The Best American Essays 2013 Page 4

  One night while typing, the windows sweating with the humidity of my inspiration, my cinnamon tea, and a pot of simmering pink beans and elephant, I heard Jim railing at the philistines below. I hurried over and knocked on his door. Hye let me in as if I were a country doctor making a midnight call.

  Jim staggered from the open window, arms outstretched, cigarette in one hand and can of beer in the other. “I’m back, my boy!” he cried.

  There were moths in the apartment, a situation I thought endemic to the building (since they were the exact same moths as mine) or possibly an affliction of artists who’d started too late.

  “Jim,” I said, “you can’t shout. Mrs. Vollstanger will evict you.”

  “The rentier!” he shouted gallantly, waving an arm through a squadron of eye-winged moths. “The harridan! Have a drink, old friend. Hye, get him a drink. Come look at my painting. Come look at what I’ve done.”

  In the coming days Jim painted with his door open, jazz and cigarette smoke pouring into the hallway. Around four every afternoon, just before Hye got home from work, he’d knock off and make his sacred trek to the liquor store. In the evenings, well oiled, he’d come to visit me, bringing a paper sack full of beer, old Esquire magazines, Henry Miller novels, and perhaps half a buttered baguette from the bakery or a plate of creamed cauliflower that Hye had made. We’d laugh about the moths, which I’d discovered had hatched from my weevil-infested bag of black-eyed peas, since discarded. He’d show me his latest painting, and I’d read him passages from my evil-clown novel, to which he’d listen intently, all the while nodding and huffing and afterward announcing without fail how much he admired the rhythm.

  At night, whenever Jim began to rave, I’d tense for the eviction summons of Mrs. Vollstanger, then go over and tell him to keep it down. Twice I overheard him and Hye arguing. Hye did most of the talking: Did Jim realize that he was spending more on paints, canvases, cigarettes, and booze than she was making? They no longer had enough to put a down payment on a house. He denied fiercely her charge that art for him was nothing more than an excuse to drink. Why, then, she wanted to know, did he not try to sell his paintings or at least show them in the local galleries?

  “Because I can’t sell things anymore,” he said. “Goddamnit, Hye, no one is going to remember a salesman.”

  Hye began to cry.

  “The market will come back, babe,” he told her. “And when it does, we’ll buy a house. The one you like in Trinidad with all the redwood trees in the backyard.”

  Each day I waited for America to snap from its strings and fall on its face like a broken marionette, but by January not only had the stock market recovered, it had begun to make gains. Many who, like Jim and Hye, had not sold off their investments were better off financially than before the soon-to-be-forgotten crash. The experts, reversing themselves like a school of parrotfish, predicted that the Dow might soar as high as four thousand points by the end of the year. Black Monday had had no real effect on anything but my imagination.

  It rained most of January, and I slaved over my book about evil clowns. Each day, as its shortcomings became more evident, I approached the typewriter with less enthusiasm. Finally I sat on the floor and read my satirical harlequin folly front to back as if it were someone else’s work. It was the sort of effort I would’ve panned as a reviewer: “With its too-easy targets, total absence of sympathetic characters, and overall lack of message, I see little reason to bother with such a cynical assessment of American society. It is perhaps harsh but also fair to say that at an age when most novelists are producing their best work, this one is many years away from offering anything of value to a reader, much less revealing himself outside of posing naked on a wooden platform.”

  I banded and boxed the manuscript, lethargically paced the room, chuckled feebly to myself a few times, and thought about getting drunk. Finally I went to bed and slept for three days, getting up now and again for a slice of bloody red elk or a glass of water or to listen for Jim raging down the hall or Mrs. Vollstanger’s unmistakable Gestapo knock on my door. I slept roughly, like a tree with all its bark burned off or a man buried in wet sand, but the dreams at least were good. In one I could paint with my mind, and in another everyone had a u in their last name.

  When at last I got up to face the world again, the room was full of sunlight, and I had a strong craving for chewy chocolate–macadamia nut cookies.

  “You’re the writer, aren’t you?” asked the young woman behind the glass case at the bakery.

  “How did you know?” I asked.

  “We used to listen to you type. You know Annabelle moved back to Montana. She really loved your book reviews.” Her hand dropped to her hip. “She’s going to be an author someday too. You should write her.”

  Later that evening Jim stopped by and drove me nine miles north into the redwood forest to the rustic cabin he and Hye had just bought in Trinidad, a town with a population of only a few hundred. We stood on the balcony in the cool shadows of the massive trees. “Do you believe it?” he said. “Look at the light! Smell the air! You can hear the ocean!”

  Two days later Mrs. Vollstanger lost her temper with me because I’d moved an electric stove to the wrong side of a room. We argued. I said some regrettable things, all of them true, and was relieved that my days at the Totalitarian Hotel were finally over. More depressed and confused than I would admit, I packed what I could carry, leaving behind my security deposit, a clean room, a succinct note, and a freezer full of wild meat.

