by Marge Piercy
I take one last look at Cynthia in her red crepe suit, elegant enough to please my mother, low-cut enough to interest Dad. Knowing my father has a sweet tooth she baked brownies for him last night; knowing my mother is phobic about long hair, Cyn trimmed hers two inches.
“Gabriel, oh, Gabriel.” Mom is still a perfect size five, still consumes no solid food except Sarah Lee cake. Her every vertebrae is as distinct as a swollen knuckle and as I envelop her in a welcoming hug I imagine a skeleton shellacked with hair spray.
“My Gabey,” Dad says as we paddle each other on the back. He is a tall man for his generation, with a chest like an oak wine cask and a round fluid middle. His name is Sam, nicknamed Samson, all his life likened to an ox. “Gabey, Gabey,” he sighs, proud. “How’s your car?”
Mom steps back to view me at arm’s length. Her hair is red now. It was blonde before the summer. “You look gorgeous. Look at that handsome face. So you have a belly,” she goes straight for the bulge over my belt and twists it like challah dough. “When you get older everybody gets a belly.”
“Except for Doctor Pincus. Doctor Pincus has no belly,” Dad says.
My mother freezes. Her eyes squint warning. “Don’t start.”
“Oh, svelte Doctor Pincus with his little mustache. He looks like David Niven your mother says.”
“He’s a cultured, educated man, Sam.”
“He’s a fairy.”
“This is a poor man whose wife passed away a year ago. According to your father he’s beating down my door. He’s not looking for a woman of sixty-seven, believe me. Nobody’s looking for a woman of sixty-seven.”
They moved to their present house during my first year away at college. Vaguely, I recall a sign in front of a split-level across the street: I. G. Pincus, optometrist. “He told me my wife had the eyes of a forty year-old woman.”
My mother lights up. “When did he say that?”
“I almost sent him to the moon.” Dad balls his fist. “He should talk about my wife’s eyes.”
I smile at Cynthia, a sad but victorious I told you so. For months Cynthia thought I was keeping her from meeting my parents because I was ashamed of her. Now, ignored, foil wrapped gift in hand, she can observe them for herself as they make the entire world their stage. Perhaps in another life they would have become the Lunts.
“Mom, I’d like you to meet—“
“Just a minute, Gabriel. When did Doctor Pincus say that, Sam? I want to know.”
“Mom, this is Cynthia.”
“Yes, darling, of course, yes.” My mother smiles but her eyes do not leave my father’s. She kisses Cynthia’s cheek. “Hello, hello, Cynthia. Did Gabriel tell you I saw one of your books in the library? I was so proud. But if you want me to be honest, I asked my friends and nobody’s ever heard of you.”
“It’s Doctor Pincus that’s never heard of you,” Dad says.
There is nothing left to do but eat. Mom seats us. “Sam and Gabe, there. Cynthia and I, here. And you two take these.” Mom pushes the little wooden bowl of crispy noodles to our side of the table. “We certainly don’t need these, do we?” Mom says to Cynthia. “Not at our age.”
“Ah, Gabey, Gabey,” dad sighs. He squeezes my knee. “My first and only son. You look terrific.” He snaps his fingers. “Waiter!”
I want to evaporate. I want to disappear. If anyone in my restaurant snaps his fingers for my attention, I ignore him. The waiters here do, too. “Chop Chop! Ching Low!” Dad calls.
“Pop,” I say gently. “Maybe if you don’t make fun of their language. Maybe if you spoke to them with a little respect.”
“Oh, I see, I see.” Dad slides, huffing, out of the booth. He stands next to the table and bows to a passing waiter. “Oh, excuse me, kind sir. Excuse me for troubling you. But if you do not mind the inconvenience, would you deign to honor us by gracing our table with an order of egg rolls?”
I glance at Cynthia for help, acknowledgement, anything, but my mother is commanding her complete attention. “…and Doctor Pincus says I should not be ashamed to admit that I’ve had a hysterectomy. It’s not uncommon for a woman our age, right?”
