Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things

by Amy Dickinson

  At my first rehearsal, I grabbed an old leftover three-ring binder to hold my sheet music from a pile scattered on the table in the choir room. When I opened the notebook, I noticed a small mailing label stuck to its upper right-hand corner. My binder had once belonged to Mrs. Ayers, my very first music teacher and the person who taught me to read music. Mrs. Ayers, like Jane, was now gone, but I decided that this was a sign that it was time for me to do my best to put their music back into the world, in the hopes that it would continue to bring me back, too.

  Our new choir director is Steve—the son of two Salvation Army musicians. Steve grew up playing piano in the Army (Salvation), but after our first rehearsal, he told me that he had gone through a lengthy break with his faith. He was also going through a divorce. Like me, Steve seemed to be sad and just a little bit broken but trying to tiptoe toward something.

  Our new minister’s name is Paul. Pastor Paul is young and green, while our church congregation is old and crusty. In his bounding enthusiasm, Paul reminds me of a Saint Bernard puppy. Paul’s first service (and my first with the choir) was conducted out of order. The church bulletin seemed to have been printed inside out. The (mainly) elderly congregation tried to keep up as Paul jumped from one part of the service to another, leaping back and forth through the bulletin, apologizing as he went. Paul did something extraordinary that first Sunday, when he told the small congregation, “I love you.” He had yet to learn our names, but he was claiming to love us. In my fifty years of dipping in and out of this church, I had never heard a pastor make such an extravagant declaration to our buttoned-up congregation. On the spot, I decided to love him right back.

  During the “Joys and Concerns” and announcement portion of the service, my neighbors stood and shared their news and testimony. Sue—now bald from chemo—rose from her pew and announced how her treatments were going. She optimistically talked about her recovery and asked for continued prayers. Paula, who had shaved her own head in solidarity with her friend, raised an “Hallelujah!” Melissa rose and spoke about the youth ministry’s overnight sleep-in. Melanie said she could use an extra hand for the food giveaway, because the biweekly distribution of canned goods and restaurant donations had become so popular. Someone asked Keith (a weather forecaster) if we were going to have another cold winter (yes). Mike had agreed to replace the church kitchen’s old and rotting floor; work would be starting soon. The Eagle Scouts were volunteering to rebuild a part of the church’s old stone foundation for a service project. The Harvest Festival and community yard sale were coming up.

  Finally, Aunt Millie stood up and said, “It’s nice to see Amy back in the choir.”

  Listening to this recitation, I was reminded of how life in my little town goes along, even when I am not there to witness it. Since childhood, my family and neighbors have indulged my comings and goings, offering up prayers for my frequent departures and welcoming me back after my sometimes-lengthy absences. My own life seemed to have had more verses than the old Charles Wesley hymns that soaked up so much of our choir time. This congregation remained steadfastly willing to supply the chorus to my life’s song. Through the joys and concerns of their own lives, they had done me the favor of staying fundamentally the same.

  I have sung my way back into the communion of casseroles and chicken barbeque at the Freeville United Methodist Church. In the months since my first tentative return, Pastor Paul has managed to shake off his butterflies and has become an inspiring leader. Church attendance is creeping up. Our choir director, Steve, has gained in strength and confidence and may someday date again.

  Last week Steve played the old wooden pump organ, which had traveled from the church, to our farm during my childhood, and now back to the church. The organ’s asthmatic dynamics and wheezy sound had not changed in the forty-five years since my mother played her favorite Burt Bacharach song over and over at night, during a tough time in her life.

