Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything

by Ehrenreich, Barbara

  Jean, if she’d known about my behavior during this visit, would have piled still more guilt onto me. But guilt is a pious sort of emotion, inappropriate to the present cast of characters. As a child I had learned many things from my mother, like how to sew a buttonhole and scrub a grimy pot, but mostly I had learned that love and its expressions are entirely optional, even between a mother and child. No deep mammalian genetic script compels a mother to take a little girl’s proffered hand when they step out onto the street. No hormone requires her to respond to an adolescent’s teary cri de coeur. My upbringing may have been harsh, but it was also instructive. The idea of a cosmic loving-kindness perfusing the universe is a serious, even potentially dangerous error, and I can thank my mother, however ruefully, for having made that clear long before it was my turn to brush her off.

  There is something else that could have contributed to the suicide attempt, an entirely unrelated drama unfolding. During the years when I was in college and without any evident input from actual “Negro” people, my mother had gotten emotionally swept up in the civil rights cause—part of a larger change in her that I saw only in distant outline. She read Thoreau and renounced “materialism”; she mourned Adlai Stevenson’s exit from the 1960 Democratic primary to the extent that I, still a vigilant young anticommunist, wondered about her loyalty to America. Then, when she went to the 1964 Democratic convention, she participated in the sit-in to demand recognition for the insurgent Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Or maybe she just wanted to participate and was shooed away, whether by the police or the sit-in’s organizers, I don’t know. She had had high hopes there anyway, for a few days or hours, until the party leaders sold out the insurgents in order to maintain the loyalty of the white southern “Dixiecrats,” and it may have been this that sent her down to the pier after dark. Because it is hard to believe that I pushed her in the death direction all by myself.

  I flew out to Iowa the day after Jean’s call, to visit my mother in the mental hospital she had voluntarily checked into. It wasn’t in Ames; I had to fly to Des Moines and rent a car, arriving sometime in the early evening. I expected a chastened and sober mother, or maybe even a cold and angry one, but when I got to the hospital we were immediately joined by some new boyfriend of hers, who I think had driven from Ames, a jolly, buzz-cut guy in the gray suit of an assistant regional sales manager. Never mind the setting or the occasion for our gathering—we all went out to a bar where we drank until I slipped away to my motel and the other two vanished into his car. I don’t know what psychiatric treatment modality was in place, but none of this seemed to require any stealth.

  Only when I got back from Iowa did I realize how seriously I had lost my way, not just as a daughter or a student, but as the author of my own existence, the leader of my own personal expedition. The quest I had pursued for years had ended in what could be interpreted as disaster or as some kind of breakdown, starting in Lone Pine. Then I had tried to find a fresh mission in science, in particular theoretical physics, and had failed at that. Now that I was toiling at the production end of science, where the big issues are the calibration of equipment and the stability of reagents, I had lost sight of the promised intellectual adventure. I didn’t have a quest anymore, I had a job—a place to go in the morning and stay on into the evening, a check coming every month—and what it was all leading to, when I allowed myself to think about it, was at best a lifetime of jobs. I would be a postdoc and eventually a mediocre scientist with a small grant to support my allotted slice of the global research agenda. Maybe I would end up on the faculty of some midwestern university, with an office that looked out on the parched gray cornfields of winter, where I would pine for a chance to travel to a scientific meeting in some place like Urbana or Winston-Salem and present my little crumb of a research result.

  There was hardly any sky that winter, or meteorology of any kind, and not just because I worked in a closet. Throughout Manhattan, the sky had been largely bricked off by buildings, and within the Rockefeller complex a system of underground corridors allowed travel from one end to the other without going outdoors. When I did get a chance to look up at where clouds and sun and moon should be, the effect could be startling, leading me to write, for example, the following poem or fragment of a poem:

  Child, even this milkiest sky

  Sucked by too thirsty

  Ascending eye

  Will dry, not fold, will crack.

  And before it closes you will see

  The night outside.

  There is no date on this, but it almost has to be from that despairing winter of 1964 when, in the midst of everything else, I was being let go by the older, eccentric, nonscientist boyfriend who had distracted me from my mother’s visit during the summer. I knew things were coming to an end at Thanksgiving when he went home to his parents for the holiday, which was no more than a two-hour train trip, without inviting me or even offering an excuse like familial insanity. I had dinner by myself in a diner, buoyed only by the implicit drama, which I imagined I could read in the faces of others, of an attractive girl alone in the neon city on a holiday night. Thanks to my mother, though, suicide was not an appealing option, even as a recreational thought experiment. Where was the dark glamour if you could just get drunk enough to drown, anonymously, in some tacky resort town? If you were going to do it, you had to be clear-eyed and sober, otherwise it was just plain old everyday sloppy death. I wrote to my future self, taking full credit for her existence:

  Forecast: rain for this Friday, December third. But you should know who reads this that I of December third, 1964, the conception [creator?] of your memories and ancestor of your impulse to now read, determined rather not to rain but to sublime, dryly. And so you are. I had thought of volunteering for an accident (suicide isn’t necessary, it’s unnecessarily dramatic, when there are so many accidents, dark mouths of death making little wet sucking sounds when you go by) and they, sensing the thought, reached for me, but I shrank back into the habit of life and so you are.

