Good evening.
I hope you can stay after the reading,
and have some punch and cookies with us
and get acquainted with Nancy Mairs.
Our next reading is in this auditorium on October 4th.
And the readers are Jon Anderson and C.E. Poverman,
both of the University Creative Writing faculty.
There is a reading for Among Other Things this Saturday.
And I'm sorry I don't have all the details on that.
But you can call the Poetry Center if you want more.
The Borderlands Theater is presenting Visions and Voices
on the Border through this Sunday
at the Historic Teatro Carmen at 380 South Meyer.
This choreographed theater piece features poetry and music
from Native American, African-American, and Latino
cultures.
I hope that you'll all want to come visit the Poetry Center.
We're in our new quarters now at 1216 North Cherry.
And although we haven't got everything unpacked,
we are open for business.
And we have this fear that no one's going to come over
because we're so far away.
We're a block and a half north of Speedway now,
but it's a very comfortable place,
and I hope you will come visit us.
Nancy Mairs is a graduate of the University of Arizona.
And it's always such a wonderful pleasure
to introduce one of our own.
She's a poet, essayist, and her most recent book
is a book of memoirs.
I have to read the titles because I've taken so much flak
for making mistakes.
The new book is Remembering the Bone House:
An Erotics of Place and Space, which was recently
published by Harper & Row.
University of Arizona Press brought out her collection
of essays called Plaintext.
And she has two books of poetry, In All the Rooms of the Yellow
House and Instead it is Winter.
Her honors include the 1984 Western States Book Award
for In All the Rooms of the Yellow House,
fellowships at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference,
prizes from the Academy of American Poets, and her work
appears in many small magazines.
It's a great pleasure to introduce tonight: Nancy Mairs.
OK, first of all, can you hear me?
Is this arrangement going to work?
Is it picking up?
Is it coming all the way through?
OK. .
Good.
I was just saying to Lois, the last time I read here,
I had temporary crowns in the front
and they had just popped out, and I
read looking like the witch from Hansel and Gretel.
You may still think I look like the witch from Hansel
and Gretel, but at least I have my front teeth.
At least I won't lisp the whole time.
When I'd finished Remembering the Bone House about a year
ago, I felt finished in a way that was kind of new to me.
And reflecting on that, I began to realize that in a way,
it was the third part of a single ongoing project that
had begun in In All the Rooms of the Yellow House
and continued through.
And I thought what I'd do tonight
is try to illustrate what I mean by that by reading a bit out
of each book, selecting one theme
that I was grappling with each time.
The poetry being, perhaps, the most distanced and the most
symbolic.
And then moving into the essay format in Plaintext,
which sort of foregrounds intellectual processes.
And finally, coming sort of straight up
against the real stuff in Remembering the Bone House.
Some of that part's going to be a little explicit,
so I guess I'm just warning you, if you want to get up
and bolt, it's OK.
Start off with a couple of poems from In All the Rooms
of the Yellow House.
First one is called Beast of My Heart.
We live in this white and yellow space just large
enough for a woman of bone and a black cat.
The woman, me, the black cat, ma bête noire,
the beast of my heart.
Who eats the tip of my pen as I write.
Who kills my apron hanging beside the refrigerator
in the night when I am not awake to defend it.
Bête Noire is drowsing on the latest revision of my latest
short story, which will one day be
rejected in a personal letter by the New Yorker.
She is dreaming, I think, of the Russian blue in the next yard
or of the doves whose feet scrabble on the roof or of me.
When I kill myself, I do it with a handful of tiny yellow pills.
Bête Noire sleeps against my feet to keep us warm.
And the second one I wrote for Ed Abbey's daughter, Susie,
who was a little girl at the time who had lost a cat just
about the time that Bête Noire was killed.
It's called, For a Child Who has Lost Her Cat.
They go, you know.
No matter the dish of tinned tuna,
the nest you build in your own quilts, the felt mouse,
and the ball with pink and yellow stripes,
they disappear into the paths of cars, into talons and beaks,
into the arms of strangers, and the ravages of private disease.
And from their leavings, we learn of living.
How everything that pads into the night,
soft-footed, sleek, pads out again, leaving traces.
The essay from Plaintext is--
[? let's go down a bit.
