The Clay Beneath his Hands

His models had usually sat for him before, so they knew that their skin would be cold and covered in goose pimples for hours while he worked. Rodin had a stove for heat in his studio but often forgot to add chunks of coal from the bucket, and the grey space quickly turned icy. His own teeth might be chattering, the thick black hair on his arms raised, the tip of his long nose red and dripping, but he noticed nothing but the model’s body and the clay beneath his hands.

He took so many of the models as lovers, so where the cold couldn’t reach him in his thoughts the forms of their bodies did. Maybe as he smoothed his rough hands over the soft, pliant skin on their bare bodies, molding them into the images he saw when he closed his eyes, he found he had to stop. The moment must be seized and possessed.

His passion for the human form has made his sculptures  immortal. If you were to place a palm over one of the figures’  foreheads, or cup a hand underneath a breast or thigh, you might feel warmth permeating beneath the cold marble.

brightly painted buildings

Some of the things I remember about my family are most likely not altogether true. That is how an oral history is built: fiction is sprinkled into the batter along with the truth, browned and baked until it becomes something new, something edible.

My great-grandmother’s name was Hattie Will Redmond, but she was born Hattie Will Vestal, and went by Billie. She grew up in Pulaski, Tennessee, a place that still drips with a dark, muddy history and has the unfortunate distinction of being the birthplace of the KKK. Billie and Reggie left Pulaski separately, each when they were old enough. There is a photograph of them as children, dressed in white, seated on a mule, their pretty dark eyes peek out of the picture.

In a pocket of my memory my great-grandmother still sits on her red couch, wearing a pink pantsuit and a tiny, gauzy black scarf around her small neck. Her hair is set in the style she wore in the fifties, dyed black. She retired from a downtown department store, where she sold cosmetics. Her wrists, clothes, furniture, and hair always smelled like Shalimar, and her lips were always filled with lipstick. Her skin was immaculate; creamy and olive without wrinkles or blemishes. She glowed.

Her house was small, a true grandmother’s cottage, with a bright white kitchen with chrome edged counters. Oatmeal raisin cookies filled a ceramic cookie jar, and the white porcelain icebox always held a pitcher of Tang and a Pyrex container with lime Jell-o inside. Those were my father’s favorite treats when he was a boy, and she made sure to keep them on hand. She was my father’s grandmother, and he revered her as sort of angel/saint. He was her first grandchild, by her only daughter. My grandmother had met my grandfather through my grandmother; my other great-grandmother  also sold cosmetics in the downtown department store, and the two women worked together often. They had a lot in common: both were career women when such a thing was rare, and they both had beautiful children around the same age.

There were things inside my great-grandmother’s house that frightened me, though she wasn’t one of them. Her bedroom was dark, often lit by candles, covered in off-white lace. On the dresser were framed photographs of her brother Reggie who had died and her son Bobby who also died. Both men were performers: her brother had left their home in Pulaski, Tennessee and became a comedian in the Vaudeville circuit. He made enough money to dress sharp and surround himself with pretty girls, and to buy a Pontiac Roadster. There’s a photograph of him leaning on the grill of the Roadster and wearing a light-colored three-piece suit and round tortoiseshell glasses. He would die quite young, of something that can now be easily cured with a good round of antibiotics, but they were not available to the public until a year or so after passed away. The only plausible outcome of a bout with the disease he contracted was a swift but painful death, or (if one was lucky) disfigurement and erasure of much of the quality of life.

My great-grandmother’s son Bobby had been an ice dancer and performed with the Ice Capades. I don’t remember how or when he died, but I do remember the sunroom off of my great-grandmother’s living room, which was filled with ferns. In the corner was a twin bed, made up neatly with a chenille bedspread. I remember her saying that was “Bobby’s Room”. That sunroom was one of the things in my great-grandmother’s house that frightened me. As a child I knew that “Bobby” was dead, and to hear someone refer to a dead person was scary. I didn’t care that the room was cheerful and alive with pretty green houseplants. Someone who was now dead had slept in there, and that turned the sunroom into a dark place.

