by Pam Houston
I don’t have a single memory of my mother seeming to even like my father, so it is hard for me to guess what made her fall for him. He was charismatic, but it was an Archie Bunker/Ralph Kramden brand of charisma, if you can imagine either of those two fit and good-looking with a powerful tennis serve and a convertible. He was quick-witted and could be very funny, though the humor was almost always at someone else’s expense. The one unqualified positive thing I can say about my father is that he was game—for a road trip, a new restaurant, a midnight swim in the ocean, a run on the beach. Into his eighties, he and his teenaged doubles partner, John Speer, won the “100+ combined age” tournament at his beloved tennis club. My father gave me my love of travel, the edgier part of my humor and several IQ points—none of which are small gifts. He also taught me to love baseball, football and hockey, and I remain an embarrassingly enthusiastic sports fan to this day.
My mother was anorexic and did her best to raise me to be too. From earliest memory she’d say to me, “Let’s see if we can get all the way to dinner without eating anything.” If I got hungry on one of those long, calorie-less days, and I complained about it, she’d say, “Let’s try this, then,” and her eyes would get that irresistible sparkle they always got on stage. She’d get two pieces of stone ground wheat bread out of the plastic bag on the counter. She’d hand one to me, and then draw me over to the sink where she would run warm water and scrunch up the bread in her palm until it sogged and broke into pieces and ran down into the garbage disposal. “It will give you the illusion of having eaten,” she said, beaming, as though she was telling me the very secret of life.
My mother was proud of my straight As and my graduate education and eventually the publication of my first book. But she was never for one moment satisfied with my appearance. No matter how hard I tried, I could never get thin enough to suit her, even in college when I was 5’6½” and weighed 125 pounds. If I could find a way to quantify how much she hated that I parted my hair in the middle, you would think either she was crazy, or that I was, for not just going ahead and parting my hair on the side. The truth was, I didn’t really part my hair anywhere, and still don’t, but it does tend to fall just slightly to the left of center. “Even the Mona Lisa,” she would say with a gravity she reserved for such topics, “would not look good with her hair parted in the middle.” For all the years I had braces (and there were many), she could hardly stand to look at me, and if I put my rubber bands in, as I had been instructed, it put her over some dangerous edge.
The only reason I was allowed to get braces in the first place was that my orthodontist had an ingenious way of scamming parents. (I heard he was sued over it two years after I finally let one in a long series of white rubber retainers fall into the dishwasher where it melted into a shape that would fit nobody’s mouth and declared myself finished with orthodontics.) He would take a photograph of the child, and then, through the wonders of what was at that time brand-new computer technology, age the photos two ways: with braces and without. When he showed my mother the photo of the thirty-year-old me without orthodontia, I looked exactly like a pale-faced, blue-eyed gorilla, and she fainted dead away, right there in his office.
My mother once called my best friend in graduate school (graduate school!)—Debra Monroe—to ask her to encourage me to wear lipstick. “And if you can get her to do that,” she said, “see if you can’t talk her into going with you to Weight Watchers.”
On one of my first nights out as a writer, the night the actress Mia Dillon was reading my story “How to Talk to a Hunter” at Symphony Space on Broadway, my mother almost came to blows with my editor, the great Carol Houck Smith. Carol wanted me to look “cowgirl” for the evening, and so I’d chosen a simple black shirt, a long denim skirt, a concha belt and a silver bucking bronco pin. But my mother, who single-handedly kept the world in shoulder pads for at least a decade longer than it needed them, begged me to change into a slimming fire-engine-red Liz Claiborne blazer. No matter that all I would do was stand for a moment in the audience when the master of ceremonies said my name. In the lobby, as the audience filled in around her, my mother waved the hanger holding the red blazer at Carol. “It’s a better line! It will brighten her up!” she said, while Carol kept looking over my mother’s shoulder, as if for security.
At my mother’s funeral, six months later, there was hardly anyone who did not express to me how glad they were she had seen Cowboys’s publication, that she had died knowing I had found my way in the world.
“You were her everything,” they said, partly to make me feel better, partly to jab at my father. And because my mother had told me daily she had given up all her other everythings for me, I knew, at least in some way, what they said was true.
Years after my mother’s death, my lifesaving therapist, Drew L’Oizeaux, asked me to make a list of the things my mother loved, and as usual I obliged him: acting, singing, dancing, tennis, sewing, travel, vodka.
“And how many of those did she actually give up when you were born?”
I had to think about it for a minute. “None of them,” I said finally. “She enjoyed every single one of those things right up to her death.”
“How about that?” he said. “Turns out the only thing she gave up was . . . what?”
“The condition of childlessness,” I said, which I have to grant is no small thing—a state I admit to valuing myself.
In 2011, I was on an 8:00 a.m. breakfast panel at a publishers’ trade show in Denver. I arrived with wet hair. The moderator of the panel asked me if I wanted to borrow her lipstick (the damn lipstick again!). The other panelist, who arrived looking like a million dollars, was Cheryl Strayed, who had a book coming out about her grief over her mother’s cancer diagnosis, rapid decline and consequent death, which sent Cheryl into a tailspin so deep that, had she not hiked the Pacific Crest Trail and in the process come back to herself, she might have followed her mother to an early grave. Whenever Cheryl tells this story, she mimes how I took the lipstick from the woman and put it on without even looking at the color. She says that is when she knew we would be friends.
