is what, to some small degree, has kept island development in check.

In Culebra, you must always stay on the designated paths.

You must listen closely to all warnings.

The next day David and I hike down one of those barely designated trails to a north beach called Brava,  rough one.  At the makeshift trailhead, we park next to a half- finished hut with goats and a dog who barks obsessively.  It’s a long trek through gullied terrain.  We climb a horse trail through dense thicket up over a long ridge, then down into a winding swamp.

Like Michigan, Culebra has mosquitoes and biting flies. They rise as we move through the grasses. The little lizards rustle in the underbrush, the sun comes and goes as clouds scuttle across a sky filigreed by the canopy of scrub forest.  We scramble over sections of the trail washed out in spring rains, sinking now and then into a dry gulch eight feet deep.  We get lost in the scrub where the trail splits and then fades. We backtrack to the main trail, pass the ruins of a Spanish well centuries old, skirt a wild bee hive, cross near a stagnant lagoon graced by a pair of egrets.  Finally, hot and scratching, we reach a place where the trail opens onto the beach, totally empty, which in turn opens to the wide expanse of ocean.  We stash our packs against a rock shelf that offers some shadow.

We look around. We are delightfully alone except for the surf, a whale of surf.  Huge and distant, the waves shape themselves far out, gathering enormous size as they roll over reef. They are so large that they seem like the giant backs of clumsy creatures shouldering slowly through the distant deeps.  They are enormous, but they wheel in leisurely, breaking heavily against the long sloping arms of the beach.

This surf is not something we think about.

Because there are the cooling waters, there that translucent air laden with iridescent mist tossed up by the roll of the waves.  We are hot.  We want to be refreshed.  We do not hesitate. We run out a spit of sand and into the water to stand in the ebb and flow.

We do not yet understand the reach of the waves, the unchecked force of Brava.   We are in up to our ankles, leaping and playful.  I throw my arms open, sighing at the coolness.  Way out, a distant wave rises, teasing at first, washes in slowly around our calves, tasting.  It rises again, enough for us to splash each other and aren’t we glad we came all that way and now we can swim?  And then we are in to our thighs, and how did that happen?  We didn’t walk out into it, it came to us, didn’t it?

We are drenched and laughing.

And then we feel it, the inner pull, the deep insistence, the weight of water against the backs of our legs and knees.  It is immense. We are standing in it, only a few feet apart, laughter dying. I realize what is happening. I know, by every alerted sense in me, that it could simply take my feet out from under me and sweep me out. Rip tide such as I have never felt in my life.  We look at each, and David feels it too and the wave is rising again. This time the sound alerts me, the mounting thrum of wave,  intensifying like the inside of storm.

We have taken this place too lightly.

Suddenly I am reaching for David who is reaching for me, and we lock hands and turn and push ourselves hard away, slipping in soft bottom-sand that pulls out from under our feet so fast we can barely keep footing but must keep it, keep moving, stumbling, struggling out of the grip of a current stronger than anything we have ever encountered in any of our travels.

That kind of power.  Brava.  Rough one. Greedy one.

When we finally get clear, I stand well up on the beach with my arms crossed, holding myself and gasping,  oh my god, oh my god, astonished at how close we have come to disappearance. David shakes his head, chagrined.  He reminds me we had been warned not to swim. And I snap that no one said it was too dangerous to wade.  But we both know we have been foolish; this is a beach of such isolation that if we had gone under, we could not have been saved. I am in awe as I work out the physics of this long wave.  We stop now, see its guile, how it imperceptibly gathers force over rocks and reefs way out, how it garners ruthless energy, how it would be impossible to surf or swim or live long in this kind of rush.  It is majestic and hostile and unrelenting and deceptive.   The rough one is now an understatement.

This surf, this current, this force: this is what the turtles swim through.

After the adrenaline has drained out of us, we walk the hard wet swash, cautiously letting the small waves lap our feet just enough to keep cool. Now that we know them for what they are, we are not really attending the waves, but simply watching where we are in relation to them.  What we are really paying attention to is the high water line, examining the sand surface near the scrub edge. Sure enough, only a few hundred yards down the beach, we come to the first one.