My great-grandfather had died well before I was born. When he and my great-grandmother had first married they operated newspaper stands in train stations across the south and Midwest. He ran the till and stocked the shelves, and my great-grandmother prepared coffee and snacks to sell. After their children were born he traveled alone, sometimes leaving his family for great long stretches of time. She was used to his absence. My great-grandfather was from Johnson City, Tennessee. When he was small his young Irish mother left him at an orphanage, along with his brothers and sisters. She couldn’t afford to keep them. That is was what America was like before social services.

When my grandmother was small,  my great-grandmother took her and her brother Bobby to Atlanta, to see the stars walk the red carpet outside the Fox Theater for the premiere of Gone With the Wind. My grandmother remembered seeing all of the stars of the film from her cramped spot in the huge crowd. She died recently, and the things she told me about her life (and what my father has told me), are swimming up from the dark parts of my memory like schools of bright silver fish. My grandmother, whose name was Juanita, was beautiful, strong, and modern.  She lost her first husband in a car accident when my father was a boy. They lived in Puerto Rico at the time, where my grandfather worked as an accountant. My father, the oldest of four siblings when his father died, spoke Spanish then, and was surrounded by brightly painted buildings and tiny coqui frogs.

cuckoo

This rain.

It’s given over to a low-level sort of sadness that is not necessarily unpleasant. It’s reflective. It’s kind. It gives me a bit of time to rest without the sun blazing through the windows and begging me to come out come out wherever I am.

And something tells me that I’m not doing this day right at all. I should be tucked away in my bedroom with all the covers on and the ceiling fan turned to high.  I should have the lights dimmed and candles lit and a nag champa incense stick burning in a teak holder on the dresser. Instead I am in the office, which is paused and messy in mid-organization, and am taking a break from making copies of pertinent paperwork to write this. I am having an affair with my responsibilities; I am fucking my writing instead.

I had a bad week, confidence-wise. I have stalled on two projects and am full of trepidation even thinking of starting another. I am falling into old patterns. Maybe there is nothing wrong with that; we leave in a few days for Ohio, then another few days until Florida, and then the summer will be fading away so maybe I should just spend this time before I start school to rest. I will be moving so fast soon. I might regret not hiding under the covers when I had the chance.

**

Many of the homes I cleaned belonged to those of well-off, elderly couples. Their homes were full of tasteful art, bronze sculptures, and ancient rugs woven out of soft fine thread. These clients were often home, which I didn’t mind. They might sit in their study and read, or wait in the kitchen drinking coffee at the table until I was ready to sweep and mop the marble floor or scrub out the porcelain sink with a sponge and some Comet. If we crossed paths I would usually smile and comment on some of the books I had noticed laying on one of the end tables or how much I liked the new oil painting in the hall. I tried to ignore the beige plastic “Life Alert” alarm buttons that were hidden underneath their beds; I didn’t want to think of these kind and refined people as being impermanent.

Several of these couples lived in upscale condominiums, built in the fifties, when condominium meant “large apartment” instead of “cookie cutter townhome with baby-crib-size backyard”, as tends to be the case today. These condominiums were time-stamps, the lobbies were full of brass (on the stair rail, on the elevator, on the doors), crystal chandeliers, and jungle murals rivaling the skill and depth of Rousseau paintings. The carpets were in jeweled colors; the garages were in the basement and a valet was on staff to park the many Lincolns and Rolls Royces that had been bought with cash and cared for like children.

**

Also, have you seen it yet? It is a work of genius, sent straight from heaven and the angel’s name is Wes Anderson. I mean it:

both oceans

I am in a coffee shop, a proper one, tucked inside an old house in the historic section of a town that’s near my own. It’s a bit noisy to really dig too deeply, but digging into my own thoughts and imaginings isn’t my goal today. Today I am alone, and am here to conduct research on various online databases. I have gnawing hunger to research life in Elkmont when it was a resort village, before the national park system took over and before the synchronous fireflies were world-famous. There is, of course, a narrative floating around my ears like a butterfly and I don’t want to make the mistake I made during Men in Caves (research during/after, instead of before). I want to feel confident in my knowledge, and let the words and dialogue flow from the real place as much as it flows from my own head. The advantage to this new project is that I still live near to Elkmont. When I started Men in Caves we were a month from moving away from Alaska and the mine. Elkmont can be reached from my house, in less than an hour. I can go there and hike or camp with my family, soaking in the essence of the place.

