On Debutantes, Bruce Springsteen, and Why We All Need Lockers

Busy working on my next novel, so haven’t written here much in a while.

My thirty-fifth high school reunion is coming up, and one of the characters in my book is (very loosely) based on someone I knew in high school.  So I’ve been thinking a lot about high school, which is something I don’t usually think about all that often.

My high school was located in a very affluent, very small town in northern California.  I moved there at the beginning of eighth grade, which is a terrible time to move anywhere.  I always felt like an outsider: I hadn’t grown up with these people, many of whom had known each other since kindergarten. 

There was a lot of culture shock.  I’d gone to seventh grade in Berkeley, which, in 1970, was awash in hippies.  My new school didn’t have hippies.  It had social-dance class and school-approved sororities and debutantes. 

I cannot say that I liked high school very much, but I wasn’t someone who was abjectedly miserable there.   I had wonderful teachers and friends, some of whom I’m still in touch with today.  My closest friend is someone I went to high school with.  She introduced me to the joy of eating raw cookie dough.  I wrote her from college in Pennsylvania about a singer I liked who was unknown in California.  That was how she found out about Bruce Springsteen.

I think the thing about high school is that most teenagers—not all, but most—are inexperienced in the business of having their hearts trampled.  They haven’t yet learned how to weather anguish.  High school will teach them, if they are lucky.  If they are not lucky, they will have to learn out in the big, bad world, which is a shame, because by then their best friends will have jobs and husbands and children and be too busy to leave sympathetic notes in their lockers when something bad happens. 

In high school, people really care when bad things happen to their friends.  They are really paying attention.  Otherwise, there is just geometry and John Steinbeck to think about.  (Note to teenagers: once you turn 18, you will never think about geometry or John Steinbeck ever again.)

Actually, as we all know, there are no lockers in the big, bad world.  This is too bad.  Lockers were one of the things I liked about high school: a place that was just yours, to be decorated as you chose, where you could unburden yourself of books and binders that would otherwise need to be hauled around all day. 

That is what we all need now: someplace where we can put the heavy things down.

Ano Nuevo State Park

We are lucky enough to live 30 miles south of Ano Nuevo State Park, a preserve comprised of pinniped rookeries, native dunes and coastal terrace prairie habitats, and various inland plant communities, including old growth forest, freshwater marsh, red alder riparian forest and knobcone pine forest.  (So says the website.  My knowledge of the outdoors is limited to impressions related to weather [hot, windy] and smells [grassland: fresh, loamy; elephant seals: really, really bad].)  Today we drove up, passing participants—some in masks, one sporting a pink feather boa—in the AIDS/LifeCycle bike ride—on our way.

We got a map at the Visitors’ Center, a converted dairy barn, and headed out, through fields edged in cattails and bordered at their far edges by thick pines.  To our left: the ocean, littered with whitecaps, an impossible blue.

We passed a pond, the nesting ground for red-winged blackbirds and marsh wrens.

Lots of mock heather, lupine, lizardtail and coyote bush.   (Again, thanks to the website.  When it comes to plants, I [to quote my mother] know from nothing.  I think these yellow flowers are mock heather, but I’m not sure.)

Halfway, we stopped and spoke with a genial ranger, who advised us to stay 25 feet away from the elephant seals.

 

The path gave way to sand dunes.  We trudged on, hearing the bellow of the seals, which convinces you before you ever lay eyes on them that you would have to be some kind of prize idiot to ignore the 25-foot rule.

The seals themselves were sunning on the beach.  They are quite enormous (an impression not well conveyed in the picture).  Occasionally, one of them raised a flipper in the manner of a royal wave.  I wanted to wave back.  The presence of thirty Japanese tourists was inhibiting.

We stood at the viewing stand for a while, reveling in the sun and the sea, the proximity to magnificent animals, the sense that the natural world is glorious beyond description. 

On the drive home, we were quiet, and I knew without asking that we were thinking the same things. 

That we are lucky to live where we can breathe in such beauty. 

And that people—who can turn away unmoved from pictures of pelicans suffocating in oil, who expect their need for fossil fuel to be gratified no matter the costs—can break your heart. 

For Robert, With Love and Thanks

This weekend marks Robert’s and my five-year anniversary.  We met via the Internet, Robert after fifteen years of what he likes to call “power-dating,” I after a dismal four months, during which time I met a variety of men clearly put on this earth to dissuade any woman from even so much as thinking about dating ever again.  Occasionally I wonder about them: what they’re doing now, if any of them found any takers.

 

This is what I would say to them, if I could.

--If you are 70, do not say you want to date women 47 and younger;

--If you are 70, do not say you are 53;

--Do not tell your date that the reason you don’t have any male friends is that men are jealous of how good-looking you are;

--Do not tell your date that you are giving away most of your possessions because “as long as I have my computer and my antique sword, I’ll be fine”;

--Do not meet your date through a Jewish dating service and then, over coffee, respond to her story about a skinflint by saying, “He’s Jewish, right?”;

--Do not call your date forty-five minutes after she tells you what an asshole you are for making anti-semitic remarks and start to tell her about a dream you had;

--Do not neglect to mention that you owe the IRS $100,000 in back taxes and also have a girlfriend;

--Do not initiate first-date banter by reminiscing about your ex-wife, who is bi-polar and likes to say she lives to make her ex’s life a living hell;

--Do not spend ten minutes explaining why the woman you are looking for must have clean fingernails;

--Do not, during the course of an introductory phone conversation, announce that you are wearing a Versace suit and a thong;

--Do not then say, “You like that, don’t you?”

