Riverine

by Angela Palm

  But the tipping point was a surprise, even to me. My mother’s suggested remedy for exhaustion was that I go with her to a wine and canvas night held at an Olive Garden. She described this event as a girls’ night out, attended by pairs of mothers and daughters who had never left our small town. “You used to love painting,” she said. True, I had. I had spent a few years studying with a well-known watercolorist, an experience my parents afforded me and one for which I was grateful. But it wasn’t that my mother suggested I spend what little free time I had in a chain restaurant creating the exact same picture as everyone else and calling it art. It was worse than that: in all my twenty-nine years spent living with or near her, she still did not know me at all, and I could no longer expect that she ever would. I avoided chain restaurants as a matter of principle, and I had a much different conception of what constituted a good time. Sitting around gossiping with the locals, or even pretending to enjoy the aimless and uninspired conversation, didn’t qualify. I knew she was trying to be kind and helpful, but it still bothered me.

  My father said I’d gotten snobby. But when I asked them to rise to my level by, say, watching the news or reading a book or visiting a vacation destination that didn’t involve a resort designed to make them feel “at home,” they scoffed. Probably I overreacted, but I was tired of trying to explain myself when my mother said things like “Smile. Just be happy.” And “buy this dress from Banana Republic” and “fix your hair” and “get a pedicure.” As if the change I craved were as simple as changing my clothes, or unkinking my naturally wild hair. She wanted to make me into the girly girl she had always wanted, and I could not unbend her understanding of me with a straight iron. What she wanted, I think, was to be friends. But it was an instructive friendship, where I had to bring my world to her. I didn’t want that role; in my mind, it was too late for her to take an interest in who I was.

  I’m not sure it had ever occurred to my parents to consider what it was like to have felt an impasse between myself and my own community—my own family—all my life. I had begun living defensively around them, the gap between us growing wider with each passing year even as they tried their best to remain close to me. I worried my children would come to know me as a woman in hiding. A woman who had let the best of herself settle somewhere below the surface, or worse, had never identified it at all. I didn’t want to smile when I wasn’t happy. I didn’t want to shop at Banana Republic. I didn’t want to brush my hair.

  When Mike and I visited Burlington, we’d stolen away to Montreal for the day. A world-class city, an hour-and-a-half drive from our could-be home. We went to the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, where an entire room was dedicated to the exhibit Sometimes I Am Content, created by Grier Edmundson. Spanning an entire wall was that bold title statement—“Sometimes I am content”—in typewriter font. Black on white. Yes, I thought. I get that. I wanted to find the somewhere I was content to go with it.

  Richard Yates’s novel Revolutionary Road begins on the opening night of the Laurel Players’ community theater production. April Wheeler—a suburban wife, a mother of two, and a hopeful actress—makes her stage debut to an audience that is at best underwhelmed by the group’s performance. After the curtains close, April retreats to her dressing room, eyes swelling with tears as she wipes the lipstick from her lips and casts accusing glances at her reflection in the mirror. On the way home, April and her husband, Frank, argue as the tension of April’s disappointment in the play’s opening saturates their conversation. Frank pulls the car over and the couple’s argument escalates into near violence at the side of the road. “It’s not my fault you didn’t turn out to be an actress,” Frank yells. April screams back at him, and Frank stops short of punching her in the face. His fist, and by extension their shared disillusionment with their life in the suburbs, lands on the roof of their sedan instead. But the effect on the audience, on the reader, is an emotional bruise on April’s pretty cheekbone and the innate, pressing knowledge that something must change.

  Not moving to Vermont would have been our Revolutionary Road. “The cornfields will kill us,” Mike said. “Let’s do this before one of us gives ourselves an abortion,” he laughed, referring to the dramatic ending of the book.

  I laughed, but it wasn’t funny. We had begun wondering aloud which of us would be the first to die and had taken out extensive insurance policies on our lives, mine with remarkably less monetary value than his. “I still remember the smell when the doctors cauterized the incision,” I said to Mike.

