by Robin Greene
A short time after my dad was diagnosed, his doctor heard that Brookhaven had recently used its linear accelerator, an atom-smasher that involved a mile-plus circular track that exploded apart atoms, to generate a high-powered, intensely focused beam of radiation that could shrink tumors. The doctor recommended my dad for an experimental clinical trial program specifically designed to treat acromegaly patients. My dad applied, was accepted, and while the scientists in their preliminary examinations of my dad determined that he had not experienced cognitive impairment due to his earlier wide-spread radiation treatment, my dad, nevertheless, felt that his memory had been compromised.
When I first learned about my dad’s medical condition, my mother had just picked me up at Kennedy Airport, after my flight home from college for Thanksgiving break. My mom explained how my dad had been diagnosed, about the old radiation treatment, and about the new treatment he’d just started. We sat together in her old Chevy Malibu, cruising down Sunrise Highway, in mid-afternoon, the road pretty much open.
“He’s got six treatments spread out over six weeks,” my mom said.
“Then?” I asked.
“It’s all experimental, so we don’t know. But the doctors’ best guess is that after these linear accelerator treatments, he’ll be able to live normally.” Even though it was late November, my mom had her window partly open as she smoked a cigarette, flicking the ash outside.
“Is he damaged?” I had my knapsack, the only luggage I’d brought, on my lap. I unbuttoned my sheepskin coat, shifted my gaze downward to make sure I’d remembered Crime and Punishment, which I needed to read over break.
“When you see him, you tell me,” she said. Soon we pulled into the driveway.
k
I sit now in the hot car; the a/c won’t really work until the car moves. “Dad,” I call out like I might have as a child. “I love you.”
Jake pants, drools, so I crank up the engine, feel the a/c kick in, and drive in circles around the empty parking lot, putting Ruby in gear, then in neutral, seeing how long I can coast, how many circles I can make before having to step on the gas pedal. After a few circles, I take off for home.
Opening the front door, I walk with Jake into the lovely cool air, collapsing onto the living room couch, arranging the throw pillows comfortably behind my head. I’m not sure if it’s a headache coming on or the effect of the heat, but I’m very tired.
Now inside, the air has almost no humidity, a welcome change from the intense thick afternoon air outside. Jake pants on the front rug by the window, looking drowsy, ready for a nap.
I think that perhaps I’m just lonely. If Nick doesn’t call, it will be two days since we last spoke. I close my eyes, continue thinking about my dad.
Yes, I definitely saw changes in him on that trip home. His face seemed gaunt, but his high cheekbones looked thick, almost ape-like. At some point, I picked up my guitar—to do a duet like we used to—and tried “More,” one of his favorite songs, which started with a G chord. But the smooth tone and impressive range of his voice were gone. It hurt me to hear him struggle, clearing his throat as he tried to hit the high notes. We sat in the kitchen, where the ceramic tiles offered the potential for lovely sound, but never made it through the first verse. It was the last time we sang together.
That trip home marked the beginning of the end of my relationship with my dad. For as he started to experience his losses—which continued over two decades—my father became oddly detached—from me and from everyone.
Once, on a weekend trip home from the University of Bridgeport, where I finally received my undergraduate degree, he sat with me on a Saturday morning at the kitchen table, over bagels and coffee cake, and told me he couldn’t understand me anymore. With tears in his eyes, he rose from his seat to hug me. I could smell his aftershave, see the thatch of dark hair in his right ear, hear his constrained breathing. “I love you,” he whispered, and I hugged him, feeling our lost connection.
On the couch, I say, “Goodbye, Dad,” and again, “I love you,” as tears come—fast, faster, until I’m sobbing. I remove an old tissue from my pocket, blow my nose. But as I sit up, a wave of deep grief knocks me back.
