SECRETS
Bill and Andra, Memphis, 1991
Sometimes one comes across a photograph that conveys story so beautifully and completely that it stands alone in its power. Words are made to seem redundant before the fullness and depth of the image. This photograph by Maude Schuyler Clay, taken of the great photographer William Eggleston and his daughter Andra, is such a picture. It speaks to us of secrets, in the sense that all inner life is secret. The expressive gazes of father and daughter each contain multitudes, and between them and in the close rhyming of their hands and arms, we feel the deep abiding bond of family. (Michelle Anderson)
I’m an Idiot
I’m an idiot; that’s my secret. Well kept, I might add. Genius has been thrown my way a couple of times, always by men, and usually to prove how smart they are. But idiot, I am. Now it’s called other things, dyslexic, ADHD. My learning disability, not properly diagnosed until I was well into my forties, included spatial dyslexia—don’t get behind me when I back up a car, I will run you over—inversion of letters and words, trouble writing down numbers, and woeful spelling. However, during my formative years there were no other words for what I suffered. Certainly no other words I could read or write.
As any person with dyslexia knows, you devise strategies. In grade school, a good one was to ask to go to the bathroom when it was getting perilously close to my turn to read aloud. When writing, the un-spellable ‘forest’ became ‘woods’. No stories of mine involved anyone going to the ‘hospital.’ ‘Consciousness,’ higher or lower was ignored. And, thank god, my parents give me the moniker Bex at birth. The Rebecca I learned to manage, but Edith stumped me. Unfortunately, I am named after my grandmother. My very proper English father, looming over me, demanded I sign my Christmas cards (now Xmas) ‘Your loving Granddaughter, Rebecca Edith’. There was a moment of panic, but cursive is an amazing thing. You can fudge a lot. In fact, to this day, I defy anyone to read my handwriting. My father, who had the most beautiful writing in the world, would sigh heavily before snatching the card out of my hand.
Journey to the End of Night
Darwin theorized that blushing is our way of telling the world we recognize something is wrong and we’re sorry for it. I have a secret that makes me blush. It happened in college, a million years ago on the Upper West side of Manhattan and it doesn’t amount to anything to anyone but me, but thirty five years on, I can remember the details with a startling clarity. It has to do with a betrayal, naturally, and I suppose it stands out because it was the first time I learned that I was capable of cruelty.
Setting has a lot do with falling in love. You could meet the world’s most boring man in Venice but, still, he would always be infused with bits of that city’s glamor. I met Anton, my first boyfriend, one spring in the impossibly romantic town of San Miguel del Allende, located four hours north of Mexico city. A recent graduate of Columbia University, he was teaching Spanish to gringos at the Instituto, a crumbly mansion in the heart of town owned by his mother’s family, a clan of glowering widows dressed in black. I was a high school senior studying abroad for the semester.
The Letters
When I first found the photographs, I thought the woman I was looking at was my mother. She was about my mother’s age and height, and she was wearing the kind of clothes my mother might have worn in the 1960s. In one picture, she poses in a fetching white swimsuit; in another, she wears oversized, white-framed sunglasses, her head partly covered by a thin scarf.
But this was not my mother. This woman had wavy red hair—my mother’s was dark brown and curly--and a somewhat slimmer, more athletic build. In a couple of the photos, the woman is with my father; looking directly at the camera, they’re smiling, hands touching, looking very happy.
I found these photos in my father’s apartment, a few days after his death, in the bottom of an unlocked metal file cabinet. The apartment was in an assisted living facility in Laguna Hills, California, where my parents spent the last few years of their lives. They were married for six decades; by the time of my father’s death, at 91, my mother had been gone for three years.
In the Secret of the Lie
In the car of flowers
in the train of milky ways
the lingering landscapes
roaming mountains
(fields of trespassing future!)
Where the sun splashes out rays
seawave reaches your face
A Slip of the Tongue
For reasons largely unfathomable to me, I’ve always been a person others want to confide in. I’m the person you tell you’re having an affair, an abortion, that you killed your sick cat dosing it with aspirin because you were too skint and filled with despair to take it to the veterinarian for proper euthanizing. (Even small amounts of aspirin will poison the average cat.) I’m the person to whom you reveal your old history of addiction, your compulsion to shoplift, the time you spent behind bars.
Generally speaking, I am a safe bet to tell your secrets to because normally mum’s the word. While I am a world-class eavesdropper, I’m stellar at hearing something and doing nothing. But then there’s that admittedly shitty part where I am a writer and there’s a chance I will take your secret and, at some point, if it’s interesting enough, use it for my own narrative purposes.
I Have a Secret
I have a secret.
My secret is a relationship.
My family doesn't know.
My friends don’t know.
I’ll call him, or her, “Lee.” Lee was homeless, at least for the period of our two-year connection. The Duane Reade on the three-block route between home and my young son’s school was under renovation; low scaffolding overhung its adjacent sidewalk. Lee had set up house beneath: a cardboard barrier of box sides joined with silver duct tape; beyond, a cordillera of myriad-sized bags and boxes, eruptions of disheveled, private-made-public stuff. Lee was always wholly obscured, position changed, perhaps, but burrowed down so deep into the soiled sleeping bag so as to become a package of person, weather hot or cold.
Tales Told in Whispers
One evening, I asked my students to write two secrets on slips of paper: one that was true and one invented. We folded our slips of paper and put them into Chuck’s thick winter hat. Chuck—tall and lanky, always grinning, face open as if to say, “Bring it on” because he was ready to let life in after everything that had happened, but I can’t tell you what happened. That’s one of his secrets.
We each pulled two secrets from Chuck’s hat. “Write the first thing that comes to mind,” I said. And they did, and I did, too. We only had time to write about three secrets. But something happened for me in those few minutes of writing. When I finished, my fragments were already connecting. I wanted more. I wanted more secrets.