Monday, September 29, 2014

Dreaming in Sophie

I have heard than when a person becomes immersed in the culture of a foreign country, she begins to dream in the new language. And I have seen this happen too; when my neice returned Spain after only seven weeks of complete immersion, she would begin a sentence in English but lapse into Spanish halfway through her words. It was as if some other person interrupted her to finish the thought, the way married couples or best friends do.

I do not speak a foreign language fluently, but last night, I began to dream in Sophie.

Not a dream about Sophie, but in Sophie, as if she and I were one.

I was a bit behind on writing pages from Anna Karenina, so I spent a good chunk of Saturday catching up and copied over seven pages before my hand finally revolted. On Sunday, I went back to it, sticking with my usual two pages, and some change, in hopes of staying caught up. For the first time in the novel, I have encountered a lengthy period occupied by only two women, Anna and her sister-in-law Dolly, who is deciding whether or not to forgive her husband for an affair with the governess. Perhaps the quantity of time spent copying the discussion of how women are nothing without their husbands and families, coupled with a defense of how a man's affair has nothing to do with his sacred love for his wife, merged my subconscious with Sophie's in a new way.

Whatever it was, I woke at 5am this morning, feeling not quite myself. I can't quite explain the dreamstate, or how it felt. I only know that something has shifted, in the novel and in myself. And its funny, because it is not a feeling that makes me want to completely turn to my writing at the expense of my household chores and family relationships. In fact, in addition to the nearly ten pages of AK that I copied, I also cleaned the chicken coop, gave the children's sermon at church, baked zucchini muffins, folded laundry, and helped 12 and Almost 17 clean their bedrooms. I folded laundry, swapped out summer clothes, all this after having dinner with my husband and some friends on Friday night. Writing this list feels a tad bit arrogant, but I am telling you this, because the weekend is not a typically productive time for me, a fact that makes me feel even more that my body has been possessed by another creature.

There are so many times when writing feels perilously simliar to mothering, that feeling that another being is suckling off of your energy stores, that somehow you must muster the energy to rise and greet the demanding creature that you have created. I entered willingly into this project, at least at the beginning, but now, she is here, a beating heart that I cannot neglect.

Monday, September 22, 2014

Girls

 

Sixty pages into the novel, and our main character has yet to show up. I am growing tired of Oblonsky's dinners with his pals, with young men showing off and ice skating, of Vronsky's arrogance that he is not hurting anyone. All the while, the women go to bed alone, praying to God to let it all be okay.

And I think of Sophia Tolstoy writing these lines, not once, but eight times, late at night after everyone else has gone to bed. And I have decided that Sophie, along with Anna and Kitty, needed girlfriends.

Not Mean Girl girlfriends, or women to help her get the housework finished. She needed heart-connected, warrior women girlfriends, the kind who show up on a Friday night bearing bottles of wine and a pack of cigarettes, the kind who don't care if her daughters come in and out, eating their pistachios or overhearing an occasional curse word.

Sophie needed someone to say, Girl, you copied that damn novel eight times; If you can do that, you can anything. Then they would sit outside until 4am, beside a fire started with the first 59 pages of the novel, finally going inside to fall asleep until morning. Almost 17 gets up and turn off the lights in the house.

The next day, Sophie would wake up and go back to copying pages and doing laundry. She would fold the sheets and towels, put them away in the cabinet. But she would notice that Almost 17, rather than being traumatized by the evenings' shenaningans, is sitting at the piano with sheet music, teaching herself how to play a song.

 

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Claiming my Light and my Shadow

School started for my children in early August. Six weeks later, my daughter's black school pants still lay on the dining room table, orange chalk marks indicating where to place the hem. I pass them nearly every evening, mourning another day that the job has gone undone. Until finally, last night, as I walk in after work carrying bags of groceries from the car, 12 says, without looking up from the computer where she is finishing a (late) report on women's roles in Egypt, "Are you still going to hem my black pants?"

"I'll do it tonight after dinner."

Do I need to tell you that it didn't happen? Likely not. Nor did I make the chocolate chip cookies which were my inspiration for stopping at the grocery, on a rainy evening, after a long day at work.

I do, however, climb into bed at 9:11, according the old clock radio on my nightstand, a glass of milk and two leftover Girl Scout cookies on the shelf above it. My husband and stepson are downstairs in the den watching the Colts play on tv. When Almost 17 wanders in, asking if I made the cookies, I look at her and shake my head.

I never get to everything I intend to do.

But today has been one of those rare gems: I wake early and make chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast; once the early shift is out the door, I sit down and hem, unevenly, my daughter's black school pants, lay them over her chair and call her to breakfast; I pick up my computer from the repair shop; I sit down to copy two pages of Anna Karenina, and end at four, when Levin concedes Kitty's hand to Vronsky and exits.

I am aware that I take on too much, as a mother and as an artist. And it would be easy to feel like a failure. Some days, many days, I do, choosing to stare at the long list of chores on my fridge, paralyzed by the Bigness of beginning the first story in a new collection, or hand-copying an 800 page novel.

Could it be that the secret to success is as simple as an early bedtime? In summer, when we are tempted into late-night games, my father-in-law says, "He who hoots with the Owls, doth not soar with the Eagles." And off to bed he goes. But some of the best times I have are in those late night hours, playing Euchre while bugs launch themselves against the window screens, or staying up late to finish a novel, or sitting in a rocking chair at 2am, staring into the face of a nursing baby. There is no making sense of it, no guarantee that what works today will do so tomorrow, or with the next kid or the next book.

