Growing Girls (20 page)

He came back inside after it was all over, and I put on the TV but he went up to his office and just sat.

A day later our next two lambs were born healthy and strong and it probably was good we had to dock their tails, get busy, forget about that dead lamb. Alex was all Mr. Confidence, holding the little docking tool, sort of like a hole puncher, he picked up out at Agway. I was Ms. Fatigue, feeling the relief of our two ewes who had delivered successfully, my phantom estrogen battling my phantom progesterone and God knows what all else.

I held the lamb while Alex did the docking using the band method. It was hard to know what was too short and what was too long, hard to weigh the risk of fly strike versus that of prolapse. The lamb squirmed as Alex applied the band, and when I put her down she walked like a kid with too-tight pants, but within minutes she was romping as if nothing had ever happened, so we went ahead and docked tail number two.

George stopped over to see our lambs. He had a keen interest, seeing as our ram had been caught over in his field offering its services to perhaps fifty of his ewes, and so our lambs were for him a kind of preview of what his yield might look like. Alex was proud to show George his lambs. Mighty proud of our ram, too, what with all that extra sperm to share. There was so much testosterone swirling amidst the estrogen that spring, it was hard for any of us to see straight. Alex and George stood out there for an hour doing sheep talk.

“Our tails are too long,” Alex reported when he came back
in. “George said we have to dock them up higher.” He grabbed the tail-docking device and asked if I had time.

“No!” I said. I told him Gretta said they could prolapse if they were cut too short.

“George said they prolapse if the tails are too
long”
he said.

“No, too short,” I said, and explained why I thought my way, or rather Gretta’s way, made a lot more anatomical sense. “If you cut the tail short you loosen some important muscles up there,” I guessed.

Alex shook his head. “Our tails are too long,” he said, and he held up the device.

It was one of those standoff moments in a marriage. You have to decide if it’s worth it. Soon enough we were in the sheep pen and I was holding the two-day-old lamb while Alex snapped a band about an inch higher than the one we had placed the previous day. I felt disappointed and sorry, but not angry. I figured hey, these are his sheep. This is his project. If it weren’t for him and his project, I wouldn’t know anything about fly strike or prolapse, anything about how very brutal and gruesome the bucolic life is. It is no more so than regular life, I suppose. There’s an awful lot of horrible stuff you have to learn to block out. Any mother who has ever delivered a baby has a lot of cleaning up to do before she can go home and go into coochie-coochie-coo mode in her Pottery Barn Kids nursery with the pastel colors and the super-soft Humpty Dumpty afghan her mother made. It somehow seemed honorable, or maybe elevating, that the lamb, the symbol of peace and tranquility and fabric softener and all good things, had so much going on behind the scenes.

“Sorry about this, girl,” I said to the lamb, referring to the inch of tail she was losing, and also to the fact that, like all new parents, we had no idea what in the hell we were doing.

I was in Toronto working on a story when the chicks started hatching, and even though I didn’t want any more chickens at all in my life, I was sorry to miss the excitement. Alex called me on my cell phone to tell me about it, and I got hit with the now familiar ache of homesickness. Ever since marriage, and the farm, and the one-two punch of Anna and Sasha, I don’t travel nearly as much as I once did. It gets harder and harder to leave, which I guess is a lot better than feeling the opposite.

The story I was researching in Toronto was about a U. S. soldier who had fought for seven months in Iraq, then deserted and fled to Canada. There were six other guys in Toronto I was talking to who had similar stories, and a lawyer who was a Vietnam draft dodger who was helping them try to obtain legal citizenship, but Josh was my favorite and my focus. Before going to Canada, he hid out in Philadelphia for a year and a half with his wife and four children. He was a terrified young man, unsure of his stance on any of this, brittle and naive and soft and hopeful. That’s what I liked about him. “Liking” when it comes to writing isn’t about liking someone personally, although I did Josh. But this kind of liking is more akin to loving, the way a fiction writer might love a character. You love him for his vulnerability, the tender shell you vow silently to protect even as you imagine exploiting it. He’ll give away everything, all of his secrets and all of his pain and all of his
heartache if you ask for it. Your job is to listen. Your job is to portray him, in all his glory and all his foolishness, but that doesn’t mean you steal his dignity. That’s your promise and that’s your responsibility.

