For a minute Rose of Sharon sat still in the whispering barn. Then she hoisted her tired body up and drew the comfort around her. She moved slowly to the corner and stood looking down at the wasted face, into the wide, frightened eyes. Then slowly she lay down beside him. He shook his head slowly from side to side. Rose of Sharon loosened one side of the blanket and bared her breast. “You got to,” she said. She squirmed closer and pulled his head close. “There!” she said. “There.” Her hand moved behind his head and supported it. Her fingers moved gently in his hair. She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously.
I had never read an ending that affected me like this one of Rose of Sharon giving her milk to the dying stranger. Speechless, I read the final scene again and again, its power never lessening. Even as a teenager, I understood the symbolism and power inherent in Rose of Sharon’s selfless act. In A Life in Letters, Steinbeck said that he had “tried to make the reader participate in the actuality, what he [the reader] takes from it will be scaled entirely on his own depth or hollowness.” Referring to there being five layers in the book, he added that “a reader will find as many as he can and he won’t find more than he has in himself.” It may seem hyperbolic, but I believe understanding this not only shaped me as a writer but also led me to become an English major when I went to college. I wanted more symbolism, more of those layers in literature. I wanted to find as many as I could, in both my reading and my writing life.
?
FOR YEARS MY math whiz brother was a mysterious blur in my life. Five years older than me, he mostly kept his distance from his bookworm little sister. I was, in the way of all little sisters, a nuisance. I cried if he sat too close to me in the backseat of the car. I cried when he got control of the television and forced me to sit through Combat! or The Three Stooges. I snooped on him and his first girlfriend, a tough-looking blonde with plum-colored suede boots and a leather miniskirt. I snooped on him and his buddies when they whispered together in his room, the air thick with exotic, musty, sweaty smells. He sat across from me at the dinner table, reigning over the bowl of mashed potatoes, getting extra pieces of steak from our grandmother, always the slide ruler nearby. “Does your face hurt?” he’d ask me. “’Cause it’s killing me!”
Then he was gone, off to college in his raspberry Bermuda shorts and matching polo shirt. I barely noticed. By then, I was entering junior high and my world became slumber parties and crushes on boys. I never even thought about Skip. Until he returned home that summer, now long-haired and wearing ripped jeans and pocket T-shirts, driving a lime-green VW Bug. He brought boys with him. And not just any boys, but college boys. Loads of them, each in their own VW Bug. Once again, he seemed to reign, this time over the picnic table in the backyard with a cooler of beer beside it. He worked that summer as a stock boy at Zayre, a local discount store, and there he acquired a cool, aloof, freckle-faced girlfriend who wore brown suede moccasins and a hard stare.
I kept a diary back then, mostly documenting how boring my life was. The one glimmer of emotion came in March of that year when I heard that Paul McCartney had gotten married. Oh God, I wrote, please don’t let it be true. The next day’s entry: Bored.
But when my brother’s new girlfriend arrived, hanging back by the front door, glaring, clutching his hand, I began to write about her. And them. If I had been a more mature twelve-year-old, I might have recognized the sexual tension between them, understood that her constant desire to “go now” was sexual desire. Instead, they seemed oddly mysterious, with their whispering and disappearances. I became the Nancy Drew of romance, mistaking that sexual energy for what, I believed, must be love.
This, of course, made me even more of a nuisance. No, I couldn’t go with them to the mall. Or for ice cream. Or on a walk. Or to the beach. Or anywhere. Still, I persisted in asking, and reported to my mother every time I was rebuked. My mother knew exactly what was going on, and she didn’t like it, didn’t like this brown-moccasined girl who kept my brother out late, made him miss dinner with the family, and wouldn’t join a game of cards with us. Take your sister, she’d insist, and sometimes he would relent. I’d sit squeezed into the backseat of the Bug, watching his girlfriend’s hand rub his thigh.
By Skip’s junior year, they’d moved in together and he hardly came home at all that summer. And then, as his college graduation approached and he got a job with a chemical company in Connecticut, they announced they were getting married. Reluctantly, his fiancée asked me to be a bridesmaid, and she and her friends mostly ignored me through the endless bridal showers and gown fittings that ensued. The May day they got married I stood holding a bouquet of daisies, dressed in a pale yellow chiana gown, as “Sunrise, Sunset” played. But I was insignificant—to the wedding, and to my brother.
Or so I thought.
When he returned from his honeymoon in Europe later that summer, he brought me a gift—a cork box shaped like a windmill from Portugal. Perhaps he knew I was already chasing after windmills? We sat at the picnic table in the backyard together, his new gold wedding band glinting in the hot sun.
I asked him about his travels, and he told me that there was a shortage of cork trees and someday wine would all have twist-off caps. That was the thing about my brother, the thing I didn’t realize until after he died nine years later. He was a visionary, always predicting technological advances and changes in the world as we knew it. Years later he would buy one of the first Betamaxes, showing me the miracle of taping television shows and watching them whenever you wanted to, zipping past the commercials. And a few years after that, he was one of the first people in the United States to get corrective eye surgery, restoring his bad eyesight to twenty-twenty vision and eliminating the need to wear glasses. So long ago was this that the surgery, performed by a Russian ophthalmologist, was done with scalpels instead of lasers.
That afternoon in our backyard, Skip asked me about myself, as if I were someone he’d just met. “What do you do?” he asked me. The answer was that I did a lot. I listed my activities: Marsha Jordan Girl, traveling back and forth to Boston to do fashion shows and mother-daughter teas, a floater at Jordan Marsh covering people’s breaks and vacations in the Linens or Misses department. As I told him all this, he cocked his head and looked at me as if for the first time. He grinned. My brother had the most charming grin.
“Mostly,” I said, “I read.”