Falling Through Space (4 page)

That's the thing that wakes me at dawn and keeps me in this room while everyone else is out in the real world making deals and talking on the phone and running the place.

We live at the level of our language. Whatever we can articulate we can imagine or understand or explore. All you have to do to educate a child is leave him alone and teach him to read. The rest is brainwashing.

I
HAVE BEEN
moving around all my life. Going to different schools, living in different houses, shedding old roles, assuming new ones. This way of life is as natural to me as staying in one place is for other people. I do variations on the theme. I return to places where I used to be. I find my old personas. I try them on. If they still fit, I wear them out to a party or a show. If they begin to restrict my movements, I take them off. I am a human being, capable of mimicking anything I see or remember or can imagine. This week I am in the middle of moving back to Jackson, Mississippi. Finding my old friends. I am the hunter home from the hills, with stories to tell, news to catch up on, compliments to exchange.

I began my roaming life during the Second World War — every five or six months I moved to a new town and went to a new school. Some children are harmed by this process. I thrived on it. My parents are stable and enthusiastic people. A war had to be won and we were part of winning it. What had to be done would be done. I was raised to believe that people are brave and resourceful and resilient.

Now, here I am, so many years later, sitting in an empty apartment waiting for my furniture to arrive and I am perfectly happy and I have this wild idea that I know exactly what I'm doing and am in charge of my own destiny. I see myself as deliberately playing out an old scenario from my childhood. Tearing up a perfectly nice comfortable life and going off to live somewhere else. Deliberately complicating things.

Well, I am a writer and when life becomes comfortable for an artist the energy stops — nothing in the long history of our species has prepared us to be comfortable. Being comfortable is so boring it makes us drink and take drugs and bet on football games. Anything for a little excitement, so I invented this adventure for myself. My belongings are somewhere on a moving van between Fayetteville, Arkansas, and Jackson, Mississippi. My papers are scattered everywhere. My mind is like a pile of pick-up sticks, seeing new streets, new trees, new faces, learning my new address and phone number.

I wish I knew what I was really up to. A writer's mind is as full of tricks as a magician's. I might be running away from wondering if my new book is any good. I might wake up a year from now and decide this whole thing was either absolutely sane or absolutely crazy.

M
Y GRANDCHILDREN
are visiting me. Marshall Walker, age four, and Ellen Walker, age one — and I am watching the terrible pangs of sibling rivalry. This is real suffering and all I ever need to know about jealousy, its power and its source.

For a whole year Marshall has put up with this baby hanging on his mother and sucking on her breasts and sleeping in her arms. He has put up with her walking into his room and picking up his toys and getting all the attention.

But my house on the mountain is another thing. I am his grandmother. I belong to him, hook, line, and sinker. My piano belongs to him and my closet full of toys and my chairs and my pillows and my bed. Also, the box of huge wooden blocks a friend of mine always brings over when she knows he's coming.

Now this one-year-old baby girl is actually walking around this place touching anything she wants to touch. This is the first time she has been here since she could walk. He is going crazy. He sobbed himself to sleep the first night he was here, exhausted from trying to protect his territory. I am in such sympathy with him I have found myself taking sides against my own little granddaughter. These lessons are too hard to learn. This is more than I want to know about jealousy.

Be objective, I kept saying to myself. Then he would sit down to play the piano and here she would come, beating on the bass keys, ruining his music. Be objective, I warned myself. Then he began building a spaceship out of the blocks. He had been working for an hour stacking and arranging them, humming happily to himself as he formed the cockpit, the wings, the fuselage. She came walking out of the kitchen and destroyed half a wing with a sweep of her hand. He was on top of her in an instant. He grabbed her head in his hands. His mouth was open. I leaped over a stack of books. “Don't bite,” I screamed. “Did he bite her?” his mother asked. “No,” I said. “I stopped it. Come on,” I added, grabbing him up. “Let's get out of here.” We went out to the shed and found our old green tent and set it up under a maple tree and spread some sleeping bags on the ground and put the blocks on them and got a radio and put it in the window of the shed attached to fifty feet of extension cord and turned on KUAF's “Jazz and Fusion Hour.” We have moved to the yard.