  In my years away, I had forgotten how filled with music the Methodist service is. Some Sundays, I’ll look out from the choir and see that Bruno has skipped his Catholic Mass and is sitting in a pew. He likes to hear me sing with the choir, and he joins right in, enthusiastically bellowing the old hymns. This reminds me (yet again) that I married very well. When my stepdaughters visit the church, they always remark on how loudly the relatively few of us carry on with our rafter-raising. I remind them that you don’t need to read music, know any music, or commit to any particular point of view, philosophy, or spiritual belief to sing these ancient songs. You just have to close your eyes, let the music rearrange you from the inside, and hear what happens.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Counting Sheep

  I don’t sleep well. I do not enjoy being an insomniac, and so I don’t like to dwell on how little sleep fuels my day, although it feels like it is usually somewhere between forty-five minutes and four hours. There are people who traffic in their sleeplessness—they get four hours a night and then run marathons. I’m not like that. Most of the time, I’m pretty tired.

  I have married, however, into a family of braggy sleep-getters—a group of near-narcoleptic wonders who can fall asleep in full daylight while waiting for a traffic light to turn green or catch a quick nap, head down, at the kitchen table while supper is simmering on the stove. Frequently my mornings will start with one or more family members reporting on how exhausted they are because they only got nine hours of sleep. Avila, especially, although a teenager, seems to have the sleep schedule of a toddler—preferring a solid eight or nine at night and, if possible, a good long nap after she gets home from school.

  Bruno falls asleep instantly. The moment he shuts his eyes, his muscles twitch, starting from his head and shoulders and moving down his body, all the way to his feet. They twitch once and then relax, one at a time, into slumber. It is as if a factory whistle has sounded and the assembly line is shutting down, section by section. The workers grab their lunch pails and stream toward the exit after their shift, shutting off the lights with a thunk as they go. The last person out slams the factory door with a thud, and the deep snore commences.

  I live with sheep grazing outside my bedroom window. They lazily cluster in the pasture we lend to our neighbor Brian, who has the world’s most alluring résumé because he is—yes—a shepherd. At night I listen to Brian’s flock lowing and murmuring to one another until they fade with the passage of the stars into a soft silence. I listen to the sheep and the occasional coyote barking in the distance, and then I listen to the silence.

  You might think that having sheep at the ready would be all the better for a chronic insomniac; I could count them as they bound one by one over an imaginary fence. Yet if you live in proximity to sheep, the last thing you want to do is picture them jumping over a fence at night. That’s because they do, occasionally, jump fences. The last time this happened, I had gone downstairs for my morning coffee. You know that feeling that you’re being watched, but you can’t put your finger on the source? I raised my heavy-lidded eyes to the kitchen window and—BAM—there were many pairs of eyes, blinking in concert like a Wallace and Gromit cartoon, as the entire flock stood calmly in my flower garden, four feet from the window. I herded them myself that morning.

  The secret to herding sheep is to walk slowly toward them with your arms outstretched, waving your arms in a downward scooping motion. You are not flapping—please! If you flap, the sheep will scatter, and you deserve whatever happens next. No, you circle and scoop, circle and scoop. (A soft wave is okay.) I learned this herding technique by doing it (and also, I think, from Wallace and Gromit). Brian, the shepherd, has a dog to help him. Also he sometimes uses swearing.

  Along with my inability to sleep at night, I am also unable to nap during the daytime. What happens is that I lie stiffly on our stiff Stickley couch, hyper-aware of the sun shining and the birds flying outside the window. When I close my eyes in the daytime, I play a home movie on the inside of my eyelids. My movie is of a little girl on a swing set, fly
ing back and forth against the sky. She kicks her legs and arches her back to pump higher and higher as she is silhouetted against the clouds. The girl is me, and the person pushing is my mother. The girl is also my daughter, and the person pushing her is me. I watch the swing rhythmically pulse, and this lets me rest, although I don’t seem to sleep.

  Most nights I wake up two or three times, and when I’m awake, I tend to stay that way for up to an hour. Lately I am awash with nighttime thoughts of my mother. I remember what she was like, and I think about what I am like. During Jane’s life, I was often aware of how different we were. I didn’t physically resemble her very closely, favoring more my father’s side of the family. My mother was introverted and shy until she knew you. She was a listener. There was a special quality and depth to her attentiveness. I often felt she paid better attention—or a better kind of attention—to me than I did to myself.

