Forget me not
The muddy bottom of the Bohemia glittered with Budweiser bottles, the emerald necks of Molson 12-ouncers submerged jewels peeking out of the muck. Above, his daysailer, an stretched oval of white, bobbed in the wake of a speedboat. We were joined like in porno below the jib. From the marina a pair of binoculars focused on us, the watcher's eyes trained on the fools in the boat who believed in the false privacy of an almost-empty river.
"I don't know if I love him anymore," I thought afterwards, pulling a beer from the pack, letting him adjust the sail so the wind could drag us back home. We were browned and bleached by sun, by Saturday afternoons on the water. A starburst of new freckles marked his right shoulder blade. I counted them, added them up. Every trip started with a struggle, first with the boat as we pulled it from its grassy hiding place, next with him as we moved the daysailer onto the rollers and slipped it into the brown water. I could do nothing right.
If glass is made of out of sand, is the substrate holding the liquid in place, then we were returning the bottles to their rightful place, sending them home. The bottles became worm homes, mud collectors. They carried the memory of what they once were, of being small enough to sift through his fingers. The shards on asphalt, loose mosaics on the edge of driveways, scattered into cornfields, were part of the process, too, the breakdown, the slow return of glass to rock to sand again.
"I don't know if love him anymore." The thought followed us up the street to his parent's house. Inside, it smelled like him: spicy with a hint of sawdust, like soap, like freshly-dried paint. His mother, a rangy woman, gangly and tanned, was cutting the grass. We walked downstairs to his room and I collapsed into him, breathing him in, his family, the threatening safety, the years of sameness that would await. From the window, his mother's feet did their dance with the mower, the tip-toe push and back-up, her calves rippling with each move. He wrapped his arms around me as if I was a child.
I can hold on to a moment for as long as my memory holds out. I can warm myself with love, the love object, the glow of his attention. I can take the walk after dark cozied up to my man, telling my secrets, letting the tears flow in the dark. But I can't make the moment last forever. Eventually, the road beckons and I become a cliché of non-commitment: If I leave here tomorrow, would you still remember me? Because I will remember everything about you.
Instead, I remember landscape: the crumbling decrepitness of fallow cornfields in the moonlight, the languidness of July air after midnight, the crackle of dead leaves on the oak as the new growth forced them out.
That evening, I found a baby rabbit by the birdbath, tiny enough to be practically newborn. My grandfather had cleared out the undergrowth at the birdbath's concrete base and left it homeless. I tended to it with an eye dropper and sugar water, made a nest in a shoebox. I let the creature sleep next to me, cuddled up against me for warmth. When I woke up, it was dead, crushed by my weight.
Motherless animals don't stand a chance.
He stopped by late the next night. I recorded it like a photograph, like a movie: a knock on the door, my head pressing into his chest, the thin fabric of his sleeveless t-shirt soft against my cheek. I switched the television off. Every night was what if, the romance of not knowing, the worry of the no show. He redeemed me again and I forgot my worries about love for the moment, for the sweet moment when he hovered above me.
Image: Small rabbit, Summer 1985.
I've taken license with space and time in this post, compressed events from a couple of summers together.
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.
Head rush
Over time, we were told, that rush would go away and the cigarettes would become necessary, essential to the stressful moment, the celebration, the first thing we would think about in the morning. I heard my grandfather’s hacking coughs into the bathroom wastebasket, saw the dark strings of mucus he left behind. But addiction was something that happened to old people, was part of the alchemy of time and experience and maybe even a matter of strength of character. We would be fine.
Despite my best efforts, cigarettes weren’t for me. Though I loved the romance of them, the way I could court death and look rebellious simultaneously, I smoked for less than a year. Cigarettes made me sick. Even cloves, with their thick, exotic scent, the smoke like a veil over my hands and face, made my stomach lurch. Unlike most of my friends, I couldn’t even smoke when I was drunk. The combination of blurry booze and acrid cigarette only intensified the nausea.
But everyone around me smoked. There were smoke-fogged bars with their odor of stale beer, my roommate letting the smoke rise from her open window, the clouds of pot smoke in the parking lot and the bathroom, the cigarette-scented air of my grandfather’s car, his window barely cracked to set it free. After a night out, my roommate and I would hang our clothes in the living room to air out, but the smell lingered. It clung to our hair, intensified the hangover.
