Borrowed souls
He escaped. He got out of that car and climbed up the thorny hill and I was chasing him and she was, too, and all of the sudden I was scratching a dog behind the ears in my therapist’s office while all the people I know from my local waking life, the Berkeley era, parents from school and preschool, were in the waiting room with me. Outside children played on old-fashioned monkey bars while their parents were otherwise occupied (in the city or locked into office buildings or tapping away at laptops in coffee shops or maybe they were hanging their heads, resting them in their hands, listening to the blood flowing, pumping, feeling the stress of money troubles).
They knew me, these parents. They knew me better than I wanted them to know me. They had read my confessionals, my one-sided characterizations of the past (“myopic” one ex-friend wrote to me in a terse huff). They didn’t know why I borrowed people, those whom I felt had wronged me, those I once loved or still did but couldn’t. Because they weren’t writers themselves, they didn’t know that the people who lived, that I recreated in words, were now characters, that I owned them. I took their features and my own perceptions and changed reality into a copy, a mix of impression and imagination and sometimes emotion.
Thems the breaks when you know an artist, folks. Besides. By the time I get to you, to the hidden or not-so-hidden you, you are a fiction. Not real. Mine.
Can I call myself an artist? A writer? Can I handle the pretension, the assumption of it all? I can certainly hide behind it when I write things that cause pain or reveal too much about other peoples’ lives. It’s not as simple as borrowing other people, or making them my own. The past I sometimes write about doesn’t belong only to me and the people I pepper my writing with are sometimes very real.
I don’t want to be borrowed myself, want to exist fully as a human being, to not be summed up or characterized by a few of my traits in order to fit someone else’s idea of who I am or what they want me to be. I am slowly learning to tread carefully when dealing with the “facts,” to not direct my anger in public words so obviously or without some compassion for the people I prop up and make mine. Unfortunately, I have a whole passel of melodrama out there in the world to show up a time when I didn’t even think about how others might react, where I was the glowing center (or sometimes the black hole), the god moving around the souls of other people.
All I can do is to try to do better, to be better. I'm trying.
Postscript
A poem by Kevin that has been going through my head lately. Dedicated to those whom I've hurt out of my own myopic pain.
TWO-PIECE PUZZLE
Here's one of those two-piece wire puzzles.
There's only one way to take it apart.
(If you don't have the patience, don't start.)
It belongs to my son who would dazzle
all of us, doing it right.
He can't, I couldn't have either
when I was seven. I found it on the floor
of the bedroom after he'd spent the night.
I remember I'd had one like it
and I sat on the bed for a long while
fooling with it before I put it down
in frustration. I'd thought: Don't force it.
If you can't solve it, at least you'll
not spoil it as you did the other one.
--Kevin Sheehan
From the prompt "What I know about writing." The last prompt of the Round Robin. The end of the madness. I'm not sure if I will take the next round, so my posting will not be as frequent for the next several months. Unless I cave and take the class.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image of disembodied marionette heads at Marionette Museum in Hohensalzburg Fortress the by Curious Expeditions.
Telling the truth
I don’t know how we got on the subject of adoption. Maybe it came from his questions about my first marriage, though there were no babies, adopted or otherwise, from that union and about whether I had another child. From that point, we traveled to my mother’s adoption and her biological mother’s second rejection years later, her denial of contact and details.
And then I blurted it out. I want to write about it this morning, but it is one of those things that just can’t flow easily from my fingertips, so bear with me.
He was curious about babies. About whether I had any more out there. About adoption (the fact that my mother never knew her “first parents” made him cry and he resolved that we should find these people, and not just contact them, but meet them). I knew I had to tell him someday about my own experience, but I thought it would be later, much later, when it seemed more age-appropriate, but at the same time I didn’t want to keep it a secret, something dark and heavy.
So I told him my story, minus much of the emotional pain, of the stillborn baby I had when I was sixteen. I was expecting curiosity or perhaps disbelief, like the “you’re kidding!” response I got when I explained sex to him a couple of months ago. I wasn’t expecting tears, tears at the fact of the baby’s death, at the fact that he had a brother.
A brother. Tears. It was the first unfiltered response to my story that I have ever gotten. He wanted to know if he had a name. He wanted me to write it down so that he wouldn’t forget it. He wanted to know what he would have looked like. I had to explain that the baby would be almost 26 years old by now, a grownup, and he wished that if the brother did still exist, he would be still be a kid and be around to play with.
How did I know he was dead? Where did I have him? I told the story without blame. I tried to explain how someone might not be ready to raise a baby. I told him that no one knows why the baby died and that when I was pregnant with him, the still-living boy, I was closely monitored, just in case.
Oh, the depths of this conversation, of feeling, of connection, the tangibility of what went before. It makes my heart ache. It returns me to the world, and I mourn again for what we lost.
The prompt for this was "At the grocery store," which obviously has nothing to do with what I wrote. To really write about this will take some time. It was a striking conversation and healing and very sad all at once. I realized that at least I could talk about it without being so focused on me and without maligning my own parents. For once the focus was on that baby and the sadness of his death, the feeling of mourning that I still stuff down.
Photo of the boy at Point Reyes by his father.
Must be some kind of way out of here
I have decided that there is no past, nothing to talk about, that I have detached myself from it, have jumped off the side of memory into the deep, into the ever-present now.
There will be no more conversations about the cold hospital room at Georgetown and how the phone lines didn’t work, the frantic call earlier in the day from my mother to get out and the way my coworkers and I didn’t know where to go and gathered around a Capitol Hill fountain under a searing blue sky before walking home, the forced march with the others, and the rumors flying about bombs and planes intermingling with the truth.
I don’t want to discuss dead pets. Or the way K had a way with the rhetorical knife. Or the summer the three of you spent on Smith Island, sunburned under dead sky, the fights about evolution and carpentry, the way the ice cubes melted in the glasses of gin and tonic, and the son sat quietly, protected but not, because we know now that his reticence was a permanent condition, not something stuck to childhood.
We agree on the facts, most of them, and we share the history, and it is not comforting to me now as it gets further and further away. The main characters are dead. They have moved to distant states with people we've never met. We shared houses once and meals and sometimes conversations, and there were summers of entwined limbs or afternoons on the damp couch with the paperbacks, and the road shimmered in the heat. I am in the dark now, in the waiting room (so many times this comes up, the waiting room) and if I look back, I am afraid I might get stuck.
On that day almost ten years ago, I walked home. I made sure my boyfriend, who was at a meeting in northern Virginia, was ok. In the surreal beauty of a Washington DC September afternoon, he and I walked to the hospital. It was one of the last “normal” afternoons for K, although the world was changed from the outside, soon to be changed from the inside. Then it was bleeding and ventilators and tubes shoved down K's throat. It was traches and Factor VII and anthrax and for one week I had “All Along the Watchtower” going through my mind when we thought K was going to die. He was, but it was months away, and everything was burning.
Before that it was sickness. Before that, anger mixed with talk. Neglect tempered with love. Insanity, insanity, and I detach myself from that. But I am just detached right now and I hate it, I am searching in the dark for a path, making sure that it takes me forward, not back into the muck and if I am not careful I will spend every moment lost, in tears, holding it together so tightly I destroy myself, wondering how the story will end.
From the prompt "Ten years ago."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by lost in pixels.
Born again
I tossed one leg over the other. The hanging foot twitched and bounced. I knit my fingers together and took them apart, knit together and took apart, and when that was no longer satisfying, I tapped my fingernails against themselves, hid one set under the other. My hands were one creature, my arms connected, they would never separate, would never open up for another again.
I distracted myself with thoughts of sex, of fields at night, the trembling under a fitful breeze. Every landscape was dark, the sun gone, but the moon made shadows of trees on the ground. The stars twinkled. Every cliché about light in the dark came true, and I didn’t know who was beside me and I didn’t care. The glow from his cigarette hung in the dark. I knew the other end touched his lips, the lips that didn’t let words out, that caressed the edge of wine glasses and pecked me on the cheek in the morning. He turned his head to the side and removed the cigarette, the glow moving with him.
I knew his hands once, the long thumbs, the thin fingers and broad palms. What was it about men’s hands? I used to watch him write letters on Sunday afternoons. I glimpsed his fingertips as they held the newspaper or tapped out email. I reached for those hands, he reached for mine, but now there was no familiarity. I had taken to looking at the hands of strangers, the men at the coffee shop grabbing distractedly at sheathed paper cups, the guys on the street clutching cell phones or holding the looped ends of dog leashes.
He extinguished the spark and said goodnight, his footsteps crunching up the dune. Waves returned to the beach again and again and again. I buried my feet in the cool sand and closed my eyes against the murky dark, imagined a man who spoke, who knew how to use his hands. I conjured him up from dream and memory, and in my mind we walked along the edge of water, talking, never stopping. There was no barrier and the words were born, they lived and died and were born again.
