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.
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Prompt: In
the blink of an eye (heavily edited from the original
and then avoided for a few weeks). This piece is
mainly fiction, with some nonfiction thrown in. The
narrator's viewpoint is not my own, though I struggle
with the idea of what shouldn't have been.
Image: Chair outside the Little
House,
Fall 1986.
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.
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I feel it. I name it. I let it go.
So it might surprise you that one quarter through that first margarita we started fighting. We don't fight often these days, and when we do it's usually quite civil. This was an old-style fight with incredulous looks and just-caught nastiness. Each of us thought the other was clueless, wasn't listening, was going off on some crazy tangent. Ultimately, we pulled it back together, reached a deeper understanding, but for fifteen tense minutes, I fought the urge to run out of the restaurant into the cold rain. I fought the urge to be by myself and pretend that it was better this way, to live without risk, to be warmed only by my own intellect and senses.
Yes, here they are again. My
parents after their wedding, June 1969, staring off
into the misty future. It's too late now ...
Earlier that day, my mother and I
had been talking about trust and infidelity. I
explained how how I learned some time ago that to
trust in others blindly is foolish because no one is
perfect. Other people can let you down, not out of
cruelty, but because they are human and bound to make
mistakes. If you expect perfection or total fidelity,
you may end up very disappointed, so why not keep an
open mind about it? Not to expect to be let down, but
to not let yourself get crushed if it happens?
The words had come out with more vitriol and less
clarity than I felt. I sounded angry, specifically
with my husband, and Mom asked me if he knew I was so
angry. Strange. I didn't feel angry. But there Mr.
Trinkle and I were in Fonda a few hours later,
raising our voices. For the last half of the fight,
I'd been dabbing at my eyes with the corner of my
cloth napkin, trying to hold back the tears. It felt
like I'd been willing them not to fall for weeks,
maybe months, while I kept the rest of life together.
When it was over, when we reached détente,
the tears came
out, along with the sudden understanding that this
whole thing was all about my
mother. Or
maybe it wasn't that simple. It was also
all about my
father. And
let's not forget to point a finger at the
dissertation and the feelings it stirred up in its
death throes. That thing was once used as a wedge, a
separator, an agent of my perceived rejection. The
diss is dead and buried now. It hadn't been an issue
for years. What could I hold against a corpse?
Here is my mother, more present than I ever remember.
There is no demanding, angry Kevin, no Baltimore
petty criminal heroin addict boyfriend, no personal
life drama to get in the way. When Mr. Trinkle and I
left the East Coast, the addict was the center of her
life. Interacting with her then felt like a continual
rejection, an extension of the loneliness of
childhood, though I see now that that the rejection
has never been personal. In the past two and a half
years, she's changed her life. The addict is now on
the periphery, no longer the center of her world.
There is no drama. She is here, flawed but available.
I have just enough safe space for the anger to
emerge. It's wordless, this anger, and scared, too,
rage coupled with fear. I know she is capable of
turning on me, of causing great pain, of making me
wish I never existed. Or at least that's how it used
to be.
Here is my husband, present and loving. The days of
avoidance by dissertation are long over, but I
remember them, remember how neatly our neuroses fit
together, his reluctance dovetailing with my grasping
need for absolute acceptance, with the tests and the
tantrums, the nastiness and tossed objects. We have a
history, a time when I felt very rejected,
unloveable, and even though we've talked the hell out
of it, there are still those tight corners in our
relationship that remind me.
Combine my mother's visit with the completion of the
dissertation and those deep feelings of unworthiness
rise up. They poke and prod. I want to run out in the
rain and be alone forever. I want to ball up my fists
and shadowbox in the cold attic. I want to be
invisible, the observer who cannot be observed. An
old self-protective voice whispers
if you let them get
too close, they could destroy you. Keep your
distance. But this is not the only way to see
things. I have choices.
Now the struggle to be present, to be in the moment,
is mine. If I don't give all of myself over, if I
hold back, I don't risk absolute rejection. It used
to be that I would test the ones who loved me, would
stamp my feet and pepper every fight with threats to
leave. These days I hide under a carapace of calm. I
hold it together and when I do break, I tend to
downplay my vulnerability. I maintain a friendly
facade, a protective attitude. Intimacy equals risk.
