Elizabeth Berg’s novel, “What We Keep,” opens with a woman on a flight to California to see someone she has not seen for thirty-five years: her mother. That circumstance reminded me of a woman with whom I had worked. I remembered a post on her Facebook page saying that she was going to visit her mother, whom she had not seen in 32 years. After reading Berg’s novel, I wrote a note to that friend, saying that I had thought of her while I read it. I also told her of the woman with the secret smile.
On my walk to work some years ago, I would frequently pass a woman whose face always showed a small smile. It did not seem to be a smile of recognition or acknowledgement; it was just a smile. I looked forward to seeing her (though the smile is all that I can remember of her today: no other details, no height, weight, depth, breadth). I imagined that the source of the smile was an inner joy too great to be contained, and the smile was leakage. In my mind, I created small stories and circumstances about her that gave birth to that smile. I made no attempt to get to know her and I doubt that she was even marginally aware of me. I was content to accept the unoffered gift, secretly stealing the delight from her face.
When I was a student at Indiana University, the manuscript I submitted to get an invitation to attend a writer’s conference was accepted. At the time, I thought that I might like to focus my writing on children’s literature, so my manuscript was a “kiddie-lit” story. I was invited to attend, but I also joined discussion groups that focused on adult fiction. At one of those “break-out” sessions, participants were directed to make copies of a story that was then distributed to the other attendees. A woman who was also in the “kiddie-lit” group with me suggested that I write a novel, saying that it was already partially written.
“The characters in your children’s story are the same as in the adult fiction,” she told me. She figured that out, despite the fact the characters had different names in the two stories. But of course, the stories were drawn from the life I lived. (I wonder if she figured that out, too, and what she thought of the illegal activity I wrote about.)
Our lives do not become stories until either we write them, or someone else does. A 35-year disconnection from one’s mother seems improbable, but Berg’s novel in some ways mirrors the life lived by my friend. The reunions had different results, but I know which of the events is real. I told my friend that I did not want to know the “who-what-where-when-why” of her disconnection and re-connection with her mother: I like the “mystery” of mysteries. But she is a writer, and if (or when) a story is written, I will buy it.
I will never know the life and story behind the curve of that mystery woman’s mouth; if it has been written, I’ve not seen it. But whatever forced that joy – and I want it to have been joy – to the surface of her face, I am the beneficiary. She is part of the life that I lived, and the story I tell of it. I saw the smile and was pleased, and she passed on to me her secret joy, the source of which may never be known, but whose memory still warms me.