Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings Read online

  I cannot remember acting this way (well, maybe; there was one terrible argument with my father that I remember, because he wanted to hear Al Smith’s speech accepting the presidential nomination just at the time when my particular favorite weekly radio program was on), but then I like to think, vainly perhaps, that my life is no longer managed by the lives of my friends. What my life is really managed by is the lives of my daughter’s friends.

  Perhaps my main quarrel with this anonymous “everyone else” is her poor taste, based as it is on the lowest common denominator, the least possible thing that will suit everyone. I know by now that I am an old-fashioned, conservative, tone-deaf old fogey who doesn’t know one guitar from another, and that I am heartless and a constant embarrassment to my daughter, but I cannot condone the garish, the pat, or the slovenly. I have been known to howl furiously at her to turn off that racket when all she was doing was listening to a recording of an eighteen-year-old lad singing about how he is old enough to recognize true love when he sees it. I have shuddered visibly, in public, when I have met her walking with her friends, all of them wearing dirty sneakers and swinging those hideous pocketbooks.

  I snarl at the dinner table when she rattles off for the hundredth time the current popular phrase. I hunch myself over the wheel of the car, teeth clenched, when I am driving a pack of them to town so Patty can buy herself a blouse (it takes six of them to buy Patty a blouse, six giggling girls and three hours of shopping) and I hear the conversation going on behind me. I know by now that if I am putting six girls into my car the front seat beside me will always be left empty, but I can still hear them. What Ricky did, and what the teacher said, and oh, it was so funny, and does anyone remember what Johnny said to Cheryl when she dropped her pencil and oh, it was so funny, and one thing about Sandy, even though she’s terribly pretty, and all the boys go for her, it’s that fellow in college she really likes, even if he is almost eighteen, and Cheryl knows for a fact they’re going steady. Linda heard this from Carole and Carole heard it from her big sister and her big sister says Sandy’s not the one he really likes, and when Patty came right out and said so to her face, oh, it was so funny. And then Carole said that Cheryl liked Tommy, and oh, it was so…

  —

  It is all a kind of safety device, of course, and understandable even when most infuriating. They are making a firm bridge between being children and being grown-ups, so that they may cross together, holding hands, without terror. Nothing is ever as frightening as that first clear look at the world beyond thirteen years old, with its responsibilities and decisions and individuality, and sooner or later there is going to come a moment when what everyone else does is no protection or excuse. Her personality, evolved somehow out of what Carole said, and experiments with lipstick, and gaudy pocketbooks, and sick jokes, is going to have to stand up by itself, facing (oh, heavens!) perhaps marriage and children of her own. I hope she remembers. I only hope she remembers.

  What I Want to Know Is, What Do Other People Cook With?

  I have an electric mixer and an electric blender and a timer on the oven and an electric skillet and an electric can opener, but what I really cook with is a fork. It is about five inches long, four-tined, with a black wooden handle, and my mother gave it to me when I was married. (My mother has a knack for gifts like that: when Laurie was born, everyone else showed up with pretty baby blankets and little sweaters wrapped in blue tissue paper; my mother gave me a vacuum cleaner.) I use my little fork to scramble eggs and to turn meat and to get muffins out of the toaster (I know that’s wrong, but show me a better way, really better) and to poke at potatoes to see if they’re done and to turn corn fritters in the pan and to hook doughnuts out of the fryer and to weasel waffles out of the waffle iron and to prick the tops of pies and to stir rice. I could really not begin to start making a meal without my fork.

  It began to wear out at last. The screws that held the handle on had been replaced by my husband and my son Laurie and eventually my son Barry so many times that the holes were enormous and the handle kind of swiveled when I picked it up. And the tines were worn down on one side—I always cook right-handed—until the tip was triangular. I had better get myself a new fork, I thought reluctantly, caught for a minute in a recollection of the thousands of eggs that fork had scrambled and the pork chops it had turned and turned and turned; I had better go around to the hardware store the next time I am in town and pick up a new cooking fork.

  “I would like a cooking fork, please,” I said to the man in the hardware store the next time I was in town. “A fork for cooking.”

  “Certainly,” he said, and led me to a great rack of forks.

  Some of them were eight feet long and some of them were twelve inches long and they all had only two tines and the cheapest one cost four dollars. “This one is for outdoor cooking,” the man said to me. “This one has an attachment that turns it into a roast baster. This one has a genuine plastic bone handle.”

  “No,” I said, feeling silly. “I want a cooking fork with four tines and it ought to cost about a quarter and it’s not for any special thing, just cooking.”

  “A quarter?” he said. “We don’t have any forks that cost a quarter.”

  He didn’t have any forks about five inches long, either, or any with black wooden handles and four tines. “Look,” I said, holding my hands apart, wishing I had brought my little fork along with me, “about this long, four tines, and maybe it costs more these days, maybe as much as fifty cents.”

  “There is no such thing,” he said with enormous dignity.

