has traveled from her mother—into realms unimaginable, like a girl who leaves home for verboten erotic love and can’t return, or a daughter whose ambitions transport her far from her mother’s values. “Oh, don’t go away!” rang in my mind, and my eyes dripped. Locked in my own situation, I identified, not understanding quite why. It was late November, a month since I’d signed the contract, and still no words came, or rather no words came and stayed. I seemed under a spell. I crossed everything out; nothing was what I meant anymore.
I was living at the time in the town of Salem, Massachusetts, on Pickman Street, a narrow, weathered passageway of saltbox houses near Collins Cove. Each morning I hunched at my keyhole desk as if wedged in a kayak. I set down words, then retracted them, ignoring the visitors who strolled past my first-floor window hauling chaise longues to the curve of beach at the end of the street. Even in winter people sunbathed on the mudflats and dug for crabs in shallows that extended for a mile when the tide was out. One late-November dusk after a particularly frustrating day, a day when more words than ever presented themselves but were always the wrong ones, the ones that didn’t lead where I needed to go, I abandoned my cross-outs and wandered to the shore.
It looked freshly troweled, it was so smooth. A plump woman lay on a pink lawn chair in the gusting wind, beach towels covering her from toes to chin, eyes fixed on a fluffy-paged bestseller. Beside her on the sand sat a dirty-haired child who glanced up at me with the triangular, sullen, pretty, kittenish face of a minx. I liked her instantly, and smiled. She stuck out her tongue. Then, clasping her red metal shovel, she returned to her labors, digging restively in the sand. There was no one else. The shore was so saturated that it shimmered a reflective sky blue, inducing an upside-down sensation. The low sea here sloped deeper by the most infinitesimal degrees; you could walk out to the horizon, and still be wet only to your knees. Across the muck near my sneakers tiny beasts had dragged unwieldy claws, leaving momentary gnomic communications. It seemed to me for an instant as if the girl herself, isolated beside her mother, bored and in a rage, had forced up onto the sands themselves the thwarted message, this scrambled rune.
I sighed, and the solitary woman glanced up blindly and flipped her page, then continued reading, a Picasso goddess pursuing the gossip of Olympus, incurious about meager mortals. The child heaved a heap of dirt over her shoulder. An oily, metallic tang arrived: rife, fulsome, making my gorge rise. I dug my hands deep into my pockets, and walked back to the sidewalk. When I regained it, I turned. A trail of footprints held the precise waffle grid of my sneakers. Within seconds the prints blurred, though, already beginning to be subsumed by the smooth sand, and inducing a panic within me. I walked quickly home.
The next day was even worse. A headache split my skull. After an hour I thrust the page of cross-outs away and grabbed my coat. I would go to Blockbuster Video. Perhaps seeing the Oz story again would help me understand what was wrong. The day was again cold. It came as a relief, as I shut the door behind me, to step into raw, stinging gray air.
I’d been inside too much. Now I trod hastily past the historic federalist brick manses that framed the town green. A neighborhood realtor in a silk scarf and earrings, her face heavily but expertly powdered, coasted by at the wheel of a Mercedes. Her car seemed not to roll so much as eventually migrate past, bearing clients who gazed steadily out at the museum-like edifices with their hoop-skirt chandeliers and ponderous, tasseled curtains. Soon the streets descended. Far beneath us lay the remnants of the town’s weary commercial district. Here a Greek-temple-front post office presided over a central parking lot, adjacent to which stood a decaying grocery store that sold iceberg lettuce and tough tomatoes packed three to a box under crackly cellophane, and where, in the aisle, I’d once, memorably, seen a pudgy pink man wearing a T-shirt that read: “Is that your face or did your neck throw up?”
