An Abbreviated Life

by Ariel Leve

  The lists are all over his desk. Words with question marks. When something comes up that needs to be tended to, it goes on a list. This is how he talks to himself. He carries a pen and a folded piece of paper in his pocket at all times. Sometimes while we are talking, he will pause to jot down a note. Or he will consult his list to remember something he had to ask me about. It is his way to keep track of the details. He will write down: Batteries for hearing aid. Follow up with Dr. Teo. Follow up about what? The mechanics of his life are a mystery to me. Now the words on the lists are clues to something I must know about.

  “IT WAS,” HE says, “the hardest decision I ever had to make.” He is speaking about why he left New York and moved to Thailand when I was five. It was a painful decision but a decision he does not regret. He could not have survived in New York. He had to be true to himself so that he could be available to me. There are people who cannot withstand conflict and trauma or manage strife. He didn’t know what he was getting into. My mother was too powerful. He had to retreat. There was no alternative; he had to disengage. There is no one who identifies with this better than I do. I compensated for the absence of his presence with understanding. He was protecting himself. He had no choice but to leave and I had no choice but to assimilate. I never felt abandoned.

  “I WOULDN’T BE here today and we wouldn’t have the relationship we have,” he says. He is not a dramatic man. “I would not have survived.”

  I take his hand and nod. “I know.”

  “We are a team,” he says, with watery eyes. We are a team.

  47

  The girls have made me Mother’s Day cards. One is a colorful drawing of a rainbow with a blue sky and purple stars. The card reads “Happy Mother’s Day. I love you Ariel.” The other card is in pencil and she has drawn the three of us. The girls have given me these cards without warning. Without fanfare. Mario remarks, “Very colorful,” while looking at the card with the rainbow. The other one, whose card is in black and white, appears suddenly in need of approval. In her defense she states, “My hand got tired.” That makes me smile.

  “I love them both so much,” I say, holding the cards in my hands.

  WE HAVE A family meeting. It is the night before I leave for New York. I hear a squeak. It might be a rat, but I tell myself it might also be a chirp from a bird. I’ve learned not to reveal my anxiety in front of them.

  Mario explains to them that soon I will be going away for a month. “But you’re not going away forever, are you?” one of them asks. No, I say, I am not going away forever.

  EIGHTEEN MONTHS HAVE passed, and I contemplate that with every ounce of love I give to them, I am rebalancing the scales. I ask the girls to come into my office so we can talk. The three of us have special time together. While Mario is cutting the trees or changing the filter in the fishpond, I tell them how much I love them. I tell them the cards they made me are my favorite things in the whole world.

  When they are in my office with me we look at the photos on my desk of when I was their age. They enjoy this. They remember the stories I’ve told them. I don’t share the sad stories, only the good ones. One of them points to a photo of me sleeping while holding my blue rabbit. “That’s Pinky!” she says. Or another one where I am at the table with my father and Smashy. “That’s Smashy!” one of them says. The other one adds, “You lost him in the taxicab and your father looked everywhere for him.”

  “That’s right,” I say. I feel known.

  48

  There is a photo of a family. The four of them are in an embrace, the final seconds of a hug, and a moment is captured just before they break apart. It appears the closeness will not be undone. Everyone is smiling in a natural, unguarded way. The handsome father is leaning forward. He laughs, looking down at his two daughters, who are standing in front of him. His eyes appear shut. The woman next to him is leaning back on his shoulder. Her eyes are open slightly and looking straight ahead. Her slender fingers are touching the curve of her neck, as though she has just smoothed away an errant cluster of hair. The two little girls, nearly eight years old, are exactly the same height. Their heads are a few inches below the woman’s collarbone. One of the little girls is holding on to her father’s forearm, which is wrapped around her torso, and she is hugging it tightly from above and below. Three people are held within the grip of his long arms. Hands, narrow wrists, and fingers in varying sizes are entwined. There is unity.