From the prompt "Pregnant," which is almost as bad as "A baby."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
I dreamed last night about planes and crash landings, about people holding blowtorches to boxes of raw popcorn in order to cook them in the heat. Small explosions and runways carved out of dirt: what does it mean?
Image by ElvertBarnes.
Sound barrier
First it was the people, with their yammering, with their jabs and petty squabbles. Leaving them behind was no big deal, considering how little I interacted with them anyway. And I took it slow, stopped asking folks at work how they were or about their weekends, about their perfect children. I didn’t make eye contact when I walked the halls, the street, the parks, the supermarkets. People respond to feedback or its lack. They didn’t know what my game was, they didn’t care or notice or even think about it, until finally I lived in glorious silence, alone, unmolested.
I even turned the sound off on my television set. I watched the faces of the actors, the anchors, the grinning and grimacing idiots on the commercials, and tried to interpret the action without sound. This gave me the idea of walking around with earplugs. I practiced in my living room, my ears stuffed with a magical synthetic, pliable and complete in its blockage, a sound barrier. I danced to music by feeling the beat in the floor. I held my hand against the walls as they trembled with treble and bass. I watched the phone quiver in its cradle.
Living without using your ears is not easy. The cues we get from sound – the rumble of a car engine, the crash in the back of the house as a cat knocks over a plant – I had to intuit, to tune into the vibrations, the way movement disturbs the air and the waves of sound glide past one’s skin. It almost became too much, the soft touch of the small sounds – the cat licking its chest, the refrigerator’s sigh – intermingling with the macho waves pushing their way out of the garbage truck, the slaps from ambulances, a neighbor’s shrill screams at her daughter or her dog or her husband a nasty cut across my cheek.
But most of the disturbances came from cars. The highway, with its low rumbles and its pretensions to ocean waves, was a constant undercurrent. My insides felt like they were being jumbled by the trucks of San Pablo. I thought about constructing a suit out of sheets of aluminum, something to deflect the noise, but I knew that would have its own cadence and would rob me of my anonymity. I had to be like the rest of them. I had to stop noticing, had to let the sounds pass through me as if they didn’t exist, another way to erase the world, to stop containing it in my body.
From the prompt "A time you let go."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. LIghtly edited.
Image by lemasney.
The sacred against the asphalt
It is easier with my eyes closed, with my mind only on sensation, on the thick succulents with their reservoirs of water at the center. Even the bees don’t mind my gentle touch, and the ladybugs tickle the back of my hand, while the praying mantises dart away. I can feel their presence, their fear, and so I hold my hand still until they take cover.
In the room there is nothing but a cool breeze, the sound of the neighbor talking in German on his cell phone. I hear the highway traffic, the soft thump of cat paw on roof shingle. You are silent, I feel the warmth of your breath, and if I pay enough attention, I hear the flow of blood, the heartbeat, my own life humming in my head against the rhythm of yours.
The garden, the room, the smooth coolness of the pillow, the heavy hot weight of a cat against my hip: I am not to open my eyes, I don’t want to, but one can’t stay closed forever. The challenge is to open up, to acknowledge the world, to take it in all forms, to let it enter you as you enter it.
Last night on the dog walk I looked across a quiet side street and saw a tree, its trunk like grey withered skin, its canopy high and round and dignified. I saw the tree, green and grey, with leaves like hands. It had being and separateness, its own life in the world. I remembered the closeness of childhood with nature, the way I befriended trees and said goodbye to them when my mother and I moved on. There was no barrier between me and them and I didn’t need to close my eyes against the world, to distract myself with chatter and the glowing screen, with a book cracked open at every opportunity.
This is what I want, no division between me and you and trees and plants. I want to take it in, to see it clearly, the sacred against the asphalt and cracked sidewalk. My hand reaches for yours in the evening fog, both of us aware of the music of blood flow, of life, separate, related, part of the world.
The photo above was the prompt.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. This one was lightly edited.
Image by Jane Underwood, Writing Salon Mistress.
When and where
Get to the coffee shop 23 minutes before I do. Sit with your back against the wall at the table by the bathroom. Open your laptop. Wait. Do not look at the door. At precisely 2:48 I will sit at the table opposite, facing you, my laptop yawning at my fingers. Don’t glance my way. My IM name is fussbdgt. Tell me why it happened. I don’t care if you lie. Just make it good.
Write it down on a piece of paper. Cover both sides. On a windless day in August ride your bike down to the marina. Sit with a picnic basket and blanket in the shelter of a hill. Bring me something vegetarian and luscious and beyond the realm of the caprese sandwich. Sneak in a cold beverage, too, a crisp Sauvignon blanc, an IPA. I will appear at 12:30 in wraparound sunglasses, a baggy t-shirt and sweater and the holey jeans that I can't bear to part with, will arrange myself across from you on the blanket. Pass me the food. Pour me a drink. Take your paper explanation (your apologia? Is that what this is about?) and fold it into an airplane. Float it my way. I will read it, commit it to memory, crumple it up and toss it into the bay.
This is not a difficult task. Tell me that I matter, that I am more than a ghost floating in the world. Tell me that my body is good for something, too, but not without my mind, my personality, my opinions. Talk to me about coming out of hiding. Show me that the world is generally safe as long as I am cautious.
Show up on my doorstep when I am least expecting it. Talk to me because you care, because you were thinking about me, because we are both strong. Come without expectation or agenda. Explain what you want if you want to. Pretend that the day is like a blank sheet of paper, waiting to be filled with musical notes, with bits of poetry, the unearthing of beauty out of ash, time, and pressure.
Edited for sloppiness, clarity, and to make it generally better on 7/9.
Photo by Renée Turner.
My time at camp
Down the hill there was a creek and the boy and his friend dragged a log over it for a bridge. They crossed high water on real bridges, hung on the edges of rocks while I told horror stories of larger bodies carried down rushing rivers, of the man at World’s End who fell off a water crossing and had to be fished out a few days later, pried out from a boulder where only a month later the river would trickle. They tossed logs over the bridge railing and watched the churning, the way the falling water held the wood down before spitting it downriver.
The place was beautiful and the boy was free and close to his friend and at night after the children were asleep we sat in the dark on our friends’ deck and talked of faraway places and cartoon violence. We drank wine and bit into slices of sharp cheese and by the time we stumbled into our cots (the boy, miraculously, still asleep), I was so exhausted that I almost slept through the night myself.
On the second morning I got up before six a.m. and showered against rocks, drank coffee in a rocking chair by a communal fire, and wrote. I wrote and wrote and wrote, away from my computer and from my cell phone and from most electricity. I wrote on the deck later that morning while the menfolk were at the swimming hole and I wrote after quiet hour, too, pages and pages, some fiction (embarrassingly biographical, a projection into a future I wasn’t sure I wanted), some life kvetching, and then the loneliness set in again and the worries about where everyone was and I was on the outside, the deadened corner of a triangle.
In the dining hall we sat with friends and friendly strangers, people who knew the chants and the foot stomps. The boy and his buddy sat next to each other and made butt jokes while the grownups rolled their eyes and tried to make them stop. I sat apart, across from the boys, from my husband, from the shifting other half of our couple friends. The night the man next to me, red-faced, blue-eyed, sat with an almost-finished bottle of white and a drained glass, I tossed him questions: name, past, present. He told bizarre stories of Vietnam and the benefits of knowing senators, of living in antebellum homes the size of private schools.
For a writer, data in means data out. This conversation was fascinating, stimulating, and I remembered what it was like to be in the world, remembered a time when I talked to strangers or sat at the front of the bus to chat with the driver, a self almost lost but coming back, hidden under layers of reluctance and don’t-do and mistrust. Withdrawal from the world doesn’t work, isn’t me, I saw it clearly and knew I had to be in the world more, but how would I make myself?
The first dinner after our return, I cried again at the sink, reminded of the helplessness of children, of their necessary reliance on the capriciousness of adults, and I wrote this, a set of enigmatic instructions that I now instruct you to ignore:
I want to be held here, cold and delicate, like a shell, warmed by your hands , but not for too long. Tell me stories of long winter nights on the steppes, the woman in the reindeer coat, the snow like fluffy candy until your tongue ached. Put me on the shelf, dust me when you notice the accumulation like a layer of frost, the deadening of color and form. Grasp me in your palm when you crave beauty.
I will cry and no one will hear me, there in my Siberia, contained by leaden half-memory, the cloak between me and the world. Don’t listen. Pretend it is the rain, the scattering of snow, and I will pretend it too, another collusion, a way of staying safe.
Instead, we will talk of the pain rendered by desire, the way want leads to rejection, the way I huddle into safety like a cocoon, telling you never leave never leave because I am good and contained and crush my want, contain it like poison, slicing at the tendrils that come from underneath my boot-clad sole.
Image: The boy leaping over water at Yosemite.
