Crash Course

by Robin Black

  House Lessons I:

  Aspirational Storytelling

  On a sunny afternoon many springs ago, a young man rang our doorbell, clipboard in hand. He looked like every earnest canvasser who had ever come to call, but he wasn’t there for my signature. He was there to inform me that the spectacularly unkempt appearance of our house made us likely candidates for a free façade makeover on a new TV show that might as well have been titled: “Wow, Your Neighbors Must Really Hate You.”

  My visitor grew excited as he waxed rhapsodic about our busted shutters and three-story-high hedge, but I felt more as though I were receiving an unwelcome diagnosis than a gift. I’d spent years convincing myself that the house wasn’t really that bad, and now here was this oddly enthusiastic stranger dismantling my delusion. At one point, as he took pictures, I muttered ‘‘Lord,’’ and he muttered, ‘‘I kind of hate this part of my job.’’ But then, very soon, with only negligible resistance on my part, we slipped from the norms of decent society into another set: the norms of reality TV.

  It’s a bit like A Christmas Carol. One message of Scrooge’s big night is that if you behave hideously enough, otherworldly beings will intervene. And today if you step too far outside what society expects of you, the denizens of reality TV swoop in. The extremely obese are fair game, the rampant procreators, the neglectful homeowners lowering the property values of their lovely neighborhood.

  I called my husband Richard, who was skeptical—first that I wasn’t pulling his leg, and then that we should get involved. But I was already a naturalized citizen of Reality World, and I felt a distinct impatience with his reactions, never mind that they had earlier been my own. How could he be embarrassed, or have doubts? We’d been invited into a realm in which our failings would turn us into stars. And we’d get free stuff. I was adamant, wheedling, nagging. He didn’t hesitate for long.

  Some tense days later, we learned that the network loved the documentation of our disrepair, but we were cautioned that we were in competition with another house in the neighborhood, a property equally run-down. My son took a practical approach. “I think we should find it and fix it up, weed the place, trim their hedge.” We all thought that was brilliant, and never once puzzled over why, if we had it in us to do that in the name of cheating, we couldn’t manage to do it on our own property for more conventional reasons. In the end though, we never found the other house. And our investigative drives through streets of monolithically well-tended properties depressed me. It looked so simple, so doable. The mowed lawns. The weeded gardens. The trimmed hedges. We were, I realized, an oddity. The people about whom others must talk, clicking their tongues, rolling their eyes.

  “So what’s our story?” I asked Richard, the night before our final audition was to be filmed. “How did this happen?”

  They are never precisely the same question, of course, the story one tells and what has actually taken place, and in the distinction lies not only the immeasurable gulf between reality TV and reality, but also the seductive thrill of reworking one’s own narrative. The story we crafted that night was one of good-natured over-achievers who couldn’t possibly do it all. The next day, as the camera rolled, I bubbled over, doing my best to be charmingly ditzy, babbling about how in lives as rife with interest and accomplishment as ours, something’s gotta give. Richard gave a mock serious performance as the husband of the zany wife, the man who’s just trying to keep up with all the hilarity. And in the end, we stood together, arms wrapped around one another’s backs and called out with some heartfelt passion, “Please! We need your help!!’’

  As for how it had really happened, the busted shingles, the overgrown hedge, that was mercifully irrelevant throughout.

  “God, imagine, if they don’t take us,” I said, as days passed by. “That must be the worst. They tell you your property is a disgrace, then abandon you.” And of course that’s exactly what happened. The other house won—not because it gave them a better challenge, as I had worried, but because it was in better shape. A less daunting project.

  “I’m really sorry,” the producer said. “The network loved you guys. They loved your story.”

  Sure they had. So had we.

  As the sun set that evening, Richard and I stood out on the curb, studying our home of fourteen years. I looked down the street at the other houses, neat and tidy, conforming to expectation, the words “All happy families are alike…” crossing my mind.

  How had this happened? Really? There were unanticipated losses, grief that enveloped us for years. A stillbirth. A beloved child with special needs. Challenges we never imagined we’d confront. None of it amusing. Nothing like a situation comedy. We’d let go of so many easy assumptions about how our lives would proceed, and in the process we let other things go as well. Gradually, we learned to live a new story, different from the one we had imagined would be ours. Maybe we had even became stronger, doing so. But the evidence of our faltering remained, the façade of our home stubbornly unable to mend itself, obstinately true.

  Beside me, Richard sighed.

  “Reality’s a bitch,” I said, reaching for his hand. “Let’s go back inside.”

  Autumn, 1972

  My maternal grandmother moved into our home when I was ten. Grandma was a tough cookie. Shtetl-born, Lower East Side raised, the second oldest of eight children, seven of them girls, she had the reputation among her own generation as a drill sergeant. She was certain in her own opinions, a woman to whom it had seemingly never occurred that she might be wrong. Her favorite, oft-repeated expression was, “There’s a right way and wrong way to do everything,” and it was clear into which category her way invariably fell. But she was also a woman of contradictions, unexpectedly tender-hearted, and always likely to side with the underdog, yet someone who hadn’t hesitated to smack around her own sons when she thought they’d stepped out of line. A good woman? A bad woman? A complicated woman. And, by the time she moved in with us, a seventy-two year old woman who had been paralyzed from the waist down from spinal tumors for more than ten years, and widowed for most of that time.

