Lost years
I was sitting at a playground when this revelation hit me. The boy had a shovel in his hand and was tossing sand through the sieve, pausing occasionally to tell me what he was doing, giving me the story behind the game.
I’ve been sitting in playgrounds for almost five years now, sitting in them when he was tiny and all he could do was slump in a swing or hold on to my hands as we walked on wood chips or on springy recycled tires. There was a time (the really lost years) when we just moved to California that he hated playgrounds, when we spent dark rainy days and bright sunny days in our house or yard and I didn’t talk to anyone but him and my husband or my mother on the phone, talked in dark clipped resentful tones.
Because I’ve gone underground during the last five years – and especially the last three, after we moved to this unfamiliar place with a rainy season and foggy mornings that burn off into cloudless sky. I stopped caring what I looked like (despite my occasional forays into style). I stopped showering every day and sometimes didn't even shower every other day. I stopped using an ATM card and instead relied on my husband to give me cash infusions, like I was asking for egg money. I stopped reading much. I stopped going anywhere by myself and when I did the feeling was either exhilarating (“I’m riding on BART to San Francisco by myself!”) or scary and unfamiliar.
There have been afternoons spent at playgrounds, chasing the kid, talking to him about castles, or taking on the voice of Dress Me Monkey. We’ve trekked to libraries and Habitot and hopped on the BART to the city or to Fairyland. One long fall we regularly traveled a mile to a playground by a large playing field with the sole goal of sitting in a play structure and watching a high school football team practice. That was all the kid wanted to do there, plop himself on our little seat (growling at any other child who wanted a turn) to watch these teenagers in bulky colorful outfits run and tackle and pass.
I sometimes still walk long distances with the boy in the stroller, despite the fact that he will be five years old at the end of this month and weighs about 43 pounds. Since I don’t drive or bike, but love to walk, I’m thinking that a stroller may come in handy for a while longer even though pushing him up sloped Berkeley streets isn't always pleasant, even though I know that people think it's time for him to walk or ride a bike. (Ever walked 2+ miles roundtrip with a bike-hating five-year-old beside you? If so, let me know.) But he also walks with me, too, his warm hand in mine. We stop to pick flowers or retrieve sticks that he turns into spears or swords or arrows.
The lost years. The worst of these meant isolation and – yes – boredom for me. The kid has only recently been comfortable playing on his own with friends when we go to the park, so most of the play time has been on me. I am not one of those inventive mothers who always has a kid project going, some sort of craft or messy activity. A lot of the time I’ve felt like a stay-at-home-mom failure, a woman who isn’t actually suited to the job, but has taken it on anyway only to complain about it.
The best of these years has been the sweetness, the fun we have when I allow myself to live in the moment, the feeling of his hand in mine, the real conversations we have about his stories or our lives or even about his fears. I know that the conversations will only get better (except, maybe, during his teenage years). I know that our playground trips will be more and more about him playing with his friends until playgrounds cease to interest him. But I also know that the sweetest things will disappear. Soon he will stop holding my hand or asking for 20 kisses before he goes to school. He will stop patting and kissing my belly, will cease to bob back and forth to music he likes, no matter where he hears it. He will become self-conscious in new ways.
My son starts kindergarten on September 1st. It could be the beginning of my return to the world, the found years. In preparation, I am working out and showering daily, wearing things other than stretchy knit pants, and dusting off my ATM card. I have a short solo trip -- my first since the kid's birth -- planned for next month. But I also hope that the sweetness will last for as long as it can, that despite the changes the boy will still keep the cuddliness, will still tell me "I love you 3-a-million" before going to sleep.
It's possible, right?
Image: The kid, looking into the future.
I've written this post in the middle of a four-day business trip for my husband. So far things are going pretty well with me and the kid AND I'm still getting to shower (and exercise) daily. It's a good start to the found years.
godless wonder
—What’s ash?
Erica’s question—it was one of those brilliant moments. Kevin and Ciara looked at each other. They smiled. There were no coal fires in the house and neither of them had ever smoked. The cooker was electric. Nothing was ever burned. There was no real religion, at home or in school, so Erica had never noticed the gray thumbprints on Ash Wednesday, on the foreheads of the old and the Polish. A child like Erica could get this far without knowing what ash was, until she saw it spewing from a mountain. -- Roddy Doyle, "Ash," New Yorker, 24 May 2010.
I am not a religious person, though I received a bachelor's degree from the Catholic-to-the-core School of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America. My closet friend there was a seminarian, a kind-hearted young men who accepted me, though he prayed for me to feel god's love, to take on the golden cloak of the believer. But it was philosophy that led me to atheism, to the idea that if you couldn't prove something, why cling to it? The proofs of god's existence seemed so medieval and naive, so pointless. I let go of my belief in an afternoon of paper writing, was not bereft at the loss of the First Cause. What protection had It offered me?
Belief in god was a given in my childhood, even without church, even without being baptized (my mother didn't believe that a newborn had any sins that needed washing away). I occasionally attended the Methodist church where a friend's father was minister and I also sometimes went to temple with a Jewish friend and her family. God was in the air. When I was eight, I read Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret. After that, I talked to god in the shower at my grandparent's house, stared at my distorted reflection in the taps as I sat on the bumpy stool and let the water go cold. I gave him my confessions and hopes. Perhaps it was a form of self-mortification, the bracing water, the red round marks the stool left on my flesh. But I think it was the idea of having someone listen to me, someone who took a personal interest in my well-being that made these conversations so long.
My father-in-law eventually discarded religion and my husband has as well. My mother, who was briefly Catholic, now leans more Buddhist than Christian. My father has never been a churchgoer. I know I will never be religious, can never talk about god in any concrete way. I can't suspend my disbelief in the face of religious lore. If there was a first cause, it doesn't care about me or my problems. I don't see a divine need to suffer, only human beings and animals that live and struggle and feel joy and sadness before disappearing into the ether.
Still, I'm not a Christopher Hitchens, religion-hating type. I can distinguish between entities like the Catholic Church (which I have a lot of problems with) and individual Catholics, though I admit that any sort of fundamentalism gives me the willies. I know many religious people who are intelligent and thoughtful. Some are more conservative than others, but they are generally compassionate, kind-hearted folks who have taken it on faith.* They believe in god because he feels real, because they have an experiential knowledge that defies proof or rational surety. And I no longer describe myself as an atheist, even though I don't have any concrete belief. I can't say that there is no unifying force in the universe, that we are just soulless bodies waiting to rot (though we may be just that and I'm not betting on discovering the truth, if there is one). Life is a mystery.
The world my son is growing up in is devoutly secular, but it is also one in which we still need to talk about belief and religion, about god. I'm not sure how to do it without removing all of the mystery, without making it sound like I know something for sure. How do we leave the door open for him to make up his own mind? I want him to know about ash, about belief and how we think about death. He has questions. He worries about ghosts, buries skeletons in the planters, has seen enough to ask about the crucifix. My explanations of why we celebrate Easter and Christmas are painful: "There was a man named Christ who some people believe was the son of God . . . . " These are Christian holidays, even though you can celebrate them without a word about Christ's birth, death, and resurrection. To tell the kid that god is a story does both the kid and belief a disservice. But still I struggle, with the questions, with dogma, with how to frame the question of the god I don't quite believe in respectfully.
*And sometimes people are blinded by faith, use religion to dictate how other people should live. In this piece, I am not talking about homophobia or the anti-abortion movement, or about people killing in the name of god.
Images: Top: The kid burying Big Skully, the Skeleton King, in our former sugar snap pea patch. Middle: Newspaper clipping from the family prayer book.
I remember the heavy air and the smell of gin
The kitchen on Queen Street was out of proportion, with a large linoleumed space that could hold a table for six but contained only an old refrigerator and a telephone jack. The stove, sink, cabinets and counter space were jammed into an adjacent galley. Everything we owned -- pots, pans, dishes, and silverware -- was a parental hand-me-down. In the mornings we would linger over percolated coffee diluted to a muddy brown with half and half, the perfect solution to a mild hangover. Some days I would come home for lunch to make BLTs on poppy seed buns, the bacon still hot from the pan, tomato juice and mayonnaise dripping down my fingers.
This was the place where we learned to cook, tried recipes from Gourmet Magazine and the Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook. In our year there, we made pizzas from scratch, cleaned and fried squid, and grilled chicken marinated with olive oil, lemon juice, and rosemary. Peter showed us how to make pesto and a cook at the Ironstone brought us a bushel of crawfish that we steamed in a cauldron of boiling water.
I have a file of recipes from that period, most of them copied by hand from D's mother's cookbooks, some of which I still make, like Lebanese Cucumber Soup, and Rice with Garlic and Walnuts. I even have the pizza recipes from Gourmet, which seemed so exotic at the time (Sun-Dried Tomato Pizza with Peppers, Onion, and Garlic Confit, Broccoli and Ricotta Pizza). Going through them reminds me that I never clip recipes anymore, just search around on the internet or Epicurious to see what looks good. Recipes on paper are another thing I miss from the pre-internet days, another reason to toss our modem out the window. I want a paper trail blotched with oil and tomato sauce. I want tangible memories. I want to have my mind and time returned to me (brief interruption while I look at Facebook: see what I mean?).
Still, the memories remain. When my family returned from vacation last Friday, there was a half batch of gazpacho, vinegary and bright, waiting for us, courtesy of our housesitter. Gazpacho was one of D’s favorite foods and I thought of that long-ago summer, which was also the first time M and I made the soup. The recipe called for peeled, deseeded tomatoes and we were mystified. How did one peel tomatoes? Like, with a vegetable peeler? Or by hand somehow? And, umm, the seeds? What was the problem with seeds? Finally, M called her mother. She gave us instructions: put a big pot of water on to boil, remove the tomato stems and cut Xs in the blossom ends before immersing them in the boiling water for under a minute. Then remove the tomatoes with a strainer and plunge them into an ice bath.The peels would slip off in our hands.
Gazpacho recipe, copied in the summer of
1988.
It worked. M and I pureed
the still-seedy tomatoes with bread crumbs,
garlic, vinegar, olive oil and tomato juice,
adding onion and cucumber at the end. The
soup chilled while we chopped the garnishes.
It was late July on the Eastern Shore. The
air was resistant, fluid, like water. Heat
flattened the landscape, made the houses
across the shimmering street one-dimensional.
