Cracked yard
I just can’t be bothered to focus on a lawn. It’s hard enough to keep the real plants watered, which is why our two backyard tomato plants – which are actually producing ripe tomatoes before October, a first for my Berkeley garden – are a little dry and why the pumpkin plant – the Jackie Littles my son calls them – has only two pumpkins on it. The cucumber withered, too, a victim of not-frequent-enough watering.
My mother’s father was a keeper of lawns, a cutter of grass. He had a John Deere tractor with a mower attachment and made neat little rows, patterns in the green. He maintained the park grounds by the beach on the Elk River once or twice a week, too, rode the tractor down the road and let it rip around the trees and across the shuffleboard court. I associate him with the bright scent of freshly cut grass (the clumps of it falling off the underside of the mower) and of sweat and sawdust and coffee and cigarettes. The mower’s high pitched growl-whine was a constant summer feature. I turned up the air conditioning and the sound on my TV set in the Little House as the old man whipped noisily around the yard.
My mother kept her yard unmown. It was a meadow in progress, with wildflowers and hopes of beauty, of goldfinches glinting in the summer afternoons and rabbits hiding in the tall grass.
People at Hollywood Beach liked everything tidy, the grass groomed and plants trimmed. Mom’s next-door neighbors, the ones with the Doberman named Babe who snapped at me from the end of her leash, called her yard a shithouse, a comment that was the source of much amusement to us. All my friends mistakenly thought she had burned her brains out in the sixties, that this was just another sign of her hippie hangover when it turned out that she just needed a bit of the wild, a place to stand. There were candlelit discussions with K about yards and the bourgeoisie and money, the way people needed to control with cutters and poisons, the vast expanse of green groomed for croquet and badminton.
A yard wasn’t simply a yard and a silence was always in judgment. There was no way to win between them, so we took our punishment as it was meted.
From the prompt "The lawn."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I've worked with this one a bit, to no avail.
Image of Big Skully in my backyard by me. I don't think the boy was making a commentary on the state of the lawn when he propped the skeleton up on a stick and stuck the stick in a crack in the dirt. He just needed evidence that there were once vicious cyclops in Berkeley.
Last night, verging on sleep
When we wake up in the morning (he thought), it's the first task that lies ahead of us: the separation of the true from the false. We have to dismiss, to erase the mocking kingdoms made by sleep. But at the close of the day it was the other way round, and we sought the untrue and the fictitious, sometimes snapping ourselves awake in our hunger for nonsensical connections. Martin Amis, The Pregnant Widow
Here's an experiment: me sitting at my desk, hot water on one side (in the Advertising Age mug my mother got for me when I was twelve: JENNIFER CASEY WINS "MARKETING GENIUS" AWARD it reads), smoldering cigarette on the other. Hold on while I set it up.
OK. My ashtray is a cat food bowl. I've got the kitchen matches. My water is freshly heated. Here we go. Yes, I am smoking in the house. I tried this on Saturday (outside) and it didn't go over well. Today it's easier. But disgusting. How does the cigarette stay lit? Chemicals and tobacco technology, I guess. The trails of smoke make me think of my grandparents, the ubiquitous cigarettes in beanbag ashtrays, the stink, the smell of coffee and burning, my grandfather's hacks in the bathroom trash can.
It's the exhale that's the worst, that weird feeling of dryness in the throat. Sip of hot water, please. Ah, the light head rush. I should be outside on a gray Delaware day in January, my back against a brick wall, hanging out with the stoners by the dumpsters, the boys with their stringy hair and the girls with their poufs, some guy in a acid-washed jean jacket asking me for a "cancer stick." Am I really wearing a letter jacket? Is someone quoting from Frankie Goes to Hollywood? What decade is this, anyway?
The cigarette, half-finished, is now extinguished. The cat food bowl has burn marks on it. I have returned the pack to its hiding place behind the envelopes in my desk.
But what about the quote at the top of this post?
I've been waking up in the middle of the night again, wide-eyed in that space between the close and opening of day, trying to sort out the true from the false, the real from the unreal. One a.m., two a.m., three a.m.: these are the most desperate lonely times when thoughts refuse to be corralled. After tossing around a bit last night, I got out of bed around 2:45. I walked downstairs in the dark with my faithful feline companions, did the usual Facebook thing. I responded to my partner's Round Robin write and tackled today's prompt, which was Last night, verging on sleep ...
Last night, verging on sleep, I closed my book, The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis (after taking a break from it, I've picked it up again). I was tired but my body was unsettled and I had a feeling that I would be up, would be crouched over my little screen or tapping away at the iPhone at some obscene hour. The best thing for insomnia is to stay away from screens of any sort, to grab a book or a magazine and read in some relatively low-lit place until sleep overtakes you. But the screens are too tempting sometimes.
Insomnia is boring and insomniacs are dullards, their minds fried by too little sleep, their anxieties focused on what will happen in the middle of the night, the flip flop, the ceiling stare, the wandering mind. My last knock-down, drag-out with insomnia lasted months and was a byproduct of underlying life issues. And it went away. The insomnia went away.
The bitch may be back, but I still eventually returned to bed. I wedged myself between my son and the edge. I warmed myself against him. When we woke up this morning, both of us still trying to separate the true from the false, to wipe the dreams clear with daylight, he said, "Mom, tell me about when you were a kid."
I'm glad he didn't ask at night, when all I could give him would be sad half-truths, the bad bits. Instead, I left those out. I talked of the days when my mother and I lived in Hollywood Beach and had four cats, two birds, two rabbits, a dog, and a gerbil. I talked about the hamster my grandmother gave me, Happy Easter, and how I would make him squeeze through the smallest apertures possible. I talked about the time Liz had kittens in a bureau drawer, how they were orange tabbies. "Orange? Like my favorite color?" he asked.
But the best part was telling him about the tents I used to make in the backyard, four blankets pinned to a clothesline, a quilt for a floor. I spent half my summer nights out there, alone or with friends, reading by flashlight, letting the dampness of the night cover my sleeping bag. In the morning, I'd wake up to a dewy world. Inside, pancakes awaited, delivered to the table by my mother as my grandfather sat in the living room in a cloud of smoke.
