INDEPENDENCE

Summer reminds me of Carson McCullers.

Odd, because I scarcely remember when I read her books, or where, much less the season.

I recall hearing about "The Member of the Wedding" from my sister. I think she wrote a book report on it in high school, probably because it's short. I remember thinking it was a romance novel and not reading it. Then I read "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe." A friend of mine, on whom I had more than a little crush, loaned it to me along with some other books — Andre Breton's "Nadja," Albert Camus' "The Stranger," "The Philosophy of Andy Warhol," and a book that, for lack of a better cliche, changed my life: "Le Grand Meaulnes" by Alain-Fournier, the French J.D. Salinger, who was killed in World War I.

These books are all fantastic, but when you read them under the spell of infatuation, they are magical.

And that's how I conceived of Carson McCullers, as magical. After "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe," I ended up reading all of her books and short stories, some more than once. I must have been in my late teens when I read "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter," because it didn't impress me much that she wrote the novel when she was 22. Now, of course, I can't fathom it.

I read her "Reflections in a Golden Eye" sometime in college. Whenever I think of it now, I can think only of the bleak Marlon Brandon/Elizabeth Taylor movie of the same name. And I always get it confused with the Elizabeth Taylor movie "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" It's the same 1960s how-did-my-marriage-come-to-this? aesthetic.

I read a few of McCullers' short stories for college classes, and the rest later.

It was a long time ago. But all her writing has stayed with me — not as precisely remembered plots but as a feeling of melancholy that one might associate with autumn.

But she is a Southern writer. Like Flannery O'Connor. Eudora Welty. Harper Lee. Truman Capote. In the South, summer is the season of mellow fruitfulness. Not fall.

Summer is when all the marvelous children peopling these great Gothic novels sit around the kitchen table and yearn for something to happen.

And nothing ever does.

And that's the story.

And the tone is inevitably nostalgic. For nothing.

Oh sure, things happen. People get lynched. Neighbors feud. Flies buzz.

But mostly someone comes of age. Imperceptibly. Unassisted. Irretrievably.

And the poetry is always in the retelling, not the happening. As with the South itself.

As George and I were meandering through central Kansas last week, we came upon a sight that could have been in a McCullers novel because it was so striking and yet, in its own context, unremarkable. An older couple sitting in yellow metal chairs in the meager shade of their tiny house. It was 106 degrees, the middle of the afternoon. They waved at cars as they passed on the highway. We surmised that maybe their air conditioner was broken, or maybe they didn't have an air conditioner. Maybe this is how they kept cool, how they socialized. Maybe they spent the whole summer this way, like McCullers' characters: Frankie and Berenice and John Henry, sitting around the kitchen table, "saying the same things over and over, so that by August the words began to rhyme with each other and sound strange."

Or maybe the scene had nothing to do with their way of life. Maybe they were just taking a break from weeding the yard. Maybe they'd go out on the town later.

Something else that recently reminded me of summer and Carson McCullers: Neko Case's new song "Star Witness," which I've listened to a hundred times, partly because the refrain has a curious sexual rhythm — not like routine adult sex but like sex before you knew what it was like, sex as you imagined it as a teenager: enchanted.

But mostly I listen to it for the lyrics leading up to the enchantment, which are about a little girl tripping on the sidewalk where tree roots have sundered it, like nature reclaiming civilization. The kid's pocket change falls out.

Trees break the sidewalk
And the sidewalk skins my knees
There's glass in my thermos
And blood on my jeans
Nickels and dimes of the Fourth of July
Roll off in a crooked line
To the chain-link lots where the red tails dive
Oh how I forgot what it's like

It's something McCullers would have seen significance in. A moment dense with meaning. Decaying order. Shattered glass. The weird freedom of summer, a sweet liberty constrained by thick boredom. Independence Day. Money. Blood. Birds who could fly anywhere but stay.

The difference between Neko Case and Carson McCullers is that McCullers would never have written "Oh how I forgot what it's like."

Because — this must have been her gift and her curse — she would never have forgotten what anything was like.