In the coming weeks, look for blogs on bird love, ADHD, and kickboxing.
Ghosts win this week by popular demand. Read on!
Ghostbusters
November 6th, 2011 § 4 comments § permalink
I’m not going to tell you my house is haunted. After all, I do teach freshman composition. I profess daily about rhetoric, how to support an argument. I cannot convince you of a ghost—mine or anyone else’s. I can’t even convince myself. My husband, a process analyst, is perhaps even more reasonably skeptical than I. “When you want to believe,” he says, “you will allow yourself to be convinced.”
“So you don’t believe in ghosts?” I ask.
“I’m ambivalent,” he shrugs. “There’s no proof.”
“And you need proof?”
“Yes.”
I want to believe. I covet faith, even the blind sort—faith in the invisible, in intuition, in something beyond comprehension or reason. But I can’t quite cultivate that faith, not even when my husband, the great analyst and skeptic, admits that he can’t quite shake the unreasonable feeling that something is in our house.
Perhaps the first time he got this feeling was the night Sophia awoke in the middle of the night unable to breathe. The wheezing sound she made was alarming and woke me up immediately. I ran to her, lifted her out of bed and watched as she labored to breathe, her eyes wide with anxiety. I remembered something a friend told me about relieving croup and frantically ran to the shower, turned on the hot water full blast, filling the bathroom with steam. Still, she wasn’t getting a full breath. I panicked.
“I’m taking her to the hospital,” I said, brushing past my husband who was still trying to sleep.
“You’re overreacting,” he mumbled. Perhaps I was, but as far as my husband’s concerned, I’m always overreacting. Nothing can touch him. Most of his life has been lived safely and securely. The worst case scenario is a distant and rare possibility, and one we shouldn’t waste so much time worrying over. But when I’m afraid, I go to the hospital. I can’t stand my own helplessness. So as my husband rolled his eyes and went back to sleep, I drove, heart racing, the ten miles to the hospital, my daughter wheezing in the backseat.
Five hours, an antibiotic, and a large dose of steroids later, Sophia and I returned home to find my husband still in bed but a bit white-faced and anxious.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Yeh,” he mumbled. “Is Sophia?”
“Yeh,” I said. “Why is her Dora vanity in the middle of her room?” I asked, bending over Sophia to change her diaper after I’d laid her down, asleep, next to her dad.
“The thing started singing,” he said, sitting up and shaking his head.
“What?”
“You know, playing the music and talking and stuff. I ran in there, and…nobody was in there, but I swore…I mean…I started looking in closets. I went everywhere in the house. I just felt…I felt like someone was in the house, like someone had to have been in there for the thing to start talking like that.”
I tried to remember if the vanity had ever started on its own before. It hadn’t.
“I thought Daisy might have been in there and bumped into it or something,” he said, quite logically considering the dog a suspect, “but she was in the room with me.” He shook his head again, embarrassed of his anxiety. “I came back in after checking it once, and the damned thing started talking again, Daisy looking right at me.”
He was afraid.
“I ran in there and pulled it away from the wall, looked for some way to shut it off and finally found the switch on the bottom.”
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Laying here in the dark alone after that,” he said, looking away from me, “was hard. I gotta admit.”
I giggled. “Really?”
He nodded. “I thought someone was mad at me for not going with you to the hospital. Like your mom was here.”
Two days later, after getting off the phone, I turned to discover that a painting had fallen off the wall, its frame shattered on the floor. The person with whom I’d just been speaking was a woman who was offering me information regarding what had happened to my mother when she was in the Navy, information on what was revealing itself to be a terrible secret my mother had kept from so many of us.
“Did you hear that?” my husband said, walking downstairs with Sophia in his arms after changing her diaper a few days after the shattered picture.
“What?”
“The alarm clock in the spare bedroom,” he said, his eyes wide again. “It started going off while I was changing her diaper.”
We had never set the alarm on that clock. I couldn’t think of a reason why it would go off.
“I went ahead and unplugged it,” he said.
“Maybe it’s time to talk about the way the lights in the hall outside the spare bedroom always flicker,” I said. We’d always thought it was merely an electric short. And surely it is. “Right?”
He couldn’t help himself; he smiled. So did I.
“Something is up in that spare bedroom,” he said.
I nodded in agreement. I can’t go in there with any ease. Whenever I step in, I find myself waiting for the door to slam behind me.
“I’m always waiting to see something,” David says.
“Like?”
“Like I’m going to see…something,” David says. “I don’t know how to explain it.”
Shortly thereafter, I began arriving home from work to find an anxious dog. Daisy would meet me at the front door, and instead of jumping up to greet me, she would run out to the car, demand to be let in. And when I opened the door, she’d jump in. And there she would stay for a while, seemingly uncomfortable with the prospect of coming back in the house.
I have to be honest. None of this is solid evidence of anything. I am not convinced of anything. Nor should you be.
But still, I covet faith. I can see this faith in the eyes of two friends from work, two women who share, with me, the recent loss of a friend, a special man.
“Did you hear about the ghost hunter guy who came to campus the other night?” one of these friends asked.
I shook my head, waited to hear more.
“He had a machine, and he and the crowd following him ended up hearing a voice come through the machine. In Berks Hall. The voice said it died from cancer. And it said its name was…”
I nodded, knowing what she’d say next. Perhaps for one glorious moment, I believed fervently that this voice was the voice of my lost friend, a man who had lost his life to cancer. Surely he would come back. He would come back to campus. He would let us know he still existed. Of course he would. He was not gone. He still existed. He still claimed the name I had known. He could see us, hear us, mingle with us. He wasn’t gone. Not entirely. This ghost hunter had to be the real thing. The college had invited him. He’d had a television show. Yes.
I called my husband. “David,” I said breathlessly, but as the words began to spill from my mouth, so did any faith in what I was saying. In fact, by the time I got to “ghost machine,” I began to laugh at myself.
“They have a machine for that?” David laughed. “How’s that work?”
My heart sank.
“I want to believe it.”
“I know. We all do. That’s why it’s so easy to convince an audience.”
“So what you think…” I said that night at dinner, “is that we’re just dust in the wind.”
David stared back across the table at me. He seemed tender, apologetic. “Believe,” he told me. “Believe in ghosts. You should. Don’t let me talk you out of it.”
But once I believed, I would have no reason to know. And I wanted, gluttonously, to know. I couldn’t give up the hope for confirmation.
I remembered the weeks before my friend’s recent passing, the hours I considered asking him to look back after he’d gone where he was going. “Come back,” I kept wanting to tell him. “Come back if there is a way to communicate,” I wanted to say. “And let me know. I want to know. Before I go.”
But I never told him any of that. Maybe I never got the chance, or maybe I never got the courage. Many things went left unsaid for me in that particular friendship. When he was close to his end, I tried to sum up, via text, what he had meant to me.
“His son will read it to him,” another friend told me, so my thumbs went to the urgent work of last words, a desperate attempt at winding up, too quickly, the natural trajectory of shared growth. What to say, what to say. Tell him what he did for you. What did he do for you? Tell him about every one of those moments he left you in epiphone or left you grinning or left you in some wonderful combination of both. Tell him you really did think his jokes were funny; you just sucked at laughing. Tell him when he talked about how much he loved his daughter, you could progress toward forgiving your own father. Tell him that you see, within his children, all that he thinks he didn’t have time enough to create in himself. Tell him you didn’t realize how strong he actually was at first, and when you saw his authentic goodness, that was enough to make you think you could start over too. Tell him he renewed, for you, a bit of hope in yourself. Tell him you were glad to know him.
