by Robin Greene
Jake, on the couch now, lifts his head to see if I’m leaving. Agency—I’ll go with that.
I sit back down at my desk and write all afternoon.
nineteen
Later, toward evening, after walking and feeding Jake, I retreat to the sunroom to read, relax, perhaps even to nap. I have just shut my eyes when my cell phone rings. It’s still light out, and very quickly, I remember that Anna Karenina and my reading glasses are beside me. It’s very hot here, I think, as I find my book, my glasses, put them safely on the coffee table, and reach for the phone—mom appearing on the screen.
“Hi,” I say—the greeting seems too informal, even gruff. Then there’s a pause and a sigh on the other end. “Are you all right?” I ask, now sitting up and quickly deciding to go inside for the air conditioning.
“No,” my mother says. “I’m not. Do you have a few minutes?”
I’m in the living room now. Jake is sleeping on a small area rug by the front window, where the blinds have been pulled up so that he can enjoy the comings and goings on the street. I’m walking around, somewhat aimlessly. “Sure. What’s up?” I ask.
“Lydia’s car isn’t working. The engine seized, and it’s too expensive to fix. We’re down to Julia’s car, and she’s staying mostly at Terrell’s house.” Terrell, I quickly recall, is Julia’s boyfriend. He’s Jamaican, and the family lives in a large house. Terrell has a younger brother who’s still in high school, but Terrell just graduated from community college and is becoming a licensed plumber. Julia works as a pharmacy technician and is planning to go back to college to study nursing when she gets enough money put aside for tuition. They’re thinking of getting married.
“Can’t Lydia buy another car, Mom?”
“No, she can’t afford it. She’s still making payments on the car that died.” My mother sighs deeply, pauses again.
I also pause. I know what’s coming.
“I hate to ask you again.” My mother’s voice is hard, resolute. “But I need to borrow a few hundred until we get on our feet again. We managed to buy groceries, pay the light bill, but now’s there’s this stupid car, and our rent is due. Overdue. Lydia sunk some money into a new timing belt because the mechanic thought that was the problem. But he took her money, and the car’s not fixed. She’s a fool. You know that. She was supposed to pay the rent with that money.”
“How’s Dennis doing?” I ask. I’ve walked upstairs, turned on my laptop, and now I’m thinking I’ll write a bit before making dinner. Then I remember that I need to go to the grocery store to pick up bread, coffee, and half-and-half. I turn off the computer, open my bedroom closet and slip on my black Birkenstocks.
“Not well. He’s tired all the time and in pain.” Then another pause. “Rae, I have no one else to ask.”
I know this, of course. She’s borrowed money from all our relatives to pay Dennis’s gambling debts, and, for the most part, she’s never paid them back either. “Mom, I can’t…” I begin.
“Just three hundred? I’ll pay you back when I get my Social Security check. I promise. I don’t know what we’re going to do.” I hear my mom’s desperation.
“Mom, I can’t. I don’t have the money.” Don’t have is so much easier than won’t give.
“Can’t you borrow against a credit card? Get a cash advance?”
“No,” I say. I’m sitting on the bed, my heart pumping so hard that I can feel it in my chest. There’s something there resisting, resistant. “Nick and I don’t do that. I can’t use my credit card. Mom, don’t ask me to do that.” It’s the same conversation we’ve had before.
“Okay, okay.” My mom says, fed up with me. “I just don’t know what we’re going to do. We can’t be homeless. Dennis is too sick.”
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I say. I’ve walked down the stairs and now sit on the bottom step. Jake has followed me, his companionship steady and welcome.
“All right. I’ve got to go, Rae. Love you.”
“Love you, too, Mom. Sorry.”
I sit there for a few minutes, my heart calm again, trying to feel something—guilt, sadness, anger, exhaustion. I can’t tell. I certainly don’t feel good. But then again, if I gave her the money, I wouldn’t feel good either. I just gave her money, I tell myself. I can’t keep giving her more. There’s a point at which I feel taken advantage of, abused.
Abused. I sit with the word for a moment. Too harsh? Then I think, abused by whom? Not my mom, really. Though I feel bad for her. And angry.