  WHO IS THIS woman in the picture? Was she Photoshopped into it? I look at this image and marvel that it is me. I am here and there, outside and inside. It is incongruous with what I’ve known. I see stability. I see extradition. I have been repatriated.

  I USED TO look at family photos in other people’s homes and wonder what it would feel like to be inside of that unity. The vibrations of childhood would disqualify me from that kind of inclusion. I would remain separate.

  Because to be separate was to be safe. The destructive beliefs were too entrenched in the landscape of my psyche, rooted in a soil that couldn’t be tilled. I believed what was missing would never regrow. Adult life would be recovery from the past. Stasis is all I could have.

  “YOU FALL LIKE a sack of potatoes,” he says, shaking his head in disbelief and laughing in a caring way. “Why don’t you put your arms out to protect yourself?”

  Mario is standing on top of a paddleboard. His body is firmly planted like an elegant suntanned statue on the mantel. He holds the paddle in one hand and demonstrates what I should do when I lose my balance. His arm extends in front as he leans forward, mimicking the motion of bracing a fall.

  I am several feet away, treading water impatiently. I hold on to the board in front of me with both arms stretched horizontally across it, weary and listless, as though I’ve been drifting at sea for months. I fumble around for the paddle, which is moving away in the current, and splashing around, I climb back up onto the board.

  Later that evening, several hours after the aborted paddleboarding activity, he revisits the fact that I have no reflex to protect myself from a fall.

  “I don’t understand it,” he says. He is trying to figure it out. His voice is soft, but he is stumped. “There was a total lack of response.”

  MY EQUILIBRIUM IS interior. A refusal to succumb to inherited feelings of helplessness. Equilibrium, for me, was balancing internal conflict. It wasn’t possible for my mother to have a feeling and not discharge it immediately. It was up to me to not lose my balance and adjust.

  WHEN I LOOK at the photo of the family, I see that I am not condemned. The juggling act in isolation didn’t banish me to solitary confinement for life. I am not destroying, in spite of my default to protect myself from harm. The roots of distrust are deep.

  But there was a constellation of goodness that provided nurture and built up my resistance. My father. Rita. I can discriminate between what’s real and unreal. Satisfaction, which seemed impossibly elusive, is not out of reach.

  THE PHOTOGRAPH IS a moment. And I was in it. It wasn’t drooping from the weight of the past. Or corroded with anxiety about the future. It wasn’t punctured by an urge to sabotage. It is a moment I cherish because it existed. And believing in that moment took a lifetime.

  49

  I was stamped with disdain for the ordinary. But the ordinary was something I craved. The ordinary is worthwhile, too. Sustaining relationships is ordinary. Not feeling oppressed is ordinary. The odds were flipped. What were the chances I could go against the odds, flatten out a mangled shape, and embrace an ordinary life?

  WE WERE SEVEN years old. Christina had come for a play date at 180. It was a bitter cold winter day in New York and we had been playing outside. We took an enormous block of snow, a slab of icy marble, and carried it into the apartment so we could carve it.

  “I remember your mother didn’t bat an eye,” Christina says now. She is seated across the table from me in a noisy restaurant in midtown Manhattan, her fork poised over a plate of mussels. “She was so excited—she said, ‘Oh,
that’s great—put it in the bathtub!’ She thought it was the most amazing thing to create something. And I would have never been allowed to do that.”

  I am nodding my head as I listen to her. The permissiveness sounds enchanting.

  I can see how my mother’s shriek of “Goody!” when she was excited was a welcome alternative to the rules imposed in a functional household. “Going to your house,” she adds, “was like going to Disneyland.”

  Christina talks about how my mother made me take piano lessons. “Your house was always so artsy. Your mom had this kooky sense of humor. I was at a party at your house and had a bug in my glass of water and I said, ‘There’s a bug in my drink,’ and your mother immediately shot back, ‘Don’t worry, it won’t drink much.’”

