Swann Read Free Page B

say, “Tell me about your average day.”
    Dailiness to be sure has its hard deposits of ennui, but it is also, as Mary Swann suggests, redemptive. I busy my brain with examples.
    Every day of his short life, for instance, my father pulled on a pair of cotton socks, and almost every day he turned to my mother and said, “Cotton lets the skin breathe.” He also made daily pronouncements on meat that had been frozen: “Breaks down the cell structure,” he liked to say. “Destroys the nutrients.” In the same way he objected to butter, white bread, sugar—“attacks the blood cells”—garlic (same reason), and anything that had green pepper in it.
    He was otherwise a mild man, a math teacher in a west-side high school. His pale red hair, the drift of it over his small ears, his freckled neck and the greenish suits he wore in the classroom—all these things kept him humble. His small recurring judgements on garlic and green pepper were, I’ve come to see, a kind of vanity for him, an appetitethat had to be satisfied, but especially the innocent means by which he was able to root himself in the largeness of time. Always begin a newspaper on the editorial page, he said. Never trust a man who wears sandals or diamond jewellery. These small choices and strictures kept him occupied and anchored while the cancer inched its way along his skeleton.
    My mother, too, sighing over her morning cup of coffee and lighting a cigarette, is simply digging in for the short run. And so is my sister, Lena, with her iron pills and coke and nightly shot of Brahms; and Olaf with his shaving ritual, and Brownie with his daily ingestion of flattery and cash. Who can blame them? Who wants to? Habit is the flywheel of society, conserving and preserving and dishing up tidy, edible slices of the cosmos. And there’s much to be said for a steady diet. Those newspaper advice-givers who urge you to put a little vinegar in your life are toying, believe me, with your sanity.
    Every day, for instance, I eat a cheese on pita for lunch, then an apple. I see no reason to apologize for this habit. Around two-thirty in the afternoon Lois Lundigan and I share a pot of tea, alternating Prince of Wales, Queen Mary, and Earl Grey. She pours. I wash the cups. Sisterhood. Between three and five, unless it’s my seminar day, I sit in my office at my desk and work on articles or plan my lectures. At five-thirty I stretch, pack up my beautiful briefcase, say good night to Lois and hit the pavement. The sun’s still keyed up, hot and yellow. Every day I walk along the same route, past grimy shrubs and run-down stores and apartment buildings and trees that become leafier as I approach Fifty-seventh Street. About this time I start to feel a small but measurable buzzing in the brain that makes my legs move along in double time. There I am, a determined piece of human matter, but adrift on a busy street that hassuddenly become a conduit—a pipeline possessing the power of suction. Something, a force more than weariness, is drawing me home.
    There’s no mystery about this; I know precisely what pulls me along. Not food or sex or rest or succour but the thought of the heap of mail that’s waiting for me just inside my front door.
    Among my friends I’m known as the Queen of Correspondence, maintaining, in this day of long-distance phone calls and even longer silences, what is considered to be a
vast
network. This is my corner on quaintness. My crochet work. My apple sauce. Mail comes pouring in, national and international, postcards and air letters and queer stamps crowded together in the corners of bulging envelopes. Letters from old school friends await me or letters from sisters in the movement. Perhaps a scrawl from my six-year-old nephew, Franklin, and my real sister, Lena, in London. My editor in New York is forever showering me with witty, beseeching notes. Virginia Goodchild, my former lawyer, writes frequently from New Orleans where she now has her practice.