Queen Anne’s Lace
corn
cattails
Oxford
Montezuma
Brooklyn
go
West, young man
the man once said once
upon a time
this was the West
That’s what I wrote in my head on the way to Ministries Retreat. I was there to make a little video.
My grandfather, who had left my grandmother many years before, killed himself when I was three months old. I never met him, though I’m told he heard my babbling over the phone. My father killed himself when I was five and a half. I have two friends I’ve known long enough that they remember my father, at least a bit. One has never met her father, as her mother left him before she was born. The other has a father who barely acknowledges her and who was never married to her mother, though he has been married to a number of other people over the years.
I’ve never been too keen on Father’s Day as a result. I pass it off as part of my eternal hatred of holidays perpetuated by the greeting card industry, but in point of fact, I have perhaps understandably mixed feelings about the whole notion of fatherhood, and precious little experience with it myself.
When I was in fourth grade, there was a girl in our school whose mother was dying of cancer. We all made cards for her, at the instruction of our teachers, and everyone was terribly solicitous toward her. It was terrible for her — I knew that even then — but at the time my primary emotion was envy. She had a parent dying and people knew about it and understood it. Her mother was dying for a reason. I thought nobody knew how my father died, and I didn’t want anyone to find out. I was convinced it would simply brand me as crazy.
In years since, of course, I’ve come to know many good fathers — fathers of friends, and, now that I am older, friends who are fathers. They are to a man good men and good fathers, and I’m honored to have their friendship.
And I was lucky in many ways: I did not have my father for long, but for the five and a half years he was here, I had the best father a little girl could ever have wanted. He was never the dependable parent — he was famous for running out of gas, or for getting on the wrong bus, or for forgetting crucial things like my breakfast — but he was good and true in many other ways, and he loved me and he loved my friends, and he did some of the things their fathers were not there to do, giving them rides home and taking us to story time at the public library, and buying us rainbow sherbet afterwards.
But on this Father’s Day I’d like to take a moment to remember absent fathers, difficult fathers, even bad fathers. We carry their genes with us, even if we don’t know how or what they mean. I’ve been told I wash my hands the way my father did, for instance, and I know that I got his hair, and his temper. Who knows what other bits of him are lodged within me, or what bits of the fathers they never knew are lodged within my friends?
Those of us without fathers still, somewhere, had a father, and I believe we still honor that, or that we have to find some way to, because you can’t, as Malcolm X once said, hate the root of the thing and not hate the thing itself. I can’t, of course, actually speak for anyone else here, but I cannot hate my father. He was difficult at the best of times, and of course he left me in the most final way possible. But I cannot, and do not, hate him.
And so today I remember John M. Crossett Jr., professor, printer, doubles tennis player, drinker, pipe smoker, tyrant, and, most importantly, father. Much love to you, Daddy, wherever you are.
I was taught to swim crawl in 6/8 time. Your legs were to be ramrod straight, working up and down like a pair of metronomes. ONE two three FOUR five six. On one your right arm hit the water; on two and three it pulled you forward until suddenly on four your left arm hit, and all the while your legs were beating away, one two three, four five six, one two three, four five six. Your arms came up in a particular way, too: elbow first out of the water, and then hand arching forward. You turned just your head to breathe, not your shoulders or any of the rest of your body. And your legs kept going in time, one two three, four five six, one two three, four five six.
I have a hard time referring to crawl as freestyle.
After age twelve, I stopped taking swimming classes at camp and just swam laps on my own. For several years, I stopped swimming crawl at all. It was all breaststroke all the time for me, with occasional lapses into sidestroke or my very favorite swimming guilty pleasure, elementary backstroke. (That had instructions, too: monkey! airplane! soldier! monkey! airplane! soldier! But you got to lie on your back when you did it, and the instructions were fun.)
Somehow, though, I got tempted back into crawl. Tempted might be the wrong word. I felt I should swim it. I was ashamed of not being able to do it. There I was, down at the docks every day, logging in ten or even twenty miles in a summer, and I wasn’t swimming crawl? It seemed terrible. So I started thinking about it again.
Then I tried to do it.
It was horrible. I was out of breath and just yards from the dock (we swam between two docks that were far enough apart that it took three laps to cover a quarter mile. It was wonderful, except of course when you were running out of breath). I must have given up for awhile.