To the other women these men have dated, I would say, Do not give up.  Because the world is wide and wonderful, the heart is resilient, and the extraordinary and the impossible can present themselves at any moment.

The Pleasures of a Garden, As Told by One Who Is Gardening-Impaired

I love having a garden, but I hate gardening.  Over the years, I tried to love gardening, but I have finally had to admit that it is not for me.  The dirt, the sweating, the inability to do it while lying down compel me to leave the gardening to George, local barfly and raconteur extraordinaire.  He does a lovely job.

I am a little bit ashamed that I don’t like to garden.  I feel as though I should.  It’s an admirable, wholesome, healthful activity, plus you get to wear a floppy hat.  I console myself with the fact that George can’t write children’s books.

Our garden is at the front and on the south side of our house, protected from the street by a high hedge.  The woman who designed it made sure that something would always be blooming, no matter what the season.  Right now, we have roses.

 

Soon, it will be hydrangeas.

We have more lemons year-round than we know what to do with.  I make a lot of lemon bars and lemonade.  The scent of a lemon just pulled off the tree is further proof of divinity all around us.

I love these.  They grow at the back of the house.  I don’t know what they are.  They look like Dr. Seuss characters to me.

We have ferns in front of the enormous living room windows.  I grew up in a house in Berkeley that had a fern garden.  They lend shade and peace.  They are the garden’s gentle librarians, staking out a quiet corner (apart from the unruly roses), demanding whispers.

We have two Monterey pines.  Last year, two tiny birds flew in and out of a hole in the bark of one of them no larger than a mail slot.  We watched as they doggedly brought twigs and grass and straw into the tree.  Later, we could hear the chirping of baby birds.  We never saw them fly away.

Out by the kitchen door, Robert channels his inner Midwesterner and does a little farming.  Right now, we are all about the butter lettuce.

The bench is between the Monterey pines and is shaded by a wisteria-covered arbor.  When we first moved here three years ago, my daughter liked to sit on the bench.  “How do you like the trees?” I asked.  “Oh, we’re going to be friends,” she said.

Voice

My favorite aspect of writing is creating voice.  I like for each of my characters to have a distinctive way of thinking and speaking.

 

Creating children’s and teenagers’ voices is especially challenging because their vocabularies are necessarily limited.  Little kids don’t know a lot of words; teenagers often speak inartfully (“Like, um, yeah.”) and profanely.  (There are only so many times you can use “bitch” and “asshole” in a young-adult novel.)  Somehow, you have to give the impression of child-speak or teen-speak without relying too heavily on the words children and teens actually use when they are sitting at your dining room table telling you why peas are disgusting and why, by the way, you should buy better snacks and you don’t know anything.

Another part of this is conveying character through voice.  The way a character speaks is the best way for a writer to tell readers something about her.  Is anybody watching this season’s “The Amazing Race”?  You know those two brothers, Jet and Cord?   Their preferred exclamation is, “Good gravy!”  What does this tell us?  That they are polite (at least on camera), that they are unafraid—proud, even—of being different, that they keep their cool under intense pressure.  All this from just two words.  (I should say that while Jet and Cord seem like lovely young men, they would be terrible characters in a book.  I have no idea which one is which.  Real people can be similar to each other, but characters have to be distinct and well differentiated.)

My favorite writers use voice to good effect.  Mona Simpson (ANYWHERE BUT HERE) comes to mind.  Also Philip Roth and Jennifer Egan.  Nicholson Baker’s THE EVERLASTING STORY OF NORY is an adult book about a nine-year-old girl, written in the third person.  Baker gets nine-year-old girls so well that he actually disappears. You forget the book is written by a middle-age man.

 

It’s not just that Baker gets nine-year-old girls.  He gets this particular nine-year-old girl.  Nory is kind to a classmate who is bullied, she worries about aphids that are eaten by ladybugs, she is suspicious of kids who “tell stories a certain way.”  She is at once like all other nine-year-olds and different from all other nine-year-olds: her very own particular self.  It is an achievement.  (I recommend the book if you love language and character, not so much if you are a fan of plots.  Not much happens.)

I am working on a book right now that takes place in Missouri.  People in Missouri speak differently from people in California.  I want to get it just right without beating readers over the head with it.  Not easy, but that’s the fun part of being a writer.  (The not-fun part is sitting in front of the computer for two days trying to figure out whether Danny should like Cap’n Crunch or Fruit Loops.)

It doesn’t sound like much, but if you like reading about believable, authentic characters who, somewhere along the line, turn into believable, authentic people, it’s a big deal.

Like, um, yeah.

