Grace (Paley) and Faith

what we do today is what we leave behind; saving each other and saving ourselves

“Another Day,” Beth Kephart, multi-media collage

She’d be with us, marching. She’d be standing at the prison gate saying no to the cruelty of cages, the injustice and indignity, the inhumanity. She’d be making all five feet of herself as tall—no, taller—than the nearly 900 pages of a reconciliation bill. She’d be serving us a bowl of soup or a stark cup of coffee, soothing our very broken hearts, urging us to keep going forward, again, to keep hoping, again, to take care of one another. Now. Always.

Grace Paley published three collections of short stories, a number of poetry collections, and nonfiction. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, a Guggenheim winner, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a teacher—but she was also, she might have said she was mainly, the daughter of immigrant parents (Ukraine), a protestor of war, a feminist, an advocate for social justice, a co-founder of the Greenwich Village Peace Center, and a thorn in the side of police who were not keen, let’s say, on those who would stride across the White House lawn to unfurl an anti-nuclear banner.

I met her only once, and briefly. It was Bread Loaf, mid 1990s. I was standing beside one of my early, only teachers, Jayne Anne Phillips, and there Grace was, in the near distance. “Come,” Jayne Anne said. “You have to meet her.” And so there I was, being introduced to this stout (her word), iconic (not her word) tour de force, just as the conference week was closing.

Distracted by her halo hair.

Seduced forever by her smile.

Lately I’ve been re-reading Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Paley’s second story collection, published in 1974, a full 15 years after the release of her first collection. (She’d been busy living in the meantime.) I’ve been wanting to thrum this vapor space with her best lines, but I’d be breaking all the copyright rules, air-quilting page upon page.

I would share entire paragraphs, and whisper, Look: Simile more powerful for its unsweetening. Description becoming action. Humor as pathos:

He had had a habit throughout the twenty-seven years of making a narrow remark which, like a plumber’s snake, could work its way through the ear down the throat, halfway to my heart. He would then disappear, leaving me choking with equipment. What I mean is, I sat down on the library steps and he went away. (“Wants”)

I would isolate single sentences that emerge from the talk and twists, the neighborhood scenes, the preposterous and the crushing, with the preamble, A story (our lives) must have meaning:

Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life. ("A Conversation with My Father”)

I would offer up Grace’s instructions on craft, because she offers her instructions on craft right in the middle of her multi-story stories:

“Well, you just have to let the story lie around till some agreement can be reached between you and the stubborn hero.” ("A Conversation with My Father”)

I would uphold us all the way Grace Paley, speaking at times through her alter ego, Faith, would most surely uphold us. I would remind us, because Grace and Faith remind us, that what we do today is what we leave behind. What we fight for is more our legacy than any pretty sentence:

As for you, fellow independent thinker of the Western Bloc, if you have anything sensible to say, don’t wait. Shout it out loud right this minute. In twenty years, give or take a spring, your grandchildren will be lying in sandboxes all over the world, their ears to the ground, listening for signals from long ago. (“Faith in the Afternoon”)

“I don’t feel like I have anything to say,” Jan Heller Levi once told his Sarah Lawrence advisor, Grace Paley. “Of course you do,” she answered. “You just think you don’t have anyone to say it to. Say it to me.”

Whether she was making fiction of her life or making fiction for our lives, Grace Paley was adamant. Don’t give up on love. Don’t give in to power. Don’t worry your hair, your clothes, your name. Do not go silent. Do what you must to save each other. That is how you save yourself.