“My luck I’d end up with the kind of wife, all you ever hear is nag, nag, nag.”
Unless he had to be in the valley for doctors’ appointments, he had a habit of spending two or three days in Mystic, with our mother, and then returning to Palmer. As he put it, “I spend a couple of days in Connecticut and I get bored, so I go back up to Palmer for a couple of days and I get bored. It works out.” We saw to it that he had a car and a credit card for gasoline.
When he had the energy, he would surf the tag sales, collecting various items for a few bucks and later trying to sell them for a few bucks more, at the local auction centers and antique stores. He had a book called Curios and Collectibles: A Price Guide to the New Antiques that he would sometimes flip through.
“It’s amazing what’s valuable. Begin with the A’s. You got your Avon bottles, all shapes and sizes. Keep going. Mickey Mouse Club pencil sharpener: fifteen dollars. Little Orphan Annie Shake-Up Ovaltine Mug: twice as much. Those cast-iron dump trucks Michael used to play with: forty, fifty bucks. Want me to keep going? Tiffany-type Coca-Cola hanging fixture, no scratches, no chips? Two thousand easy. Comic books! If I had all those comic books Uncle burned because he said I wasn’t studying enough, I’d be on easy street today. The first issue of Playboy is a pure gold mine. Old buttons, World’s Fair spoons, Shirley Temple anything.”
“Junk or Junque?” the book asked on its back cover, a question that intrigued him.
“Usually you want something to be in mint condition: rust-free, not torn and clean if it’s paper, no crayon marks if it’s a book, shiny if it’s supposed to be, still works if it’s a toy or a watch. But sometimes you’ll run across something that’s more valuable because it’s all dented and chipped. You think it’s covered with shit, but really it’s what they call patina.”
Once he thought he’d found potential riches in a wire tree with hundreds of bicycle plates that were only slightly rusty. He called it a true resistance piece.
He put it in his car, covered it with old towels to prevent potential wire tree thieves from spotting it, taking it out to show us with an appropriate sense of ceremony. The main problem was that the names on the plates had all been popular for babies born before World War II and were now hopelessly out of date, not yet recycled through to a new generation:
Eugene, Irving, Chester, Ernest.
Nancy, Phyllis, Dorothy, Lorraine.
Sometimes he thought about opening his own booth at a local flea market, between the woman who did charcoal sketches of people’s inner angels and the woman who hand-painted barrettes to coordinate with your boyfriend’s tattoo.
No matter how hard we tried to get him into even some sort of day program so that he would have more structure, he refused, saying that the next step would be placement in some sort of halfway house with “rules about everything and group therapy with psychos.”
By the end of Raymond’s life, we all had to fight not to see him as just a series of ailments and diseases: he was manic-depressive, he was an adult-onset diabetic, a self-medicating alcoholic, a cancer patient, and a dental nightmare. His days consisted of awakening at three or four in the morning, arising at five, heading out for coffee at his favorite donut shop, favorite because a nice waitress said hi and he had not been banned from it as he had been from so many others, calling my house at 7:45 to deliver a weather report (we jokingly called him Doppler Raydar), marking time until the first doctor’s appointment, getting lunch, stocking some meat and potatoes for dinner, opening his first beer at two or three, eating at around five, falling asleep by six. He had no access to the large consolations that take most of us outside ourselves—marriage, children, the stock market—or to the small ones—a cup of tea, a brisk walk, some dumb video. He had lost the ability to concentrate on much of anything; even TV was a fuzzy assault of confusing images. Weakened from all the drugs, the lithium and the insulin and the Haldol, hands that once fisted in fury now trembled in despair. He had no escape from the shackles of a tormented self.
