FEBRUARY 21, 2011
I remember the first time I wrote for relief. I was fifteen and worried about all kinds of things, and one day I sat at a dresser with a mirror and looked into my own eyes, searching for an answer as to who I was and what was going on inside me. No reply. So I got out a notebook and a pencil and began to write, and a heavy curtain parted.
My first novel had to do with what it was like growing up as an Army brat, calling on my memories of riding in the backseat of the car as we drove to the new place, watching the telephone poles whip past, watching too my father’s eyes in the rearview mirror, always fearful that I might get in trouble for something. I also drew from things like sitting on the steps of yet another porch and waiting for kids my age to find me. Unlacing my father’s combat boots for him when he came home, being afraid of those boots as well as the insignia pins on his khaki shirts. Sitting at the dinner table unmoving, my heart banging in my chest, while I or someone else got yelled at. Standing on the edge of the bathtub to look over my shoulder into the mirror at the red slap marks he’d left on my butt, as clearly outlined as if I had painted them there. The last time he hit me, it was when I was a senior in high school, and he slapped me across the face. That time, I didn’t cry, and he never hit me again.
I wanted to talk about all of this, but mostly I wanted to come to peace with it. I knew other kids had had it far worse than I, whether they were Army brats or not. And I knew there were other sides to my father: all my life I had seen the love and care he directed at my mom. He had shown me things: how to thread a needle, how to dress a wound, how the Dutch Masters used light in their paintings. Whenever I saw that he approved of anything I’d done, my spirit soared. As Dory Previn’s song says, I danced to please my father, just to win one glance.
In writing the novel, I wanted to put some memories into a mix that was largely fictionalized and see what emerged. And what emerged was compassion. Still, I worried about publishing it. I worried that I would hurt my father in ways that were unfair.
I consulted with my mother, who read the manuscript in secret, and told me that yes, I should publish it. She said, “I think it would hurt your father more if you passed up this opportunity than anything you said in the book would.” When Durable Goods came out and my father read it, it did hurt him. But it also made him ask some questions. He asked my mother, “Was I this bad?” And she said, “Well, you were pretty bad.” And then something wonderful happened: the book seemed to heal us. My dad became My Guy.
But all that’s happening with my parents now: Is it unfair to publish my thoughts about it, to make it available to anyone who cares to have a look? Would I want someone writing about me losing my facilities? The answer is I don’t know. But I think if it served a larger purpose, I wouldn’t mind.
I brought this question to my writing group. I asked them if I should make public such intimate things about my parents. And they, all sensitive and intelligent women, said yes, I should. Because reading it helped them, when they thought about what they might be headed for with their own parents—or, ultimately, themselves. Because it would help others who were going through the same kind of experience. Because I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together. But the women in my group are writers, with an innate understanding of what art demands, requires, and does. They, too, have a reflexive need to document everything that happens to them or to others close to them, one way or another. I know a writer who lost two lifelong friends when she wrote about something personal that happened to one of them. Wrote about it and published it, I should say. I didn’t ask her if it was worth it. Nor did I ask her if she felt like she had no choice.
The idea of sharing such personal history is a bit like slowing down for an accident. You see people in the cars ahead of you rubbernecking, and you think they are shameful. But when you pass by the wreck, even if you don’t slow down and look yourself, you want to. What compels you might be the blood and the bones, but probably not. Probably what draws you to look at an accident is the fact that it didn’t happen to you. Yet. But deep in your own bones is the knowledge that it could, and so you look to imagine what it might be like. If you are a writer, you need to put what you imagine into words, and then you need to read those words in order to understand yourself. After that, you might feel a need to put those words before others. I think I have to say that need is the operative word.
