That's the best introduction I've ever had.
That was just wonderful.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
I'm going to lower this a little bit.
I should say one little just side thing.
When the five women were nominated for the National Book
Award, we all became friends.
So we those of us who were still left
in New York, which is not all of us,
always go to each other's readings.
It's like five years later when we kept that.
So that's what those women do.
Yeah.
I'm going to read you, I wanted to read you something new
because that's nice for me.
I get to hear what my work sounds like.
So I just finished another book of linked stories called Fools.
And this is one story from the group.
And I write these very long rambling stories
so I can't read the whole thing.
But I'm going to read you some chunks of it.
So every so often, I'll stop and sum up
what happened in that bit.
And then I'll go on.
But even so, it'll still be one piece.
But I hope it will hold together for you.
You don't really need to know anything before it starts.
It's starting right at the start of World War II.
When my father was in prison, my mother took us to visit him.
I was 9 when he first went in and my sister was six.
Some of my mother's friends thought
taking us there was a mistake.
"The girls have to know," my mother said.
"They're not too young.
And why would I do that to Joe?"
My father was in Danbury, Connecticut,
which my mother said was nicer than a lot of places.
And he was there on principle.
I knew what principle was.
He was against the war.
Despite his despising Hitler and Hirohito as much
as anyone ever could, he was against all wars
waged by governments.
He was against governments.
He was an anarchist.
Other people my parents knew went into the army as medics
or did service at special camps.
But not my dad who wouldn't register for the draft.
I had a fair idea what registration was.
But my sister didn't get it.
My mother dressed us nicely for these two-hour bus trips,
in pleated skirts and Mary Janes,
as if we were going to visit a relative.
Which we were.
We had never, of course, thought of our father this way.
And Barbara, my sister, shrieked when she first
saw him in those brown clothes that weren't his,
with his mouth a tight line in his face.
"Get her shushed," the guard said.
"Or get her out of here.
I'll say it once."
My father had an expression I'd never seen before--
a wince of mortification.
I made a zipping motion over my sister's lips, sealing them.
"Hey, muffins," he said to us.
We were in a visitor's room with a bunch
of wooden chairs and several other families
and dramas of their own.
Our mother made us tell him what we'd done in school.
Barbara had learned the state capitals,
and I had come in second in a spelling bee
after Maxie Pfeiffer, who thought
she was the top of the world "Second is good,"
my father said.
We couldn't bring crayons or pencils or toys into this room,
so when my mother wanted adult talk,
she had me take my sister into a corner
and tell stories to entertain her.
We sat on the pitted linoleum and linoleum
and I made up a story about a blue elf that made no sense.
Barbara pretended to like it.
"Behave yourselves, kitten heads," my father
said when we left.
On the bus going home, my mother opened a bag
with special treats--
celery stuffed with cream cheese,
ham sandwiches with relish, homemade brownies and date nut
squares, and a thermos of lemonade.
We were very excited.
The whole trip seemed to have been
so we could have this food.
We learned to expect treats on every trip, donated
by friends or baked by a hardworking mother at night.
my dad was allowed an hour of us a month,
which could be broken up into two half-hour visits.
The visits had creepy aspects.
Our mother had to go behind a curtain to be searched.
One of the prisoners had a face like a panther.
The guards blocked us and made us go home the time we
were four minutes late.
All the same, we mostly look forward to going.
Our father was quieter there than at home--
no rowdy games, no tickling--
but he could tease us about our big feet
or tell us we were more beautiful than Lana Turner.
His voice was still his voice.
The kids in school were the problem.
My father didn't care if the enemy bombed and burned
and shot everyone in his own country.
He didn't care who died among all the brothers
and fathers who are fighting for all of this, all of us.
I heard this all day every day from kids I didn't know
and kids I did.
"He's my father," I said.
Maxie Pfeiffer dared another girl
to punch me in the stomach.
I had been taught not to hit, and my hands
trying to shield myself just made everybody laugh.
A teacher broke us up and sent the girl into detention--
Maxie went free-- but I was never safe at school.
Barbara didn't have it easy either.
Once they threw a bag of dog shit at her back.
My friend Ruthie's family wouldn't
let me come to their apartment anymore.
Ruthie said, "Does your father want Hitler to kill us?
We're Jewish, you know."
