First, A note about the story:
11/11
To Whom It May Concern,
The following is a short story or a novel
exploration; it is a very, very rough draft (obviously)... Right now,
what I have is this: some characters and their house. What is on
the following pages is what has spilled out of my head thus far. What I
need to do next is this: I need to have something happen. The story
is about Ella’s parents and their profound, but messed up love for each other
and also for Ella. It is about their problems and how that they do not
have the strength to transcend them due to their own weaknesses and mental
unsoundness. The story is about Ella and how she triumphs despite her
loss (her mother’s suicide). And the story is also about the characters’
relationship to Delia (Ella’s half sister, her father’s first daughter) and how
she (Delia) shapes the rest of the family whether she is present or
absent. This is trying to be a story about what happens when there is
loss…. I keep thinking that Ella, the main, teenage character is (or at least
becomes) “strong in the broken places” like Hemingway talks about.
And here is the actual, thus far untitled story:
“Living here all together was so
sweet. Even when we fought.
I felt like it would never
end. I’ll always miss it.”
-Jennifer Egan, A Visit from
the Good Squad
“I want to go up to them and say
Stop,/
don't do it--she's the wrong woman,/
he's the wrong man, you are going
to do things/
you cannot imagine you would ever do,/
you are going to do bad
things to children,/
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of, /
you
are going to want to die.”
–Sharon Olds, “I Go Back To May
1937,” The Gold Cell
The year my mother killed herself, we still lived in the tiny and white New
Englander that my parents had rented forever from Ryder, one of my father’s
oldest friends from his RISD days. The house sat snugly on three acres of
meadow, a knuckle of spiny apple trees out front and four stained glass windows
punctuating the house's old clapboards which bathed our inside rooms and
hallways with violet and emerald light for the whole entire day and for part of
the evening.
Ryder came up
from Manhattan with his wife and their two small boys once a year to look at
the leaves. They spent the week with us, helping with household chores
that were too big for my mother to take on alone while Dad worked as many hours
as possible at the pallet factory down the street from us; they helped us with
cleaning the house’s gutters and also helped repaint the deck a rich slate
color. When they had finished for the day and my father drove up our
driveway from his job--where the only day off was Sundays--we’d all sit outside
under the stars. Dad and Ryder would strike up an easy melody on their
just slightly out of tune guitars, teaching us kids and our moms lyrics to
their goofy, boyish songs, born out of their unaffected, childlike perceptions
that belonged to their art school days when life was one big welding project,
there were no mouths to feed, and every other person was a like-minded hippy or
hipster. "The stars, the moon, your smile in June," we would
sing and laugh, feeling like forever was a good thing, and not that life had
already passed us by.
My father did miss his younger days though; there was no doubt.
When the guitars were put away and it was time to drive back to the
factory, the poetry he lived in often disappeared quickly. His college
friends seemed to miss the old days as well, only his friends seemed less sad
than Dad and also seemed older, too. Dad’s friends, especially Ryder,
seemed, in my child and then teen mind like this: they are wearing ties
to work and sometimes even to the dinner table on certain nights while eating
with certain company; they are talking about preparing for depositions
and the stock market; they seem collected in their mannerisms, their speech,
and in their home décor, choosing clean lines over comfort. My dad: he is
wearing a perennial flannel and worn Levis; he drinks beer on our over stuffed
couch, letting a series of Rolling Rocks clatter collectively to the floor in
his absent-minded way. He does not expect Mom to pick these up, though
she will. My dad’s friends seemed to take care of their parents; one even
purchased an immaculate cobalt colored stained cape on a popular, resort town’s
just for his mother. My mother stared at this friend as though star-struck when
he told us the details.
“I cannot have her forever sitting around at our summer place,
right? Cathy’d divorce me before the summer's half over. This way
she can just come over for dinner and watch the kids. At her place”
Sometimes my mom had to borrow money from her father for the rent. My
parents could never seem to save up enough money to put on a down payment, and
Dad was too proud to borrow or just plain accept a gifted down payment on a
house. My father owned one tie for funerals and weddings. Each time the
tie resurfaced from its burrow, we had to watch youtube videos to figure out
how to get it looking good or even normal, like a person who was not
impersonating a straight person. I was better at this task than my dad,
but my mom usually was the one who got it the most normal
looking, but only after watching the video about
six.
