Collected Stories

Nor did we. Dobey and I had made a pact at the start of the trip that we would conceal ourselves, our professions, our antecedents, where we lived, what we were to each other. We would dwindle, grow deliberately thin, almost invisible, and live like aerial plants off the packed fragments and fictions of the hitchhikers we picked up.

One day we traveled for two hours—this was between Conway and Manchester—with a lisping, blue-jeaned giant from Canada who’d come to England to write a doctoral thesis on the early language theories of Wittgenstein.

“We owe tho muth to Withgenstein,” he sputtered, sweeping a friendly red paw through the air and including Dobey and me in the circle of Wittgenstein appreciators. He had run out of money. First he sold his camera; then his Yamaha recorder; then, illegally, the British Rail Pass his parents had given him when he finished his master’s degree. That was why he was hitchhiking. He said, “I am going to Oxthford” as though he was saying, “I am a man in love.”

He talked rapidly, not at all embarrassed by his lisp—Dobey and I liked him for that, though normally we refrain from forming personal judgments about our passengers. He spoke as though compelled to explain to us his exact reason for being where he was at that moment.

They all do. It is a depressing hypothesis, but probably, as Dobey says, true: people care only about themselves. They are frenzied and driven, but only by the machinery of their own adventuring. It has been several days now since anyone’s asked us who we are and what we’re doing driving around like this.

Usually Dobey drives, eyes on the road, listening with a supple, restless attention. I sit in the front passenger seat, my brain screwed up in a squint from looking sideways. At times I feel that giving lifts to strangers makes us into patronizing benefactors. But Dobey says this is foolish; these strangers buy their rides with their stories.

Dobey prefers to pick up strangers who are slightly distraught, saying they “unwind” more easily. Penury or a burned-out clutch—these work in our favor and save us from having to frame our careful questions. I am partial, though, to the calm, to those who stand by the roadside with their luggage in the dust, too composed or dignified to trouble the air with their thumbs. There was the remarkable Venezuelan woman who rode with us from Cardiff to Conway and spoke only intermittently and in sentences that seemed wrapped in their own cool vapors. Yes, she adored to travel alone. She liked the song of her own thoughts. She was made fat by the sight of mountains. The Welsh sky was blue like a cushion. She was eager to embrace rides from strangers. She liked to open wide windows so she could commune with the wind. She was a doctor, a specialist in bones, but alas, alas, she was not in love with her profession. She was in love with the English language because every word could be picked up and spun like a coin on the table top.

The shyest traveler can be kindled, Dobey maintains—often after just one or two strikes of the flint. That sullen Lancashire girl with the pink-striped hair and the colloid eyes—her dad was a coward, her mum shouted all the time, her boyfriend had broken her nose and got her pregnant. She was on her way, she told us, to a hostel in Bolton. Someone there would help her out. She had the address written on the inside of a cigarette packet. I looked aslant and could tell that Dobey wanted to offer her money, but part of our bargain was that we offer only rides.

Another thing we agreed on was that we would believe everything we were told. No matter how fantastic or eccentric or crazy the stories we heard, we’d pledged ourselves to respect their surfaces. Anyone who stepped into our back seat was trusted, even the bearded, evil-smelling curmudgeon we picked up in Sheffield who told us that the spirit of Ben Jonson had directed him to go to Westminster and stand at the abbey door preaching obedience to Mrs. Thatcher. We not only humored the old boy—who gave us shaggy, hand-rolled cigarettes to smoke—but we delivered him at midnight that same day.

Nevertheless, I’m becoming disillusioned. (It was my idea to head for Portsmouth and cross the channel.) I long, for instance, to let slip to one of our passengers that Dobey and I have slept in the bedchamber where King John was nipped by a bedbug. It’s not attention I want and certainly not admiration. It’s only that I’d like to float my own story on the air. I want to test its buoyancy, to see if it holds any substance, to see if it’s true or the opposite of true.