Then I tried again but decided to maybe ditch the whole 6/8 kicking thing. No one was watching me, and I wasn’t in class. Maybe they wouldn’t notice if I didn’t kick in time, or if I kicked less. Then one day I wondered what would happen if I didn’t kick at all. That was the day I discovered what is now my very favorite nonexistent stroke: crawl arms. You just do the arms for crawl, and you don’t kick. I swam that way for years. I still swim that way a lot of the time. A lap of crawl arms, a lap of breaststroke: that’s my pool routine these days. I’m a grownup now, and really nobody cares how I swim.
I was thinking about all of this as I was swimming this morning, trying, as I occasionally do, a little of the old 6/8 time crawl and scoffing silently to myself at the people who bend their knees when doing flutter kick. (Of course they’re all faster than I am — everyone is — but I have to do something to maintain my sense of swimming prowess.) I love crawl arms, and it’s how I mostly swim, but I know in my heart of hearts it isn’t really enough for me. Back when I was a teenager, I gradually worked my way up from crawl arms to something more like real crawl. My goal was to do a quarter mile of real crawl, which was one of the requirements for the next swimming and canoeing honor, the one I wasn’t going for because it involved diving, which I knew I couldn’t do, and canoeing with a single partner all summer, and I didn’t have any friends. But I wanted to see if I could do this part.
I did, finally, one summer. One quarter mile of crawl. Not in 6/8 time, but kicking all the way. I wanted some notice or some recognition, but I’m not sure I even ever told anyone. I’d never done it before, and I’ve never done it since. I’ve slacked off, instead. There were years when I didn’t swim at all.
Now I’m a regular — well, as regular as I am about anything. One or two or three days a week I’m at the pool, doing my half mile. Crawl arms, breaststroke, crawl arms, breaststroke, and once in a great while a foray into actual crawl. This morning, after my 6/8 time experiment, I decided to do a breathing-on-the-other-side experiment, because I also do yoga, and you’re always supposed to do everything on each side there. It was a disaster. I stopped before they’d think I was drowning. I simply cannot breathe turning my head to the left. Somehow, though I can easily look over my left should here on dry land, I cannot do it in the water.
I am not heavily into challenging myself. I live again in the place I grew up in part because, when thinking about moving back to the Midwest, I thought that at least then I could go back to using the same tire place and the same coop and going to the same DMV that I’m used to, and I wouldn’t have to find all those things all over again in yet another new town. I’ve never been one to push on to bag a peak when hiking, and I almost undoubtedly ride the clutch too much when driving stick shift. (I want to be one of those people who prefers driving stick, but I think really I’m just not.)
I’ve been swimming again regularly now for a few years, and once in awhile I get the idea that I ought to try to accomplish something: swim a certain distance, learn butterfly, get back up to a quarter mile of crawl. But I don’t. But I do keep swimming, getting back in the pool, pulling myself back and forth through the water with my own arms and legs, never getting really much faster or much slower, just going back and back and back again, like Camus’s happy version of Sisyphus, who always has something to do, in a place where no one can ask me to do anything else.
I’ve been driving around town — specifically my town, my home town, this town of Iowa City that I so recently moved back to after seven years away. I’ve been driving around town, and I’ve been thinking of how to answer the question posed to me by a friend recently — posed by a lot of people, actually — about what it’s like to be back, and how it’s different from Wyoming. I haven’t had much of an answer for them. I drive more places here. Things are more available and yet strangely more trouble to get, perhaps because the possibility of getting them is easier, and so it seems harder to do without. It is not nearly as sunny. But these didn’t seem like answers. Then yesterday, while not driving, I heard — that is really heard — this Dresden Dolls song [bonus: excellent live version on YouTube].
i’ve been driving around town
with my head spinning around
everywhere i look i see
your ’96 jeep cherokee. . . .the number of them is insane
every exit’s an
ex-boyfriend memory lane
every major street’s
a minor heart attack. . . .
The singer is talking about being haunted by an old relationship in the form of a Jeep. Coming back to your home town is just like that, except that instead of a single relationship, it’s almost everything that happened in the first twenty-seven years of your life, and instead of a Jeep, it’s every fucking house and building and alley and tree you pass.
It’s not all bad. I’ve had many good times in this town — more good than bad, on the whole. But it’s all so there. It’s like having an Advent calendar where every day you open a door, but instead of an unknown surprise you get the surprise of recognition, the thing you’ve known but not thought about, or the thing you used to know but don’t quite any more because the color has changed, or the thing that you keep trying to forget. Everyone drives the same truck, but of course it’s not the same truck, because though they all remind you of the truck, none of them is it. Even the truck itself is no longer the truck it once was. And yet they all have an emotional impact like being hit by a truck. There’s philosophy in all of this, of course — the pleasure of recognition and the same river twice and something about reality and illusion and the idea of objects and memory and maybe even mechanical reproduction and other things that I don’t really understand because I never actually studied philosophy or literary theory and all I got out of reading Foucault is people have come up with some pretty appalling ways to treat other human beings.
