M.E. Breen

I remember playing this intense game as a 12 or 13 year old. Two friends, maybe three, got together in some enclosed, secret-feeling space. It might be sitting on your bed if the friend was spending the night, or in some corner of the abandoned tennis court during lunch hour. The game started with straightforward questions: who is the prettiest girl in the class? Second prettiest? Third prettiest? First and second place tended to go to girls who were pretty but not very appealing — not, though we didn’t think of it this way at the time, sexy. The third and fourth place finishers were usually a little more interesting, but the girls with real power rarely made the list: B., good at soccer, with zits on her forehead that she tried to hide behind her bangs but the guys didn’t seem to notice and asked her out anyway, or T., who had thick eyebrows and heavy breasts and changed into heels and a scarf after school and took a bus none of the rest of us took. The game got worse and weirder from there. Soon it was, what’s my best feature? And then, what’s my worst feature? And then, look at every feature of my face, every part of my body, and tell me, Is it good, bad, or middle?

The strangest part of this game was the mood of buoyant hope with which I always approached it. I couldn’t imagine that someone would say something mean (again), that I would be found unlovely (again), because surely, by sheer dint of wanting, I had fixed everything that was wrong with me. I heard a replay of one of Terry Gross’s interviews with John Updike recently, and she quotes a line of his to the effect of, “I’m always looking in windows and mirrors to see my face, not because I’m vain, but in the vain hope that something has changed.”

I’m thinking of this game and of Updike because I’ve been doing something I really ought not do, which is Google myself looking for reviews. I was never a self-Googler before. The impropriety of it always dwarfed any possible payout (look, I work at a place I already know I work!). But now I feel as though someone — even, quite literally, a 12 year old girl — might tell me what I hope and fear to know: am I popular? am I acceptable? did I do a good job? The problem of course is assuming that someone else has the answer to these questions, or that if they tell you what they think, they’re right. But in the same way that a preteen girl suddenly finds her body on display in the world in a new way, and nothing she can do, no baggy tops or calf-length shorts (man, we sported those — the longer the better) can take her back to her old, anonymous body, her child’s body, having sent my book out into the world means that a part of me, and what feels like a pretty essential part, is permanently and irrevocably on view. And then the last question creeps in, the doubt that awful game forced into the open, though no one said it outright: here I am, on display. What if no one wants to look?

The dog commited some exceptionally evil acts at the beach, for which I punished her with a bath, for which punishment I must now atone by eating chocolate rabbit ears. This rabbit, five inches tall, wrapped in electric blue foil, pink-eyed and idiotically smiling, with an actual cloth ribbon around its neck, is the last piece of Easter candy in the whole house. This isn’t as impressive a show of restraint as it sounds: my mom only dropped off the candy on Friday because I am, after all, a grown woman. But still — to eat the chocolate Easter bunny is to commit a kind of crime. It looks so perfect, so like a toy. You try to refold the wrapper to disguise the ear-ectomy: look! antennae! but it’s a mess. On the other hand, if I don’t eat it soon those white flakes like a skin disease will show when I finally unwrap it. And then what? Eat it anyway with the avidity of the guilty and self-disgusted, certain I am, in fact, eating some sort of crawling fungus, though a teacher, or maybe just a kid at school, told me it’s nothing to worry about, that’s what happens to chocolate when it melts and rehardens, or throw it out (throw it out? the poor fellow half drowned in a compost of onion skins and coffee grounds?) and see in myself one of those people so afraid of pleasure that they let everything go to ruin?

I’ve unwrapped him. He looks a little feral without his foil. Someone took the trouble to etch a few eyelashes but the smile is gone.

The rabbit is now, for all intents and purposes (read: my digestion), a chipmunk. I left some nubs of ears and made a foil mullet for him — maybe those singing chipmunks have a tough cousin named Mitch? Mitchmunk, sings baritone? — but anyway, he’s over it. He’s actually glaring at me, his blue wrapper stretched tight over his head, his eyelids tugged back. Mitch, I’m sorry. Mitch, I can’t bring them back. Mitch, accept it. You’re one sweet carapace, dude.

When I got home from work today I found 25 copies of Darkwood on my doorstep.  I felt at once, What will I ever do with so many? And, I want more! This wanting more is an interesting part of publishing your first book. More what, exactly, is the question, and for me the answer seems to be news. Emails, letters, telegraphs, even the scroll of a carrier pigeon, just send me some news. Seeing all those books stacked neatly in their box I had an impulse to eat them like a bunch of Fig Newtons. (In The Faerie Queene, the monster Errour vomits books  in her death throes. She ought not to have eaten those!) So then I think, you don’t want news, you want newspaper. You want filler!  You want to fill the doubt abyss! Which means I don’t want more at all, but less. A lot less of doubt and uncertainty, a small reduction in dread.

