During this time my husband and I separate, are reunited. Separate again.
It is with this initial bundle of more than a thousand pages of paper, carefully placed in two stationery boxes, that I meet the man who will eventually become my second husband, a graduate student who teaches writing at a continuing education center at a local university. I decide I must know the worth of all these pages—whether I should bother retyping what I have written onto white bond paper. So I sign up for the class, even though I will have to ask a man I’ve never met before to read my more than a thousand pages of yellow paper. I’m scared he’ll say no; I’m scared he’ll say yes. Since I don’t trust that my words themselves will be enough to convince him to read them, I slip into my short cut-off jeans and halter top for the first class. I carefully apply makeup and arrange my hair. I watch for him to take his seat in front of the class before I stroll past, wanting him to notice me, remember me, desire me—believing in the power of my body to be noticed, desired, remembered. More than I would ever trust my words or any sentence.
In class that first night I sit in the front row, my legs slightly parted, watching him, wanting him to watch me. Mack—his name is Mack—talks about irony, a word I’ve heard, but not a word I truly understand. He says irony is when the reader knows more than the protagonist, has a clearer understanding of events than the protagonist. He says irony is also when the punishment doesn’t fit the crime. He says irony is when you say one thing but mean another. Irony is when things are not what they seem. I am about to stop listening. I am about to let this word “irony” drift into oblivion where it might take years before I discover it again.
But then I don’t. I raise my hand and tell him, this instructor named Mack, I don’t quite understand what he means. Will he explain it again? With patience, he does. I hear the definition again. I make a connection. I see our pretty houses and our pretty clothes, see our Fleetwood Cadillac, see all the people who admire my parents, see all the smiling family photographs—see this—almost connecting it with a vision of what is seen when the walls of the pretty houses implode, when the pretty clothes are stripped off bodies, when the images on the photographs are ripped off the paper.
Mack’s smile is shy, not insistent. He agrees to read my unwieldly manuscript, carefully reaching for the two boxes, holding the boxes with hands that are gentle. His hands—they are as gentle, yes, as the hands of my Uncle Esey, a man who also loved words, who knew you must hold words carefully so as not to break or misuse them.
Yet I believe that Mack agrees to read my book only because of the way I dress, for surely he knows what I offer. Perhaps I think I must “pay” him with more than money.
But this isn’t what he wants. He’s not like the others. And although he has a patched-together definition of love himself at this time, still, months later, he says he loves me and wants to marry me. And maybe I marry Mack just because he does read my words—he is the first person to read them. It will be years, though, before I understand that what he really wants is to hear a stronger voice—not the shadowy, stuttered words, a mere scaffold of an uncompleted path of sentences that, even with the thousand pages, leads me forward with only the most tentative step.
I’m never able to tell the psychiatrist how I see myself. I’m never able to tell him about my parents.
It’s only now, with Randy, I practice all the words I need to speak. I especially practice saying words that have always scared me. Over and over I chant the word “no,” what I must learn to say to dangerous men. He has me repeat the phrase “thank you,” what I want to say when complimented—a phrase I struggle with—since I’ve never believed I deserve praise or attention. I learn to ask for what I want. I learn to express what I need.
I think of other skills I have learned. I remember the time in seventh grade when a teacher commented that I had sloppy handwriting. Devastated by this criticism, I spent months practicing penmanship, copying pages out of books, until the teacher smiled approval. All I cared about then was the beauty of the handwriting, the perfection of the page, for I had nothing of my own to write, nothing of my own to say. But now, with Randy, I learn to speak, learn to write, the words of my own vocabulary.
On the hospital unit we meet for Spirituality Group. Today, with paper, crayons, ribbons, yarn, we are to give tangible form to our higher power, visualize it, create it. We must try to believe in a power greater than ourselves—a power, therefore, greater than our addictions. The way to recover from destructive behavior, addictive lives, is to discover spirituality.
