How many times has my mom picked up the phone to hear my voice cracked with tears, only letting it crack once I knew she was there? When she arrived in the hospital after my daughter was born, I sat there on the starched sheets holding my baby, and she held me, and I cried uncontrollably—because I could finally understand how much she loved me, and I could hardly stand the grace of it.
* * *
When my mom told me that her first husband had written a novel about their marriage, I was thirty years old and feverish with curiosity. Peter and I didn’t know each other well. He had been a benevolent figure hovering around the edges of my childhood, vaguely mythic himself, living in the Oregon woods. I knew he kept his income under the federal taxation minimum to avoid financing our nation’s wars. I knew he’d been arrested for blocking access to nuclear power plants. I knew he’d given me a dream catcher when I was a kid.
Growing up, I had a cinematic portrait of their youthful marriage, painted in broad brushstrokes—full of acid, folk music, and heartbreak—and it thrilled me that some part of my mom’s past lay beyond my grasp, far beyond the familiar landscape of our shared life of freeway exits and haggles over breakfast. But even as I felt a certain excitement at the fact that her youth lay beyond my vision, I also wanted to see it. This is part of why I turned it into myth—claimed it by making it into something reductive and vivid that I could hold in my hand like a jewel.
During my childhood and teenage years, I conjured a vague vision of my mom and Peter as a young couple from photographs and scraps of anecdotes: my mom was a leggy brunette with smoky hazel eyes and sculptural cheekbones, one of those infuriating women who are beautiful without particularly caring about being beautiful; while Peter was a tall guy with a beard and a dramatic, regal nose, the son of European Jewish intellectuals who had always identified as an outsider but had found his people in college, playing folk songs on his guitar and breaking the drama professor’s rules by doing his set changes in character, as a lowly shoe shiner with a blacked-out tooth. My mom told me there was something primal about how she was drawn to him, as if she sensed he was the leader of the tribe.
When I wrote to Peter to ask if he would be willing to share his novel with me, he actually seemed excited to send it, even though there were only a few copies of the manuscript in existence. I waited eagerly for its arrival—wanting it to confirm my mythic ideas about my mother’s past, but also hungry for it to grant that myth the breath and bones of particularity.
The novel arrived as loose pages tucked in a purple folder, the faded photocopy of an original typewriter manuscript. The pagination skipped backward partway through, a relic of the revision process, and the pages were peppered with small handwritten corrections. In a scene involving a few friends smoking pot and sticking their toes into liquid laundry detergent, an apostrophe was carefully crossed out.
The novel felt like precious contraband in my hands, as if I were reading letters I wasn’t meant to see. I read it in a single day. It let me perch on my mother’s shoulder as the mysterious, elusive, unknowable days of her early life played out in front of me, starting with that first trip in Tilden Park. I’d been a tiny stowaway tucked into her ovaries, a not-yet-person along for the ride.
The novel’s opening chapters conjure paradise: Sheila and Peter ride a psychedelic painted pickup truck through the Emeryville mudflats, drinking orange juice laced with acid. They go to the Fillmore in San Francisco to watch Jefferson Airplane play with a band called the Grateful Dead, who haven’t yet cut an album. California offers them a thrilling alternative to their existence back in Portland, where Peter worked at a stainless steel foundry, surrounded by coworkers picking their noses above the degreaser and quartering their powdered doughnuts in the break room. In California, their life revolves around what Peter calls the “Ethic of Cool,” something ineffable but unmistakable: It’s a wooden bowl of clean grass in the middle of the dining room table. It’s people frequently and unironically calling things “far out.” It’s a beautiful girl named Darlene sweet-talking the cop who wants to write her up for trespassing on a state beach. Even if Peter doesn’t fully understand what “cool” is, he knows it when he sees it. “Now I may not know much about sitar,” he observes at one party, “but I can sure as HELL tell that this dude knows what he is doing.”
Their Shangri-La is a nude beach down the coast, where they go camping one weekend. The only problem is the man with a shotgun guarding the private road. (“Paradise down there and we can’t get to it. We’re blocked by an insurmountable egomaniac who won’t let us climb down his lousy cliff.”) Luckily, a naked man standing in the surf draws them a map in the sand that leads them to a secret road. They make a campfire and spend the night, tripping at dusk near the glimmering phosphorescent algae. They hold a mock funeral for “the good old days.” They don’t realize they are living the good old days, the ones they will someday look back on, the ones a daughter might look back on, too—as if she is peering over the shoulders of their ghosts, hungry for the lives they once lived.
* * *
Trying to write about my mother is like staring at the sun. It feels like language could only tarnish this thing she has given me, my whole life—this love. For years, I’ve resisted writing about her. Great relationships make for bad stories. Expression naturally gravitates toward difficulty. Narrative demands friction, and my mom and I live—by the day, the week, the decade—in closeness. Besides, I’m no fool. Who wants to hear too much about someone else’s functional parental relationships anyway?
A friend once told me that it was frankly a little bit exhausting to hear me talk about how much I loved my mother. But what can I say? My hunger for her feels endless. I want to love her more fully, by loving the woman she once was. Perhaps it’s a way back into the womb, past the womb—seeking these stories of her, from before I was born.
