Alison McGhee

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.

Why is it that when she searches for images here in cyberspace,  images related to concrete things here on earth, the images that come back to her are from space, outer space?

Like this one.  That image right there is the Cartwheel Galaxy, 150,000 light years away.

Cartwheels have been on her mind for a while, cartwheels like the ones she used to do when she was little, and also when she was not so little, when she was twenty and living on the ocean for that one summer, and she used to get up early and go down to the beach in the fog, and cartwheel down the beach on the hard-packed sand, plush beneath her feet.

She had just flown back to the U.S. from Taiwan, where she had been living, and the adjustment was disorienting. She was no longer an oddity, so tall, tromping around streets where she was the only one who wasn’t Chinese.

She and her best friend lived  in rooms in a tiny town  on the ocean, rooms that they rented by the week, in a house where no men were allowed past ten o’clock at night.

They were waitresses that summer, at different restaurants. They worked the dinner shift, and they got back late at  night, and they went out after they got back, to the only bar in that tiny town on the ocean.

Her best friend would order a gin and tonic, and she would order something called a Seabreeze, which was a simple drink,  a pretty combination of fruit juices that, when combined, turned a coral color in the glass.

The  bathroom at the bar was full of girls their ages, hovering before the mirror, eyes narrow and focused, re-applying mascara or lip gloss. The air in the bathroom was heavy with hairspray. She did not wear hairspray or mascara or lip gloss, but she too looked in the mirror, if briefly, covertly.

She was full of longing that summer, intense and unspecific, the kind of longing that kept her from deep sleep at night and woke her at dawn. In memory she makes her way down the narrow path through the dunes to the beach, wearing the pink skirt she bought from a stall in Taipei. Always the pink skirt.

The beach, in memory, is always fogged in at dawn. The high tide line, in memory, is always visible, and the sand down by the water is packed hard.

She raises her arms above her head and does the running skip she always does before the first cartwheel, lifts her right knee high, and then over she goes. She’s in the fog, it doesn’t matter if the skirt flies up above her neck.

Down the beach she goes, cartwheeling over and over, skirt flying up and settling down, flying up and settling down. Now her heart is pounding and she’s out of breath. Her palms are red and imprinted with grains of sand.

From out on the water come the sounds of the fishing boats, the bells, the harbor buoys. There is a boy out there on one of them who brings her fish while she’s at work, when he comes in from fishing. She finds a note on the refrigerator of the house with a stick picture of a fish, an arrow pointing to the freezer, her name, and a smiley face. She would like to see more of this boy, but he works while she sleeps,  and he sleeps while she works.

She has a bunch of friends who are men – boys, still – strictly friends is what they all are, and they come visit her that summer, in twos and threes and fours, and what are they to do, with that no men past ten o’clock rule? The only thing they can do, of course: Stay out all night, sleeping in the dunes in sleeping bags and under blankets.

Sleep, always elusive for her, is beautifully eluded that summer, down there on the sand, with her beloved friends asleep around her and the stars massing overhead, hundreds of thousands of light years away.

Late at night, every night, she leaves the noisy hot bar and walks down the street to the house, the ocean air salt and cool on her face. Again, in memory, she’s wearing the pink skirt.

One night she is walking back to the house, making her way through the grass by the side of the road, when a car swishes past her in the darkness. Someone calls her name from an open window, and calls it again.

Who?

She has always wondered.

From far away across the years, she is  thinking of that night now.  The dark night sky full of stars, the waves curling and uncurling on the beach, the grass brushing against her bare legs as she walks barefoot home, holding her sandals in her hand.

She wishes she had the pink skirt, wishes she’d kept it.

On summer mornings when she was a child she stood on the cinder blocks outside the small bedroom window of the addition built onto the trailer which sat next to the old frame house, out there in the foothills.

She shaded her eyes – the sun rose to the right, over the pines across the field – and peered in to see the grandmother  sleeping quietly in the bed, in the room with the knotty pine walls.

The grandmother was sleeping still. The child went away and came back again later. Climbed the cinder blocks. Shaded her eyes. Peered in.

Groan. Groan.

The grandmother was waking up. She had a headache when she woke up, a bad one, one that went away only after her coffee was drunk, her cigarette was smoked, an hour had passed by.

