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Bobbie Louise Hawkins' Almost Everything is just that.
It leaves out her scattered poems and any direct reference to
her two unhappy marriages and the children they produced. What
remains, two collections of short prose pieces and nine new
stories, run a mere 172 pages -- the condensed version of a
life punctuated, as Tillie Olsen might put it, by
"silences." So when Hawkins speaks, it's that much
more pungent.
The book begins with "Back to Texas," Hawkins's
account of driving with her mother from Albuquerque to visit
various relatives in West Texas, a landscape of sticker
patches and mesquite trees, horizon as far as you can see on
all sides, and a native language both colorful and
plain-spoken. The trip is a perfect framework for the kind of
oral family history that consists of stories beginning
"You knew he shot himself?" or "When Mama had
pelligrisy..." Divided between verbatim dialogue and
fill-in-the-blanks reminiscence, the history is juicy with
detail about characters like Aunt Ethel, who held family
prayer meetings every night "to get back at anybody who
had irritated her during the day," and her daughter
Velma, who once spent weeks mailing postcards to a radio
station to win a meeting with Eddy Arnold but then got
"gloriously saved" and threw out all her cowboy
records "except the religious ones."
Hawkins's prose, meanwhile, is dry to the bone. Where Roy
Blount or Garrison Keillor would want to get cute and back
into caricature, Hawkins gets tough and accurate, like when
she talks about people who don't know they're poor. Retracing
her childhood, she sees exactly how poor they were, where it
hurt, and where it didn't. "The corrosion of time is
accelerated by poverty. Things grow old aster. Cheap dresses
hung unevenly from their first washing. Plastic buttons melt
against the iron. Cheap bright colors fade and run. Cheap
shoes begin to curl up at the toes the first wearing, reaching
for that foetal position old shoes take when they die...In all
that grubbiness and unspoken despair the children were the
joy. Their necks were nuzzled, their sides and feet were
tickled to make them scream. They slept and waked in poverty's
matriarchy."
Hawkins half-consciously wants to set down the kind of women's
history usually heard only over kitchen tables when the
menfolk aren't around, and she thoroughly succeeds, whether
the subject is how to cook liver and onions, geriatric sex, or
sexual harassment at work. "A Moral Tale," the last
and finest of the new stories that close Almost Everything,
surveys Hawkins's short career selling advertising for a
small-town TV station. The new sales manager, puzzled over
Hawkins's lack of enthusiasm for the job, wonders if she'd
like to make extra cash by escorting company bigwigs when they
come to town. "It's always been a flaw in my moral makeup
that I just don't get indignant and righteous and brain people
and feel insulted when they come up with something
interesting," she writes. "Anyway, when he finished
his sales pitch, I explained to him that being poor meant
there were lots of things I couldn't afford. But I could keep
on affording the luxury of only going to bed with somebody
when I cared for them a lot and probably not even then. 'That
doesn't cost me a dime,' I said. We didn't bother mentioning
that it had just cost me a lousy job."
I've been
reading these stories for years in their original chapbook
editions and hearing Hawkins perform them on her periodic club
tours with folk singers Terri Garthwaite and Rosalie Sorrels,
and I am still astonished by their extraordinary compression
of information, their voice (as particular as Hawkins's own
Southwestern drawl), their humor, their lived wisdom. The only
time she falters is when she forsakes folksy narrative for
Gertrude Steinian attempts to pin down emotions; then she
wanders into vagueness and not-quite-poetry. The attempt to
capture an abstraction pays off only once, in "Take Love,
for Instance," when she describes the "divine
emotion," that "longing that drives us until if we
are fortunate, lucky in love, we have a brief relief that
shines like fulfillment."
A brief relief that shines like fulfillment.
"And then,
or somewhat later, downhill all the way."
Village Voice
Literary Supplement, February 1983
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