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Preface

“I have always imagined that Paradise

will be a kind of library.”

∼ Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) ∼

When I was seven, my mother drove the family car off a thirty-foot bridge. My sister and I were in the backseat and after the dive, the sky-blue Cadillac Seville flipped over into the craggy ravine and landed on its roof. There wasn’t much water in the river below and the upside-down car sank slowly in the muck, its headlights streaming through the fog. I don’t remember being scared exactly, just too dumbfounded to speak. Then my mother said in a perfectly calm voice, “Do you think you girls can push open the doors?” It was as if she was asking us to turn down the television or put the dishes back on the shelves. She was very matter-of-fact. The radio was still playing as we tumbled over each other, somersaulting out into the shadowy gloom, and I remember thinking that this was just like the Tunnel of Love at Willow Grove’s amusement park that had recently been bulldozed and turned into a suburban shopping mall.

“Okay, let’s pull ourselves together here,” my mother announced over the incongruous sounds of background music. The dark water was gurgling away, our voices echoed when we talked, and I imagined us huddled together in a little wooden rowboat, magically floating down an ersatz river on some weird joyride gone slightly amiss.

“Smile,” my mother said abruptly to my sister, Virginia, when she saw her sucking on her lip. Virginia chipped one of her two front teeth in the accident but, other than that, we were both unharmed.

“Wider. I can’t see.”

“Do I have to? I don’t feel like smiling,” Virginia said, and stomped her foot in the gunk.

“She doesn’t mean smile, like ‘BE HAPPY,’ stupid,” I scoffed. “She means open your mouth so she can see if you’re bleeding. Geez!”

“Well, I’m not,” she retorted, but I could see she was now in tears, rubbing her nose and eyes with her mud-stained sweatshirt.

“Does it hurt?” I asked sheepishly.

“No, it doesn’t hurt, Dora. I just don’t like it here. It’s creepy and I want to go home.” She was scared, my mother was dazed, and I, as usual, was completely detached—a knack I have since perfected in order to deal with life’s crushing disappointments or precarious entanglements.

“We’re okay,” I told her. (I was always telling her that.) “Anyway, Mom’s the one who should be upset. Dad is going to kill her.”

“No, he’s not,” my sister replied. “Maybe we don’t even have to tell him.”

“Are you kidding? Look at the car! This is the second one she’s ruined this year.”

Meanwhile, my mother was standing behind our belly-up, bashed-in, virtually unrecognizable vehicle. “Oh my lord,” she suddenly exclaimed. “Your father’s new clubs are in the trunk. Now, did he tell me to take them out this morning? … I can’t remember ….”

When the police finally arrived with a tow truck and an ambulance, my sister and I clambered up from the muddy riverbed and bundled into a squad car while my mother stood outside wrapping her long mohair coat around her. Her tone was shaky as she ran her hands through her matted, blood-soaked hair and I suddenly realized she had hit her head. The idea that we had been involved in a near-fatal accident never entered my mind.

At the time of the crash, we were in east central Pennsylvania, ninety miles northwest of Philadelphia. It was an area known as the coal country of Schuylkill County, where rolling green pastures were blighted by deep brown scars, heaps of piled-up slag, and decaying railroad tracks. Even the billboards were battered with peeling, unintelligible messages from a bygone era. We were headed for Pottsville to visit the dilapidated childhood home of John O’Hara and I remember feeling relieved that we probably wouldn’t be touring this author’s home anytime soon. I’ve since learned that O’Hara called Pottsville a “god-awful town” and couldn’t wait to get out.

My mother told the police that she was looking down at the map from the Philadelphia Historical Society, and when she looked up we were plunging into the dark, swirling waters of the Schuylkill River. I guess they believed her, because the cop pointed out that we were a few hours from the spot in Chadds Ford where Andrew Wyeth’s father, N. C. Wyeth, drove his car onto a railroad track with his four-year-old grandson in the backseat. The car was smashed to smithereens by an oncoming train and no one ever knew whether it was suicide or just a freak accident. Why he insisted on telling this story in front of us, I will never understand. But it sure cheered my mother right up, with her penchant for literary legends, and she subsequently peppered him with questions.