In January 2016, we spent a week together on the island of Kaua‘i and we talked a lot about mothers. Even then, with her mom having been gone more years of Cheryl’s life than she was present, the grief on her face and in her voice when she spoke of her mother was palpable, piercing and so near the surface.
We’d been walking on the beach at Hanalei, the powerful January surf thundering against the sand and rushing up between our feet, threatening to destabilize us.
“Do you miss your mother?” Cheryl asked me.
“Yes,” I said. And then, “No.” And then, “I’m honestly not sure.” Another wave pounded against us, the water sluicing up between my knees. That Cheryl’s question did not have a clear and immediate answer unnerved me. “I don’t miss her, anyway, in the same way you miss yours.”
For the moment that was the right answer. But the question gnawed at me. Did I miss my mother? And what exactly did it mean if I did not?
The story I’d been telling for years about my family, to therapists and best girlfriends and prospective lovers, was this: My father broke my femur when I was four years old. I believe he meant to kill me. My mother spent the next decade throwing herself between him and me, trying to make sure he didn’t. This is the same story she told her friends. She couldn’t leave my father, she always said, because she was afraid of what he might do to her and also afraid she wouldn’t be able to make a living on her own.
My mother’s version of our story is more or less true—here I am, after all, fifty years later to tell it. But like most truths, it is not uncomplicated. In this version of the story, my mother is sad and little bit heroic. My father might have hurt her if she’d tried to leave him, but it seems at least possible—given his rage over having to support us—he might have sighed with relief. Had my mother been freed from picking up my father’s dry-cleaned suits and cooking the elaborate dinners he
demanded, she might have had more time to turn her substantial talents into income.
“After her funeral,” I said to Cheryl, “I found myself reaching for the phone to call her often. I was deeply sad for her that she was not going to get the years she had always imagined at the end of her life without my father—and sad for myself, because I thought maybe if he were gone she could finally relax, maybe we could finally relax together.” I could hear how paltry those words sounded in the face of Cheryl’s acute, abiding grief.
“My mother loved me a lot,” I said, “but she loved vodka more and it ruled her. It made her untrustworthy on an hour-by-hour basis. I think maybe you have a different brand of love for a parent you can’t ever trust.”
Over the roar of the ocean my ears hummed with the tinnitus of truth telling. Should I go on? Should I, here on this sunny, sea-sprayed beach, tell Cheryl what I’d never told anyone except Drew, my therapist, that my mother knew my father was hurting me on a regular basis for more than a decade? That often she was in the next room? That sometimes she was in the same room? That the broken femur was only the showiest injury? The one that took the longest to heal? That from a very young age (six? seven?) I had perfected two specific ways of leaving my body, one that worked when he was punching me in the head and another for when he grabbed me by the hair and pulled me with him into the shower? That by the time I turned seventeen, the various objects my father had forced inside me in addition to his dick had created so much scar tissue on my cervix that I had to have hush-hush surgery, performed not by my gynecologist, but by my father’s urologist? And that two days after I’d been released from the hospital, when I started to bleed more than any person ought to bleed ever, my mother was too scared of outing my father to take me to the emergency room? That I begged my mother to leave him at least weekly, that I offered to quit school, work full-time, seek sanctuary with my friends’ parents, whatever it took?
We were past high tide, and the waves were smaller now, the sets less frequent. I no longer had to raise my voice to speak above them.
“The crime for which my mother was always—whether she knew it or not—atoning, was that her mother died during her birth,” I told Cheryl. “I believe it is why she married my father, why she stayed with him, why she drank, why she starved herself, why she let surgeons cut into her face to remove her wrinkles four different times.”
We even loaded the car one time, after my father had knocked two teeth out of my mouth with his fist. It was two months after the urologist butchered my cervical surgery, and I told her either we could leave together or I would leave by myself and emancipate. We got as far as Hilton Head Island, of all places, where she spent all weekend flirting with the tennis pro before she lost her nerve and we turned around and went back to my father’s house. I had entered first grade early, and would graduate in June and leave for college in September. On the way back from Hilton Head she promised me if I just stuck with her for those final months, she would not try to guilt me out of going to college. I did not emancipate, and she kept her promise.
Cheryl is one of the best listeners I have ever known and she has empathy for miles. But I left a lot out, including the other thing I’ve only told Drew, which is that insofar as I know, my father never one time hurt my mother. I went to school with bruises so often teachers made inquiries, called social workers in to talk with me, strategized with me about safe houses and exit plans. My mother let surgeons turn her face into a bloody and bruised pile of hamburger meat on a regular basis, but I have no memory of her turning black and blue at my father’s hand.