  Less than three months later it was my father’s turn to make a break for the other side. There is only one written fragment referring to this development, from a letter apparently written to a friend but obviously never sent. The letter is on airline stationery, which was then available in the seat pouch along with the airline magazine, and the occasion for writing was a flight to L.A., where my father had just been in a drunk-driving crash from which survival was not guaranteed:

  Being sucked toward Los Angeles, drinking scotch, reading Genet, inventing an erotic mythology of protein chemistry. My dad smashed up his golden Olds with backseat radio, and probably his life, against a truck. On Thursday night a week ago, when I was vomiting from codeine after dental surgery, his wife [his second wife, Nell] called. She said she’s leaving him. Diane [my sister, who was living with them at this point] is seeing a psychiatrist. And now this accident—more accurately, this coincidence of truck and 12-horsepower death wish. “Up to that time, the presence of a phial of poison or a high-tension wire had never coincided with periods of dizziness.” (Genet) He may be disfigured, or having DT’s, or both.

  My father survived that one. When I got to L.A. his face was still cut up like meat, but his blue eyes were intact, staring fixedly into the void that the truck had opened up for him on the highway. I sat with him in front of the TV hour after hour, because that seemed to be what was required of me. He could walk, although unsteadily, but he could not be bothered to speak except for a muttered greeting when I arrived and further mumbles whenever I brought him a glass of milk. His lifelong struggle, it occurred to me now, had not been against poverty, failure, religion, or intellectual backwardness, but against boredom. Obviously we, his family, had never been interesting enough, and I suspect that even his work was insufficiently enthralling. Anything he had ever wanted to learn he could master in a few hours or minutes; nothing was ever challenging enough to tie him up for days or of course make him wake up in the middle of the night scream
ing. As soon as he had seen the trick, or the pattern, or—in the case of corporate decision-making and preening—the deep layers of bullshit, he was bored enough to need a drink. And of course, once you have that drink, you are not in a condition to ask the follow-up questions that might make even the banal seem mysterious and gripping.

  It was dispiriting to see my father like this, practice, perhaps, for watching his eventual decline into Alzheimer’s: the blank, hopeless stare, the shuffling gait, the refusal to respond. I wanted his story to contain elements of nobility as well as tragedy, but maybe the real story was not even about him. Maybe it was about alcohol, the “demon rum,” or what is more accurately personified as Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the yeast that makes alcohol and bread, an ingenious single-celled creature that has found ways to reward us in return for loyally cultivating it. My mother bought packets of it in the supermarket, adding water and sugar to bring it to life when she decided to fill time with bread-making. More commonly, both parents ingested its metabolic product, ethyl alcohol, in liquid form. The result is that just when humans are about to figure out what a great racket this clever little microbe has got going, it offers them a drink and they forget the question. In fact, maybe the whole family drama was just a minor subchapter in the many-thousands-of-years-old epic of S. cerevisiae.

  But now my father was not supposed to drink anymore, meaning there was to be no escape ever from boredom. Whatever tedium he had entered into—a TV game show, rush hour traffic, a family meal in the kitchen—he’d just have to sit there like everyone else and endure it, or at least that was the doctors’ plan. I can understand his despair. There are times when the world just gets too stale to generate new situations and you are left with reruns of what you’ve already experienced way too many times: Flight 3647 to Dayton has been delayed indefinitely. Please remain in the boarding area for further announcements.

  For the first time since my midteens, I wanted to dissociate, to see the world dissolve back into its constituent elements, and I hoped that the pastel smoothness of the L.A. suburbs could be counted on to get me there. It was time to restir the pixels and start all over again. But no luck. That is not something you can summon as easily as, say, you can order a drink. It happens or it doesn’t happen; the choice is not yours. I started reading the Saul Bellow novel my father had been reading before the accident, but it did nothing to lift the banality that weighed down on the house like doom.

  How do you distinguish between an accident and a suicide attempt? Surely my father had not swerved to run into the truck, even if he had been dismayed when his wife announced her coming departure. Nor could it be said that he deliberately drank his way to some multiple of the legal blood alcohol level for the purpose of inviting an accident, unless you acknowledge that he did the same thing almost every night. The question of intent was to come up again with a certain forensic urgency after my mother’s death eleven years later, from an overdose of painkillers and alcohol. One theory, the most plausible, was that she had simply lost track of how many pills she had taken, ostensibly for a lower back problem, and had slipped gently and of course painlessly from sleep into death. The other theory, advanced by my brother, who had talked to her the day before her death, was that she did it on purpose because she had discovered that her second husband was having an affair. At least she had hinted to my brother that something was wrong. Or possibly, the speculation continued, the husband, who was to remarry not long after her death, had stirred some extra pills into her drinks. There was no investigation, just—when I went out to Ames for the funeral—a general mood of evasiveness.

