Limbo (19 page)

And then there was this: she'd been past twenty-five, an old maid by the standards of the day, when she'd married. Her father had approached my grandfather, and the two had negotiated until my grandmother's dowry was sweetened with the promise of good land. My grandfather himself had told me the story, in Florida, well after my grandmother's death.

“No one else would have her,” he said.

“Why?”

But my grandfather just shook his head. How he loved the Florida sunshine! He went out and bought himself a pale pink suit. He died a happy man.

Vinegar Hill
quickly departed from the fragmented facts of my grandparents' lives, entering into the Gothic terrain I'd admired in books by O'Connor and the Brontës. Soon I was enmeshed in a fictional world every bit as real to me as any I had known. I finished the book when I was twenty-five, but I was twenty-eight by the time I'd found a publisher for it, and I'd just turned thirty, and was completing my third book, by the time I finally held the first copy in my hand. It had become the story of woman struggling to reconcile the demands of her faith with the reality of a failing marriage, and, frankly, I lost a lot of sleep, wondering what my Catholic relatives would think of it. In fact, my relatives were overwhelmingly supportive. (I once overheard my Auntie Lu explaining to a stranger at a reading, “When we talk about Ann, we just say, ‘the Lord moves in mysterious ways.'”) What I had not anticipated—had never even considered—were the reactions I might get from people I didn't know well, people who happened to live in my hometown.

Port Washington, Wisconsin, is a scenic little town of about nine thousand set on a hill overlooking Lake Michigan. People still say “hello” when they pass on the street. At the top of the hill is Saint Mary's Church, an old Catholic church made of stone. Lodged in its steeple is a four-faced clock, one of the largest in the United States. Growing up, it seemed to me that no matter where I was, or who I was
with, or what we happened to be doing, the eye of that clock was fixed upon me, unblinking as the eye of God. Who could have resisted such a landscape, so ripe for metaphor? I borrowed the hill, the church, the clock for the fictional town where
Vinegar Hill
is set. I also borrowed my grandparents' house, which resembled many houses in Port Washington, furnished with the same hanging Jell-O molds, the same framed biblical portraits, the same avocado carpeting. I borrowed Lake Michigan—it is, after all, a big lake—and I borrowed a few other general details. A downtown swimming pool, for instance. A tourist-trap restaurant.

Not exactly the town's crown jewels.

I was fully expecting questions about the church and its clock. But what I wasn't expecting was all the people who would accuse me of setting
Vinegar Hill
in
their
home. Who claimed to recognize my protagonist, Ellen, as their own mother, their own best friend, even their own self. Who showed up at the readings I gave in the Milwaukee area to chant the refrain of my childhood: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In a bookstore, during a question-and-answer exchange, the mother of a childhood friend stood up.

“Nothing like this really happened to you!” she said.

“You're absolutely right,” I agreed.

We stared at each other helplessly.

Rumors abounded. A cousin of mine was shown the “real” house where
Vinegar Hill
had taken place—a house I'd never even seen. My parents, who have been married thirty-eight years to date, were whispered to have been
secretly divorced
. My favorite bit of gossip asserted that
Vinegar Hill
was actually “Sweet Cake Hill,” a small street in Port Washington I hadn't known existed.

The truth was that I'd struggled to find a title. I'd known early on that it would be the name of the street my characters lived on; I'd known, too, that its connotations should reflect the book's bitter sensibility. And yet, two months after the manuscript was finished, the title page was blank. I was still living in upstate New York, teaching at Cornell as a visiting lecturer. One day, driving out of town to see a friend, I glanced up and saw a street sign I'd never noticed before.

Vinegar Hill
.

I leaned on my horn. I zigged and zagged through the autumn leaves. Never since has a title hit me with such absolute clarity.

I once heard another writer say that we are living in a time of such cynicism that all nonfiction is assumed to be fiction and all fiction is assumed to be nonfiction. The fact is that certain people will see themselves in your work, regardless of whether or not you put them there. There will always be the postpublication smirks, the howls of betrayal,
the accusations of thievery. In a sense, it's liberating. You're damned if you do, damned if you don't.

And yet, in this case, I'm glad that I didn't.

Halfway through the first draft of
Vinegar Hill
, as I was struggling with a character named James, an entire backstory appeared to me—not exactly based on my father's experience in the san, but springing from it. For nearly a year, I wrote this backstory in, then wrote it back out. Ultimately, I let it go, and to this day, I am grateful. No matter how different James was from my father, no matter how distinct his circumstances might become, the word
tuberculosis
would have had to remain, like a tombstone, like a monument, visible for miles. The effect on my relationship with my father, with my family, would have been devastating. And the effect on my writing? One could argue that I'd be a better writer for the experience. One could also argue that I would not have gone on to write as prolifically, as freely, and with the sense of joy that sustains me, had there been that weight on my conscience, that distracting sting.

As it was, my parents took all the attention, good as well as bad, in stride. My father, a consummate salesman, actually
liked
the controversy over our personal lives, believing that it could only boost sales. At local book signings, I'd see him grinning mischievously when people asked him if the book was about our family.

“Have you read it?” he'd ask.

If the answer was no: “Well, then, you'll have to read it and let me know.”

And if they
had
read it?

“Oh, she's got another book coming soon. Once you read that one, it'll clear things up.”

My mother was more cryptic. There's a scene in the book where Ellen is playing tumbling games with the children; at one point, she stands on her head. Signing books at a local library fund-raiser, I heard a woman asking my mother, in a stage whisper, if Ellen was supposed to be her.

“Well,” my mother said, evenly, “I really can stand on my head.”

