Benefit, page 21
character
Specifically, according to Dan and the slides that followed, narrative meant an essay in which the young person happens to want to do what they happen to be uniquely good at and what their experiences so far have uniquely prepared them for. It was also very important, according to Dan at the workshop, if at all possible, for an applicant to show how they had overcome adversity. The overcoming of adversity was something of a formula, true. But it was still vital. More and more schools and fellowship programs were interested in character, he said. “Character over credentials!” Overcoming adversity was a measure of character.
incident
Justin looked up and narrowed his eyes. “Are you saying my writing sucks?”
“No, no, not at all—”
“I’m kidding. Ease up. In college I did. Writing class, yeah, easy A.”
“I didn’t,” I went on. “I read a textbook, though. This textbook says a character needs to do something because a story is a character actively wanting things and making decisions.”
“Sure.” He ranged over the remains of the plate.
“My question is, does that happen? In life. In real experience. How often do you actively want something and make decisions to get it?”
“Um.” Justin gave me a puzzled look. “A lot, I think? Like all the time?”
I was still holding the slice of cheese he had made me take. “Oh,” I said. “Right. Of course.”
I took a bite. He was staring at me.
I said, “Forget it. Dumb question. This honey is good, by the way.”
“I told you.”
“I’m working now on advising for scholarships and fellowships,” I said. The words were meant to cover my embarrassment. They didn’t. “It’s all about story. Apparently. Anyway. I’m trying to learn. To, you know, help students—kids—those who—”
Justin supplied the words: “The disadvantaged.” His voice was dry.
“Right, but—”
“Underrepresented.”
“Well—”
“Minorities.”
“Please stop.”
“It all sounds very valuable.”
He smiled to underline his scorn. After his talk, for a moment, I thought about asking if he had ever considered that these assumptions about being someone, someone with a story, a story of choices and decisions, choices and decisions only this person could or would make, seemed to emerge with the capacity to originate systems and structures that, once created, could not be controlled, could not be prevented from erasing and undoing and obviating in unforeseen ways the very chance for choices and decisions, the very legibility of any story, so that the proof of being ourselves was our recognition we could not be, had prevented ourselves from being, ever again—and I was glad that I had not said anything about this. It was so obviously dumb. Sometimes I couldn’t believe how little I knew.
I said to Justin, “It’s just something I can do.”
character
“But how does this work?” Greta’s note. “Are you in charge? Can I send you some names, basically. My friends in Philly. Will they qualify?? We need to get them SOMETHING. Right? These kids, what they’ve been through, you will not BELIEVE.”
I wanted to write that I would, I would believe, but of course my belief was not the point.
incident
“I know almost nothing,” I said to Lois. “I tried first to learn something about sugar, because sugar is where the money came from.”
“Well, the sugar business is where the money came from.”
“But my assignment was Ennis, because he was the source of the money.”
“His death,” Lois said.
“And Florence was the one who gave it away, the Weatherfield money, your family’s money. So I wanted to know more about her. I could find almost nothing.” I stopped. “I’m going to scratch my forehead for a second, if that’s okay.”
“Yes yes, do whatever you’d like.”
“All I had was the fact of her giving it all away. I mean she wasn’t involved. That part was interesting to me. I wanted to understand it.” I put my hand down and resumed my motionless stance. I was talking to the view. “I saw in it something definitive, I guess, something strong.”
Lois said, “Oh, well, that’s completely erroneous.”
I heard a whisper of paper. She was turning a page. “It is?” I said.
“Yes yes.” She was calm, preoccupied, her tone that of someone engaged in a task and giving only half a mind to her words. “My great-aunt was a very weak person.”
“She was?”
“She was.”
“Do you know that?” I sounded feeble. “You were only five. Six.
“Oh, I was old enough.” Lois was unoffended. “We visited her every few weeks, out at her place on Long Island. Out near Glen Cove? You probably have those facts, too. It seemed like a long drive to me then, so strange, perhaps because no one wanted to go. I don’t think even Florence enjoyed those afternoons. Mostly she spent the time complaining. Though perhaps she enjoyed the complaining.” She paused. “Do you need to scratch anymore?”
“No.”
“This is going quite well, I have to say.”
“That’s good,” I said. “I’m glad.” I added, “And what did Florence complain about?”
“Oh, everything, nothing. She had no one to talk to. She had Emilia, but that was different.”
“Emilia?”
“So when we were there, she went on and on. It was frightening, to a little child like me, but in a pathetic sort of way. Sometimes my brother and I were herded into her bedroom, which was always dark. She would put in her teeth while we watched. Then she would go downstairs and feed us these cheap candies from a glass jar that we were meant to be grateful for.”
“That sounds—yes.”
“My parents, I think, tried to get her to do things. She was in fairly good shape for her age, you know. She wasn’t weak physically. She talked endlessly about things she hated without trying to change them. I’m sure you know those kinds of people. Endlessly dissatisfied and incapable of doing anything. There comes a point.”
