Alison McGhee

Have you ever played the game True, True, Not True? (If that is indeed what is called. You sit around and take turns telling two things about yourself that are true, and one that isn’t, and the others in the circle – best played around a campfire – guess which is the untrue thing.)

This is a variation, in which I list some of the things I saw yesterday, down here on the forgotten coast. Everything on the list is true except for one. And which one is it?

A brown pelican, gulping down a large fish and then flying in a prehistoric, cawing way low across the water in search of another.

An old celadon-green sink, rusting at the base, propped outside a junk store.

A very old woman in a black pantsuit and a black hat, escorted into the raw bar by her crimson-faced, pickle-brained middle-aged alcoholic son, who, every time he rose to pull himself another beer from the tap on the wall, found something new to salute: a wooden Indian, a photo of a football team, his own reflection in the window.

A bald eagle circling high over pines on an island, maybe looking for prey or – more likely, from the way he drifted back and forth – enjoying the steady breeze off the ocean.

Two alligators, one sunning his eight-foot body next to a pond, the other barely submerging and floating along lazily.

A hunched woman of indeterminate age, wearing a pink Piggly Wiggly t-shirt and a pair of men’s sansabelt pants, her eyeglasses mended with what looked like a popsicle stick and duct tape, trying to sell several used copies of “The Shack” and one copy of “Slim for Him” on the street corner of a tiny Gulf town.

A large man enthroned on a golf cart, putting down the dirt street of a trailer town, his two dogs – one a black pit bull, the other a shepherd mix – cantering a block behind him.

Two enormous jellyfish, beached and no doubt dead.

A handsome, wide-shouldered man, crouched before an abandoned yellow one-story home overgrown with vines, two enormous pink wooden crab legs extending from either side of the front door, taking a Polaroid photo.

An unsteady wooden sign pointing the way to the Love Fellowship Church, three blocks that way.

Two large black-bristled wild boars charging through a palmetto grove.

A bubble of saliva dropping from the trembling mouth of a hungry dog crouching on the floor waiting for his bowl of food to be lowered before him.

A wizened potato, many times microwaved, being used as a bedwarmer, just as they did it back in the Laura Ingalls Wilder days (only without the microwave).

A man wearing a New York City subway #7 cap – Manhattan to Queens – hunched before a glowing computer screen in a many-windowed round house on tall stilts.

A partially-knit scarf trailing a ball of rust-colored wool, which upon closer examination reveals its knitter to be incapable of remembering when to knit, when to purl, and how to keep a stitch count constant.

A folded piece of scrappish-looking paper which, when opened, is covered with the names and nicknames of various people, below which is written, in capital letters, THANK YOU.

A week after Lent began and although she’s not Catholic and never was, that whole Catholic Lenten thing seems to have filtered down through the air and water so that it’s a part of her. The idea of it anyway, the idea of giving up something for six weeks.

Each year she carefully considers giving up something, something that means something to her, but has she?  Ever? Honestly, she can’t quite remember.

Way back when that photo was taken – she’s on the left there, in the baggy bathing cap – she was more committed to the idea. Six weeks isn’t a long time and it seems entirely possible to give up virtually anything or 42 days, doesn’t it? And yet did she?

Consider for a moment the little girl in the upper right, one of her sisters, the one in that cute plaid bathing suit. That little girl did indeed follow through one year on a major vow: Give up all desserts. For six straight weeks not a bite of dessert touched her lips. And yet on Easter day the stone was rolled away from the freezer, and from the freezer did issue forth 42 days’ worth of desserts, carefully tinfoiled away and frozen until the day of dessert resurrection.

Can that possibly count as a Lenten sacrifice? She thinks not.

It is already one week into Lent and once again she is mildly tormented by the thought of sacrifice and what, if anything, she should give up. Because there is so very much to give up.