  She laughs at this and mentions she never forgot that line. “I wasn’t used to parents talking to children like they were adults. She was sarcastic and I remember thinking, ‘She’s so cool—she’s treating me like an adult.’ From the outside, it seemed like she was such a fun, playful parent.”

  THIS IS THE scene that plays in my head as Christina speaks. A woman has abducted a child. She has hidden the child in the basement. The child is there. A detective comes to the door. He rings the bell, and as this happens, my heartbeat becomes faster, accelerating because I believe the child will be rescued. The circumstances will be revealed and it will all be clear. The child will be released. But when the woman answers the door, she invites the detective inside. The apartment has bookshelves and there are fresh flowers. She charms him. Classical music is playing. She gives him no reason to suspect anything is wrong. She convinces him that she is the victim of a misunderstanding. As this is happening, I want to scream, “No! Don’t be fooled! This is not real!” I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. The detective leaves thinking he made a mistake.

  I HAVE SEEN my mother crumpled on the floor. She always got up. I have seen her tap-dance with joy. I have seen her tap-dance with sorrow. I’ve seen her fly a plane, read a poem, captivate a room of people. I’ve seen her lash out with vituperative fire and unsparing claws. When she felt abandoned. Left out. Not cared for. Living for her was a crisis in progress that had to be shared. An emergency that had to be tended to. A calamity. A threat. A catastrophe. Unaware of the harm she caused to others. She marches on.

  THERE WAS NEVER one moment I could point to and say: that’s when I knew it wasn’t normal. When I was in school or in Thailand, with Rita, my father, or with friends, I knew I felt different than how I felt when I was in my mother’s company. Because I wasn’t on edge or calculating the best move. But there wasn’t a defining incident that marked a clear delineation.

  THE UNDERSTANDING OF abnormal could only be viewed as an adult, looking back. As a child, there was no barometer for normal other than not feeling under siege.

  It could come from being in a plane in the clouds, at the bottom of the ocean, or on an empty road in an unfamiliar neighborhood. These anonymous places where I felt dislocated, off her radar, and undetectable were my sanctuary.

  I WAS AT home in this dislocation. Limbo was parole. No verbal or physical attacks. No manipulations. No threats. Removed from the line of fire was as good as it could get. To thrive in those moments was to live in parentheses. Where no one knew where I was. Not even me.

  50

  It took a long time. Four decades. To learn the damage was not irreparable. To graduate from childhood, where it is no longer an affliction but part of the story, is scaling the wall. Climbing out of the ruins. We tell our stories to be heard. Sometimes those stories free us. Sometimes they free others. When they are not told, they free no one.

  THE 79TH STREET crosstown bus is rolling through the park. Central Park West to Fifth Avenue is a stretch of uninterrupted movement I’ve always enjoyed. The bus doesn’t stop to pick anyone up or let anyone off. Even when there is traffic and the bus is at a standstill, this pause is a comfort. Stowed away in a capsule between the East Side and the West Side—between all activity, suspended in timelessness. It has a calming effect. I will get from one side of the city to the other. And in the meantime, there is an acceptable oblivion.

  It is the same feeling I have on a flight. Midway over the Atlantic or the Arctic Circle, coasting through darkness. Outside the oval window there is only the abyss. High above earth. I’ve savored long-haul flights for these interludes. The grinding takeoff, the landing, the stomach-churning turbulence, the crying infant, the hassle, the physical discomfort—all of that fades away during that time when I disappear, surrounded by strangers. Even when I am pinned next to them, I can depart and coast like an astronaut, into another orbit. Weightless.

  I DON’T OFTEN take the bus in Manhattan, but the 79th Street crosstown is nostalgia in action. When you grow up in New York City, potent memory is on every street corner, in every neighborhood. I avoid the Upper East Side because of this.

  I rode the 79th Street crosstown throughout my childhood, imagining what it would be like when I was older. Passing by the Museum of Natural History, I figured out that in the year 2000, I would be thirty-two years old. That was the same age my mother was when she had me. I don’t recall what I was wearing or how I looked or even how old I was when I made this calculation, but the unimaginable prospect of one day being a thirty-two-year-old woman occurred to me on the 79th Street crosstown. One day I would be in charge.

