Asylum--Chapter Eight In Residence

Chapter Eight
In Residence

When I arrived in San Jose, I discovered my apartment was just a few blocks from the main flight path of the airport. I would just have to get used to the sound of the planes, though it was infinitely more irritating than the buzz of cropdusters flying over farmers’ fields. I was used to seeing the sun set over wheat-covered hills, but here the buildings were so tall the only glimpse I had of the sunset was the glint of orange on the belly of a plane. 

The partially subsidized apartment that came with the fellowship was just as I had envisioned. It was in a stately turn-of-the-twentieth-century building, but was, unfortunately, situated directly next door to the construction site where they were building the new, enormous city hall. I could put up with a few hours of construction noise every day, I told myself. 

 In the airy, high ceilinged living room I put all the antiques I had bought. At last, after years of living with cheap furniture from garage sales, I was surrounded by things with solidity, heft, age. There was an office separated from the living room by French doors. I filled it with all things Alaskan, and I felt reassured being surrounded by objects that reminded me of my future home. At the same time, having some of my grandmother’s Alaska belongings—her scrimshaw ivory bracelet, her lucky billikin carved from the tip of a walrus tusk—around me made me feel close to her, which, I thought, would help me to write about her.

In a small bamboo cupboard I placed jade carvings of Eskimos and sea otters and small pebbles and shells I’d collected from the islands on my kayaking trip. I set out several small boxes I’d bought in Alaska: a carved argillite box, heavy and black, from Ketchikan; and a Russian birch bark box, light in color and weight, from Sitka. I had collected boxes for years: small, medium, and large, made of wood, paper, brass, ceramic. My brother-in-law once said to me, “You’ve always been good at compartmentalizing your life.” Maybe that’s why I thought it would work. Thomas and our marriage over here. Billy and our undefined relationship over there. My two sons, one in eastern Washington and one in western Washington. Alaska, California. Somehow, I thought I could have it all, if I just kept everything separate, everything in its place. Now down to work.

I gave myself a couple of weeks to settle into my new place and to get used to life in the city. Most of that time was spent unpacking and hanging things on the walls. By then I should have been able to plunge into Smokey’s story, but I had trouble concentrating. I blamed it on the noise, noise, noise, noise. The quiet apartment I had imagined was turning out to be anything but. Living next door to a construction site was proving to be a disaster. I hadn’t even known that sound on such a scale could exist outside of, say, an open-pit mine. It was breathtaking, ear-shattering, bone-crushing noise that seemed to render people speechless. Out on the street, I could see their mouths moving but it was as if no sound came out.

I tried writing at the library around the corner but the eight-story combined university and city library was a very noisy place. Could I write with someone in the next seat chomping on chips or talking on a cell phone? Or with one of the police officers stationed there harassing an elderly women for smuggling in a lapdog or threatening a mother with reporting her to Child Protective Services for letting her child roam unattended? I found that I couldn’t.

I could only work in the rare hours when the apartment was quiet, which were between seven in the evening, when the construction workers left, and midnight, when the skateboarders arrived to zoom and whoop down the ramps of the parking structure right outside my office window. After the skateboarders left, there was a short interlude before trucks began to arrive with construction supplies at around three-thirty or four a.m. Actual construction started before six o’clock, about the time a homeless person came to pick bottles out of the dumpster in the alley and throw them into a shopping cart. It was an impossible situation. I was getting no sleep.

Every day, before I opened the door of the apartment building, I took a deep breath, inserted ear plugs, clamped on a pair of noise-canceling earphones, and plunged into the chaos. From the left came the immediate assault on my ears from the construction site. From the right came the roar of traffic from a busy street. Across from the apartment was the depressing sight of a soup kitchen, where ragged lines of people—faces as drawn and weary as dustbowl farmers—formed long before mealtimes.

Next to the soup kitchen was an evangelical church where frequent and raucous services were held, with a loud band and a singing, celebrating, hands-in-the-air choir swaying, people dancing in the aisles, and crowds spilling out of the open doors. One night, several members of the congregation stood in the middle of the street, encircling a woman who swooned in someone’s arms in a religious fervor. A man stood over her, arms raised, praising God for allowing her to speak in tongues.

