At the end of December I traveled with Hanauta to my childhood home. There I slept long and heavily under dense strata of down and wool. I ate wonderful meals of roasted salty richness. Mid-mornings I ran a slow course over streets whose names I can never recall, down and up hills under gray, descending skies. And I sorted through things my father had saved and which my mother had recently retrieved from the long prismatic space under the attic’s eaves. My visit seemed to lack a proper story arc but had something of a fairy tale’s simplicity and weight – the reward, as soon became clear, had preceded the trial.
I returned to my present city alone, the day after a hard snowfall, walking first from my mother’s house to the commuter train station looking for signs of service on the route. Sighting a train traveling northwest, and wishing to head southeast, I returned home stepping carefully on paths of stamped snow, walking as though on the concave bowl of a large spoon, each cautious footfall angling slightly. Then, with burdens strapped to shoulder and back, and the bulk of my suitcase clutched high against my chest (not possible to roll it along the spoony paths) I hurried back to the station, a sulky Hanauta and cheerful mother and niece accompanying me though we barely walked together. Hanauta was an angry block ahead, my mother came carefully a block behind (having stayed to lock the door.) My niece sprang along brightly by my side.
I do not like goodbyes. I usually say “thank you” and “I love you,” and “I’ll see you,” and I usually do not admit “goodbye.” The train arrived, I boarded, marking the aisle with a regular trail of boot sole puddles. I knelt on a seat by a window near the back of the car, and from there, well above my farewell-bidders, I waved. They squinted and waved blindly back. The train’s windows offer a view only from the inside out. They are high and scumbled with the many mineral traces of weather.
There were a lot of legs to my journey, and many delays. More than a few times, during the eight hours I spent making a three hour trip, I gave myself over to thinking about other choices I might have made. I disliked myself for choosing the wrong course of action. I should have traveled back the day before, should have stayed one more day, should have taken the national railroad service and not the commuter train. I should have offered my crust of bread to the wizened crone who appeared from nowhere to clutch at my sleeve and who disappeared like smoke when I refused her. It is irrational and unhelpful but it sometimes appears to me that perfection exists, that disappointments and failures come to me because I am flawed – because I am, in fact, the foolish and expendable seeker who (in fairy tale calculus) does not make it through to the end of the story. I can’t find my way to the places of perfection…but OTHER people can and do.
As I sat in a train held outside of Newark Penn Station, twilight stealing down the snow-sealed roads below, the wind raised a tumult. Grains of ice swung together, swarming and plunging, forming barchanoid ridges and cutting contours along banks so that the trestle’s empty, rail-side expanses sparkled in the lowest beam of sun like the topographic map of a pure and empty land. My thoughts swung together, swarming up, tearing down. I anticipated, with terrible longing, the return to my empty apartment where I would devise a master to-do list for this my first real vacation in a year. (Note to readers: the word vacation is here defined as a calendrical unit of at least five consecutive days in which I am able to putter at home – following, to a certain degree, the suggestions of an ambitious and detailed to-do list of my own making, but allowing latitude so that apparent distractions can reveal themselves to be part of a larger – a strange and majestic – plan. How else can all the notes and scraps, references and sketches ever be sorted out? Mere “days off” do not a vacation make.) Hundreds of people, thousands of people, hundreds of thousands were stalled and stranded on roads, trains, and planes but I felt singularly frantic, robbed of opportunity and strangely ashamed by my circumstances. I felt (deeply but without rational belief) that for everyone else being stuck was just something that happened, by chance. For me it was the inevitable product of my diffuse and slouching mind (a/k/a my stupidity.)
But then, having gotten to the hard cord of this idea, and wrestling with it for some dozen agitated minutes, I somehow began to slip its loop. I stirred in my seat, heard stories and rumors, I eavesdropped on conversations and made unsolicited conjectures about subway service in my city. I urged one family to get off the train and have supper at a Portuguese restaurant in Newark’s Ironbound neighborhood, a few blocks southeast of the station – they had missed the curtain for a Broadway show.
