That yearning
It was a small-framed beach cottage two blocks from the Sassafras River, built in the 1950s for lazy summer living. The house belonged to a friend of my mother’s, another poet, and was in a state of construction, the kitchen and living room gutted and draped in sawdust-coated plastic. The friend and her husband were on a sailing trip, a neighbor needed a sitter for her elderly cat, and would Mom like the job? It was the summer after Kevin died. My mother lived in a suburb of Washington, DC and I was in the city. We ached for Maryland’s Eastern Shore, for the cornfields and woods, for the roadside vegetable stands piled with corn and tomatoes. We missed river swimming and barefoot walks on tarry blacktop.
For more than half of their 18-year relationship, my mother and Kevin moved from place to place on the Eastern Shore, from the community on the Elk River where both my mother and I spent our childhood summers to a house on Smith Island in the Chesapeake Bay. When Kevin was diagnosed with myelofibrosis, Mom had just bought a red cottage in a neighborhood they eventually nicknamed Hatefulmoor. This was where Kevin insulted the neighbors, built curtain rods and trellises out of driftwood, and gathered beach glass to make jewelry while Mom made the money, prepared most of the meals, washed the dishes, and drove an hour each way to Wilmington and back for work. When that house slipped out of their fingers, they moved from place to place, to Stillpond and Chestertown, and points in between. In the end, it was hard to separate the place from the relationship, to disassociate the fights and cruelty with the landscape, with those long walks through fallow cornfields and along beach cliffs.
Kevin's absence hung over us that summer, the last six months of his illness hung over us, the horrible long hospitalization, the pain. We wanted the good parts back, the lingering dinners by candlelight, the conversations about philosophy and literature. We wanted the old times, the glint of Kevin's glasses across the table, the juice glasses of red wine warming in our hands. In the morning, we said, we would walk to the river, delight in the shock of water the color of late-summer moss, brown and green and cool in the delirious humidity.
The water was gorgeous. But the house was occupied. The living room and kitchen echoed with someone else's presence and every moment I was in the place I felt like I was being watched. The only habitable room was the bedroom, where my mother and I shared the bed and Kevin's son slept on a couch. We set up a fan in the window and tried to sleep, but the air moved in strange ways. I slept fitfully. One night Kevin's golden retriever, Woody, barked, a sudden sharp cry. My mother grabbed a flashlight and searched the house, but no one was there.
The physical ache of mourning -- the desire to see, hear, and touch the one who has gone away -- lingers. Our bodies mourn the loss. Was Kevin with us? Or did we just wish him there? It felt like he was present, hanging over our conversations. We were so dull and pedestrian without him. Maybe he came to mourn himself, the rush of being alive, what poet Marie Howe calls that yearning: "We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss -- we want more and more and then more of it."
My mother's friend had a large collection of poetry books in the bedroom, some purchased from Kevin during one of his purges. Mom removed them from the shelves. She scanned the pages, ran her fingers along the print. Some passages were heavily underlined and in the margin, Kevin's writing recorded his long-ago reactions.
"It's stupid to sell books when they really matter," she told me recently. "You don't know what you are giving away. It might be something you never can replace."
WHAT THE LIVING DO
by Marie Howe
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss--we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.
Image: I think this is the beach at "Hatefulmoor" in the early 1990s.
Remember part of me is you
Where it takes
me:
*A hot Delaware day, late
July or August of 1986, D. at the
construction site. He wears cut-off shorts
and a torn, sleeveless shirt, has wrapped a
red bandana around his head to catch the
sweat. Somehow on him sweat is sweet,
necessary, like the damp of a spring rain. D.
stands on a ladder at the roof line, swings
his hammer. On the backstroke, the claw end
meets his eyebrow, tearing a gash that
requires fifteen stitches. I wasn’t there,
but I can imagine it, the blood, the truck
ride to the emergency room, the endless bowls
of marijuana that he probably smoked to
counteract the dull throb. Later I held my
fingers above the stitches, lightly kissed
the jagged rays of black thread.
*D. at the wheel of the Newport Custom,
gunning it over 100 miles an hour on Town
Point Road, the flash of
grey-green cornstalks
rushing past
the window, the curve before we reached
the woods, cool and dark, my heart
pounding, the tape deck blasting
Manic
Mechanic. I cupped the wind, I
caught it, let it flow across my body to
his.
