CARAPACE by Julie Marie Wade
For a long time, everything only happened to other people. Dreams were for sleep, and hunger was for waking; breakfast for morning, and supper for evening – a whole world plotted at coordinate points, the axis of which was witness.
Families looked alike and answered to the same names. School was a turnstile of listening and lurching suddenly forward. Churchgoers faithfully covered their heads. (Why did they do this? Was God offended by hair?) And the sprinklers came on before the sun came up, and the flag came down before the sun disappeared, and there were whole locked chambers in the middle of the day (while children were napping) when secret business was silently conducted.
What I knew of the world I learned from simple observations and from stories. Stories belonged to books, which were their literal dwelling-places, and books became the rough and ragged cottages that characters called home. Like me, they dreamed and hungered, considered obedience and conformity, gazed curiously across the sinews of the world, in which they were not yet, or fully, enfolded.
We were the watchers then, of vicarious vocation: standing on the life-docks; untying the knots: notaries of the Goodship’s passage.
* * *
The first funeral I ever attended was Humpty Dumpty’s. His death occurred without warning, or precedent, as I sifted the pages of my Mother Goose book:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again
The rhyme, arresting in its sadness, compelling first by its seeming randomness – was it foul play? the shoddy laying of stones? how had Humpty come to fall at all? – and then by its plaintive hopelessness. Could there be no reassemblage? Did no one own a glue gun? Was this really and truly the end of him, a shell of his former self, muted and concrete-cracked?
Lexicon-building: Euphemism, from the Greek for “good speech”; the way no one would say he was “dead,” only that he had (tragically) “fallen.”
* * *
In Vacation Bible School, we read a story called “The Fall of Man.” I imagine mountains, one helpless body hurtling over a cliff, plunging toward the craggy ravine below. In my story, he pulls the ripcord attached to his knapsack, and all at once, an explosion of color: the parachute swirled red and gold, enlarging to fill the cloud-crowded horizon. And the man is safe and happy. And the world does not end.
“Open your Bibles to Genesis, Chapter 3,” our teacher instructs. As she moves through the words on the onion-skinned page, I follow them each with my finger. The title says nothing of women, nothing of snakes, and there is no tumbling, no crumbling, no collapse. What’s more: I’m not fond of this character called the “LORD God.” Why did he plant the fruit-tree there in the first place if he didn’t want his garden party to eat?
Now the teacher leans a felt board on her easel. She places a man-figure called Adam (though he resembles Barbie’s Ken) beside a tall, green tree brimming with apples. Beside Adam, she adds a woman-figure called Eve, and beside her, a long, uncoiled serpent who she reminds us is really Satan in disguise. “Why are Adam and Eve banished from the Garden? What did they do wrong?”
A dozen hands jut eagerly into the air. The general consensus: “Because they disobeyed God!”
“And what is it called when people disobey God?” Her eyes narrow on mine, and I look down at my book as a flush floods my face. “Julie?”
After some hesitation, I repeat my own crime, what my mother says I am increasingly guilty of: ”Acting out?”
”Sin,” she clarifies. “God tested Adam, and Adam failed the test. He got a big F on his report card next to Obedience, and as a result, he had to be punished.” Between the tree and the two humans, Mrs. Walters inserts an angry-looking angel waving a fire-rimmed sword.
“All of you memorized a Bible verse yesterday about sin. Do you remember? It begins: ‘And the wages of sin . . .’ How does it end?”
Another flock of fluttering hands, and someone shouts an answer: “The wages of sin is death.”
Now Death I understand. Death is Humpty Dumpty split open on the sidewalk and “lights out” and going to sleep and never waking up – a night with no morning to follow. Mrs. Walters reminds us “the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ,” but because he was hungry, Adam has been condemned to die, and Eve was only trying to be helpful, and Jesus doesn’t exist yet if you read the book in order, and I am still not sure what any of this has to do with falling. The teacher says we are all already “fallen,” even if we have no scrapes to show for it, no bloody knees or broken limbs. The sin original, the fate inevitable: inside each of us thumps a fierce and fractured heart.
Lexicon-building: Felix culpa, from the Latin for “fortunate fall,” wherein a series of miserable events leads to an ultimately happier outcome. Enter Icarus. Enter Sisyphus. Enter my mother, who says I am “headed for a fall.”
* * *
If there were Chosen People in the childhood world, then Sarah Hodson must have been one of them. Small for her age, with a nymph’s demure voice and dancing eyes and tiny diamonds garnishing her ears, she reeked of sweetness, sliding with ease into any unoccupied lap, earning the praise of all who observed her.
An ordinary day. We sat in our chairs around the oblong, crayon-marred table. Mrs. Whitehair instructed us to “stay inside the lines.” We learned the names of the first three Presidents, whose silhouettes were represented on the wall. For snack: frozen cups of half-peach-sherbet, half-vanilla ice cream, consumed with a tiny, wooden spoon.
Sarah Hodson was absent. Mrs. Whitehair conferred with the Principal in the doorway. Suddenly, we were all instructed to stand and hold hands and pray: “God bless Sarah Hodson, and be with her today. God bless Sarah Hodson, and be with her today.” I wanted to know why Sarah Hodson in particular, and why today in particular, but Mrs. Whitehair held a long finger over her lips and frowned.
That night at the dinner table, I asked my parents why the sadness at school, and the phone tree, and the preparation of casseroles.
“Is this little girl a friend of yours?” my father asked.
“No.”
To my mother: “Well, that’s a relief.” And she passed him a plate of steaming spinach.
“What happened to her? Why wasn’t she at school?”
“There was an accident,” my mother said.
“What kind of accident?”
