Wednesday, October 29, 2014

The Curse

My daughter read The Scarlet Letter in Literature class. Every year, the teacher gives extra credit to students who create their own crafty version of Hester's badge of shame. 17 told me that last year, one student used his father's welding equipment to creat a cast iron image of an A. I was going to knit one, she said, but another girl is already doing that. Ever her mother's daughter, 17 decided to make a pillow. This is why I came in from work to find her red IU sweatpants spread out on the dining room table, ready to go under the knife.

"Wait! Don't cut those. They are really nice. We can find something else for you."

"But I never wear them. Why does it matter?"

"If you don't want them, I can give them to the clothing bank at church."

In the end, we found some old red pants, and she kept her IU ones. While I made dinner, she layed her pattern on the fabric, pinned it in place and cut out two shapes. She sewed them right side out, because we could not figure out how to turn the shape right side out after stitching it (A's have that pesky hole in the center). She slid into the kitchen, Risky-Business style (fully-clothed), smiling and holding her Scarlet Letter over her head.

"Where is the pillow stuffing?" she asked.

I grimaced, not sure I had any, and not wanting to drive to the store, I wondered what else she could use.

Then I remembered the Sock Basket.

Before my husband and I blended into a family of nine, I had two pairs of running socks, which I washed and carefully reunited a couple of times a week. But less than a month into our marriage, one lonely sock remained in my possession. I held onto it, and occasionally another would turn up in the sock basket, the catchall for every mismatched sock in our house, but by that the time, the other one would have gone missing. Almost ten years later, our oldest kid teaches 6th grade English and lives on her own. Three of our kids are in college, and a fourth is visiting a college in Ohio today. Only two little monkeys will be jumping in the bed, and those two do their own laundry. So earlier that day, I had emptied the sock basket into a plastic bag, which sat at the bottom of the steps. I couldn't bring myself to throw it away. This is my curse. I hoard anything that I think can be used later. I should be forced to sew a single, unmatched sock on my clothing as a badge of shame.

When I plopped the bag on the table beside my daughter, she looked up at me and glared. But she took up her scissors and began to cut the socks first into strips and then little squares. 13 refused to help, on the grounds that she wasn't allowed to borrow 17's phone charger earlier that evening. I initially begged off (trigger finger, remember?) but after dinner came in to help. She shooed me away, saying that she didn't have anything else to do. When she was finished stuffing the pillow, she used gold glitter glue to recreate the elaborate embroidery Hester added to her letter.


When I came down to make tea the next morning, I found the pillow laying on the table. I picked it up; it had a satisfying denseness to it. What would the teacher do will all those Scarlet Letters, and what had become of all the letters from years past? And then I realized, I had not salvaged anything. Eventually everything must go.

Friday, October 24, 2014

Pain Relievers

We're pretty good these days at alleviating pain and discomfort. Currently, I am taking ibuprofen to ease the pain in my right thumb from a condition called Trigger Finger, so named because when I bend my thumb, tendon catches, pulls, and with an audible pop, tendon springs from its sheath. At some point, hopefully this year, because, as my husband pointed out this morning, we have met our out-of-pocket deductible, I will have to have a "procedure." The doctor assures me this will fix the problem.

 

But I wonder. My hands already bear the scars of other stories: a skin graft from burning oil, which the nurse told me is the most common burn for women, a triangle of ropy skin where the oil spilled back as I tried to put out the fire; 1/2 of a missing joint on the ring finger of the same hand, an industrial accident when I spent a summer working in a plastics factory; a moon-shaped scar from a knife that slipped while I was cutting a pan of cookies into squares. Given that I have bitten my nails since I was six, and that I am also, while I write this post, wearing a brace on my left hand for carpal tunnel, I would say that my hands have born the brunt of pain in my life.


