It is hard to explain your life. We are papier maché, our memories shredded and bound together by the paste of everything we have forgotten. I was born in Pennsylvania, not far from the Amish, some miles west of Valley Forge. What I remember: stone walls, quarries, the overgrown railroad gully behind our house. Neighborhood kids went tribal in there, with hierarchies and rituals that sometimes sent me racing for the gap in our hedge. Next day, I always went back.
I had no philosophy as a child; perhaps I have none now. There were things I loved: the wiggly net of sunlight on the shell and starfish bottom of our baby pool, the swish of snowpants, the smell of Play-doh. I loved our cat’s pretended nonchalance, coiling snake stuck on his tooth. There were things to be learned. Look up while you swing, rust gets in your eyes. Ride your bike down the big hill, you’ll have to walk up it. Grilled cheese next door is not the grilled cheese of home.
I was a wanderer. I crossed Swedesford Road, leaving one blue flip-flop there for my mother to find. I followed Winding Way to play in the creek. I loved the gurgle of the water and how the long marsh grass lay in squelchy pillows on the margin. These excursions were not meant to frighten my parents. I would forget myself, one foot following the other, then suddenly it would be getting dark, or I would hear my mother calling: time to go home.
Later, as our entire family reenacted these meanderings, I would remember those first six years as a kind of ideal, my normal American life. After two years outside Washington, D.C., my father, through a series of accidents, signed on with the U. N. We all remember the job offer: Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. We had to drag out the atlas, the one I could barely lift. Sure, what the heck. My parents were wanderers too.
Thus began the rest of my childhood: seven schools, five countries, four continents, and the Caribbean. We would get someplace, live in a hotel or a rented apartment while my parents found us a car, a house, a school. They were always much quicker about the school than I wanted. In Addis Ababa, we first lived in the Ghion Hotel, which had a rose garden, a swimming pool with cloudy green water and diving platforms, and across the street, the emperor’s stables. Despite not drinking the water or eating the salad, the four of us immediately came down with the runs and spent the first week feverish, chugging Kaopectate and fighting over the john in our hotel room. But the bidet was interesting, as were the people outside, who looked different and spoke a kind of fascinating gibberish. Three schools later, my sister and I, now 9 and 14, were taking ourselves to lunch at the Chinese restaurant during our two hour lunch breaks from the French school (Lycée Gebre Mariam Franco-Ethiopien), and occasionally getting ourselves home in taxis—tiny blue Fiats whose ripped up seats we shared with other passengers: smelly old men, ladies in bright white shammas, brown and white chickens in handmade coops. The drivers turned their engines off downhill to save on gas.
We lived in a modern, Italian-built house, which also had a bidet, and a fence with spikes. Ponies were cheap so we each had one, except my mother who abstained because of some prior unpleasantness involving her big toe and a horse named Patricia. After school my sister and I would ride down the street to the British Embassy paddock, where we were tolerated and even became fixtures, though Bar and Moreno once accidentally tried to jump a wire fence and went sprawling into a garden party of visiting MP’s. My best friend, Christina Hoskens, lived at the embassy. She and I spent hours replaying reel-type audio tapes of Camelot, My Fair Lady and Thoroughly Modern Millie, and making up shows and dances to go with them. We cloned our paper dolls—we each had fifty. We made jumps and tack for all our stuffed animals, with leather from a bag of scraps Christina had. We put on massive horse shows, like the Badminton Horse Trials she’d seen on TV.
And then I’d go home, trying to keep my pony from bolting for his dinner along the road’s eroding shoulder, trying to keep him from being spooked by the herders’ whips and the sheep and the goats, and the boys running and the men calling to each other while taking a whizz in the drainage ditch, or the pairs of women like oil pumps alternately beating Tef into flour, plunging the ends of short poles into hollowed out stumps. It might be starting to rain, sounding like beans on the tin roofs, fly-strips squirming in the doorways of the one-room rectangular mud houses, the air thick with smoke and smells of berbere, sewage and burning eucalyptus. We’d sidestep the rewinding of a shawl, cross the street away from the Tej house men as they emerged heavy-footed and foul-mouthed, and at last be home, safe inside the gates.