How to survive at the bottom of the sea
Use your inhaler. Slip out of the house, a messenger bag slung across your chest. Walk, bike, hitchhike to Caffe Trieste in Piedmont, where you'll be another pretty girl with a writing notebook in a room full of chicks in glasses and tattooed men lost in novels and knitting. Write poems on how to be a quiet and thoughtful person. Or pen birching stories of the Victorian or stepmother variety, your characters with naked bottoms poised. For simplicity's sake, make the stories authentic and text only. For variety's sake toss in a few Russians. Or take on the newest craze, flash fiction about hamster birching (remember that hamster punishment DVD you found in your brother's room?). No matter the flavor of your erotic fiction, you can't go wrong if you include someone who gets a thrill from being naked in public, a supine male nude causing model mayhem.
If the birching stories don't work out, make a website because your life is fucked up. Make it a grief blog. Put it on a dark background. Even if you are as lazy as Ludlam's dog, you can still create a fictional character that survives. Write instructions on hiding crack cocaine in a styptic pen. Teach melancholics how to survive. But please don't include pictures of people who barely survive car accidents and, take it from me, nobody wants writing prompts from Nubs the dog.
The café empties out. You don't see the men with tattoos noting their places with bookmarkers and stuffing yarn into tote bags, the chicks in glasses yawning and checking the time. Everyone is anticipating the post-coffee cigarette, the cloak of night air. A man wearing a suit and coffee and cream wingtips hovers over your table. He smiles and reaches out a hand. "Writing to survive? Hi, Jennifer, hope you're well."
Your hand smashed in his, your heart tight, your writing forgotten: He looks familiar, but how does he know your name? Was he the guy at the poetry slam in the city who wrote something nonsensical, something about cha cha gabor's husband gluing his eyes shut? It was social commentary, it was above your head, but the poem did make you laugh, the name like a dance, like a starlet long gone to seed, the hapless husband with his tube of Krazy Glue, the car crash at low speed.
The man sits down. You talk about surviving college as a quiet person, the way you both feel more comfortable with a pen in hand. He compares his writing style to Bertie Wooster's (a reference you don't get: wasn't Bertie Wooster a P.G. Wodehouse character?). Things start to get weird. He gestures to his forehead with two fingers, then whips them to yours, pressing lightly against your brow. "My thoughts get to you," he whispers, leaning close. This clean-cut character suddenly reminds you of a 1950s Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg on weed, actually. He stinks of it.
You start to babble, to make excuses for your quick exit. "You know what Michael Ondaatje said about our stories? That our past is like a villanelle, that we keep returning to it? I'm going to create a blog with romance prompts about car accidents, get people to write of their past traumas, the screech of brakes, the smash of metal, the fluttering of hearts. A type of therapy, right? Just go to, ummm, 'human skull writing.' It's on blogger."
And with that, you are out the door and back into the night.
Search terms used in this post (some modified): birching stories, birched buttock stories, Victorian birching, Amis on insomnia, Jennifer Trinkle arrest, stepmother birching, middle age doldrums, writing grief blogs, writing prompt website with a dark background, Eighties “tall hair” tom waits lyle lovett, “its like a villanelle,” birched buttocks, how to survive liquefaction, poem about a quiet and thoughtful person, Russian birching, the simplicity of childhood, “bertie Wooster” writing style, “my finger” “her divorce,” “my thoughts get to you,”annoying loud night sounds insomnia insects frogs, as lazy as ludlam’s dog, birching naked bottoms,caffee Trieste pretty girl writing notebook piedmont,cha cha gabor husband glues eyes shut, coffee and cream wingtips, Djarum clove cigarette head rush, feeling frumpy mom, fictional character that survives, Ginsberg weed, hamster birching, hamsters DVDs punishment, hiding crack cocaine in styptic pen case, how should melancholics survive, how to be quiet and thoughtful, how to survive at the bottom of the sea, human skull writing, made website because my life is fucked up, male nudes supine model mayhem, “my mother insists on burning candles, ignoring my asthma,” naked public thrill, nubs the dog writing prompts, pictures of people who barely survive car accidents, quiet person survive college, romance writing prompts about car accidents, text only Victorian birching tales, the smell of gin, tight_heart, want to read authentic Victorian punishment stories, writing to survive hi Jennifer hope you’re well
And a "hi" back at you, Vito!
Image by new_sox (modified by me).
Stay
In the middle of the night, when the dreams wake you up (always a bus and an almost stranger, the meeting in a restaurant turned to a mysterious journey. Last night it was Emily with her magic eyes and her reserved manner and there you were on the bus and there she was behind, dragging a fifteen foot bench they had left by accident), quiet your mind, tell your brain to rest, that nothing is so important that you need not sleep. The night is a dark time for thoughts and love. It is the time that ghosts steal souls, that your life leaves through your breath.
But don’t think about that. Think about small, soft things, sleeping puppies, the tomatoes growing out back, the feel of butter sauce in your mouth. If you must go to the bathroom, walk there with your eyes shut and ignore the cat as he rubs his scent against your calves.
The truth is that nothing is really important, that life is a series of moments connected by time. Yesterday in the sunlight you thought you were happy. On the Bay Bridge, the traffic inching for a reason that had not yet been revealed, you thought of the repetition, its “here-you-are-again” nature, the bridge above and below, the bay gleaming out the window .
Then you passed five police cars – it’s a habit now to count things, so goes life with a kindergartner – and a tow truck, but no car. The police officers were looking over the edge of the bridge and you thought: oh no. Oh no. The boy asked you and your husband what you were oh noing and neither of you really wanted to talk about, so you glossed over it instead and besides, the scenario you were both imagining was unlikely.
But you knew the feeling, the desperation, the substrate of nothingness that might lead someone to the edge of a bridge in the mixed weather of a June Saturday. Another person out there who thought that nothing would ever get better, that they were evil to the core, or so sad that they should end the dance early. It’s an edge you’ve been on, though not quite as precipitously, and you wished that you could hold out a hand to all the people suffering, could hug them and reassure them. Together you would form a community of black humor and heavy sighs, a mutual support group of deep sadness, everyone rooting for the fleeting moments of sunshine.
It wasn’t a group that you thought you belonged to, but now they are your brethren, the depressed and desperate, and you love them for their depth of being. Stay here, you tell them, stay here with me and we will prove that we can live.
From the prompt "Good advice."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. Turns out the reason those police cars were on the lower deck of the bridge was because a man had stopped his car on the upper deck and was standing on the ledge. He was later arrested for a suspected DUI.
Image of the Bay Bridge by Thomas Hawk.
Why I've gathered you all here
I still walk, I wander the streets of Berkeley and Albany. I take in the flowers, the bungalows in various states of repair, stuccoed in purples and calming greens. This is my secret life, going from appointment to appointment, from therapist to counselor to doctor, observing the lives of others, their public faces. It's the slow way to travel, though I am a fast walker, and my mind records and remembers. Here is where I waited in the rain, my head filled with me, with friendly warnings for the coming earthquake, waiting for the car with my husband and son to whisk me away from the flood.
The sidewalks are empty and the houses silent. I wander during weekdays when the rest of the world is gathering cash and stress and knowledge and I go to my helpers, the people who prop me up and make me hopeful, like an old lady grasping the arms of youth, one on either side, as she attempts to make it up the hill.
I have dreams about children running away from me and lost pets, about clocks that don’t work and friends who tell me that they won’t invite me over. Last night, my heart trembling, I broke out in a sweat and dreamt of the end of the world by machine, the last of humanity stamped out by falling metal. I woke up from that, and from the next, an old friend in a ratty apartment by the ocean, the dangerous walk to her place from a bus stop. She’s a mother of two now, two southern babies that I’ve never met, and I’ve consigned her to the past, to memory, have kept her there like a fine piece of china, delicate and easily broken.
I’ve consigned you all to memory, I make up my mind again and again, keep you trapped here. You can’t talk unless I tell you to, and eventually you listen to my ramblings, to my explanations, the perfect imaginary audience.
From the prompt "Whispering."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by striatic.
Shoeless
The bottom of the Elk was mud and leaves, a thick layer of it, and no swim shoes, just my feet pressing pressing, the mud getting between my toes and wasn’t high tide the best, when you had to swim out to the raft without touching? I swam until I was shivering, until it was time for dinner (5:00 p.m. sharp) and then back up the road I walked, towel around my waist, hair clinging to my shoulders, body browned by sun and mud.
It was the ethos of summer, no shoes unless I absolutely had to, the freedom to walk down to the river by myself because there was always someone familiar there to watch over me, a grandparent, generally, not necessarily mine, someone who knew my mother and her parents since my mother was a little girl. But I barely remember their names now. My grandmother died when I was nine. The other grandparents got older. I got older, too, not so cute, rebellious and angry and sneaky and can you believe the way she took advantage of her poor handicapped grandfather like that?
