Animals in the House

Reading from the Body

Lot's Wife

Writing from the Earth

Write Where You Are

Sandra Cisneros: Latina Writer and Activist

Out of the Restaurant and Back to the Cliff

My earliest memory concerns a restaurant and a cliff, and how I was taken from one to another against my strong-willed, two-and-a-half-year-old consent.

The cliff was obviously close to the restaurant at some resort in the Catskills. I sat beside my always-silent (except when yelling back to Grandma) grandfather as he held the pole over the water. I remember the vast distance between where my feet dangled and where the waters ran fast and dangerous way below, and I remember the silence of sitting on that moss next to my grandfather as he probably smoked one of the four packs of Camels he inhaled each day. We were fishing, and all was well.

Then my mother, aunt and grandmother came, and forced me to go with them into a huge restaurant, the expanse ballroom-like and filled with round tables, lots of middle-aged Jewish people, and tiny bowls of that fabulous hotel type butter I came to marvel over when I got older. But back then, I probably didn't notice the butter and Jewish people, just the largeness of the room, how I was forced there, how I had to sit on someone's lap while her arms held me from running back outside, which was where I wanted to go.

I'm still trying to get from the restaurant to the cliff again, even that I'm a thousand miles and 40 years away from that memory. I want to go back outside, and really there's no reason I can't anymore. No one is dragging me here, making me stare at little bowls of butter and imprisoning my arms in their arms. No one is saying, "you can't find a cliff and go fishing." No one is threatening to break the quiet I would find away from town.

Yet I don't know how to fish anymore, and I don't know how to be outside in the same way that I was born knowing outside. Living in this culture has unlearned me of such things, and I've surely weakened in my preference for savory meals served gingerly in cozy corners of neighborhood restaurants where I meet friends, write, read, organize my date book. In fact, so dependant am I on such luxuries that when I'm not feeling well, my first inclination is to go out to eat. When I'm depressed, I decide to meet a friend for lunch. When I'm heartbroken, I realize it's time for a bagel and some tea someplace. When I'm running late, when I returning early, when I have a lot to do, when I need time to clear my head, when I want space for an intimate talk with one of my kids or my husband, I go out to a restaurant.

I know - this is totally screwed up, especially when I do know, when I do remember, how I could find all of this and much more in a field, under a tree, sitting even on the edge of my deck and staring at the sky. I hang a hammock between two trees, but tell myself I'll go there when I have some time, some open time between doing work, recovering from work, giving too much, replenishing, and all the other things I tend to do in restaurants. I put a great chair, something wooden I found on someone's curb with their trash, out on the deck, but then I go inside to clean the kitchen. I seem to be imprinted with restaurant as the head duck in line, leading me down the quackety pathway of days. How do I get back to the cliff? How do I reimprint my psyche with what should have been its native flight pattern?

After a while, I have to confess that some of this is fear of the outdoors, and some of this is just having forgotten how to be outside, like a Martian trying to comprehend a tennis game, having never seen rackets or balls before. But then what's behind this forgetting, this foreignization of ourselves, must be a kind of fear too. Fear of being out of control. Fear of bad weather. Fear of discomfort. Fear of not getting all the stuff inside done. Fear of harm, illness, death. Most of all, fear of not knowing what/how/why we are once removed from the giant arrows and headlines that culture wraps us in constantly. In other words, fear of life.

Once I decided I would simply conquer all fear of the outdoors in one big swoop. I was in my mid-20s, stupidly brave and determined to camp alone for five days way out in Western Kansas. I cooked and fussed and prepped and packed my car with a cooler full of some simple essentials (eggplant paramsian, pesto, fine bread, lots of chocolate) and headed out six hours to Cedar Ridge Reservoir. I found my way over the long, fenceless elevated road that divided the reservoir, and sought out the most remote campsite I could find.
I faced the first evening a little nervous, a little bored, but mostly okay. Sealed up in the tent, competently (to my surprise) set up by me alone, as a rain swept through, I only woke a few dozen times fantasizing about king-sized tornados bouncing around the sky, and in the morning, a little more sober than I imagined I would be, I got up, made breakfast, and sat on the picnic table swinging my legs. Bored with myself, I decided to turn on the tape recorder I had brought and record thoughts for my husband who I was sure would be fascinated, as I was, with my little realizations and wonderments at that time.
I swung my legs, talking about the weather, what it was like to sleep alone in the tent as the wind swam over me, the clear sky, how I was a little scared but okay. I swung and swung, and what I didn't know was preparing to make itself known: underneath that table was a nest of wasps, a creature I was about to get allergic to in a hurry. In a few moments the whole herd fanned out and attacked. I ran, leapt, screamed, instantly started crying although the small but hearty rational part of my brain kept reassuring me that it was just a few wasp stings.

Within minutes, my body exploded in hives. I did two opposing things that got me nowhere: I sat quietly and tried to meditate my way out, sure that my powers of concentration and manifistation were so advanced that I could simply will myself out of this physical reaction (hey, I was in my 20s). And I jumped up, jumped up and down screaming and crying with all my will. Both actions just spread the reaction through my body faster, or perhaps, did nothing at all that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

Tape still running, recording all my anxiety and fear, I threw myself at my tent, compacting it into some shape that could be stuffed into the back of the car, grabbed everything else I had near me, and got behind the wheel. The reaction was surging through me so much that I wasn't sure I could drive, but then I could also feel something tightening in my lungs that told me, "DRIVE!" and so I did.

