My father is eighty-six years old and in bed. His heart, that bloody motor,
is equally old and will not do certain jobs any more. It still floods his head
with brainy light. But it won't let his legs carry the weight of his body
around the house. Despite my metaphors, this muscle failure is not due to his
old heart, he says, but to a potassium shortage. Sitting on one pillow, leaning
on three, he offers last-minute advice and makes a request.
"I would like you to write a simple story
just once more," he says, "the kind de Maupassant wrote, or Chekhov,
the kind you used to write. Just recognizable people and then
write down what happened to them next."
I say, "Yes, why not? That's possible."
I want to please him, though I don't remember writing that way. I would
like to try to tell such a story, if he means the kind that begins: "There
was a woman..." followed by plot, the absolute line between two points
which I've always despised. Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all
hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.
Finally I thought of a story that had been
happening for a couple of years right across the
street. I wrote it down, then read it aloud.
"Pa," I said, "how about this? Do you mean something like
this?"
Once
in my time there was a woman and she had a son. They lived nicely, in a small
apartment in
"O.K., Pa, that's it," I said,
"an unadorned and miserable tale."
"But that's not what I mean," my father
said. "You misunderstood me on purpose. You know there's a lot more to it.
You know that. You left everything out. Turgenev
wouldn't do that. Chekhov wouldn't do that. There are in fact Russian writers
you never heard of, you don't have an inkling of, as good as anyone, who can
write a plain ordinary story, who would not leave out what you have left out. I
object not to facts but to people sitting in trees talking senselessly, voices
from who knows where..."
"Forget that one, Pa, what have I left out
now? In this one?"
"Her looks, for instance."
"Oh. Quite handsome, I think.
Yes."
"Her hair?"
"Dark, with heavy braids, as though
she were a girl or a foreigner."
"What were her parents like, her stock? That
she became such a person. It's interesting, you know."
"From out of town. Professional people. The first to be
divorced in their county. How's that? Enough?" I asked.
"With you, it's all a joke," he said.
"What about the boy's father? Why didn't you mention him? Who was he? Or
was the boy born out of wedlock?"
"Yes," I said. "He was born out of
wedlock."
"For Godsakes,
doesn't anyone in your stories get married? Doesn't anyone have the time to run
down to City Hall before they jump into bed?"
"No," I said. "In
real life, yes. But in my stories, no."
"Why do you answer me like
that?"
"Oh, Pa, this is a simple story about a
smart woman who came to N.Y. C. full of interest love trust excitement very up
to date, and about her son, what a hard time she had in this world. Married or
not, it's of small consequence."
"It is of great consequence," he said.
"O.K.," I said.
"O.K. O.K. yourself," he said, "but listen. I believe you that she's good-looking, but I
don't think she was so smart."
"That's true," I said. "Actually
that's the trouble with stories. People start out fantastic, you think they're
extraordinary, but it turns out as the work goes along, they're just average
with a good education. Sometimes the other way around, the person's a kind of
dumb innocent, but he outwits you and you can't even think of an ending good
enough."
"What do you do then?" he asked. He had
been a doctor for a couple of decades and then an artist for a couple of
decades and he's still interested in details, craft, technique.
"Well, you just have to let the story lie
around till some agreement can be reached between you and the stubborn
hero."
"Aren't you talking silly, now?" he
asked. "Start again," he said. "It so happens I'm not going out
this evening. Tell the story again. See what you can do this time."
"O.K.," I said. "But it's not a
five-minute job." Second attempt:
Once,
across the street from us, there was a fine handsome woman, our neighbor. She
had a son whom she loved because she'd known him since birth (in helpless
chubby infancy, and in the wrestling, hugging ages,
In order to keep him from feeling guilty (because
guilt is the stony heart of nine tenths of all clinically diagnosed cancers in
America today, she said), and because she had always believed in giving bad
habits room at home where one could keep an eye on them, she too became a
junkie. Her kitchen was famous for a while - a center for intellectual addicts
who knew what they were doing. A few felt artistic like Coleridge and others
were scientific and revolutionary like Leary. Although she was often high
herself, certain good mothering reflexes remained, and she saw to it that there
was lots of orange juice around and honey and milk and vitamin pills. However,
she never cooked anything but chili, and that no more
than once a week. She explained, when we talked to
her, seriously, with neighborly concern, that it was her part in the youth
culture and she would rather be with the young, it was an honor, than with her
own generation.
