Field Notes
in which I was a writer because I said I was a writer
“Is there no way out of the mind?”
— Sylvia Plath
I randomly pulled my Fear of Flying book off the shelf today and was yet again delighted by Erica Jong, and the memory of how I felt back when I discovered Erica Jong. God, I loved when I first found this — my mom’s 1980 copy, the book jacket already peeling back at the corners even then, a paint swatch left inside that I assume she used as a bookmark. The book is mine now, because I took it off her shelf, which was no longer her shelf, and I put it on mine.
This was all around the time shortly after I moved to Chicago, when I was still earnestly outlining my essay collection idea and certain I was not only going to write it—but that it would be published, too. (“When everybody called me Baby, and it didn’t occur to me to mind.”)
I hadn’t yet failed at anything, quite. I would sit on my living room floor before my waitressing shifts, papers all around me, mapping out my mind. Telling myself I wouldn’t be waiting tables forever.
Whenever anyone would ask, “what do you do?” I’d reply, “I’m a writer.”
“But what do you do?”
“I write!”
I was on fire and had something to prove.
That was the spring of 2009, and I was drawn to Erica, spending my cash tips on a $4.50 used copy of HALF-LIVES, one of her poetry collections from the 1970s. It’s right there, my own writing in blue ink: Alison Hamm, March 30, 2009.
It was someone else’s before, of course — someone who had received it as a gift. The transcript reads, in writing that reminds me of my grandmother’s:
Because — you are so special. Dee
Imagine! What a treasure. Who did Dee find so special, I wonder? Certainly that special person was or is less sentimental than I am, I think. Thanks for the book, Dee — and they get rid of it?! No.
I comfort myself with the thought that they must be dead.
Because —
Erica quoted Sylvia Plath and had lines in HALF-LIVES like:
“I have come to tell you I have survived.
I bring you chains of paper clips instead of emeralds.
I bring you lottery tickets instead of poems.
I bring you mucilage instead of love.I lay my body out before you on the desk.
I spread my hair amid a maze of rubber stamps.
RUSH. SPECIAL DELIVERY. DO NOT BEND.
I am open — will you lick me like an envelope?
I am bleeding — will you kiss my paper cuts?”
I think up more wild stories about Dee and the recipient of the book. It smells like incense and my grandparents’ basement.
you are so special
I open mom’s/my Fear of Flying book again, and feel the imprint of her “From the library of… RAH” book stamp underneath where she wrote her name, right there in black ink: Rexanna Hamm, May 10, 1980.
I promise you, if you find this in a used bookstore, it is because I am dead.
Look for the paint swatch, page 153: Cameo White, Netural, Bamboo Beige, Mudstone, Tundra.
These days I am trying to go to the library more and stop buying so many books, even though I am no longer counting out my cash tips and wondering if I can afford pad thai takeout and also still justify another used poetry collection.
When anyone asks, what do you do? I am no longer defiant; I have nothing to prove. I almost never say I write.
But today I miss that version of me, if only a little.
I was a writer, because I said I was a writer. I was a writer and a waitress. I was learning how to be. I was mapping out a plan. My mother was gone and I was only alone if I stopped looking for her in Erica and Sylvia. It was right there in our own handwriting, because she was a woman and I was a woman who put our names on the front page of our books to say, This is mine.
Because — you are so special