Red Apples Like Baseballs, November Before it Gets Grim, The Muppets and St. Dymphna
On becoming a writer
In our kitchen, a statue of St. Dymphna sat on a shelf rarely dusted. She kept company with a ceramic dish that held dimes for the Flatbush Avenue bus, an old can of Billy Beer and a piece of Palm, grown brown at the edges. About six inches high, she wore a blue dress and a red robe. An open book lay across one palm. She was an Irish saint, patron of runaways and knitters. I was eight years old and standing beneath her when I realized that I was a writer.
It was a blue and yellow afternoon, early in November. Winter coats hibernated deep inside the house. Boots were not a thought. But the storm door was already in place and the sun lit the scratches on the glass so that they looked like confetti, tossed in the air. We had gone apple picking recently in an upstate New York town with enough open space to astonish girls from Brooklyn where backyards come in slices and running is done from curb to curb. Beneath the shelf sat three paper bags of McIntoshes, red apples the size of baseballs.
That day, I was fetching an apple and thinking about what I wanted to be. My third grade teacher had recently posed the question. Mrs. T– was feared throughout Our Lady Help of Christians, a Catholic school. There was a rumor that she’d been a nun and I believed it. She yelled, threw books to the floor, banged boys’ heads against the blackboard. Most of the class gave the same answers: cop, fireman, teacher, nurse. Nobody said priest or nun and Mrs. T— got mad. As ever, she went into a tirade. We froze like rabbits in knee socks and neckties. She was angry that never, ever had one student of hers had a vocation. Didn’t any of us give a thought to the church?
Nurse, I’d lied. My mother worked in the ICU at the fortressy Kings County Hospital, but I could not imagine doing so. My father was a firefighter, but girls were not allowed on the FDNY (yet). Days later, I still had no answer to the question: what to become? Then, beneath the saint, beside the apples, I thought, author.
I’d loved books for ages already, their weight across the hands, their covers, as unique as faces, turning a page, that bare disturbance of air. Books were trapdoors pulled up, attics climbed into.
For a long time, I’d had a story in my head with a title and characters and a plot in perpetual revision. Yet, I had never before thought of writing it down, which in that moment seemed astonishing. Like waking up and failing to open your eyes. Writing belonged to me at once, like something bequeathed.
For my birthday a week earlier, the new girl in my class had given me Muppet stationery, which I set aside politely since I had nobody to write letters to. But the stationery had now turned provident. I dashed from the kitchen upstairs to my bedroom to where my gifts still sat in a pile beneath the bureau.
I took up a fresh pencil and began at once to write on the lined sheets of paper that had Muppets cavorting in the red border. A week or so later, I set my book aside, confused by the way the words were failing on the page. I blamed the Muppets, as though they must be eating the good sentences.
Yet I didn’t quit. I kept writing, though only on looseleaf. And, after, I read differently. Each novel was at once itself and textbook, map, puzzle box.
The raised white letters, bright against the building’s pale brick read, “Brooklyn Public
Library,” or at least they had until the B, the P and the L were stolen one night near Halloween. They were replaced, stolen again.
rooklyn ublic ibrary
This, for a long time, until a new kind of sign was put in place, one that lay flat against the brick.
Whatever the name, I would go to the gunmetal gray fiction shelves, find the place where my name would come and slip my hand between two books, creating a space, a void to fill.