She was right, it was indeed a thing she had to show me, a prop she had kept in the wings for more than a decade. Saturday was to be the opposite of Father’s Day. You can have a thousand educated thoughts about gender, then in actual parenting, messy and constant parenting, you’re repeatedly backed into one of a few messy corners. Will my daughter be another victim or, if not, pathologically selfish and manipulative? Will my son be another asshole taker or, equally unwelcome, a coward?
Wait until Saturday. I’d learned by then that there was no point trying to whine or bargain once Mom had set rules, nothing to gain and dignity to be lost if I tried, so I sat it out. Concentrated at school. Kicked some (gr)ass on the soccer field. After school each day I was flagrantly good, but from a distance. Did homework quietly in my room. Proposed a meal rather than ask what was for supper. Single children of single moms, you’ve got to learn silence, its opportunities, its rewards, its respect. Silence is your coin.
Come Saturday morning she greeted me with four words, one of them as bright as these Web links. “Eat your breakfast first.” First.
Breakfast dishes cleared from the kitchen table, she tried one last stall. She lifted a large manila envelope from off the top of the fridge and did her gentle but direct look into my eyes. “Antony, you’ve asked for information, however impolitely. I agree you deserve to know. But look outside. It’s a sunny, spring day out there. This envelope is now yours and yours alone. Its contents will almost certainly upset you, and there’s absolutely no reason why you have to open it now.”
She laid the envelope in the centre of the table. “I’ll be around the house all day. Nothing you say will be wrong.”
I was twelve and had waited six or seven years for this. I wasn’t about to go for a bike ride instead of opening that envelope. As soon as she was out of immediate earshot I shook out the meagre contents. Two photocopies slid free. The first was a copy of a smaller piece of paper. The copied edges of the notepaper were faint but uniform compared to the brief, scratchy handwriting it contained. Here, take a look.
The unwilling
led by the unqualified
doing the unnecessary
for the ungrateful.
No salutation. No date. No signature. And not Mom’s handwriting in any way.
The second sheet was a photocopied article from an early 70s issue of Time magazine. Two photographs pinned down the columns of text. A master shot showed military caskets being loaded onto a giant jet in Vietnam. A detail shot showed a chalk inscription on the wooden lid of one casket. Some anonymous American soldier had scrawled this same indictment of uns, this litany of negation, on the casket of a fallen comrade. The unwilling led by the unqualified doing the unnecessary for the ungrateful. The Vietnam War in a sentence.
Boy-sponge, I absorbed every word. I had never read more quickly or with better retention. Antony, branded. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Dad, and the Word was Dad. I was immediately incapable of forgetting all those uns. And yet the copied article, not the note, kept bringing me back. The note was from Trevor, the article from Mom. She distracted me with history, allowed me to fixate on the context, not the kiss-off. This soldier’s mantra of uns had been engraved on Zippo lighters and written out on helmets, ammunition cases, even rifle butts. No doubt some Saigon engraver’s stall did a steady trade switching between one grunt’s paean to freedom (Death before dishonour) and these undoings. You can still find these engraved Zippos for sale online, or at least you can find intentionally scuffed and faux-aged counterfeits. Oh, weBay.
Again, you wouldn’t believe this in a novel. One night at the casino, smoky work a welcome distraction from September’s should-it-stay-or-should-it-go debate with Kate, I saw this same slogan of uns printed on the T-shirts of half a dozen buzzcut American soldiers over for some post-Iraq whoop-up. Thirty years after soldiers wrote this little anti-poem against their government’s war in Vietnam, the same government was now printing it for soldiers on tax-funded T-shirts. Government-funded, anti-government swag, the keeping-things-whole fashion line.
I’m running now like I was running there in Mom’s kitchen, observing not confessing. Yes, my stomach went squirmy and my ears rang as I read Trevor’s note. Alongside that sticky heat was a spreading thaw that pulled me out of myself. I could see my own neck, my skinny arms raising and lowering one page then the other, the back of my head twisting left then right. With the article, Mom had sewn me a net of history, knowing it would slow my fall but not prevent it. She’d also spared me going to her with questions and playing parental catch-up. I stood alone, obsessively rereading a copy of the note with which half my genes had tossed me aside while calling Gloria unqualified. And me ungrateful. At least this note of mine took months to write, not two seconds.