*Early on: waiting by the flicker of the
television set in the Little House, falling
asleep to Kung Fu or Fantasy Island reruns,
waiting until 1 a.m.. Waiting even later.
Just waiting, sometimes for nothing, a replay
of my waits of early childhood.
*Still early on: The weekend he rode his bike
home from college, logging almost 100 miles,
to wish me a happy sixteenth birthday. Me,
waiting. Him, appearing at 10:30 or so, a
reasonable hour, with a half-consumed bottle
of vodka. My present. He knew I would be
leaving Maryland soon, but he didn't know
why. He didn't find out until
after
the drama was over.
But it actually wasn't a photograph that
brought this back, it was a poem from one of
my Round Robin writing partners last week,
something about the love of men who work with
their hands. D. was (and still is, I presume)
a talented carpenter, a man who framed houses
and built furniture. Despite the endless
nostalgia of my brain, the way the past rolls
out of my fingers and clogs up my mind on a
daily basis, I don't think about him very
often. He's from the far-away past. I don't
wish I was back in Maryland living the life I
rejected when I was still a teenager, making
the roundtrip from home to grocery store to
liquor store and back again. And although I
look back on him with sweetness, the pain I
feel in writing this surprises me. It's a
secondhand ache, pain at his early treatment
of me that echoed my parents' treatment,
sadness at how I ended up treating him
ultimately.
I still puzzle over how people drift away
after love, after the intensity of the burn
is over. In early 2002, when my mother's
boyfriend Kevin was in for his final
hospitalization, I called D. to talk once or
twice. I called him because he was there
during the worst of my teenage years. He was
my closest friend then, the only insider. He
knew Kevin as a healthy, often cruel man. D.
was there through nights heated by kerosene
and electric heater, he held me when I cried,
and he cried in my arms when he found out
about my pregnancy after the fact. So I
called him from Kevin's hospital after a
particularly harrowing day. I was nervous,
paced in front of the wall of windows in the
Critical Care Unit hallway. We had an
awkward, didn't-I-used-to-know you
conversation. D. didn't remember much. Who
can blame him? It wasn't his intense life, it
was mine. I remain the only witness.
When old friends disappear, a bit of our
memories go with them. I mourn the shared
experience, the fading away. I wish I could
gather them all up, friends long gone, the
ex-boyfriends, the ex-husband. We would talk
and laugh again, would remind each other of
our once-live connection. I would pull them
with me into the present, link the people we
used to be to with who we are now. I would
tell them, "Remember part of me is you."
Image:
Pixelated D. in the Little House, Winter
1985/86. Some of my readers know this guy and
I feel a little strange for putting his
picture out there. Hence, the pixels.
Some of this is from a prompt,
"Rectangular."
A virulent strain of grief
And then there was what happened to Kevin.
I’ve written about Kevin,
my mother’s long-term boyfriend, here before,
in short bursts of roundabout language. He
came into our lives when I was fourteen and
nothing was ever really the same again. By
the time I was fifteen, I was living in the
Little House with disastrous results and he
and my mother were at the thin edge of
eighteen tumultuous years together. Kevin is
starting to lose his mythical qualities, has
become more human in my mind in the last
year, more culpable and weak. He was a bully,
really, a smart and witty bully, though that
of course was not the whole of him.
[Warning: The below goes
into detail about an illness and a harrowing
hospital stay and may be upsetting to some
readers.]
In March 2002, Kevin, 55 years old, died of,
well, it’s a little murky. He was in the
final stages of myelofibrosis,
a bone marrow disease, though it was probably
pneumonia that did that last dirty work. With
myelofibrosis, the bone marrow becomes
fibrous and hard. Blood production that
normally occurs in the bone marrow moves to
other organs -- the spleen, the liver -- in a
last-ditch effort to make blood, a phenomenon
with the poetic name extramedullary
hematopoesis. These organs try, but
ultimately fail, to make useful blood.
Instead, they produce bad blood, the cells
immature and misshapen, blood that does a
half-assed job of keeping the body healthy.