Still, bare feet in teenagerhood, bare as I walked the slate stepping stones from the Little House to the main one, for the shower, for the bathroom, to use the phone or make something to eat. On late summer nights, I walked barefoot down to the beach, to the parking lot with its cars and guys and beer and pot. Drunk, I drove my grandfather’s golf cart without shoes and Maureen and I were probably both barefoot when we took out my his car on that early summer night. A mistake. Not the lack of shoes, but the action, with predictable consequences.
Late that fall, I may have slipped on shoes before the ambulance took me away. More likely my mother packed me a bag, since I was half-naked anyway. It was cold that morning, but when I went into labor and had to call her, had to make the walk to the main house to use the phone, I doubt if I put on shoes, distracted by pain, by what was happening to me, by the threshold I was crossing too young.
From the prompt "Barefoot."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image: My feet.
The unseen life
The woman stares at the ceiling, thinks about her next move. Slowly she lifts the child’s arm from her torso. She slips out of the bed and puts on a robe. The cats leap from their places and follow her downstairs. Coffee with cream. Laptop. Email. Facebook. Writing. She sits on the couch in low light, one cat behind her, the other beside.
Later, we see her walking the dog, phone to her ear, the dog sniffing sniffing sniffing, sometimes stalking a squirrel. She sorts the laundry, unloads the dishwasher, folds, puts away. She writes. Checks the mailbox. Lets the dog out. It’s all in time lapse photography. Her path is circuitous and fast and the camera doesn’t linger on her time in the kitchen, the tears are blurs and though she is wiping her eyes it could be from laughter or maybe there’s something stuck in there, a cereal grain, a fleck of coffee grounds. When she rests her head on the counter it reminds viewers of elementary school, their own hot breath making the faux wood of the desk top damp.
Her emotions don’t matter. We want to see the flow, the beauty of sameness, someone else’s monotony turned into entertainment.
One day, in an act of defiance, a show of stamina, she turns to the camera, crooks her left arm up, and extends her middle finger. She stands in this pose for fifteen minutes, her expression a blank, bored almost, and then she drops her arm and sashays to the washing machine. After that there are other acts of rebellion: a marathon nose-picking session. Partial nudity. She starts to move in slow motion so that the film looks more like real speed. There is the day of the Nixon mask, followed by the week of the gorilla costume.
Viewership goes up. Everyone loves a crack-up, likes to see a stranger disintegrate in front of them. She expresses what we all feel in some way, what all of us want to do, to be seen as we are and then to hide it again, to give secret messages to strangers because no one else is listening. She starts writing signs: Help Me! I’m trapped. She tapes her mouth shut. Begins avoiding the cameras. And eventually, she isn’t there at all.
From the prompt "Reality TV."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by suttonhoo.
Speeding
I want to stay up all night and all day for a week, to feel the bugs crawling along my skin, to watch them scale the vast white walls of my apartment, black, skittering, the noise of a thousand legs on drywall.
I want to be fast, too fast, not enough time to think and when I do think it’s profound, of the moment, my synapses tossing around adjectives and verbs and nouns and somehow collecting them so that they make sense in a poetic kind of way and I would dance around with them, would need no company but my own words and the cat and maybe another friend, another speed freak. We would break into mailboxes and steal identities. We’d take shredder confetti and tape it back together, the speed freak’s dream of a task, so important, it requires concentration and a bit of lucid hallucination, us in the empty factory with the fans hovering above us and the ghosts of the old machinery whispering.
I can almost see the women with their grey faces and washed-out uniforms, can feel the suppressed thoughts and wants, the decades of tamping down of need, of creativity, so that at the end of the shift they left smaller somehow, more compact, robbed of a part of themselves, the rest stuffed into a corner in their minds.
There we’d be with our barrel of confetti and our Scotch tape, fitting together the credit card bills and the documents like puzzles, focusing on the paper, the pieces, against the shuffling of the women’s feet.
Can you feel them? Generations of women leaking lives out on the floor, leaving a part of themselves? I want to tell them that they are not forgotten, that every life matters, that I will listen to their dreams and record them after the high has worn off and I’m left alone with my thoughts, my too-slow thoughts. Their stories, meandering and long, will bring me back to earth, will be my touchstone, my grounding.
They are here. They tug at our sleeves, tells us to stop wasting our lives. “You have so much,” they gesture to the air, to the needles on the table beside us. “Don’t throw it away.” A gust of wind scatters the confetti and you put your head on the table and cry while I comfort you, touching your shoulder, remembering the solidity of flesh.
From the prompt "Speeding."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by sassymonkeymedia.
Narrow focus
The bed is narrow, just wide enough for me, and on the floor beside it is a dog bed for Nora. Every week the farmer delivers a box of sweet summer vegetables and creamy cheese. Sometimes he takes me fishing, shows me how to toss in the line, how to be patient as dawn pinkens the sky and the sun makes the clouds boil away. He’s fine and tall, rangy, with work-bitten hands. His face is kind. He is quiet, but it is a companionable silence, one that doesn’t increase my loneliness, but lessens it, and the effect lasts until the next time I see him. I don’t want anything else but his occasional presence, his mineral-bittered greens, the misshapen tomatoes and peppers and squash (the pattypans, the zucchini, the crooknecks).
During thunderstorms I read books by lamplight and comfort Nora as she shivers on the floor. The cabin has a supply of classics, Dickens and Hardy, but I’ve also brought the latest fiction with me, the stuff that keeps a lifeline between me and the real world, so that I don’t forget the rush of cars and the stink of exhaust, the way people are divided against themselves by too much: too much screen time, too many ads, the magazines piled around them as they channel surf.
When the dreams come, when the scenes from a life that I’ve escaped enter my mind, I watch them dispassionately: this is who I was then, who I am now. Here are the people I loved, lined up, imploring me not to forget them. And there I am at 16, a girl alone in a house not so different from my cabin, telling me now, the future her: It’s ok. I’m ok. You can let me go now, because I am you and you are good enough and I am in your bones and blood, programmed into your brain cells. I die when you do.
From the prompt "This summer."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by Extra Medium.
In my defense
One morning as I was walking the dog, the clouds, the kind of clouds that always have me reaching for metaphors, to go beyond blanket or miasma or oppressive, though a “miasma of cloud cover” has a nice ring to it – the clouds parted briefly, setting free a beam of light. In front of us, a crow picked at a chicken bone, spot lit from above. It hopped and cawed and Nora lunged for it, more for the bone than for the bird, and the miasma thickened again, the hole in the sky covered over. It was as though the sun never existed.
The brutality of bird against bone plus light plus miasma plus darkness made me do it, flipped the switch inside my mind. Not that it felt like a decision, it felt like a change. Nora and I walked across the street, turned around. At home, my fingers tapping on the keyboard, I ignored my husband. I ignored the boy. I let the cats meow at me without acknowledgement, and when Nora barked to be let back in, her barks stayed in place, bounced off the glass panes of the back door.
I looked as though I was sleepwalking when the truth was I was letting a scenario play out in my mind, a dream life was opening up that required me to ignore the present. What did the present care about me anyhow? The present demanded care and attention to monotonous detail. It left me cold, truly, trapped in a back corner of my mind with the hot water and the heavy robe, looking out the window of all that was required of me, that I be there and cheerful and fuck the darkness and let’s pretend that it’s all ok and if this is all to life, well, it could be a lot worse, right?
You spoiled little brat, I told myself. You are free from most want. You live pretty fabulously. What more could you want? I denied the want and then I didn’t and here I am, here we are, sitting in the waiting room, wondering what will happen next.
Image by liquidnight.
From the prompt "Defend your decision."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
The crowd
Hosts poured the wine and whiskey and gin and vodka with a generous hand, the glasses were bottomless. In the morning the children, five and six and towheaded, fascistic little blondes with ice-blue eyes, picked their way among the bodies of the fallen, the dissipated adults who dusted themselves off and doctored their headaches with Bloody Marys. The boy drained the cups, sometimes collapsed into his cereal bowl at breakfast, and the grown-ups with their hoary breath and bloodshot eyes would wink and laugh too loudly for anyone’s taste, the kind of laugh that enters your dreams, the sound that the man with the fingernails like claws makes as he rips at your pinafore, at your high-necked nightgown.
Everyone slept with everyone else. Desire was hidden and then revealed with the snap of a corset, with a leer and a grope. These men were artists, the women were their muses, a quickie against the walls in the host’s bedroom the price of admission. The children woke up once to see their mother and Uncle Robert (the poet, the madman who once thought he could stop traffic with his mind and his one upraised hand, standing in his underwear in the middle of Fifth Avenue in the middle of the day, eyes closed, the other hand resting on his heart) settling in on the floor. Their mother was throaty, her voice slow and low, like she had scraped her words against broken glass before releasing them.
“Mama?” the girl said and the room got quiet, the form on the floor stopped cold. In the hallway a woman was crying. Everyone waited. The adults returned to the dance when the children appeared to fall back asleep.