The pattern is beautiful in the damp sand leading from the water’s edge to the scrub thicket, over a hundred feet, a yard wide and serpentine.  The indentations are a script, a topography of will and instinct and necessity, deep and regular corrugations with the furrow down the center where the tail drags as a kind of rudder.  It looks like a replica of a complicated mountain range, one where the hills follow a miniature faultline of volcanic moraines.

These marks were made by a female.

Sea turtles are made for the water, not the sand. It seems counter to everything in them except the survival of the species to drag those heavy bodies over the soft sand to a place where they dig with appendages meant for swimming. They dig out the sand to a deep bed, then turn and force out dozens of eggs. I have heard they make tears while laying their eggs.  Then each turtle turns, covers the eggs,  turns again, and crawls back, slowly grooving the sand with this instinctive text, back to Brava, the rough one, and through that hellacious surf.

They do this in the dark.

Each morning, the new nests are marked with stakes; the orange tape dated the night the nest was found.  When the time comes, scientists, ecologists, nature lovers watch for the hatch, counting and trying to help the tiny turtles reach the water.  If they make it that far, more of them will live.  But until they hatch, the most important thing is for them to remain undisturbed.  We stay the designated six feet away from the nests,  look admiringly at the hollow that remains even after the covering up, at the intricate pattern of tracks, then move to the next one. We find no new nests to report.  All the nests we find have been staked, but it is early in the season. We visit close to a dozen nests during the slow hike down the beach.  We count every nest as a blessing on he future.  With each one, I am more and more awed at the mother’s journey, at the tenacity of this internally driven quest through the grip and treachery of Brava.   I better understand Jorge’s symbol, the death, the dance, the dive and resurfacing.

Our last night in Culebra we return to Flamingo Beach.  We have learned much about this island that we have come to appreciate. The wide and lovely beaches, the fish-laden waters, the constant and generous warmth—not to mention strong coffee and excellent rum.  We have snorkeled every calm day for it is the bath that renews the soul, a baptism of regeneration, this swimming on the surface, looking down into the sea.  We have never seen the elongated tear of a bomb still resting on the bottom, or the tears of the great sea turtles, but we have seen plenty of other industrial shapes:  pipes and rebar embedded in fractured concrete, parts of tools we cannot name, enough to convince us that there was another world here once, and it was not beautiful.

But superimposed over those shadowy shapes, we have seen the fan and bright flash of coral and its inhabitants.  We have hiked hills and drunk cheap island beer, eaten fresh fish and conch, and listened in bars late at night to the island mix of drumming and jazz.  We have learned which of the small makeshift eateries are run by people who know the native way of food.  We have gone back and talked to Jorge who has told us more about how the island is inevitably threatened by development and how the locals are becoming demoralized by the shift in policy that will allow more devastating shoreline resorts, resorts that will encourage erosion, silt, pesticide run-off, waste water that could tip the balance for the reefs, fish, and turtles to a death watch.

He has given us this last set of directions.

It is dusk on Flamingo.  Because this is a beach that faces north, it is the most stunning moment of the day. The sun drops behind the beach, not on the water, and an even pink light spreads out.  It does not have a source; it is just there, resting on the water and sand.  Artist’s light.  It is quiet at this time of day; sunset buffs go to the ferry launch where conventional sunsets dazzle, where there is ice cream and beer. Flamingo is at its empty best.  The low surf rolls lazily and the spray drawn off the breaking waves rises and floats, an echo of the wave it  has abandoned.

We walk west toward the sandy point, knowing what we are going to find.  I am wondering if this is how I want to mark my last evening on Culebra.  We pass the picnic and camping area where a distant radio plays a fast salsa, and then the last buzz of campers, beach parties, humanity fade away.  After a long time we round the point of the horseshoe, and there it is, visible but still a long way off.  Unmistakable.  We keep taking the steps that will lead us to this dark shape in the sheer warm light of the evening until at last we are standing a dozen feet away.

A historian could tell me what kind it is. I need know only that it is a World War II tank, half-buried in the warm sand, its hatch flipped open and partly blown away so the rims still reaching resemble the horned antennae of an enormous insect. It is covered with rust and pocked with holes. Its tracks, strange corrugated runs.  This is the tank that the military used as a target, this tank, still here fifty years later, at which they aimed and fired and aimed and fired. Sometimes they hit, sometimes they missed, sometimes the shells exploded, sometimes they didn’t.