“Eat your meat.”
“I don’t like it.”
“I’m sure everything will be fine,” my father murmured. “Don’t worry your pretty little head – ”
“Is Sarah Hodson going to die?”
A long silence before my mother put down her knife and replied: “It’s possible. She’s in a very deep sleep, and no one knows if she’s going to wake up.”
Lexicon-building: Coma, from the Greek for “deep sleep”; often occurs following trauma to the skull. Think of Sleeping Beauty. Think of Rip Van Winkle. Think of spells, which also must be broken.
“I want to know what happened,” I say to my father. He sits on the edge of my bed, pulls the covers close to my chin, a phenomenon he calls tucking.
“I know you do, honey, but I don’t want it to upset you. I don’t want you to have any more bad dreams.”
“Do you think Sarah is dreaming right now? And is she in her own bed or a hospital bed?”
He sighs. “When Sarah was walking to school this morning, she didn’t cross in the crosswalk like she was supposed to. She probably didn’t even look both ways. She saw somebody she knew, and she ran out in the street, and she got hit by a car.”
“But she lives on the same street as our school.”
“I know.”
“And we have a crossing guard.”
“I know.”
“Did the car run her over, or did she just bounce off the hood?”
“I don’t think we should talk about that,” he replies. “She’s in the hospital now, and her family is there, and the doctors are doing everything they can. They know she’s broken some bones and cracked a rib, but with the right care and plenty of prayers, she can heal.”
“Will she have to wear a mummy suit?”
“I don’t know.”
“Will she have amnesia when she wakes up?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Will she still be as pretty as she was before?”
He kisses my forehead. That’s how I know I’ve gone too far. “Good night, young lady. Sleep tight.”
But I can’t sleep, and as soon as my father is gone, I sit up in bed and switch on the light. The following are problems with this story:
•
Absent antagonist. Who is responsible for Sarah’s injuries? Did God “smote” her; is being hit by a car evidence of “smoting”? Most believers would say God “allowed” it to happen. Maybe God was “testing” her, lured by a friend peddling fresh peaches or clusters of caution-yellow bananas. So if Sarah failed the test, maybe she is to blame: running out into traffic, not even looking both ways . . . Can you be the victim and the villain of your own story? But what about the negligent crossing guard or the driver of the anonymous car or the witnesses, puttying our narrative gaps, suturing our questions along a seam of closure?
•
Lack of motive. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, this is a motiveless crime, which makes it a non-crime, which leaves us with that empty bowl of the word called “accident.” Scrape the porcelain as many times as you like, but no porridge there, no sustenance. And because Sarah was beloved by more than most people, because her beauty and innocence were so widely and effusively lauded, what shield might any of us have hoped for? If what we deserve is not what we receive, and vice versa, then the world is a wild machine, plowing these fields at random.
•
Lack of moral. I have learned nothing new from this story. Being careful, looking both ways . . . I had been told already, as Sarah had, but the knowledge did not save her, and likewise, would not protect me from harm. The unexpected was too powerful, unstaking claims to mastery, reinventing the familiar as foreign. She walked that way every day. She did as she was told. Her mother watched from the upstairs window of their house with the slanted roof, a baby on her bony hip and the curtain drawn back like a veil . . .
* * *
In October, every year, we marked the end of Daylight Savings, the pleasure of “falling back,” with a ritual we called the hollowing. It began with a venture to the pumpkin patch and culminated with the lighting of a jack-o-lantern, which seemed an allegory for the strange ways in which all of us are capable of being transformed.
To carve a pumpkin was to enter its body with an intimacy I perceived intensely but could not find words for. My father steadied my hand as I drove the blade through the pumpkin’s thick skin, dragging it counter-clockwise to create a “lid.” My mother had covered the kitchen table with newspapers; my father and I had donned our matching floral aprons. He turned the pumpkin over on its side and began to cut away the orange cords of flesh, tethering this stem to its base. I could not have known then how sexual it was, easing my hand into the exhilarating darkness of pith and seed, touching the slope of the firm walls and the soft, unusual interior. I felt reverent toward my task and approached it with uncustomary quietness and concentration: scooping out the tendrils, rinsing the seeds in a colander for my mother to roast, olive oil snapping in her scalding pan.
As we collaborated to create the pumpkin’s face, the ridged canvas awkwardly transfigured in our human likeness, I imagined the dramatic determinations of God. Was this how we also had been devised – haphazardly, with a scalpel in one hand and a Sharpie in the other? Were we God’s whims, his seasonal decorations, pleasing shells he lit with candles for a spell, then watched as they grew gray, blew out, sunk in at the center, gave over (inevitably) to rot and decay? There was nothing sadder, I thought, than the sight of a pumpkin shriveling on someone’s back porch, surrounded by bags of compost, soggy from the bleak November rain. For this reason perhaps, I often turned pensive after our work was done, regarding the jack-o-lantern with a romantic regret (that we had defiled it) and also with a vague disappointment (that it did not resemble the Platonic Pumpkin of the mind’s perfectionist eye).
Lexicon-building: Deism, from the Latin for “god”; belief in a deity who created the world but has since remained indifferent to it; see also clockwork universe, wherein said deity winds the clock of the world along gears governed by laws of science. No parting of the Red Sea. No miracle with loaves and fishes. Theology in place of religion. Parables without supernatural powers.
