A facsimile of truth
07 April 2010 02:15 PM Categories: Fiction
The chamber smelled of menthol and burnt coffee. A visiting nurse had muffled the window with a wool blanket, one of Schaefer the late, great golden retriever’s favorite sleeping surfaces. Schaefer attended my mother even after his death, lent his doggy odor to the room, the memory of salt water and mud and vigor. In the corner, on a daybed, my mother reached for her book.
“You come up with the first sentence and go from there. Don’t think about it any more than that,” she told me as she looked over the tops of her reading glasses. Giving writing advice like she knew what she was talking about.
“It’s like I don’t know how to put one foot in front of the other," I replied, "like I’ve never learned how to walk, metaphorically speaking. And who am I to think I can tell a story? I should have taken up poetry.”
“Leave it to you to make poetry sound like the easy way out.”
She waved at me dismissively and returned to her biography of Virginia Woolf. I no longer recognized her hands. Sometimes I would find her staring at them, too, the swollen knuckles and liver spots, the transparent skin. We were both thinking: is this what life comes to? A brief period of expansion, of shining hair and growing strength followed by decades of shrinkage? Aging, the long great loss of looks and faculties, terrified me. Yet it was happening to me. Sometimes I thought I visited her for the contrast, for the feeling of her papery skin against my plumped cheek. I planned to off myself before I got to her age, to embody the cliché of living fast, dying (relatively) young, and leaving an attractive corpse. Except I could stand to lose forty pounds and I wasn’t sure that being a law-abiding reference librarian qualified as “living fast.”
My mother had already set up the scene. Her life had become this room, food and liquid ferried in by home health aides, a bedpan on stilts to hover over when the need arised. Twice a week Noelle gave her a sponge bath, wheeled in a basin of soapy warm water and scrubbed off the must. Some old people stop washing. It is no longer worth the effort, or maybe they don’t notice the stink. But Mother didn’t sweat. She didn’t do anything. Frequent scrubbing aggravated her sensitive skin and a daily splash of scent covered some of the rot.
She slept, briefly, book still poised in her hands. She was a talented napper, had always been able to squeeze in rest. Me, with my permanent eye-circles, my aching temples and nap frustrations, I wasn't so lucky.
Her eyelids heaved open. “I made a point of never lying to you.” Here we go again. “There were no myths about the Easter Bunny, about Santa. When you lost a tooth, we just handed over a quarter. There was no sneaking about.”
“But what about that night with Henry?”
“Oh, him.” She let out a woosh of air. “Henry was just a friend.”
This room used to be mine. The walls were semi-permeable, let the moods of the household flow in without flowing back out. Everything was pink, from the rug to the ceiling to the canopy on my bed. On the night in question, my father was away on business. It was early summer and a breeze tapped on the blinds. Max, our fat tabby, pressed himself between the slats and the screen in my window, staring at the shaking leaves. I was supposed to be asleep, lights out by nine for the nine-year-old. But the house was restless. She was restless. The doorbell rang at 9:15. Their conversation was unrelenting, words like waves, eating away at my calm, the low rumblings and crashes of talk. I smelled pipe smoke, candle wax, the clean burn of the gas fireplace. My head pounded. The mattress felt like it was resting on gravel. I waited in the dark, tossed and flipped until my sheet wrapped around me like a shroud. When I woke at 6:00 a.m., I found my mother on the couch, snoring under a thin blanket, two glasses sticky with liquor on the the coffee table.
I recorded the white lies, the outright fibs, the sins of omission, the cover-ups. All children do. I was just more canny about it. I remembered.
Henry showed up periodically for family dinners. He was tall and extremely thin and dressed in an early 70s professorial uniform, tweed jacket with arm patches, a pipe that probably contributed to his death from mouth cancer. He and my mother had met in a freshman philosophy class. I tried to picture them in 1959, fresh and young, earnest in their discussions of Nietzsche and Sartre, living the cliché of what it was to be aware and thinking in those fraught moments before the sixties, before her marriage to my father changed the game.
“So, you don’t tell a kid the story of Santa Claus and that makes you honest?”
I didn’t know why I continued these conversations.
