What Now? Read online

  whole time I dreamed of the novels I would

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  write while I heard the Greek chorus singing in my head, What now?

  Then one day, while serving straw-

  berry daiquiris to businessmen at four in the afternoon, I had my answer: now you are a

  waitress with a graduate degree.

  ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

  Receiving an education is a little bit

  like a garden snake swallowing a chicken egg: it’s in you but it takes awhile to digest. I had come to college from twelve years of Catholic girls’ school. At the time I thought that mine was the most ridiculous, antiquated second-ary education in history. We marched in lines and met the meticulous regulations of the

  uniform code with cheerful submission. We

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  bowed and kneeled and prayed. I held open doors and learned how to write a sincere

  thank-you note and when I was asked to go

  and fetch a cup of coffee from the kitchen for one of the nuns I fairly blushed at the honor of being chosen. I learned modesty, humility, and how to make a decent white sauce. The

  white sauce I probably could have done with-

  out, but it turns out that modesty and humil-

  ity mean a lot when you’re down on your luck.

  They went a long way in helping me be a wait-

  ress when what I wanted to be was a writer. It turns out those early years of my education

  which had seemed to me such a waste of time

  had given me a nearly magical ability to dis-

  appear into a crowd. This was not the kind of thing one learned at Sarah Lawrence or the

  Iowa Writers’ Workshop, places that told

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  everyone who came through the door just how special they are. I’m not knocking being

  special, it was nice to hear, but when it was clear that I was just like everybody else, I was glad to have had some experience with

  anonymity to fall back on. The nuns were not

  much on extolling the virtues of leadership.

  In fact, we were taught to follow. When told to line up at the door, the person who got there first was inevitably pulled from her spot and sent to the back and the person from the back was sent up front to take her place. The idea was that we should not accidentally wind up

  with too grand an opinion of ourselves, and

  frankly I regard this as sound counsel. In a

  world that is flooded with children’s leader-

  ship camps and grown-up leadership semi-

  nars and bestselling books on leadership, I

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  count myself as fortunate to have been taught a thing or two about following. Like leading, it is a skill, and unlike leading, it’s one that you’ll actually get to use on a daily basis. It is senseless to think that at every moment of

  our lives we should all be the team captain,

  the class president, the general, the CEO, and yet so often this is what we’re being prepared for. No matter how many great ideas you

  might have about salad preparation or the

  reorganization of time cards, waitressing is

  not a leadership position. You’re busy and so you ask somebody else to bring the water to

  table four. Someone else is busy and so you

  clear the dirty plates from table twelve. You learn to be helpful and you learn to ask for

  help. It turns out that most positions in life, even the big ones, aren’t really so much about leadership. Being successful, and certainly

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  being happy, comes from honing your skills in working with other people. For the most

  part we travel in groups—you’re ahead of

  somebody for a while, then somebody’s

  ahead of you, a lot of people are beside you all the way. It’s what the nuns had always taught us: sing together, eat together, pray together.

  It wasn’t until I found myself relying

  on my fellow waitress Regina to heat up my

  fudge sauce for me that I knew enough to be

  grateful not only for the help she was giving me but for the education that had prepared

  me to accept it.

  ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

  Is it possible that at the moment in my

  life when I should have been processing what

  I had learned in graduate school, I was just

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  beginning to untangle the lessons of seventh grade? I had studied at the Iowa Writers’

  Workshop, after all. I had studied writing at Sarah Lawrence with the likes of Allan

  Gurganus and Grace Paley and Russell Banks.

  But with all the important books I’d read and all the essential things I had learned about

  how to write, I didn’t become a writer until I worked at Friday’s. More specifically, I didn’t learn what I really needed to know until the

  police came late one afternoon and took away

  the guy who worked the dishwash station. It

  turns out that I was the only waitress who was willing to wash dishes, and it was while I

  washed that I finally learned to stare. Oh,

  maybe I’d played around with staring in

  school. Maybe I looked out the window every

  now and then when I was stuck trying to fin-

  ish a paper, but I had never stared deeply.

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  Catholic school and college and graduate school had prepared me both for how to be

  part of a group and how to be the group’s

  leader, but none of them had taught me the

  most important thing: how to be alone. I had

  never stared as a way of solving a problem or really seeing the details that make up a story, which is to say I had never just stayed still, been quiet, and thought things through. In

  the end it was the staring that got me the novelist job I wanted.

  ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

  As I scrubbed the soup pots and mar-

  garita pitchers, I figured out that What now is always going to be a work in progress. What

  now was never what you think it’s going to be, and that’s what every writer has to learn. I

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  had benefitted enormously from my education, from the rigors of class work and the

  discipline of study, but really, I had learned how to write from the nuns who taught me

  patience, and from the Hare Krishna who

  taught me how to devote my entire self to my

  beliefs even when it meant looking like a

  fool. I learned from writing letters, but also from Alice Ilchman’s openness to a stranger.

  I learned as much from waitressing as I did

  from teaching. I learned the most from stick-

  ing with my dream even when all signs told

  me it was time to let go. I came to understand that fiction writing is like duck hunting. You go to the right place at the right time with the right dog. You get into the water before dawn, wearing a little protective gear, then you

  stand behind some reeds and wait for the

  story to present itself. This is not to say you 7 3

  are passive. You choose the place and the day.

  You pick the gun and the dog. You have the

  desire to blow the duck apart for reasons that are entirely your own. But you have to be

  willing to accept not what you wanted to have happen, but what happens. You have to write

  the story you find in the circumstances

  you’ve created, because more often than not

  the ducks don’t show up. The hunters in the

  next blind begin to argue, and you realize

  they’re in love. You see a snake swimming in

  your direction. Your dog begins to shiver and whine, and you start to think about this gun

  that belonged to your father. By the time you get out of th
e marsh you will have written a

  novel so devoid of ducks it will shock you.

  ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

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  I hadn’t planned on winding up as a waitress, but the truth is there was a lot about the job I liked even if I didn’t think I’d do it forever. I spent my days with good people

  who were hardworking and resilient. They

  took their tough times in stride and managed

  to dream big dreams in between the salads

  and desserts. I laughed an awful lot in those days, and I felt proud of the money I folded

  into my pocket at night. Just because things

  hadn’t gone the way I had planned didn’t

  necessarily mean they had gone wrong. It

  took me a long time of pulling racks of

  scorching hot glasses out of the dishwasher,

  the clouds of steam smoothing everything

  around me into a perfect field of gray, to

  understand that writing a novel and living a

  life are very much the same thing. The secret is finding the balance between going out to

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  get what you want and being open to the thing that actually winds up coming your

  way. What now is not just a panic-stricken

  question tossed out into a dark unknown.

  What now can also be our joy. It is a declaration of possibility, of promise, of chance. It acknowledges that our future is open, that we may well do more than anyone expected of

  us, that at every point in our development we are still striving to grow. There’s a time in our lives when we all crave the answers. It seems terrifying not to know what’s coming next.

  But there is another time, a better time, when we see our lives as a series of choices, and

  What now represents our excitement and our

  future, the very vitality of life. It’s up to you to choose a life that will keep expanding. It

  takes discipline to remain curious; it takes

  work to be open to the world—but oh my

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  friends, what noble and glorious work it is.

  Maybe this is the moment you shift from see-

  ing What now as one more thing to check off

  the list and start to see it as two words worth living by. This is the day you leave this campus, but if you keep your heart and mind

  open and are willing to see all of the possibilities that are available to you, it will only be the start of your education.

  ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

  If you’re trying to find out what’s com-

  ing next, turn off everything you own that has an OFF switch and listen. Make up some plans

  and change them. Identify your heart’s truest desire and don’t change that for anything. Be proud of yourself for the work you’ve done.

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  Be grateful to all the people who helped you do it. Write to them and let them know how

  you are. You are, every one of you, someone’s favorite unfolding story. We will all be anx-ious to see what happens next.

  ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

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  P O S T S C R I P T

  None of us ever outgrows the need for a

  teacher. It is a fact I recently rediscovered when I was asked to give this commencement

  address. I was flattered by the invitation and I worked very hard on my speech. What I

  came up with in the end was something I

  deemed to be both serious and grand. I stuck

  to the admonishment of Ezra Pound’s that

  had meant so much to me when I was an

  undergraduate: Make it new. I thought I had

  done exactly that. My speech was not about

  me, my time in school, or my experiences of

  trying to become a writer. My speech was

  ponderous and impersonal, full of necessary

  information. Like all medicine, it was

  slightly bitter going down, but I was sure it 8 4

  would do this class of graduating seniors a world of good.

