Helena Clare Pittman, one of the Center’s most dedicated teachers, has written, painted, and taught her entire life. In her monthly Helena Writes series, she shares a lifetime of wisdom, one pearl at a time.
In her 56th post, Helena shares an exercise on building characters, along with memories of her beloved sister. Enjoy!
Alone on a train: A writing exercise
Here is a character exercise, or more accurately, a practice. It applies to anything I may write, memoir or fiction.
I may have, at some time, seen someone sitting alone on a train.
I was that person, when I was in my teens and early twenties—riding on the New York City subways to commute to school. There may have been one other person in the car besides me. Or, if not, I would walk through the cars and sit in the engineer’s car, the car where the conductor sat. It was too spooky to be alone in a train car. It spooked my imagination. Crime was very rarely heard of, even in Lower Brooklyn, then called Bedford Stuyvesant. Riding the subway home late at night was not anything I thought much about. I read, or more often, drew in my sketch book.
But let’s remember, or imagine, a person sitting alone on a train.
What would they look like?
How are they dressed?
What is their mood, as indicated, let’s say, by their body language?
Is their clothing rumpled?
Is it torn? Is it neat? Clean? Is it pressed?
Are they meeting someone? Who would that be?
If you had the time and freedom to really look at this person on that train, without intruding, let’s say in a dream, on a theatre stage, or in your mind’s eye, you could look closely, concentrate on that human figure. You could read them.
What is their situation? What are their circumstances? Are they homeless? Are they commuting? Where are they coming from? Where are they headed? What is on their heart? Their mind? What are they struggling with?
When I look at a stranger, they may seem opaque. There is too much tension in me, in them, to stop and allow my curiosity, my intuition, to wander, to take a deep picture of the person I am seeing, talking to, passing in the street, sitting across from in a moving train. It would be, I think, impolite. It’s natural not to prolong a look, natural not to stare. Yet later, I find their image has been recorded in my memory. I can now turn my eyes to them, really look at that person, maybe sitting across from me. And I can ask those questions, I can probe my impression, I can see. I can begin to take in what I saw, imagine a life, an extension of my reading of that other human presence.
I can wonder, do they have a consciousness of themselves? Are they connected to a sense of self? Is it sharp and keen and practiced over many years? Or are they fogged out, beyond their own reach? Is some sight of who they are more within my reach than it seems to be within their own?
Where will they go home to? Do they have joys? Momentary joys? Prolonged joys? A foundation of joy? Do they have sorrows? A dominant sorrow?
A character appears, someone I can get to know, in that enchanted space between myself and the written word, the page.
I see my sister, Jolene, on that train.
**
I am looking at a photograph taken by my father. It has to be taken by him because he isn’t in it. And because he wore a camera around his neck. Sometimes two cameras. One for still pictures, and one for moving pictures, sixteen-millimeter moving pictures. My father isn’t a photographer like his friend Dan—Dan had a studio, a dark room. Dan was an artist. My father was a recorder of life.
There is my sister, and there I am in my carriage. I am toothless, grinning, looking at my father, covered in a thin, light-colored blanket. My sister is wearing a plaid dress and Mary Jane buckle-up shoes. She’s looking at my father, too. Unmitigated adoration lights her face. Maybe he was doing something silly, to get us to smile, so fully from our hearts. My father was an adult who could be silly without losing his hard won adult composure. He had an instinct for children. I am reading him, he had to be in touch with the child that still lived inside him. That’s why children, and everyone else, loved my father.
Of course my sister adores my father—he was good of soul, good of mind, intelligent. Imagine silliness that comes from such a man. That perception of goodness and intelligence had to be operational in my four-year-old sister. She was as intelligent as he. Later, her IQ would test 172. I can’t imagine what my father’s IQ would have been, or his father, Joe Prezant’s, our paternal grandfather who died before my sister and I were born. My cousin Stanley told me this: “Your father was brilliant, yes—but his father…” leaving to me something only my heart, my imagination, could make something of. There were a number of such intelligent people in my family, including Stanley.
