And in the room locked up inside me
I remember what it was like to care about fashion and boys and what the other girls thought, all the other girls with their money and their bright sweaters in primary colors and their designer clothes. When you’re a teenager you think everyone else is better off than you, except for S. whose brother would beat her up or F. whose father didn't know he existed or N., who lied about her address, too, and had an alcoholic dad. My friends were the exceptions, but the rest of them, the money flowed like water from a tap and their parents, they might have been strict, but it was in good ways that showed they cared instead of being random like my mother. The other kids had stable parents who drove newer cars. They lived in the suburbs, not the middle of the city where the houses slammed against each other, where you knew everyone's secrets, could smell the neighbor's dinner burning.
It was a time when I joined the consumer world with its fashion and makeup and music to buy (Def Leppard morphed to Wham! and Duran Duran bled into the Dead Kennedys, the Circle Jerks, Echo and the Bunnymen) and then retreated from it. In the Little House I was stuck with the dull depression of being fifteen and separated from the world, first alone, then alone and pregnant, and then the survivor of both, still alone, and with life experiences that made me feel so, so old.
But there was beer to drink and a guy who bought it for me. He eventually came around more often, was there for real, for love. D. still lived at home, was the youngest of four in a tight family. They got together for big extended family dinners, would greet me with a hug, kiss my cheek when it was time to say goodbye. The womenfolk prepared delicious food and it always seemed like there were at least twenty people at the table, with toasts ("Proost!") and heated conversation and endless bottles of Grolsch.
I loved that family, their sheer number, their passion and personality, the safety net of so many people. In the photographs, however, I look small. Contained. A little scared, like I knew a secret that could destroy me.
Image: Me, late December 1984, in my grandfather's yard. This was before I moved to the Little House, but I still spent most weekends and school vacations visiting. I remember this day very well, the abnormally warm temperatures, the feeling of anticipation that D. might show up that night, that he actually did show. Ah, redemption, brief and sweet.
The original prompt was a photo. You can look at it here.
The post title is a line from a Yaz song that I listened to a lot in the Little House: In My Room.
Remember part of me is you
Where it takes me:
*A hot Delaware day, late July or August of 1986, D. at the construction site. He wears cut-off shorts and a torn, sleeveless shirt, has wrapped a red bandana around his head to catch the sweat. Somehow on him sweat is sweet, necessary, like the damp of a spring rain. D. stands on a ladder at the roof line, swings his hammer. On the backstroke, the claw end meets his eyebrow, tearing a gash that requires fifteen stitches. I wasn’t there, but I can imagine it, the blood, the truck ride to the emergency room, the endless bowls of marijuana that he probably smoked to counteract the dull throb. Later I held my fingers above the stitches, lightly kissed the jagged rays of black thread.
*D. at the wheel of the Newport Custom, gunning it over 100 miles an hour on Town Point Road, the flash of grey-green cornstalks rushing past the window, the curve before we reached the woods, cool and dark, my heart pounding, the tape deck blasting Manic Mechanic. I cupped the wind, I caught it, let it flow across my body to his.
*Early on: waiting by the flicker of the television set in the Little House, falling asleep to Kung Fu or Fantasy Island reruns, waiting until 1 a.m.. Waiting even later. Just waiting, sometimes for nothing, a replay of my waits of early childhood.
*Still early on: The weekend he rode his bike home from college, logging almost 100 miles, to wish me a happy sixteenth birthday. Me, waiting. Him, appearing at 10:30 or so, a reasonable hour, with a half-consumed bottle of vodka. My present. He knew I would be leaving Maryland soon, but he didn't know why. He didn't find out until after the drama was over.
But it actually wasn't a photograph that brought this back, it was a poem from one of my Round Robin writing partners last week, something about the love of men who work with their hands. D. was (and still is, I presume) a talented carpenter, a man who framed houses and built furniture. Despite the endless nostalgia of my brain, the way the past rolls out of my fingers and clogs up my mind on a daily basis, I don't think about him very often. He's from the far-away past. I don't wish I was back in Maryland living the life I rejected when I was still a teenager, making the roundtrip from home to grocery store to liquor store and back again. And although I look back on him with sweetness, the pain I feel in writing this surprises me. It's a secondhand ache, pain at his early treatment of me that echoed my parents' treatment, sadness at how I ended up treating him ultimately.
