My father always held a certain power as the man and the breadwinner. He was a big fish in his small pond. And he’d come from a family with more money and cultural capital than my mom’s. My mother had a good education, but she’d been raised in the brash immigrant spirit of her parents’ families. She never felt she fit into my father’s more formal, high-achieving family. They were more aristocratic, and more inclined to conceal their Jewishness. At home, my mother was often trying to get his attention, and was frustrated that getting it was essential to getting certain things done. I shouldn’t have to go before the tribunal to buy the girls’ tights, she once said to him. “Going before the tribunal” was a phrase she often invoked when they were discussing money, and it stuck with me always. I was especially attuned to the paradox of her role—at once powerful and powerless, the director of all household energies and still beholden to my father for all official and financial decisions. During some of the worst chapters of Lucia’s addiction, my mother had locked herself in the bathroom to cry over my father’s inaction, his lack of urgency.
Once we knew about the crack, Jim was off and running. Disappearing for days, one time moving away to Utah for a year, spinning some bullshit yarn about needing more freedom on the way out the door. My mother wept. She broke out the acoustic guitar we hadn’t seen since we were kids and began to write really good country songs in her bedroom. But he always came back and discovered that not even his absence, the sudden and cruel withdrawal of his love, had convinced my mother that he was wrong for her. There were apologies and promises. My mother did not feel the same level of panic as she did about Lucia, obviously, but she felt an echo of that panic, and all the enlivening, purpose-granting, and righteous feelings of duty and meaning that accompanied it. She felt responsible for him, and she did want to do everything she could to get him sober, to love him into being the man she knew he could be.
Her anguish over Jim’s addiction was repellent to me. It looked like weakness. It was one thing to throw yourself into saving your own child, but this guy?
As with Lucia, she exerted control wherever she could, in the only places where she might have an effect. She worried that he was cold and bought him a winter coat. The worry seemed to obsess her. So what if he’s cold? I thought. Let him be cold, let him fucking freeze.
But we’d spent so much time talking together about love and drugs by that point. Our bond, the one represented in snapshots of her holding me as a baby, had been supplanted by the need for survival. Now we were like friends. I could be sympathetic because I thought she was really in love.
Just as she had with my sister, my mother loaded up the car with CDs and rice cakes and made the three-hour drive to visit him in some rehab in Delaware every weekend. I didn’t go with her on those trips.
In Al-Anon meetings, people say that they fell in love with a person’s potential. I did that thing we do, they say, and I fell for the person I knew he could become. I should have been able to see who he really was, and not expect that I could change him. They say that they “went to the hardware store for milk”; in other words, they looked for something in a place where they should have known they’d never find it.
Jim left my mom after eight years. She’d just bought a new house, a small fixer-upper they planned to work on together while raising their new puppy. Instead he broke up with her on their moving day, with the truck idling outside. Then, some weeks later, before knocking over a liquor store and leaving town, Jim broke into that house and robbed my mother, took everything of value she owned. Any paltry heirlooms we might have one day inherited—our parents’ gold wedding bands. A ring made from an Egyptian coin passed down from Nanny’s mother. And one very valuable thing: an antique star sapphire and diamond ring my dad had surprised my mother with years earlier. We thought it might be languishing in a local pawnshop, but no one had it.
The house she fixed up herself with sweat and tears. The puppy she raised into a dutiful, soulful dog that became her partner and her Buddha. I was twenty-something then. Angry. In a touring band, riding around America in a van, getting drunk, and setting off fireworks. I still remember that I had my feet up on the dash when she called to tell me about the burglary. The sun shone brightly, my cellphone was hot in my hand.
That sick! Mother! Fucker!!! I yelled out the open window. That twisted fucking fuck.
I used to wait for him to get to the ninth step and have to make an amends to her. How long could that take? I wanted him to return, not to be with her, but to sit his ass down at the kitchen farm table with its Fiestaware fruit bowl and have to hear what it had been like for her, all that heartache and pain. But we never heard from him again.
* * *
• • •
More than a decade later, on a road trip from Oakland up to Portland with my mom and Lucia, I put on a playlist and a cover of the Dido song “White Flag” came on. “I will go down with this ship,” the Irish pop singer had crooned on the original single the summer of 2003, which was after a breakup with Jim. My mother listened to it over and over. “I won’t put my hands up and surrender. There will be no white flag above my door. I’m in love, and always will be.”
Now the car grew quiet. My mother took out her iPhone and set it to camera mode, then pressed the back button on my phone to start the song over again at the beginning, and positioned her camera toward the passing trees and sunset. For a few minutes, no one spoke, we just listened to this song we knew the meaning of, and watched our mother make a kind of music video of the lush foliage of I-5 passing by. The cover of the song is more steely than the Dido version. It is the best kind of cover, a cooler, lower-fi riff on the super-produced pop strains of the original. It is to the original as my mother is to that former version of herself. When the song ended, my mom turned the volume down and watched the video she’d just made, the whole song playing again and the screen lit up with the blue-violet of the sky, the streaking by of forest-green trees. Men miss these moments, I think. They so rarely stick around for the magic of women becoming themselves, or maybe we can only become ourselves in the spaces where they aren’t. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw that, like me, Lucia was crying. You’re so cool, Mom, she said.
chapter thirteen
Love is women’s work. Or the work of love belongs to women. It falls to women. We punch out at work and punch in again at home—the second shift, the double bind. It is not only labor that is required at the workplace, nor simply domestic labor at home. In both places and everywhere in between there is another more ambiguous set of expectations—that we will bring a swirling emotional energy that sands down edges, that smooths and warms and nourishes. That we will be kind. That we will sow love.