 

We have had lots of rain in the past few days, which makes me very happy. I love storms, frightening as they can be sometimes. I love the way the wind blows the trees, carrying in fresh smells and cool air. I love the sound of rain on the roof, and love to watch puddles form in the yard. I love the way that birds sing after, loud and strong and full of praise for the rain.

 

On the drive here I was thinking about this city lodge in a large Anchorage park, where we took most of the photos for our picture book project. The lodge is quiet and warm, and perched on the top of a large hill that’s used for cross country skiing and sledding in the winter and frisbee golf in the summer. In August, these wonderful fairy tale sort of mushrooms explode from the mossy ground at the foot of the trees, flashing their poisonous colors of orange and red, spotted with white. Moose crash their antlers against the trunks of white birch, full, strong, and dangerous in their rut. The air smells of leaves and decay. When winter hits there is nothing subtle about it; snow falls in clumps and swirls and covers the hill quickly. Once there is enough packed on the ground, children descend on the hill with their sleds, their heads and hands covered in wool and their small bodies wrapped in snowsuits. The bright colors of the wool, fabric, and the gaudy reds and oranges of their plastic sleds, are some days the only colors besides the bright white on the ground and the pale baby blue of the sky above. When they sail down the hill the noise is magnificent, their happy shouts and the whoosh of the sleds makes the cold air crackle and fizz.

 

I’ve been lucky in my life so far. I’ve dipped my toes into both oceans, and have walked on many mountains. I’ve known the heat and the green of the south and the cold and the white of the north.

Collecting

When I was a girl I loved collecting the broken bits of robins eggs that I found near the trunks of the trees in my front yard. I would hold them in the palm of my hand and run my index finger over the smooth inner shell, hoping that the baby bird had hatched healthy, and was on its way to flying. I collected little bits of nature this way, hiding feathers, egg shells, dead bugs and dried flowers like a magpie in a shoebox in my closet. I had pulled the insides out an old stuffed animal that was tattered, and placed the specimens on the cotton like I had seen in museums.

 

If it was raining or I was tired of playing outside, I would often organize my books on their shelves, placing them in alphabetical order. I loved this self-ordered task, and the sun always seemed to shine brighter through my window when I was finished. I keep meaning to assign myself the same occupation now; I have many more books now and none of them are in order. Many of them are arranged aesthetically, since I love old books with rich design. I have a first edition copy of Charlie Harper’s Birds and Words, and it’s autographed. That book is placed on my mantle, with a small cloth-bound pocket grammar book and a 1918 guide to herbs (by “The Herbalist Joseph Meyer”, who in his picture looks like Stephen Colbert). On top of that small pile of books is a large piece of quartz, a small chunk of apatite, and a large, smooth rock from the Homer, Alaska spit.

 

When I arrange objects, whether they be books or natural artifacts, or the photographs I find, I get this sort of calm feeling. I never gave the feeling much thought, though it’s of the same variety as the cool robin’s egg blue feeling I get when I am writing. This blend of peace, harmony and creation is the fuel that propels me, and is the motivation for me to attend to my education. I will resume study this fall, filling my head with creative writing and information sciences. Maybe one day I will sit in a museum full of ancient smells and quiet books, putting beautiful and old things to their rites and creating publications that explain the history and the beauty of each object in the collection. I will go home at the end of the day with a full, warm, still sort of feeling filling my chest. So different from the usual frenzy of my heart and my actions and occupations. I am so ready for this.

 

Elkmont

How delicious it must have felt to them, when they left their beautiful but oven-hot homes for the summer, and boarded the trains by the river. When they returned from the mountains in September, the morning air would have finally started to cool, and the evenings would smell again of apples and roses and clean things. The heat must have felt like a snarling sort of beast, with nothing to tame it with but small electric fans placed near open windows to churn a breeze. The children kept cool by sneaking chunks of ice from the icebox, moments after the iceman delivered the square block from his truck. They would chisel away great bits of ice with hammers pilfered from toolboxes, sucking on the cleanest pieces and placing the dripping remnants down the backs of one another’s shirts.