Refined sugar, that’s always a big one among her friends. She herself doesn’t crave it enough to make it seem like a big enough sacrifice, though.  Her one small cup of strong coffee with heavy cream in the morning, that would be a true sacrifice. But she doesn’t want to give it up. Therein lies the problem. She may be too wedded to her vices to give them up.

Is one small cup of strong coffee with heavy cream in the morning a vice, though? A vice implies harm, and is the coffee truly harming her? She thinks not.

She could give up painting her toenails, but that wouldn’t work because she almost never paints them anyway. She could give up Milky Ways, but they’ve gotten too sweet lately, so that wouldn’t work.

She could give up her Wednesday Powerball purchase, but then she would also have to give up the many dreams that accompany the weekly purchase, and that would be a sort of death-in-life, would it not, which seems antithetical to the nature of the sacrifice. Besides, she won $3 in last Wednesday’s Powerball, which must mean that she is inching ever closer to the pot o’ gold.

She could give up her dream of being an Olympic speed skater, but that wouldn’t work either, for too many reasons to go into here on this humble blog.

Maybe a sacrifice can mean not the taking away of something for 42 days, but the adding in thereof. She could do yoga for one hour every day for the next six weeks. She could practice meditation – focus on the breath, return to the breath – for one hour every day for the next six weeks.

She could give up cussing – not one single swear word will issue from her lips for the next six weeks – but she knows damn well (see?) she wouldn’t be able to follow through, and how self-defeating to attempt something you know you will never succeed at.

She returns to the photo at the top and gazes upon the little girl with the baggy swim cap drooping off her head. Tell you what, little girl: Let’s give up swim caps! Let’s give them up not only for the next six weeks, but for all eternity. Now that is a sacrifice not only worth making, but possible.

We applaud you. Go forth and be bareheaded, my child.

“Sometimes I feel that I am not living so much as being lived.”

She’s been mulling this for days, that line above that came shimmering up from the middle of a faraway friend’s note in her inbox. It’s reduced itself in her mind to I am being lived, and she thinks about it in her waking hours and when she’s going to sleep.

She’s thinking about it now, from a chair in front of tall windows that open onto a narrow balcony. The balcony looks out over a driveway made of small white rocks and crushed oyster shells.

A cage where three parrots perch, gazing about and squawking. Where did these parrots come from? If someone opened the door to their cage would they fly out and make a life for themselves here on this forgotten beach, among the tall pines and stubby palms? She doesn’t know.

Now she’s thinking about the wild parrots of Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. She saw a documentary about these parrots once, and when she went to San Francisco she kept a sharp eye out for them, but they were not to be found. Although, given the non-sharpness of her sharp eye, they were probably perched all over Telegraph Hill, watching her watch for them.

Is she living or is she being lived? She will sit in this chair, looking out at this pine that, were she a child again, she would build a treehouse in, and she will write down whatever comes to her.

A bookshelf, maybe three feet across, in the small blue-green room so far away. Forty-nine desk diaries, filled with scratchy angular half-script half-printing. Two years in which each desk diary is only half-filled: hard years. One desk diary for each year of each child’s life.

Now that the oldest lives so far away, in that city by the sea, should she stop? She thinks of her mother, who raised her to be fiercely independent. She once asked her mother if it had been hard at all, when she went away to college. All she herself remembers is the station wagon pulling away, nosing down the hill, her mother waving goodbye out the car window, smiling – and the sense of her own life, horizons lifting and opening all around her.

I cried the whole way home, her mother said, all those years later. I realized that I would never again know what you were wearing, never again watch you eat breakfast before school.

She thinks of the red one-peck apple basket under her desk, again back in that small blue-green room with the small orange couch. Little squares of paper inside, dozens of them, hundreds, one for each day, the names of those she loves written on them.

Now a blackhaired girl appears in her mind, posing in the doorway of that small blue-green room, smiling, embarrassed. Should I wear the black ones or the blue ones? Don’t just say they both look good. I don’t want you to think like a mom. I want you to tell me the truth.

