We keep trying, but morning light is unforgiving.
In Oxford, I am studying Pre-Raphaelitism and Decadence, which means I am doing a lot of thinking about parlors and flagellation and Japanese kimono prints. But I am also thinking about the uncanny. What Freud defines as “that class of frightening that leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.” Unheimlich, in German. A word that means unfamiliar, not home, but also unconcealed, what is revealed. A word that moves in circles until it finally coincides with its opposite, heimlich, belonging to the house. Home. But it would be incorrect to assume that only the unfamiliar is frightening. The uncanny is the red swell of recognition, the buried obsession, the glossy vaginal folds, the former heim. Yes, this is terrifying, we decide, and off we run.
After three months, I am travel-weary and punch-drunk on paint, lost in Rossetti’s blues and the pink tongues of Persephone’s pomegranate seeds. I am leaving Oxford’s museums thinking that the whole world is now in HD satellite picture! like a big joke, a commercial’s refrain having somehow mixed in my mind with the clarity of those images. This happens sometimes when I’ve been left to my own devices for a while, roaming foreign countries alone like some empty, vaporous disciple, rootless and hungry.
Between loneliness and exhilaration is a bit of madness, too. I have a trick up my sleeve. I am able to convince myself that I am unattached—come from nowhere, headed nowhere—without a home. Here, I subsist on worship, but my mother’s God never came for me. Instead of spirits and symbols, I kneel to the crooked trees and the yellow ageless finch, the silver and sallow riverbed that winds wanly through an old village, which is ashen and crumbling and useless. Every strange face is suddenly familiar, as if from long ago, and every train heads in the right direction.
When I call my mother from a pay phone she tells me to get my shit together and hangs up. It’s a good idea, I think, except that in the morning I tripped over my own feet, landing chest first on the stone steps of the Bodleian Library, my left breast now swollen to twice its normal cup size. Purple-red flesh capsizing over the edges of a black lace bra. I wonder why I missed out on my mother’s level-headedness, which gene got pinched.
In truth, I tell her, I might be too far gone.
At night we gather in the Trinity College dining hall for a supper of fish and chips and something vaguely broccoli-ish, all soaked in buttery Hollandaise sauce. The warm white room pulses like a fever—hot skin of the eager, the underdressed. Grim portraits line the walls; under the accusing scowls of long-dead deans and bishops and moneyed benefactors, we sit and twitch and shift. We pull at thin dresses or khaki shorts and discreetly wipe away the sweat beneath our knees.
I eat slowly and leave. The courtyard is empty and the last light is glowing phosphorescent on the stone walkway. From another courtyard I can hear the hum of voices, the occasional crescendo of laughter. A door opens; music escapes and silver clatters on a wooden floor. As I head toward the pub to join my friends for a pint, I see two baby hawks huddled beneath the archway that leads from Front Quad into Chapel Quad. I step past them cautiously. They have the soft, pillowy down of the newly born and their small round faces are tucked into gray-white tufts which stand on end as if windblown, grasping for heat. And despite the warm summer air these chicks are shivering, eyes closed, silent. I look around for a mother and see none. I find my friend Maggie in the bar and she says not to worry, even if the birds fell from their nest the mother will be along to feed them eventually. This sounds right to me, but when we return through the archway a few hours later they are still there, swaying, knock-kneed, their breathing shallow.
“All right, clean up,” says our mother. The lights in the parking lot are blinking now and it is becoming harder to pretend that they are anything but what they are.
“Why do you always do that?” I ask.
“Do what?”
“Order us to clean up dinner like we’re still kids.” Eric begins to gather plates. “As if we’re not going to do it anyway. Besides, it’s Eric’s turn. I did it last time.”
But she is older now. We all are. I notice her slower gait, the slight hesitation when she rises from a chair, the unsteady first steps. The constant Marlboro burning like an extra appendage. We are not a team anymore. “What we are” is the problem in general, since what we are is only a vestige of where we have been, the clunky manifestation of an abstract set of memories, and even these are made up, an experiment. When we come together, it is partly an effort to cling to something shared from long ago, even while we know these memories are as varied and variable as the people we have become. The shadow of the familiar is still just a shadow, and yet we’ll never stop hunting it down. It is the only thing that makes us feel real.