Image from Follow My Bliss, but I am not sure where she got it.
From the prompt "The crowd." Based loosely on what I've heard of Anne Roiphe's most recent memoir.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
The texture of sorrow
We shine them up, facet the edges, take the sorrow and make it into something else, muffle it. The transformation leaves me cold. It’s a burial, a way to take the depth of sorrow and buff it up, make it reflect light, refract it. I prefer my sorrow rough and real, my regret salty, dirty, unwashed.
It was only after my nap today (a nap after another night of four hours of sleep) that I felt real regret. I’ve been having a hard time with that, teasing out my confusion and emotions from acknowledging the pain I’ve caused. I feel regret. I don’t feel shame (I’ve read a lot about this, shame versus guilt, how shame in some cases is about getting caught, about worrying how others will perceive one's transgressions, while guilt is about not doing the right thing, is more internal, not that this is the whole of it). I make my decisions willingly for concrete reasons. I own them. But I do wish I had handled things differently, had been braver a long time ago.
There is a creek bed, a stream running over rocks, not enough water because of the drought, even after all the crazy March rain, but still the water rushes and plays. I’m at the side, I carry heavy amethysts, raw, stone mixed with stone. I walk to the water’s edge, let its coldness envelop my hands. It rushes over the amethysts, carries the confusion away. I am left with pure clean emotion. I throw the crystals one by one across the creek. I watch them arc through the air before the grasses on the other side swallow them up.
What am I to do? Do I let sorrow trump action? Do I let guilt keep me trapped? I have to acknowledge the pain, the complications, the fears in all of this, and then move forward. It’s the direction of movement that paralyzes me, the decisions that are clouded by mud, history, and the unknown.
From a prompt: amethysts.
Confidential to my Google friend: I'm ok. Maybe not well. But I'll be in touch soon.
Manifesto
With my resolve, small, compact, like a bullet, I will get what I want: catch and keep, write until my fingers bleed beauty, pierce the publishing mystery. I will take what I want like a man, my knuckles bruised from the struggle, from pushing through brambles and misperceptions and reluctance.
We collect history. Memories cloud our vision, they clog the landscape of thought, tributes to a dead past, cairns on a moor. We react before we know why we're reacting. I’m used to my own brain fog but I sometimes forget other people have sad pasts, too, that I’m not the only one with clouded vision.
The resolve cuts through all of that – it pierces the fog, it sees the others clearly. It’s a bullet of love and clarity. With it I will get what I want. I will rip off my own shirt, muddied, dirty with leaves and sand and cigarette butts and the smell of a barroom floor, to reveal the smoothness of my skin. My candor will make the others want to do the same.
Hands intertwine, with hope for connection, with concern for the roadblocks on the way. I prefer to feel my heart rather than use my head, to let the is-ness of it be, to live in the ontology of the other, of the moment, even when I don’t understand it. The more I think, the less resolved I am, the more my heart withers in my chest. Why not let it sing, let it call out, let it ask for nothing in return but love or a facsimile thereof, the regard, the explanation-defying connection?
One target, one set of eyes, the resolve like a bullet. The rest will fall into place. It’s part of my plan to live, to write, to love both selfishly and without self. The bullet is silver, it is platinum, it is made of blood and bone, brain and heart. It waits in my chest, to fly out of my mouth, out of my fingers, from the center of my soul. I concentrate, I let it be, I see what will happen, knowing that what happens will happen no matter what I do, that the more I let go, the more I will receive.
From a prompt: Keep your eyes on the target. Edited slightly and reposted because some of the wording was bothering me.
Image: One of Jasper John's many Targets. I got this image from The Nervous Breakdown. Where The Nervous Breakdown got it from is unknown.
Recovery process
What she doesn’t know is that for years, under the newspaper clippings and the accumulated knowledge, behind the tough bone, her heart has been healing. Getting stronger. Over time, the beats have come with more force. The twinges she’s been feeling, interpreting as warning signals, as the pain of a phantom limb, are actually signs of recovery, like when a scar starts to tingle and ache.
In the past week, her heart has been a barometer of truth: it shuddered when she encountered a neighbor, plump as a tick and just as evasive, riffling through the bushes out front (“He’s not as dangerous as he looks. He’s just as damaged as the rest of us. Treat him with kindness.”). It plummeted when she told her second lie in fifteen minutes (“Why lie? What are you afraid of?"). It beat out a rhythm when she walked in the wind, was lifted free by the breeze, pulled up through the branches, whirled across the street with the plastic bags and leaves and then back again to her (“This is life: I am alive!”).
She presses a hand against her chest. Her heart thumps reliably underneath. She wonders at how the world heals itself eventually, at the moments of clarity and sweetness that we all experience if we would only let the healing happen, if we allow the knowledge that in order to live, we have to risk our hearts, ourselves, and that eventually, it will all be fine. We are human and to be fully human is to be vulnerable.
From a prompt: describe a process. Impossibly short, like most of what I've been writing over the last week. Barely edited from the original.
What I'm going to do
I kept a mattress there and a stack of books, mouldering classics from the resale shop. There was a wool blanket on the bed, old army surplus, a kerosene lamp, an vintage calendar with pinup girls for atmosphere. I pretended it was a time before the Internet and cable, that I was a pioneer woman, the first of my kind, making it alone on the misty prairie. I had a dog, a terrier with odd bald patches here and there and an iffy temper, who scared away the riffraff, and together we sat by the fire, a stack of wood in flames outside our little house, roasting squirrel meat on a stick, sharing the bones.
Some nights I thought back to my girlhood, my dreams of an adobe hut, my desire to escape my body and my mind. He threatened me, had power over me, and I eluded him, built a treehouse, a log cabin, an igloo in my head. I sat in the branches and looked over us as he did what he wanted to do. My feet grazed his hair, so short and rough, but he was so intent he did not feel them.
I used to imagine puncturing his chest with a weapon, something slim and sharp, as slim and sharp as him and just as deadly, but I forgot about it in the daylight, only remembered when it was too late.
He died eventually anyhow. They all do, thank God. But I’m still here, in my little wooden house with the brick foundation, reading by kerosene lamp, stirring the fire with a stick, letting the dead stars shine their light upon me forever.
From a prompt: What we're going to do, barely doctored from the 12-minute version.
Image by Mike Pennington.
Hope to be back writing more frequently (and in more depth) soon.
Reconciliation
Rockville, Maryland, March 24, 2002
Kevin’s last day started with a predawn pantomime, a fluttering and flapping of his thin-boned arms, his blue eyes serious as he gestured to his throat and chest: I can’t breathe.
My boyfriend Stephen and I were keeping vigil in his hospice room, taking over that night for my mother and Kevin’s 24-year-old son Ian. The cots were rigid, thin, like subpar stretchers but low to the floor. We would periodically awaken to the creak of the door as the night nurse checked on Kevin, the widening wedge of light from the hallway prying our eyes open.
Hospitals and hospices are yellow-tinged at night, their lights low, the rectangles of frosted glass over the bed or ceiling fluorescents dimmed just enough to give the nurses light to pierce a vein. The effect is barroom dingy and sordid, the supine patients the barflies, the nurses cocktail waitresses plying pharmaceuticals and sympathy. Still, in the dim glow of the light over the bed Kevin looked at least a decade younger than his 55 years. His skin retained its tanned, smooth quality and his hair was still chestnut brown without a trace of grey. It was his weight that gave him away, that and the tubes, the hissing oxygen tank. After nine years with the terminal bone marrow disease myelofibrosis, after almost seven months in and out of the critical care unit at Georgetown University Hospital, Kevin’s five foot ten frame had melted down to 86 pounds.
With his tracheostomy speaking valve removed, Kevin could not talk, but his distress was clear. I groggily rushed to get help. Kevin again fluttered his arms, too earthbound to be wings, too light to be useful, at the nurse. Thinking a change of position would take the pressure off his fluid-filled lungs, she and I turned him on his side. She administered a bolus of morphine through his IV.
Kevin’s body slumped. His eyes closed and his breathing took on an autonomic quality. It was as though she had flipped a switch. Kevin’s panicked pantomime was his last conscious act.
“You’d better call your mother,” the nurse told me. “There’s been a change.” It was 4:15 a.m., March 24, 2002. Kevin was dying of untreated pneumonia.
Wilmington, Delaware, 1984
Kevin Sheehan, poet, philosopher, carpenter, moved down the street from my mother and me in late March. Pale pink cherry blossoms feathered the tree out front. April’s candy-colored tulips foretold of May’s riotous azaleas. My mother invited our attractive new neighbor over for dinner, plied him with Szechuan chicken, coarse red wine, and talk of the Romantic poets. I was fourteen, a high school freshman, a volleyball cheerleader and devotee of German class, obsessed with the pop groups Duran Duran, Wham!, and Haircut 100.
