Today, as I was driving around, buying hardware and apples, I was thinking about getting a new book to read. I couldn't think of one I wanted, so I drove past the book store, and then began daydreaming about the books I read as a boy -- especially the beautiful volumes in My Book House, by Olive Beaupre Miller. The blue volume was 'Nursery Friends from France'; the orange one was 'Tales Told in Holland'. They came with the encyclopedia my parents bought, when we moved into the ranch house on Lilac Drive. When the books arrived, I sat on the wall-to-wall carpet in the living room, inspecting each book as we put them on the shelf.
The Olive Miller illustrations are extraordinary. I didn't realize how good they are until, after spotting copies of these books in a friend's library, I found and bought my own copies (the ones we had at home had long since disappeared). In both of these splendid books, the Miller and her husband used classic works of art as the basis for showing us one adventure or another. I now understood, in retrospect, why, in my college art history classes, I had felt so at home with the Northern European paintings of Vermeer and van Eyck. Illustrating one story in the orange volume is a complete -- but reversed -- rendering of the famous Arnolfini Marriage Portrait, with the groom with his huge black furry hat, the bride in green, and the puffy little dog at the woman's feet. To support a little poem, are two facing pages, spreading out a pristine cityscape in Amsterdam, with the typical open half-doors revealing interiors, and a complacent-looking hausfrau tending to her child. In the blue volume, the storied and songs are accompanied by visual reminiscences of Fragonard and Boucher and Watteau.
These books were my main refuge during the breaking apart of my family. And after I was back with my father's second family, we still had most of that collection, and I continued to lose myself in the luscious colors and extraordinary drawing, and continued to reread the classic fairy tales, like Rumplestiltskin, and The Little Humpbacked Horse. I think that I believed more in those books, and in the carefully-rendered tableaux, than in the life in which I found myself embedded. My parents complained bitterly that I was living in a dream world. I realized, even then, that what really bothered them was the fact that the dream world I was living in wasn't the same one as their own. And I preferred mine.
In the orphanage I didn't have access to those books. In the orphanage, I had no idea whether I would ever see those books, or my father, or anything of an ordinary family life again. But even as strictly watched as we were, and as regulated as our schedules, I still found ways of escaping, if just for a little while, from a way of living I found all but unbearable.
In the big basketball court that served as the homework study hall for all of us during the school year, there was a table with a stack of National Geographic magazines, for those of us who had finished our schoolwork early, and were waiting until it was time to go to bed. I learned to be very quick with my arithmetic and English, so I would have first pick of those golden-bound treasuries. I remember spending many homework sessions, diving into an artist's rendering of life in pre-Spanish Mexico -- the stylized Mayans and Aztecs were electrifying. There was also an article on the Native Americans of the Plains, illustrated using the conventions of the Otoe, the Sioux and Cherokee. Horses in blue and red, floating weightlessly; buffalo and arrows and warriors defying logic and gravity.
My favorites, though, were the photos of the wild animals. There were never enough of them. I especially loved the powerful hunting cats, and great birds of prey, and the fleet antelopes -- oryx and impalas, elands and gemsbok . Once, by being very quiet and working very slowly, I tore out a single page from one of the magazines -- a page featuring a front-on view of a male black buck with long spiraled horns -- and slipped it into my school books. When homework was done, we returned to our dorms, and I put my books -- and my pirated picture -- into my little locker. Later, as time permitted, and I wasn't under close watch, I used a little pair of scissors I had 'borrowed' from school, and patiently began cutting away the background of the picture -- eliminating the grasses and bits of blue African sky, cutting as close to the animal's body as I could. I worked very slowly and intently, focused intently on this powerful image.
Because I had to work so stealthily, it took several days of cutting, a little at a time, to reach my goal -- the complete liberation of this splendid beast from its surroundings. I can almost recapture the breathless feeling, as I trimmed away the last bit of extraneous paper. I think I really expected, at some deeply important level of fantastic belief, that at the instant that final snip was complete, the paper would turn heavy and warm and coarse in my hands, the black nose would moisten, the wide-set, dark eyes would blink, the sharp horns would make a soft swishing sound as the beast turned his head and then wrenched himself away from me. There would be the clatter of small hard black hoofs on the linoleum, and with one heroic leap, the black buck would burst through the window at the end of the room, bound down across the terraced roof tops below, and onto the grassy circle where we played on the seesaw, and then catch its breath, before disappearing through the brambles and into the thin woods beyond.
No amount of intention and yearning can turn paper into beastly flesh. Without the background as support, the image of the black buck was fragile and difficult to manage. The potential for release had been lost. In a week, it was just another twisted scrap under my geography text.
And during that institutional time, there was another mode of escape -- a deeply secret, dangerous ritual I'm not sure how I discovered, let alone had the nerve to explore, much less repeat as often as I did.
It had to be done late at night, when everyone else, including the dread housemother, was asleep. I would sneak out of my bed, and as quietly as possible, open the heavy, dark green fire door that separated our sleeping quarters from the communal bathroom. I opened it only as much as necessary, to squeeze myself through. Then, just as carefully, I opened the swing-hinged bathroom door, slipped inside and turned on the overhead light.
This room was green too, the usual soulless institutional color that has nothing to do with growth and life. There was a row of eight sinks along the wall by the door, and above each sink hung a mirror. At the end of the wall of sinks was a row of windows. Standing in the middle of the room was a simple open wooden framework, with coat hooks every eight inches or so, for hanging our towels, or our clothes when we were getting a bath. One row of hooks was high up on the frame, another was lower, for the smaller kids to use. Usually, the room had at least two or three other boys in it. It was strange to be there alone.
I was barefoot. I took off my pajamas, and hung them on one of the empty hooks. I was naked. I selected one or two towels from the rack -- hoping for something not so worn, not so faded, not so hopeless. Then, I would dance.
I had to do it. It came from inside. I didn't think about it, I just obeyed. I knew that if I made any noise, or if I was discovered, the beating in store for me would be ferocious. But I danced anyway. I danced around the central structure as though it was a hollow altar without a god. I twirled and spun, and I jumped up and down. I whipped the towels around me, like fraudulent wings. Sometimes I could see myself, for just a second or two, in the mirrors over the sinks, but I didn't really care what I looked like. I danced because I needed to shed something, to exorcise something. I needed to transform what my life had become, into these furtive muscular gestures that no one, not even me, would ever see. I danced until I was worn out.
I put my pajamas back on, and sneaked back into my bed.
I was never caught. When I was beaten, it was for other things.
There were other escapes too, but these seem particularly eloquent and enigmatic. I think that, at some level, I knew that, because I was just a boy, this unbearable life couldn't possibly last forever. Without question, I took for granted that I would have a future. I took these little bits of relief as I found them, living intensely in my imagination, and through whatever artwork I could sneakingly create, in order to keep myself whole, for that time when my life would be, somehow, better. How odd, now, to find myself yearning for a similar kind of imaginative escape -- not from anything remotely resembling an unbearable life, but from the loss of that very sense of futurity.
How much longer, I'm asking myself, always, even when I'm not really thinking about it. Will I need... how many more tubes of toothpaste? How many spritzer bottles of Jean Marie Farina Extra Vieille?
Is this the last hair brush I'll ever need? How many more pairs of shoes? Can I find a picture now, that if trimmed precisely enough, will help me imagine my own escape? How long will I need to dance now, to quiet the piercing sense of mourning, for the time when the dancing will be done?
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