Harriet Doerr

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

Praise for
The Tiger in the Grass

“Some of the most enchanting prose around ... Tiger connects the author’s life and her fiction with veins as delicate and rewarding as traces of copper in an ore sample.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer

 

“In the same unflinching, unsentimental voice of
Stones for Ibarra,
Doerr sketches the facts of her life.... Just as in her best fiction she swiftly and effortlessly makes us care about her characters, here in her memoir we are equally enchanted.”—
The Boston Globe

 

“Uncommonly elegant ... Doerr’s intimations explode in a seemingly placid landscape ... her prose must be considered matchless.”

—
Newsday

 

“Redolent of her beloved Mexico ... Doerr casts her compassionate yet razor-sharp eye over situations with imbalances... detail[ing] the atrocities of village life... in the same lyrical prose with which she illuminates pockets of happiness.”—
Elle

 

“Wise insights, couched in stunning metaphors and sensory imagery that lifts individual sentences off the page.”—
Publishers
Weekly

 

“Incandescent ... written with great tenderness and understanding”

—
Library Journal

 

“Masterfully varied in its rhythms ... Doerr’s assured control of tone persuades us of her deep involvement with her material. She can ... capture the whole sweep of a life in a single emotionally charged perception.”

—
Kirkus Reviews

 

“Full of grace... her insights are like the stones of her stories, worn smooth by wind and weather. Through her experiences, stones speak.”

—
Detroit Free Press

 

“Doerr is a master of selecting telling details and then weaving them together to create fictional portraits that have the clarity of photographs.... Her characters reverberate with truth as she celebrates the small miracles that, taken together, make up a life.”—
The San Diego Union Tribune

Born in Pasadena, California in 1910, Harriet Doerr attended Smith College in 1927, but received her B.A. from Stanford University in 1977, where she was accepted into the Creative Writing Program. She was a Stegner Fellow, received the
Transatlantic Review
Henfield Foundation Award and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Doerr’s first novel,
Stones for Ibarra,
won the 1985 National Book Award for First Fiction, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award, the Godal Medal of the Commonwealth Club of California, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Harold D. Vursell Award. Her second novel,
Consider This, Señora
, was a national bestseller.
The Tiger in the Grass is
Doerr’s first collection of stories and anecdotal pieces.

PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

 

First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,
a division of Penguin Books USA Inc. 1995
Published in Penguin Books 1996

Copyright © Harriet Doerr, 1995

All rights reserved
“Sun, Pure Air, and a View” (under the title “Consider This, Señora”) first appeared in
Atlantic
Monthly;
“Way Stations” and “Edie: A Life” in
Epoch;
“Low Tide at Four” in
Ladies’ Home
Journal;
“Like Heaven” in
Los Angeles Times Magazine;
and “A Sleeve of Rain” (as “Houses”)
in The Writer on Her Work, Volume II. New Essays in New Territory,
edited by Janet Sternberg,
W. W. Norton & Company. “The Local Train,” “Way Stations,” “Saint’s Day,” and “Like
Heaven” were published in the author’s collection,
Under an Aztec Sun,
Yolla Bolly Press.

 

PUBLISHER’S NOTE
Some of the selections in this book are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and
incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

eISBN : 978-1-440-67431-0

I. Title.
PS3554.036T54 1995
813’.54—dc20 95-32391

 

 

For
(in order of appearance)

 

Glive Miller
John L’Heureux
and
Cork Smith

Yesterday was my eighty-fifth birthday, and my son, who has had lung and brain cancer for two years, gave me a toy stuffed tiger as a reminder to write, without further delay, a short account of my long life. My daughter, substituting a baked Alaska for a cake, whipped egg whites for twenty minutes by hand to produce a confection that towered on the plate and melted into a sort of heaven on our spoons. This backward look is for them. It was only four years ago that I realized I was making my way through the thickets of life together with a scarcely visible, four-footed companion, who matched his steps to mine.

I first learned of the tiger in the examining room of my glaucoma doctor.

Sitting in a black revolving chair, my chin in a rest, my forehead against a strap, and facing an intense light about to be focused on my inner eye, while the doctor at his illuminated glass counter made entries on my record, I turned pessimistic. ,

“Let us hope,” I said, “that I don’t lose more sight in my right eye,” and went on, “since I have only peripheral vision in my left.”

Without turning from my folder, the doctor said, “Don’t belittle peripheral vision. That’s how we see the tiger in the grass.”

Then he added, “It’s also how the tiger sees us.”

In this way, at the eye clinic, almost at the end of my life, I met and recognized the tiger that was mine and had been from the start.

 

 

If I began at the very beginning, I would probably tell you, dishonestly, that I remember taking my first reeling steps on garden paths while wearing rompers and ankle-high brown button shoes. Or I might say I remember taking baby chickens with me down the slide when I was two or three.

But how much of all this is remembered, how much absorbed from torn and faded Kodak pictures, taken by my father, who died when I was eleven?

Unsupported by snapshots is my recollection of the time when, at the age of eight, I wept at the blackboard in French class. I still have total recollection of the event, but none at all of its cause. Was it simply not knowing the idiom, or needing to go to the bathroom? Was it fear of the teacher, who had snapping black eyes and wore two strands of jet beads? Or was it because the year was 1918 and the war had lifted my family from southern California and set us down hundreds of miles north of the house where I was born?

This was a place I had come to know intimately by sight and sound, touch and smell, a place whose arrangement of roof, walls, and intervening spaces I loved with a passion that occasionally flames even now. Did I weep that day for the door knocker, a twisted metal ring? Or for the umbrella stand in the shape of a copper frog with four holes in its back?

Or were my tears merely a child’s acknowledgment of the times of band music and parades, of images of soldiers bleeding on stretchers or caught in barbed wire? Or of the spiked helmets and starving Belgian children in the posters people hung in their front halls?

Toward the end of the war, Spanish influenza crossed the Atlantic, then North America, finally to reach California. On certain days, decreed, we supposed, by President Woodrow Wilson’s doctor, we had to wear white gauze masks to school. However, on the day of my shame at the blackboard, I was unmasked when I cried.

I think occasionally of these unexplained, long-ago tears and wish I could cry them now.

After the war I lived at home, as before, with two parents, three sisters, and two brothers in a shingle-roofed, brown-shingled house that had been built with no sleeping porches and before long had three.

Bamboo grew along the driveway, eucalyptus over the toolshed, and, at the bottom of our hill, three peach trees blossomed pink in a field that turned yellow with wild mustard in the spring. There was also a steep canyon, which every summer hid its rough slopes under green drifts of poison oak.