on the library shelf: “Just as every rewriting of a tale is an interpretation, so every interpretation is a rewriting.” Here, then, is one more framing of the storyteller’s dilemma. In the end, no tale receives a passive listening; no telling enacts an innocent repeating. We can never get out of our place in the plot.
So what is my place in the tale? How can it be told? How does the imagination embrace the child or parent lost along some journey? How do the mother and father bargain for the son or daughter who has bitten from some forbidden fruit? Like children, adults, too, spin out their own fantasies.
Mary and I started sleeping with Jacob when he was five years old. He had always been a restless sleeper, unlike our daughter Sarah who, at six weeks, began sleeping through the night. We could not count on our son for such accommodation. Having learned to walk by nine months, Jacob soon mastered the gymnastics of climbing from his crib. It took a few weeks before we realized that he was spending parts of the night wandering in his room. When Mary or I brought him into our bed and laid him between us, he would rarely return to sleep. In the end, one of us would take him back to his room and nod off in the rocker or on the floor with Jacob looking on. Finally, succumbing to our need for sleep, we bought him a full-sized bed, cleared the room of any thing that might fall or be swallowed, and attached an outer latch to the door.
But nearing three years of age, he also began waking in a panic. When we arrived in his room, he would be shaking. It was as if the bedroom filled up with what he could not name, though once or twice, in his limited speech, he seemed to describe animal sounds or shapes. It was a panic that could not be calmed, could not be quickly soothed from his memory. What experiences or stories, we asked each other, haunted him to the point of such fear? Rocking with him, we would repeat, “It’s all right; it’s okay,” and soon Jacob began to take up the incantation. “It’s all right; it’s okay,” he would say, as we laid him back down, his limbs still trembling. We wondered why he would not call out our names when he needed us—and then we realized that he had rarely called us by name. And we thought of those nightmares from which we awake, gasping for air, unable to find our voices or words to cry out in recognition or for comfort. After we found out that Jacob had autism, we tried to remember that ignorance, not cruelty, had led us to abandon him in his trembling and wakefulness.
Sleeping with Jacob started slowly, the way hunger creeps up after a missed meal. We first tried the routines and rituals of our own childhoods; we read books, turned on the soft light of the night light, and rested against the bed until Jacob fell asleep. We picked out the stories composed for such times: Goodnight Moon, Where the Wild Things Are, Weird Parents. Eventually we brought up a single mattress to rest upon as we watched for signs of Jacob’s slumber. It was more comfortable as we waited, though we often slipped into sleep before he did. Soon, we crawled into bed alongside our son and stayed through the night. We alternated nights, Mary usually sleeping four days of the week or five if my teaching schedule intensified. We stayed for five years.
Succumbing to such sleep fulfilled the needs that come with confusion and uncertainty. The evening began to seem more peaceful without the worry of Jacob’s noises and aloneness. Moreover, when Mary or I slept with our son, we believed, in the better times, that it was a kind of gift, a brief respite for the other. We began to feel as if we had some control over or achieved some deliverance from the evils of the day: the after-school tantrums, the seemingly impossible diet recipes designed to “recover” our son, the uncertainties of medication, the urgent demands of work, the isolation from friends and family. Let loose during the daytime, the evils retreated at night—or so we pretended. Like all the stories that we told, we believed that our own wit and will, mixed with the sacrificial magic of sleepless love, could replenish and sustain us.
When I married, I thought that I would never again sleep alone. I knew that Mary and I would be apart at some time. She or I would return alone to family in Iowa or travel to a conference or workshop or interview. Still, with the exception of these infrequent absences, I pictured our bed as a place where the day ended—in conversation, in weariness, in making love, in the quiet play of what we knew and still wished to discover about who we were and wanted to be.
In marriage, this kind of knowing is its own story; it is the mystery that holds together the gaps in history and memory and motivates the desire that pervades the telling. It is a narration without resolution, however, for the past is endless and forever calls the other to ask and wonder and at times forgive. For instance, not long after we were married, I discovered a picture of my wife when she was twenty. She sits on a metal folding chair in her parents’ basement. Behind her, the cement block wall gives greater distinctness to her white cotton shirt and red pants. Her left leg is crossed upon her right knee; her hands cup her left calf. She is unaware of the picture-taker. She looks toward a place that I cannot see; it is not in the room but something interior—perhaps something fleeting like a thought about driving home from college or perhaps something deep and intimate like a future child or a parent’s death. So much history registers in this random flash. In looking upon this moment, this distant glance, I risk a kind of disorientation, a loss of bearings. How is it that, in our storytelling, we can act as if the unknown past and future can be taken in? How can I hope to knit together what seems so vast and unknowable? Yet, in first telling, I believe in the possibility of knowing, of holding together so much of the unwitnessed, of what has been and will be. In first embraces, after all, so much must be taken on faith. It is a faith that calls us toward the parts that have been left out or have yet to come. To get to these places, we must ask the unexpected question and develop the discipline of listening, of letting the mind’s eye estrange the familiar.
Did the husband and wife in the tale of Hansel and Gretel begin with such desires? In the first days, at the edge of the imposing forest, the cottage might have seemed like a sanctuary. During the waking hours, the echo of the woodcutter’s axe would have provided a reassuring cadence; for the wife, the mixing of flour, yeast, and water, the kneading of the dough, and the firing of the oven would not have yet become a burden. All might have been the taste of new seasonings, the replenishing moment spilling forth without hesitation. The deepest hunger must have been the desire that came from waiting, the yearning for the next disrobing, the taste of the remembering and telling, and the touch of tongue and breath. In the time of first knowing, this coming together might have been enough, this willingness to talk about the past without judgment or blame amid the fragrance of bread and pine sap.
What is it that was forsaken? What is it that could not sustain the possibility of imagining a way through the famine? The old story does not flesh out what must have been endured. That it was famine which broke the covenant seems the surest of truths. Famine is the slowest of tragedies. It may first come in hints, like happenstance and rumor. The rain does not fall; the blight speckles the first leaves. The neighbor’s front door swings indifferently in the wind; the hoe leans unattended. The people left behind accommodate less. They learn that leanness can even be a mark of strength, the legacy of hard work and diligence. Hope and endurance give way to unsteadiness and malaise. Soon loss narrows into habits of survival; the mouth accepts coarse grain, not flour and bread, then chaff not wheat, then the unimaginable.
It is hard to look back at so many years attending so closely to so little. In my own world of work and home, I became an expert with rationing. As a teacher, I often paused during the day to multiply the number of student papers by the amount of time needed to read, compose responses, and record grades. The reading itself required a kind of empathy, a willingness to listen without intruding too quickly with judgment and correction. It demanded rest and, if rest was not possible, a willed attentiveness. Incoming sets of papers often meant between twenty to thirty hours of additional work over ten days—and then the next set of writing came in, and then the next. In one eleven-week semester, when committee and teaching responsibilities were especially burdensome, I would set the alarm for 3 am and fall asleep after I put my daughter to bed at 9 pm. Beside me, where Mary used to sleep, I left open the unfinished papers or chapters. I stemmed the chaos with numbers; I survived because I knew an end would come. The cycle of work guaranteed completion.
At times, I thought of what could be worse. I remembered the years when I contracted to detassel corn in the fields surrounding Storm Lake. In the summers during college, I would paint houses or farm buildings during the day and, in August evenings and weekends,