I loved Josh’s tattoos. I loved his wife, Brandi, and her tattoos. She started with the comedy and tragedy theater masks on her back, but she later got that tattoo converted into Gemini panthers above a tulip. I loved that throughout all their troubles, all the rude awakening to an America that once was the land of freedom but became, to them, a land of betrayal—through all of it, they kept a little box they put pennies in, to save for their next tattoos.

These were complicated characters not because of some vast intellect or awe-inspiring talent or spotlight of fame, power, or influence. These were complicated characters because they had been bounced about by the world, thrown this way and that, chewed up and spat out as they tried to make sense of it all. Characters any of us could be.

This was exactly the kind of story I signed up to write, way back in grad school, when I checked the “nonfiction” box instead of “fiction” or “poetry” as my intended genre. Go out and live in the world. Talk to people. Find ordinary people living ordinary lives and start to understand passion and joy and misery in ways you never did before. Re-create those characters on the page. Play with voice, set scenes, stack dialogue, massage metaphors, use all the tools you know how to use to make those characters come alive on the page.

“But
why
?” asked a literature professor who was questioning
me a few years ago. I was interviewing to join the faculty of a large English department where I would teach “creative non-fiction,” a trendy term that had been invented long after I started writing stories. I hated that term. Why did we even need a term? “Creative nonfiction” made it sound as if we made stuff up, that we were “creative” with our facts, slippery writers taking license with other people’s lives. We were not. Worse, it made us sound as if we were begging for respect—that nonfiction writing was somehow and certainly by definition “not creative.” Because it deals in facts. Because we begin with the real world as opposed to, as is assumed, the fiction writer’s meandering through the imagination, which is somehow presumed to be … a more literary place? People never, for instance, have to say “creative fiction” to distinguish it from any other kind. But we have to say “creative nonfiction” to somehow beg for its legitimacy?

Well, if I was a fighter, I would wage a campaign and write long essays for prestigious literary magazines as I gnawed on this stuff. But I’m not a fighter. I don’t care enough. I have chickens hatching and kids to get bathed and I have phantom hemorrhoids. If I didn’t have all of this, the marriage and the farm and the one-two punch of glory known as Anna and Sasha, maybe I would be a better writer. Maybe I would be a fighter. I would have long days in libraries with nothing more important to do than give my brain daily and huge concentrated doses of literature. I think about this sometimes, and feel regret. I wonder about my deathbed, and regret. I think of God as an army sergeant, giving us life so that we can be all we can
be. He gives you a dose of talent, and you’re supposed to run with it, and run hard. That’s your job. That’s why you were put on this earth.

“But
why?
” asked the literature professor who was interviewing me. He wasn’t asking about the term “creative nonfiction.” He was questioning the whole genre. Why re-create a character from the real world? Why all this playing with voice, setting of scenes, stacking of dialogue, massaging of metaphors, to evoke these characters? Why evoke the characters in the first place?

Well, then. Why do I do what I do? Um. I had been writing nonfiction stories for fifteen years and had never once asked myself why I bothered doing it. What a question! Why does the accountant do what he does? Why do any of us do what we do? Oh my God, we should at least be asking the question! I was sitting there asking myself the question, spiraling into what I figured was my first actual midlife crisis.
How did I end up here? Why did I pick this path instead of some other path? Why do I do what I do?

I must have had a very contorted upper lip. The room was hot and stuffed with literature professors, all of them leaning back and about to pass judgment, a court of cranky angels you had to pass through before you got through the Pearly Gates. That’s what it felt like. A practice round. This was a preview of the afterlife. This was a near-death experience?

But why?

Finally, I shrugged. “I guess you could ask the same question of a photographer,” I said. “You know, why take pictures? Or,
why does a painter decide to do a portrait of a lady or a man or a dead fox?”

“Dead fox?” one of them said.

Okay, that was stupid. I was thinking of those English hunt pictures you see in fancy homes.

“You do it to evoke emotion?” I guessed. “Or to record history or to have a lasting effect on people?” Or, you do it because you’re all worked up about your own mortality? You do it because you have a certain point of view you want to share?

