Treasures

My friend Kris, center, hosted a party for The Playgroup at her Phoenix store full of treasures, Trouvé Antiques, Home & Garden. I donated a portion of the proceeds to Literacy Volunteers of Maricopa County.

“Amy Marley didn’t keep a scrapbook, but instead tossed family photographs into an old suitcase, trusting memory to match each treasured image with its story.”

 –The Playgroup

I’ve been treasure hunting.

At a series of events celebrating the publication of my novella The Playgroup, part of the Gemma Open Door series to promote adult literacy, I’ve asked my guests—many of them cherished friends—to write about a treasure they’ve lost or found, loved and given away.

They wrote of favorite toys and foolproof hiding places, of best friends and garages that doubled as theatrical stages, play schools and skating rinks.  They described the  “Lefty Gomez” baseball bat bought by an uncle at a Yankees double-header, and the closet containing go-go boots, ballroom dancing dresses, a cap gun, and a box full of mysterious keys.  They recounted the tale of the doll that fled Germany during World War II, companion to a young girl whose father had been killed.  They lamented the quartz citrine engagement ring lost by a great-grandmother in the Mississippi mud, found by a grandmother planting okra 50 years later, and stolen from the granddaughter who inherited it when she turned 18.

These friends told of losing a mother and finding her in a daughter, and of the “gift” of partnering in business with a beloved father.  They fondly remembered books and new school shoes, Devil’s food birthday cake with meringue icing, heart-shaped notes left by a 1^st-grade classroom elf called Tiny, and a favorite photo of their face-painted kids at a carnival.   They wrote of backyard magic kingdoms “full of twisty-turny vines and tall trees” and of the “primeval forest” bordering the bat-infested mansion of the neighborhood witch, a house revealed in hindsight to be an ordinary structure observed by a solitary tree.

These stories move me.  They’re like scattered sherds dug up from our shared provenience, pieces I ache to put together again.  As my friend Frances (next to me in the photo, above) says of that stolen citrine engagement ring, “I imagine someone, somewhere, loves the family treasure that I lost. Maybe one day I’ll make a replica of it for my girls.”  Isn’t that what we do when we remember, and when we write about what we find?

“I thought I lost my fun once," wrote my 9-year-old niece, "but then I found it again…so easily in my brain.”

I learned to read with these folks.

My Madison Meadows Elementary School friends.

 

Celebrating The Playgroup

A book party is truly the best part of the whole business, and I am grateful to my friend Amy Rubinoff for throwing one for The Playgroup, and to Radnor Patch for covering it.

For one thing, it’s the rare occasion when a writer has physical evidence of an audience.  But for me, it’s a bit like This is Your Life, too.  As one of my characters, Laurie (not me but like me, a writer) says,

“…writing is not living. It’s a half-life spent behind a closed

office door waiting for wisdom, counting on time to eventually yield

fruit.”

In other words, my friends and family are my real life.  When I look around a room full of these people, I can account for my life–and the ten years between novels!   Among these guests will be the Bryn Mawr classmates who intimidated me in the best of ways, helping me to shape a meaningful life.  Ruth Koeppel, midwife to my novel, My Life As a Girl.   The mothers who (as the book’s dedication says) “were home when I needed them”—and their children, grown from toddlers to teenagers.

There will be the teachers and volunteers who’ve helped me raise my daughters by giving their time and expertise to our community.   The colleagues who’ve been with me in the trenches in elementary school classrooms as part of the Young Writers Day program, who’ve made literature come alive for high school students in the summer Writing for College program, who’ve made English House at Bryn Mawr College a friendlier place for creative writing.

There will be writers whose work I admire, several of whom generously helped me shape The Playgroup or risked their reputations by “blurbing” this book:  Beth Kephart, Cynthia Reeves, Antonya Nelson and Robin Black.

There will be my husband, Chris Mills, and daughters Alison and Catherine Mosier-Mills, who make my life whole.

This novella has gone through so many incarnations as I tried to gain perspective on my experience as a mother.  Now I’m thrilled to have it be published as part of the Gemma Open Door series to promote adult literacy. The series started up in the UK, with authors including Roddy Doyle and Nick Hornby, launched on the idea (I’m quoting our publisher, Patricia O’Hare) that “the best writers would help encourage people who struggle to read, or people for whom English is not their first language and, as we are discovering, the adult reluctant reader.  The books will be used to inspire reading, instill confidence (hence the short chapters and wide margins) and build vocabulary as well. No dumbed-down or patronizing dickandjane stuff for reluctant readers, but the very best writing to entice.”

Because reading is central to my writing life, I’m especially happy to make a contribution to the Delaware County Literacy Council, whose director, Madeline Bialecki, will party with us.

When my editor, Brian Bouldrey, called me to ask if I would contribute to the series, I offered The Playgroup with the idea that one potential group of “reluctant readers” might be the sleep-deprived mothers I knew and once was.  Women who—like the mothers in my real-life playgroup and in the fictional The Playgroup—need and seek diversion and philosophical discussion, even while they only have time or attention for Parents magazine.

