Falling Through Space Page 11

  The Designated Driver and I kept looking at each other. We weren’t satisfied yet. The Trout Fisherman came back across the road and announced that the water came from higher up and we would have to climb. We crossed the road and followed a leaf-covered ridge that curved along the side of the hill below the post office. We could hear water, a steady drip and gurgle about a hundred yards back. Following it we came to a waterfall and twenty feet above that another one.

  “Let’s hike,” the Trout Fisherman said. “Let’s do some climbing.”

  “Let’s go to the truck first and get some dry socks,” I said. “We might be gone for a while.”

  “Let’s talk to those folks across the road,” the Designated Driver added. We left the waterfall and went back to the truck. A red Buick was coming down the hill from the post office. The driver was kind enough to stop and answer our questions. “You need to talk to Mrs. Hunter,” she said. “She knows everything around here.”

  “Is that her house across the road?” the Trout Fisherman asked.

  “Right there,” the woman answered. “Just knock on the door. She’ll be glad to talk to you.”

  Maybe Mrs. Irene Hunter is just the friendliest and most trusting person in the world. Or maybe it was the pair of long white socks the Trout Fisherman was holding in his hand when he knocked on her door. One way or the other she came right out and offered to help.

  The driver of the Buick was right. Mrs. Hunter did know everything. In the first place she had been a forest ranger until her retirement several years ago. In the second place her nephew owns the land that holds the spring we were seeking. She went back inside for a coat and returned and got into the truck. She pointed out directions with beautiful sweeps of her hand. “Yes, four rivers rise on this little knob. The White runs to the north, the War Eagle to the west, the Kings to the east, and the Mulberry to the south.” We were enchanted. She was a lovely graceful woman, widowed five years but not the kind of person who gives in to grief. Her children grown and her husband dead, she keeps on living in her house, a comfortable-looking white wooden dwelling across from the deserted post office.

  With Mrs. Hunter giving directions, we drove past the post office and up a red dirt road to the crest of the rise. Tall yellow grasses bent beneath the rain. We were all very excited, we were on a great quest and had found the mythical wise woman who would show us the way. We drove through the high yellow grasses and got out and marched along to a small clear pond with a black tree growing up in the middle. “Right there,” she said. “The spring starts underneath that tree.” We walked out onto a narrow dam and stood transfixed. The dead tree stood up in the water like a symbol. It must have been a proud oak or maple before the first dam on the White River killed it and left its skeleton for a statue to mark the place.

  We stood in the cold light rain and took photographs and whispered about the source of water. Not far away, in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, there is a spring whose waters are part of an aquifer that has its beginnings in Alaska.

  Below the small dam the water continues down the ravine in waterfalls and comes to the place where we had left our footprints an hour before. Then on down and along its watercourse to where it meets up with the West Fork. Between here and there a thousand million trickles make music and run past the Designated Driver’s dome and on to Fayetteville. Then the river doubles back and falls all the way down the state of Arkansas to meet the Mississippi across from Rosedale, where the Famous Writer’s father was born, at the beginning of this century, when men still knew rivers and shared and used that knowledge.

  We got back to Dave’s house in the afternoon and made a fire and heated up the Wok Stew and started talking. It was the best of conversation, about night and the size of the universe and black holes and what fish do in the winter and fish the Trout Fisherman had caught and photographs the Designated Driver had taken and books we all would write and plays we would put on and movies we could film if they would only give us the chance. About the death of rock and roll and the secrets of DNA and how people lived a long time ago and the houses they built and who invented the hearth and what the hearth means and whether the world will end in fire or ice and if we will get what we want out of life in the meantime.

  We talked about babies in the womb and ecstasy and poetry and songwriting and how to catch trout and how to print photographs that will last forever and how the Cajuns put their photographs in enamel on their graves and Leonardo da Vinci and Walter Anderson and Ginny Stanford and the upcoming wedding of Kathleen Whitehead who started wearing her wedding band the day her fiancé bought it. We talked about the hard job of being a young man in the modern world. About how hard it is to figure out what to do for a living and how hard it is to come up to everyone’s expectations and how young women are so strong nowadays that a man has to really get cracking to catch and hold a good one. About how to be a man and who to emulate and what to learn and what to know. “You got to know when to hold ’em,” as Kenny Rogers sings. “Know when to fold ’em. Know when to walk away. Know when to run.”

  Finally, we threw the last log on the fire, finished off the brandy, and went to bed listening to the river and the dry branches in the November trees. “Goodnight,” I called out. “I love you both. Thanks for taking me.” “We love you too,” they called back.

  Love, it said on the mailbox. What else does a Famous Writer want from a magazine assignment?

  THERE WAS a wonderful piece in the New Yorker in which the writer explains the Zeitgeist, the way ideas or fads or states of mind spread throughout a culture with the speed of light. All of a sudden everyone has a crew cut or marches on Washington or decides to be very very thin or decides to give up on being very very thin.