?] It's sort of hard to remember now,
but I think it's the first essay I wrote.
I mean, you know, it wasn't an assignment for freshman comp.
First, what's called in the pedagogical trade,
self-sponsored essay.
And I wrote it, in fact, in the first class
that Ed Abbey taught in nonfiction here
in spring of 1981.
It's called On Touching By Accident.
Those of us who would be suicides
come at odd bits of knowledge about the failings
of the human heart.
Not necessarily literal heart failure, of course.
A good many of us stopped short of that point,
for one reason or another.
Virginia Woolf, for instance, who
swallowed a lethal dose of Veronal in 1913,
did not take her final walk into the river ooze with her pockets
full of stones until 1941.
We may survive.
We often do.
The failings I'm talking about have
to do not with death, which is another matter altogether.
The one experience Woolf noted, I shall never describe.
But with life, with lives.
The last time I tried to kill myself, a number of things
happened to me.
Most of them predictable and some of them not very pleasant.
But one of them was odd enough that still, months later, I
returned to the thought of it, amused
and puzzled and more than a little
anxious about its significance.
I am a depressive.
Researchers know surprisingly little about my condition,
which is called unipolar depression, to distinguish it
from bipolar or manic depression.
It may be caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain.
It occurs cyclically and each person
has his own cycle, or more likely,
her own cycle, since far more women
suffer from depression than men.
No one knows why, though some very good reasons
have been proposed.
Depression is characterized by disturbances
in normal physiological functions
like eating and sleeping, and by suicidal thoughts or acts
arising from a sense of personal worthlessness and despair.
As a rule, a depressive does not attempt suicide
until she begins to feel better.
Probably because in the depths of depression,
she has felt too powerless even to kill herself.
Several doctors have told me, with a good deal
of satisfaction, that I am a textbook case.
I do not like being a textbook case.
I feel dull.
Nonetheless, every so often, I fall off the edge of the world
into a void even blacker than the one that
kept medieval sailors in chartered waters.
And just as soon as I begin to emerge,
I grab for the bottle of pills.
Just so the last time.
Gradually, my consciousness filled
with the image of a thin, sharp blade drawing again and again
across the blue veins in my wrist.
This image is symbolic only except for one
youthful attempt.
I have never tried to slash my wrist,
and would not now choose to do so.
And I'm never entirely free from it.
But when it becomes so repetitive that it screens out
the faces and voices of people around me,
even my own face in the mirror, then I
know I am in mortal danger.
Wonderful how such cliches take on their original purity
and force in literal context.
I kept checking myself for signs of survival.
I polished my fingernails and had a permanent.
I bought a director's chair in which to sit in the sun,
and a soft plum colored velveteen blazer.
I sent a short story to the New Yorker.
And you all know what happened to that one.
People who do such things, I reasoned,
do not commit suicide.
Finally, however, exhausted by the moment to moment decisions
to stay alive, I decided on a Tuesday
that I would kill myself on Friday night.
From then on, I was frantically busy.
I had to sort through the tottering piles on my desks
at home and in my office.
I had to catch up on the teaching
duties I had neglected, and plan activities
for the rest of the semester so that whoever took over
could do so with the least possible disruption
to my students' learning.
[INAUDIBLE] We take this stuff seriously, guys.
I had to write a long letter to George
listing the names and numbers of people to notify,
reminding him that my body was to be donated for research
into multiple sclerosis.
Detailing the distribution of my personal effects.
During that time, I also did a couple
of interviews for a television program about the disabled
that I was hosting, I had a drink with a friend,
I invited my daughter to spend a night with me
in the apartment to which I'd moved a few weeks before,
and bought her a pink striped shirt
and a pair of purple jeans at the time I bought my blazer.
By Friday night I was tired.
I thought about staying home from the Halloween party
I'd said I'd go to.
But finally, I put on my new blazer and went.
And all evening, harlequins and witches and men
with gigantic bosoms and mini skirts
asked me, where's your costume?
And I said carefully each time, you're looking at it.
I had a pretty good time.
To be sure, the man with whom I was
in love, who had recently thrown me over--
another pure and forceful cliche--
was there, annihilating me.
But then, a well-known novelist flirted with me,
so I must have had some substance.
I was kissed by a pirate, and possibly also by a devil.
