Violation (2 page)

     
Contents

       
Introduction

       
Orphans

       
Fetus Dreams

       
The Only Harmless Great Thing

       
Burning For Daddy

       
Gentleman Caller

       
The Weight

       
The Happiest Place On Earth

       
Meat

       
The Basement

       
The World Made Whole and Full of Flesh

       
Big Ideas

       
The Hounds of Spring

       
Temporary God

       
Crossing to Safety

       
Recording

       
Violation

       
Second Chair

       
The Birth

       
Scars

       
On Being Text

       
Balls

       
Chemo World

       
Twitchy

       
The Sutra of Maggots and Blowflies

       
Falling

       
Here Be Monsters

       
The Indigo City

       
So Long As I Am With Others

       
Publication notes

     
Introduction

WHEN I WAS SEVENTEEN AND A SOPHOMORE IN COLLEGE
, I took any course that interested me. One semester, I signed up for Advanced Writing. (I had never taken a writing class, but I was a bit of a snob.) I bugged Dr. Ryberg constantly, haunting his office hours until he took pity, declared me his assistant, and set me to the filing. I gave him a lot of junk to read. Toward the end of the semester, I gave him a story with trembling hands. I was so proud of it; I thought it might win a few awards. He handed it back to me a few days later with entire pages crossed off in red ink. He had circled the last paragraph and written, “Start here.”

The following spring, I ran into him in the college bookstore. I was dropping out, I told him. Going north to test my theories of love and goodness.

“You're a writer,” he said. “You're already a better writer than me. What are you waiting for?”

I think I laughed. What an idea—that you could
be
a writer. But I wasn't ready; I was consuming life like a gourmand just let out of jail. I went north and joined a communal household and a co-op and tested, with some success, several theories of love and goodness. I was still signing up for every subject that looked promising. But after a few years, when I had a new baby and hardly any money and decided at the last moment not to move into another commune in the mountains, I thought that instead I could be a writer. I hocked my piano and bought a typewriter and joined a writing support group. The leader told us to study
Writer's Market
,
so I sat in the reference room of the library and read about query letters and submission guidelines. I started writing essays about all kinds of things and sent them out more or less at random, with polite cover letters and self-addressed stamped envelopes.

Out they went and back they came. Sometimes there was a little note thanking me for my submission, but often not. I would type a fresh copy and send the story out again. The support group dissolved after a few months when the leader committed suicide. Others might have taken that as a sign, but I was young and ignorant and somehow immune to despair. I had decided to be a writer and so I wrote. I sent stories out, again and again. And then one didn't come back.

The essays in this book are a selection of work spanning almost thirty years. I have never lost my fascination with the essay, and the stories here range across the continuum of the form. You don't know what your voice sounds like until you speak. My writer's voice chose itself. I recognize it here, but I'm not in charge. I used to wish I was a comic writer or a novelist or an investigative reporter. I tried to be a poet for a while. What I am is an essayist.

Certain themes recur as well; why should this ever surprise us? Life is just following a trail around a mountain. The path loops back to the same view time and again. Sometimes we see all the way across the plain and sometimes we're lost in the woods, but the perspective is a little higher each time. So I return again and again to questions about the nature of the self, what it means to live in a body, why we are all lonely, how to use language to say what can't be said. These are questions of intimacy and separation, and the answers are ambiguous at best. Long before I knew how to describe it, I liked ambivalence. Certainty has always seemed a bit dishonest to me.

Being a writer of the long personal essay is a little like being the village blacksmith. It takes decades of training, and there may not be much demand. I think I'm a good writer, but not a very good author—that is, I'm rather introverted and uncomfortable with self-promotion. As the noise level rises, I retreat a little more. Writers
are increasingly expected to be multimedia performers, chasing the zeitgeist and molding their work to fit. I remember hearing the word
midlist
for the first time, decades ago. My editor was gently explaining her modest expectations for my book, but my first thought was,
yes, that sounds about right.
The midlist is disappearing now, and I could spend a few more years fretting about it. But the cure is to write.

To write—which is to say,
solve the problem.
I sometimes imagine the barren stretches, false starts, and breakthroughs that I experience with almost every story are kin to what any scientist or inventor feels. The essay is the problem and I seek the solution: a structure, a start, an end, a phrase. A word.

My basement is filled with failures—boxes of unfinished drafts, scribbled outlines, entire books collapsed into chaos. Countless dead ends. But it is as important for writers to fail as it is for any inventor. A year of not succeeding is a year without editors or deadlines. No other voices intrude. There is, finally, nothing to fear. If you don't know what to do, and finally you don't know so completely that the entire world seems to be the question—well, then anything is possible. When we don't know the way, a thousand paths exist. All I have ever had to do to succeed as a writer was to fail, because not solving the problem means the solution lies ahead.