When you read The Playgroup, you’ll see that it is short, has a straightforward narrative, and has been combed through for clarity. But the story is the same one my supportive and long-suffering friends remember, my attempt to provide an answer to the question I often encountered while I had one foot in each of the working mom and stay-at- home mom worlds: “What do those women do all day?”

For a preview, check out Sam Gridley’s take on The Playgroup.

 

I Have, I Fear, the Literary Temperament

 

May Day, 1923, as recorded in the diary of Dorothy Burr Thompson, Bryn Mawr College Class of 1923

February 28, 1920, gray, cold, dull

“I used to feel that having big thoughts and feeling deeply were a sign of greatness and that I was marked, so to speak.  Query: Can I write?  Is this an indication of the good taste of Bryn Mawr or my vile style?”

These words, inscribed in a composition notebook by Bryn Mawr freshman Dorothy Burr Thompson ’23 ninety years ago, remind me of my own overwrought musings, which served as source material for my novel, My Life As a Girl.  By the time I wrote the book, I was fifteen years removed from the angst of adjusting to college life.  Though I was teaching creative writing to Bryn Mawr undergraduates in the same building where I’d conferenced with my Freshman English professor, the psychological landscape of the campus had changed—as I had—in the intervening years.  In order to fictionalize the fear, uncertainty, and awe I’d felt on a campus that was by then my workplace, I had to undertake an archaeological excavation of my past.  I dug up my old insecurities (detailed in the journals I kept from 1980 – 1984) as well as my successes and grand plans (trumpeted in my letters home) to find again what I thought and felt at 17.  At that age, I entered Bryn Mawr’s class of 1984 with my brilliant, far-better-prepared classmates—and finally met the mythical Elizabeth Vermey ‘58, who’d opened the door with her signature on the letter of admission that is, along with my light-blue lantern, one of my most cherished college artifacts.

Middle-aged now, I tell my own true story differently to Bryn Mawr student Jen Rajchel ’11, who requested my biography when I signed up to participate in an archival project for Elliott Shore’s course in “Women’s Higher Education in the 19th &20th Centuries: The History of Bryn Mawr College”.  Like any life, mine is lived circuitously, but in retrospect I can plot my path as a series of points along a narrative timeline leading logically to the desk where I sit today, writing this essay.  As if becoming a writer is the inevitable conclusion to the story of a character who studied psychology, as I did at Bryn Mawr, and who planned to earn a Ph.D.

Dorothy Burr Thompson did the opposite; she entered Bryn Mawr a writer (she’d penned poems and stories and a novel draft, Marjorie, at Miss Hill’s School in Philadelphia) and exited as a scholar.  As I learned before I began reading her 1919 – 1923 diaries, she graduated summa cum laude, forged a brilliant career as a classical archaeologist specializing in ancient terra cotta art, and lived to be 101.  Knowing the end of her story diffuses its narrative tension somewhat by revealing what Dorothy accomplished in her long, productive, fruitful life.  But for me, this answer to the question of who she became only brings her own urgent query—Can I write?—into greater relief.

In fact, Dorothy published more than 50 scholarly papers and books on her excavation work in Athens.  Her life-spanning diaries in the Bryn Mawr College Archives (beyond the three volumes my research partner, history major Emily Kirchner ’12, and I studied) contain evidence that she wrote fiction and poetry into her forties, and yet no mention is made of this work in her New York Times obituary.

“There will be a box here for you one day,” Lee Wacker ’12 said cheerfully, as she and Michelle Smith ’12 sat across from me—Youth facing Middle Age—at a reading table in Canaday’s Coombe Suite one cold, rainy day in October.  How I will be remembered isn’t something I thought about much at Bryn Mawr, but it’s definitely something I think about now.  Perhaps it was this sudden realization—that a complex life with conflicting ambitions might be abstracted to fit a column of type or an archive box —that directed my attention to the subtext in Dorothy’s story.

And so, as Emily investigated Dorothy’s preparation for Bryn Mawr’s entrance exam and rigorous curriculum, I focused on her literary aspirations—and the role of Bryn Mawr College as setting and (at times) antagonist in altering the arc of her life.

Monday, September 22, 1919

“Four years of college should prove whether I have a right to write or should take up a manlier way of life.”

Bryn Mawr, at the point when Dorothy matriculated, was in some ways an unlikely setting for a young woman who declared herself a “literary type.”  Creative writing was not yet part of the curriculum.  Practically speaking, the long list of required courses in English, philosophy, math, science, Greek, Latin, and two modern languages left her even less time for outlining her new novel  (working title: Youth) than I would have six decades later, as I chose courses to fulfill slightly less onerous requirements.

