Читать книгу Writing in an Age of Silence - Sara Paretsky - Страница 10

At four the little girl’s hair is a frizzy mass, a knot of tight curls around her head instead of the fine straight silk of other girls her age. Her mother makes a forlorn attempt to set it right, to put it in pin curls and smooth it out. But when the bobby pins come off, instead of the glossy curls the mother hoped for, the daughter’s frizz now stands up wildly all over her head.

“Witch! You’re a witch!” Her older brother dances in a circle around her, pointing and doubling up in laughter.

The little girl scowls. “I am a witch,” she says menacingly. “And witches know everything.”

The brother’s laughter collapses. He races to the kitchen calling to his mother. “Sara says she’s a witch and witches know everything. She doesn’t really know everything, does she?”

Their mother soothes him and tells him of course not, that his sister was just making it up, she doesn’t really know everything. That was my first story.

Soon after that my mother, weary of my unruly frizz and the tears at shampoo time, cut my hair close to my head. If I tried letting it grow out my father would mock me at dinner, telling me I looked like a sheep dog and to get it cut. I wore it short for many years, like my four brothers, like a fifth son.

In the stories I told in my head my hair was long and straight and glossy. In the sixties, when the fashion was for hair like Cher’s used to be—a heavy curtain down to her knees—I spent hours of misery putting chemical straighteners on my hair, only to have it flame out around my head like the burning bush. Now that I’m post-menopausal, the traditional time when women become witches, my hair has lost its zip; it’s thin and lanky and I would love to have my wild halo restored. I suppose that is the nature of the unsatisfied life, always to want what isn’t possible.

Jewish friends of mine who grew up in larger communities tell of being taunted for having “mattress heads.” The first time I heard this, I imagined heads covered in grey-and-white striped ticking; I didn’t realize it was an insult, tossed at both Jews and Blacks, meaning our hair had the wiry quality of mattress stuffing. In my small town, no one called me that. My loathing was mostly internally induced, by parental strictures, and by isolation from the larger world; I came to adulthood feeling that a glass wall separated me from the universe of people who knew how to act, dress, feel pleasure. Even today, I often feel numb and bewildered. I try to believe it’s the result of my isolated upbringing, but it’s hard to believe that, deep down, I’m not a monster, a lusus naturae.

My parents, both desperately needy, unable to help each other, laid on me, their only daughter, the role of domestic support. My mother was bitter over opportunities lost or denied and took a savage delight in the failures of other women. Such failures proved to her that she had been defeated by the System, not by her own fears or withdrawals from life. Accepted into medical school in 1941, when that door was closed to many women, she chose not to take the bus from her home town to the University of Illinois on the day she needed to report to class. She could never explain why she did that, only giving a rambling tale of expecting more from the school than being consigned to a bus journey. If I brought home any achievement from school, she was almost savage in her bitterness. I quickly learned to keep success to myself.

Afraid of women and of female sexuality, my father, who thought it funny to wear a button demanding repeal of the 19th Amendment—which had granted US women suffrage in 1920—actually imputed minor witchlike powers to me. I could change traffic lights, for instance; my Gorgon stare could freeze men. I could do nothing to make myself an equal person.

Male writers such as Sartre and Bellow have recorded knowing early in life that their destiny lay in literature. Bellow knew he was “born to be a performing and interpretive creature,” Sartre that he was born for words.

I call myself a writer, but I do so without great conviction. Where did they get this sense, I wonder? Like them, I wrote from an early age, but I knew that as in all fields literature belonged to men. The history and biography we studied in school told tales of the deeds of men. We learned to speak of the aspirations of mankind and of “man’s inhumanity to man”—his inhumanity to woman not being worth recording.

The literature we studied was all written by men. If they were like me Bellow and Sartre may not even have known that women wrote in a serious way, that the first novelist to treat psychology as a significant force in human life was a woman. Sartre claims his boyhood was spent with Flaubert, Cornelius, Homer, Shakespeare; Bellow, that he turned to Anderson, Dreiser, Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay (I do always wonder about such grandiose reports. Like politicians on the morning shows who say they had yogurt and granola for breakfast when they were really eating fried eggs and bacon, was Bellow in fact lost in the Tom Swift tales?)

