Maggie Smith - You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir

You Could Make This Place Beautiful

A Memoir

Maggie Smith

Goldenrod

Keep Moving: The Journal

Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change

Good Bones

The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison

Lamp of the Body

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Copyright 2023 by Maggie Smith

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Interior design by Dana Sloan

Jacket art and design by James Iacobelli

Author photograph Devon Albeit Photography

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-1-9821-8585-5

ISBN 978-1-9821-8587-9 (ebook)

I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.

Emily Dickinson

B efore we go any further together, me with my lanterns, you following close behind, light flickering on both of our faces, I want to be clear about something: This isnt a tell-all. A tell-all would need an omniscient narratorgodlike, hovering over the whole scene, seeing into the houses, listening to the conversations and phone calls, reading the texts and emails. Im jealous of this all-knowing narrator, even though she doesnt exist. I want to know what she knows.

This isnt a tell-all because all is something we cant access. We dont get all. Some, yes. Most if were lucky. All, no. Theres no such thing as a tell-all, only a tell-somea tell-most, maybe. This is a tell-mine, and the mine keeps changing, because I keep changing. The mine is slippery like that.

This isnt a tell-all because some of what Im telling you is what I dont know. Im offering the absences, toothe spaces I know arent empty, but I cant see whats inside them. Like the white spaces between stanzas in a poem: What is unspoken, unwritten there? How do we read those silences?

The book youre holding in your hands was many books before it was this one. Nested inside this version are the others: the version I began deep inside my sadness, thumbed into my phone in bed on sleepless nights; the one I scribbled out with sparks in my hair. Youll see pieces of those books inside this one. Why? Because Im trying to get to the truth, and I cant get there except by looking at the whole, even the parts I dont want to see. Maybe especially those parts. Ive had to move intoand throughthe darkness to find the beauty.

Spoiler alert: Its there. The beautys there.

I know the real people who are part of this story, the story of my life, may read it. Most importantly, my children may read this book someday (hi kids, I love you). I share this story with them because we share the life. But this tell-mine is just thatmy experience. Theres no such thing as a tell-all because we can only ever speak for ourselves.

Where do I begin? I could begin in my childhood. I could begin in a college classroom where I sat across from the man I would later marry; or in a Dennys on State Route 23, where we wrote private jokes on the sugar packets; or in our first apartment in Grandview, where I was hit by lightning the night we moved in; or in the hospital where my children were born and I was born and my mother was born; or on our last family vacation, when I packed my sadness and took it with us to the beach; or in my lawyers office, rubbing a small, sharp piece of rose quartz under the conference table; or at the end of everything that was also somehow the beginning; or in this moment, writing to you, watching fog skim the roofs of houses across the street, as if the clouds had grown tired of treading air and had let themselves sink; or, or, or

This story could begin in any of these places. Im beginning here.

I t was an unusual pinecone, the one my husband brought home from a business trip as a souvenir for our five-year-old son, Rhett. Like a small wooden grenade, I thought.

My son has always been one to collect what he calls nature treasurespinecones, acorns, stones, flowers, shells. I find them when I empty his pockets, doing the laundry. I find them in my purses and coat pockets, where hes slipped them for me to find.

This pinecone, brought home to Ohio on an airplane, sat on one of our two dining room sideboards. We bought the pair years ago to house our white wedding dishes, the ones wed registered for, because the serving platters and even the dinner plates were too large for our kitchen cabinets.

The house was built in 1925. Its periwinkle and whiteperiwinkle just like the crayon, likely an accident of paint that looked gray enough in the can. Built before central air-conditioning, the house has so many windows, and so few walls without them, we had no idea when we bought the house where we would put the couch or hang the large paintings.

There are so many windows, the house is lit naturally all day long, and you can follow the sunlight as it moves from the back of the house at sunrise to the front at sunset. There are so many windows, I couldnt bear to hang blinds or full curtain panels. With only caf curtains covering the lower halves of all the windows, my head can be seen floating from room to room at night from the street. There are so many windows, living in this house is like living in a glass display case, especially after dark. There are few places to hide.

A few weeks after my husband returned from his latest business trip, one of a few trips hed taken to the same city in recent months, something felt off. Something had shifted, maybe just slightly, but perceptibly.

One night he went to bed before me, and I stayed up late writing, sitting on the brown sectional sofa wed had to float in the middle of the living room. The leather messenger bag he carried to work was sitting in its usual spot on a dining room chair, open, its unbuckled flap hanging over the back of the chair.

Everyone was asleep in the house but me; even the dog, our brindle-and-white Boston terrier, Phoebe, was likely snoring on the couch. I call her the marble rye because of the way she looks like a dense loaf of bread when shes curled up.

Everyone was asleep, so no one was watching what I did next, but I felt watched. There are so many windows that someone walking by our house that night couldve seen me from the front walk, but that wasnt what made me feel uneasy, nearly seasick, as if Id just stepped off a boat. It was as if an omniscient narratorthe one I imagine now, the one whose knowledge I envywas watching me as I set my laptop down and walked over to the chair. I cringe to think of it nowmy hand reaching into the bag, rifling through the manila file folders and legal pads inside. I was