While I poured the soup, M filled two cups
with ice and gin and topped them with tonic
and thin wedges of lime. We sat in the living
room with our drinks, the bowls of gazpacho
balanced on our laps. The soup was bracing,
the acidity of the tomato and vinegar
complemented by the bite of onion and
coolness of cucumber.
Sometimes all that remains
is sense memory -- the taste, the scent, the
aching loss, the joy of conquest -- or a
suspicion that something
else must have happened. So
maybe M and I went our for a walk that night
after the sun went down, barefoot on
sidewalks that radiated a memory of sun. Or
maybe we refilled our cups again and again
and cried about our crazy mothers, our absent
fathers. Or we danced to Prince or sung along
to Paradise
by the Dashboard
Light. D may have spent the
night, the two of us still and quiet on
checkerboard sheets, feeling the pull of
the window fan in my attic bedroom, while
downstairs M let the smoke from her
cigarette drift out of an open window.
That night is lost. But I remember the heavy
air and the smell of gin, our kitchen counter
splattered with tomato juice, the closeness
of friendship at a time when the world was
new.
Images:
Top: Me, a blurry goofball in the yard on
Queen Street.
Middle: The original gazpacho recipe.
Bottom: The checkerboard sheets, the
I
Love You This Much
statue, the orange crate. The
artfully-placed bottle of Corona.
Bullets over Berkeley
We live in a tightly packed neighborhood in West Berkeley, with a house directly behind the back fence and other people’s yards and houses on either side. When was someone firing off a gun? Target practice seems unlikely, unless the shooter liked the idea of randomly hitting a house or killing a neighbor making breakfast or having a late-night snack. Maybe these were celebratory bullets, fired at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Day, or maybe something more sinister happened in our backyard long ago.
I wonder about what houses hold, memories and smells and the intensity of events long gone. Sometimes I walk into our son’s room, which was just an attic at some point – it’s right against the roof line and the ceiling angles, perfect for a kid’s room – and I smell old cigarette smoke. That stuff soaks into the walls, into the floorboards and rafters. You can never truly get rid of it. I picture an old guy up there, smoking and sweltering, listening to baseball on the radio or plopped in front of an ancient TV. Maybe a part of him is still there and he’s mystified by our setup, the Legos and stuffed animals, the piles of children’s books.
When my ex-husband was in his early twenties, he had an encounter with a ghost. He was visiting a friend’s house and was exploring the attic when the air was suddenly infused with the smell of pipe smoke. "I couldn't get down those steps fast enough," he told me years later. It was an overnight visit and as he slept he was visited by the house's previous owner, though X. described it as less of a visitation than being pestered by a lonely presence, like getting stuck next to a talkative guy on the train. When X. woke up, he knew the man's name, that he was a widower and a painter and that the man had spent many hours up in the attic smoking a pipe and mourning his dead wife. His friend's mother confirmed the man's name and widower status and said that she, too, had felt his presence.
I find a bullet and I want a story. I almost want a crime scene for the excitement of it, for the unexpected narrative, but I don’t want someone else’s real life pain to come out for my entertainment. I want to believe that everyone who has lived in our house has been happy. I want their happiness to fill me with joy or at the very least contentment. I don’t want to think of the pain of others who have come here before me soaking into the walls, into the dirt in the backyard where I will grow vegetables, cucumbers on the vine, juicy tomatoes, pumpkins that will be as heavy as toddlers by summer’s end.
I want us all to have the happy ending.
Image: Bullet in hand.
Sweater dress logic
That's me up there, in our
office/guest room/exercise space, dressed in
full stay-at-home mom regalia. Baggy cropped
pants? Check. Shapeless long-sleeved t-shirt?
Check. Hair in desperate need of a cut or at
the very least a comb? Oh, yeah. And then of
course, there is the room itself, the armoire
mirror obscured by smudges, the
partially-made bed, the pillow propped on my
desk chair so that I don't get a backache
when I write, the old boxes in the corner
that my mother puts in the back windows at
night during her visits to block out the
neighbor's porch light (she likes to sleep in
near darkness). Welcome to my glamorous
world.
I don't tend to get dressed up during the
week (or ever), because what's the point?
Most mornings I sit around writing or letting
my mind go in four or five dark directions,
and afternoons are kid time. I'm not going to
put on my fancy spandex pants to go to the
library. Over the years I’ve worn many short
and form-fitting outfits, but since my son
was born I've apparently given up on looking
good. It isn't worth the bother or the
expense, and who am I trying to impress? My
husband finds even frumpy-mom me attractive
and I have no female coworkers to dazzle. The
game of dress-up, of wrapping myself in
appealing fabrics and styles, is no longer
familiar.
But feeling frumpy is depressing, so I'm
starting to think about what I wear, to
attempt to dress like I'm still in the game,
like I haven't given up completely on feeling
attractive. It takes work, sometimes it isn't
worth it, but I make the effort. I've started
to go shopping for clothes in person again,
not online or at outlet stores, but in resale
shops, places like the Crossroads Trading
Company, where I might find
funky, offbeat duds on the cheap, where
I'm likely to find interesting options in
small sizes.
This is where I found the sweater dress.
The dress was short, slate blue and
formfitting, with a princess waist and a cozy
turtleneck collar. It went well with a pair
of knee-high black leather boots that I
bought at the same store. When will I wear this
thing? I thought, but clothes
shopping often puts me in fantasy mode, a
sunny place where I shower seven days a week
and get my hair cut four times a year, where
I remember to brush my teeth hours before I
pick up the kid from preschool, where I
decide to put on cute dresses every day
instead of baggy pants. The dress was under
twenty bucks, so I went for it. I made an
investment in fantasy. My husband and I were
planning a nice dinner at Oliveto
to mark the
completion of his dissertation, so I had
an occasion.
On the evening of our
dinner, I laid next to the boy as usual,
waiting for him to fall asleep, for his
breathing to become even and light before I
tiptoed out of his room to change. Boy
asleep, dress safely on, I applied the
tiniest bit of makeup and pulled my hair
back. As I creaked down the steps, my husband
was talking in the living room with our
babysitter. She is freshly twenty-one,
effortless with both adults and children, and
as I came closer I realized that I was
wearing a
dress, that I was wearing
the
dress. It was
as though I had just put on a buttless
formfitting leather jumpsuit. I felt exposed,
like I was pretending to be something I
wasn't, a young person, a stylish
person, non-maternal.
I had brought a coat with me downstairs and I
whipped it on before the babysitter could see
me, then ran behind the magazine rack to put
on my boots. Indecency covered, I fluttered
out the door with my husband before she could
notice that I was dressed as an imposter,
that I was attempting to play the part of an
attractive, stylish woman. And in the cold
restaurant, I kept my coat wrapped around my
shoulders, covered my cheap disguise.
Did the blame for my discomfort lie within me
or was it the dress? Was I over-thinking the
whole thing? (Remember how
neurotic I can
be?) The dress had one
more chance to prove herself. We had a
cocktail party to attend.
The party took place in a typical Berkeley
house, a small two-bed, one bath, and it was
hopping by the time we arrived at 8:30. It
was my kind of crowd, mainly parents that had
escaped their kids for the night, a mix of
thirty- and forty-somethings. The women were
brightly plumed, showing off cleavage and
shoulders, wearing dresses in thin colorful
fabrics. The room was a tangle of bare legs,
and men in dark colors, of manicured toes
peeking out of exotic shoes. I felt
positively demure in my turtleneck sweater
dress with black tights and scuffed black
boots. The princess waist seemed too
youthful, like I should have had an oversized
lollipop in my hand instead of a beer. And it
was hot in there, so steamy that a bloom of
sweat broke out on my wooled-over torso. I
could have removed my boots and taken off my
tights, could have swung the tights
seductively around my head, grazed the faces
of the other partygoers before tossing the
hosiery out of an open window. But instead I
pulled on my turtleneck, looked enviously at
the bared collarbones around me.
Apparently clothes are all about context.
I haven't given up on my sweater dress or on
regaining my fashion mojo. But I might need
to start fresh, to begin with the foundation
garments. Next week I will jettison my
vintage underwear collection for a more
contemporary look.
You won't be reading about it here.
First image: Me, in
the office, this morning. The
frump-quotient has gone up since then. I
got cold and put on a fuzzy sweater and
socks.
Second image: Sweater dress.
Because I am hungry for art
But worse than feeling the real world slip away is the feeling that I get when I don't write. It's a kind of lovesickness, an ache of not-having. The only way to feel better is to sit down and start typing. Even if it's painful to write, even when I procrastinate, when I avoid turning on Freedom for the Mac and bop around the Internet looking up information on John Quine or Anya Phillips (I've been re-reading Please Kill Me and the 70s punk scene is haunting my brain), eventually I get around to writing. Because I have to. It fills me. Without it, I am empty.
I want to write all night, sipping on red wine and smoking the occasional cigarette. I want to go to sleep at 3:00 a.m., sated with language, and wake up for a light lunch of mineral water and salad, of warmed baguette slices smeared with roasted garlic and chevre. After lunch, I want to linger over a book, sip a cup of muddy espresso in preparation to wrestle with words on and off into the night. I am up at 3:00 a.m. these days, listening to a frustrated cat howl, staring at the billowing curtains as my mind forces me to consider various bleak scenarios, feeling the heat of a feverish, fitful boy as he pushes me off the cliff's edge of the bed. A week of just the two of us -- me and the words -- would cure my angst. One week of writing in a dark room, embraced by a circle of lamplight, feeling the sediment on my tongue as I drain a final glass of wine, letting my mind dance with the headrush of unfamiliar nicotine. Just a week. I would take the time to focus on this useless fantasy in order to discard it before returning to the here and now.
The Round Robin, with its daily prompts and sweet feedback, helps, but sometimes I still feel like I'm bouncing around in my own mind, where (as usual) it's all about me. Other times, though, I create something that I can't explain, but I like.
So here you go, a piece that is a mix of homesickness and the past and an attempt to transcend. And let's hope for a few weeks of health and clear weather, of writing and creating. Of sanity.
Stained
I want
a cylindrical room made of factory glass, the
door a piece of carved mahogany salvaged from
the She-Wolf, Lord's old boat, the one that
is sitting on a trailer in the backyard, the
hitch supported by a stack of cinderblocks.