I keep remembering what happened one time when my mother came to one of my readings, along with her sisters and a cousin who is a fan, and that cousin’s husband. Many writers find it difficult to read before their families; I am certainly one of them. But there I was, standing at the lectern reading a short story that was meant to be humorous and that was told in first person. The character says that when she was in high school and would come home to find that her mother had made liver and onions for dinner, she felt like committing suicide. My mother did make liver and onions occasionally. And I hated liver then and I hate liver now and I will hate it all my life; in my mind, there is nothing you can do to liver to make it taste good. I know many people love liver. I know many people love tongue. I know many people love rides at the state fair that make me throw up. If you catch my drift. But I plucked that real-life detail of hating liver to put in a fictional story to serve a larger purpose, having to do with the complex relationship between women and food. When I had finished reading the story, my cousin’s husband’s hand shot up. Eyes blazing, he asked, “What did your mother cook that you did like?”
“Um. This is fiction,” I might have said, but I answered by listing some things my mother made that were sensational: Enchiladas. Goulash. Apple crisp. I think I might also have confessed that I used to lie by the stove just to smell certain things baking. Thus I admitted culpability for a crime I never intended but that clearly he thought I’d committed.
I see his eyes now, I still see his eyes: accusing. Appraising me as a selfish show-off, an ungrateful bitch, a bottom-feeding opportunist. He was only one person in that audience, but when I think back on that reading, oftentimes he is all I see. But. Recalling his contempt for me on that day makes me decide on this day what to do.
FEBRUARY 23, 2011
In the basement, my neighbor Bob, who is the contractor who rehabbed my house, is working on fixing my furnace. He tells me he’s just back from Oxford, Mississippi, where he watched his star-in-the-making son play baseball. He asks if I’ve ever been to Oxford, and I say yes, indeed; I love Oxford; I love the South.
Bob says he loved it, too; that the people were just so nice. And the town square was cool. And college kids were drinking all over the place. He tells me Essie was a big hit, referring to the family’s bulldog, whose formal name is Esther, and if that isn’t the perfect name for a bulldog who resembles nothing so much as a fireplug, I don’t know what is.
Bob asks how I’m doing and I tell him I’m going through a lot of stuff having to do with my parents right now. I fill him in and then tell him some happy news:
Last night I called my parents and learned that they had liked Gentle Transitions. My mother said the woman who came out was thorough and patient and not pushy and that they are going to hire the company to pack what they wanted to keep, move it, and then unpack everything. Dust off your hands, put your fists to your hips, voilà. She told me the amount the company would charge, which she thought was staggering, but which I thought was a good deal, and I told her so. I said, “Go ahead and let them do it all; on moving day, I’ll come up and we’ll all go out and play.” And she laughed. She made mention of some things she would miss: her garden, the nearby park.
“Right,” I said. “I haven’t been through this, so I don’t know exactly how you feel. I do know it must be so hard. But there is a garden at the place you’re going to, and there’s a little trail you can walk on by the stream. Mostly, I think that there is still joy to be had for you two, and that you will find some there. In an
y case, it will be a lot easier for you both.”
Next I talked to my dad, and he said, “Well, we decided to go ahead and just let them do it. It costs a lot, but we can afford it.” He seemed like his old self, in charge of his life, completely aware of what was going on and in support of it. I was going to offer to pay for the move, but I realized it would take something away from him if I did. He has talked about feeling emasculated because he believes he is no longer taking care of his wife. Well, now he is. Now, together, they are moving forward.
This morning, I got an email from Vicki with my parents’ budget information. She listed their income, which is modest, and their expenses, also relatively modest. I thought, Well, this will be helpful, and started looking at the spreadsheet. My sister is a very thorough person, and in the expenses, she had listed all the magazines my parents subscribe to, even though both of them have trouble seeing now. They get Country Living, Birds & Blooms, Family Circle, Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, Looking Back, National Geographic, National Geographic Traveler, Reader’s Digest, Smithsonian, Woman’s Day, and Taste of Home.
