22. Denial: Optimal Coping Strategy?
The Year of Paying Attention
I was alone, on my way home when my older daughter called to give me difficult news. We both pretended it wasn’t. My first thought when Ellen’s name popped onto my phone screen was — what’s wrong? Ellen doesn’t just call me. I was sure to use my “no worries” voice when I answered. “Hi! I’m just gassing up the car,” I told her, as if she’d called for small talk, “What are you doing?” “I’m just getting a salad for lunch,” she told me, as if she’d called for small talk. We chatted for a few more minutes about salad and having lunch together soon.
“So, Jonah’s decided to go to Stanford,” she said — her boyfriend, she told me, had been offered a full ride to law school there. “Really? That’s great,” I lied. She said, “So in like a year or 18 months I might move out there,” and she laughed a tiny nervous laugh.
“You can’t go to California to live — it’s too far away! What the hell is wrong with Jonah?” I didn’t say. “Don’t be sad because I’m moving so far away, and you and Mom should try to not be devastated,” Ellen didn’t say.
“Now I’ll have a great reason to visit the West Coast,” I chirped, as brightly as I could. She said the first year of law school was no fun for anybody, so she’d stay here in New York and take her time finding a new job — all very mature, civilized, rational. But, I thought, how could she be happy away from Jonah for that long? The ground was shifting beneath my feet. Was this how my mother felt when I announced my plan to move from Boston to New York? Ellen and I made a lunch date, and I told her I loved her, and she told me the same, and I hung up, and I knew there was nothing to be very sad about, and I was very, very sad.
When Sarah got home she studied my face, and reminded me that Ellen had gone to college in Minnesota, and I’d survived that for four years. When I phoned my sister and told her about my daughter’s plan, she treated it like grave and terrible news, which both helped and didn’t. I was concerned about Ellen’s mother, my ex, and sent Grace a text to see how she was doing with the news. She texted back, “I feel that a year is a long time and anything can happen so I am not really accepting it / viewing it as a sure thing.” Denial can be a powerful coping strategy.
***
I’ve been thinking about the last stop of the Southern Tour Sarah and I made a few weeks back. We were in the Oxford, Mississippi town library, to hear a poet named Louis Bourgeois read from In Our Own Words, a collection of essays by Parchman Farm penitentiary inmates.
I know Parchman Farm from the blues song — Bukka White wrote it, having been incarcerated there, and Mose Allison, a white native of nearby Tippo, made the song popular. The Cohen Brothers’ movie, Oh Brother Where Art Thou? gave moviegoers a darkly comic image of life on a prison farm. Bourgeois told the auditorium that for many of the prisoners he works with, writing their stories is pretty much all they have to do, since many of them will never leave prison alive. Without his writing program, their stories would die with them.
Later, we walked from our hotel to Off Square Books, where a man named Cody, who buys books for the store, spoke from a podium about his wife, sitting on a folding chair behind us. “Today is my wedding anniversary,” Cody told the packed room, “and when my wife asked what we were doing to celebrate, I told her we’d be listening to Peter Heller read from Celine here at the bookstore.”
Heller looked like an author — sport coat, jeans, Western belt buckle. He wasn’t nervous or self-conscious. He talked about being a little boy, and how his father read poetry to him. It didn’t sound precious. It sounded virile. He described the novel he’d just published, and began to read from it. I had trouble paying attention. After a few minutes, Heller stopped reading and started talking. “I started writing this and after a little while I realized it was about my mother, who died a few years ago. I wanted to hang out with her for awhile longer,” he explained. He told us his mother always wanted to be a private detective, so she got her Private Investigator license. He described how she went shopping for a .45 Magnum pistol, and left the gun dealer speechless after demonstrating her mastery of the weapon. When he invited questions, Sarah asked if he’d always written fiction while pursuing his career as a non-fiction adventure writer for Playboy and Men’s Journal and Outside.
“That’s a good question,” he said. He grew up in New York City, but was always interested in being outdoors, and in writing. “Nobody who teaches writing courses mentions that you can’t make a living writing fiction. A friend of mine suggested I try writing about the things I love to do outside.” Heller found the name of a senior editor on the masthead of Outside — “Her name sounded like a nice person — ” called, and asked to talk to her. She picked up. He told her he was a class 5 kayaker, and wanted to take a dangerous trip and write about it for Outside. She agreed to pay half his travel expenses, and after he turned in an acceptable article, she’d cover the rest of the expense and pay for the article. He set forth on a high-adventure trip, during which a whitewater accident killed a man in his party as Heller watched, no one able to save him. “He was on his honeymoon,” said Heller. He came home and called the editor. “’I can’t write the story,’ I told her. I talked continuously for about forty-five minutes. When I was finished, she said, ‘Why don’t you write that.’ So I did.”
Outside published it, and submitted it for a magazine award. “So the next assignment I got was from Playboy, which you’d think was really an indoor magazine, you know, Hugh Hefner in his pajamas.” One thing led to another. He turned to fiction, and published The Dog Stars, his first novel, in 2012. It was a best-seller. Of course it was.
Heller read another section from Celine. This time I was hooked, the novel describing a woman trying to help the helpless, people with troubles and no solutions, mothers who’ve lost their babies after losing their way. The language tightened my throat. Then he pulled out his phone. “This is one of my favorite bookstores, and I want to take a picture of you. If you have any outstanding warrants, you should turn away. I heard somebody say that at a Hell’s Angels funeral before he took a picture, and everybody around me did this,” Heller said, and quickly turning away from his audience, and theatrically raising his arm to obscure his face.
Next week: Out Every Night For A Week!