The cigarettes remind me. It all feels so very long ago. The memory is washed out like an old photograph, part of it has burned away, and I choose to focus on the good, the stars above the yard, the safety in the dark, the old man in his wood shop working the lathe, a Pall Mall dangling from his thin lips, lost in the dust and the ash and the smoke, occupied for the moment. Real as anything.
Image: Still life with cancer stick.
Most of the memories I told the boy this morning come from a time that I would describe as being one of the worst in my childhood, when we moved in with my grandfather after my grandmother's death. It's refreshing to remember the good stuff, a reminder that life is all mixed up.
Some of this is from the prompt mentioned.
Head rush
Over time, we were told, that rush would go away and the cigarettes would become necessary, essential to the stressful moment, the celebration, the first thing we would think about in the morning. I heard my grandfather’s hacking coughs into the bathroom wastebasket, saw the dark strings of mucus he left behind. But addiction was something that happened to old people, was part of the alchemy of time and experience and maybe even a matter of strength of character. We would be fine.
Despite my best efforts, cigarettes weren’t for me. Though I loved the romance of them, the way I could court death and look rebellious simultaneously, I smoked for less than a year. Cigarettes made me sick. Even cloves, with their thick, exotic scent, the smoke like a veil over my hands and face, made my stomach lurch. Unlike most of my friends, I couldn’t even smoke when I was drunk. The combination of blurry booze and acrid cigarette only intensified the nausea.
But everyone around me smoked. There were smoke-fogged bars with their odor of stale beer, my roommate letting the smoke rise from her open window, the clouds of pot smoke in the parking lot and the bathroom, the cigarette-scented air of my grandfather’s car, his window barely cracked to set it free. After a night out, my roommate and I would hang our clothes in the living room to air out, but the smell lingered. It clung to our hair, intensified the hangover.
The days of high school smoking courts, of workplaces glittered with ashtrays and bar rooms brown with tobacco residue, seem long ago. Many cities have banned smoking in bars (though I remember seeing scofflaws in Brooklyn when I lived briefly in New York). Even most cigarette-smoking grandparents probably go outside to smoke, are alone with their addiction in the cold, in the rain, as far as possible from the grandchildren. My grandparents lit up everywhere, didn’t connect my asthma with the billows of smoke that filled their house. It truly was a different time.
I smoked my last cigarette in the mid-1980s. It was a clear winter night and I wanted to see the stars, wanted to escape in the fleeting rush of a nicotine buzz. I walked out of the Little House with an old pack of cloves and a lighter I’d pilfered from my grandfather and sat across from the next-door neighbor's house. The ground was hard and cold. Orion hovered above. I lit up, drew in a heavy breath. The cigarette was an unfiltered Djarum, the smoke harsh and plentiful. First came bitter, then sweet, the lightheadedness, the brief forgetting. Then, nausea. I stubbed out the cigarette in the grass and covered my eyes until the feeling subsided.
The blog looks different. Expect some changes over the next month or so -- and maybe more changes in 2011.
From a prompt: Write a story about smoking.
Image by Money Munni.
For a soundtrack of the night of the last cigarette, listen to Bad Houses, by Big Black.
The stepchild
I spent so much time at my best friend Maureen's house that her mother, Meredith, called me her stepchild. Meredith was tireless, a blur of movement. When she wasn't at work, she was making dinner or doing the dishes or gardening or hovering over Maur and me as we baked a cake. Their house, a boxy Colonial in a small Maryland Eastern Shore town, was a work in progress. Meredith repaired walls, restored furniture. She painted. She waxed the floors. I don't remember her sitting in the TV room watching a show or reading a book on their expansive porch. There was no time.
Meredith's face was long and smooth. She had thin lips and auburn hair styled in a poufy permanent. Her eyes were unreadable, glossy and cool whether she was happy or teasing or angry. She was not one to hold her tongue. A self-taught artist, she preferred to paint winter landscapes, liked the simple beauty of the naked trees, their limbs chafed by cold, their bark furrowed and complex. The bone-bare limbs of a tree in winter remind me of her, of the oil painting in the kitchen, a tree's dark silhouette against a grey sky.
She grew up on a farm in post-Depression Alabama. I imagined cotton fields and sticky summers, a pre-Technicolor landscape, the women in house dresses and aprons grey from too many washings, the men in straw hats. Everyone spoke with a syrupy drawl, though Meredith's accent was sharp, like the smell of crushed ginkgo berries. She told us stories of poverty and farm life. The only detail that stuck with me is that her family used corn husks for toilet paper, probably in an outhouse with a crescent moon carved into a door, a stack of husks next to the seat. It was best when the corn was still green, pliable and fresh, but people who use corn husks for toilet paper take what they can get.
From third through ninth grades, I slept over at Maureen's house at least once a month and spent many post-school afternoons hanging out there. We walked down to the corner store for Dixie cups, flung ourselves off the backyard tire swing into piles of leaves, annoyed her older sister Karen with our Three Stooges fake snores. In the early years, Maureen and I danced around the spacious living room to Goofy Gold, with songs like Transfusion and Mr. Custer, her younger brother tagging along (later it was Prince and Duran Duran, the brother supine on a couch in the den, a wet washcloth plastered across his temple, the television humming in the background. He spent most of his early adolescence in this position.). The living room flowed into the dining room, with a cabinet stereo and a gravity heat register in the corner by the stairs. Maureen and Karen dried their hair over the grate every night, tipped their heads upside down into the heat and let it lift the strands.
I learned how to properly hold a fork at Maureen’s house. I regularly gorged on junk food there, too, barbecue-flavored potato chips, cheese curls that I would let melt in my mouth, smoky Slim Jims. For a kid from a health food household, it was the stuff that dreams are made of. I played endless Atari games and savored leisurely baths in the old-fashioned tub on the second floor. The weekend my mother decided to kick my stepfather out, I was at Maureen’s, a weekend I remember as being hazy with worry about what was to come. My first cigarette was in the woods out back, I had my first joint on the side porch, and heard Madonna for the first time in Maur’s third story room.