But he was fading fast. And he was in pain. And I couldn’t inflict my last words upon him the way I wanted to. So I minimized the message—told him he had taught me more than I’d taught him, that I loved him, and I told him to be brave. I didn’t, however, tell him to come back.
Someone else did. Before he died, she told him what I’d wanted to tell him—to come back if he could, to send some message, reach through the distance, let us be relieved to know that he was not forever lost. And it was in her office that the ghost hunter’s machine transmitted a sound that sounded much like his name.
“Your mommy wants you to leave our house,” said my daughter one morning.
“What?” I responded, jerking my head down at her as she fiddled with the dog’s cage.
“She says there is a monster here, so you should go be with your dad.”
I paused. “She told you that?” I asked.
Sophia nodded then quickly focused her attention on the television.
She’s two and struggles with the difference between reality and fantasy. Just last week, she told her teacher I’d hit her on the knee, which was not true. But I had been holding her hand when she fell and skinned the knee.
She is really into monsters right now. She’s always seeing pretend monsters, is always playing monster, and will roar at a stranger for no particular reason, claiming to be a mean monster. She also believes alligators live under the little rug in front of the kitchen sink. She is not a source I suggest you trust. Though I know you want to.
My mother wrote in journals I regularly read that she created signs for which to identify signals from the universe. A positive or “yes” response from the universe would be manifested in the appearance of a butterfly. A negative or “no” response would be manifested in the appearance of a spiderweb.
“Mom,” I said to myself one night, in the car with my husband. “Were you raped in the Navy?” I was being silly; I knew. But I did it anyway. It was an experiment. But minutes after I had asked the question, I recognized the flaw of asking the question so late at night. After ten o’clock at night, what sort of butterfly was going to appear?
When we got home, my daughter ran up to her room, and after she chose a couple books to read, we put on her nightgown, brushed her teeth, and tucked her in. We hadn’t read The Very Hungry Caterpillar in some time. But that night she had excitedly chosen it without my prompting. Not until I’d finished reading her the book, when she smiled happily at the last page and said, “Mommy, I love butterflies,” did I make the connection between the enormous butterfly, covering two final pages of the book with the question I had asked an hour earlier.
But this too is nothing to take to the bank. A mere coincidence, right? I can prove nothing. And I surely can’t convince you. I won’t try. I can’t even convince myself.
“How?” I wondered one night as I lay next to Sophia’s crib, waiting for her to go to sleep. How could it be real? How could human awareness extend beyond our senses?
I must have fallen quickly to sleep there on that pink beanbag because when I woke, I knew I had dreamed, and I had vague memories of an answer to my question.
How can we have awareness without physical faculties?
Like a mouse is representative of your identity, your choices, your navigation on the computer, so is your awareness supplemented once the energy from your life is transformed into a web of energies.
Foolishness, I thought as I stood up and left Sophia’s room. That was no answer. I had merely dreamed, allowing my psyche to imagine some fantasy up. A web of energies doesn’t have eyes. It can’t see.
Just the other night at dinner, I told my husband I admitted defeat. Even the new book I was reading, written by a doctor who swears to encounters with the supernatural, can’t offer me the supreme proof I long for. “Even he’s lost his objectivity,” I told my husband regarding the doctor who authored the book. “A doctor can’t see that his own desire to believe is influencing him.”
David nodded and smiled. He was walking out to the dining room from the kitchen, holding his dinner plate in his hand. And as he sat down into his chair, he jumped, flung his head around, shouting.
“What?” I asked.
“Someone just touched me,” he yelled.
“It was the chair,” I said, pointing at the chair behind him.
But his eyes were wide, and he barely noticed my suggestion. “You don’t understand. It was on my side, under my arm. Something just touched me.”
I hesitated.
“I’m telling you. I’m weirded out right now. Something just touched me.”
There was no point to the many efforts I made to explain away the feeling that something had touched him, so after a while, I gave up.
I have no proof that he didn’t simply feel a muscle spasm or bump the chair. So you shouldn’t vest yourself in the possibility that this small moment—this tiny mystery—can offer us any hope. It, of course, doesn’t prove anything at all.
When I asked David if he thought it had been a ghost that had touched him, he simply shrugged and shook his head. “All I know is what I just felt,” he said.
And he’s right. The invisible forces that sway us all are shifty like ghosts. They always leave us wondering.
Party in Pink
October 22nd, 2011 § 4 comments § permalink
Hi, all! Here’s another breast entry for you.
Today, I had the privilege of both attending and speaking at Zumba’s Party in Pink, in Fleetwood, PA. We all had a great time and raised money for the Susan G. Komen Foundation. Below is a copy of what I read in honor of the cause and, of course, in honor of my mother.
Here’s hoping for a cure!
It’s official. I have my mother’s breasts. They’re just like hers–small and limp.
I can remember, as a little girl, staring up at my mother’s breasts when she stood before the bathroom mirror, applying her makeup. I was curious about the way her breasts varied from the ones I’d seen on other women, younger women, women on television, breasts that women proudly allowed to burst from tops of dresses and blouses as a cohesive pair, a set of cleavage—those big, beautiful, buoyant, round, sanguine breasts that rose into the air and bounced on the tanned chests of women who ran, slow motion down the sandy beaches of Baywatch. Those knockers, the bizonkas– every woman’s dream.
My mom’s didn’t so much bounce as much as they…draped. They lay, tired, no longer interested, after four children, in impressing anyone. They could count the long, arduous process of nursing four babies on their tally of accomplishments—the very existence of four human beings a result, in part, of the effort of these forlorn pair.
As teenagers and twenty somethings, my sister and I used to sit around, proud of our young breasts, afraid that one day for reasons we couldn’t understand, we would both end up with Mom’s breasts. That was, perhaps, our legacy. We were her daughters. And just like her young breasts had fallen to the posture of age and experience, so must ours. Except that we were sure that if we planned ahead, we could escape a droopy fate.
“The problem was,” my sister used to say, “Mom didn’t wear a good bra.”
So we bought good bras, supportive bras, bras that defied gravity; we even wore the stiff, uncomfortable lacy things to bed.
Alas, despite my efforts, a couple of years ago, a few days after I stopped nursing my daughter, I stood in front of the bathroom mirror to make an unpleasant discovery.
I was barely thirty one years old, and after my second child had finished with them, my breasts had withered into the same tired form my mother’s had taken on all those years ago. Gone were my “hottie” days, the days of cleavage and sexy bras. I was no longer that young woman anymore. And my breasts, much like my mother’s breasts, were telling a story. They were telling my story, her story, our story—the story of women, the story of the passing of time, of great accomplishment.
My mother’s story is—much like the story of all your mothers are for you—my legacy. She is a part of me, and when I look in the mirror, I see more than her breasts. I see her, looking back at me. And it is from her story that I learn and grow. It is her story that I offer you.
If she were here right now, she might tell you about April 20th, 1985, the day she and my father found it, that lump in her breast she said reminded her of “a tree stump growing right out of the wall of [her] chest.” When she attempted to move it, she found no flexibility at all. “The rigidity,” she said, “more than the lump itself, sends an ominous chill down my spine.”