Sometimes on the way back from school my mother would stop to get bread. After the first time, we refused to get out with her. As soon as the car slowed, school-aged boys in rags surrounded us. My mother was terrified she would hit one of them while parking. When she got out they would be on her, “Madam, Madam, Madam”. After awhile she had it down to a system: she always bought a big bag of extra rolls in the bakery. On the way back to the car she handed those out. When they were gone, that was it. She got in the car and we drove away. Often, while we were waiting for her, young boys would lead lepers and blindmen up to the car and tap on the glass. We could see the white film over the blindmen’s eyes, the gaps in the lepers’ noses, the dirty bandages covering the stubs of their fingers. We saw these things, but we never spoke of them. Except once, I remember, my mother said: when you stop seeing, it’s time to go home.
In all of this, was I writing? Not exactly. Was I reading? Yes and no. Our house was literate. My parents met as scholarship students at Cornell. The earliest books I remember were hardcover: a fat Mother Goose, which I memorized completely; and a children’s anthology of my father’s from the twenties, with marvelous art deco woodcuts. In that book Cinderella was tall, with tiny bows and flounces and gobs of pearls draped all over her hair, dangling from her tiny fingers. She was incredible; Disney had it all wrong. I also loved Dr. Seuss, how sound and rhyme took over. I’m pretty sure I learned to read from The Foot Book, The Eye Book and The Cat in the Hat.
I was never a bookworm—that was my sister. I hated her wanting to read rather than play with me, but I reaped the benefits. I would be playing Kerplunk with myself, and Bar would yell, Mom, what does ____ mean? I soaked up the answers—vocabulary by osmosis. Later, when we were going to school in French, my parents bought books for me to read in English so I wouldn’t be behind when I went back to school in the States. Happy or sad to say, I skipped grades three and four in the American system, and when I returned it was as if I had never been gone, except that after two years in the French school I was way ahead in math. Of course, I did almost have a nervous breakdown in the French school. This, it turns out, is not uncommon. I locked myself in the bathroom at home, refused to come out for school, and threatened to climb down the downspout if anyone tried to come in (which I wasn’t serious about, since anyone could see it wasn’t attached to the wall very well.) My dad had to brave our principal, Monsieur le Directeur, and ask if I couldn’t please be in a different class.
After that I was pretty happy. We had a reading book called L’Ile Rose, which was fairly imaginative as reading books go. I memorized “A la claire fontaine” and “La biche brâme au claire de lune, et pleure à se fondre ses yeux.” At the English School (which we attended briefly) I had memorized Walter de la Mare’s, “I heard a horseman ride over the hill”. I was building up a repertoire. In about fifth grade I added some Ogden Nash—“The Time to Tickle a Lizard” and the poem that begins, “One thing I like less than most things is sitting in a dentist’s chair with my mouth wide open”. Okay, not high art, but poetry just the same.
It was around sixth grade when I finally started to write. We had a school anthology of short stories, which included “The Bottle Imp,” “The Most Dangerous Game,” “The Ransom of Red Chief” and several tales by Poe. What I loved about these stories was the sense of danger, the alternate worlds you entered when you read them, and the surprise endings. I started writing short stories. At first, my parents were encouraging, though my mother did caution me about how hard it is to make a living as a writer. (She said the same thing about acting.) My stories got more and more graphic. Finally I showed my parents a story about a bullfight, in which the bull did significant detailed goring. That was it— shock and horror! My mother said, “You can’t write that!” I got the message and quit writing then and there.
At least, I quit showing grownups anything I wrote. In junior high I loved musicals. We were living in Nairobi then, so there weren’t many to see, but we went to whatever there was. I saw Hello Dolly, Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar, Genesis, and The Dream (a musical version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.) My twin best friends and I wrote a musical comedy of our own called Backstage, with a revolving set so you could see the play within the play alternately with the shenanigans going on behind the scenes. We never finished it but at one point had about twenty typed pages. At the same time, I was reading whatever I could get my hands on at home: Vanity Fair, 1984, Jane Eyre, Shaw and Shakespeare, plus bestsellers like Papillon, A Clockwork Orange and The Spy Who Came In from the Cold.