I wasn’t sure of any of these answers, which is probably why they came out as questions. “I don’t know why anyone creates anything,” I said. “It’s probably a combination of a lot of things.”

Duh. Pull the lever. Send this girl down the chute. No sense even bothering giving God a crack at this one
.

I figured the literature professor would come back at me with something, probably something that made use of the word “pedagogy” and maybe “dialectic” and “hegemony” and some of those famous English department words.

But no. He shrugged right along with me. “It’s a fun question, isn’t it?” he said.

I wanted to kiss him. Oh, so this was a game! This was … fun! That was when I realized that reentering academia could be a wild romp as opposed to the slog of drudgery you so often hear about.

I ended up getting the job and loving the romp. It turned out to be an oddly disorienting pursuit to stand in front of a classroom and talk about writing, about researching a story, all the
how-to stuff that students have paid good money to learn about. I became a different person in the classroom. A person with lived experience and a bulging brain that was expected to hold wisdom. For the first time in my life I was part of a writing community. How wonderful it was to talk to other people who did what I did! People who went off on stories and gathered facts and came home and stewed over them. I was one of them! I was part of an Us! How very civilized and grown-up! I bought fancy silk trousers and pointy-toed shoes and a briefcase and a new watch and I had … appointments.

When I am off on a story, I am not that person. When I am off on a story, I am a kid. I am twenty-six years old, fresh out of grad school, hopping on a barge for two weeks, just letting go of my life, leaving the cat in the charge of the neighbor, while I plod down the Monongahela River with two ornery deckhands and a grumpy pilot and a cook with silver teeth. Sailing off to the ridiculous, not knowing what will happen and gradually entering, becoming a little of them but still a little of me, the me shrinking as they take over. An adventure. That’s what I decided my life would be back when I checked the “nonfiction” box. My life would be one adventure after another, sailing off into the unknown, collecting stories and coming home, like a potter who just spent time in a creek bed gathering clay, and making something of my find. An artist. I would be an artist. And so of course I would be lonely. You couldn’t form lasting relationships living like that, living like a gypsy. Well, maybe you could. I would have to see. The main thing was art. God gave me a dose of talent; it was my duty to run with it.

And so, walking down Bloor Street in downtown Toronto,
thinking about Josh, thinking about what I needed to say to Brandi, I was excited. I was feeling a familiar kind of alive, being inside a story, tossed about inside an adventure. And then Alex called to tell me the chicks had started hatching, that the girls were jumping for joy, that the girls had actually
watched
one of those chicks peck its way out of that egg, and so naturally I was caught. Caught between this alive and that alive, caught between the life of adventure that by now had become routine, and motherhood, an adventure I had never planned on way back when. But motherhood had come along and when it did it came on like a punch. One-two and three-four and five-six-seven. Punches in my heart that hurt and bruised and demanded to be known, and got that muscle pumping. Motherhood, the mother of all adventures, the great unknown.

I was and remain caught. Caught between a God Who wears army boots and shouts marching orders, and this God, a God in His slippers. “Love,” He tells me. “Love comes first, you ninny.”

The bright red mass on the back of the ewe looked like a giant ripe tomato. I looked away. I pretended I didn’t see it. I pretended it wasn’t there. I felt nothing. I felt no hemorrhoids, no bulges, no bloat. Numb. This was weeks after Toronto, weeks after the newly hatched chicks, which were now five yellow balls hopping to and fro, the very picture of spring.

Our “yield” during this, our first lambing season, so far was six. An amazing five females—the more valuable—and one male. He was the prettiest of all, with a coat whiter and
smoother than the rest, a kind of kitten. The others were in their own way adorable—you can’t look at a gangly lamb with her long legs and tight fuzzy coat and not believe in fairy tales—but the thing that got me was how the five of them all looked exactly the same and none of their mothers seemed the least bit distracted by this. Seconds after a lamb is born it calls, “Meeee,” for its mother, and the mother answers, “Meeeeh,” and that just seems to do it. The bond is formed; the lamb nurses and the mother licks and it’s a real happily-ever-after tale. Occasionally a lamb might get confused and walk up to its aunt for a drink, but that big old girl will nudge her good and send her sailing, so the lamb will cry, “Meee,” and the real mother will answer, “Meeeeh,” and life goes on.