Coming into the End Zone (25 page)

At Yaddo I met two novelists at the beginning of their careers who are still my friends, Joseph Caldwell and Allan Gurganus. We used to go out drinking together, wandering the fashionable streets in our ragged writer's clothes (although I remember Allan once bought a battered raccoon coat in a secondhand store and wore it at night regardless of the heat). We talked endlessly about what we were writing, sometimes about the other Fellows and their peculiarities. We became friends despite the difference in our ages—I was at least twenty years older than they. The bond of a common endeavor and the fine, relaxed time after the day's work wiped out, at least for me, that disparity. And still does.

Now that I know we are soon leaving these Washington streets, I find myself walking more often. There have been weeks when I have not used the car. Serendipitously last night, Sybil brought home a seventeenth-century book by Thomas Fuller,
The Holy State
. I read here and there in it (I am not fond of religious tracts) and found a fine sentence: ‘Running, leaping, and dancing, the descants on the plainsong of walking, are all excellent exercise.'

Aha. If I am certain I am not being watched, and because I am so excited by the thought of moving to Maine shortly, I may take to running, leaping, and dancing along North Carolina Avenue to the market, the post office, and Wayward Books. Occupied in this way, I may even stop counting my steps.

May

The first stage of the move was accomplished today. Most of our ‘city' furniture, some of our books, and half of our kitchen and linen supplies are now in an apartment on C Street, around the corner from the bookstore and across the street from the Eastern Market. It is small, but has two balconies which give it a more ample sense. However, one of them looks out at a distant row of trees which will soon be obscured by the upper stories of a corner building to be erected in the summer. The study is a small, viewless room we will share, since Sybil has a computer like mine and will bring it from the store when we return here in the winter.

I have not lived in an apartment for almost twenty years. There is something odd about going home to a lobby, an elevator, another hallway, and then a series of boxes opening into one another, with the same doors, the same fixtures, and two identical bathrooms, the only difference between them being the location of the toilet-paper holder.

Our furniture, rearranged a number of times, and our books all seem to be cramped into these rooms. This is true city living, too much furnishing, too little space. A symbol of the reduction is the absence of the sixteen volumes of the
Oxford English Dictionary
, soon to be making their way on the van to Maine, and the substitution of the two-volume edition, with its 2-point print and magnifying glass.

A handsome young black man comes to install our two telephone lines. It takes a long time to bring the extra line in. He rests now and then, and looks at the walls of books.

‘Have you read all these?'

‘Most of them.'

‘What do you do?'

‘I write.'

‘I've often thought of being a writer.'

‘Why?'

‘Oh, to make more money. And to sit down while I work.'

‘I think you may make more money doing what you do. And I get tired of sitting down.'

‘You're kidding. And another reason—you get famous and people recognize you on the street.'

‘Not really. Only if you're Norman Mailer or Stephen King or someone like that.'

‘Who is Norman Mailer?'

‘A famous writer.'

‘Oh. Well, both phones are now working. I enjoyed the talk.'

‘Thank you. So did I. If you became a writer what would you like to write about?'

‘Anything, anything that makes money. My life, maybe. Well, so long.'

June and July

Maine. In the bookstore van, we start on our way from Washington to Sargentville, stopping to visit the Kosteckis, Sybil's family outside Philadelphia. There I am given her granddaughter Rachael's bedroom. The walls are papered with photographs of a boy who appears, I gather, in soap operas. He is Rachael's love. Her bed had been covered with stuffed animals, now thoughtfully removed for me. I lie on it for some time before I go to sleep, the light on, trying to imagine, or remember, what it was like to be adolescent, protected from my family and the outside world by a wall of toys and pictures of … who was pasted on my wall then? John Gilbert?

We stop the next evening at Jim Hillman's house in Connecticut, for an hour in his hot tub, a good dinner, much loud talk between argumentative male guests and the host, and sleep. Then it is time to make the last part of the journey north to ‘Plas Newydd,' as the heroines of
The Ladies
called their house in Wales: the New Place. But we have decided against calling our house Plas Newydd or even Serious Trouble. It will be the Captain White House, because that is the name painted on our mailbox. We know little about Captain White, but there is a comfortable sense of anonymity and buried history behind the name, so we shall keep it.

