So if I did write my story, what would it be about?
Maybe it would be a ridiculously artful story about a storyteller who tells everyone else’s story to perfection, but can’t verbalize her own. But that’s simply too cute. It would also be very easy to get lost in it while writing it, and becoming horribly tedious and artful. There’s that word again: artful. And when I see that word, I always think of The New Yorker. The poems in The New Yorker have been getting boring again lately, after what I’d perceived as a slight upturn in worth.
Who wants to hear stories of the truth? Everyone else’s truth is at least probable, if not likely. Some of the more bizarre stories are so bizarre that they couldn’t have possibly been made up.
The truth is that I was a very lonely little rich girl, who grew up far from friends and school and family, outside of my parents. [Immediate accusations fly: “Oh, you’re one of them. You’re a leech on society. How come you got the money and I don’t? Say, can I have a loan? You have so much you won’t even notice it’s gone.”] At least, that’s how Mom always told me other people would regard me, if they knew of my family and my background. In retrospect, I assume she meant in part to make me feel how privileged I was — another bit of her attempts to live through me.
I just wanted to be “one of many” — Stevie Smith’s line. One of many, nestled in the midst of a warm, happy crowd of friends, always someone there who understood, who would listen or play.
Instead, I grow up in a big barn of a house full of (I’m told, and so I believe) priceless antiques and paintings, an upright piano with ivory keys that was never ever tuned, a bedroom with a porch that was never to be used (too much trouble).
So I launched out on my adulthood with no more conception of how real life worked than a small child does.
Oh, there’s a story or two or a dozen in there. But would telling it make me a target?
white pebble 