I Cannot Get You Close Enough by Ellen Gilchrist Page A

Sheila, I decided. She’ll let him do it.
    Later that day I went out to Daniel’s and picked up Jessie and we drove out to Summerwood and caught the horses and went riding. We rode all the way to the back of the property, past the Deadening to the pond. Jessie moved ahead of me on the old mare, Bess. Her back was as strong and supple as a birch, her neck so long and sweet rising from her spine, her little riding hat pulled down around her ears. Our Jessie, the divine end of all the mess and confusion of the genes. In any world she would be the daughter I would wish for. Now I had helped steal her from her mother. Any act creates both good and evil and comes from both. I watched as Jessie guided the mare down the path into the meadow. I watched her hands on the reins.
    When it was settled I went back to New York City to live among strangers for several more years. At that time it was not possible for me to live among my kin. I do not mind suffering in my own life. I believe life is supposed to be tragic, why else would we need whiskey or need God? But things which are bearable in my life are unbearable to me in the lives of my family. I cannot bear to watch them suffer. It is a flaw of character to think I am so above them. As if I say, see, I can suffer, being tragic and brave, but you are too dumb and weak to suffer. Here, let me bear that for you. Let me haul all those crosses. I would rather carry them than worry about you not being able to. Of course it’s proprietory to think like that, but I’ll defend myself to this extent. I am the oldest daughter. As I once wrote, cause and effect, for whatever percent believe in that.

DE HAVILLAND HAND

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    The creation and first sixteen years of life of Olivia de Havilland Hand, only child of Daniel DeBardeleben Hand and Summer Deer Wagoner, of Tahlequah, Oklahoma.
    First there had to be a revolution and there was one. In nineteen hundred and sixty-one the young people of the United States of America looked at their parents and said, Oh, no, I cannot bear to be like that. The girls looked at their mothers in their girdles and brassieres, with their diet pills and sad martinis and permanents and hair sprays and painted fingernails and terrible frightened worried smiles and they said, There’s got to be more to life than this. This is not for me. Then the boys looked at their fathers dreaming of cars and killings in the stock market and terrified of being embarrassed or poor, poor fathers with their tight collars and tight belts and ironed shirts and old suits, with their hair cut off like monks, and the boys said, I don’t care how much he beats me, I won’t look that way. Then the boys and girls turned on the brand-new television sets and saw images of a new president and a new time that was dawning and they said, Let’s get out of here, something new has got to happen, something’s got to give.
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    Then the earth moved a fraction of an inch to the left or right of its orbit and the music began to change. Singers sang of changing times, feeling good, trying new things. People began to dance sexy Negro dances. Poets appeared in Iowa and Minnesota, in Boston and New York City, in Mississippi and San Francisco and L.A. Smile faces were sewn onto the rear ends of blue jeans. Girls started burning the brassieres. Boys quit going to the boring brutal barbers. Small bags of marijuana began to circulate. Then the children stopped going to school, or else they smoked marijuana, and then they went to school. Let them bore us now, the children chuckled to themselves. Just let them try.
    By nineteen sixty-six the revolution was in full swing and taking up the front pages of every newspaper in the United States. News of it had even reached Charlotte, North Carolina.
    Daniel Hand was having a hard time in school anyway. Even without marijuana he kept going to sleep reading The Pearl and The Lottery . What a bunch of nuts, he would think. Why would anybody