* * *
Sheila and Peter’s marriage starts to unravel halfway through The Parting of the Ways, after Sheila falls in love with an engineer named Earl. Earl is introduced as a hopeless straight man, reading the Stanford alumni newsletter on a stoop while everyone else in a ten-mile radius is getting impossibly high. But he and Sheila have a history—insofar as it’s possible to have a history with someone when you are twenty-two years old. When the three of them go backpacking together in the Sierras, part of Peter’s attempt not to be jealous, Peter finds himself haunted by images of Sheila and Earl together: “my subconscious opened a trapdoor to show me a weird little 3D film built out of my fears and insecurities.” Even though Sheila and Peter have an open marriage, they aren’t meant to fall in love with other people.
The rift caused by Sheila’s relationship with Earl becomes a fissure opening onto deeper discontents: she and Peter can’t quite make their life together work and can’t quite agree on the life they want to lead. They are broke and trying to figure out what to do about it. Is Peter going to get a job? Is he going to get a job that requires cutting his long hair? The chapters stop being called things like “Consenting to Blow Your Mind” and “The Second Coming,” and start being called things like “Hassles.” They could have been kings of infinite space, but there’s no running from their bad dreams.
Their tensions reach a boiling point at Sheila’s mother’s house in the suburbs. “Mother Jean” has asked Sheila and Peter if they’ll take her on an acid trip. Grandma Pat? I thought as I was reading, then nodded with recognition at the exchange she has with Peter. When he warns her, “Acid isn’t all hearts and flowers,” she replies, “Neither am I.” She is ready for anything—only disappointed when her first hallucination is of a boiled ham.
During that trip, Peter talks to Mother Jean about his fears that Sheila might want to end their marriage, and Sheila herself has a confrontation with fear behind her mother’s house. “Fear and I had a little discussion up on top of the hill,” Sheila tells Peter, just before asking him explicitly, finally, “Do you think we can stay together?”
As a reade
r, I followed the unraveling of their marriage with a sense of tender sadness mingled with selfish relief. Their marriage needed to fall apart, after all, in order for me to exist.
* * *
The novel’s epigraph is from that famous poem by Robert Frost, who is identified as “a straight American poet”:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by
I’ve always found the most moving part of that poem to be the stuttering pause created by the line break, the repetition of the pronoun—I / I—as if the speaker is trying to assure himself that his path was the right one. But there’s a break in his own voice that betrays his uncertainty.
The fork in this road is starkly asymmetric: Sheila is determined to end the marriage, and Peter is devastated. His pain is operatic and eager to express itself. He writes a poem called “Rough Spot,” full of barren imagery: “The strange ocular rain / Gets no one / Pregnant.” He goes to Sexual Freedom League parties where you can have sex with strangers, but they aren’t much fun. During their separation, he finds himself playing guitar at a party one night: “I reach into the open wound and bring the pain out like an eel wriggling on the end of a hook, hold it up, glory in it.”
Sheila, on the other hand, is portrayed as unruffled: self-possessed and craving independence. When she tells Peter that she wants to get her own place, he sees the determination harden in a “firm little corner of her mouth.” That firm-set mouth—her determination, her desire for autonomy—stands in contrast to his open wound. Reading The Parting of the Ways, however, I knew what its characters could not: that even after getting divorced, my mother and Peter would stay important to each other for more than fifty years. The end of their marriage was just the beginning of their story.
* * *
It was an act of trust for Peter to send me his novel. Not only am I his ex-wife’s daughter—and thus, perhaps, a biased audience—but I’m also a writer, that particular species of vampire: one part barnacle, one part critic, always capable of betrayal. Someone invested in stories of my own.
But I don’t think Peter would ever think of me as his “ex-wife’s daughter,” because he doesn’t think of my mom as his “ex-wife.” At one point, when Peter asked me what this essay was going to be about, I told him that I wanted to explore the ways that his marriage to my mom influenced the rest of both of their lives, as well as the ways their lives diverged after their relationship ended. He interrupted me midsentence to say, “The relationship never ended. I would never characterize it that way.”
It came as a relief that I loved his novel as much as I did. I loved its details, how it evoked the world of that summer with crisp tenderness, in all its fever-dream wonder: friends letting their baby sleep in a dresser drawer as a bassinet, roommates keeping two pet mice who leave droppings all over the apartment, a guy writing a comic book about a hero whose superpower is that he can give anyone an acid trip (even the members of the jury who might convict him for drug possession!). I loved how the novel noticed the small things, how it recognized acid as a pretext and catalyst for lavish attention to the ordinary world, to the pleasurably aggressive sensation, for example, of drinking Diet Rite soda: “The bubbles roll into my mouth like the tide coming, and each one has a little pitchfork that’s driving into my tongue.” I loved the novel’s sense of awe—the startling way it describes listening to Coltrane “as if the music were concrete, it hardens in mid-pour into a bridge upon which I can walk straight up and out of my own head”—and its sense of absurdity, how one character suggests curing a bad case of crabs: “Shave half your pubes, pour kerosene on the other half, light it, and stab the little mothers as they run from the flames.”
