The Long Journey Home

by Margaret Robison

  Mother, I couldn’t read.

  You lie in intensive care with whatever comfort machines and tubes can give you tonight. They’ve cut your oxygen back. It’s late and my own rooms are quiet. I can almost hear your lungs wheeze. I grope for a way to endure this night of your dying, and I remember a night when I was young and afraid and you sat by my bed and read from A Tale of Two Cities aloud.

  Mother, may the spirit of everything and everyone you have loved be with you this long night of your dying: Flannery O’Connor, Marc Chagall, Latin roots of words. Plants and flowers in your yard—camellias, roses, and the fragrant mint, pink azaleas grown to trees. You loved the long-leafed pines. Lonely Mercer, Bubba and Anne. Meridith, and Leigh. The many children you taught. And more people than I can name.

  Mother, I remember the tick of the clock in the hall, the light from the bedside lamp, and the sound of your voice as you read to me until far into the night.

  After I finished writing I finally fell asleep.

  When I woke the next morning I couldn’t bear being alone in the apartment, waiting. I took a shower, dressed, and went out and ran errands. I returned home to find that Bubba had left a message on my answering machine telling me that Mother had died.

  II

  I missed Suzanne terribly.

  Half kidding, I asked my friend Sheryl Stoodley, a graduate student in the theater department at Smith College, with whom I taught a women’s theater/writing workshop in a prison in Lancaster, Massachusetts, to find me a new lover. Almost as soon as the new semester started, she told me she thought I might be interested in one of her professors, a new faculty member from the South. She suggested the three of us have lunch together. We agreed to meet at Paul & Elizabeth’s, my favorite Northampton restaurant.

  I was first to arrive. I pulled out a chair, sat down, and lit a cigarette. Then I saw Suzanne sitting at a table yards from me, talking with a friend. It felt awkward, but I didn’t want to call attention to myself by changing tables. The room was crowded anyway, and there wasn’t an empty table in sight.

  Sheryl introduced me to Kendall. Katherine was her first name, but she preferred to be called Kendall, so Kendall it was. She was a tall, slim woman with extremely short, straight, blond hair. And she had a nub where the little finger on her right hand should have been, something I noticed soon after she sat down because she talked a great deal with her hands.

  I also noticed that Dr. Turcotte was sitting just two tables down from Suzanne. His daughter June walked past us and sat down across from her father. But when she saw me, she got up and rushed out of the restaurant.

  We had hardly begun to talk before Sheryl started to tell Kendall the story of how Dr. Turcotte had sexually assaulted me in Newport, my having police protection, the trial, and about the doctor finally losing his license. I felt uncomfortable, but Kendall listened with acute interest and there was nothing I could do except to sit silently.

  I still couldn’t talk about or listen to anyone else talk about the sexual assault without feeling intensely upset while trembling inside, and sometimes outside as well. Now I fought to control my trembling as well as my embarrassment in being introduced this way. As soon as we finished lunch, I said goodbye to Sheryl and Kendall and rushed away.

  Kendall ran after me.

  She caught up with me and said she was interested in getting to know me. We agreed to meet at Paul & Elizabeth’s the following week, this time without Sheryl. I was fascinated by Kendall’s nub of a little finger. And I was attracted to this woman who gave me hints of having had a Southern Gothic childhood that rivaled mine.

  Our second lunch together led to more lunches, dinners, movies, plays, and long walks on the Smith campus. We were rapidly getting caught up in a wildly intense infatuation.

  “I make a terrific short-term lover,” Kendall announced.

  I was shocked by her directness. But her statement turned out to be true, at least partially. Short-term or not, the relationship became an important one to both of us in ways neither of us could have predicted.

  We made love and we made war. We lived together and we lived apart.