People with myelofibrosis are often anemic;
they bruise easily and are susceptible to
infection and bone pain. While there are
drugs to manage this disease, there is no
cure outside of a stem cell transplant, which
is always a dicey position. If you have it,
one way or another, myelofibrosis will
eventually kill you. Or more accurately, an
infection will kill you. Or you will develop
leukemia. Or you will develop a wasting
illness. Or your liver will cease to work
(because of the extramedullary hematopoesis).
Before March 2002, before we called in
hospice and accepted the fact that Kevin’s
death was imminent, Kevin spent six months in
the hospital, nearly all of it in the
Critical Care Unit (like an intensive care
unit) or a unit one step below Critical Care.
Trying to write about that time in a way that
makes any sense is impossible. I’ve tried it,
tried to come up with a timeline and a reason
why he ended up on a ventilator (aka
respirator) shortly after he was admitted and
how early on we thought he was going to
slowly bleed to death until a miracle worker
hematologist/oncologist came up with a genius
solution to get Kevin’s blood to clot, and
how Kevin couldn’t swallow because his
epiglottis was damaged from his emergency
intubations, so he couldn’t eat and how there
was a doctor we called Dr. Death because he
insisted on telling Kevin he wasn’t going to
make it, let alone walk again (he was right
on the former, wrong on the latter). Kevin
was on the vent/off the vent. He kept on
getting pneumonia. He was hooked up to tubes
and lines, trapped. But alive.
Fall 2001 was full of death and fire, of
anthrax scares and work closures, of mail
that came to the federal library where I
worked months old, crispy and irradiated. It
was the beginning of Kevin’s long end, a
journey that required great vigilance on my
mother’s part and the amazing efforts of a
large number of doctors and nurses. Being in
CCU for six months is incredibly intense,
all-encompassing, and stressful, and when a
patient is as fragile as Kevin was,
you have
to be vigilant.
It isn’t that the professionals aren’t
competent, it’s just that they want to do
things, think that action is always the best
course. And sometimes it isn’t.
When I sat down to start my NaNoWriMo novel,
all those details of his hospitalization came
out, details I have stored away for years:
the sound of the ventilator and the beeps of
IVs that need attention; the smell of
pneumonic mucus as I suctioned it out of
Kevin's trach; the image of Kevin trapped
under a blanket of tubes and devices, so
fragile you didn't want to touch him (and the
too-late knowledge that he must have been
desperate for touch); the horrors of his
frequent intubations, emergency procedures
where doctors had to essentially jam an air
tube down his throat after his oxygen levels
dropped precipitously; the rushed meals at
Taco Bell Express, knowing we had to get back
and that eating in front of him when he was
getting his food, this green sludge, through
a stomach tube would have been horribly
cruel; how skinny, impossibly skinny he
became. How, after being bedridden and
hospitalized for three months, he took his
80-pound frame and a walker and did halting
laps around the CCU, in an act of pure will.
So all this came spewing out last month,
disguised under a new premise with a much
younger protagonist. After the month was over
and the first draft off my head, I realized I
had a lot of legwork to do. For example, I
know next to nothing about the disease I had
chosen to grace my unlucky character with.
And what do I know, really, about parental
grief, which is a particularly virulent
strain? I've been doing research, reading
books and looking at websites. There is one
blog out there, very detailed and
well-written, created by a mother who was
chronicling her little boy's fight against
cancer. That little boy died in September.
The whole thing is horribly sad (and as I
read it, I wonder: why, exactly, am I doing
this?).
When you are in the middle of a
life-and-death-struggle, the intensity of
keeping someone alive, of trying to make them
well, it's all you can think about.
Everything becomes medical and you find out
all you can. You learn about the strength of
nurses and the support system that crops up
in a hospital. You learn to live with things
you never thought were possible before. You
are steeped in the smells and sounds of
illness and it feels like it will never end.
You don’t want it to end with death, but
sometimes it does and you have to let go of
the struggle. I read this blog and I cry, for
this family and the little boy that will
never grow up. I hope that I can do justice
to him and to Kevin and to all the people who
have experienced such prolonged pain.
The kid at Kevin's grave on Maryland's
Eastern Shore, April 2009.
Perhaps this is an impossibly tall order.
What I'm looking for now is authenticity, a
way to write something that sings and is true
and real, that doesn't exploit illness as a
book topic, but brings it to life and honors
those that have gone before us.
It's daunting.