But the book is so much more than just a curiosity cabinet of hippie countercultural artifacts; it’s ultimately an unapologetically earnest articulation of the hope and sense of possibility that bloom in the attempt to build a life with somebody, and the despair of watching that life crumble, watching that person pull away. I’d already seen my mother weather a divorce—from my father, when I was eleven—but reading about the end of her first marriage not only forced me to confront her as someone capable of causing pain, it also forced me to confront that her experience of divorcing my father, as much as we had discussed it, contained layers of hurt that lay beyond my sight—that I might never fully fathom.
In one sense, reading The Parting of the Ways felt like reading a stack of private letters—charged by the same transgressive thrill as snooping through your parents’ drawers when you’re home sick, alone—but in another sense, it felt like reading a moving piece of art. It presents less like an autopsy report—how did this marriage die?—and more like an attempt to take a rupture between two people and build a story around that rupture that could recuperate it. The story allows their split to become an indelible part of them both: the origins myth of their ongoing relationship.
After reading the novel, I decided to interview Peter and my mom about how they each remembered the end of their marriage. It was partially that I was curious to see how Peter’s perspective had changed with the passage of time, but it was mainly that I wanted to hear my mom’s side of the story, too. Peter and I spoke on the phone, always in the afternoon. (“I’m not a morning person,” he told me, “as your mom surely remembers.”) My mom and I talked across my kitchen table, often with my baby girl napping in the next room—my breast pump wheezing beside my mom’s mug of tea, freezer bags of pumped milk between us—as she told me about the woman she’d been before she was my mother.
* * *
While Peter’s novel portrays Sheila as stoic about the end of her marriage—determined in her resolution to get out, with that firmness in the corner of her mouth—my mom tells me that the months after her separation from Peter were the worst of her life. They split up in November of 1966 and she spent that winter working at a call center, patching calls across the Pacific. Many of the callers were wives and mothers trying to reach soldiers in Saigon or Da Nang, crying over the phone. She can’t remember a single one of those calls going through. She started smoking and slept fourteen hours a day. She was attacked in the street one night and almost raped. Her grandmother sent her a copy of her own wedding program with certain phrases underlined from the printed vows: “Till death do us part.”
The following summer, my mom went back up to Portland and had a brief affair with her college thesis advisor—out of the feeling that she’d already broken so much in her life, so why not break something else? She looks back now and sees the melodrama of youth in that sentiment, but at the time it seemed clear that she had ruined her life.
If it was slightly disorienting to imagine my mother as the source of Peter’s pain, it was far more disorienting to imagine her as someone with an outsize narrative of her own. I’d never known her as someone prone to melodrama, had always experienced her—to the contrary—as a force pulling me back from the far ledges of my own melodrama. In the aftermath of every breakup, it had been simultaneously comforting and deflating to hear her say it wasn’t the end of the world. Now I realized that wisdom hadn’t been entirely intuitive; it had also been a kind of muscle memory—something she might have wanted to tell that version of herself, from the past, the one who thought she’d ruined everything.
Meanwhile, soon after the end of their divorce, Peter got married to another woman in a beautiful beachside ceremony (my mom heard about it from her mother, and felt betrayed that she had gone at all), and they had a baby boy, Shanti. My mom visited them a few weeks after Shanti was born and remembers seeing all three of them lying on a bare mattress in a small apartment. She remembers it was the first time she felt—not just abstractly, but in her gut—the desire for a child.
* * *
While it seemed to my mother that Peter was living precisely the life he had imagined for himself, it felt another way to Peter. He remembers that he spent much of the eighteen months after their separation trying to “reclaim” their marriage
, repeatedly pushing the boundaries of the friendship she had agreed to. But that wasn’t destined to work, he tells me. “You can only turn yourself out so far, to be what another person wants you to be.”
Peter wrote the first draft of The Parting of the Ways two years after their divorce, as a way of reconciling himself to the loss. At first it was largely a therapeutic exercise. He was also seeing a counselor, taking LSD regularly as a “sacramental substance,” and participating in a nude encounter group (who gathered at someone’s house to take off their clothes and dig deep into one another’s lives). At one point, the group became convinced that Peter’s increasing involvement in nonviolence was about sublimating his anger, and they did an experiment—pinning down his arms and legs and whispering insults in his ears in order to draw this anger out. He tells me simply, “It failed.”
Peter initially drafted the novel in the first person, to keep its self-analysis explicit and immediate. He compressed and exaggerated certain events to convey the intensity that he had felt while living them, but mainly he tried to stay faithful to what happened. When I ask him why he wrote it, he quotes Nietzsche: “Memory says you did. Pride says you couldn’t have. Memory slinks into the background.” He didn’t want to let memory slink into the background. He didn’t want to let his own pride rewrite the truth. “Let me grab hold of this stuff, as honestly as I can,” he remembers telling himself. “Put it down so that it can be trapped.” It was a way of holding on to my mother, so he could let go of her in life.
What My Mother and I Don't Talk About Page 18