With a first, unplanned pregnancy, sure, a young Gloria would have started out unqualified. But she was a learner and a doer, Medea offstage long before she was Medea onstage. For a hippie who’d been in one protest march after another—US troops out! No nukes! Pro-choice NOW!!—raising another resource-consuming North American baby was/is certainly unnecessary. Ironic that most mothers would condemn me for putting what I want ahead of what a baby might want. Look at the selfishness of North American mothers putting what they want ahead of everything else. Go on, have two kids, have three. You love your kids, and love can’t be bad, can it? Malthus, Schmalthus, right? There is no argument. There is only I want, so stop pretending we’re any different. Gran, Gloria, Melissa and her sisters, me, Kate—we all said be honest about what you want.
The unwilling led by the unqualified doing the unnecessary for the ungrateful. Family life in a sentence. If Gloria was the unqualified, that made me the ungrateful. Well, T-bone, we’re all waiting to see about that.
How was I supposed to go to school on Monday after reading Trevor’s rejection letter on Saturday? Do exponent homework? Watch cartoons? A man who had fled his homeland to avoid fighting in Vietnam had been as unwilling to raise children as he was to kill them. No half-assed poetry lesson in school would ever stick language to me like absent Trevor’s note had. It took me years to fully appreciate that the one poem I’ll never forget has an anonymous author, no fame sought or bestowed. From the start, Mom showed me it wasn’t Trevor’s phrase, just something else he borrowed. Then again, when the man was mostly just words to me, it was hard not to confuse father and author. That’s another family curse I haven’t stopped.
A kitchen table is as good a place as any to admit that half your genes come from an asshole. (Though with a laptop, you’re probably not reading this at a kitchen table.) Mom didn’t hear any shattering glass or slamming doors. No screaming. No crying. Eventually she came back with her own line ready. “That’s the note the man who called himself Trevor Reynolds left me one afternoon after we’d discovered I was pregnant with you. Abortion was still quite daunting then, legally, and it certainly wasn’t an option for me emotionally. I wanted you even when you were a possibility, even when he left, even when I realized who he was and wasn’t.”
It was hard to look her in the eye, but for several reasons I didn’t want to be looking down.
She pressed on. “You know the phrase nature versus nurture. Always remember that nature and nurture are like length and width: you can’t have one without the other. There’s no nature to see without some nurturing, and nothing to nurture without nature. Yes, you have his eyes, his cheekbones, probably his shoulders. But you’re you, not him. You are becoming you—by choice, by experience, through education. Both your nature and your nurture are very, very different from his.”
I didn’t last the weekend before I tore up that copy of Trevor’s note and scattered the pieces into the Detroit River. But of course Gloria had expected that. (Encouraged it?) The photocopy showed the edges of an original note I hadn’t yet seen. Eventually, I got it too.
FYI, manila envelopes are still called manila envelopes even
though most of them are no longer made in Manila. How did they earn a global reputation for strong paper? By making it from hemp.
33. A French Inhale
Back then, yes, I tried to prevent more life coming into my world: guilty as never directly charged. United I stood, divided I would fall. When a different life started shutting down, I tried to focus on Gran’s high score, not her end.
The length of Gran’s life changed the shape of mine. If she’d passed before my time, if her smuggling and war stories hadn’t come from her directly but had only been filtered through Gloria, if she’d been a photograph, not a retired smuggler on the other side of the room, would I have strolled downtown selling joints out of my teenaged pockets? Once I’d started, sure, slinging got its green thrill into me, but part of what first took me downtown were the countless hours I’d spent beside an old woman whose legs had once carried bottles over to the other side. And when it came time for her to cross the River Styx, I had comforts to offer. Tea from the tillerman.
Over the years, plenty of moms (especially mine) and a few dads have tried to tell me how much I could learn from the dependency of infants. Sure, but what about the dependency of the very old? What, we can only learn from smooth skin, not wrinkles? Your love list has a cut-off age? Try saying that in divorce court.
