This Is Where We Came In

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  I never longed to take that high ride again: to tell the truth, I’d never enjoyed it all that much. I’m not a sucker for romanticism, and I’d rather be mildly tipsy than blind drunk. Fortunately this reincarnation of crazy love offers the adoration without the agony, which was tangy, certainly, but toxic.

  All that, though, is the known part. Beyond the known is a state of being that’s mysterious and unsentimental, even a bit scary in its utter irrationality. There’s something suspiciously viral about the condition: relentless, forceful and all-consuming. Those it strikes feel helpless, stupefied, even stupid in their immersion. Before it struck me, I’d listened—patiently, indulgently—to others in their blithe affliction. I’d never be susceptible, I thought. I knew love—infatuation, passion, devotion, the whole business—inside and out; I wrote the book—lots of them, actually—about the ways we link or entwine or hook up. No variety of attachment could subjugate me.

  That was another thing I didn’t know.

  The love grandparents bear for their grandchildren is viewed sentimentally as the purest of passions. But all love affairs have their source in self-love, and this one is no exception. Beneath the selfless grandmotherly devotion, I suspect, lurks the same self-serving quest as always. The allure of love is being seen. Even more, being seen anew. Seen right. Granted, from time to time we may fix on some distant paragon who’s blind to us, but the vertiginous plunge doesn’t really occur until we find ourselves mirrored in the answering glance. Meaning that we love the person who sends back the most flattering reflection, whose vision of us fits most precisely with our own—cut from the same cloth, and congruent. On more lasting acquaintance, that perfect fit may not endure, just as our most cherished clothes tend to fit less well over time, as the body, that notoriously unstable landscape, shifts and betrays. It might happen that we have to go seeking an entirely new outfit. (Though it won’t with the grandchild, I’m quite sure.)

  Like so many perturbations of the heart, what makes this one interesting and worth parsing is, precisely, its impurity. The wonder of the grandchild is that she sees us with fresh eyes, granting us that most egotistical of thrills. Eyes that couldn’t, indeed, be fresher—they’ve hardly seen anything else. She’s an empty mirror on which we can flash our best self, see it registered and flashed back. A perfect reflection: she doesn’t know enough to make judgments or be critical.

  Of course, like any newborn creature, the grandchild is not a blank slate. Anyone who’s ever observed the visible nuances of heredity knows that; now, with the mapping of the human genome, it’s obvious even to those who require scientific proof. But she’s blank as regards her impressions of us. In that way, she differs from everyone else in the world, all the people we know who’ve already formed their impressions and opinions. And we needn’t worry about whether she’ll love us back. Of course she will. Fresh as she is, she doesn’t know enough not to. (In that sense we may be taking advantage of her innocence, but it’s a quite benign exploitation.) This, then, is the only relationship where we loved someone infinitely and hadn’t a worry in the world about whether they would love us back.

  But what about our own children? Didn’t we assume they’d love us back? Yes, but that certainty was so clouded over by the dense fears involved in raising them that we couldn’t enjoy it with anything like the abandon we feel now. So. Reluctantly, inevitably, we near the tangle shrouding the mystery: to think about grandchildren, we have to think first about children. Immediately, the bright subject flickers and darkens; the plot thickens; complexity looms. Grandchildren are simple; children, not in the least. Ours are grown now and have impressions of us and opinions galore. So many that they’ve lost interest. Who wouldn’t?

  Our memories of them as small children are vague, alas, made blotchy by old panics at every stage, panics that blurred our appreciation like smudges on a camera lens. Because it was terrifying, actually, to grasp that they would be forever with us, part of us to death and beyond. It was our job to civilize, socialize them, and what young creatures wouldn’t harbor less-than-beneficent feelings for those charged with curbing their appetites and impulses? They thought we were all-powerful. How could they know we were frightened all the while, frightened of them? What would they think of us, how would they judge us, would they ever forgive our civilizing duties and come to love us without reservations? Even more, would they care to know us? Their relation to us was an existential conundrum: we made them, they were our creatures; at times they felt like our possessions. And yet our task was to free them from us. How could we both own them and free them?

  For their part, they thought about us both too much and too little. They’d forget us at the oddest times, just when they ought to be remembering us. (Literally—they might disappear overnight and forget to call.) Quite forget our existence, and we’d have to go hunting for them, reminding them who we were and where they belonged. Yet at the same time, they thought about us too much. We’re not so important, we wanted to say. Go ahead and do as you like, and stop worrying about what we’ll think. We won’t think anything. In fact, we’d be very glad to think about ourselves for a change. We fretted over them and they fretted over us, but never at the same times and in the same ways, never in harmony. And sometimes we’d catch each other fretting and send, mutually, a sympathetic, rueful glance of complicity, as if to say, Will we be locked this way forever? Can we free each other?