"I know," I said.
"I've only known you since you were five."
Her parents wouldn't let her in my house either.
But we were old enough to go to the park in Washington Square
ourselves--
there, in New York--
where we continue to game about cowgirls and runaway horses
that we'd played for years.
There was a grassy spot across from the fountain
that we especially liked, and we met in all weather,
out on the range in earmuffs.
None of this got easier as time went on.
My father was sentenced to a year.
And when he came home, my sister kept sitting on his lap
every time he sat down, and I was always tap-dancing for him.
I pursued him nonstop with the shuffle-off-to-Buffalo.
There was a big party to celebrate his return,
with music on the Victrola and my mother giggling.
She kept working at the job she had now,
sketching ads for a department store in Brooklyn.
And our dad was mostly home, where he read a lot.
I didn't understand what happened next.
The law still wanted him to register for the draft.
Hadn't he already told them?
He had to tell them again.
He was home for six months, and then he was back in prison.
My sister Barbara was a mess, so I had to be not a mess.
I ignored her stupid whining and I
acted very upright and prissy, which was a good idea.
After a while, she tried to imitate me
and stopped being such a pill.
My mother started to visit the prison more often without us.
And in my dad's second year there, he
was part of a work strike because he didn't like it
that colored men had to sit separate in the dining room.
My father told the guards he wouldn't work.
And this went on for months, and none of us
could get in to see him.
I was a teenager and the war was over by the time
they let my father out.
He had been a jovial talkative man before he'd gone in.
He came out shadowy and subdued, a phantom father.
But then, week by week, he grew more distinct and animated.
He spoke to us more often and more loudly.
Sometimes he was newly bossy, checking
to see if we'd made our beds, making us wait to eat
until our mother sat down.
We were a little afraid of him now.
In the meantime, I was starting to think about boys.
In high school, people still knew
my father had helped the enemy, but some boys decided
it wasn't my fault. I liked almost any boy who liked me.
I couldn't get over the thrill of their interest,
though I had been raised to be a serious person.
Various boys joked around with me after school
or leaned over me on the subway ride home,
but nothing came of it until there
was an argument among the staff of the school
newspaper about whether we needed another article
about prom etiquette.
And this boy and I were on the same side against it.
He was a broody, sharp-edged guy with a nicely developed sense
of irony, which allured me greatly.
Walking on the street after the newspaper meeting--
our side had lost--
we did our own spoof of a student boob
presenting a corsage and stabbing the girl with a pin.
I clutched my chest and leaned against a stoplight
to act out my wound.
He pretended to half carry me across the street,
and all that horsing around was extremely interesting.
What was his name?
Ted Pfeiffer.
He was Maxie Pfeiffer's his older brother.
This twist of fate was not as jarring as the other known fact
that came with it-- the father in that family
had been killed in the last year of the war.
"I know your sister," I said.
"She's a total pain," he said.
It wasn't until our third time at the movies
when he made a move to start necking,
and I absolutely didn't stop him.
And we emerged from the theater with pink, blurred faces,
a tickled-to-death couple, that he told me on the way home
that he really hadn't wanted to start
dating me because of my father.
"But you're not him," he said.
"Are you?"
I didn't even pause.
I didn't resist or explain or defend our family faith.
"No, I'm not," I said.
"Definitely not."
I would have said anything to keep him with me to make
sure he didn't change his mind.
And perhaps I was lucky he didn't ask me anything worse.
But that was the beginning for me-- and I knew it--
of a different life.
When I got back inside our apartment
I looked at my mother who had fallen
asleep on the sofa waiting for me, and I thought,
this apartment is really shabby.
And in the room I shared with my sister,
I hissed at Barbara when she woke up.
"Stop looking at me.
I despise you looking at me."
For a long time, I'd held what I thought of as two opinions.
With my parents, I was entirely against the war and all wars.
What could be gained by millions of people
marching out with the sole purpose of killing as many
of each other as they could?
I couldn't believe this butchery was allowed,
had always been allowed.
The ugliest of all insanities.
I was proud of my father for not going along with any of it.
On the other hand, we all saw the photos of the concentration
camps in Europe after our soldiers went in,
the living skeletons lying among piles of corpses.
And what if our side hadn't won?
Could people who did such things ever be stopped by peaceable
means?