But I’m a primary text kind of girl, and this city seems to be my primary text, for all that it changes.
When she was pregnant with me, my mother spent a lot of time in this city trying to pin down a text about a river. (That the irony and the symbolism of this is only now striking me is perhaps as good an argument as any for why we must come back over and over to these texts before they exhaust what they have to teach us.) The river was the Mississippi; the text was Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi. Her job was to find every version of the text she could and figure out whether Twain meant to use a semi colon or a comma, whether he preferred school house or school-house or schoolhouse, whether he meant blackness or darkness. The result was this three volume behemoth that you can get from the University of Iowa library (it was supposed to be published as part of a big project, but the big project ran out of money). She found out — or decided — what Twain meant to write in all those instances, and now that text is fixed, very much unlike the river he wrote about, which, as he acknowledged, was changing even as he wrote.
My town has a river that feeds into the Mississippi, and like the Mississippi, it has changed. And it has changed my town, flooding badly twice in my life, once in the summer of 1993, when I lived here, and once just a few years ago, when I was in Wyoming. That second flood in particular changed things. The whole music and art complex at the University was flooded, and many of those departments are still in temporary quarters, some of which have become semi-permanent. The buildings are still there, but they may never again be the buildings I used to run around in as a kid, pounding on pianos and reading the graffiti in open practice rooms and writing melodies on the chalkboards pre-printed with musical staffs.
The old houses around downtown that have been divided up into apartments are still there, but I can no longer aspire to be a twentysomething graduate student living in one of them, because I’ve done that, and I am older now, and changed.
So I just drive around, looking at the houses where I once knew people and the buildings I once ran around in and the things that ought to be there that aren’t there any more and the things that never were there that have now appeared. And I run into people whom I knew, or who knew me, or know my mother, whose lives intersected with mine back when both our lives were different. And people say to me, “Oh, small world!” or sometimes, “Small town,” and those are true, of course, but the feeling is not that. It’s that I’m continually surprised that the past is not prologue, as someone in Shakespeare said, or not just prologue. It is also present.
When I was seventeen, I read Mrs. Dalloway for the first time, and I was floored by it. Floored for a lot of reasons, but floored mostly that there was Mrs. Dalloway, fifty years old, with a husband and a daughter and a house and a party to throw, and she spends a big chunk of the book thinking about the summer she was eighteen. Grown ups were so dismissive of teenagers when I was one that I assumed they must be dismissive of their own teenage years as well. And yet here was proof — proof at least that in fiction, at least in this case, those years were still there. You can go home again. You do go home again, like it or not, or home comes back to you, willy-nilly.
A lot of people move away from their home towns for just this reason. It keeps you, at least, from seeing the Jeep. But I can’t seem to do that. I keep looking — looking at those houses and alleys and buildings and trees. So yeah. Don’t tell me if you get another girl, baby. Just tell me if you get another car. I’ll be looking.
Half a century later, I barely recognize it
when I search the address on Google Maps
and, via “Street view,” find myself face to face—foliage overgrown, facade remodeled and painted
a drab brown. I click to zoom: light hits
one of the windows. I can almost see what’s inside.–from “9773 Comanche Ave.” by David Trinidad
None of my childhood homes are available on Google’s street view yet, which amuses me, as the house I’m in now, in podunksville, is there. But I discovered in my search that one of them, the house we moved to when I was eight and stayed in till I was twelve, is for sale. It’s funny to see your old house, many owners and coats of paint later, for sale, staged by some real estate agent, some things gone, some of the features you added–the wood floors upstairs–now advertised, the window of your bedroom over the garage where you once snuck out at night. I remember helping write copy for the ad we placed for that house when we sold it so long ago. The current ad, sadly, preserves none of my excellent phrasing about the nearness to the park and the nature of the trees in the yard. (Actually, I doubt those things made in to the ad when I was twelve, either, but my mother was good at humoring me.)
The park is still there, but the trees have changed, and the fence is gone, and house is painted a different color. It looks better now, in truth, but it’s not a house I really loved at the time or would ever want to go back to. No, the house I keep hoping to find again, the rooms I keep searching for, the place that still truly says home to me is the house we lived in when I was very, very little, when my father was still alive.