I still puzzle over how people drift away after love, after the intensity of the burn is over. In early 2002, when my mother's boyfriend Kevin was in for his final hospitalization, I called D. to talk once or twice. I called him because he was there during the worst of my teenage years. He was my closest friend then, the only insider. He knew Kevin as a healthy, often cruel man. D. was there through nights heated by kerosene and electric heater, he held me when I cried, and he cried in my arms when he found out about my pregnancy after the fact. So I called him from Kevin's hospital after a particularly harrowing day. I was nervous, paced in front of the wall of windows in the Critical Care Unit hallway. We had an awkward, didn't-I-used-to-know you conversation. D. didn't remember much. Who can blame him? It wasn't his intense life, it was mine. I remain the only witness.
When old friends disappear, a bit of our memories go with them. I mourn the shared experience, the fading away. I wish I could gather them all up, friends long gone, the ex-boyfriends, the ex-husband. We would talk and laugh again, would remind each other of our once-live connection. I would pull them with me into the present, link the people we used to be to with who we are now. I would tell them, "Remember part of me is you."
Image: Pixelated D. in the Little House, Winter 1985/86. Some of my readers know this guy and I feel a little strange for putting his picture out there. Hence, the pixels.
Some of this is from a prompt, "Rectangular."
The noises of destruction
One night, frustrated, I drained a 12-ouncer and went outside. Two feet from the oak, I held on to the bottle as if it were a diminutive baseball bat, gripped its neck with my fingers, and slammed the tree with as much force as a slightly drunk sixteen-year-old girl could.
It’s harder to break a bottle than you think.
From a writing prompt last summer: Out the window. NaNoWriMo is beginning to drive me crazy. Sixteen days. 41,000 words. One messy and rambling novel very close to completion.
Bit of trivia: my mother now makes jewelry from pieces of broken glass she finds on the street or breaks on the cement slab in her own back yard, a picture of calm with a broom and dust pan.
Living proof at my fingertips
My husband and I were standing against the wall at the Fox Theater in Oakland, this over-the-top restored venue from the late 1920s, drinking our beers and waiting for the group Echo and the Bunnymen to come onstage. We'd already had a lot of laughs that would be almost impossible to explain here (for example, the image of us wearing cucumber and cabbage outfits, just to find our moment of glory in the truly ridiculous [but very cool-sounding] Echo song Thorn of Crowns). Without warning my dead son winnowed his way into the conversation, which lead to talks of alternate lives and then my father showed up, too, unrepentant, demanding the old song and dance of anger.
My father and stepmother visited us last month, which was a truly wonderful visit, one for which I am grateful. As a result of nerve damage in his back, he is in constant pain and traveling is very difficult on him, but they made the trip and we all had a good time. There was just one ripple in the visit, one that I tried to ignore, in a discussion that would have been impossible without the blog. He found writing to survive over a year ago and read through it in its entirety. Eventually he apologized via email for any pain he had caused me, which was the extent of our interaction on the topic. During this most recent visit he asked "Are we ok?" meaning, I suppose, "Is everything all right between us?". Yes, I said, we were ok -- when he read the blog I felt like he was listening to me. Did he feel like we were ok?
Well, sure, but he wanted me to know that, despite my accusations to the contrary, he had tried. I had no idea what he was talking about, but his response was probably to this post, where I write about my anger at my parents for doing nothing when I desperately needed help: "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." It's a heavy accusation and I stand by it. The truth hurts. We didn't dig any deeper into that particular pit, but our discussion bothered me, still does, and that was what I was talking about in the lobby of the Fox Theater, that and imagining my never-to-be-24-year-old son, dressed in skinny tapered pants and an ironic t-shirt, angry at me for my own form of neglect, of the fetal variety.
The band started. We hustled to our seats, suddenly surrounded by the music that was a part of the soundtrack of my mid-teens and I started to cry. I sobbed through the first three songs while my husband patted me reassuringly, probably feeling bad about the tickets, which were a birthday present. The music transported to a bleak time in my life, when things started really getting bad and I was indescribably alone. I felt the direness of my situation at fifteen and sixteen, combined with the beauty of my current life. I am forty years old, married to a good, supportive man. We have a healthy, creative, wonderful child. My life is in enveloped in love and warmth. How did I get so undeservedly lucky?