It’s Dennis. Lurking ghost-like behind the scenes. A memory stirs, a shadow of a memory that fades before I can grasp it.
Regardless of what Mom says, the mess they’re in is Dennis’s fault. He’s stolen all their money, and even now he’s probably gambling somehow—phoning in bets—even sick as he is. But then I wonder, Where’s my compassion? For Dennis? My mom? For my sister-in-law and nieces? If I can alleviate some of their suffering—whatever the cause—shouldn’t I?
“No,” I say to Jake, and decide to go back into the sunroom, lie down, calm down. Jake follows me.
Groceries can wait. I slip off my Birks and collapse on the sunroom couch. The heat here is intense. Closing my eyes, I reflect on the Buddhist term “idiot compassion”—used to describe, among many things, those unskillful gifts that enable the addict or offer misguided generosity.
I think about money and what it represents—love, approval, attention, support. I remember back to times when Nick and I needed financial help—when we were first married during a major recession and were desperately broke, unable to find jobs. And again, when we were pregnant with Cal, then poor graduate students—and my parents told us that they couldn’t afford financially to help us. Yet they’d managed to help Dennis, always the more needy “child.” But wasn’t I as deserving? Aimed toward a professional career? Working hard in graduate school? Struggling to keep old cars running, to be good parents, to get ahead? But Dennis was struggling, too, with his compulsive gambling and lying. He, too, was worthy of help, though of another kind. Giving him money and allowing him to steal were never good ideas.
Nonetheless, I feel guilty. In the sunroom now, I lie on the couch and breathe, concentrating on the heat and the breath through the mid-channel of my body, my chakras. I think of the word aligned—aligning the breath, the body, our energy, ourselves. Giving money to my mother is giving money to my brother, enabling him as my mom did. And my dad, reluctantly, when he was alive. He couldn’t talk to my mother about Dennis’s gambling or thieving. She wouldn’t hear it, and he knew that she wouldn’t or couldn’t refuse my brother anything. After my dad died, my mother continued on her own to enable Dennis—even more so, without my dad’s silent disapproval to hold her back.
I’ve lost track of time, and that, I tell myself, is okay, what summer is about. The evening sun is low, and I can’t stop feeling bad about saying no to my mom. How can I, a daughter, refuse my desperate mother? How can I live with myself, knowing that she’s suffering?
I close my eyes, reflecting on my middle-class childhood. We always had money. Every season, I was allowed to purchase new clothes; there were my summer camps, guitar lessons, trips to the city. I enjoyed a childhood of plenty. Don’t I owe her something for that? I blink open my eyes, stare out into the backyard, where a squirrel runs gracefully across the top of our privacy fence. What balance, I think.
When my parents first moved to Florida to retire, they had a million dollars in savings. Some of it was the profit they made from selling the South Shelburne house; some of it was my paternal grandfather’s legacy. My grandfather, a notorious tightwad, had amassed a small fortune by investing in blue-chip stocks during the Depression, and he’d left most, though not all, to his only child, my dad. Back then, a million dollars was a lot of money. Much of it was well-invested and earning steady interest, which generated a decent, albeit modest, income, but one that along with income from my mom’s therapy practice and my dad’s Social Security check, offered more than enough mon
ey for my parents to live on comfortably. Where did it all go? Bad business decisions. Bad decisions that repeatedly linked their lives with Dennis’s gambling problems. Denial masked as optimism.
And, of course, there was the time that Dennis had forged my father’s signature to take $50,000 in cash from an IRA. And the time that Dennis had been accepted into a Physician’s Assistant program at Nova University but ended up dropping out. By lying that he was still enrolled, however, he’d been able to steal the student loan money that should have paid for his tuition. He gambled away all that money, to the tune of over $100,000, then proceeded to forge checks from our mother’s checking account. My mother and father must have known. My mother, in charge of family finances, must have noticed that large amounts of money went missing from her accounts.