I read this list of publications and it seemed so innocent to me, so dear. I thought about how you can tell a lot about a person by looking at what magazines they subscribe to. I thought about how I was raised with magazines fanned out on a coffee table next to the sweet potato plant, various women’s magazines and Life and The Saturday Evening Post with the Norman Rockwell covers. I thought about how, for years, I followed my mother’s lead and bought Family Circle and Woman’s Day at the grocery store, and tore recipes out of them with abandon; I found some really good recipes in them that I still use today. I thought of how I used to sit next to my sister on the sofa, watching her read magazines; how she turned the pages in a very specific and deliberate way. First, she delicately licked her finger. Then she turned the page from the very edge of the bottom right-hand corner, and she turned it slowly. She made reading a magazine look like paper ballet. Whenever I tried to read a magazine like her, it just wasn’t the same. It wasn’t a cool ritual practiced by a glamorous teenager with bobby socks and loafers and jeans rolled to the knee; it was just me, a flat-chested poseur with crooked bangs, turning the pages all wrong and in any case not finding what was on those pages nearly as alluring as when I was looking over my sister’s shoulder.
Next on the spreadsheet, I consulted the charitable donations column, and was dumbstruck. My parents, with their modest income, give to: Alzheimer’s Foundation. American Institute for Cancer Research. National Foundation for Cancer Research. American Heart. American Lung. American Veterans. Boys Town. Holy Childhood Church. Friends of Como Park. Doctors Without Borders. Easterseals. Friends of the Library. Smile Train. Special Olympics. St. B’s Indian School. Gillette Children’s Specialty Hospital. Minnesota Hospice. Humane Society. Listening House. Little Sisters of the Poor. March of Dimes. Maryknoll Sisters. Mercy Home. Paralyzed Vets. Salvation Army. VFW.
I read that long list and then I read it again. And then I looked out the window and saw not one single thing except this:
I can live a long life and for every day of that long life make mighty efforts to improve myself, but I will never be as decent a person as either of my parents is. Not even close.
Bob told me his dad had moved to a place for retirees, and that at first he had hated it. “But, you know,” Bob said, “before he moved there, I used to call him just to check on him—I was really worried about him living alone. I’d call and say, ‘Hey, Dad, what are you doing?’ and he would say, ‘Nothing. I’m just sitting here. Having a martini before I go to bed.’ I’d say, ‘Dad, it’s six o’clock,’ and he’d say, ‘Yeah, well, I get up at four.’ But now he’s not there half the time. He’s out having dinner with friends, or a bunch of them went out somewhere together. Your parents will love it.”
“I know,” I said, and I did not tell him that when I spoke to my sister about selling the house in the spring when my mother’s tulips would be coming up, I sobbed. But you know? Happily.
MARCH 6, 2011
When my younger daughter was five years old, she went one day with a friend and that friend’s mother to a play-ground. She was delivered home soon afterward by the friend’s apologetic mother, who said that Jenny had fallen off the jungle gym and hurt her arm. I’ll say. It was broken in two places.
Jenny didn’t cry, at first. She walked all the way home, holding her pain and tears at bay for the fifteen or so minutes that it took to get there, but as soon as she was released to my custody and I shut the front door, she let loose, howling with pain. I flung off my apron, told my older daughter to sit with Jenny in the backseat of the car, and drove to the emergency room. Jenny was X-rayed, casted, and put into a sling, and that night she came home and was read books before bed, as usual.
The next morning, I had a moment of worry about the best way for me to take a shower, because I didn’t want to get my cast wet. Then I remembered I wasn’t the one with the cast. I was just overidentifying with someone I loved, trying to take her broken arm for her.
Something similar is happening now, with my parents. Last week I dreamed about being a much older woman, a mass of shock-white untamable hair around my head, a bowed torso, big brown age spots on my legs, worry in my mind and my heart and my soul about how I am going to fare after I leave a place so familiar to me, so dear and so full of memories. Last night I dreamed I was living in the apartment my parents are going to, and I was knocking on all the doors of the people who lived down the hall, wanting to see who they were.
Things are getting harder at my parents’ house. My mother has come into some anger, which is always a good catchall for feelings of grief, of fear, of pain, of longing, of regret. My father is confused. He takes her anger personally, as it is sometimes intended, and he doesn’t know what he has done wrong. He can’t remember that he has asked the same question many times over. When he asks questions of the people who have been asked to come to the house, when he asks what (the hell) they are doing there, he is trying to protect her, not humiliate her. The other day, he asked if she was embarrassed to walk with him, because she is always rushing ahead. She has told my sister she thinks he could stop that shuffling gait if he wanted to.