Stay on the paths.

But I also see what Jorge wanted me to see, that this destruction—the way the tank was damaged and then eaten by the salt and years and trade winds—has softened it.  It is melting, losing shape, a monstrous blossom gone soft and brown with rot.

And then there is Jorge’s symbol.

Painted across the turret, smoothing the surface with bright colors, the emblem of the rising dancer.  Jorge’s Sea Phoenix, the figure that has been adopted by the activists, young and old, native and transplanted, the symbol of the dancing fish, a creature rising from the dead, diving and dancing and swimming, human and fishlike, painted on the side of a tank so old and rusted it has ceased to be frightening and is being transformed into something else, a paradox,  coming to mean the opposite of what it once was.

Irony stretches out in the light around us, for the tank and Jorge’s Sea Phoenix are the two protections for this delicate place.  We stare at this artifact of defense and destruction, we touch it, this mechanical creation maimed by its maker, and we finally turn away to look again to the forgiving ocean, watching for the hope that rises from inside the surf, catches a current, struggles forward hard-shelled with need,  to make a nest out of sand in the amazing night that permeates this small and fragile paradise.

(From Anne-Marie Oomen’s forthcoming book, An American Map. Copyright © 2010 Wayne State University Press, with the permission of Wayne State University Press.)

The best that a would-be nonfiction writer can do is to use imperfect language to invoke

imperfectly remembered events based on imperfect perceptions.

–David James Duncan

At a writers’ conference not long ago, I gave a public reading from “Trading Off,” a memoir that for the most part dramatizes a turbulent relationship I’d had with an old high school baseball coach. During the q and a, I was asked the usual questions: “Did it really happen the way you wrote it?” “Did your coach really do those perverse things to you?” And the one that almost always comes up; “If you were only fifteen, how can you remember exactly what was said in the coach’s office?”

Predictable as they are, those questions go right to the heart of some of the more provocative issues that literary memoirists are currently debating. Issues such as; does the writer have to stick to the literal facts of the story? What should writers do when they can’t remember the details of an important incident, situation, or conversation? Can they/should they invent or embellish the events? And if so, to what end?

My first impulse is to advise aspiring memoirists to write the entire narrative first, just the way they remember it. Include all the specifics, names and situations. I say this because ideally when we’re writing memoir, we’re hoping to create a compelling story—a story that another human being can enter. And to that end, we want the work to ring true. But what does that phrase, “to ring true,” really mean?

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{A} memoir is not about what happened, but why you remembered it the way you did. That’s where the story is. That’s what we talk about.

–Kim Barnes

I started thinking about these matters while I was attending an AWP (Associated Writing Programs) convention a few years back. As part of a panel discussion on truth and invention in nonfiction, memoirist Fern Kupfer gave a talk entitled “Everything But the Truth?” in which she made a clear distinction between “literal” and “artistic” truth. At one point, she said something to the effect of the following. I’m paraphrasing here. The question of lying comes up all the time in the creative nonfiction classes I teach, Kupfer said, “But that’s how it happened’ my students sometimes say when I suggest changes that would shore up the narrative and pep up the prose. ‘Your memoir shouldn’t read as slowly as real life,’ I tell them.

Kupfer went on to say that we need to give would-be memoirs permission to {imagine and embellish}, but only when the reconstructed version of the story does not deceive the reader in its search for the aesthetic truth.

By raising the issue of aesthetic truth—which I’ll talk more about later–Kupfer is moving into a controversial area. Some writers and editors contend that memoirists should remain faithful to the facts and events, much like good journalists are expected to do. Others like Kupfer, Vivian Gornick, and Patricia Hampl, believe that imagination cannot help but alter memory.

For myself, I believe that the type of memoir a writer produces is determined at least in part by that writer’s sensibility—that is, how he/she sees the world–as well as by how that writer views and defines the genre. Someone who believes that memoir should be an accurate, literal rendering of the past will compose a different kind of work from a writer who, like myself, sees memoir as a form of self-discovery and self-exploration. Then too, the writer who positions herself as a witness/observer will see a different reality than the writer who places himself at the center of his own story.

