by Joanna Scott
Dear Sally, here I am. What a day, oh, it’s not worth going into, suffice it to say that it took a bad turn when I spilled my coffee in the car on the way to school. From then on, everything that could go wrong did go wrong. When the bulb on the overhead projector popped, I knew it was time to give up. Why are we still stuck with projectors in this school? I have friends teaching in the town next door who have smart boards in their classrooms. How about that. And then I had to go and ask one of my favorite questions. I like to ask my students to explain why spiders don’t get stuck in their own webs. You know what one said? One boy, he said they don’t get stuck because God doesn’t let them get stuck. Well, okay, let’s pack up our books and go home, there’s nothing to learn, everything’s the way God made it so what’s the point of scientific inquiry? What’s the point of this question? Of all questions? I tell you, there’s a large portion of the population of this country who believe a question is in its very nature Satan’s work. Don’t get me going. So the spider, what he does, do you know what he does? He spins his original web of dry threads, threads that aren’t sticky, and then when he’s almost finished he weaves in a gummy silk, and it’s this silk that catches the insects, this gummy silk that’s only in certain places on the web. If only we were as intelligent as spiders. Well, anyway, how are you? I hope you’re in love with someone who loves you. I hope nothing comes in the way of your love. I was listening to Johnny Cash on the drive to school this morning, I was listening to him sing about love. You are the rose of my heart, you are the love of my life.… Oh, what slush, but I tell you, more and more, I like slush like that, as I get older, I can put up with slush. I think if I ever tried to write a song, I’d write a slushy song. You are the rose of my heart, like that. Did you ask your mother about me, by the way? But I guess it would be better for you to listen all the way to the end of this story before you speak to her about me. By the time you get these tapes, it will be past Christmas, though right now, Christmas is next week. I have a gift I wish I could send you, but I don’t have the nerve. I was surprised to find it at Marshall Field’s downtown, the old Marshall Field’s, it’s Macy’s now, but they had the perfume your mother used to wear. Ah, it takes me back. It takes me back. This takes me back, just talking to you about her. I’m going to stop now. I’m not in the best frame of mind to continue. This is the first Christmas in twenty-eight years that I’ll be alone. The girls aren’t coming home. My daughters, my two younger daughters, are out west. You’d like them. They’d like you. Marcia, she’s the serious one, a whiz at math, she’s in an engineering program at Caltech now, and Tracy, she wants to be an actress, she’s waiting tables in LA and trying to get auditions. She’s been in one TV commercial so far, a local commercial for, um, it was for pet food, and Tracy is on a beach throwing a ball to a dog. The dog is the one mostly in the commercial, Tracy’s only on for a split second. I don’t know, I don’t think LA is the best place for her, but I can’t tell her that. Maybe you could tell her that. Someday you’ll meet the girls, you’re half sisters, after all. Well, Merry Christmas to you, and Happy New Year.
Dear Sally. I appreciate your patience and hope you will bear with me a while longer. I was remembering when I heard from your grandmother, when was it, back in 2000, that your mother’s second marriage had ended in divorce, I was sorry for her. No, I wasn’t. Well, you could tell her for me, tell her — no, I guess you shouldn’t tell her that. Forget it. Let’s wait. Maybe you can coax her to reveal things to you without admitting that you’ve heard from me. There’s her side of the story, there’s mine, we’re lichen, our stories, the way they relate, they remind me of lichen. Lichen, you know, is made up of fungus and algae, it’s really two plants in one, the fungus is a parasite, it draws the carbohydrates from the algae, but the algae don’t seem to mind. I like to cite lichen as a prime example of symbiosis. Doesn’t every story involve symbiosis in a way, a relationship of dependence between parts? Your mother’s story, what she knows, it’s a partial version, but so is your grandmother’s. The story your grandmother believed, well, it’s not all true. It’s true that she thought it was true. What I mean is, oh, I’m getting all bollixed up. Your grandmother. Okay, so this is where it gets complicated. Are you sitting down? I’m standing, looking out the window of my condo, looking at the parking lot. It’s unseasonably warm today, it’s been warm for weeks here. How about there? But why am I stalling? I’m going to tell you, I can begin to get into the details. Let’s see. In the summer of 1974, your mother and I fell in love. By August, she was pregnant with you. That November, I abandoned her. I never wrote to her, never explained anything. I left her to conclude that my disappearance was an act of, of profound betrayal. And that’s what you were brought up to believe, I assume. Right? How would you ever know different? The real reason I left was a secret I was obliged to guard for the rest, I thought for the rest of my life. There was only one other person in the world who knew the truth, what I thought was the truth, and that was your mother’s mother, your grandmother. But wait, let me back up, I’m getting ahead of myself. I could use a sip of water.