Against the cool glass, set into block, the
mahogany will seem rustic, warm to the touch.
I will rub my hand against it before I enter
the room, think of the times we went
waterskiing or just bobbed around in the
muddy waters of the Elk, my wet ass spreading
a dark stain on the boat seat.
Even then that boat was a piece of shit. Lord
wasn’t paying attention to it. He let it sit
in the water all winter long. The varnish
wore off, the gleam melted away. Every year
he bought cans of teak oil, stacked them in
the shed, and let them sit. Barnacles coated
the She-Wolf's hull. They were rough against
my hand, cut into my feet as I pushed against
the boat into the heavy water.
So, the room. It is lit from within, white
light/white heat. Even the ceiling is made of
factory glass. The floor, too. It is empty. I
will go inside, lock the door, and remove my
clothes. I will press myself up against the
glass. See if you can tell me what you are
looking at, my blurry image refracted in each
square. I will light a cigarette, will snuff
it out on the rounded wall, again and again.
You will see flesh, the death of ember, the
end of the spark.
Lord is dead now, too, washed away, though
not in the way you would expect. It had
nothing to do with water. It was emotion. The
dike broke, his water wings deflated, a big
hole opened in his roof and the house filled
with rain. You want me to tell you about it,
to be more direct, but I won’t. I have his
boat and my plan. Every weekend I sand down
the mahogany, try to remove the stains, think
about my cylindrical factory glass room. I
picture Lord on the other side, horn-rims
slipping off his nose, one hand marking his
place in the book. I mystify him and he likes
that.
Image by
Vinje.
I feel it. I name it. I let it go.
So it might surprise you that one quarter through that first margarita we started fighting. We don't fight often these days, and when we do it's usually quite civil. This was an old-style fight with incredulous looks and just-caught nastiness. Each of us thought the other was clueless, wasn't listening, was going off on some crazy tangent. Ultimately, we pulled it back together, reached a deeper understanding, but for fifteen tense minutes, I fought the urge to run out of the restaurant into the cold rain. I fought the urge to be by myself and pretend that it was better this way, to live without risk, to be warmed only by my own intellect and senses.
Yes, here they are again.
My parents after their wedding, June 1969,
staring off into the misty future. It's too
late now ...
Earlier that day, my mother
and I had been talking about trust and
infidelity. I explained how how I learned
some time ago that to trust in others blindly
is foolish because no one is perfect. Other
people can let you down, not out of cruelty,
but because they are human and bound to make
mistakes. If you expect perfection or total
fidelity, you may end up very disappointed,
so why not keep an open mind about it? Not to
expect to be let down, but to not let
yourself get crushed if it happens?
The words had come out with more vitriol and
less clarity than I felt. I sounded angry,
specifically with my husband, and Mom asked
me if he knew I was so angry. Strange. I
didn't feel angry. But there Mr. Trinkle and
I were in Fonda a few hours later, raising
our voices. For the last half of the fight,
I'd been dabbing at my eyes with the corner
of my cloth napkin, trying to hold back the
tears. It felt like I'd been willing them not
to fall for weeks, maybe months, while I kept
the rest of life together. When it was over,
when we reached détente,
the tears came out, along with
the sudden understanding that this whole
thing was all about my
mother. Or maybe it wasn't that
simple. It was also all about my
father. And let's not forget to
point a finger at the dissertation and the
feelings it stirred up in its death throes.
That thing was once used as a wedge, a
separator, an agent of my perceived
rejection. The diss is dead and buried now.
It hadn't been an issue for years. What could
I hold against a corpse?
Here is my mother, more present than I ever
remember. There is no demanding, angry Kevin,
no Baltimore petty criminal heroin addict
boyfriend, no personal life drama to get in
the way. When Mr. Trinkle and I left the East
Coast, the addict was the center of her life.
Interacting with her then felt like a
continual rejection, an extension of the
loneliness of childhood, though I see now
that that the rejection has never been
personal. In the past two and a half years,
she's changed her life. The addict is now on
the periphery, no longer the center of her
world. There is no drama. She is here, flawed
but available. I have just enough safe space
for the anger to emerge. It's wordless, this
anger, and scared, too, rage coupled with
fear. I know she is capable of turning on me,
of causing great pain, of making me wish I
never existed. Or at least that's how it used
to be.
Here is my husband, present and loving. The
days of avoidance by dissertation are long
over, but I remember them, remember how
neatly our neuroses fit together, his
reluctance dovetailing with my grasping need
for absolute acceptance, with the tests and
the tantrums, the nastiness and tossed
objects. We have a history, a time when I
felt very rejected, unloveable, and even
though we've talked the hell out of it, there
are still those tight corners in our
relationship that remind me.
Combine my mother's visit with the completion
of the dissertation and those deep feelings
of unworthiness rise up. They poke and prod.
I want to run out in the rain and be alone
forever. I want to ball up my fists and
shadowbox in the cold attic. I want to be
invisible, the observer who cannot be
observed. An old self-protective voice
whispers if you let them get too
close, they could destroy you. Keep your
distance. But this is not the only
way to see things. I have choices.
Now the struggle to be present, to be in the
moment, is mine. If I don't give all of
myself over, if I hold back, I don't risk
absolute rejection. It used to be that I
would test the ones who loved me, would stamp
my feet and pepper every fight with threats
to leave. These days I hide under a carapace
of calm. I hold it together and when I do
break, I tend to downplay my vulnerability. I
maintain a friendly facade, a protective
attitude. Intimacy equals risk. Oh, it's easy
with you, reader. We have geographical
distance and thick words to separate us. The
pull of the everyday, the undertow of the
mundane, doesn't come between us. We can
pretend for a few minutes that we are
intimates, reach an understanding without
touch, and then return to our real lives
unscathed.
Already all of this is changing for me. By
the time my thoughts get to you, I'm working
them out, naming the feelings, articulating
them so I can put them away. One of the
reasons this blog was so important to my
recovery process (I call it a recovery
process because I don’t know what else to
call it) is because it gave me a place to
name my fears, to articulate my ugliness in a
relatively risk-free environment. Still,
there are risks. When I find out that someone
I know in real life or from my past has read
the blog, I feel a panicked thrill – they
know! (Depending on how far they've read, of
course. They may know very little.) And then
my stomach sinks and I feel a different sort
of panic. I'm afraid of being judged for the
things I've done, for those I've scraped up
along the way. But I also worry that they
will read and think: She deserved it. They
will wonder about the intrinsic evil in me,
about the horrible things I must have done to
cause my family to abandon me. Rationally, I
know this is crazy. Emotionally, it makes my
heart ache.
I feel it. I name it. I let it go. But it
isn't easy.
A virulent strain of grief
And then there was what happened to Kevin.
I’ve written about Kevin,
my mother’s long-term boyfriend, here before,
in short bursts of roundabout language. He
came into our lives when I was fourteen and
nothing was ever really the same again. By
the time I was fifteen, I was living in the
Little House with disastrous results and he
and my mother were at the thin edge of
eighteen tumultuous years together. Kevin is
starting to lose his mythical qualities, has
become more human in my mind in the last
year, more culpable and weak. He was a bully,
really, a smart and witty bully, though that
of course was not the whole of him.
[Warning: The below goes
into detail about an illness and a harrowing
hospital stay and may be upsetting to some
readers.]
In March 2002, Kevin, 55 years old, died of,
well, it’s a little murky. He was in the
final stages of myelofibrosis,
a bone marrow disease, though it was probably
pneumonia that did that last dirty work. With
myelofibrosis, the bone marrow becomes
fibrous and hard. Blood production that
normally occurs in the bone marrow moves to
other organs -- the spleen, the liver -- in a
last-ditch effort to make blood, a phenomenon
with the poetic name extramedullary
hematopoesis. These organs try, but
ultimately fail, to make useful blood.
Instead, they produce bad blood, the cells
immature and misshapen, blood that does a
half-assed job of keeping the body healthy.
People with myelofibrosis are often anemic;
they bruise easily and are susceptible to
infection and bone pain. While there are
drugs to manage this disease, there is no
cure outside of a stem cell transplant, which
is always a dicey position. If you have it,
one way or another, myelofibrosis will
eventually kill you. Or more accurately, an
infection will kill you. Or you will develop
leukemia. Or you will develop a wasting
illness. Or your liver will cease to work
(because of the extramedullary hematopoesis).
Before March 2002, before we called in
hospice and accepted the fact that Kevin’s
death was imminent, Kevin spent six months in
the hospital, nearly all of it in the
Critical Care Unit (like an intensive care
unit) or a unit one step below Critical Care.
Trying to write about that time in a way that
makes any sense is impossible. I’ve tried it,
tried to come up with a timeline and a reason
why he ended up on a ventilator (aka
respirator) shortly after he was admitted and
how early on we thought he was going to
slowly bleed to death until a miracle worker
hematologist/oncologist came up with a genius
solution to get Kevin’s blood to clot, and
how Kevin couldn’t swallow because his
epiglottis was damaged from his emergency
intubations, so he couldn’t eat and how there
was a doctor we called Dr. Death because he
insisted on telling Kevin he wasn’t going to
make it, let alone walk again (he was right
on the former, wrong on the latter). Kevin
was on the vent/off the vent. He kept on
getting pneumonia. He was hooked up to tubes
and lines, trapped. But alive.
Fall 2001 was full of death and fire, of
anthrax scares and work closures, of mail
that came to the federal library where I
worked months old, crispy and irradiated. It
was the beginning of Kevin’s long end, a
journey that required great vigilance on my
mother’s part and the amazing efforts of a
large number of doctors and nurses. Being in
CCU for six months is incredibly intense,
all-encompassing, and stressful, and when a
patient is as fragile as Kevin was,
you have
to be vigilant.
It isn’t that the professionals aren’t
competent, it’s just that they want to do
things, think that action is always the best
course. And sometimes it isn’t.
