Place

When I was a sophomore in college I wanted pretty desperately to be a fiction writer. I was taking English 218R: Writing Fiction [R=repeatable, though not for credit, and I did lots of times] and decided that to be a respectable writer of short stories one either had to write from the haughty assurance of New York City or down home simple pride of the country. So I imagined myself at the end of college in either Virginia or New York, not really sure doing exactly what, but with some serious writer ambition, living alone in some sort of a great apartment being cool enough to merit publication. But I'll get back to that. So tonight I'm driving home from Asheboro and I had all kinds of revelation about just why I am not actually doing any writing, this journal excepted, and it hardly counts. Asheboro is a smallish town west of where I live, and is part of the whole Western North Carolina land of producing textiles and furniture. It is of sufficient population to have a Super Wal-Mart, heaven help us all, but my real reason for the trip was to get some rocking chairs. Chances are pretty good that when you purchase furniture it -- or the fabric that covers it -- was made right here in my lovely state. High Point, the sleepiest town ever, turns into this giant smorgasbord of buyers, producers, and industry darlings at the Furniture Market each year, and the whole sort of Western area, with the exception of Greensboro and Winston-Salem, seems to me a collection of small places where people are born and die, usually working in the mills.

I was getting rockers because what you do in the South, no matter how blasted hot and humid it is outside, is sit on the front porch at dusk and drink sweet tea and watch the lightning bugs. And you need a respectable rocker. So I went to P&P Chairs (they don't so much have a website), which is housed in the same warehouse as when it started. You go through the office -- clearly marked by one of those hanging-from-chains "OFFICE" signs perpendicular to the door -- to the outlet store, really just a mass of chairs in a large room with wood floors and pillars, and a room which, I quite vividly imagined, could have served as a social hall for some sort of hoe-down in the past.

I asked the middle-aged man helping me how long they'd been in business, and he said, proudly, "Since 1926. In this same building." And it was pretty obvious. There were a couple hundred coats of vaguely greenish paint on the walls, a million coats of gray on the outside, and some 70s-looking improvements like a couple of wall-unit air conditioners that blew freezing air to the office and a serious blast of heat into the warehouse this 95 degree day. He told me that his grandfather started the business, and his father, "the white-haired man you saw in there," runs it now. I went with him in the office to pay through a swinging half gate, around randomly placed old desks and through a door with a frosted glass pane marked "Private" in red letters. After taking my check and giving me directions to the restaurant where I was meeting a friend, he hesitated a minute, then told me that I shouldn't go to that restaurant (and having been there before, I silently agreed) but that I should go just up the road to the American Roadhouse, which boasts a seriously schizophrenic menu of fried chicken or frog legs. We took his recommendation, and I ended up with 2 gigantic chicken breasts coated in mozzarella and weird marinara, a side of garlic mashed potatoes, and Texas Toast, with a Diet Coke in a Ball jar. My meal and Tracy's came to less than $15, and we were surrounded by all these Asheboro folks, regulars, a bunch of them, familiar to the waitstaff and each other.

Then in the truck I heard on NPR some reading recommendations, and there was an excerpt from a contemporary writer named Maile Meloy whose first collection of stories has just been published in paperback. The girl who read had a perfect radio voice and I was so entranced by the prose that I nearly ran a red light. And even though it's a space hog and probably a violation of some copyright to post it, it's so fabulous that I listened to it on NPR about a thousand times so I could transcribe it, and here's how it goes:

"If you’re white, and you’re not rich or poor but somewhere in the middle, it’s hard to have worse luck than to be born a girl on a ranch. It doesn’t matter if your dad’s the foreman or the rancher, you’re still the ranch girl, and you’ve been dealt a bad hand. If you’re the formean’s daughter on Ted Haskell’s Running H Cattle Ranch, you live in the foreman’s house, on the dirt road between Haskell’s place and the barn. There are two bedrooms, with walls made of particleboard, one bathroom, no tub, muddy boots and jackets in the living room, and a kitchen that’s never used. No one from school ever visits the ranch, so you can keep your room the way you decorated it at ten, a pink comforter, horse posters on the walls, plastic horse models on the shelves. Outside there’s an old cow dog with a ruined hip, a barn cat who sleeps in the rafters, and, until he dies, a runt calf named Minute, who cries at night by the front door."

I even said WOW out loud in the truck and then I was of course, jealous and awe-struck and I thought, "See, she can write that because she's lived on a ranch and so she can get those details just right" and then I almost crashed again because it hit me: I am in precisely the spot that I once thought I needed to be, and it's like I have no idea. I live on a farm, in the country, people at my neighborhood feed & garden store know me and give me discounts on my herbs, I can chase down the FedEx man while he's getting lunch at Subway and he knows me and even stops to chat a bit, the crazy woman in the Wendy's drive-thru says "SEE YOU TOMORROW" every time I go (even though I really do NOT go every day), my neighbor Clark Poe knows everyone within a 10-mile radius and most of them go to church at the Orange Chapel A.M.E. Church just down the road, and I know from him that my mechanic tries to cover up the booze on his breath with "too much Listerine" and that Mark Crawford's truck recently blew up, "just blew up!" while it was sitting in the garage, and that there's a secret bar in downtown Chapel Hill that does all its business just after 4:30 or so, and serves 2 kinds of beer and nothing else. Truth, it turns out, is much stranger and a whole lot more interesting than fiction, and I am living smack in the middle of the things of so many whose fiction I admire: Faulkner, O'Connor, Raymond Carver.

In other words, I have no excuse, and that's kind of depressing. My dying breath is that maybe I'm meant for New York writing, which is probably why I'm all antsy to talk about Abby's possible move there: it's probably 20% jealousy and 80% sad to see her go. And I'm still not entirely comfortable with what I see as too many paradoxes in my belonging to this wonderful place: can you have subscriptions to Vogue, Allure, The New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, Martha Stewart Living and Weddings, and Harper's and carry around all that poser angst, and yet still smile fit to make your cheeks ache when you drive over the Cape Fear River and imagine your branch, the Haw, that runs in the backyard of the place you currently call home?

Don't answer that. I'm a little obsessed with this notion of place -- in fiction and in life -- it would seem, but when we talked about literature in college and when I read it now, I dwell on place and I think kind of incessantly about how that shapes us and the characters we write. But I am dripping with beauty of place over here, so maybe my dying breath is actually that I'm scared that I'm not good at it, which everybody knows isn't a very good reason to not try, because even if you end up being pretty terrible, someone will tell you. And, as us ranch girls know, there's the whole getting back up on the horse thing.