As he works on your car you look around his house. Everything in this man’s life is impeccably ordered. His shoes are polished, his clothes are pressed and neatly hung in the closet, his floors are swept, his books and records alphabetized. Nothing is in confusion or disarray. His keys hang by a hook just inside the front door and you imagine that he hangs them, unfailingly, every time he enters the house—he has probably never misplaced his keys in his life. After Walter finishes with your car (he fixes it!) you smoke a cigarette with him on the front porch, and you are mesmerized by the calm that surrounds him. He moves languidly, purposefully. He even smokes in a way that strikes you as refined. Not hungrily, greedily, like other people you know, but very lightly, letting the paper burn, the ashes collect at the tip for whole minutes, after which he taps them, an inch long, into a cut-glass tray. You want to disappear into Walter’s life, this small bungalow with its gleaming floors, its manicured lawn, you want to live in this house the way children want to disappear into fairy tales.
In the following weeks you learn that Walter is a twenty-year veteran of the military, where he worked as a machinist. For ten years he lived in Germany, and he seems to have brought back with him the habits and pacing of the Old World. He spends entire evenings listening to records, reading books, playing chess. He fills a bag with breadcrumbs and takes long walks, stopping here and there to feed the birds. You learn things when you are with him: art, music, history, politics. Suddenly it seems there’s another world than the one you’ve been living in—better, brighter, more intricate—and you want to know its secrets.
When you marry Walter—a simple ceremony at the court-house—the older girl moves out, moves in with your parents. She is tired of this, she says, tired of moving around, tired of you getting married. The younger girl stays with you but seems unmoored—without her sister she doesn’t know what to do. She starts taking long walks, she disappears into books. You trouble yourself, sometimes, with the question of whether you’ve damaged them, all of this moving back and forth, all of this change, but it is not a question you can afford to think about. You are pregnant again, and you intend to do things right this time.
Then things turn. Cruelly, they turn. Your brother dies, and while you are still thick in the grief of losing him, you deliver your child—another daughter—prematurely. When she dies it is as if the life you were trying for, the simplicity, the beauty, has died with her. Aspersions have been cast on you, on the marriage, on the very idea that such a union might succeed, that happiness was possible. When you leave Walter Adams you don’t even have to explain. You simply look at him, and he looks at you. You leave wordlessly, over a number of days. You go back to your old ways.
But now you are approaching forty, and your old ways no longer suit you. You move in with a golf pro, ten years your junior, but instead of making you feel younger, he makes you feel older. You are tired in the mornings—your eyes are puffy and there are circles underneath them. Your skin has begun to loosen. You have gained weight in your hips. You sleep less and less, and finally develop a nearly complete insomnia. You spend two years in almost total sleeplessness. At night you lie on the couch flipping channels, and in your exhaustion you are overcome by desperate urges. You wish to purchase the things you see advertised, you wish to travel to the places you see on screen. You consider moving to a remote location, where no one knows you. You consider swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills.
One night on television you see a preacher pacing around in front of a congregation. His name is Les Witherspoon, and he fairly gleams. He is dressed in a shining silver suit and his hair, which is a bit overgrown, is touched with silver. He has a strong jaw, a sharp nose, a sweeping brow—he has the face of a president, something that could be carved on Mount Rush-more. You have never seen a man of God in quite this light. You are used to priests in their shapeless robes, their long, somber, celibate faces, but this man is virile, this man is ecstatic. “Jesus!” he cries, and you hear the word as if for the first time. You hear the word spoken as something other than a curse.
You are about to change the channel—your interest in Les is nothing more, you think, than the passing curiosity in an attractive preacher—but just then Les asks a question. “Are you one of the long-suffering?” he says. He looks into the camera and it is as if he is looking directly at you. “Are you adrift, aimless, do you wander from one thing to the next to the next, and every time you’re sure you’ve figured it out, you’re on the path now, but the path just takes you around in the same old circle?”
Yes, you think. Yes. Yes.
“I’m here to tell you,” he says, “no more. I’m here to show you the way. Which is God’s way.” One of the preacher’s more influential techniques is to ask his audience to imagine themselves on their deathbeds. “Go on,” he says, “someday it’s bound to happen. Go on and think of it now, close your eyes and think of it. You’ve lived your whole life through, you’re looking back on it, what do you see?”
You close your eyes.
“I guarantee,” says the preacher, “the troubles in front of you now are not the things you’ll be thinking of at the end. No, they are not. Feel them fading away right before your eyes. Now, I ask you, once you let all of that go, what do you see?” For a moment your mind is blank. But then what appears to you, to your horror, is something you haven’t thought of in years: the white-haired woman in the mental hospital, coming for you, on top of you, her vicious face, the moment your life was taken from you, the most alive you’ve ever felt.
“This is the moment God was with you,” says Les. “And if you’ve lost your way since then, it is not too late to go back to the person you wanted to be, to make a new life for yourself. Join me,” he says, “join our church and the work that we do every day, to bring true meaning to the lives around us.”