When I sat down to start my NaNoWriMo novel,
all those details of his hospitalization came
out, details I have stored away for years:
the sound of the ventilator and the beeps of
IVs that need attention; the smell of
pneumonic mucus as I suctioned it out of
Kevin's trach; the image of Kevin trapped
under a blanket of tubes and devices, so
fragile you didn't want to touch him (and the
too-late knowledge that he must have been
desperate for touch); the horrors of his
frequent intubations, emergency procedures
where doctors had to essentially jam an air
tube down his throat after his oxygen levels
dropped precipitously; the rushed meals at
Taco Bell Express, knowing we had to get back
and that eating in front of him when he was
getting his food, this green sludge, through
a stomach tube would have been horribly
cruel; how skinny, impossibly skinny he
became. How, after being bedridden and
hospitalized for three months, he took his
80-pound frame and a walker and did halting
laps around the CCU, in an act of pure will.
So all this came spewing out last month,
disguised under a new premise with a much
younger protagonist. After the month was over
and the first draft off my head, I realized I
had a lot of legwork to do. For example, I
know next to nothing about the disease I had
chosen to grace my unlucky character with.
And what do I know, really, about parental
grief, which is a particularly virulent
strain? I've been doing research, reading
books and looking at websites. There is one
blog out there, very detailed and
well-written, created by a mother who was
chronicling her little boy's fight against
cancer. That little boy died in September.
The whole thing is horribly sad (and as I
read it, I wonder: why, exactly, am I doing
this?).
When you are in the middle of a
life-and-death-struggle, the intensity of
keeping someone alive, of trying to make them
well, it's all you can think about.
Everything becomes medical and you find out
all you can. You learn about the strength of
nurses and the support system that crops up
in a hospital. You learn to live with things
you never thought were possible before. You
are steeped in the smells and sounds of
illness and it feels like it will never end.
You don’t want it to end with death, but
sometimes it does and you have to let go of
the struggle. I read this blog and I cry, for
this family and the little boy that will
never grow up. I hope that I can do justice
to him and to Kevin and to all the people who
have experienced such prolonged pain.
The kid at Kevin's grave on Maryland's
Eastern Shore, April 2009.
Perhaps this is an impossibly tall order.
What I'm looking for now is authenticity, a
way to write something that sings and is true
and real, that doesn't exploit illness as a
book topic, but brings it to life and honors
those that have gone before us.
It's daunting.
Top
image: Kevin at Georgetown University
Hospital, January 2002, about three months
before he died.
Beautiful simplicity
When you go to the ballet,
sitting up in those nosebleed seats, don’t
look up at the ceiling. You might find
yourself dizzy with the height, lightheaded
on the knowledge of the distance between you
and the stage. The ballerinas are fleshy
blurs, their tortured feet rustle and tap,
sounding the effort of weightlessness. The
chandelier, heavy with crystal and planetary
glass, is so close you can practically touch
it. Your bones flutter with the thought.
Your mother has put you between him and her,
and you are wearing a floor-length skirt, a
little quilted number that befits the time.
1973. His fingers are thick. You remember the
marks they made when you were bad or weren’t,
red welts across your bottom, three broken
circles around your skinny arm. When you are
three years old, it doesn’t matter who makes
the rules or what it means to break them. To
be a three-year-old girl is to be too much of
everything: lower lip pout and high screech,
pounding footsteps interspersed with tiptoes.
You are flesh-and-blood will.
His hand kneads the bulb of the lacquered
armrest. As he reaches across your back to
touch your mother, the scent of underarm
sweat, whiskey and Vitalis floats into the
air. Below, the dancers’ feet hover above the
wooden planks of the stage, hard legs defined
under delicate pink.
His smell envelops the three of you.
From a prompt that morphed
into a longer piece. The longer piece
currently lies dormant on my computer,
waiting for me to be ready again.
Image from DanceHelp.Com.
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.
The bitter scent of coming winter
I remember preparing a meal for him in the decay of autumn, after the leaves had dropped from the trees and lay rotting in the gutter and the breeze was turning cold and harsh. I was just 21 years old and could focus on the kitchen, had the time to think about cooking, and it was all still new, too, love and cookery. There was a recipe in Gourmet for roasted fall vegetables. I skinned and hacked a heavy butternut squash, added knobby shallots, garlic, and chunks of red potato, then tossed the vegetables with olive oil and roasted them in the oven. Near the end of cooking, I added slivered sage leaves, the bitter scent of coming winter.
Sage takes well to butter and olive oil, get
crisp and intense, medicinal over gnocchi,
tucked among thick slices of potato. My
husband and I grow sage in our front yard.
The plant sits between the flat-leafed
parsley and the lemon verbena, its silver
green leaves upright, purple flowers still
drawing honeybees. I’ll have to trim it soon,
deadhead the flowers and clean off the spider
webs in preparation for the feasts and
sadness of fall.
Here is the original recipe, from
Epicurious. Add 2 tablespoons
slivered sage in the last ten minutes of
cooking to recreate my more winter-scented
dish.
Roasted
Autumn Vegetables
1 1/2 pounds small red potatoes
1 pound shallots (about 24), peeled and
trimmed
5 tablespoons olive oil
1 bay leaf
1/4 teaspoon dried thyme, crumbled
4 garlic cloves, crushed
2 pounds butternut squash, peeled and cut
into 3/4-inch pieces (about 4 cups)
fresh thyme sprigs for garnish, if desired
In a bowl, toss together the potatoes,
quartered, the shallots, 4 tablespoons of
the oil, the bay leaf, the
dried thyme, the garlic, and salt and pepper
to taste. Spread the vegetables in an oiled
large roasting pan and roast them in the
middle of a preheated 375°F. oven, shaking
the pan every 5 to 10 minutes, for 25
minutes. In a bowl toss the squash with the
remaining 1 tablespoon oil and salt and
pepper to taste and add it to the pan. Roast
the vegetables, shaking the pan occasionally,
for 10 to 20 minutes more, or until they are
tender. Discard the bay leaf and garnish the
vegetables with the thyme sprigs.
Gourmet
October 1990
Image: Attractive sage
bush, much nicer than ours, from
eHow.
The intersection of food, love, and memory
If it wasn't frozen,
processed, or heavily laced with sugar, my
grandmother didn't cook it. I have her old
recipe box, which includes many selections
from the "Kitchen of Duncan Hines," as well
as things like Pow-Wow Sandwiches, English
Liver Bake, and salad molds, recipes that are
products of the sixties and seventies. My
grandfather made the box, designed it to hang
between the refrigerator and the stove in the
kitchen at Hollywood Beach. We use it to hold
keys now. One of the first things I do when I
move to a new place is to hang it by the
front door, a reminder of a past so long gone
that it feels like fiction. I may look
through the recipes, but I never feel an urge
to actually make any of them.
When the corn
and tomatoes are at their peak, however, and
I steam a dozen ears to eat for dinner
alongside a salad of freshly-picked tomatoes,
I feel a tug on the line that connects me to
those long-ago meals. Corn on the cob with
butter sits at the intersection of food,
love, and memory for me. It has the power to
bring me back to a time before I was born, to
Hollywood Beach in the late fifties and early
sixties when my mother and aunt were still
children, before my grandfather was
injured in
an industrial fire. On late July and early
August evenings when my grandfather was
working late at the plant, Mom-mom could
be persuaded to abandon the freezer and
let the canned food gather dust in the
cupboard. She would prepare farmstand corn
and sliced tomatoes for dinner, maybe add
some sliced bread on the side. Perhaps she
was feeling as lazy as Ludlam's
dog, unwilling to turn on
the oven or chop loads of vegetables,
happy with simplicity.
It's the only meal she made that my mother
and I still talk about. When I was a kid, my
cousin and I were given weekend corn shucking
duty, sent outside with paper bags to do the
messy work of removing the husks and
cornsilk. We would sit on the white-washed
metal lawn chairs out front under a canopy of
maple leaves, kick our heels against the
grass. After passing the naked corn to my
aunt through the side door, we would wait for
the moment at the table when we could smear
the cooked kernels with squeezable Parkay. I
was fascinated by the prongs, shaped like
tiny ears of corn, that Mom-mom stuck into
either end of the cob, and studied them
between bites, felt the neat rows of
miniature kernels like braille against my
fingertips. We ate until we are too full for
anything else but a thin slice of tomato.
You probably have summer food memories of
your own, can bring back an evening lit by
fireflies, your lips stained purple by
blueberry cake. Your parents didn't care how
late you stayed up and you got to light a
sparkler even though the fourth of July had
been over for days. Or maybe you remember
your mother, already unsteady on her feet,
placing a platter of swaying Jello on the
picnic table. You swirled the first bite
against your gums, pushed it between your
teeth before swallowing and then refused to
eat any more. After dinner you and your
brother played tag in the dark while the
grown-ups drank bourbon on ice and talked in
voices too low for you to understand. When
you slipped in a pile of dog shit, they
laughed until you started to cry.
Image: Recipe from my
grandmother's collection.
Education of an impostor
Because folding is the metaphor, see? For domestic knowledge and stability. For normalcy. When you don't feel normal and want to fit in, you observe and try to copy. Everything is a clue to the right way to behave. Nobody needs to know that you are an impostor.
Last night my small book
group met to discuss Michael
Ondaatje's novel
Divisadero.
It's a flawed book, or at the very least a
book that requires both careful reading and a
lack of attachment to resolution. I was the
only one who really enjoyed it. Yes, the
characters are damaged and abandoned,
solitary types with hidden motivations. But
they are my people, sketched out in
Ondaatje's poetic language. I can't be the
only one who knows how to fill in the blanks.
What I can't get from
careful observation, from cracking open other
peoples' linen closets, I get from books.
Stories show me the possibilities in life.
Sometimes I know
the characters,
fellow strangers in a strange land. There is
solace in the world of quiet ones, solitary
bookish people trapped in the amber of
personality and circumstance. Freedom is
possible. Maybe it is as simple as
self-acceptance and if there is hope for
them, there is hope for me. Or maybe there is
no hope and I should just get on with it.
“All my life I have loved traveling at night, with a companion, each of us discussing and sharing the known and familiar behavior of the other. It’s like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the villanelle’s form refused to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion. Only the rereading counts, Nabokov said. So the strange form of that belfry, turning onto itself again and again, felt familiar to me. For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.” -- Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero, p. 136.
Without stories, I would be a series of events waiting for an author, searching for a unifying theme. Without memory, the raw material of story, I am nothing. But a strange thing can happen when we start to tell our stories, to mix memory with narrative: the stories can change. We can change. Our past can drop away, defanged.