That said, Nick and I had often lent my parents money over the years. Small amounts—$500 to $1,500—and we were sometimes paid back, sometimes not. At times, we’d insist that the money was a gift; at other times, we’d tell them it was a loan when we really needed the money returned. Of course, there was the $10,00 loan that wasn’t all paid back. But even smaller loans were never repaid on time nor repaid freely; I’d always have to ask or plead.
Often, I’d catch my mother in a lie. She’d say anything to get the money she needed. Although she would never tell me that Dennis’s gambling was the real cause of her desperation, Nick and I knew. Once she told me that she had been the victim of a scam—she knew better and was deeply embarrassed, she admitted. But the upshot was that she needed $1,500 to pay the mortgage. Another time she told me—and this happened later when my dad was in decline—that she needed money to pay for an uninsured medical procedure for him. When I offered to make payment directly to the hospital, she said, no, that she wanted the money so that she could pay the bill herself.
“Don’t you trust me? she asked
“No, Mom. I don’t,” I’d said, and she’d hung up. We didn’t speak for months.
k
Having fallen asleep, I awake suddenly to Jake’s pawing at the sunroom door, wanting to return to the living room. It’s steaming out here; I’m sweating intensely—a hot flash, I think. I feel drugged, sluggish, stupid from heat, sleep, worry. But I struggle awake, ready to get out, to walk Jake yet another time before going to the grocery store, then relaxing for the evening. I’m in no mood to write now. Only to forget.
twenty
“I made you do it,” the boy on the low tree branch says. I see the ball thrown as the two boys play catch. “I made you do it,” and I think of the “it” as a broad pronoun, without clear reference. I’m thinking again of free will. I’m thinking of the crazy way that our lives make sense and then don’t. I see myself, a young girl eating Italian Ice by the playground and the young mother working at midnight on a graduate paper at my kitchen table, thinking that I can’t go on. Cal had chronic ear infections, and I had a fifteen-page paper due each of the last six weeks of my first semester. What was the force that pushed me to complete the paper, the semester, the degree? What is the thread that connects the young girl to the current me?
After a poor night’s sleep, I’m not doing well this morning. I’ve fed the dog, made coffee, and I’m sitting in my study, at the computer, trying to work on my book. It’s Monday, and the house feels empty.
Nothing comes. No words, no ideas, no thoughts.
I look out the window, scan the sky, which appears bright and relentless, summer’s oppressive light offering no refuge. Jake sleeps on the rug. And that inspires me, all of a sudden, to get back into bed, read, and nap. Why not? I turn off the computer.
In my bedroom, I yank off my tee-shirt and sweat pants—writing clothes—then lift the corner of the summer quilt.
k
I’m back in school, 1968. And as I see my young teenage self, walking down the hallway where the English classes are taught, I realize that I’m half asleep, caught in a waking dream. I’m dressed in a short blue pleated skirt, a ribbed black sweater, color-coordinated argyle knee socks with saddle shoes. As I walk into a classroom, I spot a large black and white poster of Allen Ginsberg at the back of the room. He’s wearing a sandwich board sign that reads “Pot is fun.” The poster strikes me as odd but interesting.
Then, I’m at home in South Shelburne, in my bedroom—wearing a work-shirt, low-rise bell-bottom jeans, and sandals—sitting at my desk, trying to write poetry at my typewriter as I listen to the Rolling Stones’ “Get Off of My Cloud.” I tell myself in the dream to focus on Wayne, and my dream now shifts to include him. He’s a new friend this year. With his encouragement, I’m becoming more intellectual and radical.
Wayne is older by a couple of years, and he attends Stuyvesant High School, known at Sty. The school, located in Manhattan, is free but open only to exceptionally smart city kids. How Wayne qualified, I don’t know.
Wayne comes from a strange family. His dad is about ninety years old. Once, he’d been a chemist and had actually “discovered” instant coffee during World War I—there was a government-issued plaque in his office, acknowledging his “Contributions to the cause of America’s Freedom.” The family lived in an old house in Lawrence, the wealthiest of the “Five Towns,” in the area we both lived—though the name was anachronistic because even then there were more than five towns.