  I’ve inherited my father’s low forehead, heavy eyebrows, and movie star minky hair. Like Buck, I have moved around a lot. I also seem to have come into possession of my old man’s loud assholiness. I got Buck’s jackass gene. I like to hold forth, to tell people what’s what. I have a case of chronic verbal jazz hands. These are qualities right at home straddling a barstool in a roadhouse, which is where my father used them to some effect. My being a gasbagging know-it-all is certainly useful in my career as an advice columnist. But, when I was younger, there was a louder and more persistent edge to my personality, and now when I look back, I simply don’t like that about myself. I wish I had spent less time showing off and more time showing up.

  I hold my mother partially responsible for my occasional unbridled displays because of something that happened when I was eight. I had been very entertaining at the supper table that night. I was into impersonations, and that night I had done Gomer Pyle, my third-grade teacher, and Carol Burnett’s Tarzan yell. I could feel the disgust of my three older siblings, who left the room, but I pressed on. I finally went upstairs to change my clothes for bed, and as I headed back down the stairs, I heard my parents talking. About me.

  “Do you think she’s all right?” I heard my father ask. Buck’s voice had a reasonable tone, and I had never heard him be reasonable, so I knew it was important. I couldn’t see him from behind the door, but based on his inflection, I could imagine him drawing his index finger in a circular motion next to his temple—the universal symbol for “cuckoo.” I imagined the ride to school on the special short bus where they put the special kids who went into the special ed classes. I had always wanted to be special, but not in that way.

  “Oh…” Jane sighed. “I think she’s funny. I really do.”

  Just as an unkind remark from a teacher can scar you for life, this overheard comment from my mother forever cemented my belief that she was on my side, no matter what. Jane sometimes appreciated—but mostly tolerated—my social boisterousness. But there were times, especially at a crowded table closer to the end of her life, when she would shut me down with a look that said: “For the love of God, STOP!”

  I have trained myself to modulate my behavior publicly, but it’s like I’ve merely pulled a curtain on my vaudeville act. At night my thoughts race and gambol backstage. They put on puppet shows and cabaret acts and tap dance for quarters on street corners. They do standup sets and declare, “Thank you, thank you very much! We’ll be here all week, and for the rest of my life!”

  When I was a child, I fought sleep every night by imagining what it would be like to die. At the age of seven, I saw my dear grandmother in her casket, and after that I dreaded and feared death. At night, I would lie awake imagining how it would happen and how terrible it would be for me to die. Some nights, I distracted myself purposely from my death thoughts by thinking about what it would be like to be a member of the Cowsills family singers or fantasize about having Davy Jones and Peter Tork pull me onstage to sing with them. But not even the Monkees could keep me from my fatalist rumination for long.

  There were many nights as a child when I couldn’t bear my own thoughts anymore, and I would head down the creaky stairs to sit with my mother. I did not want to be the big baby in the flannel nightgown crying to my mommy at night, and yet—night after night—when nothing else worked, I would leave my bed, make my way to the staircase, and sit on the top step, tucking my legs and feet under my nightgown for warmth. I breathed my hot breath down through the neck hole of my nightgown to create a little body furnace while I tried to calm myself.

  I would sit on the stairs in my flannel cocoon and listen to Johnny Carson’s muffled voice on the TV in the living room. Sometimes, say, if Buddy Hackett was on, I might eventually be jollied back to bed, but most nights I would sit on the top step, quaking and dreading my compulsion to go down the stairs. Some nights, this death thing was riding piggyback, and I simply had to have help shaking it off.

  Getting to my mother in the living room was a torturous journey in failed self-control. I would slide on my bottom, stair after stair, counting to a hundred on each step, thinking that I might eventually calm down and be able to go back to bed by myself. Eventually, I would find myself on the bottommost step, and so I would slowly, accidentally-on-purpose poke the door at the base of the stairs open with my feet.

