40 gag gift people turning

Reflections in 20/40 Hindsight on My Story "Public Appearances"

The Governor's wife: How come nobody seems to believe it when I say she isn't me? I am not she: grammatical proprieties seem, if anything, to reinforce the impression of falsehood. But honest, she isn't. Moi? She never was, I swear.

How, for starters, could I have wished, for either of us, such unsavory symbiosis, I using her for disguise, she using me for a mouthpiece? No, I look at The Governor's wife and see myself neither in the here-and-now nor in the bygone. That poor woman is older than I was back when (though yes, a bit younger than I am now), more timid, more alone. Though it shames me to admit it, I really don't know what she looks like. Only that she is small. She has fine, delicate hands, which I do not.

The Governor's wife wears a costly, understated dress of a sort I've never been drawn to, a costume designed to give no offense. I'm afraid I'm inclined to flamboyance myself. My clothes have always dared people not to notice me, my wardrobe since childhood a sort of running gag. I wish I could get away with that: I'm the kind of woman other women say that to. The Governor's wife is the kind of woman who'd say it. Mean it. Be unable to imagine it. How on earth could anybody mistake us, one for the other?

It is true that when I wrote the story "Public Appearances" (1981 would be my guess) I was married to a politician, an able and attractive man, still young, who after several terms in the House of Representatives had just been elected to the U.S. Senate. In that respect, the sources of this story are disappointingly obvious. Less apparent a factor than the public life but perhaps more significant in the story's conception, though, was the secret life I was leading in those days: I was trying, slowly, to kill myself by starvation, and I was trying, desperately, to keep myself alive by writing.

The starvation part is so complicated, so hard--hard, even now, to remember, hard to believe. What kind of a stunt was that for a grown woman to pull, whittling herself down to nothing so that she might slip through the bars of a cage she'd locked herself in? I feel toward the woman who did that much as I feel toward the Governor's wife--heartsick with sympathy, yes, but also eager to disassociate myself from a creature so helpless, so ... hapless. What a terrible word that is, so weak. The dictionary makes it sound as if no one's to blame, but a "hapless" person somehow looks as if she's brought it all on herself, just by being so inert. I don't want to blame the Governor's wife for her haplessness. I don't want to discuss starvation. Let me talk about writing instead.

Writing was my life raft. I began at a time when I wasn't strong enough (maybe not even sure enough of wanting my head kept above water) to heft myself up over the edge and haul my butt out of the deep. Writing simply gave me something to grab onto, the one bit of dear life I could talk myself into holding on for. And if writing were not enough, I also, through a series of lucky mishaps, wound up in school--the low-residency MFA Writing Program at Vermont College, to be specific. There my secret life as a writer began to take on a life of its own.

I had teachers then--extraordinary teachers! generous, passionate, wise--to guide and goad me, to give me tough assignments. But the toughest were the ones I laid on myself. Indeed, I sometimes look back with awe at what, through desperation, I saw fit in those days to demand of myself. For one thing, I had to write at least one new story each and every week. And in each new story I was obliged to address a specific aspect of craft, defined in advance. The week I wrote "Public Appearances," I'd been working up the nerve to tackle something I conceived of as a fiction writer's high-wire act without the net: shifting point of view.

Everybody brings some natural gift to the process of making art, I believe, and the rest of the artist's life and work are defined and delineated by the effort to acquire what abilities do not come naturally, may even seem to defy capture.

I began as, at heart have always been, a "voice writer." My natural gift, from the start, was my ear. The eye was my greatest lack. Indeed, I was, as a writer, very nearly blind.

My teachers, my peers in workshops, the occasional magazine editor to whom I'd send work were unanimous in their insistence that my fiction needed grounding in the physical world ... starting with the eye, yes, but not neglecting the nose, the tongue, the fingertip. I needed to stop writing stories that amounted to little more than a soul talking to herself, talking to herself about herself in an unseen place known only to herself ... I needed, it seemed, to get real.

That need, no matter what else the weekly assignment might entail, defined the ongoing struggle: to place the stories in a concrete world whose sensations the reader could observe and share.

Why, for so many of us, does that seem to come so hard? I've taught fiction writing for more than a dozen years now, worked with hundreds of students, and I'd say that absence of grounding may be the most common affliction among us, the hardest impediment novice fiction writers butt up against. Even now, I can sometimes forget ... can fail to leave room in my fiction for the world to come in. Why? The world can hardly be lost on us. Were that so, why would we have chosen this flimsy, maddening vocation in the first place? Maybe it's just that, as dreamers, we get so caught up in what we see that we simply forget to say ... or is it that we're enchanted, under the spell of those irresistible voices in our heads?

My recalcitrant vision, in any case, was giving me fits. "Your stories," one teacher told me, "might as well take place inside a ping pong ball."

Too true. And I was miserable about it ... but at least this presented a more constructive challenge than self-starvation. Starvation is hard to practice as a sideline. It's a full-time job that's got to come first. Your attention can't wander. Not to mention that the rewards are negligible. Having so little to show for myself was starting to get mighty stale.

What a godsend, then, to have found, at Vermont College, a place to go where I could be nobody's wife. No one in Montpelier knew a thing about me, nor much cared, past what I cared to reveal in black and white on a page. Godsend, indeed. In retrospect, I see how being just another writer wrestling with the angel started a sense of self-worth sneakily rooting in me. I was taking on heft behind my own back. Now if I could only learn to use that eye ...

And then one day my disguise slipped. Jean, another student in the program to whom I'd become especially close, had seen this senator on television and noticed he was from the same state where I lived. She'd started thinking lately anyway how odd it was that I never seemed to say much about my existence apart from school, aside from writing ... barely breathed a word about my real life. So Jean, putting two and two together, had arrived at a sum that blew my cover.

"You're married to him, aren't you?" she said.

The gig, as my sister is prone to say, was up.

But Jean wasn't about to give me away. We were sisters in a secret sorority of emigrees, recently landed in a land of the free and home of the brave. In this new country we were worth the paper we'd written on, exactly that. In Montpelier, allowed to wrestle the angel without worrying what might get broken, we might actually grow into the writers we longed to be. No, Jean was hardly about to turn me in.

"But what is it like?" this friend who mostly knew me by my stories wanted to know. Those big political events, the cameras and crowds ... she simply couldn't imagine me in the midst of all that, she said.

I was disinclined to begrudge or belittle her curiosity, when I could scarcely imagine me there myself. That may have been my problem all along.

Because writing is such a fearsome thing, I have sometimes had to fool myself into facing it. I am not going to write a story, I'll swear, and over and over the unwary self falls for that tired ploy. It's actually kind of funny.

No, we'll just try a little writing exercise this morning ... suppose we work on the sense-perceptible detail problem. Maybe that way we can try to tell Jean how it feels to be in the middle of all that ... and listen, while we're at it, now might be the time to face down the shifting viewpoint thing ...

The story was there before I knew it. It named itself, seemingly without so much as consulting me, "Public Appearances." The viewpoint panned the room much as a camera would, picking up the ordinary details of a typical and tedious political banquet, actually amusing itself with the event's very triteness, I suppose--menu, slogans, speech.