The house had a great many problems, but at ages zero through four, they were mostly lost on me. I did not notice that we had only a clawfoot tub in the bathroom, and that if you wanted to take a shower, you were relegated to a Sears shower stall in the kitchen. I did not notice the peeling wallpaper, the drafts, the door that led outside to a steep dropoff, which confused my mother for many years until the people who eventually bought the house restored the wraparound porch, and suddenly a second door onto the porch made sense. I didn’t really notice any of this: it was just the house where we lived.
It was a block and a half from the college where my father taught. The college, in a sort of ür-liberal arts college fashion, sat on top of a hill, and at the bottom of the hill, by the sidewalk, was a stone wall that functioned as a sort of terrace between the town and the college proper. In my memory, it is a very tall stone wall, although since I have been back, I realize it is perhaps two feet at most. But in the autumn when I was very little, my father and I would stand or sit on the wall with tall sticks and “fish” for leaves. It is the only fishing I have ever done, and I hesitate to do any real fishing for fear that it would not live up to the original.
There was a garage to the side of the house — one year my father bought my mother an automatic garage door opener for her birthday, and she was deeply irked — and a barn behind it, leftover from when the house was built, in the 1880s, and people still needed barns. It served no real barnlike function, but it did house a great many students bicycles during the winter months. It was a sort of bicycle stable — all late 1970s racing bikes, the sort that Jennifer Beals rode in Flashdance – a thoroughbred stable of bikes. Between the barn and the house my mother had a vegetable garden, and we had a lawn where our friends planted a cherry tree in honor of my christening. The cherry tree is long gone now. Our tenants after we moved to Iowa City kept trying to start cuttings from it for us, but they never survived, and the tree eventually fell to the ravages of time, but for many years our neighbors Dr. John and Mrs. Mary made cherry pies from its harvest every year.
We had two living rooms in the house in Mount Vernon: I suppose at one time they were a front and back parlor. The front living room is where my parents entertained, and I was not allowed to have my toys in there, although I was allowed to hang around when people came over, at least for awhile. I was puzzled by grown up drinks — they sat there with what seemed to me rather small glasses of fluid and then drank them for hours. I would have drained a cup like that in seconds flat. Given the preponderance of alcoholics in academia, and the story my mother tells of a night when they had a party and everyone decided suddenly it would be a good idea to go to Iowa City, twenty miles away, and so they all did, piling into cars and leaving the lights and the stereo on and the doors wide open, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them were draining their glasses of bourbon in seconds flat, but I never saw it. They seemed to sip.
The back living room contained a number of books, an odd oil portrait of my mother that my parents won at a raffle or auction of some sort, and the corner that was my father’s–a Swedish modern armchair and a hassock, his pipestand, and a small black and white television where he watched football and tennis. I spent as much time as possible sitting on his lap, unless of course my mother was baking, or I needed a balloon that Daddy had blown up tied off, in which case I had to get my mother to do it.
My room, when my parents moved into the house, had had red walls and bright red shag carpeting. My mother decided this was not the place for a baby, and so they had it recarpeted in a soft green, and they painted the walls white, except for one wall that was a pale green, as they’d run out of white paint. The drapes were a dark green and white pattern. I remember the house as having arched windows, although I realize now it was simply that there were arched shapes inlaid in the rectangular windows. My parents slept down the hall from me, and it was my great goal in life to convince them that I was a cat so I could sleep on the bed. Our cat Moby Tom was allowed to sleep on their bed, but I was not, which struck me as unfair, so I would crawl up and curl up as small as I possibly could.
We were poor when we lived in that house, or so I am told. My mother grew vegetables and made applesauce from windfall apples and made her own Bisquick and made all our bread, though that had more to do with my father’s unwillingness to eat storebought bread than with money saving. It was the first and only house my father ever owned, purchased in his late 40s or early 50s, and when we moved to a rental house in Iowa City, he insisted that we had to rent it out, too, instead of selling, because he couldn’t bear to part with the only house he had ever owned.
Daddy died a year after we moved to Iowa City, where we lived in a tiny, shoddy rental house on Rider Street. I was only four and a half when we moved there, and its flaws were no more apparent to me than those of the house in Mount Vernon. It was tiny, but it had an enormous backyard, and there was a girl two houses away who would play with me, even though she was several years older. There were rosebushes and a strawberry patch and a mulberry tree that straddled the line between us and our neighbors, and on my birthday, a few of my friends came over and we had a party. But when I think of my father in that house, I see him stooped, as if the house itself were too small for his 6’1″ frame. He injured his hip when we lived in that house, and had to use a walker for some time, which meant going down its hallways sideways, as they were too narrow for the walker to fit head-on. I know, of course, that the house didn’t kill him, but it is hard not to see it as some sort of factor in his decline.