  I sneaked down the grand staircase and walked to the bus depot a few blocks away. There were only three other passengers on the bus, so I racked my bags and nestled in with two seats to myself. Before I dozed off somewhere around Petaluma, I watched the darkness roll past the windows and wondered how long I would have to go on knowing nothing about art, or women, or my country.

  ALICE MUNRO

  Night

  FROM Granta

  WHEN I WAS YOUNG, there seemed to be never a childbirth, or a burst appendix, or any other drastic physical event that did not occur simultaneously with a snowstorm. The roads would be closed, there was no question of digging out a car anyway, and some horses had to be hitched up to make their way into town to the hospital. It was just lucky that there were horses still around—in the normal course of events they would have been given up, but the war and gas rationing had changed all that, at least for the time being.

  When the pain in my side struck, therefore, it had to do so at about eleven o’clock at night, and a blizzard had to be blowing, and since we were not stabling any horses at the moment, the neighbors’ team had to be brought into action to take me to the hospital. A trip of no more than a mile and a half but an adventure all the same. The doctor was waiting, and to nobody’s surprise he prepared to take out my appendix.

  Did more appendixes have to be taken out then? I know it still happens, and it is necessary—I even know of somebody who died because it did not happen soon enough—but as I remember it was a kind of rite that quite a few people my age had to undergo, not in large numbers by any means but not all that unexpectedly, and perhaps not all that unhappily, because it meant a holiday from school and it gave you some kind of status—set you apart, briefly, as one touched by the wing of mortality, all at a time in your life when that could be gratifying.

  So I lay, minus my appendix, for some days, looking out a hospital window at the snow sifting in a somber way through some evergreens. I don’t suppose it ever crossed my head to wonder how my father was going to pay for this distinction. (I think he sold a woodlot that he had kept when he disposed of his father’s farm, hoping to use it for trapping or sugaring or perhaps out of unmentionable nostalgia.)

  Then I went back to school, and enjoyed being excused from physical training for longer than necessary, and one Saturday morning when my mother and I were alone in the kitchen she told me that my appendix had been taken out in the hospital, just as I thought, but it was not the only thing removed. T
he doctor had seen fit to take it out while he was at it, but the main thing that concerned him was a growth. A growth, my mother said, the size of a turkey’s egg.

  But don’t worry, she said, it was all over now.

  The thought of cancer never entered my head and she never mentioned it. I don’t think there could be such a revelation today without some kind of question, some probing about whether it was or it wasn’t. Cancerous or benign—we would want to know at once. The only way I can explain our failure to speak of it was that there must have been a cloud around that word like the cloud around the mention of sex. Worse, even. Sex was disgusting but there must be some gratification there—indeed we knew there was, though our mothers were not aware of it—while even the word cancer made you think of some dark, rotting, ill-smelling creature that you would not look at even when you kicked it out of the way.

  So I did not ask and wasn’t told and can only suppose it was benign or was most skillfully got rid of, for here I am today. And so little do I think of it that all through my life when called upon to list my surgeries, I automatically say or write only “Appendix.”

  This conversation with my mother would probably have taken place in the Easter holidays, when all the snowstorms, the snow mountains, had vanished and the creeks were in flood, laying hold of anything they could get at, and the brazen summer just looming ahead. Our climate had no dallying, no mercies.

  In the heat of early June I got out of school, having made good enough marks to free me from the final examinations. I looked well, I did chores around the house, I read books as usual, nobody knew there was a thing the matter with me.

  Now I have to describe the sleeping arrangements in the bedroom occupied by my sister and me. It was a small room that could not accommodate two single beds, side by side, so the solution was a bunk bed, with a ladder in place to help whoever slept in the top bunk climb into bed. That was me. When I had been younger and prone to teasing, I would lift up the corner of my thin mattress and threaten to spit on my little sister lying helpless in the bunk below. Of course my sister—her name was Catherine—was not really helpless. She could hide under her covers, but my game was to watch until suffocation or curiosity drove her out, and at that moment to spit or successfully pretend to spit on her bared face, enraging her.

  I was too old for such fooling, certainly too old now. My sister was nine when I was fourteen. The relationship between us was always unsettled. When I wasn’t tormenting her, teasing her in some asinine way, I would take on the role of sophisticated counselor or hair-raising storyteller. I would dress her up in some of the old clothes that had been put away in my mother’s hope chest, being too fine to be cut up for quilts and too worn and precious for anybody to wear. I would put my mother’s old caked rouge and powder on her face and tell her how pretty she looked. She was pretty, without a doubt, though the face I put on her gave her the look of a freakish foreign doll.

  I don’t mean to say that I was entirely in control of her, or even that our lives were constantly intertwined. She had her own friends, her own games. These tended toward domesticity rather than glamour. Dolls were taken for walks in their baby carriages, or sometimes kittens were dressed up and walked in the dolls’ stead, always frantic to get out. Also there were play sessions where somebody got to be the teacher and could slap the others over the wrists and make them pretend to cry, for various infractions and stupidities.