The books Sartre’s grandmother read were feminine, he says, and he was taught by his grandfather to deem them inferior. By an odd chance I learned the same lesson. We studied only one novel by a woman in my school—and her first name was George.

While Sartre’s mother fueled his childish ambitions by binding his writings and forcing them on the neighbors (“Regardez, how my Jean-Paul is a writer!”), all my childhood dreams were directed to the present, specifically to escaping it, until I learned escape wasn’t possible. My older brother and I would look at a picture of a ship at sea or a beautiful island, some strange wonderful place we wished to be. We would hold hands and run toward the picture and, by wishing hard enough, be transported into it. More often we climbed onto the two hitching posts in front of our house—remnants of the days when visitors had horses to tie up. After turning around three times we jumped, landing in a magic world where we fought dragons and elves came to our rescue.

The walls of my bedroom were papered with cabbage roses and behind the roses lay an imagined corridor, a long hall whose windows looked on perpetual sunlight. After going to bed I would escape into this corridor and live a life of total secrecy.

Little Women was the staple of my childhood, the book of girls, maternal love, women’s friendship. I read Little Women for the first time when I was eight, and out of school for three weeks with measles. I wept copiously over Beth, I worried about Jo’s temper, envied her for her attic room with its tin desk and pet rat, was put off by Amy and her stuck-up ways, and wished ardently, not just for a mother like Marmee, but for the rational calm of the March household.

I revisited Little Women dozens of times in the next ten years. The book drew me for many reasons. Despite their earnest efforts to follow the progress of Bunyan’s pilgrim, the March sisters are no plaster saints. Each struggles with serious flaws—Jo’s temper, Meg’s vanity, Amy’s greed, Beth’s fear. They love and support each other, but also have the kinds of fights only siblings can produce. Indeed, their occasional fights make their intimacy more welcome. Their quarrels could assume alarming proportions, as when Amy burns Jo’s only copy of her stories, the careful rewriting of many years’ work. In retaliation, Jo lets Amy skate to her near-death in a spot on the river where Jo knows the ice is thin. I never thought Marmee made Amy express as much remorse as she should have—Jo had to assume an outsize mantle of contrition over her sister’s accident—but Amy was alive. Jo’s work was gone forever.

Looking back, I realize that among the things which drew me to the March sisters was just that: their sisterhood. Sisterhood allowed them to fight, make up, share each other’s concerns. This was an intimacy missing from my own life. I have four brothers, but no sisters. (My mother also modeled herself, very consciously, not on Marmee, but on Don Marquis’s Mehitabel; she would look at us and snarl, “What did I do to deserve all those damned kittens?”)

As a child I missed having someone who shared my most personal interests, not to mention my fears. If I wanted to play with my brothers, I had to act out the Korean war, not play dress-up. While I loved baseball, I liked dolls, too. (My two-room country school fielded a team in our rural league; the high point of my childhood was getting picked to play third base, which I did with more zeal than skill—I think my lifetime batting average was .078.) If I had anxieties about school, love, or friendship, not to mention my temper, vanity, or the terrifying ballooning of my breasts when I turned thirteen, no one around me cared.

My parents lived five miles outside the town of Lawrence, Kansas, and the hours I didn’t spend in school were at home, cleaning the house, doing dishes, acting as de facto nanny for my youngest brothers. Every Saturday, from the time I was seven until I left home, I did a baking for my father and brothers. My brothers were allowed to borrow the family car but I was a girl; I belonged at home. As a result, I grew up in an isolated world, one where I longed both for the intimacy of a lover, and the intimacy of a friend. The March sisters, with their Pickwick club, their nature walks, their attentive mother, had a life that I envied, and idealized.

Little Women also presented me with something less positive: a seduction into womanly self-denial. Among the novel’s subtexts is the notion that women have, or ought to have, a self-sacrificing nature, that they should subdue their ambitions to domestic responsibilities. Beth is depicted as a household saint, the embodiment of this negative ideal; one might say that’s what kills her.