Top
image: Kevin at Georgetown University
Hospital, January 2002, about three months
before he died.
Prognostication
In my dreams, the dead are silent. I’ve never
had a good conversation with a single one of
them, just offer my apologies, bake the
bread, pour the coffee. What is the guilt
about? The dead no longer care about my
transgressions. Isn’t it enough that I hold
them here in my subconscious, treat them as
gently as I would a freshly-laid egg?
But this dream was different. We were going
to visit Kevin, who has been gone for over
seven years now. As in real life, I was
nervous: would I react properly to him? Would
he toss the verbal slings, so subtle and
cutting, if I didn’t pick up on something, if
I reacted too slowly? Or would he sit there,
blue eyes glowing, as my mother and I circled
him like butterflies, flitting here and there
in our attempts to placate?
Kevin spoke. He used the ethereal language of
dreams, of those who are now ashes and light,
but in that nasal New Jersey accent that I
haven’t been able to replicate in my mind for
years. And he was funny, so funny, because
Kevin was
bitingly funny.
I laughed and realized how much I missed him,
how much time had gone by and then I woke up,
not remembering a word of his complicated
meta-joke.
Time flies on and I die a little every day,
lose another connection, feel the pull of a
long-ago past. Yet my grandfather still shows
up at the old house. I smell his cigarettes,
breathe in sawdust, too-sweet coffee and
turpentine. He waits in his cell of a room, a
voiceless old man in a flannel robe, unshaven
and glassy eyed. I rush past the sink filled
with dirty dishes, walk a path of slate to
get to a mailbox that hasn't been opened in
years. Sometimes we take his car for a
complicated drive to Christiana. Maybe we are
heading to the hospital, waiting for someone
to hand me a small bundle, something I've
forgotten.
The dead appear without explanation or
warning. Carolin greets me in a too-bright
dorm basement, fixes me with intense eyes.
David Anderson sits in a classroom, shoeless,
staring at the algebra equation on the board.
Frank the cat meows for food that I don't
have. And my grandmother, the one I ache to
see, is sick of my inattention and has
stopped showing up at all.
Someday, no one will know that I was sixteen
and angry once. They will remember an old
woman deeply lined, forgetful, with
clouded-over eyes, demanding and harmless.
Inconsequential. As though I had been born
without desire, without the power to wound.
Image: Postcard, date
unknown.
My hands untied
Kevin, summer of 1984.
Enter spring–let's say April–1984, West Street, Wilmington, Delaware.
Birds are singing. The tulips and pansies in our raised beds are starting to bloom. Recent March winds have deposited the remnants of chaos, muddied papers, dead leaves and tree limbs, in the alleyway. The winds lifted deck chairs against back fences, turned over plastic flower pots, battered pedestrians. They blew Kevin the poet-carpenter, intellectual powerhouse and gin guzzler, in down the street, saluted him with a flurry of cherry blossoms.
My mother invites the new neighbor over for dinner. He seems strange, a little awkward in his old-fashioned glasses, his blue eyes intense and clear through Coke bottle lenses. Kevin speaks with a touch of New Jersey nasal and renovates and flips houses for a living. He arrives lean and tanned, armed with words of sharpened steel and a large bottle of Gordon’s, his old blue merle collie Barney by his side.
What could I do? I was fourteen. The last guy in our house didn’t even speak when I was at the table.
Here’s what I didn’t do: talk. Smile. Instead I just sat and shoveled in the food, exuded resentment, made infrequent eye contact. Maybe I smirked. And Kevin, a man I had just met, called me on it.
“What’s your problem? You’re just sitting there, sucking all the air out of the room.”
I have no memory of my response.
It wasn’t until yesterday, as I was attempting to capture this pivotal moment yet again, looking over what I’d written almost a year ago on that same dinner, that I realized: I blame myself. Reading over my early attempts is somewhat painful. I was straining to describe that night, to explain Kevin’s poetic rockstar persona and my mother’s deadly attraction to him, to explain my role in my own rejection. The end of parenting, my premature emancipation, the series of adult situations I got into before my time? Culpa. Mea culpa. I should have put on the charm, talked, given a little bit that night. I should have been someone else.