The summer before Raymond died, I spent an afternoon outside of time at a college campus in the northern part of Vermont, a place thick with pine trees and rivers. My task that day was to talk about writing and memoir to a group of students, mostly poets, who gathered for a couple of weeks several times a year as part of a low-residency master’s degree program. I told them about the time I had to write a foliage ditty for a newspaper, and how I had trouble coming up with something witty and incisive on the spot. When I started out as a journalist, I thought reporting would strike the proper balance between artistry and profit. At the beginning, there was little of either, and it took the usual appalling number of years to get to the point where I understood what was compelling to me about reporting, whose Latin root means to carry back. It was the power to capture what is real, the music of what happens, and to impound all those details that defy embellishment—the Life magazines hidden beneath the mattress, the wallpaper with the drummer boys, the wire tree with the outmoded name plates. Every hardworking reporter knows the glow of coming in from the field having just heard or seen something riveting: And the best part is I didn’t even make it up.
The students and I sat in idleness and we opined. What was the difference between a story you want to tell and one you have to? The story you choose and the one that chooses you? As someone who had spent her entire professional life listening to the stories of other people, I had begun to wonder: was it time to tell my own? What was prompting the recent epidemic of memoirs? Why were so many writers trying to find the pattern in the morass of this and that which makes up a life and to present it to the anonymous public? What had turned us into a nation of magpies, of chattering housewives?
I’ve always assumed that the impulse to divulge is connected to the wish to settle scores. Or to set the record straight. “Set rec” is what the editors called it at the Miami Herald. The best part about those little boxes with revisions in the newspaper is the implication that except for this one tiny flaw—so and so’s medical degree is not from Harvard, it’s from Yale—every fact is truth’s official ambassador. Are memoirs simply book-length versions of corrections boxes? Not objective so much as self-serving? Or are they something else, these slender volumes, these mere weekend guests, these evanescent versions of lost time and lost places, something with unexpected force and overlooked heft. I am reminded of those unobtrusive little red peppers in General Tso’s chicken at Chinese restaurants and how just a small bite can have such intense reverberations. And thinking of those peppers, I am reminded anew of how memory creates memory. A friend from Ursuline once told me that her husband almost died when a pepper he consumed pierced his internal organs and he began to weaken and to hemorrhage mysteriously. At the time I thought of the story as somehow Irish with its easy sense of doom, as the product of a culture that fosters a high level of suspicion because even the most innocent objects can backfire and do. Betrayal can be swift and fatal. In Ireland, the story is often told of the fine lady who went to tea one afternoon in black ’47. On the way she passed a field filled with plump potatoes and took grateful note of their health, only to pass it again later that day and nearly pass out from the stench that had overtaken the entire crop.
But now I view the story of the pepper differently, more figuratively.
Bleeding from within, another memoir writer, Kim Barnes, once said, also happens to people who keep their stories to themselves.
We talked that still summer’s day at the workshop about how as a culture we’ve stopped believing there is anyone in charge. Through the Second World War, there was a commonly held set of beliefs about who we were as a country and where we were headed. But since then, we have been exposed to a long reign of bullies and fools. We’ve had Joe McCarthy and the cold war; we’ve had those quiz shows on TV in the fifties. The pope actually fired some lesser saints, on what grounds was never clear, though obviously they must have failed to make some quota or another. We’ve had Watergate and the lust in Carter
’s heart. We’ve had a president who believed that trees cause pollution, another who never inhaled. We’ve been inundated with priests who molest, ballplayers who extort, and trigger-happy officers of the law. There’s a feeling today of being orphaned, adrift, left to one’s own resources. Is it possible that the self is the one enduring institution? Funneled through the individual, history at last achieves resonance.
One of the poets had recently undergone a spiritual awakening and become a Buddhist. “If anyone had ever said I’d be part of an organized religion when I reached the age of forty-five, I would have told them they were full of it,” she said. With the famed fervor of a recent convert, she went on to describe a training that consisted of passing through what are called the Five Gateways. To pass through one, she had to sit still for eleven hours. It was more than worth it, she said.
