It is said, she once had a name. But it had been decades since she had become simply the Doll Maker. In the time when she had a name, she had been famous for her portrait dolls, each made in the image of the fortunate little girl for whom it was crafted. Whether through art or magic, as the girl grew to a woman, the doll mirrored every change in her face, until the day when the old woman was laid to rest, her small, white-haired companion by her side. The Doll Maker herself was impossibly old; village whispers measured her life in hundreds of years, but of course, everyone was too polite to ask her age. Then, when today’s grandmothers were little girls, the Doll Maker suddenly stopped making portrait dolls. Puzzled and disappointed parents asked her why, and she replied with the story of her dream. In my dream, I was walking through a crowd of people, all walking slowly in the same direction. I searched for a familiar face, but every head was turned away from me or turned toward the grounds if avoiding my gaze. Moving to the edge of the crowd, I found a small raised platform and climbed up on it for a better view. The faces on the silent, moving figures turned toward me as if on a signal, and I saw they were all the same. She knew in that moment that she must fill the village with those faces, and from that day on every doll has had a single face. The face of love.
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Being a latchkey kid might sound like a lot of fun. It probably is if you're the kind of kid who is sneaky when grownups aren’t around. But I'm a good kid, and that means I come right home and stay out of trouble. No friends coming over to visit, no long phone calls, no snooping around for Dad's smut collection.
Every day, I walk home, unlock the door, lock it again after me, get an approved snack. The fridge isn't locked, so I could have ice cream and cake, or even try to cook something and maybe set the house on fire. But because I'm a good kid, I make a peanut butter jelly sandwich, pour myself a glass of milk, and settle down in front of the TV. I'm allowed to have half an hour of TV when I get home, before I start my homework. Usually, I catch the last half hour of a talk show. There are several on when I get home, so I have my pick: entertainment gossip, family drama gossip, sports gossip, political gossip. Yesterday was Monday, entertainment gossip day. But instead of my usual entertainment talk show, there was a quiz show. No big deal, I thought. Probably just a schedule change, and I like quiz shows, too. Besides, the category for the day what science, and I had science homework, which seems like a nice coincidence. "First question: what is the third planet from the sun?" "Earth!" The TV contestant said. “Venus”. I said simultaneously. He was right. “Next question: Which of Newton’s laws states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction?" Tough one! I shouted “First!” and the contestant answered “Third”. He was right again. By the end of the show, I had gotten none of the correct answers, but the TV whiz kid had aced them all. I turned off the TV, dragged my back pack to the kitchen table, and took out my science folder to start on my homework. First question: What is the third planet from the sun? Puzzled, I scanned the rest of the page and smiled. Sometimes being a latchkey kid can be a very good thing. The postmark was five days after Mark's memorial service. Yet here in my hand was a postcard written in his familiar crabbed left-handed scrawl and signed signed "love, Mark". “I’m not dead. Meet me Tuesday night at 8 at the Bistro at IKEA.”
IKEA had been our favorite hangout in college, a good place to stroll, imagining our more prosperous futures. We'd pick a model room and settle in for an hour or two, reading or reviewing for an exam. Then we'd head for the Bistro for a soft serve cone at a price that couldn't be beat. But that was years ago, and Mark was dead. Or was he? The Bistro was busy when I arrived, as tuckered-out shoppers, their carts full of plates, accent pillows and frozen meatballs, stopped for a quick hot dog or frozen yogurt before facing the task of loading their cars. Finding a spot at the counter, I looked around. Mark's face as I had last seen him kept surfacing in my mind: sparse hair, sunken cheeks, his gray eyes drooping and dull. I imagined him emerging from a checkout line, his hospital gown flapping above his knees. "Is this seat taken?" The soft feminine voice startled me. "Are you expecting someone?" "Sort of. I'm meeting a friend but not sure..." This was awkward. Then I saw the baby in the carrier and the bulging shopping bag over her other shoulder. "Please, sit. It's ok." The baby was awake, staring around at the commotion. She -- obviously she, from the floral headband and pink t-shirt -- fixed her gaze on me and blinked. "Hi, there!" I said softly. Her mom laughed, "I see she's made a new friend." "How old is she?" "Three months today. She's a May Day baby." May 1st. Mark's birthday. The baby's gray eyes caught mine again and she smiled. "Say hello, Marcia." "If you don’t leave home, you suffocate, if you go too far you lose oxygen." -- Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story The words blew me away. I was taking a break from the painstaking task of course preparation, relaxing with a cup of coffee and Gornick's book about the personal narrative. It was a relief to be just reading something without looking for an answer, something I just don't do often enough. Her description of Harry Crews' essay "Why I Live Where I Live" was interesting, even engaging in a comfortable detached way. It was about Crews, not about me. We could not be more different, Harry Crews and I. He hails from the Georgia swamps; I am from the high, dry plains of Nebraska. He lives in Florida; Prince George's county, Maryland is as far south as I have ever lived or wanted to live. But then he described his writing life and how his home in Gainesville gives him "a kind of geographic and emotional distance I need to write", and Gornick translated: "If you don’t leave home, you suffocate, if you go too far you lose oxygen." And I started to cry. I just spent nearly a month in a place no longer my home, writing every day with focus and passion. Since I've been back, I have shifted from desk to chair to dining room table and from one coffee shop to another, trying to recapture the feeling I had there. I don't want to be tied to a place or a time of day or a ritual to be able to write. I want to be close enough to "home" but not too close. The problem is that I have no sense of "home", and the emptiness of that realization hit me hard. Unlike Crews, "home" for me has no fixed location.Forty years in Maryland, and when people ask where I'm from, they get a five-minute answer. My writing has flourished not in some place with a mappable relationship to a long-time homeland, but in far-flung locations with seemingly nothing in common: the porch on Star Island, a slope overlooking the St. Lawrence River, the lounge car of a moving train, a coffee house in a small town. I am grateful for each of these places and the many others I have yet to discover. But I will never be home.
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