If I had won Kevin over that evening, maybe my mother would have stayed engaged in my life. She might never have started bringing dinner to him, eating in his dusty dining room every night while I ate alone. I wouldn’t have begun wandering the Wilmington streets after dark, wobbly with purloined gin, smoking unfiltered cloves and blasting the Dead Kennedys from my Walkman. The Little House would have stayed empty. The end of innocence could have been put off for another couple of years. If I were a better person, a different person, no one would have told me that I was evil, the root cause of family turmoil.
I know. I know. My brain tells my heart that it would have made absolutely no difference in the outcome if I had smiled or curtseyed or made insightful conversation about Nietzsche and Wordsworth. To be honest, until yesterday, I didn't know I felt this way. I blame myself.
Why do children take responsibility for things over which they have no control? Why do adults shift the blame to the helpless? And why, when we molt and grow and leave our child forms behind, does this sense of responsibility for our own small fates, this idea of being the masters of our abuse (if only I were nicer or less shy or stronger ...) carry on into our adult life?
The child decides that she is the cause of her mistreatment. The adult lets those early experiences dictate her behavior. We find ourselves recreating situations again and again, little kids in the guise of adulthood, sifting our lives through the rusty emotional sieve of the formerly helpless. We choose partners who fit into old scenarios, make decisions based on faulty data, try to get it right this time. With our motives hidden and our reasons obscured, the do-overs usually fail. Then? Familiar pain and reinforcement of our feelings of worthlessness.
Or maybe it's just me who's felt this way. Yes, I've done this, set up the scene, chosen guys who reject who I am, who blame me for their own shortcomings. I've blundered my way through friendships, the sullen fourteen year old in a thirty-year-old's clothing. And although I have stopped replaying the same scenes over and over again, I still have an overarching sense of responsibility for the trajectory of my childhood. My invisible scars feel completely self-imposed, my exposure of them a shameful confession. I feel rotten from the inside, capable of destroying entire worlds. Run from me before I drag you into the muck!
But I'm not that way. I'm not.
So I'm writing my path to self-acceptance, still trying to forgive myself and my family, to look at the world through clean eyes. I don't want to shift blame. I want to let go of the entire concept of it. After all, I'm here, alive, doing so much better than I ever thought I would be. It's time to let go, to untie my hands and live fully.
I figure I'm about 20% there. Maybe more. And if I can do it, you can too.
Coming up: February's blog, a return to the Maureen story (we'll skip over the guess who's coming to dinner segment), and some awards. Not necessarily in that order.
Not fade away
Mick Jagger, circa 1969, from Rolling
Stone.
The centerpiece of
Thanksgiving dinner was a rockfish one year.
Kevin had caught it himself, straight from
the Chesapeake Bay. Mom stuffed it with
breadcrumbs spiked with chopped fennel and
onion, and there were mashed potatoes,
cranberries, and a nod to green, string beans
on the side.
We ate by candlelight, as usual, talked about
politics as usual. I wish I could go back and
capture those conversations, remember the
deep level jokes and high level discussions.
Almost any dinner with my mother and Kevin
was devoted to real conversation and humor,
sometimes dipping into reminiscence. It was
the closest we ever came to feeling like a
family.
Like the night a couple of years before Kevin
got sick, when he was just starting his PhD
program at Penn, and Augie the collie was a
puppy. I had taken the train from DC to
Wilmington to visit and things were unusually
smooth, no arguments, very little baiting. We
ate sautéed chicken over vermicelli in the
candlelight. The entire dish was sprinkled
with breadcrumbs toasted in olive oil,
garlicky and herby and delicious.
The conversation turned to the sixties. Kevin
had taken a year off from college in 1966
after being busted for selling marijuana (a
setup, he claimed) and he headed off to
California, hitchhiked down the coast. He
talked about Dylan going electric, mentioned
the rivalry between the namby pamby Beatles
devotees and the rebellious Rolling Stones
fans. There was talk of high school dances,
the moves and the moments. The radio was
playing music from that era and he and Mom
started to slow dance as I watched from the
table.
What do you do when a
family culture dies? When a powerful
personality disappears? The center did not
hold. We’re still trying to create our own
gravity.
Two ways of looking at it
I wish I could explain the
importance of the notebook. It’s one of those
old black and white composition books, barely
held together by 45-year old glue and
stitching, the edges of the pages the color
of dead oak leaves, cured by time. An
artifact, a little piece of Kevin,
half-filled with poems of late adolescence,
poems that he probably wrote in his senior
year of high school. They are short and
generally angry, each one typewritten and
stapled or taped to the front of a page.