Jo, who is a projection of Alcott herself and has the novel’s leading voice, exemplifies that self-sacrifice in a more subtle fashion. Jo is a writer. At the end of Part II, she is married, with two sons, running a boarding school for boys in Aunt March’s old mansion.

She and her sisters are discussing the dreams of being artists they had had in adolescence, and Jo says, “The life I wanted then seems selfish, lonely and cold to me now. I haven’t given up the hope that I can write a good book yet, but I can wait . . . .” Amy, who paints and sculpts, responds that she still longs to create great original work, despite the importance of her domestic duties.

The conflict both sisters express was present in Alcott’s life, in a deeper, more tormented form: her writing supported her family, including her father, who was aloof from such commonplace activities as making money. While in one sense Alcott fulfilled the artistic life Jo only aspired to, her artistry in a perverse way was a further enthrallment to domesticity. Her very words, that is, her inner-most self, were sacrificed to meet the needs of her family.

There’s no evidence that Lizzie, the sister on whom Beth was modeled, was a domestic saint. Unlike the other three Alcott sisters, however, she did stay home, and she did die young, probably of anorexia exacerbated by an addiction to laudanum. (Anorexia was often praised by Victorian writers as the ultimate sign of a womanly self-denying nature.)

I was drawn in an uneasy way both to Jo, and to Beth. I’ve never met another lover of Little Women who admired Beth, but given the circumstances in which I lived, it was perhaps not surprising that I was attracted by an ideal of self-immolation. I was an angry, restless adolescent, wanting what I was told I couldn’t have, but I also kept trying to lose my sense of self in high ideals of service.

The larger society in which I came of age didn’t offer much in the way of a competing vision for girls. In Kansas during the fifties, in a society where everyone had a defined place, where everyone knew right from wrong, and what happened when you forgot, girls often saw limited horizons in their future.

I grew up in a world where white, Republican, Protestant male decision makers (“deciders,” as we have recently learned to call them) were so much the norm that any questioning of this standard produced an aggressive reaction. Nowhere in the country, not even in Berkeley or Madison, was the reaction to the women’s movement, the Civil Rights movement, or the anti-war movement as violent as it was in my home town.

For a fifteen-month span in 1970–71, there was a fire-bombing every day, often more than one. Student protestors set off some of these bombs; Minutemen and other right-wing groups carried out other attacks. The Minutemen were one of the earliest of the armed militias which are now widespread throughout America, particularly in rural states (Timothy McVeigh, who carried out the Oklahoma City bombing, had trained with a right-wing militia in rural Michigan). In 1970, the Minutemen tried to capitalize on student unrest in Lawrence by creating an atmosphere of fear great enough for the town to welcome an authoritarian government. To the town’s credit, this did not happen, but the discovery that prominent local citizens were behind some of the attacks did cause the police to investigate rather charily.

I had left Lawrence for Chicago by then, so I don’t know how widely or deeply the anti-war, pro Civil Rights movements altered institutions at the grassroots level. When I was in school, we had mandatory daily Protestant prayers. Every Easter, the high school held a religious revival in the school auditorium; again, attendance was compulsory. In 1964, when a handful of brazen protestors (which included me, three Catholic girls, and one boy) claimed First Amendment protection against attendance, we were locked in a small room next to the principal’s office during the revival service. What they would have done in event of a fire, I don’t know—maybe rejoiced in the destruction of the heathen.

My school barred black students from college-track courses, while the town made sure they couldn’t swim in the public pools. Realtors followed unwritten zoning proscriptions, consigning blacks and Jews to parts of town where houses often had dirt floors and no running water. My parents opted out of this world by buying an old farmhouse outside town, but they also became active campaigners for open housing.

The sexual politics of the fifties meant that abortion was a crime, and unmarried women had no access to contraception. Still, we were brought up to think that only bad girls had sex outside marriage—whereupon they reaped the inevitable punishment of pregnancy. Today, it is alarming to see that the triumphant religious right is proving very successful in returning us to that era.