I didn't drink much, I left early.
When I got home, the backyard of my little apartment building
where I parked my car was dark.
But there was a moon and I'd left my porch light
on so I could find my door.
As I stuck the key into the lock,
a figure danced out of the darkness.
A clown, I think, in a pink ruffled suit, and pleaded,
oh, can I use your bathroom?
I'm at this party over there.
Vague gesture.
And the line to the bathroom is miles long
and I've been drinking all this beer
and I'm about to burst and.
Sure, I said, swinging the door in.
It's in there.
While she peed torrentially, I turned on the radio,
opened a beer, and put down fresh food
for Bête Noire, who was twisting around my ankles
like a dervish.
The clown flushed and came out, yanking at her ruffles.
This is so hard to get in and out of, she moaned.
Oh, thank you.
You saved my life.
I just couldn't have waited any longer.
She was pink and plump.
I didn't think she was old enough for the beer.
Oh, there you are, she called to a shadow
that loomed on the doorstep.
And off she bounded, recounting my heroic rescue of her
in her moment of greatest need.
I close the door behind her.
I went into the bathroom and started
taking Elavil while I washed my face and undressed.
I went back into the tidy white bedroom, living room, kitchen,
study, and sat down at my desk.
Still taking the Elavil three by three,
I finished my letter to George and tried
to write in my journal, but my vision was too badly blurred.
I dropped the bottle of Elavil and couldn't
see to pick it up again.
That clumsiness probably saved my life.
That and Bête Noir.
I had at first thought I would turn
on my stove and heater, which had no pilot lights,
and thus hastened the work of the drug.
But Bête was so tiny that I knew the gas would
kill her long before me.
And I couldn't bear the thought of her black body
still and lifeless.
By this time, I had no sense of myself
or anyone else as a living creature.
And when, later, a psychiatrist asked
if I hadn't tried to call for help after taking all
those pills, I had to say that I didn't know there was anyone
to call.
Yet I couldn't kill the kitten.
George found me 18 hours later and took me to the emergency
room where, after a few hours on a heart
monitor and the obligatory psychiatric interview,
I was pronounced a survivor and sent home.
I had, at some point, roused having to go to the bathroom
and unable to get even to my hands and knees
and drag myself around my apartment, battering my body
and smearing the floor with blood and urine.
But I heal quickly.
Before long, the bruises faded and the scabs fell off.
I was still shaky, but no longer suicidal.
I had let a lot of my responsibilities slide,
so I threw myself into activity and forgot the whole mess
as much and as quickly as possible.
Then one day, six weeks or so later,
when I was having lunch with a friend
and we were swapping stories of failed love and suicide,
I saw suddenly the round, pink, ruffled form
of the little clown dancing through my door
and into my bathroom.
I had wholly forgotten her and the young man
waiting for her in the shadows under my cedar trees.
I was startled by the memory, so quick, so complete.
Startled and amused, and I began to describe it to my friend.
Just then, though, the man who had thrown me over,
with whom I was still in love, asked if he might join us.
And naturally, we had to speak of other things.
I never finished my story about the clown.
I have thought of her often since then, however.
She entered my life so lightly, this child,
needing only a place to empty her bladder so that she
wouldn't disgrace herself.
At just the moment when I was planning to leave.
So she couldn't have known that.
And I wonder whether I have done just the same thing myself.
Wandering through some other's desolation in my costume,
tight jeans, soft shirt, dusky velveteen blazer,
cane, needing some quick favor on my way.
How many times?
And when?
At the time I wrote that essay, the experience was--
I'm not good with mechanical devices.
The time that I wrote that essay, as you can tell,
the experience was still fairly fresh
in my memory, which perhaps added
to the vividness of the writing.
But hadn't permitted me the time to reflect on the significance
of the whole experience.
And so when I wrote Remembering the Bone House some years
by that time later, I was coming to it
from a much different vantage point.
Not just a survivor, but kind of long term
survivor at that point, with distance from it
enough to try to understand what was underneath the desolation
of a woman thrown over.
You know, what was really at work.
Why does an experience like that desolate?
And I think it's not an idiosyncratic experience.
I think there are a lot of women, perhaps
here in this room, who could say, yeah,
I've been done in by just that kind of thing,
that kind of abandonment, or what have you.