 

Between 1994 and
1999, I published four novels and a collection of short stories, statistics that mean I've spent roughly a year of my life on a book tour. Since handicap access to public transportation can be, as my father would say, “a challenge,” he arranges to meet me whenever I give readings in the Midwest. He picks me up at O'Hare and chauffeurs me to talks and interviews in the Chicago area before driving me north to Milwaukee, Madison, Minneapolis. We take the backroads, the rural highways he still remembers from when he was just starting out, fresh from the san, working as a traveling salesman selling fertilizer across the Midwest. We listen to polka tapes and AM radio. My father points out how the little towns have changed,
admiring the Wal-Marts, the shopping malls, the super-size grocery stores.

“When I used to come through here, there was nothing but cows!” he declares, biting happily into a deli sandwich.

It's early in the evening, July 1996. I've just finished speaking to a book club in Madison, and my father and I are driving north toward Minneapolis, passing between the endless darkening fields. He has been evaluating my response to the book club's questions, pointing out places where my answers were too long, recalling missed opportunities, drawing my attention to a moment when, caught off guard, I made a self-deprecating remark. This postgame analysis might sound unpleasant; it's not. My father's observations are practical ones. He evaluates me the way he might evaluate another experienced salesperson. He evaluates me the way he might evaluate himself.

“The product is good,” he says, thumping my latest novel with affection. “If a product is good, it will always sell.”

And now we've settled into comfortable silence, polka music chortling from the radio, the last of the sunset lapping the curve of the horizon, when he says, “Are your legs bothering you?”

So they are. I realize I'm wearing what my husband calls my “gray look,” the angry, impatient expression I get when I'm in pain.
In pain
—such a maudlin phrase, and yet I'm intrigued by its implications.
In pain
, like a faraway place or
a state of mind; like a country where you've gone to live for a while.
In the Arctic Circle. In a state of grace
. My arms are aching, too, particularly my right elbow and wrist. I am right-handed, and everywhere we go, there are books to personalize, stock to sign.

“Tomorrow is a light day for me,” I remind us both. I'm scheduled to fly to Seattle in the morning; my next reading isn't till the following night, and I have nothing to do in between except speak to a university class, which is something I particularly enjoy doing. I'm thinking ahead to that, and to San Francisco, where I'll be heading after Seattle, and the friends I hope to see while I'm there, when my father says suddenly, almost savagely, “It's such a shame this had to happen to you.”

For a moment, I think he's talking about my writing career, my books. Then I understand. I look at him, at his unrelenting profile, so much like my own. Yes, it is a shame—and no, it is not. It is simply what it is. Meaning is the color of whatever lens we happen to wear when we look at our lives. Like fiction, meaning evolves out of our own fascination and need, a structure we invent from facts that, on their own, would add up to very little. Like fiction, it tells a story that may or may not have anything to do with our lives. Yet if we tell the story well enough, it becomes believable. It becomes true.

“Such a shame,” my father says again, and his voice,
which is gentler now, breaks. And I realize he has carried this thought since I first fell ill, a weight every bit as constant, as distracting, as my own physical discomfort. I see him at nineteen, working in his father's fields, so tired that by noon he must return to the house. I watch as he sits down on the porch steps, too weak to go inside. Thinking, What the hell is the matter with me? Thinking, Am I losing my mind?

He entered the san as a young man with prospects; he left at twenty-one, missing most of one lung, with no idea what he would do next. Men his age were heading for Korea. Women his age awaited their return, rings shining on their fingers. He had toppled out of his life the way, someday, I would topple out of mine. He would start over, work his way up from entry-level sales, start his own company. He would fall in love and have children. He would stand in the doorway of his oldest, the excitable one, the one so full of energy that as a child, she'd prowled the house in her sleep, and he'd tell her that someday, she'd look back on this time of stillness and it would be nothing at all. You'll start over, he assured me. You'll catch up. You'll find a way to turn all of this to your advantage.

I remember how he took my photograph—over my protests—sitting in my power wheelchair. “To look back on,” he said. “After you get better. After you don't need things like this anymore.”

We are hurtling through the absolute country darkness of western Wisconsin: no light pollution, no other cars. There's only the sunburst of our own headlights, illuminating the road just ahead of us, just in time. E.M. Forster said that writing a novel is like driving a car at night with the headlights on: you can't see your final destination, but you can see enough to make the whole trip that way. The truth is this: I do not know my destination. All I know is the circle of light just ahead, its shifting geography. And suddenly, more than anything else in the world, I want to write down what I see. Because it isn't a shame so much as a wonder, if only because it's so far away from anything I might have imagined or dreamed. The way my father's life is different from what he had imagined, coming in from the field, coming home from the san, and thinking it was all over for him when, in fact, it was only beginning.

It is not that I believe the things that happen to us happen for a reason. I certainly don't believe that
things have a way of working out for the best
, something I've been told countless times by well-meaning doctors, family members, and friends. But I do believe that each of us has the ability to decide how we'll react to the random circumstances of our lives, and that our reactions can shape future circumstances, affect opportunities, open doors. The truth is that I love my life, and to love it fully, I must acknowledge that it could not be what it is had I
not
fallen ill. I told my father
all of this as we drove toward Minneapolis. I told him how I thought the parallel between our lives was an interesting one, something that I really wanted to write about—in fiction or nonfiction, I wasn't sure. I told him I didn't think I could write about my own experience without including, in some way, his, and the stories he had told me, and what they'd meant to me.

It was the perfect opportunity for him to say he understood, to tell me I was free to write whatever I wanted, with his blessing. If this had been a fictional scene, he would have done so. But in fact, it would be 1998 before he'd call me up, out of the blue, to give me this unexpected gift.

To say that if I wanted to write about his time in the san, I could do so.