An Abbreviated Life

by Ariel Leve

  “YOU HAVE A right to set boundaries,” Emily said.

  When she said this, I argued with her that it wouldn’t work.

  “It’s impossible,” I stated.

  “No,” she corrected me. “It feels impossible.”

  The feeling was the obstacle. The feeling owned me. She would find me. She would show up. Would I go into the witness protection program?

  I WAS COMPELLED to quarantine myself. But I was also compelled to quarantine friends, lovers, acquaintances: the expectation that she would impose and insert herself into my world to get to me made me doubly protective of my life and relationships. She was my problem; it wasn’t fair to inflict her on others.

  I PROMISED TO call my mother once a week from London, which I did from a pay phone. I called her collect because she insisted this phone call happen.

  I was indentured. The money confused me. I accepted help because I needed it. It was a gift, she said. But I knew better. There was no such thing. “I have always been supportive of your dreams and put my money where my mouth is.” Reinforcement of the idea that I owed her. And I knew that the expectations would be there no matter what. I was weak.

  I WOULD LEAVE my flat at night in the rain and stand in a red phone booth on a London street corner that smelled of urine.

  “I need a phone number for you,” she pleaded with me. “I promise I won’t use it unless it’s an emergency.”

  I didn’t give in. “I don’t have a phone.”

  “How is that possible?”

  I made up an excuse.

  The excuse was challenged.

  The setup: “If you feel in some way I could improve my behavior and be a better mother, please tell me. If you have anything on your mind, don’t keep it a secret. I welcome your criticisms, your comments, and your suggestions. You are my child but also my friend and fellow artist. A truthful bond between us means more than anything. I am open to change and it hurts that you don’t trust me with your phone number. I know you don’t want to hurt me.”

  I COULDN’T TRUST her with my phone number because I had learned from experience. Phone calls came in the middle of the night. If I didn’t want to talk, there had to be an explanation. The explanation wasn’t good enough. When caller ID came around, the messages piled up. Messages that went on for ten minutes without her taking a breath.

  SO I WITHHELD my phone number, but the once-a-week phone calls had to be made. I couldn’t take a week off. When I did this anyway, there were repercussions.

  “Hello, Ariel,” she would say. Flat, cold, battered by my insensitivity. “I waited here for your call last week and arranged my whole evening around it. I waited all night. And the call didn’t come. I know that you have no idea what it’s like to wait for a call that doesn’t come from your child because you don’t have a child. But I can tell you that I am fighting despair and sadness that you didn’t call me because I am so curious to know what is happening with you. I have you in my mind always because I love you and the very fact that you are you makes me feel good.”

  Who I am to her is not who I am, and this part of the conversation washes over me.

  “Do you think that’s a nice way to treat someone? It’s very cruel. What happened? Tell me the truth. If you want nothing to do with me and never want to see or speak to me again, tell me.”

  I couldn’t tell her the truth. No one could. Rita’s letters are filled with “I couldn’t reveal this or she would use it against me.” It was mandatory to hold back.

  “I was on an assignment,” I said. “I was working.”

  “Well, I’m sure you could have found two minutes to call me and let me know you weren’t able to speak.”

  There was no such thing as two minutes.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It won’t happen again.”

  “You said that the last time. I feel like an idiot. I shouldn’t have to beg you to speak to me. It’s bad enough that you force me to wait for your call.”

  Silence.

  “Why do you want me to suffer so much?”

  I FELT LIKE a bad person. A terrible daughter. And I could not cut off. I wasn’t ready. I was afraid of what she would do. The anxiety of not knowing was a threat.

  WHEN SOMEONE DOESN’T take no for an answer, you shut the door. But they pound on it. They demand to be let in. The door is shut for a reason. You are bankrupt. You have nothing left to hand over and your pockets are empty. To be on the other side of a door that she couldn’t kick in felt unattainable. It was safer to know where she was. Stay one step ahead. She would always be there, kicking and screaming, but it was better this way than to have no idea when she would show up and suddenly, without warning, break the door down.

  I LIVED WITH two sets of rules. One for her, one for everyone else. When I was in New York, I couldn’t tell her. If she knew I was there, she would insist I spend time with her. I had time for others, why not for her? If I chose not to see her, this led to a maze of conflict that had no exit. It never resulted in “Call me when you feel like it.” I walked the streets in Manhattan afraid to run into her. Her claim on me was powerful. I was a master of deception. Did it diminish or exalt me? It didn’t matter. I was protecting myself the only way I knew how.

  MY INTERIOR CLOCK was set to her mood. When her mood was stable, my life was better. I accommodated that. I believed I owed her. I believed that after everything she’d done for me, everything she’d given me, this entitled her to her due. But there were no limits to her entitlement, and for those in the path of it, there were only two options. Give in or pay a price. I gave in. I wanted a peaceful life and believed this was the only way to get it. These acts of betrayal were self-preservation. Or so I believed.

  44

  I am sitting alone on the swing outside my office. One of the girls comes over. “What are you doing?” she asks.

  “Thinking,” I say.

  “About what?”

  “How to tell a story.”

