Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things

by Amy Dickinson

  In the solitude of my adult insomnia, I no longer obsess about my death. Mainly I listen to the sound of my mistakes and regrets. I think about what I might have said, done, or written that I might need to clean up the next day. I perform a mental version of my Methodist confession, strategizing about those things I have done, and fretting about those I have left undone.

  I think about my e-mail correspondence, like the one today with a young woman who wondered if she was in an abusive relationship. The subject line of her e-mail read: Is my BF abusive? After describing a relationship that was not only abusive, but alarmingly so, I responded to her privately (not in my published column) and told her to please, please call the National Domestic Violence Hotline. I gave her the website link and phone number. I asked her to get back to me afterward. She e-mailed me back, saying, “My boyfriend doesn’t punch me. He only chokes me. One time he threw me down. I thought my hip was broken, but it’s only a bruised tailbone. I’ve got it better than a lot of people. He only does this when he’s angry. I really love him…”

  I told her that she deserved much better than this. I told her that this wasn’t normal and that this wasn’t what a healthy relationship was supposed to be like. I told her to tell a friend or a family member. I asked her to keep in touch with me. Throughout the day as we corresponded back and forth, she became more and more defensive of her partner’s behavior, before cutting off the communication altogether.

  A few months ago, I expressed a similar concern and alarm toward someone I knew who was in a volatile and violent relationship. After the police left her house, I told her how worried I was and urged her to call the hotline and speak to a counselor. She did not speak to a counselor, she did stay in the relationship, and the only thing she changed was that she stopped speaking to me. I ended up calling the National Domestic Violence Hotline myself. The young counselor on the other end of the phone line listened to me choke out the story and then said that she couldn’t do anything for me, just as I couldn’t do anything for the woman who wrote to me or the woman I knew who stopped speaking to me. In my dark night heart of hearts, I know—indeed—that it IS every man for himself.

  That’s what I think about at night. I try to mentally prepare for being one day closer to the next thing that might happen—the midnight phone call from the nursing home, the knock on the door from the state trooper.

  But as I lie awake, nothing happens. The only insight delivered to me during these wakeful hours is the breadth of my powerlessness. I no longer shiver with the thought of my own death, because I’m convinced I’ve already experienced something that is likely worse: to close the casket on a loved one and be left behind to remember and grieve.

  But perhaps my insomnia has also delivered a gift, in that I have gained a deep appreciation for the blessings of my waking life, which is real and raw and rich with incident. I have been granted and cursed with the privilege of awareness. I know I will both witness and tangle with the deepest part of the night, until the night is done and the sky turns platinum with the dawn. And when the sheep are lowing good morning, I know I will rise to greet them.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  How to Use a Saw

  1. Identify the Problem

  There is a tree in the corner of my mother’s yard. Unlike most of the other trees there, this one seems to have no history. It is not the sycamore my sisters and I planted after I came back from five years living in London. It isn’t the ancient Japanese lilac that overhangs the driveway with its sweet and dripping blossoms, nor the towering maple that dwarfs the house and that itself replaced the gargantuan and graceful elm that was a local landmark before it died of Dutch elm disease. No, this tree just seemed to appear. It has undistinguished leaves and a strange trunk that is really four trunks that meet at the ground. It looks like a giant weed that got ahead of itself, and now this weed is twenty-five feet tall.

  Half of the tree came down last week in a storm. Two of the trunks snapped off at the root and landed in the yard. The mess was large enough that it was like, “Whoa!” when I pulled into the driveway.

  I went into the barn and found the pruning saw. This is a small saw that I bought for $7 at the hardware store last week. I was there looking for plants and lightbulbs, but I came out with cat litter and a saw. I looked at it, hanging from a peg in the saw department, and I thought, I’m going to use this thing to saw the legs off of something.

  One of Jane’s primary modes of home decorating was to saw the legs off of things. You’d go upstairs to bed at night, and in the morning when you came back downstairs, the kitchen table had become a coffee table. Growing up, we got used to it.