Their mothers would pack carefully for their summer away. In their large bedrooms, they would spread their entire summer wardrobe over their large beds, open the french doors wide (look at the white curtains flutter like butterflies, smell the almost erotic scent of the roses in the garden), and let the errant breezes float over the fabric to air the clothes out. They wouldn’t need so many clothes in their cabin on the river; just a few frocks in white cotton that weren’t ruined if drenched. In the city they had to keep their ankles covered and their hair in an upsweep. In the mountains their hair (still rich and honey blonde, no streaks of wiry grey yet) could tumble around their bare shoulders. Their children could run around in their loose underthings. Their husbands could roll up their pantlegs and fish for rainbow trout for hours, returning at sunset with sunburned foreheads and wicker creels full of the evening’s dinner.

When the families left, their large houses would be quiet except for scurrying of grey tomcats, left at home to catch any mice that might sneak in through the crawlspace or boldly scuttle to the cool downstairs from the hot attic.

The tomcats are fed and cared for by the families’ gardeners, who carries galvanized watering cans and pours out metallic and warm water over the cracked clay earth. They shoo away crows who’ve come to pick at the blueberries that the families left behind, and scare off the thin and tattered looking rabbits who dig up the lettuce. This is what they’re paid for, and they enjoy the hot toiling work and the quiet that the families have left behind. Their job is to keep the gardens and the homes from growing wild and feral, to keep the elements from destroying the quiet civilization that holds on so tenuously.

***

I have a small tomato plant, just a scraggly little one really, that’s yielded a few perfect and red fruits so far this summer. I’ve not been able to try a bite, due to my new dietary restrictions (tomatoes of course are full of acid, which is a no-no for my troublesome digestive system), but my husband said they tasted just lovely.*

There was one tomato this weekend, slowly ripening but still mainly green. We had a few days of intense heat and two weeks of no rain, so even with my diligent watering the plant was shriveling in its pot. On Sunday night, it finally rained, and as I was outside listening to thunder and moving some of the plants out from underneath the eaves of the house I noticed a caterpillar eating the tomato. He was as big as my index finger and the same shade of green as the tomato. I called Xander out to look, and he wanted to touch it. I wouldn’t let him because the caterpillar looked so busy eating. I didn’t want to spook him.

I wonder what would happen if we just left the world to the wolves? If we stopped culling the smaller living things off of our plants and land, and learned only to pick off the tiniest bits of meat and fruit to survive. If we became like vultures, scavenging and swooping up what’s freely available to us. What would happen if we entered the woods like bears, picking off berries and bathing in waterfalls?

There are too many of us. Something bigger would eventually come along and pick us off one by one, trying to protect their valuable crop.

*He did not say just lovely, he probably said “good”, but I am in the writer in the house so I can literally put words in his mouth. 

Who Will Sing the Praises…

This heat is like a fairy tale giant that’s moved in from the dark woods while the villages slept. When they closed their eyes for the night, all was cool and expectant; but when they woke the fog burned away the frost and now the crops are turning brown and there is a giant stomping on all the flowers. When they look to the sky all they see are sun devils, and when they look toward the ground sparks fly behind their eyes. They are afraid, and are thinking of their wells and their livestock.

 

The heat was like this, like a giant, when I worked my summers as a tour guide, during the spring, summer and fall of my high school years. The heat would make a swamp out of my skin, and sweat would pool in the crooks of my knees and elbows. I usually had several books in my backpack, tucked in safely away from the sweating cold bottle of ice water I packed each morning along with my lunch. The summer between my sophomore and junior year, I had assigned reading to complete, and the temperature (nearing a hundred and ten degrees), would make the words on the page swim and congeal and turn to illegible mush. I had been accepted into a fledgling honors history program, and we were supposed to read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (we would be studying immigration and the emergence of labor unions), and a six hundred page piece of dry nonfiction chronically the first world war.

 

I read The Jungle in an afternoon; work was slow and I had the luxury of compensated time. I was usually stationed near the historic trains at the park, and though the exhibits were popular, they were not at that time air conditioned. Most visitors kept to the cool indoor buildings instead, ducking in from one to another and fanning themselves when they had to be exposed to the relentless yellow sun. I practically had my end of the park to myself, and read non-stop both before and after lunch, stopping only to give tours to children who wanted to see the trains and trolleys. Most children don’t mind harsh temperatures as much as grownups do, and they happily clanged the trolley’s silver bell and sat in the engineer’s seat of the black steam engine. Their parents and grandparents mopped sweat from their foreheads, and walked slowly as though underwater.