My dad’s face appears again, this time as a memory—his handsome, young face, the one I’ve really only known through photographs. On the magnetic board in my study, I have an old black and white photo of him, half-smiling, his young body forward-leaning, impatient. My mother sits behind him on a park bench. Perhaps they’re on the Brooklyn College campus or maybe in Prospect Park. Their adult lives are spread invisibly before them, the molecules of their future already coalescing.
Then I remember back to a dinner Nick and I had with my parents in the South Shelburne house. We were newly married, and Nick made a comment about needing to protect his inner life.
“What’s an inner life?” My dad wanted to know. Nick thought he was making a joke, turned to me to laugh. But I wasn’t smiling and had to explain the concept to my dad, who replied quite matter-of-factly that he didn’t think he’d ever had one.
twenty-three
How did I get here? To this emotional place? To Fayetteville? To motherhood? To this book? Why did I marry? Who are my children, now grown men? And my dying brother? Mother? Father?
Thought loops—carrying me in circles. I can’t stop.
I’m in bed, early morning, drifting into a dream in which I’m in my study, but there’s no exit in the room. Bookshelves line all the walls, and there’s no door. Random books lie open on the floor. I try to skim their pages, thinking clues to my escape can be found in them. I’m wild, frantic. Then I read: Karma lives on Flatbush Avenue. Her shoulders are hunched, and she walks with Zen, her golden retriever, on a retractable leash. Is this woman me?
“No,” she says, trying to become real, to emerge from the book, to stand beside me.
I say to her, “You’re just psychic trash. Go back to the page.”
Then she speaks, as if reciting an incantation, “Ghosts and dandelions, cotton lace and dirty maps with missing continents. Oxen and mountain paths. A floor smelling of incest. Words can rip you in half. Chaos, blue water. Vertigo and snow. Apologies on cardboard.” Next, she yells, “I could fit my hand inside your mouth, so lick the salt off my shoes, breathe the nitrogen until my eyes melt your face.”
When I wake, I’m sweating, and Jake is on the bed, licking my face, wagging his tail.
It’s Saturday morning, and Nick hasn’t called for three days now. I shouldn’t worry; I told him he didn’t have to call every day. But then again, I can’t call him. It’s weird that there’s no cell phone service there. The number at the retreat center is just for emergencies, and I don’t think I’m having one.
I’m sitting at my desk now, having made coffee, fed Jake. And I’ve just written two pages. As I read over the work, I’m thinking that it doesn’t make sense, that it mirrors back to me my incoherency, failures, uncertainties, issues. Which makes me crazy. I now have about fifty pages, counting my two newest pages, which I’ve just saved. Turning off my laptop, I let the screen go black.
I feel dull, disorganized, as I walk downstairs to the kitchen, sit at the table with my coffee, a bag of pretzels, and Anna. Jake appears, after coming in from outside, laying his head on my lap, then collapsing at my feet. I reach my hand down and offer him a broken pretzel ring, which he gobbles up.
Anna needs Vronsky. But the more she expresses her need, the less interested Vronksy is. Push and pull, pull and push. I think of Nick. Maybe my need of him—do I need him?—is driving him away.
I close the pretzel bag—empty calories—giving Jake one last broken ring, and push-pull, I’m back to college.
I met Nick when he and I attended the University of Bridgeport—a full decade before Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church and his followers, called “Moonies,” bought the entire Bridgeport campus, turning it into what many suspected was an indoctrination center. Back then, UB was an above-average university wi
th a few strong programs, among them the creative writing program run almost single-handedly by a little-known but well-published poet with a strong personality and a wonderful ability to nurture talent.
I’d heard about UB and its creative writing program at Nassau Community College, where I was taking a Spanish class one summer, and where my mother was enrolled as a nontraditional student, a rarity back then. She’d always wanted to go back to college, to become a professional woman, so she started at the community college the year I left for Shimer College.
In high school, I’d accelerated my academic program. By tenth grade, I decided that I wanted more academic challenge. I longed to read philosophy and literature, to have important discussions about the nature of art and culture. I’d been reading, studying on my own, and my high school classes had failed to engage me.
