Adulterated joy
30 July 2011 08:58 AM Categories: Writing prompts | The struggle
Except for me, it’s all at the surface, I have a direct line to my emotions, to what is going on, though I don’t always know the source. I knew that the very idea of family was threatening, the translation of woman/man/kid into me against them, but it had never occurred to me why. Years of threes, me on the outs, the sacrifice, the undesirable, the way I had to build a framework to protect myself, the avoidance even now, now at 41 -- it pulls me back to the days of John the Murderer or Jim the Silent or Kevin the Troubled Genius. That's the background, anyway, for my internal tightening, my bracing against rejection. I am not thinking of these people when I am locked away inside my own head.
I walk past whitewashed bungalows in our neighborhood, grandparent houses with stiff drapes browned by years of cigarette smoke and television rays. Inside the furniture is dark and it smells like sauerkraut and over-boiled hot dogs, like coffee and fake cream, like sewing machine oil and old man sweat. I ache for my grandmother, for the simplicity of two, of being enveloped by love. The year I lived with her and my grandfather is summed up by memories of breakfast on a tray in the kitchen, toaster waffles with margarine and syrup, sausages, and a jelly jar of orange juice. The filtered light of a winter Eastern Shore dawn comes through the casement windows. The kitchen is warm. I am safe. It mixes in with the memory of getting into her bed on snowy weekday mornings, cuddling up close and listening to the radio for school closings. There were quite a few in the winter of 1977-78.
If you ignore mourning, if you try to pretend that loss is all about self-development and looking on the bright side, or if you’re a kid and don’t know how to deal with it, it pops up at the oddest times and years later. The bungalows tell me of other peoples' grandparents, of love going stale in empty houses, and the television is on constantly and the threat of loss hangs everywhere.
My mother and were sometimes two and then a man came along and we were three and I was on the outs, the three-year old standing every night at a dinner table set for two, the melodramatic seven-year old shunned, the preteen who was excluded from dinner conversation the teenager eating alone and living on her own in the year-round coolness of a summer bungalow.
My grandmother and I were always two. She shared her Coke on ice with me, let me lie next to her in her bed. She taught me about double-lined two-way streets and the rules of swimming after eating. She was there on weekends and school holidays. And then she died in front of me and I could do nothing about it, watched helplessly as she slumped on the chair. Nine years old without an advocate.
Maybe this is the tension I’ve been carrying all week, since that session of threes. Connection means loss and relying means loss, too, and so I see the lines of it all, I see it, but you still can’t remove the truth from the matter. There is no pure joy, no happiness without pain, no life without death. Someday I’ll be the one going out, or the one left alone, and my heart tells me “don’t’ get used to it. They all leave and no one will care about you when they are gone.”
From the prompt "Pure joy."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. This one was lightly edited. Yes, I skipped yesterday. It was taking too much time, had too much to develop. Maybe I'll post it someday.
Image: Me at around three years old, my grandmother's cigarette smoldering in her hand. I've posted this picture before. Unfortunately, I don't have any other pictures of my grandmother and me.
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