The Best American Essays 2013

by Robert Atwan

  But this rule, as stated here, is not so simple as The Book of Knowledge likes our wonders to be. There is the word seem in the phrase “he will seem to be looking at you,” which is never simple. It drains the ink out of the words around it, appropriating them subjunctively. The little mood shift created by that one word invites supposition, hypothesis, possibility, and desire into the mix, leaving the facts behind. It is the seem of what is not, the seem of absence and longing and despair that these pictures in the end make me feel, a magical seem bringing in its wake the black smoke of an apparent accident that has not happened yet in the photo but has already happened a long time ago in life. Nothing is looking at me in this photograph, although it is smiling broadly into the camera and trembling slightly in the cold, a trembling I can’t feel because of the nothing she is and the nothing between us, and this nothing follows me no matter which way I turn.

  Thirty years later, in November 1960, my grandmother “got word” that my mother was in the hospital. I was eleven and we were living in Deerfield, Illinois. The phrase got word, taken from notes that my grandmother wrote near the end of her life, is portentous. It means that my mother was in no condition to write to her or call her and that my father, whom my grandmother never trusted, had to break the news. If I grow still and close my eyes, I can imagine the sound of the conversation, him offering up the facts through the mixture of sympathy and complaint he used to calm anxious colleagues, and her, with her Kansas reticence, replying in tight-lipped, staccato phrases. I cannot even begin to imagine their words. She and my grandfather “left immediately by train for Deerfield.” They stayed with my brother and me until my mother killed herself five months later. My grandmother never talked to me about what happened when my mother was institutionalized for depression, but she did talk to Barbara, who wrote letters to her on a regular basis until my grandmother died in 1986, and who was probably my grandmother’s dearest confidante at the end of her life. She told Barbara that when they released my mother from the hospital, the doctors said that they “had done everything that they could” and were still pessimistic. “When she left the hospital, your grandmother knew she would do it,” Barbara said when I asked her about it again this morning. She had told me about the conversation before, but to make her point clear now she put it this way: “When she left that morning,” on the day she killed herself, “your grandmother knew she would do it.”

  After I graduated from college, I asked my father about my mother’s death. We were riding in silence in his car early in the morning. It was still dark outside, the only light the blue glow from his dashboard. I know he didn’t want to talk about her suicide, but he wanted to answer my questions. Nothing made her happy, he told me, and the doctors could do nothing for her. “They tried everything,” he said, an echo of my grandmother’s words. He said that she bought a .44-caliber gun, which is a large bore. “She meant to do it—to end things.” So she drove to the lake and killed herself. It pained him to say this, I could tell. I do not want to underestimate the difficulty of living with someone who is clinically depressed. I know now, from reading her letters. that he tried to make her happy, and he was very good at making others feel happy, but in the long run he could not work that charm on her. He took a long drag from his cigarette, squinted, and stuffed the butt in his ashtray, slowly exhaling the smoke as the car hurtled down the highway, waiting for my next question, but I did not ask any more. We rode silently into a predawn darkness illuminated by the blue light from the dash.

  I turn to The Book of Knowledge for the answers to questions I didn’t ask.

  In its 7,606 pages, The Book of Knowledge has no entry for suicide. It has no entry for insomnia, alcoholism, or addiction, either. There is an entry for ragweed, but not for rage. In the age of anxiety, there is no entry for anxiety. No entry for depression without “Great” in front of it. The entry on sex is limited to plants and flowers. There is no entry for conformity or blandness or dullness or insipidity—and this was the 1950s! Sometimes I wonder about The Book of Knowledge. I find an entry for Peter Pan, of course, but none for Cyril Ritchard. No entry for either “Fever” or Peggy Lee. Nothing on the doldrums, the dumps, the mulligrubs, or the blues. No blue funk or the blahs. Nothing on grief—grief! No entry for funeral, burial, interment, last rites, cortege, mourners, pallbearers, or pall. No entry for self-murder, self-slaughter, self-destruction, and no entry for self. No entry for hara-kiri (which is a little surprising) or suttee (which is not). There are several entries under medicine, but no cure for despair, despondency, sadness, sorrow, unhappiness, melancholy, or gloom. Doom does not make the pages. Nor agony nor suffering nor woe. In The Book of Knowledge, no woe!

