Harriet Doerr (4 page)

Old Juana’s eyes were on us.

She wants a confirmation, I thought, and said, “The two together.”

Soon after that, barefoot and happy, she took us to the gate.

 

 

The last of the happiest interludes that I hoard memories of came late, when I was a widow of sixty-five and, challenged by my son, went back to school to get my B.A. degree.

I earned the necessary credits in two places, Scripps College (near at hand) and Stanford University (far enough away to require my bed, desk, and bookcase to be moved). Even at the time, I suspected that I would have transferred my household. gods, my lares and
penates,
anywhere on this planet, to any desert or jungle or Antarctic shore, to sit with these students, who, after the first shock, looked upon me as one of them.

This process could be quite brief. In one class, a student told me that at first she thought I was the professor’s secretary’s mother. My classmates commented in the margins of my stories. “Wonderful!” one student wrote of a phrase. “Ugh!” wrote another. “This should be a novella,” from a third. “Cut pages 3, 4, and 7,” advised yet another. “Harriet, try to use your own judgment,” wrote the professor.

We believed we weren’t asking for miracles. All we wanted was the perfect word in the perfect sentence that, when multiplied, would fill the pages of the perfect book.

A few of us, not including me, were published, and I sat next to them in awe.

I used to look at the faces of people crossing streets, waiting on benches for a bus, standing in lines at the box office, sitting beside me at a concert, and never found a person who appeared likely to read anything I wrote.

What things are there left for me to tell?

I think about the day I went back to school in 1975. Arriving at my classroom fifteen minutes late and finding the door closed, I stood outside it, holding my book bag and a note from the registrar, while terror assailed me. How could I, sixty-five and graying, invade the province of students young enough to be my grandchildren? Go back to the registrar, my common sense told me. Go out to the parking lot. Go home.

At that moment I remembered the words-of Bob Gibson, who gained renown pitching for the St. Louis Cardinals. According to a sportswriter, Bob Gibson, in his prime, said, “I don’t believe in standing around on the mound waiting for the catcher’s signal and trying to scare the batter. My philosophy is, just hum it in there, baby, and let’s see who’s best, them or me.”

Then I pushed the door open, entered the room, and the professor—for the class was Intermediate Spanish—said,
“Buenos
días, señora.
” And I knew I was safe.

I think of the people who worked with me in my house and garden. Hatsu Tamura, Setsuyo Doi, Hajime Doi. American citizens all, they spent the years of World War II in concentration, or detention, camps.

I asked Mr. Hajime Doi, who helped me grow flowers for twenty-five years, what his camp was like. It was in Gila Bend, Arizona, he told me. “Very hot there,” said Mr. Doi. One hundred twenty degrees inside his house, he said. Therefore he dug a basement, so that his wife could sit there and keep cool. Smiling, he said that this project caused him to contract mountain fever, from which he recovered after two months in a hospital.

Then he raised one hand and smiled. “But,” said Mr. Doi, and, repeating the word “But,” went on to tell me there was a stand of cottonwoods near the headquarters of the camp. When night fell, the men of the Japanese families went to these trees and broke off branches, which they planted in the ground around their houses.

Mr. Doi, a small, wiry man, lifted his hand again and smiled. “We poured water on these branches and they grew,” he said, still smiling. “And by the time we left,” he went on, “there was shade, shade everywhere.”

And at that moment I wanted to apologize and bow a formal bow to Mr. Hajime Doi, as I wished I had bowed to the caretaker of the Japanese house seventy-five years ago.

I think of a conference in Park City, Utah, where I spoke one afternoon to a number of published and unpublished writers. I explained my late start as an author after forty-two years of writing “housewife” on my income tax form. These years without a profession, from 1930 to 1972, were also the years of my marriage. Hands were raised after my talk, and I answered questions. The final one was from a woman who assumed, incorrectly, these were decades of frustration. “And were you happy for those forty-two years?” she asked, and I couldn’t believe the question. I asked her to repeat it, and she said again, “Were you happy for those forty-two years?”

It was then that I said, “I never heard of anyone being happy for forty-two years,” and went on, “And would a person who was happy for forty-two years write a book?”

I think of what it is like to write stories. It is a completion. It is discovering something you didn’t know you’d lost. It is finding an answer to a question you never asked.

I think of all our children. Let us celebrate the light-haired, the dark-haired, and the redheads, the tall ones and the short ones, the black-eyed, brown-eyed, and blue-eyed, the straight ones and the gay ones. Let us celebrate our vision, clear or clouded, central or peripheral. Let us celebrate our uneasy foot-hold on our shaken planet.

Now here is my fierce old companion, half threat, half friend. If I listen, I can hear him breathe. I see him sidelong. Sidelong, he sees me. We are still in step after all this time, my tiger in the grass and I.

