Brought to you by the number 40

Sesame Street and I both turned 40 this year–so where’s my Google logo? There hasn’t been nearly enough fanfare on my part, even when you factor in such highlights as my emerging bunion.

My mother tells me I learned to read from Sesame Street, and I don’t doubt it; I watched it twice a day most days (followed by The Electric Company with Morgan Freeman in the cast), and the second airing was a repeat. When I was given a CD of Sesame Street’s greatest hits at my baby shower, I knew all the songs that predated Elmo. Still, I don’t recall many specifics of the show, only kids cavorting with muppets against the backdrop of an urban landscape á la Ezra Jack Keats.

I do remember certain words becoming legible, like “horse,” which I sometimes mixed up with “house,” and writing my name with the letter n backward again and again on dry brown paper, thick tablets of the cheapest pulp. Though I knew the n was wrong, I could not force my hand to reverse the motion. In kindergarten and first grade, we were issued reading comprehension packets color-coded by level, but oddly, as you progressed, the colors grew more drab, peaking at brown. (My friend Margaret told me she flubbed the assessments on purpose so she could have the lavender one.) 

As my older son makes his first forays into reading, I recall such instances more often; they are among my first coherent memories, or rather, I don’t remember much of my existence before I could read, and certainly none before language, as if the story of my life could only begin once I was at least capable of the simplest narratives: I want that; I didn’t do it; it’s not fair. My great-grandmother said she could remember being a baby in the cradle, wanting someone to come and get her.

I wonder when my son’s life began to gel for him in memories; I suspect it has happened only over the past year or so, as he has been finding his way to the written word. The excitement of identifying “MILK” emblazoned on the truck we were behind on the way to preschool. Sounding out and spelling “Batman.” Slogging valiantly through the opening pages of One Fish, Two Fish. It seems almost incredible that he may not remember much about his life before the cataclysmic event of his brother’s birth, because for his father and me, there are volumes’ worth of the history of just the three of us. But that we can keep for him, and tell him those stories until he makes them his own.

All-Nighter

I finally read Beautiful Children by Charles Bock, one of those splashy debut novels the NYT slobbered all over last year. I waited until it was readily available in the library, just as I had Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl, so put off am I by people I think no longer have to work and can just write; I am constitutionally incapable of contributing to their royalties. (And must they also be so fresh-faced?) I know this reveals a certain poverty of spirit, but it’s a private little spite that causes no measurable harm to others. I think I’ll work on my explosive temper first, then take a long look at my relationship to food. 

When I do finally sneak a free peek at a book post-splash, it’s with the sincere hope that it really won’t be of much account. How gratifying when Special Topics turned out to be a thin gruel of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, with some drawings thrown in, as if to say, “But this one has drawings!” Whither the sexual intrigue, the bacchanal bloodletting, the thousand or so extra pages of gravitas?

But Beautiful Children. I was getting a migraine that afternoon and downed some caffeinated headache powders, which relieved the pain but kept me up all night, and the novel made for fine company. Set in Las Vegas (though, thankfully, rarely in casinos–to me the only thing more dull than reading about casinos is going to them), it mostly orbits an obnoxious twelve-year-old boy who goes missing and the people overlapping that: his parents, the young man last seen with him, and the stray punks and homeless kids whose ranks he may have joined. I liked it the way I like a Richard Price novel, with a recurring mild surprise that the story has captivated me against expectations, and a sense of even the basest character bathed in the golden glow of the author’s attentions.

Reading all night is sort of like watching TV all night–enjoyable in the moment, though not much lingers past a slight quease from having glutted oneself. It has become a rare pleasure for me to give over a night of sleep to a book. Until this recent headache-powder-fueled stint, I’m not sure I’ve done it since I had children. The closest I came was in the weeks following my sons’ births, when I was up around the clock anyway, and they were still manageable enough for me to nurse and hold open a book. What strange juxtapositions I’d choose: a biography of Genghis Khan, then a holocaust memoir; Gibson and Sterling’s steampunk The Difference Engine, followed by Lily Tuck’s The News from Paraguay, which shocked the hell out of everyone when it won the National Book Award in 2004, not because it wasn’t a terrific book, but because it had been virtually invisible until that moment, reportedly having sold fewer than two thousand copies. I have to root for a book with a backstory like that.

Fox

I subscribe to a Web site called One More Story that I sometimes enlist to do the work of reading to my older son; it offers him musical accompaniment and much better voice work than I am capable of. Also, the words turn red as they are spoken aloud, which puts me in mind of the King James Bible, where all of Jesus’ talk is printed in red.

I mostly love to read to my son myself, but I get lazy, and he gets bored, and sometimes his younger brother’s intrusions and demands make reading anything but the simplest board books impossible, so sometimes it’s just better for him to go to this site and be read to. It’s almost as good as TV to him, and I get to feel as if I have enriched him without expending any actual effort.

Recently it was pure laziness that drove us to the site; the toddler was sleeping, so I dozed on the couch with my older son curled up beside me, letting the laptop mother him. I dreamt lightly through the first couple of books, then woke at the beginning of Fox, by Margaret Wild.