If I could explain the importance of the
notebook, maybe I could explain the
importance of Kevin. How can someone who
tried to destroy me, who battered my mother
emotionally, be so key to who I am? Kevin was
extraordinary. I’ve never met anyone like
him, a man who pushed himself out of a
childhood of emotional and physical abuse and
formed a self out of will and ashes. He was a
poet, a self-taught carpenter, a working
class intellectual. In the midst of
fatal
illness, he completed his
dissertation and received a PhD. He was
also so wickedly funny that my mother and
I still laugh when we remember his stories
and jokes.
Kevin sometimes ripped us to shreds with that
knife-like wit. He was an active participant
in the neglect that led to my pregnancy at
sixteen. Whenever he saw hypocrisy or hidden
motive – which was often – he skewered the
hypocrite, uncloaked the motive. His ability
to see the darkness in himself and others
never took into account the overwhelming
goodness we each have, the lightness that
makes up most of who we are.
I have a lot of empathy for him, whose
cruelty and black math was caused by a
childhood of pain and anger, but it probably
helps that he is off stage now, six years
dead. It was a long and painful exit. Kevin
didn’t deserve to suffer, to be hospitalized
for six months, to have his body whittled
down to 80 skeletal pounds. He didn’t deserve
to lose his ability to swallow and sometimes
to breathe unassisted. No one deserves what
happened to Kevin. But that time of suffering
was also a time to make peace. I was at the
hospital for hours almost every day, there
for both him and my mother, keeping company,
being a second set of eyes to make sure no
mistakes were made. I was there for comfort.
It gave me a chance to prove my humanity, to
show that we all have the ability to be good.
Even him. Even me.
Sometimes I still believe it. But writing
that paragraph about how I benefited from
Kevin’s suffering leaves me with a dirty
feeling, as though I relished the opportunity
to be redeemed through his pain. It wasn’t
like that. I was there because I wanted to
be, couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.
Kevin’s final day stretched
and stretched from early morning into late
afternoon. A small group of family gathered
in his hospice room and listened to him wind
down, heard the silent spaces grow between
each breath, watched his heart flutter out
from under his ribcage. Outside, daffodils
were pushing through once-frozen ground and
the forsythia was in bloom. The world was
coming to life again as we sat and waited for
death.
It came with a dramatic final exhale followed
by dead quiet. The dog broke the silence with
a bark, my mother reached for me and Kevin’s
son, held us and cried. Mom later said she
felt Kevin’s energy leave his body, had an
image of him walking along a river path
against a cloudless sky, his old collie Augie
by his side. When Kevin's brother thanked me
for my presence, I said, "I'm so glad we had
this time," and immediately regretted it.
What was I saying? Those six months of dying
were great? What a wonderful opportunity for
me?
That night I woke up after midnight to the
pressure of Kevin’s hand on mine, a grateful
and loving presence. Don’t be hard on
yourself. You were there for me. Thank
you.
Then he was gone.
Two
Ways of Looking at It
Kevin Sheehan (Knife Gift)
The magician, who is about to perform,
is wearing a suit which belongs to
his father. No one is supposed to know
that he is not his father. His first
trick, which involves some
simple sleight-of-hand, is well-received.
he bows, and the suit collapses.
And what if I would not grow up,
would not perform
the necessary murder. So what.
Was it any of your business?
I chose to be the child, hurt
and unhurting, but my body,
my beauty, betrayed me.
Louise Peevish
"Oh, Louise is being peevish again," we'd say. "Louise Peevish."
It was the move back to Maryland that did her
in. There were stories of other dogs that had
cracked after hearing the tests at
Aberdeen Proving
Ground, dogs that pushed their
way through second story window screens,
desperate to escape the sounds of the bomb
and munitions tests across the river. The
aural bombardment contributed to Louise’s
general nervousness, but now when a
thunderstorm blew through town, she was
absolutely inconsolable. No drug calmed
her. By the time you got the pill down,
the storm had passed.
One afternoon, my mother drove with Louise to
the local grocery store. Mom rolled the
windows down a safe distance, locked the
doors, and entered the market.
