[Beliefnet, February 2, 2001]
At dawn on the last day of the year, my husband and I were walking along a rural highway in South Carolina, following a trail of broken things. I had left my pocketbook on top of the car at a gas station late the previous night, something we didn’t realize till we got to my mother-in-law’s house about 45 minutes later.
It was too dark to search then, but all night I fretted. Had it fallen off right in the gas station lot, and was someone even now using my Visa card to order a vintage Corvette? Was some fan using the cell phone to leave long messages on Ricky Martin’s answering machine? How would I ever replace all those little plastic cards, when I couldn’t even remember what half of them were for? I pictured myself spending all afternoon at the DMV, glumly waiting to pose for a new license.
There was something even worse. I didn’t tell Gary this. My list of Internet passwords was in that pocketbook. The card I’d been scribbling them on for years had gotten so bent and dingy that I thought I’d make a fresh one during the long car trip. So much for that idea. Not only could I not remember all those passwords, to speedily change
them, I couldn’t even remember all the sites on the list.
All night, these tiny windows of vulnerability kept opening in my dreams. I felt like I was being shot at with miniature arrows. We set the alarm for an hour before sunrise and soon were back in the car, gliding along and scanning the other side of the highway.
“There are a lot more black clumps on the road than you’d think,” Gary said, as we passed another unidentifiable object. There were also plenty of flattened dogs. I’d never looked so intently at asphalt before. Behind us, the skyline shifted from oyster gray to misty pink, while up ahead the high tips of trees burned with sudden gold.
And there it was. A quick U-turn, and we were upon it. Picture a black leather pocketbook, about the size of a small shoebox, run over. Its long braided strap, snapped, tailed out in a curl on the gray pavement.
We parked and walked up for a closer look. The purse was still zipped, but had been popped open and exploded. Everything was smashed. The little blue-backed mirror was in fragments, reflecting the pearly sky, and the plastic shards of red and blue ballpoint pens and a pink nail file were scattered around it like confetti. The crushed highlighter splayed its yellow fibers, fanned out into a brush. The fuchsia lipstick was only bent, but the red one was good and smashed, and lumps and streaks of red were scribbled throughout the scene.
It was strangely festive. I found I was kind of enjoying this. I kept walking up the road. I came upon the little case I keep business cards in. It had been banged on top as by a hammer, a single decisive blow. I liked picturing someone being exactly that mad at my business-card case. There was the coin purse, its mouth bent into a grin, nickels spilling out like broken teeth. Then I found the wallet. All its contents were present but not, technically speaking, intact. Cracks ran through both the Visa and ATM cards. Those were the two I’d been most afraid of losing, but as I looked at them broken, I felt strangely freed.
I unzipped the pocketbook and poured out a half-cup of rubble: plastic splinters, broken key chain, smashed mints and aspirins. And this: my good ol’ Timex, still shiny, still ticking, absolutely unscathed. I had been just a kid when the “It takes a licking and keeps on ticking!” ads were on TV. This was like finding out there really is a tooth fairy. I strolled on, impressed.
Then I came upon the cell phone. This was best of all. It had been a large, clunky old phone, and it made an impressive spill that ran 20 feet or more. It was kind of exhilarating. I walked along in the chill, recognizing pieces here and there: the keypad, the batteries, the antenna and little plastic window, shiny fragments of this and that. There is nothing like the sight of a well-run-over cell phone to really cheer you up, early in the South Carolina dawn.
As I got to the end of the broken-phone trail, I looked up the road toward the pale pink horizon. For one crazy moment, I thought, I could just go on walking.
Then I thought a little more. I could just go on walking, and in a few hours all I’d get to would be Ravenel. I had driven through Ravenel many times, and I didn’t think it would be improved by walking.
And then, after a whole lot more walking, I’d just be back at my mother-in-law’s. Why not drive? If we went back now, maybe I could get to a store and start replacing all this stuff. I walked over to where Gary was gathering my bent and broken keys, and we began the drive back to town.
I kept thinking about why the sight of an exploded pocketbook would be so gratifying. It seemed a sudden opportunity to be free from all these nattering things that pin us down, that incessantly whine of their importance. A pocketbook is literal weight, and you must guard it closely or encounter catastrophe. No wonder one style of pocketbook is called a “clutch.”
Seeing it so run over, irrelevant and powerless, gave me a strange, momentary rush of freedom. It was a timid taste of what some more daring individuals must feel when they plunge into exhilarating, forbidden adventures and cast off responsible propriety.
But even for them, there must be a wan morning-after, when pleasure is only a shrunken memory, and the most pressing concern is finding the Pepto-Bismol. For me, all my wild freedom deflated as I pictured myself trudging through Ravenel.
In the car, I started making a list of things to replace. Perhaps this time, I’d go for a red wallet instead of a black one. I’d need to shop for a new cell phone, too, one of those tiny ones. There would be a lot of small, complicated things to gather as I rebuilt that nest of security, and it would be interesting to make decisions. This was going to be fun.
***
I don’t know if some of you are interested in the process of writing, but if so you might want to try to guess which was the one sentence that I had the most trouble with. I’ll tell you later.
I’m a “brick by brick” writer—incapable of making outlines, I just start in and lay down one paragraph after another, making sure the first one is squared away before I go to the next. Sometimes I don’t even know where exactly I’m going when I start writing, or what my point is going to be; I just have a nagging need to “write something out,” akin to talking it out. What’s there emerges as I go along. So it’s important that each paragraph, or even each sentence, each *word*, be as true and accurate as can it be before I leave it, because if it’s not I won’t wind up in the right place at the end. As I go along I keep scanning over the preceding paragraphs, “ironing” them, to see if anything is sticking out of place or doesn’t fit. And there was one sentence here that I couldn’t quite get to lie down flat.
This is the first mailing since we switched to an automated mailing list system. It’s not a discussion list—if you hit “reply” it will still go to me alone. But it should make it easier for people to sign themselves up, change their addresses, suspend delivery during vacations, etc. You should have received a “welcome” message yesterday about all this, including the place to go to make changes. Hope it makes things easier for all of us.
The troublesome sentence was “All night, these tiny windows of vulnerability kept opening in my dreams.” I was pretty sure I wanted to keep the next line, “I felt like I was being shot at with miniature arrows” but also wanted something about those windows to precede it. But why were they little windows? I didn’t know. To be the size of the little arrows? the image just wouldn’t get nailed down, but neither would it go away. I tried other ways of casting the sentence and some variations, eg “portholes”, but decided it was not a good idea to bring in nautical imagery when the metaphor was already barely under control. Mixed metaphors is probably my biggest writing flaw (well, of the flaws I’m aware of) and I often think ruefully that I’m fortunate to live in an era when people just don’t have high literary standards. My cap is off to my beloved High School English teacher, Miss Keith, who made us memorize Shakespeare and Wordsworth and had a red rubber stamp reading “Do Not Use Contractions in Formal English.” When I meet her in heaven I’m going to have a lot of rewriting to do.