Thoughts While Sitting in the Doctor’s Office

--I am okay with the old-fashioned formality that used to attach to the doctor-patient relationship. I want my doctor to be authoritative and wise, and to the extent that calling him “Doctor” furthers this notion, I am not put off. I don’t want to be his friend. I don’t want to call him “Todd.”

--Doctors are explorers, mapping uncharted land. They are 49ers, prospecting in faraway territory for something priceless and elusive. Doctors are spelunkers. (“Let’s go down there! And bring a camera!”)

--At a certain point in your life, you are going to end up entrusting your physical health to someone who was riding a Big Wheel during the Reagan Administration. At first it seems fabulously risky, but you get used to it. It is a strange rite of passage, one of the first times you are able to acknowledge that someone younger knows more than you do.

--It is impossible not to look at other people in the waiting room and wonder what is wrong with them.

--I wish the nurse who takes my blood pressure would stop talking about her son who is doing Jazz Studies at Chico.

--On the exam room wall: graphic illustrations of normal sinus cavities, written exhortations to get your colonoscopy, a sign reminding all health-care practitioners to wash their hands. There is nothing to read except a back issue of “Modern Maturity.” I don’t read it because it might be germ-y: a sick person might have touched it last. In doctors’ offices, I push open doors with my shoulder and slather anti-bacterial cleanser on my hands when I get back to the car.

-- It is inordinately important to me that my doctor believe I am smart. I am sure this has something to do with the fact that my father was a doctor. (I couldn’t care less what my accountant thinks of me.) When he says, That’s a good question, I beam. It is just nuts.

--I never take the elevator at the doctor’s, if I can help it. Germ-y air.

--I love my doctor, but I am always so relieved to be finished talking to him. Is there another person in my life I feel this way about? Can’t think of one.

--A lot of people are sick. A lot. It is easy to forget this if you and your family are healthy. When you go to the doctor’s, you are immediately reminded. It is touching and sobering. I hate being sick more than anything. (The only thing worse is when my kids are sick.) Going to the doctor’s makes me want to be compassionate and kind. I want to hug all those people in the waiting room and tell them it will be all right, except that, of course, I don’t know that it will be all right. (And also, the germs.) For some of us, it will be, and for some of us, it won’t. And that is just brutally awful, something I never get used to.

--A lot of things I go to the doctor for are things people died of seventy years ago. Now there are new drugs and therapies and technologies. It makes you think of all the things we are still dying of that someone will someday cure. Who is she, and what is she doing now? Probably sitting at the kitchen table, coloring.

Genius

I am reading Nicholson Baker’s new book, The Anthologist, and finding it wonderfully entertaining. Every night I look forward to getting into bed and diving in. It is like having a conversation with a funny, damaged, massively literate friend.


Nicholson Baker is a remarkable writer. I am certainly not the first person to say so, but I may be one of the first people to have recognized it. He was in a creative writing class I took in college. (I attended a women’s college, Bryn Mawr, which has a cooperative relationship with Haverford College, where Baker went.) I noticed him on the first day of the semester. He was very tall and very handsome, and I had never seen him before (which was noteworthy in and of itself: the two colleges were quite small and “tall and handsome” [at the same time] was a rare and highly visible attribute among Haverford men).

The class was taught by Christopher Davis, who told us that each of us would be required to submit eight pages (I think) of fiction, which would then be critiqued in class. I set confidently to work and produced a short story called “Summer on Goose Island.” Just writing the name fills me with horror. It was the story of a Tragic marriage, with lots of fog-swept sand dunes and execrable dialogue. I was rightly eviscerated in class for its many flaws, none of which I remember, as I threw the story away immediately on returning to my dorm room.

What I do remember, though, was being handed Nicholson Baker’s writing sample. It was twenty-six pages long and I thought, Oh, good Lord. I imagined that it was going to be an obvious attempt at suck-up-ery, that this Nicholson Baker, whoever he was, thought that twenty-six pages was his sure-fire route to an ‘A’.

I don’t remember what he wrote. I just remember that on page six, I looked up and said to my boyfriend, Oh, my God.

I don’t recall how the story was critiqued. I think Christopher Davis knew that he was in the presence of greatness. Nobody said much, except another Haverford student who made an ass out of himself by saying that the story “took too long to get going.” (There is one of these in every writers’ critique group I have ever been in.) Nicholson Baker didn’t say a word. He nodded and made a few notes.

After class, I went over to him and babbled something about how he was a genius. He smiled politely and said, “Thanks very much.” In that instant, I knew that Nicholson Baker was destined to travel in circles different from those I would inhabit. He was already a grownup, albeit with talents and sensibilities very few grownups possess. I knew that I wanted to be a writer; I knew that I was probably good enough to become one. But I also knew that I would never approach the deft, sure-handed brilliance that Nicholson Baker effortlessly commanded at the age of twenty.

It’s okay. I’ve accepted it.

Some people are just that good. And what I learned by being in class with Nicholson Baker is that most of us are not. Most of us have to work really, really hard and be very, very lucky.

And isn’t that just the greatest name for a writer? How did his parents know?