I made a sound that I hoped was the right response to this point.
“She hated the damp out there by the ocean but she wouldn’t move; she had some old friends, I think, or would have, but she couldn’t make a phone call, write a letter; she listened to silly radio programs about angels, I remember, which left her even more bigoted than she was anyway. In all, I suppose she seemed to me deeply silly.” She paused. “Silly or fearful. If there’s a difference.”
“I see. Do you think,” I tried, “that she was shaken by Ennis’s death?”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Lois firmly. “Before my time. From my parents’ opinions I would say, not much. I think he was a weak sort, too.”
“Well, there was also the war.”
“The war?”
“It must have been hard.”
“Which war? I don’t think Florence could blame her personality on the war.”
I persisted. “But do you think she was different when she was younger?”
“Not really,” said Lois mildly. “At least I doubt it. Anything is possible, of course. But in my experience people don’t change much.”
“No?”
“No no. How you start is how you go on. Circumstances change. But I’ve never thought that circumstances mattered that much.” She paused. “Is any of this useful to you?”
“Of course,” I said. “Very useful. Thank you.”
character
I wrote back to Greta that I thought her friends would qualify. They would help our deliverables, for the grant. The deliverables, in fact, specified domestic students, within the United States; the questions surrounding visas and foreign schools and different records were just too complicated and heterogeneous. The advising coordinator had explained this to me when I asked her about the possibility of an applicant from, for example, a former U.S. colony with an economy still tied to the sugar trade where women could be forced through general conditions of the international economy and specific practices of international corporations to expose themselves to the danger of yet another war by working for the men of an occupying American army in Iraq. I didn’t ask in precisely those terms. I found the file first in a database, where it seemed to be languishing. It was probably languishing because we needed to focus on domestic students, the advising coordinator said. I agreed that this made sense. Nor would such a focus be difficult. There were plenty of files, plenty of obstacles overcome, plenty of stories.
incident
“Good,” Lois said. “We’re almost finished here,” she added. She meant her drawing. “I want to try one more page.”
“That’s fine,” I said. There was something else I wanted to mention, but I had forgotten what it was. Being a subject had turned my mind vacuous. I wanted a pen, desperately, a piece of paper, though nothing she had said was worth writing down—was it? “How long have you been an artist?” I asked, to cover the silence. It would come to me.
A decade, Lois said. She dated her beginnings as an artist from the moment she decided to draw every day. She had drawn every day for a decade.
“Ten years.”
Yes, ten years. Consistency is paramount, she reminded me. Inspiration is a myth. I had heard this before, and so firm a consensus about the worthlessness of inspiration made me fairly certain that random, uncontrollable inspiration must be overwhelmingly important, but as Lois talked I considered the more humdrum problem of drawing every day for a decade and achieving only the ability to make what I saw on the walls. Ten years. Lois continued to talk. Yes, it took her a long time to come to her vocation. She was an actress first; she left home to act. “I met a director.”
“You were how old?”
“Eighteen. I matured early. Yes yes. I knew what I wanted.” She married the director right away. They had a studio in the Village and a lovely life together; they did a terrific Antigone at a festival, some other projects. But neither of them was very domestic, it turned out, and both were sleeping around, which wouldn’t have been a problem, except Gerald was still stifled by notions of propriety. Lois came home one night and told him she thought they should be honest with each other, “to be adult about the arrangement.” She was twenty-two. Gerald couldn’t agree, about honesty or adulthood, and that was that, though they didn’t get divorced officially until much later, and she kept his name because she liked the rhythm and she had done work she was rather proud of under that name. After, she said, she was sure she needed the challenge of a new environment, so she talked herself into a job in a theater in San Francisco, where she answered the phones and regrouped. The pay wasn’t much, but when you’re young, you don’t need much; she slept on the couch in the living room of the woman who ran the place, another director. A generous soul, Lois explained, but unfortunately Lois fell in love with the woman’s brother, who was already married to someone else, children too, and so Lois had to leave.
“You didn’t want to break up the marriage,” I summarized.
“No no, that marriage was doomed.” The brother left with her; they went to Seattle. Sam worked on a fishing boat. Which was not ideal, because he was away so often and Lois was lonely; Seattle can be a lonely city. Lois took belly-dancing lessons from a woman whose cousin ran a farm, and eventually Lois went to work there, at the farm. They were doing what might now be called “organic,” though they didn’t use that term; Lois thought it wasn’t in fashion yet. Lois did not know anything about farming but felt very in touch with the energy of the place and was allowed to take home all the fresh vegetables she could carry. She was a vegetarian then. Vegetarianism can be useful to determine what’s best for one’s body, she explained, but everything is so individual; it’s all trial and error, “yes yes, until you get very in tune with your own biofeedback.” She herself had been a vegetarian and a vegan and then she did macrobiotic. Now she ate mainly broth and rice and fish. At the time on the farm, she was coming into her thirties, when a woman’s energy changes so much. “You must know how that goes,” she told me. “You must be exploring that now.”