Fleeing the noise, I often walked a few blocks away to an area posted as “Another neighborhood served by San Jose’s traffic calming program.” I imagined coming to an intersection and finding a friendly cop shushing the traffic. The houses were turn-of-the-twentieth-century Arts and Crafts bungalows, the type Smokey’s parents had owned in Pasadena. They were graceful buildings, with large verandas and broad-hipped roofs. The trees in the yards were heavy with grapefruit, oranges, and lemons, the leaves glossy and motionless. Each block was like a frieze, a picture on an orange crate label: a black cat in the curving alcove of an adobe wall, waiting patiently; a Scotty dog posed artfully behind a wrought iron gate, guarding some high-tech worker’s empty palace.

As the weeks passed, I grew increasingly worried at how little I was getting done. This was the perfect set-up: my own apartment; all the time in the world; no responsibilities. But I could write only in fits and starts, when I needed to be working for long stretches, shaping my material into a comprehensible book form. Thinking it would be easier to complete something short, I returned to the McPhee article, but I had trouble summoning up words, let alone sentences or whole paragraphs. I blamed it on my lack of sleep. It was important to make progress on my book to prove I hadn’t made a mistake in accepting the fellowship.  I needed to show Thomas that the sacrifice, inconvenience, and expense of me being here was worth it. My husband expected it of me—no, demanded it. “You OWE me a book,” he yelled over the phone. I was angry but not surprised that he believed browbeating me was an excellent motivator.

I wanted to believe I was strong enough to handle anything San Jose threw at me.

In a sense, the city was just another challenging environment, requiring the same adaptability, courage, and self-reliance Smokey had needed in order to live in the bush. What would it say about me if I failed here? Would I be able to handle life in the north?

My grandmother had succeeded at it, though she’d started out as a Pasadena society girl, albeit a rebellious one. Over the years, she’d managed to transform herself into an Alaska sourdough. Scotty had aided his wife in her metamorphosis, just as she’d changed him, softening up the tough former Marine so much that people said, “He thought the sun rose and set on Smokey.” He taught her many practical skills and was proud when she persevered, overcoming her frustration at how little her years as a newspaperwoman had prepared her for life in the bush. I thought of how delighted Billy had been when I’d shot the beer can and spent hours digging potatoes despite my eyes swelling from whitesox bites. I still had much to learn from him.

I had always been curious what had drawn them together—my grandmother, a college-educated professional woman, and Scotty, a scrappy jack-of-all-trades with an eighth grade education. After the especially hard winter in Chicago in 1926, Scotty announced he was moving his family to Alaska to get warm. There he worked as a lighthouse keeper, dynamite monkey (handling dynamite on road construction projects), disc jockey, and fox farmer, raising foxes for their fur on a small island.

Smokey and Scotty had met in Manhattan Beach, California, when a waitress mixed up their breakfast orders. Scotty, who was working winter job in the beach cities as a taxi driver, transfixed Smokey with his tales of Alaska Territory. Six weeks after that day in the diner, they were married, and Smokey couldn’t wait to experience Alaska herself.

It was easy to see the parallels between my grandmother’s life and mine: we were both nature-lovers who had been pulled north; both were attracted to men from Alaska with their stories and cabins full of fascinating treasures. We were former city girls, each determined to re-make herself in her new home up north. But in the meantime, my life had become an interleafing of disparate images: Thomas at the piano, beating time for a student lagging behind on the violin; Billy coming around the corner of the cabin singing “Camptown Races”; Emlyn bounding up the stairs with some happy news to share; Ambrose standing in the kitchen talking to me while I fixed dinner. These scenes of homesickness were intermixed with images of the city: businessmen leaving upscale restaurants in the early afternoon, stuffed with lunch and self-importance; Asian girls from the university flocking across the street as the light changed, brightly dressed and chattering on cell phones; big-bellied workers in hard hats pointing and shouting over the sound of the machinery; young men, each alone, striding down the street as if they owned it, arms swinging, chins thrust up. So many people, so much swirling activity. So much noise. 

I got out my coloring books again. The attention to detail needed to fill in the intricate Arabic designs allowed me to block out the fact I was in California while my heart and mind were more than two thousand miles away in Alaska. It gave me a brief reprieve for the-tug-of-war I felt between Thomas and Billy. My urge to color should have set off warning bells—not only about my obsession coloring in Pullman that summer, but also about a strange, prolonged bout of coloring almost a year earlier when I was in Sitka on a writing residency—the first of three month-long residencies I’d had over the past year. San Jose was my fourth, and the longest by far.