“Go get Mommy another glass of wine,” she orders.
This is the point Eric and I know too well, the time of evening we have come to dread. She will begin to slur and stroke our heads too lovingly. She will ride a conversation to unintended heights and then watch the thoughts tumble over an unforeseen precipice, bewildered.
We bring the bottle. We have learned to just bring the bottle.
And so we all settle back into our chairs. We watch the dogs wander through the yard, the gray one clawing new holes in the ground, the yellow retriever stamping at fireflies and then bellowing into the night. The azalea bushes next to the patio are shrunken from a late-summer heat wave, while the untended roses, having long since given up, lie flat atop the dirt. It is near midnight and a couple of cars sit idling in the parking lot behind the fence and the bushes, up to no good. I feel tired and heavy-lidded. There is dew collecting on the glass table and sweat in the crooks of my elbows. For a while, the only sound is the hum of the cicadas or the electric buzz of the telephone wires; I can’t tell which. This is the sound I’d been hearing all summer right before I fell asleep, though it had been the sound of my dreams taking shape, the sound of letting go. Many nights, I was afraid. I was further away from my family than I had ever been and I thought it meant I had relinquished some measure of control over our collective fate. Sleep was a devastating reminder, a small death, and it made breathing difficult. I fought it. I paced the hostel lobbies and empty dining rooms in Scotland. I sat in the window of my dorm room in Oxford, watching the lines of people swerve around the late-night french fry stand. I’d thought to bear witness was to stave off disaster and by leaving I had done irreparable damage, not just to the three of us as individuals, but to the vital organ that bound us and kept us safe. I didn’t yet understand that we were like conjoined triplets. What happens after surgery is yet unknown, but we’ve no shot if we mean to keep on sharing the same heart.
“Okay, Jess, tell another ‘ye old weary world traveler’ story,” says Eric.
“Oh no, forget it,” I say, exhausted.
“No, really,” he says, filling my glass with wine.
“Please,” says Mom. Her words are thick now, eyes red and dangerous. There is always this moment, when the wine and pot reach the point of saturation and reveal a second of startling regret. She is ready for bed.
I want to tell them a lovely little story about green and undulating landscapes, about skies soft as cotton and faces old as dirt.
I want to say, “We’ll go, let’s go.”
I want to tell them about Vernon Lee and Freud and the uncanny, about sheep and whiskey and Scottish folk songs. Could I explain that to return home is not a return from the uncanny, but a return to it? Who would I be if I said that I don’t belong here, don’t belong anywhere?
Or . . .
But what could I possibly say of churches?
Instead, I tell them this:
For three days, we kept a steady vigil over the baby hawks. I have never witnessed a death so slow. I was there when it finally happened. The two birds, covered in flies, finally stumbled apart and moved toward opposite corners of the courtyard. Their progress was hindered because they could not see, their eyelids closed and swarmed by the flies. Every so
often one would lose its balance and collapse sideways onto the stone, or else reel forward and back like a drunk, clumps of feathers scattering in its wake like tattered, shiftless cerements. I did not smash their heads with rocks. I did not slice their throats with a kitchen knife. I only watched as they floundered to the rose beds and clawed beneath the brush, biding time in separate charnels, a wonder to the worms.
FALL
A BLACKFACE EWE stumbles in a northern wind. She is high in the mountains on the Isle of Skye—a small but sturdy chip of land long ago cast from the great shoulders of the mainland. The ewe works a clump of grass against a toothless upper jaw as she leans her heavy, woolen flank against a rock for balance. As the wind tumbles down the cliff she recognizes the distant bleating of lambs, her own and others, but rambles further up the mountainside, chewing as she goes. Further down, some members of the flock sense her distance and look up from their grazing. They recognize her absence and are unnerved. How far she has wandered. A young ram lowers his head to scrape his horns in a patch of shorn grass and wet mud, blinking into the rain. An older ram takes off in the direction of the wayward ewe, but stops short to gum a silver stalk of asphodel bent over the cold water of a shallow stream.