“You know what mistake most writers make today?” Now we were back to writing.
“No, Mother. I don’t.”
“They make it too complicated. They toss too much into plot, subplot. Isn’t the reality of life enough?”
As she continued to speak, I buffered myself with lousy poetry, described and contained her in my mind.
My mother’s hands
no longer grasp
the glass of bourbon,
but instead
hold onto the memory
of things that never happened.
Totally false. She wasn’t a bourbon drinker and her memory is tight.
My mother no longer drinks coffee,
but inhales the smell
of water filtered through
roasted beans
left on the burner
until all that remains
is black sludge.
“Phoebe?”
I looked up.
“Have you heard anything I’ve been saying?”
I shook my head and excused myself from the coffin. The rest of the house was bright, every curtain open. I stepped into her old room, into the walk-in closet where my father’s clothes hung, carrying the scent of cigarettes with them. Outside it was a May Saturday haunted by ghosts of other May Saturdays, the hum of the mower and the over-green smell of freshly cut grass, the chaise lounge getting damp with my sweat. I traveled in nostalgia and every turn brought me back.
It was a curse, a narrative without ending or moral, just endless scenes and scents. I wished I could transform it into a story, into paragraphs, with twists and turns and a narrative arc, and if I failed at that, into poetry.
Henry died six years ago, alone.
When my mother and I cleaned his apartment
I found a box of photographs,
her naked in black and white,
and decades of her letters,
the last one a month before he died.
My mother used to tell me that I knew nothing about poetry, that my language was rich without structure, that I should keep a notebook of words and impressions. When it was full I was to toss it into the air, to watch the words fall and form themselves into a facsimile of truth.
Image: the dark room by ~Mongibello on deviantART.
I am trying to rid myself of the shoulds -- what I should be writing about, how I should structure my fiction. I have to let go of some ideas about length and structure and just accept the fact that I have themes that I am drawn to (family, guilt, the past as constantly present, the difficulty of connection, what it takes to be good, to be loyal, how we handle betrayal and the trampling of trust) and that borrowing from my life is ok and necessary at this point. There are risks in all of this, the most terrifying of which is the risk of writing lousy crap. But I'm hoping (and thinking) I usually write better than lousy crap. Serviceable writing is fine for now.
Oh, and this is a draft.
“You come up with the first sentence and go from there. Don’t think about it any more than that,” she told me as she looked over the tops of her reading glasses. Giving writing advice like she knew what she was talking about.
“It’s like I don’t know how to put one foot in front of the other," I replied, "like I’ve never learned how to walk, metaphorically speaking. And who am I to think I can tell a story? I should have taken up poetry.”
“Leave it to you to make poetry sound like the easy way out.”
She waved at me dismissively and returned to her biography of Virginia Woolf. I no longer recognized her hands. Sometimes I would find her staring at them, too, the swollen knuckles and liver spots, the transparent skin. We were both thinking: is this what life comes to? A brief period of expansion, of shining hair and growing strength followed by decades of shrinkage? Aging, the long great loss of looks and faculties, terrified me. Yet it was happening to me. Sometimes I thought I visited her for the contrast, for the feeling of her papery skin against my plumped cheek. I planned to off myself before I got to her age, to embody the cliché of living fast, dying (relatively) young, and leaving an attractive corpse. Except I could stand to lose forty pounds and I wasn’t sure that being a law-abiding reference librarian qualified as “living fast.”
My mother had already set up the scene. Her life had become this room, food and liquid ferried in by home health aides, a bedpan on stilts to hover over when the need arised. Twice a week Noelle gave her a sponge bath, wheeled in a basin of soapy warm water and scrubbed off the must. Some old people stop washing. It is no longer worth the effort, or maybe they don’t notice the stink. But Mother didn’t sweat. She didn’t do anything. Frequent scrubbing aggravated her sensitive skin and a daily splash of scent covered some of the rot.
She slept, briefly, book still poised in her hands. She was a talented napper, had always been able to squeeze in rest. Me, with my permanent eye-circles, my aching temples and nap frustrations, I wasn't so lucky.