  Well, I went to the five-and-ten and I went to the other hardware store and I looked in catalogues and I wrote to all the department stores I could think of and he was right: There was no such thing. I wrote to my mother and she wrote back that oh, yes, now I mentioned it she did remember the little black-handled kind of fork she used to cook with, but she had no idea where to get one. What did I want it for? I started asking my friends, and several of them remembered that their mothers or grandmothers had used just such a fork. (“Doughnuts,” someone said wistfully; “you know, I haven’t thought of those doughnuts for years and years; my grandmother used to get up in the morning and make them for breakfast, and I can still remember those hot fresh doughnuts on school mornings. Of course,” she went on, resting one hand casually on her pressure cooker, “no one has time for that kind of thing now.”) One of my friends thought she had seen such a fork in her aunt’s kitchen not long ago, but when she called her aunt and asked, her aunt thought she was crazy. “Look, dear,” her aunt said, “this is the twentieth century.”

  I took to hanging around people’s kitchens, a habit that made me fairly unpopular and eventually got us largely not invited out to dinner anymore, trying to find out how other people did things. “Don’t you scramble eggs with a fork?” I would ask. “What do you poke potatoes with to see if they’re done? How about little holes on top of pies?”

  Well, some people used a table fork and some people used a long two-tined fork, and I talked to a lot of people who never made scrambled eggs at all because they were too rushed for breakfast, and there were lots of gadgets for getting muffins out of toasters, and almost all of them got their pies at a bakery or frozen from the supermarket, and no one in the world but me ever used a little black-handled, four-tined, five-inch kitchen fork. I finally got so embarrassed about my little fork that I tried to use it secretly, so the children could not see and tell their friends, and I paid $5.95 for a great unwieldy thing that flipped pork chops halfway across the kitchen and short-circuited the toaster and could have been used nicely for weeding the garden. Words were passed around the dinner table about the charm of eating in restaurants, and my career as an active, participating member of the family was saved only when I finally got a new little fork.

  A friend who hangs around antique shops found it for me in a basement store in Brooklyn. It was unused, authentic, and cost a dollar, because, I suppose, of its rarity. “Is this wh
at you were looking for?” my friend asked. “I just happened to remember that you were interested in old kitchen utensils. Better boil it first if you plan to use it.”

  Well, I do plan to use it. I am starting right now to look for another one because this one ought to be wearing out in fifteen or twenty years. And unless someone lets me know what the rest of the world uses to cook with, I may even need another one after that.

  Miss F. Etti Mology, Spinster

  V

  •••

  I’d Like to See You Get Out of That Sentence

  Lectures About the Craft of Writing

  •••

  “I’m teaching short story at Bennington, and I love it. I have two classes a week. I took the job with two conditions—one, a hundred bucks a week, and the other, that the College president learn to square dance. If he doesn’t learn by this coming Saturday I quit.”

  •••

  About the End of the World

  A Lecture

  I feel that before I read any of my new novel, The Sundial, I would be wise to explain how it came to be written, and why, since I would not like to have any of you believe that I cook up this kind of thing in a cauldron.

  I had published seven books, and was wandering around whining about writing another, considering and discarding plots, complaining that everything had already been written, and in general behaving like a novelist who needs money.

  In order to reassure myself that all the best things had already been written, I took to rereading my own books, and discovered with some embarrassment that there was a kind of similarity to them, not necessarily in plot, which I could find all sorts of learned opinions to excuse, but in images and metaphors. Prominent in every book I had ever written was a little symbolic set that I think of as a heaven-wall-gate arrangement; in every book I have ever written, and, indeed, in the several outlines and rough sketches in my bottom desk drawer, I find a wall surrounding some forbidden, lovely secret, and in this wall a gate that cannot be passed. I am not going to attempt to analyze this set of images—my unconscious has been quiet for a good many years and I think I am going to keep it that way—but I found it odd that in seven books I had never succeeded in getting through the gate and inside the wall.

  It occurred to me, then, that the thing to do was to write a new book, and start inside—write a kind of inside-out book, and maybe see what I have been writing about all these years when I have been writing outside-out books. What happened, of course, was the end of the world. I had set myself up nicely within the wall inside a big strange house I found there, locked the gates behind me, and discovered that the only way to stay there with any degree of security was to destroy, utterly, everything outside.

  Concretely, the story is simple enough. A group of people are living in my big old house, which belongs to an old tyrant named Mrs. Halloran. These people are in the house more or less by chance—some of them are members of the family, one is a governess, others are guests who prefer to stay in the house rather than face destruction in the general cataclysm outside. These people believe for one reason or another in the prophecy handed down by one of their number: that the world outside is going to end, and everything will be destroyed except this house and the people inside it. After a night of horror and destruction they will come out, the only survivors, into a world of loveliness and peace, and become the first of a new race of mankind.

  Nothing I have written has ever given me so much pleasure.