Les Witherspoon’s church is in Atlanta. A person would have to be crazy, you think, to drive all that way to sit in a church. And yet already you are moving about the dark house, stuffing a bag full of clothes, going through the golf pro’s closet and drawers and cabinets, looking for the money he keeps rolled up here and there, in the tips of his shoes, in the toes of his socks, in the pockets of his golf bags. You move about as if you’re a marionette, as if compelled by some higher force. You leave the golf pro snoring in his bed—you are gone before sunrise.
At church you sit up front, and Les Witherspoon takes a special interest in you, as you knew he would. Several times during his sermon he looks directly at you. After services he makes his way over to you. He sees the scars on your neck, reaches out to touch them. “Sister,” he tells you, “forgive me, but a miracle is happening here.” He closes his eyes, trembles, presses his fingers into your flesh. “On the night God first spoke to me I closed my eyes and what I saw were two white birds in flight against a white sky, just like this, and I’ve seen them ever since whenever I pray, and what God is telling me now is that you are someone special, you are a gift He is delivering to me.” He raises his hand in the air.
One of your more bizarre characteristics is an ability to mimic, in tone and diction and accent, the speech of other people, and when you open your mouth to speak to the preacher what comes out is a sermon similar to his. I was led here, you say, raising your hand and pressing it against his. It was a higher power that drew me here, that spoke to me, and I didn’t even know what I was doing or where I was going, but the force of it led me here to you, and the moment it touched me it lifted me up out of my despair and since then there has been nothing but light.
“My brothers and sisters!” Les says, addressing the church, “you are witnessing here God’s work, God’s bringing together of two people and two destinies, and making one!”
You are married within a month. You move into Les’s home, which is the home you have always imagined in your dreams. A stately Colonial on a large lot, with a circular drive out front, in which Les parks his long white Cadillac. Inside everything is white—the carpet, the walls, the s
ofa, the linens. It is a place of such light, such dazzling beauty, that it manages to obliterate all memory of your previous suffering. Suddenly it seems to you that your life has been driving all along toward a happy ending, but you simply failed to see it until now, you simply didn’t have faith. The past twenty years have been a terrible detour, but now all of your troubles are gone and you have been delivered, you have been delivered. You develop the habit of fingering the scar on your neck, dreamily. Nothing can touch you now.
Mother, this was your life. Full of turmoil and heartache, desperate striving, bitter failure, triumph, tragedy, redemption. A role any actress would kill for. And indeed it often seemed to me that you were acting. You laughed, you cried, you raged, you trembled, but none of it seemed quite real—all of your emotions seemed rehearsed. Over the years I came to suspect that you weren’t really living your life, but making your way through a series of scenes, playing different parts, changing husbands and homes and jobs like costumes. The life around us had the thin, flimsy quality of a stage set, the walls and furniture and props made of the cheapest, lightest materials. We lived a life whose only certainty was that it would change—just when we’d settled in, just when we’d gotten comfortable, the lights would go down and the scene would be cleared away.
For years I thought of myself as your assistant, your understudy, someone standing on the sidelines with a clipboard, some category of employee who existed for the sole purpose of cataloging your every gesture. In your dealings with other people—your family, coworkers, authority figures—you always presented different versions of yourself, and you relied on me to keep everything straight. What did I tell the landlord? you’d ask me. Did I tell him I was sick or did I tell him I got laid off?
“Neither,” I’d say. “You told him me and Malinda were in the hospital.”
Oh, you’d say. Right. And then, a minute later, I said that? That was stupid. He could have just stopped by and figured out you were home.
“I know,” I said. “I told you that.”
You did?
I nodded.
Well, don’t let me do that again.
One of your favorite phrases was, Take notes. You weren’t the kind of mother who believed in protecting her children from life’s difficulties. You talked all the time, and in great detail, about the stupid mistakes that had brought you to your present fate, and you spared no details. Birth control, you always told us, long before we had any idea what it was. Always use birth control. You’d look at us gravely. Are you taking notes? you’d say.
I had been taking notes. All those years, I liked to think that I knew you better than anyone else, better than you knew yourself. I knew when you came home late you’d need a glass of water and two pills by your bedside. I knew when you were about to quit a job, and started circling the classifieds. With men, I knew when you were working up to leaving, and started preparing for another move. In one case, with Bud Francis, I never even completely unpacked my bags.
When you joined Les’s church, I assumed that your conversion would last no more than a year or two, that it was just another role you were playing. It wasn’t a part I particularly cared for. After your spiritual rebirth, as you called it, your voice took on a spooky calm, a lightness that I found unsettling. You had also adopted a preposterous southern accent. What a beautiful day the Lord has made, you’d say when I called to talk.
“Would you knock it off?” I said. “It’s me. You don’t have to pretend around me.”
I don’t know what you mean, you said. I’m disappointed in your attitude.
“Are you fucking kidding me with this accent? You sound like Minnie fucking Pearl!”
I’m sorry you’re so angry, you said. You should really come join the church and learn how to live in God’s love.