Gran broke her ankle during Mom’s MFA year and needed Elevator Antony for two months. We grew even closer. By the time Kate and I were waiting and weighting, Mom and I discovered that an even older Gran was spending nights on her couch rather than mounting the stairs. Even though her body was failing, at 103 her mind was still good. She had no trouble learning to use the cordless phones I’d begun sprinkling around her rooms. When I first proposed getting her a MedicAlert pendant, she’d said, “I’m no prize racehorse.” On Attempt No. 2, it was, “Big Brother’s not going to have the eye on me.” When she finally relented I was half-tempted to tell her I’d be paying for her transponder by sending off electro-magnetized bags of weed. The electronic bad met the electronic good. Robin Hood with shorter, whiter arrows in his quiver. But technology can only do so much for an ailing body, and eventually I had a bigger plan than just the pendant. I was lying to both of us by putting a phone in her hands if I wouldn’t be available at the other end. In the summer, Mom and I, even solo Kate, had been able to juggle regular visits. But when school resumed for Kate and Mom, we needed to change the game.
Gran had never asked anyone’s permission to start smuggling, hadn’t asked anyone else’s advice whether or not she should have sailed to France, should have gambled on baby G. Did I ask a non-asker if she’d consent to my moving her bedroom of nearly eight decades down into her wainscoted and unused dining room so she wouldn’t die on the stairs? She who lives by direct action dies by direct action. But I needed Gloria’s help for the switcheroo. One evening when I was sick of bickering with Kate, I swung by Mom’s. She made us tea.
As always, I thought I was being reasonable. “Look, this business with Gran and the stairs, it’s dangerous, it exhausts all of us, and it’s never, ever going to improve.”
“If you’re proposing putting her in a home, it’ll be over two dead bodies. At least one of us won’t go down without a fight.”
“Jesus, Mother. A home? What do you take me for?” I shook my head. “I want to move her down into the dining room. Clear out the table. Make that her bedroom.”
“What’s this, dying on the instalment plan?”
“The next time she’s got a doctor’s appointment or goes for her hair, you take her. I’ll handle the furniture.”
She poured more tea. “Careful with that table of hers. It’s worth more than your truck.”
“When did you work in the trades? I’ll wrap it in blankets. I’ll slide. I’ll lift.”
She nodded.
“And that’s not everything. I’d also like to hire a careworker. I can swing it or maybe you want to contribute.”
“Why, oh why, couldn’t you have stayed in school and gone without money for a few more years like a proper young person? You’ve been working for half a decade, I’ve been working for three, and you tell me I may contribute? A money bully’s still a bully.” She shook her head for a little pause then found something else to lob at me. “And what makes you think she’ll accept strangers into her home?”
Incentives, Mother, the right incentives. Dog Management Lesson No. 3: influence doesn’t consist of convincing another to do what you want. Influence involves showing another that the two of you share mutual interests, that in fact they want what you want.
The following week Mom took Gran to the hairdresser’s while Reese and I flew in to move the furniture. He didn’t make a single joke about old lady smells and spared me much eye contact. After our years together, he knew how to earn a tip.
Gloria plotted Gran’s return, suggesting the old girl might take it harder if both of us witnessed her first seeing her bed in her dining room, that prototype of a coffin. Mom had invented an excuse so I would be the one to pick Gran back up. I knew she’d be tired, which was both good and bad. The Gran I met at the hairdresser’s wasn’t so much Gran as a five-foot-two-inch need for a nap.
“We’ll get you home to bed.”
Beyond the closed dining-room doors, I’d left Voodoo in her back garden so she’d have something to look at other than her relocated bedroom furniture. So intent was she on a nap that she made no comment on the dining room’s closed pocket doors and simply headed to the stairs.
“Actually, Gran, I’ve moved your bed down here.” I slid open the doors. “Your garden’s beautiful from in here. Take a look.”
She remained immobile at the foot of the stairs, her eyes a little more rheumy but her jaw still as hard-edged as a tombstone.
“Look, Voodoo’s out there.”