  So maybe my mother’s covert biographer, the woman who had published a story about us in the literary magazine, was right in discerning a narrative arc that tended toward ruin. The lesson seemed to be that you just couldn’t get out of Butte, out of overcrowded little houses and the heat of the mines, without paying a terrible price. Electrons, after all, cannot go anywhere they want; some energy states are not accessible, some transitions are not allowed. My family had violated an important boundary of class and geography, for which crime we would all be brought down. I would be the exception, of course: the baby who is tossed from a second-floor window of the burning house and manages to crawl away. If I were a good, responsible person, I would have abandoned my education and set up housekeeping for the wounded, but fortunately no one was suggesting that I do that.

  Chapter 10

  Joining the Species

  At the beginning of “the sixties,” meaning in about 1965, news, as in current events, held no interest for me. I didn’t have a television or radio, and no source of print news except for the headlines I occasionally scanned at newsstands. If anything happened that might require some sort of action on my part, like an outbreak of plague or nuclear war, I figured someone would tell me about it. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t be bothered with human events, compared to events at the molecular or atomic scale, because I sometimes enjoyed reading history, especially of the ancient Mediterranean world, where everything important seemed to happen outdoors, at sea or on “windswept plains.” What I lacked was the concept of a shared “now.” It was hard enough to keep on assembling a personal “now” out of the onslaught of incoming data—the angle of light, the need for lunch, the whispered forecasts of Edelman’s mood—although that is our fundamental task as sane and conscious beings, in fact it is what we are: momentary juxtapositions of incongruent events. But now for the first time in my grown-up life, history was beginning to intrude into my painstakingly constructed private moment. In answer to the question of what “I” was, I wrote:

  These fragments: the rose, the old lady ridiculous with death and child-size again, the coincidence of me and morning always, almost, repeated, bus stops, headlines, and reverberations of impossible pain. You are the collision of these fragments. Out of many anecdotes, you are a story.

  You—who? You in particular, you who are the only one who read of 10 deaths by napalm while the radio was playing “Downtown” and the lady with the white dog walked into the store.

  Everyone had their own turning point, when some feature of our shared reality began to seem unbearably insulting or absurd. Mine came about almost incidentally, on a February evening when I was still dutifully at the bench well after nine. I emerged from my closet to find Jack, another graduate student in the lab, still working away with his dozens of neatly labeled test tubes, and we paused to exchange our usual cynical commiserations about the grind. What he did when he was outside my line of sight, which was of course most of the time, whether he watched football games or collected butterflies or hung out in jazz clubs, I had no idea. He was a fixture of the lab as far as I was concerned, with one hand usually attached to some piece of glassware or the dial on a machine—and a friendly fixture in my experience, always eager to explain how something worked or what he was finding out about the heme-bearing protein of horseshoe crabs, which is, interestingly enough, not red but blue. But on this particular night I found him oddly morose. “I don’t see the point anymore,” he told me. “I’m going to be drafted and sent to Vietnam.”

  And then I saw Jack—pale, large-eared, good-natured Jack—lifted out of the brightly lit lab and crouching in a jungle, dodging fire from invisible enemies of his government. I did not have a secure notion of where Vietnam was, other than across the Pacific, but now, with the lucidity of exhaustion, I could imagine a chain, a long concatenation of whorls and loops, suddenly connecting us to this little-known place, and all in the service of some global system of bullying—older men over younger men, white over black and brown, the well fed over the thin and desperate. How had I missed this in all my years of metaphysical questing? Why had I not been drawn to the civil rights movement, which so clearly stirred my mother? For that matter, why had I looked the other way in the last couple of years while my family was visibly disintegrating and my sister, for example, was being passed back and forth from one reluctant parent to another? I don’t know, but so
mehow for me the key to a new kind of awareness lay in this momentary superposition of stolid Jack and the distant jungle. If he could be snatched up into the fighting, then the instruments of coercion were sharper and closer than I had ever noticed before. “But that’s crazy,” I told him. “You can’t go to Vietnam.”

  The connection between Southeast Asia and the Upper East Side of New York did not of course have to include me. Women couldn’t be drafted, nor, as it turned out, could Jack be drafted once the student deferrals were put in place, but that was still many months ahead. When this conversation took place in early 1965, the forces of destruction had already been loosed. The United States had started bombing supply lines in Laos in December; the first American combat troops had been shipped to Da Nang at the beginning of the month. Neither Jack nor I disagreed, at some general level, with the idea that communism had to be stopped. But what if people were so miserable or ignorant that they opted for communism? And if communism meant a life totally managed by government and ruled by petty apparatchiks, what was the difference between communism and the life of a graduate student at Rockefeller University? The war made no sense, and it was possible that the president hadn’t been fully briefed. Hence the first political action of my life: Jack and I would write a letter to the president, very logical and polite, explaining why this war would be a waste of American lives and resources, never mind its effects on the Vietnamese.