High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [107]
I do want to state for the record that I no longer have any inclination toward real dishonesty; I don’t bear false witness to strangers or to friends. And I check my facts obsessively when serving the journalist’s or essayist’s trade. So my mother isn’t to blame—she did, evidently, teach me to know true from false. I gather I was just born with an excess of story, the way another poor child might come into this world with extra fingers on each hand. My imagination had more figment in it than my life could contain, so some of it leaked out here and there. As I’ve matured, I’ve learned to control the damage.
I don’t believe I’m extraordinary on this account. Every one of us, I think, is born with an excess of story. Listen quietly to a group of toddlers at play: the lies will swarm around their heads, thick as a tribe of bright butterflies, flickering gracefully from one child to another, until they notice a grown-up has come into the room—and in a sudden rush of wings the lies will vanish into air.
A little bit sad, isn’t it? If you look it up, you’ll find lying was never registered as one of the seven deadly sins. (Pride—an anemic sin if you ask me—is on that list, and so is gluttony, and of all things, sloth. But not lying.) Yet, in the age of evidence and reason, it has gotten such a very bad name. When so many smart, lively people keep insisting to me that all my stories must be true, I begin to suspect they can’t quite get their minds around the notion of pure fabrication.
I want to tell them: Stop a minute, right where you are. Relax your shoulders, shake your head and spine like a dog shaking off cold water. Tell that imperious voice in your head to be still, then close your eyes, and tap the well. Find the lie you are longing to tell. It’s in there. When you manage to wrestle that first one out, a whole flood may gush out behind it. Take them up in your hands, drink their clarity, write them down in a secret book. Tell them to your children behind the golden door of “Once upon a time.” Choose one chair at your dinner table, give it to a different family member each night, and declare it “the liar’s seat.”
Or take a long bus trip through the cornfields. You may find a new career.
REPRISE
Buster the crab remains well, at this writing. His dominant left claw, which is much larger and purpler than his right and which he slams like a door behind him when he withdraws into his shell, is showing some wear. It’s rumpled and split around the edges like an old laminated countertop. In fact, even though he has no greater adversary in his life than his own mood swings, he has recently managed to lose one of his antennae and is looking pretty dinged up. We think he may be preparing to molt. Crabs have this option: they can split themselves open from time to time and start life over with a fresh skin, complete with new appendages and even—if need be—whole regenerated eyes. The molting process itself is as astonishing as its results: the hermit preparing to shed its brittle skin will creep out of whatever seashell it’s wearing at the moment, bury itself in damp sand, and inhale water (insofar as an animal with gills “inhales”) until it has built up enough hydrostatic pressure to split its old casing and shuck it off. This is self-renewal at its fiercest and most tempting. It’s the secret belief most of us carry forward from childhood, that we might have in us somewhere the capacity, like Rumpelstiltskin, to rupture and transmogrify out of a sheer tantrum of desire.
The crab’s new skin is soft for a time, until it has the chance to dry and harden up like varnish. This is the brief period of its life when an edible marine crab becomes the potential delicacy known as soft-shelled crab. When the crab molts, it emerges larger; since its skin has no elasticity, this is the only way it can grow. If a newly molted hermit crab finds it can’t fit back into the shell it parked nearby prior to molting, it may panic. My guidebook to hermit-crab