The studio apartment given to me by a nonprofits arts organization for the month of November was several miles outside of Sitka. (Coincidentally, it was within sight of the cove where Smokey and Scotty had lived after they left Thimbleberry Island and before they’d moved into the Sitka Pioneers Home, where they eventually died of old age. Their cabin had been torn down many years before I arrived.) Perched above a rocky beach, my apartment looked out on a tranquil scene of small wooded islands scattered about in the early winter mist. At night I could hear the waves washing against the shore.

The residency included the use of a car, and every day I drove to town to research Sitka’s history in the 1960s and ’70s, when my grandparents had lived there. I remembered Smokey’s husky voice on the reel-to-reel tape they’d sent us after the 1964 earthquake, giving an account of their evacuation from their cabin at the water’s edge, spending the night on the hill waiting for a tsunami that never came. In the evenings, I typed up my notes and transcribed tapes but when it came time for bed, sleep eluded me. I often stayed up until four in the morning, listening to the BBC and using bright felt pens to fill in pictures of Alaska in a kids’ coloring book.

Why I continued to suffer from insomnia when I was in such a peaceful environment, I couldn’t understand. Maybe, having lived in the open fields of the Palouse, I was spooked by the oppressive, dripping rainforest with its Sitka spruces over two hundred feet high. Deciding part of my problem was the isolation I felt out there in the woods, I went to a potlatch at the Tribal Community House. I had been to many pow wows, as they were still called, in Idaho, which were similar to the potlatches of the Northwest coast Indians. There was always singing, drumming, dancing, feasting on traditional foods, and the giving away of gifts. One time, on the Nez Perce reservation, a purple scarf floated onto my lap, tossed there by an old woman who was distributing food and other small presents. I was transfixed by the Tlingit dancers’ forceful movements to the beat of the hand-held drums. They swooped their arms, swirling the striking black and red robes around them, each with the dancer’s clan animal on the back—bear, wolf, killer whale and others so stylized I could not identify them.

In the feast that followed, I tried herring roe for the first time, and it was pleasant surprise, the little fishy beads making a neat popping sound between my teeth. As I ate a bowl of venison stew, I thought about the innumerable books on Alaska I’d read over the years, from which I’d learned a fair amount about the many and varied Alaska Native cultures. But reading, I’d discovered, was no substitute for seeing and hearing this music and dancing in person. I was left with a profound sense that what had been lacking in my experience of Alaska was precisely this exposure to the people who had survived in the north for thousands of years. 

Following the meal, I noticed an old woman sitting alone, waiting for her son to take her home. She accepted my offer to give her a ride. I learned her name was Frances Young, and that she had been working for decades to preserve Tlingit songs, dances, and stories by passing them on to the next generation. I told her I had something I thought she’d be interested in seeing. A couple of days later, I came to her house with  a packet of snapshots Scotty had taken when he and Smokey were living in the Sitka Pioneer Home and a group of teenagers in full regalia had been dancing on the lawn. I gave Frances the pictures, and as she looked through them, she kept giving cries of recognition and touching the face of a girl here, a boy there. Some, she said, were still with us, but many, I understood, had died too young.

I visited her several times, undeterred by the occasional rebuke when I didn’t make her tea according to her specifications or did something that only a white person would do, like ring the front doorbell instead of coming around to the back door. Frances was a respected elder well known for her acerbic speech and prickly personality, not someone who naturally takes to strangers, but I knew she had accepted me when she invited me to come one evening when her family would be preparing songs for an upcoming potlatch honoring a Tlingit tribal member who had recently died. Men and women, elders, children, and teens crowded into the living room, some holding skin drums. As the drumming took hold, everyone started singing, the women’s voices hovering a fifth above the men’s, creating harmonies as unearthly as medieval chants. The haunting sound made the hair rise on the back of my head. I didn’t need to be told these were songs of mourning. This was grief made audible, overfilling the small room with a power that made everything around us, even inside us vibrate.

 Frances later entrusted me with a jar of sourdough starter that had been kept alive in her family for decades. I felt terrible when I forgot to add flour to it every few days and it died. I felt close to expiration, myself, utterly exhausted after my sleepless nights. On every window pane was taped one of the pictures I’d colored of polar bears, totem poles, and breaching whales. I seldom went to the store and was living almost entirely on hard-boiled eggs and a kind of honeycomb candy from Australia called Violet Crumble—a name I found almost as delicious as the taste.