More significant, perhaps, is the psychological setting for Dorothy’s endeavor, as depicted by Cornelia Meigs ’08 in What Makes a College?: A History of Bryn Mawr.  Our alma mater was founded by pragmatic Quakers and shaped by its formidable first dean, M.Carey Thomas, who articulated an agenda for “solid and scientific” instruction in her cheeky 1883 letter to James Rhoads, applying for the president’s job that would shortly become his.  Bryn Mawr in 1919—post-armistice, pre-suffrage—still had much to prove about what women and women’s colleges could do.  Though Dorothy’s fateful meeting with by-then-President Thomas wouldn’t occur until her sophomore year (Helen Taft took the reins in 1919 – 1920 while Thomas took a sabbatical), Bryn Mawr was Thomas’s brainchild, if not her stone embodiment in Collegiate Gothic style.  In literary terms, M. Carey Thomas is the antagonist in the conflict Dorothy establishes in her diary on the first day of classes in her freshman year.  Dramatically, Bryn Mawr is the perfect setting for the struggle that will intensify over four years and, finally, reveal her character.

August 8, 1920 clear, warm, soft

Oh, such a soft summer day, peaceful and dreary, ill-fit for recording turbulent and petty feelings!  Yet I must.  I have, I fear, the literary temperament—capable of being happy only in writing, however foolish may be my ideas.  Every day I have promised myself an orgy in the empty inviting blank book…”

By sophomore year, though Dorothy laments being “gradually weighed down by study to less artistic tasks,” she’s using her diary differently, as a true writer would:  to practice her craft and articulate her emerging literary aesthetic.   Her entries are transformed in content and style; self-analysis becomes literary criticism (she admires Jane Austen and Ivan Turgenev), ruminations on her friendships become thoughts about her characters.  “Malcolm is dead,” she writes on September 13, 1920—and I have to re-read the passage several times before I realize that Malcolm is not a family member, but her fictional creation.  “Perhaps it is wrong,” she adds, “or rather, inadvisable, to suffer so much for an imaginary pain…”  Her entries from this time reflect new awareness of herself as protagonist in her collegiate experiment of self-invention.  In one passage, she admits of her eponymous novel, “I always knew Marjorie was myself.”

Again and again in her diaries, Dorothy pits the “literary type” (such as her brilliant friend D.W., to whom she “confided all my schemes and hopes”) against the “scientific personality” (typified by her math professor, Anna Pell).  She pursues these women’s stories as a novelist would, seeking resolution to her own internal conflict.  By spring of sophomore year, D.W. makes the “upper ten” for the European Fellowship that Dorothy covets; by spring of junior year, she withdraws from Bryn Mawr after suffering a “nervous breakdown.” Dorothy’s professed fear of the literary temperament is informed by such dramatic outcomes, which seem to reinforce her own associations:  inspiration with depression, dullness with mental and physical health.  She expresses her dichotomous view of these mental states throughout her diaries, but never as succinctly as in her entry on February 28, 1920:  “I’d write tonight, but curiously, I feel vigorous, but uninspired, like a strong cow.”

Anna Pell is another story.  On Thursday, December 21, 1920, Dorothy presents (in dialogue with stage directions) a pointed conversation with the math professor at “Yarrow”.  As the two women speak, Mrs. Pell’s odd, “dog-like” husband Alexander shuffles in and out of the room, muttering that his wife is “crazy” and that he and she are “incompatible equations”.

D—Why am I more stupid as I go on?

Miss P—Misdirected energy, Miss Burr.

D—Must one give up everything, and health?

Miss P—Almost (pathetically but unsentimentally.) You must make a great many sacrifices; it is an isolated life. You can’t talk about your work to anyone.  But Mathematicians don’t consider—they go straight ahead.  (Bursting through reserve.) It’s the most wonderful thing in the world.

A month later, on Thursday, January 27, 1921, Dorothy depicts another, less amusing visit to “Miss P’” at Yarrow, to deliver a puzzle she’s promised to bring.  “Her eyes were red and swollen and her face white,” she notes, signaling an important scene with slower pacing and minute detail.  “I was embarrassed to meet her, so I chatted jauntily on about Miss Blake, engines, puzzles, etc. trying to set on myself as theatrical and romantic in imagining that she had been crying.”  Mrs. Pell takes the puzzle, though something in her manner is uncordial, and Dorothy feels unwanted.  “I got out quickly,” she reflects, as she builds to her point, “without knowing exactly why.”

Later, she’s shocked to learn from a professor of psychology, Miss Fernald, that Mr. Pell had died from a stroke just that morning.  “That that provincial, untrivial, earnest woman should have received me so undramatically, even tho’ she was in undoubted sorrow… a few hours after her husband’s death—is a triumph of the scientific personality,” she concludes.  “A literary woman could not have been so matter of fact.”  Dorothy presents the scene as more evidence of her own literary temperament, but her writing also reveals her instincts for character and story.  Her portrait of the strange Mr. Pell was prescient, as it turns out.  More than eighty years later, Richard Pipes would make the case in The Degaev Affair:  Terror and Treason in Tsarist Russia that “Alexander Pell” was in fact notorious Russian terrorist Sergei Degaev, accomplice to the murder of Tsar Alexander II, leading a double life as the husband of Bryn Mawr’s math department chair.  Now that’s a story—one that Dorothy might have told.