My family was not unique in seeing my future as limited. What was unusual was the isolation and constraint in which I grew up. My parents were highly educated, and highly literate. Education and devotion to the written word were perhaps their highest values. My father, who was a research scientist, could read Greek, as well as German and Yiddish, and my mother was deeply and widely read in fiction and history.

But while they borrowed money to send my brothers to expensive schools far from home, they told me that if I wanted a college education, it would be at my own expense, and, further, that they would not permit me to leave Kansas. I was a National Merit scholar, but they had so inculcated in me my low self-valuation that I acquiesced in both strictures. When I finally started graduate work at the University of Chicago in 1968, my father told me not to be surprised if I failed, since it was a first-rate school and mine was a second-rate mind. There are still days when that criticism starts to sink me, and I lack the energy to rise above it.

My parents probably needed a kind of nurturing that neither had received as children. My grandmothers were essentially orphans: my mother’s mother died giving birth to her, my father’s was sent to New York from eastern Europe after her own father was murdered in a pogrom when she was twelve. She became a mother at fifteen, and raised her children far from any support network—indeed, she never saw her own mother or most of her siblings again; they perished in the Holocaust.

These two women, my grandmothers, stumbled through maternity as best they could, but my parents went into family life without having much to give each other, let alone their five children. I’ve thought in my own later adulthood that my father and mother both wanted a mother so desperately that they tried to make me assume that role in their lives. When my mother used to visit me in Chicago, she would sit in the car, calling to me, “Pick me up, carry me inside; I’m just a helpless little girl.”

In the larger world, they actively worked for social justice—my father brought Asian and African-American graduate students to his department at the University of Kansas in those segregated times; my mother supported the city’s first African-American school teacher in his quest for decent housing.

Inside the home, my parents were insatiably needy, both too much to help each other. Their early years together were filled with witty conversation, dinners with interesting visitors from around the world. Later, sadly, drunkenness, blind rages, squalor, and worse horrors began to replace shared story telling, sports, jokes, and candle-lit dinners. Whatever the cause, it was a hard way for all of us to live.

Both my parents had stories to tell, their sides in an unending feud, one which grew more violent and more consuming as time passed, so that when my father was suffering from advanced dementia, my mother thought he was smirking at her, planning a new round of insults.

Despite these difficult years, and difficult lessons, my four brothers and I gained some good lessons, as well. My brothers and I all acquired a great love of books and language from them.

In addition, we learned about the importance of service for the public good. My father’s parents met walking a picket line for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. My grandfather was a cutter, my grandmother a finisher in a shirtwaist factory. Both hoped to improve the loathsome conditions in New York’s sweatshops. One of my father’s uncles was active enough in the Wobblies to be deported during the infamous Palmer raids of the 1920s.

My mother’s father was the doctor in the small Illinois town where she grew up. He refused a job offer from the Mayo Clinic at the height of the Great Depression because he would not leave his community without medical care. He died at the age of fifty-one; he was recovering from surgery, but the old man who had trained him had fallen on the ice, and my grandfather went out into the snow to carry him to bed. My grandfather died shortly after that from the exertion this put on his heart, but seventy years later, people in his small community remember his service and his charity.

It was years before I learned a name for the domestic model in which I was reared, but in reading Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, I found I had grown up under the wings of the Angel in the House. This is the formal name for an unnatural vision of women described by Coventry Patmore in his 1854 eulogy to his wife’s self-abnegating nature. Even without Patmore’s name for her, this angel has blighted women’s lives for a long time (“he for God only,” Milton wrote of Adam and Eve, “she for God in him”).

The struggle with the angel was a constant for nineteenth-century writers. Elizabeth Barrett Browning confronts her head-on in “Aurora Leigh,” her epic about a woman who heroically finds her poetic voice. Barrett Browning, escaping her father’s house for Italy with Robert, living there an extraordinary second life as the friend and chronicler of Italian revolutionaries, and as a vehement anti-slavery advocate, may have done better than most in ridding herself of this monstrous spirit.