  And then, at some point we did release each other. At some point in young adulthood, they stopped fretting over us, stopped referring to us in their heads at every critical moment. They lost interest and left us behind. And we, who are constitutionally unable to lose interest in them, we, for whom the children are and will be forever a source of fascination because they’re ours—and as well as we know them, we still can’t predict what they’ll do tomorrow—we must paradoxically rejoice that they’ve outgrown us. We must accept with good grace that we’re no longer objects of any interest. We’re what they’ve put behind them. We’re simply too well known. There are ways, to be sure, that children don’t know their parents at all. But in the long run, those ways don’t matter. In the ways that matter, they know us all too well. They’ve gotten to the bottom of us, and there isn’t any more. They find us predictable.

  But to the new one, the grandchild, whom we did not produce and whom we do not in any way possess, we’re new. We interest her. And—bittersweet gift of mortality—we won’t live long enough for her to get to the bottom of us. Meanwhile, we can inscribe the precise image we want recorded, in perpetuity. We can show the self—our self that no one else would care to see. So we murmur secrets, we sing, we dance. We wait. We assemble our gifts for when she’s ready. Some of them are even our own books.

  Raising children and writing books. Those are the two endeavors we spent our life on. They were our education and our striving after . . . what to call it? Learning to make a livable place for ourselves in the world. Of course there was all the rest of what constitutes a life. There was love, the grown-up kind of love, for one thing. That was an education too, but it was something we learned with another, while the books and the children, when looked at under the aspect of eternity—or as much of eternity as we’ll ever know—were what we had to learn, all alone, to master. Many more books than children: children take more time and work. And the two strivings were always in conflict. Always attended by guilt and doubt. Each seemed to detract from the other. When we were writing, we felt it was time we ought to be giving the children. With the children, we felt it was time we ought to be giving the writing. We never figured out a satisfactory balance, and eventually we learned to live with that incessant tug-of-war.

  We felt at times, with a gruesome guilt, that if not for the children, we might have written more, and better. At the same time, we grasped that if not for the children, we might not have written anything at all worthwhile; we wouldn’t have had anything to write about. Not that we wrote exclusively about child rearing or family life, not at all. What
we wrote about perpetually, however varied the books appeared to be, was the evolution of character, what it meant to become and remain a human being; what it felt like, here and now, to be the enigmatic, flawed, mortal, relentlessly self-conscious creatures we are, struggling constantly between the world within and the world without, mediating between what we are and what we yearn to become, what the world will permit us to become. (Come to think of it, we wrote all our lives as we’re doing right here, that is, teasing out the slightly disreputable motives beneath the innocuous surface.)

  None of this could we ever have understood without the children, without watching their astonishing transformation from know-nothing, frangible infants into something resembling . . . us. In that sense the children gave us our writing life, our raw material, and we should be grateful.

  We observed the genetic code unfolding and marshaling its forces, preparing to collide with circumstance and destiny. We gathered our data on what shapes human nature as it undertakes its delicate negotiations with the world, and this ramifying human nature and these worldly transactions became the subject of our work. But we couldn’t watch with the kind of thorough and dedicated attention such research deserves, because these were, after all, our children. We had to feed them and clothe them and see that they didn’t choke on buttons or put forks in electrical sockets or run out in the street under the wheels of a car. (And when one did run out in the street in front of a car and we ran out to grab her, we realized instantly that the old cliché about mothers is true.)

  Which brings another cliché, one of those swept aside earlier, scuttling back to our aid: yes, grandparents are more relaxed, less anxious and burdened, so they can enjoy the grandchild. Except that it’s not the enjoyment part that absorbs me. Sure, that giddy, adolescent high is a blessing right up there with the best of life’s intoxicants, but being ineffable, it doesn’t bear analysis. What does bear analysis is the intense, focused concentration on the process of becoming human, embodied in the grandchild, who metamorphoses into a person right before our eyes, a live documentary in slow motion.

  When we point to our hand and she points to hers, right in front of her, that’s simple to understand. When we point to our nose or eyes or chin and she points to hers, how does she know? How does she know she has a face that’s the same as ours? She’s too young to grasp what mirrors are for. When I spoon food into her mouth and she tries in turn to put the spoon in my mouth, how does she know I eat the way she does? How does she know she’s one of us and not, say, one of the very plump rabbits her parents keep in a cage in the living room, and who are closer to her size than I? What encoded pattern helps her deduce we’re the same, only on a different scale? She must figure out that resemblance trumps size as a criterion of species identity. And then she thinks, I eat, so this bigger version must eat too. Once she gets that straight, her next step is, I laugh, I cry, so she must laugh or cry too. She discovers the concept of our common humanity. A little later, though, she finds that “I want” and “She wants” are not always the same thing; they might be antithetical, and so she’s got to fight for what she wants. Yes, we’re the same, we share a common humanity, but our interests are not always the same. She grasps the primal flaw of human society already, and she’s not even two years old.

  These aren’t questions that can be answered by experiments with rats and mice. They’re not questions that can be answered at all, only lived with and incorporated into our ever-shifting mosaics of who we are and might become. We observe and brood over the givens and then piece them together as imaginatively as we can. This time around, with the grandchild, I observe with no conflict at all. Love and work conjoin. My heart may be in thrall, my spirits buoyant as a teenager’s in love, but my head is clear.

