by Robin Greene
I repeat the poem to myself now, at the kitchen table:
Hating the ways of me,
breeding disease in the seas of sorrow,
I turn and lines of destruction
appear on my face—
a place of hate,
a place of hate.
Not really a poem, I think. More a mantra of self-loathing. Yet as I speak it aloud, it surprises me. The words feel so good and right that I repeat them again and again.
three
By afternoon, it’s now clear that I’ve wasted half the day and haven’t written anything useable. Today, I decide, will be about something else. Sun pours in from the blind I opened earlier. I rise from the kitchen table, wash out my coffee cup, and think about which of my summer projects I’ll tackle.
Organizing. I’ll turn my attention there—a closet, a drawer—and that might jumpstart my writing and school work. Order the external world, and the internal one will follow.
Before I begin, I go upstairs to brush my teeth and make the bed. But with the covers in disarray, especially on Nick’s side of the bed, I stop.
I’m back in Queens again, in bed, and holding my old heavy pink winter quilt. Shame again washes over me. Then, I’m here, standing by the bed in Fayetteville, on this summer morning, touching the corner of the white top sheet, matching it to the thin summer quilt so as to make up the bed.
As a young girl, I had a ritual I’d follow. First, I’d pull the blanket out from beneath the mattress—all sides. Then, I’d climb onto my bed, gently slip under the covers. Next, I’d gather the ends up to tuck them around my body—lifting my right and my left side, pulling the blanket in tightly so that I was wrapped mummy-like, the blanket becoming my cocoon, my sarcophagus.
I’m back in my Queens apartment. I’m four years old. In two years’ time, we will move to our house in South Shelburne, but right now, that neighborhood hasn’t been created yet. When I am six, my mother, Dennis, and I will take weekly trips every Saturday morning with my Aunt Em and cousins Ellen and Sheryl from Queens to Long Island to watch our houses and the neighborhood go up in the tidal wetlands. My Aunt, Uncle, and cousins live in the apartment just below ours. They are my favorite relatives. Happily, when we move, they too will move into the same new neighborhood.
But now that future doesn’t exist for me. I’ve just gotten into bed for the night. As I put my head down to complete my cocoon—the only part of me that won’t be encased in blanket—something sharp stabs me in the neck. Something inside my pillowcase, on top of my pillow. I have to disturb my cocoon to investigate, removing my arms, turning my body over to find the problem. “Oh,” I say aloud. There’s a wire coat-hanger inside.
Dennis is still up, watching TV in the living room. His bedtime is an hour later than mine. I can hear the low voices from the set, rhythmic and indistinct.
This coat hanger, I quickly understand, is part of my torture. Because torture, I’ve realized, often masquerades as a joke.
It’s summer, still light outside, still light in the bedroom. Slowly, I remove the black wire hanger from my pillowcase. It’s the kind from the dry cleaners. Now, I will need to completely disrupt my cocoon and get out of bed—which I do. I take the hanger and place it in the closet, near the neat line of my jumpers, shirts, skirts, dresses, all arranged by color and season—summer, fall, winter, spring.
The hanger is my reminder that I’m stuck in my brother’s universe and must observe his laws. If I don’t smile at him during dinner, I’ll be punished. If I don’t say “please” before I ask Dennis for something, I might be smacked “accidentally on purpose” or hit or tripped when I’m walking. Beneath the surfaces of our family life, there are wild animals and stinging insects. There are rules, customs, tripwires, and minefields. I can be hurt or damaged, and no one can keep me safe.
k
Up now, bed made, memory and its accompanying madness gone, I’m attacking the hall closet, which is currently a mess. Random coats and jackets are hung up on hooks and hangers; some have slipped to the floor. There are two vacuum cleaners stuck there—one working, one not, and a couple of old tennis rackets. On the closet’s only shelf, above the hangers, there’s a cardboard box of winter hats, gloves, scarves, other winter items.
The box I begin with has Ajax written on its side. A decorative box would look better, I think, but I probably won’t buy one. I carry the box to the kitchen table.