I didn't mind having two viewpoints.
It made talking to my friends easier--
especially Ruthie-- and it showed
that I was advanced enough as a thinker
to hold more than one idea in my mind at a time.
Wasn't that a sign of a higher intelligence?
"It's OK to have two opinions," my mother said.
"If all you have to do is have an opinion.
If."
I thought my mother, typically, was making everything harder
than it had to be.
Meanwhile, Ted and I were getting along extremely well.
We cracked each other up at the newspaper meetings.
We talked about what a bunch of yahoos most of the school was.
We argued about whether Tolstoy was better than Dostoevsky--
I said, "Tolstoy is fuller"--
and we agreed about William Dean Howells really being boring.
And he walked me between classes at school--
a sign of major attention.
This is what real life is, I thought, at his side
in the hallways, and I have it already.
Even Maxie started being nicer to me.
Once when I was complaining about a sudden streak
of sultry weather in May, Ted said, "My father
always liked the heat."
And I stopped feeling that he held
his father's dying against me.
I had gone over to another feeling, an envy
of what Ted knew about death.
"You should like hot weather, then," I said to him.
"As a tribute."
He nodded at this he liked by making room
for his ceremonies of memory.
We did a lot of necking.
I was only 16.
I didn't think-- and he didn't demand--
we would get into actual sex.
But we hovered in an exquisite border area,
became a depth in every shading of excitement.
How slow and patient we were then,
how attenuated in our efforts.
It was the sweetheart desire of innocence,
for all its shocks and grunts and revelations.
He was two years ahead of me in school,
and I did not have a good feeling about his graduating,
though I gave him a very nice edition of Tolstoy's
Resurrection as a present.
I didn't like the way he thanked me
by saying, "I only hope I'll have time to read it."
He was going to city college just a subway ride uptown,
but I had reason to fear he'd slip away from me.
And I wasn't wrong.
He took up with some female from his Western Civ class,
and then, more fatally, with a blonde
who worked in the library.
He decided that we should no longer fence each other in
and that I was free to date other people.
During his speech, he looked stern and aggrieved
at having to speak at all.
"Thank you for the blessing of liberty," I said.
Sarcasm was not even slightly effective.
What could I do?
I wanted to fight for him.
Fight hard and dirty, if I had to.
I had my pride and my upbringing,
but I wasn't above using Maxie.
Nothing sneaky, but I goaded her into inventing mean nicknames--
Frog Eyes, Miss Dainty--
and using her gifts of mimicry after the poor girlfriend
paid a family visit.
Maxie claimed the girl had actually said,
"I adore pot roast," and Maxi loudly adored everything
in sight for weeks after.
My job was to be the true blue one.
If I ran into him--
Maxie aided this--
I was friendly, forthright, calm.
"Great to see you, Ted.
Everything OK?"
Ever loyal.
Very, very warm.
My mother did not admire my scheming.
"What can you gain by trickery?" she said.
"It's not tricks," I said.
"And all is fair in love and war."
"Oh, Louise," she said.
"Can you hear yourself?
Can you?"
I spent two years of my adolescence gutted
by the outrage of being without him, eaten up
with agonized guesses about my future.
It was constantly clear to me what I had to have.
Every cell in my body was fixed in certainty
I had no way to know whether I would win.
All the nights of imagined raptures--
could they be for nothing?
My friend Ruthie, who didn't have anything going yet,
envied my suffering and probably thought
it was better to have loved and lost than never
to have loved at all.
But I didn't.
And I didn't have a plan B.
When Ruthie said, "You could get Allan Raddatz to like you,
if you wanted," I said, "No, thank you.
No.
No halfway measures.
No compromises."
I knew what I knew.
I shouldered my burden.
I had been bred to staunchness.
So after their breaking up when he's in college,
they do get back together again.
No triumph could have been purer, more glorious,
than those early days of having him back.
I was smug with victory.
I went around giving my sister the most platitudinous advice
about love and life.
If it's meant to be, it happens.
When you know, you know.
His mother was less than pleased about me
and tended to refer to my parents as reds.
No matter how many times I explained,
they were anarchists, not Marxists.
The black flag, not the red flag.
And their actions these days are mostly down to picketing
with labor unions.
Perfectly lawful.
