High Tide in Tucson (4 page)

When a male bird—a vireo, for example—sings his belligerent song at another male vireo that approaches his neck of the woods, he is singing about family. It's a little bit like grumbling over the handsome delivery person who's getting too friendly with your spouse; a
lot
like coming with a crowbar after an intruder at your child's bedroom window in the night; and nothing at all like a
NO TRESPASSING
sign. The vireo doesn't waste his breath on the groundhogs gathering chestnuts under his nose, or the walnut trees using the sunlight to make their food, the grubs churning leaves into soil, the browsing deer, or even other birds that come to glean seeds that are useless to a vireo's children. Worm-eating birds have no truck with seedeaters; small-seed
eaters ignore big-seed eaters. This is the marvelous construct of “niche,” the very particular way an organism uses its habitat, and it allows for an almost incomprehensible degree of peaceful coexistence. Choose a cubic foot of earth, about anywhere that isn't paved; look closely enough, and you'll find that thousands of different kinds of living things are sharing that place, each one merrily surviving on something its neighbors couldn't use for all the tea in China. I'm told that nine-tenths of human law is about possession. But it seems to me we don't know the first thing about it.

 

It did not take me long in the desert to realize I was thinking like a person, and on that score was deeply outnumbered. My neighbors weren't into the idea of private property, and weren't interested in learning about it, either. As Kafka frankly put it, when it's you against the world, bet on the world.

So I dispensed with lordship, and went for territoriality. I turned a realistic eye on my needs. I don't really have to have hollyhocks outside my door. But I'd like some tomatoes and eggplants. Oak-leaf lettuce on crisp fall days, and in the spring green beans and snowpeas. Maybe a
little
bed of snapdragons. It wouldn't take much. Since I had no plans to raise a huge brood, sixty square feet or so of garden space would serve me very well.

I revised my blueprints and looked hard at Pueblo architecture, which shuns the monumental for the more enduring value of blending in. The Pueblo, as I understand their way of life, seem to be more territorial than proprietary, and they've lived in the desert for eight centuries. Between the javelinas and me it had come down to poison darts in about eight days. Enough with that.

I settled on a fairly ancient design. The wings of my house
enfold a smallish courtyard. My territorial vireo song is a block wall, eight feet high. Inside the courtyard I grow a vegetable garden, a few fruit trees, and a bright flag of flowerbed that changes its colors every season. The acres that lie beyond the wall I have left to cactus and mesquite bramble, and the appetites that rise to its sharp occasion.

Life is easier since I abdicated the throne. What a relief, to relinquish ownership of unownable things. Engels remarked at the end of his treatise that the outgrowth of property has become so unmanageable that “the human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation.” But he continues on a hopeful note: “The time which has passed since civilization began is but a fragment of the past duration of man's existence; and but a fragment of the ages yet to come….A mere property career is not the final destiny of mankind.”

Indeed. We're striving hard to get beyond mere property career around here. I've quit with the
Adenium obesum
, and taken to leaving out table scraps for the pigs. I toss, they eat. I find, now that I'm not engaged in the project of despising them, they are rather a hoot to watch. On tiny hooves as preposterous as high-heeled pumps on a pirate, they come mincing up the path. They feel their way through the world with flattened, prehensile snoots that flare like a suction-cup dart, and swivel about for input like radar dishes. When mildly aroused (which is as far as it goes, in the emotional color scheme of the javelina), their spiky fur levitates into a bristly, spherical crown—Tina Turner laced with porcupine. I don't even mind that they come and eat up our jack-o'-lanterns at Halloween; it's worth it. They slay me every time with their hilarious habit of going down on their foreknees and walking along, pious supplicants in awe of life's bounty, pushing whole pumpkins before them.

Meanwhile, in the cloistered territory of the courtyard, so many things come and go it would feel absurd to call it mine: I've seen an elf owl picking through the compost pile; Gila woodpeckers fighting over the tree trunks; hummingbirds at the flowers; doves who nested in the grape arbor; a roadrunner who chased off the doves and gulped down their eggs; a pair of cardinals and a Pyrrhuloxia couple who nested in adjacent trees and became so confused, when the young fledged and flew to the ground, that they hopped around frantically for a week feeding each other's kids. A pair of Swainson's thrushes stopped in for a day on their migratory flight from Canada to Peru; to them, this small lush square in a desert state must have appeared as Moses' freshet from the rock.