Later, when my family moved to Vienna, culture-starved as we were after six years in East Africa, we overdosed on opera and concerts, Strauss and Mozart, not to mention schnitzel and schlag. We could walk to the Kunst Museum, with its plaza of bullet-riddled shrubbery, where Bar and I spent hours staring at the Breughels. We saw the Klimts at the Belvedere, admired the gilt of Schönbrunn. But despite all its treasures, the Vienna of the 70’s was not a happy city. Old ladies scowled at us in parks. There were no old men. We weren’t sure where the young people were.
I finished 8th grade at the Vienna International School. The only good thing about that was our class trip to Moscow and Leningrad. Imagine two busloads of children who had grown up during the cold war, raised on Spy vs. Spy, Boris and Natasha, “We three kings of orient are/trying to smoke a Russian cigar/ it was loaded/ and exploded”, suddenly dropped into Moscow. These were children of diplomats, some, no doubt, children of spies. We had a blast searching our rooms for bugs, yelling obscenities into the chandeliers and flowerpots. We were thoroughly obnoxious and will never forget it. Oh, and the sightseeing was interesting too. Ironically, as little as I was paying attention, this trip must have affected me. In high school and college I studied Russian. I met my husband in Russian class and in 1995 returned, with him, to Russia to adopt our son.
So what did all this childhood travel do to me? I learned sounds, and I became rootless. After eight years overseas I could identify many foreign languages on hearing them spoken. I was used to all kinds of accents in English, and would imitate them. I had learned the nuances of French vowels, the Amharic “ts” and clicking “k”, the Swahili “ng”, the Austrian “ch”. I made friends from all over. I lost them. By the time we got to Bangkok, even though I worked with Thais in the biochemistry labs at Mahidol University, I am ashamed to say I made no effort to learn the language. I was burnt out; what was the point? The people I was working with all spoke English and I’d be leaving soon anyhow.
Yet in spite of my eventual sense of drift, I had absorbed the landscapes. On the one hand, flamingos and mudflats at Lake Abbayata, subterranean stone churches at Lalibela, the view of Mt. Kenya from the Aberdare hills, Masai standing on one leg in the Serengeti plains, Mt. Kilimanjaro, and the ubiquitous Rift Valley; on the other hand, the Alps, the rust-colored clay of the black forest floor, cobbles at the Spanish Riding School, Berggasse—Freud’s old street. Cane fields of Barbados, saronged women gliding up Mandalay Hill, and saffron-robed monks and rank canals of Bangkok stick in my head. When I think of these scenes, I ache. These places are burned into my circuitry; the nostalgia can be overwhelming. I have not been back. For one thing, I haven’t had the chance. For another, I know things won’t be the same. Still, I would like to show my children places I come from.
In a wise attempt to provide some stability, my parents sent me to boarding school from ninth grade on. Many find living away from home at that age unsettling. I was relieved to know I would be in the same school for four whole years. It was at Northfield Mount Hermon that I learned to think. Teachers can make such a difference in your life. I had the idea that I wanted to be an engineer, perhaps because my father had an engineering degree, perhaps because science was difficult. I took the nastiest math and physics courses I could find. It was always a relief to get to English class, where there were more girls and fewer calculators. Audrey Sheats was my English teacher for two years. She was eccentric but she knew how to make you see the layers within the layers. She had us reading The Sound and the Fury in tenth grade. Later we combed through King Lear, then went to see it at the Boston Rep. She always seemed to know what I was trying to say, and didn’t let sloppy work slide by. I remember, one time she wrote on one of my papers: Use your power. What was that supposed to mean? I wasn’t sure, but it seemed important. The woman was clairvoyant. As a senior, I was awarded the prize for excellence in writing. The book she picked out to give me for the award was a copy of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in facsimile, with Ezra Pound’s notes.
