Stella, In the Upstairs Room

Stella, In the Upstairs Room Karen Salyer Mcelmurray (bio) A story passed down to me from my mother's people was about a woman named Stella. During the 1930s, Stella, it was said, lived in an upstairs room at a brother's and never left the house. The historical facts are vague. She was a distant cousin of mine, or a great-aunt, and her sequestered life was in Dwale, Kentucky. I imagine her with long, [End Page 90] copper-colored hair, a braid winding down her back. She loved the garden below her window, its sunflowers and ripe tomatoes. I think of her alone in her room with bisque-faced dolls for whom she crocheted dresses, and the fine handiwork she might have done—pillowcases with initials and roses. I do know that she never married, a thing summed up both acceptably and unacceptably in the phrase maiden lady. What I heard most often about Stella concerned her strangeness. Odd-turned. Not right in the head. The Stella-stories were tinged with secrecy, and though I searched family history books I was never able to find out very much about her. At one point, I wrote a short story about Stella. The entirety of the story takes place on one day, when she is completely alone in the house. The action is her making her way downstairs and out to the front porch, where she sits listening to the chilly fall wind from the mountains. She sings a song I made up and put in her mouth. The wind blows down, the wind blows back, the wind blows cold and that's a fact. In a later version of the story, I gave Stella a small bell which she threaded onto a piece of twine and hung from the porch rafters, so she could hear it even when she went back to her upstairs room. The real Stella passed through the rips and tears in collective memory. I'm not sure if she was a Gray or a Calhoun, and I think, but I am not sure, that she was my grandfather's aunt. I have no one to ask about her history, especially now that most of my ancestors are gone. This much I know must have been true. Glass, back then, wasn't exactly clear. Panes had odd waves and imperfections. Looking into an upstairs window from the yard, you must have seen only an impression, almost a ghost of a woman. Looking out through that beveled glass, Stella would have seen a subdued world, a hushed brilliance that passed as light. [End Page 91] ______ As a writer of memoir and personal essays, I've often confronted the question of what should or should not be told when it comes to writing truth. When writing a memoir about surrendering a child to adoption, more than one family member suggested that the story would better written as a novel. I've many times heard criticism of my propensity to tell raw stories, ones that explore what happened, when, and why. During a recent trip back to Kentucky, a dear friend encouraged me to write a novel about my time in Greece many years ago. Your kin must feel threatened, she said. You've told so many of their secrets. Why not write fiction instead? I have written secrets, many of them belonging to my family of origin and to my ancestors. I've written about the truths that have been swept into corners, under rugs. The ends of marriages. Infidelity and reckless desire. I've explored pain, both my own and those that must have been inside the hearts of my kin. I've spoken my own history; I've given voice to other unspoken histories that have included mental illnesses. Schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder. Are these stories a betrayal? Are they exploitation? I acknowledge that I've written hard truths, but my hope has been that the telling will provide answers. What does it mean, I've asked my pages again and again, to come from the center of a labyrinth and find one's way out? ______ Secrets fed me when I was

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