A facsimile of truth
“You come up with the first sentence and go from there. Don’t think about it any more than that,” she told me as she looked over the tops of her reading glasses. Giving writing advice like she knew what she was talking about.
“It’s like I don’t know how to put one foot in front of the other," I replied, "like I’ve never learned how to walk, metaphorically speaking. And who am I to think I can tell a story? I should have taken up poetry.”
“Leave it to you to make poetry sound like the easy way out.”
She waved at me dismissively and returned to her biography of Virginia Woolf. I no longer recognized her hands. Sometimes I would find her staring at them, too, the swollen knuckles and liver spots, the transparent skin. We were both thinking: is this what life comes to? A brief period of expansion, of shining hair and growing strength followed by decades of shrinkage? Aging, the long great loss of looks and faculties, terrified me. Yet it was happening to me. Sometimes I thought I visited her for the contrast, for the feeling of her papery skin against my plumped cheek. I planned to off myself before I got to her age, to embody the cliché of living fast, dying (relatively) young, and leaving an attractive corpse. Except I could stand to lose forty pounds and I wasn’t sure that being a law-abiding reference librarian qualified as “living fast.”
My mother had already set up the scene. Her life had become this room, food and liquid ferried in by home health aides, a bedpan on stilts to hover over when the need arised. Twice a week Noelle gave her a sponge bath, wheeled in a basin of soapy warm water and scrubbed off the must. Some old people stop washing. It is no longer worth the effort, or maybe they don’t notice the stink. But Mother didn’t sweat. She didn’t do anything. Frequent scrubbing aggravated her sensitive skin and a daily splash of scent covered some of the rot.
She slept, briefly, book still poised in her hands. She was a talented napper, had always been able to squeeze in rest. Me, with my permanent eye-circles, my aching temples and nap frustrations, I wasn't so lucky.
Her eyelids heaved open. “I made a point of never lying to you.” Here we go again. “There were no myths about the Easter Bunny, about Santa. When you lost a tooth, we just handed over a quarter. There was no sneaking about.”
“But what about that night with Henry?”
“Oh, him.” She let out a woosh of air. “Henry was just a friend.”
This room used to be mine. The walls were semi-permeable, let the moods of the household flow in without flowing back out. Everything was pink, from the rug to the ceiling to the canopy on my bed. On the night in question, my father was away on business. It was early summer and a breeze tapped on the blinds. Max, our fat tabby, pressed himself between the slats and the screen in my window, staring at the shaking leaves. I was supposed to be asleep, lights out by nine for the nine-year-old. But the house was restless. She was restless. The doorbell rang at 9:15. Their conversation was unrelenting, words like waves, eating away at my calm, the low rumblings and crashes of talk. I smelled pipe smoke, candle wax, the clean burn of the gas fireplace. My head pounded. The mattress felt like it was resting on gravel. I waited in the dark, tossed and flipped until my sheet wrapped around me like a shroud. When I woke at 6:00 a.m., I found my mother on the couch, snoring under a thin blanket, two glasses sticky with liquor on the the coffee table.
I recorded the white lies, the outright fibs, the sins of omission, the cover-ups. All children do. I was just more canny about it. I remembered.
Henry showed up periodically for family dinners. He was tall and extremely thin and dressed in an early 70s professorial uniform, tweed jacket with arm patches, a pipe that probably contributed to his death from mouth cancer. He and my mother had met in a freshman philosophy class. I tried to picture them in 1959, fresh and young, earnest in their discussions of Nietzsche and Sartre, living the cliché of what it was to be aware and thinking in those fraught moments before the sixties, before her marriage to my father changed the game.
“So, you don’t tell a kid the story of Santa Claus and that makes you honest?”
I didn’t know why I continued these conversations.
“You know what mistake most writers make today?” Now we were back to writing.
“No, Mother. I don’t.”
“They make it too complicated. They toss too much into plot, subplot. Isn’t the reality of life enough?”
As she continued to speak, I buffered myself with lousy poetry, described and contained her in my mind.
My mother’s hands
no longer grasp
the glass of bourbon,
but instead
hold onto the memory
of things that never happened.
Totally false. She wasn’t a bourbon drinker and her memory is tight.
My mother no longer drinks coffee,
but inhales the smell
of water filtered through
roasted beans
left on the burner
until all that remains
is black sludge.
“Phoebe?”
I looked up.
“Have you heard anything I’ve been saying?”
I shook my head and excused myself from the coffin. The rest of the house was bright, every curtain open. I stepped into her old room, into the walk-in closet where my father’s clothes hung, carrying the scent of cigarettes with them. Outside it was a May Saturday haunted by ghosts of other May Saturdays, the hum of the mower and the over-green smell of freshly cut grass, the chaise lounge getting damp with my sweat. I traveled in nostalgia and every turn brought me back.
It was a curse, a narrative without ending or moral, just endless scenes and scents. I wished I could transform it into a story, into paragraphs, with twists and turns and a narrative arc, and if I failed at that, into poetry.
Henry died six years ago, alone.
When my mother and I cleaned his apartment
I found a box of photographs,
her naked in black and white,
and decades of her letters,
the last one a month before he died.
My mother used to tell me that I knew nothing about poetry, that my language was rich without structure, that I should keep a notebook of words and impressions. When it was full I was to toss it into the air, to watch the words fall and form themselves into a facsimile of truth.
Image: the dark room by ~Mongibello on deviantART.
I am trying to rid myself of the shoulds -- what I should be writing about, how I should structure my fiction. I have to let go of some ideas about length and structure and just accept the fact that I have themes that I am drawn to (family, guilt, the past as constantly present, the difficulty of connection, what it takes to be good, to be loyal, how we handle betrayal and the trampling of trust) and that borrowing from my life is ok and necessary at this point. There are risks in all of this, the most terrifying of which is the risk of writing lousy crap. But I'm hoping (and thinking) I usually write better than lousy crap. Serviceable writing is fine for now.
Oh, and this is a draft.
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.
Lordy, lordy
Guess how old I am today?
Just add one to this
number.
I'm fine with it. Really.
Image: Me in 1970 at Hollywood
Beach.