M.E. Breen

Why didn’t anyone tell me how good this book is? People did tell me, teachers and mothers and that sort of people. One teacher in particular may have mentioned it. She was teaching a class on Victorian heroines in which I was a student. Mind you, this isn’t a post about how I never did any work in college. It’s possible I did all my work in college, excepting any assignments in subjects biological, chemical, mathematical, or musically educational (History of Jazz? Withdraw).

I read Middlemarch. I even liked it, judging by all the little stars and things I marked in the margins. But I wasn’t ready for it, or I would have remembered it. I was ready for The Mill on the Floss. The heroine is named Maggie, for one thing. Totally approachable!  I read the last 100 pages on the floor of my mom’s living room during winter break. It must have been Christmas day or Christmas Eve because we had a fire and one side of my face turned flaming pink.

But Middlemarch. At nineteen, I couldn’t have known what to make of this:

“Suppose we turn from outside estimates of a man, to wonder, with keener interest, what is the report of his own consciousness about his doings or capacity: with what hindrances he is carrying on his daily labours; what fading of hopes, or what deeper fixity of self-delusion the years are marking off within him; and with what spirit he wrestles against universal pressure, which will one day be too heavy for him, and bring his heart to its final pause.”

But I did put a star next to it. Now it seems to me impossible that my rambunctious, wildly hopeful self could get a bead on the deeper fixity of self-delusion, but maybe I’m wrong. My mother asserts you can’t understand Proust until you turn sixty, but I only read Proust in French class, which narrowed my chances of understanding it to nil. That’s what’s interesting about keeping old school books around. They can make you look pretentious and sentimental and kind of lame, sure, but they also work as a record of a very private self, the reader self, marking off moments of discovery and revelation.

A month ago, if you’d asked me what I remember about reading Middlemarch, I would have said something about how horrified I was at the prospect of someone young marrying someone old and ghoulish and skinny-legged. I wouldn’t have claimed to remember much about the plot, but I would have been confident about who I was and what my concerns were when I read it.  I would have been confident in the recollection of my own plot, and I would have been wrong. Because all the things I put stars and dashes and question marks beside then are the things I’m most interested in now. I’m the same. I was young, I’m older, but my sense of humor hasn’t changed, my anxieties haven’t changed, my rabid desire for annotation hasn’t changed. It’s so weird. I’m so invested in the idea of progress. I feel like I’ve been through so much and am so different than I was at Dorothea’s age. But I loved this book at nineteen, and then I forgot it.

I’m teaching a two-weekend writing workshop through Stanford at the end of the month. It’s not a class on the fine art of pet-blogging, I swear, so sign up today!

Here’s where you sign up:

http://continuingstudies.stanford.edu/courses/course.php?cid=20091_WSP%20121

And here’s the description:

Writing Novels for Children and Young Adults: Creating Character

As readers of literature for middle-grade children and young adults, we all have favorite heroes and villains, whether the drama between them unfolds in Narnia or on the dodgeball court. But what makes a hero heroic or a villain villainous? What details of dress, speech, and gesture let the reader know this is a person to trust or mistrust? And how does an adult reader’s perception of character differ from a child’s?

http://continuingstudies.stanford.edu/courses/writersstudio.php

My cat burned off his whiskers yesterday. Some are completely gone, some are still long, but most got curly and short with the heat, so he has a frizz of white question marks where his eyebrows and whiskers and chin hairs used to be. He looks like a cartoon cat, after the cartoon mouse tricked him into sticking his paw into an electrical socket. This cat is a 10 year-old marmalade tabby, a big cat, the kind who would have made a ferocious Tom, only his head never grew to proper bullish size and, when he was tiny and his sister was somewhat less tiny and I wasn’t thinking about the long term psychological effects, I named him Didi.

Didi’s accident involved an attempt to Cross the Stove.  On the other side of the stove is a window, and outside the window is a vine, and in the vine nests a fruit rat. Nested, actually. For two days. A year ago. But it might come back. My other cat has no problem jumping to the edge of the sink and reaching the window that way, but Didi has this great down-hanging stomach that throws him off balance. I have seen the stomach swing to one side and drag him from the top of the fridge or the bookcase to the floor, like a man in cement shoes dropping to the bottom of a lake.

And that’s what this is meant to be about. Not a stove, but a lake. Over the weekend, I made my own wild attempt. There was something I wanted, something that would make my life better, but getting the thing I wanted involved terror and risk.

C. invited me to spend labor day with her in her family’s cabin on a lake. You can only reach the cabin by boat or by foot. I packed my swimsuit. I packed my long undies and my headlamp. I packed five different kinds of face cream. I was ready. And then I got sick. Really sick, like the swine flu, except not the swine flu, but still: really sick.

C. went on hikes and cooked beautiful dinners and made me a thousand cups of tea and slept under the stars and wrote in her journal while the sun rose over the water. I marinated in germs inside my sleeping bag. C. and I have known each other since we were eight. We are like a pair of feet in old shoes together. But still, being sick is embarrassing. Self-pity is embarrassing, and having your nose peel and crack and your left eye leak fluid for three days straight is embarrassing, too.

On the second day we decided I might actually turn to liquid if I stayed in that sleeping bag any longer. So, wobbling, with C. behind ready to catch me, we went on a hike. By hike, I mean walk, and by walk, I mean three steps, sit on a rock, three steps, sit on a rock. But we got up to this sunny ridge and lay on the flat-topped boulders and tanned our shins and laughed and my eye leaked. On the way down, I took off my sweatshirt, and then the sweatshirt I was wearing under the sweatshirt. I was hot. Sweating, even. And there was that lake.