  As a writer, it’s almost inevitable that you will wonder sometimes what made you the sort of writer that you are, what periods of your life, what particular events, what people. It’s a strange kind of inquiry because of course there is no definitive answer, but still, there are these little glimmers you can find, moments and exchanges that seem to explain something, if not everything. Grandma’s move into our home offers just such a glimmer for me.

  •

  During the initial years of her paralysis, after her widowhood, she had lived alone, a couple of hours away from us, maintaining more independence than anyone could believe. Her six sisters did her shopping, provided her with constant company, and played other crucial roles in helping her. One of my earliest memories is of watching her wash the dishes, the gravity of her weight against the sink keeping her upright. And she would cook that way too, or sometimes she would do it by pulling her wheelchair up to the kitchen table. She wasn’t exactly mobile, but she wasn’t exactly immobile either—until something shifted in her damaged spine.

  By the time she moved in with us, there was some talk of her continuing to be active in the ways that she had been, but in fact she soon became entirely bedridden—as she would be until her death at nearly eighty-three.

  I was ten years old that first day, November 1972, and I was not a happy child. My father, alcoholic and depressive, had been institutionalized for many months in ’71, an experience preceded and followed by disorienting chaos in our home. But I remember being giddy around my grandmother’s move to our home. It seemed like such fun, so cool to have her there. It was a change in our routine; and maybe the routine of our house was unhappy enough that any change seemed promising. I wrote poems to commemorate the event and I raced my brothers in Grandma’s two wheelchairs, and I made a lot of what I thought were very funny jokes about—of all things—an imaginary suitor for her.

  Here, an element of
self-protective repression sets in, because I don’t remember the specifics of this long-running joke of mine. He had a name, he had a spiel—all of it mercifully gone from my mind. But what I do remember, vividly, is the evening my mother took me into the hallway and suggested as gently as possible that I stop. “You know, if Grandma hadn’t been in a wheelchair, stuck in her apartment, she might have had a real suitor. She might have remarried after my father died. It may well be a thought that makes her sad, so it’s probably not something you should joke about now.”

  When I remember that moment, so long ago, I feel an array of things—most obviously my own shame, even horror, at my mother’s words. I had thought I was being funny, cheering everybody up, when in fact I had been causing pain. It was devastating. And I sense too, even now, the reverberations of a kind of shattering of my foundation and a quick rebuild, a change at a molecular level of who I understood myself to be. No longer someone who could look at another person without wondering what their life was like, but someone with a new curiosity about what people’s stories might actually be. Below the surface. Not because I suddenly became a better person, but because I was terrified—and perhaps am terrified still—of again being inadvertently cruel.

  The impact of that evening goes beyond this vague notion of having an empathic imagination shocked into me. When my story collection came out, people often asked me why so many of my stories were about older women, women in their seventies and beyond. “I feel a commitment to reminding people that older women are still complex human beings,” I would say. A worthy goal? Of course. A lifelong creative penance for having been a little girl who hurt someone by forgetting that fact? Perhaps.

  What does it take to write fiction? The answer is as varied as the results that emerge when a hundred million authors sit down to write. What determines our obsessions? The places and people toward which our imaginations are drawn? The questions are both unavoidable and unanswerable. But I suspect that each of our lives is scattered with such glimmers, shimmering shards that provide a glimpse—and that may always remain sharp enough to cut.

  AD(H)D I

  On a recent early evening, my husband drove nearly four hours, round trip, to fetch my wallet. We were away from our home, but my wallet was still there. The return leg would be after dark, and my vision makes night-driving difficult. He didn’t look happy as he set off, but he made the drive, and, considering everything, he did it with remarkable grace.

  I say “considering everything” because this is a common occurrence for me, and therefore for him. I don’t mean that I leave my wallet two hours away with any regularity, but that my entire life is short on regularity and long on forgotten necessities: lost keys, unpartnered shoes, and so on. I am perpetually defeated by physical objects, often in a panic over something that’s gone missing, frequently hurling vivid, heartfelt insults at myself for losing everything that comes into my care.

  “How is it possible?” I asked recently about a scarf, while stomping around our home. “I swear to God, I was just holding it, telling myself to remember where I put it. How does this happen to me no matter what?”

  “Are you talking about this scarf?” my husband asked, producing it, magician-style from under the couch, where I had looked three dozen times.

  A lot of people don’t believe in Attention Deficit Disorder, but those who suffer from it do. I suffer from it, and my husband suffers from my suffering from it. Long ago, my father-in-law walked into our messy home and said to me, of his beloved son, “You’ve broken him.”

  “I’m sorry,” was all I could think to say in response.

  Apologies are tricky, though. It was easy enough to apologize to my father-in-law for lowering his son’s housekeeping standards—by a lot—but if I apologized to my husband for every inconvenience my ADD causes, we would have little time left to speak of anything else.

