When I first read Grace Paley in my twenties, I could not hear her characters speak. Had I chanced upon the clamorous street the narrator of “The Loudest Voice” looks back upon, I would have had no difficulty settling down to read amid its familiar cacophony. The grade schoolers who scrub construction paper turkeys off streaky windows to make space for “new shapes” in red and green paper would have returned me to schoolyard chatter just as quickly. After all, I was barely a decade removed from cutting out snowflakes and reindeer myself.
But ever the dutiful student, I turned the title page of Paley’s The Little Disturbances of Man and ran smack into the middle-aged woman whose voice sets “Goodbye and Good Luck” going in the ringing tones of an old alarm clock. “I was popular in certain circles, says Aunt Rose. I wasn’t no thinner then, only more stationary in the flesh. In time to come, Lillie, don’t be surprised—change is a fact of God. From this no one is excused.” Rose was solid: I could not get around her. There was a staunchness in her emphatic double negative I also could not escape. Assuming that glee in midlife was a contradiction in terms, however, I registered none of the jauntiness in her verbal delivery. Nor, preoccupied with establishing gloom, could I spot the rapacious desire for life that offsets defeat. Now that I am Rose’s age, I can see that Paley’s core metaphysics offered echoes of wartime dauntlessness to grown-up readers. But when I first read her, I was just venturing out in the world and thought the staying power in this fiction about as thrilling as a limpet clutching a rock.
Suffering: this was hard to miss in her work. While still a teenager, Paley’s father served prison terms in Russia and Siberia. At an equally young age, readers of Just As I Thought learn, the writer’s mother was exiled. The rest of the terrors—revolutions, pogroms, and the murders of relatives—these two kept to themselves, convinced the past was “a swamp of despair” in which their children “could only sink.” Or maybe, Paley continues, rolling a clutch of unvarnished nouns into a catalogue at breakneck speed, they were just “too busy” with “English, school, work, family, life” to offer more before their “story ended.”
With the same shock of hours upended, the narrator of “Goodbye and Good Luck” spies the “rotten handwriting of time” on her mother’s cheeks and “across her forehead” and runs their implications together in a jumble of hurried fragments: “Back and forth—a child could read—it said old, old old.” At twentysomething, I understood Paley’s repeated sonority here as expletive rather than honorarium. Naturally, I whizzed past descriptions of Rose’s too too solid flesh and missed the spirit underneath. The alloy of grief and humor that girds and girdles her and a host of other Paley characters was an amalgam too mixed for me to interpret. And then I still believed in plot, a literary stratagem the fictional daughter in “A Conversation with My Father” dismisses as “the absolute line between two points.” “Everyone,” she goes on in this story, “real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.” Bent on reading for discernably happy endings, willing to accept tragic conclusions where happiness, I assumed, could not possibly find purchase, I did not so much follow along this story and others as skitter over the ellipses, circles, and tangents Paley improvises upon the taut lines of her sentences.
Things changed, just as Aunt Rose promised they would.
I got a little older—old enough to want to forestall endings rather than hurtle pell-mell toward them. I had a daughter. Finding my mother’s blush in my child’s laughing face, I realized there was more to living and writing than adhering to the lockstep march of the present. As I typed out compound, complex sentences and slogged toward the close of my dissertation, I began to obtain an inkling of what it might take to create the high-wire syntax of dives and somersaults Paley’s narrators execute with such finesse upon each story’s tightrope. Then, when I was a graduate student in my thirties balancing Zoë on my hip, Paley read in Berkeley. As her compact figure sang out a story in her Bronx accent, I caught the blend of rue and relish in her characters’ accents. All at once, people and places resolved into as clear a focus as if I had been handed the aural equivalent of opera glasses.
Why hadn’t I heard the music of her sentences earlier? Maybe, having fled Boston when I went to college, I had closed my ears to the acerbic inflections that were second nature to me. Maybe I was trying too hard to look out for my glamorous future to recognize the “ordinary place and terrible time” Paley names in “Other Mothers” and that almost all of her characters accept as their bailiwick. Or maybe I had not yet developed enough respect for language to see that it could not just provide escape from my then present circumstances but offer a way to root me more firmly in the actual. Listening to Paley, I realized that virtuosic twists and turns of phrase rather than pedestrian sequencing of events drive her stories. “The sound of the story comes first,” I read much later in a 1992 interview she sat for the Paris Review: “A story can begin with someone speaking. ‘I was popular in certain circles,’ for example; an aunt of mine said that, and it hung around in my head for a long time. Eventually I wrote a story, ‘Goodbye and Good Luck,’ that began with that line, though it had nothing to do with my aunt.”
In “The Value of Not Understanding Everything,” a piece that could speak as easily for the unknowns Einstein, Rothko, Bellow, and Feynman look toward, Paley identifies the mystery that spurs her writing in terms of what she cannot properly hear rather than what she does not easily see. “My family spoke Russian, but the street spoke Yiddish. There were families of experience I was cut off from. You know, it seemed to me that an entire world was whispering in the other room. In order to get to the core of it all, I used all those sibilant clues. I made fiction.”
Now that I am in my late fifties, I have no difficulty detecting grins alongside the audible sighs in Paley’s sentences. Nowhere does that mingling of sounds speak to me more directly than in “Mother,” a piece as virtuosic as it is brief. Exposition, development, recapitulation, coda: in ten paragraphs, three of which are single sentences, Paley plays upon time, offering readers the entire sonata structure of human relations. We hear variations on the theme of marriage: (“They sat in comfortable leather chairs. They were listening to Mozart. They looked at one another amazed. It seemed to them that they’d just come over on the boat”), notes of longing between couples (“She said to him, Talk to me a little. We don’t talk so much anymore”) and between parent and child, (“I heard a song: ‘Oh, I Long to See My Mother in the Doorway.’ By God! I said, I understand that song. I have often longed to see my mother in the doorway”), dissonances (“I’m tired, he said. Can’t you see?”), recapitulations (“I wish I could see her in the doorway of the living room”), and melodies that reverberate into silence (“Then she died.”).
To call this piece a gesture sketch would get at its Mozartian lightness of finish. But as I listened to its spare sentences climb upward and plummet downward and hang steady in air, they seemed to me to render not so much the silhouettes of lives in contact as the dense substance of loneliness in the midst of shared experience. I have taught this story to hundreds of students. And yet, as I linger this time through on the distances between intimates it represents so ably, it is my own mother I see—a woman who frequently played second fiddle to my father’s louder and seemingly more dynamic music, a person I frequently railed against for not hearing me, a mother who continues, even today, to stand in the doorway waiting and smiling at me, as I in turn wait for her and the return of her eighty-four-year-old memory. Stubborn? Yes. Staunch? Absolutely. Stoic? Always. And so rather than rush to the end, let me go back (if only rhetorically) to our respective beginnings and open a window or door in your own memory; and ask you in turn, as I have asked my mother so many times and have finally perhaps learned to demand of myself: just listen.