Perhaps because my father died when I was so very young I remember a great deal about my early childhood in our first house — the ghost stories my father told me about the laundromat, the placement of my crib and later my bed in the green room that used to be red, the windowseat in my father’s office where I sometimes napped, the room where my mother had an ironing board and her sewing machine set up, our neighbor’s dog, Brink, who chased our cat Moby Tom up the telephone pole so many times that they finally kept him chained, and I brought him a piece of balogna every time we went to the butcher shop and fed him my hotdog peels. I remember sitting on the stone curb of our driveway when their kitchen caught on fire, and my mother telling me to Stay Put as she ran across their yard. I sat and watched the firemen run in and out from their truck. In those days, fire trucks were still fire-engine red, not the yellow-green they are today, and that color perhaps sums up everything I have to say about Mount Vernon — the old water tower that I called the pea on toothpicks, the red and green tennis courts, the limestone walls, the computer at the college that occupied a whole room, the way I shuffled through the leaves in the fall in my red and green Winnie the Pooh sweatshirt with the hood pulled up, holding my father’s hand.
So it is Mother’s Day again. I am generally opposed to holidays that seem to exist primarily to support the greeting card industry (I know, I know, Mother’s Day started as an anti-war thing, but let’s face it, it is not celebrated that way any more). The other day, though, I saw my friend Jenna soliciting advice on Facebook for a reproductive rights place to which she could donate on behalf of her step-mother, who had asked for such a donation in lieu of a Mother’s Day gift.
As it happens, I’d been thinking just the other day about how grateful I am that I have never been pregnant and thus have never needed to get an abortion. And that got me thinking about what I would do in such a situation now that I live in the boonies. I grew up in Iowa City, home of the fabulous Emma Goldman Clinic, which currently makes its home in the building once inhabited by my pediatrician’s office. My sophomore year of high school, I joined 400 or so other Iowa Citians outside the clinic when 40 members of Operation Rescue came to town to protest. Someone across the street put Madonna on their boom box and aimed it out the window, and a bunch of us went over to dance to “Papa Don’t Preach,” an odd choice, I suppose, in the circumstances, except that it does contain the line, which we all yelled loudly, “I made my CHOICE!” There’s a newspaper photo of me standing at a Roe v. Wade anniversary rally on the history wall there, and when I used to go there for an annual exam, they’d all say how much they’d liked my most recent column.
Well. I do not live a few blocks away from Emma anymore. In fact, as it turns out, in order to get an abortion, I’d have to go to Billings, two and a half hours away and in another state. I’d have to take a day off work, and get someone to drive me up there, and come up with the money (given that my health insurance won’t pay for psychiatric care, I can’t imagine that it would cover abortion). It would be a pain, but I could do all that. I have money, and friends, and sick leave. Not everyone is so lucky.
Shortly after the passage of Roe v. Wade, my great-grandmother, Harriette Glasner, had a similar realization, and she started Emergency Medical Assistance, a fund that still helps poor women in Florida get abortions. It is one of many such funds around the country, many of them small and local, dedicated to trying to provide the kind of options that I have always taken for granted to women who have never had those options.
So this year for Mother’s Day, with their approval, I made a donation to the National Network of Abortion Funds in honor of my mother and grandmother, and in memory of my great-grandmother. These are the women who raised me, a child who was very much wanted and who was loved and helped out at every turn. My wish for Mother’s Day is that every woman be able to make the choice to become a mother, and that every child be wanted as I was, and have mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers like mine.
I’m not sure that this post will make very much sense if you don’t, or didn’t, listen to Ani Difranco in the late 1990s or very early 2000s, or if you weren’t in college or shortly out of college at that time, or at least around that age, or if you aren’t female, or if you aren’t, in other words, somewhat like me. But maybe not. I will write it anyway.
The dorm I lived in my first few years of college had a number of what were called triples, inhabited almost exclusively by freshmen — one long room divided into two small rooms by a large wardrobe; one small room, and one larger common room. The three small rooms were bedrooms, although two of them had windows that opened into the hallway. The common room was unfurnished. I heard rumors of people who had living room sets in their common rooms, although I was not friends with any of them. I also heard that the inhabitants of one particular triple routinely “borrowed” furniture from the Rose Parlor, which was this fancy large room with ornate Victorian furniture and a baby grand piano where they served tea every afternoon and champagne to graduating seniors after spring convocation.