Always, I’d thought I had none. But when the therapists say a higher power needn’t be a god—can be anything, even nature—I think of my heart safely beating in stone, or of my body protected by hibiscus petals. Yes, by hiding in nature—in its language as well as in its strength and its beauty—I felt as if it guarded me, so that even if my father found my body I could pretend he didn’t find me. A higher power. I think of my Christmas tree, of that night in New Jersey when I was protected by Christmas spirits. So now I reach for a pine-green piece of construction paper and a pair of scissors. Yes, that tree must have been spiritual. It was full of power far greater than my own.
Today, for my session with Randy, I have brought a photograph of myself to show him. It is the one taken in second grade, when I was ordered to hold the crayon in my right hand. Even with this misrepresentation, it is the photo, the image, I think of when I imagine the little girl.
The photo is in a cardboard cover. I open it and hand it to Randy, telling him the story of the crayon. He holds it carefully, softly exclaiming over the little girl like a proud parent.
Listening to Randy, I also begin to feel like a proud parent, and all I can do is beam.
“Why don’t we ‘re-do’ the photo,” he says. “Hold a ‘crayon’ in your left hand. See how it feels.” He places a pencil on the small coffee table in front of the couch where I’m sitting. “Let’s pretend it’s a crayon,” he says. “What was your favorite color?”
“That dress was lime-green,” I say. “I really loved that dress.” I look at the pencil. “Okay. It’s green.”
“Would you like to pick it up?”
I reach for it with my left hand and hold it.
“How does it feel?” he asks.
Quickly, in my mind, I run through the list of feelings Randy has taught me: mad, sad, glad, scared. “Glad?” I say.
He nods. “Anything else?”
I run the pencil across my fingers. I hold it as if about to write, then grip it tight in my fist. For a moment the pencil almost feels as strong as a magic wand. I glance back at Randy and say, “Powerful.”
Now it is his turn to beam.
He puts the photograph on the coffee table, face up. We both look at her. She smiles straight into the camera. Yes, she—I—would never have let anyone know I was angry that the crayon had been taken from my left hand. Nor would I have let anyone know I was angry that my mother and father weren’t with me to ensure I be allowed to hold the crayon properly. Later, when I’d explained to my mother what had happened, she’d told me not to worry about it, it was only a photograph. It doesn’t mean anything, she’d said. It doesn’t matter.
I reach over and lightly touch the face in the photo. I look at her eyes. I want to reach her. I want to touch her. I want to hold her hand. I want to wash her, dress her, feed her, love her. I want to whisper to her… I want to say to her, I do say: It does matter. You matter.
“But who loved her?” I whisper to Randy. “Loved me? Didn’t my parents? My father always told me he loved me.”
“They did love you,” Randy says. He straightens and leans toward me as if hoping I’ll feel his words, feel the power of his words, more strongly if they travel a shorter distance. “But their kind of love was hurtful and destructive. Little girls shouldn’t have to be scared of their parents’ love.”
We are silent. Randy has tears in his eyes, yet he doesn’t turn from me or wipe them away. I am confused.
I don’t understand who this man is or what this means. But—no—this time I will not be confused. This time I will let myself see him, will not turn away from him either. I allow myself to understand that their kind of love is not his kind of love, his, which isn’t hurtful or destructive. I want to understand the foreignness of this man, a man who knows how to love well. His generosity, his love, his safety, his wisdom, his patience are almost too much. Yet this moment I allow his steadfast heart to warm my own once-dead heart. It is this, allowing myself to accept Randy, that will heal me.
“But suppose I never learn how to love the way you know how to love,” I say.
“You do know how.”
“But I don’t feel like I do.”
“Look at how you’ve cared for friends,” he says. “Look at the men you’ve most cared about.”
Christopher. Mack. “You,” I say. “I care about you.”
“I know that,” he says, smiling. “Otherwise you wouldn’t keep coming back here week after week.” He pauses and nods toward the photo. “And, most important, you care about her.”