So off I went to Yale, and did I study writing? Of course, not; I majored in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. I thought I wanted to be a doctor because a) I could, b) I wanted to make a living and c) I thought I should want to help people. I had known for a long time that writing wasn’t a viable option, so it didn’t even occur to me to try that. I slogged through mouse lab and frog lab, and later (in medical school) dog lab, bloodstains of countless beasts coloring my conscience. I disliked most of the courses in my major. What I loved was what seemed the most frivolous subject possible: art history. I will never forget Vincent Scully whacking at the projection screen with his six-foot pointer, manic over Queen Hatshepsut’s tomb or the elongated proportions of Chartres. I wrote papers on early American silverware, Manet’s Argenteuil and paintings by Sargent. Then I went to medical school.
For some reason I had the idea there was art in medicine. Perhaps, at some level, there is. Physiology, how things work in your body, is amazing. Anatomy is interesting, too, though disgusting. Pathology is a puzzle, trying to guess what ailed former owners of formalinized organs in plastic buckets. There is a whole planet inside us we walk around with, not even knowing. Even its images—MRI’s, microscope slides, freeze-fractured electron micrographs—are beautiful. The first two years of medical school were completely focused. I read nothing but medical texts. There is a kind of joy in absorbing huge amounts of information in a very short time, sort of like eating an entire bag of Oreos. (The skill to do so served me well later when I wanted to bone up on gardening—I memorized perennials in about a week.)
It was in the third year, when we actually had to see patients, that I started having second thoughts. I should have known, the day the Welch-Allyn rep handed out the otoscopes, it wasn’t going to work out. Most students were swaggering around with their newly engraved doctor bags, pinning their name tags onto their white coats, playing with their tuning forks. I felt like an idiot. It wasn’t the patients—they were fine. It was the responsibility and the hours and no chance to do anything creative that eventually got to me. From the beginning, though, I felt peculiar trying to pass for a doctor. It seemed ludicrous, which it was at first: we didn’t know anything and the patients could smell it. But even after I’d graduated I felt like a sham in that white coat. Still, I’d invested so much in getting that far, I kept going through the motions, getting more and more numb. I could see, watching my teachers, that contrary to popular belief, the life of a doctor is not that much better than internship. The early rounds, emergencies and nights on call continue indefinitely. One day, exhausted, I sat by as my patient’s heart monitor displayed a short run of ventricular tachycardia, a potentially fatal arrhythmia. Alarms should have been going off in my head. Instead I just stared—felt nothing. It was horrifying; I knew I should do something but I was paralyzed. My mother’s words came back to me: when you stop seeing, it’s time to go home. So I went. Though not right away; my residency director said he’d sue me if I didn’t finish out the year. Before I left I told one of the cardiology fellows I wanted to write. Just don’t write one of those books about how bad internship is, he said. I haven’t. Yet.
In July of 1989, I went home, got pregnant, and started writing. I planted a huge, unmanageable garden. I painted. I cooked. All that backlogged will to create took over. I have never been so relieved in all my life. People (though never doctors) ask, do you miss medicine? I walk into the medical center, see the hunched figures in the cafeteria where I take my children to play with the frozen yogurt machines, and thank God or whatever that I am free to go. That place is a prison.
The joy of art, on the other hand, is that it is voluntary—the purest expression of freedom, choice. Take it or leave it. For those who choose it, or allow themselves to be chosen by it, it is a way of extending the spirit outward to encompass others, of sharing internal workings, saying the unsayable, triggering feeling. We have names for emotions, but emotions cannot fit neatly into their name-boxes. Feelings are amorphous, no two alike; they occur in fluid combination, run together like dye. Art steps in where language fails.
If language is incapable of conveying the nuances of the heart, how can we expect to make art from words? We move the words from the dictionary into the studio. Poetry is the most intense, concentrated form of writing. In some ways it combines all other forms of art. We produce images with the spontaneity of watercolor, the deliberate layering of oil. The white space—literally, on the page, and figuratively, what we don’t say—is critical. There is sound, silence, rhythm, the movement of dance. As with acting, we project a personality, from the printed page and from our performance of the work. The piece is a mosaic, a code: we present a few details, and from this small sampling the listener must come to a place, maybe not even the place we intended, but some place new and interesting. It is a strange kind of map, the map of our thinking.
I once took an interest inventory test. The result was that I should be either a cartographer, or an entertainer. How convenient, as a poet I can be both. |