I did go out on picket lines with them--
we'd always done this as a family--
but I wasn't big on chanting.
"They're just slogans," I said.
"What do you have faith in?" my mother said.
The truth.
Was that I wanted to be ordinary.
I wanted the coziness of private life.
Why should that be out of reach?
Why couldn't I have that?
"I have faith in people," I said.
"What does that mean?" my mother said.
"You think you can do without ideas.
But you can't."
I lasted through 2 and 1/2 years of college,
and then Ted and I were married.
I'm going to skip ahead a little bit.
My parents were against my marrying Ted.
My mother said, "You're selling yourself to the first bidder."
A surprisingly bitter thing for her to say.
But they put together a decent wedding for me.
Not fancy, but with bouquets of pink carnations
and a real cake from the bakery.
Everyone was crowded into our living room
and we had a Unitarian minister, which satisfied no one.
And I wore a dress I'd sewn from a pattern,
with a scalloped neck and a gathered skirt in dotted Swiss,
white on white.
I love the dress.
Ted had managed to graduate a semester early,
and the city was in bleak winter.
We moved into a tenement on the Lower East Side
with crappy heating, and I worked
very hard to make it nice.
We paid the rent from Ted's new job teaching English
in high school, and I liked all the budgeting and household
cleverness.
No one in my family admired the cotton drapes
I made for the windows.
A tasteful slubbed weave and creamy beige?
"I can see a lot of effort went into this,"
my mother said, not that nicely.
"Isn't everything you fight for,"
I said, "the peace and the fair wages
for the sake of each family?"
"We fight for freedom," my sister said.
"Not for cornflakes."
But I fooled them all by being happy.
Ted came home every day from being a permanent sub,
teaching five English classes--
oh God, five-- of 9th and 10th graders in deepest Brooklyn,
and he could be very funny.
We crack up over their misapprehensions
of Silas Marner and their hilarious sentences,
and I'd get indignant on his behalf
when the principal made absurd decrees.
And in this spirit of teamwork, we ate my excellent meals.
And by dessert, I was explaining why
I thought Pearl Buck wasn't that great a writer
or how Tolstoy could get into any character's head.
I had plenty of time to read.
We were happy in bed, too.
I had a life of considerable animal pleasures,
a day of simple tasks easily done,
and a husband who treated me well.
I felt very elemental in our fifth floor walk-up,
with its clanging pipes and lopsided walls.
I was a person who guessed right about what was essential.
I had what I wanted.
How many people have that?
I didn't even mind this summer when our small boxed in rooms
were airless ovens and we slept on the fire escape.
Ted was teaching summer school to make more money.
And in the days alone, I'd go dunk myself
in the municipal pool on Carmine Street,
near where I used to live.
The pool was so crowded, it was like swimming on the subway.
But I'd see Ruthie or other girls I'd known in high school,
and I felt older, calmer, less worried than they were.
I'd lie on a towel in my bathing suit
and be very aware that my body was not a virgin's body.
Summer school had all the students who'd flunked.
And Ted was stuck with seventh grade--
which he wasn't even licensed for--
a nightmarish age, squirming, untamed creatures.
He could not get them interested in the poetry of Oliver Wendell
Holmes or the need for verb agreement.
They were always talking, eating candy, passing notes,
exploding into elicit laughter over who knew what.
One evening, Ted said he had worked
out a plan for dominance.
He told the class that any student who
reported on another student eating in class
or passing a note would be rewarded
with an extra tenth of a point toward his or her grade.
"You're training them to rat on each other?"
I said.
"I'm teaching them to be loyal to me above all."
"That's fascism," I said.
He laughed.
In my family, ratting was the lowest of the low.
My father had survived in prison by not breaking solidarity
with other inmates and refusing special favors from the warden,
lest people think he was a spy.
And in the years since, more than one friend
had gone to prison rather than give
any names of people who belonged to the so-called Communist
fronts.
"So you bribe them to turn each other in?"
I said.
"And you're going to give them a false grade
with padded points?"
"You know absolutely nothing about keeping control
in the classroom," he said.
"You have no idea, do you?"
Ted came home the next day and said, "Ha!
It's working."
Three boys were turned in for eating a bag of Tootsie Rolls.
