I woke early the next morning to a sound. A step. Something emerging from the forest that lined our land. I don’t know how I could have heard her, for she was too far away, but I swear I heard her step, her delicate cloven foot landing lightly on the still soaking leaves, coming closer, closer, while I slipped out of bed to watch at the window. The doe seemed to be of suede, with a fine shapely head and ears at once triangular and furred. Her long neck arced out, lowered her head like a lever, and I saw her drink the accumulated rain our whole pond held, for her, and us.
I believed something was over, had passed then. I felt I had climbed to the top of a steep spiral staircase and now I stood looking down at the vortex of steel from the final landing.
That afternoon, Benjamin took the kids for ice cream, and I planned to try the pond out for myself.
Where we live: on thirty-eight acres forty-eight miles from Boston, MA, but forty-eight worlds apart. Our town is tiny, rural, the streets astir with horses and cars in equal number. At rush hour, carts roll down the road, pulled by geldings with black blinders siding their angular faces, and every morning the sun rises from behind the mountain, first its rays snaking upward and then at last the yolk of yellow yanked suddenly into the sky, as if pulled on a chain, or some string, held in the hand of god. And every night that same sun sets in reverse order, first the yolk, aflame now, streaming salmon pinks and hemorrhage-red from its bruised body, that yolk drops down abruptly behind the stony ridge, leaving its rays to linger aimlessly, until, one by one, they fizzle out almost audibly, and the darkness is a-chirp with crickets and other creatures.
Where we live, a neighbor can be eight acres away.
I walk around naked where we live. When it’s warm, I do this, despite my weight, because of my weight, I do this and revel in my privilege.
Thus, I stripped to my skin and, without even the screen of sun lotion, walked down the dirt path to the pond, which looked so peaceful, like a huge cup of tea on an earthen saucer. Dragonflies glinted above it, snacking on mosquitoes, and way down at the bottom, frogs skimmed the water, their back legs flung behind their goopy bodies, clowns, every one.
Now I made my way down the embankment we had made, surprised at how steep it actually was. We had tried to dig the sides to no more than a slope of twenty degrees, but this could not have been twenty degrees. Gravity put both his hands on my back and pushed me, so my cautious walk turned into a stumble, and then a slip, and then before I could say catchascatchcan, I went lickety-split into the pond, sliding to my destination on my bare ass, cool clay caking my palms and parts.
And then I was in, swimming around, pedaling in the water, flinging my legs like the frogs, breast stroking back and forth with them. Delightful. Five days of heavy rains had not managed to fill ’er up to ten feet. I’d say our pond was filled to four feet ten inches, maximum. I know this because when I finally stood up, I, at five feet, could stand with my head above water, stand, that is, in the center, the deepest point of the pond, which is where I stood now, with my head above water, and then I walked forward, towards the embankment, our steep-sloped shore, having had my fill, ready to get out, standing for a second in the shallow end to admire what we’d made, the water calm and lapping. I stood, water at my ankles. I stood for no more than maybe five seconds, gathering myself to get out.
And that is when it happened. Not slowly; it happened suddenly, as though a rug had been pulled, because suddenly I was sinking, the muddy bottom collapsing out from under me, my flailing feet searching for water but instead stuck in sucking mud, and I could not stop the sucking. I’ve never felt anything comparable. I had never known the earth was capable of collapsing in this manner; my standing spot was having a nervous breakdown of some sort, melting down into some substance all ooze and excrement, some voracious devilish substance gobbling me up, or down; down, I went, not even thinking to scream.
I was, then, sunk to my knees, my thighs; it happened fast. I recall feeling in a flash how hot and heavy the afternoon sun was on my head, like a hand, pushing me down, this image in a flash of a flash, and then disappeared, just darkness, and now the mud was at my midpoint. I kept going.
My life did not roll before my eyes.
I did not process my regrets, or my loves, or my luck, for that matter.
I lost all thought; I shed my status as a noun and became pure verb, at one with the plot I was quite literally sucked into. I was going down, and I needed to find a way up, and out; but I was no match for the mud. My muscles were irrelevant in the mud. I could not quite grasp this fact at first, because I have always thought that, if caught in a natural disaster, your muscles would save you or sink you; it was all about strength, was it not? And yet here, no matter how hard I strained and clawed, it made not one whit of difference; I was clawing at mush, at mash; clawing at cloud, pushing against emptiness, each tiny, solid center my feet seemed to find collapsing still further inward.
A long time passed. This I know. So perhaps my struggles did do me some good, did slow the sinking; the sun was far westward when the mud crept past my neck and pressed up against my pursed lips, clasping my whole head just below my flaring nostrils. “Where the fuck is my family,” I thought, and then, in a flare of rage, “This is one hell of an ice-cream cone they’re all eating.”
