She looks the way I expect her to look, and so I wonder if I have seen her photo already somewhere, but I don’t remember it. At the other end of middle age, perhaps, a woman of average height and build, dark hair gone mostly grey and hanging thickly past her shoulders.
We hear her first during her interview, where she is seated in an armchair on the stage, her purse crumpled next to the chair leg. The scene between her and the interviewer evokes thoughts of Letterman and Oprah, but this is so much more important.
Her voice, too, does not surprise me. It is gentle, modulated, lined with thought that comes from quiet hours of writing. She thinks deeply about things: her students, the hills of Idaho, the development of colleges in the Mid-West, John Calvin. Laughter comes willingly, and honesty too. The interviewer asks, “How do you manage to be so plain without being clichéd or facile?” She answers, “I don’t know.”
That voice is familiar the next morning, when it is her turn to deliver a lecture to the whole assembly. From my seat at the back of the Field House, one in a row of folding aluminum chairs, I cannot see her at all. But there is the voice, serene, gentle, carrying words and ideas by the armful. In its gentleness, the voice doesn’t hurl these things, but instead sets them about me on the ground, stacks them up, balances, creating something that I, philistine, have not the intellect to interpret.
Instead I pick them up, one by one, this idea or that, roll it in the palm of my mind, test its gravity and texture, smell it, taste. Here is one: “Words can inform, but they can also enlist.” The stone of this thought is faceted, sharp. It pricks my fingers with possibility. Words do call to me, don’t they? They ask for action. Yes. I mull over this, my mind grunts response.
When finally I am ready, I put the stone down and find that she hasn’t stopped. She has continued in her gentle way, has crafted a solid wall, framed a door and windows, all with the light touch of that steady voice. But I can’t see the entire structure; it looms next to me, tall and textured. She is talking about readers, about audience, about learning, and my sleeve is snagged on this fragmentary gem: “liberated into an era of downward expectations.”
I write it down, again allowing my mind to test the roughened roundness of idea. But the voice brings ideas by the armload; her tongue and teeth shape sounds like a poet: “retrojecting,” “expiate,” “epiphenomenal.”
This happened when I read her books. The words came, composing ideas as water composes sand, sending them all tumbling up the beach. But when I went to move, turned my head to look up the shoreline, I found pattern minute and intentional, designs that captured the sun in glinting flecks of blinding brilliance. I stopped circling vocabulary words. I stopped folding down the corners of significant pages. Whole paragraphs needed underlining; entire chapters demanded attention, reflection.
I read slowly, lifting my head to find that she had—very quietly, gently—constructed a cathedral out of the stones of words. The vaulted ceiling leapt away from me, hiding in its curved corners the shadows of meaning, the haunting possibility of choice, the troubled concept of the certainty of death.
When the lecture is over, the line for her autograph extends to the back of the gym. I wait ten minutes, fifteen. I open my book to the signing page; the attendant asks me to step forward.
I can see her sitting, how she takes the time to look each person in the eye, exchange a word or two.
My turn. I hand her the book. She takes it, sets it down on the table, looks up at me. Her eyes are large, a deep grey blue. She begins to sign, her name taking shape on the page, letters marked another time in yet another book.
I fish them from my pocket, two smooth white stones, and set them on the table: “Thank you for your books,” I say, and I mean it, standing there before her, standing in the Field House, standing in the cathedral of my mind where sun spills through leaded glass and pours color all about my feet.
She closes the book and lays it in my hands. Then the hands of her smile close around the stones on the table: “You’re welcome,” she says. And I walk away.