Maybe it’s because I’m now in my sixties that my current memoirs tend to be more self-interrogative, more speculative. The impulse behind the piece about my baseball coach (the one I cited earlier), in fact, evolved out of a nagging mid-life itch—an urge to go back into my past and examine that turbulent relationship. That impulse, however, didn’t just appear. It was triggered by a disturbing situation that arose during what at the time was my then current life. To make a long story short, I was allowing myself to engage in a series of professional compromises with specific colleagues—peers and superiors– that were making me at first uneasy, and then angry with myself. Against my own beliefs, I was, for some reason, electing to take the high ground—maybe to avoid the conflict and tsuris I knew would be the end result.

Those responses, those avoidances, I soon found, were starting to call up rather specific memories of other childhood compromises that I’d made with an old high school baseball coach—a man I hadn’t thought much about almost five decades. Being a memoirist, I naturally began to see this as potential raw material. And so I started writing down any similarities, any connections I could come up that might link my behavior in the present situation with my colleagues with and my childhood experience with this coach.

In “Trading Off,” the stand alone memoir I referred to earlier, the narrator–the “I, who is a version of my younger self—discovers why he had allowed himself to make the kinds of tradeoffs with that coach that he did. One reason was that at fifteen, he–meaning I–desperately wanted to play baseball for the high school team. Coach Kerchman knew it too; and at the time he used that knowledge to manipulate me—in some deliberately cruel ways.

He had the power. That was pretty clear. And at fifteen, what choices did I have–other than to walk away from the situation—which at the time was an unthinkable option.  I was that obsessed with making the team. But even back then, at some level I was aware of the costs–if not yet the larger implications–of making such deals. And now, here I was in my early sixties making similar tradeoffs with colleagues and superiors. And I wanted—no, check that–I needed to understand why.

My point is that in speculating on the childhood/adult connection, I found myself having to reshape and rearrange certain events, situations, and conversations in order to get a better grasp on why, even today, I’m still prone to making compromises that I’m not always comfortable with. Was there a pattern of behavior here, I began asking myself? And that’s the kind of thing memoirists tend to look for.

As far as memory serves me, the incidents, situations, encounters, and particularly, the confusions that I wrote about all happened. But clearly, not in the exact sequence they might have originally occurred.

Still, I’m convinced that I would not have stumbled upon the connection between my adult and childhood behavior had I simply reconstructed or retold the events of the relationship with the coach in the exact sequence in which they had occurred—if indeed I could even remember what that sequence was.

Consequently, I understand what writer Pam Houston means when she says, “I’m not going to tell the story the way it happened. I’m going to tell it the way I remember it.”

In my case, I remember it in the context of urgently having to write about it. And that’s a much different undertaking than relating the story to old friends over a drink—or even writing it simply because it happened.

As the controversial memoirist Vivian Gornick, rightly maintains, “What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the larger sense that the writer is able to make of what happened. For that the power of imagination is required.”

To me, that’s what distinguishes a memoir from a reminiscence. And that is essentially the heart of the matter here, is it not?

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The aims of the imagination are not the aims of history.

–Cynthia Ozick

Let’s explore more fully the notion of how imagination alters memory. First, there’s what Phillip Gerard in his very fine book, Creative Nonfiction calls “the truth of event.” Author Mary Clearman Blew says about the family memoir she wrote, “I struggled for a long time with the conflicting claims of the exact truth of the story and the emotional truth as I perceived it.” And then there’s the “aesthetic” truth that Fern Kupfer refers to. That’s three different truths. What’s wrong with this picture?

What these three writers are referring to when they talk about  “emotional” or “aesthetic truth”–as opposed to the truth of “event”—is inherent in what Annie Dillard describes as the act of “fashioning a text.”

Let me explain. As Gornick suggests, in a literary memoir the writer’s personal story is frequently—and maybe, always–less important than the larger meaning or human connection that he/she discovers—hopefully, during the process of writing. And, if the work is crafted with careful attention to language, detail, and most especially, form, it becomes much more than a direct confession or retelling of one’s own personal story. Whether a memoir succeeds or fails as literature then, has a great deal to do with the writer’s skill and ability to shape his/her experience into a satisfying ”aesthetic” whole.

In another vein, poet Stephen Dunn says, “Just because it happened to you is no reason to write about it. You have to be interesting or no one will care.”

