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
It was one of those conversations
that I'm tired of having, but I couldn't seem to stop
myself.
Mr. Trinkle 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 Mr.
Trinkle 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. Mr.
Trinkle 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:
Image:
Living proof at my fingertips, or me and family at
Muir Woods, August 2009. Photo by my
mother.
Heartbreaker
And -- this is written a year after I posted this -- rereading this makes me feel uncomfortable, like I've presented a story that isn't fully processed or finished. But it is mine and there is a truth to it.
Click here for Part 1.
As I pulled the wheel of the John Deere tractor to the right, the mower, wide and low to the ground, hit rock and screeched as it scraped the edge of the flower bed. Palms damp, grip tightened, I put the tractor briefly into reverse, then hit the gas and forged forward. Shit! The magnolia! I quickly swung around the tree, barely missing the azalea by the front door. Suddenly there was a clear path ahead of me, a gleaming expanse of green. The mower shot across the lawn, cutting another inadvertently serpentine swath.
"Jenny! Got a minute?"
My grandfather was gesturing at me from the kitchen window, summoning me in the usual way: by screaming out a nickname I hated and asking me a question for which yes was only answer.
I cut the engine and surveyed the mower's wobbly wake. Three uneven rows occasionally interrupted by jagged patches of ragged grass; a mangled forsythia; two scraped river rocks; several crushed marigolds. Not the cleanest job. The air smelled green and bitter with freshly cut grass. In the maple outside of the kitchen, a blue jay and her mate traded a series of rusty squeaks, rustling the leaves as they hopped from branch to branch. Some other unfortunate up the street was wasting a perfectly brilliant Saturday on yard work. Their mower sounded wonky, chugging in fits and starts.
Here’s where the moment slows down, where we cue in Duran Duran’s Hungry Like the Wolf. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a boy on a bike whizzing down our street in the direction of the river. College aged, tanned and blonde, wearing a black t-shirt and ragged cut-offs, he glances at me. His long muscular legs propel the bike forward and I can just make out the checkerboard Vans on his feet. The moment passes, the bike and passenger become a blur and disappear.
Documented: Dirk's Vans, Little House, 1986ish.
In a place where I know almost everyone, a place I’ve been a part of since before I was born, this person is totally unfamiliar. Cut the music.
Who was that guy?
"Jenny!!"
I hop off the tractor and go into the house.
It is June 1984, the beginning of a summer of new love for my mother and Kevin, the beginning of my time in the Little House. Back in Wilmington, I have a part-time job at a daycare center, but most weekends I end up at my grandfather's place at Hollywood Beach. It will be a year before my mother buys a cottage down the street, less than that before I become pregnant (in the Little House. Sorry, parents. That wasn't my story then, but it's the truth). Come spring my friendship with Maureen will end here, too. "Everything happens in the Little House," Maureen and I used to say, and that was before I gave birth there.
So this warm mid-June weekend kicks it off. Maureen's mother drops her off to spend the night and we immediately douse ourselves with baby oil and lie out in the sun, with no worries about wrinkles or skin cancer. Dinner is simple, pepperoni and mozzarella on Italian rolls. When night comes we get restless and decide to take a walk, to kill some time before Saturday Night Live.
Recent picture of Hollywood Beach. Looks like the old benches are gone.
Maureen and I walk about a half mile to the Elk River, down the shoulder of a barely two lane street, past little shacks and cottages built in the 40s and 50s, some expanded in later decades. The beach has trucked-in sand (the actual river bottom is mucky), with a small swimming area marked off by buoys and lines. Several benches face the water. The old folks hang out here at sunset, smoking their cigarettes and admiring the view. Behind the benches are sycamores and a grassy fenced-in area with swing sets, a merry-go-round, and shuffleboard courts, all dating back to the early 60s. The small parking lot has a single street light and a soda machine.
The soda machine stands against a small white clapboard building, the clubhouse, used for community events, the Men's Pancake Breakfast, the Association Potluck. Before the accident in 1966, my grandfather called Bingo here on Saturday nights. Back then he was handsome and charming, unfaithful and dissolute. I played the same game in the 70s, would come down to the clubhouse on a Saturday night with my grandmother. Skeeter Haines, a tall man with a shiny bald head, would call and I'd concentrate on my board. Sitting next to Mom-mom, I would kick my legs underneath the table, rest a hand on her solid muumuu-ed leg. I haven't been in the building since her death in 1979.