  I have always been a bellwether of such fads. I was one of the first women in New Orleans to go out running in Audubon Park. I was one of the first ones to quit. Anyone who has ever known me will attest that I have been at the cutting edge of every diet and exercise fad in the United States. All this time I have weighed exactly the same. Except for times when I was too busy to think about my body, during which times, for some mysterious reason, I would become quite thin.

  At the moment I have given it all up. As an adult in a world where eating disorders have become a real problem and a menace, I think it is my place to stop acting like a neurotic teenager and set an example of harmony and balance. So all I am doing now is walking a few miles a day and eating anything I want except sugar. Also, I have vowed never to eat another salad unless I really want it and I am having an easy time keeping that promise to myself.

  Here is the good news. It is eight weeks later and I haven’t gotten fat. I’ve been eating when I was hungry and nothing bad has happened. Amazing. It is like some terrible spell has been broken. Also I quit weighing myself. I have thrown those damn scales away for good. A steel box with a set of revolving numbers is not going to have the power to ruin or make my day. What a metaphor the body-weight obsession of our century makes. Scales and surrogate mothers and nuclear warheads and mean-spirited people being delighted that young men are dying of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. I’ve got about thirty more years to live here, in this culture, with this madness. I may not escape all of it, but I am running as hard as I can. I’m going to begin by learning to love my own little soft round useful hungry healthy body.

  FOR A LONG TIME I have wanted to set something straight in the world. There are many people who read my books and decide that I am a feminist. I believe they base this assumption on the stories that deal with an intense sibling rivalry between a little redheaded girl named Rhoda and her brother, Dudley, poorly disguised versions of my brother Dooley and myself. This real-life Dooley is three and a half years older than I am and he was always the pet. My mother liked him best and my father liked him best and my paternal grandmother liked him best. He was always getting his Eagle Scout badge or going to the Junior Olympics or stoking the furnace or carrying out the garbage or being brave when he put out his eye and
playing championship golf and football and basketball and track anyway. He went on to father ten children and become a big-game hunter with a reputation for courage in the face of danger and so forth and so on. My problems with him, however, had nothing to do with male and female roles. It was pure sibling rivalry, a bitter battle for the minds and hearts of our parents.

  On top of everything else he has done to me he goes on loving me more than I love him, as a Big Brother should. I know, for example, that if I was in a hospital with some terrible cancer and no one else would do it, he would shoot me if I asked him to. He would kill or die for me and that brings me to the real subject of this essay. I like men because they protect me. All my life they have protected me and I believe they will go on doing it as long as I love them in return.

  I like men. I like the way they look at themselves in mirrors, quickly, with a sort of sleight-of-hand pride.

  I have two brothers and nine male first cousins and three sons and four uncles and a grandson and three ex-husbands. All of them are good-looking and all of them like themselves. Women like them and I like them and they like themselves. They had good mothers. It takes a good mother to make a good man. It takes a woman loving a man to death when he is small to turn him into a man who will kill or die for the women he loves.

  I suppose I should modify my statement and say that I like good-looking men who will kill or die for me.

  “I don’t know what you women expect of us,” a philosopher and ex-Vanderbilt football player once said to me. “Goddammit, you expect us to be gentlemen twenty-four hours a day and ready to kill at a moment’s notice.”

  “Yes,” I answered. “That is what we have always expected.”

  It is what we have expected. Down through the countless ages of human life, women have held the babies in their arms while men fought for them. This is not some sort of joke or cartoon. This is the reality of who we are and where we came from. All our modern associations with each other come from that long, indelible history. Once, when my first grandchild was about three months old, I went with his mother and father on a long car trip from New Orleans, Louisiana, to Austin, Texas. I sat in the back of my daughter-in-law’s old black Buick pretending I was the grandmother in a Flannery O’Connor short story, wishing I was wearing a hat. I was holding the baby. My son was driving and my daughter-in-law was riding shotgun. We talked about men and women and babies all the way to Texas. It was our plan to figure things out before we got to Austin so the two of them could lead a long and happy life and make a perfect home for the little boy I was holding in my arms. I have forgotten all the things we said or the points we made and argued about and discussed. I remember that we gave up after two hundred miles and decided it was a subject that did not reveal its secrets.

  But this is boring grandmother talk and men want me to tell them how beautiful they are and how much we like the way their shoulders grow so wide and their arms so long and how we love their voices to be deep and how we like them to laugh at us and pretend we are dumber than they are. Maybe men don’t like that anymore. I know it was out of style for a while. I’m not talking about dumb, like in dumb blondes with small intelligence quotients. I mean dumb, like in let’s pretend, just for this evening, or until I get you to say you love me, that maybe you are a bit better informed, able to reach logical conclusions faster, and certainly you can add and subtract better than I can. Otherwise why are you doing that boring income-tax return while I polish my fingernails.