He entered our lives like an explosion, tossed our world this way and that. That first dinner led to more. Kevin objected to my teen angst, my silence at the table, so my mother started cooking meals in our kitchen to bring to his house every night, always leaving me a plate. Most weekends I abandoned Wilmington to go to my grandfather’s place in Maryland, where I stayed in the Little House, an adjacent summer cottage that had no heat, plumbing, or phone line. My grandfather removed his prosthetic foot and hearing aids at night, leaving me completely unsupervised. I embraced the blurrying effects of alcohol, raided my grandfather’s liquor cabinet (the Johnny Walker Red, the sour Paul Masson wine) or siphoned my mother’s gin into a jar to bring with me.
That summer I met a 20-year-old college student who liked to visit after midnight. I learned to anticipate his knocks on the door as I watched Kung Fu reruns in the dark and yearned for his kisses with their heady taste of Budweiser and pot.
By September, my wardrobe darkened to black with fluorescent accents, safety pins dangling from my ears, I had discovered the saving power of punk music. At Kevin’s house he and my mother ate by candlelight, drank bottles of Sangre de Toro or gin and tonics, light on the ice. They talked Keats or Nietzsche over homemade French fries and garlicky chicken. At home I poured slugs of amaretto, made bitter screwdrivers, the orange juice bleached pale by vodka. I walked the streets in the dark, smoking clove cigarettes, my Walkman blasting the Dead Kennedys.
Washington, DC, March 21, 2002
“But I’m only 55 years old,” he cried out. “I’m not ready to die!”
Kevin spoke from his bed in the critical care unit, a thin thing, all stretched skin and solid bone, solid from the myelofibrosis.
With myelofibrosis, the bone marrow fills in with scar tissue, becoming fibrous and hard. Blood production that normally occurs in the marrow moves to other organs -- the spleen, the liver -- in the body’s last-ditch effort to make blood, a phenomenon with the poetic name extramedullary hematopoesis. The blood these organs make is inefficient, practically useless, the cells misshapen and immature. Already overloaded with the task of filtering out the extra white blood cells the body produces as part of the disease, gorged with their own blood-making, the liver and spleen swell dramatically.
People with myelofibrosis are often anemic; they bruise easily and are susceptible to infection and bone pain. While there are drugs to manage the disease, there is no cure outside of a stem cell or bone marrow transplant, which are both dicey bets. 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.
Myelofibrosis was killing Kevin in its indirect way. It dodged the blame, pointed its finger at the hospital, the pneumonia, the fact that Kevin’s body had stopped digesting the food that was coming to his stomach via a surgically-installed tube.
Delaware and Maryland, 1984-2002
This is what happened during my mother and Kevin’s 18-year relationship: Thirteen moves, three mortgages, one bankruptcy and foreclosure. Scores of fights. My move to the Little House at fifteen when my mother bought a one-bedroom house down the street. My labor in the Little House at sixteen which resulted in one stillborn child. My return to the Little House a week after the stillbirth. Four lousy cars. One new car totaled. One new car driven into the ground. Four dogs come and gone. A summer of no communication between me and them. One (empty) refusal to attend my first wedding. One spleen out. At least three breakups. One Ph.D. completed by Kevin at the midpoint of his illness. Dozens of philosophical conversations between the three of us over red wine, candlelit, intense, perfect. Laughter – at Kevin’s jokes or our shared ones -- the biting wit, the piercing eye. Seven hospitalizations.
Maryland and Delaware, 1992
The biggest fight I remember took place right before I left the East Coast for graduate school in Illinois, only months before Kevin was diagnosed. It was a fight that stretched out over a day, with deceptive lulls, lacunae of calm. There was a truck ride along a ribbon of asphalt, the tall green corn of an Eastern Shore August tunneling us in, and the yelling, about what I no longer remember. “Get out!” Kevin screamed at my mother as he pulled off the road. She slipped out the door, squawking all the while. As I slipped along after her, Kevin said, “You don’t have to go, Jen.”
“Why would she want to stay here? You’re not her father!” my mother screamed, a moment that clicked a switch inside of me: like I needed a father? Had she been looking for one?
I followed my loyalty out of the truck.
That night, back in Wilmington, my mother and I ordered a black olive pizza. Kevin, who was not planning on eating pizza, walked into the kitchen as we were opening the box. He hated black olives. Our choice was a choice against him (you were either for or against Kevin: there were no other interpretations). Spit flew. He flung a plain yogurt container across the kitchen where it exploded, heavy and white, against the oak cabinets. More screaming, my mother’s hysterical rush into the night, the dog chasing after her.
Kevin looked at me icily over the banister as he walked upstairs, his belly swollen, his spleen secretly filtering out excess white blood cells, heavy with blood-making.
“This only happens when you’re here. You cause these things.”
“No. No, I don’t.”
I was defiant. I knew he spoke lies. But a lifetime of blame comes home to roost at some point.
Washington, DC 2001 - 2002
In early September 2001, almost nine years after his diagnosis, Kevin checked into Georgetown University Hospital for shortness of breath. His pleural cavity, the space that houses the lungs, was filling with fluid.
I imagined the sharp straw they used to drain the fluid out, thin, metallic, pointed like a quill at one end, the flow of a liquid as viscous as a milkshake, as red as blood. One of the effects of end-stage myelofibrosis is a low platelet count, which can cause difficulty clotting. The internal puncture wound from the drain kept bleeding. Blood drizzled and oozed. It pooled in his pleural cavity before finally solidifying into a gelatinous mass. The mass interfered with his ability to breathe. It had to come out.
September that year was all clear blue skies and fluffy clouds, superior, deceptive mornings of pure sunshine. On September 11th, after being belatedly evacuated from the U.S. Senate office building where I worked as a librarian (the march home with other federal and nonprofit workers, the quiet skies and scary rumors, the unreality of it all), I took my unexpected afternoon off to visit Kevin in his hospital room. Stephen and I walked from our Adams Morgan apartment to Georgetown, a walk I would repeat countless times over the next several months. It was a liminal moment, the time of change. It was one of Kevin’s last afternoons of relative normalcy.
This is what happened to Kevin in seven months of hospitalization: Three thoracic surgeries to remove blood clots. One unnecessary hernia operation that landed him on a ventilator (aka respirator) for the first time. Several emergency intubations, a procedure that takes place when one’s oxygen levels fall precipitously and medical personnel force a breathing tube hooked to a ventilator into one’s lungs. One intubation-scarred epiglottis that let food and liquid enter his compromised lungs, making them more prone to infection. Two failed swallowing tests. Installation of a tube that went directly from his stomach through his abdomen to a drip bag of nutrient-rich sludge, Kevin’s “food.” Ten days of almost-fatal bleeding. Two expensive doses of blood Factor VII to stop the bleeding. Three tracheostomies. Numerous bouts of pneumonia. One nasty bedsore that went down to his tailbone. Endless bags of fentanyl, of hardcore antibiotics, of morphine. Several triumphant February walks around the critical care unit, Kevin gripping a walker, all 86 pounds of him getting along on pure will.
We watched over him, my mother and me, were at the hospital together almost every day for six and a half months. When she got the flu, when she moved from her apartment to a condominium, when she had to complete something on deadline, I took on her role at the sickbed. After Kevin emerged from a drug-induced coma, when the bleeding had stopped, he talked of angels and devils, the murk of being subdued by drugs, by the ventilator, how my mother and I appeared as saviors in the darkness.
He apologized.
I continued to keep watch. I listened. Sometimes I read to him. One afternoon a favorite nurse talked about an unnamed patient who didn’t get visitors: “That’s what happens when you’re not nice to people in your life.” If you only knew, I thought.
I was there because I cared. I was there because I wanted to help. But I was also there to redeem myself, to erase my own sins, for being the kind of person parents abandon and people are cruel to, for not being able to love the baby I gave birth to when I was sixteen.
Here, with Kevin trapped in the hospital, I could show my goodness. I could show him his goodness, that even those who do bad things deserve to be treated as human beings. It was absolution for both of us, hope in life, in the power of human beings to forgive and be made new.
Rockville, Maryland, March 24, 2002
My mother woke quickly to my call, roused Ian with a shoulder tap. They rushed without panic in the manner of people used to medical emergencies, pulled on yesterday’s clothes in the dark and splashed cold water on their faces. Casey House Hospice was in Rockville, Maryland, about 15 miles away from my mother’s Takoma Park condominium, a journey from one set of desperate concrete strip malls to another, up Georgia Avenue past the bodegas and Chinese grocers to the rolling greenery of the distant Washington, DC suburbs. In good traffic the trip took about 40 minutes, a buffer zone between my mother’s life and what remained of Kevin’s.
The morning was cool. Optimistic. Spring coaxed green out of brown earth and black branches. Forsythia bushes flamed across the landscape and daffodils sprung from dampened ground. A few hours after my mother and Ian arrived, Joe, Kevin’s closest brother, drove in from his hotel. We began our death watch.