On Halloween night, it was our custom to read “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” I had seen the Disney animated version also, which superimposed itself over the rich, archaic language of Irving’s nerve-tingling tale:
“ ‘Certain it is,’ ” my father commenced, his voice deliberately low and slow, with his arm wrapped comfortingly around my shoulder, “ ‘the place still continues under the sway of some witching power, that holds a spell over the minds of the good people, causing them to walk in a continual reverie. They are given to all kinds of marvellous beliefs, are subject to trances and visions, and frequently see strange sights, and hear music and voices in the air . . .’ ”
I would begin to shiver from the mere ambiance of Sleepy Hollow, pulling candy corns from the pockets of my pajamas and stuffing them anxiously into my mouth at each (albeit predictable) twist of the plot. And how to explain: it was both fear I craved and fear I longed to curtail, as in facing the fear, as in confronting at last the headless figure lurking in alleyways and under rain-soaked awnings in my own troubling, marathon dreams. And how to explain: the story never became tiresome or tame, despite hearing it year after year, despite discussing with my father how Brom Bones was the most likely culprit, how Ichabod’s own fears had gotten the better of him, had driven him into embarrassed exile:
“Look here,” my father would say, pointing to the phenomenon called foreshadowing – a word neither of us had learned but which would become increasingly relevant over the span of our years: “ ‘. . . Brom Van Brunt, the hero of the country round, which rang with his feats of strength and hardihood. From his Herculean frame and great powers of limb he had received the nick name of Brom Bones, by which he was universally known. He was famed for great knowledge and skill in horsemanship, being as dexterous on horseback as a Tartar.’ And later, what do we learn? ‘Brom Bones, too, who, shortly after his rival’s disappearance conducted the blooming Katrina in triumph to the altar, was observed to look exceedingly knowing whenever the story of Ichabod was related, and always burst into a hearty laugh at the mention of the pumpkin; which led some to suspect that he knew more about the matter than he chose to tell.’ ”
Still, I favored an alternative explanation: that Ichabod Crane had been the victim of a ghostly crime for which Brom Bones preferred to take credit; he let rumors of his mischief churn rather than admit they were not alone in those woods, not safe from the stalking supervision of a “galloping Hessman,” who rode every night, blind and crazed, in search of the body to yield his future head.
When I was scared and dove beneath the blankets, my father would suggest a different story. At once, my head resurfaced on the pillow, and I begged him not to stop reading again. Because as much as I longed to follow Ichabod to his moment of doom – his desperate ride to the bridge – I also longed for a taste of his courtship, however ill-fated, with the “country coquette” called Katrina Van Tassel. In the movie, she wore a peach dress puffed out at the waist and cascading down to the floor in a graceful, old-fashioned way. She carried a parasol, that emblem of elegance and femininity, what Marta had wanted for her seventh birthday in The Sound of Music. I too asked for a parasol and received one, but the feeling was less spectacular, twirling it under my own hand, raising it over my own head, than watching Katrina do so and looking on with Ichabod and Brom in a state of prickling hypnosis, an aching hunger so deep in my gut I thought it a bellyache from too much Halloween candy.
Lexicon-building: Foreshadowing, a literary term associated with “prolepsis” or “prefiguration”; suggesting the placement of important clues to prepare the reader for twists of plot to follow.
* * *
Mrs. Olsen, the school librarian, announces that this month we are going to read autobiographies. “Can anyone tell me what this means?” And I can because I have read autobiographies before!
“They’re stories written by people about their own experiences – but different from diaries, because they’re meant for other people to see.”
“Good.” She smiles at me, and I bask in the warm glow of adult approval. “Now can anyone tell me the difference between an autobiography and a biography?”
I sit up tall on my knees; my hand jettisons above my classmates’ heads. “Anyone else?” She scans the room, searching for another volunteer. Conceding at last: “Julie?”
“Autobiography means when the person telling the story is the person who actually lived the story. Biography means a writer is reporting on the life of someone else. Biographies can be authorized or unauthorized.”
As I look around the room, pleased by the high bookshelves nearly occluding the windows and the commingling odors of dusty hardbacks like The Count of Monte Cristo and clean, crisp pages of The Babysitter’s Club and Sweet Valley High, I notice also the contemptuous faces of my classmates, arranged on the rug in cadres of their own choosing, the gulf around me ever-widening.
When it is time to select our autobiographies, I proceed at once to the appropriate section of the Dewey Decimal System, only to find I recognize every spine. “Mrs. Olsen, I’ve already read all these books.” Erica Gregory says something mocking behind me, accompanied by a chorus of squawking laughter.
“That’s impossible, dear. We have over a hundred of them.” She lifts her glasses from the chain around her neck and begins reading off a series of titles, my own voice interjecting – “Yes, I’ve read it” . . . “That one too” . . . “Oh, that was a really good one.”
After some negotiation, it is decided that I will go with my mother after school to the Southwest Public Library, where I have gotten into trouble before for speaking too loud and for squealing with delight and for not understanding that a library is “a sanctuary, not a live bidding auction,” and there I will choose an autobiography from their much greater selection. And we go, and I am overwhelmed (as always) by the Jenga maze of books, the puzzling and provocative sea of choices, so my mother, in her increasing exasperation, selects an autobiography for me:
“I read this book in the ’70s,” she says, “but the message is still relevant today.” I place my red plastic Q card on the counter, bar code up, and study the laminated photograph on the cover: Joni: An Unforgettable Story.
Lexicon-building: Sanctuary, from Middle English, Old French, and Late Latin for “a sacred place” or “private room”; the word promises protection, as in the most holy region of a church nearest the altar; as in refuge or immunity granted to fugitives; as in a nature preserve where birds and wildlife, especially those hunted for sport, can thrive and breed safely.