  Memory and Delusion

  A Lecture

  The children around our house have a saying that everything is either true, not true, or one of Mother’s delusions. Now, I don’t know about the true things or the not-true things, because there seem to be so many of them, but I do know about Mother’s delusions, and they’re solid. They range from the conviction that the waffle iron, unless watched, is going to strangle the toaster, to the delusion that electricity pours out of an empty socket onto your head, and nothing is going to change any one of them.

  The very nicest thing about being a writer is that you can afford to indulge yourself endlessly with oddness, and nobody can really do anything about it, as long as you keep writing and kind of using it up, as it were. I am, this morning, endeavoring to persuade you to join me in my deluded world; it is a happy, irrational, rich world, full of fairies and ghosts and free electricity and dragons, and a world beyond all others fun to walk around in. All you have to do—and watch this carefully, please—is keep writing. As long as you write it away regularly, nothing can really hurt you.

  My situation is peculiarly poignant. Not, perhaps, as sad as that of an orphan child condemned to sweep chimneys, but sadder than almost anything else. I am a writer who, due to a series of innocent and ignorant faults of judgment, finds herself with a family of four children and a husband, an eighteen-room house and no help, and two Great Danes and four cats, and—if he has survived this long—a hamster. There may also be a goldfish somewhere. Anyway, what this means is that I have at most a few hours a day to spend at the typewriter, and about sixteen—assuming that I indulge myself with a few hours of sleep—to spend wondering what to have for dinner tonight that we didn’t have last night, and letting the dogs in and letting the dogs out, and trying to get the living room looking decent without actually cleaning it, and driving children to dance class and French lessons and record dances and movies and horseback riding lessons and off to town to buy a Ricky Nelson record, and then back into town to exchange it for Fats Domino, and over to a friend’s house to play the record, and then off to buy new dancing shoes….It’s a wonder I get even four hours’ sleep, it really is. Particularly, I might add, since I can’t use the telephone. There is always someone using the telephone. The best I can manage to do is shout out the front door to the grocer’s son when he drives past in his hot rod, and tell him to ask the grocer to have fourteen lamb chops ready when I come by later.

  Actually, if you’re a writer, the only good thing about adolescent children is that they’re so easily offended. You can drive one of them out of the room with any kind of simple word or phrase—such as “Why don’t you pick up your room?”—and get a little peace to write in. They go storming upstairs and don’t come down again until dinner, which usually gives me plenty of time in which to write a short story.

  At any rate, assuming that I am paying for my mistakes in judgment and never have enough hours in a day to spend at the typewriter, I would like to pass on a few things I have learned from those harassed, tense, welcome moments when I finally sit down to write. This, by the way, is what makes for Mother’s delusions. All the time that I am making beds and doing dishes and driving to town for dancing shoes, I am telling myself stories. Stories about anything, anything at all. Just stories. After all, who can vacuum a room and concentrate on it? I tell myself stories. I have a whopper of a story about the laundry basket that I can’t tell now, and stories about the missing socks, and stories about the kitchen appliances and the wastebaskets and the bushes on the road to the school, and just about everything. They keep me working, my stories. I may never write down the story about the laundry basket—as a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure I won’t—but as long as I know there’s a story there I can go on sorting laundry.

  I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing. Just as I believe that a painter cannot sit down to his morning coffee without noticing what color it is, so a writer cannot see an odd little gesture without putting a verbal description to it, and ought never to let a moment go by undescribed.

  I was playing bridge one evening with a musician, a chemistry teacher, and a painter when, during a particularly tense hand, a large porcelain bowl that we kept on the piano suddenly shattered. After we had all calmed our
selves down, we found four completely individual reactions. Looking at all the tiny scattered pieces, I thought that I had never realized before how final a metaphor a broken bowl could be. The chemistry teacher pointed out that someone had emptied an ashtray into the bowl with a cigarette still burning, and of course the heat had shattered the bowl. The painter said that the green of the bowl was deepened when the light caught the small pieces. The musician said that the sound it made when it broke was a G sharp. Then we went back and finished our bridge hand.

  Someday I know that I am going to need that broken bowl. I will keep the recollection of those scattered pieces, lying on the piano, and someday when I want a mental image of utter destruction the bowl will come back to me in one of a dozen ways. Suppose, for instance, that someday I had occasion to describe a house destroyed by an explosion; the manner of destruction would be different, of course, but what I can remember is the way the little pieces of the bowl lay there so quietly after they had been for so long parts of one unbroken whole; now, not one of them could have found its place again, and the compactness that had held them together no longer existed in this world.

  Suppose I wanted to describe the effect of a sudden shock—I had just played a jack of spades when the bowl broke, and for what must have been three or four seconds I sat staring at the jack of spades uncomprehendingly before I caught my breath again. Suppose someday I want to describe the sense of loss over a treasured and valuable article—my green bowl was not particularly valuable, or I wouldn’t have let people dump ashtrays into it, but I can remember how I felt when I swept up the pieces and put them in the garbage and how entirely destroyed the pieces looked.