I eat and I eat. I cannot hear their voices when I eat. The rice steams in its little bowl, sticky as a snowball, the mustard burns my sinus clear, the charred flesh of the pink sparerib flakes on my fingertips as the hot juice runs down my chin. I eat it all, everything. I refill my plate with the sweet and sour gravy, the shredded mu shu pork, the soggy mattress of egg fu yong, the crunchy water chestnuts.
I eat and I grow young, a child again at my parent’s table. I eat and watch them, huge as dinosaurs, knocking each other over with the thunderous wallop of their scaly tails. I eat now as I ate then, compulsively chewing, swallowing, trying not hear my mother screaming at my father he was too fat to sleep with. I eat now as I ate then, as my mother sobbed through our entire Thanksgiving dinner, her food untouched, her tears falling into her cranberry sauce and making it run in thin maroon rivers. I ate as my mother watched the clock and my father slept off his depression, Friday night to Monday morning, awakening only for trips to the bathroom, fingers digging into the crotch of his wrinkled boxer shorts.
“Look at him eat with chopsticks,” my father says with pride. It is the small changes he notices, the gestures acquired away from home. I’ll order an after supper eau de vie, suggest we watch “Masterpiece Theater” instead of “Sunday Night Football.” The small things, each one a wave taking me farther out to sea. “Gabey, Gabey,” he shakes my shoulder with love. “How’s your car?” It is only when I visit my father that I appreciate engine failure.
“Car’s fine, Pop.”
“You got enough money, Gabey?” Dad whispers. “You had to bake the brownies, you couldn’t buy them?”
“I’m working. No complaints.” I take more rice, more mu shu pork.
“How come we never see you?” You don’t love us anymore, Gabey?”
“Of course I love you, Daddy.” One more egg roll. One more butterfly shrimp. A last ladle of Five Happiness chicken.
“Naw,” my father sighs, “you don’t love us.”
“But I do.”
“You don’t.”
“I do.”
“You don’t”
Pause.
Her food untouched, glazed and reflecting the yellow light of the Chinese lanterns, my mother shakes her head and sighs. “You don’t talk to us anymore. Not like you used to.”
I am having momentary difficulty catching my breath. “Sure I talk to you.”
“Oh, you tell us all the time what’s good. Everything is fine. You never talk to us like your sister does. You never tell us what’s really on your mind.”
I am slightly nauseous now. It comes in waves. One minute I feel feverish and about to fall over, the next I start to shiver. No, I don’t talk to them now, I don’t try to communicate. I blather on like a happy idiot, like an AM disc jockey. The last time I tried to talk honestly, to help them with their problems, I sat my mom down on the couch and held her. My voice trembled. She was crying. She hated living with him, she said, she cursed the day they were married. “Mama, if you are in so much pain, maybe you should separate for awhile. “ That evening my father called me at my apartment. “So you told your mother to leave me, you little prick?”
All sound is muted. All lights in blur. I hear Cynthia defending me. I hear her ask my mother why only negative feelings are real ones.
“You don’t understand,” my mother says with contempt. “You have children and they become strangers and it hurts.”
“But I do understand,” Cynthia says. “I do have children.”
“So you’re a success, we’re failures,” my mother says.
“You’re not.”
“We are.”
“You’re not.”
“We are.”
I have never been so hungry. I am eating the last of the white rice and lobster sauce. I scrape the soggy water chestnuts from my mother’s plate.
“Gabe, maybe you should slow down a bit,” Cynthia reaches for my wrist.
“Let him live.” My father shows his teeth. “Eat, Gabey, eat. It’s good here, huh? Remember we used to be so close? We ate out every Sunday. We went on trips together. Remember we went to the Amish country? Oh, we found a good restaurant there.”
My throat is dry, so dry I can only nod. I reach for my water glass, swallow it all, then Cynthia’s.
“Remember the trip we took to Washington?” Dad continues.
On that particular excursion my father was mute for seven and a half hours, fuming anger like a toaster with crust jammed against its heating coil. Finally exploding, on the sixteen lane highway that rings the capital he said he was only on this goddamned trip because he’d never hear the end of it from my mother if he didn’t spend his only vacation schlepping his kids to Washington, D.C. So leave! Go home! My mother wailed. She grabbed at the wheel. He shoved her away. We swerved off the road and my sister lost three teeth when her head rammed sideways into the ashtray.