All right, I was telling you about that summer. Your mother worked during the day as a lifeguard at a country club, and after work she’d come to my room, when I was in town, that is, and not out on some highway in Minnesota or Missouri. It’s strange that I drove through Missouri but not Kansas. I don’t know why I never drove through Kansas. I was away more often than I was home, but when I was home I was with your mother, she came over every night. We’d listen to music and take off our clothes and lie with each other. But maybe I shouldn’t be telling you the details. Is a father supposed to talk to his daughter about her conception? It was in one of those old houses by the train tracks, those shingle houses in Maplewood, or maybe it was in the Edgerton neighborhood, or Dutchtown, it could have been Dutchtown. I was renting my rooms by the month back then, and I lived in three different rooms that year. I was in search of the best room I could get for the money. I wanted a nice room where your mother and I could listen to music and make love. We were so caught up in each other, we didn’t think about birth control at first, and when we did, well, it was too late. In September your mother went back to school, but I’d visit her on weekends whenever I could. And she came home and surprised me one evening in October. As I opened the door to let her in there was a rumble of a train in the distance, I remember hearing a freight train. And then when we were inside together, the overhead bulb went out suddenly, just for a second, and then blinked on again. I remember Penny, I called her Penny, you know, I remember she became vivid with the light, her face was suddenly vivid, and I saw that she was struggling to speak. She wasn’t upset, though. Not exactly upset. She was frowning, like she was trying to think up a word to a crossword clue. Does she still love crossword puzzles? There was one time, I remember, when she would do nothing else until we came up with the answer to a difficult clue. I don’t, I don’t remember the clue, but the word, it was elaborate, I mean e-lab-orate, we figured it out together. Well, that was a different time. The time she came over to tell me she was pregnant, all she said was I have something to tell you, and I knew, I… I knew what she had to tell me, and without asking what, exactly, she had to tell me, I said, We’ll get married, let’s get married. We really loved each other, we wanted to be together forever, we wanted to have a family together. We weren’t expecting to start so soon, but we figured, we thought we were ready. And when it came to committing ourselves to each other for the rest of our lives, we didn’t hesitate. We were in complete agreement that we belonged together. We started to plan a wedding, and then we decided it would be better to elope. You see, your grandmother had taken a dislike to me, or that’s the impression she gave. I thought she’d decided that her daughter deserved better than me, and she didn’t want me around. But it turned out she had another reason for wanting to keep us apart. My own mother was dead by then, she died in July. June was over in July, there’s the irony. Anyway, I was all alone except for
your mother. We were having a child together, we’d marry and start a family. You have to understand, I would have been totally alone without your mother. I was alone after I left her. I couldn’t bear being so alone. I remember reading a statistic in a magazine around that time, I remember it said that one in every four Americans will develop a physical, a physical ailment attributed, attributable, to emotional causes. I don’t know if that was an accurate statistic, but I thought about it, I was thinking about it when I was driving to Detroit. But here I’ve gone and gotten ahead of myself again. Let’s see, I was saying that we knew by September, no, by the beginning of October that your mother was pregnant. And we let, gee, it was nearly a month, we let about a month go by, we kept it a secret while we planned our future together. We were going to elope to New York City, we were going to drive to New York City and get married and then spend the weekend in the Catskills. We talked about this all month. We spent every weekend together all through that October. I’d go to see her at school, and we’d stay in a motel. We lived together on weekends like a married couple. We were going to be married. We were going to be together forever. It seemed, the way I remember it, when your mother arrived that day to tell me she was pregnant, we planned what we were going to do in an instant, before we even spoke, in that instant when the bulb went out and then lit up the room, like lightning. Did you know, by the way, that one of the by-products of lightning is nitrogen, that lightning causes atmospheric nitrogen and oxygen to unite, forming nitric oxide? I like to talk with my students about this, about how the nitric oxide compound picks up another, an additional oxygen atom, and forms nitrogen dioxide, and this dissolves in rainwater and falls to the earth. The earth is bathed in nitric acid, dilute nitric acid, which then unites with chemicals in the soil to produce calcium nitrate, and, and calcium nitrate, you probably know, is a nutrient for plants, it’s a good and essential nutrient. So during a thunderstorm, the soil is being enriched. When I think about that moment with the light, the vivid glow of your mother’s face in the sudden light, it’s like, it’s like my awareness of her was being enriched, I understood her deeply, and I knew I couldn’t live without her. I mean, I’d already decided that, but I knew it in an absolute way right then. Huh, I never guessed what lay in store for us. I never guessed. It’s hard to speak about your mother like this. About the two of us together. I think, I think I’d better stop here, if that’s all right. I’ll say good-bye for now.