The days of high school smoking courts, of workplaces glittered with ashtrays and bar rooms brown with tobacco residue, seem long ago. Many cities have banned smoking in bars (though I remember seeing scofflaws in Brooklyn when I lived briefly in New York). Even most cigarette-smoking grandparents probably go outside to smoke, are alone with their addiction in the cold, in the rain, as far as possible from the grandchildren. My grandparents lit up everywhere, didn’t connect my asthma with the billows of smoke that filled their house. It truly was a different time.
I smoked my last cigarette in the mid-1980s. It was a clear winter night and I wanted to see the stars, wanted to escape in the fleeting rush of a nicotine buzz. I walked out of the Little House with an old pack of cloves and a lighter I’d pilfered from my grandfather and sat across from the next-door neighbor's house. The ground was hard and cold. Orion hovered above. I lit up, drew in a heavy breath. The cigarette was an unfiltered Djarum, the smoke harsh and plentiful. First came bitter, then sweet, the lightheadedness, the brief forgetting. Then, nausea. I stubbed out the cigarette in the grass and covered my eyes until the feeling subsided.
The blog looks different. Expect some changes over the next month or so -- and maybe more changes in 2011.
From a prompt: Write a story about smoking.
Image by Money Munni.
For a soundtrack of the night of the last cigarette, listen to Bad Houses, by Big Black.
That yearning
It was a small-framed beach cottage two blocks from the Sassafras River, built in the 1950s for lazy summer living. The house belonged to a friend of my mother’s, another poet, and was in a state of construction, the kitchen and living room gutted and draped in sawdust-coated plastic. The friend and her husband were on a sailing trip, a neighbor needed a sitter for her elderly cat, and would Mom like the job? It was the summer after Kevin died. My mother lived in a suburb of Washington, DC and I was in the city. We ached for Maryland’s Eastern Shore, for the cornfields and woods, for the roadside vegetable stands piled with corn and tomatoes. We missed river swimming and barefoot walks on tarry blacktop.
For more than half of their 18-year relationship, my mother and Kevin moved from place to place on the Eastern Shore, from the community on the Elk River where both my mother and I spent our childhood summers to a house on Smith Island in the Chesapeake Bay. When Kevin was diagnosed with myelofibrosis, Mom had just bought a red cottage in a neighborhood they eventually nicknamed Hatefulmoor. This was where Kevin insulted the neighbors, built curtain rods and trellises out of driftwood, and gathered beach glass to make jewelry while Mom made the money, prepared most of the meals, washed the dishes, and drove an hour each way to Wilmington and back for work. When that house slipped out of their fingers, they moved from place to place, to Stillpond and Chestertown, and points in between. In the end, it was hard to separate the place from the relationship, to disassociate the fights and cruelty with the landscape, with those long walks through fallow cornfields and along beach cliffs.
Kevin's absence hung over us that summer, the last six months of his illness hung over us, the horrible long hospitalization, the pain. We wanted the good parts back, the lingering dinners by candlelight, the conversations about philosophy and literature. We wanted the old times, the glint of Kevin's glasses across the table, the juice glasses of red wine warming in our hands. In the morning, we said, we would walk to the river, delight in the shock of water the color of late-summer moss, brown and green and cool in the delirious humidity.
The water was gorgeous. But the house was occupied. The living room and kitchen echoed with someone else's presence and every moment I was in the place I felt like I was being watched. The only habitable room was the bedroom, where my mother and I shared the bed and Kevin's son slept on a couch. We set up a fan in the window and tried to sleep, but the air moved in strange ways. I slept fitfully. One night Kevin's golden retriever, Woody, barked, a sudden sharp cry. My mother grabbed a flashlight and searched the house, but no one was there.
The physical ache of mourning -- the desire to see, hear, and touch the one who has gone away -- lingers. Our bodies mourn the loss. Was Kevin with us? Or did we just wish him there? It felt like he was present, hanging over our conversations. We were so dull and pedestrian without him. Maybe he came to mourn himself, the rush of being alive, what poet Marie Howe calls that yearning: "We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss -- we want more and more and then more of it."
My mother's friend had a large collection of poetry books in the bedroom, some purchased from Kevin during one of his purges. Mom removed them from the shelves. She scanned the pages, ran her fingers along the print. Some passages were heavily underlined and in the margin, Kevin's writing recorded his long-ago reactions.
"It's stupid to sell books when they really matter," she told me recently. "You don't know what you are giving away. It might be something you never can replace."
