If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother

by Julia Sweeney

  When he did turn around again, he discovered only three students remaining.

  He only ever had those three students. One of those turned out to be one of the smartest students in the larger class. He got one of the highest marks on the midterm. Another one got the absolute lowest score in the entire larger class. The third was a divinity student who was so confused, and so ill-equipped to understand, and yet so earnest, he kept Michael after each session for thirty minutes.

  After this traumatic experience, Michael knew that a career in academics was not his ideal career choice. Plus the grant writing that would be required for such a career made him even more uncomfortable than the teaching. What he really liked to do was build things. He always liked to work on cars, for example. He decided to develop his own version of a type of camera that could be used to understand the structure of proteins.

  After our walk, I said, “There’s a bar upstairs at the Tennis Club. Usually, while I wait for Mulan to be ready to go home, I sit in the bar and read my New Scientist magazine.” I know that sounds flirty, and of course, I was flirting. But I really did do that on Fridays! I love that magazine. I still get it each week and I read it cover to cover, absorbing and understanding a good 10 to 12 percent.

  Michael responded, “Well, I guess this week you’ll just be bringing your new scientist.” Good one. Cheeky.

  Of course, when we actually got to the bar I had arranged for my friend Julia (yes, we are the two Julias) to just happen to be in the bar with her husband, Chris (of the “incentives and disincentives” discussion). We all sat together and had a drink. Chris is from upstate New York, and it turned out Michael’s father was, too.

  My friends approved.

  More importantly, I approved.

  We all approved of each other.

  As we walked home with Mulan, she put her hand up to take Michael’s as we crossed the street. Done. Done, done.

  I was a goner.

  He was a goner.

  Mulan was a goner.

  We were all goners.

  We got married two years later, in a big blowout of a wedding. My family is Catholic and mostly disappointed that I am no longer one of the faithful. Michael’s family is full of proud atheists from the Jewish tradition. In order to please our families, I got my friend Don Novello to officiate the wedding as Father Guido Sarducci, the character he played on Saturday Night Live. That seemed to satisfy everyone.

  I can report with some confidence that a good time was had by all.

  Sometimes I marvel at the fact that, if Shyamala hadn’t had to use the bathroom that day after my show, none of this would have happened.

  How we got to Wilmette is another story. In fact, part of Michael’s dream (in fact possibly part of my allure!) was that I lived in Los Angeles, a place he lived in as a child for a couple of years. He’d always dreamed of residing in his beloved Los Angeles again. But no. We don’t all get what we want. At least not all at the same time.

  Writing that story was a good thing. I remembered. We’ve only been married for about five years now, and yet I already forget what a crazy miracle it was that we even met. When you have a kid, I think you’re thrown into the kid business. Everything seems to be about mealtimes and when ballet starts and who’s taking her to piano and when is the parent-teacher conference? We only have one kid, and I work at home, and it still seems chaotic to me, filled with appointments.

  Michael is coming home tomorrow for three days. The only time we’ll be together during this month. And likely the only time we’ll be alone in the house together until next year. The time away from each other was good. I’m feeling gratitude. (I was going to write, “I feel grateful,” but that sounds creepy somehow.) So let me say it this way: I appreciate him. I want him back. Bring him home.

  And then send him away again.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Sphexy

  I have come to know Bugs so well, that I no longer have to think about what he is doing in any situation.

  —Chuck Jones on animating and writing for Bugs Bunny

  Michael has been out of town, working. He came home from Tucson, Arizona three days ago, and he leaves tomorrow afternoon for Switzerland. I feel like a kid, and I think he does, too. When Mulan is at camp we joke that we are at marriage camp. Because we were parenting immediately upon meeting each other, we never had the normal time a couple has to just be alone together. When friends and family ask us how we’re doing, I tell them we’re running around naked day and night.