One moonless night I turned off the lights and stood at the window looking at the wall of woods just a few yards away. Something was drawing me into the dark, and I inexplicably left the apartment wearing only a coat—nothing underneath, not even boots on my feet—and walked across the driveway. A nervous tremor ran through me just standing so close to the enormous hemlock, spruce, and cedar trees cloaked in black. I felt uncomfortable hiking in the rainforest even in the daytime, and I was always careful not to stray off the trail.

Once, beachcombing on Thimbleberry Island—an island small enough to circumnavigate—I had gone farther than I thought from my grandparents’ cabin. As only a cheechako unfamiliar with southeast Alaska would, I tried to take a shortcut through the dense, entangled forest. Before going even twenty yards, I was lost. Detouring around fallen trees and climbing over moss-covered logs, I became disoriented and frightened until a glimpse of sunlight appeared between two massive tree trunks, glinting off the open water of the bay. Since that night, I’d felt claustrophobic and panicky in the rainforest and had stuck to walking on the beaches.

I had been warned about the huge brown bears sighted in the Sitka area recently, but I somehow felt compelled to enter the midnight woods. Naked. I slipped out of my coat and left it beneath a tree. I felt my way along the trail, hands out in front of me, feet sliding along, feeling for obstructions. The rainforest was woven together into one damp, living, and decaying organism that I had to find my way through. Every inch of my body was alive with sensors, experiencing each squoosh of wet moss beneath my feet, each brush of a fern against my bare hip. My heart thudded in my chest. 

I had a general sense of where I was going, making for a cove on the other side of the point. I remembered there were several fallen trees across the path, which I had to crawl over, and that the trail led uphill and then down to the right, so I knew I was headed in the correct direction. I could not see my hand in front of my face nor the tree my fingers were touching, but my hands were seeing for me. Although it was about forty degrees, I had no sensation of being cold. My skin was prickling, aware, but I felt no difference in temperature between me and the air around me.

Finally, I came to the edge of the woods. I gingerly made my way across the jagged rocks in my bare feet. If the forest had been frightening, the sea was worse. I had never felt more afraid of doing anything in my life than approaching that water roaring against the unyielding shore. It was black and coming at me, the waves rimmed with white. And yet I was inexorably drawn forward, looking down at my toes gripping each rock, my body luminescent in the starlight. I squatted down and splashed myself with seawater. As the cold dashed against my skin, exhilaration dispelled my fear. I felt my way back through the forest more easily now, as wet, dripping, and alive as every bit of moss, every tree. 

At the time, I could make no sense of my behavior and only knew it wasn’t just the dark woods that terrified me, but the darkness of my own mind that had driven me there. It was both the turbulent white-frothed sea and my own turbulent emotions that threatened to carry me away. 

By the time my residency was over, I left for home with a mixture of relief and reluctance: relieved because I was experiencing things and acting in ways I found strange and incomprehensible; reluctant because, although I would be glad to see Thomas and the boys, I knew it would not be long before the noise of our household and the strain of our marriage would get to me again. I told myself I wouldn’t have to put up with it for long—I had another residency scheduled, this one at an artists’ colony in New Hampshire.

After spending December and part of January in Pullman, I took off again, arriving in New England in midwinter. I loved my daytime studio in the snowy woods, so different from the apartment in the midst of the dark rainforest in Alaska. This studio had a baby grand piano and a fireplace. I often awoke to the sound of a snow blower clearing the walkway outside one of the colony’s lodging houses where we fellows slept. I understood that snowplows needed to be out clearing the streets first thing in the morning so that a city could get down to business. But here a snowfall was treated with the same sense of urgency, as if a heavy snow could bring the whole artists’ colony to a standstill. The important business of art must go on. There were poems to be written, pots to be thrown, thoughts to be thunk. It was a kind of New England work ethic unfamiliar to me, having grown up in laid-back Southern California. I felt I had to get a lot done and not dilly-dally.

Maybe it was the presence of other artists and the emphasis on productivity, but I was not plagued by the sleeplessness and bizarre behavior I had experienced in Sitka. I wrote up my notes from my various trips to Alaska, trying to piece together what I had learned so far about Smokey, including what information I had gleaned about her youth by reading her early diaries and the WWI-era letters she’d received from her many male admirers.

The picture-puzzle of my grandmother was coming together; the hole in my life that had been her absence was beginning to be patched up. I was coming to understand what had made Smokey tick: a consuming curiosity about people, places, wildlife, the world; a strong rebellious streak; a self-absorption even she acknowledged; a hard-won awareness of her own strengths and weaknesses that had come only late in life; and an ungovernable urge to prove herself. 