Though visually and viscerally fascinated with the choices this man had, both
my parents also held a minute buzz of disdain, feeling that their belief system
led them to their own life which bumped up against poverty. They had to
look down on people with money; if they could not do this, then they were
failures. I remember visiting this guy’s mom who hosted a dinner at
her impressive lake house. I remember she was so sweet to her son and
even kinder to her daughter in law, which made us all squirm, as we knew how
much her daughter in law loathed her. This place was a bargain,
she’d tell us. But even as a bargain, she'd say "my goodness, the
cost of this place is more than twelve regular houses off the lake. I
wish my father were alive to see me here, to see how well things are going for
all of us.” And then she’d add with wonder how usually art majors like
her son were penniless. She meant no harm to my father when she said
this, but I am sure it was difficult for my father to hear nonetheless.
"What
did the necktie say to the hat?" My father would laugh. I would
answer, my mouth forced into a serious line to perfect the delivery, "You
go on a head; I'll just hang around." My mother would shake her
fluffy hair at us, happy that we were assuaging her anxiety at whatever event
we were off to. Mostly, funerals and weddings often forced us to not only
scavenge for Dad’s tie, but also propelled us to reluctantly conflated with her
rich, stuck up parents who sneered at my father’s “career” at the factory and
seemed baffled about where my mother could find a hairdresser or a copy of The
New York Times in the
sticks.
Because I loved my mother and because she was an addict and then a suicide and
also because I lost her so young, you probably assume I remember the dark
things more intensely than our happy times: the reason for why my mother,
desperate to quiet her mind, took two consecutive Ativan prescription of my
father’s, washing them down with a bottle of inexpensive, red wine.
It is true: I do see our sad times from those days. I
think of them though without much clarity, with a fuzzy, distant uncertainty:
my parents’ rabid fights which left behind broken dishes in the kitchen and
holes in the dry wall of their bedroom; both of their stints at rehab, when I
worried the state would place me in a foster home and the vapid characters my
parents would begrudgingly invite to our home, trying to make the best out of
the sad situation that was their mutual, court-ordered attendance of AA; my
mother’s “extra-curricular” boyfriend who dealt pot, but shot speedballs and
who lived in a lean-to made out of sticks and indoor-outdoor carpet
remnants located deep in our town’s conservation land (my mother’s
boyfriend: famous for showering at the Y and then sometimes at our house
while Dad ripped apart pallets, also famous for driving in zig-zagged patterns
down our long, country roads); and then there was my much older, half sister
whose sporadic visits left my father with a sadness so visceral to him, he
would shoot up for days in his closet office, leaving his works out, a jumble
atop blood spotted song lyrics.
I can still see him as though I am peering into a dollhouse, the wall only
figurative for the house’s spectator. I am looking at this father doll;
he is so close, his mouth big and handsome covering strong, but crooked rocker
teeth. His hair is thick, matted like a dog in the woods. Looking
at him in this way: his fragility scares me; I could extend my arm, reach into
the house, pick him up, look into his eyes, and then maybe I could save him, if
only I didn’t crush him first. Seeing him this way, inside of this house
without him noticing, I see a situation: my sister is gone after a particularly
draining visit and he is like a man you’d see in a Vietnam vet documentary, a
picture of shell shock: those boyish, scared eyes, eyelashes that both girls
and women alike coveted, boyish strength undercut completely by uncotrolled
disaster; everything in him and around him broken and beautiful at the same
time. My father: nodding out in the kitchen, too scared to be alone, but
too messed up for actual conversation, the shapes of his words overwhelmed by
low sounding vowels that sound like moans. My father, with his usually
perfect voice singing his perfectly boyish songs reminded me of an old man with
throat cancer on days like these.
My half sister, Delia, had schizophrenia and lived with her rich, maternal
grandmother in another state, hours away from us. The distance did keep
her at a safe distance; however, it added stress onto the already stressful
visits, and it added to my father’s guilt which was already about to break him
where she was concerned. She would
come to our house once every two months for a long weekend. She would
leave her suitcase in the kitchen and it would stay there until me or my mother
bought it into my room, where we had a twin bed set up for her. For the
whole visit, with the exception of meals we ate in the kitchen, she would sit
in front of the television while my mother watched the clock and talked in a
voice that sounded different from what I knew. Misery and confusion
rolled off of Delia while I sat next to her; I was half enthralled, half
disgusted. And I always grappled with the confusion I had which was
this: was she hideous or beautiful or neither, just regular? I
always wondered how the same blood was racing through our veins. I was
like my mother in almost every way: light with light blue eyes. You could
nearly see though my hair, ashy blond. We are both waifs, my father could
pick us up at the same time which he does on the weekends when he is not too
tired from ripping up pallets in the factory. He never did this on
Delia’s weekends though. In fact, in the recesses of my mind, it is hard
to place Delia and my father in the same room. I can see her sitting next
to me, only speaking to complain about our house or my mother’s food, or our
water pressure. I can see her dark, solid limbs and longs hair that was
pretty, but too thick somehow, looking like it would turn into dreadlocks if
she had skipped brushing for more than half a day. I can see her
near my mother, looking so dark and solid in comparison. Near my mother
she is always scowling; and there is my mother with her pseudo cheer, exhausted
just underneath the surface, almost grey, counting the moments to the visit’s
end.