I am here to gather the pieces and make them into something new, a narrative, a mutable monologue: this is who I am. If I'm lucky what I write will spark something in you.
Maybe it's time for another story.
Image: Me, Wilmington, DE, circa 1976?
More on the villanelle.
Marked by heavy hands
This is the sensory soup of
childhood. It is a mix of family and
location, of bad luck and lucky streaks. We
continue the pattern with our own children,
begin the silent lessons, mark them with
heavy hands: this is who you are, who we are.
Whenever my son smells oatmeal pancakes or
plucks a plump blueberry from a glass bowl,
the past will live. "You Are My Sunshine"
will conjure up a darkened room, my soothing
cuddle against impertinent wakefulness. He
may spend years in therapy trying to get my
voice out of his head, only to find that same
voice coming out of his mouth in middle
adulthood.
I can only hope that his experience is as
painless as growing up can be. Sometimes my
best won’t be good enough.
I remember being seven, lying on that
flowered couch in my grandparents’ family
room, my hand sunk into a plastic bag full of
cherries. Cold from the manufactured air,
goose-pimpled, I clutched a pillow for
warmth. The television, which was as much a
piece of furniture as an entertainment
device, was showing Fred Astaire and Ginger
Rogers in Top
Hat.
That night I would have another asthma
attack, whether it was because of mildew, cat
hair, cigarette smoke, or my own melodramatic
emotions is up for debate.
Image: Me and my grandmother,
Hollywood Beach, 1973.
Beware of Estonians bearing basil *recipe not included*
Peter was only after the blender.
I
was working in the college bookstore, propped
up on a stool behind the register, when he
came in to buy something small, a pack of
gum, a used book, a cassette tape, I don’t
remember. As I passed his change over the
counter, brushed my fingertips across this
stranger's calloused palm, Peter said “I know
you from the newspaper. You told it like it
was.”
A month earlier I was one of five or six
people chosen to answer a question for
The
Elm: what did we think about
the proposed student fee increase? Below my
photograph was the statement “I know nothing
about it. I have no opinion.” Ignorance and
flat honesty prevailed. It was my statement,
my stand on nothing in particular that got me
the boy.
Or maybe it really was
the blender.
After asking my name and relationship status,
Peter went straight to appliance ownership:
if I had the blender, he had the basil. He
knew where to score pine nuts and a fine
wedge of pecorino romano. Peter wanted to
come back to my place, make a little pesto.
The blender sat on the
stained linoleum kitchen counter in the small
college apartment I shared with my roommate
Martha, right beside the coffee percolator
that she filled with Folgers each morning.
Martha bought it with plans for soup-making,
warm vichyssoise in winter, refreshing
gazpacho during the humid summer months, but
in reality we used it make frozen drinks.
After the Piña Colada incident the appliance
went fallow, gathered cooking grease and
flour dust.
Peter's basil source was a
garden across the Chester River, a plot of
rich soil courtesy of his employer, Anthony's
Landscaping. We rode there one sticky June
night, pedaled his tandem through a landscape
defined by moonlight and shadow, moved our
legs in time to the percussion of crickets.
The basil had formed a moat around a pair of
tumbledown beefsteak tomatoes. Rabbits and
groundhogs had ravished the rest. As I
smoothed my fingers over the soft leaves,
pale in the semidarkness, the basil sighed,
let out a breath of spice and earth and warm
sun, a promise of pasta sauce and
anise-tinged kisses.
When you are 18, most of
the world is still a mystery, or it should
be. I already had a boyfriend, and Peter knew
it, but something about his earnestness – his
habit of tossing rocks at my window for
midnight bike rides, the fact that he was as
aimless at 24 as I felt at 18 – made him
irresistible. He was an English major whose
literary mind had been muddled by
deconstructionism, an Estonian-American who
later taught me the best places to go in
Washington, DC for Ethiopian food and the
blues. Peter liked to pass things on. It was
insider information: the slightly off-kilter
notes of Thelonius Monk; the tuneless
pounding and punk bands of d.c. space; the
Biograph movie theater; linguini with pesto
sauce.
His pesto obsession was endearing. And
it was
an obsession.
In circa 1988 Chestertown, Maryland, pine
nuts were an exotic foodstuff. Without a car,
Peter had to finagle his way 75 miles and
back to DC to procure one expensive cupful.
He arrived at our place on the appointed
night, clutching two bouquets of basil, a
greasy paper bag half-filled with pine nuts,
and a crumbling hunk of cheese. Martha and I
had already peeled the garlic, purchased a
good-enough olive oil. We had wiped down the
blender. In the kitchen, I started grating
cheese while Martha opened beers. Peter began
tossing pine nuts and knobs of garlic into
the machine.
The blender turned out to be an inferior
pesto-making tool, or perhaps it was all in
the technique. Crammed in the bottom, the
garlic and pine nuts slowly turned to paste,
while the basil calmly refused to be pulled
into the fray. Peter finally grabbed a wooden
spoon. The high-pitched whine of the blender
was interrupted by a thunk as the bottom of
the spoon splintered against metal blades.
Too late to go back now. He picked out the
shards.
Twenty minutes later, Peter
offered a fingerful of the final product.
Eyebrows raised in anticipation, I kept a
cheerful expression, gazed past the green
film coating his glasses to look directly
into his eyes. The pesto tasted of garlic and
more garlic interrupted by a heady nip of
basil and the punch of sharp cheese. Raw pine
nuts, resinous and rich, just barely kept the
other ingredients in tune. As olive oil ran
down my chin, I carefully deflected a
splinter with my tongue, a little kick from
Peter's secret ingredient.
(First image: Me, Chestertown,
MD, Summer 1988, taken by "Martha." Companion
picture of Martha not included. Second image:
Basil plants, from Vultus Christi.)
Gut and rebuild
In Baltimore, new people
are moving in, are paying top dollar to
remove the Formstone.
Men, almost always men, come in with
crowbars, pry the fake rock off the façade,
tuck and repoint the newly exposed brick,
repair tumbledown walls. Often the brick was
already turning to dust when the first
workers set up scaffolding, draped the famous
white marble steps that the fastidious Polish
ladies of Baltimore kept bright and clean.
Entire blocks were caged in chicken wire and
lathe as the men slathered cement mix on
chockablock rowhouses, transforming old world
brick into new world faux.
In San Francisco, they are propping houses up
on jacks, underpinning foundations,
retrofitting in case of earthquake. What do
they find beneath the slatted wood? The
houses rest on broad oak beams or heavy hips
of steel propped up on concrete columns,
strong, but not enough to take the shaking
that is inevitable. The workers come with
their heavy equipment and digging machines,
extend legs deep in the ground. They marry
house and foundation, bolt them together to
ensure that the two don’t separate in a
moment of crisis.
I dream that I am in a house, that I
am
the house, a
faded Victorian, gingerbread rotting on the
porch. My foundation is sunk and the
slightest shaking will slump me into the
street, or have me crying drunkenly into a
neighbor’s garden, letting shards of my
window glass dangle in the koi pond.
I am my mother’s house, an alley rowhouse no
more than 12 feet wide and 27 feet deep,
huddled with my compatriots on Finch’s Way, a
one-block dead-end Baltimore street. The
brick underneath my Formstone is solid and
plumb. I am bright with open windows that let
in Mexican music and the sounds of the crazy
woman across the street cursing the traffic
and the illegally parked cars. I am tolerance
smelling of English tea roses and home
cooking. But be careful climbing the winding
staircase at my core, where the stairs narrow
at the inside edge and you must climb in
darkness.
One misstep will send you tumbling.
(Image: Looking at Kevin's
old house on West Street, the one on the
left.)
From you I get the story
Cherry tree on West Street.
I tell myself that when I am dying, leaving
the things of this world, it will no longer
matter that I paved the banks of that river,
diverted its flow, moved the humming stream
of desire to my imagination. What I want with
an ache of jealousy, with the pain of
something that was never meant to be, won’t
matter to me then. The impulse – to covet, to
pursue, to get – will be meaningless.
Self-denial will have been the obvious
course.
Don’t expect a description here, a list of
lusts. It’s not all about lust (though
sometimes, of course, it is. I am human.). It
is the pull and push of expectation, sadness
at the inevitable narrowing of life. Here I
stand on a plank in the river, steering in
the direction of what will be, trying not to
gaze back. My husband is here too, pushing us
through the water, sometimes reaching back to
touch my hair or hold my hand. I love him. He
is comforting. Real. I am free from want.
Or I’m not. What about the desire for
lyricism? Luck? A publishing contract? Some
days I just want to be left alone. I want to
eat a meal in the sunshine, with my book and
my thoughts, without guilt. I want 24
obligation-free hours. I want words that fly
out of my fingers, practically effortlessly.
I want to watch them take off and form
themselves into unstoppable narrative. I am
power-mad for deadly metaphor.
But even more strongly I want to be an image
in someone else’s head, a character real and
fully formed. I need an author, someone to
flesh out the plot of my own life, someone
who understands these redirected desires
implicitly. He (yes) sees me, knows my lurid
heart, feels the iciness of my thoughts. He
loves me anyway. This is what believers get
from God, I suppose. It’s an impossible task
for any human being, given that we are opaque
even to ourselves.
Pointless, pointless
desire. But it does propel me
forward.
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.
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.
So real you can taste it
Let’s look at the facts as revealed here: I’m a stay-at-home mom with a preschool-aged son. A former librarian, I went to culinary school and from there decided to be a writer. My family is relatively new to Northern California, having moved from the East Coast almost two years ago. I’ve told you my name. Given my birthday (oh, those worries about aging, forcing me to seek comfort on the web).
And if you’ve been here for a while, you know about the defining story of my life, the lifeless premature baby I gave birth to at home when I was sixteen.
But what do you really know?
Jennifer recovering from a late night, 1988?
Or another photo to continue the
ruse?
How would you feel if I was
actually a 25-year-old male advertising
copywriter from Peoria? What if I really
lived in Buffalo, NY? Or if I was pushing 70,
mother to a multitude of now middle aged
children, grandmother to teenagers, a Brit
using the blog to flesh out a character? This
"Jennifer" person you think you've been
reading could be someone I’ve been keeping in
my back pocket for years. writing to survive
might be some kind of grand fictional
experiment, an attempt to create a flesh and
bones person out of ethereal imagination.