  During one of these days, I came home from the grocery store only to find Michael missing. I figured he must have gone out. I sat down in a chair on the back porch and relaxed, reading for about fifteen minutes. My heart nearly hopped out of my chest when he stood up from the middle of some bushes, only a few feet away, holding an insect he had been quietly watching. It was a digger wasp, a bug of the genus Sphex.

  Before I met Michael, the only scientists I knew were characters in movies. And the first movie we saw together as a couple was at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. We saw The Lady Eve by Preston Sturges, and in it Henry Fonda plays Henry Pike, a scientist of the naïve and bumbling variety. “Scientists aren’t like that,” Michael said.

  I nodded agreement, but inside I thought, Really?

  Now that we live together I will point out to you that Michael has a butterfly net and a magnifying glass near the back door and his emergence from the bushes after a long quiet stillness is not atypical. I don’t know why it still surprises me. But no, he’s nothing like the Henry Pike character in The Lady Eve.

  “This is the digger wasp!” Michael told me with enthusiasm. “You know—the insect that Daniel Dennett [philosopher and scientist at Tufts University] refers to when he argues against the existence of free will.”

  “Oh right,” I said. “What was that about again?”

  “This wasp makes a little nest to lay her eggs. To feed her offspring, she kills another insect by paralyzing it, dragging it into her nest, and then the digger wasp babies feed off the paralyzed insect slowly, until it dies.”

  “Oh God,” I said. Suddenly an image popped in my head. It was of Mulan and me, just before she left for summer camp. We were in a Walgreens drugstore, late at night. I was so exhausted I could barely see straight. Mulan was full of energy and enthusiasm and as we walked down aisle after aisle she found things she needed to buy for camp. My slow, discombobulated slouch behind her forceful determination to pluck just the right items off the shelves made me imagine that we had a tube connecting us. In this tube, all my chi—my life force—was flowing steadily into her. The more energetic she appeared, the increasingly tired I felt. I was the insect being fed upon.

  “No,” Michael said, patiently, “not like that. It’s because of this programmed behavior that digger wasps have when they kill their prey.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “You see,” Michael went on, “the digger wasps have this ritual they perform where they leave their paralyzed prey outside the nest and go inside and inspect it before coming back out and dragging the victim in. But if an experimenter moves the prey, the digger wasp will quickly find it and bring it back, but here’s the thing: it begins its ritual again!”

  “Uh, huh,” I said, marveling at his enthusiasm. “Which is what again?”

  “The wasp goes into the nest and inspects it again, like the first time never happened,” Michael said. “In fact, an experimenter can do this unlimited times, and the wasp will do the same thing every time.”

  “Oh . . . ,” I said slowly, putting it all together.

  “I guess the idea is that seemingly premeditated behavior is really just mindless repetition that has evolved in the brain of the wasp,” Michael helpfully explained.

  “The opposite of free will,” I said.

  “Yes. The opposite of free will,” he said.

  I turned and went into the kitchen. I automatically began to unload the dishwasher, but then, because I was thinking about
the concept of free will, I decided to stop. Then I decided to have a glass of wine, which is what I always do when I realize I’m automatically emptying the dishwasher.

  WEEK THREE

  Death

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody

  Bill is dead.

  —Jim Sweeney, my brother, who was on the phone with me yesterday morning

  Okay, let me stop this lightly comic, chatty memoir and bring things to a dead stop. Emphasis on dead.

  My brother Bill died yesterday. It was not unexpected as he’s had chronic problems with drugs and alcohol. But somehow, this feels like a complete surprise. I feel spent and tired; my grief makes me want to quit all writing and also write my way into some clear blue light.

  I’m home all alone and I am so glad and very unhappy about that. Michael is in Europe. Mulan is still at camp, of course. I am just here with this enormous ball of weight pushing into my chest. It’s suffocating and heavy. Michael said to me on the phone when I told him, “It’s probably even more disturbing for you than you are capable of realizing right now. I mean, that probably would be true for anyone.”

  Yes, I agree.

  I want to write about Bill, but first, I need to lie down.