Now, the mud was in my mouth.
Up my nose.
I started choking, spitting, but whenever I spat, the more mud was in my mouth. I could still breathe. I could breathe well enough to weep, and weep I then did, and my tears merged with the mud and made it still muddier. And once again, then, I saw that, quite literally, there was nothing I could do. There was simply no way out. No amount of understanding, or struggle, would crack the code of quicksand, which this essentially was, and I was tired. So very tired.
I tried once more to thrash my way upward, and then exhaustion captured me completely, and I slumped in my mud and tasted its taste: drenched darkness, thick salt, shredded plant. I tasted it all: the earth, the depth, the darkness, the minerals, the fire, the water, the loam the clay the seeds the salt the weeping the wanting the living the dying; I tasted it all because I was forced to. I slumped in my mud and sampled the whole world.
I didn’t know that if you are ever caught in quicksand, rule one is not to struggle. I stopped struggling because I could not continue.
And once I stopped, the mud stopped with me. In fact, it was as though the entire earth just came to a quiet halt, with me. I hung there, entombed, suspended between here and there, then and now, with nothing sucking; just stopped. Dangling in density, utterly liminal, still weeping.
But even in tears I took note of how stopping had helped. Once I stopped, so too did the sinking. I’d like to know why this is, but I have not had the time to look into it.
And then, after minutes or hours, mosquitoes still nibbling on my scalp, the suspension transformed itself into an ever-so-slight upward lift. I felt it, a tectonic shift, a northward shrug, the earth in all its layers quite literally lifting me out of my mess.
Now I stayed very still, afraid to even wriggle my toes, because clearly there was a connection between the stillness in my body and the upward movement of the world. I was in mud, but miles beneath my feet the tectonic plates held me aloft, ground their gears, and then urged me skyward, so eventually my mouth emerged, my neck, my shoulders, my breasts, black moguls, my belly, black balloon; I rose in increments standing still, doing nothing. I rose, or, rather, the earth rose me, rewarded me, and once my stomach was out, I flung my whole self forward, clung to the embankment, hauled myself high and higher still, the pond’s lip just inches away now. And only then did I allow myself these images: phoenix, swan, mermaid, rising from her own excessive froth, finding her land legs, ecstatic not because of talent, and surely not because of luck (but then again precisely because of luck, her gifts sometimes gaudy, sometimes simple, she favors the prepared, perhaps, but, as far as I’m concerned, everything I get, both good and bad, yes, everything I ge
t starts to go as soon as I feel it on my fingers . . . .).
And yet this I can count on: I made my way up over the embankment and stepped on solid ground. Imagine what I must have looked like from far away, my family far away, pulling in, tumbling out of the Subaru, seeing a black woman with a silver halo of hair stumbling across an infertile field, tears making tracks in her Nigerian face, this is what I must have looked like from the outside. But from the inside? Well, that’s a different story.
I was on a whole different pole but not polarized, no, no longer. I was simply on the inside, in a shining bright room, a small bundle of fire flickering in the hearth, well-steeped tea in a saucer by my side, beloved book in my lap. I looked around. Outside butterflies massed by the windows, so many species, so many colors, such a plethora of filmy wings. I could just barely hear them beat, just barely smell the garden pouring its perfume. I was inside, in a space and a grace called this place here is home, and I held out my hands and my children came running and my husband came walking and the butterflies came flying and the frogs came hopping and the locusts came shrieking and Job came limping and god came on his chariot and Bad Luck on his stallion and Good Luck in her Mercedes and my children on their lean and thank-the-lord-healthy legs and my husband powered by his steady and thank-the-lord healthy heart, they all came, such a crowd beyond counting, five football stadiums came as I held out my hands and everyone ran and I let them inside. We went inside and lit a small fire, and I told them this tale, this story, of sinking, of stumbling, of summer, and of finally finding some stillness, small fire, the fall of my footsteps always in my ears here; fall fall fall, the sound no longer ominous, oddly sweet now, like the autumn that is coming, like the leaves that will blaze, like the trees turning to torches while I watch all this, my hands held out, in humility, for balance, my borders; here is where I stand.
Acknowledgments
These essays were written over a period of so many years that it is impossible to thank all the people who had a hand in helping me, in ways small and large. My husband, Benjamin Alexander, has been perhaps the one constant, continual presence during the time span these essays describe; he has read every one, at times with a grimace, because he, unlike me, is a deeply private person who cannot fathom the autobiographical impulse, which is not, as people think, a narcissistic need to perform on your own personal stage but rather a reaching out, from some deeply personal space, a reaching out into the world in the hopes of hearing your words echo in the lives of others who, like you, share your struggles and your joys. I’d like to thank, therefore, my readers, many of whom e-mail me to let me know my work has reverberated for them; this is the greatest gift a writer can receive. I’d also like to thank my children; they have enchanted me and enriched me in so many ways, lending me language and image, plot and prism, allowing me time and space to write while also insisting that I return to the real world each afternoon, the world of peanut butter and homework, spelling tests and track meets. My children are both inspirations and anchors, as well as amazing individuals, and becoming more so every day.