WHAT THE LIVING DO
by Marie Howe
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss--we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.
Image: I think this is the beach at "Hatefulmoor" in the early 1990s.
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.
Tell your story walking
It was May and the sun was shining bright. A row of cars sat by the creek, stereos blasting as other people enjoyed the sun. Monkey Hill, a steep road paved in cobblestones, rose above the park. I took off my strappy sandles, so grown-up, by the old fountain. And then I stepped on a bee. As my foot swelled, I hopped the half mile home, dragged myself past the Brandywine Zoo, stopped briefly under the dramatic arches of the Washington Street Bridge. At home, I made a paste with baking soda to soothe away the sting.
I walked home from 213 the morning my mother and I had a fight and she told me to get out of the car, just get out. We were living in Maryland by then and it must have been early spring, because the ground was thawing, had gone from rock-hard to mud, yielding and thick. She couldn't back out of the driveway. Her tires made deep ditches in the mud, but the car stayed in place. We emptied bags of kitty litter underneath the rear wheels; I pushed against the hood while she revved the engine. In the end, we borrowed my grandfather's car, but I had already convinced myself that school was out of the question. We fought. I obnoxioused myself out of it pretty early, right after we made the turn onto 213 from Town Point. Still, it was about three and a half miles back to the Little House, past cornfields on a road with no real shoulder. I remember a couple of neighbors driving by and waving as I picked my way back home, walking in between the road and the gully.
What did I do when I got to the woods? The road there was dark and curvy and any semblance of a shoulder disappeared. Maybe my mother changed her mind and returned to pick me up. Or more likely I clung to the side of the road, walked against traffic. I kept on going.
I have a recurring dream, about once a month, where I must walk from Elkton to Hollywood Beach. I march past traffic, climb up and down the bridge over the C&D canal, stop by the small shopping center closest to home. In dreamland, the store where I used to work is still there, in expanded form, all florescent lights and earnest employees in dark blue cotton uniforms. No one there can help me. I walk out into the dusty afternoon, plodding across brown cornfields where the remains of last year's crop still poke out of the ground and the footing is uneven. At the edge of the woods I discover a path off the road. And that's where I get stuck. I run into D. or I am so scared that I just stop, or sometimes I don't want to walk forward. The trees reach into the sky and it's so quiet that I want to stay forever.
Until now I've never tied the dream to the morning my mother kicked me out of the car, the forgotten fight, the abandonment of those years again, again. It always seemed like a not-driving dream or a stress dream, but now I wonder if it all started in that walk during that terrible time. I wonder what it means, how it ties who I was then to who I am now, whether I should start to peek under the surface of its meaning.
From a writing prompt, a song this time, Tell Your Story Walking by Deb Talan (video above). I spoke to my mother after writing this and she told me that she thinks about our fight, me getting out of the car and walking home, often. She thinks a neighbor gave me a ride home. I think she's right.
And in the room locked up inside me
I remember what it was like to care about fashion and boys and what the other girls thought, all the other girls with their money and their bright sweaters in primary colors and their designer clothes. When you’re a teenager you think everyone else is better off than you, except for S. whose brother would beat her up or F. whose father didn't know he existed or N., who lied about her address, too, and had an alcoholic dad. My friends were the exceptions, but the rest of them, the money flowed like water from a tap and their parents, they might have been strict, but it was in good ways that showed they cared instead of being random like my mother. The other kids had stable parents who drove newer cars. They lived in the suburbs, not the middle of the city where the houses slammed against each other, where you knew everyone's secrets, could smell the neighbor's dinner burning.
It was a time when I joined the consumer world with its fashion and makeup and music to buy (Def Leppard morphed to Wham! and Duran Duran bled into the Dead Kennedys, the Circle Jerks, Echo and the Bunnymen) and then retreated from it. In the Little House I was stuck with the dull depression of being fifteen and separated from the world, first alone, then alone and pregnant, and then the survivor of both, still alone, and with life experiences that made me feel so, so old.
But there was beer to drink and a guy who bought it for me. He eventually came around more often, was there for real, for love. D. still lived at home, was the youngest of four in a tight family. They got together for big extended family dinners, would greet me with a hug, kiss my cheek when it was time to say goodbye. The womenfolk prepared delicious food and it always seemed like there were at least twenty people at the table, with toasts ("Proost!") and heated conversation and endless bottles of Grolsch.
