Iron grip
Or is it gripping me, pulling me under the water's surface?
The past may threaten, may flash a set of phantom fangs when I tell it to go away but it isn't really coming back. Time goes forward, never back.
But sometimes the past is as present as my own mind, and it is up to its same old tricks. Sleights of hand and feats of illusion.
Why do I still talk to you almost every day? Why
can't I just accept you for who you are and get over
it already? And then I get out the family pictures
and realize how young you were. I'm sorry.
Lacunae and mortar
I hacked away at my stillbirth piece recently, snipped away most of the backstory, trimmed the interim stuff, and shaped the conclusion into a neat little bob. It went from around 2700 words to 1300 and I was pleased. But my readers were not. They wanted more about me and my life, from the time of the pregnancy to the story's conclusion in my current, normal, well-adjusted life. (How do you do it, girlfriend? Smoke and mirrors.) And when I reread it, I knew they were right.
I'd love to give more, but which more should I choose? Writing this piece is a delicate business. How do I get across my almost total isolation without whining about it, how do I show what it was like to be fifteen and sixteen, practically on my own, with no allies? And how do I stay a sympathetic character? This was no love child. I was full of anger and hatred at what felt like a parasite, an unwanted growth. In some ways the stillbirth was an escape, albeit one with a lifetime of guilt, pain, and flight from grief.
So I'm back to it, filling in the lacunae with the mortar of my experiences, moving things around and bringing myself back. Again.
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.
Taking what they're giving
'cos I occasionally work for a living (me, that is,
not C, who is pictured above).
My time has been consumed by a small freelance
writing job I picked up last week, coming up with
some popsicle recipes accompanied by a short article
for Vegetarian
Times.
It's been kind of fun using my brain in a
different way, though it usually prefers a more
leaden diet of hairshirt nostalgia. Healthy orange
creamsicles or triple berry popsicles lighten the
mood a little too much.
But I'll take what I can get and I'm grateful for the
work.
"I've Always Been Clean"
Yes, this may be a fantastical image, though I am hopeful that my family will have happy, stress-free meals. I want my son to associate eating with being social, with other people.
I don't.
Once Mom realized that Kevin and I clashed as dinner companions, she dropped me. Suddenly eating for her was all about fat, meat, sugar, and Kevin. She cooked real french fries and bacon cheeseburgers, the plates dripping with grease, and ferried them to Kevin's place. She shopped at a special butcher, burning up the moped rubber to get there, for the proper ingredients for Swedish meatballs. The woman who used to prepare hot carob was baking trays of brownies oozing with real chocolate. I wasn't invited to the party. She always left me a plate, though.
Even before that were the dinners
with Silent Jim. Was he not talking on purpose? Was I
such a terrible dinner companion? What did I do
wrong? 
But long, long before dinners with Silent Jim were
dinners with a man that we still call John the
Murderer (if you ever want to read about John the
Murderer, Calvin Trillin has an essay about
him, "I've Always Been
Clean," in the 1984 book
Killings, taken from his New Yorker
essays). We lived with John when I was about
three, for less than a year. Since he only had two
chairs at his kitchen table, I stood for meals.
This has always been a little factoid of my life,
perhaps made slightly more interesting by the Trillin
coverage (my grandmother kept a file of clippings
from the local newspapers on John's later trial for
perjury; I wish I had that file). I barely remember
standing at the table. What I do remember is being
proud that I could play quietly in his presence. I
also remember being afraid.
This factoid has legs.
The Girls Who Went Away
I wanted to read it for insight into my biological grandmother's experience, the teenager who gave birth to my mother in a Florence Crittenton Home for Unwed Mothers in 1950. What was it like for her? How did she get there? Why did she keep my mother's existence a lifelong secret, never telling her later husband or subsequent children? What about the birth father? Or the more intriguing question: do secrets have their own genetic legacy? Is it any coincidence that her daughter got pregnant at 19 and had a shotgun wedding and that her granddaughter had her own troubles?
So I picked up this excellent book, with sad stories of a time before easily available birth control (or abortion) and sex education. And I found a part of my own story: isolation, secrecy, and shame. I am not alone.
Yes, it may seem from my current blah blah blah on the topic that I've spent the past 22 years chatting openly about my first pregnancy, telling my unlucky seatmates on long airplane rides, droning on at playgroups about the sad outcome. But it's been a big secret. Huge. Even now, as I write on a blog whose url I have in my e-mail signature, I am completely terrified of what my friends and passing acquaintances will think. But I want them to find out. I'm tired of the secrets. And I think they will be kind to me in their hearts, even if the whole thing may freak them out a bit.
Right??
Get in your go-cart and go, little sister
I can do this.
So much of what I've written is confessional, or revealing: here, see, this is how it was for me, this is what I've hidden under my shell. Secrets and shame. I can't seem to write about anything else.
Today I thought I'd try something different, a short piece about how running has helped me both with writing and with pushing through a tough year in my marriage. Running, like writing or maintaining a relationship, takes discipline. You run through reluctance, bad weather, and physical pain. In most cases, things improve with effort and persistence. Even my "inspirational" running story turned an emotional striptease. Though as I write about it here, I can see a way out of that ... I'll have to think about it some more.
Taking the interesting bits of my life and thoughts (if I could figure out which, exactly, were the interesting bits) and writing fiction -- that would be the way to go, the way to really transcend my personal pain-o-rama. But fiction is SCARY . I've barely poked my toe into the murky waters of the personal essay form. Yes, we should do things that call to us, even if they are scary. But I'd like to feel competent in some form of writing first. Work on one neural network at a time.
Ah, well. Maybe just one short story ....