 

Once the tours were complete, I sat back down to read. Since I had finished The Jungle so quickly, I tried to slog through a chapter or two the World War One book, but ended up usually only finishing a page or two a day. I started placing more interesting reading materials in my backpack before work, and a small spiral bound notebook, where I would write lists of things I liked (purple pens, striped socks, dogs and cats, babies, coffee, rain, winter). Since I was avoiding my obligation to read the nonfiction book, reading the books I had selected and writing in my journal felt like a delicious indiscretion, clandestine and sexy.

 

The book I most remember reading that summer (instead of the boring one), was Tom Robbins’ Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which I had snagged from my sister’s bookshelf. She had claimed she didn’t like it; she thought Robbins was a chauvinist. Since I loved to form opinions opposite of my sister’s, I started reading it immediately and with relish. I didn’t expect much out of it at first. I didn’t really expect it to form the way I thought, and read, and wrote for the rest of my life. I still read it at least once a year.

 

The book opens with a passage about amoebas, and since I was the sort of girl that loved science from a very non-technical and purely philosophical sort of way even at sixteen, I was immediately enraptured. Here is a sentence from that first passage,

 

“Well, the first amoeba may be floating on his/her back in a luxurious pool in Hollywood, California. The first amoeba may be hiding among the cattail roots and peepers in the muddy swallows of Siwash Lake. The first amoeba may have recently dripped down your leg. It’s pointless to speculate.”

 

Immediate rapture.

 

 

During my lunch break on one of the cooler days, I took my lunch and the book to a quiet, secret spot beneath an old covered bridge that bordered the park. Lying back on the grass, using my backpack as a pillow, I looked up at the under-planks of the bridge, and the sunlight that dappled through the cracks, and read the book and wrote in my journal. It was as though something inside of my head had unlocked. Reading and writing was all I wanted to do; everything else was a cumbersome obligation.

 

That summer now sits in my memory as now the summer I found out about Sissy Hankshaw, The Chink, Bonanza Jellybean, and the Countess. I never finished the World War I book (when the honors class convened in the fall, it turned out that only one boy had actually finished the book, and none of the girls), but I read Cowgirls at least three times. Some of the parts I read so many times, and highlighted and underlined in blue ink so much, that when I open the old paperback copy now, the pages almost open of their own accord, falling away and presenting themselves to me as though I am unwrapping a gift.

 

 

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues probably isn’t considered appropriate reading material for a sixteen year old girl on any curriculum. But oh, how it taught me everything I needed to know. Kissing, fucking, loving, reading, the Universe, civilization, the open road, travel, fear, shame, physical deformities. I remember wanting to find a church where a minister would quote the book from behind the pulpit, slamming his fist down and driving truths like this into the parishioners’ heads,

 

“There are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for.” 

 

“I believe in everything; nothing is sacred. I believe in nothing; everything is sacred. Ha Ha Ho Ho Hee Hee.” 

 

 

“A book no more contains reality than a clock contains time. A book may measure so-called reality as a clock measures so-called time; a book may create an illusion of reality as a clock creates an illusion of time; a book may be real, just as a clock is real (both more real, perhaps, than those ideas to which they allude); but let’s not kid ourselves – all a clock contains is wheels and springs and all a book contains is sentences.” 

 

“Who will sing the praises of silly and dangerous kissing?”

 

I liked these words (even if they were just sentences) better than anything I had heard in church about disciplesship or salvation. Salvation from what? My life seemed beautiful and open when I was sixteen, I had yet to fall victim to the cold strong tides of alcohol and the rehabilitating plague of depression that would fall onto my head when I was seventeen. Tucked into that book, with its naughty dirty sexy interludes tucked between pockets of mind blowing philosophy, I held the universe in my young body. The first amoeba was dripping down my leg and I was eternal.

 

What about you? Was there a book (or film, or painting, or photograph, or album) that knocked your feet out beneath you at an early age? One that you were so strongly influenced by that it still permeates through your thoughts, dog-eared and soft on your soul? I’d love to hear about it. 