I write out of what really happened, a huge field in which to roam—but a bounded field nevertheless. I sometimes work with students who are struggling to write at all. I might ask them to draw a picture of their writer's block. One young woman covered a page in black and wrote across it, “I will be found wanting and thrown out of the universe.” We are all imposters, never more so than when we try to tell the truth. To write the essay is to be haunted by our own lies. No story is the whole story. Everything we know is shadowed by what we've missed, forgotten, or been afraid to see. The title essay is my answer to a question that I have asked myself and been asked by others countless times: how do we know what is true? What is fair for me to say about others? What do I have the right to say, when I can never be sure about the truth?

I try to solve the problem.

Few things are worth writing down—that's why there are so many boxes in my basement. But there is only one way to find out what those things are. Now and then, I have imagined not writing. What a different shape my life would have had. How much time! Mine has been a very indie, mezzanine, remainder table, 367-followers-on-Spotify type of career. What if I wasn't writing or trying to write or avoiding writing all the time? What if I didn't have this witness on my shoulder? What if I just
… stopped.

Instead, I fall asleep to language bouncing around my skull. Words pour through my life like drops of water, running together into a stream, becoming—

Start here.

     
Orphans

LAST CHRISTMAS EVE MY FATHER TOOK ME BY THE ELBOW
and whispered: “Your grandmother died ten years ago today. Be nice to your mother.” I had forgotten. He is a reticent and furtive man, but he remembers things. For years he would wait till a few days before Christmas and then hand me $20. “Go buy something pretty for your mother,” he would instruct, gruffly, and turn away.

That evening while we watched television, all lined up beside each other and chatting desultorily, my mother spoke abruptly, in a new voice. “My mother died today,” she said, wonderingly, as though she'd just been told. The television prattled on. She deflects expression and emotion by riposte and foil, deftly, and we exist in the cautiously defined spaces between. It is an inharmonious harmony, tense, with voices rarely raised.

She asked me what I remembered of my grandmother, and I told her of driving fifty miles out of our way on our last vacation just to see my grandmother's house, the house where my mother was raised.

“Was the ivy still on the chimney?” she asked, for since the house was sold she hasn't been back. The threads tangle while we talk, a tweedy web of shifting associations: my mother and her daughter, her mother and my grandmother, and around us father and husband, brother and children, their children, my children. This is her surprise for me, her secret: my mother yearns to be a daughter again.

My mother's mother was a forbidding woman, stern and
drawn, with an immaculate house and a tiny yipping dog that nipped at our heels from behind her calves. She would stand in the gleaming kitchen, hot in the summer morning sun, with a spatula raised as though to swat at the first sign of disobedience. It was a house of territories, borders, boundaries, permitted and forbidden places. I knew as an undeniable law that what I valued she often ignored; that she placed value where I couldn't see it. I searched for snails in the rose bed, hid dolls in the mail chute. She waxed the kitchen floor.

Once in fury at her I sat on the concrete steps and tore apart her favorite philodendron, leaf by leaf, scattering the green shreds like dung, like ruin. The old straight-backed woman cried, still and trembling in the doorway. It was an enormous crime. I sat in the curious silence of shamed regret, curling inward, surrounded by pieces of something I couldn't put back together again—and saw behind my grandmother my own mother's stricken face. She had somehow permitted this crime, had failed, and become subject to her own mother again, through me.

And so I always found it odd, watching from the doorway, that my dour grandmother and stoic mother spent hours talking over a single pot of coffee, relaxed, girlish. These scenes are elongated and mysterious, one of the forbidden places. I sprawled on the huge rag rug, following its oval track from the center outward, from the outside in, while they laughed and gossiped. At night my sister and I lay in the soft guest bed, fighting over territory, and heard more talk, muffled, more laughing, and now and then through the magpie voices my father's deep, short bursts of speech.

Now I have three children, and new appreciations. I call my mother, three hundred miles away, to talk about them, and she interrupts, anxious to return to her book, her television. She takes her cool pleasure in us from a comfortable distance, and our conversations are often short. She parries better than I can, and I forfeit. Hanging up in sudden discontent, I am all over them, passionate and physical, rubbing and wrestling and jouncing, whispering subliminal permissions, tiny pleas, in their downy ears.