Then, in the spring of 1984, my mother met Kevin. I quickly became peripheral to her life. By that summer, I spent most weekends at Maur's or my grandfather's place at Hollywood Beach, a small community on the Elk River. Sometimes I was alone, sometimes Maureen came for a visit. We slept in the Little House, an unheated guest cottage without plumbing or a telephone line about 20 feet from the main building. My grandfather, who had been in an industrial fire in the mid-1960s, was almost deaf. He had a prosthetic foot that he removed at night at the same time that he switched off his hearing aids. Maur and I were completely unsupervised.
We did what many rebellious fourteen- and fifteen-year olds would do if given the chance: siphoned liquor from my mother and grandfather's supplies, (I can’t smell whiskey and Coke without being immediately brought back to that mildewy house, to the puking and sneaking and the excitement), stayed out all night, brought older guys back. Stole my grandfather’s car.
Well, not exactly stole. That late spring night in 1985 we had been drinking, me much more than her. Maureen had recently gotten her learner’s permit. I cajoled her into taking the car, actually an old loaner from the dealer while my grandfather's was being repaired, down to the river. Maureen wasn't sure it was a good idea, but I pushed her until she agreed. It was less than a mile’s drive along quiet neighborhood streets. What could go wrong? When we were almost to the beach, almost home free, she noticed that the driver's side door was slightly ajar. As she moved to close it, she accidentally turned the steering wheel sharply to the right. The car tumbled into Mr. Polke's yard, scraping against the decorative log border. The impact loosened the exhaust.
That's when things got complicated. My erstwhile boyfriend, D, who was dating someone else and usually showed up at the Little House after midnight, drove by shortly after it happened. He stopped to help and Mr. Polke, who had come running out of his house when he heard the commotion, became convinced that D had run Maureen off the road. Concerned for our safety, Mr. Polke backed the unmuffled car carefully out of his yard (the tire tracks! the logs askew!) and drove us back to the house. And then – my memory may be wrong here, pickled from too many nights of Johnny Walker Red chased with Budweiser – Maureen went out with another friend for most of the night. I sat up drinking, alone, hysterical. It was getting light when Maur finally returned. I was still awake.
A few hours later, me bleary-eyed, Maureen half-asleep, we told my grandfather the story, minus the drunkenness. It was an awkward conversation that started as all conversations with him did, with a pantomime to turn on his hearing aids. He took the news stoically. Meredith, however, was livid. We had taken advantage of my grandfather's handicaps in addition to stealing his car. She made a special trip later that week to apologize to him and give me a scathing lecture. Maureen was forbidden to visit. We split the cost of the exhaust pipe repair. Sometimes we talked on the phone. But the friendship was over.
Of course, my mother was angry, too. She probably made a venomous call to my father, see what I have to deal with in your absence, the same call she made when she returned from Kevin's one evening to find me drinking. She screamed, she kvetched -- what to do with me -- but she didn't stop me from going to my grandfather's house. In fact, two months later she bought a small house down the street from his and I moved into the Little House permanently.
This could simply be a story of teenage hijinks, the ill-advised “borrowing" of a car, the stupid, relatively harmless accident, the appropriately strict parent. I see the aftermath as being another abandonment, a confirmation of my battered self image, an unsettling thing to happen at a critical moment. I was fifteen years old. I shouldn’t have been in a position to stay out until dawn, to drink my grandfather's whiskey and sour Paul Masson wine, to be spending the night with a 21-year-old man who was someone else's boyfriend. Bad things happened, I courted those things, and even when my parents figured out the extent of the trouble I got myself into, nothing changed. It was enough for decades of therapy and a lifetime of writing material. It's material I wish I didn't have.
Maureen and I diverged. It would have happened anyway, as it sometimes does with childhood friends in adolescence. One goes punk while the other embraces pop. One picks up a drug habit, the other becomes a straight edge convert. Hormones and peer groups do their damage. I was lost and I lost her, I lost her family. The few times I was with them as an adult – I was in her wedding several years ago, a nostalgic nod to a childhood promise – I was uncomfortable. “You turned out to be a good person,” Meredith told me a while back, after the struggles of adolescence were long over. She seemed surprised. I’m not sure if it is because of what she thought I had in me, or if she understood, years after the fact, what I was up against.
I wish I could stand before her, stark and bare, honest, and tell her how much I missed that time when her house was a safe place, where I could swing from a tire into a pile of leaves or play endless games of Space Invaders and forget the rest of my life. It was childhood and it was wonderful, until it crumbled. Meredith did what she had to do as a parent, but I wish she could have seen the trouble I was in. Maybe she would have reached out for me, would have helped me out of a situation I didn't understand. But she was as blind as the rest of the adults were around me, human, unaware. And so I went on living as though I was fully grown, alone, independent to a fault.
This is from a photo prompt, a picture of a streetlight and telephone pole. I looked at the photo and stared out the living room window at the bare branches of a neighbor's tree against the dawn sky. It brought Meredith (not her real name) to mind and the end of my friendship with Maureen (also not her real name; none of these are real names). I've tried to write about this before, but have been unable to make it work. Still a lot to unpack, like so much from those years. I'm not sure if I've succeeded in transforming it here.
Confidential to Maureen, if she is reading: My apologies if I have misrepresented anything.
Image by lovestruck. I'm having scanner issues, hence the many photos from other people.
Back to the old house
The house meant safety and comfort. It was predictable, constant, the place my mother and I returned to when life was falling apart, where my grandmother would take care of me when my mother was working or needed the time.
Then, when I was nine years old, my grandmother died. She collapsed in a chair in the kitchen while I stood watching. With my grandmother unconscious and my grandfather unable to use the phone, it was up to me to call the ambulance. My grandfather and I waited for the Volunteer Fire Department, a long, horrible wait. We watched the men struggle to lift her substantial body onto the stretcher. Would things have been different, I wondered, if I had gotten the cat off the chair sooner, if had understood my grandmother's gasps and flapping arms more quickly?