Inside is the history of our family winters. Children’s mittens, woolen scarves, zip-off hoods from jackets we no longer own. A knitted Santa Claus hat—a Christmas gift, I’m thinking—probably belonging to our older son, Cal. Then I find a single black leather glove with a small hole in one fingertip. I try it on. When my parents moved from South Shelburne to Florida, my mom gave me these gloves and a matching scarf.
I stop to think of that move. My mother hated Florida. She loved New York City, never wanted to live anywhere else. It was my father’s idea to relocate in Florida when he closed his business. So, they did. Although my mom was still working as a psychotherapist, she gave up her job, and they sold the house.
They left New York in the fall of the 1987. Nick and I were attending graduate school. Cal was six, and we lived in a small house in Endicott, New York. Nick had decided to finish his PhD in English; I had dropped out of the program in favor of doing an MFA in Writing, a degree that had been suggested by my dean at Empire State College, where I was teaching.
Shame rises again, and I remove the glove. I shouldn’t have dropped out the PhD program. I toss the glove into one of the three piles I’m making on the kitchen table—stuff to be trashed, stuff to keep, stuff to be donated.
After almost an hour, the box is empty, and my piles are complete. I put the throwaway pile in a paper Trader Joe’s bag, the giveaway pile in small box marked “Goodwill” I’ve found in the garage, and the keeper-pile I return to the box, which I carry to the closet and re-shelve.
But now my organizing energy is gone. I pull out my mother’s glove from the throwaway bag and take it back to the kitchen table, holding it like a talisman or a clue.
k
My mother slaps my face. I’ve just gotten off the school bus on a rainy afternoon. I don’t have an umbrella or galoshes, and the rain is coming down hard. I spot a large puddle just feet away from where the bus has let me off. I jump into it. I turn around, jump into it again and again. Then, gathering my wits, I realize that I’m now sopping wet and my socks are soggy, squishy. I dash home, which is close, just across the street, bound up the many brick steps to our front door.
And there’s my mom, waiting outside on the front landing. She’s been observing my antics. But I’m feeling good, empowered by my puddle-jumping, ready to change into dry clothing, eat an after-school snack.
Slap. I get it right across the face. Sharp. On the landing outside the front door.
Quickly, I check to see if anybody has seen. But no one has.
My cheek burns with the sting of her dry hand against my damp face. We go into the hallway. My mother kneels to untie the double knots on my wet shoes.
“Sorry,” I say.
“Are you stupid?” she asks.
Tears well up, slide down my cheeks. Huge tears, big as raindrops. I don’t sob, but my breath is tight. “Sorry,” I say again, pulling off my jacket, leaving it on the floor mat by the door, where unknotted now, I slip off my soggy shoes, and run to my bedroom, leaving my mother kneeling there, my wet things littered around her.
Later, we eat dinner as a family. My father is home early. He and his parents own a furniture store on Queens Boulevard, and it stays open long hours. Most days, my dad comes home late.
Tonight, he’s home for dinner, and we’re having meatloaf, green salad, and oven fries. Salad is served first. We eat at the kitchen table, in an alcove by the bay window, overlooking Meadowbrook Pond.
“How was school?” my father asks.
Dennis talks about having baseball practice in the gym be
cause of the rain. He pitches for the high school team. He’s in tenth grade, wants to play ball in college, perhaps beyond.
I mention an essay about dragonflies that I wrote in English class. Last summer in camp, I made a hobby of catching and releasing them when we canoed on the lake.
Neither my mom nor I mention my puddle-jumping or her slapping me. We discuss the weather, however, and how it’s supposed to be a nice day tomorrow—if the weatherman is right for a change. “Good,” my father says. “We could use a little foot traffic at the store.”
Dennis looks at me. Somehow, he knows that I got slapped, that I cried in my room, that I took off all my wet clothes, dumped them into our hamper in the hall bathroom. He winks at me, and dutifully, I smile.
All this memory I’ve gotten from my mom’s glove.
I take the Trader Joe bag out to the backyard, drop it in trash. The Goodwill box I bring out to the garage, leaving it on an old chair for another day.