Our common room had no such amenities. It had a spare mattress, which we got from our student fellow (my college liked to rename everything — student fellows were what other people would call RAs, although they were assigned pretty much just to freshmen). Eventually it also had an Archie Bunker chair, brought by the father of one of my roommates, and a blue wool rug that had belonged to my mother when she was in college, which she mailed to me. My trunk sat by the window as a sort of table for my coffee pot, and tucked in one corner were two plastic crates that held my boombox on top of them and our combined music collections underneath. It was through that slightly tinny but functional boombox (a sixteenth birthday present from my mother) that I first heard Ani Difranco.
A friend of one of my roommates had loaned her a CD of Out of Range and a cassette of Imperfectly. We had them on constant repeat until the friend wanted them back, and then we made dubs of them and played those on constant repeat. I still have mine — I believe it’s in my car, which still has a tape deck. The next summer we all saw her play at the Newport Folk Festival, and we all got, or dubbed from someone who got, Not a Pretty Girl when it came out, and later Dilate and Living in Clip and Little Plastic Castle. And after that album, I must admit, my interest in her newer music waned. I don’t listen to her old music as much any more, but when I do, it is so good and so poignant, and so much the more so for having been the sound track of my first dorm room, and later my first apartment, and of the sit-in, and of so many other moments.
And sure, every young generation thinks they are different, and thinks they invented sex, and thinks all the other things you have to think before you move on to thinking about how juvenile you were when you thought those things. But they matter, and this is why Ani mattered — and still matters — to me.
I lucked out in many ways. I was born in 1975. I am in various ways a miracle of modern medicine. I got to wear pants (jeans,even!) to school, and I grew up with Free to Be. . . You and Me in a progressive college town. When I was in high school, I saw C. Everett Koop speak and I performed in an educational improv drama group that dealt with teen issues. And what I learned from all that, and from Take Back the Night and the Rape Victim Advocacy Program and the Domestic Violence Intervention Program and the Women’s Resource and Action Center was that it was okay to say no. And that is a good and important lesson, one I feel grateful for to this day.
But Ani — Ani taught me that it was also okay to say yes. Ani sang love triangle songs, and tortured artist songs, and saying no songs, and songs about things that happen when you try to say no and no one listens, and those are all good and important songs. But she also sang
the door opens, the room winces
the housekeeper comes in without a warning
i squint at the muscular motel light
and say, hey good morning
as she jumps, her keys jingle
and she leaves as quickly as she came in
i roll over and taste the pillow with my grin
and she sang
we’re in a room without a door
and i am sure without a doubt
they’re gonna wanna know
how we got in here
and they’re gonna wanna know
how we plan to get out
we better have a good explanation
for all the fun that we had
‘cuz they are coming for us, babe
and they are going to be mad
yeah they’re going to be mad at us
and she sang
‘cuz i don’t care if they eat me alive
i’ve got better things to do than survive
i’ve got a memory of your warm skin in my hand
and i’ve got a vision of blue sky and dry land
and she sang
and maybe you can keep me
from ever being happy
but you’re not going to stop me
from having fun
[lyrics from danah boyd's excellent collection]
If you are a woman in a 19th century novel, I was telling my book discussion group the other day, if you have sex out of wedlock, you get pregnant, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Sometimes you also die, like Tess, or you have to suffer the twin humiliations of wearing a scarlet A and having hundreds of terrible papers written about you.
In the 20th century, that started to change, although it has never gone away entirely. And Ani acknowledges that. If you have sex in an Ani song, you might get pregnant, you might get hurt, the guy might dump you, even later that same night, you might have to have an abortion. And she’s perfectly clear that you can say no. But what Ani made clear was that when you said yes, it was you doing it, and you still were a you — not a plot device, not that blonde who appears in the preview but doesn’t get any credits, not a symbol or an object lesson.
Ani is the person who made me think it might be okay to grow up.
What a lay me down this is
with two pink, two orange,
two green, two white goodnights.
Fee-fi-fo-fum –
Now I’m borrowed.
Now I’m numb.–Anne Sexton, “The Addict”
I have been taking pills every day–usually twice a day, though sometimes more and sometimes less–for twenty-six years. Theophylline, the first medicine I ever took regularly, came in capsules, white on one end and clear on the other, with small white spheres inside. When I was very little, I couldn’t swallow pills, and so I mixed the contents of the capsule into yogurt, which was the only food strong enough to mask the flavor. At that time in my life, I only liked vanilla and lemon yogurt (and coffee, but I wasn’t allowed to have that), and I ate a bowl of yogurt every morning and every night. That I still like yogurt is, I think, somewhat astonishing.