The cardinals, of course, eat the grapes. In some years the finches peck a hole in every single apricot before I get around to throwing a net over the tree. A fat, clairvoyant rock squirrel scales the wall and grabs just about every third tomato, on the morning I decide that tomorrow it will be ripe enough to pick.

So what
, they all declare with glittering eyes. This is their party, and I wasn't exactly invited.

I have been gone from Kentucky a long time. Twenty years have done to my hill accent what the washing machine does to my jeans: taken out the color and starch, so gradually that I never marked the loss. Something like that has happened to my memories, too, particularly of the places and people I can't go back and visit because they are gone. The ancient brick building that was my grade school, for example, and both my grandfathers. They're snapshots of memory for me now, of equivocal focus, loaded with emotion, undisturbed by anyone else's idea of the truth. The schoolhouse's plaster ceilings are charted with craters like maps of the moon and likely to crash down without warning. The windows are watery, bubbly glass reinforced with chicken wire. The weary wooden staircases, worn shiny smooth in a path up their middles, wind up to an unknown
place overhead where the heavy-footed eighth graders changing classes were called “the mules” by my first-grade teacher, and believing her, I pictured their sharp hooves on the linoleum.

My Grandfather Henry I remember in his sleeveless undershirt, home after a day's hard work on the farm at Fox Creek. His hide is tough and burnished wherever it has met the world—hands, face, forearms—but vulnerably white at the shoulders and throat. He is snapping his false teeth in and out of place, to provoke his grandchildren to hysterics.

As far as I know, no such snapshots exist in the authentic world. The citizens of my hometown ripped down the old school and quickly put to rest its picturesque decay. My grandfather always cemented his teeth in his head, and put on good clothes, before submitting himself to photography. Who wouldn't? When a camera takes aim at my daughter, I reach out and scrape the peanut butter off her chin. “I can't help it,” I tell her, “it's one of those mother things.” It's more than that. It's human, to want the world to see us as we think we ought to be seen.

You can fool history sometimes, but you can't fool the memory of your intimates. And thank heavens, because in the broad valley between real life and propriety whole herds of important truths can steal away into the underbrush. I hold that valley to be my home territory as a writer. Little girls wear food on their chins, school days are lit by ghostlight, and respectable men wear their undershirts at home. Sometimes there are fits of laughter and sometimes there is despair, and neither one looks a thing like its formal portrait.

For many, many years I wrote my stories furtively in spiral-bound notebooks, for no greater purpose than my own private salvation. But on April 1, 1987, two earthquakes hit my psyche on the same day. First, I brought home my own newborn baby
girl from the hospital. Then, a few hours later, I got a call from New York announcing that a large chunk of my writing—which I'd tentatively pronounced a novel—was going to be published. This was a spectacular April Fool's Day. My life has not, since, returned to normal.

For days I nursed my baby and basked in hormonal euphoria, musing occasionally: all this—and I'm a novelist, too!
That
, though, seemed a slim accomplishment compared with laboring twenty-four hours to render up the most beautiful new human the earth had yet seen. The book business seemed a terrestrial affair of ink and trees and I didn't give it much thought.

In time my head cleared, and I settled into panic. What had I done? The baby was premeditated, but the book I'd conceived recklessly, in a closet late at night, when the restlessness of my insomniac pregnancy drove me to compulsive verbal intercourse with my own soul. The pages that grew in a stack were somewhat incidental to the process. They contained my highest hopes and keenest pains, and I didn't think anyone but me would ever see them. I'd bundled the thing up and sent it off to New York in a mad fit of housekeeping, to be done with it. Now it was going to be laid smack out for my mother, my postal clerk, my high school English teacher, anybody in the world who was willing to plunk down $16.95 and walk away with it. To find oneself suddenly published is thrilling—that is a given. But how appalling it also felt I find hard to describe. Imagine singing at the top of your lungs in the shower as you always do, then one day turning off the water and throwing back the curtain to see there in your bathroom a crowd of people, rapt, with videotape. I wanted to throw a towel over my head.

