Early reader? Let’s just say that had the word had currency in the L.A. of the Fifties, I’d have been the girl with the big dictionary on her lap looking up “dyslexia.” Since I could not read it’d never have occurred to me that I’d become a writer. I wanted to get married and have babies, a secret so mysteriously shaming I’d have admitted it to nobody.
But I was good at math and science, pouring over illustrations in Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia to see how anything worked. Sent out of the library for talking, I never got in trouble at home. Why? We don’t go by that, our mom said.
What we went by was an alternative that came from reading. My parents read, my older brother too. I’d stare at the dark columns of dense text in The New Yorker as exhaustion closed my eyes. Since I’d never catch up, I learned the trick of listening.
Which was interesting, since as a family we were a Cheever-like machine of advanced alcoholic dysfunction. My mother and my father each imagined themselves writers, this placing them at certain windows staring out while writing captions to their hypothetical cartoons. Gifted mimics, each was hyper-articulate in their condemnation of pretty much the entire American enterprise.
If they’d learned about the myriad ways we’d never fit in from reading, we also diverged from norm by virtue of our spoken language. Our grandmothers were both English teachers so we had Standard American Usage as our first idiom, and this correctness of ours got my brothers and me mocked at school. They say we’re snotty, that we think we’re better than everybody else, I complained to my mom who answered, Well of course we do.
I read the spines of their books Look Homeward, Angel, by Thomas Wolfe, The Gathering Storm by Winston Churchill, titles that held unimaginably enticing clues to that secret place of such longing and desire it pulled me toward it as sex would one day do. Reading always equated with the exact feeling of a tactile intimacy with which I was personally unfamiliar.
Reading happened elsewhere, deriving maybe from Berkeley where babies maybe came from, as Cal was where both our parents and grandparents had gone away to go to school. That faraway town where I’d been born felt like such a dreamlike place you might go there to find out who’d marry you. Because I did not read horse books I understood myself to be inadequate as a small female person. There was some book about a boy’s dead deer but I was too sensitive to finish it.
All began to make better sense as soon as I got that our architect father was not only this glamorous intensely heterosexual Don Draper-type dad but also some variety of not particularly closeted queer man who kept being arrested in gay bars. And we were all queer, our mother said, which derived from such entwining mysteries as sex and reading and Berkeley.
My first picture book was Madeleine, the library book my mom cut up and Scotch-taped to the walls of my room. The story had to do with the pure joy of lawlessness, which was a little girl’s most true nature. We could get away with anything, my mother seemed to be suggesting, but I’d need to be as brave as she and my father were. They were not only brave, they were adept at all levels of disguise, the main one being middle-class respectability. Though we resembled a nice white family, we’d remain forever on the side of the offenders.
I began to read exactly as I began to write, while standing inside the Braille-like place of the tactile story, as if on the other side of the page. It happened suddenly: I was a grad student in creative writing at San Francisco State, assigned a book by William Faulkner. I was then working in an art-film movie-house, could not afford a coat, but I bought books because that was now expected of me. My teacher Wright Morris said the act of buying books was the only sacrament in the religion in which we hoped to one day become communicants, so if we were serious we’d tithe.
This relationship – me to book – is exactly as symbiotic as what I felt that afternoon I learned to read, so organic I can exactly mark the weather of my life by the good books I’ve read, as these exist as sundering psychic events, each title as intrinsic as the rings of a cut-down tree.
I got it that day from Faulkner: how he’d taken our language, one tongue, and used it to make all these different, distinctly American voices who echoed one another as they will in any family. I became a Bundren then, so I now sat with them at the kitchen table and could speak, saying, I know why Addy has no voice aside from the title. His trick is, that it’s by making us say those four words he has us climb into the half-built coffin and lie down with her.
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