We Did What Was Expected of Us

We became friends as most girls do at that age; we went to school together and were neighbors. We did what was expected of us.

Her mother didn’t like me, and if she came home from work and found me sitting at her kitchen table or playing with Barbies on her daughter’s pink rug, she would call my friend into the master bedroom and speak in low stern tones,

Wrap it up. Send her home.

…and my friend would return to the bedroom, where I would be quietly making Barbie make out with Ken in a shoebox, or coloring on construction paper with my friend’s Magic Markers. My friend would say that she and her mom had to go out to dinner or church, or that she had to go to bed soon (even though the sun would still be streaming in through the dotted-Swiss curtains).

My feelings were delicate then, as they are now. The mother was slim and petite and had black hair cut trendily short; I thought she was pretty and fancy. Her lips were always painted, and her nails were always glossy and groomed. Her daughter was less of a beauty, her hair a blonde frizz, her body lumpy and shaped a bit like a potato. I didn’t even like her that much, but I liked her house because she had a canopy bed and a television in her bedroom, and everything was painted white or pink or cream. Even in the living room.

I did as I was asked to, and would leave on my bike, feeling dejected, oily, and awkward. Once home, my mother would ask why I was back so soon from playing, did we have a fight? I always told her that my friend had plans, and would then return to my own pretty, sunny bedroom to read, write stories, or draw.

At school my friend always sought me out, and never I her. I preferred playing with the girls from my class who were from India; I liked the way their hair smelled of incense and curry, and I liked to listen to their soft accents that whispered underneath the American slang they were learning quickly. Their houses were warm, and filled with jewel-toned fabric and small brass statues of the elephant-headed god Ganesh, which I liked better than the sad Jesus paintings that filled the walls of my other friends’  houses. Their mothers always made me food and seemed genuinely glad to see me in their house, and would ask are you sure you’re not an Indian girl, too? With that black hair and pretty skin? I always felt comfortable inside their homes.

But if I played with Veena or Siya at recess, my friend always found me and pulled me away, begging me to go somewhere with her. Once I relented, she would regale me with boring stories about youth group or something annoying her step-brother did over the weekend. I came to dread her constant, persistent presence.

Near the end of the fifth grade, my father announced that we were moving back to Ohio, where both of my parents came from and where my sister and I were born. My friend took the news badly; shouting that she’d have no one to be friends with in middle school, and turned red in the face and spit a little as she shouted at me (as though it was my fault that we were leaving). I was sad to leave my house and my other friends, but glad to have an excuse to leave her and her cold mother who hated me. On one of the last days of school, my friend asked me to go into one of the lesser-used bathrooms after recess, and once we were inside the cool, concrete room she moved close to me and asked if I would miss her. I could smell the cafeteria chicken nuggets that she had eaten at lunch on her hot breath, she stood so close to me. I said of course I would miss her, would she miss me? She looked over my shoulder at the bathroom door, then asked if I ever played with myself. She said she had just learned and that it was neat and I should try it. I didn’t admit to her that I knew what she was talking about, and I definitely didn’t tell her about what I had learned to do with my own hands right before I fell asleep at night. She didn’t need to know about what I did and what I knew, because that was my most private secret and she wasn’t that good of a friend to know my most private secret. So I told her I had no idea what she was talking about, and she narrowed her small eyes and said you’re lying. I left the bathroom walking backwards, saying we’d better go back, we were late.

My family and I left for Ohio a month later, and my friend faded into memory fast, quickly replaced by a different set of friends with flat, northern accents like my parents. My Ohio friends liked my Tennessee voice, and would ask me to say certain words over and over: pocketbook, oil, right, reckon, water. Their mothers liked me.

tiny spiders

I thought you might like this little guy. He’s probably from the same collection as this fellow I mentioned here. 

When I was a girl, I was in a special program at my school for gifted children. I never really felt particularly gifted; my math grades were deplorable and my handwriting was atrociously sloppy. In fact, I was always writing ‘sorry so sloppy’ on top of my papers, hoping that my apologetic note would mollify the inevitable points taken off for poor handwriting.

Most of my teachers were sympathetic to my eccentricities. One of the fifth grade teachers allowed me to do all of my work in her office with the door shut, because I didn’t like the noise of the classroom. I forget how I must have convinced her. If this were fiction, I might give myself a strong speech and a precocious, firm jutting chin. I would state my case and let my needs known articulately.

