Mary Ann Caws, "Walking (Even Now) With Carolyn"
(page 2 of 5)

Sometimes when I was asked to write a chapter for a book - and this seems to happen all the time; the latest one is called Living With a Writer - I never knew whether that meant me or the man I was married to. And when I asked, the editor simply said, either one. (laughter)

It was a problem. I've included the names, but they're fictionalized. However, in my memoir, as I was asked to do, I've told the real names.

That's much more complicated, calling out those intense persons by their names. Finally, a memoir inspired by the values of feminism must be about the survival of whatever you value about yourself, and how that works when things about you seem to conspire against that so mightily.

It must be about finding your voice, whether that voice sounds feminist or not - whatever you feel that means in your case. And I know that I sound very different from a lot of feminists, and Carolyn certainly thought so.

My suspicion is that we, the writers, may sometimes not know how we sound. For me, much of my writing and speaking and living have their not-always-remembered in origin and their ongoing being through my grandmother - a painter impassioned by her work. She'd studied in Bremen, where she frequented the painters and the poet Rilke.

And then she returned to live out a gracious and relentlessly social Southern life with her family in North Carolina. A fate - I won't say worse than death, but I'm not living there, as you may have noticed. (laughter)

How ever did she do that? Never letting down either work which informed everything, or that Southern-ness which informed her? How can I do that in my work and life? Finding your brush as a painter and your voice as a writer are not so distinct. It's still a matter of determinedness, passion and energy. All that, she had.

In the long run, my memoir is about trying to find, after everything and during everything, a place where I can unembarrassedly think and write and be me. To The Boathouse is about a place in Central Park, away and yet nearby. It was enabling because it had to be chosen.

It had to be where I wasn't normally. In short, a Parisian cafe in New York. We all remember the angel in the house, and she's an object of fear no longer for any of us. In a way, I found my writing, not softened by politeness, on the one hand or rushed by my normal, hurried impatience, on the other.

My memoir is or wants to be about the vibrancy of voice that gives you a place and a home to speak from. Here's what I most hope for: vibrancy, curiosity, and adventuresomeness.

So, among these adventures I will read to you snippets from my memoir, and I hope that they make some sense together. And they made some sense for me only after I saw it in book form.

It begins with an anecdote - I went on my junior year to France. Then we all got the photograph of ourselves in France. This was like two years ago, and I'm not in it. That's where it begins:

There were all my classmates, all smiling, looking very 1950s. I couldn't find myself in the group: I was just not there with the others. That's what it often felt like growing up and then afterward, not being wherever I was. I would never have expected to see so clear a picture of my absence. (xi)

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Our town looked, so long ago, like a lot of towns in North Carolina, I expect. It was quiet and you could usually make time for what you wanted to do. I remember most, growing up in an outlying part called Oleander, how my sister, Peg, and I would make time for going down to the river. It wasn't much of a river, really, sort of a creek, with insects flitting back and forth. But we called it "the river."

Bright green wings I remember, and the water a muddy brown. And vines growing up along the trees and winding down again in a dark tangle. You would take hold of the one that seemed the right length for that particular day, swing out on it way out over the water, and drop down on the other side. Right before you would grab it, you would get a terror in your knees, and worse right before dropping. I never got over it. What Peg felt, I don't know. I couldn't seem to ask her about it. Right now, I can feel that swoop in the pit of my stomach.

The trees crowded close together by the creek to make a perfect place for secrets, away from the light, twisting and murky. Sometimes there were several of us over by the vines, but I liked best being there just with Peg. We had something special between us: hard to say what. Mother used to ask me about it; Father never did. When we'd had enough swinging, we'd go behind the vines, and smoke a bit of rabbit tobacco in the circle of the bamboo grove, hidden away. That was where Peg told me about life. I surely wasn't going to ask our parents about anything. It wasn't actually a family in which you wanted to ask a lot. Whatever kept us quiet, it had gotten all tangled up, worse than the vines. You couldn't see the bottom or where it started, or how to untangle it. (2)

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Mother wore flat shoes, so that she would not tower over Father, which she did in any case. His short stature had saved him once, she told us, when an enemy bullet had left a deep mark in the top of his pilot's helmet. He had been shot down several times, but never talked about it. Or much of anything else that seemed important to me.

Father never spoke to us about his past, although we would have liked him to. We were not supposed to ask about that or indeed anything at all. We weren't told that, I think, but we just knew.

In a typical dinner table scene Peg is asking about Father's vote in the recent elections: the world comes to a halt. His hands shaking, his voice also, he announces she has no right to ask that, or in fact, anything. Neither of us has enough knowledge to have any opinions. Fine with me: I hate having opinions. So I get in less trouble than Peg, but I feel guilty over that.

Would you say something to your daughter, dearest? She's asking questions again!

At Father's outburst, Peg bursts into tears and flees the room. I stare at my plate and cross my fingers so it won't happen to me. If I don't say anything, maybe he won't yell at me.

(As you know, in the South and probably in a lot of places, daughters don't speak; and that was what I was supposed not to do, certainly not to ask questions and never to have opinions.)

Peg rushes upstairs sobbing, trying not to make any noise. Next time, she says to me later, next time I'll take a deep breath to remember not ever to ask anything, ever. (4)