Dear Sally, I wonder if you’re making progress on your book. You know, I’m proud of you. Even though we’ve never met, I’m proud that you are willing to make yourself vulnerable by putting your name on the cover of a book. I’m sure you don’t need me to warn you to be prepared. I just read a piece in which the reviewer declared it a shame that so many trees were sacrificed for such an awful book. And how about all the insults floating around in cyberspace, the complaints, the stupid rankings. I need a refrigerator, it’s time to replace my old refrigerator, so I’ve tried checking on the Internet to see what is available, and you know, every model has its critics, loads of dissatisfied consumers who take revenge by denouncing their purchase on one site or another. Those anonymous evaluations are probably all scripted by the competition. It’s impossible to sort out the judgments. We’re going to wake up and there will be no reliable source of information left, we’ll be asked to cast our vote for every fact to establish its veracity. Forget research. Forget rationality and evidence. It reminds me of the woman who wrote in to our local paper this week, she took the time to write to the editor and hold forth on intelligent design. She believes in intelligent design, she says, because she wants to believe in intelligent design, because believing in intelligent design is better than not believing in intelligent design. Such profundity is worth a place on the editorial page of our local paper. Meanwhile, no mention is made about the conditions at Guantánamo. And in the Times, the New York Times, did you see the article on evolution? Research shows we’re still evolving, that’s the gist of it, nothing unexpected there, but oh boy did it raise hackles on, on creationism.org. Check out that site if you’re interested in seeing a blueprint for ignorance, creationism.org, which is full of rants against atheist science teachers who dare to introduce students to Darwin. Instead of Darwin we’re supposed to teach that protein formation was intelligently designed from the very beginning, we’re supposed to be sure of life’s origins, and there’s the difference, scientists offer theories which are tested with evidence while fanatics offer pronouncements that we aren’t allowed to question. Don’t get me going. I’m already going. Going and going. Listen to that, my neighbor is home from work, I know when she comes home because she turns up the volume on her iPod speaker. You can’t hurry love, oh, you just have to wait, yeah, yeah, mmm. The walls are thin around here. But I don’t mind. I like hearing evidence of people living their lives with enthusiasm. You can’t hurry love, uh-huh, mm-hmm, it’s a game of give and take. I like evidence in all forms, new evidence on top of old, and not because I need to know things with certainty, really, it’s just the opposite. Don’t we appreciate the complexities of life better when we look hard at the world and at ourselves? Doesn’t education teach us a respect for mystery? I hope so. That’s what I believe. And I’d meant to add, when I was telling you about watching your mother’s face in the flash as the lightbulb blinked back on, I was telling you about that, and I said, I think I said I was sure I understood her. But understanding, real understanding, involves an awareness of our limitations, the limitations of our knowledge. There are things we can’t know, and the deepest knowledge makes us more aware of this. When I said that I came to understand your mother, I wasn’t trying to suggest that, that there were no surprises left. No, not at all, I knew she wouldn’t stop surprising me, I mean, if we’d stayed together, if we’d lived our lives together, she wouldn’t have stopped surprising me. It was an understanding of that, a perception of a quality of being, a… I guess I can’t explain it adequately. Well, the point is, we didn’t stay together. I loved her. She was pregnant. I deserted her. And now I’ll tell you why.