If she were here, she might tell you about the surgery, how she lay awake on one side of a white curtain while, on the other side, a surgeon opened her up and silently determined her fate by deciding the strength of that tree, examining just how entrenched the rigid roots of the tumor had become. She might even tell you how when she first heard the word “malignant,” she could not process its significance. In fact, while my father sat down next to her and cried as she still lay on the table, she turned her head and tried to hide a smile. She couldn’t define it, but something about knowing she had breast cancer made her smile.
Only years later did the smile begin to make sense. Mom was tired. When she had become a mother, she became a nurturer. She had given life, nourished life, and protected it. She became the woman with answers, the one on whom her children would rely. She struggled to remain an intact self with an identity her own. As a child, she had explored the Florida Palmetto, shirtless and barefoot, searching out rattlesnakes and swimming with the alligators in the dark waters of the canals. She was adventurer at heart, with a restless spirit. And she had given up some of that joy in favor of hard work along the way.
I remember walking into the kitchen one afternoon, on my way out to play in the backyard. On the floor was my mother, on her hands and knees, scrubbing the linoleum and weeping.
“What’s wrong, Mommy?” I asked.
She shook her head and stood up, the rag still in her hand, dripping dirty, soapy water onto the floor. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It doesn’t matter how many times I clean it.” She sighed. “I’ll just always have to clean it again.”
Cancer, she learned, was a reason to rest, to sit in the back of the house and look out the bay window into her garden. It was a permission giver. It was a reason for someone to take care of her instead of her taking care of someone else. It was a way to punish herself for all the guilt she had—that typical maternal guilt which provokes us to wonder if we are enough, if we’ve loved them all enough, if there is enough of us to go around, if it’s okay to keep any of ourselves for ourselves, if we could be doing more for them all.
But perhaps what cancer did for her most of all was to remind her of how much she wanted to live. As lifegivers, women are so engrossed in the lives of others, in the giving and supporting of those lives, that we can—if we let ourselves—forget about the value of our own lives and the importance of joy in them. After all, our very biology, our very nature—evident in the role of the breasts themselves—is to provide for others.
Breast cancer very often begins in the milk ducts themselves, interrupting that place from which life’s nourishment flows. And even in its mystery, its immense strength capable of taking so many lives, cancer can be a harbinger, even a story teller.
“You’ll need to have a radical mastectomy,” the doctors told Mom.
And her response was firm, simple, unapologetic. “No,” she told them. “You won’t take my breast.”
“Why?” we all asked—my dad, her mother, the doctors. “Why? It could save your life.”
“Because,” she explained, “my breasts are part of what makes me a woman. I don’t want to lose that.”
Whether or not we agreed with her decision is irrelevant. Indeed, her breasts had in many ways defined my mother’s role as a woman—burgeoned in her adolescence, sexualized her. They’d grown and swollen in pregnancy, filled with milk, fed her children, rested wearily afterward, bearing the marks of their labor, relics of all the life she had created. And now, bearing a malignant growth, they were a strange analogy for her unmet needs and a reminder of her strength and determination—the very core from which she would find the will to survive.
“I don’t want to die,” my mother told me one morning when we laid together in her bed under her warm blue comforter. “I want to stay here with you,” she said. “You still need me so.” I was only ten years old.
But on April 25, 1991, a year later, my mother lost her fight with breast cancer. After a six-year struggle fraught with real bravery and determination, after the cancer had spread through her, after she had lived 47 years as an adventurer, a singer, a lover, a sailor, a friend, a jokester, a gardener, a bird watcher, an avid reader and reader, a wife, and of course, a mother, Mom lost her life.
I have now lived more than twenty years without my mother. And perhaps you now understand the trepidation with which I tell you that I have recognized my mother’s breasts in my own.
“Are you doing your breast exams?” my doctors always ask. “With your family history….you know, you should be doing regular self-examinations,” they say.
And so I find myself in the shower, my hands shaking as I reach for my breasts, feeling for the beginnings of trees—rigid trees with deep roots, trees that bespeak what I fear is my legacy as my mother’s daughter.
For me, my breasts are a place of mystery, of long held fear, of sadness, of vulnerability, and yet they also remain a place of pride, a reminder of my connection to my mother, of the way my head once felt when I laid against her chest. My breasts tell my story too. They herald my motherhood, my hard work, my ability to love another intensely. They tell the story of my daughters, of me, of my mother.
If my mother were here, she would smile at all of us dressed in pink. She would dance with us because she loved to dance. She would laugh heartily as she tried to learn the various Zumba moves. And she would recognize the magic that happens here, when all of our hips are shaking, and are arms are raised in the air. She would know that here, nobody is worried about cleaning the kitchen floor. Here, we can find joy in our bodies’ movements, a joy that can, perhaps, slow the growth of those rigid trees in our breasts. Here, we all find permission to smile.
And today, as we help to fight the fight my mother and so many others have lost, the fight that is still being fought by so many, we herald the sacredness of breasts, of the stories they tell and the life they provide, and we empower ourselves and others to keep breasts healthy so that they no longer propagate cancer but instead foster long lives, tell longer stories, stories that include much joy and much dancing.
Remembering Scott Loveland
October 13th, 2011 § 4 comments § permalink
Last week, a former student and a friend of mine passed away. Scott was a loving father, an honest and supportive friend, an incorrigible jokester, a billiards shark, a humanitarian, an animal lover; a creative, dedicated, highly capable, and authentically curious Honors student, and much more. I was so very honored when I was given the opportunity to speak at his funeral, along with his son and daughter. The following is what I read:
Scott once wrote, “Our lives, which get buried in the mundane matters of modern-day living, are often revealed in the creative writer’s process by turning mundane experiences into moments of rapture. Mundane places can indeed be worthy of solemn appraisal at times.”
Scott was not one to let his life become buried by the mundane. He embraced opportunities to love, to laugh, to grow, to learn, to endure.
His desire to live fully was reflected in his devotion to his studies. Scott learned quickly, from the second row of the first English Composition class I taught at Reading Area Community College, what most students realize shortly after one of my courses begins—that I am not an easy teacher. But still, Scott persisted, showed up in one of my lit courses the next semester and in a Creative Nonfiction class after that, excelling in all three of what he would call his “Andersen experiences.” “What can I say, StephJoy,” he used to say. “I’m a glutton for punishment.” He was the only student who ever called me StephJoy, and I will miss it.
Scott wasn’t one to back down from a challenge perhaps because he knew challenge keeps people looking upwards, and up is a good direction in which to look.
I think Scott and I both were saved by the knowledge that there was always something more to learn, always another book to read, another essay to write, another discovery to make. He and I both were new to Reading when we met in the fall of 2007; I was coming from graduate school, anxious and a bit bewildered in my new surroundings while he was on the brink of a second chance at life, stepping off a bus into America’s most poverty stricken city, with what he said was a “a broken spirit [and] a shattered soul.” Immediately, as his feet hit the ground, his eyes were drawn upward, out of the city, into the green hills on top of which the Pagoda stood, Reading’s famous Asian architecture once intended to be a restaurant, but with its original purpose abandoned, it remained like an incongruent beacon of hope, proof of man’s ability to build upwards, climb out of that which keeps us down, too grounded, too aware of ourselves, too safe and secure. Scott looked up instinctively to the Pagoda and thought “What is that?” and “Where am I?”