  Bill had been in and out of rehab for most of his adult life. He had also had many accidents related to his lifestyle and habits. Just this spring, he spent sixty days in the hospital with MRSA, a staph infection that is resistant to most antibiotics. He acquired MRSA from a stay in the hospital years ago, which I understand is now a common problem. Over many years, my brother Bill had been in so much emotional and physical trouble, I came to think of him as impervious. Immortal even. I think that if I treated my body like Bill did almost every day of his adult life, I would die after only one day. After many years, judgment and resentment slowly gave way to other feelings toward Bill. His tragic resilience was impressive. Expecting Bill to die had been a way of life for me. It allowed me to imagine that it would never actually happen.

  My brother Bill and I were downtown, in Spokane, just a month ago. Bill appeared sober to me, but very weak. We’d run an errand and felt hungry for lunch. I told him I’d get something for us to eat. I looked across the street and saw a place called the Pita Pit. I said he could wait for me in the car.

  Inside, I discovered that the line was long. I called Bill’s cell and asked what he wanted, reading a list of menu items. “Well, the chicken souvlaki, of course,” he replied. We both laughed simultaneously at the memory.

  So, even though this story I’m going to tell you features, as its main event, my brother Bill throwing up, and this might seem inappropriate now that he has just died, I will recount it because for Bill and me this was a happy memory of a very difficult moment in a wonderful sea of adventure.

  You see, in the summer of 1981 Bill and I went backpacking all around Europe. It was our first experience abroad. We each had about eleven hundred dollars that we expected to last us three months, or maybe more. After two months we ended up in Greece, where we spent nearly a month on the island of Santorini, almost totally broke. We found a family that would house us for a week if we helped them with their grape harvest. We worked picking grapes and even helped them stomp on the grapes—barefoot—on top of a big ancient-seeming pit, with long, intertwined twigs underneath us. The grape juice flowed into a big vat below.

  One night, one of the patriarchs of this family, who had only one arm, deftly made us scrambled eggs with feta cheese for dinner. The family’s grandmother poured ouzo from a big white jug. Bill was smiling from ear to ear. We were really far from home.

  Back in Athens for a few days, we decided to take a bus to London (through Serbia, Bosnia, Austria, and Germany, and then the bus loaded onto a boat to England) that cost fifty dollars a person. The bus would take more than thirty-two hours of nonstop driving. It was also packed. There were so many people crowding to get on that some people made bargains with others to alternate standing and sitting.

  As we were waiting in line for the bus, I looked in my backpack and saw a wrapped package of chicken souvlaki I’d bought on the street the day before, or maybe it was even two days before. I was going to toss it out, but Bill said, “Hey, I’ll eat it.” And he did. (Yes, at age twenty and twenty-one we were both idiots.) We got on the bus and began the journey. First Bill broke out into a sweat and then his head started to sway. Then he leapt up and weaved and bumped his way down the aisle, making it to the one toilet in the back just in time. He felt sick and extremely queasy for the rest of the trip. “Thanks a lot, Jules,” Bill said, sweat dripping off his brow.

  Of course, I gave Bill my seat and I stood in the aisle. It was very hot, and with no air-conditioning, inside the bus it was even hotter. A handsome guy was in the seat next to Bill, a guy who eventually insisted that I sit for part of the ride. The time it took to get to London seemed interminable. Bill recovered and then flew home to Spokane, our long summer as brother and sister in Europe over. I stayed in London a few more days with the guy on the bus.

  But that’s another story.

  So this is why we laughed together on the phone when I mentioned the souvlaki in the Pita Pit. I looked at him, through the restaurant window, in the car across the street. He was on his phone, looking back at me, his fingers on the glass of the car window. Even with the traffic on Main Street and two panes of glass between us, I could see the twinkle in his eye.

  Yesterday I was able to say that my brother died yesterday. But tomorrow I won’t be able to say that. Now time is going to pull me away from him, and each day will be a day with our hands farther apart.