The water is my sanctuary. It has been so since the first time my father lifted me onto his sun-burned shoulders and plunged me into the roiling waves. From our house on a hill overlooking the sea, we walked down to the rocky lip of Puget Sound and wandered a great distance – 2 or 3 miles – from the Fauntleroy ferry docks to the looming bulkheads of Loman Park, where the “No Trespassing” signs of private residence sprouted like blades of recalcitrant grass. Where large, kelp-belted logs had washed up on shore, we climbed them. Pretending all else around us had turned (quicksand-quick) to swamp, we built our bridge, one log to the next, charting a course from these natural high-rises to the barnacled stairs that carried us away from danger. We often sat on the ledge for hours, feet dangling, salty wind rifling our hair, and we would lay out our shells like hallowed currency, placing small pebble bets and skipping smooth, polished stones across the water.
“I learned a new riddle,” I tell my father. “Wanna hear it?”
“Sure.”
“What does a fish say when he hits his head on a wall?”
His hands crinkle inside windbreaker pockets. “I don’t know . . . I give up.”
“Dam!” And before he can respond, I quickly explain: “It’s not a swear word, though. It’s spelled the other way – d*a*m, like a beaver dam.”
“That’s a good one,” my father says. “Now I have a riddle for you. What do you a call a turtle without a shell? Is he naked, or is he homeless?”
Puzzled, I sit quietly for a while, arranging my bronze agates and hinged clam shells in a hierarchy of imagined worth. “Isn’t a turtle a turtle because of his shell? I don’t see how he could exist without one.”
“But what if he did? Would he be naked or homeless?”
This question perplexes me as much as the one in theology – Can God build a rock so big he cannot move it? And when Carl Lull asked the question (to be difficult, of course), the teacher was thoughtful and deliberate in her reply: “God calls upon us to have faith and not to test him. God does not participate in contests.” (Which was a shame, I thought, and a waste of omnipotence. Think about the gunny-sack races and the making of paper cranes. How everyone would want God on her team . . .)
“This isn’t a funny riddle, Dad. Does it even have a punch line?”
He pats my head and eases his long body down to the sand, stands facing me framed by sailboats sporting their sundry shields and driftwood enshrining his shoes: “Punch lines are for jokes,” my father says. “Riddles aren’t meant to be easy.”
That night in my little boat of a bed, I opened Joni Eareckson’s story. Her face on the cover appeared eerily familiar, beach-tanned and bright-eyed, accessible and reassuring as the sister I never had. But why, I wondered, was she clenching a pen in her teeth, and what was this small but sprawling word printed below the copyright next to “personal narrative”? I sounded it out: tet‑ra-ple‑gi‑a. Maybe a dinosaur, I thought – or a skin condition.
“The hot July sun was setting low in the west and gave the waters of Chesapeake Bay a warm red glow. The water was murky, and as my body broke the surface in a dive, its cold cleanness doused my skin.” I knew that feeling: the inexplicable comfort of the first chill, the deftly orchestrated pleasure of the plunge. “ . . . Panic seized me. With all my willpower and strength, I tried to break free. Nothing happened . . . I felt the pressure of holding my breath begin to build . . . Another tidal swell gently lifted me. Fragments of faces, thoughts, and memories spun crazily across my consciousness. My friends. My parents. Things I was ashamed of. Maybe God was calling me to come and explain these actions.”
I bit my lip, a habit my mother was trying to break me of. Each time the flesh blistered over, I tore it open again with my teeth, often absently, without even thinking. Each time I was frightened or pensive, I took refuge in that brief, acute, but tolerable – and this was the crucial part – pain. I controlled what happened to me, even as I had no say whatsoever in what happened to other people. “The next tidal swell was a little stronger than the rest and lifted me a bit higher. I fell back on the bottom, with broken shells, stones, and sand grating into my shoulders and face . . . “
Then, the moment of foreshadowing, which I had come to recognize and even expect: more subtle than angels bearing bold annunciations, but a similarly prophetic ideal: “At last, somewhere on my body, I could feel something. As I lay there on the sand, I began to piece things together. I had hit my head diving; I must have injured something to cause this numbness. I wondered how long it would last. ‘Don’t worry,’ I reassured Butch and Kathy – and myself. ‘The Lord won’t let anything happen to me. I’ll be all right.’ ”
But something had already happened! I understood implicitly and with a growing terror. Joni wasn’t going to walk again or dive into the sea at sunset or ever regain feeling in the lower part of her body. She would be a “talking head,” dead below the shoulders, like a mannequin whose limbs could be arranged, contorted, even removed without her knowledge or consent. The idea of it – to lose those tactile powers to which I was most deeply attached – seemed in fact a “fate worse than death,” which was a phrase I had heard volleyed overhead by grown‑ups who could not have possibly understood its gravity the way that I did then. And I was angry with my mother for making me read this story, for claiming it conveyed a timeless message. What could that “message” be? That the universe was only hapless currents crossing in apathy? That no one was safe and nothing could be explained? Distressed by these prospects, I struggled to conceive an alternative.
Each week in school, we copied down a long series of words from the chalkboard, the spellings of which we would memorize and the meanings of which we would learn. Part of learning a meaning meant using the dictionary to locate a word’s origin, pronunciation, and definition, followed by a careful cross-check in the thesaurus for its synonyms and antonyms. Arbitrary had been recently assigned, and in my notes, I wrote the following: denotation: “based on or subject to individual discretion or preference or sometimes impulse or whim”; synonyms: uncertain, random, accidental, discretionary; antonyms: calculated, reasonable, rational, scientific. I found this word elegant and enigmatic, its four syllables bobbing like a buoy over smooth waves of sound. But just as Mrs. Miller had predicted, this hypothetical word suddenly applied to something – a concept, and a means for that concept’s articulation.
