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about grad school, for me a very happy place:
Early Lessons
It was spring, about 3 a.m. I had chased my roommate, Haley through a field of tall grass, snagged by briars, stumbling on uneven dirt. When I caught her we bent over, panting on the fringe of someone's yard. She suggested that we climb onto the roof. Just as former gang members and recovering alcoholics tell with questionable remorse stories of their unthinking past, so do I remember grad school.
Haley and I, along with other borderline personalities, had gone to Houston to study writing under Donald Barthelme. A writing program is a good way to gather a group of needful, idealistic people who are intelligent enough to realize their slim chances of success but haven't yet given up. We felt the pressure. We held one another, used one another, and talked about whoever wasn't there.
We certainly knew we didn't have much time. Typically, Haley and I were walking on a humped and broken sidewalk at 2 a.m., Rick complaining that he couldn't sleep because the decaffeination plant was burning caffeine all night, doing it after dark when they figured no one would suspect. He said the night breeze affected him like 50 cups of coffee.
We were in love with him: with the lonestars painted on his cowboy boots that he wore bare-legged beneath baggy, paisley shorts and with his straining to be tough and that he was a Beatles fan. He was fragile but wanted to be John Wayne, saying things like, "The people around here, they need to whup ya before they take kindly to ya," and then it seemed all the men wanted to be John Wayne.
When we were away from him, Haley would grimace and shout nonsensical things: "Caliba! Aramanda!" and then turn to me and say quite drunkenly, "Aramanda, I like the feel of that one."
Police came to our apartment twice. Crouching just off the front steps, flashlights drawn, hands on their pistols, they said they had been notified of a brawl.
"That's my roommate," I explained. "She's trying to work."
"Where's the one who got hit?"
I explained that writing was difficult, and that it wasn't uncommon for a writer to toss books around, shriek like an Irish Keener, pound the wall or, occasionally, to hurl a typewriter against it. They wouldn't leave, though, until Haley showed herself. I called back to her bedroom, "Haley, they want to see you," and she came out looking shameful, in a thin shift and sweating, her breathing just under control.
We were always surprised, in part, because we had no phone. Rick and his friends would show up at 3 a.m., creeping in the shrubbery, back from "tipping over Dumpsters" and flush with some unknown chemical or perhaps only the night breeze, and we would get out the negronis we had frozen last time. "Hey! Somebody drank some of mine," Rick said, and we hugged ourselves. Keith, the poet we had befriended (we were fiction writers and naturally looked down on poets), arrived beating on our door with something Dylan Thomas had written 40 years before which couldn't wait. We knew we didn't have long.
On the night of the roof-climbing we went to a street dance and drank sweaty beer and met Rick's new girlfriend. She was from "outside." Some sort of Norse Valkyrie, she was a banker or a lawyer, I forget, a practical career which would lead to new cars and a house and dinners out. As Rick said, "She came in and sat down on my heart."
I wrestled the keys from Haley, and as I drove us home, she opened her door and swung on it, leaning out over the pavement until I slowed to 15 miles per hour.
"You're just going to drive home," she said in disbelief. She said she would walk -- we were maybe seven miles from home -- and got out and walked, and I followed in the car for about a block. Then she started running and I parked the car and chased her through the lot toward someone's house.
She stood on the short fence and scrabbled up on the first roof, and I followed. Cinders grating beneath our shoes, we shuffled to the peak and sat looking at Houston. From 15 or 20 feet above ground, you could see a long way into the city. The largeness would still you if you let it: the lights zooming up into the night sky, the stars reminding you that you were sand, calming you, deflating the tension so you could go home and sleep. Not that night. Haley wanted to climb to the next higher roof, which would involve leaping for a thick limb.
She made the leap, catching the branch beneath her arms, her feet swinging high, so that she had to clutch the limb madly but hung on. With no other choice, I followed. From the edge of the roof I leaned out, unable to make myself leap, falling over and reaching to brace against the limb, so that I was stuck there, stretched between roof and tree, looking down on someone's new Buick.
How long can one follow those impulses unthinkingly? From the distance of my 30's here in placid little Seattle, drunkenly scaling the houses of strangers seems of little merit. There must have been something up there that we needed. When I did at last struggle to that next roof, we scuffed to the top and looked around trying to find it. If there had been another, higher roof, we would have climbed further.
As I try to convey what I found with Haley in that time, it is just out of reach. Her trembling silence comes upon me. I've never pounded the walls as she did, although I know something is there, just beyond. On some early mornings I lean into it cautiously. It is of the South, or perhaps just far away, within the belief that someone can come in and sit down on your heart. Sometimes I am able to call it up, probably a thinner version, grown dilute over the years.
Donald Barthelme is dead now. From what I've heard, the grads are more studious and tend not to gather at the old places. I've lost touch with Haley. I don't know where she is, what she's doing, or even if she's alive. I think of her and grad school quite a bit. I remember the morning rides to class with her, both of us slicked up and a little shaky, feeling close in our nervousness of having to teach, trying our ideas we would tell the 19-year olds, some of the knowledge rubbing off on us, too, as we balanced our coffee in paper cups and felt as if we were going to church.
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