Sometime between the card games (solitaire, spit, go fish), the many phone calls to friends and relatives, the shopping trip for a burial dress, blue just like she'd wanted, and the wake where an uncle pulled out a cousin's loose tooth, the family decided that my mother and I would move in with my grandfather. In less than a month, we were out of our one-bedroom student housing apartment and back in the house at Hollywood Beach, my unemployed future stepfather along for the ride.
My grandfather’s house was cigarette smoke and chemicals, sugar and coffee, sawdust and mildew. It was porn magazines next to the candy in a cabinet in my grandfather’s room. It was my stepfather’s workout den in the unheated guest cottage we called the Little House. It was séances and Ouija boards, the yearning for a sign that my grandmother was still watching over me. Sometimes it was fights around the dinner table, arguments over food or housecleaning. It was nights in tight spaces, me in the sleeping bag under the bedcovers, in the attic with the pull-down steps, on the inflatable raft under the picnic table. It was sadness and anger and grief, the knowledge that I was on my own.
They sold the Hollywood Beach house in 1990, but I still visit it in my dreams. It stands for itself, it stands for part of me. The dreams used to be yearning, worried, guilty. I forget to take care of my (dead) grandfather. My mother and I bury body parts in the front yard. My uncle and aunt show up and I hide from them. Then the dreams changed, got a little better. My grandfather and I coexist in the house. We have a companionable sit at the dining room table. I leave before my aunt and uncle arrive. Interestingly, the Little House is never featured in these dreams, despite its importance in my own personal history.
Last Thursday night, I had another house dream. It was a beautiful summer day and various neighbors were busy with yard work or socializing. I felt comfortable, a part of things, visible and connected. My mother and I were discussing the renovation and eventual sale of the house, reminiscing about good times. I worried that the foundation would need to be redone, but she thought it was sound. My aunt and uncle arrived and went to work moving furniture from the house out to the lawn. Thinking this was a yard sale, a large crowd gathered in the grass and started dickering over the furniture. I yelled that it wasn't a sale, just the preparation for renovation. Suddenly I was happy about it, the prospect for an improved house, the same house but better, remade. Maybe we didn't have to sell it. Maybe we could add another floor, tear out the mildewey carpet, put up drywall where 70s embossed paneling had been, and come back to this house to live. It could be itself, a summation of memory and experience, and it could be something new at the same time.
What to make of it? The house is me, I am the house. The house is what it was, a place where things happened and people died, a holding place for my memories, a symbol of false security. My childhood was difficult, full of moves, losses, and bad men. Once my grandmother died, I had no adult advocate, and so I constructed a framework for myself, one where I made sure to rely on no one for my emotional needs, where I took care of my physical needs on my own as soon as I was able. I've let go of some of this. I have friends, a husband, good relationships with my parents. But I am still self-sufficient to a fault and quick to mistrust others. The framework gets in the way. It feels as much a part of me as my bone and muscle, organic and necessary to my existence. But perhaps I can work around it, make it into something new. The old house needs renovating. The foundation is sound. I'm ready.
And I'm not nearly as melancholy about it as Morrissey:
Image: The old house, undergoing renovation a year and a half ago. The Little House is to the left, obscured by the digger.
While your heart still beats
The pavement was slick and there were potholes and too many trees by the side of the winding road. The first to go were two juniors who were cutting school, doing what teenage boys do, driving too fast, maybe drinking or passing a bowl while the tires screeched and the car fishtailed. They ended up upside down in the creek that snaked by the road. They died. There were others in high school who died in car accidents, too, though at this point I mainly remember the names of the survivors (thanks, Facebook, with your updated images of people from the past).
Since my grandmother died, I’ve developed a strong sense of mortality, of my own, of other peoples’, of the various cats and dogs that have been in my life. Sometimes it hits me more than others, generally when I’m feeling low and isolated, when the sun hasn’t been out in weeks. It doesn't help that I've been spending an hour or two a day writing out the details of illness and death for my novel manuscript. And I’ll have dreams about these people, the dead from high school, usually as represented by David Anderson, the last one to die, the one who made it into the yearbook, a ghost by the time the book was printed.
There are other “deads” as my son calls them, like Carolin, a friend from college who had some sort of birth defect that we never discussed. She’s been gone for seventeen years, sometimes still visits me in my dream version of our college dorm. My grandfather shows up less and less now as I deal with the past, though I am sometimes reminded of how much there is to deal with (another nod to Facebook, where people who knew me peripherally during one of the darkest times in my life show up, and I remember just how bad it was and I want to die with the memory).
As I was wrestling again with that long-ago past, something that I keep thinking should be a “dead” itself at this point, as I was having a good cry after washing the dishes Thursday night, Nora, our Russian squirrel hound, came clicking into the kitchen. She likes to comfort the sad and inexplicably lonely, especially if it involves a pat or two for her. I knelt down to stroke her chest and was struck again with memory. There I was, ten years old, in what used to be my grandmother’s room, petting Greta the miniature schnauzer. Greta's fur was warm and soft. She groaned as I scratched behind her ears, reached out a paw as if to say "Don't stop." At the time, I was struck with the exquisite transience of it all, the way a heart stops and the lungs give out, the vulnerability of our soft bodies and delicate skulls. Disease creeps in. A car slams into a tree and then into you. You ignore the deep cough until it is too late. No matter the trajectory of the story, we all know how it ends.
Greta was killed by a hit-and-run driver when I was in seventh grade, about six months after we left my grandfather's house for Wilmington. He let her out when he was getting the mail. As he limped to the mailbox, Greta trotted to a neighbor's yard. She was halfway across the street when a car came tearing past and knocked her into a ditch. Either the driver didn't see her or didn't care to stop and my grandfather caught only a glimpse of the car's tail lights. It was the violent conclusion of Greta's brief story.
I knelt in the kitchen, my arms around Nora, and added up the dead. I felt their hands in mine, the touch of a gentle paw, the sound of a meow. Greta and I sat together in the dusty sunlight, her eyes brown and serious, her heartbeat strong. Sidney played a game of capture, batted at the pencil I pushed under the door. Louise curled up on the dining room table, a dog pretending to be a cat. I brushed against a boy in a hallway as he ran by, late for class. And my grandmother croaked out "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" while I giggled from the swing that hung from the maple tree. Even the tree is gone now, but like the rest it exists in my memory, in the stories I tell.