Delia was built in a solid way, but was also she was tiny in terms of height like her mother
I’d seen once at a rest area, where we’d met to pick her up. This gave
her a matronly look, which she had had even as a young teenager. I think
it was weirder for my mother to have her in the house when she would see the
two of us looking so very differently. My mom would look with her head tilted as though puzzling out a crossword; Delia was oblivious, zoned out on
reruns. It was as though my mother were a desperate woman, looking for a
clue, for anything, a sort of figurative glue that would turn the situation
into a solution; she wanted to welcome Delia into our lives, for Delia had been
in their lives before I had, but mother could not love Delia. And not
loving Delia made the guilt of my father’s inability to care about Delia in the
way he cared about me unbearable.
It was when my father got laid off from his factory job that my mother said to
him one night in their room, the walls so thin it felt like they were at the
foot of my bed, “Sam I cannot have her here anymore. You need to be here
for Ella. Delia's got her grandmother. What does Ella have? Ella needs you here."
And it was true, I did need my father in a way that Delia did not. She
had a safety net, while I had my parents. I was seven years younger than
my sister who only seemed like a child, but was partly into her
adulthood. She needed our father, too; however, her need was
insatiable. In her teen years alone, she had visited more mental
hospitals than my parents had visited rehab during their whole lives. Her
life, despite the fancy language lessons during high school, constant cruises,
and endless shelves of fashionable, but overly girly clothes, was
unpleasant. However, her grandmother and litany of preppy cousins cushioned the
space that was her tricky mind. The French lessons, her leased horse, the
swimming pool felt stacked up in a neat pile next to my own life: the rented
house full of broken poetry and parents who lived in a hopeless whisper.
When she no longer visited us, I was mostly relieved. My mother breathed
in a deeper way. And my father, after binging on JD for a fortnight at
the bar down the street, seemed lighter, too. She was not our
problem. But somehow we could not erase her. Like the violet and
green brilliance that permeated our house, my sister was a ghost who could not
be erased. The spiny apple trees out front, my father hugging our bodies
close to his for warmth, the way the three of us were like the knuckles on a
one body’s hand now was flowered with just a little bit of guilt. And I
wonder now if it was this guilt that finally tipped us over the edge.
But when I look back, it is not her visits or even her ghost that I remember
with any lucidity. Gathering memories of Delia is a struggle, as they--along with the other, darkly sad times--that were at least in part responsible
for my mother’s overly careless inability to take care of herself, are like
shadows cast across a vibrant sidewalk chalked with a hopeful series of
hopscotch rectangles.
My mother could hardly take care of herself, never mind her supposedly
beloved thirteen-year-old, eighth grade daughter. But where she neglected
me, I rose to take care of myself. Her neglect made me strong where it
broke me. And what I remembered in my strength is now infinite. Her
short, but pretty, smooth fingers as she brushed her hands through my thick
hair, her freckly skin polka-dotted more so on the left side, where her face
and arm was exposed to the sun while she drove me to school, ballet classes I
received through a kind scholarship, and art classes at the local, art center.
I wish you could see her like I do now, still: my mother, smiling tiredly at my
as my father impersonates the childlike, unaffected and adorable Jonathan
Richman’s infamous song about being straight. They adore his razor edge
ideology, as it is the opposite from their own despite the fact they have me
and want the world and the moon for my life. Mom’s head is in her hands,
her whole body bouncing happily with giggles when my father sings with mock
seriousness, “Oh, I’m certainly not stoned, like hippie Johnny is.”
I
have memorized the year my mom left this planet the way my third grade self
could see multiplication facts in the camera of my mind, penciled hurriedly
with excitement. For me, even as a little girl, math facts were like
prayers that were not fantasy or a just an idea; they were prayers that had
real answers every time. Like the magical math, I can see my mom’s last
year on earth the same way I know my own face in the bathroom mirror. I
can feel her last living twelve months in a physical way, the way I know how my
own teeth feel each moment--and each moment after this one--in my very own
mouth.