So, during tenth grade, I came up with a plan for the summer: I would go to C. W. Post College, part of Long Island University out in Brookville, New York—way out on the Island—live on campus and take all my eleventh-grade classes on the college level so that I could return to high school as a senior. I’m not sure how I convinced my parents or Lawrence High School administrators that this was a good idea, because it had never been done before, but I did.
That summer of 1971, with a roommate named Sandy Sondheim, I lived in Riggs Hall, enrolled in Sociology, Cultural Anthropology, American History I and II, and a basic English/Comp class. I had to petition the dean because, as a non-matriculated student, I was taking an overload, which was against the standard academic policy. Somehow, though, I made it all happen—though other stuff happened, too.
I did a lot of drugs that summer—pot, cocaine, psychedelics. Many of the students at C. W. Post came from wealthy families, drove fancy cars, did recreational drugs. One student, a diplomat’s son from Brazil, owned a Lamborghini, and he took me for an incredibly fast ride down the narrow rural roads that connected the far reaches of the North Shore fishing villages all the way out to the tip of the Island. The sixties had ended, but the word wasn’t out.
One night, Sandy drove me in her royal blue Mustang convertible to a mansion in Greenvale for an all-night party. The house was on the beach, and we swam naked under a full moon. Some of the guys were professional musicians and had just scored a large amount of cocaine. We snorted it, rubbed it into our gums, listened to the guitars, the lovely male voices accompanying them, then dove into the warm waters of Long Island Sound.
The next afternoon, I had a sociology exam; despite staying up all night and arriving back in my dorm at dawn, I managed to get sober enough to study and pass. And ultimately, I kept my grades up enough that summer so that when I returned to high school, I was, as planned, a senior.
But by then, I felt myself to be a full-fledged college student, no longer interested in completing high school. So, when I heard about Shimer College—a small liberal arts school that accepted “early entrants”—bright young students, capable of college work but who hadn’t yet completed high school—I applied and was quickly accepted.
I dropped out of high school in November, and by spring semester, which began in January, I arrived in Mount Carroll, Illinois, about a hundred thirty miles due west of Chicago. My high school principal had agreed to award me a diploma after I completed a certain number of college courses, but to this day, I don’t know in which year I officially graduated. I think my mother picked up my diploma, but somehow it got lost in the shuffle of moves.
I loved Shimer. It had a Great Books curriculum, so we read and discussed important primary texts in translation. All courses were five credit hours; students enrolled in three per term. Classes were conducted as seminars, and students were expected to read between five hundred to a thousand pages per week. The school used a New Critical approach, and we read the works without ever researching their historical or critical context. In fact, the Shimer library was very small, and students were discouraged from doing any supplemental reading outside of class. We were supposed to think deeply—on our own—about the texts we read. Also, the courses, Humanities I, Social Science I, Natural Science I, were all deliberately linked, so historical and philosophical contexts were actually embedded.
I loved the assigned readings, the discussions. At the end of my first semester, I met Sonya, who I now consider my best friend, my sister of choice. We cemented our friendship during the summer after that first semester by traveling across Europe together.
After Europe, I returned to Shimer for another semester—my last. Sonya also returned but was losing interest in her studies there as well. Then, after my second semester, I’d decided that I wanted to study creative writing, but there was no way to do that at Shimer.
So, I enrolled at Campus Free College—an unaccredited college “without walls,” where students invented their own curriculum. I decided that I’d live in Manhattan to study writing. Somehow this decision was okay with my parents, and through an apartment-sharing agency, I found Diane McCain and moved into an extra room in her flat on East 81st Street between East End and York Avenues, a block from the East River.
