Tolstoy and the Purple Chair (16 page)

Despite their varied interpretations of death, Waters's characters share a reverence for life. They are deeply grateful to be alive. As one character explains, “The dappled leaf shadows moving over the earth like dark cells, the entirety of this garden harmonizing and fusing . . . In the end, being alive is what matters.”

One of Waters's characters quotes a haiku by Mizuta Masahide, a seventeenth-century samurai and renowned writer of haikus. I seriously considered having the verse painted over our kitchen doorway: “Since my house burned down / I now own a better view / of the rising moon.” A better view: that is what I wanted my kids to have. Not to see the worst of what circumstances rendered for them in their lives, but the best. Resilience in the face of disappointment.

What else did I want for my children? Haruki Murakami writes in his memoir
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
about how, having decided to become a writer, he stuck to his goal with singularity: “You really need to prioritize in life, figuring out in what order you should divide up your time and energy. If you don't get that sort of system set by a certain age, you'll lack focus and your life will be out of balance.” Having decided that for him writing would be the focus of life, he dedicated himself to it, understanding that there would be other aspects of life that he must give up. He can't give up running (prone to chubbiness, he runs to keep the weight off), but socializing and staying up late at night are activities he cuts out of his routine.

“He doesn't try to do it all,” I explained to Jack that evening at dinner.

We'd had a special meal in honor of George's birthday, a continuation of days of festivities in his honor. There had been a party at school, a get-together that afternoon for friends, and now this dinner with his family. Over the weekend there would be one more celebration with my parents and Natasha. I'd made a slew of ice-cream cakes and invested in an allotment of Nerf guns and ammo (bubbles and piñatas wouldn't do it this year). I'd hung the birthday banner that would now decorate our kitchen through the summer. All four boys were born in the summer months, and Jack's birthday at the end of August rounded out the season. The weekend—and the summer—was just starting, and I was already exhausted.

Do it all? Who was I kidding? Between Meredith, the four boys, and my parents, most weekends our house is filled to bursting. In the summer more guests come, mattresses laid out across floors and towels piled high in bathrooms. Food is in constant demand, with milk, bananas, orange juice, and bread at the top of the list every single day. Mess builds up, spreading throughout all the rooms: spread-eagled books and dismembered toys, used glasses and discarded newspapers, and laundry, laundry everywhere. Kids track in dirt and leaves, and cats throw up in corners, leaving chewed-up grass in tiny mounds of offering. Every two weeks a Brazilian friend comes to the house, setting her cleaning crew to work with an efficiency and discipline I envy. Within twenty-four hours after they leave, chips have been retrod into the rug, cooking oil has splattered its way over the oven and across the counters, and another cat has thrown up another hard day's work of chewing.

“No one wants you to try and do it all,” Jack said to me firmly, watching as I licked the last of the ice-cream cake from the tin tray. I had better start running, I thought to myself, adding one more daily activity to the list.

“You mean I shouldn't try to read and write and see friends and hang out with the kids and feed the family and do the laundry and cook great meals—”

Snorts from Peter and Michael, but I forged on.

“And keep the house from absolute neglect and filth, weed the garden, and make the beds—”

“Hey,” interrupted Martin. “I make my bed, and I help with weeds.”

“Yeah,” said George, “and I made the treat bags for my birthday party. I always make my bed,
and
I bring my dirty clothes to the laundry room.”

“You all have been great,” Jack said. “I know Mom appreciates all your help.” A look over to me.

“Yeah, I do,” I said.

And I realized George was right. He had put the treat bags together all by himself, and come up with all the activities for his party. I'd only had to supply the artillery. Jack would cook lunch for our weekend party, and the older boys were on cleanup duty. No one had complained or probably even noticed that the birthday banner this year was not adorned with the multicolored streamers or pumped-up balloons I'd always added on in years past.

A year ago the clutter of postcards, coupons, and school flyers moldering away on my kitchen counter, the piles of school papers and projects and bills growing higher on my dining room table, and the dancing gray elephants of dust in the corner (to say nothing of the regurgitated grass) would have driven me mad. But this year, I sighed dramatically and said, “What the hell—I've got better things to do.”

Somehow, in some miracle wrought by reading, my messier life was affording me a better view of the rising moon. It was a very, very good trade.

“I'm lucky. I'm doing what I love, reading a book every day. And you guys are helping me do that. I bet Murakami never gets the kind of help I get. That's what a family does—helps each other.”