I got off one train, waited in a long static line for a bus ticket, quit that and got on another train, got off again, stood on a cold, empty platform as New Jersey’s winter air filled my lungs and accepted my exhalations without demur. I spoke with train personnel; they took me (somewhat) into their confidence. The departure monitors glowed yellow: DELAYED, DELAYED, DELAYED, DELAYED, DELAYED. The station seemed to be shedding streams of ambitious, focused people, outward bound; having planned their singular escapes they flowed into the night (towards places of perfection?) As I gradually stopped feeling stupid and personally culpable for being stuck in Newark I reflected dispassionately on the example of those motivated travelers who were proving me to have been right. I was (now) stuck due to lack of personal initiative.
Sometimes, a lot of times, but especially on “days off”, I accomplish nothing (my story arc, on such days, is nearly as flat as the horizon.) On the evening of this journey, after trains and waits and subways and a grateful walk through snowbound silent streets, as I opened the door at last to warm silence of my waiting apartment, I glanced back at my day with its tedious, desperate, and empty stretches without regret. My good feeling may have emerged from the knowledge that my vacation still lay before me, full of promise. Or it may have been that the past extended behind me, full of disappointments and treasures and still I had come home.
Among the things my father had kept and stored in the attic were two great packets labeled: GIRLS’ DRAWINGS. Days before the snowy journey I set to work on these with interest and dread. There were dozens and dozens of drawings made by my sister, Bina, from age 18 months upward. Some with captions dictated by Bina and transcribed by my father (in small block letters, along the margins, just as I annotate the drawings of children.) There were primordial schema labeled “Daddy,” “Daddy’s glasses,” “Mommy,” “Bina,” “Bellybuttons”, there were snowmen and snowmen’s mothers (going to a meeting and a party), there were princesses, cartoon mice Pixie and Dixie, crocodiles, witches, the Beatles, trees, houses, castles. Countless figures and schemes, ‘detailed, inventive, and well-controlled’ (as I used to write in parent teacher conferences) but more than that: beautiful, energetic, focused, and assured. “Oh look!” I said in the empty room where I squatted at my task, sorting, sorting. “Look!” My own drawings were few and far between and none had the sort of narrated captions that would give a sense of the attitude with which I might have approached my representational efforts. Halfway through the packets I said to my mother, “Bina’s drawings are wonderful – there are no good drawings of mine. I didn’t make good drawings.” She scoffed – who could be patient with my lament! Absurd! And yet, Bina’s thick and my slender stack of drawings gave some credence to my notion. My drawings included two ‘dragons’, a ‘crab’, and later on several somewhat more definitive girls. They all seem a little hasty, emerging only partly and hesitantly from a cloud of looped lines. They seem distracted – as though the drawing was not, as I drew, the actual locus of my attention. I recognize the look of them from drawings made by some of my former students (especially those with good draw-ers in the home whether older siblings close in age, artist parents, or both…as was my case.) The schema hold a quality that borders on mild despair: “I will make any old line and any old scrawl – the mysteries of representation have been divined (perhaps even codified!) by my sister/brother/parent. For some reason I cannot do what they can do and I no longer wish to try.” My drawings are not terrible but they are wan, slightly despondent much as I recall that I myself typically felt.
I think, looking at my childhood drawings, that I believed there was a right way to do them and that I did not know what it was. Today, anticipating new tasks I shrink back: I do not want to do something which should be done a certain way if I don’t know the way it should be done. So many things should be done a certain way! Housekeeping, record keeping, counsel keeping, keeping clean, using money, making demands. The cost of failing to do what is right and best is not only disappointment and humiliation but the loss love. In fairy tales the hero/ine wins love through making proper (even when improbable) choices and using proper (even when impossible) methods.
Stepping backwards to a night months before this story begins: in cold rain I am walking alone toward my childhood home over uneven paving, the drops of water step down beside me like a stranger approaching. Anxious and chilled, I turn to see. A row of heavy plane trees blocks the streetlight, forming a corridor of blackness, at my back. I shift to the left, and the trees appear to part, like uneven, looming tines and light glows through and rain strikes white in the lamp beam. As I lean back the wall is sealed again. I ‘open’ and ‘close’ the magic palisade several times. There is no one approaching, just the rain dropping. Leaning one way makes a formidable limit where there is none, leaning the other way makes this barrier obey my wish. Then, on that November night, I go back home – because that’s the sort of story this is.