  Wonder Question: “What is everything?”

  In the late 1950s, after the doctors try everything else, they strap the patient to a gurney in a hospital room and tape the leads of a heart monitor to her chest. They do not inject her with an anesthetic for pain or use muscle relaxers to reduce the chance of bone fractures and other injuries when the arms, legs, and chest rise against the restraints, but they do place a block in her mouth so that she cannot bite her tongue while the procedure is performed. They attach electrodes on either side of her face at the temples after applying a conductive jelly so that an electrical current will pass into her head and brain more easily. Once she is ready, the doctor turns on a machine that sends a steady stream of electricity into her skull, the current running between the right and left lobe of her brain for twenty seconds, inducing a grand mal seizure and leaving her unconscious, usually for about a half-hour. No one knows for sure what happens in her brain as her eyes roll back and her body stiffens. The shock of electricity may slow overly agitated mental activity or dull the brain receptors altering her mood. It may release neuropeptides that ease depression. Or it may cause brain damage. Electroshock therapy helps many people, but, as one critic put it, the procedure is “like playing Russian roulette with your brain.”

  What is everything in the late 1950s?

  It is a very sad figure of speech come true.

  When I was a boy, I lay in bed at night listening to my parents fight downstairs. The arguments began as conversation mixed with the clinking sound of ice in glasses, the words spoken softly, clipped and brittle, dipping to inaudibility when whispered. The clicking of tree branches that is prelude to the storm. Eventually the voices rose until the two were shouting and finally screaming furiously, the sound coming through the walls in unarticulated growls. I don’t think they ever hit each other, but sometimes they broke glasses and ashtrays. Dad may have caught her arms when she took drunken, limp, and futile swings at him. I think I saw that once.

  I was too afraid when they fought to move and lay wrapped under a cocoon of sheets and blankets that felt like safety but acted like an echo chamber, amplifying and distorting the low rumble until the roar, punctuated now and then with a slam or a crash, spilled over me in torrents. I waited, understanding nothing, absorbing it all. It was only when the yelling was done that the silence after the curses brought me out of bed to the top of the stairs to be sure that they were all right. I usually walked down a few steps and leaned forward, peering between the balusters in order to see into the kitchen, blinking at the fluorescent glare. One night they caught me. I can picture the tableau even now. My dad, his sleeves rolled up, facing a wall, my mother sitting bent over in a kitchen chair with her back to him, crying in gasps, mascara running down her cheeks.

  “Oh, no,” she says when she turns and sees me running back upstairs.

  The next day my father pulled me aside and asked what I had heard.

  “You were fighting,” I said.

  He corrected me. They were not having a fight, but a “discussion.”

  “That’s what adults do,” he said.

  The memory of the fight followed by the conversation with my dad glows like a lit match in the darkness that is my past. Here is another lit match. From my bedroom I see a light in the hall, soft this time like the g
low of a candle. Drawing the twisted sheets up around my shoulders, I hear the clank of the changer and the long wavering whoosh and whir when the needle hits the disk. Clink of ice in a glass. Swoosh of a magazine dropped to the floor. My mother turns up the volume, and soon Peggy Lee’s voice fills the house to the corners, beating back gathered silence. I slip out of bed and hide at the top of the stairs to watch. Snapping fingers, slapped cymbal, thud of a double bass and drum, and a lone, plaintive female voice. Mom’s there, her back to me, her face partially visible, lit by the glow of the console. She sways, drink in hand, and sings, watching the record spin, holding the notes out for no one, trying to sound good.

  “What a lovely way to burn,” she croons. “What a lovely way to burn.”