“Are you lecturing us?” George asked, his eyebrows shooting sky high and his mouth making a straight line of consternation.

“No, I'm thanking you.” Okay, maybe I was lecturing. But I was also sharing. Sharing everything I was learning during this year of reading books, every chance I got. We were figuring things out together, making it work. Resilience, enthusiasm, gratitude, focus, independence. A strong foundation of family love. I'd found these components repeated, again and again, in the books I was reading. The ingredients for a satisfying life. And I'd added a little household mess into the mix, a leavening agent for the filling cake of existence.

On the last day of June I read Ernest Hemingway's
Nick Adams Stories
. In the story titled “On Writing,” I found an homage to summer as it should be, and I remembered my own Midwest summers. Mornings spent out on the grass of our backyard, reading in ratty old lawn chairs; afternoons spent down at the beach, swimming in the cold waters of Lake Michigan; evenings when we hung out on the back patio, feeling the heat of a midsummer night settle in around us, playing Monopoly and Life, talking and laughing until late.

I wanted that again, summer days spent “just lying around,” like Nick Adams. I still had my kids home with me, for at least one more summer. There would be more birthdays to celebrate and cakes to bake, more places I had to drive, more meals I had to cook, and more clothes I had to launder. But I would make sure to also make time for all of us to go swimming or play a game or just lie around in the hammock or on the grass, reading. Our times spent together would never be forgotten, and the lessons of love and security, of easy bliss and simple joys, would always be remembered.

Chapter 17
Fireflies Dancing Across the Lawn

Maou cannot help but think of nighttime as it was then, there in Onitsha: the fear and jubilation it gave her, a shiver along her skin. Every night, since their return to the south, it is the same shiver which reunites her with what has been lost.

J. M. G. LE CLÉZIO,

Onitsha

LIVING IN A BEACH COMMUNITY, MY FAMILY DOESN'T USUALLY
go away in the summer. But during this summer of reading a book a day, I was getting myself away, far away. Books were my comfort this year, and my counselors in how to live, but they were also providing the vacations that I needed. In the hours while the kids were at camp, hanging out in their rooms, or running wild through the yard, I was traveling across miles and across years, and finding new and old places to visit. “There is no frigate like a book, / To take us lands away,” wrote Emily Dickinson. I was taking that frigate full steam ahead.

I went to Italy with William Trevor in
My House in Umbria
, where I saw “a yellowish building at the end of a track . . . curving through a landscape of olive trees and cypresses . . . broom and laburnum daub the clover slopes, poppies and geraniums sprinkle the meadows. . . . The hill continues to rise gently, and there's a field of sunflowers.”

“Mom!” George's voice cuts into my reading, pulling me back to the here and now. “What's for dinner?”

Hmmm? “Pasta, I think . . . just drizzled with a bit of olive oil.” I shut the door to my music room, and I'm back in Umbria.

Traveling by steel ship, I crossed an ocean to reach Nigeria in J. M. G. Le Clézio's
Onitsha
. It was a rough journey: “Day after day, only this hard sea, the air moving at the speed of the ship, the slow path of the sun across the steel walls, its glare bearing down upon forehead and chest, burning deep inside.” But oh, what I saw when I got there: “At sunset the sky darkened to the west. . . . Downstream the river inscribed a slow curving line to the south, as vast as an arm of the sea, with the hesitant traces of small islands, like rafts adrift. The storm swirled. There were bloodied streaks in the sky, gaps in the clouds. Then, very rapidly, the black cloud went back up the river, chasing before it the flying ibises still lit by the sun.”

I woke to take a midnight walk in Ireland in Claire Keegan's short story “Walk the Blue Fields”: “The blue night has spread itself darkly over the fields . . . spring has come, dry and promising. The alder is shooting out, her pale limbs brazen. . . . All around the air is sharp with the tang of wild currant bushes. A lamb climbs out of a deep sleep and walks across the blue field. Overhead, the stars have rolled into place.” I've always wanted to go to Ireland, having read and reread Yeats all those years during college and beyond, and now I've been.

In “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” Yeats writes,

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet's wings.

This was one of my favorite poems because it reminded me of where I grew up, beside a lake, but also offered something new and different, the seclusion of a small cabin, “of clay and wattles made.” What the heck was a wattle? It didn't matter to me. I just wanted to live again by the shore, and to live for the first time in a small cabin beside “bean-rows” and a “hive for the honey bee,” to be where the crickets sing (I knew that sound well) and the evening is “full of linnet's wings.”

