Disturbances in the Field Read online

  She felt very big and wonderful up there. She whispered to me late at night in bed that I shouldn’t ever tell anyone, but up there she was really the Princess of the Beach. I never did tell. Much later, watching Vivian running down sand dunes, bronzed and glowing, her thick black hair dripping iridescent sparkles, I wanted to fold her in my arms and dub her Princess of the Beach, but I felt it would be a betrayal of something. I hugged her and said it in my mind, but I wish I had out loud. Even though I am a talker by nature, I kept my word. Occasionally when I type those flimsy blue air letters to Evelyn I have the urge to address her as Dear Princess of the Beach, but I hold back. I still feel she deserted us.

  After she finished waving like a semaphore she would run back down. Together the wind and the slope of the dune carried her, feet barely touching the hot sand. She couldn’t have stopped. I know how it felt because I did it myself, but without her sense of magical flight. She flew faster and faster. She zoomed. The ocean and shore rose closer. Near the bottom she let go and rolled in a heap the rest of the way. She dashed into the water to wash off, then dashed back to the blanket to ask our mother for something to eat.

  I was a surfer. While she tried uselessly to resist the breakers, I welcomed them, then pushed farther on to jump over the crests or dive through them. Once in a while a wave would catch me unawares, churn me so hard in its roil and spin that I lost all sense of up and down, but I had survived before and knew enough not to struggle. I got up laughing, flung the muddied hair off my face and ran in again. I would wait for a really big one, stretch out on top and let it waft me in to shore. I was a mermaid cast up in a strange land, and I gazed around in wonder: what are these alien objects—towels, umbrellas, picnic baskets, humans? Since I was older and obliged to be more sensible than my sister, I never whispered this secret identity to her late at night in bed. Besides, I wanted to hold something back to get even for her private conversations with the sunflower.

  When we tired of dunes and waves we built castles, tunnels, bridges, and with our mother’s help, a naked woman, larger than life, who lay on her back like a sleeping statue. She looked powerful—full thighs and belly and breasts; our mother had a very solid conception of the essential female—but benign. No sooner was she completed than a huge wave washed over her. Instantly she was hollowed out at the peripheries, diminished, like someone who has aged tragically and prematurely. I kicked in her remains. My sister was sad and wanted to rebuild her; even my mother was downcast, but I laughed and said she was only sand. I kicked at her with exultation. Since she was half ruined, she might as well be all ruined. What use was half a woman?

  We stayed so long at the beach we could watch the tide change—it has a six-hour cycle. At low tide we waded out to mud islands where we huddled, shipwrecked, scanning the horizon for a sail. High tide, late afternoons, we sat on our blanket watching the waves inch their way up the sand, and measuring time by their growing reach. Waiting. Every few waves, our parents would drag the blanket farther back, but not much. I didn’t know it at the time, but they were playing a silent waiting game too. Sure enough, a stupendous wave would come heaving up out of the sea and rumble towards us. We sat excited but immobile as in a dream, daring it to wash over us, inviting it, teasing the power, accomplices in our own downfall. Till the very last second, I thought its impetus might stop just short of our blanket, our blessed island. And then the game’s great climax: a phony, belated scramble to escape, an assault of cold force. Our things were drenched, our pails and shovels gone. Evelyn and I ran to rescue them, while our parents wrung out wet towels and moved farther up the beach, this time in earnest. We pretended irritation but we were enraptured.

  My father could have stayed at the beach forever. His great pleasure was being the last family, all alone against the three stripes. It was the waning, melancholy time of day when sandpipers arrive to brood and peck over stones at the water’s edge. Gulls swooped low over the crests. Our mother made us change into jeans and sweatshirts. “Come on, Danny. It’s getting cold.” He would not be rushed; he did not answer right away. Finally, “All right,” he would sigh, with one last gaze at the water. As before, everyone carried something. At the top of the hill my sister turned and waved. “Good-bye, beach. See you tomorrow.” I thought this talking to the beach was as silly as talking to the house, but silently I echoed her.

