Dedicated to the People of Darfur: Writings on Fear, Risk, and Hope

Life Drawings

29 BETH ALVARADO






















I read in an article, long ago, that Bernard Malamud’s daughter was upset because she saw her toes in one of his short stories. Her toes? Okay, that one we can dismiss. She must have been way too sensitive, a prima donna—unless her toes were deformed, unless he put them on the feet of a whore—so I’ll be charitable. Maybe there’s a story behind her objection, some reason she couldn’t separate her feelings about her father from his description of her toes. Maybe she thought, my toes? That’s the only memorable thing about me? The only detail significant enough to borrow? The materials of life, we all draw on them in different degrees, not only to describe the surface, paint a picture, get the particulars “right” but to create an emotional grounding, to make the characters and their voices ring true. But the anxiety of alienating others, this is sure to cause writer’s block, at least for me. If I’m drawing from life, how do I deal with the risk of committing the unforgivable , of revealing someone else’s flaws or secrets? My friend, for instance, saying to her daughter when she complained about her stepfather, “Do you like living in this house? Do you want to move to an apartment?” And, by extension—I know her daughter heard the unspoken as well as the spoken—to a poorer neighborhood, a rougher school, one where you will have no friends? Implied in those two lines of dialogue is a story about my friend’s strained relationship with her husband, her willingness to emotionally blackmail her daughter, and the subliminal lesson about what a woman might give up for financial security. Or my mother, who was afraid my daughter would date a black basketball player: “Don’t go any darker than your father!” (Who is Mexican-American.) I can imagine a Grace Paley story starting with lines like those. “Don’t go any darker than your father. He’s a nice shade of brown.” Paley said that’s how Life Drawings Ch008.qxd 7/15/09 7:32 AM Page 29 30 BETH ALVARADO a story began for her, with a voice. Risk following it and a character, a life, emerges. My ex-son-in-law, a personable guy. Funny. Athletic. Down to earth. Tinkers around the house. I like him very much, as a matter of fact. After an argument with my daughter, he tore up the photographs she had put on the refrigerator. They were, of course, snapshots of people she loved, friends and family standing with their arms around one another in front of some waterfall or marble monument. The act of tearing the photographs—one by one, in front of her? or later when she was asleep?—seems to me a defining moment. It paints a portrait of a man who would, in anger, destroy her memories and, by extension , be willing to enact violence upon her or those she loved? Was he destroying , metaphorically, her connections to other people? It’s such an ominous, eerie moment, some inner rage revealed, future violence portended. Perfect for fiction. So perfect, I might say to a good friend, wistfully, “You use it. I can’t. No one will ever forgive me.” But maybe there’s a moratorium. Maybe after my daughter’s been divorced for seven years, I can use this gesture in a story without causing her pain. Maybe memory will then have transformed it into something less recognizable. Or maybe I should go ahead and use it now, trusting that the process of creating the fictional world will transform it into art. (Or, maybe—and this seems the obvious solution—I should just ask her. But what if she says: “No. Mother. How could you?” Where would I ever find a gesture as perfect as that? Besides, isn’t the tension between “life” and “art” something that gives creation its energy, its momentum? The risk, a kind of adrenaline, as addictive as driving a car too fast or drinking too much wine on a summer afternoon . Oh, the risk is heady. Better just to pretend no one will ever read this.) And anyway, as you can see from the story itself, my imagination is already filling in where memory fails me. I don’t know when he tore the photographs up. During the argument? Afterwards? While she was asleep seems to me most...