Linnet? Again, no idea, but I was seduced. The mixture of the familiar and the new was intoxicating.

But I also wanted what was old and long gone. Having lost my sister, my craving to go backward in time, to revisit when she'd been alive, had grown stronger. I wanted to take a vacation to the Evanston of our childhood. I'd choose summertime, when we girls were allowed to stay up late and we spent our evenings outside, playing tag and hide-and-seek and dodgeball with the neighborhood kids. When we became tired of running around, we just dropped, falling into a heap of children lolling on the grass. When we felt hungry, the older kids, like Anne-Marie, organized the younger ones to go back into houses, retrieving popsicles or peaches, or even better yet, money for the approaching ice-cream truck.

The gassy smell of the truck and its loud jingle taped to replay over and over came long before the sight of the truck itself, farting down the street with ice-cream cones and sandwiches and bars. After eating our ice-cream bars my sisters and I stayed outside, sitting on the front steps until our parents called us in. Fireflies skirted over the lawn and into the bushes and trees. We never talked about what we would do when we grew up. Sitting together under the open night sky, watching the fireflies light up and go dark, then light up again, there was no question that we would do whatever we wanted to do. Anything was possible.

I went back to that place and those feelings when I read Kevin Canty's story “Burning Bridges, Breaking Glass” from his collection
Where the Money Went
. Although the plot of the story revolves around an older man and his affair with a younger woman, the background is pure midwestern fecundity, the wild fertility of possibility offered by long evenings and huge open spaces and endless starlit skies. Canty writes about “the perfume of a Midwestern spring, gasoline and rose and tar, the sounds of people gunning it in the distance, the constant hiss of the interstate, the sounds of breaking glass and laughter, the sound of life itself.” For me, it was summer, not spring, when I heard those sounds and smelled those smells, and the story pulled me back into childhood.

The narrator in “Burning Bridges, Breaking Glass” feels the same pull backward. He is a middle-aged man with an alcohol problem, trying to put an end to his drinking by spending two weeks at an expensive spa in the desert. There he meets Karen, the wife of a doctor. He falls in love with her, and after she leaves, he decides to follow her home to Ohio.

Rossbach finds Karen in Ohio, but more important, he rediscovers the place and time of his youth, the “full glorious spring with flowers bursting out of driveway beds and bees everywhere.” I become exhilarated by the background of a midwestern spring, just as Rossbach finds himself entranced with the same phenomenon. As he began recovering evidence of his childhood, the “pink-and-purple spring he had forgotten,” so did I.

Rossbach immerses himself in “the bright bee-loud afternoon of full spring” where “cherry trees in the parking lot blossomed in pink, snowing pink and white petals onto the cars parked beneath them.” Remembering those “days at seventeen of just feeling himself in his body, the spring of it, the miracle,” Rossbach feels “the green fuse still lit in him, the spark”: possibility in his life has been reignited.

I finished reading that story with my own “green fuse lit,” my own youth recovered. I remembered lying in bed at night with the windows opened to let in the warm summer air. From the bed, I could hear the traffic on Golf Road and the radio playing on the neighbor's porch. I smelled the dankness of freshly turned earth in our garden, the sweet scent of cut grass, and the smoky smell of barbecues. The smells and sounds were like an invitation to me, a summons to run out and join the universe. I was older then, beyond hide-and-seek games and waiting for the ice-cream truck, but I still believed my future was limitless. I knew that the breeze coming in from the window was full of promises of adventure and love and fun, promises just waiting to be fulfilled.

Books were my time machine, my vehicles of recovery and reignited bliss from childhood and beyond. Knut Hamsun's
Dreamers
brought me back to college, and to the spring evenings when I found myself embracing a newly beloved male beneath a flowering tree. Hamsun renders the hormonal fever of spring in all its bewildering power: “It was spring again. And spring was almost unbearable for sensitive hearts. It drove creation to its utmost limits, it wafted its spice-laden breath even into the nostrils of the innocent.”

Dreamers
is set in a small town on the Norwegian coast around the turn of the century. After being pent up all winter, the citizens of this coastal town let loose under the winds rolling in off the sea, liberated by the smells of warming soil and budding trees and blooming flowers. The characters in
Dreamers
indulge in lusty dreams of love and fortune, desire born out of sudden sun and heat: “It was weather for dreams; for little fluttering quests of the heart. . . . From every rocky islet came the calling of birds . . . and the seal thrust up its dripping head from the water, looked round, and dived again down to its own world below.”