  When we got to the brown house we would clamor for a ride on the dangerous plank that could slice you in half if you stood in its whirling path. Not now, our mother would say. First a bath, then a ride. And in the twilight, scrubbed clean, Evelyn and I sat on the polar tips of the world as it spun wildly, and when my father muttered that it was a dangerous toy, we felt the secret contempt children feel for caution. Every night we dropped into bed half dizzy with pleasure.

  The three weeks went quickly. Mr. Wilson, who would be staying at the house next, appeared as we finished packing. Holding our hands, he walked around and examined his flowers.

  “Thank you for taking care of them. You two really did a good job.” He was a benevolent God, provided you met his few simple demands.

  We passed each other by, loading and unloading the cars, and I remarked to my father that this coming and going was like a cycle too. Mr. Wilson gave Evelyn and me an orange each for the trip home, culled from his giant bag of groceries; we hunted through our depleted supplies and gave him an apple and a cupcake. He said, “Did you ride on that plank back in the clearing? Did you like it?”

  Oh yes.

  “But you were careful?”

  We were careful.

  He shook hands with us gravely and patted our heads. A benediction. “See you girls next year.”

  “See you next year,” Evelyn called to the house from the back window of the car.

  But we never did see it or him the next year. In most ungodlike fashion, Mr. Wilson got sick and retired to the brown house year-round. We rented other houses near the beach but they were never as good. There were never flowers or vegetables either, just barren dusty miller. My sister grew older and stopped saying hello and good-bye to inanimate objects, out loud at any rate. Late at night in bed she no longer whispered things on the order of, I shouldn’t tell anybody but she was really the Princess of the Beach. Soon we moved to a larger apartment so Evelyn and I could have separate bedrooms. When our parents began leaving us alone without a babysitter, we would go to sleep in their big bed for comfort till they came home, and once again we whispered secrets. That was good but not quite the same.

  I went to college and met the people who became my adult friends: Nina, Gabrielle, Esther, George. I married Victor and we whispered a lot in bed, on all sorts of delicious as well as grueling subjects. The unexamined life is not worth living, Victor quoted to me as we were falling in love. Impressive. But is the examined one? That is what I wonder.

  My parents, who carried so many heavy things in their arms, in time weakened and died. When I think of them now, it is mostly their last years I remember, the specific declines in their bodies. But once in a while, in an unlooked-for flash, I see them as they were that summer at the brown house, my mother short and soft in her long yellow nightgown, barefoot, her cheeks ruddy and her straight cropped hair—dark like mine, dark like Vivian’s—still rumpled from bed, her face unlined and clear-eyed, her suntanned hands bearing the knife to the vegetable garden, deftly twisting the zucchini on their stalks without hurting them; my father, lean and hairy in his navy trunks, beginning to have a bald spot in his light brown hair but still able to awe us with a taut bicep, poised on top of the dune effortlessly holding umbrella, kites, rubber rafts, beach towels, paying tribute to the ocean he loved so well. These flashes are given to me, simple gifts, as in the Shaker song my son Alan used to play by ear: “And when we find ourselves In the place that is right We will be in the valley Of love and delight.”

  I understand now why Evelyn liked the gentleness of the bay, and I marvel that I should have been so intrepid so young, inviting those rough
waves to tumble me and rising laughing and ready for more. My sister crossed the ocean to live among mountains. I wish she had never left. I have never felt such rightness as I did that summer, when our proclivities and declivities complemented each other as neatly as the broken halves of a bowl. I would like to go back to that time. Not to the brown house itself, but to that condition, which though it partook so thoroughly of the natural cycles seemed utterly static and safe; a condition of harmony vastly inclusive yet lived against three broad, clear stripes; a condition of being intact and guarded by a wise and providential power. I can still see the brown house and those twenty-one days like one long sandy day, and hear my father explaining about the paths and the cycles. I suppose new paths are still being made every summer by the feet of people climbing up and down. I suppose nature is a cycle to which we contribute our lives and deaths and should do so willingly, but sometimes I just don’t want to be a part of it at all. Everything had the chance to be so beautiful, and look what has happened.