Diane was twenty-eight; I was still seventeen. She’d had a daughter out of wedlock and had sent the child to live with her aunt in Jersey City. Diane was depressed—about her daughter, about her derailed life, about her parents’ recent divorce, about her chronic unemployment and low income, and about her failed attempt to complete a college degree in sociology at City College of New York.
But we immediately clicked. Diane loved my intellectual curiosity, my courage to take on this unusual course of study, what she called my bravery. I was to pay her $75 a week to live in her small apartment and agreed to sleep on a mattress in an alcove between her bedroom and living room. My sleeping area had no doors, no privacy. After Sonya and I had returned from Europe in the summer, I had worked my old high school job as a dental assistant and saved about $1,000 to pay for rent and living expenses for my year in New York. My folks paid the modest tuition.
The semester’s curriculum—which I had designed myself—involved studying drama and theater with Arthur Stein, a playwright and theater critic for the Village Voice; studying poetry with Helen Burstein, a Bank Street Cooperative poet; taking Existentialism, a 300-level undergraduate course offered at The New School for Social Research and taught by Paul Edwards, a well-known contemporary philosopher; and studying modern dance with Barbara Gardner’s Construction Company, a small performance group in the upper East Village.
Two weeks into the semester, however, I arrived home late one evening to find Diane unconscious, sprawled out at the foot of her bed, with pills dumped around her and a notebook open with “Please forgive me. Mother Mary, please forgive me,” scribbled over and over on its pages.
I remember walking the apartment’s one narrow hallway to call 911. The operator asked me if Diane had a pulse, and I had to walk back down the hallway to find out. Holding Diane’s arm and concentrating, yes, I recognized a weak one. Time became distorted; my legs felt like rubber-bands. When I returned to speak to the operator, I couldn’t find my voice. I opened my mouth to say, “Yes, there’s a pulse,” but nothing came out. I had to struggle to find my voice. I did, but barely.
When the ambulance came, two medics carried Diane’s almost lifeless body on a stretcher down multiple flights of narrow stairs. The dimly lit hallway recalled a Grade B film noir movie, in which I had a small supporting role. I rode with Diane in the back of the ambulance to Lenox Hill Hospital, where she had her stomach pumped and finally revived. The doctor in charge came out to the small ante room where I waited alone and told me that had I arrived home fifteen minutes later, Diane would be dead.
I spent the winter helping Diane recover. I also hooked up with Marty, a man in his 30s who ended up raping me. After Diane’s attempted suicide, I’d become unable to sleep and found myself in a downward spiral. I’d met Marty in Washington Square after class, and we became friends.
Then one night when I was feeling particula
rly depressed and isolated, I went to Marty’s apartment, and he raped me. I never reported the incident because I felt I’d been to blame. But also, there’d been something familiar about the experience, as if Marty knew, expected my complicity. And weirdly, after many years, I found Marty’s photo in Newsweek, running along the story of how he had raped hundreds of young women in New York over decades. Most never reported, but finally two women had, and Marty had confessed and was convicted.
Suffice it to say that after this experience and Diane’s attempted suicide, I gave up my studies at Campus Free College. I returned home to live with my parents, took Introduction to Spanish at Nassau Community College, and commuted to campus with my mother, meeting her basic general education requirements while studying psychology. It was there that I connected with an English professor who recommended the University of Bridgeport for its Creative Writing program. I was tired of nontraditional approaches to education, just wanting now to complete my undergraduate studies in Writing as quickly and painlessly as possible. I applied, was accepted, and by the spring semester, in the middle of January, found myself in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
It was during that spring semester that I met Nick in my first official creative writing class. I loved his short story, “Headed for Canad’y,” about a couple of draft dodgers headed north to escape induction and a tour in Vietnam.
I approached him after class, asked if we could get together to discuss his story. Nick thought I was coming on to him when I invited him up to my dorm room, where he tried kiss me, and I insisted that he leave.
“Are you throwing me out?” he’d asked.
“Guess so,” I’d said by the open doorway. “Time for dinner, anyway.”