And my stories? What if these were figments,
scraps from my mind, absolute fiction
masquerading as angst-ridden past? It could
be that you've been reading full-blown
literary lies à la
Margaret B. Jones, the wannabe memoirist who
made up a gangland childhood. Turns out my
parents have been married for forever, I
waited until marriage (or at least love) to
have sex, and I’ve never touched a drop of
alcohol. Oh, and that isn’t my son, he’s a
nephew (never mind that I have no nephew).
Would you feel betrayed?
Don't worry. I don’t have it in me to lie
like that, though you'll mainly have to take
my word for it and trust your gut.
There were
times in high
school and college when I was a serial liar,
self-serving and hidden. My mother believed
the stories about my solo nights, even when
my boyfriend's car was parked right outside
the Little
House ("Oh, the car? Dirk
leaves it there when he goes to the
Cassady's. Sometimes he's had too much to
drink, so he stays at their place for the
night." "That's exactly what I thought,
Jenna.") Later, I hid my unfaithfulness
from my college boyfriends, created a
protective distance by pursuing empty
hopes with relative strangers.
Living a life of lies is a dirty business. I
was becoming unrecognizable, murky,
untrustworthy, a bad friend. So I stopped
lying and regained a hold on fidelity. And
while those old kinds of lies are no longer
tempting, I still struggle with my tendency
to exaggerate minor facts or to deny my
feelings. Attempting to be good is a
life-long process.
There is a difference between making things
up to avoid punishment and creating stories
to entertain. Stories aren't lies (and
sometimes the lies we
tell in our life stories
aren't fibs
either). If the blog tale is well-told,
the characters believable, the created
world tangible, so real you can taste it,
does it matter if it actually happened?
How would you know if it did?
We’re taking it all on faith in this blogging
world, want to believe that everyone is who
they present themselves to be. For the most
part, I think people are genuine. Yes, we
have plenty of time to shape our online
selves, but we’re generally real. Still …
There must be bloggers, perhaps ones you read
every day, who have created fiction under the
guise of truth. Their blogs are ostensibly
about their day to day existence, may even
include some pieces of fiction or poetry or
personal essay, but some of the facts have
been turned inside out.
Maybe the writer doesn’t want to be
identified, or is playing, having fun being
someone else. The character that demanded
life is finally born in a blog, fully
realized, solid, interactive (the fresh-eyed
college graduate moving back to her hometown;
the landlocked fly fisherman reminiscing
about his days of streams and trout; the
tech-savvy doting grandma with an herbal tea
obsession, a minor character in a SAHM's
life). Or they add a totally fictional
detail, erase a husband, gain a Weimaraner,
make a virtual move from Asheville to Albany.
And what of it? Readers are entertained, the
writer has an enthusiastic, satisfied
audience. These are tenuous connections we
have, the lengths of spider's silk stretching
across the ether from blogger to blogger.
Many of us have never even spoken. In these
circumstances, does the truth matter?
I'm still trying to figure that one
out.
Shadowplay
The year was marked by the scent of patchouli. It roped and twisted its way into my room, coated the curtains, soaked into my skin. Some pseudo-hippy incense-burning chick with Camarillo brillo hair lived in the room next door and I put up with a lot of unwelcome odors. Pot smoke, sweat masked by scented oils, cigarettes and sandalwood. My least-favorite scent is an amalgam: Fall Term 1987.
Fall Term 1987 wasn’t limited to the waftings of pseudo-hippy chick. There were hints of puke (my own, my friends: we drank a lot), late night clothes exuding flat beer fumes and the remnants of cigarette smoke, the sticky 18th birthday remains of Coco Lopez and rum. That fall I comforted myself with baked potatoes clotted with butter and sour cream, used their earthy scent as an antidote to the disinfectant-sharp dining hall air.
Then there were the freshly opened condom packets; musty sheets left to go grey on the bed; my roommate’s apple shampoo; and the dangerous pull of Carl’s room across the hall. His walls were bare. In fact, the room was practically empty, save for a dead rose propped up in the empty whiskey bottle on his college-issue desk. I remember the smell of alcohol on his breath, sweet as molasses, as he unlocked the door.
He introduced me to the band Joy Division and to the previously unknown pleasures of the grownup crush, revealed the depths of my ability to obsess about certain kinds of men -- rebellious, prone to dressing in black, ready-made blanks for my projected fantasies. I wrote a short story about him for a freshman composition class that began "Carl is tall, dark, and handsome. Not classically good-looking ...." It was true. He had a Jeff Goldblum look, the dark-haired, smart, slightly nerdy ectomorph with his thick orange turtleneck, heavy boots and thrift store coat. He smelled like whiskey and cloves. The pull to Carl was obsessive. Single-minded. And pointless: I had a boyfriend and Carl was almost completely uninterested in me.
The real danger was Alonzo. Twenty-six, a senior from South America attending our small college on a sports scholarship, Alonzo was friends with Carl, but seemed to prefer the company of freshman girls. Rangy and tall, with hair like the young Kafka, Alonzo hung out in the dorm, crashed our parties, insinuated himself into our budding social lives. “Come on! What’s the problem?” he’d ask, eyes bulging, hand outstretched for my roommate Martha, making an offer we couldn’t refuse.
By the spring semester Martha had dropped out of college to get treatment for her eating disorder. I was unmoored, lost without my fellow drunk from a dysfunctional family. One snow-fresh February night Alonzo offered to take me out for a Procolino’s pizza. Afterwards (his intensity, his forcefulness) I reluctantly went back to his place, a windowless room in a Spanish professor's basement.
Shadowplay II (Gordana &
Marko Zivkovic)
The professor wasn't home. Alonzo switched on
a desk light, turned on the clock radio and
reached for me. I could smell his cologne in
the air. Polo. Not a good sign.
You know where this is going, right? It’s an
old and very common story. I hesitate to call
it rape, rape with its violence and
violations and death threats and nightmares.
This was more like coaxed coercion. Alonzo,
all exploring tongue and crawling hands, used
his knee to push me onto his thin camping
mattress. I protested. He insisted, did what
he brought me there to do. (I recently found
out that Alonzo had been inducted into the
college’s athletic hall of fame. The entry
noted that he was so eager to get a U.S.
education that he was willing to sleep on the
floor. Yeah. That's right.)
Afterwards, the room damp with forced
intimacy, I focused on the radio. George
Michael was singing Faith. Martha loved
George Michael. She also had a crush on
Alonzo, similar in intensity to my crush on
Carl. Now there was something between us.
Another lie. I already had a moat of lies
between me and my boyfriend, a series of
flirtations and one night stands that I
excused by thinking of his early treatment of
me, as payback for the 1 a.m. visits, the
nights he lost to bong hits and Elephant
beer. It was getting uglier and uglier,
wasn’t it? What was I becoming?
Alonzo the conqueror drove me back to the
dorms in the professor's car. I headed for
the showers. The coed bathroom was empty, no
need to shout all-clear. Little blue
toiletries bucket in one hand, towel tossed
over the curtain, I turned the hot water on
full-force.
I couldn’t wash the smell of him off me fast
enough.
Hello ... Columbus?
Capitol Plaza Apartments
The studio at Capitol Plaza Apartments was
cheap and within easy walking distance to
Union Station. On the first floor of an
eight-story building, it had a large window
overlooking the basement roof and a hemmed-in
view of surrounding structures. Small and
dark, with parquet floors and
“apartment-sized” appliances in the
not-even-galley kitchen, it was a cozy cave,
the right place to hide out for my final year
of college. I moved in August 1991.
To pay the bills, I took out more student
loans, got a better paying part-time job
working in a library at a high-profile law
firm. That’s where I met Chas.
Chas had recently divorced and was trying to
figure out his newly single life at 39, the
house gone, his routine changed. I was a
loner 21, a strange combination of vulnerable
and shuttered, talking more to the homeless
men who bivouacked on my street than to my
fellow college students. We were both in love
with DC, with its high crime rate and crack
wars and the insane mayor-for-life Marion
Barry. The brick rowhouses, the policy wonks,
the strange political celebrity, the feel of
it all: It was home.
Chas had left Columbus, Ohio in the early
1970s and headed straight for the District.
He would tell me stories of growing up the
city, where his large family lived in a
massive brick Victorian. It sounded exotic in
its blandness, the spread-out burg with the
solid architecture. “They just don’t make
houses here like they do in Columbus,” he
would chuckle, and I'd smile as if I knew
what he was talking about. Chas got his own
apartment at 16, a few years before he moved
to DC. Since I’d been emancipated from
parental supervision from the age of 14 or
so, he felt like a kindred spirit, another
concealed soul, self-protective and insular.
Most of our conversations took place on my
early evening library shifts where there was
no one else in the office to interrupt us. He
would discuss the pursuit of church ladies
(they were a tough bunch), explain his
theories on electromagnetic radiation, how
the destructive energy fields from power
lines were spreading cancer and causing
miscarriages. We would stare out the window
at the office building across the street,
watch the after hours workers work or not
work, watch them watching us. There was one
man who was always talking on the phone,
standing with his back to the full-length
window glass, earpiece pinned between head
and shoulder. It was a performance just for
us, the man’s hands swooping and slicing the
air as though the person on the other end
would be persuaded by gesture. On the street
below, commuters dallied or rushed, flagged
down taxis, spilled out of the Metro station
on the corner.
A lone wolf on the streets of Dupont
Circle.
I told Chas all about my former roommate
Martha, my escapes to visit her in
Chestertown, where our evenings at
Andy’s
were blurred
through multiple glasses of Dark and
Stormies, a potent mixture of Goslings Rum
and ginger beer; he’d get the details of
the Bass Ale-soaked nights we had at the
Irish Times or the Dubliner.
Sometimes I would give him sanitized versions
of barhops with Abe, an old friend from
Delaware. Abe and I usually mixed our liquor,
beer, wining and cocktailing it to the final
rounds of Long Island Ice Teas. These
evenings generally ended in an argument over
something petty. We screamed across disco
lights and crowded dance floors, tossed barbs
in the back alleys of Georgetown, only to do
it over again a month later.
In none of these conversations did I tell
Chas about my drunken flirtations, about the
Marines Martha and I dragged back from the
bar one night, about the make-out sessions
with Eastern Shore acquaintances, the
booze-fueled pursuit of contact. Alcohol
always uncovered the chasm, brought the need
for other people to the surface.