Ah, me.
Nothing for it but to plan a party, say I. (A friend of mine, once hearing me come out with some wildly optimistic outburst, laughed, leaned into my face, and imitating Pollyanna, said, “I’m glad my legs are broken; glad, glad, glad!”)
Never mind. I’m planning a surprise housewarming party for the Saturday after my parents have moved in to the new place. I’ll call a really good bakery and order the biggest sheet cake they make for what will surely be a smallish gathering, but my plan is that the leftovers will be shared with the new neighbors and the staff. My mother has been talking about all the memories in the house they’re leaving behind, and so here I come like a locomotive down the tracks: Don’t worry! We’ll start making new memories right away!
This morning, I awakened wondering if my mother will be mad at me for doing this, and if my father will be confused by it. I hope not.
In a solicitation by a realtor that came to my house in the mail the other day was a seed packet. Forget-me-nots. I had been planning on buying my mother a new and beautiful gardening tool, to remind her that she can still spend time digging in the dirt, inhaling the scent of both it and the blossoms she so adores. Now I think I’ll throw in that packet of seeds, too.
I hope she’ll plant forget-me-nots in the woods she looks out onto, and that every time she sees them she will think she is making the most of her situation. I hope she’ll think of her life as having been well lived and, on balance, lucky. I hope she’ll go down to the community breakfasts and make new friends. I hope she’ll start a book club and ride the bus to go shopping for birthday presents for her great-grandchildren. I hope my father will find some vets and sit in the corner of the
dining room drinking coffee with them and talking about their glory days, and that he will go out to breakfasts with them to a place where the waitresses are bodacious and flirtatious. I hope my mother will look in the refrigerator one day and see that they’re out of milk and tell my dad to hop on his mobility scooter and go to the store at the end of their hall to get more. I hope my parents will go out to dinner on a double date, even if it’s no farther than the dining room one floor down from their apartment. I am, as is easy to see, full of hope. But I have to remember something I always forget: you can’t tell anyone else how to experience something. People live behind their own eyes. I’m not the one with the broken arm.
MARCH 23, 2011
It is done. My parents are living at a place that has Eagle in its name, even though mostly what you see when you look out their windows are crows. But you also see the loveliness of the woods and the meandering stream, where ducks take off and land in spectacular ways, like little boys showing off for each other. You see the sky. The light comes in. At night, there is the moon, visible through the branches of the trees.
I went up to Minnesota in advance of the move and spent the last few days in my parents’ house with them. One night, I lay in the attic bedroom and thought about how, really, this house should not mean much to me. I lived there only one summer. And then I thought about how I had brought my daughters there from the time they were babies, and how, in this bedroom where they slept on a cot across from me, they used to like to look at the lit-up Christmas decorations on the wall. I thought of how, on the kitchen table, my dad rolled strudel dough out so thin you could read newsprint through it, and how he stirred homemade lentil soup on the stove, and how, when his wife and his sisters-in-law were out shopping, he bustled in the kitchen so as to have dinner ready for them when they came back. And then I began to cry, but it was a removed and abstract kind of crying, a punch-the-time-clock type of grief. Mostly, I wanted to get my parents out of a place that had become a kind of hell to them. You don’t eat breakfast in the past, the smell of apple strudel in the air. You sit at the table with the situation as it is, and the situation was that my mother was about to murder my dad, and my dad’s world had shrunk so badly he barely moved at all. It seemed to me that his lack of interaction with others was making him run around in his own brain like a hamster. It seemed he was infecting himself with paranoia and nursing his delusions as though that were the only hobby left to him. But that is only how it seemed. The truth is, he couldn’t help it. Once, I drove him to get a haircut and he said, in a heartbreakingly bewildered way, “I just feel like I’m in a fog.”
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