On the other hand, I have an uneasy feeling that the angel helped kill that very gifted novelist, Elizabeth Gaskell. In addition to writing such important works as Mary Barton and North and South, Gaskell was a devoted mother. She kept up a major correspondence with a wide circle of friends (including French and German scientists), ran social welfare programs in Manchester—and died of heart failure at fifty-five. That she wrote any fiction at all seems unbelievable; that she wrote four major novels—novels which deserve pride of place with Bleak House or David Copperfield for their powerful social commentary—is truly “a staggering work of heartbreaking genius.”

In a world where women’s roles were narrowly defined, Victorian writers sought ways either to retreat from these definitions, or to find other sources of nurture and recognition. Illness was one escape route: taking to bed seemed to be a useful strategy for Victorian artists trying to avoid a life of domestic slavery: Barrett Browning did it, and the great writer-explorer Isabella Bird was always so ill in her father’s Edinburgh house that she couldn’t get out of bed—until the day came to board a trans-Atlantic steamer once again. Bedridden, she died at home in 1904 at the age of seventy-three; if she’d headed to Antarctica, she might have lived another twenty years. Emily Dickinson avoided domestic responsibilities by hiding in cupboards. I’ve always admired the enterprise of these pioneering women.

In “Professions for Women,” Woolf says the domestic angel also hovered between herself and her vocation as a writer. She describes the angel as “Intensely sympathetic. She was utterly unselfish. She sacrificed herself daily . . . she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but . . . sympathized always with the minds and wishes of others . . . .” The angel told Woolf:

“Be tender, flatter, deceive, use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure.” [Woolf says she] turned on the angel, caught her by the throat, and did my best to kill her . . . had I not killed her . . . she would have plucked the heart out of my writing.

Unfortunately, the wretched angel didn’t die so easily, for Woolf, or the rest of us. She has very long wings which keep flapping over us. The contemporary rock/folk singer Jonatha Brooke even sings, “I cannot kill the angel in the house.”

Contemporary moral and political pundits proclaim that women’s failure to meet the angel’s high domestic standard has caused the fall of America. Former Republican Whip Tom DeLay blamed the shootings at Columbine High School on two things: teaching evolution in the schools, and women working outside the home. After the World Trade Center was attacked, religious figures on the Republican right announced that God was punishing America for, among other things, the women’s liberation movement.

The angel kept me from a sense of a writer’s vocation, or, indeed, any vocation when I was a child, and she still comes flying around my head, telling me not to be selfish, to give myself over to domestic or public duties first, that my writing, like Jo March’s, can wait.

In the diaries of Midwestern farmwomen from the 1880s through the 1930s, their loneliness is a topic they revert to constantly: their loneliness, and the fact that their life on the farm was one of unremitting drudgery. With no one to talk to, no one to enter into their concerns or understand their needs, they often became psychotic. In fact, during that period, there was something of an epidemic of farmwomen burning down their own homes, often killing husbands, children and themselves in the process.

I wasn’t so lonely that I had to burn down the farmhouse where I grew up, but I was lonely enough to turn to fiction for my friends. I had that imaginary inner life that I suppose helped me become a writer, but it wasn’t a very comfortable place to live. I didn’t have the kind of enterprise that sent Barrett Browning or Isabella Bird to their beds, but I did retreat into daydreams, a world of interior narrative: as I washed dishes, I was a Russian scientist pretending to be a dishwasher while hiding from the KGB, or I was the improbable beloved of an improbably urbane British nobleman—someone along the lines of Percy Blakeney. Sometimes my dreams seemed so real that I could spend a whole day inside them, not noticing where I was or what I was doing.

When I was a teenager, both parents wanted to use my words to make their points—my mother demanding poems describing her entrapment, my father stories proclaiming his unlauded glories. I dutifully created both. But beyond that my writing roused so little interest that my mother told me my father burned all my childhood papers in some housekeeping frenzy or other. I kept hoping she got it wrong. Before they died, I spent hours hunting through their attic for some story, some diary, a remnant to connect me with my past, something that might tell me what dreams I used to have. Nothing comes to light.

