The Big Impossible. Edward J. Delaney
Читать онлайн книгу.
to make it interesting, not so little as to not be adequate to most.
My father would be ashamed of me.
But he died too early. Dropped dead in the rows in ’72. On Google Street View, I find the next sad place, the apartment house in Little Rock where my mother and grandmother and I then lived on food stamps and church doles. Out there on Geyer Street, I discover, that house still stands, but barely: What was likely built to shelter a single family had then become diced into tiny compartments for unfortunates such as ourselves. Now, in my computer’s image, that house stands beaten and boarded, the low chain-link fence collapsed and the scraggly trees in front as untrimmed as a drunk’s beard.
But there, in the city, our fourth-hand television could get a signal, and the transformation began in small increments. In that small airless living room, I began to mimic those television voices, whispering those accentless sentences as holy mantras. I wanted to talk just like the Brady Bunch did. I wanted to talk like the Partridge Family. My mother would sit in her chair looking at me, saying nothing at all.
School was where I spoke that language loudly. My classmates would ask me where I was from. My teachers saw my hunger, and fed me; when, on my computer, I look at that boarded window to the right of the front door, I see beyond it my younger self, sprawled on the floor with pages, my limited facts and allotment of equations.
Could I have been my happiest then? Now, looking at my iPad in my dawn kitchen, with its Italian marble tiles and its massive culinary island, I look again at that boarded window on my MacBook and wonder. It was just myself, my mother and my grandmother. We endured those hot summers with only the rattling fan. My sweat coursed onto the books in that midday heat. My mother did find a way to get me the books, and I realize I never thanked her. At sunset, she went walking, alone, to get her air. She did so every night, night after night, coming home long after dark. One night she walked home early, with a man.
“This is Herbert,” she said.
“No,” is what I said.
Herb was a widower who had a house up on East Sixth Street. He was older, with two grown daughters; I think his only sin was loneliness, although I punished him for far worse, with my silence and derision. He spoke in that slow ramble, and when I had to speak to him, I responded in kind with my clipped new voices, my Transatlantic lilt. He was kind, although I’d have never admitted it then; it’s harder for me to look at that house (which I never once referred to as “my house,” always “Herb’s house”) on Street View, although even now it looks very well kept. The two cars parked on the lawn seem functional, the yard itself is green and trimmed and only burnt toward the curb. I suspect that some Herb progeny yet occupy that little place, which stands painted and clean among less-reputable neighbors. It could have been a haven. But I was already plotting my escape.
I didn’t know what I wanted to do; I didn’t know exactly who I wanted to be, but I sure knew who I didn’t want to be. I explained as much in my college applications. It is the true remaining flaw on my permanent record of life (easily Googled now, to be sure, with various wiki entries, faculty profiles, and speaker bios) that I spring not from the Ivy League but from a less portentous place. But I recall the campus with happy memories. The day I got the letter and the pledge of scholarship at Bethany College, I knew this was the essential pivot of the plan. I can MapQuest the exact distance, door-to-door from Herb’s to Bethany: 519 miles. A substantial journey, by any measure.
At Bethany, they were stout Lutherans (How many Saturdays I spent cheering on our football team, “The Terrible Swedes”? I recall exactly our cheers from the grandstands: “Kor Igonem! Kor Igonem! Tjo! Tjo! Tjo!”).
Regrettably, Google Street View has not much come to Lindsborg, Kansas. I refresh periodically in hopes of a more ground-level view, hope that camera-crowned Google car has finally breached its borders. But the blue line vaults straight up Kansas 4, through town, headed toward other places. Travelers had little to stop for. It is exactly in its plainness that I remember it.
Among those Nordic blond farm girls and soft-spoken boys, I continued to excel, overheated and driven. My letter of application had begun my shaping of my own story; happily, application essays are kept in locked places where my mother could never experience that betrayal. But I knew the way to a Lutheran’s heart was to prostrate myself for salvation at their hands, and they were duly enthusiastic. Herb was recast as the heavy, my mother was substituted with someone sinful and irredeemable, and I was the boy in the wilderness. And they bought it! They even gave me clothes, so I wouldn’t be embarrassed. Within days of arriving on campus, I began to again reshape the narrative all over again.
The unexpected advantage of attending a college called Bethany was that not only were there multiples (the teams of Bethany in West Virginia were also “The Swedes,” although the Bethany in California fielded the “Bruins,” more fearsome than even a Terrible Swede). But beyond that, the school’s name, absent locus or eponymy, had the generic decentralized property of the accents I so astutely cultivated. A lot of people seem to think it’s a good school located in Pennsylvania, or an up-and-comer in the Twin Cities. I disabuse no one of such notions. I arrived at history as my course of study, maybe owing to the endless facts of other times that one could drink in.
I never actually met a Terrible Swede in college, only very good-hearted ones. And the best of all was my professor of history, who was a gentleman farmer and amateur poet in the Edgar Lee Masters mode. He saw what I had, and he wrote the recommendations, and when I got the graduate fellowship, he bought me a celebratory coffee in that mostly dry town. I never bothered telling my mother where I was headed. At commencement, the president alluded to my salvation from hard times, to the confusion of my classmates, who’d been led to believe (notice me using the passive voice) that I was money from St. Louis.
I cannot view that old school from my stealthy Street View vantage, nor can I really see the faces of any of those peers, whom I scrubbed from my memory like the sheen of Kansas dirt that would blow in during spring planting. But the next place I seek on my computer represented a truer sense of arrival, thanks to that professor: When he’d coughingly mentioned he was himself a graduate of Dartmouth, it was frankly the first I’d heard of it. (I’d been led to believe the Ivy League consisted only of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.)
Dartmouth, up there in the woods, is exceptionally well documented on Street View, even to the point of each crosshatched foot path on the College Green having its own blue line to drop onto. I can parachute my little Street View man, that similarly generic-and-golden avatar, onto exact spots. I can stand and again see places that still smolder in sky-clear memories.
I tend to linger especially on that curve of Cemetery Lane where, in a scene lighted only by a New Hampshire moon and its reflection off the deep February snow, I stood as Barbara walked off, disgusted at my intractability. I can drag and rotate the Street View image as if turning my head, canning those trees (still!) for her receding figure.
“I don’t know who you are,” she had said.
“I am who I am,” I said. “Graduate student at Dartmouth. Eastern European history. Thesis proposal on the effects of Serbian exceptionalism.”
She sighed. “So you are what you study,” she said.
“In a way.”
“Then I don’t know who you were,” she said, and to this I offered nothing. Not my accent, clothing, nor mannerisms betrayed a place of origin, or a story.
My own undergraduate students use Facebook addictively (even during my lectures!), pouring their minutiae out into the ether; I look at my own story and wonder if such transparency (more, really, than transparency, in its willful launch of facts into a universe presumed to care) could allow these children any chance for thrilling reinvention. My Barbara walked off into the shadows, and for the first time in my life I truly agonized, wondering if her love was worth disclosure. We never spoke again.