Later, after finding his way up to the Pagoda and learning about it, he wrote, “It is overwhelming–the climb of 87 steps up seven stories, 620 feet above the city and nearly a 1000 feet above sea level. It is 28 feet wide and 50 feet long, the walls are five feet thick at the base tapering to two feet thick at the second floor, from there to the top—sixty tons of shingles protecting the inside walls of concrete plaster and the trim and stairwells of oak. All of this is anchored to the mountainside with 16 tons of bolts. It is here I can see for miles and miles.”
When I go there now, to the Pagoda, I think of Scott as I look down over the city, try to find my house in the suddenly unfamiliar valley below, and I realize that from the Pagoda, my house—with all of the responsibilities that come with it that otherwise seem so important–escapes into a blur of suburbial white and green. It barely even exists. And yet, when I stand at the very top of the Pagoda, I can feel the structure sway in the subtlest wind, the tiniest force, the smallest detail.
Scott said, “looking towards the heavens I noticed her hard-lined pinnacles standing above the city like a solemn guardian. The sunlight enveloping the angles with shades of crimson casting shadows down the gentle slopes like a wave of luminosity and grace, while at the same time, her ferocious darkness, harshness, and isolation penetrated my soul and I realized the importance of place and its potency in my life.”
Scott was a man not undone by the thought of loss or even his own demise. He carried on despite obstacle, reaching above the pain of failure and loss into the sweet rapture of survival, of growth, of transformation. Because he had hope, he had joy, consistently demonstrating authentic grace and gratitude. He was able to manage a smile even when he sat in my office and told me he was going to die.
Scott wondered once if the Pagoda’s creator had, he wrote, “known it would be loved and cared for by the citizens of Reading, those citizens that regardless of the darkness in the world around them would keep the light of the Pagoda burning.” “I often wonder,” he wrote, “how many of the desperate people who exist beneath the most famous landmark in the City of Reading truly understand the paradox it represents—the light above the darkness.”
Before Scott took his last breath, he removed his oxygen and reached his arms into the air, upwards, knowing instinctively that remained his direction.
Photo courtesy of Jon Athans Photography
An Unfolding
September 22nd, 2011 § 2 comments § permalink
I have not posted to my blog in some time. The reason for this is that the semester has now begun and because I am in the middle of what has become an incredibly cathartic writing experience—the writing of my mother’s story.
In the beginning of this project, I had no idea what sort of story it would become. At first, I thought that despite how “quiet” my mother’s story might be, it was still a story that needed to be told. Quickly, however, I realized just how unfitting the word “quiet” is for my mother’s story though she herself may have been quieter than I once thought. Indeed, my mother had secrets—one in particular that may have silently plagued her for decades. When she was eighteen years old, something—something bad—happened to Mom. How surprising and bewildering for me to begin to discover both how bad this something might have actually been and just how few people knew anything about it.
Her brother doesn’t know. Her sister doesn’t know. Buddy, the boy who may or may not have been her boyfriend at the time, doesn’t know. Her friends don’t know. She seems to have uttered the words once to my father, who respected her privacy and asked no further questions.
“Did you believe her?” I asked him recently.
“Of course I did. I never doubted her.”
It seems, however, that others did doubt her. She tried to get help, but the response was, perhaps, to humiliate her, silence her, cover up what had happened.
“Thank goodness,” writes my grandmother in her memoir, “that someone was there in the hospital to comfort her and take care of her.” That someone was apparently Mom’s hospital roommate. And the mention of her had, up until a month ago, seemed unimportant as I read and re-read Grandma’s writing. But I knew I needed to discover the mystery of what had happened to Mom, and the more I returned to Grandma’s memoir, the more my eyes slowed over the mention of the roommate. Something was ringing a bell. She was the wife of a government official.
So many letters, journal entries, pictures, and relics have passed through my hands in the past several months of working on researching my mother’s life. But suddenly, I remembered two letters that had caused me pause back in June. I had read both letters from the same woman who was congratulating my mother on the birth of her son, my brother, Greg. But I did not recognize the woman’s name. I asked my brother. Her name meant nothing to him either. I asked my father. Nothing. So I googled the name on the return address—a man’s name, the writer’s husband. And there it was. He had been a government official in the 60s.
I held Grandma’s memoir in hand and realized, suddenly, that I had the name of my mother’s roommate when she was in the hospital directly after she had experienced the mysterious trauma nobody seemed to know about.
I thought of myself, of women in general, and I suddenly knew that if anyone would have known what had happened to Mom, it would have been that woman in the privacy of that hospital room in the 60s.
I searched for the letters, read them through again and again, found the woman’s children’s names, googled one, found her, called her, told her my strange story.
“You’re in luck, Stephanie,” she told me. “Mom’s still alive.”
A few days later, she called back. “Mom remembers your mom. And your mom did open up in that hospital room. She told my mother what had happened to her. But my mother’s not sure you really want to know. It was very, very bad.”
“I want to know.”
“I know.”
“I need to know.”
“I know.”
“Please.”
Secrets have a way of remaining secrets until the timing is right. Every day, for three weeks, I have waited for the daughter of Mom’s old hospital roommate to call me back, tell me what happened to Mom. But she hasn’t called. And maybe she never will. What I have in the meantime are the images in my mind, the screams of my mother in the dark, her hands in her face, in the sand of a beach somewhere in Maryland, her head against the white of a hospital pillow.
I have this strange picture, which I found in one of her old albums, of a young man who nobody recognizes.
I have the broken timeline of her many childhood homes that I still, after three months, haven’t managed to figure out entirely.
I have notes from my hour long conversation with her old therapist.
I have a journal entry Mom wrote about me, telling me I was her immortality.
I have the sound of the music she loved.
I have the record of an earthquake she felt—when nobody else did—in 1981.
I have the rumbling of her story within me, like the pieces of some puzzle—a legacy of our own plate tectonics—finally being released, slowly, with every turn, every interview, every discovery.
Searching for Buddy
August 20th, 2011 § 6 comments § permalink
For the past two months, I’ve been working on this book about my mother. It’s slow going. The first memoir went much faster. In fact, I’m at a full pause in the actual writing as I plunge into research full-force and, of course, back into the semester. Three chapters are…complete. But even they’ll continue to transform, I’m quite sure, as the research continues.
My husband keeps telling me nobody will believe that this is a book of nonfiction. My family—what I have always known of it—is unique and interesting. But surprises have awaited me in my research, and I continue to discover. My first great surprise happened just last week. I sent my uncle—my mother’s older brother—a friend request via FB. While on his profile, I browsed through his friends and noticed a Keller, my mother’s maiden name. I sent this Keller a friend request and asked how he was related to my mother. He was her brother, he told me. Her what? More exchanges informed me that this was her step-brother. It turns out that more than just a brother and a sister, my mother had a step-brother and a step-sister I’d never known about.
My uncle has been a real gift in this process because he is a wealth of information and is willing and gracious in giving it to me. I sent him a question via email two weeks ago, and in response, he sent me my grandmother’s memoir. I loaded it into my Nook and read excitedly. Somewhere around page 23, my grandmother mentions her Grandpa and Grandma Dailey who lived in Addison, New York. I paused, looked up at my husband. “Where was your Grandpa Dailey from?” I asked.