  There is another game that I play with my male cousins. It is called I look like a woman and wear this skirt and these high-heeled shoes and so forth but you knew me when and you know that you and I can drink all these bohoes under the table because we are kin to each other and equal where it really matters, in the endless childhood of our shared past.

  I love pride in a man. I don’t care if it inconveniences me because I can’t push a proud man around or make him do what I want him to do or even quit smoking until he gets damn good and ready. I like to see a man square his shoulders and prepare to take a stand. There were all those fifty million years around those campfires after the sun went down and the big cats came out. Maybe power to confront that night is what I’m seeing when I watch a man draw himself up to his full height and tell me no.

  Most of my close friends are men. I like women but they hold no surprises for me. I know the good things about women and the bad things about them and as long as they are strong and brave and don’t blame things on other people or act like they’re sick I like them as much as I do men. Still, the range of possibilities is all within my scope. Not so with men. Men are a mystery to me. I once loved a man who liked to fish. He could stand so still waiting for a fish to bite. It amazed me to watch him fish. I could not understand the patience he gave to it or his delight in the catch or the deep incomprehensible satisfaction it gave him. I think he had been fishing a long time. Maybe for fifty million years.

  I loved another man who liked to look at stars through a telescope. He would spend hours on the porch in the dark looking at stars without ever becoming frightened of death and needing to come inside. I would watch him and wonder what he was seeing that I would never see if I looked through a telescope. When I look at the rings of Saturn or the moons of Jupiter all I think about is whether or not we will have to go there to live and if so, how will we keep the children warm.

  But I am an old-fashioned woman. I don’t want to be a man. I don’t want to have broad shoulders or big arms or be the one to go out and fight the big cats or the invading Huns or whatever threatens us next. I want to go on living side by side with men and running my hands up and down the muscles of their arms and worrying about them and talking about them behind their backs to other women.

  I can say all that and still know that women are actually wiser than men because we are more intuitive and, of course, much as I hate to bring this up, we do bring them into the world.

  I like the clothes men wear. Once I loved a man so much I made him a white cotton shirt with my own hands. I loved another one so much I wrote three books to get his attention. There is an old gorgeous man living right here in Jackson, Mississippi, that I have been loving and fighting with and showing off for since I was born fifty-one years ago. My mother’s only husband. My father and I have almost stopped arguing now that he is seventy-seven and I am fifty-one. This is a cause of great concern to a friend of mine who is still arguing morning, night, and noon with his twenty-year-old daughter. “You mean I have to wait until I am seventy-seven years old to get Anna Katherine to be friends with me?” He shook his big intelligent head. “I have known thousands of people in my lifetime and I have always been able to talk sensibly with any of them except for my daughter. Why is that? How can that be?”

  “Back to the old campfires,” I tell him. “If you didn’t argue and fight with her you might like her too much.”

  “But it’s nineteen eighty-six. It’s the modern world.”

  “So they tell me.” I reach out and run my hand up and down his arm, not forgetting to give a few pats to the gorgeous breadth of his shoulders. “You can take it,” I tell him. “You’re tough.”

  He drew himself up to his full height and invited me to go out to dinner at a place called the Sundancer.

  Once, there was an autograph party for one of my books in a bookstore in the same shopping center as the Sundancer and when the book signing in the store was over my baby brother invited everyone in the store to have dinner on him at the Sundancer. He took a box of fifty books with him and sold them at the bar while we ate dinner.

  Surrounded by men like that I would have to be crazy not to love men. Women who really love men may have to spend a certain amount of time running their hands up and down someone’s arms, but they are almost never crazy.

  IN 1985 I was asked to give the Baccalaureate address at the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas. Wearing a long black gown and a mortarboard and my old handmade leather sa
ndals from the Flying Possum on Dickson Street, I climbed the rickety stairs and faced an audience of friends and students and college professors. It seemed to be the most momentous occasion of my life but what I was feeling was not hubris. I gathered my courage to the sticking place and began. Here is what I said.

  I am honored to be here. I want to thank the faculty for inviting me and all of you for allowing me to give you the last official lesson you will ever have at this college.

  I want to tell you the best things I know before you leave here. Unfortunately, most of them are in the words of other people. All my life I have been a reader. Before I could actually read I used to pretend to read. And reading has colored and changed my life and made me different and made me rich.

  Several times in my life I have been rich in money, had at my disposal more money than I could think of ways to spend, and each time I went out and deliberately got rid of the money. I got rid of the money because it is a bore and a terrible responsibility. A roof over my head, honest work to do, friends, books to read, a small income so I can work in peace. These are things that money can properly buy. Large sums of money that allow you at a distance to rule and order the lives of other people and demand their time and labor bring their own bad karma with them. And something worse. They bring fear.