  Schooling, 1957

  In college we took for granted our private distortions and perversities. They were not yet called “hang-ups.” We might deplore them as we deplored a birthmark or a thickness of the ankle, but that they were ours no less inseparably we never doubted. The fluid issues, open to constant reexamination, were ideas. They drew our fervent emotions like pipers charming rats. Over chocolate chip cookies in the small hours, we thrilled to Plato’s parable of prisoners in the cave, sadly debarred from the light of true wisdom. Through the grimy glass of iron-grilled dormitory windows we too—Nina, Gabrielle, Esther, and I—watched shadows, cast by intermittent traffic under Broadway’s street lights, and nodded sagely. Girlish still, we played with our ideas like jacks, feeling their cold hardness, pressing our fingertips against their sharp points and round protuberances, testing how many we could scoop up at once and cradle in our palms—twosies, threesies, foursies! Thales, Anaximenes, Anaximander, Heraclitus—their names as exotic as their accounts of the nature of the universe. The earth is made of water. The earth is made of air. No, the earth is made of the four elements mingling, crowding each other out in a struggle for preeminence. No. “This universe, which is the same for all, has not been made by any god or man, but it always has been, is, and will be—an ever-living fire, kindling itself by regular measures and going out by regular measures. …The sun is new each day.” The earth is fire. Heraclitus, sagest of all.

  Other girls might pick up and drop the boys across the street at Columbia. Our way of being fickle was switching allegiance from Plato to Aristotle. For two weeks we thought Plato the last word, and prematurely believed the adage quoted by our winning Professor Boles, disheveled and abstracted as a philosophy teacher should be: that all the rest of philosophy was merely a footnote. Till Aristotle, who came dragging the reputation of a plodder. He even looked dull: the pages in his text were thinner, the lines of type closer together. But Eureka! The whole material world Plato had left behind returned incarnate, every seed, every egg with an earthly destiny to fulfill. Other girls might aspire to diamond rings or posts in student government; our mission was to locate Truth on whatever library shelf it might be found. And to see, as some hope to see God, entelechy: essence unfurling itself in the passage from potential to actual reality.

  We slipped into middle age and a turnabout occurred. We have seen so many ideas come and go; they appear on the horizon as fleetingly as rainbows, they rise and fall and rise again like hemlines. They are our cast-off familiars, we keep them in the attic with our inappropriate dresses, too sentimentally valued to throw away, worn now and then in a frivolous mood. There is a place for Heraclitus and the notion of genesis in fiery strife, a place for patient Aristotle and even for the weightless Bishop Berkeley, a place for the existentialists and the masters of Zen. They coexist in tranquillity as they would in an afterlife; they drift in space as insubstantial ghosts do, and parlay their differences without rancor.

  We still try to understand and look for truth. But without the same urgency. Paradoxically, our quest has become academic though we are long out of the academy. Urgency now is reserved for ourselves. In the midst of life, our children, husbands, work, money, aging parents, and shall we take lovers are the daily ontological quandaries. What a falling-off, from that grand fire of Heraclitus that sparked the universe, to our small fires within. And yet to demean the personal is a form of sophistry (Professor Boles was harsh on sophistry), as well as a form of self-deprecation, feminists say. In any event, what we discuss with fervor today is our lives, their inner workings. This is a tedious sort of fascination, a fascinating sort of tedium. A casuist’s labor. When we have thoroughly dissected our aberrations from some Platonic Idea of ourselves, parsed our neuroses, we move on to a more pragmatic question, just as Greek philosophy, Professor Boles tidily summed up, moved from scientific to epistemological to ethical: What do we know, How do we know it, and What are we going to do about it? What are we going to do about our own perversities? Ignore them where possible? Exorcise them? The patients of the better sort of doctors come away not so much purged as mellowed. Esther had herself analyzed.