I’ve since taken many other pills — and been glad, on many occasions, that they’ve developed better treatments for asthma than those old theophylline capsules, which made my heart race and my hands shake, and which my body metabolized with remarkable rapidity, so that the pills I’d taken in the morning almost never showed up in blood tests done by the allergist in the afternoon. Antihistamines, anti-depressants, anti-anxiety meds; brief outings with mood stabilizers and anti-psychotics, standing dates with antibiotics about once a year and over-the-counter painkillers once a month, and all manner of inhalers. My favorite pills of all time, aesthetically speaking, were some that I took only for a few short times when I was young. I don’t remember what they were for, but they were so very pretty: tiny capsules that were a translucent blue green at one end and clear on the other, with tiny pellets inside that were red and white and pink.
I think of pill-taking as a normal part of living, and I’m always slightly shocked when I hear someone complain about having to take pills. Mostly I think (and try not to say), “Oh honey, you don’t know the half of it,” because for all that smugness is an ugly emotion, the alternative is worse. The alternative is that I start thinking about how tethered I am to these pills, and to all the things that they require. It’s a bad idea to go anywhere without an inhaler, even these days, when my asthma is generally better. I try to keep a dose or two of all my medication with me at all times, too, in case I get stuck somewhere. I have to remember to get my prescriptions refilled in time, and I have to remember to arrange to pick them up in time, which is somewhat more complicated now that I live thirty miles from a pharmacy. And I have to have health insurance to help me pay for all the pills and all the visits to doctors that they require, and that in turn requires that I have a certain kind of job, and that I keep on having those kinds of jobs, lest I have a period of no coverage and thus never again get covered for those wretched “pre-exisiting conditions.”
There are a lot of reasons that I won’t ever get to go build a cabin in the woods, not the least of which is my total almost lack of practical skills, but I always blame my inability to imitate Thoreau, or to follow the leaves of grass, or what have you, on the need to have health insurance, and then I hate the people who are naturally healthy, because I imagine (quite probably incorrectly) that they do not have these problems.
Anne Sexton’s poem is about being addicted to the drugs she’s prescribed, and to death, which she feels she’s also been prescribed. I’ve been fortunate enough to escape both those fates. I often think, though, about something my mother once said — that several hundred years ago, living with depression would have been more akin to living with poor eyesight. There would be things you couldn’t do, or couldn’t do as well, with depression or myopia back then, but they would pale in comparison to the things that the modern world requires that you cannot do with untreated depression or uncorrected vision. And so I wonder, then, if all my tethers to modernity are really addictions of a sort, and if the need for the pills — or at least some of the pills — would begin to disappear if I lived a different sort of life — if I really did get to go camping and never come back, which is what I always wish at the end of a camping trip.
As I said, I try not to head down this particular path. I try to take my pills and not think about addiction and society and healthy people. That way lies madness — and I do not know if beyond the madness lies any sanity, and so far, at least, I am afraid to find out.
The first week of my five days a week blogging and exercising plan found me exercising four days and blogging four days, or five days, if you count a short post on my other blog. Not too shabby.
This week will find me spending a great deal of time hanging out at rehearsals. Every other year, the Park County Arts Council brings the Missoula Children’s Theatre to Meeteetse. Two twenty-something MCT employees sweep into town, and, in the course of four hours a day, get 35-40 kids to put on a performance by the week’s end. The plays themselves are a bit hokey — they’re all sort of funny, musical takes on fairy tales and classics. Two years ago we had Robinson Crusoe; this year it’s Pinocchio. But for one week, instead of the all sports and FFA all the time programming we normally get in this tiny town, we get theatre rehearsals, and I get to hang out on the sidelines. Officially I’m there as a representative of the Arts Council to help the MCT folks out with whatever they need, but really I’m there to experience, albeit vicariously, my very favorite feeling in the whole world: being in a show.
I was never a particularly successsful theatre geek, but I got enough roles in school and at camp over the years that I still have theatre nightmares, dreams where I’m backstage and I know I’m on in the next scene and I don’t know my lines and I don’t have my script, and I”m running around desperately trying to find a script I can look at to save myself from terminal embarrassment. I always wake up from those dreams greatly relieved, but secretly I love them, because secretly, deep down inside, I keep hoping that one day I’ll wake up as Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney will be there, quivering with excitement, and saying to me, “We could get a barn and put on a show!”