Now a small square table, wooden with green vinyl inlay, appears. This is a table from long, long ago and far away. This table sat in a tiny kitchen, a kitchen sprayed weekly for roaches, a kitchen with a small gas stove, a single sink, dark and ugly but she and her sister don’t care.

A man, lean and quick and handsome, sits across the table from her. They are eating crackers with pesto and limburger cheese and other smelly foods full of flavor, the kind that they always ate together because they loved them and no one else did.

I’m thinking of ending it all, he says, and she stops with a cracker halfway to her mouth and looks across the table at him, a distance of a couple of feet and the abyss of space. She can’t think. Did he just say what she thought he did? Then he says it again. I’m thinking of ending it all.

Violin strings come to her now, violin strings on a violin held in the crook of a man’s neck, bow in his hand. He draws the bow across the strings and plays. Classical music, which she, being a child and ignorant, doesn’t recognize. This man is her grandfather. He came to this country when he himself was a child, from Europe, from a land with shape-shifting boundaries. He will die when she is seven years old, and she will never know him, but she will think about him throughout her life, shadow man, holding that violin, standing in that dark apartment in Manhattan.

A night comes to her, a night in southern Florida when she stands outside in the dark at a pay phone trying to hang on, but the person on the other end of the line doesn’t want to hang on, and hangs up. She is alone in the darkness, trying to breathe, and a blob of putty falls from a tree and lands on the pavement next to her. A frog. An albino frog.

Now here is another night, long after the night of the albino frog and the pay phone. She is in a hospital, alone in a quiet lamplit room, a television muted above her head and a tray of hospital food on her lap: chicken, green beans, two slices of limp toast and a small bowl of red jello.

Next to her bed a small new being is asleep, a seven-pound small new being. War is happening on the mute television, bombs are being dropped, and ordinarily she would hardly be able to breathe at the sight, but now she eats and breathes and puts her hand on the head of the small new being to feel that soft spot pulsing up and down.

This, she recognizes, is a respite. She is not herself. Tomorrow the worries will come rushing back.

She is right, but she is also wrong. This is the moment she will remember, always, for the rest of her life, when she thinks of the word peace.

Noon is approaching. She has been sitting in this chair a long time. Her muscles want up and out, want to uncramp themselves. Out there in the trees, the parrots are hopping about in their cage, watching and waiting. Am I living or am I being lived? Is there a difference?

She’s sitting in the small upstairs room at the front of the house, the room with the three paned windows overlooking the big pine tree and the city street, the room that she painted blue-green.

Silky fuchsia and orange curtains are twisted up over the long wooden curtain rod. Above the windows is a ledge that she’s propped photos and talismans on:

Her laughing, with her arms around her friend John.

Her, or her body anyway, from the waist down, arm curved around her little black-haired girl, age five.

Her in an evening gown with her arms around her two evening-gowned  sisters.

Her parents, walking down the aisle on that bright October day. Her father, smiling, still with the beard that he shaved only this past October, when the Yankees won.

Her, age five, her arm around her old childhood friend David, the two of them peering at planks laid across a creek.  This is a photo that she cut out and glued to a curved wedge of wood and gave to her parents for Christmas one year, but somehow she has ended up with it again.

Black wooden letters spelling L A U G H.

A small antique book of love sonnets, given to her by someone she loves.

A row of tiny plastic tuxedoed penguins.

She wishes that someone would come walking up the stairs and into the small blue-green room bearing a tray. On the tray would be a packet of those very thin gingersnaps – she believes they’re called “ginger thins” –  and a mug of Earl Grey tea.

The someone would set down the tray and sit on the small orange couch with the crocheted granny afghan thrown over it, the afghan she found at a garage sale for $2 and bought immediately because it looked exactly like the kind her own grandmother would have made. The ginger thins-bearing someone wouldn’t mind if she ate the entire packet herself.

Is she feeling sorry for herself? She is. She decides to list some of the things she  is grateful for. Shall she do it by letter of the alphabet, as Mary Karr was told to do and scoffed at, calling it a puerile idea, but did anyway? She shall.