I give up my common inhibitions, rules of conduct, when I hold my babies. It is a pleasure instinctive and heavy, and breathlessly free. Bit by bit time wedges us apart, forging separation, and amnesia. I love my parents because, after all, they are my parents, and my babies love me for the same good reason. We are bound in a loom of pulling away and pushing back, letting go and holding on. My children's task is to pull away and they do, they do, tugging furiously at the leash I strain to play out an inch at a time. We hold back, let go; I still tug. A friend, telling me of her mother's death, begins, “I remember when we were dying.”

My mother was orphaned a decade ago, and she still shivers with loss, denied the requisite delights of regression. Nostalgia is its own reward, its own burden; it illuminates our imagined history. My grandmother lived in that house a long time after her husband died of cancer, long after she found out that she, too, had cancer. The house was sold, furniture parceled out. The tough woman in the kitchen became a weak bundle of pain, and I lifted her under her arms and swung her from the bed to the commode, commode to chair. She admitted no complaint. I could feel in her dried and sagging arms a most peculiar substance. I could feel, blushing, a twisted skin in the faces that watched us; my mother and her daughter, my sister and my mother's sister and my grandmother's granddaughters, all of us at once and together and almost wholly unaware of it: the clinging web that held us back and wouldn't let us go.

My mother and my glacial aunt tentatively asked me to quit school and stay with her. I refused. I held back, and my grandmother let go. When the furniture was divided, my mother kept her bed; it's where I sleep now when I visit them.

All my cross-grained, melancholy generations have gently collided with each other, as generations do, like bottles of milk rattling along, sliding up the track to jostle other bottles along. We wait our turn. My mother's father is dead, her mother is dead, my father's father and three stepfathers are dead. And between us my brother and sister and I have seven children jockeying for position
by the fireplace, playing our old games. This Christmas my mother watches her grandchildren and her television from a hospital bed, where the tree used to go. She is dying of cancer, the same cancer that killed her mother.

Each year around my birthday the little ornamental cherry tree in front of her house bursts into bloom, luxuriant and top-heavy. I used to sit in its lap of low branches; now I pick blossoms off the top. The bubbling frog creek is a dry gully; the noisy park clean and quiet. I see strange faces in the streets, new shapes, house-peaks along empty hills. It is time to think things through, to follow the thread where it enters the knot until I find its exit. Time now to confess my tenuous hold on adulthood before I am orphaned in turn.

She has filled the drawers of my old dresser with her wedding albums and old baby pictures and clippings of my brother's high school football games, neatly scissored. She takes with her where she goes a voice I've heard from birth, a step, a chime, the smoky car. A door closes, irrevocably, on rooms cluttered in certain ways by her passage, on a dusty piano, sun-dried towels, and certain plays of light on certain trees. Chipped crystal stays, without her use, and the dark bedroom and high dark bed, without her smell. I begin a definition of love made fundamentally of the familiar. These things and these places, the way a shadow casts in August and seamstress hands and the cool wet smell of the grass in the early morning, are not things I've used much for years. I have been inattentive in my turn and made another family, holding hers in reserve, available. She is dying and sad and scared to die, and takes with her the remnants and desires of my life till now. She lets go and I hold back, watching her grow weak and frail, disconcertingly familiar as she disappears from sight.

She was never the mother I wanted her to be. We have never chattered over coffee, grown girlish together while my daughter watched. For a long time I tried to change her, reproachful, and failed, not seeing how she had tried to change me long ago. She won't change now; she is merely herself. So is my father, blustering
and mad. He meticulously catalogs videotapes of old movies, John Wayne and Errol Flynn, their favorites, to watch alone half-asleep in the evenings after she dies. My silent brother and my shrill, half-panicked sister won't change, not much, and neither will I. We are the gifts we were given. I sit by her bed in sadness, an unspoken summing-up held, like so much else, back. These are the people I am accompanied by, my escorts. We dance attendance on each other, as families do, and little else. There is little else to do.

And I go home, wherever it is, and confront a son resentful of my tight rein. He demands a faster adulthood, receiving power in unexpected shifts and abrupt shufflings. I grab the leash and run the other way. He is hurt by my mother's coming extinction, blustering like my father, his grandfather, her husband. I grow dizzy in the sticky threads, resistance against the spin. He is letting go of me and I am holding back, for I know he has no idea, no possible idea of all the many surprises still in store.

Zyzzyva
, Winter 1986–87

For more than thirty years I've been writing about the way family wraps around our lives. There is no escaping it, even when we escape—one way or another, we are made of it. This was one in a series of essays I wrote about the sticky threads woven around us by both parents and children—a web we create, long for, celebrate, and hate.