“Normal life seemed dull to me. Everything was slow and muffled. It was as if I were wearing a snowsuit all year long. And then,” she said, picking up speed, “when I undertook the training, everything, I don’t know, it all just seemed to fall into place.”
“What is the fifth and final gateway?”
“You have a private meeting with the leader, and he asks you questions for which you are not allowed to prepare.”
“Like?”
“Like, ‘What is mortality?’”
I pondered for a minute, figuring that a poet would answer a conundrum with an image.
What did she say?
A broken teacup? That’s what I would have said. What was W. H. Auden’s line? Something about how the crack in the teacup opens a lane to the land of the dead.
“It actually took me a long time to come up with a response, but finally I told him that mortality is the flip side of everything I have ever known.”
After that, she was welcomed into the temple with a feast of rice, vegetables, and puffy homemade bread.
The next day, I was back home in the trapped heat of the Connecticut River Valley in western Massachusetts, having volunteered to take my brother to a day of double doctor’s appointments, one to check the toe that had been infected on a life-threatening scale when he tripped and ripped open a knob of flesh while answering a phone call from Jacqueline, who merely wished to check on his well-being, and the other to assess the progress of the radiation that was supposed to cure his throat cancer.
We were down to living by the sentiments you see expressed on bumper stickers: One Day at a Time and Easy Does It. I am reminded of a Roz Chast cartoon from The New Yorker, about a store called the House of Low Goals, specializing in tributes for people who have lowered their sights. The storefront contained T-shirts that said “I survived conjunctivitis” and “I can read a bus schedule”; special occasion cakes that trumpeted the good news “Wow! Only six cavities” and “No loitering arrests in one year”; greeting cards such as “I’m so glad you’re not an arsonist” and “Congratulations on your EASY CHAIR!” and a trophy that said, simply, “Participant.”
That day I brought him flowers, a merry assortment of purples and pinks purchased at one of the many roadside stands that open their doors and thrust their seasonal bounty on passing motorists during the summer months, that kind of stand to which he had always hoped to hitch his star. Looking, I am sure, thrilled with myself, intoxicated with the tableau of my own goodness, I was both taken aback by and filled with grudging admiration for the brutal candor of my brother’s response, “What a waste of money.”
One of his tried and true topics was how little I knew about money.
“Guess it comes from being loaded,” he used to tell our siblings. “Big house, two cars, plenty of furniture. Both her kids got braces when they needed them. She has so much money she can be stupid about it.”
He expressed contempt for my choice in groceries, especially lamenting my tendency to purchase what he called “screwy” vinegar with weird berries and sprigs in the bottle, yuppie mustard that wasn’t even yellow, and pricey free-range chicken that did not, in his opinion, taste one whit better just because it had been allowed a social life. And as far as my current choice of where to live, in a college town in which citizens recently voted two to one to decriminalize marijuana and the high school was forbidden to put on West Side Story because its message is too inflammatory, he said, “Everyone in that town is flaky,” and it was clear that I was part of everyone.
That day, I asked him to smoke his cigarette before we set forth because I did not want the odor of tobacco to linger in the car. It was new and I was trying to keep it in mint condition. In addition, one of my children has asthma and the other gags at even the slightest trace of smoke.
“That’s it,” he said. “I’m not going with you.”
I was used to this kind of tantrumlike pronouncement. If you used finesse, it passed as quickly into oblivion as an ash out a car window.
“Listen, have a smoke now and if you really want another one, we’ll stop along the way.”
I watched while he puffed away, knowing it would be useless to suggest that given his circumstances it might be logical to give up smoking altogether. Arguing with him on some subjects was like arguing with the Vatican, the Mafia, the phone company, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the Cuban exile community in Miami as well as the Cuban community in Cuba, combined.
We took one of Raymond’s customary eccentric routes to Baystate, the convolutions and the detours helping to fill the time. He pointed out the scenic spots. First on the tour was a strip joint known as the Magic Lantern.
