work by Tillie Olsen
(I’ve loved Tillie Olsen’s work for a long time. When I was 18 I had a chance to hear her read in person- I went to the train stop, stood there, then turned around to go home before the train came. I didn’t want to be around people right then. I will always regret going home. I never saw her in person. She died in 2007.)
Excerpts from I STAND HERE IRONING, 1953-1954
I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves me tormented back and forth with the iron.
“I wish you would manage the time to come in and talk with me about your daughter. I’m sure you can help me understand her. She’s a youngster who needs help and whom I’m deeply interested in helping.”
“Who needs help.” … Even if I came, what good would it do? You think because I am her mother I have a key, or that in some way you could use me as a key? She has lived for nineteen years. There is all that life that has happened outside of me, beyond me. And when there is time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total? I will start and there will be an interruption and I will have to gather it all together again.
and more
Ronnie is calling. He is wet and I change him. It is rare that there is such a cry now. That time of motherhood is almost behind me when the ear is not one’s own but must always be racked and listening for the child cry, the child call.
more
“Aren’t you ever going to finish the ironing, Mother? Whistler painted his mother in a rocker. I’d have to paint mine standing over an ironing board.” This is one of her communicative nights and she tells me everything and nothing as she fixes herself a plate of food out of the icebox.
bit more
I will never total it all. I will never come in to say: She was a child seldom smiled at. Her father left me before she was a year old. … My wisdom came too late. She has much to her and probably little will come of it. …
Let her be. So that all that is in her will not bloom–but in how many does it? There is still enough left to live by. Only help her to know–help make it so there is cause for her to know–that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron.
1953-1954
Tille Olsen amazed me from the beginning.