Saturday, April 22, 1922 clear, cool, brilliant

“PT said to Uncle Earnest, “She is our best student”—I am elated, inspired—those murky misgivings and suicidal agonies retreat to deeper corners—though never do they entirely vanish.  This is my clear ambition—honor by those I respect.  More I demand still of course—honor from the world beyond academic doors—“

PT? The instant I understood the initials were President Thomas’s, I felt the intensity of Dorothy’s conflict and the certainty of her fate.  Though she had yet to choose her profession, she’d been chosen.  She’d been launched on a scholarly trajectory when her novelist mother, Anna Robeson (Brown) Burr, first suggested a career in archaeology; she’d gained momentum when she declared a double major (Bryn Mawr’s first) in classical archaeology and Greek.  Now, with high praise from Rhys Carpenter and Mary Swindler, she set her sights on winning Bryn Mawr’s European Fellowship, a prize that would cover a year of study in Greece, where she began the work that defined her life.

* * *

The students in the “Writing Short Fiction” class I teach at Bryn Mawr are smart, talented and well trained to critically examine themes in literature.  But I want them to learn to think as writers; that is, I want them to understand and apply literary technique to produce a desired effect in their stories.   This week, we talked about different kinds of story endings,  including resonant images like James Joyce’s “snow falling faintly through the universe” at the end of “The Dead”.   I was thinking of Dorothy as I told my students that stories don’t need to resolve neatly to be meaningful.   If the writer has done her work with scene and exposition and sensory detail, the reader will feel that what has happened mattered—that the events depicted have brought about a transformation that opens the story instead of tying it closed.

I shuffled through several possible endings to this narrative as my November 12, 5:00 pm, essay deadline for Professor Shore approached.   May Day?  Commencement?  The chance reunion with math professor Agnes Scott while out walking on April 8, 1923?  This last image is almost too perfect:  Miss Scott, one of Thomas’s first hires and true stars, contradicts Dorothy’s idea of the “scientific personality” as she warmly greets her former student “who deserted mathematics” and gives her a bouquet of pansies picked from her garden.  “Just so you do one thing thoroughly, that’s all that matters,” Miss Scott says. Dorothy, seemingly as surprised and touched as I am by her words, asks, “Was I wrong to leave the influence of such a spirit?”

Chronologically, this entry is nearer to the end of Dorothy’s college years than the ending I have in mind.  It also makes a point—perhaps too convincingly—that there can be no definite conclusion to Dorothy’s conflict or, one hopes, to her dreams. In this same passage—one week after winning the European Fellowship and being feted by professors and classmates and family—Dorothy is dismayed to hear that Rhys Carpenter has described her “heart’s desire” as archaeology.  She writes,  “I almost want to scream ‘No, no, no,’; to write and only to write and if not that—to create, be it but buttons!”

Finally, I decide that Dorothy’s character has been sufficiently illuminated by the story she’s told in her diaries; her “clear ambition—honor by those I respect” has been fulfilled.  And I end instead with an image of Dorothy from three weeks earlier, as she awaits word of her brilliant future from her room in Pembroke Hall:

Thursday, March 15, 1923 clear, cold, brilliant

“This week has been a worse strain than the war zone – and then I was watching for Death!  But the slow tightening of the web that draws me inescapably to the centre—ie: tonight when finally, undeniably, I shall know about the European Fellowship.  After 4 years of doubt, it comes as a high culmination, particularly by so much drama…”

Later

8:00 pm       The lights in Taylor make me uncommon nervous…

10:30             In an hour, it is about helpless!

10:50             All over! The letter, secured by adhesive tape, lies under the covers—and  here’s for a good sleep! …So quiet a night for all these years!  I rather hate to have it go!”

In life, endings are always beginnings; we just don’t know it at the time.

This archival project began with Jen Rajchel’s request for my biography, and so this seems an appropriate place to conclude:

I’m the author of the novel, My Life as a Girl (Random House), which is set in my hometown of Phoenix, Arizona, and at my alma mater, Bryn Mawr College. I graduated in 1984 with a major in psychology. I’m very grateful to the department and my senior conference professor, Rick McCauley, for allowing me to investigate such literary topics as prototype theory and metaphorical thinking before pursuing a writing career. Though I only took one creative writing class during my time at Bryn Mawr, my senior-year experience writing a bi-weekly opinion column for the Bryn Mawr-Haverford Bi-College News taught me to write with integrity and to be ready to defend my work…often face-to-face, over a meal in the dining hall with the smartest group of critics I’ve ever known.