One week, while nodding through an Antonioni film, this boy was severely jabbed by the elbow
of a stern and proselytizing girl, sitting beside him. She offered immediate
apricots and nuts for his sugar level, spoke to him sharply, and took him home.
She had heard of him and his work and she herself
published, edited, and wrote a competitive journal called Man Does Live By Bread Alone. In the organic heat of her continuous
presence he could not help but become interested once more in his muscles, his
arteries, and nerve connections. In fact he began to love them, treasure them,
praise them with funny little songs in Man Does Live...
the
fingers of my flesh transcend
my transcendental soul
the tightness in my shoulders end
my teeth have made me whole
To
the mouth of his head (that glory of will and determination) he brought hard
apples, nuts, wheat germ, and soy-bean oil. He said to his old friends, From
now on, I guess I'll keep my wits about me. I'm going on the natch. He said he was about to begin a spiritual
deep-breathing journey. How about you too, Mom? he
asked kindly.
His conversion was so radiant, splendid, that neighborhood
kids his age began to say that he had never been a real addict at all, only a
journalist along for the smell of the story. The mother tried several times to
give up what had become without her son and his friends a lonely habit. This
effort only brought it to supportable levels. The boy and his girl took their
electronic mimeograph and moved to the bushy edge of another borough. They were
very strict. They said they would not see her again until she had been off
drugs for sixty days.
At home alone in the evening, weeping, the mother
read and reread the seven issues of Oh! Golden Horse! They seemed to her
as truthful as ever. We often crossed the street to visit and console. But if
we mentioned any of our children who were at college or in the hospital or
dropouts at home, she would cry out, My baby! My baby!
and burst into terrible, face-scarring, time-consuming
tears. The End.
First my father was silent, then he said,
"Number One: You have a nice sense of humor. Number Two: I see you can't
tell a plain story. So don't waste time." Then he said sadly, "Number
Three: I suppose that means she was alone, she was left like that, his mother. Alone. Probably sick?"
I said, "Yes."
"Poor woman. Poor
girl, to be born in a time of fools, to live among fools. The
end. The end. You were right to put that down. The end."
I didn't want to argue, but I had to say,
"Well, it is not necessarily the end,
"Yes," he said, "what a tragedy. The end of a person."
"No, Pa," I begged him. "It
doesn't have to be. She's only about forty. She could be a hundred different
things in this world as time goes on. A teacher or a social
worker. An ex-junkie! Sometimes it's better than having a master's in
education."
"Jokes," he said. "As a writer
that's your main trouble. You don't want to recognize it, Tragedy! Plain
tragedy! Historical tragedy! No hope. The end."
"Oh, Pa," I said, "She
could change."
"In your own life, too, you have to look it
in the face." He took a couple of nitroglycerin, "Turn to five,"
he said, pointing to the dial on the oxygen tank. He inserted the tubes into
his nostrils and breathed deep. He closed his eyes and said, "No."
I had promised the family to always let him have
the last word when arguing, but in this case I had a different responsibility.
That woman lives across the street. She's my knowledge and my invention. I'm
sorry for her. I'm not going to leave her there in that house crying, (Actually
neither would Life, which unlike me has no pity.)
Therefore: She did change. Of course her son
never came home again, But right now, she's the
receptionist in a storefront community clinic in the
"The doctor said that?" My father took
the oxygen tubes out of his nostrils and said, "Jokes, Jokes again."
"No, Pa, it could really happen that way,
it's a funny world nowadays."
"No," he said, "Truth first, She
will slide back. A person must have character, She
does not."
"No, Pa," I said. "That's it.
She's got a job, Forget it. She's in that storefront working."
"How long will it be?" he asked. "Tragedy! You too. When will
you look it in the face?"
© Grace Paley Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Noonday Press.