One of the things I discovered in Smokey’s belongings after she died was a diary she’d written in code at age twenty. Deciphering the series of dots and carats and squares—a fun process—led me to the story of her life in 1918: the last year of WWI, the year of the worldwide influenza epidemic, and a calamitous year for Smokey, filled with a yawing between extremes of elation and despair, confidence and crippling self-doubt, frustrated repression and rebellious acting out. She watched her friends enlist, and she seethed with a pent-up desire to participate in the war effort by doing something more important than knitting socks for the Red Cross. Dropping out of college, she threw herself into a career as a reporter for her father’s newspaper, making use of her tremendous energy and need for adventure.

 She was a striking young woman, tall and dark-haired, with a spark of vitality (“dash,” they called it then) that drew men to her. She received numerous declarations of love, including three proposals of marriage that year. Fickle, perhaps unstable emotionally, she betrayed her longtime fiancé—not once, but twice—while he was in the Navy, first by promising her hand to a good-looking but uneducated auto mechanic whom she had no intention of marrying, and then by becoming pregnant by her father’s printing apprentice, whom she secretly wed long before her fiancé came back from the war. She lost the baby, got an annulment, and became engaged yet again when one of her long-time admirers returned to Southern California, beating her fiancé home by a few weeks. Within three months, she broke off the engagement and headed off alone to study art at Columbia College in New York to pursue her long-held dream of becoming an artist—one that was not fully fulfilled until she came to Alaska many years. Oh, yes, and she got addicted to opium in there, somewhere.

When I wasn’t working in my cozy studio, I took long walks in the snow-muffled woods. I was grateful to have the beautiful, shiny black piano to fill my non-working moments and relieved I felt no compulsion to buy a set of pens and a coloring book. It was very quiet at the studio and there were no distractions. At precisely noon, a young man would pull up in a small pick-up and tiptoe up to the porch with a picnic basket, leaving it by the front door. Inside there was always a gourmet meal, including a thermos of exotic home-made soup such as curried carrot, fresh bread, a filling main course, and cookies or fruit for dessert. 

Every night at dusk, we fellows walked to the main lodge for dinner, each of us carrying our empty lunch basket. The only southerner at the colony said he found the whole New England thing—the lodging houses where we slept, each in a monastic white cell with plain pine furniture and white coverlet on the bed, and especially the frequent sight of a fellow walking through the gloomy woods carrying a picnic basket—more than  a little creepy. I had to agree with him. Charming in its way, but creepy, too. 

At dinner, we talked about former fellows who had later committed suicide. The monologist and screenwriter Spalding Gray, whose body was found in New York while I was at the colony in New Hampshire, was the most recent one. A topic of speculation was how many people had committed suicide while actually at the colony. We suspected there had been at least a couple but it was a closely guarded secret. I had never seriously considered suicide, but I was morbidly drawn to the topic because I had known so many people who had killed themselves—a friend’s husband, a former mentor, a neighbor—ten in all. In my studio was a wooden plaque on the wall with the names of all the writers who had stayed in that studio. One was the memoirist Lucy Grealy, who later committed suicide. I tried not to think of it as a bad omen.

In the studio down the road from me was a photographer who spent many days covering a tree in a remote part of the woods with a tin-foil like material and photographing it. A single woman, she was thirty but looked nineteen. Her explanation was “Art keeps you looking young.” I felt like responding, “Wait until you try raising a family on an artist’s income.” 

In the other direction was an old stone barn where a metals sculptor worked. Whenever I walked by, I saw sparks flying, and one evening I stopped at the open door and asked what he was welding.

“I don’t know, but whatever it is, it’s going to be cool.” He considered it a good sign of progress that he was halfway through his residency and had used half of his materials.

“What are your materials?” I asked.

 “A ton of spikes,” he said happily. And he meant that literally—two thousand pounds of six-inch-long metal spikes.

After living for years in a friendly small town, the anonymity of San Jose was getting to me, and I started getting very lonely. Thomas had been wanting me to come up as soon as possible to see our future home, where, he believed, we would happily reside after my fellowship was over. I, too, wanted to see Taiga and see if I could imagine living there. Thomas urged me to make the trip before the cold weather set in. But I was also determined to get to Eagle somehow to visit Billy. We were both eager to see each other. What were we: Friends? Lovers? I was getting to the point where I didn’t care. I was willing to see him on any terms. He called it: friends it would be.