  “I love stories,” she says. She states that she wants to be a writer like me when she grows up. When the other one sees that her sister has my attention, she comes running across the garden to join us.

  “What are you talking about?” she asks.

  “We’re talking about being a writer.”

  “Oh, I want to be a writer, too. And a library girl.”

  “That’s a great idea. But it takes a lot of thinking.”

  “I like thinking!”

  “That’s good.”

  The other one adds, “You wanted to be a writer because you love words.”

  “That’s true,” I say, taking both of them by the hand. “Let’s write some stories.”

  WE GO INTO my office and I sit at my computer. One of them stands on the left side of my chair, one on the right. I give them instructions. “Think about what you want to say.” They are both silent for a few seconds, and then the one on the left suddenly shouts: “Okay, I’m ready!”

  She begins. Once upon a time . . .

  As we unfold this tale, she censors herself a few times because she thinks it’s not good. I explain she can say whatever comes to her mind. “There is no right or wrong,” I tell her. “Your story is beautiful because it comes from you.”

  I hear myself say this to her. I hear my mother say this to me. She was flawless in those moments. But then she was always using her own poems to illustrate her point. She couldn’t help that when she gave, she needed admiration in return.

  The other one gets impatient. “My story is ready.”

  “Okay, you’re up,” I say. “And then we’ll print them out.”

  As we write these stories, they exude confidence and a belief they have something to say. I don’t read them my own poems or share my own stories. I am realizing that I can go with them into their world without needing them to come into mine.

  The momentum builds as their stories take shape. There are no limitations. Where will we travel to? What will happen there? There is an exhilaration the three of u
s share. “Oh, and then . . . and then . . . !” Their excitement is contagious. We take off like a helium balloon headed into the sky.

  “Ariel?” One of the girls is poking my arm with her finger. “Can I tell you something?”

  Yes, I say, go ahead.

  THERE ARE TIMES I will be with the girls and we will be drawing or playing or singing or talking and I am able to rewrite the past. I am seven years old again in the way that it should be. Can I tell you something? Can I ask you something? When they ask me these questions, I respond. They need to be heard.

  I will be in the moment but detached from it, too. It is a strange and ethereal feeling. To slaughter the past while replenishing at the same time.

  45

  It is time to seek asylum from the barrage of emergencies, the incessant pleas and demands—the quid pro quo bargaining. I am asking for space.

  For days, I have spoken about the letter I am about to send my mother but am unable to follow through. “I’m getting there,” I’ve said when Emily asked if I sent it. When Mario asked why I’m waiting. When my father said firmly, “Go for it.” I’ve tried to imagine every conceivable outcome, to map out every way in which she will lash out, envisioning every scenario of how she will respond.

  This is the cartography of oppression. To navigate the options, as I have all of my life; to predict the unpredictable. I am good at it. It’s a skill I know well. A skill I can rely on to cope with the unknown. But it’s a skill that has had side effects, too.

  WHAT WILL IT feel like to be free? Will I be free?

  February 11, 2014

  Dear Mom,

  Last week was my 46th birthday. It’s taken me all this time to realize my duty now has to be first to myself and my well-being. If you can accept what is good for me, above what you want for yourself, then I believe we can find a way forward.

  You say you love me unconditionally. If this is true, you’ll let me go. You will understand that I will come back to you in my time, when I’m ready. As you’ve said, we need different things. You need to see me and speak with me and know where I am; that is not what I want and not what I need.

  That is the honesty you ask for. You don’t have to tell me how much pain it causes you because I am—and have been for all of my life—informed of your pain and sadness. Your fears and anxieties and insecurities have always been dominant, never been spared. But I am not responsible for your sadness and pain.

  THE LETTER GOES on.

  It ends with I hope you don’t punish me for my decision, but I can’t control how you respond.

  THE LETTER HAS been sent. I have blocked all communication from her and from those I suspect will try to reach out to me on her behalf. Whatever stormy response there is, I will not know about it. I will be ignorant of the damage. The suit of emotional armor is on. She can fire but it will not penetrate.

  46

  For weeks, I noticed a steady decline in his mood. My father was being deflated before my eyes. His heart wasn’t pumping properly, and with every passing day, his perspective was changing. Instead of waking up, as he always did, with a cheerful outlook to greet the day, he lay in bed with his thoughts racing, going nowhere, lost in an impenetrable darkness. Anxiety had gripped him. A depression descended. I arrive at his house for breakfast and he looks glum. He talks about not having anything to do, anywhere to go, any friends to visit with.

  “I’m frozen,” he says, shaking his head.

  WE SEE EACH other every day. Our lives are not dissimilar. After breakfast, we separate for a few hours, each of us at our computer in separate rooms, and then we decide where to have lunch. There are four different places we choose from. A local warung that has Padang food is his favorite. Indonesian dishes behind a plate of glass.

  We point to what we want and sit down across from each other at a picnic table with locals. He can’t twist open the plastic cap on the bottle of water. I watch as he tries, but it won’t crack open. “I’m losing my strength,” he says softly, shaking his head. His eyes look wearily into mine, and in that moment, my father, the former Marine, is defeated. “No,” I say, removing the bottle from his hand, “it’s hard to twist it off—even I have trouble.”

