High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [18]
Nowadays, some of my city-bred friends muse about moving to a small town for the sake of their children. What’s missing from their romantic picture of Graver’s Corners is the frightening impact of insulation upon a child who’s not dead center in the mainstream. In a place such as my hometown, you file in and sit down to day one of kindergarten with the exact pool of boys who will be your potential dates for the prom. If you wet your pants a lot, your social life ten years later will be—as they say in government reports—impacted. I was sterling on bladder control, but somehow could never shake my sixth-grade stigma.
At age seventeen, I was free at last to hightail it for new social pastures, and you’d better believe I did. I attended summer classes at the University of Kentucky and landed a boyfriend before I knew what had hit me, or what on earth one did with the likes of such. When I went on to college in Indiana I was astonished to find a fresh set of peers who found me, by and large, likable and cootie-free.
I’ve never gotten over high school, to the extent that I’m still a little surprised that my friends want to hang out with me. But it made me what I am, for better and for worse. From living in a town that listened in on party lines, I learned both the price and value of community. And I gained things from my rocky school years: A fierce wish to look inside of people. An aptitude for listening. The habit of my own company. The companionship of keeping a diary, in which I gossiped, fantasized, and invented myself. From the vantage point of invisibility I explored the psychology of the underdog, the one who can’t be what others desire but who might still learn to chart her own hopes. Her story was my private treasure; when I wrote The Bean Trees I called her Lou Ann. I knew for sure that my classmates, all of them cool as Camaros back then, would not relate to the dreadful insecurities of Lou Ann. But I liked her anyway.
And now, look. The boys who’d once fled howling from her cooties were lined up for my autograph. Football captains, cheerleaders, homecoming queens were all there. The athlete who’d inspired in me a near-fatal crush for three years, during which time he never looked in the vicinity of my person, was there. The great wits who gave me the names Kingfish and Queen Sliver were there.
I took liberties with history. I wrote long, florid inscriptions referring to our great friendship of days gone by. I wrote slowly. I made those guys wait in line a long time.
I can recall every sight, sound, minute of that day. Every open, generous face. The way the afternoon light fell through the windows onto the shoes of the people in line. In my inventory of mental snapshots these images hold the place most people reserve for the wedding album. I don’t know whether other people get to have Great Life Moments like this, but I was lucky enough to realize I was having mine, right while it happened. My identity was turning backward on its own axis. Never before or since have I felt all at the same time so cherished, so aware of old anguish, and so ready to let go of the past. My past had let go of me, so I could be something new: Poet Laureate and Queen for a Day in hometown Kentucky. The people who’d watched me grow up were proud of me, and exuberant over an event that put our little dot on the map, particularly since it wasn’t an airline disaster or a child falling down a well. They didn’t appear to mind that my novel discussed small-town life frankly, without gloss.
In fact, most people showed unsurpassed creativity in finding themselves, literally, on the printed page. “That’s my car isn’t it?” they would ask. “My service station!” Nobody presented himself as my Uncle Roscoe, but if he had, I happily would have claimed him.
It’s a curious risk, fiction. Some writers choose fantasy as an approach to truth,