  AS I RIDE the bus now, I am between two worlds, two islands. A bifurcated existence.

  The juxtaposition is striking. I have removed myself from everything I knew before. Life has been stripped down to what’s essential.

  “I CAN’T BELIEVE it,” Christina says. I am telling her about my life in Bali over lunch. I tell my friends about it because they are not able to see me in this world. The smells and the sounds of Southeast Asia, the pace and perspective; the life I have with Mario and the girls. The extremity of the change astounds her. She has known me since kindergarten, when I was five.

  “When do you go back?” she asks.

  “Tomorrow.”

  She dips a piece of bread into the broth from the mussels. “I knew you wouldn’t end up alone.”

  VICTORY ISN’T THAT I am not alone. It is not letting the aloneness and the aftermath of the past dismantle the present. It is ascending from the depths, not forcing others to join me down there. It is the foreigner in uncharted territory accepting a new and unfamiliar homeland. Can what was learned be undone? Will I permit this internal détente to exist?

  Every day is a struggle to fend off estrangement. The unsettled feeling is still there. An ominous sense that I will be disappointed, even though I work to keep it in check. It is an emotional tinnitus muted to a moderate decibel, and sometimes, without warning, it disappears entirely. And in this reprieve there are joyful moments.

  Home is not who I was. But the anxiety and detachment is with me no matter where I am. An immutable isolation is the scar tissue. The homelessness is in my bones. In the homelessness, I am at home.

  FROM THE BUS, I see people in the city rushing around, buying, consuming. Where are they going? I am sitting near the window and the seat next to me is empty. It is lunchtime on a Tuesday and the bus has a smattering of passengers. It is not crowded. There is the older woman who is smartly dressed with her expensive handbag on her lap. There are nannies and young children. There are students in high school who stare down at their phones.

  As the bus comes out of the park and approaches Fifth Avenue, I am still looking out the window when a premonition that I will see my mother seizes me at the exact instant I see her.

  MY MOTHER LOOKS disheveled and she is walking slowly. She has a limp. Because of this limp, I feel a surge of sympathy. But she has told me so many times that she is a cripple and can’t move, the instinct to feel sorry for her evaporates. She is still moving. The bus stops and I am suddenly struck with panic: What if she gets on? I crouch down in the seat and my adrenaline soars. It is the acute fight-or-flight response—a physiological r
eaction that grips my nervous system. It tells me I am in harm’s way. My heartbeat accelerates. I look for the emergency exit door. It is behind me. Will I be found out? What if she spots me? This response is instinctual. I can relax only once I’ve located the emergency exit.

  I DID NOT hate my mother. I feared her. I feared her destroying my life. I feared her lies would turn others against me. I feared the incessant and unending conflict I would be forced to engage in with someone who couldn’t see past her own reality. To put myself first caused her to suffer. I feared the pain I would cause. I feared that pain would metastasize into vengeance. I feared her in the way I did as a child because I was powerless then to protect myself. There are days I am still that child. She frightens me. And her power is undiminished by the passage of time.

  SHE IS CROSSING the street and walks on 79th Street between Fifth and Madison. She must have gone for a walk in the park. I watch for a few seconds to make sure it is her. I observe from behind a darkened glass window. I see her, but she doesn’t see me.

  This is the way it has always been.

  51

  I’m not changing my story! I’m not!”

  I DIDN’T CHANGE my story because my story was real. I knew that at seven years old. My story would not be revised on demand. Even though this demand came from my mother, the person I was biologically encoded to trust. I knew what I knew. In spite of being told my perception was false, or maybe because of it, my experience could not be eroded. The gnarled and deformed words that subverted reality were batted away. This was resilience. A mysterious alchemy of luck, DNA, and outside influence.