I admit that it’s an unequivocal, maybe even a harsh judgment. But depending on your own notions of what literary work is, it has some merit to it. My colleague, Mimi Schwartz, tempers Dunn’s assertion somewhat when she says, “You have to believe that writing about this is the most urgent thing in your life. And that you’re the only person who can tell this story.”

And as Marge Piercy maintains, “The writing of a {literary work) is taking life as it already exists.” She goes on to paraphrase Eudora Welty, who once said, ‘What distinguishes {literary writing…from journalism, is that inherent {in a literary text} is the possibility of a shared act of the imagination between its writer and its reader.’”

Ok, right about now, I’ll bet you’re all wondering where this is going, aren’t you?  But hang in there with me for a bit longer, ok?

If what these writers say makes sense, then most memoirists admittedly are unreliable narrators–as Pam Houston has suggested. Her implication is that when we retell past events–even if it’s simply to reminisce–we invariably embellish our stories. And whether we do this to make better sense of what happened, or if our impulse is simply to make the story more interesting, we still wind up becoming subjective, even self-constructed, personas in our own stories, our own narratives.

If you’re still skeptical, here are some other variables to think about. Language by its very nature distorts human experience. After I’d written the memoir about my coach, that version became more vivid to me than the actual events and memories it was originally based on. As Stephen Dunn explains, “Your memory of your past becomes your past.”

Annie Dillard suggests that a similar phenomenon occurs when you try to describe a dream. In her essay, “Fashioning a Text,” she writes, “at the end of the verbal description you’ve lost the dream but gained a verbal description. You have to like verbal descriptions a lot to keep…this sort of thing {up}.”

There’s also the shifting nature of memory itself. A while back my wife and I were watching slides of a European trip we’d taken about ten years ago. In addition to disputing our different versions of what it felt like to have visited St. Peter’s or the Louvre, we were also in disagreement about whom we were with, what our itinerary was, and even the angle of the sun at the moment we took the slides.

So, in the context of writing literary memoir, what are the implications of all this?

4

We like to pretend there are no conventions in nonfiction—‘conventions’ are for works of the imagination, and memoir is ‘nonfiction.’  Which is the same word we use for the newspaper.

– Patricia Hampl

It seems to me that this all comes down to a matter of where one locates oneself on a spectrum–or a continuum. Those like me who accept a blurring of boundaries between memoir, fiction, and say lyric prose and poetry will agree with Patricia Hampl, who describes memoir as a “hybrid” or “mongrel” form.

In an AWP interview a while back, Hampl claims that

Memoir rightly does belong to the imaginative world…once writers and readers make their peace with this fact there will be less argument over the ethical question about the memoir’s relation to ‘facts’ and ‘truth.’ But as long as we try and nudge memoir into the same confines of nonfiction that we expect for example, from journalism, we’ll have these battles with people taking rigid positions. Meanwhile people will continue to write their first person tales, trying to make sense of their lives in one context or another.”

As I’ve said, I have no trouble subscribing to the notion that imagination transposes, even reorders and reshapes memory. I think that transformation is an important part of what literary writing is all about. But I also believe that memory itself is not necessarily untruthful.

Here’s an illustration from “Trading Off.” It describes the first encounter I had at fifteen, with Coach Kerchman. All you’ll need to know here is that our next door neighbor, Gail Sloane, was Kerchman’s secretary in the Hygiene office. Rumor had it that Kerchman had a crush on her. So the summer before baseball tryouts, my father prevailed upon Gail to ask Kerchman if he would invite me to the tryouts as a favor to her.

This is the scene as I originally wrote it.

It was early September, my first day of high school. Baseball tryouts were in February, so I figured I had plenty of time before I had to worry about Kerchman. In first period home-room, though, Mrs. Klinger handed me a note, ”Be at my office 3 o’clock sharp.” It was signed by Mr. K. The rest of the day was a blur. I couldn’t hold a conversation, I picked at my lunch, and every time I opened a book, my thoughts drifted. By three, my stomach was in knots.