“Ah—yes,” I said. “Right.” I scratched my face again. Lois didn’t seem to notice.
“And then we were in California for a while,” she continued. One of the men who worked on the farm left to start a different operation in Humboldt County, and Lois persuaded Sam, when he was back from a fishing job, to come along; there were eight of them, experimenting with intentional living on about three acres. It worked very well, Lois said, mostly because they sold a lot of marijuana. That was when she learned about herbs. Oh, and her son was born there. Jeremy. But it all fell apart in a few years. Lois left for Japan. Sam’s sister took care of Jeremy for a month. Lois wasn’t ready to be a mother and needed some time to herself. “And would you mind one last change? A few moments, if you could lean—yes yes yes. There.”
While she was in Japan Lois went to a lot of temples, she said, and realized she needed to go back to school; she returned to California and began to read mystic texts and decided to get a master’s degree in religious studies. But she had never gone to college, so she needed a bachelor’s first, and decided to move to Austin because the state university there was good, or it used to be very good, and not too expensive. “Did Sam come along?” I asked.
“Sam.” The name was far off now. No, Sam was no longer in the picture. She and Jeremy went to Austin. Austin in those days was growing so quickly, so much sprawl; it wasn’t at all like what Lois thought it would be, but they rented a tiny bungalow in the back of an enormous property owned by a reclusive millionaire, Tim, who raised horses. His heart had been broken, Lois explained matter-of-factly, so he and Lois were kindred spirits. Tim asked Lois to do his chart, and when she did she was flabbergasted, astonished by how well they fit together, and soon enough they fell in love. “What is your sign, by the way?” she asked. “Aries?” I told her it was Scorpio. She said she should have known I wasn’t an Aries. I wasn’t stubborn.
“I’m not?”
“No no.” Lois was certain. She was a Cancer; I had probably guessed. Tim was thirty years older and had promised himself he would die on his ranch, but he agreed to move with Lois and Jeremy to Chicago once Lois had been accepted at a theological program there. That’s where she converted, Lois explained. She thought Judaism would help resolve questions she had about her womanhood, and it did, for a time, but then it didn’t, and so she left school. She paused to ask me to move a bit to the right. “There,” she said. Actually, she was still a credit short of her B.A. degree when she moved from Austin, and it was just luck the seminary never asked her for an official diploma, but they probably would have before she finished the graduate program, so it was a good thing she quit.
“And that’s how I got back to New York.” Lois spoke as if that had been her clear, pursued goal during the whole of the previous story. Lois had been lucky enough to find a very strong group of theater activists, and began to work with them—they staged interventions, mostly about the environmental movement; they sewed tin cans onto jumpsuits, she said, and did interpretive dances, interactive performances, demonstrations. It was a truly amazing bunch of people. The leader was a beautiful man named Jorge, who had served time for dealing heroin, or maybe LSD, no, heroin—anyway, a beautiful man. She and Tim were not getting along then, she added, but by the time they realized they should split up Tim was quite sick and moved to a convalescent home in Rhode Island. And after Tim passed on, Lois added, she decided she wasn’t going to commit to a monogamous relationship again.
“So Tim didn’t die on his ranch,” I said.
“No!” Lois said. She seemed surprised at my remembering this, but after a brief pause she continued: It was through her theater activism that she came to painting. First she discovered art therapy, when someone in the group set up a nonprofit to teach social justice and conflict resolution with movement and role-playing and acrylic on canvas, and she worked at that organization for a time, before she realized she had already spent too much of her life giving energy away. But during one of the classes Lois also realized how much she loved painting and how good at it she was. It was what she had always been meant to do. She spent six months taking classes from a genius in Tribeca—a true genius, she assured me, and she learned all she could from him—and she had been painting ever since. She paused.
“Wow,” I said.
“Done,” she said. She meant the sketch. “Done done done.
You can move.”
character
And Justin was finished embarrassing me; he had to go. He had that other, important person to meet. He stood up. “The book is in, by the way.”
“Book?”
“Um, mine? My book?”
“Oh, right! Your book! Great. Congratulations, I mean. What are you writing now?”
“Listen to you. Always the next thing.”
“Sorry. You’re taking a break. That’s good.”
“Actually, I’m writing a novel.”
“A novel?”
He laughed at my expression. “Is that so weird?”
incident
I turned around. I could look wherever I wanted now. Lois was peering at the page she had just drawn. “Yes. This went well.”
I had the urge to tell her a story of my own, or not my own, Joshua’s story—that was his name, the applicant I couldn’t help. I didn’t say anything, though. The desire came from the wrong place: spite, maybe, revenge, defense. Also it wasn’t mine to tell.
character
I told Justin it wasn’t weird at all.
“Glad to hear it.” He was winding his scarf again. “In the meantime more talks. Let me know about that, okay? I mean Royce or wherever you’re teaching.”