I can’t do justice to this story by summarizing it, but I can’t ruin it for you either; it’s that perfect. A dog runs through the woods with an injured magpie in his mouth. Her wing is ruined, and she no longer wants to live if she can’t fly. But Dog convinces her he can be her wings; he runs through the woods with Magpie clinging to his back, and she decides she can go on. 

Sounds like a sweet story, no? But it goes on: A fox takes shelter with them, and at first I think it is normal sort of children’s book danger, that he will simply want to eat Magpie. But Fox is jealous of the love between Dog and Magpie, and he speaks to her in secret, promising that he can run faster than Dog ever could, that with him she will truly take flight. It’s a seduction, and though she insists she will never leave Dog, Fox’s words work their tendrils into her, and she succumbs.

Fox tears though the forest with Magpie, miles out onto desert plains. Then he shucks her off his back and abandons her. I am wide awake at this point, wondering if it was wise to let my kid listen to this tragic story. Then I decide it’s better for him to learn within the safe space of a story that there are people in the world with this malevolence, who want to take something away from you not so they can have it, but so you can feel the terrible loss they live with always; some people are so lonely and damaged, this is their only communion. 

Noting my dismay, my son reassures me, “It’s OK, Mommy. It turns out OK, I think.” Magpie considers just lying down to die in the desert, but instead she begins the long walk home, back to Dog. She’s twice saved by love.

 

 

Laura, Dorothy, Jo

At the end of Little House in the Big Woods, Laura is gazing into the firelight, safe with her family and holding fast to the moment, fixing it forever: Now is now, she thinks. It can never be a long time ago. And for the little girl reading those words in the 1970s (me, of course!), the gulf of a hundred years had  vanished, and the world was a place where you chinked the logs of your cabin and made your own bullets and looked forward to simple pleasures like sugaring time and butchering the hogs. How dull to return to the actual now, I thought, where the winter’s provisions are simply purchased at the grocery store, and balloons were not inflated pig bladders. We ought to at least have to make a day’s walk of it or dig a root cellar.

I didn’t know then that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books were a kind of anti-New Deal propaganda penned in the 1930s, strongly finessed if not outright ghostwritten by her radical globetrotting journalist daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. I didn’t know then and I don’t care now–just like I don’t care that The Wizard of Oz might have been some kind of economic fable promoting the gold standard, with Oz for ounce, and Dorothy’s silver shoes (not ruby slippers in the book) following the yellow brick (read: gold) road to redemption. It’s interesting, and weird, but irrelevant to the girl I was then and the effect these books had on me.

Like many girls, I suppose, I loved Laura and Dorothy, and certainly fierce tomboy Jo from Little Women, though not their filmic counterparts–with the exception of Judy Garland, but she was always Judy Garland, never Dorothy Gale of the baked mud Kansas plains. I was no fan of the Little House TV show–nothing against Melissa Gilbert’s Laura, but she was just a cute little freckle-faced girl, no “Half-Pint” whose Pa said was “strong as a little French horse.” (And how surreal to see her appear in recent years on an episode of Nip/Tuck as a woman sexually involved with her dog.) When a film version of Little Women came out in 1994, I was horrified that to learn that Winona Ryder, that frail little wisp, had been cast as Jo. She seemed as authentic a Jo as the Madame Alexander doll version with its vacuous stare and pristine red dress–why no scorch mark?  It’s the flaws that make Jo interesting.

Preparatory to the Big Cull

My grandmother has promised me all of her books when she dies. You might think the collection of a former librarian and English teacher–and occasional World Book encyclopedia saleslady–is something to covet, and it’s true there will be some gold amid the heaps of dross. I will happily annex her hardcovers of Little Women and Tom Sawyer, and the set of Childcraft books whose spines when properly aligned form a complex illustration featuring a smiling sun.

But then there will be the insipid Kathleen Norrises, pale romances without a single bodice ripped, and the Gladys Tabers, whose rural ruminations left me cold: Stillmeadow Farm indeed! And there will be many a red-stamped library discard to consider: jacketless, threadbare covers, spines loose and wobbly, torn and crayoned pages. My grandmother used to bring them home for me and my sister. For a brief time she tried to entice us to play in the basement by storing the outcast books down there among the jars of preserves and low-hanging ductwork. My sister cared little for books, and these wretched orphans only abetted her indifference. To my grandmother’s credit, she soon got the message, and the basement “playroom” idea was abandoned.

The other tricky part about this impending legacy is that we already have about a thousand books too many. The narrow hallway of our little house is lined with low shelves, and any room without a bursting shelf nonetheless has at least one toppling book pile. There has never been any overt organizing principle, yet I used to somehow be able to put my hands on anything I needed; there was a subconscious awareness of where things were. Then came the children, and clutter became disorder bordering on chaos (I’m talking to you, A&E’s reality show Hoarders! Please bring your trucks and specialists. I will pretend reluctance for the camera, but in the end you will be permitted to take it all.) 

