Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Red Sky
in the Morning
Years ago, in another life, I woke to look out the smeared
window of a Greyhound bus I had been riding all night, and in
the still-dark morning of a small Missouri river town where the
driver had made a scheduled stop at a grimy diner, I saw below
me a stout middle-aged woman in a flowered housedress turn
and kiss full on the mouth a godlike young man with golden
curls. But I've got that wrong: he was kissing
her. Passionately, without regard for the world and its
incomprehension. He had abandoned himself to his love, and she,
stolid, matronly, received this adoration with simple grandeur,
like a socialist-realist statue of a woman taking up sheaves of wheat.
Their ages dictated that he must be her son, but I had just
come out of the cramped, ruinous half sleep of a night on a
Greyhound and I was clairvoyant: This was that thing called love.
The morning light cracked blood red along the river.
Of course, when she lumbered onto the bus a moment later,
lurching forward with her two bulging bags, she chose the
empty aisle seat next to me as her own. She pitched one bag
onto the overhead rack, and then heaved herself into the seat as
if she were used to hoisting sacks of potatoes onto the flatbed of
a pickup. She held the other bag on her lap, and leaned toward
the window. The beautiful boy was blowing kisses. He couldn't
see where she was in the dark interior, so he blew kisses up and
down the side of the bus, gazing ardently at the blank windows.
"Pardon me," the woman said without looking at me, and leaned
over, bag and all, to rap the glass. Her beautiful boy ran back to
our window and kissed and kissed, and finally hugged himself,
shutting his eyes in an ecstatic pantomime of love-sweet-love.
She smiled and waved back.
Then the bus was moving. She slumped back in her seat, and
I turned to her. I suppose I looked transfixed. As our eyes met
she said, "Everybody thinks he's my son. But he's not. He's my
husband." She let that sink in. She was a farm woman with hands
that could have been a man's; I was a university student, hair
down to my waist. It was long ago, as I said, in another life. It was
even another life for the country. The Vietnam War was the time
we were living through, and I was traveling, as I did every three
weeks, to visit my boyfriend who was in a federal prison. "Draft
dodger," my brother said. "Draft resister," I piously retorted. I had
never been kissed the way this woman had been kissed. I was living
in a tattered corner of a romantic idyll, the one where the
hero is willing to suffer for his beliefs. I was the girlfriend. I lived
on pride, not love.
My neighbor patted her short cap of hair, and settled in for
the long haul as we pulled onto the highway along the river,
heading south. "We been married five years and we're happy,"
she said with a penetrating satisfaction, the satisfaction that
passeth understanding. "Oh," she let out a profound sigh as if she
mined her truths from the bountiful, bulky earth, "Oh, I could
tell you stories." She put her arms snugly around her bag, gazed
off for a moment, apparently made pensive by her remark. Then
she closed her eyes and fell asleep.
I looked out the window smudged by my nose which had
been pressed against it at the bus stop to see the face of true love
reveal itself. Beyond the bus the sky, instead of becoming paler with the dawn, drew itself out of a black line along the
Mississippi into an alarming red flare. It was very beautiful. The
old caution—Red sky in the morning, sailor take warning—darted
through my mind and fell away. Remember this, I remember telling myself, hang on to this. I could feel it all skittering
away, whatever conjunction of beauty and improbability I had stumbled
upon.
It is hard to describe the indelible bittersweetness of that
moment. Which is why, no doubt, it had to be remembered. The
very word—Remember!—spiraled up like a snake out of a basket,
a magic catch in its sound, the doubling of the m—re mem-memem—setting
up a low murmur full of inchoate associations
as if a loved voice were speaking into my ear alone, occultly.
Whether it was the unguarded face of love, or the red gash
down the middle of the warring country I was traveling
through, or this exhausted farm woman's promise of untold tales
that bewitched me, I couldn't say. Over it all rose and remains
only the injunction to remember. This, the most impossible
command we lay upon ourselves, claimed me and then perversely
disappeared, trailing an illusive silken tissue of meaning,
without giving a story, refusing to leave me in peace.
Because everyone "has" a memoir, we all have a stake in
how such stories are told. For we do not, after all, simply have
experience; we are entrusted with it. We must do something—make
something—with it. A story, we sense, is the only possible
habitation for the burden of our witnessing.