“We had some good times, huh, Gabey?”
“Leave him, Sam,” my mother says. “They get older they go off. They forget all the love.”
“Want some dessert, Gabey? Hey, boy! Chop Chop!”
I breathe deeply, I steady myself. When the dizziness passes I will walk calmly to the men’s room.
“How about ice cream, Gabey?” Dad says when the waiter arrives. “What you got? Van—ee—ra? Choc—rit? Slaw—belly?”
“Maybe he’s eaten enough,” Cynthia says.
“Leave him be, let him be a man.” Dad burps, one of those intentionally loud, smelly burps, designed to shock.
“Sam!” my mother scolds him.
“So sorry, miss,” my father bows to Cynthia. “You’re an intellectual, I’m sorry. Maybe you never heard a burp before.”
I am on my feet, not aware of having planned to stand up, but lurching to the door for air.
“It’s the MSG, the chemicals,” Cynthia says.
“Oh, the chemicals, pardon me,” Dad says. “We should have eaten health food.”
“Go to him, Darling, take care of him,” I hear my mother say to Cynthia. “Go!”
In the parking lot I stand spread eagle over the trunk of my car. Cynthia paces, alternately caressing me, stroking my back, wiping my forehead; alternately raging. “What kind of idiot doesn’t eat for two days and then poisons himself?”
“I was trying to look nice, to please them, to make them happy.”
“But they are happy.”
“They’re miserable.”
“But that’s it, Gabriel, don’t you see? They’re happy being miserable.”
“You wouldn’t say that if they were your parents. I can change them, Cynthia. We can, together. By taking their minds off their own problems and helping them focus on the world. It’s a slow process, I know. Tonight, the play. Next week something else. They’re asking for help, don’t you see? Who in the world wants to be miserable?”
My mother lights a fresh cigarette from the one in her mouth when she sees us come in. Dad is finishing a dish of chocolate ice cream. “Feel better, darling?” My mother reaches for my forehead. “You should go home and lie down.”
“You should, Gabey. We’re beat, too. We’re just going to go back to the house and watch TV.”
“But Cynthia’s play…”
“We wouldn’t like it, Darling.”
“But you don’t know that.”
“We’re too old, Gabey. Your father likes to go to bed early. I like my coffee and cake. We’re just that way.”
On the way out the waiter stops me, not to thank me for the five dollars he saw me add to my father’s tip, but to hand me the foil-wrapped brownies Dad left in the booth.
Appendix II
RECOMMENDED BOOKS
In our tradition, there is a story often told about the great sage, Rabbi Hillel. A Roman soldier, taunting him, said he must recite the entire Torah while standing on one foot. Hillel thought for a moment, standing with difficulty, for he was an old man. “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor,” he said. “That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary.”
Okay, maybe you’ve read this entire book cover to cover. Or maybe you read writing books the way you read mysteries, so you skipped to the end. Maybe you’re standing in a bookstore right now and are trying to see what tips you can pick up without buying the book at all. No matter. We’re going to sum up the entire book, everything we have to say about how to learn to write in one sentence, like Rabbi Hillel: If you want to be a writer, be a reader.
That’s it. That’s the whole deal. As we said back in chapter one, if you want to write memoirs, read one hundred of them. Figure out how other writers have avoided making themselves victims or failed to; figure out how other writers with great accomplishments in their middle age managed to solve the problem of keeping readers hooked while recounting a relatively uneventful childhood. If you want to write suspense novels, read all the thrillers you can find and pay attention to how these writers end one chapter and build anticipation for the next, or drop hints early on that will figure into the plot later. Or fail to. Bad writing can be as instructive as successful writing.
Just because you’ve been reading since you were five does not mean, no matter how interesting your life, that you can write about it in an interesting way. We do not suggest reading books like this one in hopes of finding a formula, but books in which other writers have managed to overcome the same problems of craft that you will inevitably face. If you want to write, read. The rest is commentary.
