Or I’d lie in bed and hear in the hush of night the foghorns blaring far away. Awakening in the middle of the night, in the center of a city and a place thought of as the inner city, I often heard the foghorns, and they carried me to the edges and beyond, to the sea, the sky, and the fog. I heard them often, and in recollection the sound seems almost like a correlative of that middle-of-the-night state of being not quite awake, not quite asleep, with a wandering mind but a body pinned down by sleep’s Jupiterian gravity. They called to me as though I was a lost ship, not to bring me home but to remind me of the ocean and the air beyond and that there in the closet I was still connected to them.
I lived there so long the little apartment and I grew into each other. In the beginning I had hardly anything in it, and it felt vast, and at the end it was overstuffed with books and with many boxes of papers under the bed, and it felt cramped. In memory it seems as lustrous as a chambered nautilus’s mother-of-pearl shell, as though I was a hermit crab who had crawled into a particularly glamorous shelter, until, as hermit crabs do, I outgrew it.
A dozen years since I’ve left it I can still see every detail, still imagine sometimes that I’m reaching for the medicine cabinet there rather than the one I actually live with, still gave the Lyon Street address to a taxi driver automatically when I went back to walk its streets again before I recollected that I had not lived there in many years, and recited the next address after that and finally the current one that will never be tattooed on my psyche the way that place was. When I lived there, I often dreamed of the street that ran past my childhood home, turned into a country road, and then ended in a horse pasture, the road from which I slipped through barbed-wire fences to so many of my adventures, but now I dream of that little apartment on Lyon Street as a foundational place the way I dreamed of the road then.
When it was still my home, I dreamed many times about finding another room in it, another door. In some way it was me and I was it, and so these discoveries were, of course, other parts of myself. I dreamed over and over of my childhood home as a place I was trapped in, but this place wasn’t penning me in but opening up possibilities to me. In dreams it was bigger, it had more rooms, it had fireplaces, hidden chambers, beauties that didn’t exist in waking life, and once the back door opened onto radiant fields instead of the drab clutter that was really there.
The kitchen walls had once been covered in vinyl brick-patterned wallpaper whose seams showed through the white paint on the back wall behind the stove, so one day I pulled it off. It was like tearing bandages off a wound. It came off in great sheets, pulling the surface of the next layer of wallpaper off as it came. Underneath was the inner layer of an older, more beautiful wallpaper, patterned with lattices of ivy. When I saw the pale brown pattern, I felt the vivid presence of the people who had lived there before me, more ghosts, other times, from before the war, when the neighborhood was another kind of place with other kinds of people on another kind of earth.
Then I dreamed about doing the same thing, and in the dream version I revealed a dense collage of newspaper and magazine pages and scraps of fabric, a lot of floral images, all in rosy hues, luscious and strange, a garden of scraps. In the dream I knew it was a souvenir of another woman who’d been there before me, an old black woman with a gift for making.
The building was located near the center of the city, and thinking of it now I see it as the axis on which a compass needle swings, a place that opened to the four directions. I didn’t make a home there; it made me, as I watched and sometimes joined communities, wandered thousands of miles on foot in the city over the years, sometimes over familiar routes to the movie theaters or to bookstores or groceries or work, sometimes for discovery as I climbed the hills, and sometimes for respite from the density and turmoil when I went to Ocean Beach to be reminded that this was the place where a lot of stories reached their end and, across the vast Pacific, others began.
The churning ocean and the long sandy beach were another kind of home and another kind of refuge, in the vastness that put my woes and angst in proportion to the sky, the sea, the far horizon, the wild birds flying by. The apartment was my refuge, my incubator, my shell, my anchor, my starting blocks, and a gift from a stranger.
Life During Wartime
1
A friend gave me a desk not long after I moved into the apartment, a woman’s small writing desk or vanity, the one I am writing on now. It’s a dainty Victorian piece of furniture, with four narrow drawers, two on each side and a broader central drawer above the bay in which the sitter’s legs go, and various kinds of ornamentation—doweled legs, each with a knob like a knee, knobby ornaments, scallops on the bottom of the drawers, drawer pulls like tassels or teardrops.
There are two pairs of legs on the front, two on the back, set beneath the side drawers. Despite all the frills, the old desk is fundamentally sturdy, an eight-legged beast of burden whose back has carried many things over the decades, or two beasts of burden side by side, yoked together by the desktop. The desk has moved with me three times. It’s the surface on which I’ve written millions of words: more than twenty books, reviews, essays, love letters, several thousand emails to my friend Tina during the years of our near-daily epistolary exchange, a few hundred thousand other emails, some eulogies and obituaries, including those of both of my parents, a desk at which I did the homework of a student and then a teacher, a portal onto the world and my platform for reaching out and for diving inward.
A year or so before she gave me the desk, my friend was stabbed fifteen times by an ex-boyfriend to punish her for leaving him. She almost bled to death; she had emergency transfusions; she was left with long scars all over her body, which I saw then without response because whatever capacity to feel had been muffled, maybe when I got habituated to violence at home, maybe because it was something we were supposed to take in stride and be nonchalant about, back when few of us had language to talk about such violence or an audience ready to listen.
She survived; she was blamed for what happened as victims often were then; there were no legal consequences for the would-be murderer; she moved far from where it happened; she worked for a single mother who was evicted, and who gave her the desk in lieu of wages; and then she gave it to me. She moved on and we lost touch for many years, and then reestablished it, and she told me the full story, a story that could make your heart catch fire and the world freeze over.
Someone tried to silence her. Then she gave me a platform for my voice. Now I wonder if everything I have ever written is a counterweight to that attempt to reduce a young woman to nothing. All of it has literally arisen from that foundation that is the desktop.
Sitting at that desk to write this, I went to the online photography archive of the city that my public library maintains, hoping to recall a little of what the old neighborhood looked like. The fourth photograph for the street I lived on was from June 18, 1958, of a house a block and a half away, and it bore this caption: “Curious passersby peer down an alley, alongside 438 Lyon Street, where the body of Dana Lewis, 22, nude except for a black bra, was found today. Police, after a preliminary examination, said bruises on the victim’s throat indicated that she might have been garroted by a length of rope.” It’s clear her death is a spectacle for the newspaper as well, which describes her in titillating terms, while the passersby are described as curious rather than distressed by the sight of a corpse.