The moving van with our furniture and books is traveling a faster, more direct route toward Sargentville. One of the moving men is driving Troilus, my car, loaded with electronic equipment, bed pillows, and boxes of food. I have stayed in the new apartment for a few nights, not long enough to be able to think of it as another home. ‘Home' will keep, until we travel for three days, six states, 750 miles, and pull into the driveway of the Captain White House.

This move is not without its anxieties for me. One of the most constant is the worry that the view, for which I know we bought the place, will grow dull, static, without interest, after we have looked out at it for a time. Another is that I will not be able to convey my muse from the wondrous little carriage house to the room in Maine I have chosen for a study because its view of the cove is so fine. In less elevated terms, that I won't be able to write here.

‘Convey' is a real estate word I have acquired in the last months. We put into our contract a notice that the tin-and-copper chandelier in the carriage house ‘does not convey.' Cynthia Graae, once a writing student of mine, is the purchaser, with her husband Steven. She loves the carriage house as I do, wants to use it to write, and asked if the muse conveyed.

I suspect my doubts are at the bottom of the dream I had last night at Jimmy's, summarizing all my old anxieties. It is the beginning of the winter semester. I am about to teach a class of eight students, the only ones who have shown up out of an enrollment of thirty-five. I can't remember what the course is. I find a paper on my desk which informs me it is Advanced Accounting. Then I discover I have forgotten to wear a blouse. I rush to the back of the room while the
real
teacher takes the roll. I gather up my bookbag and escape to a room marked
FAC ULTY
. A tall nun looks in and tells me I don't belong there. I leave, forgetting my purse. When I get to my car, still partially dressed, I discover I do not have my car keys (they are in the purse). A long search begins for the the faculty room. I need the purse; it has my money in it. I am frightened because I remember I have to call my mother to tell her I'll be late.

My dream is full of familiar worries from my past. No one will want to take my course. I am unprepared to teach it properly. In my rush not to be late, I have forgotten some necessary article of clothing. I am really not qualified to be a member of a faculty. I will lose everything I need. My mother will worry because I am not home on time. I cannot call her.

A fleeting moment of pleasure comes as I wake, perspiring, from the terrors I have experienced. I have had a glimpse of my mother's concerned face. She is young and handsome, black-haired and blue-eyed, a beautiful woman whom I loved and who worried about me. But the memory is gone quickly. I am fully awake and flooded with apprehension. What will happen if the place we have bought is uncomfortable, cold, if the furniture does not fit, if the roof leaks, if the cellar is wet, if the view of the cove begins to pale?

I will telephone my mother, who has been dead for thirty-three years, and tell her that I don't like it here and I will be home as soon as I find my purse. Or maybe I will ask her to come and get me and take me home
.

We arrive at the house after noon, almost at the same time as the moving van. The ground, frozen and hard when we had our ‘walk-through' in April before the closing, is now a morass of mud. The van proceeds down our driveway and immediately sinks into it. Fortunately Ted and Bob have come to meet us and know the proper fellow with a tractor to call. Chains are applied, the van is freed. It is almost three hours, and getting dark, before the moving men can begin to bring in the furniture and cartons. Their tempers shorten; the sixty cartons of books are no longer the light matter they were when they loaded them in Washington. They leave with their check, glad to be gone from us and our treacherous mudhole of an estate.

We are here, not yet home, but here. We eat the dinner our friends have brought, make the bed, and get into it gratefully, not very reassured by the events of the day, too weary to build a case for optimism. Tonight I am so tired that I have no dreams of disaster, no dreams at all. I sleep until five, when I am awakened by a loud thumping outside the window, and discover that two blue jays have landed on the bird feeder erected by the former owners outside our window.