  In the month of June, as I have said, I was free of school and left on my own, as I don’t remember being in quite the same way at any other time of my growing up. I did some chores in the house, but my mother must have been well enough, as yet, to handle most of that work. Or perhaps we had just enough money at the time to hire what she—my mother—would call a maid, though everybody else said hired girl. I don’t remember, at any rate, having to tackle any of those jobs that piled up for me in later summers, when I fought quite willingly to maintain the decency of our house. It seems that the mysterious turkey egg must have given me some invalid status, so that I could spend part of the time wandering about like a visitor.

  Though not trailing any special clouds. Nobody in our family would have got away with that. It was all inward—this uselessness and strangeness I felt. And not continual uselessness either. I remember squatting down to thin the baby carrots, as you had to do every spring. So the root would grow to a decent size to be eaten.

  It must have been just that every moment of the day was not filled up with jobs, as it was in summers before and after.

  So maybe that was the reason that I had begun to have trouble getting to sleep. At first, I think, that meant lying awake maybe till around midnight and wondering at how wide awake I was, with the rest of the household asleep. I would have read, and got tired in the usual way, and turned out my light and waited. Nobody would have called out to me earlier, telling me to put out my light and get to sleep. For the first time ever (and this too must have marked a special status) I was left to make up my own mind about such a thing.

  It took a while for the house to change, from the light of day and then of the household lights turned on late in the evening, from the general clatter of things to be done, hung up, finished with, to a stranger place in which people and the work that dictated their lives fell away, their uses for everything around them fell away, all the furniture retreated into itself without wanting or needing any attention from you.

  You might think this was liberation. At first, perhaps it was. The freedom. The strangeness. But as my failure to fall asleep prolonged itself and as it finally took hold altogether until it changed into the dawn, I became more and more disturbed. I started saying rhymes, then real poetry, first to make myself go under but then hardly of my own volition. But the activity seemed to mock me. I was mocking myself, as the words turned into absurdity, into the silliest random speech.

  I was not myself.

  I had been hearing that said of people now and then, all my life, without thinking what it could mean.

  So who do you think you are, then?

  I’d been hearing that too, without attaching to it any real menace, just taking it as a sort of routine jeering.

  Think again.

  By this time it wasn’t sleep I was after. I knew mere sleep wasn’t likely. Maybe not even desirable. Something was taking hold of me, and it was my business, my hope, to fight it off. I had the sense to do that, but only barely, as it seemed. It was trying to tell me to do things, not exactly for any reason but just to see if such acts were possible. It was informing me that motives were not necessary.

  It was only necessary to give in. How strange. Not out of revenge, or even cruelty, but just because you had thought of something.

  And I did think of it. The more I chased the thought away, the more it came back. No vengeance, no hatred—as I’ve said, no reason, except that something like an utterly cold deep thought that was hardly an urging, more of a contemplation, could take possession of me. I must not even think of it, but I did think of it.

  The thought was there and hanging on to my mind. The thought that I could strangle my little sister, who was asleep in the bunk below me and whom I loved more than anybody in the world.

  I might do it not for any jealousy, viciousness, or anger but because of madness, which could be lying right beside me there in the night. Not a savage madness either, but something that could be almost teasing. A lazy, teasing, half-sluggish suggestion that seemed to have been waiting a long time.

  It might be saying, Why not? Why not try the worst?

  The worst. Here in the most familiar place, the room where we had lain for all of our lives and thought ourselves most safe. I might do it for no reason I or anybody could understand, except that I could not help it.

  The thing to do was to get up, to get myself out of that room and out of the house. I went down the rungs of the ladder and never cast a single look at my sister where she slept. Then quietly down the stairs, nobody stirring, into the kitchen, where everything was s
o familiar to me that I could make my way without a light. The kitchen door was not really locked—I am not even sure that we possessed a key. A chair was pushed under the doorknob, so that anybody trying to get in would make a great clatter. A slow, careful removal of the chair could be managed without making any noise at all.

  After the first night I was able to make my moves without a break, so as to be outside within a couple of smooth seconds.

  There. At first everything was black, because I would have lain wakeful for a long time, and the moon had already gone down. I kept on staying in bed as long as I thought I could for several nights, as if it was a defeat to have to give up trying to sleep, but after some time I got out of bed as a regular habit, as soon as the house seemed to be dreaming. And the moon of course had its own habits, so sometimes I stepped into a pool of silver.

  Of course there were no streetlights—we were too far from town.

  Everything was larger. The trees around the house were always called by their names—the beech tree, the elm tree, the oak tree, the maples always spoken of in the plural and not differentiated, because they clung together. The white lilac tree and the purple lilac tree never referred to as bushes because they had grown too big. The front and back and side lawns were easy to negotiate because mowed by myself with the idea of giving us some townlike respectability. My mother had once had that idea too. She had planted a semicircular lawn past the lilac trees, and edged to it with spirea bushes and delphinium plants. That was all gone now.

  The east side of our house and the west side looked on two different worlds, or so it seemed to me. The east side was the town side, even though you could not see any town. Not more than two miles away there were houses in rows, with streetlights and running water, and though, as I have said, you could not see any of that, I am really not sure that you couldn’t get a faint glow if you stared long enough. To the west, the long curve of the river and the fields and the trees and the sunsets had nothing to interrupt them ever.