I loved that family, their sheer number, their passion and personality, the safety net of so many people. In the photographs, however, I look small. Contained. A little scared, like I knew a secret that could destroy me.
Image: Me, late December 1984, in my grandfather's yard. This was before I moved to the Little House, but I still spent most weekends and school vacations visiting. I remember this day very well, the abnormally warm temperatures, the feeling of anticipation that D. might show up that night, that he actually did show. Ah, redemption, brief and sweet.
The original prompt was a photo. You can look at it here.
The post title is a line from a Yaz song that I listened to a lot in the Little House: In My Room.
Big water
I pedaled down to the river;
it wrinkled dark and green.
A kingfisher caught a fish like a silver comma
and flew into a sycamore tree.
-- Kevin Sheehan, excerpted from poem published in Slow Dancer (North American Edition), No. 29, Spring 1993. Full text here.
Where I'm from the water is vast. Salty. It's twisting miles of mucky rush, river bottom composed of leaves and mud. Children swim with sleek eels and glimmering fish, fight the pull of container ships in the channel. Traffic gets backed up on 50, on 213. Bridges fling cars over the C&D Canal, the Chesapeake Bay, the Bohemia River. Below, fishermen hook rockfish and net crabs.
We spent summer holidays at Ocean City, basted ourselves with tropical coconut oil before stretching out on blankets anchored to sand, begged Mom-mom for quarters for skeeball. Aunt Mildred, who wasn't really an aunt but some sort of foundling my grandmother's parents took in, had a trailer on Striker's Gut, a brackish strait that fed into the ocean. At least once every summer Bert, Lucy, and I looped chicken necks with string and dangled them in the water, a bushel basket waiting for our catch.
In college there was the house on Smith Island, 50 feet from the water. Kevin spent one foul humid summer building a gazebo and dock, my mother the sunburned helper. He'd grunt and hammer, a thin muscular man with an inexplicable pot belly which later revealed itself to be a sign of his swollen spleen, a symptom of myelofibrosis. When the dock was complete, I tethered a raft to the end of it, careful to keep my limbs out of the water where the jellyfish pulsated, ghosts with shaggy legs. At night, midges got through the screens and we yelped and growled, our hands throwing shadows by candlelight.
But most of my memories are of the Elk River, the walk down to the beach, tar staining the bottoms of my feet, the line of benches, somebody's grandparent always sitting there, cigarette shedding ash. Depending on the heat and the tide, I would either wade in until I couldn't stand the feel of the muck or dive and swim out to the raft. The houses were beach cottages built in the 1950s and '60s and the landscape rolled with cornfields and small tracts of woods. Everything was green or brown or white or black. My grandparent's house was cigarette smoke and mildew, creamy coffee, sawdust, the sound of the tractor cutting another swathe of grass.
I was Vi and Allen's granddaughter, willful, brown as a berry by September.
Image: Elk River, Hollywood Beach, Spring 2009 (picture taken on our trip to the East Coast last year).
Some of the names have been changed, some of the facts moved around.
Wild horses
Summers when I was a little girl we would drive past the horse farms owned by the Duponts, would pull our rusty Datsun over to the side of the road and tiptoe up to the fences, holding hidden handfuls of Dominos sugar cubes. Two cubes in each flattened palm, we would wait for the horses to whinny and walk over, for their soft lips to graze our hands as they picked up the sugar.
The memory is faded now. I hold the fact of it rather than any sensation, and what I see are long grasses and dark, tall fences, a blue sky with clouds raked across it, the vague sense that we were getting away with something.
Image by Jane Underwood. The image was the prompt.
Thanks for the memories
To scrape your memory clean, you need only a handful of pills washed down with gin. You need a good wallop to the head, a fall on Mexican tile or sharp granite. You need to take the prescribed dose of anti-malarial medication before the trip to the tropics. The combination of drug and sun and strange circumstance will have the desired effect, the wake-up in a stranger’s room, the philosophical conversation in a bar strangely devoid of smoke, you speaking in tongues, memory gone.
But without my memory I am nothing. There is no story, no me. You could tell me about my life and I would smile and nod, sometimes gasp. Maybe I wouldn’t believe parts of it, just like I don’t believe the stories you tell about yourself, about first grade and that teacher with the wheedling fingers. He cornered you in the empty classroom and you knew something was wrong and then you let it happen again and again. OK. I can believe it. Maybe it happened; you wouldn't be the first. But the one about your mother, her fingertips coated in lotion, rubbing your bare chest as she tried to erase your budding breasts? The chair was cold, her hands were warm. You were obedient, pulled between pleasure and confusion.