Emotions and desires settle down as spring turns to summer: “Corn and potatoes growing; and meadows waving; herring stored in every shed, cows and goats milking full pails, and rolling in fat themselves.” There is a bountiful supply of food, and of dreams as well: “Summer is the time for dreaming, and then you have to stop. But some people go on dreaming all their lives, and cannot change.”

Lucky people, to dream all their lives. A certain profound optimism is required: the belief that dreams can come true. And I realized there was yet another reason for me to be on my reading quest. To get back to that place where I was sure of all my dreams. The smell of the grass, the stars heavy in the humid sky, the warm brush of air against my cheek, all were embedded into my brain. The memories lined up as a fence, and I was safe in the enclosure. I was ten years old, and all my tomorrows waited, a whole world just for me. Or I was eighteen years old again, kissing under a budding apple tree and sure that my whole life would always be filled with the same intensity of desire and intention.

After I read
Dreamers
, my mother told me that Knut Hamsun had been a favorite author of my grandfather. I was delighted to hear it. I shared Hamsun now with my grandfather, a man I hadn't known well but whom I loved. I wondered what escape he found when reading Hamsun. I pictured my grandfather sitting in a white cane lawn chair in a patch of sun before a drift of spring green trees. The scent of white lilac bushes floats toward him over the grass. He never could have imagined a granddaughter of his reading Hamsun in a cat-stinky purple chair in Connecticut beside a window wide open to summer breezes. Two readers caught up by the place and season of one book, for very different reasons but with the same result: a love of the story told, and the comfort of the place offered, a place in time and in the world. An escape, a vacation, a recovering of memories. Travel did not have to be solitary. A book shared was an escape with company.

Even when I read a book where the story had nothing to do with an experience of my own, I found resonance from recovered memories, and an escape from the present. In “The Loneliness of the Long-distance Runner,” a short story by Alan Sillitoe, a boy is sent to a Borstal, an English reform school for delinquents. Our boy Smith has been very delinquent, robbing a local bakeshop and hiding the money in an old drainpipe just outside the ramshackle house he shares with his family. He'd turned to robbery in an effort to recapture the brief moment of bliss his family experienced upon receiving the death benefits of his father: “I'd never known a family as happy as ours was in that couple of months when we'd got all the money we needed.” When a terrible rain releases the stolen money right in front of an investigating copper, Smith is sent off to the Borstal.

But life isn't all bad in the reform school. Smith is recruited for the cross-country team and set to train for a countrywide competition. His early-morning runs out into the countryside provide him with both solitude and escape, and he looks forward to them as the best part of his day.

I had nothing in common with the Smith boy, and yet in his description of the early-morning runs, I recovered a very distinct memory of an early-morning walk I took in my late twenties. I was at an environmental conference in the Adirondacks, staying in a farmhouse about three miles down the road from the conference center. After the first day of meetings, excited about everything we were going to accomplish in the coming months, I headed back to my farmhouse for a good night's sleep.

During the night the weather turned very cold, and in the unheated upper room of the farmhouse, I slept badly. Even wrapping myself up in all my clothes, I could not get warm. Finally I just got out of bed. I headed out into the last darkness of the night, the air frosty and still all around me. If I was going to be cold, I'd rather be outside, moving around, than shivering in a narrow hard bed.

As I walked, the sky began to lighten over the far mountains. The sun rose before me, doling out sunlight in strips along the frost-whitened grass. I walked in gravel that broke like ice beneath my shoes, and fall grasshoppers, released by the coming warmth of the sun, jumped before me, guiding my way. As I walked, I noticed everything around me. The flattened grass glinting under the sun. The bordering bushes sparked red with color. The trees, black and stark against the sky, and the mountains beyond, purple under a haze of pink and apricot. The fresh air pricked against my cheeks, and I took breath into my lungs in big gulps. I felt as if I could fly, borne away up into the mountains by the pure energy coming up from the awakening ground and racing now through my veins.

I was just like the Borstal boy, running out in the morning, the world fresh and open all around him: “As soon as I take that first flying leap out into the frosty grass of an early morning when even birds haven't the heart to whistle, I get to thinking and that's what I like. . . . Sometimes I think that I've never been so free as during that couple of hours when I'm trotting up the path out of the gates and turning by that bare-faced, big-bellied oak tree at the lane end.” I recognized that feeling of “never been so free”—that was how I felt that morning in the Adirondacks.