Michelle Herman, Telling the Story

What happened was something curious, something that surprised me. As I began to write the first of what would become a series of personal essays—writing, the first time, about love (the subject that has been at the heart of every piece of fiction I had ever written)—I found that life is full of artful closure, and of singing, reverberating meaning. Why had I never seen that before? Because I never see anything completely until I have written it—I knew the answer to the question as soon as I had asked it. Writing, I discovered that there was in fact plenty of—even too much—artfulness in what we call real life. Repetition, the loops that close up tightly over the course of one’s life, the predictability of certain twists and turns—all of this was what I would cut out of fiction. What I had cut out of fiction. And so I found that what I’d always thought—that writing about my life would be constraining; that not having the freedom to fictionalize as necessary, as I wished (to stir “reality” with imagination, to rearrange and cut and paste, to refit, to invent, to shape), would be dreary, would feel like a waste of good material—was simply untrue. Indeed, rather than feeling constrained by the truth, I felt shockingly, wildly, liberated by it; I felt cut loose. I felt relieved. *** There’s another piece—just one more—left of this story, the story of J. and me. Besides the city where he works, and the place where we both once lived as students, I made a stop too in the city where he had lived with his family, where I had lived too, for two years after graduate school. I arranged to make this stop even though I couldn’t imagine I would have much of an audience (and I was right): I remembered that much about this city, that it wasn’t likely to be literary. But I remembered very little else, and I wanted to see the place—for the last time, I was sure—that I had lived in for two years and had almost completely forgotten. I had not had a life of my own in this city—that is, I hadn’t carved out a life that had anything to do with the city itself. My time there was about J.’s family and about my own work. I wrote all day, every day—I wrote my first book there, in my rented house near J.’s, near the hospital—and and J. stopped by every evening on his way home from work. When he had time off, I spent it with him with his family, at their house. Nights when he was on call, or whenever else she wanted my company, I was with S. I lived very lightly in that city, in the house I rented; I made no impression on either of them, and they made very little impression on me. But I wanted to see them again, just once. I couldn’t imagine that any of J.’s brothers or sisters were still living in that town— why would they be? J. had chosen it for its convenience, not its charms, and he had long ago moved on—but I wanted to see the house I’d lived in, the streets I’d walked so little on. As it turned out, I couldn’t find my house; I couldn’t remember the name of the street where I’d lived, and I hadn’t thought to look it up before leaving home, where I might have found it on an old manuscript or an envelope addressed to me. In my hotel room, the morning after my reading at a bookstore to which almost no one came, just as I was about to check out, I got out the phone book and looked under J.’s last name—idly, passing my last few minutes—and there in the phone book was S—under her own name, an unusual enough name for me to be almost certain it was her. And I picked up the phone and before I could lose my nerve, I called her. She was glad to hear from me. She screamed with delight, and I found myself shocked into tears. She couldn’t recall whether J. had ever given her my phone number—she thought not. But even if he hadn’t—and for a moment she became the fifteen-year-old I remembered: outraged, indignant, ready to give her brother hell—I didn’t fault him; I begged her not to, either. He was only trying to protect her, I was sure. Am sure. The time that I was in their lives was such a terrible time for those children, and his greatest wish, I suspect, is that they simply don’t remember it—that they live in their own lives, the lives they have now, and put the past firmly behind them. But I can never put the past behind me—and I never want to. S. and I talked until I had to race out of the hotel, running late. Since then, we have talked again. She is as exuberant and quick-witted as I remember her. Her sister C., two years older, lives on a farm and has lately gone back to school; she will be teaching middle school Spanish and social studies soon. She too is as I remember her—calm and generous, sweet, gentle, startlingly wise. I have exchanged photos, letters, e-mails with both of them. They are doing very well—all of J.’s “kids” are well, I was glad and grateful—and relieved—to hear. And I have had the chance, at last, to tell the girls—once girls, now women, both of them mothers themselves—that without them I don’t think I would be a mother today, that Grace, my daughter, has much to owe them. That I hope that someday she will meet them. I haven’t talked to J. again; I’m not sure when I will—if I will. But I wanted to do justice to him, finally. For which I hope he will forgive me.