By the time I got back to the road over the reservoir, I became acutely aware how I was having trouble staying on the road, and if I veered off, even a little here, I would plunge eons down to my death. So I belted out one Sufi song after another, telling God s/he was light, asking for help, praising the beauty of the earth, anything I knew. I sang loudly and badly, the magnets of the songs keeping me glued to the metal of the road, the endless road over the water, long enough to get back to the ranger station where I hoped someone could take me to the hospital.

I knocked on a small trailer, and an older woman answered. I told her I was having a bad reaction to wasp stings and needed help. She just sighed, said something about Bob, the ranger, being out, but probably returning within an hour or two. Trying to be polite, I backed away bowing, and feeling a little more quiet, the itching tempered a bit by something or another, I decided to sit and wait against the shower house, not so sure I could drive myself the 30 miles or so to Wakenee, Kansas, the nearest hospital. I even took a shower, thinking the pounding water could help me relax and get over this.

But soon afterwards, sitting against the shower house again, another wave took me over, my body flashing with hives, my lungs tightening even more, and thank heavens, Bob showed up. I hopped into his pick-up truck, and off we went on this clear, sparkling day. I didn't talk much, just stared, stunned as any dumb animal recently surprised by attack, when he asked me if I minded if he smoked.

From there, it was a shot of valium, a call home, a nap, then at midnight or so, I got out, got someone to take me back to my car, and drove home, all downhill, in record time, singing wildly and joyfully because I was alive and I was fine.

The next day this was again made clear to me as I lay in bed with Ken and replayed the tape. When I got to the point that the wasps, yellowjackets, attacked, just listening to my own voice scared and alone, not knowing how long it would take to get some relief, I immediately broke out in hives again. We stopped the tape, but it was no use. My mind had replayed the incident so thoroughly in my body that we had to go to our local hospital and get me another injection.
Amazing to me now to realize that the physical reaction could be triggered simply by playing back my own voice under attack from my own body, that what harms from the outside can actually harm from the inside too. I'm not saying that bee stings, flash floods, or the like don't happen, only that my fear of the outdoors is something so inbred in strange and damaging ways in my body that it's impossible to say where the real danger actually resides - out there, or in here.

Years later, I walk into the woods alone on a September day, my mind so occupied with news flashes about chiggers still alive or the little square of heat on my arm or the sudden chill on my leg, all of which must be addressed, that I can't see how the wind has stopped, how the tilt of land upward is dappled with low light and the trees hold the setting sun effortlessly in their branches. I sit and try to see, try to hear the bird or something in a tree to my right, but over and over, my busy brain sends out its signals, wondering about danger or boredom or if there's anything better to do now. Like nothing else in my life, I'm constantly holding up my time outdoor to extreme judgment - trying to evaluate if I really should be elsewhere, like somewhere I feel more comfortable, somewhere I know the rules better, somewhere where I'm in control.

Yet outside is where I want to be. It's where my hands want to be, my bones, my haunches, my eyes, my hair. The unlanguaged parts of me know better, and they want the scant breeze, the sudden crow on the high branch, the brush of grass on the ankles. They want to sit again on the cliff of what I know staring out into what I don't know, and just hang out in the silence: feel it and wait for just the right moment to pull it into consciousness, words, perhaps even some sort of understanding.....and perhaps into no understanding at all. The unlanguaged parts of me not only know better, but suddenly are promoted from passengers in my mind to drivers of my life. I get cancer. The doctor, an elderly man with his little sonogram microphone on the side of my breast, says, "Yes, this sure looks worrisome." The next day, breast cancer is confirmed. Weeks after, a surgery date. Eventually, chemotherapy sessions to be followed by radiation or, if I turn out to have "the breast cancer gene," a double mascetomy. Months of treatment because this tiny tumor, smaller than the size of a wasp's torso, was lounging on my lymph nodes, and leaned back into a few of them.

I stop going to restaurants so much and instead, sit in a chair, staring outside, or I just sit outside. One impetus for all the sitting is that I don't know what to do when I stand up. Do I work at the computer, plan more writing classes on the phone, wander into the woods, nap, try another of my loud, bumbling attempts to meditate, read a book on healing, learn to play the cello? Do I wash the dishes now or pray? Do I write a letter, ride a bike or reach into seldom-used cabinets to get rid of objects I never use? How do I live, how do I live, the mantra pounds through my days. What I've done before, and with such finesse, consumed overcommitment to such an extent that this question seemed more like a luxurious extra, a massage while on vacation, than a daily meal. Now it's everywhere, asking me to ask myself what to do with myself, my life. And I know it's at the center of my healing, of my very survival while, at the same time, the answers to this question tell me, in patterns of wind that can't be mapped or dreams that can hardly be remembered, something about not having control. Death, life, illness, health, longevity, briefness - it's all beyond me to map out, to even articulate clearly in the most comfortable of restaurants with the best of meals.

So I spend a lot of time sitting, not knowing how to live. Mostly, I stare at one big tree, my mind fishing for something to feed me. My grandfather's silence envelops me, and aside from the absence of cigarette smoke, I start doing some things he did, like raising exotic plants in the greenhouse where I sit. I wonder quite often what to do with the hours, which have suddenly become spacious and, at times, especially with the steroids given to me to balance the chemo, rascally restless. My body wants to stop, my mind wants to move, and they can't agree on what's the right thing to do, at this moment and in this place in the universe, to promote healing. Mostly, they're baffled because it's not like everything, or nothing, a person can do to avoid recurrence will actually and positively certainly work.

There's no one trying to carry me elsewhere so I stay at this edge of time. I can't see what's far below, but I sense that I'm safe here in all this big empty space. I sense that I've returned to a home made before the advent of words or menus. Nothing to ask for, nothing to resist, I just sit in the quiet and wait for myself to learn how to return, my feet dangling off the cliff of all this space.

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