I held Nora tighter, tried to appreciate the moment, knowing I would think about it when she was gone. And the sweetness of it almost killed me.
Top photo by Jane Underwood, Writing Salon mistress and photographer extraordinaire.
Bottom photo by Mr. T from Nora's first week with us in 2003.
After writing this prompt and struggling with various versions of it for the blog, I got out my senior high school yearbook (theme: "A Unique Blend." I had forgotten that high school yearbooks had themes), just to check on some of the facts. There was David Anderson, still in with the living seniors, but at the front of the book was a dedication to three other people from our class who had died, two of them in car accidents: Pat O'Donoghue, Rob Klaczkiewicz, and Joe Lombardino. There were others who died while I was at school, specifically those upperclassmen in the first paragraph of this post, though I could have some of my facts wrong about the accident. They died in the mid-80s, well before our lives were digitally monitored, before you could have a Facebook page even after death. The fact that there was no trace of these young men made me sad. It was almost as if they had never existed.
Prognostication
In my dreams, the dead are silent. I’ve never had a good conversation with a single one of them, just offer my apologies, bake the bread, pour the coffee. What is the guilt about? The dead no longer care about my transgressions. Isn’t it enough that I hold them here in my subconscious, treat them as gently as I would a freshly-laid egg?
But this dream was different. We were going to visit Kevin, who has been gone for over seven years now. As in real life, I was nervous: would I react properly to him? Would he toss the verbal slings, so subtle and cutting, if I didn’t pick up on something, if I reacted too slowly? Or would he sit there, blue eyes glowing, as my mother and I circled him like butterflies, flitting here and there in our attempts to placate?
Kevin spoke. He used the ethereal language of dreams, of those who are now ashes and light, but in that nasal New Jersey accent that I haven’t been able to replicate in my mind for years. And he was funny, so funny, because Kevin was bitingly funny. I laughed and realized how much I missed him, how much time had gone by and then I woke up, not remembering a word of his complicated meta-joke.
Time flies on and I die a little every day, lose another connection, feel the pull of a long-ago past. Yet my grandfather still shows up at the old house. I smell his cigarettes, breathe in sawdust, too-sweet coffee and turpentine. He waits in his cell of a room, a voiceless old man in a flannel robe, unshaven and glassy eyed. I rush past the sink filled with dirty dishes, walk a path of slate to get to a mailbox that hasn't been opened in years. Sometimes we take his car for a complicated drive to Christiana. Maybe we are heading to the hospital, waiting for someone to hand me a small bundle, something I've forgotten.
The dead appear without explanation or warning. Carolin greets me in a too-bright dorm basement, fixes me with intense eyes. David Anderson sits in a classroom, shoeless, staring at the algebra equation on the board. Frank the cat meows for food that I don't have. And my grandmother, the one I ache to see, is sick of my inattention and has stopped showing up at all.
Someday, no one will know that I was sixteen and angry once. They will remember an old woman deeply lined, forgetful, with clouded-over eyes, demanding and harmless. Inconsequential. As though I had been born without desire, without the power to wound.
Image: Postcard, date unknown.
Procrastination, B-29 bombers and ball turret gunners
Sometimes, though, when ideas are percolating, our minds lead us in strange directions. (And, of course, that's what's going on here, not really procrastination, but preparation. Percolation. All this will all lead to a wondrous stream of language soon enough. Right??)
Crew members in front of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb.
I don't want to be loosey-goosey on the details, because that would give it away, but I've been thinking a lot lately about the B-29 bomber, nicknamed the Superfortress. Boeing engineers developed the plane in the early 1940s as a long-range bomber, large enough to reach the shores of Japan, and it was a technological wonder. It also was a bit of a rush job, with early models especially prone to overheating. One 1943 prototype burst into flames on a test run when an engine fire quickly spread to the wing, destroying it. All ten crew members and another twenty people in a nearby meat packing plant were killed. By the end of the war, engineers had worked out most of the kinks, though the American public was most likely clueless about its defects (for example, this anti-Japanese government propaganda film on the bomber is all blue skies and heavy bombs).
Ball turret.
From B-29s my mind meandered to ball turrets, those little bulbs of steel and plexiglass that popped out of the bellies of B-17s and B-24s, two guns loaded on either side for enemy planes. The gunner would be cramped in the ball turret for hours, trapped, rotating, circling, with a bird's eye view of the destruction below and in the air. There are two excellent oral histories by former ball turret gunners on the web. Earl Mills, who flew in a B-17 and was eventually shot down, tells of his experiences, while author Sabine Ulibarri details a particularly frightening mission in an excerpt from Mayhem Was Our Business. Both men were diagnosed with combat fatigue, better known now as post-traumatic stress disorder.The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner: From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, / And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. / Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, / I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. / When I died, they washed me out of the turret with a hose. --Randall Jarrell
Stryker bed frame.
Really, though, what led me to ball turrets (bear with me) were thoughts on my grandfather's hospitalization. For the first six months, he was in a Stryker hospital bed frame (often used for patients in traction). From what I can tell, his mid-60s model was made up of a skinny mattress supported on either side by two mattress-width steel circles. Strapped in, he would wait for the moment when the bed would begin to move, to slowly flip his position from supine to prone. What would it have been like to be in that bed, sick, practically skinless, ears melted away and hearing almost gone, in and out of lucidity as his body fought off opportunistic infection? It turned him at least twice a day and he would often beg my grandmother to make it stop, to keep it from happening, in part because he associated it with the painful removal of his burn dressings, with debridement.
A man who avoided going overseas in World War II. A nation soaked in wartime propaganda, rah rah black and white newsreels, sanitized war stories of precision and heroism with an undercurrent of death and chaos. Twenty years later, fire, destruction, pain, and fear. Then, guilt and heroic fantasy.
Off to write. Slowly.
