My mother is alive again. She has returned from death in a hospital, under a doctor’s care. We have been told that she is very fragile, that we should expect another death soon. We set her up in the house. Sometimes it is only my father and I. Sometimes my stepmother, stepbrother, and stepsister are there too, caring for my mother, though they did not know her. Sometimes we take her around with us in a car and worry. I am happy. She is alive again, with me. I have longed for her, am always longing. But I know she will be gone again soon and will not come back. I feel a special, precious sadness. I will lose her again, but this time I know I will lose her.
Love is what ties someone to something that goes away. I wake homesick and happy.
Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life. How often this has caused me to feel that my memories, and the labours expended in writing them down are all part of the same humiliating and, at bottom, contemptible business! And yet, what would we be without memory? says Sebald of me and my mother.
I want you to know that I know, and that I am sorry. I was never fair. I asked you from the beginning to believe my story was true. I knew I was changing the facts, or only remembering the ones that would make you feel a certain way. I could not stand for you to feel another way. I could not stand to feel another way myself. All of us are fantasists, ill-equipped for life, the children as much as myself, says Sebald. But I know that you knew it was not true, that you always knew, and that you could not bear to tell me, except now and again when you knew it would help me, when you knew you could help me not to be a child anymore.
2
We are staying on Lake George. My father is on our boat. I am in the shallow water with my mother. I am clinging to her body. She is wearing a black swimsuit with a blue V across her chest. She tells me why my father is angry. He wants to take the boat out onto the lake. We do not. She does not like the boat, gets seasick. She reminds me that it is important that we go on the boat, that we show him we enjoy it. I am clinging to my mother, swimming through her legs. I do not want to be separate from her. I like the way the water makes everyone touch everyone else.
I am in my parents’ bed, between them. This is what we do on weekend mornings to show our love. My father and I are wrestling, a game of pretend we play. He calls himself “The Phantom.” I am a champion wrestler, a hero. My mother cheers me on. I love my father.
My father sat for hours every night beside my mother’s bed in the ICU. I know he is a good man. I know he knows something I can only hope to know, can only hope he taught me. What did they do during those hours and days and weeks? She could not talk. In fact, we were never sure whether, during the hours she lived without a liver on the night of her first transplant, she suffered some kind of brain damage. He must have spoken to her, and he must have felt she answered, over the unbearable, wet rhythm of the breathing machine, by gesturing, sometimes scrawling something barely legible on a pad. When he finally divined that she wanted to see me—at first he said she would see no one but him—his evidence was a word painfully scribbled on a yellow sheet of paper. The word resembled my name, if one wanted to see my name there.
For a matter of months when I was nine or ten years old, I could not, or would not, fall asleep in my own bed. I would lie down and my pillow seemed a pool of anxious thoughts. After an hour or so had passed, I would drag my blankets and pillow to my parents’ bedroom. At first they resisted, especially my father, but through persistence, I broke them down. I would sleep on their floor, comforted by their alternating snores. The dog curled up beside me. Eventually, I became embarrassed enough by this habit that I resolved to break it. Why did I feel this need to be close to them, to my mother, during the darkest hours? Did I know, though they had never told me, that she was going away? Did I think, if I could hear her restless breathing throughout the night, that I could be sure she would be there in her bed in the morning?
This is what I can remember. The rest is locked away somewhere, to be released, I believe, I hope, when everything is good again. When I realize I am waiting for it, I feel childhood rising within me: powerlessness, hope.
My father’s family: his father, an entrepreneur whose businesses, over the course of his life, included gas stations, a sandwich shop called Uncle Milty’s, and a trucking company, which upon his early and unexpected death, he left to fail in my father’s hands. His mother, a glamorous, beautiful woman about whom I know little, other than that she was funny. My father’s sister, an eccentric, a lesbian, a lost child, who, throughout her life, could not hold down a steady job, borrowed, and never repaid, a great deal of money from my father and mother, who also bought her an apartment near our home and sent her to massage school in Gainesville, Florida, though she never subsequently practiced massage. She was by far my favorite and most childlike relative. She and her lover shot themselves together in 1999.
I learned recently that my father’s father abandoned the family for several years when my father was a young man. He left and somehow ended up in Hawaii. He had some kind of gambling business, which he taught my father. My grandmother took to drinking.
My father’s family had a summer house on Lake George in upstate New York. My father, so he told me, was the 3rd best waterskier on the lake. He supported this claim when, during the many summers my family—my father, my mother, and me—also went to Lake George. One of the happiest times in my childhood must have been the summer he taught me to waterski. I remember my father, otherwise a fairly awkward and clumsy man, gracefully weaving on only one ski across the boat’s wake. When he was tired, he would signal to the driver to bring the boat near the beach. My father would let go of the line and glide atop the water on pure momentum, like a duck landing on a still pond.