In between the pickups and the throw-ups and
the work and the studying, I’d occasionally
see my faraway half-boyfriend. But most
weekends were quiet. “Friday night drinking
night?" the corner liquor store owner asked
me during one regular visit, to which I gave
a weak nod and smile. I’d drink, study, write
papers, maybe catch the PBS Saturday night
movie on my crappy box of a television. The
Capitol Building was close to my apartment
and I would walk around its lit-up beauty at
night in all kinds of weather, braving
bracing November winds, floating through the
incredible sweetness of spring, when the
cherry trees and azaleas were in bloom. (“I
am alive, I am alive” I would think as I
walked a path of fallen pink petals, feeling
the joy rise up in me).
The week before Martha drove me out to
Illinois in a battered U-Haul truck, Chas and
I went out for one last round of beers, a
temporary goodbye. I had every intention of
returning to DC immediately after graduating
from library school. But then I met a guy who
got a job and we moved to a new town
together: Columbus, Ohio. We started to build
a life, adopted some animals, and finally
bought a house. It was a four-bedroom brick
Queen Anne in the Old Towne East
neighborhood, a steal at $125,000. When I
gave Chas the address, he was quiet for a
moment.
“That’s the same block I grew up on,” he
finally told me. Almost exactly across the
street from our new house was an empty lot,
the location of Chas’s childhood home.
Franklin Avenue house and neighbor (we never
had a flag up and the neighbor will have to
be a story for another day). Photo from
Old
Towne East Neighborhood
Association.
It was a strange coincidence. What were the
odds?
'Cos I'm a liar
Fact is fiction, fiction is fact. They intermesh. One informs the other until the words themselves become the truth of the writer’s experience, more real than reality.
When I started my
stillbirth
story, I was hemmed in by
fact. I’d show it to my mother and she
would offer corrections to misplaced
fictions, give me her version of events.
Some facts are important. It is not
acceptable to totally make things up, to
frame the innocent, or create character
flaws or strengths where none exist. I
wanted to be fair to my parents, which is
a strange impulse when documenting an
unfair situation, but why give fuel to the
threatened?
Then I read poet and essayist
Mark
Doty’s piece on memoir, in
which he describes his sister’s wedding
dress. It was practical, a two-piece beige
suit with matching pillbox hat. Did she
choose beige as a rebellious stand against
traditional white? Was the choice a result
of parental pressure, the (barely)
pregnant bride denied? Was it a beige suit
after all? Why is his 45-year-old vision
of the dress so strong? Memory is elusive,
impressionistic, sometimes dead wrong.
Facts are slippery. Doty questions whether
these facts always matter in the telling
of one's life story. Aren’t the
impressions real in their own sense, the
memoir a murky middle ground, a product of
the "juncture
of memory and
imagination"? In the end,
imagination wins out.
Or it does most of the time. When I found out
that my mother's Aunt Ruth had a spinal
condition and couldn't wear high heels − one
of her legs was shorter than the other − I
had to rewrite a scene (since totally
excised) from the Florence Crittenton Home
portion of my stillbirth story. The sound of
her heels clicking against the linoleum
floor, keeping time with my infant mother's
screams was almost irresistible to me, a
summing up of institutional efficiency and a
baby's wordless pain. But I had to change it,
especially once I discovered that my mother
was a generally silent baby, calm, and
apparently tearless. The soundtrack of
nothing, no tears, no outward display of
emotion, the image of Aunt Ruth limping as
she exited the building with my stony-faced
mother, was much more compelling than a
newborn wailing against metronomic heel taps.
Here was an infant who was already accustomed
to being ignored, a child who grew up under a
heavy coat of suppressed and private pain.
This presentation of the silent child − from
my mother's memory of stories her adoptive
mother told her
− deepened my
understanding, explained the emotion
underlying her explosive temper, the
avoidance adapted early in life. Though, of
course, this is all my interpretation
informed by imagination and experience.
I’ve started to let go of the hard truth. I
can’t recreate the world of my childhood, but
can remember the feel of it. Does it matter
if the house was truly cavernous, whether the
bathroom had mint-green tile, whether it was
Johnny Walker Red or tequila? It does not,
but the story doesn’t develop without
description, without a sense of the reality
of place and time. Many facts don’t change,
of course, and those facts are the bones of
our life stories, fleshed out with language,
given new life with words.
The events I write about here (outside of my
fictional pieces, and even then the lines are
blurred) happened. When I can't remember
something, I take my impression and create a
reasonable facsimile of reality.
And that’s the truth, Ruth.
***For thought-provoking writing on writing
and a great Julian Barnes quote on creating
fact out of fiction, please check out
this post from Scottish writer Jim
Murdoch's fine blog, The Truth
About Lies.***
Two ways of looking at it
I wish I could explain the
importance of the notebook. It’s one of those
old black and white composition books, barely
held together by 45-year old glue and
stitching, the edges of the pages the color
of dead oak leaves, cured by time. An
artifact, a little piece of Kevin,
half-filled with poems of late adolescence,
poems that he probably wrote in his senior
year of high school. They are short and
generally angry, each one typewritten and
stapled or taped to the front of a page.
If I could explain the importance of the
notebook, maybe I could explain the
importance of Kevin. How can someone who
tried to destroy me, who battered my mother
emotionally, be so key to who I am? Kevin was
extraordinary. I’ve never met anyone like
him, a man who pushed himself out of a
childhood of emotional and physical abuse and
formed a self out of will and ashes. He was a
poet, a self-taught carpenter, a working
class intellectual. In the midst of
fatal
illness, he completed his
dissertation and received a PhD. He was
also so wickedly funny that my mother and
I still laugh when we remember his stories
and jokes.
Kevin sometimes ripped us to shreds with that
knife-like wit. He was an active participant
in the neglect that led to my pregnancy at
sixteen. Whenever he saw hypocrisy or hidden
motive – which was often – he skewered the
hypocrite, uncloaked the motive. His ability
to see the darkness in himself and others
never took into account the overwhelming
goodness we each have, the lightness that
makes up most of who we are.
I have a lot of empathy for him, whose
cruelty and black math was caused by a
childhood of pain and anger, but it probably
helps that he is off stage now, six years
dead. It was a long and painful exit. Kevin
didn’t deserve to suffer, to be hospitalized
for six months, to have his body whittled
down to 80 skeletal pounds. He didn’t deserve
to lose his ability to swallow and sometimes
to breathe unassisted. No one deserves what
happened to Kevin. But that time of suffering
was also a time to make peace. I was at the
hospital for hours almost every day, there
for both him and my mother, keeping company,
being a second set of eyes to make sure no
mistakes were made. I was there for comfort.
It gave me a chance to prove my humanity, to
show that we all have the ability to be good.
Even him. Even me.
Sometimes I still believe it. But writing
that paragraph about how I benefited from
Kevin’s suffering leaves me with a dirty
feeling, as though I relished the opportunity
to be redeemed through his pain. It wasn’t
like that. I was there because I wanted to
be, couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.
Kevin’s final day stretched
and stretched from early morning into late
afternoon. A small group of family gathered
in his hospice room and listened to him wind
down, heard the silent spaces grow between
each breath, watched his heart flutter out
from under his ribcage. Outside, daffodils
were pushing through once-frozen ground and
the forsythia was in bloom. The world was
coming to life again as we sat and waited for
death.
It came with a dramatic final exhale followed
by dead quiet. The dog broke the silence with
a bark, my mother reached for me and Kevin’s
son, held us and cried. Mom later said she
felt Kevin’s energy leave his body, had an
image of him walking along a river path
against a cloudless sky, his old collie Augie
by his side. When Kevin's brother thanked me
for my presence, I said, "I'm so glad we had
this time," and immediately regretted it.
What was I saying? Those six months of dying
were great? What a wonderful opportunity for
me?
That night I woke up after midnight to the
pressure of Kevin’s hand on mine, a grateful
and loving presence. Don’t be hard on
yourself. You were there for me. Thank
you.
Then he was gone.
Two
Ways of Looking at It
Kevin Sheehan (Knife Gift)
The magician, who is about to perform,
is wearing a suit which belongs to
his father. No one is supposed to know
that he is not his father. His first
trick, which involves some
simple sleight-of-hand, is well-received.
he bows, and the suit collapses.
And what if I would not grow up,
would not perform
the necessary murder. So what.
Was it any of your business?
I chose to be the child, hurt
and unhurting, but my body,
my beauty, betrayed me.
People stop and stare
Hugh Laurie as Bertie Wooster
I had a nickname name for him, a code word really, so that I could write it in my notebooks without fear of discovery. Bertie Wooster. It’s embarrassing, but 100% true: I was a 12-year-old P.G. Wodehouse fan, with a huge crush on my ash-blond, hazel-eyed classmate. Even in high school, after the thrill was gone, after Bertie had metamorphosized into a six-foot tall pothead, after I fell hard for a senior basketball player (another unrequited love), I would blush when we passed in the hall.
Crushes, I’ve had a few. They have ranged from the silly (the hot dog stand guy, summer of 1984) to intense (first husband, early days). These infatuations have been distracting, fun even. Nothing, however, has persisted like my 14-year obsession with Mr. H.
We met at work, my first week at my first real job. Mr. H. was cute and asked a coworker if I was attached. And so the internal churning began. I was attached – soon to be married, actually – but I couldn’t shake the butterflies, the deep blushes, whenever Mr. H would show up in the library. There he’d stand, feet away, hovering over the fax machine (the only one in the office); or he’d actually stop by to (gasp) ask me a question. My heart would race: it races now, as I remember those chance moments. Knowing he spent time in our neighborhood, I would survey the sidewalks evenings and weekends, on the lookout. The soundtrack for that year was a strange mix of Morphine and Holly Cole. Her version of On the Street Where You Live, with its stalkeresque undertones stirred up the ironic obsessive in me.
Today I am a happily married woman. Over the years, the crush has been mainly dormant, with a few volcanic moments. At this point, it’s academic – what meaning does this person hold for me? why do I continue to have those frustrating dreams? – but I am tired of it. And so, today, needing a new writing project to fixate on, I thought: why don’t I write a letter to Mr. H? You know, lay out my feelings in a literary sort of way, show them the harsh light of reality; get them out of my system. Maybe I send it, maybe I don’t. If I don’t, maybe I get it published. Everyone’s into reading about other peoples’ sick love obsessions! I can take this useless, ridiculous feeling and parlay it into art.