I’m done. And too weary to do much else.
four
Early morning, Sunday. My first full day without Nick. I go downstairs to get Jake his breakfast of kibble, a half slice of bread, and low-fat milk. I make coffee, measuring out the grounds, then pouring the boiling water methodically over them.
Quiet. I open the living room blinds to a gray, empty street, nothing moving outside. Then, coffee mug in hand, I ascend the stairs, old Jake behind me, so that I can work.
I pull out the notes for my novel, but I’m not inspired. Again, I give myself permission to write absolutely anything. Free associate, see what comes up. As the Buddhists say, turn off my judging mind.
When I teach creative writing, I tell my students that they should write their passions. If the writer doesn’t care, the reader won’t. I ask them to open themselves, to be present, discover their hearts, feel everything, judge nothing. No taboos.
I rise from my laptop to stroke Jake, already asleep on my study futon. I think back to when we adopted him. He was about eighteen months old. Will, then around eleven, found him on a Golden Retriever rescue site. We traveled three hours to Charlotte to meet him and his foster family and fell in love. Now he has benign tumors all over his body. A lumpy old dog. I pet his head; Jake wags his tail. Thump, thump against the cushion.
My cell phone rings, and I think about not taking the call. But when I see it’s Mom, I answer, sitting down now on my desk chair.
“Dennis has to have surgery,” my mother launches in. But the connection isn’t good. Her voice crackles, and I lose her next few words. I hear road noise, a truck, a car horn. She’s probably walked out of the apartment.
“What happened?” I stare at the Word screen, a rectangle of white pixels.
“They found a small mass in his groin, below his stomach. They’ve got to go in. His doctor called yesterday, Saturday afternoon, after he received the test results.”
“What about the chemo?”
“On hold,” she says. If this conversation had happened twenty years ago, I’d hear her drag on a cigarette. But she finally gave them up at sixty-two, after her own cancer scare.
I think of her leather glove with its hole in the finger. The smell of it, the smell of my mother—hair spray, cologne, cigarettes.
“When?” I ask. Jake slowly gets off the couch, heads to the bathroom, where he likes to drink water from the toilet bowl. In moments, I hear his lapping.
“Thursday. Pre-op on Wednesday, bloodwork on Monday or Tuesday, I think. Not sure. Dennis took the call, and I might not be remembering right.” I hear her sigh. A truck rattles in the Florida distance. A moving truck, I imagine, and we’re silent for a moment until it passes. I invent a Hispanic couple sitting in the front seat. They’re in their late twenties, a bit tired, but happy to be leaving their rental apartment and moving into their first house. The woman is pregnant; she wipes her sweaty brow, smiles.
“Rae. You still there? Mom asks.
“Of course,” I answer. “Keep me posted about the surgery.” Then I add, “How are you doing? How are you holding up?”
“Fine. You know. It’s harder on Hannah because she’s young.” Pause, more traffic, then, “I’ve got to go. Wanted to let you know. I’ll call again soon. Love you.”
“Okay. Love you, too, Mom. Remember, call.”
“Of course.” Click.
I hang up and think of Hannah, Dennis’s younger daughter, whom I’ve never met. She must be twelve or thirteen by now. I’ve heard she’s smart, does well in school, but I don’t know much about her.
It’s light now but overcast: a steel-colored sky with the promise of rain. In front of me, the computer screen beckons, and I find myself quickly back at work, typing:
Mary Jo left the room after the argument. Sal, who’d become violent, had slammed his fist through the sheetrock wall by the door where she’d stood. He didn’t hit her. He never hit her, just broke furniture, damaged walls, shattered Mary Jo’s best china, the set her grandmother had given her as a wedding present.
But then I stop. My well-planned novel dissolves. I have no energy for Mary Jo. She was going to work today at the middle school cafeteria, planning to confide in a female co-worker. Eventually, she will leave her abusive husband, find love elsewhere. But I no longer like her nor feel sympathy for her rotten marriage.