The day before, the hospice minister, an Episcopalian, had visited Kevin. Stephen, Ian and I were there, sitting in the dusty afternoon, quiet under the oxygen hiss. Kevin had something to confess and he wanted us to witness it. He told of something bad he had done, bad enough to send him to hell. The minister was sympathetic and kind, told Kevin that he was not damned.
“Does that sound ok, guys?” Kevin turned his head to face us, without irony, sincere. We reassured him.
Each of us dies an individual. Some people go on the off flutter of the heart, the sudden starburst in the brain. Others may slip into a coma and then just stop breathing. Kevin went out slowly. Six of us – me, my mother, Stephen, Ian, and Joe, sat in the room. Woody, Kevin’s golden retriever, panted on the slick floor. We watched Kevin’s chest rise and fall, rhythmic, machine-like. His jaw was slack, the mossy tombstones of his teeth showing just under the lips, and with each intake of breath his mouth opened, only to drop again on the exhale.
Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. The hiss of the oxygen tank. Sickness has a smell, a kind of fecundity, the triumph of bacteria, rich and thick. The room smelled of mucus and rubbing alcohol, of pneumonia and plastic. We sat and watched Kevin breathe. We wondered how long dying could take. We looked out the window at the incongruous spring-in-the-country scene. We excused ourselves to escape into life, to go for a walk, to read a magazine in the mauve and grey common room.
You might imagine that hospices are full of ancient people, wrinkled sickly husks, people who have had opportunities to live full and hopefully happy lives. The only other patient I remember was a woman who couldn’t have been past her thirties. She sat in her room with the door open, watching television in her hospital gown, the remote in her pale hand. A layer of fuzz covered her scalp, the aftereffects, I assumed, of a failed chemotherapy regime. Most people went to Casey House Hospice because they required serious medical attention to be comfortable: pumped-in oxygen, help in being turned, an IV, a catheter. Kevin, who could barely move and was dependent on oxygen and constant pain relief, fit into this category. This woman must have as well. But she looked so young, so alive and alone, free of tubes, with the enviable ability to move on her own power.
Back in the room. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. The slack jaw, the shock of brown hair, the fluttering of Kevin’s heart underneath his solid thin bones. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. Outside, robins tore into earthworms, tulips inched towards the sun. A spring breeze, hopeful, but with a touch of winter, pulled through the soft green new leaves. We didn’t speak. We watched. We wondered how long it would take. He took another gulp of air, his chest swelling, before he discarded it again.
Midday, Stephen and I escaped to get lunch for the family. We left the hot heavy air of the hospice and leapt into the car. The outskirts of Montgomery County were unfamiliar, the high and wide malls with their box stores, the restaurants with heavy meat and fried food. We drove somewhat randomly, would stop and look at menus and report back, finally bringing back bags laden with fat-crisp food, comforting and rich.
The room hissed. Kevin breathed low and wet through the pneumonia. Each member of the family took a break to eat in the common room, nibbled at the French fries or the fried chicken or the veggie burgers with cheese. We ate without tasting, ate because we had to, because that’s what the living do. Back in the room, the rhythm slowed, but the pattern remained the same.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale.
Exhale.
The fluttering was fainter, Kevin’s heart still hard at work, the lungs doing their duty, slower now. Slower.
At 3:00 p.m., I went outside to call Martha, an old college friend, someone who knew the stories about Kevin, knew his effect on my life. The expansiveness of Kevin’s last hospitalization was almost impossible to convey. How could I explain the deathbed, his relentless heart and lungs? Typically, Martha kept on talking and talking. I could have left the phone on the path and gone back in, I could have just hung up or claimed a low battery. Instead, I paced. I listened to the swish of car tires on the interstate. I looked back at the window. I stepped on the cracks and watched a line of ants invade the grass. Finally, I cut her off mid-sentence. “I really have to get back to the room.”
Inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale.
Exhale.
We were tired with Kevin’s effort, with the winding down, almost bored with it. His body clung to life. The pneumonia had taken over his lungs, it was slowing down his heart, the two organs were working together as always, going out as a pair. The hiss of the oxygen. The rise and fall of his chest. The crazy tappings of his heart. Outside, the sunlight thinned and the bushes shivered with afternoon’s end.
Kevin took a deep breath. His heart gave a feeble beat. He exhaled. My mother gestured to his chest, Woody barked, and we clung to each other, my mother, Ian, Stephen and me, while Joe looked on.
Kevin went out in a flash of light, my mother told us. After the flash, she had a vision of him walking along a riverbank, his old collie Augie by his side.
That night I thought back to the afternoon that I had massaged Kevin’s scalp. His skin was thin as vellum, his hair hadn’t been washed in weeks. Kevin closed his eyes contentedly, like a cat in the sun, as I worked my fingers through his unkempt hair and palpitated his forehead. Why couldn’t I have done more of that? More handholding, more touch? Hospitals are impersonal anonymous places. Most of the touch he received was the medical kind, invasive, bloody, painful. I wished I had massaged him more, had held his hand more. It was all too late now. His body was heading for ashes.
I woke at 2 a.m. to the feeling of Kevin’s hand upon mine, his presence in the room. “You were there for me, and that was enough,” he told me. “Thank you.”
I went back to sleep.
A version of the personal essay I wrote for my creative nonfiction class (edited version added Sunday afternoon). If you got through all 3300 words of it, I thank you.
Thin end of the wedge
Where does this couple come from? They show up sporadically, once a month or so, time travelers in their denim and leather, the woman wearing pointy-toed boots that demonstrate the thin end of the wedge, the toe jam, the man with quirkily British brothel creepers, thick-soled and wide. Both of them have artificially blonde hair, tousled, the roots a shade of anonymous brown. The quick intake/exhale, the sideways glance, the tabby or calico, all of it incongruous against a stucco house the color of French’s mustard.
This is one of my dream lives, beholden to substances, a life of no obligations, romantically influenced by the 70s punk scene, where I could reasonably write something like this:
I paid for it
A lifetime of clean living doesn’t show on the face. The late nights, the whiskies and tequilas, the hovering over a mirror with a tightly rolled dollar bill: eventually, those years catch up with you. It starts out as a slight dullness in the eyes, a yellowish tinge to the skin. One night you go to sleep almost young, the next morning, the fine lines start to appear, the fissures, the sags and bags.
At that point, it’s too late. No amount of detox can save you from the destruction you’ve brought upon yourself, the physical ruination.
At that point, then, why stop? Why not go out in a hazy glare of glory, the afternoons fuzzy, the mornings cotton-mouthed? We’re all dependent upon something. Some people need sweet-as-candy positive thoughts, the cheery aphorism, pep talks written on the bathroom mirror in styptic pencil. Others need human touch, have to feel skin against skin, insist upon hugging every acquaintance, on touching palms with strangers. You, lover of chemicals, of the products of ferment, find this need pathetic. It’s nothing that sour mash and cheap wine followed up by a pack of Pall Malls can’t solve.
So you examine your face, pinch the sagging skin on your forearms, remember the long ago days when you were young and naïve. That first drink was bitter, but the next one went down easy. It wasn’t just the taste, the feeling of looseness, like drifting on the ocean, it was the camaraderie, the friends around the bonfire, the people stacked against the bar.
From a prompt, I paid for it. The next Round Robin starts up this weekend, thank goodness. Feeling very dark today, despite my night of long-enough sleep, but there's good news: we're closing on the house on Monday.
Image by Diamond Farrah.
Other houses, other lives
Offer me tea, kombucha, beer in a glass. I sink into your couch or perch uncomfortably on the edge of the easy chair. I cross my legs and lean against the wall as your cat rubs his chin against my fingertips. On the opposite wall, you've hung a still life, a single mottled pear resting on a wooden pedestal. I want to pluck the pear from the painting, cup its coolness in my warm palm before I take a bite. The juice coats my chin. It drips on my shirt. I apologize for my lack of control, the drips marring your futon, ask you to forgive me my destructive ways.
Will you reach for the core? Do you fetch me a warm wet cloth and dab it against my chin, press it against the fabric of my shirt?
For now, I smile behind my glass. I gesture awkwardly, sit on my hands when they threaten to take me somewhere I'm not yet prepared to go. I note the stacks of papers, the dishes sitting out on the table.
***
1975, Kindergarten. My mother drops me off early at my best friend's house (whose mother is also my after school babysitter). The contrast between outside, the grey winter morning, car exhaust trapped in the air, and inside, the house sweet, warm, and comforting, makes my heart ache. In the sunlit kitchen, her family sits around the breakfast table. I smell pancakes and butter, syrup and sausage, coffee and cream. It's as though I have stumbled onto an extra family, intact and loving. I am grateful when they invite me to the table, but also embarrassed, as though they think I don't have breakfast at home.