Life must either be arbitrary, or it must not. I wavered on the binary bridge a moment, steadied myself. This was no solid bridge but one strung together with wooden planks and fraying ropes: a consciousness given to sway. If nothing is random, then mustn’t everything be planned? Did God really have the option of indifference, or was he in fact the sole and master arbiter of suffering – disguised as punishment – plucking off pieces from the human checkerboard?
I began to read again in pursuit of clarification. In science class, we had learned that all hypotheses must be tested for their validity. What had Joni done to deserve her fate? Was she culpable in some way that could be proven? My mother insisted that Pollyanna’s fall from the tall tree outside her bedroom window was a direct result of disobedience. The nature of her injuries was not discussed with the same meticulous detail as Joni’s, perhaps because Pollyanna herself was not telling the story (i.e., a biography, not an autobiography). However, neither Pollyanna nor Joni Eareckson was able to walk again as a consequence of her particular experience. Joni did not appear to have been breaking the rules when she dove into Chesapeake Bay, yet she recounted in the time prior to her injury, that sometimes she’d “even climb down the drain pipe outside [her] bedroom window and meet [her boyfriend] after curfew.” Eventually, her mother caught her sneaking out, and from then on, her adherence to household rules was more strictly enforced.
But she didn’t fall then, not literally. The old connection between “falling” and “sin” resurfaced as I read Joni’s accounts of her romance with Jason and her difficulty “dealing with the problems of temptation.” She seemed at this point in her story to be writing in code – nothing concrete or explicit, only euphemistic statements like “Before we realized what was happening, innocent, youthful expressions of love for one another – hand-holding, hugging, kissing – gave way to caressing, touching, and passions neither of us could control.” Did this mean “sex”? Was she referring to the “slippery slope” my mother had warned me about? Was she also referring back to her thoughts while drowning of “things she was ashamed of”? And the most important question of all – did Joni lose feeling in her lower body because she had used this body for sexual pleasure outside of marriage in the way God expressly forbids?
Certainly I saw a correlation, but there was no firm evidence of causality, which was – as I had been told – the real work of science: proving things. As I read on, my feelings for Joni grew stronger – not in the “Katrina way,” as I had come to regard it whenever a woman aroused in me some more riveted attention accompanied by physical reaction (the tensing of calves, the sweating of palms . . .) – but a kind of empathy began to emerge, as though her story might have been my story; as if we were, in a way, the same person. What frightened me most was not, ultimately, this new-found fear of diving and the water or how I too might lose the use of my body, despite every possible precaution taken, despite resolute observance of curfews which I didn’t yet have and the oppressive sense of my own interminable purity. (It seemed unthinkable that anyone would ever want me the way Jason had wanted Joni . . .) Rather, I was frightened by Joni’s reconciliation with God, her growing insistence that nothing was arbitrary, that all was predestined – God had made a plan for her life, and through faith, she must graciously accept it.
Lexicon-building: Paralysis, from the Greek meaning “to loosen or disable on one side.” As in a literal impairment of voluntary motion. As in any state of complete stoppage or perceived helplessness.
* * *
My father’s turtle riddle returns to haunt me. What is a turtle without a shell? What is a human without a body – or with a damaged body, distorted, immobilized, or incomplete? The two questions seem analogous on purpose, and both concern the problem of “the stuff inside.” There is that longing to enter things and to be enveloped by them: the warm house on the rainy night, the sensual interior of the pumpkin, even the small bathroom stall on an airplane and the satisfied click of the “Occupied” slate in the door. There is also that longing to be inside other bodies, which – as a girl, a future woman and wife and mother; as a “vessel,” to use the poetic term – I have learned implicitly is an aberrant desire.
On my own time, I have been studying the intricate vocabulary of fear. I am particularly interested in phobias, which are long-lasting fears distinguished by their acuteness and irrationality. “Claustrophobia” is a common one, meaning “the fear of closed spaces.” Perhaps birds hatch because they grow claustrophobic inside the egg. Perhaps corn is relieved when freed from its husk and peas when liberated from their pods. But I seem to suffer from the antonym – agoraphobia – meaning “the fear of open spaces,” which is what most of the world seems to offer. I perceive the tremendous vulnerability of crossing through traffic, how pedestrians appear daily “to take their lives in their hands.” On the chair lift at the Fiorini ski school, I kept to my seat, even when the moment came to dismount. I couldn’t proceed onto the daunting openness of the mountain, its incessantly white invitation, so I went round again like a rider on a carousel, the teacher distressed and waving his hands and all the other children laughing.
There was no “right” answer to the riddle, but how you answered said something about how you saw the world. If the turtle is naked without his shell, then the shell itself must be equivalent to clothing: an accessory “added on” to the real being, something ornamental and disposable, not part of the essence or core. But if the turtle is homeless, then the separation between Physical/Tangible and Whatever Else There Is decreases from a cavern to a sliver, the schism between “body” and “soul” shrunk significantly, perhaps even eliminated altogether. Once again, the pressure building up in me – reminiscent of pickle jars, the black rubber “grip” from the silverware drawer, and the strain of breaking that seal. How necessary it seemed to choose between extremes: faith or doubt, destiny or puppetry, the Almighty God or the Big Bang Theory. Paralyzed, I retreat further inward. I look for books that promise nothing but easy answers. I use a kickboard in the swimming pool and keep my head resolutely above the water.
Lexicon-building: Agnosticism, from the Greek for “not known”; an intellectual doctrine or attitude affirming the uncertainty of all claims to ultimate knowledge. Think of “the rock and the hard place.” Think of the “double-edged sword.”