A: She is grateful that her parents named her Alison, as she’s always loved her name, which, in her experience, is not that common.

B: She is grateful for BD, whose way of seeing and way of being turns the small and ordinary into the beloved.

C: She is grateful for Cindy Sykes, marvelous companion of her childhood, lost and now found.

D: She is grateful that she remembers a woman who loved flowers, bending over a big bunch of them, calling to her son: Davily, Davily.

She pauses for a moment, wondering if every single letter of her list of gratefulness will  be the beginning of someone’s name. It certainly could be, she thinks, because she is blessed with people she loves.

E: Eritrea and Ethiopia. She is grateful that these countries interest her, and that she knows something of their history, because it has led to many an interesting conversation with the Eritrean and Ethiopian cabdrivers of Minneapolis.

F: She is grateful for fudge. Peanut butter fudge, especially that bought at the store at the very peak of Hogback Mountain on Route 9 in Vermont.

G: Gabrielle. She is always, especially, grateful for Gabrielle.

H: Halvah, specifically chocolate-covered Joyvah Halvah. Now she is remembering the many years when she always had this halvah in the refrigerator. Two small logs of it came in a package, and she kept it hidden, so that she and she alone could saw off chunks whenever she felt the need. Not that anyone else would’ve wanted it anyway. Why did she stop buying it? She wants some now. Does the grocery store still carry it, she wonders.

I: Isla, her beloved island in Mexico where she went so many times, where she would walk the shoreline for hours on end until the year of the hurricane, when the beach was cut by three-quarters.

J: Julie. She remembers the day many years ago when she met Julie, who was wearing a long sundress, whose husband calls her Beanie, and who had a coughing fit that first night at dinner.

K: She is grateful for Krispies, as in Rice Krispies, as it is one of the primary ingredients in her secret homemade unrefined sugar good for you but oh so delicious power bar recipe that both her daughters love.

L: Lecithin. Should she be grateful for lecithin? What is lecithin, exactly? She decides to be grateful for it no matter what it is, because it’s the first thing that popped into her head, and she is a believer in instinct.

M: She’s grateful for McGhee Hill Road, the road that she and Oatie were just talking about the other day. “Let’s you and me go take a road trip back to McGhee Hill! Yeah, and we’ll go to the farmhouse, and we’ll stop at the stone wall!” Yes, please let’s do that, she thinks. And she wants to stop at the graveyard, too, because her grandmother would like that, her grandmother who always went and took care of her grandfather’s grave. Who is taking care of the graves now?

N: Neighbors. She’s grateful for her neighbors. They watch out for each other. They take turns taking care of each other’s dogs. They bring each other food. They let each other know when there’s trouble on the block.

O: Olives. She loves them, lucques especially. And she loves a good dirty martini, which would not be dirty without the olive juice.

P: Pickles. Half-sour Batampte pickles from Fishman’s, the kosher grocery store on Route 7. Actually, she loves pickles of any kind, even watermelon rind pickles. Capers, do they count as pickles? She thinks so, and how wonderful is a caper, with its ability to put a little salty zing in virtually anything? Especially the salt-cured kind.

Q: Queen, which is what her French middle name translates as, another name she’s always loved. She lucked out with the names, there’s no doubt about it.

R: Right as rain. A good expression, don’t you think? She appreciates that someone long ago saw rain as lovely and necessary, enough to precede it with “right as.”

S: Silly putty. Remember silly putty? Who could not be grateful for it? Long ago, when she was lucky enough to have purchased a little egg of it, she used to press it against the Sunday comics and then peel it off slowly and stretch it out to elongate the cartoon faces. Snap – that’s what silly putty does, eventually – snaps, with a very satisfying, crisp sound.

T: Toddlers,  as in her nephew, the one who spent the weekend with her this past weekend, who kept pulling up his shirt to show her his long abdominal scar, and saying, with a wicked grin, “They cut me open! And then they cut me up again!”