He'd sent the three to the principal's office
while Ricky, the kid reported them, crowed in his seat
and was full of himself all day.
When the boys came back to class the following day,
they stole Ricky's shoes, ripped his shirt,
and then claimed to find a half-eaten Milky
Way on his desk.
"Here is the evidence.
You said we had to have evidence."
Ted walked all four of them, whining in protest,
to the principal.
All was calm, except the principal came by after school
to ask why Ted was having so much trouble.
"Uh oh," I said,
"I have to think of other punishments."
"You had to what?"
I saw there I didn't know him very well, which
made me feel extremely stupid.
I hadn't seen him this way before
because I hadn't seen him up close when he was losing.
He was losing this class.
I could tell.
The punishment he invented was docking their grades.
And the summer became a tournament
of shave points up and down, a mess of calculations,
and pettiness, and futile warfare.
He explained its progress often, and I could never
follow what he was saying.
I felt sorry for him, with his bluster and his vain efforts.
Who was he kidding?
I felt increasingly sorry for me.
Not that there was much to do about it, but
why did I wait at the end of every day with dinner
on the stove for a conversation I only wanted to get away from?
The system didn't work if I didn't believe in him.
Everything seemed ridiculous, including the drapes
I'd been so tickled with.
And who and who did I think I was?
"Feet of clay," anyone would have
said, if I had complained about my husband.
"A mere bump in the long and winding road of marriage."
My mother guessed, and I didn't want her to guess.
I could tell by the way she peered at me
and patted my hand.
I told my mother I wasn't pregnant,
if that's what she was worried about.
We were still having sex, and I didn't hate the sex either.
It was now a more private set of excitements,
as if I were crying out to myself.
What a liar I was becoming on all counts,
scared and selfish both.
Ted half knew, but only half.
Some women stayed in love with their husband's long
after the men began to beat them or cheat on them
or publicly shame them.
Ted was hardly guilty of anything worse than being
a new and incompetent teacher.
I knew that.
I told myself that.
I'm just going to read you one more little section.
Ted does sort of know that she's becoming disenchanted with him.
And they quarrel very badly, but they make up.
She doesn't want to lose him.
And I'm just going to read you one little extra section.
This is after they've been fighting.
All that suffering had a good effect on us
in bed, as if we had been through a war
together as comrades, not enemies.
Our natures were more fully bared to each other.
We had only to take off our clothes
to be our more audacious, less innocent selves.
We knew more.
We went further.
It startled us both, and we laughed in astonishment after.
When Ted went back to school in September,
he was given an extra class.
Could his day be any fuller?
and I was outraged for him, which he liked.
When he had to appear at Meet The Teachers night,
I decided to be eager to be in the audience.
I sat with the other wives in the big wood and linoleum
auditorium, surrounded by a sea of parents,
while our spouses stood and explained
their educational goals.
Ted said he hoped to bring students
to an understanding of the power of the English language.
A Mr. Sloane, whose wife was next to me
said, he believed that algebra refined all thinking.
"Well, they have to say something," the wife whispered.
"Or take the Fifth Amendment," I said.
A Latin teacher in the school had
been fired for doing that when asked about communists
in the teachers' union.
And I suddenly thought, this is not my best joke.
Not funny to me.
But the woman smiled.
"At least they're not talking about locking the bad students
in the closet," she murmured.
"They used to do that when I was a kid.
Some of them need it now."
"I'll say," she said.
"My husband bribes them to rat on each other," I said.
"Does he?" she said.
Someone shushed us and I flinched in my seat.
It was right to shut me up.
What sort of person had I become now
with spite leaking out of me?
If Ted had started baiting and buying off his ninth graders,
what did it matter to me?
I had to hope she would forget my words.
Why would she bother to remember?
And I got away from Mrs. Sloane when we all filed into the gym
for punch and cookies.
"You were excellent," I said to Ted.
"Oh shucks," he said.
But I knew what I was.
At the slightest opportunity, at the first instant that offered,
I'd informed on my husband.
Just like that.
Speaking against him had been very easy.
Every day, people were hounded for refusing to bear witness
against someone.
They were fired or arrested or blacklisted
for being un-American.
And still, they kept their mouths shut, on principle.
And me?
I leaped at the chance to spread a small bit of damage
about the man I slept with every night.
I'm going to stop here.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]