Baby, stick around
Thanks to washwords, Koe Whitton-Williams, tricia, Dori, Karen, Bobby Revell, Jennifer D., Melinda, Lorenzo, Candy, Ashe.Selah, lydia, timethief, SmallWorldReads, John Folk-Williams, and Jim for your encouraging words and comments. Your support makes the difference.
Here's a bit of writing inspired by the prompt "Alright, fine. Let's hear your explanation." Well, inspired by that and by reading my grandmother's burn notebooks, written during my grandfather's long hospitalization, where her anger over his vices and infidelities comes through, clear and Mercurochrome-bitter. I couldn't bring myself to change the names; they are too good to be fictional.
I just went to the track to look at the horses, to watch them ripple around the oval, to see their hooves beat the dust into red clouds. But once I got there, the action sucked me in. Before I knew what my feet were doing, I was standing in front of Les’s booth to place my bets. The air was heavy with money and I was feeling lucky. I’d win enough to pay off the rest of Atlee’s mortgage or maybe just enough to buy a smooth fifth of whiskey. Or even score a downpayment on a new washing machine for you, Vi.
Then I ran into Williard, who had a full flask and offered me a swig or three. Maybe the alcohol clouded my judgment. Maybe I couldn't see what an amateur that jockey was, but I think the race was rigged, that somebody paid him out to fall off the horse. Or maybe they slipped the little guy a Mickey, I don’t know. The end result is that I lost. The flask made a few more visits to my lips and I didn’t feel like going home just yet anyways.
You and the girls were at the cottage and I was planning on sleeping at the empty Tuxedo Park house, but then I remembered Molly. Molly with the blonde hair and long legs, Molly from the Tip Top Club in Salem, a nice easy-going girl. The Mustang knew the way from the track to the bar. It’s no coincidence that they call that car a Mustang. It has all the bucking power and smarts of a horse. It knows where to find the watering holes, knows the trail back home, too.
After I left the Tip Top, I was exhausted, so I took a snooze in my ride. That’s where I was last night, sleeping in the Mustang.
You can ask Molly if you don't believe me.
The burn notebooks
Part of the front page of the notebooks my grandmother kept after my grandfather was burned.
After my grandfather was burned over 80% of his body in a flash fire at the Dupont Holly Run paint plant, my grandmother started keeping a diary. I have the copies, four small looseleaf notebooks with her remarks on his hospitalization, dating from the accident on 11 June 1966 until his release from the hospital on 24 February 1967. There are tallies of blood transfusions (38 pints of blood between June and December), of skin grafts (26; the last one is on 22 December, with the note "last - if all take"). I'd missed the fact that he actually had four operations on his right foot before they finally amputated it (28 September: "Little toe came off in dressing.").
It's slow going. Mom-mom's handwriting is hard to read and the first six months are a roller-coaster ride of medical emergencies, infections, and mourning for what was lost. Doctors gave him a 50-50 chance of making it. No one knew that the fire wouldn't kill him for another 24 years, when he finally succumbed to skin cancer at the age of 78. The "girls" -- my aunt, 20 at the time, and my mother, 16 -- don't get much mention. What it was like for them? I may ask my mother, but don't expect to get very much information and it might not be necessary for my purposes.
I'd love to talk to my grandmother about that time for her, too, though the notebooks conjure her up. Ultimately, though, I'm looking at these books to get a better understanding of my grandfather, who went from being an active man in his fifties who loved jazz and waterskiing and driving fast in his '65 Mustang to a dependent, almost-deaf burn victim. He didn't get behind the wheel of a car again until 1981.
During his hospitalization, he suffered, really suffered. Being burned is painful, but so is the treatment, borrowing healthy skin to graft onto exposed flesh, having your raw body immersed in a whirlpool once or twice a day. Even the necessary turning ("Dressings wet. Al begged not to be turned."), which probably happened at least four times a day, sounds like a horror. And then there is the debridement, the sloughing off of dead skin and muscle that had to be done on a regular basis. Things surely have gotten better for burn victims since the 60s, but there is no getting around the pain. It's no wonder that my grandfather was scared of his hospital bed in those first six months. It must have seemed like a torture chamber.
Pop-pop and Greta in 1978, 12 years after the industrial accident.
Pop-pop suffered and hovered close to death, lost his hearing and a foot. His once-smooth skin tightened and scarred. Then he got out of the hospital, had a home nurse for another nine months, and went back to work (a desk job this time). He retired and taught himself how to build furniture and make Canada goose and mallard whirligigs to sell at Nickerson's Fruit and Vegetable Stand. He built the Little House and put a new wood shop on the beach cottage, as well as a new family room. His interest in model trains intensified and the old wood shop became the setting for a huge train set with two separate tracks, a couple of tunnels, and a tree-covered mountain range. It was the kind of thing that neighborhood kids and grown-ups would come over to admire, though he would always remind me that these small trains weren't toys.
I'm working on a piece that is about him, but not quite about him, fiction informed by imagined experience. I want to figure out what was forged by flame.
Who are these people and what are they doing in my blog?
DATE: May 1981
OCCASION: My mother's second wedding.
LOCATION: Eastern Shore, MD.
PERSONNEL (from left to right):
Mom: Barely 31 years old. Obscuring new husband's mother.
Grandfather: Looking pleased. The bridegroom had a reputation as a good guy. Even though he had spent the year before the wedding happily unemployed, lifting weights in the Little House, and waiting for my mother to come home from work and make dinner (though perhaps this view is a little one-sided).
Me: Eleven. And a half. Wearing my mother's dress
Best friend (from ages 8 - 14): Total support. Very funny. We went from childhood to rebellious adolescence together, from dancing around her living room listening to "Goofy Gold" to sneaking cigarettes and chugging 7-oz Budweisers. I miss her.
Cousin: Seven years old. Now an Episcopal minister. I haven't seen or spoken with her since my first wedding in late 1995. Our mothers don't speak either.
Oh, and I almost forgot. Here's a better look at ...
The car: Then-stepfather's 1968 (?) Oldsmobile Cutlass, permanently awaiting a paint job. I hated that #%*& thing, though it did get us from Point A to Point B.