All right, here we go. In November of that year, early in November, November 5, 1974, to be exact, your grandmother Mrs. Sally Bliss, Sally Bliss Senior, she was waiting for me on the porch of my apartment when I came home from a two-day haul. She was standing on the porch. It was raining hard. Rain was streaming between the shingles of the roof and forming a sheer curtain around the front and sides of the porch, I remember, so I didn’t recognize your grandmother at first. I saw the shadow of a person there as I walked up the front steps, and I smelled cigarette smoke mixed with the rain. I knew it wasn’t Penny because Penny didn’t smoke, but not until I stepped under the cover of the porch roof did I recognize your grandmother standing there. She was holding a cigarette, sucking on the stub of a cigarette, taking one last drag. And of course I thought that we’d been found out, she’d discovered that her daughter was pregnant. She wanted Penelope to finish school, to graduate with a degree in theater, and then it would be a short step either to Broadway or Hollywood. That was your grandmother’s dream for your mother. She wanted Penelope to be a star. She was convinced that it would be easy for her, all Penny had to do was bring her college degree along with her talent and beauty to her first audition. Sure. That’s the way it works. Huh. Anyway, it wasn’t in the plan for her to get pregnant, not in Sally’s plan for her daughter. I’d come along and messed things up. But your grandmother wasn’t waiting on the porch to blame me for messing things up. There was another reason for her visit. I remember when I moved under the cover of the roof, I said, Hello, Mrs. Bliss. I always called her Mrs. Bliss, though I knew she’d never been married herself. And I invited her to come inside, to have a cup of coffee. The rain was dripping and hissing and splashing, what a downpour, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it rain as hard as it was raining then, that day your grandmother appeared on my porch. I remember the cigarette seemed to fall out of her hands, I don’t think she’d meant to drop it, but
she went ahead and ground it out with her heel. And as she stepped inside, she tripped over the lip of the doorway, I recall. She managed to catch herself, to grab the pole of the coatrack and keep herself from falling flat, luckily. This part of it is still clear in my memory. But, um, what follows, I… I don’t know, it’s hard to remember the sequence, exactly as it happened. I had an electric burner, and at some point I put the water on to boil, though I’m not sure if this was before or after your grandmother spoke. I really don’t know whether she was holding her cup of coffee while she announced to me… but maybe announced isn’t the right word. I mean, she spent a while with me in the room that evening. She talked about how she’d had a baby when she was sixteen. She explained that she’d left the infant with her family and run away from home. She told me everything, but in what order, I’m not sure. She told me about her sister, your great-aunt Trudy. She’d been searching for Sally and had finally found her that summer. Whatever her sister said was enough to arouse her suspicions, your grandmother’s suspicions. There was money involved, some sizable amount of money. Your grandmother had been under the impression that money she’d been sending regularly over the years had been given to her son. But her sister appeared early in the summer and told her that the money Sally had been sending had never reached her son. It was because of her sister’s visit that your grandmother decided she needed to know what had happened to her child. So for the first time in several decades she went back to visit the town in Pennsylvania where she’d grown up. Her own parents were no longer living, and she couldn’t track down her cousin, the one, his name was Daniel, Daniel Werner, who was the father of the baby. He had disappeared, and no one knew or was willing to say where he’d gone. But it was communicated to Sally that Daniel Werner had taken the baby after Sally left home, he’d tried to raise it, but he couldn’t do it, he couldn’t handle a baby on his own, and after two years, less than two, he gave the child up. The Werner family maintained that Daniel Werner put the child up for adoption. And that’s the point where Sally managed to connect her story to mine. Is this all making sense? What your grandmother came over to tell me that night made it necessary for me to leave. But please understand that this isn’t about blaming her. It wasn’t her fault. She didn’t invent anything. She received all her information from sources that should have been absolutely reliable. She was persuaded to believe… now it’s going to sound absurd, I know, but back then, the discovery was presented as incontestable. You see, she became convinced, and she convinced me, that I was her son, the son she’d left behind. It’s unfathomable, really. But she believed, and she persuaded me to believe, that I was her firstborn child. Well, maybe I should give you a moment to consider it.