This stream slices its way down the mountainside and collects under the wooden bridge where we are gathered, belly-down and hovering over the water, our faces submerged for seven, six, five more seconds. My arms shake as I try to hold myself up. Graeme is counting down from somewhere, laughing as he reminds us of the promise of eternal youth and beauty, the Scottish fable that has us facedown in this frigid water, eye to eye with a tiny world of undulating lichen, microscopic fairies tucked into their folds. I remember now why I prefer to travel by myself; even lonely, even hungry, even weatherworn and aimless. I stay this side of sea level.
Five years before I journey alone to Scotland, my father sits in his mother’s attic in the Philadelphia suburbs and takes shots of Gordon’s vodka from the bottle. Her new townhouse is in a town called Worcester, thirty miles north of where I grew up, on the top of a hill so high it is always windblown and cloud-covered, like a castle in a fairytale. He reads a book about a seagull that shares his name: Jonathan. He folds his T-shirts and places calls to my cell phone, none of which I answer. Two flights down, my grandmother Cynthia sips tea and mutters softly to herself as she turns off lights and locks doors, her legs swollen with her latest bout of sciatica. It is so painful she has to grip the banister with both hands and drag her weight slowly up the stairs. She is unhappy with a son living upstairs again, but grateful for what she believes to be his new sobriety, the catalogues from community colleges collecting on her dining room table, and the working stove that he has rigged together with an ell bracket and a spool of fishing wire. Jon is forty-four years old and has spent most of this time drunk, drugged, and drained, in a constant battle with his own brain.
He is a tired, uneager student.
The group wipes at red cheeks and ambles toward the idling gray bus: eleven Korean college students and me. I’ve latched on to the tail end of their three-week tour after introducing myself to Graeme in the living room of my Skye hostel. He agrees to let me onto his tour bus for their last day on the island only after I promise to teach his group a “quality American drinking game” when we return. Eventually, I’ll teach them Flip Cup in the dim kitchen of the rakish hostel—a quiet affair that quickly digresses into a scene from a “quality American dance club,” our guide and his Korean students doing the Macarena on the kitchen floor. I’ll slip outside and smoke cigarettes and sip amber whiskey from a safe distance on the other side of the window, hips thrusting involuntarily to a hard beat on an empty island under a dusky hollow sky.
But first, the gray bus must wind its way down the shoreline highway, through fog thick as fingers and sudden bursts of rain that pound ferociously on the windshield for several minutes before retiring back into the clouds, low and grumbling. Graeme drives steadily and tells stories into a microphone, Scottish fables of kings and fairies and promiscuous women. Saucy Mary who bared her breasts to passing sailors as they entered island waters, collecting tariffs in the bib of her dress. And then one day Mary leaps into the sea, raging and screaming until finally she sinks, silent, still, weighted with gold.
As we turn inland and begin to slide between the mountain range, the blackface ewe makes her way to the crest of a jagged ridge. She has lost sight of her flock but is driven by instinct up and into the wind, as sheep often are. She has chewed her way along a path of wilted heather, the purple flowers whipping against her ankles as she staggers over loose stones and black mud and slips toward a white and opal sky.
Cynthia retires to her bed and Jon slowly gets up from a wooden attic floor. Vodka storms his bloodstream and, for the moment, he is calm. The lightbulb blinks inside the unfinished bathroom and he resolves to fix this first thing in the morning. Tomorrow his children will arrive—two teenagers now, a boy and a girl—and he will be sure to tell them this new plan: an electronics degree from Concordia Community College and an apartment across the street from their high school. He will tell them and tell them and tell them until he is sure that they understand. Then they will go for a spaghetti dinner in his mother’s new car.
For now, Jon tucks his suitcase under the extra bed and folds down the blanket. He tightens the cap back onto an empty vodka bottle and stashes it in a dresser drawer. He looks through a window and watches the moon undress in the front yard. He remembers nights like this while camping in the Poconos with his brothers or sailing through the Chesapeake Bay, the moon naked over St. Michael’s. Fiery anchor. Steadfast woman. He wants water and then sleep and so he heads to the stairs and fumbles for the railing in the semi-dark.