And I ask myself about the stories we’ve been hearing lately: Have they grown thinner? The Australian mother and daughter, for example—what had they offered? Relations in Exeter. A wedding in Melbourne. Is that enough? Dobey says to be patient, that everything is fragmentary, that it’s up to us to supply the missing links. Behind each of the people we pick up, Dobey believes, there’s a deep cave, and in the cave is a trap door and a set of stone steps that we may descend if we wish. I say to Dobey that there may be nothing at the bottom of the stairs, but Dobey says, how will we know if we don’t look.

Scenes

IN 1974 FRANCES WAS ASKED to give a lecture in Edmonton, and on the way there her plane was forced to make an emergency landing in a barley field. The man sitting next to her—they had not spoken—turned and asked if he might put his arms around her. She assented. They clung together, her size 12 dress and his wool suit. Later, he gave her his business card.

She kept the card for several weeks, poked in the edge of her bedroom mirror. It is a beautiful mirror, a graceful rectangle in a pine frame, and very, very old. Once it was attached to the back of a bureau belonging to Frances’s grandmother. Leaves, vines, flowers and fruit are shallowly carved in the soft wood of the frame. The carving might be described as primitive—and this is exactly why Frances loves it, being drawn to those things that are incomplete or in some way flawed. Furthermore, the mirror is the first thing she remembers seeing, really seeing, as a child. Visiting her grandmother, she noticed the stiff waves of light and shadow on the frame, the way square pansies interlocked with rigid grapes, and she remembers creeping out of her grandmother’s bed, where she had been put for an afternoon nap, and climbing on a chair so she could touch the worked surface with the flat of her hand.

Her grandmother died. It was discovered by the aunts and uncles that on the back of the mirror was stuck a piece of adhesive tape and on the tape was written: “For my vain little granddaughter Frances.” Frances’ mother was affronted, but put it down to hardening of the arteries. Frances, who was only seven, felt uniquely, mysteriously honored.

She did not attend the funeral; it was thought she was too young, and so instead she was taken one evening to the funeral home to bid goodbye to her grandmother’s body. The room where the old lady lay was large, quiet and hung all around with swags of velvet. Frances’s father lifted her up so she could see her grandmother, who was wearing a black dress with a white crepe jabot, her powdered face pulled tight, as though with a drawstring, into a sort of grimace. A lovely blanket with satin edging covered her trunky legs and torso. Laid out, calm and silent as a boat, she looked almost generous.

For some reason Frances was left alone with the casket for a few minutes, and she took this chance—she had to pull herself up on tiptoe—to reach out and touch her grandmother’s lips with the middle finger of her right hand. It was like pressing in the side of a rubber ball. The lips did not turn to dust—which did not surprise Frances at all, but rather confirmed what she had known all along. Later, she would look at her finger and say to herself, “This finger has touched dead lips.” Then she would feel herself grow rich with disgust. The touch, she knew, had not been an act of love at all, but only a kind of test.

With the same middle finger she later touched the gelatinous top of a goldfish swimming in a little glass bowl at school. She touched the raised mole on the back of her father’s white neck. Shuddering, she touched horse turds in the back lane, and she touched her own urine springing onto the grass as she squatted behind the snowball bush by the fence. When she looked into her grandmother’s mirror, now mounted on her own bedroom wall, she could hardly believe that she, Frances, had contravened so many natural laws.

The glass itself was beveled all the way around, and she can remember that she took pleasure in lining up her round face so that the beveled edge split it precisely in two. When she was fourteen she wrote in her diary, “Life is like looking into a beveled mirror.” The next day she crossed it out and, peering into the mirror, stuck out her tongue and made a face. All her life she’d had this weakness for preciosity, but mainly she’d managed to keep it in check.

She is a lithe and toothy woman with strong, thick, dark brown hair, now starting to gray. She can be charming. “Frances can charm the bees out of the hive,” said a friend of hers, a man she briefly thought she loved. Next year she’ll be forty-five—terrible!—but at least she’s kept her figure. A western sway to her voice is what people chiefly remember about her, just as they remember other people for their chins or noses. This voice sometimes makes her appear inquisitive, but, in fact, she generally hangs back and leaves it to others to begin a conversation.