This lake is something you want to drink and be swallowed by at the same time. The water is clear, clearer than water in a glass or a bath or a pool. On the shore are broad sloping rocks that slope you right into the water, as deep as you want to go. And there are high round-shouldered rocks over dark pools for when you want to jump, and battered wooden docks for when you want to jump, but not so high. On this particular weekend, the wind was up. There were whitecaps on the water. And the water was cold, cold enough that when you put your hand in to test it you were ready to take it out again right away. I said, I’m going swimming. C. said, I think you should.

I jumped off the dock. I gasped and flopped like a fish in fast-forward evolution onto the shore where C. was waiting with my towel. I was proud. I wheezed. But then, standing there, a dripping, prickly-skinned, bright pink mammal, I wanted to do it again. So I did, and this time I really swam, all the way out to a rock island and back through the chop, and C.’s neighbors cheered and gave me a thumbs up and offered me a beer, and said, Aren’t you sick? And the next day I did it again, and I was still sick, but I was better.

I’ve taken my show on the road lately. The show, in this case, means my laptop, along with a stack of fliers advertising apartments for rent printed off craigslist. The road is San Francisco’s Great Highway. I depend on and disapprove of the Great Highway about equally. On the one hand, it creates a broad, ugly, treacherous barrier between the city and the ocean. On the other, it’s the sort of highway where you might reasonably expect to encounter a highwayman: windswept and fogswept, with ice plants draggling their way over the curbs and crows picking their way through the ice plants. The highway runs unbroken for sixteen blocks, but every two blocks is a pedestrian crossing and a traffic light with a seagull sitting on it. Commuters prefer 19th Ave, roaring two miles to the north, which leaves the Great Highway to dog walkers, surfers, funeral processions, Irish house-painters, and the guy with the refitted police car with the words “UFO Response Team” stenciled on the side.  The highway is closed so often in winter and spring it has its own gate. Wind off the ocean blows the sand into drifts right down the middle of the road. If they didn’t plow it, the beach would bury the highway in a week. In two weeks, the beach would be at my door.

The Great Highway does have its own highwayman, of a sort. He’s an old man with bright white hair and pink cheeks and red flannel long underwear who sleeps in the dunes. He looks like a thin Santa Claus and I can tell you from experience he does not like dogs. I’m always scandalized when the weather turns hot and all these people pour off the train and flip-flop themselves across the highway to the beach. Don’t they know this is a cold beach? A dead bird and seal beach? A beach for pot-smokers and lonely rangers and washed up jelly fish? It is not a bikini beach, and a thousand times not a volleyball beach. I wonder if thin Santa sees me and Truckstop and thinks, Get out of my yard!

When I make my lists of life’s pros and cons, when I worry those old bones of Where should I live? and How should I live? and What if I miss all my chances? I realize I’m always assuming there is a better place to be. Not better because it would suit me better, as I am, but a place that would make me better. Here, where I live, amid the dead birds and the living birds and the broken bottles and the trash and the tourists and the heavy, encroaching sand and the vast gray ocean, this huge, imperfect place — this is just the place for me. This is just like me. Sometimes I can’t bear it.

The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.
The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding–
Riding– riding–
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.

He’d a French cocked-hat on his forehead, a bunch of lace at his chin,
A coat of the claret velvet, and breeches of brown doe-skin.
They fitted with never a wrinkle. His boots were up to the thigh.
And he rode with a jewelled twinkle,
His pistol butts a-twinkle,
His rapier hilt a-twinkle, under the jewelled sky.

-From “The Highwayman,” by Alfred Noyes, 1913

I’ve been on vacation in the desert. I went there to see my family. I love seeing my family and this was an especially joyous occasion, but what I actually want to write about is how my dog almost starved to death. She didn’t almost starve while I was on vacation. She ate things like fresh buffalo in giblet sauce while I was on vacation. The time she almost starved was when she lived in the desert, before I knew her, before maybe anyone knew her. I suspect she had a dog mother and dog litter mates, but I don’t know. She does look a little like E.T.  A space ship might have crashed in that Arizona wilderness. For the record, she would still be a dog on her home planet, with dog-level brain power, except her owner would be a rubbery looking alien instead of me.  She hasn’t exactly been building the return-pod the whole time she’s been here on Earth.

While I was in Arizona I kept thinking two things: one, how my dog’s fur is the exact color of this landscape (dun), and two: HOT. Then we got home and I watched the desert episode of Planet Earth about the poor kangaroos who only survive the midday heat by cringing in the shade and licking their forearms. All of this got me thinking about what it means to be from a place that is always trying to kill you. What would it be like to live in an environment so hostile that even your bizarre, precise adaptations fail to protect you? David Attenborough told us that if the kangaroos don’t make it to the shade in time they just fall down dead from heatstroke. I kept thinking, why don’t they move? I mean, why don’t they pack up their pouches and hop off to a verdant plain somewhere? Ok, that’s dumb, but it does make you wonder about habit, and habituation, and why it’s easier to do the same, incredibly difficult thing over and over than it is to do something new, the difficulties and pleasures of which are unknown. And even when you do move, the new place only ever exists in some uneasy relation to the old: It’s hotter/colder/tackier/cozier/lonelier/more unreal here than there, or there than here. I guess I’m reminded these days of something I’ve known for a long time, which is how much easier it is to suffer than to change.

Unless you’re Truckstop. She survived the ride through space. She survived the crash landing. She survived the desert and the truck stop, though barely, and only by swallowing dirt. She survived transplantation to this city of ocean and fog, and grew back all her fur.  She does not participate in fatalistic arm licking, air-conditioner blasting, or complaining. Take that, tourist-self. Take that, hoppers.