  “I still remember seeing your guts,” he said. He scrunched up his nose with the memory. “And the sucking sound that came out of your belly when they took him out.” We’d agreed, holding our second son in the recovery room, that there was no going back once you’d seen a person’s insides. You couldn’t unsee it. It colored our love differently, blood-red and ripe with mortality. That memory—the cut and pull, the stretched infant limbs—greeted us as we poured our coffees in the morning and again when we poured our cocktails at night.

  Another six months later, we justified all the costs of the move as we unloaded the U-Haul in front of our new garage in Vermont. With a “now or never” mentality, we’d left friends, jobs, and everything that was familiar to us. We left my extended family to their midwestern ways. I was so ready to leave the past behind, leave sameness and smallness and suburban expectations behind, that I didn’t even think about stopping by my hometown for one last look. We’d decided to absorb the sheer financial burden of moving across the country to New England, where the cost of living was twice as high as in the Midwest, unflinchingly, and said, over and over, that it was worth it. We never talked about whether we’d be new, too, or whether we’d be the same—our regular, relocated selves, only surrounded by green now, our mouths gaping Os of wonder, finally in the place that would content us.

  . . .

  Instead of collapsing under her belief that she had failed as an actress, April Wheeler ignites a plan to move to Paris, which Frank enthusiastically supports. We’re not like them, they say, referring to their suburban neighbors. We’re not meant to be here among them, they say. April offers to work as a secretary in Paris so that Frank can read and write and discover what it is he wants to do, who it is he is. To April’s horror, her plan evaporates when she learns she is pregnant again and Frank insists they can’t raise a baby in Paris.

  Vermont was everything it was advertised to be: plenty of green, enough mountain views to last a lifetime, and a disproportionate share of fresh air. The tightening in my chest that had come and gone for years began to ease. A thought occurred to me a few weeks after we’d settled into our new home. We still had not unpacked the half dozen blue plastic bins that had been through four prior moves—a yearlong stay in Denver, Colorado, two apartments and one house in Indianapolis—never to be opened in any of our homes, but instead relegated to storage. We’d dragged the containers from apartment to apartment across Indianapolis, then to Denver for a temporary work move, then back to Indiana, and then finally to Vermont. Storing them and storing them again, forgetting why. Forgetting what. “I feel like an idiot,” I said, and sat upright in the dark.

  “Why?”

  I told him about the bins.

  “Now?” he asked.

  I couldn’t be stopped. I had to know what was in the bins, and neither of us could remember. We couldn’t think of a single thing that was missing, nor could we think of anything we’d be holding on to for later. But I knew the bins held an answer to a question I hadn’t yet asked. I knew that even in this new postcard-picture-worthy land, there was still something I lacked. Mike helped me pull them down from the small alcove in the new garage, their fifth home. He was helpful like that—always finessing my environment, providing whatever would make me happy. And my satisfaction was fleeting, unpredictable. Perhaps even impossible. But sometimes, I was content.

  When he went back to bed, I opened the bins, perplexed. I’d kept all the wrong things: a brief l
ifetime of boring. Irrelevant papers and attempts at short stories, old candleholders, small glass dishes that served no obvious purpose, the odd chipped mug, a small ugly lamp, wooden frames for paintings I never painted, a Norton anthology of literary criticism, a textbook on the theory of punishment, an outdated introduction to criminal justice, some VHS tapes. I laid it all out by the curb in the dark, wondering who I’d be by morning.

  II

  A woman I met through a mutual acquaintance years ago had recently quit her job as vice president of a Midwest-based software company to make herself completely available to be herself. Jory had worked as a jet-setting executive for fifteen years, often detailing her negative airline experiences in Facebook posts—delays and more delays; yoga sessions she barely squeezed in between power lunches and late-afternoon meetings; incredulous faux pas of her professional wardrobe. The Internet, as an extension of place, was a dumping ground for the hassles of everyday life. Though Jory was only arriving at the cusp of her fourth decade of life, and by many Americans’ standards had achieved quantifiable success, she decided to enter what she called her “retirement.” I received the announcement of Jory’s impending job change in my Facebook feed.