Once a woman got into an elevator with her and said, “Will you forgive me if I speak my mind? This morning I came within an inch of taking my life. There was no real reason, only everything had got suddenly so dull. But I’m all right now. In fact, I’m going straight to a restaurant to treat myself to a plate of french fries. Just fries, not even a sandwich to go with them. I was never allowed to have french fries when I was a little girl, but the time comes when a person should do what she wants to do.”

The subject of childhood interests Frances, especially its prohibitions, so illogical and various, and its random doors and windows that appear solidly shut, but can, in fact, be opened easily with a touch or a password or a minute of devout resolution. It helps to be sly, also to be quick. There was a time when she worried that fate had penciled her in as “debilitated by guilt,” but mostly she takes guilt for what it is, a kind of lover who can be shrugged off or greeted at the gate. She looks at her two daughters and wonders if they’ll look back resentfully, recalling only easy freedoms and an absence of terror—in other words, meagerness—and envy her for her own stern beginnings. It turned out to have been money in the bank, all the various shames and sweats of growing up. It was instructive; it kept things interesting; she still shivers, remembering how exquisitely sad she was as a child.

“It’s only natural for children to be sad,” says her husband, Theo, who, if he has a fault, is given to reductive statements. “Children are unhappy because they are inarticulate and hence lonely.”

Frances can’t remember being lonely, but telling this to Theo is like blowing into a hurricane. She was spoiled—a lovely word, she thinks—and adored by her parents, her plump, white-faced father and her skinny, sweet-tempered mother. Their love was immense and enveloping like a fall of snow. In the evenings, winter evenings, she sat between the two of them on a blue nubby sofa, listening to the varnished radio and taking sips from their cups of tea from time to time or sucking on a spoonful of sugar. The three of them sat enthralled through “Henry Aldrich” and “Fibber Magee and Molly,” and when Frances laughed they looked at her and laughed too. Frances has no doubt that those spoonfuls of sugar and the roar of Fibber Magee’s closet and her parents’ soft looks were taken in and preserved so that she, years later, boiling an egg or making love or digging in the garden, is sometimes struck by a blow of sweetness that seems to come out of nowhere.

The little brown house where she grew up sat in the middle of a block crowded with other such houses. In front of each lay a tiny lawn and a flower bed edged with stones. Rows of civic trees failed to flourish, but did not die either. True, there was terror in the back lane, where the big boys played with sticks and jackknives, but the street was occupied mainly by quiet, hard-working families, and in the summertime hopscotch could be played in the street, there was so little traffic.

Frances’s father spent his days “at the office.” Her mother stayed at home, wore bib aprons, made jam and pickles and baked custard, and every morning before school brushed and braided Frances’s hair. Frances can remember, or thinks she can remember, that one morning her mother walked as far as the corner with her and said, “I don’t know why, but I’m so full of happiness today I can hardly bear it.” The sun came fretting through the branches of a scrubby elm at that minute and splashed across her mother’s face, making her look like someone in a painting or like one of the mothers in her school reader.

Learning to read was like falling into a mystery deeper than the mystery of airwaves or the halo around the head of the baby Jesus. Deliberately she made herself stumble and falter over the words in her first books, trying to hold back the rush of revelation. She saw other children being matter-of-fact and methodical, puzzling over vowels and consonants and sounding out words as though they were dimes and nickels that had to be extracted from the slot of a bank. She felt suffused with light and often skipped or hopped or ran wildly to keep herself from flying apart.

Her delirium, her failure to ingest books calmly, made her suspect there was something wrong with her or else with the world, yet she deeply distrusted the school librarian, who insisted that a book could be a person’s best friend. (Those subject to preciosity instantly spot others with the same affliction.) This librarian, Miss Mayes, visited all the classes. She was tall and soldierly with a high, light voice. “Boys and girls,” she cried, bringing large red hands together, “a good book will never let you down.” She went on; books could take you on magic journeys; books could teach you where the rain came from or how things used to be in the olden days. A person who truly loved books need never feel alone.