If the grandmother was groaning, then she would be up soon. The child went inside and lit the tall, skinny oil furnace with a long fireplace match. She put water on to boil. She got down two teacups, two saucers, two spoons and a single plate.

The grandmother was getting dressed now, washing, brushing her hair.

When the water boiled, the child stirred Nescafe into one of the teacups and added Cremora. She tore open a hot chocolate packet and emptied it into the other teacup and stirred hot water into it. She added Cremora to the hot chocolate.

The grandmother came into the tiny rounded-end kitchen of the trailer and sat in her chair at the formica table. The child set the coffee before her.

“Thank you, dear child,” said the grandmother.

The grandmother tapped her pack of Lark cigarettes against her palm and shook one out and lit it. She leaned forward, supporting her aching head with one hand and smoking with the other.

The child put two slices of Roman Meal bread into the toaster and got the plastic tub of whipped margarine out of the tiny trailer refrigerator. She waited for the toast and she watched the Lark cigarette.

When half an inch of ash hung off the end of the cigarette the child said, “Flick,” and the grandmother tapped her cigarette on the ashtray.

The toast popped up and the child put it on the plate and turned her back to the grandmother, hiding the plate from her so that she could spread an inordinate amount of whipped margarine on it. This was her secret vice. When she ate the toast she would hold the slice, heavy with its over-buttered-ness, under the table so that the grandmother wouldn’t know how much butter she had spread on it.

Now she wonders if the grandmother knew anyway, and thought, let her eat as much butter as she wants to.

They sat together in mostly silence, the grandmother and the child. The grandmother often closed her eyes and groaned, waiting for the headache to dissipate. She let her coffee grow cold before she drank it. This was a peculiarity of the grandmother – she wanted her coffee boiling hot, but she never  drank it while it was hot.

When the grandmother had smoked her first two cigarettes, she would tell the child stories of her own childhood in the big city, the biggest city in the world, six hours downstate from the hundreds of acres of woods and fields that the child was growing up in.

The butcher down the block, who wrapped three slices of bologna in white butcher paper for a penny, can you imagine? The grandmother’s father, who stowed away on the ship from France, bound for the harbor where the Statue of Liberty raised her giant torch, and he dove into the water in the middle of the night, and he swam to shore, and he spoke to a man on the street in French, and the man answered in French. The child’s mother, whose hair had curled in long silky ringlets until that time she had the long fever, and it never curled again.

The child spoke, but not much. She listened to the stories she had heard so many times. She knew the inflection of each sentence, and she waited for the dip of the head and the brief smile that meant the story was finished.

The grandmother had been a model in her youth. She had married late after several engagements. She had borne her only child when she was nearly forty years old, almost unheard of back then. She had worn high heels and suits every day to her job as legal secretary. She was a sophisticated woman who could not have imagined she would ever leave the bustling streets of the biggest city in the world, a woman who carried the knowledge of that city and its life with her always, as she sat at that formica table in that tiny trailer kitchen, looking out at the woods and fields that were not the city, nothing like the city.

One day the grandmother looked straight at the child and leaned toward her.

“You don’t talk much,” she said. “But I want you to know that you can tell me anything. There is nothing I have not seen. There is nothing about you that would shock me, and I am here to listen to you.”

“I know,” the child said in a voice that she made bright and childlike.

I won’t, though, the child thought, in a thought that was not childlike. I won’t tell you anything, anything that’s real.

She thinks about that now,  how the grandmother leaned toward her, the intent look in her eyes. There was so much that the child didn’t know then, and there was so much she had to protect and keep safe and contained and hidden.

And now? She thinks about the grandmother every day, usually at dawn. Sometimes she thinks about how unspeakably hard the grandmother’s life was, at times, but more often than not she simply sits and lets the grandmother come to her.

Which she always does, leaning toward her with outstretched hands and a genuine smile.

Wherever she is now, she is happy. That is the sense that the now-grown child, a woman now, has of her – happiness and light.

The woman talks to her now the way she never did as a child, about things that are real.  See the two of them, leaning forward in their chairs, hands moving, smiling and laughing, the toast and the cooling coffee and the silent cinder blocks forgotten.

