This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
My writing room represents a delicate battle, endlessly waged, between competing impulses: on the one hand, I want to surround myself with artifacts, mementos, beautiful curiosities. Things that provoke me, comfort me, make me think. On the other, I long for austerity, clean lines, soothing colors.
Decorate, purge. Decorate, purge.
At the moment, sentimental chaos is winning. Two ceiling-high bookcases overflow with colorful spines and assorted objects: a spelling bee plaque from eighth grade, three building blocks, a pair of black boots I wore long ago to dance all night in Paris, a Japanese doll sent to me by a traveling aunt long ago, her delicate fingers clutching air where a paper parasol once rested. Another small bookcase houses the paperback mysteries I salvaged from my mother’s house after she died: a representative sample; I couldn’t take them all. I aired them on the front porch for two days to minimize the traces of mildew, of cats; systematically read every single one; shelved them. They are a clue, a riddle; they demand an answer, and I haven’t yet found it.
Across the room a mantel frames a fireplace converted to a mirror, and it displays a ceramic flute, a hand-painted mask from New Orleans, two kaleidoscopes, a tiny, intricate dollhouse-sized desk with miniature drawers that open, a beaded purse that was my mother’s. The housekeeper gave it to her on the occasion of her first dance, she told me. It is hard to imagine my mother having anything to do with housekeepers and dances, but it seems like an important piece of evidence. Another wall is cut short by the slanting ceiling, and features an autumn landscape painted by my great grandmother, a whimsical and prolific artist. Two photographs flank the painting: one is my father’s – a misty swamp at daybreak, stunted trees jutting upward like twisted ladies of the lake. The other is a picture I took of the abandoned insane asylum in Buffalo, once directed by my great grandfather. Between the windows hangs a Victorian-era portrait of a corseted lady, an open book dangling from languid fingers. Perhaps an ancestress. No one remembers.On the back of the closet door hangs a red wool dress, short-sleeved and tight-waisted, moth-nibbled. It is clearly from the sixties, rescued from my mother’s closet, and it reminds me that she was once a person I can hardly imagine: hot rollers and pale lipstick, light on her feet, not even dreaming of me.
In the midst of all this, my desk. I found it in an antique store when I first moved to the south; I had left behind the cheap makeshift desk that got me through grad school. Do you know what it is? asked the man who owned the store. Confusingly, he wore a cowboy hat, and looked as if he had wandered onto the wrong movie set.
I didn’t know what it was. It was simple, a little rustic, with a few drawers and a little pull-out shelf that looked like a perfect place for a keyboard, whatever its original purpose. The aging cowboy tugged gently on two slight protrusions on one end of the desk to reveal narrow strips of wood that jutted outward at slight angles. Between and below them, he pulled out a tray. It reminded me of something. I didn’t know what. I looked down the length of the desk: the other end had a fold-out leaf that was curved. Like a headrest.
Like a body?
It’s a country doctor’s table, said the cowboy, triumphant. Late-nineteenth-century. And suddenly I understood: the patient’s head would rest at the rounded end. The keyboard tray was for various surgical instruments. Things designed to poke and prod. At the other end were stirrups. Nineteenth-century feet had rested there, knees pressed together, resisting probing fingers.
My turn-of-the-century house is not haunted. If it had been, the realtor explained matter-of-factly, the seller would have had to disclose that information. But my desk is no stranger to long-ago hopes and fears, pain and sorrow. It knows more stories than it can tell. It’s a good place to write, surrounded by echoes of ancestral pasts.
As for the rest, I feel a purge coming on, a need to refine and consolidate, like editing a manuscript: gently but mercilessly cutting away what turns out to be inessential. Seeking clarity, I will need to cull, to confront the riddles I have constructed over the last decade. The desk has birthed one book; it’s time to make way for another.
Pretty Is by Maggie Mitchell is out now.