  Once we went to Peg Robbins, a psychic whom another Smith professor suggested we see. Neither of us had been to a psychic before. Peg—or rather “The Ones” whom Peg channeled—told us that we’d been very close in a lifetime centuries before. According to The Ones, I had been killed in a war and Kendall had never been able to get over it. Peg explained that if Kendall could resolve her feelings in this lifetime, I wouldn’t have to die again as a part of the present relationship. But we didn’t seem to be able to resolve the small daily problems, much less a problem that was centuries old.

  III

  My friend Sally had once taken me out to lunch at the Riverside Restaurant in Shelburne Falls, a small town in the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains. We chose a table overlooking the Deerfield River. After lunch we walked across the Bridge of Flowers, an old trolley bridge the local garden club had turned into a glorious garden. And there was something in the air itself that drew me to the town.

  During the most difficult time I had in my relationship with Kendall, I decided I had to move out of the house we shared at the time. I drove back to Shelburne Falls and went to the Riverside Restaurant again. I had thought of the river and town ever since Sally had taken me there. When the waitress took out her pad and pencil and asked what I wanted, I replied that I wanted a bowl of the soup of the day, a roll, a Diet Coke, and an apartment by the river.

  In minutes she returned. She placed the soup, roll, and Diet Coke before me. “The apartment will be available in two weeks.”

  “You’re kidding,” I sputtered.

  She wasn’t.

  “It’s over the restaurant,” she said. “The woman who rents it as a studio is going to San Francisco for two months on business. She wants to sublet it while she’s gone.”

  I rented the apartment before going back to Northampton to pack and move. By that time I was psychotic again.

  I had moved and was walking around town in Shelburne Falls when I suddenly lost all sense of where I was or how to get back to my new apartment. Frantic, I went into a store and asked to use the phone. I called Mary Gene Devlin, a teacher with whom I’d worked in the Old Deerfield elementary school and who had become my friend. She and her husband, Jim, arrived shortly. Jim drove us to the home of another Old Deerfield teacher with whom I’d also worked, whose husband was a psychiatrist. After hearing Mary Gene’s description of my behavior, he called the hospital in Greenfield and had me admitted to the psychiatric unit.

  I was relieved to be there and asked that no one be allowed to visit me. I needed to be alone to find my way back to myself. I began to do this by sitting at a table in the ward dining room drawing picture after picture with my colored pencils. Occasionally I talked with another patient before going back to my drawing.

  I have no memory of what I was thinking as I bent over my sketch pad hour after hour, but my mind was becoming less psychotic. When the psychiatrist assigned to my case insisted on giving me lithium, I declined with firm determination.

  “I know what I need, and it’s not medication.”

  In a few more days of drawing, dreaming, and sleeping, my thinking was once again clear.

  I called Mary Gene, who took me home. I was relieved to be back at my apartment and the river.

  John, who lived with his wife, Judy, several miles from my apartment, visited me. We talked, as we had off and on since the divorce. He rubbed my back. Then he got up and walked to a window across the room. He stood there looking out at the river.

  “I guess we’re like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton,” he said. “We love each other but can’t live together.”

  “Yes, I guess that’s true,” I responded. I felt a trace of sadness.

  I looked at his familiar profile for a long time.

  IV

  Chris had moved away with a new lover. First they had moved to the eastern part o
f the state, where he had intended to get a job in an advertising agency. When that didn’t work out, he and his partner moved to San Francisco. He changed his name to Augusten Burroughs and, when he was around twenty-one years old, was hired by a prominent ad agency, where he was recognized for his creative genius.

  For the first few months at the agency he called me at least once and often several times a day to work with him on his ad projects. It felt wonderful to be able to contribute to his life in that way.

  But I had reached the limits of my endurance with my own work. I was completely burned out. In addition to working with the children, I led private creative writing workshops in my home and had begun to teach in the University of Massachusetts Summer Writing Workshop. The prison project had ended, and the last journal and the play Sheryl and I had collaborated on with several of the prisoners were still to be completed.