  In the small cusp of time I had

  between writing the address and delivering

  it, I was by chance scheduled to give a talk

  with my favorite former college professor,

  Allan Gurganus. Much of what I know about

  writing is something Allan taught me. I

  admire him both as a novelist and as a person who knows a thing or two about how to live a

  fully engaged life. Allan had stepped up to the podium at Sarah Lawrence to give a graduation address many years before me, and

  when I told him I was going to follow in his

  footsteps he was pleased. He said he’d like to read what I’d written. I said yes without a

  moment’s hesitation.

  It had been many, many years since

  I had turned a paper in for my teacher’s

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  review, but wasn’t this the perfect moment?

  Wouldn’t Allan’s critique be just the thing to make going back to Sarah Lawrence complete? As soon as I was home again I sent it to him, then settled in to wait for my high

  marks.

  His e-mail reply came quickly. “The

  bit about your father works,” he said. “You

  might be able to build something around

  that.”

  I checked my speech again. The bit

  about my father was nothing but a passing

  reference, one lonesome sentence. What

  about the rest of it?

  “No,” he said. “Sorry. No.”

  Walking that careful line between gen-

  tle and firm, my favorite teacher was then

  forced to tell his grown-up student that her

  commencement speech could not be saved. If

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  you are curious as to its content I would urge you to use your imagination. You will not

  come up with anything as lifeless as what I

  had written. Allan said it should be about me, my time in college, my life as a writer. He said it should be funny. In short, it should be

  everything it wasn’t. This was not a situation that called for a rewrite. It was time to let the whole thing go gentle into that good night.

  I sat on my couch for a long time and

  stared out the window. I had no interest

  in starting over again, but there are some people whom we grant the role of oracle in our lives and when they speak—rarely, gravely—we are

  well-advised to listen. When I had written my new speech (a shorter version of this book), I did not send it back to Allan. I didn’t need to.

  After all, I am still a good student. I had done everything he told me.

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  ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

  The day of graduation started out

  overcast and then gave way to white shots of

  lightning slicing through torrents of rain.

  I waited in the line with my friend Alice

  Ilchman. She had retired from the post of

  president and bought a house with her hus-

  band a few blocks from campus. Alice stayed

  remarkably the same over time, with only a

  little more gray in her straight blond hair.

  There was always the feeling when I was near

  her that I was in the presence of a tremen-

  dous energy source, the kind of fire that

  comes from the perfect balance of intelli-

  gence and compassion. For as long as I had

  known her I had wished that I could bottle up just a quarter cup of her effervescence and

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  take it with me to have in the moments when my own intelligence and compassion failed.

  Alice had been diagnosed with pancreatic

  cancer about a month before, and the anima-

  tion that so distinguished my friend had no
t

  diminished as her health had waned. Now we

  sat together on a low stone wall to conserve

  our energy before the procession. She

  brushed aside all inquiries about how she

  was doing, and so while we waited I told her

  about Allan and the pages I’d thrown away.

  She considered this for a while. It was as if she could hear my speech coming in from

  somewhere in the distance and knew just

  how bad it had been. “Very sound advice,”

  she told me, and held my hand. “Always lis-

  ten to Allan.”

  I had listened to Allan, but I didn’t

  fully understand how perceptive he had been

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  until I was up on the platform with all the speakers who came before me. Every one of

  them was important, instructive, and serious

  unto dire. I pictured myself delivering my

  recently abandoned address, being both dull

  and pedantic, and that picture was a knife

  through my heart. Holding my new speech

  in my hands, I had never been so grateful

  to anyone as I was at that moment to my

  teacher, who twenty years later and a thou-

  sand miles away was still able to save me from making a fool of myself.

  ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

  The sun returned as soon as the pro-

  cession was over. At the reception afterward

  a young woman came up and told me that

  Alice had gotten tired at the ceremony and

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  had to go home, but that she wanted me to stop by before I left town. Her daughter,

  Sarah, now grown up and married, was visit-

  ing, and Alice wanted me to say hello. By the time I arrived, Alice had put away her heavy

  academic gown and hood, and came down the

  stairs in jeans and a sweater. She was fragile, thin, luminous. When she saw me she held

  out her arms. “Dear girl,” she said, “I knew

  you’d come.”

  ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

  I had never imagined the true gift that would come of being asked to give the commencement address at my college: the chance to say good-bye to my friend.

  ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

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  This book lets me pay honor where honor is due. It is a rare and wonderful thing to be

  able to dedicate a book, to say in print: these are the people I love, the ones to whom I am