Salon.com > Beth Kephart

The rubble-rouser

Wed, 24 Jan 2001 17:38:00 +0000

On the morning of Jan. 13, in Santa Tecla, El Salvador, the earth parted its jagged jaws and roared. My mother-in-law was parking her jeep in her carport when it happened. She was returning from a baptism and looking ahead to the afternoon when she heard the bellow and felt the pavement beneath her move. What had been solid became liquid ooze. What had been level rose like molten concrete waves, so that she went up and down but not forward as she ran toward an open space where only sky was at risk of crashing down. Nora, my mother-in-law, is 68, a divorcée with a bad leg. She wore her best church dress as she ran along the ground that had gone vertical in an instant.

Down the street, meanwhile, in a neighborhood of Santa Tecla called Las Colinas, mansions were tumbling from the sky, plunging from their mountain berths in a storm of dust and drama. Whatever was in their path fell prey -- the clustered houses that sat on the mountain's lower face, the children spinning tops in the narrow streets, the idle conversations between neighbors. Before there was time to look up and run, a swath of suburbia was swallowed whole, entombed in a mudslide that stopped six blocks short of Nora's front door. Those who were saved were saved because of luck -- because of an errand that had taken them away from home, because of a traffic jam that had delayed their return, because of a plate of hot tortillas they were delivering to a neighbor. Because of a baptism that had ended on time, not minutes later, when the cathedral would be lying in a smolder.

The uncomfortable reader

Wed, 21 Jun 2000 19:05:00 +0000

Jeremy, my book-wary 10-year-old, wants to know how to sit when he reads. He asks me flat out from his miserable sprawl on his bed. "I am just not comfortable," he complains. "I just don't get it. I don't."

I study the crooked line of him, his grave exasperation -- how he's propped up his head with one of his hands and smashed his book to the quilt with the other. Every time he needs to turn a page, he has to adjust all his weights and all his levers, get use of both hands, separate the one page from the rest, flip it over, grind it down, replant his elbow and start again. A shadow falls across the words. He grumbles, pitches his body to the floor, lies on his back, lifts his book above his head and squints as if looking at the sun. His arms quiver, twitch, visibly ache. They grow weary. He looks at me. He half crab-crawls to a barren patch of wall and bangs his back against it, throwing his lean colt's legs out straight.

"It's so much better when you read to me," he grumbles and whispers, then sighs to prove his point. "All I have to do then is be in your arms and wait for the story to come."

Crossing over

Fri, 28 Apr 2000 16:00:00 +0000

I first met Jayne Anne Phillips in a city of puppets, on a night of daggering rain. It was Prague, the summer of 1995. She was across a gilded, mirrored room, across a table strewn with apples and cheddar, and I remember watching how she moved through the writers who had assembled there -- moved through them, touched a hand to them, then escaped them, just in time. I remember how her long, crimped hair sat on her shoulders like a cape, like depth, a protection. She seemed otherworldly among the rest of us, unspoiled by the rain. She seemed to be dismayed by all the crackling, smacking loudness.

Standing there, observing Phillips, I was struck by contradictions, as readers of her work have always been. Here was the originator of characters who marched straight out of the dark side and spoke: "Jamaica, you black doll, wobbling like a dead girl sewn of old socks ..." Here was the author of tender reminiscence: "My mother's ankles curve from the hem of a white suit as if the bones were water." Here was the teacher -- at Brandeis, at Harvard, at Boston University, elsewhere -- with the reputation for being obsessed with the minuscule, the line edit, the word and its hyphen, the punctuation mark.

It's how they take you anywhere

Wed, 16 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Let us begin where it all begins, in the land of the Limpopo River, in the company of the Elephant's Child, his bulging, blackish, boot-sized nose, his powerful 'satiable curtiosity.
"Wait," I say. "Just wait. What's this? ''Satiable curtiosity'?"
"Oh!" Fourteen hands waving. "Oh! Oh! I know this one! I know!"
" 'Satiable curtiosity," Greg says, his wire-rimmed glasses twinkling, sparking, "means an elephant who is very curious."
"But nicely curious," Michael adds, a smile beneath his spray of freckles. "He's very nice about his being so curious."
" 'Satiably nicely curious," Alex says, finger up, like a meticulous trial lawyer. "Don't forget the 'satiable part."
"But I don't get the ''satiable,'" I complain. "What is it? Someone help me out here with this term."
"It's a Rudyard Kipling word." A chorus. "You know." Twenty-eight separate eyes roll at me. "Rudyard Kipling. He's the guy who makes his words up."
"Ah," I say. "A fictional term." Dictionary in hand, we guess at what we suppose it means, and then the kids fall quiet, I read on.
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Into the belly of the earth

Mon, 29 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000

We have driven for many days now over the thin carapace of the earth, beneath a vast and vaporous sky. It is the end of the sunflower season. Like tired corn, the stalks take their beating from the sun, their faces the color of repentance, their fringes singed past glory. Where there are no flowers, there are loose-jowled cows, and where the cows have given ground, there are flocks of unimaginative sheep, and sometimes as we drive there is no ground at all. It's rocks on one side, piling up, and nothing but air on the other.

Bill, I say to my husband, who's at the wheel. For God's sake, Bill, we're going to fall. And then, because God has intervened, we are miraculously spared.

Earth, in this southwest knuckle of France, is a phantasma of layers. It is our planet left essentially alone or, more true, it is our planet respected. Ruined stone castles crumble down hills. Iron crosses sprout out of unlikely limestone pilings, like rusty bouquets to religion. I come from a place where land has been disregarded, pulped, and here, in this region of unblemished possibility, I suffer from a sadness that is also partly prayer.