Kerchman’s “office” was across from the boiler room, deep in the bowels of the ancient brick building. To get there, you had to walk past the showers and through the boy’s locker room. As I opened the stairwell door, I inhaled the steam from the shower, and above the hum and buzz of locker room banter and casual small talk, I heard the clackety-clack-clack of aluminum cleats hitting the cement floor. An entire bank of lockers was reserved for Angelo Labrizzi, Mickey Imbrianni, and Leon Cholakis, the football studs I’d been admiring for the past year. I’d seen them around school and at the State Diner jock table; but here in their domain, they had an even more potent aura. As far back as grade school, this was a prestigious, exclusive club I’d dreamed of belonging to.

Though football would never be my sport, playing varsity baseball offered some of the same privileges. I’d already witnessed it for myself: Adults–your own parents, and your friends, actually paid money to watch you play; cheerleaders chanted your name (“Steinberg, Steinberg, he’s our man, if he can’t do it no one can.”), and they kicked their bare legs so high you could see their red silk panties. After school, you sat at the jock table in the State Diner;  you got to wear a tan leather jacket with a big blue and red “R” across the left breast, and your girlfriend wore your letter sweater to school. Maybe the biggest ego-trip of all was when everybody watched with envy when you left sixth period Econ to go on “road trips.”

I tried to push those thoughts out of my mind as I timidly knocked on Kerchman’s door. “It’s open,” he rasped in a deep, gravely voice. The room was a ten-foot-square box, a glorified cubby-hole, smelling of Wintergreen, Merthiolate, and stale sweat sox. The brown cement floor was coated with dust and rotted-out orange peels; and on all four sides were make-shift-two-by-four equipment bays, which overflowed with old scuffed helmets, broken shoulder pads, torn jerseys and pants, muddy cleats, and deflated footballs, all randomly piled on top of one another. Mr. K stood under a bare light bulb wearing a baseball hat, white socks, and a jock strap, He was holding his sweatpants and chewing a plug of tobacco. “You’re Steinberg, right?” He said my name, “Stein-berg,” slowly, enunciating and stretching out both syllables.

“I don’t beat around the bush, Stein-berg, You’re here for one reason and one reason only. Because Gail Sloane told me you were a reliable kid. What I’m looking for, Stein-berg, is an assistant football manager. I’m willing to take a chance on you.“

I wanted to run out of the room and find a place to cry. Assistant football managers were glorified water boys; they did all the “shit work,” everything from being stretcher bearers to toting the equipment.

He sensed my disappointment and waited a beat while I composed myself. “Gail also tells me you’re a pitcher,” he muttered, as he slipped into his sweat pants.

Another tense beat. Finally, he said, “In February, you’ll get your chance to show me what you’ve got.”

And to make certain there was no misunderstanding between us, Kerchman added, “Just like everyone else.”

‘I knew it,’ I muttered under my breath. I was pissed off at myself for allowing my father to ask Gail to put in a word for me. Too late now, though.

Then Kerchman said. “So what’s it going to be, Stein-berg?”

It had all happened too fast. I couldn’t think straight. In a trembling, uncertain voice, I told him I’d think about it and let him know tomorrow.

*

Almost five decades later, how accurate is my memory? I do recall that Kerchman asked me to be the assistant football manager, when all the while I was thinking that he was going to invite me to baseball tryouts. I vaguely remember what his office looked like, and I vividly recall what it smelled like. But who knows if the specific items I described were arranged in just that way? And I don’t remember if he called me out of class on the first day of class, or if I initiated the visit on my own. Or, if this happened sometime during the first week of school and not on the first day.  And, of course, I had to reconstruct some of the dialogue.

But I did not imagine or invent the scenario I just narrated. I unquestionably did meet with him. And he was standing in the middle of that tiny room wearing only a jock strap, socks, and baseball hat. Who could forget that image?  Well then, did I see and hear all this on that particular afternoon? And would it have made a difference if I had? What’s authentic here is the numbing despair and humiliation I felt at that moment. And for as long I write (and tell) the story of that encounter I’ll continue to claim that this is the real truth–just as I remember it.

Thus far, I’ve made a case only for memory and imagination, qualities that identify a given memoir as a literary work. For me, that’s the “creative” in creative nonfiction. But it’s only part of the equation, part of the challenge presented by this genre.

5

Research is essential, whether telling a coming-of-age story, investigating a family secret, or recreating the legacy of several generations. Whether we write about a world we know intimately or are just discovering, research leads to more layered and authentic narratives.