Perhaps this why I write a line from Susan Vreeland inside the cover of each new journal: Even a scarred hand can bring forth greatness. It is a line from her novel The Passion of Artemesia, about a woman painter in the time of Michaelangelo. A priest tied Artemesia's hands with rope and squeezed them until all the bones broke, as punishment for adultery with a man (who, as you have probably already guessed, raped her). Artemsia continued to paint despite the constant pain in her hands.

 

I have found that while surgery relieves the pain of injury or stress, each scar brings a new form of discomfort that never recedes. If you are ever around when I bump my hand on the edge of a table or countertop, my reaction might seem extravagant. And if I have my trigger thumb repaired, it is likely that the condition will pop up in another finger. But what would I do without my hands? All the work I enjoy and am called to do requires the use of my fingers and hands. I have, as of today, copied 100 pages of Anna Karenina. I sew, knit and embroider. I gather eggs from my chickens. In the summer, I pick pounds of blueberries to freeze for the winter. On my walks, I watch the squirrels, and notice bits of shell and nut fall to the ground. What would a squirrel do without its paws? It could not survive. How lucky I am, I think, to be able to repair the damage to mine.

 

This past week, I worked at my parents' house, helping to clear out the garage of old furniture and wood. Once, while supervising the burn barrel in the backyard, I reached out to push a piece of wood down into the fire. The pain in my thumb was so sharp that I pulled back as if the flames emanated from inside my own bones. When I asked my mom if she had any pain relievers, she told me that my sister had taken the last two the night before. There was no way to get more; the driveway was filled with the vans and trucks of shoppers at the moving sale. I had no choice but to keep working. And so I did. I worked until about noon, drove home, and spent the weekend weatherizing windows. I painted the walls in the new space where I hope to sell my artwork. Now the pain is a constant ache. And I will call the doctor as soon as I finish this post. The doctor will make an appointment for me to return in a week or so, at which time he will make a small incision and go in and cut the sheath, allowing the tendon to move back and forward with ease. And until then, I will continue to work, and write, with pain. Because the alternative, to do nothing, in no less pain free.

Monday, October 13, 2014

Losing the Lead in My Pencil

Whenever I refused to eat something as a child, my dad would coax me by saying, "It will put lead in your pencil." I think I was in college, at a large table in the dining hall, when understanding of this metaphor hit me.

The image came to me again, late last night, sitting in a silent house, copying pages from Anna Karenina. My first pen will soon run out of ink.

I have recently copied the scenes at the ball. Kitty enters, fake hair piled on her head, pink dress covered with tissuey roses, perfectly done up to attract the attention of Vronsky. She feels quite certain of her appearance, until she dances past Anna Karenina. She takes in Anna's dress, black velvet trimmed with lace, and thinks how much more beautiful she is dressed this way, instead of in violet, as Kitty had been attempting to convince her to wear. And Anna's hair, adorned only with a wreath of flowers, is beautiful in a way that Kitty could not achieve with her cake tower of a hairdo. And Anna's shoulder, bare. Her necklace, stunning, keeping one's eye drawn to her naked skin.

Anna is putting lead in everyone's pencil that night, even Kitty's.

And Vronsky's, another detail that Kitty notices.

If you are picturing Kiera Knightly right now, let me draw you a different picture. I can't quote it directly, because I used my latest round of pages to stuff care packages to my college kids, but when Vronsky first sees Anna at the train station, he notes the roundness of her woman's figure, a contrast to the constant referral to Kitty's thin arms and wispy appearance. And as a reader, I know exactly when Vronsky is smitten: when Anna alone speaks up on behalf of the poor widow standing beside the track where the her husband has been crushed by a train. On cue, Vronsky disappears to find the woman and give her money.

I admire Anna, at the ball, being Anna, an older woman, married with a child, called to Moscow to save her brother's marriage while tending to her nephews and nieces who tug on her dress with their gooey child hands, drooled over by Vronsky in a room full of made-up maidens. Anna has a beauty that has come with age and experience. She has tenderness that make her vulnerable and strong.

I am thinking this as I copy pages, late on the eve of my baby's thirteenth birthday, as my pen's ink fades from glistening black to a scratchy gray: that aging has it's own beauty.