How did I survive this upbringing? How did I become a writer?

These were questions that I tried to answer for an essay in a collection called Family Portraits, published by Doubleday in 1985. In company with writers far more distinguished—I. B. Singer, for one—I was asked to write about the family member who most influenced and supported my writing voice. I thought of my mother, who was a great reader and story teller, I thought of my older brother, who taught me to read and write, but I could think of no family member who cared that I wrote. Instead, my fantasy of writing had been a daydream so private I never shared it with anyone. So I wrote an essay about my Golden Retriever Capo, who stayed with me day and night while I labored on my first novel. Doubleday didn’t want an essay about a dog.

I thought again, and wrote about my mother’s cousin Agnes. Doubleday liked Agnes, and included her in the collection.

Among other things, I wrote:

The summer I turned ten, on one of her abrupt visits, Agnes learned I was writing a story. She asked me to read it to her. She sat in the living room and listened with total attention. It still seems unbelievable to me that a grown woman could really want to spend an hour hearing a young girl read a story. She didn’t offer any literary criticism. I don’t even remember her saying anything. Just that she sat and listened . . .

Agnes’s listening to one story was not enough to give me a sense that my future lay in words. It was enough, though, to keep me writing. After Agnes listened to my story I would lie in bed imagining my parents dead and me adopted by her, taken into her school where there were only girls.

The dream took on new dimensions in 1958, when we moved to our house in the country. At first I loved it: I finally had my own room and we went to a two-room country school—just like in Understood Betsy or On the Banks of Plum Creek. Later I came to hate it. My parents’ fights intensified and the isolation of the country made it easy to seal me off completely from friends my own age, from any activities but school and housework.

The main line of the Santa Fe crossed the road at the bottom of the hill on the outskirts of Lawrence. There wasn’t any crossing gate or bell and every now and then the Kansas City Chief, roaring around a blind curve toward San Francisco, would annihilate a family.

Mary and Dave would be fighting, not paying attention to the road or to the tracks. The crash would be appalling. We’d be at the house, of course, my four brothers and I, lounging around reading or maybe playing softball. We should have been doing a dozen chores—mowing the lawn (my older brother’s job), vacuuming (mine), changing the baby’s diapers (mine again) or sorting the bottles in the trash to take to the dump (my brother). I don’t need a dishwasher, Mary used to tell visitors—I have two right here. And she would point at my older brother and me.

When we heard the car in the drive we leaped into action, attacking our chores—there was hell to pay if we were found loafing in bourgeois self-indulgence. And then we saw it was the sheriff’s car, the red light flashing. We raced over to see what he wanted, me grabbing the baby and carrying him along on my hip.

The sheriff looked at us very kindly. He said maybe we should go sit down: he had something very serious to tell us. There’d been an accident and we were orphans now. Was there someone we could call to look after us? Of course not, we already did any looking after there was to do, but we couldn’t tell him that, and anyway, we were underage, we needed guardians.

I would go to Agnes, to the school for irremediable girls. Even though she only took girls I would have to bring the two little boys with me, they were mine to look after (they thought I was their mother. When they started kindergarten they didn’t know what the word “sister” meant—they didn’t know that was me: they thought they had two mothers.).

We looked solemnly at the sheriff, conjuring up tears out of shock, but we couldn’t believe it had really happened: we were really orphans. Just like Anne of Green Gables or English Orphans. Our future changed miraculously.

And then Mary and Dave would come up the drive, still arguing, not dead at all, and we would leap into activity that was never quite frenzied enough. My older brother could never get tasks quite right, or the tasks set for him would change between when they were assigned and when he did them, and most of the yelling went his way. The rest of us slid upstairs.

I want to say here what I couldn’t say in 1985: there was no cousin Agnes. The behaviors, and support, I ascribed to Agnes were an amalgam of my teachers and friends, as well as some adult women whom I saw interact with my parents. However, Agnes did have a very particular existence: she was my imaginary mentor.