  One night Chris called, saying that he was terribly upset and was afraid he was going crazy. “There’s no one here I can talk to, and I really need to talk. Please come to San Francisco. I need you.”

  I told him I would get there as soon as I could. I canceled my teaching job for the fall. My mother had left me a small inheritance, and that, together with what money I had of my own, was enough to allow me to take the year off. I packed and left for San Francisco.

  As soon as I spent a little time with Chris and his partner, I saw how unhealthy the relationship was for Chris. His partner was evidently more interested in boys than men, and when they were together, Chris acted like a boy. This disturbed me deeply, but I also saw that the relationship was falling apart.

  I shall never forget standing with Chris outside his apartment building on Bush Street one windy day, tears streaming down his cheeks. “I’m lost. I don’t know who I am anymore.”

  I wish I could say that I was able to help him find his way home to himself, but we were rarely alone, and he no longer talked about his emotional state. I suspect he was spending most nights drinking. I was staying in a lovely Nob Hill apartment that belonged to the parents of one of Chris’s friends at the ad agency. The friend’s parents were out of the country for several months, and they were happy to have someone stay in the apartment. Occasionally Chris dropped by to see me after work. Sometimes he sat and quickly typed a poem on my typewriter. He never even bothered to reread it or take it with him, but I kept every poem he wrote.

  When we went out with his friend and her sister one night, he enthusiastically told them about the writing workshops I’d led in Amherst when he was a teenager. The workshops were intended for adults, but Chris would often participate in them, and the groups were always enriched by his contributions. Knowing a group would be coming for the workshop in Amherst often inspired expressions of his humor. A cow skull hung on one wall, and I told the sisters how I came downstairs the morning of a workshop to find an apple in its mouth, while an extremely realistic rubber snake lay half-hidden under the hem of the couch.

  Chris also entertained the sisters and me by mimicking his father, brother, and me one evening. He captured all of us at our worst, and it was hysterically funny. His co-worker commented that he would be a terrific stand-up comedian. We all agreed.

  V

  After I had lived for five months in the Nob Hill apartment, the parents of Chris’s friend returned from their trip and I had to move to a room in a hotel for women. Chris no longer came to see me except on rare occasions, and the job he had assured me I had in his ad agency had fallen through. I felt sad and depressed. Without a job or a place to live, I could no longer afford to stay in San Francisco, and I lacked the energy to return to teaching in Massachusetts.

  I decided to go to Mexico, where my money would go much farther than in the States. Though Kendall and I were no longer partners, I’d invited her to San Francisco and we’d had a pleasant time together. When I told her of my plan to go to Mexico, she suggested that I go to San Miguel de Allende, where many Americans lived and English was understood most places. On vacation from Smith, Kendall went with me.

  Before Kendall left Mexico for Northampton we found a wonderful apartment on the outskirts of San Miguel. It had rust-red tile floors, a corner fireplace in the living room, and clusters of banana trees in the courtyard. It also came with the service of a cleaning lady and a woman who did my laundry in a large tub just outside my bathroom window.

  I loved San Miguel with its tree-filled Jardín (town square), its locals and tourists wandering the sidewalks or sitting on benches reading, talking, or simply watching the crowds pass by. There was the old man with his cluster of balloons and small tin push toys for sale. Often musicians played in the gazebo. I spent many hours sitting on a bench sketching people or writing letters. Mornings, a tall thin man bent over a broom and swept the steps of the Church of Saint Michael the Archangel across the street from the Jardín. Evenings, glistening grackles by the hundreds rose from its trees.

  I often ate dinner at Mama Mia’s, where many Americans met to visit with one another and exchange helpful information. I made several friends, some of whom I traveled with to nearby towns.