Oh, it's easy with you, reader. We have geographical
distance and thick words to separate us. The pull of
the everyday, the undertow of the mundane, doesn't
come between us. We can pretend for a few minutes
that we are intimates, reach an understanding without
touch, and then return to our real lives unscathed.
Already all of this is changing for me. By the time
my thoughts get to you, I'm working them out, naming
the feelings, articulating them so I can put them
away. One of the reasons this blog was so important
to my recovery process (I call it a recovery process
because I don’t know what else to call it) is because
it gave me a place to name my fears, to articulate my
ugliness in a relatively risk-free environment.
Still, there are risks. When I find out that someone
I know in real life or from my past has read the
blog, I feel a panicked thrill – they know!
(Depending on how far they've read, of course. They
may know very little.) And then my stomach sinks and
I feel a different sort of panic. I'm afraid of being
judged for the things I've done, for those I've
scraped up along the way. But I also worry that they
will read and think: She deserved it. They will
wonder about the intrinsic evil in me, about the
horrible things I must have done to cause my family
to abandon me. Rationally, I know this is crazy.
Emotionally, it makes my heart ache.
I feel it. I name it. I let it go. But it isn't
easy.
Living proof at my fingertips
It was one of those conversations
that I'm tired of having, but I couldn't seem to stop
myself.
Mr. Trinkle and I were standing against the wall at
the Fox Theater
in Oakland, this
over-the-top restored venue from the late 1920s,
drinking our beers and waiting for the
group Echo and
the Bunnymen to come onstage. We'd already
had a lot of laughs that would be almost
impossible to explain here (for example, the image
of us wearing cucumber and cabbage outfits, just
to find our moment of glory in the truly
ridiculous [but very cool-sounding] Echo
song Thorn of
Crowns).
Without warning my dead son winnowed his way into
the conversation, which lead to talks of alternate
lives and then my father showed up, too,
unrepentant, demanding the old song and dance of
anger.
My father and stepmother visited us last month, which
was a truly wonderful visit, one for which I am
grateful. As a result of nerve damage in his back, he
is in constant pain and traveling is very difficult
on him, but they made the trip and we all had a good
time. There was just one ripple in the visit, one
that I tried to ignore, in a discussion that would
have been impossible without the blog. He
found writing to survive
over a year ago and
read through it in its entirety. Eventually he
apologized via email for any pain he had caused me,
which was the extent of our interaction on the topic.
During this most recent visit he asked "Are we ok?"
meaning, I suppose, "Is everything all right between
us?". Yes, I said, we were ok -- when he read the
blog I felt like he was listening to me. Did
he
feel like we were ok?
Well, sure, but he wanted me to know that, despite my
accusations to the contrary, he had tried. I had no idea what he was
talking about, but his response was probably to
this post,
where I write about my anger at my parents for doing
nothing when I desperately needed help:
"My mother
stopped parenting; my father never even started. They
deserve my compassion. It's no use getting angry at
those who don't see their own
worth."
It's a heavy accusation
and I stand by it. The truth hurts. We didn't dig any
deeper into that particular pit, but our discussion
bothered me, still does, and that was what I was talking about in the
lobby of the Fox Theater, that and imagining my
never-to-be-24-year-old son, dressed in skinny
tapered pants and an ironic t-shirt, angry at me for
my own form of neglect, of the fetal variety.
The band started. We hustled to our seats, suddenly
surrounded by the music that was a part of the
soundtrack of my mid-teens and I started to cry. I
sobbed through the first three songs while Mr.
Trinkle patted me reassuringly, probably feeling bad
about the tickets, which were a birthday present. The
music transported to a bleak time in my life, when
things started really getting bad and I was
indescribably
alone. I felt the
direness of my situation at fifteen and sixteen,
combined with the beauty of my current life. I am
forty years old, married to a good, supportive man.
We have a healthy, creative, wonderful child. My life
is in enveloped in love and warmth. How did I get so
undeservedly lucky?
Our conversation in the lobby -- the clinical look at
my father, the ghostly appearance of my son, my guilt
over that time of terrible fear and anger -- began to
make sense. No matter how much work I've done here on
revealing secrets, writing out my pain and anger,
trying to forgive my parents, I can't take the
experience of what happened in the Little House away.