* * *
Then the day arrived when the students in my middle school (who were also the students in my Confirmation class) traveled several hours away to spend a weekend at the Lutheran Bible Institute. It was explained to us by our teacher and pastor that “spiritual rejuvenation” was expected to take place, once we were removed from the noises and hazards of the city. It had also been explained to me personally that outside the constraints of the classroom, I was expected to “come out of my shell.”
Since the first fairy tales, I had been uneasy about the forest. Riding Hood had gotten into trouble with the Wolf, Hansel and Gretel with the Witch, and Goldilocks (though notably her fault) with the Three (less than gregarious) Bears. And then there was Ichabod on his decrepit steed, desperate for a clearing in the midst of the effusive, overshadowing trees: “The night grew darker and darker; the stars seemed to sink deeper in the sky, and driving clouds occasionally hid them from his sight. He had never felt so lonely and dismal.”
Lonely and dismal also, confined to a tiny dormitory in the middle of the woods, I leaned out the window in search of stars. Since my life had been parsed into two alternative pastimes – reading and brooding – the pressure to socialize, to be friendly with my peers, proved all the more demoralizing, and I receded from it like a waning moon. Unzipping my backpack, I withdrew a new book, a “children’s” book – which typically I passed over with disdain – but this one had fastened itself to my attention with a provocative, two-word title: Tuck Everlasting. “Tuck,” which I associated with “tucking” and sleep, was here paired with “Everlasting,” suggesting immortality or an unchanging state. I wondered if this would be a story of someone in a coma.
Settling down on the thin mattress with the rough orange blanket, I began to read in silence: “There was something strange about the wood. If the look of the first house suggested that you’d better pass it by, so did the look of the wood, but for quite a different reason. The house was so proud of itself that you wanted to make a lot of noise as you passed, and maybe even throw a rock or two. But the wood had a sleeping, otherworld appearance that made you want to speak in whispers . . .” At the mirror, Kendra Kostrich, my random-selection roommate for the trip, fussed with her hair, raising it up in a pony tail, tightening the hair band, then letting it back down again. Finally, she sighed loudly and whirled around.
“I’m bored! When are the activities supposed to start?”
I looked up, shrugged my shoulders, and continued reading. I had become engrossed by the introduction of a character named Winnie Foster, a girl just slightly younger than I and with a similar problem. As she explained: “ ‘If I had a sister or a brother, there’d be someone else for them to watch. But, as it is, there’s only me. I’m tired of being looked at all the time . . .’ ”
“You never say anything,” Kendra observed. “It’s freaky.”
I turned down the corner of my page and returned her obstinate gaze. “What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know. Something. What is it with you and these books?”
“I like reading. Since when is that a crime?”
Kendra sat down on the adjacent bed and began to thread the laces through her bright, white, and thoroughly unsmudged Keds tennis shoes. “It’s just kind of stuffy and middle-aged.”
Winnie was just now explaining to the stranger in the yellow suit that her family had lived in Treegap forever – since before any other families lived there – and she recounted her grandmother’s tale that the town around them had been “all trees once, just one big forest . . . but it’s mostly all cut down now. Except for the wood.” Was it possible that Winnie Foster was telling my story also? I too was an only child, living under the close scrutiny of my overbearing parents. I too grew up in a neighborhood (much like a small town) that had once been nothing but trees on a bluff above miles of sea. My grandmother lived there also, and she remembered moving into her house in 1953 before much of the area had been occupied, before Fauntleroy had become what is commonly known today as a “suburb,” where – despite its dwindling sense of seclusion – settlers still seek refuge from the City.
I wanted to stay in the room and keep reading. I had to know the outcome of Winnie’s plot to run away, and of course I was interested also in the Tuck family, who had found – it would seem – the “fountain of youth” in the woods near Winnie’s home, and as a consequence of drinking from it, were now immortal and had not aged a bit in eighty-seven years. But, in true storybook fashion, there came a knock at the door, and Kendra and I were summoned outside for the first of our “Encounter sessions.”
“As you all know, part of this weekend’s experience involves working in small groups with some of your peers and one of our gracious chaperones. As I call your name, please line up next to the adult to whom you have been assigned.” Miss Christjaener proceeded down the roster but failed to call my name. I listened closely, yet it was never read. Did this mean I was exempt from participating? Perhaps I could sneak back to my cracker-box bedroom, dive into the comfort of the new book, no one would be the wiser. As the groups dispersed, I trailed along quietly, hoping to veer off at the next bend in the hall.
“Julie!” Miss Christjaener exclaimed. “You’re not on my list. Where are you going?” A dozen heads snapped around and stared.
I shrugged. “I’m not sure.”
“It must have been an oversight. I don’t know how we missed you. Here – you go with Dave Hemme’s group.” And she directed me toward the man with the bulldog face, sagging jowls, and the droopiest, saddest eyes I had ever seen.
* * *
Outside in the cool grass, we formed a circle, crossing our legs so that our knees were nearly touching. I don’t remember the other children in my group. I remember only Mr. Hemme, whose premature arthritis was flaring up again, so he sat in a lawn chair with a crescent of prepubescents at his feet.
“We’re supposed to – ” he cleared his throat loudly – “inspire you with some kind of – personal testimony. I don’t know if I can really do that, but I’ll try. Some of you may have seen me around at church. You probably know my daughter – Sarah – or my other daughter – Mary – since they go to your school. I have another daughter in college, and a son who dropped out to go to VoTech, and I’m married. My wife made some of your cheerleading uniforms, so you might have met her then.”
Dave Hemme was a large man, crammed too tight into a chair made for someone much smaller. He was about my father’s height but broader across the shoulders and with a large stomach that protruded over the waist of his pants. I also noticed his sideburns came down a bit too far, while the hair on top of his head had been clipped short, almost military-style. His cheeks were clean-shaven, but his skin had a scratchy look about it, and there were huge pockets under his eyes, which seemed the result of consistent sleep deprivation.