  I also made friends with Gert Dickman, a widow and the aunt of a Smith College student. Gert and her husband had moved to San Miguel from Brooklyn, where she had taught in an elementary school. After her husband’s death, Gert had donated time and money to the building and development of San Miguel’s American library. She was a member of the Shakespeare Society and for many years was on the staff of San Miguel’s American newspaper. She also built a home for homeless Mexican women. She was in her late seventies when I met her, but though she chain-smoked, ate rich, hot Mexican fried foods, and drank liberal amounts of scotch each day, her energy appeared to be inexhaustible.

  Gert was an amazing woman. She often invited me for lunch, during which she educated me about how to make my water safe for drinking, what vegetables and fruits to buy and not to buy and where to buy them. She suggested restaurants and sometimes invited me out with her and her friends.

  Most important, she lent me her typewriter.

  At home I painted, read, and wrote letters and journal entries. I checked my shoes for scorpions before putting them on, as I’d been taught. At night in bed I listened to the radio, and sometimes to rain splattering on the banana leaves.

  Mine was an interesting and peaceful life.

  Then for no apparent reason I began to feel physically weak. I grew progressively weaker, and Gert insisted that I make an appointment with her doctor. When the time came, she went with me. After examining me, the doctor—a kind, elderly man—expressed serious concern. He said that if he sent samples of my blood to Mexico City, I might never see them again. And he didn’t think I had enough strength to go to the nearest town with a hospital equipped to do the blood tests I needed. He believed I had lupus and thought the wise thing for me to do was to return to the States.

  When I told Kendall I was returning to Massachusetts, she invited me to stay with her until I found a place of my own.

  I hired a taxi to drive me from San Miguel to the Mexico City airport. I asked the driver if it would be possible to stop at the basilica to see Our Lady of Guadalupe, but he said he thought there wouldn’t be time. I was disappointed to not see it again. Then my driver turned a corner and I was surprised to see in the distance the ornate, sixteenth-century church, its front even more sunken into the earth than it was the last time I’d seen it.

  When the taxi driver smiled, I realized he’d been determined to get me there all along. But I was puzzled when he drove past the building and turned into the parking garage of a round, very modern church. He explained that the old basilica had been condemned, and the new basilica had taken its place. The painting of Our Lady of Guadalupe was now displayed there.

  Light poured through the many windows of the new church. The painting hung on a wall under which crowds of people passed on a conveyor belt. I joined them and found my heart moved once again by the image of the Virgin with her gentle face, clasp
ed hands, her robe scattered with stars. And though the feeling of sacred mystery I experienced when I first saw her in the old basilica, with its dimly lit interior, was gone, I was once again reminded that I too am part of the Divine.

  VI

  While my doctor in Northampton assured me that I didn’t have lupus, I knew that something was wrong with me. And going back to teaching felt impossible. Whatever was wrong, I knew I needed more rest.

  Memories of Shelburne Falls and the Deerfield River tugged at me. Kendall announced to her classes at Smith that I was looking for an apartment by the river in Shelburne Falls. One of her students knew of such a place and told Kendall. I called the landlady of the apartment building, and we arranged to meet each other there.

  The apartment was much too small, but it had a large porch overlooking the river. Because of the porch, and because I intended to stay there for only a year, I decided to take it.

  I had left much of my furniture and many of my books at John Elder’s, but I brought my favorite reading chair, my computer, and the computer table Kendall had given me. I also brought the antique kitchen table I’d bought when I’d first moved to Northampton. In the new apartment I put it under the window overlooking the river and used it as a desk as well as a place to eat. Then I settled into living in Shelburne Falls, which held the same attraction for me that it had held originally. But I continued to feel tired. And as the days and weeks passed, I found myself growing more and more depressed. I joined the YMCA in Greenfield and swam laps in the pool there four or five times a week. I wrote in my journal. I tried unsuccessfully to meditate. Time after time I tried to stop smoking, only to give in and light another cigarette, which only made me feel more depressed.

  I found the most relief from depression during the time I spent in a small store across the river. Just as I had felt something in the air that drew me to Shelburne Falls, there was something in the atmosphere in the store that made me feel secure and spiritually comforted.