One last image:  the day in my senior seminar class, “Cognitive Issues”, when Professor McCauley referenced my column in the Bi-College News. “Good work,” he said casually, kindly.  “You’re going to make a living writing one day.”  This essay, drafted 26 years later, is just one fragment of the encouragement I heard—still hear—in my psychology professor’s words.

 

The Big Tree

This towering eucalyptus was already old when I was in elementary school at Madison Meadows in Phoenix, and it was wide enough to block the path from home to away-from-home.  The Big Tree’s leaves laced the sky; sun burnt bark peeled and fell away from its body; its roots gripped the ground where it had stood for a century.   Back then, the tree gave shade and cover for fights that began in the schoolyard and smoldered until dismissal.  We all understood what “Meet me at the Big Tree” meant:  the words were a challenge, a waving red flag signaling a crowd of bike-straddling students to gather and witness and fan the flames.

Beneath the Big Tree, I saw boys—sometimes best friends—wrestle murderously in the dirt; there, I saw a girl lose her tube top slugging the boy who’d broken her heart; there, two chronic insomniacs—my best friend Laurie and I—met sometimes at midnight to roam our neighborhood, studying the skeletons of night-lit houses to see how other families lived.  And there, two years ago, I met my father to strategize in secret, after my mother—confused and angry and terrified as her aging brain dissolved to lace—bruised his body and broke his thumb.

Certain artifacts from our pasts are discarded; others stay with us, charged with emotional power.  The Big Tree often appears in my stories.  I’ve imagined my teenage characters standing beneath its familiar umbrella, where the air tastes—in my memory—of coconut and citrus, sweat and cooling mud.  Their hearts beat loudly from danger they’ve summoned, as they swagger and posture, daring a friend or protector or life itself to strike the first blow.  But the stories we tell affect us, too; they become part of our personal mythology.   When I met my father at the Big Tree—the site chosen unconsciously, unintentionally—I implored him to see what my brothers and I knew:  caretaking was killing him, and he had to save himself.

That night I pocketed a large piece of the Big Tree’s bark—curved gracefully, like a hand at rest or half a prayer—and carried it home with me to Philadelphia.  This tree bark now sits on my writing desk, while I sort through the sad story of my father’s rescue and my mother’s decline.  Sometimes I stop and rest my hand on the wood and, in the mysterious way that memory frees and fails us, I’m a teenager again.  I am returned like magic to some forgotten sense of safety, as I kneel beneath the Big Tree and touch its rough trunk, feel its gnarled roots beneath my sneakers.

8th Grade Graduates, Madison Meadows Class of 1977

 

Memorial

 

The President's House memorial (in progress), 6th and Market Streets, Philadelphia, May, 2010

 

            It doesn’t surprise me that the “interpretive text” for the President’s House memorial is taking longer to construct than the building that will enclose this monumental story.  Nor that the first draft (briefly on display at the Independence Visitor Center and currently posted at http://www.ushistory.org/presidentshouse/plans/eisterhold/01-history-lost-and-found-1.htm) has elicited conflicting reviews (too concerned with slavery, too dominated by well-known figures like Washington and Adams) and rare consensus (that it is  “unimaginative”).  Writing crafted by committee is often mediocre, in part because during the process vivid, often opposing, views are compromised to the duller middle.  And this particular project is constrained by a marketing agenda separate from its historical one; you can sense the rush to reassure visitors in the carefully balanced presentation that ironically seeks to “brand” Philadelphia even while it aims to liberate the stories of Washington’s nine slaves:  Moll, Austin, Richmond, Giles, Paris, Christopher Sheels, Joe Richardson, Oney Judge, and Hercules.  

            But there is judgement evident in any narrative, whether overtly stated or conveyed through what the text emphasizes, downplays, frames and omits.  As a writer, what I found most revealing in the interpretive text draft is the persistent use of passive voice to tell the story of slavery in colonial Philadelphia:  History is lost to these Africans, who were kidnapped and transported to America and given new names and forced to learn a new language.  The agent is missing in these constructions, either because the agent is unknown or (still) is unacknowledged.

            The words we choose to tell the story of our flawed first president – and of our flawed democracy – enclose and connect our unfinished business and unsettled feelings just as tangibly as bricks and mortar do.  As National Park Service archaeologist Jed Levin says, “History isn’t just what happened long ago.  We make history by fashioning a story that future generations will tell about who we are now.”

President's House Project Plan

 

Proximity and Pressure

There are stories beneath the ground at 6^th and Market Streets in Philadelphia, the location of George Washington’s residence and slaves’ quarters from 1790 – 97.  This complicated narrative—democracy framed upon the faulty foundation of slavery—first drew me to the site (and, eventually, to my volunteer work at the Living History Archeology Lab) three years ago.  That week, in May 2007, a team of archaeologists revealed the mortared stone walls of the “Philadelphia White House” and, in the process, disturbed the surface of a story last interpreted for the United States Bicentennial.