Yeah, I've been going through my boxes of life detritus, old photos, letters, embarrassingly boy-crazy journals. The process has has brought up thoughts about friendship, loss, and connection. This picture stuck out, less for the time and situation (which, wonderfully, have lost their power for me) but for the strange posed/not posed quality of it, and for the relationships that have slipped away.
There's the next post, though I'm not sure where I'm going with it. And hopefully fiction will be returning when my writing class starts up again next month, or even sooner if I can pull it off.
It's not easy being green
Elk River, Winter of 1977-78
The year before, my mother had decided to go back to college. In order to save money, she moved in with Jim, her future former husband, while I went to my grandparents’ house in Maryland. It was a year scented by cigarette smoke and coffee fumes. Mornings were my favorite time of day, sitting in the warm kitchen, a tray of food prepared for me by my grandmother, usually Eggo waffles dabbed with Parkay squeezable margarine and dripping with Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup, cartoon-character shot glass of orange juice on the side. That winter the snow kept coming. It piled up and formed five-foot drifts in the driveway, places to dig out forts and make snowmen. Snuggling in my grandmother’s bed as we listened to the radio school closing announcements became an almost-regular ritual.
Mom scored a one-bedroom apartment in student family housing in the summer of ’78 and I moved back in with her. She took the couch in the living room while I slept on a full-size mattress on the floor in the bedroom, a wooden orange crate for a bedside table topped with a flowery ceramic lamp, a clock radio, and an “I Love You This Much” figurine -- a robed, potbellied man, arms outstretched – that she had given to me in first grade.
1978-79 was the first year of court-mandated school desegregation for the Wilmington city schools. We were bused 34 miles roundtrip from suburban Newark, a predominantly white, middle class community at the time, to an elementary school in the middle of the inner city. It was the fourth school I had attended since kindergarten.
The dark, institutional halls smelled of ancient gymnasium mats and cafeteria pizza. Because I didn’t like sandwiches, Mom would pack things like crackers and cheese or the occasional hard-boiled egg, cooked until it was sulfurous and the exterior of the yolk was green. I’d display the egg to my friends and toss in the trash can to a chorus of ewwwws.
After lunch, students were herded over crumbling asphalt to play outside on ancient metal jungle gyms and rusty swings. Murals with selected scenes of black history covered the exterior walls. At night the surrounding neighborhood leaked into the schoolyard; people left behind their bottle caps and broken glass, empty lighters and plastic bags. The atmosphere became more unwelcoming when I acquired the nickname “Kermit,” a name given after I came to school in a kelly green, polyester, three-piece suit (worn with white turtleneck!). Think Saturday Night Fever meets Annie Hall meets the Muppets, a well-meaning gift from my grandmother, who had become accustomed to choosing my clothes.
The teachers weren’t happy either and went on strike from mid-October through most of November. Much of that time is lost to me. My third grade teacher brought me back to Chesapeake City Elementary for a day or two; I read a lot of books from the small children’s section at the University of Delaware library, spent many hours staring at the ceiling of the Malt Shoppe. The ending of the strike coincides in my mind with reports of the Jonestown massacre, images of children lying on the ground beside their parents, as still and peaceful as if they were asleep.
April 1979
By early March, 1979, my grandmother was dead and Mom, Jim, and I had moved back to Maryland to watch over my grandfather.
Our grand experiment was over.
I slip into the night
My first memory of the house is from the summer of 1972. I am three, walking the 20 feet from the cottage to my grandparent’s place, planting my sturdy feet in thick grass and clover. I take off in a run when the ball of my right foot meets something small and sharp. It burns. I begin to cry. Someone – my aunt? my grandmother? – whisks me into the main house, probes tender flesh with pointed tweezers to remove the bee’s stinger. Afterwards, I lie on the family room sofa in cool air conditioning, injured foot propped on a pillow, a thick paste of soothing baking soda drawing out the pain. I watch cartoons, sucking on a straw to get at the last of Coca-Cola over ice.
That was over thirteen years ago. My grandmother has been dead since 1979 and the Little House is now my home. I spend my days waiting for darkness to fall. Bring on the night, I couldn’t stand another hour of daylight.
Inside the main house at 9:30 p.m. sharp, my grandfather takes out his hearing aids and removes his prosthetic foot, trapping himself in bed for another night of muffled sleep. Four houses down the street my mother, blinded by man and money troubles, sleeps in a cocoon of sadness. My father is sixty miles away, a prisoner of debilitating depression; his kindly wife is totally focused on his well-being. Unheard, unseen, and seemingly unimportant, I slip into the night or let the night slip into me.
This is where my power of description seizes up.
Really, I’m on the road to forgiveness, and I don’t want to rehash the past in angry diatribes here.
But – the inevitable but – I am in the midst of the never-ending stillbirth story, attempting to write about my time in the Little House, a companion piece to my biological grandmother’s experiences and as I try to get my mind around it I find myself asking: WHAT IN THE HELL WERE MY PARENTS THINKING?
When reality broke through, when my pregnancy became apparent and ended a month later in a stillbirth, in dramatic labor occurring in the Little House, when it became clear that I needed parenting, WHY DID NOTHING CHANGE?
These are not new thoughts, but the underlying feelings have changed. My anger before was mainly self-directed, anger at my family turned inward: what evil in me brought on their rejection? But now I am reaching a different conclusion: my mother and father had so little respect for themselves, for their power as parents, that they gave up, figured I was fine on my own, or maybe even assumed that they would only make things worse. My mother stopped parenting; my father never even started. They deserve my compassion. It's no use getting angry at those who don't see their own worth.
Now I have to work through the feelings, unpack the meaning of the Little House, dense with suppressed emotion, so much a part of who I am. I’ve left it almost completely out of most other versions of the stillbirth story because it feels like an emotional bomb. As I try to get back into that time of isolation, loneliness, self-hatred and anger, my self-protection (or something) kicks in.
It is time to control the explosion through language, to capture the shards of the experience on the page.
I'm scared. But if I don't go back, the experience controls me.