After I gathered these essays together, which was in and of itself a significant task as they were strewn across computers and hard drives and disparate publications, I sat down to read them in the order my editor at Beacon Press, Helene Atwan—whom I also need to thank for her masterful mind and vision—had suggested. And I was, well, a little shocked, a little shaken, by what was on the page.
These were indisputably my essays, but some I hadn’t seen or touched for ten years or more, and thus reading them in a chronological arrangement was like peering at my past through a hole someone had punched in the air. There I was, pregnant and despairing. Here I was, still bleeding from my mastectomy, my daughter’s words and comfort—remember that? I did. I saw myself starkly, a self capable of greediness, small heartedness, fear, and also love. It was uncomfortable to see myself from so many angles, rendered so starkly, all jagged and ripped and incapable, at least at times.
Each essay in this book was written “on assignment” (though here you are seeing the full-length versions, sometimes two and three times longer than what was first published), and thus I always took these essays less seriously than my “real work,” my books, which I wrote not for money but for love. And yet, looking at these arranged essays, I realized that, without ever knowing it, or meaning to, I had told a sober, serious, and scathingly honest account of one woman’s life straddling two centuries.
I want to thank each and every person who put up with me during those years. I want to thank the friends who nurtured me, despite my prickly nature. I want to thank, especially, the editors at the magazines from which the assignments issued, specifically Laurie Abraham at Elle, and Paula Derrow, who was at Self, and Deborah Way and Pat Towers at O, The Oprah Magazine, and Cathleen Medwick and Nanette Varian at More; I want to thank every editor at every women’s magazine where these essays all initially appeared.
Women’s magazines—they get a bad rap. If you can publish in the New Yorker or the Atlantic, then you can publish with pride, but to publish in a glossy with advertisements for lingerie and lip gloss and attendant articles about lovemaking techniques—that can be embarrassing. And I was always a bit embarrassed about publishing in “women’s magazines,” as they don’t have the pomp and polish, the intellectual heft, of some of their more serious competitors. And yet, I now see that I was wrong to feel that way. Elle, Self, O, More, and the other women’s magazines that published my autobiographical work were willing to show their readers much more than eyeliner and thongs. My essays are about the darker aspects of being a white, middle-class female in our times. These magazines, for more than a decade, allowed, even encouraged, me to tell the truth about my life, the whole unruly, unpretty truth, which they then published, proving, along the way, that “women’s magazines” are capable of carrying complex stories about difficult subjects to their vast audiences.
In making this book, I have revised my notions about women’s magazines and want to encourage you to do the same. These glossies have provided me with pages to tell stories that had no gleam or gloss in them, stories my editors celebrated each and every time, their mission, I now see, to bring to their readers honest accounts of what it is like to live inside a mind and body with two x’s in every single cell, this body, this mind, grim, difficult, delighted, in every state, in every way, with thanks to all the hands held out, from all these magazines. My stories exist because they do.
Beacon Press
www.beacon.org
Beacon Press books
are published under the auspices of
the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.
© 2013 by Lauren Slater
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the uncoated paper ANSI/NISO specifications for permanence as revised in 1992.
Text design by Ruth Maassen
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Slater, Lauren.
Playing house : notes of a reluctant mother / Lauren Slater.
pages cm
eISBN 978-0-8070-0174-5
ISBN 978-0-8070-0173-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Slater, Lauren—Family. 2. Women authors, American—20th century—Biography. 3. Mothers—United States—Biography. I. Title.
PS3619.L373Z46 2013
814’.6—dc23
[B]
2013013073
Parts of some chapters in this book were previously published in significantly different versions in the New York Times; O, The Oprah Magazine; Self; Elle; Iowa Review; Sun; Salon; and in Behind the Bedroom Door, Paula Derrow, ed. (New York: Delacorte Press, 2008); Kiss Tomorrow Hello, Kim Barnes and Claire Davis, eds. (New York: Doubleday, 2006); Searching for Mary Poppins, Susan Davis and Gina Hyams, eds. (New York: Hudson Street Press, 2006); Coach, Andrew Blauner, ed. (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2005); and Maybe Baby, Lori Leib
ovich, ed. (New York: Harper Collins, 2006).
Playing House Page 21