  It did not change her noticeably but maybe she finds life and herself easier to tolerate. Shall we accept them, even love them? Surely if we can be exhorted to love our neighbors and love our enemies, we can attempt to love ourselves. Or shall we exploit them for professional advantage, like politicians and military men, high-class whores and artists?

  On the topic of friendship Aristotle says, “It is well not to seek to have as many friends as possible, but as many as are enough for the purposes of living together.” We were a family of sorts, a family of sophomores, sophomoric. We switched the roles of parents and children, depending on the need. After studying alone till eleven or eleven-thirty, we gathered in Nina’s and Esther’s second-floor dormitory room with the beige institutional curtains and brown bedspreads on the twin beds. Esther and I were the restless ones, changing our places nightly—the beds, the floor, the windowsill. Nina and Gabrielle were always, reliably, where they were. Gabrielle sat on the new amber shag rug that was losing its glow from absorbing Esther’s cigarette ash. She would have preferred a bare floor but she made do. Long-legged, hard-muscled, and ponytailed, Gaby did warm-ups in second position, flexing and pointing her bare feet, widening nightly the angle between her thighs till by graduation it was close to a hundred eighty degrees. In our freshman year she had directed a modern-dance performance illustrating the myth of Prometheus. That was how we became friends. We were in the corps, cavorting after her as she leaped magnificently across the gym, a living torch, even her flying hair one of the deeper shades of flame.

  Nina took the single armchair, rust-colored. She fit in it best, neatly combed and neatly dressed in tweed skirts and nylon stockings that she didn’t remove till bedtime. She always looked impeccably like a lady. Her oval face, with its straight, clean features, was never shiny; her dark hair never escaped its pins. Everything about her face and body was fine and understated, so that later, when she deliberately cultivated glamor, it was like adorning a neutral base. I didn’t room with Nina, so I never saw her in morning disarray. But even in the required swimming course she remained herself, tall, slender, and composed in the regulation tank suit which made the rest of us anonymous. Our lockers were adjacent; as she undressed she folded away every light and clean undergarment. She never complained about menstruation, as everyone else in swimming sooner or later did; there was never a sign of it; she was unspotted and strove to believe the world was likewise. The years to come would unravel her beliefs and blot her purity, but leave her ladyhood intact.

  Earth, water, air, fire, Professor Boles told us the first day of The History of Philosophy 101. The story began simply. The second week they were all three out with flu. I was delegated to take good notes and report back without fail, as if the course were a serialized detective story. I went to the sickroom around midnight, fixed them tea and handed around the notes. Esth
er and Nina huddled under blankets, Nina in a bathrobe for once.

  “She’s still wearing that gray tweed suit but she changed the blouse. And her hair wasn’t so wild today, and she had lipstick on. Maybe she was going out to lunch. The best thing she said isn’t even in the notes. You know how she tosses out these little gems? It’s not really philosophy, I guess. Thales, the one who said everything was water, also figured out how to measure the height of a pyramid. If you were ancient Greeks and had to measure the height of a pyramid, what would you do?” Silence. I crossed the room and paused a moment, for suspense. “He waited until that time of day when a man’s shadow became equal to his height. Then he measured the shadow of the pyramid.”

  They didn’t seem very interested.

  “Actually,” said Nina, “he could have measured a man’s shadow at any time of day and then applied whatever proportion he found to the pyramid.”

  “God, she’s so smart,” said Esther despairingly from her bed. It was true, Nina was extremely smart. I certainly would not have thought of that. Did Thales? And yet it did not have the same poetic Tightness.

  “For some reason,” I said, “that little story fills me with wonder. Why is that?”

  “Because,” said Gabrielle. She was lying on the floor groaning with muscle aches but flexing and pointing her feet so as not to waste time. “Because it’s based simply on the measure of a man. Or it could be a woman just as easily. From the size and scope of one human body you can discover immense secrets of the universe. That’s what you like, Lydia. Your pride likes it.” Gaby had an odd and rare feature—one blue eye and one green eye. Most of the time there was only a shade of difference, but at moments of strong emotion or insight they flared up, each gleaming its own color. I used to stare, and then I got used to it.