By: Ann Putnam
I'm trying to write a story called “Zoe’s Bear,” which has a deadline right around the corner. It will eventually become part of the novel, I Will Leave You Never, which will be published this May. I began it on the drive home from Glacier National Park, where we'd taken the children not knowing a grizzly bear had just killed three people. The experience of the bear was far more real to me than to them. They thought it was a grand adventure and loved wearing bare bells tied to their shoes. The terror of that bear has never left me, nor the sense that I would never be big enough or brave enough to protect my children from it, however it came. It began my thinking about motherhood and peril, and thus the urgency of writing this story.
I had worked for weeks in the margins of my life, ideas written on cereal boxes while cooking breakfast, on receipts, restaurant napkins, my car registration. I’ve become so interruptible that the expectation of interruption has become a habit of mind. But if I could just have a single day completely alone to get the fragments of ideas, phrases and lines, even a word here and there into some kind of magical and revelatory combination, I could go deeply into the very heart of what I most need to say.
This is the story of that day.
I’ve cancelled classes, the kids are all at school, and at last I’m alone. The day stretches out full of possibility. I sit at my computer and take a deep breath of gratitude. But I hear voices that do not speak, footsteps and no one's there. Unaccustomed as I am to this silence, I hardly know what to do. Yet this day is what I've wanted for so long—uninterrupted, unambiguous time, hour after precious hour.
I had decided ahead of time that I was not going to answer the phone. Yet when the phone rings an hour later, of course I answer it. It's my little girl’s school. She’s in the nurse’s room, throwing up, could I please come and get her? She was fine this morning! But with kids, these things turn on a dime. So of course I’m out the door, only stopping for my purse and a towel and pan for the ride home. She’s lying curled up in a ball on the cot in the nurse’s room, hugging her coat. Her face is damp and flushed. When did this happen? She’d danced out of the house and slid into her carpool’s backseat, blew me a kiss.
But now my little girl is in her bedroom, fast asleep. I’ve checked on her about a dozen times, telling myself that if she had a fever, it’s gone now, but keep a lookout. I don’t trust this strange suddenness. Then it’s after lunch, and I'm settled into my writing space. I look out into the woods, crack open a window and the air floats cool over my skin. I can do this after all.
My dog, my eighty-five pound black and white shadow friend, is lying under the computer table, chewing on an old tube sock. Time flies, then stops, as she crawls out from under the table. She's making a funny noise, sort of like choking or gagging. I start to rush her outside, but whatever was going to come up must have gone back down, because now she's standing there, looking up at me, wagging her tail. Then I notice that the sock is gone. Bring her right over, the vet says. I scoop up my daughter, who’s still half asleep, buckle her into her car seat, and hand her the pan and towel. Her eyes look funny. She really is running a fever.
The X-rays, examination, and diagnosis pretty well took the rest of the afternoon. It was lucky you were home today, the vet said, this could have been life-threatening. Ah, there it is—the presence of that bear and the necessity for my constant vigilance. But I get weary keeping track of it all. I look at my daughter in the rear-view mirror. She’s fallen asleep, which is just as well. The dog is nestled as close to her as she can get. We’re all tucked in now. All safe. At least for now. I’ve done everything I can to keep that bear away, with my secret chants, tokens, charms, cruciferous vegetables, vitamins, seat belts, mittens, and scarves—incantations all, against certain unspoken things.
I pull into the driveway, and just sit there, looking at the waiting house. It’s about time for my little boys to be coming up the hill from the bus top. Party’s over.
We would watch to see if the sock reappeared, which I'm happy to report it did quite unceremoniously, the next day. Well, you can't live real life with pets and kids without, say, somebody putting a bean up their nose, though all of this makes me feel that there really is too much of everything. I do not know what the answer is to this conflict between one’s attachments and one’s work in the world, because I have never learned how to be two places at once and I do not know how to love either any less. Other than death, I do believe that having a child is probably the most life-altering experience a person can have. Certain ways of feeling and thinking are changed forever. What I do know is this: even as they diminish my capacity for work, the tugs and pulls of those I most love have enriched that work in strange and wondrous and continuously surprising ways.
Ann Putnam is an internationally-known Hemingway scholar, who has made more than six trips to Cuba. Her novel, Cuban Quartermoon, came, in part, from those trips, as well as a residency at Hedgebrook Writer’s Colony. She has published the memoir, Full Moon at Noontide: A Daughter’s Last Goodbye (University of Iowa Press), and short stories in Nine by Three: Stories (Collins Press), among others. Her second novel, I Will Leave You Never, will be published this spring. Her literary criticism appears in many collections and periodicals. She holds a PhD from the University of Washington and has taught creative writing, gender studies and American Literature for many years. She is finishing a third novel, The World in Woe and Splendor.