The first morning. We watch the sky lighten as we lie in bed. The water turns from black to blue to green. By six-thirty we are downstairs, having coffee made in our old pot and staring from the kitchen window at a new, transformed view of Billings Cove. But it is very early to be up. We vow to take the bedroom bird feeder down as soon as possible. Sybil reminds me of her former sister-in-law who taught a preschool class and liked to educate her pupils in bird lore. She maintained a feeder for their instruction. Her dislike of jays communicated itself successfully to them. One day a little boy rushed into her classroom and reported: ‘Mrs. Hillman, the fucking jays are back again.'

Our contractor, Tracy Sampson, who has done all the painting inside the house, reconstructed the study, built an island in the kitchen, and is now engaged in various electrical and carpentry chores, arrives at nine. The gas man delivers his two canisters of natural gas, the oil man fills our tank, Don Hale, our neighbor who picks up the trash, comes on his first visit to remove packing boxes. We start the endless task of unpacking while Tracy's assistant puts together the bookcases and we begin to fill them.

I would be happy merely to thrust books into shelves to reduce the number of cartons, but the librarian in Sybil will not permit such unprofessional arrangements. Fiction must be shelved alphabetically, the rest of the collection according to subject. I sigh but accept her edict. The emptying of boxes proceeds much more slowly.

First indication of a new environment: Our mailbox is across a rather busy main road. Traffic, we discover, travels at forty-five miles an hour. Sybil is worried. In two weeks, when she returns to her job at the Library of Congress and to the bookstore, she thinks I will be almost instantly killed crossing the road to get letters and the
New York Times
, which I am having delivered by mail.

We questioned the former owners about this weighty matter. They reported they had asked for the box be moved to their side of the road, without success. So they trained their children to
listen
for cars, and then dart swiftly across.

We decide to ask again. The Sargentville post office is in a corner of a private house less than a mile from us, a little cubicle of a place with a devoted postmistress who introduces herself at once to us as Frances. We introduce ourselves to her, but it is unnecessary. She knows our names, where we have come from, exactly when we moved in (‘Saw the van coming to work,' she says), knows we are having work done in the house, hopes we will like it up here. ‘Folks from away generally do,' she says. It is the first time we have heard that phrase, used for anyone not a born Mainer.

Having been instructed to stand back, say nothing, and look a bit daft, I do so, while Sybil explains to Frances that she would be grateful if the mailbox could be moved. ‘My friend,' she says, ‘is somewhat deaf and may not hear the traffic when it approaches. And she is no longer able to dart across the road ahead of it.' Her implication is that those two difficulties are only the beginning. There are my mental infirmities. I continue my look of somewhat dazed antiquity, and say nothing.

Frances, herself a lady of a certain age, studies me. Then she says: ‘I think it can be arranged. I'll speak to the postmaster at Sedgwick [the town nearest to us, and a larger station] and to the postman.' The next day she telephones to say that both gentlemen have agreed to the change. The postman will dig up the letter box himself and replant it at our driveway. In a few days it is done, civilly and without any further reminder, thus, to Sybil's way of thinking, saving my life.

Reading has taken on a new quality for me. Before I left Washington I told my editor/producer that I would be doing no more reviews for National Public Radio. I had collected what seemed to me to be good reasons for retiring from the job I had held for more than five years. Maine was far from Washington and required long travel in order to tape; I have grown tired of having to have an opinion on every book I read; I am losing my hard-won fluency of speech, and the fear that I will stammer or slip or mispronounce has grown to the point that every review is both a challenge to perform and an expectation of failure. In the past, I have had a series of reassuring editors who helped me through these self-doubts. But the new chap, very nice but even more nervous than I am, serves only to make me do badly.

I've noticed that persons on radio or television who make one slip of the tongue will invariably make another in the next few sentences. This happened to me at my last taping. So I gave up the difficult monthly chore that I had come to dread, said goodbye to my friends at the station, and left, feeling unburdened and free. I told Alice Winkler not to bother to forward mail or books, another gain that will cut down on correspondence, invitations, and thank-you notes for inscribed books I did not request and could not figure out what to do with.