I loved being in plays, even terrible plays. I loved it even though the roles I got were almost always what my college friend and I referred to as MANGAS parts — mothers and nurses, governesses and servants. The exception was camp, where I got to play men’s parts. But I didn’t care, even when I knew I’d gotten chosen for a part more for my dumpy looks than for my acting ability. I loved the feeling of creating something from nothing, of watching the people you saw every day turn into other people, and of watching how suddenly all your interactions were different. I loved it because I thrive on adrenaline and crisis, and theatre is full of both. I loved that I suddenly had a relationship with the other people in the play: I wasn’t just some girl they went to school with, or who lived in their cabin: I was a cast member.
I don’t get to do theatre any more, although in a particularly grandiose mood I’m prone to fantasize about putting on a production of Our Town here in my tiny town. But this week, the week of the Missoula Children’s Theatre residency, I get to hang out and watch it all happen in front of me, and it’s almost as good, I’m happy to say, as having it happen to me.
First, a quick programming note: apologies to all of those whose comments were held for moderation until just now. My spam program was, unbeknownst to me, set up in the most aggressive fashion possible, and for some reason I did not receive email notifications of comments and thus did not see them until I logged in. All that should be fixed now, I think.
Earlier today I read Vanessa Bush’s Likely Stories blog post about a project she attempted that involved interviewing white families and their black servants, these many years later, about their experiences — only while she found the white families eager to talk, none of the black servants have been willing to be interviewed. At the time I thought, “Huh,” and contemplated what one could say about that in relation to Kathryn Stockett’s bestseller The Help, which is a novel written in three voices, one that of a young white woman and the other two those of, you guessed it, black servants in the early 1960s. I enjoyed the book but was troubled, as I often am, by wondering if I liked it because I am white, and the narrative is one that allows me to feel superior and enlightened as compared to many whites in the South in the early 1960s. That’s all well and good, but if it doesn’t translate — and sometimes I worry that it doesn’t — into present day anti-racism, then it’s not really doing much good.
This evening, as I was casting about for a topic, I suddenly thought, “Well, of course, Vanessa Bush should interview Annie!” And then I stopped dead, because Annie has been dead for many years now, and because I would guess she would not talk to an interviewer either, whereas my family, I’d guess, would be quite happy to. After all, I am talking to you.
Annie worked for my great grandmother and later for my grandmother. When I knew her, she came to the house one day a week to clean, or to help my grandmother clean, or to clean under the direction (often somewhat confusing to outsiders — “iron the dining room” translates, in my grandmother’s household, to “vacuum the living room”) of my grandmother. As the years went on, they spent less time cleaning and more time fussing about cleaning, but cleaning days always involved lunch, which was always soup and sandwiches.
It’s easy for me to fall into sentimentality about all of this, to think of Annie as a family extension, but I think that way only when I remember her through the eyes of my six or seven or eight year old self. By the time I got to be twelve and thirteen and fourteen, I became more uncomfortable, and I rather dreaded visiting my grandmother during cleaning day, because I began to notice things. I noticed that Annie — whose last name I do not remember, if I ever knew it — always called my grandmother Miz Wallace and me Miz Laura and my mother Miz Judith. I noticed that she nodded a lot. And — and this will seem like the stupidest thing ever — I noticed that she was black.
I knew that, of course, and I could have told you that even when I was younger, but its full import did not come to me until later. I was raised on the Civil Rights movement: my mother’s best friend in high school marched on Washington in 1963, my grandmother had, at one time, a subscription to a newspaper put out by the Black Panthers, and the only time I was allowed to stay up past my bedtime as a child was when there was a special about Martin Luther King Jr. on television. But that was all abstract. I was educated but I was not experienced; I grew up in a very white state and went in the summers to a very white camp. I had ideas about freedom and equality and the brotherhood of man, but when faced with the situation of a black person in what was clearly a subservient role in my own family, I did not know what to do.
I do not think that my family were bad employers or were cruel or unfair in any way, and I don’t think we were quite as crazy as the sort of dysfunctional white family archetype that Bush describes. But if I try to imagine how Annie might have seen us, I fail. I can guess that her feelings must have complicated, a sort of mixture of affection and resentment, love and envy — but I don’t, and won’t ever, know. Maybe I can’t know: maybe those are stories that won’t ever be told. I like to believe that listening to stories helps us to apprehend the world, and that somewhere out there there is a story that would help us all understand, but I’m not sure such a thing exists — perhaps it is one that is yet to be made.