  Clear enough to wonder, for instance, why she finds hiding and revealing so funny. From quite early on, there was that burst of knowing laughter if I covered my face with my hands, then revealed it. There’s the element of surprise, of course. But her life is full of surprises: doors open and people materialize; buttons are pressed and lights go on, music and pictures appear. Nearly everything is a surprise to one so new. Only the hiding and showing is so uproariously funny.

  Beyond the question of where a sense of humor comes from, what does she intuit about here and not here? After all, it is the duality we struggle with from birth to death in countless formulations. Love, work, money; courage, power, ambition and confidence. All these crucial components of our lives have a way of appearing and disappearing—being here and then not here—in baffling, even frightening alternation. The ultimate guise that duality takes on is the here of birth and the not here of death. Could she have some notion that our game is emblematic of the life process? Is she laughing at the succinctness of the gesture: now I’m here, now I’m not? She can’t possibly know that just as she recently arrived out of nothingness to be so vividly here, just so, I, merrily making only my face disappear, will in time vanish totally to the not here. But I know. Nevertheless, I laugh with her, a laughter tinged with that knowledge, making the game more precious, the time left to play more precious, the laughter itself a kind of whistling in the dark.

  Listening to Anthony Powell

  Years ago, working at a temporary job in some godforsaken place, bored and friendless, I spent a while on the phone complaining to an old friend about my plight. When I was finished I paused, hoping for some Delphic utterance about how I might endure until my term came to an end. In the past she had been occasionally oracular. The pause lasted for some time, growing weighty with her anticipated wisdom. Finally she said, “What you need is . . .”

  I waited, taut.

  “A VCR.”

  Obviously, this was in the dark ages before Netflix. Like other oracular utterances, my friend’s counsel was puzzling, even disappointing at first. But it turned out to be the perfect solution. I remembered it much later when I found myself again working in exile—luckily not bored and friendless this time, but in a place I didn’t want to be, in a life that didn’t seem my own. By then VCRs were common and my sublet house had one, but I had no time to sit in front of it. I needed something for short, intermittent flights from reality. A colleague mentioned listening to books on tape while pacing the treadmill in the gym. Portable. Controllable. Not yet an iPod, but a step in that direction.

  Soon I had in my eager hands tapes of the opening volumes of Anthony Powell’s epic twelve-volume novel, A Dance to the Music of Time. The entire work took up six boxes of tapes, each box holding some ten to a dozen tapes. It was winter. I trudged through the snow in heavy gear and came home to the warm house, the cat that was part of the sublet deal, and the tapes. When I finished listening to one box, I’d seal it up, drop it in the corner mailbox, and phone an 800 number to order the next.

  A Dance to the Music of Time, hailed as a twentieth-century British masterpiece, was something I had always intended to read, but I had been daunted by its Proustian magnitude. I thought I had to wait for some endless summer, like the long-ago summer of my youth that I spent with Proust. Anthony Powell’s book turned out to be like Proust in other ways as well: its submission to the rigors and caprices of time, its reliance on memory as a magnetic field, its enormous cast of recurring characters. The comparison has been noted often enough by readers and critics and is alluded to more than once by Powell himself, most memorably when the narrator, serving as an army liaison officer, realizes that the French seaside town where he’s quartered for the night is none other than Proust’s Balbec:

  I had been standing on the esplanade along which . . . Albertine had strolled into Marcel’s life. Through the high windows of the Grand Hotel’s dining room . . . was to be seen Saint-Loup, at the same table as Bloch, mendaciously claiming acquaintance with the Swanns.

  But even though he capitalizes Time much of the time, Powell is a Proust minus the fluid poetry and minus the inimitable soul. Proust made pragmatic, stripped of metaphysics. Or more precisely, the novel is Proustian with the soci
al world in its largest sense—lineage, tradition, the tangled web of relationships—inflated and elevated to occupy the place of the metaphysical. Whether society can be successfully made to occupy this place is one challenge of the enterprise, whose true genre is wry social comedy, frequently edging into satire and burlesque.

  Proust or no, A Dance to the Music of Time was fine for my purposes. I wanted something to see me through, something I couldn’t see the end of. In the very first moments of listening, as I heard the words of the second paragraph (though of course I couldn’t know it was the second paragraph), I knew I’d found my salvation:

  For some reason, the sight of snow descending on fire always makes me think of the ancient world, . . . human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure, stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognizable shape.

  Here was an alternate world in which I could live, and for a long time indeed.

  I shouldn’t give the impression that those opening paragraphs were what I heard first. No. Presumably to ensure that the listener misses nothing a reader would be privy to, the producers of the tapes were excruciatingly thorough. The reading opens with a recitation of the copyright page, followed by the jacket copy, even the blurbs. When opening a book, I find this material a nice apéritif; when listening, it’s a delay, like an actor clearing his throat before the great soliloquy. It also has a greater influence than it should, read in the same voice and tone as the text itself. I tend to read jacket copy in a skeptical mood. “The most important fiction since the war,” says Kingsley Amis? We’ll see about that!