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Letter from Joyce Archives
June 26, 2002
Dear Friends,
The
last time I posted one of these letters was back in December, from Guatemala.
I hadn't expected to be there, still. In September, I was in New York
City, where I had stopped off (September 9) for what I expected to be
a short, simple visit with my son Charlie at NYU before embarking on a
season of work on a new novel. With my youngest son, Willy, graduated
from high school and off to explore the Middle East (he thought) and my
daughter headed for the Dominican Republic for an eight month stint of
social work, I had rented out our house in California with the plan of
living more simply and cheaply and working on a novel. My destination
was a cabin I'd learned of, on the Big Island of Hawaii.
I never got there.
Like all of us, I saw the world change on September 11. I was in midtown Manhattan when it happened. That afternoon, I sat in front of the television for hours. That night, with one of my oldest friends from high school days, I rode the subway downtown as far as we could go and stood on the perimeters of Ground Zero, trying to take in the scale of the loss. It was more than any human could grasp in a day, or a year, of course. But I knew I needed to bear witness.
I didn't leave New York as scheduled, and not just because planes weren't flying. In the end, I stayed in New York for three weeks. It was the most heartbreaking spot to be (the most heartbreaking place in North America, anyway). One of the things I realized, during my many days of walking the streets of New York, studying the faces on the flyers and every altar in front of every fire station I passed, was that tragedies as vast as this one occur, not infrequently, on our planet. Just not on American soil ever before. News of the Turkish earthquake, a couple of years earlier, had occupied my mind no more than a few hours. Now we saw what that scale of disaster looked and felt like. And I hope, because of that, I'll never again register a story like that one from a safe and insulated distance as I once did.
I
had set out on my sabbatical from my old life with a novel in mind. But
after September eleventh, it no longer seemed important. I couldn't imagine
writing anything, at that moment, that didn't in some way bear reference
to the events around me -- not only death, and fear of terrorism, but
a sense of hopelessness and uncertainty about the future. I wanted the
novel I wrote -- whatever it would be -- to address the kinds of concerns
I myself was struggling with. Where does a person go, after great loss?
What's left, when you seem to have lost everything?
I had not experienced death of someone I loved on that day of course. But I couldn't walk a block without seeing the faces of people lost. I couldn't stop studying the faces on the flyers. Most of all though, I looked at the faces of the husbands and wives in the snapshots with them, the babies on their laps, the smiling children beside them.
There was another powerful experience going on for me at that point. My children were scattering around the globe. Audrey, age 23, had just left for Guatemala, where she would work on improving her Spanish before heading to her work in a place called Barahona, Dominican Republic. My seventeen year old son Willy was moving forward -- despite recent events -- with the plan to head out, within days, on an open-ended and largely uncharted backpacking trip halfway around the globe, using savings earned from his year working nights as a waiter. Only Charlie, my middle child, would remain in the United States.
Watching them saying goodbye to each other, I thought a lot about the great gift my children have been for each other. Maybe in part because of all the hard times they went through, as children of a particularly painful divorce (I'm trying now to imagine any other kind), they have always been each other's closest and best friends and supporters, the constant in a world that required them, on a regular basis, to shuttle (paper bags of clothing in hand) between the two worlds of their too-frequently-warring parents. Watching Charlie say goodbye to Willy on a sidewalk in New York, minutes before he took off for the airport, headed for his first stop, Madrid, I thought about how their lives would be without each other.
Sometime over the course of those first days and weeks after the eleventh, in one of the thousand column-inches of reporting on the World Trade Center tragedy, I read a passing reference to a young girl whose mother -- long divorced from her father -- had been killed in the towers that day. The girl had lived with her mother and stepfather and little brother, but now, with her mother gone, she was moving (whether by choice remained unclear) to a new town, to live with her natural father.
I had no desire to speak with the real child in that story, or her remaining family. But I found myself haunted by the situation of a young person, dealing with the terrible loss of a parent, having to rebuild a life -- and having at the same time to be separated from everything she'd known up till then. No doubt because my own children had experienced the painful fragmentation of their family -- through divorce, not death, thankfully, hers was the one story, out of the thousands, I chose to focus on. I decided my novel would be about a girl -- not the real girl, but a girl out of my imagination, but possessing some aspects of my own absent daughter when she was young, and other daughters of other mothers I had known -- who found herself suddenly without her mother, at the very age when she might need her most. (There are many such ages, actually. But one of the most poignant, I felt, would be age thirteen.)
I spent my last days in New York talking with thirteen year old girls and visiting the classes of eighth graders in Manhattan and Brooklyn, just to absorb the voices and concerns of an age I knew well -- but hadn't lived with for a few years. And then I took off for what was to be the first stop on my travels -- Guatemala. The plan was to spend a couple of weeks travelling with Audrey there, after her spanish studies were done, before heading off to our respective destinations.
Audrey and I had a wonderful time together in Guatemala -- visiting the ruins in the jungles of Tikal, as monkeys howled in the trees over our heads, walking the cobblestone streets of Antigua, riding chicken buses filled with babies and children up the steep sides of mountains to a small town where, in the darkness of an adobe hut, a shaman woman treated my daughter's sore throat by chewing herbs and spitting them out on her neck. But the most wonderful part of our trip, to me, was our visit to Lake Atitlan -- a large, wonderful lake surrounded by volcanoes, with a series of small villages around the rim, accessible mostly by boat.