It is time to leave the hospital. I go home with my Christmas tree cutout. I go home with the pencil gripped tight in my left hand. I go home understanding that the girl’s smile in the photo is not a smile that seduced my father. It is just a little-girl smile—both special and ordinary—a little girl, who I always wanted to be.
Two Small Rooms in Minnesota
In the mid-1980s my parents move to Rochester, Minnesota. To me, it seems as if they go there to die, although to live in a retirement complex associated with the Mayo Clinic is not without logic. This move scares me. I don’t want to feel my fear of their deaths, so I look for the joke. I tell my friends I have the only parents in the world to retire in frigid Minnesota. Visiting them in Minnesota is scary. Who are these two old people? Have I ever known anything about them? They’re going to die with all their secrets intact. They’re going to die alone, even as they’re surrounded by people. I want to imagine they have souls that will slip from their mouths as they exhale their last breaths.
In the restaurant on the top floor of the retirement complex, my parents’ friends meet me. They exclaim about my wonderful parents. I smile and agree. What a fascinating career my father has had, they say. I smile and agree. My father gives lectures wowing people with the breadth of his knowledge. After one of his lectures a letter to the editor appears in the local newspaper with the headline “Positively Electrifying.” The letter ends by saying, “Dr. Silverman, those who know you must truly love you!”
I want to bolt. Because of the hypocrisy? Because my parents have gotten away with it? There is no one to significantly disturb their final days, interfere with their decorum. Even if I told these people in the restaurant the truth about my parents, they would not hear me. The truth would be too difficult to consider. After all, each table is set with linen and flowers. The arrangement is too pretty. Who would want to disturb it? Who would want his or her equilibrium interrupted? No one wants to hear; so no one will know. But of course I am the one who says nothing, who can’t tell these people, who can’t confront my parents. So maybe I—not these people, not my parents—really, I am the one unable to face it.
Instead, like a Fundamentalist preacher, I am obsessive in my mission to “save” them before they die, as if I can be the one to nourish their souls. I talk about spirituality, about the need to discover a higher power, to believe in something greater than ourselves. I ask my parents about themselves as children. Mom—what were you really like as a child? Dad—who were you? I want them to remember themselves, find something within themselves that’s gentle. Surely they—all of us—began as sweet, cute children. Or maybe I am the one who wants to know them as children. Before they die, I want to be able to love them, if not as adults, then as children, as who they were when they were little. But even though they listen to me, they don’t understand me and aren’t able to respond to anything I say.
In a way, though, perhaps they help to “save” me instead, by giving me what they always provide: money. When my insurance ends they agree to pay for my therapy. And while money isn’t spiritual, it helps, is a way they can help “save” me, even as they don’t understand that what happened in the past is why I need it.
While visiting them I sleep in a blue sweatshirt with an emblem of Mickey and Minnie Mouse across the chest. One evening when I’m saying good-night to my mother, she reaches forward to touch it, pretending she wants to see the design more clearly. I step back. She steps forward, her arm still outstretched. Unable to say “stop,” I again step back until I’m against the wall. She laughs awkwardly, asking what’s wrong. I say the word “boundaries.” She doesn’t understand. I draw an imaginary line in front of my body. Still she doesn’t understand I now own my body and she can’t touch it. In her need she lunges forward—I try to turn—but her fingertips graze my chest.
My father has diabetes, and in the morning the resident nurse comes to check his blood sugar. My father is in his underwear, but I don’t want the nurse to see him this way or know this is the way we live. Since I’m afraid to say anything to him, I whisper to my mother, “I think it’d be better if he put on a robe.” She doesn’t say anything to him either, but she hands him his robe. He puts it on but then fails to tie it.
Shortly after they move to Minnesota my father undergoes heart surgery. I fly up immediately; my sister doesn’t follow. My mother catches a cold and can’t visit him in the hospital, so I am the one to stay with him for hours, days, alone with him—my duty. Am I a martyr? I believe my impulse is fear: If I don’t do what is expected my parents won’t love me. I, the adult, am still not able to love her, the child, enough by myself.