Our conversation in the lobby -- the clinical look at my father, the ghostly appearance of my son, my guilt over that time of terrible fear and anger -- began to make sense. No matter how much work I've done here on revealing secrets, writing out my pain and anger, trying to forgive my parents, I can't take the experience of what happened in the Little House away. Even thinking about the music we were about to hear brought me to the edge of that past, to the isolation and neglect. And my father's main reaction upon reading this entire blog, apart from a generic, though I'm sure heartfelt apology, was to tell me that he tried. He has never acknowledged any direct responsibility for (or curiosity about) that time. I wish his acknowledgement didn't matter. Maybe someday it won't.
I've put so much effort into trying to forgive the unaware that I've forgotten to pay attention to my own grief. I still carry around sadness for things lost, for not mattering enough, for acknowledgment that will never be. So I cried and cried until Ian McCulloch started singing about vegetables. My husband turned to me and raised his eyebrows. We started to laugh.
I really am lucky.
Echo and the Bunnymen play "Silver" in Oakland, courtesy of some fellow fan:
Everything around me remains the same
And the story is just about really, finally, complete. The final excerpt (still in draft mode) is below. For other excerpts from the work in progress as well as posts on the topic, follow the stillbirth tag.
I'm putting this experience to bed now.
Photo by PhineasX.
Gusts of words swirl around me that week. I walk right through them. Who needs to talk? Dad is explaining the baby’s name to his father: “She said it was the first thing that popped into her head.” “Jennifer didn’t know what was going on,” my stepmother tells the phone receiver. At an aunt’s house for Thanksgiving, we sit and hide behind the blast of televised football and the scraping of forks, my paternal grandfather’s frequent throat-clearing sounding a note of general disapproval. Six days after the birth I try the nightgown trick again, tighten it over my empty abdomen. Flat as a pancake.
On an unseasonably warm December day, wisps of clouds pulled across a cerulean sky, Dad drives me back to Maryland. There is clean-up to be done. He drags the stained twin mattress to the end of the driveway, props it against the fence, bloodied side in. (“Very tasteful of your father,” Mom tells me later, with more than a hint of sarcasm.) My parents share a laugh at the ancient pack of pilfered Pall-Malls I’d jammed underneath it – if they only knew about the empty beer bottles hidden in the box spring of the other mattress. Dad gives me an awkward hug, waves goodbye from the car. I open the door to the Little House.
Smells become part of the background of a place, as invisible as the color of the ceiling or the punctuation of electrical outlets against wallboard. You forget how a house smells, forget it practically the moment you close the door. The stale air of the Little House hits me like a slap in the face. It is the scent of bottled-up mildew, of pressed wood and formaldehyde, the smell of isolation. I take a canister of Lysol and scour the room with an antiseptic rain, spray the walls and floor until they are damp. Over the afternoon I slowly change the feel of the place, moving furniture and taking down photographs.
When the familiar urge hits, I walk quietly into the main house. From my grandfather’s room comes the sound of MacGuyver, then the jingle of a commercial. An ice-cream scoop sits in the sink beside a spoon and scraped bowl. Grabbing a large tumbler from the dishwasher, I kneel to open the china cabinet, reach for the Johnny Walker Red on the bottom shelf. I walk back to the Little House clutching my glass of whiskey and Coke between both hands, taking careful, deliberate steps on every slate stepping stone, as though one misstep onto grass means bad luck. After locking the door behind me, I take a sip. The drink is strong and bitter, cold and soothing. Humanizing. Some drink to numb the pain. I drink to feel it. I begin to cry.
On Monday morning, puffy-eyed and stoic, I walk to my mother’s for our ride to school and work. She is cranking up the ancient, oil crunch era Toyota with the nonworking gas gauge. An egg and scrapple sandwich lies on the passenger seat, on top of the paper. I hop in, open the Wilmington News-Journal, take a bite of food. Mom puts the car into gear and backs out of the driveway.
Everything around me remains the same.
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.