They went to the fair in the late afternoon. That way, they could fly into the sky – or as close as they could come – when the Midway was lit up against the darkness. Two of them had been dreaming of the Kamikaze – which he termed “a truly horrifying ride” – since last year’s fair.

She had no such inclination. Why subject herself to the torture of dangling upside down, body held skyward by only a slender metal bar?

But the Kamikaze would come later, when the Midway was extravagant with colored lights beating back the darkness.

First, the food: for two of them, the traditional first-Fair-food foot-long hot dog, raw onions for the young one, fried for him, a stripe of mustard and a few pumps of ketchup for both. She looked at them eating their footlongs and thought, Will I go my entire life never having eaten a footlong?,  and stepped up to the window and ordered one.

And then it was on to the Fine Art, where the three of them scoffed at the prize winners and where they each gazed in awe at a magical, hand-stitched work of art on hand-woven cloth stretched over canvas, tucked away in a corner.

Ribbonless. Proving once and for all, in case there was any doubt left, that they lived in an unfair world.

Time for a beverage? Certainly. And what might she have, a rumless pina colada or an Orange Tastee? Why, a rumless pina colada, thanks. Feel free to have some, if you want.

On to the Amateur Talent Contest, where it soon became evident that the only kind of amateur talent remaining in the entire state was musical. Shall I sing this year?, wondered the amateurs statewide. I shall sing.

And they sang, all of them.  A skinny little 13 year old girl in cowboy boots, a country star in the making. A 39 year old security guard in tight blue jeans and a Stetson, a country star in the making. A retired man of 69 who took up the mandolin two years ago, a star of some kind in the making.

But wait. On stage came a sister and her twin brother in identical black suits and hats, tapdancing. I want to be that girl, she thought, I want to dance and smile like that. She wanted to be that girl because that girl’s joy was so evident, and so infectious, that the three of them sat on their hard wooden bench and laughed. The happiness of that girl made them all happy.

Laughing made them hungry again, so they journeyed on, on to the International Bazaar, and a giant cup of noodles for him, and another giant cup of noodles for the young one, and gyros sampler with tabouli for her.

He nudged her and pointed out the old couple next to them, the old couple with their coupon book, dozens of pages carefully sticky-noted in some sort of code known only to the two of them. She told him that watching the old couple confer over their coupon book made her want to cry, and he nodded.

Then it was getting dark.

They made their way to the Midway, where they carefully tore out the $6 off coupon from their own coupon book and purchased 80 tickets. She sat on the bench and watched as he and the young one were strapped in. She made a face as they gave her the thumbs-up.

She watched as they rose into the air, higher and higher, faster and faster, until gravity overtook the old steel cars and they whipped around and around and around, first forward, then backward, for many minutes on end. She watched as they grew silent and red-faced, split at the waist by that iron bar as they dangled upside down. Grim determination in the air.

She turned to the man sitting next to her on the bench and made big eyes of Never In This World to him, and he silently nodded in agreement. No Kamikaze for her, and no Kamikaze for the man next to her on the bench.

But what about Big Ben? What about the tall, tall clock tower with the dangling-leg seats and the anti-gravity swoop straight up into the air? What about that ride?

Why not?

Up they swooped,  and then down they plunged. She could not stop screaming. He laughed at her. The young one laughed at her.

The Crazy Mouse hurled them around its square corners, and had they not been strapped in, would have hurled them straight out into the night and the lights, human cannonballs. The young one’s phone flew out of her pocket and straight into the air, and he caught it as it came soaring back down.

And finally, on their way out, they stood before the Freak Show as they did each year, waiting for the tiny man to eat fire. 79 years old. Poobah, the last performing pygmy on the carnival circuit. He sat as he sat every year, on his small chair, his legs dangling down, two black spokes of iron held in one hand.

The fire eater has been performing for more than sixty years. The fire eater dipped the black spokes in fuel, set them ablaze, turned to the crowd and, one by one, patiently swallowed the flames. Black teeth. Smoke-darkened face. Eyes that every day watched a thousand eyes looking back at him, expectant.

Late at night they trudged down the dark roads to their car. The young one shared her cotton candy with them. Fireworks exploded above their heads, and their eyes turned high to the lit night sky.