Are you sure that you're not confused now?
I don’t need my memory to tell me that I am a skeptic. It's built-in, a defense mechanism, maybe, or just hardwired into me. So you could tell me about my life, the room done up in pale pink, my chenille bedspread soft against my cheek. You say he came in through the window after I went to sleep and the image is so surreal it could be fantasy, the fluttering curtains, the dark shadow of stubble on his familiar cheeks. And then, seven months later, in the same room, the push and shove of labor and my mother screaming. The silent bloody bundle that neither of us knew what to do with.
Or you could lean across the table and tell me my secret, say that I let him in, did nothing to prevent it. The curtains didn't billow: the windows were closed. I unlocked the door and held out my hand for his. You could cup your hands and whisper, "Some girls get the ending they deserve."
No.
You could tell me and I would be polite about it, would raise my eyebrows in mock surprise, but inside I would fold your stories on top of themselves, like the handkerchiefs I wash and fold for my husband. I would make them smaller and smaller. I would compress them and leave them on the table for someone else to put away.
Prompt: In the blink of an eye (heavily edited from the original and then avoided for a few weeks).
Image: Chair outside the Little House, Fall 1986.
Swann song
I miss the tall ginkgos with their rotting fruits, the way the berries felt beneath my feet with just enough crunch, a pleasure to step on. The sidewalk was covered with ginkgo leaves, too, bright yellow fans dampened with the rain. A storm had come through the night before, had knocked the leaves off along with the fruit. The air was full of the smell of them, acrid, rotting, sweet.
We were lost and I was defensive about it, but if you were going to be lost, this was the neighborhood to be lost in. The street was tunneled in by wide brick rowhouses, voluptuous Victorians with turrets and whimsical windows accented with stone. Each house had a set of black iron steps, shiny and slick, one-two-three-four, up to the entry. The steps made little caves over doors to English basements, a term which conjures up mold and damp and a view of other peoples’ ankles, the angling of a dog’s leg as it releases a spray of urine against low iron window bars.
He got angry with me after I got angry with him and we had an embarrassing fight in front Martha, a hissy fit that revealed more than we intended. A tense moment with the map revealed my mistake and our luck: we were three blocks from Adams Morgan, a short walk to a few cold beers and a platter of Ethiopian food. The three of us marched from Swann Street to 18th Street, walked uphill against a thin wind. It was getting dark, people were bundled up against the cold. We walked without talking, single-file past the homeless, the crazies, the young people with their know-everything attitude. And then we shared a meal with all the awkwardness of something being over, knowing we had years to go before it would really end.
This is from a Round Robin prompt this week, my (slightly edited) response to a very different photograph.
Photo by Antediluvial.
Pictures of Atlantis
This is a record of young love and wobbly stability. There's Mr. X in male cheesecake pose, lying in front of the newly-planted impatiens in the backyard of our first Columbus apartment. Here's Loudon the sheltie-dog, a ball of fluff, on his first day home. Sidney and Zoe appear as young kittens, playful, flexible, and sleek. In one set of pictures, Mr. X and I pose separately, each of us holding a champagne glass and wearing the dark-lensed glasses that came with my grandmother's 50s-era sunlamp. We look like goons, but that was the point. And then there are the shots of our wedding, that great party we gave, where his relatives filled the space and made it joyous while mine were reserved and inward, quiet in their happiness. These photos are relics of another time, part of my life but outside of it, too.
As time went on, Mr. X and I took fewer pictures. Fifteen months after we were married, we both got jobs in Washington, DC and life got much more stressful. Mr. X clashed terribly with his incompetent boss. Our living situation wasn't comfortable. The basement tenant in the house we rented, a man named Dewey Wayne (I've since forgotten his last name), had an intense personality. Dewey Wayne had sold his house in Raleigh and put all his money into a move to DC, which included paying a year's rent in advance. He had a habit of leaving his front door open while he took his dog on walks, which was his business, except that his place was connected to ours by a door that we couldn't lock and our neighborhood wasn't a good place to leave doors open. The washer and dryer for the building were in his apartment and he freaked out (rightfully) once or twice when we walked in on him, unannounced, to do our laundry.