Her eyelids heaved open. “I made a point of never lying to you.” Here we go again. “There were no myths about the Easter Bunny, about Santa. When you lost a tooth, we just handed over a quarter. There was no sneaking about.”
“But what about that night with Henry?”
“Oh, him.” She let out a woosh of air. “Henry was just a friend.”
This room used to be mine. The walls were semi-permeable, let the moods of the household flow in without flowing back out. Everything was pink, from the rug to the ceiling to the canopy on my bed. On the night in question, my father was away on business. It was early summer and a breeze tapped on the blinds. Max, our fat tabby, pressed himself between the slats and the screen in my window, staring at the shaking leaves. I was supposed to be asleep, lights out by nine for the nine-year-old. But the house was restless. She was restless. The doorbell rang at 9:15. Their conversation was unrelenting, words like waves, eating away at my calm, the low rumblings and crashes of talk. I smelled pipe smoke, candle wax, the clean burn of the gas fireplace. My head pounded. The mattress felt like it was resting on gravel. I waited in the dark, tossed and flipped until my sheet wrapped around me like a shroud. When I woke at 6:00 a.m., I found my mother on the couch, snoring under a thin blanket, two glasses sticky with liquor on the the coffee table.
I recorded the white lies, the outright fibs, the sins of omission, the cover-ups. All children do. I was just more canny about it. I remembered.
Henry showed up periodically for family dinners. He was tall and extremely thin and dressed in an early 70s professorial uniform, tweed jacket with arm patches, a pipe that probably contributed to his death from mouth cancer. He and my mother had met in a freshman philosophy class. I tried to picture them in 1959, fresh and young, earnest in their discussions of Nietzsche and Sartre, living the cliché of what it was to be aware and thinking in those fraught moments before the sixties, before her marriage to my father changed the game.
“So, you don’t tell a kid the story of Santa Claus and that makes you honest?”
I didn’t know why I continued these conversations.
“You know what mistake most writers make today?” Now we were back to writing.
“No, Mother. I don’t.”
“They make it too complicated. They toss too much into plot, subplot. Isn’t the reality of life enough?”
As she continued to speak, I buffered myself with lousy poetry, described and contained her in my mind.
My mother’s hands
no longer grasp
the glass of bourbon,
but instead
hold onto the memory
of things that never happened.
Totally false. She wasn’t a bourbon drinker and her memory is tight.
My mother no longer drinks coffee,
but inhales the smell
of water filtered through
roasted beans
left on the burner
until all that remains
is black sludge.
“Phoebe?”
I looked up.
“Have you heard anything I’ve been saying?”
I shook my head and excused myself from the coffin. The rest of the house was bright, every curtain open. I stepped into her old room, into the walk-in closet where my father’s clothes hung, carrying the scent of cigarettes with them. Outside it was a May Saturday haunted by ghosts of other May Saturdays, the hum of the mower and the over-green smell of freshly cut grass, the chaise lounge getting damp with my sweat. I traveled in nostalgia and every turn brought me back.
It was a curse, a narrative without ending or moral, just endless scenes and scents. I wished I could transform it into a story, into paragraphs, with twists and turns and a narrative arc, and if I failed at that, into poetry.
Henry died six years ago, alone.
When my mother and I cleaned his apartment
I found a box of photographs,
her naked in black and white,
and decades of her letters,
the last one a month before he died.
My mother used to tell me that I knew nothing about poetry, that my language was rich without structure, that I should keep a notebook of words and impressions. When it was full I was to toss it into the air, to watch the words fall and form themselves into a facsimile of truth.
Image: the dark room by ~Mongibello on deviantART.
I am trying to rid myself of the shoulds -- what I should be writing about, how I should structure my fiction. I have to let go of some ideas about length and structure and just accept the fact that I have themes that I am drawn to (family, guilt, the past as constantly present, the difficulty of connection, what it takes to be good, to be loyal, how we handle betrayal and the trampling of trust) and that borrowing from my life is ok and necessary at this point. There are risks in all of this, the most terrifying of which is the risk of writing lousy crap. But I'm hoping (and thinking) I usually write better than lousy crap. Serviceable writing is fine for now.
Oh, and this is a draft.
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