–Mimi Schwartz

The notion that memoirists rely exclusively on memory and imagination to craft their narratives is a persistent misconception. Memoirs are set in real time and in real places; and they include real people and real events. Let’s agree then, on this much. Whatever else we think of the form, none of us would be inclined to trust a writer who fabricated those truths. So it goes without saying that the memoirist’s—or for that matter the journalist’s -credibility rests on those things that can be verified—even fact checked. To my mind, that’s the “nonfiction” part of creative nonficton. Let me illustrate very briefly by referring back to “Trading Off.”

Originally, I wrote it as a stand-alone essay/memoir. But over time it became the impetus for Still Pitching, a full-length memoir I wrote about growing up in New York City from the late 1940’s until the late ‘50’s. The memoir is set against a backdrop that sports historians even today still call “the golden age of NY baseball.”

Here then, are some verifiable facts. During the post war years from 1947-1958, one or more frequently two of the three New York teams–the Yankees, the Giants, and the Brooklyn Dodgers—played in and won the World Series. That’s how the term “Subway Series” was coined. And if you were a young boy growing up in New York during that time, you couldn’t avoid baseball whether you liked the sport or not.

Those ten years were also the setting for my own coming of age. And like most adolescents, I wanted to fit in, to find a place where I belonged. But I also wanted to distinguish myself by pursuing something at which I could excel.  As it turns out, becoming a baseball pitcher was that something.

That inner struggle is the central narrative, the personal story, if you will, in Still Pitching. Where in the stand-alone piece, I needed to focus almost the entire narrative on the relationship between the coach and me, in the book length memoir, the personal story needed a larger context.  And so, I set the body of the memoir between two major baseball-cultural-historical events; 1947—when Jackie Robinson became the first black player to break the major league color barrier—and 1957, when the Dodgers and Giants left New York for California. Their departure, to be sure, marked the end of my childhood. But it was also the beginning of major league expansion. And for me and many others of my generation, this still serves as a marker for a myriad of other changes in the larger culture.

Before, during, and even after writing Still Pitching, I spent hundreds of hours reading baseball histories and period histories about New York, as well as looking at microfiche, videos, and newspaper and magazine clips–about New York City in the 50’s, and about baseball in New York during that period. One sports writer, Roger Kahn, even titled his book, The Era 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World. All hyperbole aside, there were other cultural and historical events, other forces, other people—entertainers, politicians, writers, and so on–that came to bear on the personal story I was telling. And to get the names, places, situations, and dates right, I needed to research all of that as well. Moreover, I also talked to people–friends, acquaintances, teachers, family members, sports writers, and baseball historians–who lived during that same time.

So then, we’re back to my original claim that memoir is indeed a hybrid genre. Which means that the narrator’s personal story—which evolves out of memory and imagination–and the research and reportage—are both, in one way or another, the necessary raw materials that the writer still has to organize and craft into a coherent narrative. And that, as Annie Dillard suggests, is how you “fashion a text”—which, in the end, is what all literary writers—memoirists, poets, and fiction writers–must do.

Works Cited

Barrington, Judith. Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, Portland, Oregon: Eighth Mountain  Press, 1997.

Dillard, Annie. “To Fashion a Text” from Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

Dunn, Stephen. Craft Lecture given at the Stonecoast Writer’s Conference, Freeport, Maine, July 27, 1996.

Gerard, Phillip. Creative Nonfiction: Researching and Crafting Stories of Real Life, Cincinnati: Story Press, 1997.

Gornick, Vivian.”Why Memoir Now?” from Women’s Review of Books, 8:10 (July,1996.

Hampl, Patricia, with Laura Wexler. “An Interview with Patricia Hampl” from The Associated Writing Programs Chronicle, 30:3 (March/April, 1998).

Houston, Pam, with Jan Goggins. “All Narrators are Unreliable: An Interview With Pam Houston” from Writing on the Edge, 8:1 (Fall/Winter,1996).

Kupfer, Fern. “Everything But The Truth” from a talk given at the Associated Writing Programs Convention, Washington, D C, April 14, 1996.

Steinberg, Michael. “Trading Off: a Memoir” from The Missouri Review, XV11:1 (May, 1994).