dirt floor newly swept.
Old Juana smiled and pointed. In the grotto on the right stood a pink-and-blue plaster statue of the Virgin, a candle burning at her feet. To her right, as tall as she, stood the figure of an Indian god, his bulging eyes leering, his square mouth exposing a beast’s teeth, savage hands raised.
Old Juana’s eyes were on us.
She wants a confirmation, I thought, and said, “The two together.”
Soon after that, barefoot and happy, she took us to the gate.
The last of the happiest interludes that I hoard memories of came late, when I was a widow of sixty-five and, challenged by my son, went back to school to get my B.A. degree.
I earned the necessary credits in two places, Scripps College (near at hand) and Stanford University (far enough away to require my bed, desk, and bookcase to be moved). Even at the time, I suspected that I would have transferred my household. gods, my lares and penates, anywhere on this planet, to any desert or jungle or Antarctic shore, to sit with these students, who, after the first shock, looked upon me as one of them.
This process could be quite brief. In one class, a student told me that at first she thought I was the professor’s secretary’s mother. My classmates commented in the margins of my stories. “Wonderful!” one student wrote of a phrase. “Ugh!” wrote another. “This should be a novella,” from a third. “Cut pages 3, 4, and 7,” advised yet another. “Harriet, try to use your own judgment,” wrote the professor.
We believed we weren’t asking for miracles. All we wanted was the perfect word in the perfect sentence that, when multiplied, would fill the pages of the perfect book.
A few of us, not including me, were published, and I sat next to them in awe.
I used to look at the faces of people crossing streets, waiting on benches for a bus, standing in lines at the box office, sitting beside me at a concert, and never found a person who appeared likely to read anything I wrote.
When I visited my son recently, among the books stacked on his bed were a novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett, mysteries by Agatha Christie and Cyril Hare, Listening to Prozac and Talking Back to Prozac, the Plays of Oscar Wilde, Kip-ling’s Kim. On a nearby shelf were some of his old books —The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Dr. Dolittle, Treasure Island, The Wind in the Willows, Gone Is Gone, Junket Is Nice.
What things are there left for me to tell?
I think about the day I went back to school in 1975. Arriving at my classroom fifteen minutes late and finding the door closed, I stood outside it, holding my book bag and a note from the registrar, while terror assailed me. How could I, sixty-five and graying, invade the province of students young enough to be my grandchildren? Go back to the registrar, my common sense told me. Go out to the parking lot. Go home.
At that moment I remembered the words-of Bob Gibson, who gained renown pitching for the St. Louis Cardinals. According to a sportswriter, Bob Gibson, in his prime, said, “I don’t believe in standing around on the mound waiting for the catcher’s signal and trying to scare the batter. My philosophy is, just hum it in there, baby, and let’s see who’s best, them or me.”
Then I pushed the door open, entered the room, and the professor—for the class was Intermediate Spanish—said, “Buenos días, señora. ” And I knew I was safe.
I think of the people who worked with me in my house and garden. Hatsu Tamura, Setsuyo Doi, Hajime Doi. American citizens all, they spent the years of World War II in concentration, or detention, camps.
I asked Mr. Hajime Doi, who helped me grow flowers for twenty-five years, what his camp was like. It was in Gila Bend, Arizona, he told me. “Very hot there,” said Mr. Doi. One hundred twenty degrees inside his house, he said. Therefore he dug a basement, so that his wife could sit there and keep cool. Smiling, he said that this project caused him to contract