Throughout history, women have grown tired of this work. In college, I became enthralled by Russian history, specifically the spasms of revolution and the new world order the Soviets had tried to usher in. One of my favorite Soviet propaganda posters depicts a kerchiefed, smiling woman opening the door of her dark domicile to let in the light of socialist utopia beneath the words DOWN WITH KITCHEN SLAVERY! A second woman is visible inside in the darkness doing the washing in a tub. Outside their door are buildings with the labels CLUB, NURSERY, CAFETERIA. I remember the first time I saw this poster. It was fuzzily projected onto a massive screen in the grey-dark of an art history lecture hall. The professor was a beautiful Dutch American scholar of Russian Constructivism who rode a motorcycle to campus. She had written about the design of Soviet dresses and cookie packaging. I wanted to be her. Once, as I smoked a cigarette before class, I saw her pull up in a leather jacket and floral dress, black boots to the knee. I watched as she took her helmet off, shaking loose a waist-length curtain of straight, chocolate hair. An image encoded as indelibly in my consciousness as any Titian or Botticelli.
* * *
• • •
Kitchen’s closed, my grandmother used to say as she finally h
ung the dish towel on the oven and brought one large, commanding, dishpan hand down over the light switch to turn it off for the night. It meant don’t ask for anything else to eat. Just hearing her utter that line made you feel a little hungry. She had four kids in five years. When her grandchildren slept over, she made Jell-O in sundae dishes and served it with a dollop of Cool Whip. I ate mine one miniscule bite at a time so it would last for an entire episode of The Golden Girls or Empty Nest. Sometimes she dispensed with dessert altogether, then later was forced by her own appetite to reconsider, and offered us each what she was having: one frozen marshmallow, the sole nightly treat she allowed herself in the diet-mad eighties. By nighttime, she seemed tired, her ankles bulging slightly in her nude hosiery socks.
Kitchen slavery, kitchen servitude. The perfect utility of “kitchen” as an adjective. Handy as a wooden spoon. In the early days of Al-Anon, women mostly made coffee and cake for their alcoholic husbands. An undated mid-century memo from an Akron AA describes the wives’ group as a “non-alcoholic kitchen brigade” that “was allowed to wash dishes, make coffee, organize picnics, and things like that.” (Allowed to wash dishes!) It was seen as a privilege of sorts to be welcomed into the fraternal organization. Wives were understood to be integral to the recovery process, but that didn’t mean all the men wanted them in the program. Some were suspicious, thinking the women were gossiping about them, which they likely were. In the beginning, Al-Anon cofounder Lois Wilson writes, “Some of these groups were what we call ‘coffee and cake’ groups or AA auxiliaries. The wives did what came naturally to wives—made the coffee and served the cake. If the AA’s had a clubhouse, these wives groups hung the curtains and all that sort of thing. Any spiritual growth was just a side issue.” As historian Lori Rotskoff has pointed out, AA literature has long characterized the contributions of Lois Wilson and Anne Smith, the founders of Al-Anon, “in domestic terms, focusing on the behind-the-scenes encouragement and gracious hospitality they displayed toward the alcoholic men in their lives.” The work of restoring balance in the home, of achieving “emotional sobriety” as it was called, was to be shared by the recovering alcoholic and his wife, but women’s spiritual growth in the program was rarely figured outside of the context of marriage or domestic and emotional labor.
chapter fourteen
The love myth I bought into was human-made, fallible. A modern invention. I couldn’t see this. To me, love existed outside of time, space, or bank accounts. I believed in the idea of two lonely souls finding each other and finding completeness. Not exactly happily ever after—in fact, wasn’t a little tumult the mark of true love? It was more like desperately ever after.
Lucia continued to swing between clean and not clean, okay and not okay, and my love for her felt unrequited. It had left me brokenhearted. In 2003, she was back in rehab. “Sweet Lucia,” I wrote her in February on the stationery of the company where I worked, “It’s Valentine’s Day and crisp and cold and I’m wondering why Aron girls never have warm enough winter coats.” Addressing her almost like a lover, I went on to tell her she had scared us with whatever behavior had landed her back in treatment, which now escapes my memory. “I feel lucky that you’re alive, and I miss you so much. My thoughts are disjointed right now, at the end of this long work week (I sound like Daddy), but I just wanted to get in touch and tell you that I (still, always) love you, accept you, think of you constantly, and have hope in my heart for you. I know that if we want to repair our relationship, we have a lot of work ahead, but I’m still willing if you are. I want you back. I want you to want to come back, for yourself and not for us.” I told her I would be there the following weekend: “I want to see your face and hold your hand, if only for an hour or two.”