I first met Wayne through a friend at a party, and we immediately began discussing Freud. I insisted that Freud was phallocentric and that as a female I resented his idea of penis envy, though girls and women, I added, might want the power that a penis represents.
Before long, Wayne and I were reading books together and having regular discussions. Wayne introduced me to Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization and Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message. We discussed Walden, which I’d read earlier. Thoreau had offered me the possibility of a personal freedom unhooked from society’s conventions. I found Thoreau’s ideas about nonconformity appealing, and I loved his nonmaterialistic views. Someday, I had decided, I’d live away from others, in my own Walden, to develop a deeper understanding of myself before committing to long-term relationship with friends or lovers. Friendships—I now believed, after Nancy, Honey, Leslie, and Jane had dropped me—were over-rated.
k
I’m wide awake. I’m sitting up in bed and willing to give myself over to my lucid dream, which is now a memory.
I’d slammed into adolescence in eighth grade and developed a perverse attitude, in-sync with my generation’s counter-culture notions of remaking the world into a kinder, more loving place.
As I walked the halls of Lawrence Junior High that year, moving silently with my classmates, always staying to the right side of the hallway—the rule back then—I’d looked at all the girls with their eye makeup, pretty outfits, and decided to quit modeling completely—a kind of selling of the self, I thought.
When I’d entered junior high to begin seventh grade, my grades had been excellent. I’d placed into all the “smart” classes. By mid-fall of eighth grade, however, I was becoming a more irreverent version of my smart, seventh-grade self. By the spring of that year, I’d become an “out-there” hippy chick, questioning everything—myself, the system that imposed its idiosyncratic, irrational rules, my parents, and the purpose of life. Wayne had played a part in that transformation.
Sitting in bed, I see him: long mousy brown hair tied back in a messy ponytail, big nose, thick lips, thick-set body, and rather short. He approaches me, and I hear his voice again. He’s telling me to be careful. “About what?” I ask, but his image fades.
k
When Cal calls, I’m still in bed, thinking about my time at Lawrence Junior High. I’m just settling into my seat at the back of Mr. Lamb’s eighth grade Honors English class when my cell phone jolts me back to Monday, today. Cal, an early riser, often calls when he’s out buying fresh bagels and cream cheese at Finagle Bagel, just a few blocks away from his apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“Did I wake you?” C
al asks. There’s a lot of background noise, and I think he’s probably walking on a busy street.
“Sort of, not really. I was awake but still in bed. How are you? How was your week?”
“Did Dad get to New York okay? Cal asks. “And where’s his retreat exactly? North of Binghamton?” I hear wind blow through his cell phone.
“Not really sure, but I think it’s more toward the eastern part of the state, nearer Vermont, and very north, near Canada. Anyway, yes, he’s there and checking in with me about every day. He’s doing fine, getting into the swing of things.”
Cal tells me that he was in Chicago last week for a big technology conference and that he arrived home late yesterday, Sunday night. He has the day off, so Jess took the day off as well. Nowadays, he works for an IBM partner company, but he worked for IBM for about five years after graduate school.
“How’s Jess?” I ask. She was pregnant in the spring and then miscarried. “Good,” Cal says. “She taking a course, Bio-statistics, at night at BU, and now she thinks she’ll apply for the Masters of Public Health.” I hear a car door slam, and soon I hear voices in the background.
“Where are you?” I ask.
“At the grocery story now. Gonna pick up coffee. Then head to the bagel store. I think Jess and I are going out toward Walden Pond for the day.” I hear Cal talk to someone, a clerk maybe, and there’s crowd noise.
“Well, you sound busy. I should let you go.”
“Are you okay, Mom?”
“Yeah. Of course. Why?”
“I don’t know. You seemed weird for a minute. You sure?”
I breathe deeply, realize Cal is right. I’m upset. “I just need to wake up,” I say. “I love you. Give my love to Jess.”
“Okay. She was asleep when I left. We’ll talk again soon. I’m going to be around Boston this week. Maybe you can catch up with Jess next time. Just wanted to check in.”
“Yes,” I say. “That would be good. Give her my love. And I love you.”