Amateur Hour

by Kimberly Harrington

  The days were long and free, full of high-stepping-bare-feet-on-searing-asphalt walks to the beach, searching for shells and pulling seahorses from fishermen’s nets. My friends and I put on fashion shows and plays in the backyard, pinning a sheet to the clothesline for a theater curtain. We baked cupcakes and I learned how to properly make a bed. I caught tiny jellyfish in a jar and learned how to sew. I ate seedless grapes and a nightly dish of vanilla ice cream and rivers of Cheez-Its. I felt loved and cherished, cared for and fussed over.

  I never knew how good I had it. Do any of us, ever?

  3. Unforgivable, Merciful Fate

  Their early lives were punctured with loss. My grandmother is a first-generation American and one of nine children. Her mother, my Portuguese great-grandmother, was often a single parent, throwing out her husband for the uncontrollable drinking that would eventually kill him.

  Her sister Dorothy, who had been institutionalized for reasons we never knew, died at the age of fourteen. Probably from neglect, probably from the way people who were confined to a “school for the feeble-minded” were treated.

  There had been a passed-down story about her possibly falling in the tub when she was three or four. Maybe she had suffered some sort of serious brain injury. Then a late-night conversation only a few years ago unearthed a bit of family hearsay—she used to flap her hands. And one of her sisters, now in her nineties, confirmed Dorothy had been institutionalized before she had even turned five. I was thunderstruck. All of these fragmented bits of information, decades old, suddenly collated. She was autistic. She had to be. Autism has threaded itself throughout our family in whispers and shouts. It is seen and unseen. Diagnosed and undiagnosed. It is a part of us. She was a part of us.

  Sometimes, when we think we are not moving forward as a society, that progress is not fast enough, that our humanity is utterly lacking—and there are plenty of occasions to think all of those things—we would do well to pause and think of Dorothy. Out of the arms of her mother, away from the eyes of the world. What did they do to her? If she were a child now, how profoundly different would her life be? The powerless and the vulnerable, forever the canaries of our morality.

  My grandfather was one of six children and grew up poor in Pennsylvania coal-mining country. Both of his parents died by the time he was seven. His oldest brother, Bill — only seventeen at the time — took on the unfathomable task of keeping his own family together. Bill’s girlfriend, Eva, who became his wife, was fifteen maybe sixteen at the most. A teenage girl, an adoptive mother of five. Imagine.

  His brother Andy died on the train tracks as he walked home from fishing with his older brother. He was only seven, his brother just eleven. The tracks had switched for an oncoming train, trapping his foot. Immediately bound to his fate, he couldn’t be freed. His brother helpless, left to bear witness to the unimaginable. All of the children in the family would grow up to one day warn their own children away from train tracks with a fiery sternness born of heartbreak.

  From these dark circumstances, their early lives dotted with absence and need, grief and unforgivable fate, came two of the lightest and most joyful people you could ever hope to meet. Quick to laugh, quick with a hug, and quick to pick up the check (and uncharacteristically upset with you if you tried, as I once learned the hard way). What they had lost early on, they gained in each other. Forever.

  Sometimes fate has no mercy. And sometimes it will save you.

  4. Big Life

  Eventually they went the way of the snowbird — to Florida part-time and then full-time, enjoying the type of retirement that no longer seems to exist. They became a part of a community that cooked, swam, traveled, golfed, sunbathed, played cards, dressed up, and, quite frankly, lived it up more than I ever had.

  Whenever I spoke to my grandparents, one on the main phone and the other on the extension, talking over each other, they always gave me the weather report followed by “You know you can always come to Delray!” They invited me to visit every time we spoke. Every time. I always begged off. I knew I would see them when they traveled north to visit. And I didn’t have the money or enough time off for an additional trip. But if I had had the money I wouldn’t have spent it on a trip to Delray Beach to stay with my grandparents in their retirement community. I have a sharp memory of saying those actual words out loud. Not to them, never to them.

  All I knew is that I needed to start my big life and go to big destinations that had bigger and better things for me to do.

  Looking back now, I never felt guilty about not going, because they never made me feel guilty about not going. Their lives were bursting there, full. They didn’t need me to visit to fill up what was missing. They wanted me to visit because they loved me. Simple.

  But was guilt really the reason to go anyway? Who has the big life now?

  5. Hello, Goodbye

  I’ve been to Florida maybe five times in my life, all at very different stages of my life — and theirs. I was a twelve-year-old road-tripping with my family from Massachusetts to visit them and hit Disney World and Epcot. I was a twenty-nine-year-old newlywed on a cross-country road-trip honeymoon, where it felt like their entire retirement community had cooked for days just to host a feast for us. And I’m talking some old-school Italian ladies from Rhode Island and New Jersey, so when I say feast, I mean a for-damn-real feast. I remember very clearly having to lie down on the floor with my pants unzipped for a good hour to have any hope of making it through dessert. That same night, several of her friends came over to hug me, give me a card or small gift, and wish us a happy married life. One of them looked up at me and then over to her friend and yelled, “Remember when we used to be that tall?!”

