| Our
Sometime Sister
Excerpt
This book was
completed in March of 1994 on a portable typewriter. There to date exists only
one complete copy of the manuscript. It is perhaps due to this material singularity
that I cannot help but feel, at this time, that the novel is another thing, another
of the nostalgic oddities, the unique if not useless tokens and trinkets I have
been collecting, mooning over, sorting through and saving my entire life. Our
Sometime Sister is itself, herself, the collection of all my saved scraps of the
past; quite frankly, junk, odds, torn movie tickets, candy wrappers, marbles,
patches of fabric, pencil stubs, class photos of children whose names have long
escaped me. I find now, only now, there was an odd underlying logic to my relentless,
okay, obsessive accumulation. It has added up to something. And what it has added
up to is this poor heap of pages, inky, bruised and battered, difficult to read,
but more than that, a difficult little world to inhabit. The sentences never lead
to coherent narratives; plot, which should be causal, collapses into story; and
the characters, worst of all, they never loved me, they were always leaving exactly
when I needed them most. Don't worry, I'm not asking for your pity here. Well
maybe I am. Maybe just a little. I want you to know that for me, sequence means
far less than instance. There is an inexactitude to the way the days, hours, weeks
follow each other. A moment of course is something quite different; it is an instance
of memory: full, disastrously overwhelming in the complexity of detail we bring
to it. Who can after all recall the days of the past, let alone last week, one
from the next? Yet how simple it is to recall the instant when perhaps the afternoon
began to slip away and even how at that moment the real was slipping impossibly
out of reach, already into the past and what could one do but try to recapture
it? We can neither
of us escape the inevitable; the things we collect will come back to haunt us.
All that we have keeping us together, you and I, from start to finish, are words.
What can I do but regret that I cannot show you baby pictures, spray on your wrists
perfume, haul out the dress I wore on an October day ten years ago, that is, present
you with the concrete remains of a world already slipping away into obscurity.
Words, this is going to be difficult, fussy little things, short, guttural, romantic,
sonorous, to replace all that is and was real. How difficult it is with words
to separate the time, moments, years, the scent of oranges, sticky orange-scented
kisses, the afternoons, all of them, one by one, and the words, yes, where would
I be but for the words? I
know about this, about telling stories and how it is to tell a story aloud over
a cup of coffee and maybe a cigarette or two while the afternoon slips away, to
digress, to touch the knee of your companion for emphasis, perhaps have another
cigarette and then resume as you stare out the window into the bleak winter afternoon;
this is far different from the lonely prospect of setting a story down on paper.
I don't have you here to ask questions, to tell me when things are confusing,
upsetting, or flat out boring; that is when you would politely interrupt and rise
asking, More coffee for you, Pearl? On paper words are lonely things. The more
of them one strings together the further one strays from intention; something
is always missing. I know this better now than ever before. I no longer have illusions
about how romantic it might be to sequester myself away from the world in a cabin
in the north woods and write a novel. I have just done this. I have just written
a novel.
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