Cool. Dark. Moist.

Thu, 09 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000

All summer long we've been waiting for rain. We've been watching the grass turn starchy, fawn-colored, hot; the phlox gray out, like hair; the carpenter ants circle our proud purple maple, as if the tree were prey. Even Harvey, the bat who hides in our porch shutters, has been parchedly preserving his poop, and around our mailbox the vinca moans -- something about broken promises, betrayal.

Last night I couldn't sleep and I came downstairs to write, and a daddy longlegs begged for a drink. I tell the truth. He climbed a wall, he climbed a couch, he climbed a bookshelf, he stood on my knee, lunging and desperate and pleading and shaking one of his too-many long arms at me, doing his unlevel best to sip from the glass of chilled water in my hand. Finally, at 4 a.m., I took the beast outside. When I told my husband about my late-night encounter he wiped a trickle of perspiration from his freckled brow and scolded me for refusing the spider a drink.

The bad seed

Wed, 14 Apr 1999 19:00:00 +0000

A few days before Christmas 1968, 11-year-old Mary Bell sat in a British
courtroom and listened as the jury foreman pronounced her "guilty of
manslaughter because of diminished responsibility," first for the killing
of Martin Brown, a blond and "sturdy" 4-year-old, and second for the killing a few weeks later of Brian Howe, who was just
3 years old, still pink-faced and cherubic when his life met its
grisly, unprovoked end.

Mary was a pretty girl, slight of frame, with blue eyes and a heart-shaped
face. Unlike Norma Bell, the anxious, cowering 13-year-old neighborhood friend (no relation)
who was accused but not convicted of the crimes, Mary had given a
bewildering performance in court -- keeping her back straight and her face
alert; yielding to paroxysms of delight when, for example, the judge
appeared in his formal red coat or the barristers bowed solemnly in their
funny wigs. Two toddlers were dead, two families were shattered, a
neighborhood grieved openly, and there sat Mary Bell with her
perfect posture and her brightly lit eyes, hardly showing a flicker of
remorse. She was a monster, in the minds of most. A bad seed. Evil
incarnate. She was sentenced to detention "for life."

See no evil

Wed, 14 Apr 1999 19:00:00 +0000

In her slight, well-meaning new book "The Kindness of Children" (Harvard University Press),
MacArthur genius-award winner and former kindergarten teacher Vivian Gussin Paley begins with this quote
from Rabbi Yehuda Nisiah: "The moral universe rests upon the breath of
schoolchildren." In the 144 pages that follow, Paley works hard to prove
this point.

Paley's method is to scoop up stories of kindness and to transplant them,
in classroom after classroom, across the country. The action begins in a
school in London, which Paley happens to be visiting. A multiply
handicapped boy named Teddy is wheeled into the nursery school and he is
included -- spontaneously, at the invitation of another child -- into the playful
goings on. "It is a simple transaction, such as might be seen any place
where children play, but the joy it brings to Teddy's face fills my eyes
with tears," reports Paley. "What could I ever do to cause him to gaze at
me that way?"

Who needs experts?

Fri, 18 Sep 1998 16:52:00 +0000

Two-thirds of the way through "The Nurture Assumption," author Judith Rich Harris breathlessly puts us ringside at her Very Major Moment. "Except for the dog, I was alone in the house," she remembers, no detail here being too small to spare. "I was sitting at my desk on a dark winter afternoon, reading an article about adolescent delinquency. It was January 20, 1994." Shortly, without due warning, a fiery inspiration pierced Harris' skull and seized her brain -- an insight so startling and effulgent that even she felt staggered by the light.

"Teenagers aren't trying to be like adults: They are trying to distinguish themselves from adults!" Harris recounts her thinking. "The thought blossomed like a magician's bouquet. Within a few minutes I had the basic outline of group socialization theory -- the theory that children identify with a group consisting of their peers, that they tailor their behavior to the norms of their group, and that groups contrast themselves with other groups and adopt different norms. Only after I had gotten that far did I realize the full implications, and then I had to go back and reconsider the evidence before I was willing to accept the second half of my epiphany. 'Hey, it's not the parents! It's not the parents at all!'"

A melody of his own making

Fri, 21 Aug 1998 18:42:00 +0000

They bring him to me just after dawn. I turn, and he is there. They show me how to bend my arms so that I can take him down toward my heart, and there is nothing else to say. The nurse leaves. I fall profoundly, madly into love, peel the aftermath of birth from my son's black-haired crown, try to slow down the shifting of his well-lashed eyes. Hey, little guy. Over here. It's me. I'm your mom. He is as light as that part of the dream that, come morning, slips away and slips away again. I bundle him tightly in the blankets provided and stare without comprehension at the nurses, who have now returned with instructions on the care and feeding of newborns. I don't believe that I will ever learn what they are trying to teach me, and I ask them quiet, obedient questions until my husband comes to rescue me and I can lobby for a quick release from the hospital.

Soon I'm being conveyed home in a rusting white Ford Mustang whose only defense against the persistent July heat involves my fiddling with the windows, cracking them just wide enough apart so as to whip up strong blasts of air. It is the hottest day of a long, dry summer, and Jeremy, one day into life, is blanketed and behatted in the car. His head keeps rolling around above his shoulders, though my husband is driving old-man slow, and I feel criminal exposing him to the heat and potholes like this, make him a promise I will never keep: "Hey, after this, no more cars. We'll walk the world."