Then there were the rats. The backyard, a rectangle of bare dirt dotted with ratholes, held a thriving rodent commune. We had a parking space out by the trash cans and the rats began to use our car as storage space, something we discovered on our way to the grocery store one weekend. As Mr. X pulled out onto 15th Street, the engine began to smoke. Over the course of our ten-minute ride, the car slowly filled with the odor of roasted, rotten meat. We rolled all the windows down and covered our noses with tissues to filter out the smell. When we pulled into the parking lot, Mr. X popped open the hood: two smoldering pork rib bones had adhered to the carburetor. The car stank for weeks. Later a rat actually chewed its way into Dewey Wayne's apartment ("I came in and there he was on top of the refrigerator, munching on a bagel. Like Mighty Mouse," he told us).
Mr. X and I finally fled the rental after five months and bought a house in Takoma Park, Maryland. The night before the house inspection, our car was stolen from our street, though it was recovered somewhat unscathed a week later. In the meantime, Mr. X's job had gone from horrible to intolerable. His old position in Columbus was still open and they were happy to take him back. On the weekend of our second anniversary, only eight months after we had arrived in DC, he returned to Ohio. There were solid reasons for him to leave that had nothing to do with our marriage, but it was the beginning of the end, or at least I can mark the final slide with this event. We were doomed from the beginning.
Mr. X is remarried now. He and his wife have a child on the way. We haven't spoken in a couple of years, though we are Facebook friends. And while the past is always present for me in some way, I don't think much about that time when I was young and in love and it was all fresh and new, when I was with someone who was my loyal protector, when I was learning to be an adult without drama. I wasn't good at living without drama and still courted it with alcohol and arguments, with cruel remarks and coldness, but there was an underlying sweetness to the relationship. Mr. X helped pull me out of my childhood, was the first person to hold out his hand.
The only evidence I have of that time is some paperwork and photographs. We had no children and the last living pet we shared is fading fast. There are no friends in common with which to reminisce, to verify that it all happened. But I'm still not sure what to do with the artifacts, the pictures that show the world that we created for a brief moment, now submerged in memory.
Image: Champagne on our first anniversary, Columbus, November 1996. I still have the glasses and -- strangely, but coincidentally -- my son just fished them out of a toy box this morning and put them on, even though he hadn't worn them for months.
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.
The noises of destruction
One night, frustrated, I drained a 12-ouncer and went outside. Two feet from the oak, I held on to the bottle as if it were a diminutive baseball bat, gripped its neck with my fingers, and slammed the tree with as much force as a slightly drunk sixteen-year-old girl could.
It’s harder to break a bottle than you think.
From a writing prompt last summer: Out the window. NaNoWriMo is beginning to drive me crazy. Sixteen days. 41,000 words. One messy and rambling novel very close to completion.
Bit of trivia: my mother now makes jewelry from pieces of broken glass she finds on the street or breaks on the cement slab in her own back yard, a picture of calm with a broom and dust pan.
Halloween, 1972
She and Paul shepherd you into a blank-faced building with a mirrored lobby. There is a gorilla in the elevator. He stands upright and powerful with black fur that tufts over his arms and legs. You dig into your mother’s thigh with angel nails. “It’s all right. It’s just a costume,” she says and the gorilla, with some difficulty, removes his head to reveal another one underneath. “See?” he says. “Just a costume.” Your heart flip-flops. The gorilla struggles to replace his head and turns toward you, ape face askew and fixed in a lipless grin. He attempts to give the thumbs-up sign with a rubbery hand. “Shit. How am I supposed to hold a drink with this,” he says, tugging awkwardly at his digits. More people collect in the elevator: a flapper, a man in a Nixon mask, a woman mimicking the hangdog face and lanky body of Cher. Paul, making a joke, has dressed in prison stripes, while your mother has Cleopatra-flat hair and a beige tunic with gold accents.
You flow out with the crowd toward a door in the hallway. It swings open and Catwoman steps out, revealing a room cloudy with smoke and conversation muffled by faux fur and latex. She reaches out with heavily lacquered nails and rakes the hair under your halo. People are always touching your hair, cooing over your thick blonde ringlets as though you were a doll.
The gorilla closes the door.
This is an excerpt of a work in progress. The entire piece isn't written in second person, just those bits of dredged-up memory. For another Halloween story, read The orangutan did it.
Image: Man in gorilla costume from Compassionate Spirit.
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.