All animals have flight distances. (You’ve read this far but are still keeping a wide flight distance by not hitting Send.) Species and individual determine how far an animal will tear off from a startling noise before glancing back at the possible threat. Surprise a fox, and you’ll see its face glancing back in seconds. Make a loud noise near a rabbit, and it will be a cannonball of blind fur until it reaches the next field. I stood there asking Gran to admit that her flight distance had shrunk from the Atlantic Ocean to straddling countries in the New World to just a few yards on one storey of a gorgeous house she’d no longer see two-thirds of. Her upstairs was becoming a ghost town. A cheval mirror and a sewing table forsaken unto dust. A balcony door unopened in years. The house’s best river view abandoned. To her I was the nursing home ambassador, the man come to shrink her whole life down to one closet, an undertaker with a tape measure up his sleeve. But she’d already abandoned most of those upstairs things anyway.
Being right in theory did little for the reproach of her doing and saying nothing. (Pattern. Pattern.) She stood there, affront perched on one shoulder, desperation on the other. On to Plan B then. “I also brought you some organic marijuana. In the little medical research that gets done, it’s the wonder drug. Arthritis, any pain, anxiety, muscle relaxation.”
Wait, sorry, are you on the Big Pharma boat to Cuba? Maybe you’re not pulling the oars, just enjoying the profiteering, lobotomizing ride. Fact: minimally processed plants still provide one-quarter of Western medicine. Fact: Westerners constitute 20 percent of the world’s population yet consume 80 percent of the world’s pain medication. The nineteenth-century English and American opium wars didn’t end, they just switched from soldiers to pharmaceutical reps. Given global demographics (i.e., the West’s fucking baby boomers), the World Health Organization details a looming global “pain crisis.” Demand for pain medication will far outstrip supply, fuel costs will be exponentially higher, and, sheep to the American shepherd that we are, weed will still be illegal. When a palliative plant comes from away, we call it medicine. When we grow one in our own backyard, it’s a crime.
Gran remained mute with indignation and reproach. Through the window, Vood gave me the head-tilting idiot stare. I crossed to Gran’s walnut bedside table to remove a pipe and matches. “This is some very pleasant weed, like a quilt of hugs. Top drawer here whenever you want it.”
Finally she shuffled to the bed and sat. Every moment she hadn’t spoken increased my fear that she’d rebuke me with something like, “That stuff’s for riff-raff.” Instead she held out her hand for the pipe and nodded at me to light her up. Before leaning towards the bowl she finally spoke. “So this is your deal, is it?”
My blue-green genie slid into another contested room.
“Just try it down here,” I coaxed. “Try it down here for a week.”
By the time I was ready to leave I thought she was already asleep until she opened her eyes and stopped grinning to speak. “For God’s sake, roll me some. If I’m going to smoke on my way out, I want a cigarette in my hand again. I haven’t smoked in half a century.”
Turns out this one-time recipient of a French letter could French-inhale like an Old World hooker. Normally I don’t sample during work hours, but the first time I handed Gran a pinner I had to follow her into the greenshine. Private, observable fact: the shit works. Her shoulders would visibly relax. Her appetite revived. For the first time in years, she’d ask me to put on records. Blossom Dearie. Sarah Vaughn. And she got chattier. “Next time, bring that girl of yours. She might as well have my cheval mirror.”
I still maintain that my care, not my wares, earned me the royal favour (and curse) she bestowed a few weeks later.
34. Speered
There’s that line in Raging Bull, the obsession mantra. “Weight, weight, weight, weight.” When he was boxing, it was all anyone ever asked about, all he thought about, the focus of his days. For me it was risk. Risk, risk, risk, risk, risk. The cops. Kate. Gloria. Other criminals. For civilians, the police offer more than protection. They also subcontract your risk, shoulder some of your worries. Sure, you generally don’t fret about how many times you can tase an airplane traveller before he dies, but you know what I mean. Cops get to speed on duty and off, and civilians don’t have to fight very much. On my side, we don’t get these scapegoats, the fall guys in blue, the cannon fodder with nightsticks.
Keeping Things Whole Page 18