  On my last visit I was a thirty-eight-year-old mother of two with my eight-month-old daughter in tow. I brought her to meet my grandfather for the first and last time. He loved babies. And he was dying. His eyebrows lifted, ever so slightly, at the sight of her. His animated, head-tilted-back laugh was already gone. But there she was. And so was he. And never would that meeting, those old eyes meeting new, ever happen again.

  When I returned to Vermont I spoke to him one last time. I don’t remember most of what was said. The call was brief; he would die just a few days later. But toward the end of the call I quietly said, “I should let you go”—as if this was a routine call, as if I could really ever let him go, how bound we are to our conversational shortcuts—“I don’t want to tire you out.” He replied slowly and with a catch in his voice, “You will never tire me out.”

  Ten years later, that thought, the intention behind it, the love I felt so crisply and clearly from his weakening voice, still floods me with sadness. I have never let him go.

  “You will never tire me out.” Isn’t that what we all want to hear? To believe?

  My grandmother was never the same after he died. Maybe the kind of marriage they had is a thing of the past, I don’t know. Born during conventional wartime (if anything about war can be considered conventional) and success that’s modest yet inspires generosity, what they had feels almost foreign to this world now. Their marriage wasn’t fractured by the simultaneous invented closeness and real distance of technology but bound up in handwritten letters and photographs printed on beefy squares of paper edged in metallic ink. Built to last.

  She has survived so much, a brain aneurism and surgery, breast cancer, strokes. But losing him was the beginning of what continues to be a long, slow, sad end. I’ve sat in front of her, not being able to grasp the person I once knew. The always ironing, lipstick-mark-from-kissing-you, independent trailblazer of a grandmother I knew my whole life. The one who made her evening gowns and bikinis by hand and the one who taught the neighborhood kids how to bake. And the one who — the last time I visited them in Florida — was rummaging through a basket of photographs, held up a school picture of a child none of us recognized, and said “Who is this kid?” and threw it in the trash. She’s lost to most of us now, locked in a place tha
t she sometimes reaches out from, remembering her birthday or tracing invisible dance steps with her fingertips.

  My aunt, who lives down the road from my grandmother, visited her last week and noticed she’s losing weight. Her wedding band is close to slipping off, probably for the first time since it was wiggled onto her finger sixty-nine years ago. We are all just slipping through. We will all be released.

  If you have grandparents, visit them. Go because no one will ever love you in the bold and gentle, big and uncomplicated way they do. Go because you can. Even if you think you can’t, find a way. Take them up on their offer, let them wait for you at arrivals. Go because we all assume that what we have in our lives now, we will have in our lives forever. But the reality is we’re only certain of our good fortune once we glimpse it in the rearview mirror. Go because you are loved. Go because you love. Go.

  Let’s Have the Wedding Later

  I know, it’s a big party. It is a pretty dress and a pretty cake and everyone is so very pretty because usually everyone is so very young. But what is the wedding all about, really? What have these two people even achieved? We met while we were hopeful and we were idiots, the best kind of idiots who have no idea of what’s to come. We think we will handle everything thrown at us with aplomb and finesse. We are different, you see.

  Unlike everyone who is giving us sage advice, we are actually more in love. Marriage will never be hard for us. We will always see our lover’s side—because lovers is what we are right now, most of all—and we will respond to complaints with a level head and an open heart. We will never hold a grudge or raise a voice, and we will certainly never get divorced. Gross.

  Look at us, crossing the finish line before the race has even started. We stand on the podium and beam as the gold medals are slung around our necks; we accept our bouquets and raise them above our heads long before the opening ceremony has taken place. No one trusts more in the crystal clear certainty of How Things Will Go more than us. We are winners. We have done it.

  Except we have done nothing.

  All we have done is agree we are in love and a party would be nice. We have achieved little except making our way through some checklists without murdering our parents or our florist. We have tasted the vegetarian options and we have chosen the wines. We have gathered wildflowers in mason jars and made elaborate chalk signs. We have posed this way and that. We have arrived. But, oh, we have so much to prove.

  I know. Because we were once them. Weren’t we all? But we are older now and know too much. Now we sit through wedding ceremonies (we are the “older family” or the “distant family” or the “workplace acquaintances”) and at a particularly inane and unrealistic vow one of us will lean over and mutter to the other, “Good luck with that,” and then we will try not to laugh, as if we are the children in that church.

  So maybe the wedding should come later, when we can point around the room and at ourselves and to each other. “We made those two small people” we could say, and “You gave me these gray hairs” or “You nursed me back to health” and “You talked me down off the ledge more times than I can even count.” Thank you. I’m sorry. Let’s party.

  We could write real vows based on real experience; they would sound like a cross between a eulogy, a performance review, and a thank-you card. We wouldn’t worry about the future. We would talk about where we had been instead. We would propose carrying certain successful marriage initiatives forward. We would smile on both our past and present good fortune rather than moon over airy promises of future perfection.