  Facebook gathers together people from the past, many faces from many different places. It also opens another realm of existence, where we can be slightly better, slightly more presentable versions of our messy selves. It gives us space to love our mothers the way we wish to love them, to forget, at least within the confines of Internet filament, that they are flawed; it lets us forget our own flaws. The Internet, in many ways, is a happy, pretend place. It is a version of reality. It is real life, rivered by the banks of our choosing.

  Jory announced that she was through with the rat race, and she had decided to take a new job, effective immediately. She appointed herself “chief innovator” at “[Her] Life,” formalizing her transition on both her Facebook and LinkedIn profiles. This period of retirement, she proclaimed on these platforms, would serve the sole purpose of self-discovery. She would endeavor, through systematic soul searching, adventure, and intentional quietude, to find out who she really was, the demands of her corporate job stripped away. “The plan is to take a year or so off to focus on myself,” she writes. “To experience life on my terms untethered from the shackles of a job. To make each day what I want and need it to be to move myself closer to my true spirit.” When I read that last sentence, the following diagram came to mind:

  Where could her true spirit possibly reside if not within herself? Afraid of being typecast, I think, as an exec who had worked so hard that she’d forgotten how to live and who had somehow lost something crucial to her personal identity, perhaps even to her humanness, she set out upon a 365-day blogging practice to document the first year of her retirement. As promised, Jory blogged daily about her experience, updating the world at large on her progress. At the time of this case study, she was 174 days into her retirement. Since she began, she had taken a cross-country trip by car with a friend. She had paddle-boarded at sunrise. She had jogged across a variety of terrains. She had sought the expertise of her shaman, inviting her physical and emotional energies to be manipulated, coaxed, and released by his incantations. She had tried to find new love via Tinder (to no avail). She had entered a new romantic relationship (not via Tinder) and moved in with her new partner. She had done a lot of yoga. She had occasionally passed judgment on other people. She had whined. She had set intentions for herself, reminded herself to be present in her own life, meditated, and contemplated her divine purpose. She moved significantly across lands and bodies of water, traversing terrain, moving through space and time in her search, the world wide and her need great. This part, I understood. The need to look at other landscapes for clues about what already lies within us is real. It is a variation on distance, that thing you need to put between yourself and a problem in order to see it clearly.

  I read most of Jory’s posts, not necessarily because I was interested in or envious of her unfettered pursuit of what I would call leisure activities, but because I was fascinated by the end goal: a core knowledge about herself that undoubtedly awaited her at day 365 like a wrapped gift. Santa presenting Jory with her true self by firelight. I was fascinated by the very concept of her journey toward that true spirit, as if it were something that could simply be revealed or discovered or unearthed, if only one knew its whereabouts and proximity to the body. “I know that everything I write is a documented intention to manifest a result somewhere in my life … either now or down the road,” she writes. “There are no wrong paths,” she writes, attributing the sentiment to Oprah. But aren’t there? I wondered.

  I read Jory’s posts and wondered how she would measure her success. On one hand, I wished I possessed her certainty that each day’s experience, and by extension its write-up on her blog, was leading to a positive, conclusive, tangible end. That there was somehow sense to be made from experience, or the accumulation of choices and circumstances. But what I noticed most often about Jory’s posts was that they were iterations of the same thematic point: she was on a quest for missing pieces; she was clearing the fog; she was staring into a mirror waiting for her own image to speak or blink or sing; she was opening the hatch and letting all the world in for as long as there were pieces of herself left to gather. There was no mistaking that she did not perceive herself as whole. And the missing pieces—well, they could have been anywhere. Pieces of this whole self could even be other selves. They could be Earl Grey tea or headstands or sleeping until noon. They could be scattered along the Appalachian Trail, or they could be sitting on her nightstand all this time in the form of the one book that had gone unread all these years, or they could be in the bottle of pills that she saved for emergencies only.