  As the days pass, when I ask “How are you?” he shrugs and forces a smile. “Average.” Then, because he doesn’t want me to worry, he adds, “I’m okay, I am.” But I knew that he wasn’t.

  His energy was disappearing and he had breathlessness from walking. His pacemaker was overworked. It had to be taken care of. The logistics of this are not simple. His cardiologist in Singapore recommends a cardiac resynchronization therapy device. Every detail of what this means squashes him. Any medical problem requires a trip to another country.

  He is frustrated with the failure to regain control. As though he is just now realizing that life ahead of him is maintenance. “I take seven pills a day,” he says disapprovingly. “For the rest of my life.”

  WE SIT TOGETHER in front of his computer and I assist with a transaction online. It requires his password, and when he reveals it to me, I smile. “I use the same word,” I say. He becomes emotional and squeezes my shoulder because we’re sitting side by side in chairs and can’t hug. “We’re a team, kiddo,” he says. “We’re a team.”

  SOMETIMES WE’LL BE out to dinner and he is amused to see a group of people sitting together, all of them staring down at their phones, tapping away. We laugh and share disbelief. “It’s the end of the world,” he says. We will see someone sitting alone laughing out loud, before realizing she is communicating with another human being using the video camera. “Look at that,” he says, sighing. It mystifies him, but not really. He reads four different newspapers a day. He is more informed than anyone I know. But his fear and disregard for modern technology has become an attribute that he’s attached to himself. He is open-minded about philosophies and ideas, he is a generous and progressive thinker. Deeply analytical. We will have long discussions about a topical event—a trial that is under way or a social injustice—and always during these debates he will say, in a considered and humane way, “Let me be devil’s advocate for a second.” He sees all sides.

  EXCEPT WHEN IT comes to owning a cell phone.

  “It’s not who I am,” he says. I have to accept this. And what this means is that if I want to reach him, I can’t. My desire to be in touch with him is trumped by his need to be unreachable. Unwanted communication is an interruption. He is a loner who detoured into a marriage and, when it ended, resumed his resting state of solitude.

  FOR YEARS WE have argued about the cell phone. “You have a daughter,” I say. I try to impress upon him that he doesn’t have to call me or talk, all he has to do when he is traveling or late for lunch is answer the phone so I know where he’s at. My concern is brushed aside.

  “If something has happened to me, you’ll find out about it eventually. If I’m in the middle of a car accident or having a heart attack, I’m not going to answer the phone anyway.”

  This “what will be will be” attitude is unalterable. Pushing him gets us nowhere, and he tells me to stop trying to control how he lives and let him be. He senses my frustration and apologizes. “I’m sorry, pal,” he says compassionately. “I am who I am.”

  For a long time I’d believed that his resistance to technology was generational. It is, in part. But the choices he has made from where he lives to how he lives reveal an actuality that defies aging. He is a man who prefers to be cut off.

  HE HAS NEVER planned for getting older in a third-world country, even though he has lived in Southeast Asia for over fifty years. Like everyone, he put off what he didn’t want to think about. The future. Not being vital. The first time I ever heard my father say “I’m getting old” was in his eighty-sixth year. It was stunning because it was so out of character.

  THERE IS NO infrastructure in Bali that supports Western medical care. He needs medications that are not available in Indonesia, and he will have to go to America. There are details—so many detai
ls—to work out. Details that seem insurmountable. Visa agents and paperwork and languages we don’t speak. Bali feels like the end of the world.

  THE TWO EXTREMES. My mother, who feels entitled to sympathy and has no recognition of being a burden. My father—who doesn’t want to impose, doesn’t want to encumber me with his problems—has become my biggest worry.

  I WALK AROUND his house. It is filled with books. Photographs are in frames. They are either of the two of us, or of him by himself.

  A photo in a tent after he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. He is in his seventies and has a flesh-colored bandage wrapped around his knee. A photo with an orangutan in the jungles of Borneo. He is kneeling down and the orangutan’s hand is on my father’s upper thigh. A photo of him in a cycling outfit on a mountain bike in Tuscany. And at the top of Gunung Agung, the volcano. There are photos of him trekking in Nepal with a wooden stick, bundled up. It is startling to see my father in winter clothing. I am aware every day of his loss—to have vitality be in the past, knowing it will never be recovered. He is in China. Cambodia. Hanoi. I hold in my hand his medal from the New York City Marathon. His first and only marathon at the age of sixy-four. His name is engraved along with his time: 5.29.37.

  “I’M NOT IN good shape.” When he says this, everything stops. There is no wisdom, no time for reflection. There is only a need to fix it and make it better. I feel responsible in a way that I must be. He has no one else.

  MY FATHER MAKES lists. It is how he organizes his thoughts. They are written on white notepads and yellow Post-its—hastily jotted down. His handwriting is, like the sound of his voice, characteristic of his stoic manner. He writes trimly and legibly in print that slopes to the right, and the words are recognizable even when he is in a hurry to jettison a thought. The smaller the handwriting, the less integral to his life; but still, it has to be purged. Tiny lettering indicates a reminder of something motivational he knows he should do. Walk!