When I called to tell you about my search for Malinda—that I’d found her, and she’d slipped away again, right between my fingers—you barely registered surprise or even interest. I’m sure you’ll find her again soon, you said. The Lord works in mysterious ways.
“Well the Lord,” I said, “seems to be on a cigarette break.”
Mary, you said, sarcasm is the defense of the weak.
Mary, you said, silence is a way of closing God out of your heart.
I told myself that it was just a phase, that it couldn’t possibly last. You’d come out of it soon enough. And when you did, you’d find me.
I went off to graduate school without even telling you where I was going, and for two whole years we didn’t speak. The only connection I had left in our hometown was Walter Adams. For years Walter and I had been playing chess by mail, our letters going back and forth every week, the pace so glacially slow that it took us years to finish a game. Along with his moves (he was fond of traps—Lasker, Monticelli) Walter always wrote a line or two about what he was reading and listening to, just a few phrases dashed off. But in the winter of my second year of graduate school Walter sent a long letter about the sorry state of our city. It had changed drastically in the time since I’d left for college—several of its major employers had failed or relocated—and now it seemed that every third house or business was boarded up, abandoned. The schools were a particular problem. The kids in our city were stuck in a failing system. There was a desperate need for good teachers. Walter’s son Reggie, whom I’d never gotten to know very well but whom I’d always admired for his cool reserve, had already worked his way up to assistant principal at our old high school, and there was a position for me there, if I wished to take it. “You might find other useful things to do with your life,” Walter wrote, “but you will find nothing more useful than this.”
And so I moved back to town, partly with the idea of teaching but also because, much to my surprise, I found myself unable to live anywhere else. The towns I’d lived in since leaving home had presented to me landscapes, versions of life, which I acknowledged to be superior in all ways to the life I’d known, and yet those beautiful college towns also struck me as deluded. I lived in them only partly, I walked through them the way one walks in dreams, with a weightless ease one is startled by, but which one also understands, on some deep level, to be false.
My old high school had taken on the feel of a prison. One was obliged to enter through a metal detector, to surrender one’s bag for inspection. There were security guards walking the hallways, with fat clubs attached to their belts. The walls were gray, fluorescent tube lighting flickered overhead. Years prior the hallways had been outfitted with corkboards, to display artwork and announcements, but now these were empty. One of the boards had a heading that read COMING EVENTS, but there was nothing underneath it—just dozens of old staples embedded in the cork and the tiny corners of bright paper from old flyers, announcing events long past.
Most of the students at the school were there because they were required by law to be there. If statistics held up, almost half of them would drop out as soon as they were old enough. In the meantime they cut class and forgot their books, they made their test sheets into paper airplanes and launched them at me, they talked during class, listened to headphones, fell asleep. The only way to get them to display the slightest interest in learning was to teach them foul language and insulting sentences they might one day find useful. “Do you want to learn how to tell someone to go screw themselves?” I asked.
“Hell yeah,” they said.
“Let’s conjugate,” I said. “I screw, you screw, he, she, it screws.”
“You’re tricking us,” they said. “You’re trying to trick us into learning something.”
“We screw,” I said, “you plural screw, they screw.”
“Just tell us how to say it,” they said.
“And the command form would be?” I asked. “Anyone want to guess? To screw yourself? Anyone?”
Reggie had explained to me that, in a school like this, every teacher had to find what he called a “coping mechanism.” Each teacher had developed his or her own style, and so long as that style fell short
of criminal liability, it was something to be encouraged. Some teachers walked around the classroom with wooden sticks, which they crashed down on a student’s desk when they suspected that student wasn’t paying attention. One teacher carried a lighter which she called “the flame of knowledge,” and which she liked to ignite casually, as she walked between the rows of seats. When she caught someone misbehaving she ignited the flame very close to his ear. “Are you listening to me?” she said.
“The thing is,” Reggie said, “when you start something, you have to see it all the way through, or else they know they got you. Don’t go changing your coping mechanism halfway through the class, or even halfway through the year. You pick it, you marry it, you stick with it, even if it kills you.”
I’d chosen a bad coping mechanism. I’d start a lesson and the class would be under control for the first ten minutes or so. Then the students would grow restless and start talking, mouthing off, and I’d turn off the lights and sit in the dark staring at them blankly. Sometimes when I did this they settled down, but more often they didn’t, and they spent the rest of the class talking and chasing each other around the room like three-year-olds.
The only hope I had in the classroom were the immigrants (a large number of kids had moved to our city from India, and a few from Africa) whose Old World manners prevented them from making a mockery of their teachers. They were a quiet, mournful group who—despite being teenagers—looked and dressed and conducted themselves with the soberness of undertakers. Because of the pressure their families put on them, these kids were the only ones who routinely did their homework and remembered to bring their books. They were the only ones to volunteer in class. But their participation was often disheartening. Their lives, the ways they’d suffered, made my life look like a sock hop. Even the most benign subjects—the kinds of things people talk about when they are learning a new language—had a way of turning disastrous.
Elegies for the Brokenhearted Page 21