High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [106]
When it’s put that way, it dawns on me that this may be the snag—the part about lying. In the book-jacket photos I look like a decent girl, and decent girls don’t lie. That social axiom runs deep, possibly deeper than any other. The first important moral value we teach our children, after “don’t hit your sister,” is the difference between fantasy and truth. Trying to pass off one for the other is a punishable infraction, and a lesson that sticks for life. Whether or not we are perfectly honest in adulthood, we should be, and we know that on a visceral level. So visceral, in fact, a machine measuring heart rate and palm perspiration can fairly reliably detect a lie. We don’t even have to think about it. Our hearts know.
So I suppose I should be relieved when people presume my stories are built around a wholesome veracity. They’re saying, in effect, “You don’t look like a sociopath.” And it’s true, I’m not; I pay my taxes and don’t litter. Track down any grade-school teacher who knew me in childhood and she’ll swear I was a goodie two-shoes even back then.
But ask my mother, and she’ll tell you I always had a little trouble with the boundaries of truth. As the aerospace engineers say, I pushed the envelope. As a small child I gave my family regular updates on the white horse wearing a hat that lived in the closet. When I was slightly older, family vacations offered me the delightful opportunity to hang out alone in campground restrooms, intimating to strangers that I came from a foreign country and didn’t comprehend English, or plumbing. When I got old enough to use public transportation by myself, my sport was to entertain other passengers with melodramatic personal histories that occurred to me on the spot. I was a nineteen-year-old cello virtuoso running away from my dreadful seventy-year-old husband; or I had a brain tumor, and was determined to see every state in the union by Greyhound in the remaining two months of my life; or I was a French anthropologist working with a team that had just uncovered the real cradle of human origins in a surprising but as-yet-undisclosable location. Oh, how my fellow passengers’ eyes would light up. People two rows ahead of me would put down their paperbacks, sling an elbow over the back of the seat, and ride all the rest of the way to Indianapolis backward, asking questions. I probably registered an increased heart rate and sweaty palms, but I couldn’t stop myself. I strove for new heights in perjury, trying to see how absurd a yarn I could spin before some matron would finally frown at me over her specs and say, “Now really, dear.”
No one ever did. I concluded that people want pretty desperately to be entertained, especially on long bus rides through flat midwestern cornfields.
For me, it was more than a pastime. It was the fulfillment of my own longing to reach through the fences that circumscribed my young life, and taste other pastures. Through my tales I discovered not exactly myself but all the selves I might have been—the ones I feared, the ones I hoped for, and the ones I’d never know. None of them was me. Each of them was a beckoning path into the woods of what might have been.
Eventually I found a socially acceptable outlet for my depravity. Now I spend hours each day, year after year, sitting at my desk with