But, she continued, holding up a finger, there are people who do shameful things to books. They pull them from the shelves by their spines. They turn down the corners of pages; they leave them on screened porches where the rain and other elements can warp their covers; and they use curious and inappropriate objects as bookmarks.

From a petit point bag she drew a list of objects that had been wrongly, criminally inserted between fresh clean pages: a blue-jay feather, an oak leaf, a matchbook cover, a piece of colored chalk and, on one occasion—“on one occasion, boys and girls”—a strip of bacon.

A strip of bacon. In Frances’s mind the strip of bacon was uncooked, cold and fatty with a pathetic streaking of lean. Its oil would press into the paper, a porky abomination, and its ends would flop out obscenely. The thought was thrilling: someone, someone who lived in the same school district, had had the audacity, the imagination, to mark the pages of a book with a strip of bacon. The existence of this person and his outrageous act penetrated the fever that had come over her since she’d learned to read, and she began to look around again and see what the world had to offer.

Next door lived Mr. and Mrs. Shaw, and upstairs, fast asleep, lived Louise Shaw, aged eighteen. She had been asleep for ten years. A boy across the street named Jackie McConnell told Frances that it was the sleeping sickness, that Louise Shaw had been bitten by the sleeping sickness bug, but Frances’s mother said no, it was the coma. One day Mrs. Shaw, smelling of chlorine bleach and wearing a flower-strewn housedress, stopped Frances on the sidewalk, held the back of her hand to the side of Frances’s face and said, “Louise was just your age when we lost her. She was forever running or skipping rope or throwing a ball up against the side of the garage. I used to say to her, don’t make such a ruckus, you’ll drive me crazy. I used to yell all the time at her, she was so full of beans and such a chatterbox.” After that Frances felt herself under an obligation to Mrs. Shaw, and whenever she saw her she made her body speed up and whirl on the grass or do cartwheels.

A little later she learned to negotiate the back lane. There, between board fences, garbage cans, garage doors and stands of tough weeds, she became newly nimble and strong. She learned to swear—damn, hell and dirty bastard—and played piggy-move-up and spud and got herself roughly kissed a number of times, and then something else happened: one of the neighbors put up a basketball hoop. For a year, maybe two—Frances doesn’t trust her memory when it comes to time—she was obsessed with doing free throws. She became known as the queen of free throws; she acquired status, even with the big boys, able to sink ten out of ten baskets, but never, to her sorrow, twenty out of twenty. She threw free throws in the morning before school, at lunchtime, and in the evening until it got dark. Nothing made her happier than when the ball dropped silently through the ring without touching it or banking on the board. At night she dreamed of these silky baskets, the rush of air and sinuous movement of the net, then the ball striking the pavement and returning to her hands. (“Sounds a bit Freudian to me,” her husband, Theo, said when she tried to describe for him her time of free-throw madness, proving once again how far apart the two of them were in some things.) One morning she was up especially early. There was no one about. The milkman hadn’t yet come, and there was dew shining on the tarry joints of the pavement. Holding the ball in her hands was like holding onto a face, it was so dearly familiar with its smell of leather and its seams and laces. That morning she threw twenty-seven perfect free throws before missing. Each time the ball went through the hoop she felt an additional oval of surprise grow round her body. She had springs inside her, in her arms and in the insteps of her feet. What stopped her finally was her mother calling her name, demanding to know what she was doing outside so early. “Nothing,” Frances said, and knew for the first time the incalculable reward of self-possession.

There was a girl in her sewing class named Pat Leonard. She was older than the other girls, had a rough pitted face and a brain pocked with grotesqueries. “Imagine,” she said to Frances, “sliding down a banister and suddenly it turns into a razor blade.” When she trimmed the seams of the skirt she was making and accidentally cut through the fabric, she laughed out loud. To amuse the other girls she sewed the skin of her fingers together. She told a joke, a long story about a pickle factory that was really about eating excrement. In her purse was a packet of cigarettes. She had a boyfriend who went to the technical school, and several times she’d reached inside his pants and squeezed his thing until it went off like a squirt gun. She’d flunked math twice. She could hardly read. One day she wasn’t there, and the sewing teacher said she’d been expelled. Frances felt as though she’d lost her best friend, even though she wouldn’t have been seen dead walking down the hall with Pat Leonard. Melodramatic tears swam into her eyes, and then real tears that wouldn’t stop until the teacher brought her a glass of water and offered to phone her mother.