  2. Choose a Good Angle

  I was outside surveying the tree damage when my neighbor Mike stopped by to gaze at the Japanese lilac, which is in full glorious bloom and sending out a very strong honeysuckle scent that drifts down Mill Street.

  Mike lives just down the road, occupying the house and farming the land that was once our dairy farm. Mike and his family live in the house I lived in during my childhood, before we lost everything.

  Mike seems to know a lot about a lot of things. He keeps sheep on his place, and you have to know a lot in order to manage sheep. Sheep can be tricky. Sheep test a person’s ability to handle sudden humiliation, because, like all livestock, they don’t pay attention to what people want. Sheep move through the pasture in woolly barnyard cliques. They don’t give a damn. They look cuddly from a distance but nasty, matted, and muddy up close. They have pointy hooves and spindly legs, improbably holding up ottoman-shaped bodies. Basically, as animals, sheep make no sense. They seem both untamable and illogical. It takes a wise and humble person to be a shepherd.

  I asked Mike, “Hey, what kind of tree is this?”

  Mike ambled over. “I call that a junk tree,” he said. “They just sort of show up. Some people like them because they grow so fast, but they tend to fall over once they get big. Why?” Mike hesitated, suspicious, like this was a tree quiz. “What do YOU call it?”

  “Yeah, I call it a junk tree, too,” I said. “I’m going to saw it up.”

  “You’d better get yourself a chain saw. That’s a bigger mess than you think,” he said.

  Oh no, I thought. I will be sawing this tree myself, mister. You’ll see.

  3. There Will Be Swearing

  I’ve had a rough few days. Yesterday I got an e-mail from a reader who said my responses lately to advice questions were mean and grouchy. Of course I responded to her in an exceedingly grouchy way, and then she replied that her husband had just died. I tried to take it all back, but I couldn’t make it right. Another reader wrote in: “Amy, you are a retart (sic) who doesn’t know anything about relationships.” Spelling aside, I knew what he was getting at, and I worried that he was right.

  Also, our youngest is getting ready to graduate high school, and, just like all of our other girls at this stage, she is not going quietly. Lately there have been yelling sessions and door slamming. I’ve mainly tried to hide out in the bedroom, only catching snippets through the walls as she nails Bruno for being a concerned and protective parent who won’t let her spend the remaining weeks of her childhood ramming around all night in the car. I had done this dance with Jane when I was a teen. Knowing this doesn’t help.

  Essentially, each daughter as she leaves home seems to want to renovate her father by trying to saw his legs off. Tomorrow morning I might go downstairs and see that Bruno has been reduced to the dad equivalent of a coffee table. Something you rest your feet upon.

  People helpfully offer up the wisdom that kids have to push you away before they leave home. I’ve pointed this out myself—endlessly—responding to questions in my advice column. But like most life experiences, knowing about it does little to mitigate experiencing it.

  4. Don’t Hurt Yourself

  Sometimes everything seems like a metaphor. I catch myself thinking that every experience is really about something else. Yard work is especially metaphor-rich
, because even if a rose IS sometimes just a rose, quite often it is something else, too.

  Last summer I had an epiphany about my family while weeding. I was yanking up bishop’s weed, which is an exceedingly invasive plant. The roots of this weed are all connected belowground, and they are tricky and elastic, so they snap off when you try to pull them out. You don’t get the visceral satisfaction of pulling up bishop’s weed and bringing up its roots. You end up standing there holding a fistful of stems. The elasticity of the plant’s root system is a brilliantly designed protective survival mechanism. No matter how many stems you manage to pull up, they will sprout again and spread. Don’t make me draw you a diagram. This is how my family works.