The warm house, the sunlight against the table, the bronze copy of the Kiss by Rodin in the living room, the older brother's mysterious attic sanctum. It was my introduction to other peoples' houses, their dinner tables, the pantry with the garlic salt I sprinkled on my palm, the stairs that led from the kitchen down to a dark cellar, the sleeping porch off the office where a lobster trap hung in the corner.
***
The damp living room in the Sugar Shack, J's brother's painting on the wall (keep this coupon/drop this coupon). The rattan furniture. The college apartment with the bed on the floor. D's family's house with his grandfather's artwork (The Fall of Icarus, the family portraits), his mother's loom in the corner of the dining room. Family dinners, blurry with Grolsch and toasts (proost!). We met at the tot lot my first week in Berkeley or we introduced by mutual friends on a street corner. We were an old item, a new item, had barely touched, had already kissed (in Metro tunnels, on the floor at my place, on the tan couch with the dog looking on). Now here we are, exchanging parenting stories. Making out on the couch while the movie Hairspray flickers across the room. Spending Christmas Eve in sleeping bags on the basement floor because your parent's house is full of family.
1998. My husband's old family home, empty of people. His mother was in the hospital and his father was by her side. He wanted to show me this place that was so much a part of him, more the landscape than the house, though the house was that, too. I admired the open floor plan, stood out on the deck and breathed in eucalyptus and sage from the canyon that he and his brother used to scramble down. That Christmas was my first with him, the only one where we stayed apart. In later visits, we slept in his old bedroom on crumbling foam mattresses, listened to the coyotes howl from the yard while his brother cocooned in a sleeping bag on the deck.
***
Maureen's house. The front porch swing on Canal Day, the two of us wielding 20-inch sparklers at the line of cars leaving town. The mysterious plumbing, with separate faucets for hot and cold. The couches, formal downstairs, soft velveteen upstairs. The walls with their Williamsburg colors.
Gayle's house, midcentury, clean-edged in a neighborhood of Colonials. Boxy furniture, teals and turquoise, black and white. The tiny room she shared with her little sister, the slumber parties downstairs, watching Fridays and laughing at her goofy dad.
Climbing through Peter's bedroom window to sit on the tin roof of his porch, talking about James Brown or Tama Janowitz or Washington, DC.
Mr. X's apartment in Champaign, forbidden territory at first, then a love den with its treetop views and Ikea furniture, a little kitchen for the hollandaise sauce, for the bacon, for the hot and sour soup, twelve Berghoff bocks stacked in the half-size refrigerator.
Resting my head on DT's couch the day of my divorce (the early morning flight to Columbus delayed so that I almost miss the court appearance, the awkward lunch with Mr. X at Rigsby's or was it at the brewpub we used to go to, a sad heavy pint between us?). Hot July day mitigated by cool air conditioning, the blinds closed, the feeling of sadness and happiness, of relief and comfort. One thing ends, another begins.
***
I don't know what your house will bring. I will remember the way the light slants through the blinds in the late afternoon, that painting opposite the couch, the conversations built around a core of curiosity and contrast, the moments before, before, before.
Image: Another person's house (my mother's house), mid-1980s, by me
This started with a photo prompt and went off from there. I'm not sure what to call this, a mix of fact and fiction, memoir and concealed wish.
Disambiguation
I remember you, how you fit into my small world, expanded it briefly before disappearing, how you coaxed me into feeling comfortable before kicking me in the shins. You didn’t understand what you were doing. How could you? You were barely 21 years old and knew nothing of the rest of my life.
We talked, it was endless talking, you speaking, me listening, interested, supportive, engaged. It wasn’t until I reread your letter that I remembered we met in a Shakespeare class, though I can bring the class to mind, the prof with lank chestnut hair and metal-rimmed glasses. I loved that class, especially the paper writing, the way I could take a topic and mold it, how it was all about language. We were all about language too, discussions of plans, what we were working on, your school paper movie reviews, your thoughts on lacrosse, on philosophy, on writing.
Mid-October 1991: We stood at the base of the concrete steps by the campus convenience store. I clutched the iron handrail. I wasn’t wearing gloves and my hands were cold, my cheeks flushed. The ATM in the tiny bank on the hill still gave out one dollar bills and I was still in love with DC and all it meant, the power, the machine. The sun was low, the sky glowing pink. You made me laugh. Soon I would take the Metro back to my claustrophobic studio apartment where I'd eat mashed potatoes with plain yogurt for dinner again. But before that, I swam in the words, bobbed along your stream of consciousness. It was entertaining. Like me, you are a thinker. You’ve upped the vocabulary, have years of scholarship holding up every linguistic diversion, but essentially your approach, the free flow of ideas, is the same.
We talked before class. After class. About class. Did we talk on the phone? No matter, it was talking, always talking. I don't remember how it got romantic, but once it did, the air around us deadened and stilled. We walked in silence.
Another memory: a nighttime drive in a beat-up car to Gravelly Point to watch airplanes land at National Airport. The tall trees of campus swayed and blurred as I stared out the passenger seat window. At the Point, the planes lit up the water, blew our hair around, filled the air with fumes and noise. It was one of those moments that I was a part of and apart from, pulled into the drama of the landing gear, the inevitable worries about how close the planes were to the ground, and the anticipation of what was happening between us.
I wish I had kept a journal then, had some primary source to pinpoint our brief romantic turn. I remember the pain of it ending, but can scarcely concoct the joy of it beginning. Was the night at Gravelly Point before or during? The after has lasted years. Our brief romance? Weeks.
Autumn pressed on. It grew cold and dark. We spent an awkward evening at a Capitol Hill bar (you told me that Magic Johnson had AIDS, a shocking revelation at the time), we shared an awkward dinner at my place -- do I have the order of events right? -- and then you put an end to it.
The ending was painful, a deep heavy pressure on my heart, out of proportion to the amount of time that we knew each other.
As usual, I drank. I listened to James Brown (and Friends, Live: The Soul Sessions), to Robert Palmer. I turned the music up loud and danced. Cold Sweat, Out of Sight, Sneaking Sally Through the Alley, I'll Go Crazy: In the weeks after you dumped me, I gyrated in a funk frenzy around my studio apartment, jostled the roaches out of their hiding places, made the parquet floor shimmy. I danced until I was gasping for air, until my mind was empty and my heart numb.
I didn't know then that the future stretched before me, beckoned with promises that things would get better. At least I had a brain and some semblance of good looks. They would make up for my pathos. I still had time to create a life. Which I did. Two years later, I found someone (reasonably) normal and supportive who wanted to spend his life with me. With his help, I built that life up. I dug deeper than I needed for a foundation, the walls were two feet thick, and every window triple-paned. In the end, I left it and him behind. I knew I was capable of stability, that I didn’t need a fortress around me. But that was later. When I met you, I was struggling to figure out how to live like a normal person. I identified more with the homeless people scattered across my block, interrupting me on my way home from the Metro station, than I did with our classmates. I didn't let many people in. You were one of the very few I trusted.
Over the rest of that school year, I slowly shut down my college life. I studied for comps, wandered around the Capitol Building almost every night, reveling in the view, the beauty of the spotlit dome, the Washington Monument piercing the sky, my Walkman on Nirvana and James Brown and Ministry. I worked and read, drank and cried. J, my on-again, off-again boyfriend (did you even know about him?) visited sometimes, as did Martha, my old roommate. Some weekends I traveled to see them on the Eastern Shore. I loved them both. We each had pain between us, had gotten comfortable with the ambiguity, with our carapaces, our walls.
My last memory of you is from graduation, a crowd of twenty-somethings muted by robes, the campus swarming with parents, siblings, relatives. I looked up and there you were, focusing a video camera. Perhaps we smiled. I turned and walked away.
Later that weekend, after hours at Andy's bar in Chestertown, I danced slow to Frank Sinatra songs with Mark, a regular who was a decade my senior. He was a kind man, easy to talk to, no pressure. We slipped into a kiss against the wall in the back. I freed my heart without giving it away, knowing that J would be there again for me, or maybe you, that Martha was waiting behind the bar, that time would flow in and out and back again. Someone would find me, would recognize that I was worth more than I believed. I was getting away from this place soon. The rest of life was waiting.
"You've got to live for yourself, for yourself and nobody else . . . "
For a different take on this same time and the time immediately after, read Hello . . . Columbus?
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 from my job at the college bookstore 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. A boyfriend 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 my boyfriend 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 Martha 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, Martha 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. Martha 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, Martha 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. Maybe Martha 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.
What actually happened 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 we 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
I’ve been reading a lot about death lately, death and long hospitalizations and the kind of hope that people with sick children cling to, a stretched kind of hope that comes with chemotherapy and radiation and surgery. When I started writing for National Novel Writing Month, that’s where I was drawn, partly out of some kind of voodoo thinking that writing about it would protect my family and partly out of wanting to work through how someone copes with the loss of a child.
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.