His answer brought me no comfort. His Grandpa Dailey was from the same area as my grandmother’s Grandpa and Grandma Dailey. I made some phone calls, wrote a couple emails, but we’ve not yet discovered a record of a genetic connection between the two. Still, we remain somewhat uneasy.
My father, as always, is also incredibly supportive of this endeavor and remains consistently willing to respond to my lengthy lists of emailed questions regarding my mother’s life. Poor guy. As soon as he sends me his answers, I just send him another list of questions regarding his answers. The last set of questions I sent him were regarding my mother’s relationship with a man I knew only as “Pa Fulton.” Pa, as I remember him, was a great guy, enjoyed Ponderosa, always had an ice cream sundae, always ate donuts and baked beans, and always had a dog named Inky. As a child, I never thought to ask who this man was. He was simply “Pa Fulton,” and when we visited him, my mother was happy. Long after she passed away, I asked my father. “Who was Pa Fulton?”
Only then did I discover that he was the father of a former boyfriend of hers and had become, over the years, like a father to her.
The more I read my mother’s journals in the past couple of months, the more I’ve learned about Pa. When in doubt, she turned to Pa. When afraid, she turned to Pa. In the last year of her life, when the treatments weren’t going well, and she was tired, sick, and scared, she wrote, “I need to be at Pa’s.” And in the next entry, she was there, looking out the kitchen window at the bird feeder, identifying the many birds that frequented the feeder, going out for a swim in his gravel pit, baking bread in his old oven. And she was less afraid there. She was okay with Pa.
“I want to understand this relationship she had with Pa better,” I wrote my dad. “Tell me more.”
“I don’t know much more,” he wrote, “except that she lived with him once for a while when she was younger.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it had something to do with her relationship with her mother.”
“What about Pa’s son?” I asked. “Who was he? What was her relationship with him like?”
“I don’t know.”
A dead end. And I hate dead ends. I had to know why she had loved this old man like she did. But how? Pa died years ago.
“Dad,” I wrote in my next email. “How do I find out more about Pa?”
The next morning, I got his response. “Look up his son.” And he gave me the son’s name, told me where he might live.
So I began searching, which quickly yielded nothing.
“How could this be? No phone number. No address. Just a name with which various websites taunted me. Did I want more information on this guy? Pay up. A year’s membership would be twenty bucks. No way. Come on. Just give me the damn phone number.
And then the dreaded possibility that he—this son of Pa, former boyfriend of Mom—was no longer alive occurred to me. What if he was gone?
But I kept searching. And one of the websites slipped up, listed some of his relatives, a girl. I looked her up. No phone number. But she also had a list of relatives. So, one by one, I began to call the list of relatives. First one—no answer. Second one—no answer. Third one—jackpot.
“Hello?”
“Hi. This is going to sound crazy. My name is Stephanie. I’m from Reading, PA. I’m writing a book about my mother. I’m looking for an old friend of hers. And I think he’s related to this girl. And this girl’s related to you.”
The woman chuckled, but she was kind. “Give me your information, and I’ll pass it on, Stephanie.”
“Is he still alive?” I asked anxiously.
“Yes,” she said. “He’s still alive.”
“Thank you,” I said.
A short forty-five minutes later, the phone rang. I picked up my phone, noticed the area code. My heart raced, and my hand shook as I answered.
“Hello?”
“Stephanie?”
“Yeh.”
“It’s Buddy.”
I paused, swallowed hard. He sounded so young. I pictured a handsome man, maybe a tall one, big eyes, a nice smile. I was immediately comfortable with him. “Hi, Buddy.”
He chuckled.
I laughed.
“Thank you so much for calling me,” I told him.
“I’ve got some stories for you, Stephanie,” he said. “And I’d be happy to talk with you. Just a couple weeks ago, I was telling my step-daughter—the girl you saw listed as my relative apparently—about your mother. My dad and I went to see her the week before she died. She had fifteen wonderful lucid moments with us as if there was nothing wrong with her. And Dad was real happy about that. It meant a lot to him.”
“I have so much to ask you,” I said. “So many questions.”
He laughed. “She was the daughter my dad never had.”
Wow, I thought. This was a piece of my mother’s history I’d never before had access to. And here it was, this voice on the other end of the line, this voice that she heard, this man she had known, who had known her before I ever existed. Who was she to him? Who was he to her? What did they talk about? Where did they go together? What did she tell him? What does he know about her?
“You’re not going to believe this,” I told him. “But I have to be to an appointment in less than an hour.” It was the truth. I had to hang up. “When can we talk again?”
“My wife and I are traveling now,” he said.
A wife. He had a wife.
“But we’ll be home August 29. I’ll give you my home number. And my email.”
I frantically wrote it all down.
“We’ve got a lot to talk about, Stephanie,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. But I could only imagine.
I still can only imagine even now as I write this anxiously as the week slowly ticks away, as I get closer to another chance to talk again to Buddy, to ask him about my mother, about how he knew her, about how she knew his father, about what their lives were like together back then, about the secrets he knows about her that I don’t know about her, about the woman she was when he knew her.
My sister told me that when you act upon your most authentic desires, the world—the universe—will respond.
The moment I began seeking out my mother’s life, it began coming to me from multiple directions. And I’m soaking it all in joyously, hungrily. She is a lovely collection of many stories, continuously unfolding, threading through me and beyond me, before me and after me, as constant as her words on paper yet as mortal as spoken words, voices spinning in galaxies in my mind, creating her and recreating her.
1. Faith (a chapter from my new memoir, the story of my mother)
August 3rd, 2011 § 3 comments § permalink
The woods were dark, populated by evergreen trees with thick trunks and angular
branches like gnarled feathers hovering over, sometimes aimed at the ground, sometimes
looking as though they were shadows engulfed by a dark black sea in the brown
earth. Northern woods like these, with their deep brown moist soil and bright
green fern, are cooler and cleaner than southern woods, the sort in which she had played as a girl.
She heard the light rattling of the pine needles where she stood, just inside the
woods, where shadows formed, her eyes wide and glowing in the moonlight. She leaned close to Dad, her eyes narrowing
as if to search him for some semblance of sanity. She uttered the word, but it came out slowly,
its syllables heavy with annunciation: “sacrifice.”
“Dedicated.”
She blinked, confused. Perhaps he had spoken, but she hadn’t really seen his mouth move. Maybe she had glanced to the ground, and he uttered the word while she wasn’t looking. Or perhaps the wind sputtered and whistled it.
The moon was a perfect circle that night, outlined in orange. She looked up to it, considered her reluctance to withhold her child. She did not want to miss anything, to be closed-minded. But to ritually dedicate a child to Satan by using the trees was unquestionably intolerable, unconscionable. And as the wind picked up, so did her will.
I, her baby, was in my father’s arms, wrapped in a blanket, invisible, asleep perhaps, somehow unaware of the fate he had planned
for me, to give me up to the devil, to do it there in a circle of evergreen and fern and sharp shadows moving in the wind.
My mother enjoyed the wind. Had I been looking at her then, I would have seen her arms lengthen a bit, lift subtly into the path of its momentum, step forward, perhaps with her right foot alone, just enough to shift her weight and
offer her refusal. He had rarely heard her forbid him, and the relationship he had with their child was a territory
she’d often been afraid to infiltrate.