  5. If You Saw Too Fast, Your Blade Will Get Stuck

  I haven’t spent much time sawing things, but, like its cousin the hammer, a saw suggests how to use it by not offering many options. You draw the blade back and forth, just like a child actor in an episode of The Waltons. Going after a six-inch-diameter tree trunk with a pruning saw is like trying to cut steak with a cheese grater. I knew that, but I tried it anyway.

  I stood in the kitchen, saw in hand, and pondered the mess in the yard from inside my mother’s house. The weather had just become warm enough to leave the inside door open. The kitchen was still a jumble of boxes filled with her belongings, my own stuff, and random assortments of things that seemed like cast-offs from a Victorian-era yard sale: tallow candles, tiny ink bottles with quill pens, enough dish towels and doilies to dry all the dishes and host all the teapots in a small city, and odd-shaped lace thingies too lovely to throw away.

  I promised Jane I would keep her house just as it was, and I have broken that promise. My mother’s house is now my house. I just need to swallow that lump in my throat to be able to say it out loud. For now, the peculiar squeak and slap of the old screen door—so familiar from the thousands of times I’ve heard it—keeps me pinned in place.

  Every sawing project starts with the first cut. I made a careful draw against the grain of the tree trunk. Then I caught a groove. The sun came out. I drew the blade faster and faster. Sawdust started to sprinkle down onto the cute shoes I brought back from my most recent trip to Chicago. Sweat trickled down the back of my no-iron shirt. I looked like a mom on her way to Target for guest towels, but on this day I was a lumberjack (and, like the old Monty Python song said, it was okay).

  I started thinking about my father. Buck rambled from marriage to marriage, and when he was about seventy years old, he paused between relationships to work as an apple picker and tree trimmer at an orchard in Nova Scotia. At least, that’s what he said he was doing. He lied about many things, but I chose to believe this particular story. I always enjoyed the vision of my old man scrambling up a tree. In his way, he has led something of a hair-raising life, in that he always had a tendency to saw off the branch he was standing upon. Now he languishes at a nursing home in Pennsylvania. Lately he won’t get out of his wheelchair, even though the aides there tell me he can walk. I’m the only one of his children to visit him, and that’s not saying much. I know I’m doing the minimum.

  I sawed about three inches into the trunk when I faltered. My saw refused to go farther. I started to worry that a passerby would stop and try to help me. I am married to someone who drives a pickup truck, has arms like mighty oaks, is in possession of a chain saw, and loves to rescue people. But I have always resisted rescue, especially when I really need it. I know this is a legacy of the rugged individualism both my parents drummed into me, but I also know I’ve wasted a lot of time standing in the middle of a mess and saying, “Back off. I’ve got this.”

  6. When You’re Not Making Any Progress, You Have to Come at It from Another Angle

  I left my saw dangling in its cut and went into the house for a glass of water. Lately I’ve been trying to switch from coffee to water, but I don’t like water. I like coffee. And Diet Coke. My friend Megan recently told me, “Diet Coke is the worst thing you can do,” but I know there are many, many worse things I can—and do—do. Just yesterday I ate a whole box of Easter Peeps I found in a cupboard. They sat there like a little conjoined flock behind their cellophane wrapper, taunting me with their tiny black dot eyes. I had a fleeting thought of wondering how long they had been there. Perhaps Easter 2005? I ate one. And then I ate the rest of them. It turns out that Peeps, like fine wine and Helen Mirren, age very well.

  I have also lied and cheated. I have been a thief. When I was fourteen, I shoplifted a small item from the Woolworths store in downtown Ithaca. My mother left her job as a typist at Cornell and drove downtown to get me where I was being sequestered at the store’s security office.

  I had been caught attempting to steal the plastic insert from a billfold. I hadn’t stolen the wallet itself, but only its plastic innards—those slots where you might keep your school photo or your license. This was a highly ironic choice, since I had neither a wallet nor money to put into a wallet, nor photos or a license to put in the plastic slots.