I read something years after my mother died when I was pregnant with my
own daughter: When a mother gives birth, her cells are inside of you, and
your cells are still inside of her. When she is carrying and loving you during
her pregnancy they are in you, and you are in her. Then, after you are in
the world on your own, next to her, coloring a picture of a star, you are also
still inside of her and she is inside of you, too. Each mother holds the
cells of her children after they leave her body. These cells are like
tiny tattoos of your soul on her heart.
My mom had a tiny Polish box filled with mementoes from her girlhood and in
this box she also saved my baby teeth. My cells stayed inside my mother,
until that year she took her life, like the baby teeth in the Polish box.
When she left this earth, I wondered if I was literally lighter on this planet,
my cells less numerous. The etching of me she carried inside got snuffed
out, unseen, unheard, and unknown except to me and my father, and maybe other
people, too, if they ever thought of us.
I can still see her Polish box, round and orange with tiny black, brown, and
green detailing sitting on the top of her dresser though it now sits on my own
holding not only my baby teeth, but now my daughter’s as well.
I can see this box vividly, as I can see other details in our little, rented
house of my childhood: All of my art work is hung almost professionally,
though my parents have little money for small things, even like frames.
It is displayed mostly in the hallway where our stairs led down to our kitchen;
and it is overlapping sometimes just slightly in frames resting on the tops of
the bookshelves in my father’s office and in the hallway that met the stairs.
Every time I climbed the stairs to do my homework or go to bed, I
could see my progression as an artist.
I worked mostly with charcoal and Cray pas, but sometimes I experimented
with other mediums. I adored the idea of hand colored photographs.
There was I did collaging, too. I would paint oceans of grey and green
and blue hues and then tear these pages, sometimes for hours past the middle of
the middle of the night, and then glued these oceans into shapes that were
precise little houses. These houses seemed better than our own, sturdier,
less poetic, but sharper architecturally. The collages were from
middle school, as were the hand color photographs. The charcoal started
when I was maybe eight. I remember the art teacher showing them to us,
and she worried more about the mess than the product. Recanting the
teacher’s anxiety to my mother, she laughed sadly, remarking, “That’s public
school for you…”
My dad’s factory job and my mom’s inability to find work as a nurse because of
her drug felony could not place me into the private, alternative private school
they dreamed of in their minds. As a result, whatever grades I brought
home were perfect. If I failed English because I wrote poetry refusing to
apply the assigned meter, my parents believed I was a subversive genius.
If I excelled, as I always did in my art classes and seemed to do in math as
well, adoring the rules of algebra, which felt as perennial and true as tiger
lilies, my parents knew that my genius was pulling up the idiot IQ of the
“other” more “common” kids whose brains certainly would have rotted without my
presence.
I remember the morning best, the whole house still and hushed with only our
sleepy murmurs to each other like far off crickets in a damp, just lit
meadow. I would stagger down the painted white stairs that glistened
under my artwork and the light of our stained glass windows. Barefoot, I
would walk across our sticky kitchen. My mother was a late riser on her
own, but my father and I were morning people, so she always pulled her body out
of bed. She had trouble talking so early, but she always made coffee for
dad, tea for me. As I sat in my chair, Dad would greet me like we were
pals from another lifetime, recently reunited, “Good morning Cowgirl in the
Sand!” My father’s green eyes held mine, and he smiled.
I felt sad for my father almost every morning back then, for he was a welder by
trade and was an artist, too, our yard punctuated by his innovative butterfly
and bird sculptures made from metal scraps found by the factory’s trash
bins. I hated that he went somewhere he hated everyday, and I hated that
there seemed very little I could do about it. He also was in a band, the
band sometimes changed, as his buddies, like my dad, were always in and out of
rehab, but there was hardly ever a time when people weren’t coming over to jam
with my dad. He was usually the singer, but occasionally played bass,
too.
My father was not a nine to fiver by nature; he was a definite free spirit
artist confined by the family life burden we forced on him without meaning
to. We would have encouraged him to leave if we had thought he would have
listened, but he loved us more than life itself, so it would not have mattered
what we said. We lived so far in the woods it was impossible to find high
paying union work. “And in this economy, really, “ my dad explained to me
once, “even if we moved closer to the city, in some sketchy as shit
triple-decker, it would do us zero good. They’re constantly union busting
these days.” Watching my handsome, artist dad, a dreamer if there ever
was one, stuck inside at a factory—even on Saturdays, especially on
Saturdays--broke my heart each and every morning.