Tonight there are a couple of cars parked by the street light. A small crowd of guys are hanging out, leaning against the fence and talking. Someone is playing Led Zeppelin, Heartbreaker, and the not-yet-familiar smell of burning marijuana wafts our way. We walk up and greet the crowd. Rudy, the nineteen year old brother of a school friend introduces us to the boy on the bike, Dirk Nieubaur.
Interior of a '67 Chrysler Newport Custom.
Before we go on, I need a delusional interlude, a nostalgic montage of the future past that comes with its own soundtrack. It’s a hot summer night two years later and I am sliding across the wide seat of Dirk’s 1967 Chrysler Newport Custom, admiring my legs in the dashboard light. The sinuous strains of Ted Nugent’s Stranglehold are coming from the eight-track and I know that a Budweiser is waiting for me outside. Or we’re tearing down Town Point Road in that same former family car aka “The Beast.” Dirk has just restored it to its Motor City glory and wants to see how fast it can go on the straight pass between cornfields, before the road twists and turns through the woods. He steps off the gas at 100 mph, slows it down right before that first curve, ZZ Top’s Manic Mechanic blasting from the new tape deck. That’s us, kissing in the Little House to the White Album. He's thrown over his other girlfriend for good and the moment is sweet and warm, comforting.
OK. The former teenager in love hidden away within me is satisfied now.
Here’s the darker version, the pre-bliss. Two nights later, alone, I go down to the beach to join the crowd. Dirk walks me home, holding my hand, pushes his bike alongside us. Did we kiss down at the beach, did he offer his mouth to mine? Did I breathe in the memory of pot smoke and too many Budweisers on his breath? These are the moments that are supposed to be marked in our minds forever, first love and all that. But there were so many similar nights, nights when he traveled in a haze of drugs and alcohol, when his breath was smoky and beer sweet, that this one no longer stands out.
"Everything happens in the Little House." I let him in, into the house, into me. It was my first time. I thought that casual sex was the way of twenty-year olds. They just did it (though perhaps not with fourteen-year olds, even particularly mature ones). I went along with without joy or desire, let the boundary be crossed without note. Before this moment, I had joked with my friends about the possibility of nuclear war, the potential Armageddon to come. Could you imagine dying, I'd ask, could you imagine some The Day After scenario in which some of us have been obliterated or are radiation-sick and dying, having never had sex? It turned out that sex was much more complicated than I knew, even in its apparent simplicity, the basic equation of one plus one. I wasn't ready.
After that night, Dirk and I became a strange sort of late-night item (in part because he is also dating Rudy's sister, Anne). He shows up at 1:00 a.m., 2:00 a.m.. I fall asleep watching late night broadcast television, awaken to his knock on the door. Maureen begins seeing Rudy. We start to drink the beers that are offered. I bring jars of gin, siphoned from Mom and Kevin's endless supply, with me to my grandfather's house, hide them in my massive pocketbook. Sometimes a jar springs a leak and I wonder if anyone else on the bus to Newark can smell it too. But nobody says a thing and my grandfather doesn't seem to notice when he picks me up at the bus stop.
When a neighbor friend reports to my mother that he saw two men leaving that Little House at 1:30 in the morning, saw Maureen in Rudy's arms and me giving Dirk a final kiss, I get a lecture, maybe even a cooling off period of one weekend away from the beach. But nothing changes. More importantly, my mother doesn't say a thing to Maureen's parents, though in retrospect I am not sure why. There is nothing to stop us from picking things up where we left off after my brief time away.
At the end of the summer, Dirk goes back to college. Mom and Kevin continue their relationship, with the threat of catastrophic storms to come. And I start tenth grade. Everything is different, from the music (cue in the Circle Jerks, Suicidal Tendencies, the Dead Milkmen) to the make-up (from none to fluorescent stripes on my eyelids) to the cloves I've started to smoke. And it isn't going to get better any time soon.
To be continued.
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.