As always, my time with my daughter revealed to us both the presence of great love, and old wounds. We talked -- sometimes gently, sometimes not -- about the long-ago years of the divorce, times of bitterness towards my children's father, and the cost, to my daughter and her brothers. I was never going to stop being my children's mother of course, but that moment -- last fall -- seemed like a kind of graduation for me, too, as I faced my first season in twenty-four years without a child at home. (Or a home, in fact.) No doubt because of all that, I found myself looking back on what those years had meant.
One nice, surprising part of my two weeks with my daughter in Guatemala were the evenings we spent (and sometimes, the long bus trips) reading together. When Audrey was little, I loved reading out loud to her, and now, once again, I did that, only the book was the wonderful coming-of-age novel by Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding.
As the days grew closer, before Audrey's departure (and my own, I thought), we stayed up late, to finish the story. We reached the last page at the Guatemala City airport, ten minutes before she had to board her plane. The last photograph of the the two of us, taken before she left, taken by a stranger we asked to shoot it) shows us sitting on the hard linoleum airport floor with our arms around each other, holding the paperback book, with our eyes red. Partly the ending of the novel. Partly the ending of our time together for what we knew would be a very long stretch of months.
Not until that day did I make my decision: to stay in Guatemala, rather than leaving for Hawaii.
I had been feeling a need (as I always do) to rush into my work, but now I acted on an unfamiliar impulse, and stopped for a while. I rode a bus to the town of Quetzaltenango (Xela) and found myself a Spanish school there. A day later, I was unpacking my bags in a bedroom of the tiny house of Nicky and Luis, a Guatemalan couple with whom I would live for the next month, while I worked on my Spanish.
So I was a student again, for the first time in thirty years. And my world shrank, from New York, and the leavetakings of my children, and news of US military action in Afghanistan, and reports of anthrax in the city where my son lived, to the market of Xela, and hours spent studying verbs and playing Lotto in Spanish with Nicky and Luis's children, Dulce and Angel. I put away thoughts of my novel, until Spanish school was over.
And then I rode the bus again, back to Lake Atitlan. I checked into a little hotel there first, but within a couple of days I'd found myself a house to rent there, overlooking the lake and the volcanoes. I set a table on the balcony, plugged in my computer and got to work.
That was October. For the next several months my life was very simple. I got up at five-thirty, fixed myself a pot of coffee (from beans grown on the sides of mountains in that town and roasted a few days before) and got to work. Sometime in mid morning, I'd stop to take a swim in the lake. Worked some more. Swam some more. Late in the afternoon, I'd walk into town with my shopping basket and pick up fresh vegetables for dinner.
I was sharing my house with a young man I had met on my travels -- Didier -- a Belgian, who was also working on a novel. Evenings, we'd sit out on the patio and tell each other stories. I sometimes read my work out loud to him. (He couldn't do the same, since he was writing in Dutch.) It was a friendship, not a romance, and specifically because it was that, I found, with this 31 year old, a most unexpected gift of friendship. Our lives and worlds had so little in common. I saw, in Guatemala, who I could be, that wasn't about being in my house, or the mother to my children, or in my country even -- but what part of me remained, when all the rest was stripped away. Which turned out to be a very happy woman, more relaxed and able to simply sit still and look out at the volcanoes, or swim, than I could have imagined.
Work
went well. Away from my children -- and the internet, and the phone, even
-- I spent my days with myself only, and my characters. As I explored
the character of my main character, Wendy, going to live with her father
after her mother has been killed, I found myself giving voice to the kinds
of feelings and perceptions (and, sometimes, anger and hurt) that my own
daughter must have felt, towards me, when she was younger. And because
I was writing from the girl's point of view, I was able to see how the
division between her two parents must have felt, to the child, this time,
instead of (as I had experienced it) always from inside my own adult head.
Didier left in January, but I stayed on in Guatemala -- though I moved at that point to a second house, a former hotel, right on the shores of the lake, with room enough that I could take in friends and travellers who needed a spot to stay for a while. I made friends of all ages, from all over the world. Most days, children came by in the afternoon to play or bake bread with me, or dance. I cannot remember a happier time.
Having come to feel that this spot was uniquely well suited to writers intent on focusing on work, and avoiding distractions, I decided to run a writing workshop there in my home, in late February, with the assistance of a dear friend and longtime editor turned agent, Stephanie Von Hirschberg. We were joined by fourteen writers -- from Michigan, Alabama, Montana, New York, Massachusetts, California, and a few English speakers from right there in San Marcos. For a week we gathered every day to talk abour our work. Afternoons, most people worked, or conferred with Stephanie and me, before our nightly dinner in one of the village restaurants. Evenings we sat on the thatch roof patio overlooking the lake and read from our work. All around, it was a great week -- and one that left me eager to hold other workshops. The next is set for November 8, back at Lake Atitlan. (November 2002 workshop.)
I left the lake in early April. I'm back in California now -- a major adjustment, though I love my home here too, and was glad to see my friends, dog, and of course my travelling children. Willy and Charlie returned from their travels in west Africa six weeks ago. Audrey returned just this month from her nine months of social service work in the Dominican Republic. In one way, it was very hard to have my children gone so far, for so long. But in another, it made me happy, knowing they were doing what I had wanted most for them, experiencing the bigness of our world, learning new things, and becoming more open minded and compassionate people because of it.
My new novel, The Usual Rules -- the story of a thirteen year old girl who has lost her mother in the World Trade Towers -- is set for publication with St. Martins' Press this February. In the months to come, I'll look forward to telling you more about it, and will hope to meet some of you as I travel around next winter to talk about it. Meanwhile, I look forward to once again hearing what you have to say, and will no doubt be piping up myself now and then.
With friendship,
Joyce
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