The tantalizing formula of my companion on the Greyhound—oh,
I could tell you stories—is the memoirist's opening
line, but it has none of the delicious promise of the storyteller's
"Once upon a time ..." In fact, it is a perverse statement. The
woman on the bus told me nothing—she fell asleep and escaped
to her dreams. For the little sentence inaugurates nothing, and
leads nowhere after its dot dot dot of expectation. Whatever experience
lies tangled within its seductive promise remains forever
balled up in the woolly impossibility of telling the-truth-the-whole-truth
of a life, any life.
Memoirists, unlike fiction writers, do not really want to "tell
a story." They want to tell it all—the all of personal experience,
of consciousness itself. That includes a story, but also the whole
expanding universe of sensation and thought that flows beyond
the confines of narrative and proves every life to be not only an
isolated story line but a bit of the cosmos, spinning and streaming
into the great, ungraspable pattern of existence. Memoirists
wish to tell their mind, not their story.
The wistfulness implicit in that conditional verb—I could
tell—conveys an urge more primitive than a storyteller's search
for an audience. It betrays not a loneliness for someone who will
listen but a hopelessness about language itself and a sad recognition
of its limitations. How much reality can subject-verb-object
bear on the frail shoulders of the sentence? The sigh within the
statement is more like this: I could tell you stories—if only stories
could tell what I have in me to tell.
For this reason, autobiographical writing is bedeviled. It is
caught in a self which must become a world—and not, please, a
narcissistic world. The memoir, once considered a marginal literary
form, has emerged in the past decade as the signature genre
of the age. "The triumph of memoir is now established fact,"
James Atlas trumpeted in a cover story on "The Age of the
Literary Memoir" in the New York Times Magazine. "Fictions," he
claimed, "isn't delivering the news. Memoir is."
With its "triumph," the memoir has, of course, not denied
the truth and necessity of fiction. In fact, it leans heavily on novelistic
assumptions. But the contemporary memoir has reaffirmed
the primacy of the first person voice in American imaginative
writing established by Whitman's "Song of Myself."
Maybe a reader's love of memoir is less an intrusive lust for confession
than a hankering for the intimacy of this first-person
voice, the deeply satisfying sense of being spoken to privately.
More than a story, we want a voice speaking softly, urgently, in
our ear. Which is to say, to our heart. That voice carries its
implacable command, the ancient murmur that called out to me
in the middle of the country in the middle of a war—remember,
remember (I dare you, I tempt you).
Looking out the Greyhound window that red morning all
those years ago, I saw the improbable face of love. But even
more puzzling was the cryptic remark of the beloved as she sat
next to me. I think of her more often than makes sense.
Though he was the beauty, she is the one who comes back.
How faint his golden curls have become (he also had a smile,
crooked and charming, but I can only remember the idea of
it—the image is gone). It is she, stout and unbeautiful, wearing
her flowery cotton housedress with a zipper down the middle,
who has taken up residence with her canny eye and her acceptance
of adoration. To be loved like that, loved improbably: of
course, she had stories to tell. She took it for granted in some
unapologetic way, like being born to wealth. Take the money
and run.
But that moment before she fell asleep, when she looked
pensive, the red morning rising over the Mississippi, was a wistful
moment. I could tell you stories—but she could not. What she
had to tell was too big, too much, too something, for her to place
in the small shrine that a story is.
When we met—if what happened between us was a meeting—I
felt nothing had ever happened to me and nothing ever
would. I didn't understand that riding this filthy Greyhound
down the middle of bloodied America in the middle of a mutinous
war was itself a story and that something was happening to
me. I thought if something was happening to anybody around
me it was happening to people like my boyfriend: They were the
heroes, according to the lights that shined for me then. I was just
riding shotgun in my own life. I could not have imagined containing,
as the farm woman slumped next to me did, the sheer
narrative bulk to say, "I could tell you stories," and then drifting
off with the secret heaviness of experience into the silence
where stories live their real lives, crumbling into the loss we call
remembrance.
The boastful little declaration, pathetically conditional (not
"I'll tell you a story" but "I could") wavered wistfully for an
instant between us. The stranger's remark, launched in the dark
of the Greyhound, floated across the human landscape like the
lingering tone of a struck bell from a village church, and joined
all the silence that ever was, as I turned my face to the window
where the world was rushing by along the slow river.