U: She is grateful for underwear. It comes in handy.

V: She is grateful for Victorious, the boy on the schoolbus who makes her daughter laugh every morning, which makes her laugh too.

W: Why, which is one of her favorite words and favorite questions. It’s a slowing-down word, a slowing-down question, and she needs – always – to slow down.

X: She is grateful to live near a street named Xerxes, which is not the same as living near a street named Oak or Chestnut.

Y: You. Whoever you are, reading this right now, whether she knows you or not, she is grateful to you.

Z: She is grateful to Nel, who sends her a goodnight text every night, which she’s recently started signing off with this:  Zzzoxoxoxo.

She looks at the list and thinks, Thank you. She breathes in – thank you – and breathes out – goodbye.

Interviewer’s note: The below interview was conducted on Sunday morning, January 10, 2010.

The long-distance writer had just finished reading the many and various and often wondrous contributions to the Facebook group Ah, Look at All the Lonely People.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=252518999360&ref=mf

Q. So, let’s begin with happiness. Have you, to the best of your knowledge, ever been happy?

A. Certainly. Often, in fact. Sometimes a wild sweep of happiness comes rushing through me and I’m helpless and thrilled by its presence.

And now I’m thinking of Oklahoma, the musical I first saw in the Holland Patent High School auditorium when I was a little girl, sitting with my sisters and my mother.

Q. Please stay on task. At what times are you happiest?

A. When am I happiest?

Q. That’s the question, and I am the interviewer here, not you, so do not try to wrest control of either the questions or the order in which they are asked.

A. Would you consider yourself a tough interviewer? Someone determined to get to the heart of the matter? Not willing to let her subject avoid, deny or contradict?

Sorry. But not really. One trait of a skilled interviewer is knowing when to follow the breadcrumbs, a trait you might do well to acquire.

To answer your question: I’m happiest when I’m happiest, and that’s not predictable. At times in my life when the mythological-industrial complex would have you the happiest, I have been walled off inside my own body, my own body which is going through the motions, this face that is smiling, these eyes that are fixed on yours, this head which is tilted in a friendly manner, this voice which is conversing with you readily and amiably.

And the walled-off part of me? Observing. Unsmiling. Untalking. Lonely beyond measure.

Q. We’re talking about happiness here, not loneliness.

A. They’re the same thing, aren’t they? Turn that quarter over and the picture’s different but it’s still a quarter. My second-favorite coin, by the way, next to the dime, which doesn’t buy nearly as much and which can be used in almost no parking meter outside small town meters, but which is so lovely and shiny and heartbreakingly slender.

Q. Did you just turn a question about happiness into a brief discourse on the qualities of the dime as you see it?

A. Indeed I did. Do you have a problem with that?

Q. Give me one moment in your life when you were purely happy.

A. I’ll give you several, right off the top of my head, and then perhaps you’ll shut up and let me talk about anything I want.

1) Riding my bike down Ankens’ hill when I was nine years old, with the new speedometer attached, and I got it up to 35 mph and then lifted my hands off the handlebars.

2) That night at the Alibi when El wore her lavender shirt and the DJ played that Police song.

3) That night when I was lying in the porch swing reading the Sun and the white lights strung overhead blinked on, and a car door shut softly, and footsteps came up the steps.

Q. What would you like to talk about?

A. How things come and go. How they come and go without you – you meaning me – willing them to or wanting them to.

How in a life that by all possible standards is blessed beyond measure, filled with friends and family and work and animals and places, all of which are beautiful and beloved, there are still those moments when the black hole opens up. And everything, all of it, is in question, and nothing, none of it, is of help.

Q. Would you say that that particular kind of loneliness, if you can call it that, is specific to you?

A. No. Surely not. I would say that it belongs to all of us.

Q. What is your promise to us, then?

A. My promise to you is this: That when I am looking at you smile at me, talk with me, hold out your hand to me, and when I smile back, and talk with you, and hold your hand, squeeze it even, I know.