What probably happened was that I cried.

We had a science project once, where we were supposed to bring in nature studies from our backyard or neighborhood. I debated about bringing in some tent caterpillars since my backyard was filled with them. Sometimes when I was bored I’d take a stick and poke their silky nest and watch what appeared to be hundreds of them tumble out onto the grass. These were unexciting, and too brown and boring looking to impress the teacher and my classmates, so I kept looking in the backyard.

Underneath the deck, I found a spiderweb with an egg sac attached. The mother didn’t appear to be near, so I ran to the kitchen and found a small orange Tupperware container to put the sac in. I couldn’t find the lid, so I pulled some Saran Wrap and tape from a kitchen drawer and ran back underneath the deck and made sure the mother wasn’t back from hunting or hiding  in shoes or scuttling across a kitchen floor or whatever it is that mother spiders do when they’re not in their webs. Using the Saran Wrap as a barrier from actually touching the egg sac, I held the Tupperware underneath the web, pushed the sac inside, then covered it all up with the plastic wrap. Crouching on my knees on the cool ground beneath the deck, I dug up bits of dirt with my hands to put inside the container, then crawled out to gather some grass, a small twig, and a clover to add to the habitat I’d created for the soon-to-be spider orphans.

I didn’t give a thought to whether these little guys would be poisonous once they emerged, or that I had just stolen babies from their rightful mother. What I cared about was having an awesome specimen to bring into class. Maybe I could prove just how gifted of a naturalist I could be, even if I wasn’t all that gifted in math or handwriting.

Once behind my closed bedroom door, I found a purple rubber band to secure the Saran Wrap to the container, and put the little terrarium outside my window in the flower box because I didn’t want to sleep with spiders in my room, even unborn ones. A year before the flower box had a mourning dove’s nest inside of it, and I remember wishing that the nest was still there so I could bring that in instead of the egg sac. Baby birds were much cuter than baby brown recluses or black widows, both of which were common in my East Tennessee backyard.

In the morning, I put the orange Tupperware habitat in my backpack carefully, and rode the bus to school. The container went inside my cubby, because we didn’t do science until after lunch. When it was time for all of us to bring out what we had found in nature, I felt really cocksure that I would have the best find. Unfortunately, my heart sank and my chest constricted (and I suddenly had to pee), when I saw what the other kids had brought.

One boy had brought in a tiny garter snake, curled around a stick and tucked inside of a Ked’s box. My friend Veena Patel had found a bird with a broken wing and one leg, and she had made a sort of makeshift nest out of kudzu and some of her mother’s colorful sari fabric for the bird to sit in while safely enclosed in a lidless plastic tub. One girl had found a whole batch of plants and flowers that are safely edible: clover, honeysuckle, and wild strawberries. She brought enough for everyone to have a sample, and had even written out little index cards with easy recipes for the wild food (I believe there were even carefully drawn, colorful  illustrations on the cards as well, but that could be my imagination).

I felt like my little spiders were worthless. I had only pillaged a spider web and stolen the egg sac. I didn’t even take the time to make a proper home for the nest; the clover and grass had wilted and browned already.

When I looked down at the Saran Wrap cover, trying to bolster up my courage for when my turn came to share, I was horrified to find that the plastic wrap had come loose beneath the purple rubber band. What was worse: the tiny babies had hatched, and were spilling and crawling out of the small holes that I had cut in the Saran Wrap. At least twenty were already marching in a line on my desk, headed toward the floor. I raised my hand, choking back tears, and asked if I could share right now because the spiders are hatching and come look but they’re escaping!

My teacher gave out a little eep! Some of the girls said gross! and most of the boys said cool!

There were probably hundreds of them. I of course had no idea what kind of spider they were, or whether they were poisonous or not. Regardless, they were spilling onto the floor, into the classroom, ready to infest the entire fourth grade.

I covered up the hole as best I could with a piece of notebook paper, and started stomping on the little babies with my sneakered foot. The rest of the class followed suit, sending dozens of newborn arachnids to an early grave. As for the fate of the remainder of the young trapped inside the Tupperware, my teacher ended up freeing them all. She grabbed the container from my hands and ran out the door that led to the playground. We all watched out the classroom window (still stomping out the tiny spiders on the linoleum) as she shook out the grass and clover and the egg onto a grassy patch underneath a tree.