Even thinking about the music we were about to hear
brought me to the edge of that past, to the isolation
and neglect. And my father's main reaction upon
reading this entire blog, apart from a generic,
though I'm sure heartfelt apology, was to tell me
that he tried. He has never acknowledged any direct
responsibility for (or curiosity about) that time. I
wish his acknowledgement didn't matter. Maybe someday
it won't.
I've put so much effort into trying to forgive the
unaware that I've forgotten to pay attention to my
own grief. I still carry around sadness for things
lost, for not mattering enough, for acknowledgment
that will never be. So I cried and cried until Ian
McCulloch started singing about vegetables. Mr.
Trinkle turned to me and raised his eyebrows. We
started to laugh.
I really am lucky.
Echo and the Bunnymen play "Silver" in Oakland,
courtesy of some fellow fan:
Image:
Living proof at my fingertips, or me and family at
Muir Woods, August 2009. Photo by my
mother.
My hands untied
Kevin, summer of 1984.
Enter spring–let's say April–1984, West Street, Wilmington, Delaware.
Birds are singing. The tulips and pansies in our raised beds are starting to bloom. Recent March winds have deposited the remnants of chaos, muddied papers, dead leaves and tree limbs, in the alleyway. The winds lifted deck chairs against back fences, turned over plastic flower pots, battered pedestrians. They blew Kevin the poet-carpenter, intellectual powerhouse and gin guzzler, in down the street, saluted him with a flurry of cherry blossoms.
My mother invites the new neighbor over for dinner. He seems strange, a little awkward in his old-fashioned glasses, his blue eyes intense and clear through Coke bottle lenses. Kevin speaks with a touch of New Jersey nasal and renovates and flips houses for a living. He arrives lean and tanned, armed with words of sharpened steel and a large bottle of Gordon’s, his old blue merle collie Barney by his side.
What could I do? I was fourteen. The last guy in our house didn’t even speak when I was at the table.
Here’s what I didn’t do: talk. Smile. Instead I just sat and shoveled in the food, exuded resentment, made infrequent eye contact. Maybe I smirked. And Kevin, a man I had just met, called me on it.
“What’s your problem? You’re just sitting there, sucking all the air out of the room.”
I have no memory of my response.
It wasn’t until yesterday, as I was attempting to capture this pivotal moment yet again, looking over what I’d written almost a year ago on that same dinner, that I realized: I blame myself. Reading over my early attempts is somewhat painful. I was straining to describe that night, to explain Kevin’s poetic rockstar persona and my mother’s deadly attraction to him, to explain my role in my own rejection. The end of parenting, my premature emancipation, the series of adult situations I got into before my time? Culpa. Mea culpa. I should have put on the charm, talked, given a little bit that night. I should have been someone else.
If I had won Kevin over that evening, maybe my mother would have stayed engaged in my life. She might never have started bringing dinner to him, eating in his dusty dining room every night while I ate alone. I wouldn’t have begun wandering the Wilmington streets after dark, wobbly with purloined gin, smoking unfiltered cloves and blasting the Dead Kennedys from my Walkman. The Little House would have stayed empty. The end of innocence could have been put off for another couple of years. If I were a better person, a different person, no one would have told me that I was evil, the root cause of family turmoil.
I know. I know. My brain tells my heart that it would have made absolutely no difference in the outcome if I had smiled or curtseyed or made insightful conversation about Nietzsche and Wordsworth. To be honest, until yesterday, I didn't know I felt this way. I blame myself.
Why do children take responsibility for things over which they have no control? Why do adults shift the blame to the helpless? And why, when we molt and grow and leave our child forms behind, does this sense of responsibility for our own small fates, this idea of being the masters of our abuse (if only I were nicer or less shy or stronger ...) carry on into our adult life?
The child decides that she is the cause of her mistreatment. The adult lets those early experiences dictate her behavior. We find ourselves recreating situations again and again, little kids in the guise of adulthood, sifting our lives through the rusty emotional sieve of the formerly helpless. We choose partners who fit into old scenarios, make decisions based on faulty data, try to get it right this time. With our motives hidden and our reasons obscured, the do-overs usually fail. Then? Familiar pain and reinforcement of our feelings of worthlessness.