 

 

 

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

A Salmon Kind of Love

My friend Jennifer used to say that men were monomonical, a fancy word for obsessed, driven. And she was not refering to sex. She meant they could zero in a project or job and block out everything around them. Implied, in her comment, was the idea that a woman had to keep all the balls in the air, even when they had something to accomplish that should, in theory, be given all her attention.

Monday night, on the way home from my writing group, I was thinking of this, because I knew we were out of dog food, but I also knew that by midnight, I had to submit a story for an upcoming workshop, a story that was less than halfway through its current revision. The dog, I reasoned, was already in bed for the night, and wouldn't notice his empty bowl, and so, I chose my story. I sent the story in, at 11:32 by the clock at the corner of my computer screen and headed up to bed, where my husband had been asleep already for hours.

Yes, hours. The reason I was debating the dog food question: My husband had an interview at 6:30 am the next morning, for the case he is working on. And today, he left the house at 4am for a trip to New York.

Only a couple of days before, we were in Michigan, watching salmon trying to leap over a four-foot dam. The fish didn't know where they are going; their only goal was to get as far as they could before spawning. We stood in awe of these beautiful fish, who doggedly worked their way against the current before attempting and occasionally making the leap over the concrete barrier from which a monster of water rushed at them. There were six of us, three couples, male and female, plus an older man and his dog. And I noticed everyone was saying, "He almost made it that time!" and "Look at him! He's beautiful!" and my favorite, "Come on Dude, you can do it!" When I mentioned that I thought the salmon were going to lay eggs, which meant they were female, we began to correct ourselves. And then one of the women said she thought they were capable of being both male and female, as some animals can be.

Thank goodness for the internet, where we were able to find the answer. Turns out both male and female of the species, are driven to swim upstream until they have completely exhausted themselves and can swim not farther. Then the females lay eggs. The male fish fertilize them, afterward heading off to find another female of the species.

Most of the time, we humans don't know what we are doing either. We spend way too much time analyzing why we do things, or debating, whether in our heads or with each other, whether this way or that way is right, or more likely, why the other person's way of doing things is wrong. And when I began this project, I was pretty sure that Sophia Tolstoy was not treatly fairly by her husband or the history books. But the more I write, I hear not only Sophie's voice, but the exchange of words between Leo and his wife. He wrote, she copied, he wrote again, and so it went. Anna Karenina may symbolize Russian politics or culture or human nature, but it was first, before it became a novel, an exchange of words between two people who loved each other, who began their relationship by exchanging diaries, so that they could know everything about each other. I find that as I write, I hear a tenderness in my ears, of Leo for his wife, and I did not expect this.

Humans have the capacity for love that is about more than procreation, more than maternal love or love between husband and wife. This I believe. And yet we try to limit Love, judge it, declare one kind good and another kind bad. But love is love, even flawed, broken, makes-me-want-to-beat-my-head against the wall love. Love drives us to swim upstream and fling ourselves against concrete barriers, often with no understanding of why.

Choosing to finish my story does not diminish my love for my husband, or even my dog, or my children. Perhaps this is why I empathize at times with Leo, who responded to the call to write stories, at great cost to his relationship with his wife. And Sophia answered her own callings, to her photography, her children, and to a man with whom she became friends after the death of her seven-year-old son. No one knows if they had a physical affair, but from her diaries, it is clear that she felt love for him. And I have a close friend to whom I declare my love every day at the end of our emails. It is a different kind of love than I feel for my husband, but I feel it just as strongly, and the two do not compete with each other.

The thing is, the end result is the same for both of us, human and salmon. Once we fight to get upstream, lay our eggs and protect them until they can live on their own, we die. We can choose to throw ourselves against the wall until we make it across, or we can give up and throw ourselves in front of an oncoming train. Either way, it ends the same way. Both ways are painful and disorienting. And every moment of every day we choose whether to keep going or to stop where we are.