Another time, she was walking home from a friend’s in the early evening. She passed by a little house not far from her own. The windows were open and, floating on the summer air, came the sound of people speaking in a foreign language. There seemed to be a great number of them, and the conversation was very rapid and excited. They might have been quarreling or telling old stories; Frances had no idea which. It could have been French or Russian or Portuguese they spoke. The words ran together and made queer little dashes and runs and choking sounds. Frances imagined immense, wide-branching grammars and steep, stone streets rising out of other centuries. She felt as though she’d been struck by a bolt of good fortune, and all because the world was bigger than she’d been led to believe.

At university, where she studied languages, she earned pocket money by working in the library. She and a girl named Ursula were entrusted with the key, and it was their job to open the library on Saturday mornings. During the minute or two before anyone else came, the two of them galloped at top speed through the reference room, the periodical room, the reading room, up and down the rows of stacks, filling that stilled air with what could only be called primal screams. Why this should have given Frances such exquisite pleasure she couldn’t have said, since she was in rebellion against nothing she knew of. By the time the first students arrived, she and Ursula would be standing behind the main desk, date stamp in hand, sweet as dimity.

One Saturday, the first person who came was a bushy-headed, serious-minded zoology student named Theodore, called Theo by his friends. He gave Frances a funny look, then in a cracked, raspy voice asked her to come with him later and have a cup of coffee. A year later he asked her to marry him. He had a mind unblown by self-regard and lived, it seemed to Frances, in a nursery world of goodness and badness with not much room to move in between.

It’s been mainly a happy marriage. Between the two of them, they’ve invented hundreds of complex ways of enslaving each other, some of them amazingly tender. Like other married people, they’ve learned to read each other’s minds. Once Theo said to Frances as they drove around and around, utterly lost in a vast treeless suburb, “In every one of these houses there’s been a declaration of love,” and this was exactly the thought Frances had been thinking.

To her surprise, to everyone’s surprise, she turned out to have an aptitude for monogamy. Nevertheless, many of the scenes that have come into her life have involved men. Once she was walking down a very ordinary French street on a hot day. A man, bare-chested, drinking Perrier at a café table, sang out, “Bonjour.” Not “Bonjour, madame” or “Bonjour, mademoiselle,” just “Bonjour.” Cheeky. She was wearing white pants, a red blouse, a straw hat and sunglasses. “Bonjour,” she sang back and gave a sassy little kick, which became the start of a kind of dance. The man at the table clapped his hands over his head to keep time as she went dancing by.

Once she went to the British Museum to finish a piece of research. There was a bomb alert just as she entered, and everyone’s shopping bags and briefcases were confiscated and searched. It happened that Frances had just bought a teddy bear for the child of a friend she was going to visit later in the day. The guard took it, shook it till its eyes rolled, and then carried it away to be X-rayed. Later he brought it to Frances, who was sitting at a table examining a beautiful old manuscript. As he handed her the bear, he kissed the air above its fuzzy head, and Frances felt her mouth go into the shape of a kiss too, a kiss she intended to be an expression of her innocence, only that. He winked. She winked back. He leaned over and whispered into her ear a suggestion that was hideously, comically, obscene. She pretended not to hear, and a few minutes later she left, hurrying down the street full of cheerful shame, her work unfinished.

These are just some of the scenes in Frances’s life. She thinks of them as scenes because they’re much too fragmentary to be stories and far too immediate to be memories. They seem to bloom out of nothing, out of the thin, uncolored air of defeats and pleasures. A curtain opens, a light appears, there are voices or music or sometimes a wide transparent stream of silence. Only rarely do they point to anything but themselves. They’re difficult to talk about. They’re useless, attached to nothing, can’t be traded in or shaped into instruments to prise open the meaning of the universe.