**
I don’t know anything at all about the first three and a half years of my sister’s childhood. But two things came to me, spoken by someone. Here’s the first: When I was an infant, one of my parents found my sister trying to smother me with a pillow. I was in my carriage in my parents’ bedroom sleeping. Then my father latched the door with a hook and eye, screwed high up, too high for my sister to reach.
Anger, sorrow, guilt. That’s what goes with displacement, unimaginable just the year before. A first child displaced by the second. I wonder if my parents understood anything of that natural pain, that mix of love and hatred—if they tried to help her with it. My parents were good people. But they had parented their immigrant parents and I don’t see that they had any concept of what we would recognize now as good parenting. My father had a great heart. My sister and my father had to have had an affinity—that look on her face—their love still intact.
There is a scar I can feel now under my chin. The other thing I came to learn was this: My sister dropped me on a tin can. I needed stitches. I’d forgotten that scar. The place under my chin was smoother when I last sought the scar with my fingers. I can remember how that three-quarter inch scar felt when I was in the fourth grade, then fifth and sixth grades, when I entered into scar-showing competitions with classmates. My chin must have bled profusely. It must have been terrible for my parents and for my sister. We were in the country. They had to rush me to a hospital. I have never been able to remember the moment. Imagine how my sister felt. And what did my parents harbor? It had to have scarred us all. An emblem in the life of a family.
**
My sister was fierce, fixed. Taurus. I can’t bear to imagine the shock and sorrow she wove into herself after my father’s love divided to encompass both of us. A story of siblings in a world of trauma—and grace. It became self-rejection—I carried it with her, wove into myself the feeling of being responsible. I was the object of her passionate love, and her passionate hatred. My poor father wept when, in adolescence, my sister took her revenge and moved out, disconnected from my parents.
**
My sister was a beautiful child. Graceful, with a kind of nobility. Her face seemed marked—someone destined to be known by the world. She seemed to have a knowing of who she was at two, at three, at four and five. At seven, already an athlete, posing for Dan’s camera with her tennis racket. In the photos, she’s wearing dark shorts with overall straps and a white t-shirt. She’s photogenic, green-eyed, looks straight at the camera, her face open, her mouth distinctive in the way her lips come together. She was someone. As she grew, she was willowy, long in the torso, narrow in the waist; like my mother, she emanated grace and mystery. She died at fifty-three, the age when a beautiful woman can look as if she is in her twenties or thirties.
**
My sister saw herself as ugly. I felt for her, carried that burden with her. We laughed about the things she’d imagined she’d heard someone say about her. Impossible things that at heart she knew she hadn’t heard, but which haunted her. Her twist on things, her sense of humor, was god-like, the way Sid Caesar’s was god-like. She was the funniest person I knew. We ached with laughing.
My sister was a writer the way I was an artist. She was politically passionate long before I was aware of the existence of politics. My sister’s passion was too big for our small apartment in Queens. Of course, she had to leave. But not before she went to Queens College and found her life’s work—rescuing animals. She began the animal shelter at Queens, still there, and went on to get her law degree. Marginalized then, animal law was coalescing around a growing number of people who recognized animal sentience.
The lone figure on the train is Jolene, my sister. Of course it is she. She’s coming from her office. It’s late. Her Esprit bag is resting on the seat next to her. She’s exhausted, slumped over pages she’s turning, a legal brief. She was a litigator, she was tough—for another little while. But I see. She’s had enough, the hard shell is cracking. She needs to pass the torch. That heart that loved my father is pulling at her. She’s ill, but it hasn’t yet manifested as cancer.
When it did, we drew close, and I walked with her, slowly, to the threshold. She’d come to peace. She told me she’d finally understood what she had accomplished. She said our parents were waiting.
She’d made her mark on the world.
When she left, I watched the years melt away. She looked young. There was a smile that remained on her face.
Her heart was sprouting new green. She was going home.
Will you try this exercise in character development? What did you think of Helena’s latest post? Share with us in the comments.
Related reading: Helena Writes
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