“What else about me?” he murmured. “Well, I’m a math teacher. I like math. I’ve always liked it. It always just came natural to me, I guess, and it’s easier to like something when you’re good at it. But even though I get involved with the numbers and working out the equations, showing other people how to do it, I’ve always had this – this nagging feeling that my life is incomplete; that I’m just walking on eggshells, just biding my time. I guess you could call it a void. And nothing and no one else can fill it for me: not my wife, my kids, my work, nothing. I’m not even sure if God can.”
Now my ears perked up. This was a first time I had ever heard a declaration of doubt from a grown person toward God. Certainly my father would never admit such a thing, even if he had wavered before.
“The truth is, I probably shouldn’t be here.” He looked around nervously, as if expecting a spotlight or video surveillance camera. “I mean, here, at this retreat, telling you my story about – spiritual crisis and recovery – and I mean, here, on this planet. I’m a mathematician, and the odds are against it that I should be here at all now.” He took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and the chair creaked with him as he said: “In the last eighteen months, I’ve tried to kill myself no less than six times.”
A terrible silence swept over us. I had kept a growing tally in my head for years of different kinds of “falls” – the apple on Newton’s head, Niagra, succumbing to temptation, falling asleep, in love, over a cliff, into the arms of someone, boys playing football on the playground (who weren’t afraid their insides might be horribly jostled around, their bodies permanently damaged . . .) – but this was the first time I knew distinctly what it meant to say a hush had fallen. I felt reverent toward the moment, averting my eyes to the ground. When I looked up again, I saw that Mr. Hemme was crying, silently – and his whole body trembled with each tear.
At last, he continued: “Sometimes it’s hard for me to concentrate on anything but death. I know it’s coming, one way or another, but I don’t always want to fight it. Does that make sense?” For the first time, I think he remembered his audience. I met his eyes and nodded. “I want to have some say in something, and I’ve never liked the notion of borrowed time, here on God’s dime, that sort of thing. So every night on the way home from work, I stop off at this place. I think it’s kind of a lover’s lane, but no one’s around at that time of night . . . not during rush hour. And I sit there in my car, and I know I’m supposed to be going to my support group for Suicide Survivors and the Christian Men’s Group and my therapist and taking all these pills for depression, anxiety, the numbness I feel toward the world . . . but I resist it, all of it. I sit in my car, and I fantasize about driving over that ledge, plummeting down into the ravine, going out in a great blaze of glory . . . Do you want to know the only thing holding me back?” He seemed to be speaking directly to me now, with an intensity I feared and cherished. “It wasn’t God and my faith in him. It wasn’t even my kids or the thought of obligation to my family. It was just plain fear. Not fear of death either – fear of not dying, being stuck in that car with both my legs broke, helpless and in pain and no way out. But if I could be guaranteed that I would die instantly, that I wouldn’t have to suffer any more . . .” He shook his head, wiped his face with a thin white handkerchief, and looked out over us and across the field into the woods. “If God would make me that promise, I’d drive up there right now and end it all.”
Lexicon-building: Thanatos, from the Greek for “Death” and the personification of this figure. In Greek mythology, Thanatos is the twin brother of Hypnos, the personification of Sleep, suggesting that death and sleep are closely related. In psychoanalytic terms, the word suggests a primitive desire for destruction and decay. This “death wish” or “death instinct” coexists in human beings with an instinct for life or survival.
While Kendra is in the shower later that night, I attempt a prayer for Dave Hemme. I kneel down on the linoleum floor, my nightgown tucked under my knees as a makeshift cushion. I bow my head and interlace my fingers and try very hard – as the pastor taught us – to “say what is in my heart.”
“God, do you remember last year when I memorized the ‘To Be or Not To Be’ monologue from Hamlet for drama class? I didn’t really think about what I was saying, what the words meant all together as a speech. At the time, it only mattered that I knew what word came next and next and next, so I could get through the whole thing without messing up. But tonight when Mr. Hemme was talking, I got to thinking how he was doing a version of the same speech. Not exactly the same, I guess, because Hamlet seems more afraid of what comes after death, and Dave Hemme seems more afraid of all that comes before, but it amounts to the same kind of despair, doesn’t it? No one understands how to live or how to die, but we are doing both all the time. And that’s called a paradox, which is one of the best words I know, and a word that applies to almost every situation. But I get it now, God. We’re in a no-win situation down here.
“To die, to sleep – No more; and by a sleep to say we end/The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks/That flesh is heir to – ’tis a consummation/Devoutly to be wish’d. So sleep is like death, but to die is also to say good-bye to sleep forever – to go beyond sleep, beyond even coma. Some part of us must always want to surrender. We’re tired of the burden of bodies, of being sentient, which is another vocabulary word I’ve recently learned meaning capable of experiencing pleasure and pain. As if it’s a special gift or something. Only humans and animals are sentient beings, and only humans seem unsure how to feel about having this capacity to feel. That’s a paradox, too. But then Hamlet – but really William Shakespeare – says it again: To die, to sleep, but this time – To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub. I never understood that part, unless it means that dreams rub against our consciousness and challenge what it is we think we already know. Maybe dreams cause friction between our waking selves and our sleeping selves, turning us into somnambulists, which is a word I’ve learned on my own. Maybe all of us are just two different people, with two different sets of desires.