Or maybe it's just me who's felt this way. Yes, I've done this, set up the scene, chosen guys who reject who I am, who blame me for their own shortcomings. I've blundered my way through friendships, the sullen fourteen year old in a thirty-year-old's clothing. And although I have stopped replaying the same scenes over and over again, I still have an overarching sense of responsibility for the trajectory of my childhood. My invisible scars feel completely self-imposed, my exposure of them a shameful confession. I feel rotten from the inside, capable of destroying entire worlds. Run from me before I drag you into the muck!
But I'm not that way. I'm not.
So I'm writing my path to self-acceptance, still trying to forgive myself and my family, to look at the world through clean eyes. I don't want to shift blame. I want to let go of the entire concept of it. After all, I'm here, alive, doing so much better than I ever thought I would be. It's time to let go, to untie my hands and live fully.
I figure I'm about 20% there. Maybe more. And if I can do it, you can too.
Coming up: February's blog, a return to the Maureen story (we'll skip over the guess who's coming to dinner segment), and some awards. Not necessarily in that order.
Shameless
Image from Hope4Survivors
You want instant writer's block?
Try to write about your own shame.
That's not how today started. I wanted to write a
story about a boyfriend I had in college, the tale of
my second long term relationship. Our innocent
beginnings. He was a teller in my bank, we shared
smiles and pleasantries. Then one evening, when I was
leaving the local watering hole with one of my male
floozies, J approached me and said “I know you’re
leaving with this guy, but can I call you sometime?”
I gave him my number.
There was the little detail of my real boyfriend and
our slowly dying couplehood. I had to put that out of
its misery. It wasn’t a clean death. And when J went
on a white water rafting trip with his family a month
into our serious dating, I might have had a bar
hookup or two. In between his return and our demise,
we shared a period of sweet intense love. I loved
him. I really did.
I was kind of crazy then. Angry. Pathologically
needy. J was sarcastic and cruel, bitingly funny with
a mean streak brought on by his quietly twisted
childhood. After six months of total absorption, our
relationship stalled and then limped along for
another two years, with sporadic weekend visits (the
margarita-inspired sex in a sprawling azalea near the
Capitol grounds; the drunken knock on my door after a
Redskins Super Bowl victory; my leap into the pool
with the band, fully clothed, after I secretly
followed J and Frieda back to his bedroom). I had a few
mini-boyfriends on the sly, including one fellow
philosophy major who totally trampled my heart and a
graduate student who was a Jew posing as an
Italian-American. Nervous about how he would be
perceived in a Catholic-tinged philosophy program,
the graduate student exploited his olive-toned skin
and love of opera to go undercover, lived an odd
temporary lie.
Still, J and I continued in our half-love without
discussing the side relationships. The week I headed
for graduate school, he left me a message, sang “I’m
Leaving on a Jet Plane,” to my answering machine,
funny and bittersweet as ever. In November of that
year, 1992, I found out that he’d gotten a new,
serious girlfriend. After a tearful, confessional
conversation, I mailed him a copy of the credit card
receipt for my abortion. I’d been holding on to it
for five months, waiting for the right moment to tell
him.
Shame.
Ashamed of who I was and what I did. Ashamed of the
abortion – the abortion. You think you can wash away
shame or pain by showing it to the world, or to a
limited subset of the sympathetic. Sorry, my good
religious friends, my lovers of life. I let one baby
happen by accident and took care of the next by
violence.
By the end of my first semester in library school, I
was in crisis, totally falling apart. Enter my first
real attempt at therapy and my future first husband,
the slow process of life rebuilding. If you are
reading this, thank you future first husband, future
ex-husband, for being so totally solid. I don't think
I've given you enough credit for that. There is
absolution in unconditional love.
I am starting to sift through the decade after the
stillbirth, shining light on a dark time, preparing
myself to come clean. I have wondered if the blog, my self-made
public confessional, is the best way to expurgate
shame. Wouldn't it be simpler to say nothing at all?
Maybe finally get around to locating another trusted
therapist, go the traditional recovery route? Or, if
I must expose the ugliness, couldn't I just make it
quick, compile a list, invite brief flagellation or
accolades for my honesty and then move quickly on to
self-forgiveness?
No, no, I have to transform the shame into a
narrative, examine it inside and out. I need to dust
if off, shine it up, put it in the shop window.