  Jory seemed to know for sure that a person ought to be whole. A person ought to be somehow circular and transparent and known, and the individual, as the maintainer of the person’s whole self, is simply tasked with finding what is missing. She’s charged with putting the sphere back together and keeping all the curved glass parts clear of debris. When this is achieved, the moment when all the dust is wiped clean before new dust can settle on any of the round, puzzled-together pieces, then and only then is the self made whole. Somewhere a bell rings and someone snaps a picture—#selfie #me, finally #whole.

  By the conclusion of her yearlong journey, if she were to leave a trail of bread crumbs that marked her daily path, I would expect Jory’s search for self in all directions to have taken on a likeness to a Jackson Pollock painting—all lines and motion, but little sense. What would Jory see in a Pollockesque visual representation of her year? Would a pattern or answer emerge? Would she see chaos? Would she feel like a different person? Failing at a palpable takeaway, would she accept instead something beautiful created in the wake of her disciplined pursuit?

  Rachel Kushner poses a similar notion in her novel The Flamethrowers. Reno, the book’s protagonist, endeavors to achieve artistic success by photographing the patterns created by tracks she makes racing her motorbike. This allows her to combine two things she loves—velocity and motorbikes. By taking a good look at these markings from the top-down view of a camera’s lens, she assumes they will somehow make an unintended sense. They will transform Reno’s physical experience of racing across the desert into art, thus memorializing and intellectualizing the individual tracks themselves. She will take the sum of the tracks’ parts and project meaning onto the experience as a whole. Like Reno’s photographs, Jory’s blogging journey—a daily foray into the physical and digital worlds in search of parts of herself, the shedding of the job, the act of looking for the “self” regardless of what is actually found, of pinning down the day’s most important themes through the titles of her blog posts—will become a collective personal truth that stands apart from the intention and the individual “tracks” that sweep across the desert sand of that year of life. A new idea, the year’s summary, a result of the exploration of the self, will be retroac
tively applied to Jory’s experience. She will likely intuit and internalize wisdom—making sense of the things that happened during the course of that year after they’ve occurred.

  In her posts, Jory refers to her blog as a trial run for more serious writing—not an uncommon goal for bloggers and diarists. What if Jory writes a book about her experience that then pushes outward into a readership, creating its own ripple effect that is then entirely separate from the writer? To write the book, Jory will have to further assess and consider her experience. New thoughts will mix with old, while time passes on the clock that measures the distance between the experience itself and the ever-changing memory of the experience. Decorative language will be added to make the account of the experience richer and more interesting and more meaningful. Lines will be drawn in the sand. Pictures will be taken from above. Look, here is what happened. Here’s who I am. Sort of.

  III

  I suppose I could have said that I was between jobs, or that I was changing careers. That I’d been distracted by the curious landscape of southern Quebec—the odd roadside businesses barely hanging on, situated between sad-looking homes whose architecture couldn’t be associated with any decade’s style that I knew. That something was about to happen, though I couldn’t say what. I could have said that I was temporarily unemployed, unsure of what I’d hoped to find waiting for me in Vermont. Unsure, too, of whether I was the same as I was before I’d moved, or changed. Whether a new place could actually open the door to a new me. I wanted to be changed. I wanted to be whole. I wanted to think that a simple change of place had that power, or that the work I’d begun to put into writing, having found myself friendless in my new state and inspired by the topography and the very idea of the opportunity to reinvent myself, was leading me to my true self. (Are you a vegetarian? people asked me in Vermont. Are you a locavore or a vegan or a pescatarian? they asked. Perhaps, I thought in reply. Perhaps I would be one of those things here. I could, after all, be anything here. Say it and it became true. A new place certainly presented that opportunity. It’s the classic reason for moving to New York: to be someone. And sometimes, to be someone else, place equated to anonymity.) In Vermont I had tried many things besides writing (not shaving my armpits for three months, foraging for mushrooms and ramps, yoga on a paddleboard, indoor surfing class, acting as if I liked other people’s dogs, sewing, cross-country skiing, a planter garden on my balcony, relearning French, life drawing and drinking classes—at the same time), and only the writing had stuck. I had told Mike that we needed to get away, though we had only recently arrived in our new state, and now I was coming back from Montreal empty-handed.