But there would be other possible ways of responding
to such an experience.
I might, for instance, have been really pissed
and said, well, the more fool he for dumping me,
what a terrible loss for him, or something like that.
But I didn't.
I never never thought of it that way at all.
Why not?
As I say, from the distance I then had,
I was able to ask questions like that.
And so I think that the retelling in this book
is both closer in a kind of physiological sense
because a lot of what I do in Remembering the Bone House,
the significance of the title is that bone house
is the literal translation of the Anglo-Saxon word for body.
Your ban-hus is your body.
And repeatedly, in the book, I'm trying
to come at literal physical experience which
has been overlaid by all kinds of cultural layers.
So I sort of stripped those off.
So that was at work.
But then also that sense of trying
to understand the resonances of an experience, not
just the raw material, but the significance.
The book is written as a series of essays
and each one is divided into subsections.
And each of those sections is further
divided so that it's kind of like snapshots, kind
of like verbal snapshots.
I can't really-- it works on the printed page.
I can't really do it orally, except to pause a little longer
where the white space is on the page
between the different sections.
But this is section four of the essay called The Desert.
I fall in love with a man because he eats a cup of yogurt
with a fork.
From the frailty of this pretext,
you can guess, though I don't, how ripe I am for capitulation.
Richard has come into my office to eat lunch with me.
But he's forgotten a spoon and all I've got in my desk
is a fork with twisted tines, kind of like the one
my old school principal, Bessie M. Buker,
used to wrap the cafeteria door frame with
to get our attention.
The sight of Richard making do with that disarms me.
Well, there's more.
Smiles in the corridor and little compliments
and witty notes in my mailbox.
All the small singling out gestures
that signal the presence of an other on one's
cluttered horizon.
Slowly he comes into focus, a lovely long body
with good Legs, tight from cycling,
and a deep chest below narrow shoulders,
a shock of black hair, a dense beard framing
sensuous lips, pale hazel eyes.
I think off and on about having an affair with him.
But the idea makes me tired.
Having an affair, I remember, requires
a lot of effort, a lot of attention to another person.
And although sometimes I feel like bothering,
as often as not, I don't.
It's been six years since the last one.
I'm afraid I've lost the energy for turning anyone on.
But he gets turned on.
A group of graduate students gathers
on the last night of July under a chinaberry tree
strung with tiny clear lights on the terrace of the Shanty.
I sit beside Richard.
We look at one another for a long moment,
and he smiles a little.
"What?"
I ask.
He starts to say something and then breaks off.
You know, I've been wondering, I say softly,
laughing, what would happen if I leaned over and kissed you?
This is a dumb idea.
I don't know most of the people here very well,
but Richard does.
And they all know I'm married.
I think we'd better wait to do that on our own, he replies,
soon.
Yes, I say.
Yes, soon.
Then go home.
Three months later to the night, I nearly die.
Because I don't die, but go on living for many more years,
I gained ample hindsight.
I recognized that Richard and I entered
one another's lives at the worst possible moments.
He, bolting from a ruined relationship.
I, on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
He couldn't help treating me badly any more
than I could help cracking up.
Reading over my notes from the time,
I will see that an elegiac quality permeated
the brief affair.
I knew the ending before the beginning.
I will feel grateful to have survived.
For now, I hold love on the back of my tongue.
Bitter pill of a word.
Bitter as poison.
Determined to die rather than spit it out.
That's just how crazy I am.
Richard is a careful, empathic lover,
and a humorous companion.
After making love, he sits beside me,
reading me bits out of Jacques Barzun,
recalling his college sweetheart who loves him still,
recounting how he organized the Canterbury Recycling
Association.
I've been lucky in lovers.
Most have been bright and entertaining.
Richard, I feel especially close to,
delighted by, because he likes to write too.
Still, in the years since my last affair,
I've grown increasingly introverted.
And now his lovemaking lays me open to terror
as I haven't felt before.
When he puts his fingers between my legs,
my insides explode and I think, my God,
how does he know how to do that?
As though he had violated my private self.
"You like to make love, don't you?" he asks.
And I don't want him to know that about me.
I don't want anyone to know so much about me.
I don't want anyone to have such power over me.
"You're different in bed.", he says.
"How so?"