  I’m surprised that now that Bill is dead, a new Bill is born. It’s his better self, a guy I know well, who has been buried for so long inside the alcoholic. He visits me at night. I dreamed that Bill was in the middle of the pond in Manito Park, in Spokane, up to his waist. “Come on in, Jules, it’s not that gross.” I took a nap today on the sofa in the living room and Bill woke me up saying, “Why are you sleeping? We’re gonna miss the first snow.”

  Bill was my constant companion growing up. We skied together almost every weekend in winter. Bill pushed me on harder and harder runs, and more runs than I wanted to take. I hear myself saying to Bill, “I’m tired, I’m hungry. Let’s head back in to the lodge.” I see Bill pulling out a completely smashed peanut butter and jelly half-sandwich on white bread, embalmed in Saran Wrap, and gesturing toward me, “Here, this should hold you for an hour or so.”

  Once, when we were adults, we went to Aspen together and he forced me down a black-diamond run, far above my ability. I cursed Bill all the way down, sidestepping with my skis for much of the way. But when he suggested we try it again, I did. It was easier. Bill would often lead me to ski jumps and then goad me over, showing me how to tuck my skis and then hustling me along before I could think of better and firmer reasons not to do it. Being with Bill was always fun. And scary.

  I think of Bill with his six-pack abs, which were sadly eroded from drinking actual six-packs. But I don’t want to remember that. I’m remembering him lean and taut as can be, throwing himself onto his bike. His great long, muscular legs, his unique hunch over the handlebars, his smile of enticement. “Come on, Jules. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.” God, his underbite—those teeth, gleaming. His ability to persevere physically seemed supernatural. He rode his bike from Spokane to Seattle several times. He hiked through the Olympic rain forest, I think more than once. He loved the early morning, and he liked to be out before anyone else, like he was stealing time.

  Sadly, Bill’s downhill run—the one his life was on—didn’t go as well as the ones we conquered on the slopes. He was really already an alcoholic at age twenty. In his early thirties, however, he was lifted out of his chaotic vodka-fueled stupor by a strong, insightful woman, Sandy, whom he married.

  He had about five good years, and fathered two amazing children, Nick and Katie. When the kids were young, he bega
n to drink even more heavily than he had before. He became angry and cold. Sandy turned him out, and we all knew she was doing the exact right thing. Bill couldn’t save himself, and if you threw him a line, he’d pull you down with him. Sandy heroically saved her children from a world of hurt. They’ve grown up to be resilient, thriving young adults.

  Like most addicts, Bill felt deeply. He numbed himself, yes. But he also imprisoned himself in his emotions, never fully able to get beyond the sting and the heartache. He couldn’t get to a perspective that was measured or thought through. He never fully moved past Michael’s death—our other brother who died at age thirty-three from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma—and I could see that the alcohol and other drugs both delivered him from and kept him inside a nightmare of constant emotional pain. On the other hand he had a joyfulness about him that drew people in. He was eager and interested.

  Weirdly, one of Bill’s best times was when he was in jail. He was imprisoned several times for driving while drunk. Fortunately he never hurt anyone; he was just pulled over by the police for swerving all over the road. After three arrests, they sentenced him to a year.

  In jail, Bill thrived. Bill needed supervision and regimentation. I had some of the best conversations with Bill when he was in prison. While a big part of his personality was a profound resistance to authority, when he was in the prison system—when it was clear there was no way out—he put his defiance aside. He followed the rules, he helped his fellow prisoners. He was assigned to the kitchen, where he was a cook. He was lucid and articulate, and he read constantly: Richard Dawkins, David Quammen, Barbara Kingsolver. I think Quammen’s Monster of God was his most recent jail-time favorite. The last book we talked about seriously was one I sent him, The Great Hunger by Cecil Woodham-Smith, a book about the Irish famine. I haven’t even read my own copy yet. Now we will never discuss it together.