Later, I'll pass it along to my fictional characters.
They are waiting backstage, eager to take on the
burden, ready to be set into motion. But before all
that, before I can pass the torch in good conscience,
I'll occasionally be picking apart my mistakes here,
aiming for tricky self-forgiveness.
I hope you can stay with me for the ride, can keep an
open mind and an empathetic heart. Oh, the places
we’ll go!
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.
Everything around me remains the same
And the story is just about really, finally, complete. The final excerpt (still in draft mode) is below. For other excerpts from the work in progress as well as posts on the topic, follow the stillbirth tag.
I'm putting this experience to bed now.
Photo by PhineasX.
Gusts of words swirl around me that
week. I walk right through them. Who needs to talk?
Dad is explaining the baby’s name to his father: “She
said it was the first thing that popped into her
head.” “Jennifer didn’t know what was going on,” my
stepmother tells the phone receiver. At an aunt’s
house for Thanksgiving, we sit and hide behind the
blast of televised football and the scraping of
forks, my paternal grandfather’s frequent
throat-clearing sounding a note of general
disapproval. Six days after the birth I try the
nightgown trick again, tighten it over my empty
abdomen. Flat as a pancake.
On an unseasonably warm December day, wisps of clouds
pulled across a cerulean sky, Dad drives me back to
Maryland. There is clean-up to be done. He drags the
stained twin mattress to the end of the driveway,
props it against the fence, bloodied side in. (“Very
tasteful of your father,” Mom tells me later, with
more than a hint of sarcasm.) My parents share a
laugh at the ancient pack of pilfered Pall-Malls I’d
jammed underneath it – if they only knew about the
empty beer bottles hidden in the box spring of the
other mattress. Dad gives me an awkward hug, waves
goodbye from the car. I open the door to the Little
House.
Smells become part of the background of a place, as
invisible as the color of the ceiling or the
punctuation of electrical outlets against wallboard.
You forget how a house smells, forget it practically
the moment you close the door. The stale air of the
Little House hits me like a slap in the face. It is
the scent of bottled-up mildew, of pressed wood and
formaldehyde, the smell of isolation. I take a
canister of Lysol and scour the room with an
antiseptic rain, spray the walls and floor until they
are damp. Over the afternoon I slowly change the feel
of the place, moving furniture and taking down
photographs.
When the familiar urge hits, I walk quietly into the
main house. From my grandfather’s room comes the
sound of MacGuyver, then the jingle of a commercial.
An ice-cream scoop sits in the sink beside a spoon
and scraped bowl. Grabbing a large tumbler from the
dishwasher, I kneel to open the china cabinet, reach
for the Johnny Walker Red on the bottom shelf. I walk
back to the Little House clutching my glass of
whiskey and Coke between both hands, taking careful,
deliberate steps on every slate stepping stone, as
though one misstep onto grass means bad luck. After
locking the door behind me, I take a sip. The drink
is strong and bitter, cold and soothing. Humanizing.
Some drink to numb the pain. I drink to feel it. I
begin to cry.
On Monday morning, puffy-eyed and stoic, I walk to my
mother’s for our ride to school and work. She is
cranking up the ancient, oil crunch era Toyota with
the nonworking gas gauge. An egg and scrapple
sandwich lies on the passenger seat, on top of the
paper. I hop in, open the Wilmington
News-Journal, take a bite of food. Mom puts the
car into gear and backs out of the driveway.
Everything around me remains the same.
Inner battle
Grappling with myself.
Photo by my husband, taken from the vast Santa
collection of my father and
stepmother.
The things I am supposed to be
doing and don't want to do, the shoulds, they
sometimes control me. They become obligations
body-checked by anger. Or maybe it’s the should nots,
the tamping down of what rises up naturally: I should
not be feeling angry. I have no right to be upset.
This is not supposed to be a blog about current angst
(except for the mundane, piles of laundry, sick kid,
dog-walking variety). Most of the anger I carry
around is the nostalgic sort, dealing with that stuff
that happened when I was a kid, the things I can’t
change and must make right in my mind in order to
live a full life. It’s been working, for the most
part. I’m letting go.
Yes, I have complained about my current relationships
with my parents, have brought up marital discord from
the not-so-distant past, but most of this has been in
the context of grappling with painful memories,
revealing old scars to healing light.
