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This week, we offer a third essay by Brenda Miller, in which
she skillfully uses an chance meeting to draw a metaphor that allows her to
more deeply reflect upon herself as a writer. Again, the weaving of the outer
world with the inner world yields a rich essay and a transformative experience.
Decoys
by Brenda Miller
The other day I rented a car from Enterprise, and good to their word, they sent
a car to pick me up. The driver, Stan, was nearly deaf -- I had to repeat
everything I said to him at least twice -- and he spoke in a gravelly southern
accent that turned everything in his mouth the texture of fine cornmeal
pudding. But he had bright blue eyes and a friendly smile, and he wanted to
know all about me.
"I'm an artist myself," he said. He makes wooden decoys, and came in
third in the Decoy World Championships last year. It takes him 18 months to
make a competition duck, as compared to five days to make a duck he could sell
in a general store; the average person, he said, wouldn't be able to tell the
difference. But still, the experts know. And he knows. It's all in the detail. I pictured Stan at his workbench,
the block of wood transforming bit by bit into a duck under his hands as he carves
out the pinfeathers and the suggestion of down; I imagine he even captures, in
the duck's eye, a hint of the reflection of the pond in which he floats.
These competition decoys, I suspect, never do feel the cold slap of pond water,
never submit themselves to the real
experts: the ducks, themselves, the Mallards who fly overhead, always wary, but
always ready to be enticed to come chat with a newcomer where he bobs in duck
heaven, mute, with everything but a duck's voice to call the rest of his kind
to his side. No, these competition decoys might be too beautiful for the
workaday world, too pure; they're meant to be put on a shelf, stroked by human
hands, unsullied by the weathering forces of marsh and wind.
But still, I wonder if Stan ever longs for the decoy so real it actually becomes a duck? No mere depiction, but
every line so authentic the decoy can't help but transform? Whenever I remember
the Pinocchio story I always get it wrong: I think it's the wooden boy,
himself, who longs to morph into a real boy, to have a human boy's skin and
eyes. But no, it's the wood-carver who wants it, Giuseppe, his desire for a
child so strong and so pure the angels relent and give his wooden child flesh
and blood. But it all comes with a price, doesn't it? Once the representation
becomes real it starts lying and running off, and you have to go out in the
dark, roaming the streets, your hands cupped to your mouth, shouting
"Pinocchiooooooo! Pinocchiooooooo!"
****
I'm renting the car to take a break from weeks of intensive writing, the kind
of writing where I'm hunched over a workbench, shoulders aching as I craft the
glint in someone's eye, the exact quality of light through a window. I'm
carving out the Seattle skyline, or a clump of cherries dripping with rain. And
often when I'm writing like this, so immersed in detail, I wonder why I spend
so much time reconstructing memory
rather than just letting a memory fade as it will, letting a life unfold as it
does, with all its messiness, its refusal to conform to art's beautiful lines.
I wonder if I, too, am crafting with terrible precision a decoy: something that
looks pretty, but is really a trick: a way to avoid life rather than immerse
myself in all its contradictions. I wonder if I am swimming among a fleet of
imposters, pecking at them with my beak.
But, of course, they are real, in
their own crafty way; still often I have to come up for air, take a break from
this world of appearances. When we get to the Enterprise office, I ask Stan if
he has any of his decoys there for me to see, but alas, no. I get a free
upgrade, though, to a full-size sedan, which is almost as good, and I drive
away, duckless, into the perfect autumn day, sunlight gleaming off every real
autumn leaf, red flashes of real cardinals along the fence, my borrowed car
nosing along the highway, so clearly a real car, and me inside it, new memories
already on the way. . . .
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