As my father recovers he kisses the nurses’ hands and flirts with them—this sick old man who is dying. He must tell every nurse on every shift about his career to ensure they know how lucky they are to be allowed to care for him. He believes he has graced the hospital with his presence. I want to scream, Daddy, nobody cares. I say nothing. I sit in the plastic chair in his hospital room and stare out the window at a bitter winter sky. To me, he will describe in detail the bath the nurse gave him earlier this morning. Now, he says, he feels clean all over. Is this an invitation? Again I say nothing. My father will never stop. I know I will never have the power to stop him.
Soon after the operation my father’s mind begins to slip into other realities, even though, to him, little has ever been real. To hide my fear, I joke to Randy that my father has “slipped his gears.” This is how I see it, though. His mind, once knobby with information, spins smooth, grooveless, as he chucks out unneeded and unwanted facts. He creates a fantasy fourteen million dollars that my sister and I are to inherit and presses me to set up a company to handle the money. Have I hired a lawyer? he asks. For weeks he grills me about plans for the corporation. He wants the board of directors to meet with him. I do not try to reel him back to reality. As I have always done, I enact the play with him, play the role I am assigned by him, and allow his mind to float far away from the inconvenient confines of his skull. When my patience thins and I barely respond he gets angry—and still the little girl gets scared.
Finally, in the middle of the night he sneaks from their apartment and is found wandering outside. He must be moved from their apartment down to the third floor of the complex, a nursing unit, where he receives constant care.
Even though she never smoked, my mother gets lung cancer and needs surgery. When the surgeon calls to say the operation was a success, my feelings are ambiguous. I’m not truly relieved; yet, while I knew the operation was being performed, I compulsively cleaned my house.
While my father is on the third floor of the complex, my mother now moves to the fourth, where the residents’ problems are physical. They will never return to their apartment, never again be together. During the past few months, my sister and I have spoken more frequently then ever before, not just dividing up our parents’ possessions, but also
, perhaps, needing to hear each other’s fear as our parents die. Now, over Christmas, I fly to Rochester to ready their things for the movers.
I am alone in my parents’ apartment. Outside their twelfth-floor window is a gray December day. Inside, I am awed by silence. My parents will never be in these rooms again, will never see their lifetime collection of furniture, paintings, art objects, photographs, books. They will never eat from their plates or drink from their glasses. They will never use their silverware. These objects seem still and waiting, as if willing to accept the inevitability of a thin layer of dust until they have been relocated, willing to accept the inevitability of a new location. These objects owned by my parents will outlive my parents, yet their footsteps will always be felt in the weave of rugs, the touch of their fingers felt on the skin of glass vases.
The apartment is not large—two bedrooms. Still, I wander in and out of the rooms. I open closets and stare at shoes and clothes. Pink sandals. L. L. Bean boots. Some clothes still have tags. For my parents the end has come suddenly, now that it’s finally come. In the pantry is a file cabinet filled with business papers and personal letters, saved over the years. My sister wants to throw all the letters away, but I will save everything. In the refrigerator is a half-finished loaf of rye bread. Fruit-juice bottles not yet empty. Daddy. Mom. I want you to be able to finish them.
I touch their possessions as if I have never before seen them. There are vases, plates, and tea sets that my father bought in Occupied Japan after the war. There are masks and fans from the South Pacific islands. A set of Wedgwood plates from the West Indies. Candlesticks my parents purchased in Israel, when it was still Palestine. Oriental rugs from the Middle East. A handwoven rug from South America. Antique photograph albums. Silks from Hong Kong. An enameled plate from Egypt. Engraved plates from Puerto Rico. Furniture my father built, years ago, with that electric saw. There are bits and pieces of households from Washington, Maryland, St. Thomas, and New Jersey.
Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You Page 21