 

 

The Flowering Stick
A fable for Carmer Hadley

Once there was a far-off country ruled by a king who ordered his privy council to order the earls to order the mayors to order the constables to carry out the royal edicts. Thus the king was privileged to command his subjects as he pleased, by wisdom or by whim. But in all the realm there was only one who could turn dreams to substance, and that was the magician.

On the shortest day of the year, when dusk fell in midafternoon and the air was bitter with wind and snow, a beggar woman went to the magician’s door and, after hesitating until her fingers froze, found courage to knock. When the magician came, she saw behind him logs burning on the hearth, a lamp lit, and brightly covered chairs as soft as newly shorn wool. She sat in one, with her bare feet on the rug and her hands stretched to the fire.

The magician said nothing, and at last the, beggar woman spoke. “I have three wishes. Can you help me?” He asked what they were. When she described them, he said that, though he could make a fish walk and a tiger sing, the first two wishes were unattainable.

“The last one, though,” he said, contemplating her. “The third wish, perhaps.”

Then he opened a cupboard door, took out a crooked stick as long as a cripple’s cane, and said, “Walk with this.”

“I didn’t ask for a stick,” said the beggar woman.

The magician led her to the door in silence and watched her disappear among the hurrying passersby.

The beggar woman carried the stick for weeks and months. It did not fill her pockets with coins, or put an eiderdown on her cot, or crowd her larder with sweetmeats and fruit. So, finally, telling herself that she was not a cripple, she stopped walking with the stick. Hating to look at it, she took it outside her hut and left it leaning against the rough boards.

In a later season there came a restoring rain after an extended drought. Dust was washed from the oaks and cedars, pools filled, street gutters ran with the sound of mountain streams. The dry wash flooded. Fields, lately despaired of, turned green.

After the last shower, the beggar woman walked out of her house and saw the stick. At the top, leaves were pushing out of the wood. Buds were beginning to swell along its length. She left it against the wall but examined it every day. When flowers came, she started to carry the stick again.

Amazed by this phenomenon, the townspeople approached her with alms, the baker gave her bread, the weaver a robe patterned in royal colors, blue, scarlet, gold. Her stick blossomed in perpetual springtime, lilacs crowding lilies, violets edging primroses.

One summer morning, not long after sunrise, the beggar woman went once more to the house of the magician. She knocked, and he answered.

“Look at my stick,” said the beggar woman.

“Yes,” said the magician.

She reaches through her invisible shield and takes lamb chops from the freezer and a bag of fresh spinach from the lettuce drawer.

She once read an article about a baby born without resistance to even the mildest threat of infection. A speck of dust, a draft, a breath, could kill the child. He lived with his sterilized blocks and balls in a plastic tent. The gloved hands of doctors, nurses, and his mother entered through hidden openings in the transparent walls to examine, feed, clean, and hold him, aseptically. He was fourteen months old when the account was written.

Ann Randall lives in such a protective bubble, but not alone. She lives with herself. They no longer speak. She can’t remember being shut away. Life, like a subway train, simply began to recede, taking the people she knew out of earshot. Either they have stopped listening or she has forgotten the words. In the case of Elliot, her husband, she is out of sight and sound. His eyes focus behind her and his voice is directed to one side. His arms do not reach through the unseen walls.

Now she hurriedly unwraps the chops and puts them in a pan to thaw. She runs cold water in the sink to cover the spinach. She picks up her bag and car keys in the hall, latches the door behind her, and runs down the steps. She will be late for the hairdresser. The image of Joseph, courteously containing his annoyance, rises before her. She has the last afternoon appointment. He will have to stay until six.

Backing out of the garage, she finds no reason or excuse for the delay. She has had either too much or not enough time.

In spite of the hour, she stops next to the mailbox, which is half buried in shrubbery near the sidewalk, and opens it without leaving the car. She puts a few envelopes and a magazine on the front seat. There are two bills, an announcement of a sale, a letter to Elliot from his brother, and a message to occupant. And one more envelope, unstamped. A large printed word, PRIVATE, has been cut out of some publication and pasted on. Below it is the smaller word “Mrs.” She imagines that a neighbor’s child has left it for her. With her foot on the brake, she opens it and takes out a single sheet of paper folded once.

All the words were clipped from newspapers or magazines except “cheating” and “snob,” which have been printed by hand, in black ink.

The plastic bubble explodes. Part of Ann shifts gears and directs the car toward the freeway. The other part of her observes from a reasonable distance and sees that although something (a fist?) has hit Ann in the chest, she is unable to double over because of the traffic. The observer notices an object that looks like a knife protruding from Ann’s chest. She thinks Ann is driving competently. She is using her rearview mirror, she is signaling for lane changes, she is moving into the fast lane, doing a steady sixty-two. She has, without conscious volition, turned on the radio. It is Renaissance music. Ann is listening to a pavane played by lute and viol. This is followed by lively rhythms, subsequently identified by the announcer as a galliard. He says the instruments played in this dance were cornets, crumhorns, racketts, recorders, and a portative organ.