When I first visited the dig with my daughters, I couldn’t help but read the emerging revision as a writer would.

There, in the ground, was the visible footprint of the bow-windowed room that architectural historians say is the precedent to the modern-day Oval Office.  Washington added it to the house for the purpose of meeting visitors (at his level, not elevated and enthroned like a king).  And there, five feet away, was the open-hearth kitchen where the enslaved man called Hercules cooked the president’s meals.

One version of the story is shaped by this proximity:  the symbol of democracy next to the brick and mortar evidence of slavery.  Here, in this ironic setting, Hercules rises from plantation slave to celebrated chef, his talents and loyalty to Washington rewarded with unusual privileges.  He makes an income selling kitchen scraps, buys fine clothing, strolls Philadelphia’s abolitionist streets.  Narrative tension is sustained by the dissonance between text (the appearance of liberty) and subtext (the reality of bondage)—and resolved brilliantly in March, 1797, when Hercules escapes.

Or so the story goes.  Structurally, this version is as elegant as the picture presumed to be of Hercules, painted by Washington’s portraitist, Gilbert Stuart.  But portraiture is not a story.  And that is the problem at the root of this narrative:  a complete dramatic action is elusive when the protagonist isn’t free to act.  Or when the protagonist vanishes.

If this were fiction, the writer might attempt to open and deepen the draft by shifting narrative point of view.  As my friend Robin Black (author of the story collection If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This) says, “Changing point of view puts pressure on a story, forcing issues that change the way a story is crafted.”  In the case of Hercules, seeing events through his eyes would compel the writer to develop him as a character—not simply present him as an ironic figure in Washington’s conflicted tale.

But this is history, and only facts can free the narrative from the limits imposed by its frame.  In fact, the age and provenance of the portrait isn’t fixed.  The tall toque Hercules wears is a style that wasn’t popular until later, in the early nineteenth century; Stuart scholars don’t acknowledge the painting as part of the artist’s body of work.  And now, a discovery by Mt. Vernon research historian Mary V. Thompson not only recasts the story’s climax, but also offers an ending that opens into his probable future.

In the Mt. Vernon farm report dated February 25, 1797, Hercules is listed as “absconded for four days”, meaning Washington’s birthday (February 22) was the occasion for his flight—not Washington’s March departure date.  Meaning that, as Washington hosted farewell parties in Philadelphia, the culinary artist valued for his skill and loyalty was at Mt. Vernon, assigned to the hard labor of digging clay for bricks.  Meaning Hercules fled from Mt. Vernon, most likely to Philadelphia — just as Washington had speculated in a letter to his secretary, Tobias Lear, that confused historians until the farm report was found.

And the portrait—which journeyed to aristocratic residences in Paris and Gloucestershire, England, before reaching its current home in Spain’s Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza—could have been painted by someone other than Stuart, after Hercules fled to Europe from Philadelphia and joined the household of a British diplomat.

Though the ground at the President’s House site is now covered, the dig for hidden stories continues.  And I’m reminded of what National Park Service Archaeologist Jed Levin explained when I first signed on for this long project:  archaeological research is intended to illuminate what is uncovered at the dig, not merely to preserve artifacts.  I’ve found that this process applies to the work of storytelling, too, whether it’s being done in the pit or on the page.  http://www.ushistory.org/presidentshouse/

 

Pool Hopping

 

I'm the girl hiding her eyes.

 

I learned to dive in order to show up my big brother Andy, who trembled visibly at the plank’s edge while our swimming instructor at the Phoenix Swim Club tried to coax him into the deep end of the pool.  Then as now, my brother was my moral compass; I secretly admired the way he refused to jump to prove himself.  When my turn came, though, I was compelled to leap into the unknown by some instinct I didn’t fully understand — and was then compelled by expectation to repeat this false act of bravado over and over again.  I was scared, but by pretending to be bold, I learned to love diving:  the chilly moment of impact, the explosion at the water’s surface, the stunning quiet below.

This begins to explain how I grew into an “over imaginative” teenager prone to nightmares and poetry, a girl who found herself one summer night, at fourteen, hiding in another family’s oleanders, clothes dripping with water from that family’s pool.  I crouched there, along with two friends who shall remain nameless, straining not to scream from anticipation and fear.  We breathed quickly, taking gulps of hot, heavy air that tasted like coconut and citrus, sweat and cooling mud.  We were waiting for something, anything, to happen.  Around us, the night was alive with the hiss of cicadas and another sound that defines my childhood in Phoenix:  the pulse and hum of laboring pool pumps.

That summer, it was our unspoken quest to hop every pool in our North Phoenix neighborhood.

“Hop” as in to make a series of quick, springy leaps into water contained in rectangular, pinched-oval or kidney-bean shaped pools.  “Hop” as in partake surreptitiously, without prior written permission of the pool owner who was, conveniently, asleep.