But this leads me to two more thoughts: the first relates to an interview I read with a couple who had been married for ten or fifteen years and were raising three sons together. One of the things they kept saying was that you can’t admit doubt into your relationship or you damage it. Shortly after I read that interview I heard something about doubt on the radio. Just a snippet, I don’t know who was talking or what about, but here’s what he said: Doubt is the forge of faith. I think I’m with anonymous radio man and not the happy couple. How do you learn to trust anything except by doubting your way through it and coming up wrong?

And finally, I found out last night that the comic book character Daredevil is blind. Old news for many people, I’m sure, but it made a big impression on me. Daredevil is also known as The Man Without Fear. His other senses are exceptionally acute, ok, but how can you be without fear if you’re blind? When you don’t know what’s ahead of you? But Daredevil isn’t fearless in spite of being blind; he’s fearless because he’s blind. Well, right on. We’re all blind when it comes to the future. I have no idea what will happen with my book. But I’d rather plunge ahead and let whatever is coming come than cringe my way through this business. I’d rather treat that box of books like a box full of week old kittens (and no, not eat them like Clem on Buffy), but take them out carefully and look them over head to tail and wonder what sorts of lives they’ll have.

Now here’s the Spenser, lest we end on too kittenish a note:

Therewith she spewd out of her filthy maw

A floud of poyson horrible and blacke,

Full of great lumpes of flesh and gobbets raw,

Which stunck so vildly, that if forst him slacke

His grasping hold, and from her turne him backe:

Her vomit full of bookes and papers was,

With loathly frogs and toades, which eyes did lacke,

And creeping sought way in the weedy gras:

Her filthy parbreake all the place defiled has.

(Canto I, Stanza 20)

My dog hurt her feet. No wonder: I took her on a long hike on some hot rocks. She usually seems so thick-necked and indestructible that it didn’t occur to me she could be hurt by nature. Civilization, sure, but I do well enough keeping her on the leash and off the chicken bones. This was definitely stupid on my part, and I definitely feel guilty, and she definitely isn’t holding it against me.  What interests me about all of this is how it has exposed my aspirations for myself and my dog. I hope this doesn’t come off as a version of the bumper sticker admonishing you to be the person your dog thinks you are (ugh), it’s something a little closer to, I want to be as good a person as my dog is. So what do I mean by that, since I’ve just claimed to be so persuaded by my dog’s animal-ness that I imagined her to be One with Nature? I mean the qualities I admire in my dog are essentially the qualities I want to cultivate in myself: independence, stoicism, freedom from care, consistency, discernment (ok, this one has its limits in dog town), toughness, honesty. The fact that she doesn’t cultivate any of these qualities makes me admire them more, but it shouldn’t. What am I admiring, really, except traits that are as outside of her control as height or foot size are outside ours? Why should the thing that appears good and natural, for want of a better word, be more impressive than the thing that seems good and fought for? Maybe because I thinking fighting for something shows you want it, and wanting things is somehow indecent. Wanting implies dissatisfaction, trouble, jealousy — and yet the dog wants things all the time. It’s just that the things she wants are simple and largely free: fresh air, time to run around, things to smell, things to eat. Maybe the distinction between us (and, really, I hope there is more than one) is that she wants what she wants, but not what anyone else has. She wants without envy. Who wouldn’t be jealous of that?

I’ll end with Walt Whitman, the same passage Sheila Burnford uses for the epigraph to The Incredible Journey:

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d,

I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,

They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,

Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,

Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,

Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth.

–Leaves of Grass, “Song of Myself,” 32.

San Francisco is having what my mom would call, Whew, a scorcher! Windows open, fan going (a small, antique-looking, but not, it turns out, wholly decorative fan), pets stretched out all over the place for greatest surface area cooling possibilities. The whole apartment feels full of sun and fur. I like this weather. I like how bizarre weather gives you a sense of solidarity with neighbors and strangers on the street. How often do you have any idea at all of what other people are thinking or feeling? But today, everyone must feel at least one thing in common: hot.

Hot is good for reading and drowsing, crosswords and doodling, drinking but not eating. It’s not great for writing, either, at least not for me. Writing is something that has to happen fast. I don’t mean writing actual sentences (I am treacle-pace at writing actual sentences), but when I’m writing it’s usually with the feeling of chasing after an idea that’s blowing down the road ahead of me, and when you’re drowsy, you don’t chase.

It’ll be time soon to drink a cold drink and nap a long nap, but first I want to make a book recommendation. The book is called It’s Like This, Cat, by Emily Neville. It won the Newbery in 1964. It’s about a cat, yes indeed, but mostly about a kid (14, named Davey) and a city (New York). That kid races all around the boroughs on his bike and on the subway and on the ferry, sometimes with the cat in a wicker hamper, sometimes not. Not a whole lot happens that’s grand or tragic, but you can’t stop turning the pages. It’s great.