A psychiatrist friend suggests that the best thing to do is to show him the world is big and full of more exciting things than his mother's breasts. I agree. We're going to build telephones from the tent to the shed and start some swimming lessons and as soon as he gets home this afternoon I am going to call my older brother and apologize to him for being alive.

T
HESE JOURNAL ENTRIES
allow me to answer questions reporters ask me about my work. I am always dissatisfied with the reports that reach my readers. The boring little domestic details of my life don't seem to have anything to do with the mental life that makes the stories, with the real excitement of writing, the pitchblende I refine in search of radium. I'm so influenced by movies I saw as a child that that is actually how I view what I'm doing. I think of myself as a sort of literary Madame Curie in a shed in Paris surrounded by tables piled high with pitchblende. If I keep on trying, if I do the work, I will find some light at the end. Remember the wonderful scene when she goes at night to her workshop, certain she has failed, and then sees the light shining from the petri dish? That's the sort of fantasy that leads me on.

I refuse to be cynical in any way about my work. My work helps me live my life. It tells me who I am. Take
The Annunciation
, for example — my so-called novel. What was that obsession with adoption about? I'm not adopted and I've never given a child away. Was it about my son in Alaska? When my middle son was eighteen, he handed me a high school diploma, got into a pickup truck, and drove up the Alaska highway to Fairbanks to work on the pipeline. He was happy as a lark, doing exactly what he wanted to do.

Meanwhile I was down in New Orleans, going crazy, staying up nights with outdoors catalogs, ordering triple-lined down coats and gloves and helmets guaranteed to work in the Antarctic and flare kits and sending them to him. I must have sent him half a dozen flare kits. Every day that child was in Alaska I would wake up and wonder if his eyeballs had frozen yet. He didn't even have a phone. I couldn't even call him up. It's not easy being a mother. It never ends. The child grows up and the mother keeps on mothering. It's pitiful. It drives you crazy. It drives you to write novels about adoption.

A critic once wrote to me and said, Ellen, for God's sake stop writing novels for therapy. It was good advice but how can I stop?

Anyway, my son didn't freeze to death in Alaska — he made a lot of money and spent it and learned how to take tractors apart and came home and got married and now he's farming in north Mississippi and I don't have to order any more flare kits or write any more books about lost children. Now I can go back to work writing about people who are looking for love in all the wrong places.

M
Y LITTLE
redheaded grandchild has become very conscious of his hair. He fills the sink with water, then pulls a chair up to it, then very carefully, for he is a careful and precise child, he dips the top of his head down into the water. He looks in the mirror and smooths the sides down, then pushes up a small piece in the back.

“What have you done to your hair?” his mother said when she first noticed it. “It is the chicken look,” he said. “I am the chicken style.”

I suppose it was inevitable that sooner or later I must tell you about the overpowering joy of being a grandparent. People try to make light of this relationship. They say it is because a grandparent can give a child back to its parents when she becomes tired of caring for it. Not true.

His name is Marshall, this little boy that I adore. He has brown eyes and a wonderful large nose like Albert Einstein's and large ears like the Gautama Buddha's and I am sick at the thought that he must ever go to school. How awesome that one woman should have twenty or thirty children to care for all day. How could she help but make mistakes? Something is wrong at the very basis of our ideas about schools.

“The chicken look,” he said. “I am the chicken style.”

Last week I was down in Jackson, Mississippi, with my grandchild. I had taken him to visit my mother, that famous child-worshipper. We had Marshall, age three, and his cousin Heather, age four, and we had been at it with them for about twenty-four hours. I had them in the business of filling up a birdbath using eight-ounce plastic glasses. The birdbath is on the back of the yard in a bed of daffodils and the source of water is beside the house. About ten minutes of absolute peace had gone by. They were robotlike in their dedication to the idea of helping birds. I was feeling very powerful having hit upon this great idea to get them to leave me alone. I wanted to write about it. To describe the self-satisfied look on their faces as they filled the cups and carried them carefully back across the yard and dumped them in. What good citizens, helping the birds. I wanted to write about it but I didn't dare begin. I knew what would happen. The minute I got involved in my work they would sense I had stopped watching them and come running. I stood there thinking about what it would be like to be a young mother trying to write or paint or do anything alone in a house with small children. And yet life without them would be meaningless to me.