  The fights and my mother singing “Fever” happened before my grandparents moved in with us in November 1960. Peggy Lee’s new song, “Fever,” was the rage, and my parents had the album in their record collection, and this record followed my family long after my mother died. I remember it because of the distinctive cover photograph of Peggy Lee in a black cocktail dress, her pale skin and platinum-blond hair set against a blue background. The album was released in May 1960. So the fights and the drinking alone while singing into the stereo console must have happened between May of 1960 and November 1960, in the time just before my mother was hospitalized for depression.

  During 1959 and 1960 my dad was gone most of the time on business trips and to take courses in business management in St. Louis. My mother thought he was pushing himself too hard. He had developed an ulcer, and the doctor recommended that he cut back on his work. “Sometimes I think we are crazy,” my mother wrote on June 24, 1959. “The men work at such a pace and under so much pressure.” During that time she must have confronted him about the burden that the maddening pace and heavy responsibilities of his job placed on him and the family: “We discussed this when he was sick and I suggested a change, but he said he liked his work and seems to have the ability so we decided it would be a matter of adjusting our leisure time to make it workable.”

  I know what those “discussions” sounded like.

  In the end my dad had his way. The trips continued. “Max has been in St. Louis,” she writes on March 26, 1959, and on July 9 she mentions that “Max has been to St. Louis since Tues. will be back tomorrow.” These business trips to St. Louis run like a refrain after 1959 until the letters come to an abrupt halt in June 1960, within a month of the release of the album that contained “Fever.” The memory of that song may be the last message I have from my mother, since it probably came after the last letter.

  My stepmother tells me that she met my father in St. Louis.

  My mother seems unaware of infidelity during 1959 and early 1960. In the letters she appears to be genuinely concerned about the problems related to Dad’s job. What upset her was the pressure that it put on their lives. It did damage to their friends, some of whom became alcoholics; made my father ill; and saddled my mother with social responsibilities she could not, given her tendency to depression, handle. I sense in all the letters from that time a desire to live in a way that reduced the strain on everyone, and I suspect that the conversation about leaving the company was real. Dad’s ulcer and her exhaustion only reinforced the idea that their loveless marriage had to do with the demands of his career, not another woman, but sometime in June of 1960 she must have figured out that Dad had found love elsewhere, and the letters stopped.

  The depression that perched on my mother’s life and led to her suicide on April 6, 1961, had many sources, but here is one black wing: on April 29, three weeks and two days after my mother’s death, Dad married my stepmother.

  “What a lovely way to burn,” Peggy Lee growls four times at the end of “Fever.” “What a lovely way to burn.” In the penultimate line her voice rises in desire on the first word—What—before it slides down a lovely way to the last note, burn, dying like the flicker of a heartache.

  And the final line? It is a scorched whisper, a beckoning, and a come-on. It is a raised eyebrow. “What a lovely way to burn.”

  Wonder Question: “Who holds up the stars?”

  The stars only appear to be nailed into fixed positions in the dome of the night sky, and no one really holds them up for us. According to The Book of Knowledge, “All the stars—in fact, everything in the universe, asteroids, stars, galaxies of stars—all are moving through space at unbelievable speeds of many miles a second.” The “great force of gravitation” holds them in check. “Each bit of matter in the universe pulls upon every other particle of matter,” and this mutual attraction can cause collisions. “If one body comes too close to another body, the lesser is drawn into the greater and destroyed.” But when the velocity of the objects and the distance between them is right, they move in consort. In the end this apparently accidental dance of forces is “responsible for the balance and state of equilibrium in the universe.”

  On the day of my mother’s death, I stared into trembling stars nailed into the night sky of my own making in the hope of achieving some equilibrium. I liked spinning in our newly renovated downstairs den, holding a Jetfire balsa-wood plane that I kept in my hiding place under the stairs. I usually got the planes at the five-and-dime when I visited my grandparents in Glen Elder, but they must have brought the plane to me, because this memory is in Illinois. I can still clearly picture these planes that I assembled myself and studied for hours. The wings were stamped with red designs marking the ailerons and flaps and labeled on one side with the name of the company, Guillow’s, and on the other with the name of the plane, Jetfire. The cockpit was embossed on the fuselage, and inside a pilot with a red helmet leaned forward. Meant to ride breezes, the glider is light in my hand. It has a small piece of metal folded over the nose for protection when it crash-lands against the walls of the house or the concrete driveway, which is most of the time, but I’m not allowed to fly it indoors, so I hold it and spin, making airplane noises and getting dizzy. When I stop, the room seems to keep on spinning and I wobble a bit as if I have taken a blow. I’m almost twelve. Too old to be doing this sort of thing,