He was strong, so strong. And she had been afraid to show him her strength; she’d been afraid of what it would
have meant to him or his choice to rescue her. She had needed him. But by needing him, she’d feared the loss of him and therefore feared herself. Her own darkness stirred inside her, perhaps in her memory or perhaps a legacy itself.
She’d silenced herself, narrowed herself, hid her darkness, created a phantom, hoping she herself would not be noticed. But
now she had simply spoken her only conceivable truth, one that couldn’t be misinterpreted, hers entirely. And she
was glad.
That’s when she knew others were in the woods with them. She couldn’t see any of them, but they must have been there; she felt unsure of herself against both my father and these others, his obvious reinforcements.
The devil? Satan? Could he know who he meant? She thought of Adolf Hitler then, desperate maybe
for a face to offer, a reminder. Satan, embodied.
Dad nodded confidently. Indeed, he knew. He knew, he said, that the devil would save the world.
Any effort to convince him otherwise, to reason with him would be futile, my mother knew. And yet she could tell he was
quite sane, only misled. She forgave him then perhaps, or perhaps not. But at least she recognized his misdirection and could go on without him.
She took me from his arms, surprised at first that he didn’t seem to resist her. She paused, adjusted the blanket that wrapped me and looked up to my father again. He turned to his reinforcements, which frightened her. He seemed confident in
their power, in their ability to stop her, so she turned away, and the dirt was cool and rough on her feet as she ran, and yet she could feel a heat behind her as if the woods were its own heat source, and somewhere from the center, the
trees—at their roots—were enlivening, which did not frighten her, but as she ran over their roots, she was keenly aware of their depth and longevity. She felt light and small over them, separate. As she crossed over the
hedgerow into the field, leaving the woods, her shadow disappeared, and she could see Goldie, her car, in the distance. If she could just make it there.
She kept her heels off the ground, landing on and lifting herself from the balls of her feet, running like she had when she had raced Bobby Beard as a child. My mother had grown up a tomboy, barefoot and shirtless in the sand, in the thick
palmetto and in the dark waters of the canals. She and Bobby had swam together, unafraid, with the gators, feeling as
wild and at home as perhaps the ancient reptilians did in the water. Neither Mom nor Bobby were ever taught to ask
permission from the wildlife, nor was my mother ever embarrassed of herself when she flung off her shorts and jumped in alongside Bobby. Her nakedness was as stark as the water itself, as the old gators. She loved Bobby though, loved him for his
speed and intensity, for his courage and wildness. She could not play with the little girls like she played with Bobby. He was like her, curious, courageous, and imprudent, purely corporeal.
But still her mother insisted that she try to play with Lois Cornwall, who played with dolls and might, in her calmness, have a subduing effect on Mom. The kids in school called Lois “Cornball,” and Mom had always gone along with it.
She hadn’t anything against Lois specifically, just her type, the sedentary sort. When she grumbled,
Grandma insisted, so Mom sat with Lois and her dolls a few times, tried to understand the role-playing that came so easily to Lois. But after a few tries, Grandma gave up. Mom wasn’t subdued as much as she was bored and frustrated.
Released from her duty to Lois, Mom found herself unable to rid herself entirely of the girl. Lois had imprinted on her though,
and the result was that Mom had become responsible for walking her to school. Lois seemed to insist, inflicted
herself upon Mom with eagerness and a bit of a raised brow. Lois babbled all the way to school while Mom
looked on longingly toward Bobby and the boys.
Bobby, looking back with contempt, was furious. He approached the girls one morning haughtily, shoved Lois.
“Stop it, Bob,” Mom grumbled. “Go away.” She’d succumbed to her morning fate with some grace as it and the relationship with Lois seemed a part of her femininity, something to show allegiance to her gender and some regret for being unable to
truly endure the sheltered drama of dolls.
Bobby laughed, delighted he was irritating my mother. Lois gasped as Bobby shoved her again, this time harder.
“I said ‘stop it,’ Bob,” Mom demanded, having stopped walking and brought her
hands to her hips now, perturbed and curious.
He laughed again, slamming his fist into Lois’s gut then his other arm between her legs.
Mom watched as Lois doubled-over, tears streaming from her eyes. “Bob!” Mom shrieked. “Stop it!”
Bobby turned to Mom then and swung at her, full-force, trouncing her in the side of
the head with his small, tight fist.
Mom felt an explosion in her head and then opened her eyes to a slow world, an atmosphere
as thick as water, her arms falling slowly, her knees hitting the pavement almost elegantly, Bobby’s face hovering over her, his eyes wide and bitter, his mouth opening widely for another laugh. Her moves must have seemed fast to Lois and Bobby, but Mom felt the weight of herself as she stood, keeping her eyes on Bobby’s. She and the world were in slow-motion; even
Bobby’s laughs and taunts seemed far away, thick, and deep. When she was standing, she reached both arms out
in front of her, each of her hands grabbing each of Bobby’s ears. Her head was fiery hot as she shook him, so
fast and hard that she barely noticed she was lifting him off the ground, higher and higher, his feet kicking in the air. She lost her hearing entirely then, deaf to any cries he may have been making. She stayed focused, locked in on the face
that had, moments before brought her to this fury—a fury that detached her from herself.
“I would have kept shaking,” she told me once, thoughtful, ashamed, and yet somewhat in awe of herself.
But someone stopped her, some adult passerby, a teacher perhaps. Bobby was freed from her grip pretty quickly,
fell limply to the ground when she let go, his best friend, the tall skinny girl with the big brown eyes and long dark braids, who must have seemed taller than she’d ever been as he stared up at her.
She breathed in, the night air perfumed like an immortelle, she wholly aware now, the rhythm of her own pulse thumping in her
ears and her feet against the damp grass, my father close behind her. She could see every blade of grass and could hear each of my father’s breaths. Awareness is godly, she thought, like the moment Grandpa died, when Mom, more than three hours south of him, slammed on her brakes without reason as if she’d somehow felt the impact of the ______________
car that had crossed over the median into oncoming traffic, into Grandpa’s lane.
She sat in her car alone in the middle of the road in front of Brozzetti’s Pizza, stunned a bit that she’d so suddenly stopped without reason. But she realized shortly thereafter that she could see everything all at once—every brick in every building as if each of
them were a world all their own, every ridge in every tire of every car, every sound of every foot against the sidewalk as if each foot, each leg, each soul were the only foot, the only soul. She gripped the steering wheel and breathed, took her foot of the brakes, and kept driving.
Goldie, her old Ford Falcon station wagon, was cool and quiet as Mom pulled open the door and slammed it behind us. With me still in her arm, she slammed her palm against the lock in front of her then reached over her seat to lock the
door behind her, then the next door, and just before Dad lifted the handle on the front passenger door, she locked it.
But she wasn’t fast enough to stop him from climbing in the trunk door. Defeated, she frantically tried to
get control of Goldie as the car began to roll quickly backwards. But as she struggled, my father took me from
her and disappeared back out into the dark.
Somehow, using the momentum afforded the car by the slight incline of the path where she was parked, she was able to turn the car around but unable to ignite her engine because she could find no key. Goldie simply rolled downhill, Mom’s breath quickening
in the quiet of the night. She told herself that she’d go for help, for her own reinforcement, and she’d return for
her daughter.