“Best in the area,” he told me, and I wondered what best meant, under such circumstances. Sometimes he joked about taking his two oldest nephews there, but this was said mostly in the spirit of getting my goat. In fact, he wasn’t wild about the place because he had heard they charged seven bucks for a beer.
“Highway robbery,” he said, “or Route 20 robbery anyway.”
Next, he motioned toward a joint famous for sub sandwiches; farther down the road, he waved a hand at the factory where they make State Line Potato Chips. Raymond recalled the first time he saw the factory, when he was ten or eleven, and that giddy feeling of seeing a landmark in person for the first time.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Seeing it made you feel like you’d gone to Europe and seen the Eiffel Tower.”
“A person of the world,” he responded, in a musing manner, almost sighing as he spoke.
I told him that I had heard that the house in Granby was up for sale again.
As a topic the house in Granby had complete immunity and was always acceptable.
“Yeah, I guess that publisher who lived there for a while moved to Florida. Did you know that one time he had a party in our backyard and Jane Fonda was there?”
Jane Fonda had tried to make the movie Stanley and Iris, which was about being working class and illiterate, in Holyoke, hoping to use the flats and some of the factory sites in Chicopee as a backdrop. I had heard this story many times from Raymond, but I let him tell me once more.
“Don’t tell Mother that they picked Chicopee because it looks down and out. You know she can’t stand hearing a word against Chicopee. Anyway, they didn’t make it here because the vets all demonstrated and said Jane Fonda was a traitor during Vietnam, so that was the end of that.”
I knew what was coming next.
“You know what I’ve always wondered. I’ve always wondered if that day, you know, when they were having the barbecue or whatever it was at the old house, if she ever went inside. Maybe she used the bathroom Chuck and I fixed up.”
It doesn’t matter what you think of Jane Fonda and her politics. The woman still has a bladder. “You know,” I said, as if I’d never heard this speculation before and had never responded to it, “I bet she did.”
“I heard,” said Raymond, “it’s taking awhile to sell the house because they found lead paint.”
Lead paint? My ears perked up; yet another possible culprit, another explanation for Raymond’s troubles. Had he swallowed
paint chips as a child?
“Yeah, and did you know that Granby now has its own Dunkin’ Donuts?”
I had heard: its arrival was construed as a big compliment from corporate America. Finally Granby was enough of a critical mass to merit a franchise operation.
“Too bad it’s so hot today,” I said. “It would have been nice to take a drive up to Summit House.”
I knew this was his favorite spot in the valley; it is the trite but true favorite of just about everyone who lives in the shadow of the Holyoke Mountain Range. The very mention of it stirs up the endorphins, unleashes those feel-good chemicals. A short drive up, or a thirty-minute hike, leads to picnic benches and grills, all in prized spots, some with sweeping views. In the forgiving mist of distance, the nearly collapsing Coolidge Bridge is a confident arc passing over the Connecticut River, reduced to filament from afar. The eyesore skyscraper dormitories at UMass next to the vast fields are finally in the correct scale. They have a hardly noteworthy rightness, like salt and pepper shakers on a table. The diminutive cars move at a measured pace, free of honking and exhaust. There is a memorial on the mountain for some soldiers who crashed into its side while on a training mission during World War II: a rock with a plaque and the rudder from their plane. At the top there is also a stately white house, with a certain pride in its own improbability, its porch filled with benches, one of which is inscribed in honor of a man and a woman by their children on their fortieth wedding anniversary. This is where the couple became engaged. A nearby boulder contains another plaque, which celebrates the commissioning of the land, signed by Governor Saltonstall in 1941, pledging that Skinner Park will be there for the citizens of the commonwealth, to enjoy, big letters now, capitalized too, engraved on metal, “FOREVER.”
Here in this panorama is the all of it, the ultimate in razzmatazz: Love, death, beauty, and the promise, from state legislators no less, of eternity.
Every time Raymond visited Skinner State Park, he said, “I feel better now.”
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