But I haven’t talked about my stepmother. Part of the
reason I don’t talk about my stepmother is that she
is practically a saint. She is my father’s total
champion, and if anyone needs a champion, it’s him.
My father has treatment-resistant depression, a
condition he has been grappling with from the time he
entered college. It was because of depression that he
stopped working in his early 40s. The man has been on
many different varieties of medication; he’s been
through research studies; he’s done electroconvulsive
therapy (ECT) and lost a chunk of his memory in the
process. Eventually the drugs lose effectiveness, the
troughs get deeper, he stops functioning.
There are physical problems, too. Diabetes. Obesity.
Arthritis. Within the last two years my father has
developed debilitating back pain and can barely get
out the door. At the age of 57, he is practically
housebound, a predicament he and his wife have taken
on with characteristic stoicism. Throughout it all,
my stepmother has been a rock, always supportive,
never complaining, a breadwinner, maker of meals, and
vacuumer of a four bedroom house.
Why am I angry with this woman? Why am I carrying
around this stupid useless feeling? Because I am
invisible to her. Because when I was pregnant with my
second son, she talked about it being my first baby
(perhaps a teenage stillbirth doesn't count). Because
– stupidly, since I really should let go of this one,
but couldn't they have waited a week? – she got
married to my father two days before my fourteenth
birthday. Because she never even so much as e-mails
on my birthday. She has no idea why I might be
feeling pain and apparently doesn’t want to know.
Perhaps she feels she might be implicated in some
way. I don’t know.
My father loves me, but he has not been a very good
father. It's just the truth. Four years of every
other weekend visits does not a good father make.
Financial support for one's child – which I do
appreciate – doesn't make one a good father either,
though certainly there are many absentee fathers out
there who don't even do that. He laid the foundation
for distrust early. A little recognition of this past
and his part in it would make a huge difference.
After he read
the blog,
he acknowledged it in a general way, though we've
never talked about it. But what about her?
I know she thinks I'm a bad daughter and in many
ways, I am. Phone calls sometimes go unreturned for
days. I'm late with birthday and father's day
greetings or send a lame e-card. I put off making our
travel plans to see them and have been absent for
multiple surgeries. I avoid discussions of Christmas,
a holiday that is an obsession for them. The guilt
floods over me, paralyzing and cold, and I feel a
surge of preemptive, protective, useless anger.
What am I supposed to do with this anger? What do you
do when you can’t talk to someone about your
feelings? How do I do the right thing while honoring
how I feel?
So many questions. Does anyone have answers?
(And when this particular angst is out of the way, I
have many awards and other kindnesses to acknowledge.
That's the next post.)
Dead on arrival
There on the fading photocopy of an autopsy authorization form is my signature. It's the writing of a teenager, rounded and totally legible, unlike the scrawled signature I have today. Then, the autopsy. They cut him open, weighed and measured his organs. Everything was for the most part normal, or "unremarkable" in autopsy parlance, with the critical exceptions of his lungs. The causes of death are listed as prematurity and bilateral pulmonary atelectasis.
Even now when I read it I feel a moment of panic: was he born alive? It did seem to me like he was moving initially, but my mother says otherwise. If we had been at a hospital or closer to emergency care, would he have lived? But the record is titled "Record of Fetal Death (Stillbirth)."
Does that leave me off the hook?
About two months after his death, I got a call from a parent running a bereavement group. The hospital had passed on my number and he was inviting me to their next meeting. As we talked, he mentioned that his stillborn child was a Christmas baby.
"That must have been so hard for you, right around Christmas," I said stupidly.
"Well, it's hard no matter what the season."
He was so kind, as if we were in this together.
I gave him my address and got off the phone as quickly as I could. What right did I have to grieve? The child I never wanted, who I was going to give up for adoption, was dead. Perhaps I even willed it, or brought it on with dark feelings and too many Budweisers. I wasn't a parent. I didn't deserve to feel anything.
For many years, I had a recurring dream. The baby had arrived. I wasn't prepared: no clothes, no diapers, no place to sleep. And somehow, the infant would slip my mind. He languished in a cold room, too weak to cry, his stomach knotted with hunger, a soaking diaper clinging to his skin.
By the time I remembered, it was too late.
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.