I was her fourth child, her fifth pregnancy, her last, the easiest of her labors, her pain hardly noticeable at first and still
tolerable at its worst, the relief of my sudden and final burst from within by then familiar; her body had learned this sequence, this shape-shifting, this offering, this compliance with or submission to life’s use of her. And when she’d held me to her, she saw my
father in my face and breathed in the smell of me before they lifted me from her to lay me down and regulate my body temperature in a separate bassinet, where my father would approach me and first touch me.
She remembered, as Goldie coasted slowly in the dark, the first time she’d mentioned a child between them. They’d stood together in front of the house on Old Almond Road, and when she’d seen his blue eyes widen and brighten again the way they did when he was delighted by her astute awareness of her world, she slipped in the phrase into her next sentence as if she’d said it a hundred times before, as if the idea had always been. Later, alone at his desk, he wrote out his delight and surprise. “Our child,” he wrote, “were the most beautiful words to hear you speak. In many ways, that is the loveliest idea I’ve ever heard.”
She was unsure, at first, if she had really seen a figure in the dark. But when she pushed on Goldie’s brakes and slowed, she peered out the windshield and saw a man she recognized from church. She stopped Goldie and climbed out of the car, lingering at first at her door. This was a man who’d always scared her, but her baby was gone, somewhere out in the woods, and she needed help.
I don’t know who this man was. My memories of Mom’s Unitarian Universalist church are vague if not altogether gone.
But I try to imagine one who might have given her the creeps as she says he did, and I imagine a tall, slender man with dark hair and dark glasses. Maybe he wore a Members Only jacket and a wide-brimmed hat. I don’t know. But I know when she worked up the courage, she ran toward him, suddenly understanding his presence in her life, why she
had been afraid of him. He was like her.
“Help me,” she said.
And after she explained that her baby had been taken into the woods, he agreed to walk back up the hill to help her get me back. He had no reservations as if he’d been waiting there for my mother the whole time.
With him, he brought the strength of the church, of Mom’s faith in God, the world, and in herself.
They walked together speedily, neither of them tired by the hill. Mom began to cry tears of joy
as she walked, relieved and comforted to have him with her.
Once back in the woods, Mom quickly found my father. I was not in sight. In fact, she realized then that even when I
had been in her arms, she hadn’t really seen me, but now she suspected my father had hidden me from her. The woods
seem to glow like embers around her, branches flames surrounded in the black of darkness, a thunderous rumbling from within her or from within the roots she stood over.
“Where is she?” Mom asked.
“Gone,” he said.
My mother demanded I be immediately returned to her.
“I sent her away,” my father said.
“Where did you send her?”
“To the spirit world,” he answered.
But Mom was unwilling to leave without me, did not believe him.
She prayed that her own strong will be replaced, or enhanced, by God’s wisdom. In the place of darkness, the sun had begun to creep into the woods and turn it gold. The trees were emerald green, the heat from the sun igniting them in hue, and both of
their faces, Mom’s and Dad’s, were now ensconced in what was becoming a blinding light.
She squinted her eyes to see him, but he was gone. The woods were cool and quiet, and she was alone.
Prologue to New Memoir: How My Parents Met
June 30th, 2011 § 4 comments § permalink
Prologue
I hold the old the envelope with both hands, pull it to my chest. I imagine it had once been laying on a cluttered countertop near my mother. Perhaps she was on the phone, busily chatting, so he reached for this small envelope, addressed to Lolly Morgan in Corning, New York. He wrote his four words quickly but decidedly as if they had been burgeoning all night until they had nowhere else to go but over the white back of a stray envelope.
All I have now is the envelope, the words themselves, the arcs and angles of my father’s tender encryption.
“I adore you, Susan,” it says.
“Love, Stephen.”
And a few inches down, my mother’s writing: “Received 5-8-80.”
I found it in a small wooden box I pulled from my mother’s storage. Mom seems to have glued a postcard to the lid—a painting that depicts a sheepherder leading his flock along a river in what could be a valley of upstate New York. Leaves litter the path like stray, wadded paper while the trees themselves, at least at the forefront, look like torches in their sunlit fall brilliance, a soft orange hue flooding the valley while the glow of autumn has only softly marked the crests of the hills. Just across the river is a red barn surrounded by a thick rainbow of foliage. So close to the river’s edge is the barn that it seems like it will fall
in any moment, into the glittering mirror of color and darkness.
When I lifted the lid and its scene away from the box, I was thrilled to find a pile of letters along with two roses that Mom
had apparently tried to keep alive by scotch taping wet cotton to their thorny stems, but they had, of course, died and dried, stuck—cotton still taped to them—into a white gift bow so that the whole thing looked something like a
strange sort of corsage. And atop both the letters and the corsage was a plastic bag with two dark brown braids in it,
my mother’s braids that were cut off when she reached adolescence, the braids that, when she was a girl, were tied around a chair in her backyard by someill-meaning neighborhood boy who thought it would be funny to watch her struggle all day to free herself until her mother finally came home from work. I’ve taken the braids out of the bag several times, ran my fingers down each of them, feeling their smoothness, holding them up to my own hair, comparing the color, imagining myself with these
braids, like Laura Ingalls Wilder, like Susan Mary Keller, this woman I hardly know, this woman who was my mother.
I find three polaroid pictures in the box—the first of my mother alone, standing amongst the cluster of birch trees on Bonner Road where she had married my father, but in this picture, she’s wearing her overalls and a tightly fitting striped t-shirt. She
is smiling subtly as if annoyed by the cameraman somehow; she captivates me here moreso than in any other picture I’ve ever seen of her. Her shoulder length dark-brown hair is blowing a bit in the wind, and the sun is casting shadows of birch branches against her chest and face, the smile lines at her brow blending with the tree’s strokes.
Behind that picture are two pictures of my parents together, both of which depict my mother in her overalls again, his hand around her lower back in both, her feet bare in one—the one that, based on the
lighting, was taken at dusk, the other first thing in the morning, their smiles in both evincing the optimism of youth, of new love. Just behind them, in the morning shot, three chickens can be seen pecking at the ground, the chickens perhaps that had led him to her.
He’d built a chicken coop behind the old farmhouse in which he was living, the one his mother had lived in as a child. Before that, he’d lived in a tipi for a year, and once in the old farmhouse, having left his job as a tree surgeon, he began to teach himself to live self-sufficiently, off of vegetables from his own garden, off the meat from steers he raised and killed himself, and finally, off of chickens for eggs and meat.
In 1927, nearly fifty years before, the house had been leased to a group of well-dressed men who said they would raise chickens on the property. But no chicken coops were ever built, and no chickens ever appeared. Instead, after the men moved in, a new chimney appeared and cars began to make traffic in the driveway late at night. When the police and FBI stormed the house, they found two men manning a massive bootlegging operation, the source of the odor emanating into the apple orchard
behind the house. A local newspaper describes as “one of the coziest plants, for the production of illicit alcohol,
ever uncovered in Western New York,” gauged at around a forty thousand dollar value, including 5,000 gallons of mash and 70 gallons of finished booze.
The house was, shortly thereafter, gutted of its still, leaving six-foot holes in the floors and ceilings. When Dad’s grandparents
bought the place in the 1940s, they must have covered these holes, and Dad never saw the house’s old wounds when he visited the house as a child, but when his grandfather solicited his help storing wood, he’d tell Dad there used to be a large cistern in the woodshed, which was where the police had found that body two years after the bootlegging raid.