"Earthier, simpler."
"Yes.", I say.
Life seems simpler here.
There's nothing beyond the edge of the bed.
But of course, there is.
In his journal, Richard says he refers to me
as "A woman I know."
"Please.", I tell him.
"Please, in your journal, let me be Nancy."
But does it matter, I wonder.
Almost immediately, the poems start coming.
The strongest ones yet.
Some short stories too.
I feel as though I've been boarded up
and my desire for Richard has thrown me wide open,
images rushing in, words rushing out.
The sense of trespass his love making creates
is the price I have to pay.
Someone's got to break in or the poems don't get out.
I take to writing poems even in dreams.
And this is one.
Sometimes I just don't want to be good, too many of me
have been good for too long.
I may be in love less with Richard
than with Richard's space.
He has an apartment.
Really just one large room with a kitchen and bathroom
at the back of an old house downtown.
The pungent smell of eucalyptus branches
stuck in a jar on the bookcase permeates the dim air.
He says the place holds what he needs to live,
which doesn't seem to be much.
A few clothes, a few dishes, shelves and shelves of books,
a typewriter.
Mostly a typewriter.
I don't know whether he needs that to live,
but I suspect that I do.
My own house feels as filthy and chaotic as a bus terminal.
George's working hours are long and erratic.
The children wander in and out, trailing friends.
If they notice me at all, they see the big meanie.
The one who makes them wash the dishes and sets curfews earlier
than anyone else's.
I recognize that, structurally, at this point in their lives,
as a parent I have to be wrong no matter what I do.
That's not to justify my actions,
maybe they're truly dreadful.
But I'm not sure it matters a whole lot.
Whatever I do, they have to reject it.
And me too, I suppose, in order to get on into their own lives.
In the process, they're creating me,
and I hate who they need me to be.
The house itself is too big for me now.
I'm too weak to care for it properly
and no one else is willing, so I feel constantly
as though it's falling down around my ears.
I can't breathe here.
The quest of women writers, Janette Turner Hospital writes,
"It's a search not just for a room of their own,
but for safe, private space for non-toxic air, for a place
where the self can really breathe.
The search involves contraction into smaller and smaller space.
Frequently, it leads to an ultimate withdrawal
into the body itself."
Close quote.
The evening after Richard and I first make love,
everyone happens to be out at once.
Smelling of Richard, feeling soft and tired,
I make myself an omelet savoyard and sliced tomatoes with basil.
I eat alone, drinking a glass of white wine
and thinking how badly I want to live like this.
As proof of my ability to live alone
in spite of my physical limitations,
I start to clean up my own dishes
and promptly slice my left middle finger
on the French cutting knife.
Finger on ice, I take coffee and amaretto
to the porch to watch a storm boil up over the Catalinas.
And so, ignoring the omen of the sliced finger,
I run away from home.
Not far.
About nine blocks.
I find one little room with a sink stove and refrigerator
and an enamel table with two chairs at one end.
And at the other, a studio couch, some bookshelves,
and a desk.
The closet and dresser have been built into the bathroom.
I like its snugness, as though it were
a ship's cabin or a camper.
Something miniature, encompassable,
to carry me along.
The landlord is taken with me.
So he gives the walls a fresh coat of paint,
white and yellow, hangs yellow curtains in the windows,
even puts a new corduroy slipcover on the couch.
Here, I think, I will make my own life.
What I jot in my journal, however,
rings a different note, I am deathly tired.
Literally, deathly tired.
I wonder if I have not crawled away
to this little space, not as a bid for independence,
but in order to die.
Anne has given me a tiny black kitten with tufted ears
and a kink in her tail.
I've named her Bête Noire, my beloved beast,
the beast of my heart.
When I move away, George insists that I take her along
for company.
At first I don't want her with me.
I want no responsibility for another living creature.
But I go to the Safeway and buy her Purina cat
chow, tinned tuna, a pair of yellow dishes, a ping pong
ball with a fuzzy cover of pink and yellow stripes,
and we settle down together.
My affair with Richard suits me badly.
Since the evening at the Shanty, I haven't once
slept through the night.
Drained at the end of every day, I thud into unconsciousness
as soon as I stretch out.
But after an hour or two, I surface, preternaturally alert,
and often don't sleep again till dawn or later.