  Jane’s perch was on the couch, directly at the foot of the stairs. Strangely, she always seemed happy to see me. I found this surprising. I was usually pretty sick of me by the end of the day; I could not imagine that my mother would want a visitation. Buck was never around at that time of night. As a child, I figured he was in bed because he always got up early for the morning milking, but now I realize that he wasn’t there because most nights he went out.

  Jane would get some toilet paper for me to blow my nose, turn down the TV, and let me sit super-close to her on the couch. She always asked me what was wrong, but I could never bring myself to tell her. “I remember when I was your age, I would get afraid that my parents would die and leave me. Is that it?” she asked me one night. I lied and said it was. I didn’t have the courage to tell her that in my late-night heart of hearts, it was every man for himself. I wasn’t worried about her death, but about my own.

  Jane told me about her own remedy for sleeplessness. In her head, she recited the names of Franklin Roosevelt’s wartime cabinet. Did I want to try that? No—I didn’t.

  One night on the couch she told me about a story she saw in Life magazine. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with Life. I liked to write letters to the editors, commenting on articles I had seen there, and urging them to send a team of their award-winning photographers to cover breaking stories in Freeville. I always wrote my name, followed by my age: “Amy Dickinson, age 9,” figuring that the editors would find it charming and precocious to hear from an avid reader my age. I never had a letter published in Life—not even the one I wrote praising their Kent State coverage—but other ambitious youngsters did, and I hated them for it.

  On this night, Jane said she had seen an amazing story in Life at the doctor’s office about how babies grow in their mother’s bodies. She told me there were pictures showing babies floating inside their mothers before they were born, tiny pre-birth babies sucking their thumbs and waiting to come out. “Are you interested in that? Next time we go to the library, we can get out a book about it,” she said.

  I was not interested in that. I was thinking about bones and skin and caskets. But I said yes and that I was feeling better. Then I asked if I could watch a little bit of Carson with her, and she said okay.

  When I was twelve and Buck left so abruptly, essentially going out one night and not returning, my insomnia kicked into full gear. It got so bad that one day Jane kept me out of school and took me to the doctor. I only saw Dr. Ferger once a year for my physical. He was kindly and “old” (probably fifty), and he had soft, giant doctor hands. Jane took me into his office and then went out to the waiting room where the magazines were. I pictured her thumbing through that feature on babies in the womb. Dr. Ferger told me, “I hear you’re n
ot sleeping lately.” I nodded, and added that sometimes I also had headaches (I didn’t, but I wanted to give him something he could work with). He said, “Well, I understand that you’ve been going through some things at home.”

  Dr. Ferger’s knowledge of my family’s situation felt shocking and gossipy. His office was a full four miles away from our house. Although his kids went to school with us and I was the third generation of our family to be his patient, I was hoping our embarrassing situation had been contained. I felt as if Life magazine had, in fact, dispatched a team to Freeville, only they were covering the wrong story. They were covering my Kent State.

  I felt the tears come and the snot run, all on a tide of acute embarrassment.

  “No, I don’t think that’s it,” I said as Dr. Ferger handed me a tissue. “Oh. Okay, maybe not,” he said, and pushed himself backward across the room on his metal wheelie stool, to where his desk was. “I think I have something that will help you.” He took out a small white envelope and he wrote on the front: Amy, for sleep. Then he tipped a jar and counted out six white pills, which he put into the envelope. He licked the small flap on the envelope shut. “Here are some tablets,” he said. “Take one before bed. And remember, you’re going to be fine.”

  I felt important, receiving medication for my condition. And yet I also knew it was a placebo. I thought, I’m dumb, but I’m not stupid. No doctor would give sleeping pills to a kid, especially Dr. Ferger, who obviously thinks this is all in my head, which it probably is.

  I continued to lie awake at night, worrying now not only about my death, but also about my life. I felt the door to my childhood starting to close. I no longer snuck down the stairs at night to visit my mother, who was now ensconced in a sadness over my father’s departure that no amount of Buddy Hackett could remedy. I flattened out the empty pill envelope and put it on my windowsill, next to my geranium. Jane said I looked better and that the medication must have worked. I lied and said that it had.