There was nothing in the novel to incriminate my mother or
the postal clerk. I like my mother, plus her record is perfect. My postal clerk I couldn't vouch for; he has tattoos. But in any event I never put real people into my fiction—I can't see the slightest point of that, when I have the alternative of inventing utterly subservient slave-people, whose every detail of appearance and behavior I can bend to serve my theme and plot.

Even so, I worried that someone I loved would find in what I'd written a reason to despise me. In fact, I was sure of it. My fiction is not in any way about my life, regardless of what others might assume, but certainly it is set in the sort of places I know pretty well. The protagonist of my novel, titled
The Bean Trees
, launched her adventures from a place called “Pittman, Kentucky,” which does resemble a town in Kentucky where I'm known to have grown up. I had written: “Pittman was twenty years behind the nation in practically every way you can think of except the rate of teenage pregnancies….We were the last place in the country to get the dial system. Up until 1973 you just picked up the receiver and said, Marge, get me my Uncle Roscoe. The telephone office was on the third floor of the Courthouse, and the operator could see everything around Main Street square. She would tell you if his car was there or not.”

I don't have an Uncle Roscoe. But if I
did
have one, the phone operator in my hometown, prior to the mid-seventies, could have spotted him from her second-floor office on Main Street square.

I cherish the oddball charm of that town. Time and again I find myself writing love letters to my rural origins. Growing up in small-town Kentucky taught me respect for the astounding resources people can drum up from their backyards, when they want to, to pull each other through. I tend to be at home with modesty, and suspicious of anything slick or new. But naturally,
when I was growing up there, I yearned for the slick and the new. A lot of us did, I think. We craved shopping malls and a swimming pool. We wanted the world to know we had once won the title “All Kentucky City,” even though with sixteen-hundred souls we no more constituted a “city” than New Jersey is a Garden State, and we advertised this glorious prevarication for years and years on one of the town's few billboards.

Homely charm is a relative matter. Now that I live in a western city where shopping malls and swimming pools congest the landscape like cedar blight, I think back fondly on my hometown. But the people who live there now might rather smile about the quaintness of a
smaller
town, like nearby Morning Glory or Barefoot. At any rate, they would not want to discover themselves in my novel. I can never go home again, as long as I live, I reasoned. Somehow this will be reckoned as betrayal. I've photographed my hometown in its undershirt.

During the year I awaited publication, I decided to calm down. There were other ways to think about this problem:

1. If people really didn't want to see themselves in my book, they wouldn't. They would think to themselves, “She is writing about Morning Glory, and those underdogs are from farther on down Scrubgrass Road.”
   
2. There's no bookstore in my hometown. No one will know.
   

 

In November 1988, bookstoreless though it was, my hometown hosted a big event. Paper banners announced it, and stores closed in honor of it. A crowd assembled in the town's largest public space—the railroad depot. The line went out the door and
away down the tracks. At the front of the line they were plunking down $16.95 for signed copies of a certain book.

My family was there. The county's elected officials were there. My first-grade teacher, Miss Louella, was there, exclaiming to one and all: “I taught her to write!”

My old schoolmates were there. The handsome boys who'd spurned me at every homecoming dance were there.