About a decade ago, Drew and I came up with an alternative version of my mother’s story. In the new version, my father still plays the villain, but he’s no more than an actor, cast into a role by my mother, who wrote, starred in and directed the dark comedy (I refuse to think of it as a tragedy) of my childhood. It was a story that had begun to write itself upon my mother the day she was born, and yet it’s been important to me not to have thought either myself or my mother helpless. Maybe that’s why Drew’s version of the story appeals to me more than the one I had spent decades telling. In the new version my mother is acting out of will instead of fear.
And yet, no amount of reframing will ever convince me my mother didn’t love me. She did. And my mother’s love, misshapen as it was, had a physical weight and gravitational pull, like a planet, or the sun. I suspect watching my father hurt me physically and abuse me sexually for seventeen years was one more punishment my mother heaped upon herself, one more atonement for the crime of being violently born.
I may not be right about any of this—it is just a grown-up, therapized woman’s theory. But I do know when I was born, the designations of victim and criminal got re-sorted somewhere in my mother’s emotional architecture. She ceased being my grandmother’s killer, and I became the murdering child. In this way, I saved her. And when I look at pictures of myself at one and two and four years old, I can see in my own eyes I knew it even then.
When Cheryl and I reached the end of the beach I lifted my eyes to the mountains that encircle the bay, to the rainbow, that more days than not, reaches out of them and falls into the ocean just offshore. The mountains are steep, but softened by their jungle covering, and Hanalei, even on the days when the sea is the roughest, has always felt to me like a cradle.
When my mother died, I was freed from the terrible hope that she might one day actually throw herself between me and my father. As soon as she was no longer my potential protector it was perfectly clear she never had been. My mother’s death exploded me out of one story and into another, and I came to understand it had been my job, all along, to protect myself.
Ranch Almanac: Stacking Wood
According to the British Columbia Ministry of Forest and Range Glossary of Forestry Terms, a cord of wood is the amount that, when “racked and well stowed (arranged so pieces are aligned parallel, touching and compact), occupies a volume of 128 cubic feet. This corresponds to a well-stacked woodpile four feet high, eight feet long, and four feet deep; or any other arrangement of linear measurements that yields the same volume.”
Karl Kolisch is my wood guy, stoic to the point of near silence, Norwegian, surely, with his broad forehead and those giant hands. He sneaks up my driveway in his beater of a dump truck (it’s the loudest truck in the valley yet for some reason in twenty-five years I haven’t caught him at it) and dumps a cord of wood in front of the garage. I know he’ll be back with another cord in an hour or a day, and then another, and another. I begin every winter with four cords, and wait and see what happens from there.
When the wood arrives, it’s my job to move one cord off the driveway, around the house, and up on to the wood porch, and to stack the other three cords along the house’s west side. The first winter I was here I stacked all four cords on the wood porch four layers deep and by the time spring came my porch had as much give as a moderately tight trampoline, so now I bring the cords up in stages. My body prefers it when I move and stack the wood for two hours a day over a several-day period—unless Karl drops the wood off on a day before a predicted blizzard, and then I try to knock it all out before dark. I find moving and stacking this amount of wood both mind-numbingly tedious and deeply satisfying. When I was a kid, I used to love cutting the lawn for similar reasons. As a teenager, when I worked at Long John Silver’s, I loved refilling each table’s condiment bottles at the end of every shift. There is something so pleasingly pure about having a task to be accomplished and then accomplishing it. It is the exact opposite of writing, and pretty close to the opposite of teaching. In both writing and teaching, nothing is ever finished, only finished enough to let go.
Karl brings the wood with the big rounds already split, which means the only splitting I have to do is to make enough kindling, every night, to get the fire going. You would think with twenty-five years of practice I would be among the best wood splitters in America, but in truth I am not. I am still likely to miss the log and wrench my b
ack, or drop the maul on my toe, or split a piece of wood in such a way that a splinter jumps up and stabs me in the eye.
Visitors, especially urban visitors, love to split wood, for a variety of reasons. It makes them feel primal, or it reminds them of visiting their grandparents’ house when they were children, or they like to pretend each log is their ex-wife or -husband’s face. I encourage the passion, whatever its source. Last November my friend Dixon came out from Sausalito and got so into the splitting I still have a cardboard box full of kindling he cut hiding under my bed for nights when I just can’t face it.
Every time I split wood, I picture the cover of the book Chop Wood, Carry Water: A Guide to Finding Spiritual Fulfillment in Everyday Life, which came out in 1984 and was a big hit at the commune where I lived then, and whose advice I apparently took both seriously and literally. For the first fifteen years on the ranch I had to carry water too. Once the creek froze for the year, every drop the animals drank had to be carried to the trough from the mudroom in five-gallon plastic containers. Ten years ago I invested in two frost-free pumps, one at the edge of the pasture and one in the corral.
Frost-free pumps have an old-fashioned pump handle on top of a ten-foot pole that connects to a water line laid from the house at a six-foot depth. They work pretty well most of the winter, but I can tell whoever named them never tested them at 9,000 feet above sea level in a valley with temperatures that dip to 40 below zero and winds that crank up to fifty miles per hour. Luckily, when we sank the water lines, we sank an electric line too, so I can wrap the poles in heat tape for the winter and plug in. Sometimes, though, even the heat tape isn’t enough to stop the pumps from freezing.