  And apologies are tricky, too, because it’s not so simple to forge and maintain a strong relationship in which one of you is so, well, abysmal, at so much, while the other happens to be, as my husband is, so incredibly good at the very same things. And it’s not as if I’m talking about doing calculus or juggling, activities that come up rarely if ever. I am talking about the practical matters of everyday life.

  To be clear, he knew what he was getting into. When we met, 22 years ago, my electricity had been recently cut, not because I lacked the funds, but because I forgot to pay the bill, which I had also lost. Shortly before that, it was my phone. After we’d dated only a few times, I called him at his office because, my attention elsewhere, I had driven the wrong way over parking lot spikes, flattening all four of my tires. Our courtship was positively bedazzled with just such episodes—not to mention that he’d seen my apartment in all its chaotic, haphazard, never-been-vacuumed glory. So he was definitely forewarned.

  And in fact I was the one who went in blind, completely unprepared for how it would feel to live with someone who, through no fault of his own, seemed perpetually to be showing me up. I was unprepared for the rage I would direct his way every time he fixed something I had broken or found something that I had lost. I had no idea that I would become essentially allergic to his even noticing that I had messed up again—which is like saying I was allergic to his knowing that I have blue eyes.

  “Why don’t you just let me help?” he has asked, perhaps a trillion times. And for years, the answer, which I couldn’t bring myself to articulate was: Because if I do, it will make my loser status in this relationship official.

  “I don’t understand why you’re mad at me for finding your keys,” he would say.

  Because it makes me feel even worse about myself.

  There was something else, too. When we met, I was a newly single mother of two small children, ages five and two. For a long time, and from a lot of people, I heard (endlessly, endlessly) about how lucky I was that he had been undaunted by that fact and had taken us on. It seems bizarre now, even to me, how many people said exactly that, with how little sense of how it might make me feel, but in fact it was a constant theme. And they weren’t wrong. I was incredibly fortunate, as were my kids. But after enough people said it, I began to feel like some kind of good-deed sacrifice my husband had made, his sad-sack, pity-marriage of a wife.

  “I could help you organize your papers, you know. Why don’t you just let me?”

  Because if I have to deal with one more reason to be grateful, I am going to implode.

  So the truth is that he wasn’t really forewarned either. Because, though he may have known he was marrying a woman who couldn’t maintain any semblance of physical order and whose wandering attention would often leave havoc in its wake, he had no idea that I would be angry at him because of that. Angry and ungracious—as he found my left sneaker, cleaned our clogged gutters, replaced our souring milk, and remembered to pay our bills. The bastard!

  But then something in our dynamic shifted.

  I know that marriages supposedly don’t change overnight, not by common wisdom, but common wisdom doesn’t take into account what I like to think of as The Best Day Ever: the day my husband backed one of our cars out of our driveway, and smashed it into our other car, crumpling a decent-sized portion of both. It was a day that ushered peace and tranquility into our lives, the twofer that will live forever in family lore.

  I burst out laughing when he told me. But he did not laugh. I rejoiced in spite of the money it was going to cost. He was in a foul temper for reasons having little to do with the money. I was more in love with him than I had ever been before. He was disgusted with himself.

  “You really don’t see the humor in this?”

  “No, I really do not see the humor in this.”

  Finally, after I stopped high-fiving myself, and he stopped seething (a process that in each case took hours, if not days), we had the conversation.

  “You know that way you felt, when the one car hit the other car? Like a complete and total moron?” He winced, but nodded. “Well, that’s how I f
eel half a dozen times every day.”

  “I understand.”

  “And you being so good at everything, it sometimes just makes me feel worse about myself.”

  “I understand that, too. Though clearly I’m not good at everything.”

  “And really, I think it has something to do with my having had the kids as well, the whole rescue of the single mom thing—”

  “Even though I’ve never felt that way?”

  It seemed, in prospect, like an important conversation to have—though once we did, it became obvious that my husband had known about these dynamics all along. He’s a very smart man. Of course his ADD-ridden wife felt bad about her ADD. And of course she worried that she’d already come into the relationship as a burden because of the two children she brought with her who weren’t yet his. But what was he supposed to do, even knowing that his competence bummed me out? Leave our bills unpaid and not produce my missing scarf from under the couch? Let me storm and wail, when he could see my keys on the counter plain as day?

  And where had I thought this conversation would lead? Did I believe that if he better understood me, my husband would stop trying to help me? That he should? It seems like a dead end kind of goal.

  The whole episode might well have led exactly nowhere, except that in the process, I came to see that while I was focused on changing him, it was—of course—I who needed to change.

  These days, in fiction, the sort of epiphanies where characters suddenly understand what their problem has been all along are out of style. It seems so contrived, so unlikely. But the bar for plausibility is higher in fiction than in fact. Real life can be, often is, implausible—yet true. And I did indeed have one of those sudden moments of understanding, soon after my husband simultaneously wrecked both our cars.

  So what did I do?