Would you like bloodworms with that?
He sold the whirligig mallards and Canada geese at a produce stand on Route 213. They were solid moneymakers, big sellers with the weekenders who clogged the roads every Friday and Sunday night. Lined up outside the stand, a bank of lures staked to the ground against a backdrop of cantaloupe and corn, the birds would be set off by the breeze, wings turning frantically in a frustrated pantomime of flight.
Wing tracing was not enough to keep sixteen-year-old me occupied for two months, however. That’s how I ended up, after a lot of maternal arm-twisting, as the sole employee at Eastern Shore Boats-n-Things (not its real name), a small marine supply store in Chesapeake City.
Eastern Shore Boats-n-Things was a muddle of motors and Docksiders, winches and water-skis. It didn’t know exactly what kind of store it wanted to be: hardcore marine supplies (motor oil, pumps, pulleys) or day on the water store (skis, shoes, inner tubes). For the fishermen, we had a refrigerator full of packaged live bloodworms. If you wanted to toss some cash at an Evinrude motor, we could get you one. And towards the end, Eastern Shore Boats-n-Things became the local dealer for Motorola car phones, exotic objects with a limited range, toys for the gadget aficionado.
Every day at the shop offered me a new opportunity to feel stupid. I knew nothing about boating. People would question me about sailing pulleys, or what weight motor oil they would need, would quiz me on outboard motor horsepower and I would stammer through a non-answer, look dumbly at the shelves, hope for an epiphany.
The store’s owner wasn’t much help. When he was there, it was mainly to down beers in the back with his buddies, an off-duty Maryland state cop and the rug cleaning guy from the shop next door. From the clenched jaw, one-sided phone conversations I overheard, I could tell that his marriage was disintegrating along with his business. Maybe the responsibility for both was too much for him, too many things to juggle.
Over the two summers I worked for him, the owner became more and more erratic. Though he hardly ever showed up during my shifts, my boyfriend D. and I would sometimes run into him at Bennett's Liquors or at the Canal House, the local boater's watering hole. He'd greet us with a high-pitched hello and a tight grin, insist upon giving us ice or a drink. "Want some iiice?!" became our catchphrase for him, a reference to the night he filled D.'s cooler with an intensity beyond the task.
My boss was a no show for my last week of work, the week before I left for my freshman year in college. Even his wife was calling, trying to track him down. Then another call would come in on the line, his distant voice over car phone static. He'd be at the store by noon. It never worked out that way.
Alone, I’d pace the aisles, line my white MIA shoes heel to pointy toe in a circuitous route around boating supplies. The occasional customer would show, hopefully with a simple request. I waited for business, drank diet Dr. Pepper, ran my finger along the bottles of teak oil. The sailing equipment fascinated me and I would finger the pulleys, try to figure out the knot chart.
When Dan, one of our suppliers, dropped by with beer for a farewell visit on my last day, I didn’t see a problem with cracking one open. We sat in the office and talked over a couple of Coors, had a meandering goodbye conversation about John, my college plans. At the end of my shift, I emptied the cash register, doled out my weekly salary. I locked up and delivered the keys to the rug cleaner, then hopped into my grandfather's waiting car.
Within six months, Eastern Shore Boats-n-Things was closed. I never saw the owner again.
After the fire
As the story goes, he stepped outside, lit a Pall Mall, and popped the huge blister on his stomach. "I think you better call an ambulance."
80% of his body was covered in third-degree burns. He spent nine months in the hospital, nine months at home with a full-time nurse. He suffered through over 26 skin grafts. His hearing was ruined from massive doses of powerful antibiotics. When his right foot was giving up the ghost, its blood vessels cauterized by fire, surgeons took a couple timid swipes, lopping off one toe, then a couple more. It took a third operation to amputate it just below the ankle.
Years later, a doctor told him, "I've seen skin like that on a dead man."
When I knew him, he was demanding and unhappy, a man with a limp and two hearing aids. I learned to hate his call: "Jenny, got a minute?" I was definitely not a Jenny and what if I didn't have a minute? It was the typical stupidity of youth. I wish I could go back and treat him with kindness and empathy, to understand what was destroyed in the fire.
In my dreams he's back in the old house, living off hot dogs and root beer, not yet clued in to his own death. He tries to call me, jamming his thick, arthritic fingers into the phone's dial. No luck.
Missing person
The paneling tacked up against drywall, the damp concrete slab with its thin covering of plywood and carpet. The mildew, the cigarette smoke, the asthma attacks. Hollywood Beach, Christmas 1980.
In this photograph, from left to right: Jim, the unemployed soon-to-be stepfather, who spent his days lifting weights in the Upper Room; my grandfather, demanding, handicapped as the result of an industrial fire, who kept his candy in a cabinet by his porn; and me, a little freak 11-year-old who dragged a Ouija board everywhere and had séance parties, all in the hope of contacting my dead grandmother.
Mom was behind the camera. She commuted two hours round trip to work and came home every night to a hungry, demanding household. Once the plates were cleared, the complaints were served: the meal was too simple or too complicated. Had she gone too far this time, or held too much back? I listened and hated them, wanted to defend her honor. But I just sat there instead. This was not a happy time.
My grandmother collapsed suddenly one February afternoon in 1979. We were in the kitchen putting groceries away when she started breathing heavily. Unable to speak, she motioned in the direction of the sleeping cat on the kitchen chair. I was helpless. Finally she removed the cat herself, sat down, and closed her eyes. I called 9-1-1. The same volunteer fire department that whisked me off to Christiana Hospital six years later took her limp form away. They didn't tell me she was dead, but I knew.
The grief we were all smothering after her death came up in unpredictable ways. Just when we thought we had stamped it out, had ripped up the roots and crushed the last toxic leaf, we would discover another dank tendril wrapped around the front doorknob or emerging from the drain in the kitchen sink. It would not be denied. The only photographic evidence I have of her from my lifetime is a picture of the two of us. I'm playing on the floor, looking off at some distraction, away from the camera. She is a disembodied hand holding a cigarette.
It's been almost thirty years and I still miss her.