“But then the speech goes on: For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, which I guess could be referring to the Afterlife or might mean that Heaven itself is just a dream, in the illusion sense of the word. But the part that always intrigued me from the whole soliloquy is this idea of the ‘mortal coil.’ When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,/Must give us pause. So shuffling it off is another way of saying ‘dying,’ but what is the coil itself? Is it the skin, the body, the shell? And what are we without this coil – are we naked or homeless? dead or alive? I just read in my science book that turtles would probably live forever if it wasn’t for ‘human factors.’ But we are the human factors, and if we want to stop living, shouldn’t we have the right to stop? And if we want to keep going, how exactly should we keep going? There’s no textbook for any of this because if there were, believe me, I would have checked it out with my library card.”
Now Kendra returns carrying her basket of assorted soaps and shampoos, a skimpy towel cinched under her arms, and I look bashfully away. “Who were you talking to in here?” she demands. “And why does it smell bad? Did you fart?”
“No,” I say, still averting my eyes and slipping quickly under the covers. “I’m just going to read for awhile, but I brought my book-light, so it’s ok if you want to go to sleep.”
“Sleep? Are you kidding? A bunch of us are going over to the boys’ dormitory to throw rocks at their windows. Wanna come?”
“Thanks, but I think I’d rather stay here.”
I can’t see her face, but I imagine she is rolling her eyes and playing with her hair. “Big surprise!” And she is out the door in a flash of cut-off shorts and brightly colored sweatshirt.
* * *
The central question of Tuck Everlasting is also one of “to be” or “not to be.” I am beginning to wonder whether there is any other kind of question, and if there is, whether such a question is even worth considering. Like Winnie, I have been effectively “kidnapped” by this extended weekend away, and also like Winnie, I’m not entirely sure I mind. There is something of the otherworld about this place as well, and though the bed is too short for my long body and the mattress too lean for my preference, I settle into it, resolving to finish the book – with its meager one hundred thirty-nine pages – before I shove off to sleep.
It’s a profound book based on the problem of choices. The Tuck family never made the choice to drink from the Immortality Fountain. They were thirsty in the woods and came upon a gentle spring. For them, it was a matter of convenience – the way I’ve always thought it must have been for Adam. Later, as they discovered they weren’t growing older and that nothing could hurt them, they remembered the spring and began to assemble their story. Now Winnie comes along, and she is curious. In this way, we are also the same. And she sees Jesse, who will be forever seventeen even though he is really a hundred and four, drinking from the spring, and she wants to drink from it too. So his story must be relayed to her, and she must be made to see how dangerous the prospect of immortality would be – preserving her as a girl of ten forever.
So the reader is invited to consider what she would choose in a similar situation. What would life mean if there was no threat of death, no possibility of harm? Is it the turtle and the shell again? Is life even life without the certainty that it is temporary, and therefore fragile, and therefore precious somehow? When you remove the risk, do you eliminate the potential value of the action? I can’t decide, and Winnie can’t decide, but before the story’s end, Jesse has given her a bottle of spring water, suggesting that – when she is seventeen – she might drink from it also and spend a youthful eternity with him.
There are two particularly curious outcomes of this story, neither of which can be described as purely “happy” or purely “tragic.” Poignant seems the most appropriate word. Winnie has the impulse to save someone – or something; to use her new-found power to effect a change. The paradox, of course, is that the change she chooses to effect is one of changelessness: “In a moment she was back again. The toad still squatted where she had dropped it, the dog still waited at the fence. Winnie pulled out the cork from the mouth of the bottle, and kneeling, she poured the precious water, very slowly and carefully, over the toad . . . Winnie smiled. Then she stopped and put her hand through the fence and set the toad free. ‘There!’ she said. ‘You’re safe. Forever.’ ”
And that, it seemed to me, was a lovely sentiment. I had a notion that if I had a bottle filled with water from that spring, I might have taken it over to Mr. Hemme’s room in the boys’ dormitory and doused his head with it – a strange and prophetic baptism. And when he woke in a fright, not knowing yet that his fate had changed, that his path had been unswervingly altered, I would be inclined to say something coy, something like my mother always said (but with a double meaning): “There. You’ll just have to live with it.” And in this way, immortality might not equal changelessness at all but an opportunity for exceptional revelation.
The book’s epilogue also stirred this feeling, the not-quite-sure-what-to‑make-of‑it-feeling, but the further sense that I was in the presence of something phantasmal but true. Many years later, the everlasting Tucks return to Treegap. No one knows for sure what Winnie has done with her life – if she has drunk from the spring to safeguard her future or relinquished Forever in favor of Something Else. To be or not to be . . . eternally.
In the cemetery, the Tucks find her headstone. “In Loving Memory/Winnifred Foster Jackson/Dear Wife/Dear Mother/1870–1948,” it reads. And so we, the reader-watchers, know what she has chosen without ever seeing the consequences of this choice, its pleasures and pains, her most private moments of sentient certainty and sentient regret. I imagine she ran to the spring on many occasions, unpiled the little monument of stones, and poised her lips to drink. Who wouldn’t want the freedom to wander aimlessly through traffic? To dive into any depth of water? Who wouldn’t wonder if Sarah Hodson emerged from the coma alive? (She did, but altered . . .) And can anything more be said of anyone else than that he went on until he didn’t, that she emerged as herself, but altered?
I can hear the girls whooping now and running through the damp grass, the boys bellowing behind them, their chorus shattering the night’s calm. But I like best this interpretation of the story, and more stories than just this one: “ ‘Pa thinks it’s something left over from – well, some other plan for the way the world should be,’ said Jesse. ‘Some plan that didn’t work out too good. And so everything was changed.’ ”
Julie Marie Wade’s work has appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Third Coast, Cream City Review, Nimrod, Phoebe, and Denver Quarterly.