It's relevant and slightly vengeful to confess here that I was not a hit in school, socially speaking. I was a bookworm who never quite fit her clothes. I managed to look fine in my school pictures, but as usual the truth lay elsewhere. In sixth grade I hit my present height of five feet almost nine, struck it like a gong, in fact, leaving behind self-confidence and any genuine need of a training bra. Elderly relatives used the term “fill out” when they spoke of me, as though they held out some hope I might eventually have some market value, like an underfed calf, if the hay crop was good. In my classroom I came to dread a game called Cooties, wherein one boy would brush against my shoulder and then chase the others around, threatening to pass on my apparently communicable lack of charisma. The other main victim of this game was a girl named Sandra, whose family subscribed to an unusual religion that mandated a Victorian dress code. In retrospect I can't say exactly what Sandra and I had in common that made us outcasts, except for extreme shyness, flat chests, and families who had their eyes on horizons pretty far beyond the hills of Nicholas County. Mine were not Latter-day Saints, but we read Thoreau and Robert Burns at home, and had lived for a while in Africa. My parents did not flinch from relocating us to a village beyond the reach of electricity, running water, or modern medicine (also, to my delight, conventional schooling) when they had a chance to do useful work there. They thought it was shameful to ignore a
fellow human in need, or to waste money on trendy, frivolous things; they did not, on the other hand, think it was shameful to wear perfectly good hand-me-down dresses to school in Nicholas County. Ephemeral idols exalted by my peers, such as Batman, the Beatles, and the Hula Hoop, were not an issue at our house. And even if it took no more than a faint pulse to pass the fifth grade, my parents expected me to set my own academic goals, and then exceed them.

Possibly my parents were trying to make sure I didn't get pregnant in the eighth grade, as some of my classmates would shortly begin to do. If so, their efforts were a whale of a success. In my first three years of high school, the number of times I got asked out on a date was zero. This is not an approximate number. I'd caught up to other girls in social skills by that time, so I knew how to pretend I was dumber than I was, and make my own clothes. But these things helped only marginally. Popularity remained a frustrating mystery to me.

Nowadays, some of my city-bred friends muse about moving to a small town for the sake of their children. What's missing from their romantic picture of Graver's Corners is the frightening impact of insulation upon a child who's not dead center in the mainstream. In a place such as my hometown, you file in and sit down to day one of kindergarten with the exact pool of boys who will be your potential dates for the prom. If you wet your pants a lot, your social life ten years later will be—as they say in government reports—impacted. I was sterling on bladder control, but somehow could never shake my sixth-grade stigma.

At age seventeen, I was free at last to hightail it for new social pastures, and you'd better believe I did. I attended summer classes at the University of Kentucky and landed a boyfriend before I knew what had hit me, or what on earth one did with the likes
of such. When I went on to college in Indiana I was astonished to find a fresh set of peers who found me, by and large, likable and cootie-free.

I've never gotten over high school, to the extent that I'm still a little surprised that my friends want to hang out with me. But it made me what I am, for better and for worse. From living in a town that listened in on party lines, I learned both the price and value of community. And I gained things from my rocky school years: A fierce wish to look inside of people. An aptitude for listening. The habit of my own company. The companionship of keeping a diary, in which I gossiped, fantasized, and invented myself. From the vantage point of invisibility I explored the psychology of the underdog, the one who can't be what others desire but who might still learn to chart her own hopes. Her story was my private treasure; when I wrote
The Bean Trees
I called her Lou Ann. I knew for sure that my classmates, all of them cool as Camaros back then, would not relate to the dreadful insecurities of Lou Ann. But I liked her anyway.

And now, look. The boys who'd once fled howling from her cooties were lined up for my autograph. Football captains, cheerleaders, homecoming queens were all there. The athlete who'd inspired in me a near-fatal crush for three years, during which time he never looked in the vicinity of my person, was there. The great wits who gave me the names Kingfish and Queen Sliver were there.

I took liberties with history. I wrote long, florid inscriptions referring to our great friendship of days gone by. I wrote slowly. I made those guys wait in line
a long time
.

I can recall every sight, sound, minute of that day. Every open, generous face. The way the afternoon light fell through the windows onto the shoes of the people in line. In my inventory of
mental snapshots these images hold the place most people reserve for the wedding album. I don't know whether other people get to have Great Life Moments like this, but I was lucky enough to realize I was having mine, right while it happened. My identity was turning backward on its own axis. Never before or since have I felt all at the same time so cherished, so aware of old anguish, and so ready to let go of the past. My past had let go of
me
, so I could be something new: Poet Laureate and Queen for a Day in hometown Kentucky. The people who'd watched me grow up were proud of me, and exuberant over an event that put our little dot on the map, particularly since it wasn't an airline disaster or a child falling down a well. They didn't appear to mind that my novel discussed small-town life frankly, without gloss.