Here, at the crest of the mountain, the ewe can see a black swath of sea and beyond that, the ripened green swell of mainland. She has never left this island. Indeed, she has never left this particular mountainside. The neon-pink tag that dangles from her left ear marks her for this territory alone—which is every day new and terrifying and fixed just right in the vast stream of consciousness she has come to know. And this is just fine. And so it is also fine when the wind begins to taste thick and the heather on her tongue blows like hurricanes and the slim fissure between land and air dissolves and the sound of bleating sheep is just a cloud like any other. She whips her body right and left and, unblinking, lets the rain collect in the two black pockets of her eyes. When she falls she reaches her nose toward the soft gray space between this land and the next. She falls, and the taste of gray is acrid like dew on a familiar metal fence.
On the bus, I sit next to a curious man named Lin who wants to show me his very elaborate cell phone, which I cannot understand even after several demonstrations. He wants to know why I am on this bus with them—Why am I here? Where am I going?—and I try to tell him about the summer program at a British university and the rail pass that lets me wander the United Kingdom at will, and we try so hard to communicate that by the time the bus lurches to a stop I am no longer sure how I’ve gotten here myself. We stop in the middle of the road and I am almost certain that we have not made it to the island’s unofficial capital, a seaside town called Portree. Graeme slams the bus into park and leaves us without a word, the open door shivering on rickety hinges as the wind continues to blow. We cannot see him through the windshield, opaque with fog. I hear him grunt once—“Shite”—as he stomps back onto the bus to gather a pair of muddy gloves from beneath the driver’s seat. He faces us.
“Sheep,” he says, and stomps down the steps and out to the road.
At the exact moment when, five years ago in April, Jon finally finds the railing, a single electrical charge wanders beyond its constituency. This tiny, hot-yellow pulse of energy sparks another and another and another, a lightning storm in the brain. Like a man in an electric chair, my father’s body erupts in a series of violent convulsions, each muscle spurned out of complacency, and he falls, headfirst, down a single flight of stairs
.
By the time Cynthia finds his body at ten o’clock the next morning it is cold, wide-eyed, a blue sea of skin in flannel, a single yellow boot. A healthier man would have survived that seizure, but my father’s body couldn’t take any more. It was waving the white flag, and in reply he said, “Fuck you,” and took another shot. After he died we cleared our basement of his things, certain now that he would not return. Half-constructed model sailboats, boxes of old flyers for the construction business he had once failed to create, rusty tools and broken skis and fifty-seven empty bottles of vodka hidden in the crawl space. If he saw a light he would have steered toward it, elated to have finally found the way.
The carcass is a mound of snow. It is a pink, lunar heart. I watch from the side of the road as Graeme drags the ewe across the pavement, his glove and the cuff of his flannel shirt dipped in red like a candied apple. Her neck hangs limp over his forearm and a strip of black fur on her muzzle is peeled back to reveal the clean, pearlescent bone and the crimson underside of skin speckled with tiny stones. I cannot look away. I am stunned still by what seems to be an affirmation.
I never saw my father’s body after he died. For a long time I was resentful that I hadn’t been given the option. I don’t remember asking to see him, but I do recall a day many weeks after the funeral, after the shock had worn off, when I realized I could have asked and hadn’t. There wasn’t a viewing. We didn’t perform a wake. When I asked my mother about it she admitted she had gone to see his body in the hospital, but she’d felt she was protecting us by not bringing my brother and me along. I’d felt a sudden rush of anger and regret. There are reasons we sit with our dead. To bear witness is to usher them into death, and in kind, they return us to the land of the living. Because I seldom saw my father in the years prior, his final absence never felt real. It was like a fugue state, our twinned souls circling in purgatory. The ewe isn’t my father, I know that, but this corpse, she is death itself. This is tangible. This I understand in a way that I need not translate to myself. There was nothing, nothing I could do.
If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir Page 8