“No one’s coming,” I said finally, after we’d crouched in the bushes so long our knees were practically fused to our chins.  I pointed to a ranch-style house on the corner and whispered, “Let’s try that one!”

Our first attempt had been disappointing; after all, we weren’t out there just to make a pool-by-pool comparison or even to seek relief from the oppressive summer heat.  To put it plainly, we wanted to make something happen.  We wanted to make a noisy splash, to wake someone’s parents, to see them framed in the bedroom window:  a worried mother in hair curlers and a red-faced father shaking his fist and shouting, “You kids!”  Like most teenagers, we sought our independence awkwardly, trying to sever ties to our parents by mocking their good care.

Who are those kids? we hoped our victims would wonder.  We wondered ourselves:  Were we really bad girls sneaking out past curfew?  Or good girls bound for good colleges, who always finished their homework before tucking themselves into bed?  It is the confounding nature of adolescence to say you’ll do one thing and then to do just the opposite; to hold, against all logic, contradictory desires.  Looking back, I see how lucky we were; our rebellions were only minor blips on the trajectories set in motion by our parents.  We played at badness as we huddled together in the oleanders, half-hoping for car headlights to pursue us to our hiding place, for someone to slow, to search for us, to reveal who we were outside our families’ homes.

When it didn’t happen, we emerged from the bushes and set off for the next pool, avoiding the streetlights like burglars, trying to keep to the safety of the darkness in between.  Most of the neighborhood was asleep at that hour of the morning, like the peaceful pillow doubles that occupied our own beds.  There were lights on in a few of the houses, though, showing the guts of family life through windows arranged between the bones of walls.  This intimacy was thrilling to us; in the outdoor culture of Phoenix, we didn’t know our best friends’ houses as well as we did the shared spaces:  the schoolyard, the mountain park, the Christtown mall, the backyard pools that I naively believed everybody had. 

At the next house, we scaled the cinderblock fence and paused at the top to survey our escape route.  “No dog,” I said.   No gate either; on the way out, we’d have to get a leg-up on the branches of the orange trees that squatted near the fence. “Good pool,” someone said, as we admired the curvy water slide and shark-shaped rubber float.  “Let’s go!”

The first time I wrote about Phoenix, I was 23 and enrolled in a New York writing workshop.  Previously, at Bryn Mawr College, I’d penned unconvincing stories featuring commuter trains, skyscrapers, and on-street parallel parking, writing myself into this landscape as the hip urban character I thought I’d become when I went east for college.  But in that Manhattan classroom, I closed my eyes and saw oleanders, orange trees, a long block of ranch houses, a lighted swimming pool at midnight glowing weirdly green.  I saw three girls perched on the threshold of adulthood, straddling a cinderblock fence, and an idea began to shimmer distantly, provoking me the way those pools had at fourteen, the way the real story – the one you’re meant to tell – always does.  Writing requires a kind of boldness, a willingness to leap into the unknown.  I teach my students that you must begin with what you know, but write to discover what you don’t.

We dropped heavily, like grapefruit, onto the grass and sprinted to the pool, cannonballing into water strangely warmer than the air.  Afterwards, we ran for cover, our hearts beating out of our chests.  Citric air scraped our throats as we laughed and whispered and told it over and over.

“Did you see the lady in the bathrobe?” someone said, though there had been no lady.  “Yes!  And the carport light coming on?” someone else fibbed.  “They almost caught us!” I shrieked.  And when the coast was clear again, we slapped arms around each others’ backs and swaggered down the street.  It was almost dawn.

I had to write this story many times in order to understand it.  Now I see that pool hopping was my adolescent way of acting as protagonist, making a splash in order to make a story.  The first time I told the tale, I looked up from what I’d written and was surprised to see interest in the faces of those New Yorkers.  I learned then that my stories, set in the peculiar landscape of Phoenix, might take the reader – or the writer – someplace she hasn’t been, can’t go, might have gone.  After 30 years in the east, I still travel home this way, where I’m still that girl swaggering down the street at dawn as if she owned the neighborhood.

 

The Phoenix Indian School

 

The Phoenix Indian School, 1891

I attended Central High School in Phoenix, Arizona, next door to the Phoenix Indian School.  As a freshman, I played softball with my team on the south field, which was separated from the boarding school by a flimsy hurricane fence.  Occasionally, we’d see a few Indian boys, their fingers hooked through the wire as they watched us silently, but we never spoke to each other. This border — and the Phoenix street named Indian School Road — marked the limit of what I knew about the school. 

Not until 1991, when the Indian School’s closing coincided with my writerly interest in my hometown, did I investigate further into this educational system designed to make many tribes into one and, through enforced assimilation to Anglo culture, to make Native Americans disappear.  Though the so-called “assimilation era” ended in the 1930s, and the Indian School curriculum was reformed to teach academic subjects and not just basic trades, the words of Indian Commissioner Thomas Morgan are irrevocably part of the school’s foundation: “It’s cheaper to educate Indians than to kill them.” 