Yet another strange odor emanated into the apple orchard behind the house in 1929, which was when Mrs. Albert Perry first caught wind of something wrong. The police found a man in a tailored suit, patent leather shoes, with an elaborate set of gold dental work. He was short, obviously Italian, and had been shot once in the back of the head with a .38 caliber pistol before
he was shoved into the cistern. All he had in his pockets were an address to a hotel in Olean and a bus schedule. In the cistern were two loaded revolvers and .32 caliber bullets and bullet fragments, but neither the guns nor the bullets
matched the fatal slug in the victim’s brain.
The only other .38 bullets were found in the shed’s door casing. Dad remembers picking bullets out of the house’s walls
when he lived there alone, when the house itself stirred, and in the darkness at night, he stayed up to hear the footsteps and strange quaking. The noises only stopped when he called out in desperation for his grandmother’s spirit.
She’d bought the place for only the cost of its back taxes in the early 1940s—the first owner since the bootlegging clan. The house had been locally feared, said to be haunted by the man whose body was found in the cistern. Theda, my great-grandmother, apparently ignored these fears, and bought the place as a weekend retreat for her
family. My grandmother remembers the first night she slept in the house as a child.
“It was so dark in there,” she said, “and the noises kept me awake. There must have been squirrels in the attic.”
Nobody ever figured out who that man in the cistern was or who it was that put the bullet in his brain.
But Dad was the one who finally brought chickens to the house on Bonner Road. He bought them from my mother. She’d advertised them in the Pennysaver. A few layers down in the stack of letters and clippings in her box, I find the check he wrote to her in the amount of twenty-four dollars on June 26, 1976 for 20 chickens. His signature is on the front, and hers—Susan
Dodge—is on the back, looking a little different—faster, broader, less elegant—than it would be when her name would change, and she would become my mother.
Alligators
May 31st, 2011 § 4 comments § permalink
We just got back from our annual trip to Wilmington, N.C. Going back to the shore always feels like returning home to me.
This time I brought along my two-year old daughter who, much like her mother, has a thing about alligators. In her very pink, frilly bedroom, she keeps a four-foot long stuffed alligator. When we go to the zoo, her favorite exhibit is always the alligator, at which she stares longingly through the glass window separating her from it until we force her to move on.
Before we headed south, I told her we were going to see an alligator in the wild. She shrieked with delight. And just after we passed the state line, leaving Virginia and entering North Carolina, I pointed at the welcome sign and told her we had arrived. “We’re in North Carolina, Soph!”
“Where are the alligators?” she asked, looking around hopefully.
The next day, we drove her down The Road to Nowhere—a name I coined myself for a long road as old as the south itself. It breaks from the neatness of suburban development and winds through swamps, long leaf pines—woods thick with tangled
foliage. The air is thick, heavy, and stagnant, much like the swampy black water, resting motionless, opaque.
We drove for miles until we arrived at Alligator Lake—another title I came up with myself. I found this lake by accident once. I’d been visiting the old rice plantation just a half a mile up the road, a remnant of an old existence, its trees more than ten feet thick at the trunk, their branches so weighted with the years that they had grown into the ground and risen back up, like new trees of their own. I’d spend hours meandering around the plantation’s gardens, looking for gators in the shadows of the canals.
I was rarely disappointed. In the heat of those afternoons, I’d often find alligators ranging in size from just a foot long to well over fifteen feet long. “Don’t walk too close to the water,” the garden employees would warn me, and I’d fearlessly ignore them, desperate to get as close as I could. I once approached a mother who was guarding her eggs. With every step I took closer to her, she’d open her mouth another inch, warning me to stay back. When I was within a few feet, she began to hiss, so I stepped back, finally began to hear her, let her be, but reluctantly. I wanted to stay there with her, in those gardens, in the old thick air of the south.
The gardens are now closed to the public. A few days ago, I stared at the closed gates longingly. The plantation had been sold
several months earlier for 45 million dollars.
Sophia in tow, my husband and best friend and I drove the mile from the plantation down to Alligator Lake or Orton Pond as I think it’s rightfully called. We pulled over and began to scan the top of the water, looked for alligator eyes among the lily pads. It took several minutes, but we finally saw him just at the edge of the water, feet from us. He was perhaps six feet long, thick jowls, a mossy back.
In my younger days, I would have been standing on the edge of the lake, unafraid of the gator though I knew how fast they could lunge, how high they would jump. It didn’t matter. I’d stand over five or six of them, smoking a Camel Light, watching their eyes as black and still as the water, wondering what they were thinking, how they could be so dangerous, so powerful, and yet so incredibly peaceful. Such a peace was elusive to me, and my desire for it haunted me. The gators themselves haunted me. Night after night, I would dream of them—their still eyes, their round backs and sharp tails. I’d dream that they would come from the black depths to grab me away, to grab my dog away. I’d dream I was paralyzed in the water with them, unable to swim away from them as they stared at me.
Sometimes the dreams would go away for weeks at a time, but they’d come back again. They always came back. Usually it was when I fell in love or believed I had fallen in love. More alligators would find me in my sleep, stare at me from their sinister stillness, no sign of movement, not even breath.
I’d return to Alligator Lake often, sometimes bringing a man along with me, whatever love interest there might have been. I’d bring them along to show them the gators, and I’d watch the exchange—man at gator, gator at man. But mostly, I think I was showing them what I wanted, some strange and elusive peace, stillness of mind. Most of them would show their courage by
getting as close to the edge as possible, by crouching down to the gator’s level, by sacrificing their safety as if strength could be measured in such a challenge. I was never fooled. The gators’ stillness always won me over.
The largest gator we saw at Alligator Lake was the only one I ever actually heard. My best friend and I named him Thunder. When he roared, we’d look up, sure we had heard the beginnings of a storm. His booming sound seemed to travel, separate from him. He was the only one I’d ever run from.
Last year, we heard that he’d been found here on the edge of Alligator Lake, shot through the head.
We stayed in the car this time, our courage somewhat diminished by age, experience. I watched Sophia peer through the window and into the water. It took her a moment to see the gator’s head. It almost melted into the black water, almost amalgamated, as if the water itself had eyes.
When she finally saw him, she stared carefully, watching for more than fifteen minutes without any desire to move. My husband tried to make the alligator stir; he slammed the car door, beeped the horn. He wanted Sophia to see movement.
But the gator didn’t move, not for a while, not until he slowly and fluidly turned to the right, peered at us out of his right eye then straightened himself out again. After several more minutes, he disappeared below the dark water.
We all watched in anticipation, wondering if he was gone for good. But after several seconds, he
slowly reappeared, ever so slightly closer to us. I raised my window a little.
Sophia’s eyes widened in awe. And we stayed like that for several more minutes, us at the alligator, the gator at us.
I don’t have alligator dreams anymore. It’s been years since my last one. And it’s not because I’ve ever been able to find that stillness of mind, that elusive peace. It’s not even because I’ve been able to really let go of that old, heavy southern air, the quiet that seems to survive way out there in the swamps. Maybe one day the dreams will come back, rise from the depths of the dark, haunting me again, this time a little nearer, challenging whatever I’m hiding behind.