She came to me in the winter of 1969, during my first year of graduate school at the University of Chicago, when I shared a slum with three other students. I was twenty-one then, fat, ungainly, painfully lonely, so fearful of criticism that I seldom spoke in my classes. I’d never had a boyfriend and aside from my three room-mates I didn’t have women friends in Chicago, either. My room-mates and I shared a dismal apartment on the south side—six rooms for a hundred-sixty-five dollars a month and all the cockroaches we could eat. We killed two hundred and fifty of them one night, spraying the oven where they nested and stomping on them when they scampered out. (You’d have to be twenty-one to want to count the bodies.)

It was never warmer than fifty-five in the building and that was a most bitter winter. The city code says it has to be at least sixty-two during the day. We’d get building inspectors out who would solemnly measure the air. Then they’d learn the landlady worked as a precinct captain for the Daley machine and their thermometer miraculously would register fifteen degrees higher than ours.

I had gone to Kansas for the winter holiday. As usual on my visits, my mother became drunk and angry, and my father retreated into a menacing silence—he sometimes went as much as three days without speaking, but his silent presence was filled with a ferocious anger that dominated the house around him.

I fled back to Chicago several days before the end of the winter holiday, while my room-mates were still out of town. Carrying my heavy suitcase up the stairs to the apartment entrance I blundered into the doorjamb, knocking the wind out of myself. I dumped my suitcase down and sat on it, not even going inside, so miserable with my fat, my clumsiness, my loneliness that I hoped I might just die right there.

My two youngest brothers would care, of course, as would my friend Kathleen, but my parents wouldn’t even come to the funeral. I’d been active in social justice work both in Chicago and Lawrence; admiring community leaders came to the service to pay me homage. In my coffin I looked like a Botticelli angel, miraculously slender with long soft golden curls. The picture brought a lump to my throat.

At that moment, Agnes came to me. Her name was Agnes Bletch; she ran a finishing school for irremediable girls, girls like me, who always spilled food on themselves while eating, and ran into doorjambs more often than they walked through doorways.

Agnes’s school didn’t do the impossible. She didn’t train girls to eat tidily, or walk like Audrey Hepburn. Instead, she taught her students to spill food on themselves with so much élan that every other woman in the room poured soup down her dress, hoping to look half as good as the Bletchites.

It was a long slow journey I started that January afternoon, a journey to my voice. It took another decade of writing privately, not showing my work to anyone, before I began to try to write for publication. Without the women’s movement, without my mentor and friend Isabel Thompson, who took me under her wing the following fall, and without the support of Courtenay Wright, whom I later married, I might never have had the courage to write publicly.

The people who made up my cousin Agnes included my fourth-grade teacher, Patti Shepherd. She did, indeed, urge me to read my stories to her during the summer of 1957. She made me feel my stories meant something. My high school teachers Jayanne Angell and Bill Mullins both told me I had a gift with language; they gave me a spark of confidence in my writing, one that sent me to New York the summer of 1970, when I was twenty-three, to try to get a job in the magazine world. I failed dismally at that and returned to Chicago, but their encouragement did keep me writing—stories, poetry—all very privately for myself until I was in my early thirties and finally had the confidence to try to write my first novel.

The adult women I watched as a child included my Aunt Mary Clare, whom my father both flirted with and was afraid of. She was a general’s daughter, and ruled her household with a feminine but firm discipline. When my uncle was stationed at Ft. Leavenworth, forty-five miles from us, they visited often. As a child, I saw how Mary Clare could charm—and intimidate—my terrifying father into behaving like a civilized person with his family.

Finally, Emily Taylor, the dean of women at the University of Kansas, where I was an undergraduate, played a strong role in starting me on the road to rethinking where I belonged on the planet. I attended the university partly with money I had started earning at age thirteen, when I took a job as a dishwasher in a science lab, and partly with scholarships I was awarded. The most important of these scholarships was named for Elizabeth Watkins, who had to quit school at thirteen to look after her siblings and her father, and who left the fortune she later acquired to support women students.