Perhaps that is why I keep coming back to this line in Anna Karenina: "All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow."

 

Monday, September 8, 2014

Cotton Candy Crazy

It is a cool morning in the midwest. The windows are open, so I can hear the fading cicadas and the grinding school bus as it picks up speed after picking up my daughter, who entered the kitchen this morning, grumbling that there was nothing good for her lunch. I stopped my work to look in the fridge for some options. A hard-boiled egg? Celery sticks and peanut butter?

 

"You're not helping by asking about things I don't want."

 

So I go back to my writing. I am nearing 50 pages with still no Anna Karenina figuring into the story. Levin has been rejected by Kitty. Dolly has left her cheating husband, Stepan Arkadyevitch going on and on about why he was entitled to sleep with the governess. But still no Anna. She remains invisible, and silent. A thought occurs to me as I contemplate this, my hands moving of their own accord over the curve of each c and b and y. Why bother putting her name in the title? What value was there in that, for the book is not really about her. And if I were Anna, I would want more recognition for the use of my name, especially knowing that it is Anna who pays the ultimate price for the story to resolve itself.

 

I suppose the value of a woman's time is on my mind in other ways. I began my new job last week. Already I have worked more hours than I recorded on my timesheet, in an attempt to organize my workspace and schedule so that, ultimately, I will have to spend less time doing that. And on the homefront, I am trying to put some new procedures in place, beginning with a weekly menu, posted on the fridge, with assigned helpers for each night. 12 is coming home to an empty house for the first time in her dozen years of life, so I have write out her daily to-do list and leave it on the table each afternoon, including extra chores that will ease my workload. In exchange for her services, I offer her a weekly allowance of $10, another first in our household. And the last shall be first.....

 

I cannot avoid the thoughts that spin their threads into a great pink ball of cotton candy in my head: we pay for what we value. And Sophie Tolstoy, like Anna, was an invisible character in the writing of this story. Not only did she remain unpaid, because Leo took the stance I did regarding allowance, that we do this work because we are part of a family and we have a responsibility to share the work, but she also had no say in how the rewards of that work would be used. Like me, she might have sat up long after everyone else was asleep, her fingers aching with stiffness on a cool autumn evening, while a pot of chicken and vegetables bubbles on the stove for the next day's dinner, clean dishes piled up to dry on the counter, piles of yet undone laundry waiting for her to wake the next morning, knowing that her work was important for the survival and happiness of her family.

 

Unlike me, she did not get a paycheck. No part of the income from Anna Karenina went into a retirement fund in her name. She couldn't siphon a percentage of the money into a 429 so that her kids would be able to go to college even if their father wasn't around to help. She couldn't decide if it was worth the money she made to hire a housecleaner but maybe not worth buying a new pair of shoes. When the family wagon broke down, she couldn't take out a debit card in her name to get it fixed. All she could do was let those cotton candy thoughts spin in her head, sticky and blinding, and go a little crazy.

Monday, September 1, 2014

Labor

"We in the country try to bring our hands into such a state as will be most convenient for working with. So we cut our nails; sometimes we turn up our sleeves. And here people purposely let their nails grow as long as they will, and link on small saucers by way of studs, so thay they can do nothing with their hands." -Leo Tolstory, Anna Karenina

 

These are the words of Levin, a country farmer who has come to Moscow to propose to Kitty, a young woman from a wealthy family. Levin's friend, Stepan Arkadyevitch responds that people grow out their nails to show that they work with their minds not their hands. We have not come so far today, in the way we view labor, often doing anything we can to escape it.

 

And even though I broke down last week and bought a new washing machine, after two months of hauling our dirty clothes to the laundromat, my one goal this weekend is to do a load of laundry in the old wringer washer I found in the crawl space of our cabin in Michigan. What was I hoping to accomplish? I think more than anything, I wanted to get my hands wet. I wanted to push the fabric through the rollers, being careful not to get my fingers caught, which a bit of research revealed to be a devastating injury. I chose an easy load: one set of twin sheets from the girls' bunk beds. The rest of them, I confess, are piled in plastic tubs for the return trip to Indy and a final destination inside my new-fangled machine at home.

 

The most difficult part was filling two tubs without working our old well pump so much that I would have to be replace it too. Toward this end, I walked through the house, gathering up old water glasses and finding water anywhere I could to ease the load. I poured out the pitcher of water we keep in the fridge to drink. I dumped the foot rinse bucket in as well. When the sky began to drizzle, I considered setting out buckets to collect water, all this while working 100 feet from the lake. I managed about to get the tub half full, stuffing a bread bag in place of the missing drain stopper.

 

I wanted it to be hard. I wanted to labor over that laundry, but I found it surprisingly easy. The crank turned with little effort from me, pushing the water out of the fabric. I put it through again and again, until the only visible water appeared as the bottom hem went through the rollers. I took to throwing the sheet over my shoulder as I approached the end, to keep it from falling back into the tub. My clothes became as wet as the sheets. I was surprised when I stopped cranking; the wetness was wringing itself out of me as well. This easy labor had worked me into a sweat. How is it that I find it much harder to pin together these words? I wish they would flow from me like water or my own sweat. Sometimes a story does pour out of me that way, and I am tricked into thinking that writing is easy, but it is only because I have discounted the days or weeks it took me to get myself to the page. Many of my stories involve some kind of work, kneading bread or hand-whipping egg whites into meringue or mending jeans, field research that I must do before I can write. It helps that this research, like today's laundry labor, feeds and clothes my family.