I have always kept ducks, he said, even as a child, and the colors of their plumage, in particular the dark green and snow white, seemed to me the only possible answer to the questions that are on my mind, says Sebald.
We are in the hospital, waiting: my father, my mother’s sister, me. I tried to sleep on uncomfortable chairs. It is early in the morning, maybe two or three. Two doctors come through a door, my mother’s doctors. They are walking down the hall, wearing sea-green scrubs. Why are they walking down the hall? The operation is supposed to take fourteen hours. It has only been seven or eight. Can there be early good news? Something has gone wrong. The new liver did not work, did not turn on. She is alive. They are flying in a new liver from somewhere else. It is the wrong blood type but they will put it in for now. I am fourteen years old. She is still alive.
It had been a long and especially hot day, says Sebald, but FitzGerald remarked on the cool air and remained wrapped tight in his plaid as they drove. At the table he drank a little tea but declined to eat anything. Around nine he asked for a glass of brandy and water and retired upstairs to bed. Early next morning, Crabbe heard him moving about his room, but when he went somewhat later to summon him to breakfast, he found him stretched out on his bed and no longer among the living.
I was guided to her bed. The ICU was white and terrible. Everyone was connected to machines, tubes worming in and out of them. Beeps and the sound of air being pushed into lungs through tubes by machines. I walked slowly, as if in the dark. My mother had expressed that she wanted her machines disconnected or hidden. I came to her bedside. She had a tube in her throat which forced air into her lungs—a bit of liquid had collected in the tube near her throat; it shook with each thrust of air. Tubes were carrying blood in and out of her. Her skin was yellow and her hair, which had always been dyed blond, was gray. Her hands were thick with fluid. I had brought an essay I had written for class about the book The Catcher in the Rye, which I had been reading throughout her hospital stay. I read the essay to her, which I think must have been the cruelest thing I have ever done. She convulsed, as if crying without tears.
3
For a long time I lived on pity. My teacher
s hardly expected me to complete my schoolwork. The classmates who had made fun of me before no longer did. I do not know what I expected of myself. My guidance counselor took a special interest in me. My father was despondent. We lived alone now in our big house. He and I fought. We took a friend of mine on our annual summer trip to Lake George. This friend told me my father was drunk. I had never known he was drunk, did not know how to recognize it. I could not stop thinking bad thoughts. I began to feel older and older, older than my father, older than my mother had been.
In my dream, does my mother want to be alive again, or is she alive because she knows I want her to be? Is she scared? She seems to know she will die again soon. She is not scared for herself. She looks at me with a kind of regret, like there is something she hasn’t done, will not be able to do. It is not my mother who is fragile.
You have been willing to help me uphold illusions, live in fantasies. And when you did not, you were better to me, loved me much better, than I was ever willing to say. I fear I have loved you most when you seemed to be going away. You deserve more. The opposite of a story is a promise.
I have hoped, even, to publish a book-length memoir someday. But the facts would not organize themselves into memories, which are facts told as white lies at best, and the darkest lies at worst. Or this material seemed too boring, or too self-important, or vulnerable to the point of becoming the weakest kind of sentimentality. Poetry seemed too ironic to contain it. Prose too self-serious or without feeling. Determining the order of events seemed impossible. Many are still occurring, or first occurring, right now. Others have yet to take place. In the final analysis, our entire work is based on nothing but ideas, ideas which change over the years and which time and again cause one to tear down what one had thought to be finished, and begin again from scratch, he says.
My poor father.
My poor mother. My poor stepsister. My poor stepbrother. My poor stepmother. And you, poor, steadfast you, who stood by. You were so good, so giving. You let me believe for so long that I was at the center of my story, when in fact I was telling it, watching from a distance, telling it from far away so that it would happen to you and not me. I made you live my story in my stead. I was not here, with you, where I was needed.
4
My mother hated driving. Her car was an old green Aspen. My father drove a blue Buick. She would only swear when she drove, otherwise she would say “sugar” instead of “shit.” She hated changing lanes. She hated using the rearview mirror because she had to take her eyes off the road in front of her. I used to tell her what a good driver she was.
The two years after my mother died are very hazy, marked in my mind by a few disparate images and an overwhelming sense of grim desolation hanging about our house. Like twin ghosts, my father and I aged beyond our lives and seemed to await the inevitable termination of the present, sharing an aloneness like two prisoners in neighboring cells. If he was not driving me to school, I would often find him still in bed. As I would say goodbye to him, he would say, “I’m staying home from work today. I’m not feeling well.” The company that he and my mother had owned together—they were headhunters, finding people jobs in the market research sector—began rapidly failing.
