High Tide in Tucson by Barbara Kingsolver Read Free Book Online

brick building that was my grade school, for example, and both my grandfathers. They’re snapshots of memory for me now, of equivocal focus, loaded with emotion, undisturbed by anyone else’s idea of the truth. The schoolhouse’s plaster ceilings are charted with craters like maps of the moon and likely to crash down without warning. The windows are watery, bubbly glass reinforced with chicken wire. The weary wooden staircases, worn shiny smooth in a path up their middles, wind up to an unknownplace overhead where the heavy-footed eighth graders changing classes were called “the mules” by my first-grade teacher, and believing her, I pictured their sharp hooves on the linoleum.
    My Grandfather Henry I remember in his sleeveless undershirt, home after a day’s hard work on the farm at Fox Creek. His hide is tough and burnished wherever it has met the world—hands, face, forearms—but vulnerably white at the shoulders and throat. He is snapping his false teeth in and out of place, to provoke his grandchildren to hysterics.
    As far as I know, no such snapshots exist in the authentic world. The citizens of my hometown ripped down the old school and quickly put to rest its picturesque decay. My grandfather always cemented his teeth in his head, and put on good clothes, before submitting himself to photography. Who wouldn’t? When a camera takes aim at my daughter, I reach out and scrape the peanut butter off her chin. “I can’t help it,” I tell her, “it’s one of those mother things.” It’s more than that. It’s human, to want the world to see us as we think we ought to be seen.
    You can fool history sometimes, but you can’t fool the memory of your intimates. And thank heavens, because in the broad valley between real life and propriety whole herds of important truths can steal away into the underbrush. I hold that valley to be my home territory as a writer. Little girls wear food on their chins, school days are lit by ghostlight, and respectable men wear their undershirts at home. Sometimes there are fits of laughter and sometimes there is despair, and neither one looks a thing like its formal portrait.
    For many, many years I wrote my stories furtively in spiral-bound notebooks, for no greater purpose than my own private salvation. But on April 1, 1987, two earthquakes hit my psyche on the same day. First, I brought home my own newborn babygirl from the hospital. Then, a few hours later, I got a call from New York announcing that a large chunk of my writing—which I’d tentatively pronounced a novel—was going to be published. This was a spectacular April Fool’s Day. My life has not, since, returned to normal.
    For days I nursed my baby and basked in hormonal euphoria, musing occasionally: all this—and I’m a novelist, too! That , though, seemed a slim accomplishment compared with laboring twenty-four hours to render up the most beautiful new human the earth had yet seen. The book business seemed a terrestrial affair of ink and trees and I didn’t give it much thought.
    In time my head cleared, and I settled into panic. What had I done? The baby was premeditated, but the book I’d conceived recklessly, in a closet late at night, when the restlessness of my insomniac pregnancy drove me to compulsive verbal intercourse with my own soul. The pages that grew in a stack were somewhat incidental to the process. They contained my highest hopes and keenest pains, and I didn’t think anyone but me would ever see them. I’d bundled the thing up and sent it off to New York in a mad fit of housekeeping, to be done with it. Now it was going to be laid smack out for my mother, my postal clerk, my high school English teacher, anybody in the world who was willing to plunk down $16.95 and walk away with it. To find oneself suddenly published is thrilling—that is a given. But how appalling it also felt I find hard to