My exhaustion leaves me groggy and ill.
Flesh starts melting off me like candle wax.
I weigh 101, 98, 95.
I rather like this part.
The way my bones jut up under my skin,
the way my clothes hang off me.
It makes me feel fragile and pellucid.
Then Richard ends the affair.
He arrives at my door one Sunday afternoon.
We sit out on a little wall under the cedar trees.
He sleeps only with women he's in love with, he tells me,
and he's not in love with me.
I wish he'd given me that information a couple of months
ago.
Now it's too late.
Too late for what, I'm not sure.
But I know it's too late.
After he leaves, I close my door and windows
and bury my head in my pillows and howl the way
I did both times I gave birth.
Afterward, I grow quiet and begin to plan to die.
I'm not sure that the loss of Richard
causes me all this pain.
The loss of self seems at the heart of it,
a loss I never experienced with other lovers.
But I was younger then, prettier, and not so shy.
I permitted Richard to see me naked,
penetrate me, surely in sexual terms, but also symbolically.
I abandoned myself in making love to him, exposing myself
horribly, and now I'm ashamed.
The shame as much as the loneliness is doing me in.
I want my self back intact, untouched by Richard's
careless fingers.
When I think of my scrawny, crippled body, kicked
now out of his bed, I feel as though I'd
been stripped to the skin and then flayed.
The fact that I'm having a breakdown
strikes me abruptly and with perfect clarity.
I go on having the breakdown anyway.
Knowledge is no proof against certain kinds of disaster.
Maybe most kinds.
Part of me knows I am ill.
Another part sneers incredulously,
accusing me in mother's long familiar words of dramatics.
The first part gets me to my neurologist,
who prescribes amitriptyline, an antidepressant.
And to the psychotherapist I haven't
seen in years, who tells me that my psychic patterns no
longer serve me and I must restructure my life
to allow me not merely to pose but to function as a writer.
The second part circles wearily, sensing
that Jose, with his pills, and Ken, with his new structures,
may do me out of the urge to kill myself
and then I'll have to struggle on and on.
The day before taking an overdose,
I meet Richard at the Shanty for a beer.
The beer comes in sweating mason jars.
As you can see, I mix details up here.
That's the lawyer at Harper & Row that's making me do that.
You know that the beer in the sweating mason jars
comes with the big "A", right?
Served like that, it always reminds me of pee.
"You misunderstand me," Richard says.
He has a deep voice and he drawls slightly.
"I have nothing against you.
Nothing against your body.
You have an elegant body."
I'm tracing designs in water on the tan Formica table
so that I won't have to look at him as he speaks.
"It wouldn't matter to me," he goes on,
"if you were Genevieve Bujold,
Anne Tyler, Annie Dillard.
I simply don't want a relationship with anyone."
"I know all that."
Now I look up.
"Knowing doesn't make any difference.
Some part of me is so crazy, it can't know anything."
Bête Noire trains me to play fetch.
I'm a slow learner.
But eventually, it dawns on me that when
she trots up with the ball in her teeth
and drops it at my feet, she wants
me to throw it so that she can retrieve it and return it
for another toss.
We entertain ourselves in this way by the hour,
paddling in the sink too.
That is, I'm there for the serious business of washing.
But she's there for the paddling.
My sink grows a bloom of little black paw prints.
She monitors the roaring ebb and flow of water in the toilet.
The cascade of the shower is too scary, though,
and she perches anxiously outside the plastic curtain
until I re-emerge.
Our apartment has only a small gas space heater,
so it's always cold even though the winter is unusually mild.
Bête sits in my lap with her head tucked into my sweater,
like a sleepy bird.
At night, we get into the sleeping bag
and she curls between my arm and my ribs.
In the morning, she leaps out onto the bookcase
beside the bed, stretching her front paws up to the windowsill
and chittering at the finches in the cedar trees.
Daytimes, I sit in the sunshine outside the door,
reading and watching her chase grasshoppers in the weeds.
The ones she catches she brings to me for admiration,
and then eats noisily.
She is with me as I approach death and throughout my return
to life.
The telephone wakes me.
Bête, too, uncurls herself from my side and stretches.
The room is dark.
I don't know what time it is.
I squint at the clock, but my vision
is too blurred to make out the glowing red numbers.
