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.

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.