  I was humiliated. I was upset and embarrassed. I remember thinking, Why? Why? What is wrong with me? How bad am I? Will I ever get away with anything? Jane was not a disciplinarian. Her only weapon was her disappointment, which she wielded like a broadsword. I was not afraid of her; her disappointment, however, was terrifying.

  Jane walked me to the car, comforting me the whole way. Then she took the rest of the day off and took me out for ice cream at a Friendly’s near the mall. We sat in one of the orange plastic booths under the unforgiving fluorescent light.

  “Amy,” she said, “this is not the worst thing you will ever do. But it’s the dumbest.” She then promised not to tell my sisters or anyone else.

  I dried my eyes and ate my sundae. My mother got her purse to pay. Just before we left the restaurant, I said to her, “Mom, did you know you have these like jowl things under your chin? If you have jowls, does that mean I’m going to get them, too?”

  “Thank you muchly. I really appreciate it,” she said.

  “Oh, anytime,” I said. “Just trying to be helpful.”

  I have an unfortunate, and perverse, tendency to sometimes react to another person’s compassion by snapping back unkindly. It is my own shame speaking, and I hate that about myself.

  That’s the sort of thing I think about as I rattle around my mother’s place, which she made and which I have inherited. Sometimes our families deserve better than they get.

  7. Don’t Saw off More Than You Can Lift and Carry by Yourself

  I returned to the tree and jimmied the saw from the cut. I went around to the other side of the tree and started from the opposite direction. The great thing about using a saw is that you can actually see that you’re doing something as you’re doing it. Most of my efforts at work and home offer less-obvious results.

  I spent an entire afternoon attacking the junk tree with my pruning saw, feeling that righteous feeling that writers feel when they’re actually doing real work, instead of sitting at their desks, ruminating and checking Facebook. I asked myself, as I often do, Is this the best use of my time? Even though the answer was no, I did it anyway.

  As dusk was starting to descend, Bruno pulled up in his truck. My phone was in the house, so his calls had gone unanswered. I was standing in the middle of the yard, surrounded by the branches of the downed tree, holding my saw—which compared with the size of the job, looked like a nail file. Bruno wordlessly reached into the back of his truck, pulled out a chain saw and goggles, and walked toward me. He’s a good man. Our love affair, which sprouted so suddenly and grew so quickly, now has deep, strong roots.

  “Shall I…?” he asked.

  “Definitely. Have at it.” I went into the house to grab us two beers so that I could sit on the porch and watch my husband finish what I had started.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Next of Kin

  Last year, as I was visiting my father in the nursing home in Pennsylvania, I was beckoned into the director’s office for
the dreaded bill-paying conversation. Any caper involving Buck ends in an inevitable blizzard of unpaid bills. To know him is to be stiffed by him, and I consider it a minor triumph that I have never lent him money.

  As the only one of his children who will risk much direct contact with him, I have coached myself on ways to have some relationship with my father, without taking responsibility for him. On the four-hour drive from Freeville to central Pennsylvania, I had reviewed my strategy for how to dodge the inevitable mess. I’d agreed to be the point person for the nursing home, and in several meetings with the facility’s manager, I had consented that they should work with Buck to try sorting out his tangled finances, in order to pay the bills for his care. His holdings, such as they were, included a hundred-acre farm on an island in the middle of Lake Huron in Canada and a decrepit farm in Pennsylvania. Both properties were littered with unpaid-for vehicles, tax liens, pissed-off neighbors, and women he had promised to marry.

  The nursing home director said he had a question for me. I braced myself. Would I be presented with an invoice?

  “So tell me, because I’m curious,” the director said. “Was your father good-looking? I mean, back in the day?”

  His question surprised me. I thought back to my image of Buck as the rangy, raven-haired farmer of my childhood.

  “Um, yes,” I said. “He was. Movie-star handsome, in his way. Why?”

  The director explained that my father, now physically a shadow of what he had once been, behaved like a guy who had basically learned to skate along on his looks.