My mother was afraid of dogs, had been bitten by a cocker spaniel as a child. I had begged for a dog. We went to a breeder. I sat in the middle of a bundle of little white puppies. I could pick. I wanted the one that was the friskiest. I named her Frisky. The night we brought her home she went to sleep on the kitchen floor. My father went out to run errands. The puppy must have been very tired. My mother and I were afraid she was sick or dead. We had never had a dog before. My father came home and told us she was fine, just sleeping.
Frisky became my mother’s dog. Every morning before she and my father would take me to school and drive to work together, my mother would sit on one of the chairs in the living room. Frisky would come running from another part of the house and leap into my mother’s lap. They would stay like that until we left. We had to put Frisky to sleep a few years ago. She was an old dog. She could no longer see or hear and had had a limp.
At some point during my childhood, my father went on an all-liquid diet. For six weeks, he consumed nothing but nutrient shakes, and attended regular monitoring sessions at the office of the company that sponsored the diet. His weight seemed to fall from his body. Years after the diet, when all the weight had come back, my father still kept a picture of himself on the refrigerator, taken shortly after resuming solid food. He wore a tiny bathing suit and looked as thin and young as he ever had.
After my mother died, when he was drunk every night after ten, my father used to slide his feet across the hallway floor and clumsily knock on my door. He would waddle in and collapse on my bed wearing nothing but a pair of underpants and a white T-shirt yellowed at the armpits. He would lecture me about school and, try as I might, I could not dislodge him from my bed. The memory of the sound of his bedroom door opening—which meant he was beginning his nightly round of skulking about the house, binge-eating, and, in his drunken loneliness, berating me with harassing questions—still tightens my guts to this day.
The first piece of writing I remember being proud of was a paper written in 5th or 6th grade. I no longer remember the topic. What I do remember is my mother standing over me as I typed it out. Perhaps she typed it as I dictated. She told me I was a good writer. I was good at writing. This is what she said I was good at. I did not begin to think of myself as a writer until after her death. I do not think I would have been a writer if she had lived. Is it not wrong to squander one’s chance of happiness in order to indulge a talent? he asks. Have I done anything she did not tell me to do?
Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life.
The week before the surgery, the last time she and I could speak, she came home from the hospital. We did not know when the hospital would call but it would be soon. My grandmother—my mother’s mother—was staying with us. My mother had been in and out of the hospital for months. We celebrated my fourteenth birthday in a visitor’s lounge. She is home, happy. This is the last pure happiness I remember. We walk the dog together up the street. I am still her little boy. I tell her about the new music I like. I have no memory of my father from this week. In fact, I only remember this one day. Not even the day, an hour. Was it even an hour? A minute? Truthfully, I can recall only two images: my mother and grandmother sitting in the living room, my mother standing beside me as we pause on our way up the hill with the dog. I stretched these images into the shape of a week, of happiness.
At times on that day, which I recall as being both leaden and unreal, a gap would open up among the billowing clouds. Then the rays of the sun would reach down to the earth, lighting up patches here and there and making a fan-shaped pattern as they descended, of the sort that used to appear in religious pictures symbolizing the presence above us of grace and providence.
It has been years since I began writing this piece, and lately I revisited Sebald, reading his last novel, Austerlitz. Now it seems clear: Sebald is cold, intellectual, almost unfeeling, except inasmuch as one can feel simply by thinking, or think until feelings are only thoughts and so less potent, less capable of surprise, whether as rapture or despair. What other kind of soul but one ordered by thinking would write it was only by following the course of time prescribed that we could hasten through the gigantic spaces separating us from each other? Still, how true that is. But why graft my thoughts about my past onto his? Perhaps he mourns better than I do, and so, in his rambling accounts of one thing yielding to the next, he tells a story that seems real. He understands implicitly—as I would like to understand—that mourning is the means by which a life is lived, in time, in memor
y, which becomes the present. There is an accrual of power that happens when one understands this—an accrual of calm, which is power in a world that is anything but calm. Telling a story, like reading one, is an act of letting go. I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself. The voice of a story we believe is one that lets things happen, that observes even as it remakes, falsifies, the world by forcing it into words. I read Sebald because I want his voice.
On the night my mother died, I slept next to my father on my mother’s side of the bed, where she had last slept months before, where my stepmother would sleep later. I felt nothing. We had driven home from the hospital. It was late. It seemed, that night, like the right thing to do was to remain as close to him as I could. I do not remember that we said anything to each other. I remember lying down in the bed. Then I must have slept. He must have too. I must have awoken in the morning. The world must have been changed. We must have stood up. We must have gone about our lives. It must have been years since then.
To Keep Love Blurry Page 2