This summer, my copy of Lydia Davis’s landmark collection Break It Down eluded me completely. It was the day before I had to travel out of state to helm a weeklong writing workshop, and I had it in my head that only Davis’s brilliant short-short story “The Sock” would do as the springboard for my first writing exercise, which would explore the secret life of objects. My rage upon not finding it might have fueled a mighty purge of every book I owned not authored by Lydia Davis, only I had to divert that energy into packing for the trip.

I can chuck my grandmother’s Rush Limbaughs (gifted by my stepfather) with ease and maybe even her Lewis Grizzards, but I know it will be hard to do the heartless culling necessary to keep this inheritance from overwhelming us. For she loves books. Give her one, and watch her librarian’s reverence as she gently primes the spine by easing open the book at the halfway mark, then splitting it into fourths, then eighths. She cannot drive and can barely hear, and she will forget a pot put to boil on the stove, nearly setting the house alight, but her eyes without the cataracts are still pretty good for the close work of reading. It’s what she has left, and when she is gone, the books more than anything will stand in for the life. You don’t toss that out, not even piecemeal.

Top drawer discards

In the top drawer of my dad’s bureau, he kept rare coins, our baby teeth, and other trinkets in a carved box. Sometimes there would also be a slim paperback with the front cover torn off. I didn’t yet know about discards (to save money on shipping returns, the bookstores tear off the covers and mail those back to the publisher, then discard the books themselves, which are no longer legal to sell); I assumed there must have been something so racy on the cover, he’d removed it. For these were the nastiest books I’d ever encountered! I’d park right on the edge of my parents’ bed and speed read, poised to leap up and plunge it back into the drawer at the sound of approaching footsteps.

Their plots mostly blur together, but one I recall involved a kidnapped woman endlessly (and oddly untraumatically) defiled by her captors. The kidnapped woman, while not traumatized, was also not terrifically aroused, as one might expect from a standard porn scenario. She seemed to view the various configurations into which she was coerced with bemusement and a slight annoyance. The other story that I remember involved a medical center staffed almost entirely by nymphomaniacs and fetishists, and it colored my subsequent viewing of General Hospital for many seasons.

I think you can best gauge the literary ambitions of porn by whether its characters “come” or “cum.”  Those who “come” tend toward sophisticated couplings and trios, and the women are assertive and even inventive. Those who “cum” favor gang bang scenarios and the occasional barnyard animal.

There was something disquieting about reading material for which I was so obviously not the intended audience. I believed I was peering not into a male fantasy world, but the actual world of adults. This is what they were hiding, I thought. This was the future that awaited me. I hoped I would view my inevitable abductions with equanimity. I hoped I would come.

Thorn Birds Forever!

A friend just cited The Thorn Birds as an example of inappropriate preteen reading, which triggered all kinds of memories for me. I read my grandmother’s paperback copy openly, I suppose because it was a sweeping historical saga set in the Austrailian outback, and one had to go hundreds of pages between explicit sex scenes. Perhaps no one credited the speed at which I could skim. 

As I recall, the love affair between the heroine and priest was nowhere near as hot as the courtship heavy petting between the heroine and her husband-to-be, who turned out to be a total lout once they actually got married. But the part I remember most? A scene from her childhood when she got lice and her long red hair was cropped to the skull and doused in kerosene. The sheep-shearing passages loom pretty large, too. (Wonder what a therapist would make of that?)

Seems like about the same period (I must have been around eleven) when I bought the paperback reissue of Forever, Judy Blume’s controversial novel of a teen’s first sexual encounter.  I found the book disappointing–the main character was too pretty, petite, and popular for my liking–and my sensibilities were likely already too blunted by furtive reading of my dad’s porn “library.” But that’s for another post.

When reading was fundamental

When I was in fourth or maybe fifth grade, my class took part in a contest to see who could read the most books. I was an avid reader and figured I would win handily. But any book counted, even the most punk-ass Dick and Jane-style picture book, so the more enterprising (and shameless) kids soon tallied up stacks of them and left me in the dust. How this was meant to engender a love of reading, I do not know.

Like many girls, I read and reread the Little House Books growing up, but also anything that was at hand. My parents’ shelves were full of classic sc-fi hardbacks, so lots of Asimov and Heinlein, and a handful of early Phillip Roths, most memorably and confusingly Portnoy’s Complaint. (That dumb movie American Pie had nothing on Portnoy’s violated liver.) I learned how to spot “the neurotic woman” from a book called What Every Young Man Needs to Know, and I learned how best to secure your falsies when making love or waterskiing from The Cosmo Girl’s Guide to the New Etiquette. Few books were off-limits to me, but I did have to furtively skim the paperbacks of Jaws and Helter-Skelter. 

I still read a lot, every spare moment, and since I have two young children now that mostly means late at night in bed before succumbing to exhaustion. Reading is what made me want to write, and even when writing is elusive or hateful to me, I still crave the pleasure of a book offering up its weird world.