A particular flinty population shared the town. They interested me, as they were so at odds with both the showcase element and the sunny, touristic day-trippers. I had no proper context for them—the Bronx didn’t seem to have a precise equivalent. Some of these people (my landlady, a gaunt, quivering woman, among them) often seemed to be seething. Many survived the dark New England hours aided by alcohol. It was not uncommon to see a pallid person rattling a shopping cart piled impressively to the brim with empty beer cans over the cobblestones to the redemption center. Many people had bumper stickers on their old beaters: EXPECT THE RAPTURE. The town, which was becoming ever more discernible to me, had at least four distinct districts—the patrician boulevards lined with the first millionaires’ mansions in America, their existence due to the pirating of British ships and to the whaling trade; the funky weather-beaten wood houses huddled by the sea and now subdivided into picturesque if idiosyncratic apartments such as the one I occupied; the underclass of white townies and Dominicans in rotting, ramshackle multistory dwellings behind the Walgreen’s; and a new, young, burgeoningly healthful business-school element living in spiffy renovated condos, all permeated by a daily influx and outflow of tourists, and all cheek by jowl. I was always glad to have a reason to walk through; the sheer amplitude was heartening, the sense that there were myriad ways one could live. Now, as I walked, something punitive and exacting—something that seemed to hold life itself as the enemy—eased in me.
The Blockbuster was a vast, blue-carpeted space that seemed to have few videos, and favored the very most recent. Still, it did have what I’d come for. I rented it, and bought a packet of stale, brittle, brilliant orange peanut-butter-and-cheese crackers, then began to wander back through the bluish slate streets, munching as I strolled. An optimism took me—simply from holding the movie. A cardinal perched on a picket fence, I noticed, its triangular crest bright in the gray air. A black-and-white cat with a jingling collar crouched down and then slunk into a busted basement window. I smiled. Somehow I’d been recently myopic, gazing into dull gauze, lost in a troublesome middle distance. Now charming particulars glinted out—the yellow beak of the bird, the hunch of the cat. For an instant I felt as if the world itself were the key to a giant, encoded cipher. That cardinal was both itself and a signifier of something else—something that was, somehow, also only itself, the cardinal. You needed to go no further than what was before your eyes. It was all here.
The truth of the world is inherent richness, I felt. There isn’t one right way! I can get where I need to go by myriad paths, myriad sentences—for I suddenly understood that, as soon as I’d received the writing contract, I’d craved to write something truer than I’d written before, something more significant and odd.
This was why my permission had turned to prohibition! There was something more important to me than the book I’d outlined, although I hadn’t quite known it earlier. Once I sold the proposal, though, this more important thing, to my surprise, announced itself and demanded expression. It was a relief now finally to realize this. Here was my problem. I momentarily had the mad sensation that the cat had told it to me, and the cardinal. Tomorrow would be different when I sat down to work.
At this thought, a jolly creaking rose to my ears. It had been accompanying me, I suddenly realized, for quite a way. Companionable. Cheery. There it was. There! It sounded like the rasping meow of a very old cat. It made me want to dance. I moved my leg, and there was the creak. I stopped, and all was silence. Why, it came from the rollers of the cassette! They were loose, and wobbly, and registered each step, as if I were being accompanied by a companion made of jointed plastic. How goofy! How fun! And this hilarious sound kept me, as I strolled up the cobblestones, merry, dear company all the way home, assuring me that I was not alone, that I ought to be of good cheer, and that tomorrow really would be different.
I woke however to an inhospitable world. The streets were glazed. A freezing rain had fallen overnight, and then the temperatures plunged. Icy air seeped in around the old window casings. I tried to write. My sentences shattered. My stiff, cold fingers seemed to be the problem. I shook them until they batted one another. I held them under the hot water but they wouldn’t sufficiently warm. To my dismay, I was still stuck in my writing. In the early afternoon, I let my pen drop. Then I drew the curtains shut, inserted the videotape, and, with a sigh of relief, plumped down to watch The Wizard of Oz.
And the movie did let me see, quite soberly, why I was still transfixed. The clues were everywhere. I hadn’t watched it in twenty years but my mouth uttered key lines along with the characters. The movie’s rhythms were in my body like the