Two years later, I moved to Cambridge to get a master’s degree at Harvard. One October, in the orange light of a Cambridge bar, I found one lonely soul, also drinking alone—a tawny, rangy, beautiful boy, twinkling with booze—and believed that he was the one for me, that I’d been made complete. We were both involved with other people—in fact, his girlfriend was on her way to meet him. But sometimes there’s nothing you can do, right? A bigger love sweeps in like the rook on a chessboard and knocks over what was standing there before. All’s fair, et cetera. He told me he had seen me riding my bike on campus and had been looking for me ever since. We were talking and laughing when his girlfriend arrived at the bar. Later, she stole his phone and erased my phone number and he had to search every Nina in the university directory to find me again. How I adore a story that begins this way, so long as I am the searched-for party.
We fell into a perfectly transporting early love. One night, he came over and never left. Throughout the winter, we drank from a handle of whiskey in my cozy third-floor apartment. After dazed afternoons in warm seminar rooms, I stopped at the market and walked home happily in the cold, hands redly imprinted from the weight of plastic shopping bags. I cooked heartily, enthusiastically. We ate and talked and laughed and kissed, with sentences unfinished and meat in our teeth. In the middle of a December night, amid feathery snow, we walked to a playground and shook the swing set with our weight, competing to see who could go higher, howling into the purply darkness, and then lay by the space heater rubbing our feet together frantically to get warm. Under the covers he kissed my whole body, lingering over my left side, the panel from the bottom of my breast down to my lethally sharp hip bone. This sector is my favorite, he said, his breath spilling warmly over my skin. What sector is that? I giggled. Starting at my head, he began counting out the zones of my body, districts of flesh he paused over and marked with his mouth. It’s Sector Sixteen, he said when he landed back on the left side. At a bar with friends the following week, I went into the photo booth and lifted my shirt while the camera snapped four pictures. At home, I glued one into the middle of the Christmas card I’d been making for him. “Happy Holidays from Sector 16,” I wrote.
I want a baby, I had said within the first couple weeks of our meeting. You should know that I want a baby desperately—and soon. I love babies. He fixed me in his gaze, this twenty-three-year-old, smiling confidently, breathing regularly, unafraid. Let’s have a baby, then, he’d said.
We were young. We got a puppy. We drove across the country while the puppy tromped over our laps, napped in a pile of sweatshirts. Looking at him, at the dog’s velveteen body, at the open stretch of American highway, I felt drunk with love.
chapter fifteen
We took I-40 across the country so we could stop in Oklahoma to visit his family, and in Arizona, where Rachel and her boyfriend were living in a rambling house with Tank, their Rottweiler. We could hear javelinas and coyotes at night. We spent a week with them, hiking, eating and drinking, playing cards, and then drove on. I have a vivid memory of driving west across the Arizona border at night, talking about love—how theirs looked and how we wanted ours to be. This early part of a relationship suited me well—its hopeful, almost boastful plan-making, the refining of a shared vision of love unhampered by reality.
We landed in California in a chilly South Berkeley apartment with a lapis-blue living room and a crimson-red dining room and figs and apples growing in the yard. He got a good job. I walked to and from graduate school and read anthropological theory by the fireplace. We had a miscarriage. The palette of our love grew more autumnal, cozy and blustery both. We got engaged, and found out I was pregnant again a few weeks before the wedding. My sisters laughed trying to hoist the zipper of my borrowed dress up over my body, which had been rail-thin weeks prior but was now rapidly swelling with the dividing and multiplying cells of new life. The spring after we married, I gave birth in the glow of our living room while a record by The Cure played. Two nights and a day of low, bovine bellowing, then I opened my eyes after one last squelching push and saw an alien fallen to Earth, a creature who looked almost hilariously like his giant father in miniature, and seemed already sage and serene, with eyes the size of teaspoons.
I wanted to believe that our love could transcend the usual marital clichés, that it might endure not just as weak embers but an enveloping flame, the way it had been in the beginning. It feels like a part of writing this book should be revealing what happened, but I still struggle to know what happened. Or we dissolved before either of us could find out.
For starters: I couldn’t outrun my own sadness. When we met, I was only a year or so out of my first, truly debilitating bout of depression, during which, bedridden, I plucked my leg hair out one by one with tweezers while watching the World Cup and crying. I was halfway through my master’s program then and had a research trip to Ukraine planned, but I found I couldn’t move. It had been Lucia who intervened then, to tell me it was okay to take a break from being a good student. It was okay to cancel my plans, she said, and then she helped me cancel them. She brought Anya and a couple bottles of wine over with her and I sat in quiet gratitude as their energy brightened the apartment, as they called the airline, the funder of my grant, and a therapist. I was diagnosed with depression—both major depressive disorder and persistent depressive disorder, or dysthymia. So…I’m a little depressed all the time and sometimes really depressed? I asked the therapist. I suppose, yes, she said with a flat-lipped, squinting expression that seemed to say, “Must you make it sound so depressing?”
Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls Page 13