I know that even at this very moment, you might be hiding in there, behind the wall, black abyss behind you, barely able to function. At these times – which are all times – know that no matter what I am saying or how I am looking at you, I am sending you this message: You are not alone.

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”

It was the second day of a three-day blizzard, and she had just come in from shoveling.

She had decided to shovel every time four or five new inches had fallen, because it was heavy, wet snow, and it stuck to the shovel, and she figured that her back would break right in half if she left it all to the bitter end, which was supposed to be two or more feet.

Those she loved were not with her yet, and she made some lemon squares and roasted some vegetables and rubbed the skins off many boiled potatoes.

The snow was falling outside the upstairs room with the blue-green walls where she sat with the dog and the cat, all of them looking out at the street, where two tracks meandered down the nearly-unplowed expanse.

It was beautiful. The big pine outside her window was laden with snow, and so was the one across the street, and colored and white lights on houses and trees and bushes glowed through the falling snow up and down the block.

Earlier that afternoon she had watched as bundled-up women and men came struggling out of the apartment buildings, wrapped gifts piled high in plastic laundry baskets. They had started their cars, brushed snow off windows, shoveled around the tires and then helped push each other out of the drifts and into those two tracks.

Her  car with its four new high-performance all-season tires could no longer be called the Death Cab, and so she herself braved the snow and drove to her brother and sister-in-law’s house a few miles away. They ate tortellini and salad, and she partook of a vegetarian Scotch egg, a culinary first.

Her nephew showed her his favorite ornament on the tree, a small beaded candy cane. He told her he would be leaving out some cookies and water.

“Do you mean cookies and milk?”

No. He meant cookies and water.

Earlier in the day, on the first of her several shoveling expeditions, she was shoveling the sidewalk when a man came strolling down the street with a snowblower. Strolling, yes, an odd word, but the only one that fits.

“Are you shoveling that whole sidewalk?”

Indeed she was shoveling that whole sidewalk.

“Let me snowblow it for you. I’m going this way anyway.”

She let him.

She spoke to her mother and father, who were due to fly in the next day from their faraway home in the foothills of upstate New York. They compared respective snowfalls and decided that if they, they being her mother and father, arrived less than 36 hours late they, they being everyone, would all be pleasantly surprised.

She advised her mother to pack extra food and a change of underwear. Her mother advised her to take a prophylactic dose of ibuprofen before her next shoveling expedition.

On her third shoveling expedition she discovered that the snowblowing man hired by her 85-year-old neighbor had snowblown a miniature mountain of snow directly in front of her backyard gate, sealing her in.

This  was an interesting challenge which she met full-on, wielding her shovel as both pickaxe and shovel. As she worked she mulled the past tense of snowblow: Snowblew? Snowblowed? Snubled?

She reminded herself that the days were already growing longer and that the time of greatest darkness was already behind her.

She vowed to straighten her back with each shovelful, and lift with her legs, but she broke the vow immediately.

Late that night her best friend called her, sleepy, and they discussed the  amount of produce wasted when one was forced, by lack of time, to do one large grocery shop per week rather than a little shop daily, basket in hand, as the French do. Or as they would like to believe the French do.

They discussed the habit some people have of sending a single family emissary early to an event, an event such as a candlelight service at a small church, say, with many extra coats in hand, and draping those coats up and down an entire pew.

They discussed the habit each had of buying gifts, wrapping gifts, hiding gifts so they would remain safe and undiscovered, and then forgetting that they had bought, wrapped, and hidden these gifts.

Her best friend wished her sweet dreams and hung up. She looked around the blue-green walls of the upstairs room, at the orange and fuchsia silky curtains flung over the curtain rod, at the little white lights strung around the window, at the snow falling outside on the laden pines.

Near midnight, she put on her coat and scarf and mittens and her giant men’s boots and went to be with others, to sing songs and light candles.

She smiled at everyone, and they all smiled back.