Here are some books you may find suggestive:
Allison, Dorothy Bastard Out of Carolina. New York: Dutton, 1992.
Alvarez, Julia Yo!. Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 1997.
In the Name of Salome. Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 2000.
Asaro, Catherine The Last Hawk. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
Angelou, Maya. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings.
New York: Random House, 1970. (Memoir.)
Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas. New York: Random House, 1976. (Memoir.)
All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. (Memoir.)
Atwood, Margaret Surfacing. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972. The Handmaid’s Tale. New York: Anchor, 1998.
Baker, Russell Growing Up. New York: Plume, 1995.
Ballard, J.G. Empire of the Sun. New York: Pocketbooks, 1985. (Memoir
Barrington, Judith Lifesaving. Portland: Eighth Mountain Press, 2000. (Memoir.)
Bellow, Saul The Adventures of Augie March. New York: Penguin, 1996.
Bragg, Rich All Over But the Shoutin’. New York: Pantheon, 1997. (Memoir.)
Brecht, Bertold Three-penny Novel. New York: Penguin, 1972. (Out of Print.)
Threepenny Opera. New York: Arcade, 1994.
Brontë, Charlotte Jane Eyre. New York: Penguin Books, 1984.
Brownmiller, Susan In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution. New York: Dial Press, 1999. (Memoir.)
Burke, James Lee Burning Angel. New York: Hyperion, 1985.
Casella, Casare Diary of a Tuscan Chef. New York: Doubleday, 1998. (Memoir.) (with Eileen Daspin)
Chabon, Michael Mysteries of Pittsburgh. New York: Morrow, 1988.
Werewolves in Their Youth. New York: Random House, 1999.
Chaucer, Geoffrey Canterbury Tales. New York: Bantam, 1982.
Cheever, John The Stories of John Cheever. New York: Vintage, 2000.
Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness. New York: Penguin, 1999.
Lord Jim. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Danticat, Edwidge Krik? Krak! New York: Random House, 1996.
De Beauvoir, Simone Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. New York: Harper, 1974. (Memoir.)
Adieux. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. (Memoir.)
The Prime of Life. New York: Marlowe & Company. 1994. (Memoir.)
Force of
Circumstance. New York: Marlowe & Company. 1994. (Memoir.)
The Coming of Age. New York: Norton, 1996. (Memoir.)
America Day by Day. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Delany, Samuel R Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. New York:Bantam, 1984.
Triton. New York: Bantam, 1984.
Dinesen, Isak Out of Africa. New York: Modern Library, 1992. (Memoir.)
Doctorow, E. L. Ragtime. New York: Random House, 1975.
Loon Lake. New York: Bantam, 1981.
Dos Passos, John U.S.A. (Trilogy). New York: Library of America, 1996.
Dunnett, Dorothy The Game of Kings. New York: Vintage, 1997. (Or any of the books in the Lymond Chronicle Series)
Eco, Umberto The Name of the Rose. New York: Harvest Books, 1994.
Evans, Richard Paul The Christmas Box. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.
Eve, Nomi The Family Orchard. New York: Knopf, 2000.
Faulkner, William Sanctuary. New York: Library of America, 1985.
Ferrell, Carolyn Don’t Erase Me. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
Finney, Patricia Firedrake’s Eye. New York: Picador, 1992.
Fisher, M. F. K. A Cordial Water. New York: North Point Press, 1981. (Memoir.)
The Gastronomical Me. New York: North Point Press, 1989. (Memoir.)
Fitzgerald, F. Scott The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 1995.
Tender Is the Night. New York: Scribner, 1996.
Flanagan, Mary Cream Sauce. In: Bad Girls (stories). New York: Atheneum, 1985.
Fowles, John The Collector. New York: Little Brown, 1963.
The French Lieutenant’s Woman. New York: Little Brown, 1969.
Frank, Anne The Diary of Anne Frank, New York: Doubleday, 1952. (Memoir.)
Garcia, Cristina Dreaming in Cuban. New York: Knopf, 1992.