  My mother died on the day that my father planned to leave the family for good. In retrospect I know that he intended to start a new life for himself in Kentucky without my mother or my brother and me. Was he anxious or exhilarated when he left the house that April morning, relieved or scared? Or some other emotion I cannot even imagine? If on that day my grandmother knew what my mother would do, he may have too, but I’m not sure, because unlike my shrewd grandmother, he was an optimist. After he left, my mother bought the gun, drove to the park by the lake, stepped out of her car, and pulled the trigger. My grandparents, who knew it would happen, were taking care of my brother and me. When Dad found out, he came back for us.

  In memory I was alone downstairs in the newly renovated den, killing time with this spinning game, when my dad arrived and the house began to fill with neighbors and my parents’ friends. I heard the ringing doorbell of each new arrival. The hushed greetings. The whispers. The shuffle of feet over carpet as adults overhead approached each other. I am pretty sure that no one had told me what had happened yet. Dad would do that when we were on the train going to Kentucky. But I knew something, because I hid under the stairs in my favorite hideaway, where I kept some toys like the balsa Jetfire, and sat there a long time before anyone noticed my absence. The points of the nails that had been used to secure the treads to the risers of the stairway protruded overhead. Like stars they glittered in the crawlspace, and I looked into them as I listened to the groan in the floorboards. Suddenly it grew silent, and I heard my father call for me. At first his voice was a question, but then, freighted with all the tension of that day, it became a barked command. Soon others joined in, their anxious voices a keening chorus on my name.

  A shadow passed over the risers.

  “Who holds the stars up?” Marjorie Mee asked her perplexed mother.

  I covered my ears.

  Las
t September, when Barbara and I visited my stepmother, Lou Harvey, in Kentucky, we spent a Saturday morning looking through pictures. Lou—who is nearly eighty—pulled them out of boxes one at a time with her arthritic fingers, stopping occasionally to talk, and the subject came around to my mother.

  “No, honey,” Lou said, when I asked if my mother bought the gun before that day. I’m sitting across from her at the kitchen table. Barbara, who is standing, stops flipping through pictures and listens. “She bought it that morning. She killed herself in the park. A policeman saw her and thought it unusual, so he watched. She stepped out of the car and then.”

  Lou puts her finger to her temple and lifts her eyebrows.

  “Bam.”

  I look away. A cat waits in a crouch under the birdfeeder in her neighbor’s yard.

  “Neither of us had anybody,” she says, explaining that her first husband was impossible to live with too. “I had nobody. Your dad had nobody.”

  Silenced for a moment by that story, we return to the pictures. Many of them show Lou with my dad through the years, but I pause over one in particular. In it, the two of them are preparing dinner. They both are young, in their thirties. My dad, heavyset in a dark shirt and white warmup pants, has turned, startled by the picture, and his face, picking up the full impact of the flash, wears a customary carefree and bold look. He’s making a salad and is no doubt about to tell a joke. The flash explodes like a supernova on the sliding glass door behind him, turning the rest of the glass black.

  It is the image of my stepmother that holds my attention, though. She stands in the wood-paneled room, looking young and very pretty in a striped sweater and tight slacks, her nose aquiline and her hair all dark curls. She leans toward my father from behind as if she has some secret to share, but the easygoing intimacy of the photograph keeps no secrets. He came to her in St. Louis for fun, happiness, love, and sex. He came to escape a home full of woe, some of it no doubt of his own making—some, but not all. He was leaving us for this, that was the secret, and when my mother figured it out, she gave my brother and me to him, to them, with a single gunshot.