  I, take you, to continue being the person I am married to, more or less. We have changed and will continue to change but likely not in the same ways or at the same time and we’ve learned that’s just how things go. We will cross those bridges as we get to them.

  We do not “have” each other, since we are not objects to be possessed, and we don’t always hold each other, because sometimes I just don’t want to be touched, you know? But I get the general idea. And I assume you do too. Let’s vow to continue on with that.

  We can’t know what will happen from this day forward, but I can say for sure we have experienced years of better and worse. So check and check on that front. And then we’ve experienced better again, because otherwise how could we be standing here right now?

  We have been richer; we have been poorer; we have taken some stellar vacations and also borrowed money from our own children’s savings accounts to bridge temporary ruin. We are aware how much fortune can smile and frown upon two people in one life together; we have experienced it in all its pants-shitting downturns and “A round for everyone in this bar!” glory.

  We have personally been lucky, so far, to have experienced the survivable side of in sickness and in health. I’d like the record to show I prefer “in health.” We have fielded calls from people we love as they share a grim diagnosis over the phone, like a telegram from hell. We have awaited test results, celebrated recovery, been to urgent care, been an outpatient, been scared, attended funerals. We have helped people we love as they lie dying, and nothing really prepares you for that; it’s not what you think you’re signing up for with this whole getting-married business. You think you’re trying to select a shoe that gives you just the right height while also being something comfortable enough to dance in.

  I promise to love and cherish you, although it can be hard to be pure about this, to be honest. Because I am always busy thinking about who needs new sneakers or snow pants and what are we going to do about camps next summer? I am thinking about whether our meals are well-balanced and if our kids will ever grow up to cross busy streets on their own because honestly I’m starting to have my doubts. I am thinking about the weight of having to steer this ship every day, mail the packages, greet the children in the morning versus yell at them, never miss a day of laundry or, oh Lord, will I regret it. Some days, most days, cherishing is pretty far down the motherfucking list if you know what I’m saying. But I vow to bump it up a bit. At least above running a load of delicates.

  I promise to be better at just letting you help in the ways you help. Because ladies love to have help but then we want help in exactly the ways we would do things. So make the food this way and fold the towels that way, talk to the children like this and sunscreen them like that. And it all just begs the question, DO WE WANT HELP OR NOT?

  But hey, speaking of vows, how about we vow to stop calling it “helping”? When I—a woman, the wife, the mother—am doing things, it is never referred to as “helping.” I am not helping out around the house, I am not helping make ends meet, I am not helping raise our children. I am cleaning, mothering, working, doing. Such a variety of action verbs there! So no longer will I ask for help. I will expect you to just do—cut the grass, clean the kitchen, raise our children without babysitting them or watching them “for me.”

  Let’s just do things, in our own particular ways, just so they get done already.

  I don’t know if death will ultimately be what parts us, but I hope for both our sakes that day is far away. Parting and death both. I say we do the best in the time we have, knowing what we know.

  I would like to thank you, for loving me for so many years, which is insane when you think about it. You have loved me even when I have made extremely poor choices or given you highly sarcastic answers or no answers at all. You have loved me when I stormed out of our house/apartment/vacation rental. You have forgiven me for crying over manipulative commercials, and you have even forgiven me for criticizing you openly at parties.

  You are still married to me even though, more than once, I have given you double middle fingers in the middle of a fight and told you to go fuck yourself—something I am certain I vowed I would never do when we were engaged.

  Thank you for having sex with me so we could produce what are clearly a couple of the most stellar children we could’ve ever hoped for. These are our vows after all, and we should at least be allowed to brag a little.

  Even given those excell
ent children and the highs and the lows, the tasks and the really good times, I would like to apologize for my heart calcifying over time. Maybe that’s just the way things go. It is so hard to remain open and hopeful when you are a lady and getting older by the minute and also not a millionaire. What’s there to be so damn cheerful about?

  But I vow to try. That’s the only vow I can really make at this point. Because having and holding and loving and cherishing feel like words from a fairy tale. And parting at death feels both dramatic and honestly pretty depressing. So I will vow to try. I will try not to blow my stack or throw my car keys across the room like I did that one time. Okay fine, those few times. I will try to look around more and appreciate what we have built together, this relationship, this life, and those children, because I’m going to mention them one more time; I can’t help myself.

  I promise I will be me from this day forward, and you will be you all the days of your life. I promise we will definitely get mad at each other and go to bed angry, we will also leave notes and text things like, “Everything will be okay” or “Hooray!” and “You’re gonna do great, I know you will.” I promise to keep trying, for as long as we both shall live.

  I love you. Thank you. I’m sorry.

  Let’s party.

  It’s Complicated

  “But you don’t ever like anything I post on Facebook! You don’t even look at my page!”

  Those are not the words of a teenager, spitting ridiculous complaints across the room at her best friend or boyfriend. Those are the words of a forty-five-year-old woman, a mother of two, in the middle of a fight with her husband. A fight where the topic was divorce. Those were my words. As they shot out, I felt drenched in embarrassment, pathetic. To make sure the humiliation was complete, I started crying.