Stories are catalytic convergences. Fears, obsessions, haunting images begin to
leak from my subconscious mind into my waking experience. I lived in Boston for many years, worked as a waitress
and then an adjunct instructor. My “apartment”
was an attic room without insulation. I froze in winter, fried in summer. Still I knew how lucky I was to have shelter, food, a job, a
doctor. I walked everywhere, miles and
miles every day, through all parts of town, tame and dangerous, in all kinds of
weather. I encountered the homeless, the
poor, the extravagantly wealthy, the addicted, the recently immigrated, the
excessively educated.
One brutal winter, a storm surged up the coast every
weekend. I lost power for days at a
time. Pigeons flapped at my dark
windows. I walked. And there they were: the kids, throwaways and
runaways, the unloved and unlucky. The
emaciated Haitian refugee shivered in Harvard
Square, playing his guitar, trying to earn a few
dollars. He was a brilliant musician,
but his eyes were yellow where they should have been white. I thought he would die soon. The man with no fingers slept in a doorway
and could barely move; as I passed, he opened his bare palm and lurched toward
me.
Cold and poor, yes, I was—but also ridiculously privileged.
Then I got sick, really sick, with a life-threatening
illness that remained undiagnosed for over two years. I lost thirty pounds; my strong body
withered, suddenly weak, feeding on its own muscle. My eyes bulged—yes, just like all the “crazy street people.” I quivered all the time; my heart hammered so
fast and hard I could see it thumping through my skin. I woke tangled in my sheets, drenched from
night sweats.
Working became more and more challenging. By then I was an adjunct instructor teaching
four classes a semester at three different schools. I couldn’t think. My skittery body mirrored my jagged
mind. I was too fragile and weird to get
a job as a waitress. I saw, I felt, I
knew how easy it would be to lose everything.
The lives of the people I saw on the street became vivid to
me, intensely personal. I began to
imagine how those children might survive, who they might love, why they were
out there. I began composing “Nobody’s Daughters,” dreaming the lives of Nadine and Emile.
In all my stories, the lines between victims and
perpetrators blur. The homeless kids
in “Xmas, Jamaica Plain” commit the crime of breaking and entering,
but their survival on the streets of Boston
depends on their acceptance of the fact that they must allow themselves to be
exploited.
Every piece in the collection can be traced backward into
mystery: a rupture in my intimate life
(illness, injury, guilt, loss, transcendent love, exceptional
mercy) compels me to imagine another
person’s experience with greater curiosity and compassion and wonder. Anna Deavere Smith says she recognizes the
gap between herself and the people she represents in her plays. The thrill of the experience for writer or
actor, viewer or reader, is to move into that space, to become other than
oneself while still acknowledging and respecting the infinite unknowable
mystery of every other living being.
I love working in that space. I know I am not “Nadine” or “Raymond” or “Margalit,” but the research I’ve done for every line of
every story, the fever and joy of imaginative compassion, the search for each
speaker’s particular poetry, the wild immersion in the sensuous magic and
creative abundance of every environment and every experience has freed me from
the limits of myself.
There is no such thing
as “I.”
Rumi says: “You
become bewildered; then suddenly love comes saying, ‘I will deliver you this instant from
yourself.’”
We are all capable of moving outside the boundaries of our
isolated “identities.” Those identities are false constructions that
inhibit our capacity for love. My work
makes me less afraid, and for me this is its ultimate “purpose.” Love pours through the fiction and rises out of it. I live differently in the world because of
the stories I’ve told. This freedom is
the adventure I find endlessly exhilarating.