Artifacts tell the story.  Before the new Steele Indian School Park opened on the site in 2001, archaeologists excavated the contents of a 230’ x 165’ trash dump near where my team fouled a few balls.  Among the tools of assimilation abandoned there between 1891 and 1926 were the porcelain heads of white dolls used to socialize girls and rusted steam whistles that blasted at intervals to teach the concept of clock time.  But there is also evidence of resistance: forbidden fetishes and pottery sherds smuggled from home; flaked stone points showing off a traditional skill (and the school’s fine-china plates used to practice);  a cache of combs not marked, as required, with a name to show appreciation for individual possessions and tangible wealth.  These relics are beautifully subversive — ironic imagery in a landscape where students were compelled to trade tribal clothing for uniforms, native languages for English, the Native American we for the American I. 

I thought of the Phoenix Indian School recently, as I reviewed Sherman Alexie’s new book, War Dances, for the Philadelphia Inquirer.  Alexie’s exile from the Spokane Indian reservation to attend an all-white high school was self-imposed, prompted when he was issued an outdated math book his mother had once used.  But the outcome of his education is the same as that of a kid taken from his tribe:  neither assimilation nor a return to tradition, but a troubled and complicated identity – one he articulates in poems, stories, screenplays, and novels. 

Given the part educators have played in oppression, no wonder Alexie lampoons academics — like the “the Sioux writer and scholar and charlatan” orating on sovereignty and literature in the book’s title story, or the tenured professor “strangely thrilled to list all of the oppressors” in his poem, “Go, Ghost, Go”:  

            And I, a red man, think he’s correct,

            But why does he have to be so humorless?

 

Picking

Philadelphia’s Living History Archeology Lab, where I volunteer every other week, is a haven of unitasking.  I might be assigned to a six-hour session washing Colonial-era dishes or identifying leaded glass using an ultraviolet light or counting and cataloguing hundreds of pottery sherds.  There’s a meditative aspect to this work, especially the task called “picking”:  sorting through the remains of an Old City neighborhood to find the tiny artifacts – seeds and bones and beads – that have been sifted with water through a 1/8-inch screen.   

The goal is to work slowly and carefully, tackling no more than a quarter-sized pile.  First, I scrape the gravel across the tray with a tongue depressor, then separate the contents with a tweezer by type:  brick, mortar, bone, charcoal, flora (seeds), metal, misc. (buttons, beads, straight pins, teeth), insects, and oyster shell.  Focus – and nearsightedness – are the skills I call upon to hone in on a splinter of cream-colored egg shell, a transparent fish scale, the fibrous backside of what looks at first like charcoal but is actually a bit of burnt bone.   

Writers, too, are archaeologists: digging, processing, and repairing the relics of experience to find the meaning in it.  Memory is our medium for binding the human to the object, and as I work through the mountain one molehill at a time, I’m thinking about life’s lost objects and found wisdom, the mysterious ways memory serves and finally fails us, the fragments that float to the surface or fall through the screen.

 

Progress

When I first moved to Philadelphia, the Goldman Theatre, on 15th and Market Streets, was already in bad shape.  The white facade was sooty and most of the tubes that had illuminated the theater’s surname – GOLDMAN, spelled out vertically — had fizzled and burned out.  I walked past it every day on my way to Suburban Station, noting the titles advertised on the marquee — nothing I’d ever heard of or would ever want to see.  There was a red velveteen display case next to the ticket window, featuring curled and yellowed news clippings of the Goldman’s glory days.  Peering in through the greasy windows, I learned that the Goldman was one of the city’s oldest first-run movie theaters, a place where film stars had shown up in limousines for glamorous premieres.  But by 1984, that was ancient history.  The most exciting thing happening at the Goldman was that it was about to be torn down.

It’s funny how you can walk past a building every day and not really see it, how one minor change in its appearance can make you understand what you’re seeing entirely differently.  To me, the Goldman was merely an eyesore.  I was unmoved by editorials that appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, complaining that first television and then multiplex theaters had ruined the experience of cinema and that people had lowered their expectations so considerably that film, too, was a dying art.  It was sad, I thought, but that’s progress.  Where I grew up, in Phoenix, new gas stations and grocery stores and houses were born every day.  There was an atmosphere of plenty, a weird consensus among the citizenry (mostly transplanted Easterners) that it was impossible for anything to die or be depleted. 

Such were my sentiments when I visited the corner of 15th and Market one dreary, rainy evening, the evening the wrecking crew was to begin the blasting and hammering that would bring the Goldman down.  I arrived just in time to see the “G” plucked from the tower’s shoulders by the talons of a squealing crane.  The “G” hovered in the black sky a moment, gleaming in the floodlights the crew had set up.  Then finally it was lowered; I remember how it twisted and swung, as if it were resisting, in the gentle wind.