The tinny radio is playing rock music softly.
"Hello, dear."
George's voice.
"How are you?"
"Not too good."
I'm awake.
I'm talking on the telephone.
"What's the matter?"
"I took Elavil.
A lot."
"Oh my God."
He draws the words out as though they really were a prayer.
Later, he'll tell me that he's rehearsed
this kind of conversation over and over in his head
ever since my suicide attempt at Met State.
But on this night, he hasn't given it a thought.
"I'll be right there.
Unlock the door for me."
I don't know if I can.
I'm lying in bed now, but I have jumbled
memories of trying to get up and go to the bathroom.
I couldn't stand, couldn't even kneel.
I squirmed forward using my feet and elbows.
And when they were all bloody, I turned over
and scooted on my back, battering
the knobs of my spine.
The lock is too high to reach from the floor.
"I'll bring a hammer to break the window," George says.
"Just In case."
I roll off the bed and wriggle toward the door.
I'm in a lot of pain, but I feel stronger than I did before.
I'm awake.
Pulling myself upward by the doorknob,
I flip the bolt before tumbling backward.
The last time I tried to kill myself
after swallowing the Darvon, I put on my prettiest robe.
This time, I'm wearing a tatty nightgown
I've had for years, smeared now with blood and urine.
George bursts in, grabs my coat, shoves me into it.
It's after 6:00 at night on the 1st of November.
Chilly even in Tucson.
George is shaking and swearing, madder than I've ever seen him.
"Why didn't you tell me?" he asks.
"I didn't tell anyone," I say.
Only Richard, who forgot.
The next day, Jose comes by.
With the suicide attempt, he tells me,
"I've finished something I had to do and I'm safe now."
This might be wishful thinking born of guilt
at having given me the pills in the first place,
but in fact, he seems to be right.
Either that or the whopping dose of antidepressant, not quite
enough to kill me, blasted me straight out of my depression
in a kind of shortcut to normalcy.
In any event, although I go on grieving over Richard
for a ridiculously long time--
a year, maybe more--
I no longer feel suicidal.
Richard helps by shaving off his beard so
that he no longer looks like the man I went to bed with,
the one who threw me out.
I eat greedily, packing weight on almost as rapidly
as it melted off.
I sleep through the night.
I'm already becoming the woman who will one day sit across
from Richard in a little restaurant on the Gulf
Coast, to which he has long since returned,
looking at his photos, chatting about mutual friends,
and forget until hours later to check herself
for the pangs of love the way people who've
had cancer palpate themselves nervously for new tumors.
When she does check, nothing's there but the scar.
And she can hardly see that.
The poems and stories keep coming.
And in the spring I start writing essays too,
which combine the delights of poetry and prose for me.
They are carnal acts, enabling me
to inscribe the earthly life I've tried to flee.
Its tricks, its sweet poisons, they disenchant me.
I'm awake.
And I will write myself into well being.
One night at the beginning of February, Bête
runs out when I opened the door.
I don't think much about it.
She's done it before.
But this time she doesn't come back.
In the morning, I call George, who comes
to search the neighborhood.
In a while, he knocks at my door.
"Oh, sweetheart," he says, reaching for me.
"She's dead."
She was hit and killed instantly, he's learned,
and someone called the Humane Society to take her away.
So she's the only one who doesn't rest in our boneyard.
I have loved all our cats, perhaps.
Except an ungainly black and white creature
named the Princess Saralinda.
And I will love the ones to come.
But none like Bête.
Aunt Jane says that for every person, there's one cat.
And I-- maybe she's right.
Hers was Otello, the Black Man.
Now I've had mine.
Over and over, I called her the beast of my heart.
Speaking in silliness more truly, I think, than I knew.
We should all have some time during our tricky lives
the thing we can love unconditionally,
without measure.
Not because it is good and tries to please us,
but because it is beautiful and makes us laugh.
At school, I don't mention her death to many people.
I have no friends close enough to understand my loss.
When I get home, I start to call out,
"Is there a beast in the house?"
before I recall that there isn't.
Anne comes over.
Leaning over the back of a chair, I talk and cry,
and she lets me.
And then we both laugh because I've wept a puddle on the floor
worthy of Alice in Wonderland.