What was I thinking? How can I write this story? How can I create this character and write about her life? I delete a sentence, add another. But it’s no good. My words stare back at me, stale, dull, mocking, inauthentic. I delete all that I’ve written.
I get up to pace. Then sit down again and write about my mother. I see her, smell her hair. I think about putting my hand in her glove, then notice it’s with me, on my desk. I must have carried it upstairs.
When I return to the keyboard, I’m typing a description of her. She’s in her thirties. Her dyed black hair is teased away from her face. It’s stiff with hairspray, and I’m not allowed to touch it. She stands in black leather high-heels and wears a well-coordinated outfit: black slacks, a lavender blouse, purple earrings in the shape of small flowers.
Now, I imagine my mother is with me in my study. Her heels tap against the hardwood floor as she crosses the room to pet Jake, who wags his tail at her. She’s no longer in her thirties, but ageless—she’s all women, and the woman I can never be.
“Mom,” I say. But she won’t look at me. So, I turn to the keyboard and type her name: Edna Bloom.
A sentence, then two. A paragraph, a page. Words fly from my fingers. I tell my mother to talk to me. She does. I ask her what went wrong, and she begins to tell me.
five
It’s Monday. I’ve just spent about two hours on the computer. I’m done. Between Sunday and today, I’ve written about five double-spaced pages, but I can’t or don’t want to look at them.
Late morning now. I shut down the laptop, walk to the bedroom. When I turn on NPR, Diane Rehm’s halting voice is welcoming guests to speak about Obamacare.
I’m thinking I’ll go to school, check in with Amanda and other staff, then go to the campus gym to work out. So, I open my closet, take out my yoga pants and a tee-shirt, strip off my bathrobe, nightgown. Naked now, I have the urge to look at myself.
In the bathroom, I open the small linen closet, with its full-length mirror on the inside door, stand back to gain perspective.
A woman of fifty-eight—thin, not too out of shape—greets me. But everything’s relaxed: skin, breasts, butt. My face is a loose net of wrinkles. I breathe, soften my focus. I turn to the right, to the left. Hold up my breasts to see if that helps.
Now, a memory. I’m fifteen; it’s my first time—with Kevin Last. And even back then I recognized the irony of his name. For a quick moment, I’m inclined to return to the computer to write, to describe how I lost my virginity with him one summer afternoon during that important, memorable year of 1969.
Childbirth, too. I want to write about that. I look at my round belly. Before kids, it was flat. My breasts,
how I nursed each of my sons for almost two years. I don’t regret it. Nursing offered me calmness, connection with my body. Then, I look at my scar, stitched like an enormous, deformed centipede, across my right rib cage.
Scars are poems, language made flesh, I think. My scar has been with me almost my entire life. A souvenir of the surgery that saved me. A paradox, question, reminder.
k
It’s 1957. My mother kneels on the floor, pats the warm towel covering me. We’re the same height now, her loving face next to mine.
She hugs me. I feel malleable, my body yielding in her arms. When she removes the towel, I’m still warm. First, she helps me into my underpants. One foot lifted, the other…then my undershirt.
“Hands up,” she says. Up my arms go.
“Beautiful,” she says, kissing my scar. Her soft, warm lips magical.
Now I’ve forgotten her yelling, how she called me stupid when I spilled my milk on the shaky kitchen table. How her smacks and slaps stung my face, wet from tears.
“No, mommy!” I’d cried. “Don’t hit me…”
But that was earlier, when I woke her up with the TV’s volume up too high. Dennis and I had been fighting about what to watch: The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show or the cartoons with the classical music that I liked so much.
“Sweet girl,” Mom is saying. And before pulling my white undershirt completely down, she kisses my scar again.
k
I was born with pyloric stenosis, a growth in the pyloric valve that blocks the passage of food to the intestines. Without surgery, babies with this medical problem die. The most significant symptom is projectile vomiting. The problem most often occurs in firstborn male babies. Also, there is a genetic predisposition for this condition, and babies of Jewish ancestry are more likely to have pyloric stenosis. It’s rare in female infants and occurs in only about 2.4 out of 1,000 births.