Yeah. I’ve been working on it for much of the morning, and I find that the writing process doesn’t purge the feelings: it makes them more intense.
My crush has morphed into a middle-aged thing, a yearning for escape from quotidian existence. I am ensconced in my (relatively) safe life, a housewife wannabe writer, parent to one tiring preschooler. Not much excitement here, though things are quite comfortable and loving at home. Maybe I need to take up bungee jumping or fencing, something to liven up the system.
So: Jennifer, let sleeping crushes lie. Oh, and Mr. H, if you are reading this (do you read this blog? I doubt it.), write me back, OK?
Only joking.
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.
The harvest
Now we’re clutched close, lost in a kiss, tender lip to darting tongue. His calloused carpenter’s hands stroke my hair, wrap me tighter. I think over and over: “This is what is happening right now, this is what is happening right now.”
Then, a fast drive through shuddering cornfields, car windows open, my hair whipping around in a pre-knot frenzy. The stalks are taller than I am, still green, with the threat of decay around the edges.
One morning, the fields will be brown. The next week, empty.
I won’t be seventeen forever.
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.
Louise Peevish
"Oh, Louise is being peevish again," we'd say. "Louise Peevish."
It was the move back to Maryland that did her
in. There were stories of other dogs that had
cracked after hearing the tests at
Aberdeen Proving
Ground, dogs that pushed their
way through second story window screens,
desperate to escape the sounds of the bomb
and munitions tests across the river. The
aural bombardment contributed to Louise’s
general nervousness, but now when a
thunderstorm blew through town, she was
absolutely inconsolable. No drug calmed
her. By the time you got the pill down,
the storm had passed.
One afternoon, my mother drove with Louise to
the local grocery store. Mom rolled the
windows down a safe distance, locked the
doors, and entered the market.
She was filling a plastic bag with green
beans when she heard a little girl’s voice.
“Look, Mom, there’s a dog shopping in the
Acme.”
“Not my dog,” thought Mom, as she weighed the
beans and continued to the toiletry aisle.
The little girl spoke again. “Look, Mom, the
dog is still shopping in the Acme!”
“Not my dog,” thought Mom again. She glanced
past the row of shampoos to the plate glass
windows – were those thunderclaps she heard?
– when she saw Louise, panting heavily, on
the run from one of our favorite check-out
guys, a kid who worked his way up from bagger
and always made friendly conversation. Louise
darted for the automatic doors, heading along
the sidewalk in the direction of the
Chat-n-Chew.
Abandoning her cart, Mom also ran for the
door. Outside, storm clouds were gathering
force. She watched Louise scatter a school of
carpenters, men in dirty jeans and mud-caked
work boots, as the dog passed the restaurant
and made a left into the hardware store. Mom
followed, pushing past customers, until she
found Louise in the back of the store,
trembling by the PVC piping.
My mother stayed there with her until the
storm passed, then walked her back to the car
and drove home, sans groceries. Apparently,
the dog panicked when she heard the
approaching thunder, pushed through an open
car window and went looking for Mom. We were
grateful that she wasn't hit by a car.
About two years after the Acme incident, I
came home from grad school for a visit.
Things were grim. Kevin, my mother’s
long-term boyfriend, had been diagnosed with
a rare bone marrow disease. My mother was
close to declaring bankruptcy. And Louise was
getting more peevish and skittish.
Her fits of panic weren't limited to
thunderstorms; now the dulled explosions from
Aberdeen were having a similar effect. She
was terrified. If no one was home, she would
attempt to escape -- Mom was afraid she would
force her way through a closed window,
pictured a return home to bloodied shards of
glass and no dog. If someone was home, she
would scratch and pace, pant and whine.
Louise was suffering.
I went with my mother to the appointment. We
sat with Louise, stroked her as the vet
depressed the needle. It was over quickly.
On the ride home, we didn't speak.
Heathen can wait
There was no other conclusion. I couldn't believe in God. This wasn’t a question of whether or not he existed, but was a question of my own belief. No proof was sufficient and I had no faith, no religious background, no desire to hide behind the wimpy safety of Pascal's wager.
Shortly after I reached this conclusion, a product of a paper I wrote on God’s existence in a Philosophy 101 class, I dropped out of college. It was the middle of the second semester, sophomore year and for a while I kept it quiet, kept on accepting my father and step-mother’s checks, which were enough to cover my half of the rent. My roommate, in shaky recovery from an eating disorder, was working as a waitress. As the money dried up, she got me a job waiting tables.
It fell apart. We drank and drank, put ourselves in dangerous situations. I was moving to DC, she didn’t want to come. She slept with my longtime boyfriend, I abandoned her for an Eastern Shore boy who lived with his brother in a place called the Sugar Shack. That fall, my mother drove me and the cat to a small rowhouse in NE DC where I was renting a room. I was starting a new life as a sophomore at Catholic University.
This was the atheist’s choice? Catholic University? I was thinking of majoring in education and Catholic had a good program. The school was located in Washington, a city I wanted to live in. My decision was sealed during the interview, when my interlocuter -- Miss DC 1988! -- told me I was in. But on that first day of school, I jettisoned education for philosophy. It was the most interesting thing going.
Amy, my housemate, was 30 years old to my 20, a Peace Corps survivor. Amy counted her potatoes and onions, and even recorded the shape her peanut butter was in -- the knife slashes, the peaks and valleys and indentations -- before she put the lid on the jar. I found her tallies of produce, her vivid peanut butter descriptions, recorded in tiny script on a piece of paper hidden in the pantry. When I moved in, she had envisioned late night bull sessions with her new gal pal. What she got was an unhappy, underage semi-alcoholic, quiet and removed. She coped by counting her vegetables, a safeguard against (non-existent) theft.
I found salvation on the second day of classes, while taking notes for the History of Ancient Philosophy. N., a Basselin scholar, started up a conversation with me and his fellow Basselins joined in. They were men my age, in the seminary and on the road to priesthood, in addition to being philosophy majors on steroids. If it weren’t for N., who pulled me in, supported me, got me a job when I was desperate, and on occasion gave me food "donated" from the seminary kitchen, I’m not sure I would have survived. He was -- and is -- a good friend.
N. is happily married now, to a kind-hearted, amazing woman. They have five kids. He and his wife have accepting of me, of my quiet atheism. They approach me without judgement.
But am I still an atheist?
I don’t have faith, but I am not as slavishly devoted to proofs. For those who believe, God is real. As for me, I’ll have to be content with not knowing.
The Victorian Village slasher
We met him on a dog walk, a meandering stroll through our Columbus neighborhood, past a brick-solid hodgepodge of Victorians and gingerbread, Italianate rowhouses and cobblestone alleyways. This world was new to me, a stable life as an adult, with a fiancé, a dog, a professional job, living hundreds of miles from my mother. I was going to hold on to that stability with a death grip, make sure I would never fall back into the abyss.
But back on the East Coast, Mom was cracking up. I wasn't allowed to call her at home, so we’d talk at work. The conversations usually ended with screams (hers) and tears (mine). My cubicle was in the middle of the library, exposed. I would hold my voice tense and steady, then rush to the ladies’ room, smash the tears back with toilet paper, splash the redness away with cold water.
My mother was a frequent subject on our dog walks. I obsessed over our new rift, the rage unfairly projected, while my husband-to-be made sympathetic noises. I was to blame by choosing my fiancé, a snobbish WASP, loyal and overprotective. It was a slap in the face to my bohemian mother.
If my abandonment, my choice to betray, wasn't bad enough, she was also struggling with her long-term boyfriend, a difficult character in the best of times. Kevin was in the early stages of a rare illness that would eventually kill him. She had to support them both on a small salary and was stretched to the point of financial ruin.
On that cool September evening in 1995 Mr. X and I were having the usual discussion. Would Mom and Kevin follow through on their threat to boycott the wedding? Why was she being so cruel?
I didn’t notice the runner pass us. Then we heard it.
“Hey, jogga!”
The small voice was coming from a bush to our right. Whoever it was, they couldn’t quite pronounce their r’s.
“Hey, jogga! I am the O.J. Simpson! I am the O.J. Simpson!”
Suddenly, a little boy, no more than five, leapt out from behind the bush, making stabbing motions with his empty hand in the direction of the runner, who was long gone. He looked at us and just started talking. Yes, he could hang out in his yard after dark. His mom and dad were divorced and he was living with his dad, who liked to drink ice beer. Had we ever tried it? He had, and he didn’t like it. He talked on, aggressively friendly, clearly lonely.
Another runner flew by and the boy repeated the performance, enjoyed the effect. It was disturbing and amusing, this five-year-old's violent pantomime.
Beyond the open screen door of his house, I could hear canned laughter, the hiss of a bottle being opened. His father, up until this point a lumpy shadow behind a curtain, turned his head to the side and yelled, "Get in here!" The boy said goodbye, walked into the house, and shut the door behind him.
Over the next few months, we walked by that house several times. We never saw him again.
Crushed
For a long time I thought the dreams were messages from my subconscious, a sign of our untapped connection. But they were always full of anxiety, missed moments, twisting city streets, long distances traveled for dissatisfying conversations. The longing was mine alone.
In one dream, my mind created a labyrinthine mental institution for our encounters. We were both inmates, living in separate dormitories. The buildings were part of a Victorian-era hospital, dark and complex with hidden meanings, completely separate from the external world. We would meet and part, meet and part, sometimes with a glance, sometimes managing a quick kiss, always with that awful ache for what could never be. I woke up wondering: Do you care for me? Do I exist for you?
That was the hold he had on me: the pursuit of acknowledgment, the desire to be seen for who I was, while he existed as pure symbol, out of reach and impossible to know.
Last fall, when my marriage was going through a rough patch, we started e-mailing more frequently. I liked the exchange, felt my latent crush expand, fill the spaces I thought were empty. It was innocent fun – no lines were crossed. Then, without explanation, he stopped responding.
Over time the dreams went on hiatus. Until last night. I’m not going to get sucked into this game with my subconscious again.
I don’t need his acknowledgement to know I exist.
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.