She was filling a plastic bag with green
beans when she heard a little girl’s voice.
“Look, Mom, there’s a dog shopping in the
Acme.”
“Not my dog,” thought Mom, as she weighed the
beans and continued to the toiletry aisle.
The little girl spoke again. “Look, Mom, the
dog is still shopping in the Acme!”
“Not my dog,” thought Mom again. She glanced
past the row of shampoos to the plate glass
windows – were those thunderclaps she heard?
– when she saw Louise, panting heavily, on
the run from one of our favorite check-out
guys, a kid who worked his way up from bagger
and always made friendly conversation. Louise
darted for the automatic doors, heading along
the sidewalk in the direction of the
Chat-n-Chew.
Abandoning her cart, Mom also ran for the
door. Outside, storm clouds were gathering
force. She watched Louise scatter a school of
carpenters, men in dirty jeans and mud-caked
work boots, as the dog passed the restaurant
and made a left into the hardware store. Mom
followed, pushing past customers, until she
found Louise in the back of the store,
trembling by the PVC piping.
My mother stayed there with her until the
storm passed, then walked her back to the car
and drove home, sans groceries. Apparently,
the dog panicked when she heard the
approaching thunder, pushed through an open
car window and went looking for Mom. We were
grateful that she wasn't hit by a car.
About two years after the Acme incident, I
came home from grad school for a visit.
Things were grim. Kevin, my mother’s
long-term boyfriend, had been diagnosed with
a rare bone marrow disease. My mother was
close to declaring bankruptcy. And Louise was
getting more peevish and skittish.
Her fits of panic weren't limited to
thunderstorms; now the dulled explosions from
Aberdeen were having a similar effect. She
was terrified. If no one was home, she would
attempt to escape -- Mom was afraid she would
force her way through a closed window,
pictured a return home to bloodied shards of
glass and no dog. If someone was home, she
would scratch and pace, pant and whine.
Louise was suffering.
I went with my mother to the appointment. We
sat with Louise, stroked her as the vet
depressed the needle. It was over quickly.
On the ride home, we didn't speak.
A Dream of the Snow
By the time he died, after eight years of illness, we had reached a peace. I loved him like a father.
Today would have been Kevin's 62nd birthday. (My mother just called to tell me she had a pain in the neck, just like she has every year on his birthday. Ah, the tension continues even after death . . .)
In honor of Kevin, I am posting one of his poems, "A Dream of the Snow." For many months after his death six years ago, my mother had this as her voice mail greeting. She got a lot of hang-ups.
A Dream of the Snow
From Knife Gift
by Kevin
Sheehan
For a long time I hid
while my body grew,
watched while it learned
a hard way to speak
till the clothes that it wore
no longer fit me
and I could not understand
a word of its speech.
For a long time I slept
while my body dreamed,
cried when it married, moved
away. Now I dream alone
in the room where we played.
Not of the fields, but the falling,
not of the cold, but the coming down,
my body is a dream of the snow.
First time in weeks ...
The K story is changing. All of the sudden, there I am, with opinions and experiences and a viewpoint. K's arrival wasn't the first thing to ever happen to us. He stepped into a context, into a scene that needs to be set. And for this, I have to include my mother's second husband and the quirks of our great triumvirate. Without getting into it too much.
What is lost -- a tight, arid focus -- is worth losing. It's funnier, too. And maybe it's really about me anyway, right?
Making it personal
Yesterday, I read through what I've completed of my brick house. I ended up feeling as though I had swallowed a brick (and I now wonder how far I can take this analogy). It is dense stuff, well-crafted paragraphs that describe them, but as a story are somewhat monotonous. It lacks life. My mother is right -- this is about my experience, is my attempt to exculpate them, and to get over the past. So I have to jump back into the story, become the third character.
I also have to add some real life. That's difficult. The fights, well, they kind of blend together in my mind, though there are some very memorable ones. The conversations -- most of them are gone, too. But the past can be conjured, and sometimes impressions are better than facts.
The hospital and hospice: they are still fresh. I'm beginning to wonder how much of my story will be that, the time when I could be there so unconditionally, providing support, showing that I was a good person. That wasn't my intention, to focus on that time. But it was the beginning of forgiveness and understanding.
Enough navel-gazing for tonight.