Once she returned, and had handed me back the empty container, we had all settled back into  our seats (she was strict, and we were good at listening). The next student was up and sharing, and the teacher seemed grateful for the banality of the small bouquet of wildflowers  that was presented. I felt smug knowing that only my project had stirred the room into an excited frenzy. Maybe I’d finally found my gift.

hallowed

I went there as a child, and I remember how grey the day was, and how bright the roses were against the fog. The place both fascinated and frightened me. My sister told me a fib when we were down in the kitchens and peering into the pantries (which were larger than my bedroom at home). She said that George Vanderbilt’s heart was stored in a soapbox crate, and that estate workers still heard it beating at night. Soon after hearing that (and hissing that’s not true, gross), I was separated from our group and hung behind and kept staring into the pantry, both at the wooden crates with Ivory stamped on their sides in blue ink and at the pretty rows of turquoise Mason jars on the shelves. I wasn’t scared, and I didn’t really believe my sister’s story. At seven I had recently started seeing and feeling the thick black line that separates the real and the imaginary, and somehow I knew that a beating Vanderbilt heart sounded too much like fiction to be true.

I walked slowly to find my family, who were only a hundred steps or so ahead of me. In the stone hallways, which were dark and only lit with Edison bulbs in cage lights that flickered and gave off a smell of ozone, there were dressing rooms for the pool and the exercise room. Chiffon robes hung from cast iron hooks, towels as white and sweet-smelling as gardenias lay folded on glossy, polished mahogany benches. So fancy and fine compared to the YMCA locker room where my sister and I changed into our swimsuits during the summer months. In this deep and rich place, a maid dressed in black and white probably followed the guests and family around with a copper handled mop, wiping up all the drips of pool water that fell from smooth, wet legs onto the cobblestone floor. No one must slip; no one must be delayed from their perfect day. The wealth and the detail of the place wrapped me up in a tingling sort of warmth I hadn’t felt before. My family was still ahead, but I walked slowly, letting the atmosphere and the color sink into my skin and memory.

I walked past the dressing rooms, pool, and bowling alley, and finally turned into a two-story storage room, which was painted floor to ceiling with brightly painted murals. Compared to the cultivated elegance of the rest of the house, this room was full of raw creation, like the rough draft of a classic novel.

When the house was still a home, there had been a large Halloween party. The women had dressed as peacocks and gangster’s molls and the men as cowboys and Indians, and as the party yawned on past midnight, the girls were bored and the men had swallowed too much bourbon. Cornelia, the only daughter of George and Edith Vanderbilt, suggested that they take her paints and cover the grey walls with color. She had the soul of an artist, and used to go to her father’s rooftop observatory and cover large canvasses with vast shapes and glowing color.  The rest of the party agreed with Cornelia and was game to paint the room. If Cornelia Vanderbilt suggested they paint, then they would paint. But she was not just charming because she was so well-off and influential, she was also funny and kind.  She held a sort of unconventional beauty: her eyes were soulful, her mouth red and permanently curled into a slight smirk, her neck long and sinewy like a swan’s.

A servant was called to gather the paints and brushes (he was rung sharply awake from a deep slumber, dreaming of his Sunday off). The festive group painted until the next morning, the feathers and flowers in the women’s hair drooped and wilted, and the men’s hats were thrown onto a table and forgotten. Cornelia felt alive and exhilarated, even after an evening of no sleep.

The murals are still there, the colors still vibrant as a Van Gogh. They painted the walls in a frenetic tromp l’oeil fashion, transforming the dreary big room into a Cuban terrace in the moonlight. Ghostly women, ravens and doves, and men playing guitars in crudely shaped windows cover the darkest corners. As a child I thought it was the most beautiful, glamorous place in the world.

My sister and parents were there in the Halloween room, appearing small and modern in their shorts and polo shirts. They were looking at historical photographs that hung on half-walls in the center of the room. Even after I touched my mother’s soft arm and let her know I was now one of them again, I hung back a little the rest of the tour, wanting to be a bit alone in that hallowed place.