Defiant of adult intervention, Ransome’s characters set their own course for fun. “We’re free to start stirring things up. We’ll hoist the skull and crossbones again the moment we’ve had our grub. We’ll get things moving without wasting a minute.” The kids take care of themselves and of each other, having a good time and getting along with very little bickering or whining. Ransome is known for his practical details, and this novel included specifics on how to sail, how to catch trout with your hands, and how to skin a rabbit (not easily). The kids in The Picts and the Martyrs behave as I hope my own kids would, with bravery and common sense and joy.
In Junot Díaz’s Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which I read a few days later, a much darker portrait of an independent childhood is presented. Oscar is a teenager hounded by his mother but then left much on his own to defend and define himself on the streets of Newark. The kids in Ransome’s books always have the safety net of their family (or the family cook), but Oscar is on his own. His father disappeared years ago, and his mother relates to both Oscar and his sister only through threats and anger: “It was her duty to keep me crushed under her heel.” The sole loving person in Oscar’s life is his grandmother, and she lives across the sea in the Dominican Republic. To his grandmother, he is a “genius”; to everyone else, he is a mutant: “You really want to know what being an X-man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest.”
My book group in Westport read A Hope in the Unseen by Ron Suskind for our June meeting. A Hope in the Unseen is a nonfiction account of a boy raised by a single mother in one of the worst neighborhoods in Washington, D.C. Cedric, like Oscar, is something of a mutant, jeered at by the kids at school for his good grades, held up like a specimen of good behavior by his teachers, and misunderstood by his incarcerated father. His mother is his main support, and she is generous with her love and affection. Food and shelter, however, are harder to supply. Some nights there is no dinner because there is no money for food. The pair face eviction and homelessness more than once.
Although there are similarities between Oscar and Cedric, Cedric has the unfailing support, if not always understanding, of his mother. Cedric’s moment of becoming a man is, for me, when he understands that whatever he wants to leave behind in his past, his mother is “not something to rise above and leave behind. She’s what got him this far. Give, give, give her whole life, mostly to him.” He says to her now, “You can’t be the only one doing the caring. I’m strong enough to do some now, too.” Then he hugs her: “His long arms squeeze tight around her, a big woman who doesn’t need to be so damn big anymore.”
From a place of hope and love grows a man. Cedric was cared for, and in turn becomes a man who can take care of himself, and of others. An example set by a mother and replicated by a son. What examples am I setting? A book a day for a year: obsessive and crazy, or dedicated and disciplined? It was up to my kids to decide for themselves.
One very rainy day in the fall, back before I’d started my book-a-day project, I went out to the side of the road by our house and started to dig away at the roots of a maple tree growing up in the shade of bigger trees. It was a tiny tree, but with beautiful red and orange leaves that glistened spectacularly in the rain. I worked away at the root ball of that tree and finally dug the whole thing out. I dragged the tree and the huge chunk of dirt hanging onto its roots into a wagon and then pulled the wagon across the lawn and out to the back of our house. I planted the tree beside the patio. From the kitchen sink, I could look out and see the brilliant leaves against the dark blue autumn sky. In winter, the branches caught snow that glittered under the sun. In springtime, tiny thin buds came out on its branches, and now, in June, the skinny tree was abundantly green. It provided just enough shade in one corner of the patio for me to pull a chair into and read, out of the sun. My kids had asked about that tree: Why hadn’t I just gone to the nursery and bought a nice tree?
“Because,” I explained to them, “this little maple was growing out under the shade by our big maples. It wasn’t going to get any bigger out there, but it could get bigger. With more sun and air and space it could grow tall. So there it was, a tree with potential, and I saved it. That tree cost only the effort of my digging it up, lugging it over here, and planting it in the ground. Do you understand?”
“You don’t have money for a new tree?” asked Martin.
“You’re cheap?” tried George.
“You love to dig,” Michael said in conclusion. Peter just shook his head. Jack came outside and offered another explanation.
“Your mother is crazy.”
“All of the above,” I said, “and I wanted shade on the patio.”
I read Francine du Plessix Gray’s biography Madame de Staël: The First Modern Woman under the shade of that tree. Just like me, and like most mothers, the mother of Madame de Staël was hell-bent on raising her child the right way. In figuring out how to raise my kids, I relied on the example of my own mother and of the mothers I liked in books, like the character of Geraldine Colshares in Laurie Colwin’s Goodbye Without Leaving.
I felt a kinship to Geraldine. She’d been a backup singer and dancer for a rhythm and blues duo, and I’d always dreamed of being one. Once she gets married and has a kid, she wants only to hang out with her baby, Little Franklin: “Asleep on my arms, he was unaware that the person holding him was out of a job, had no profession, and had in fact outlived an era. Little Franklin of course didn’t care, and I didn’t much care either. I had a purpose in life: to sit in a rocking chair mindlessly musing on my baby while I nursed him and burped him and rocked him.”
Yes, that was exactly how I felt when the boys were little. So maybe I wasn’t looking to books for guidance on how to be a mother, as much as for approval on how I was doing it. Either way, reading Gerry’s take on how motherhood was just like being in a band—“being very tired and singing a lot. Also being on your feet all the time”—made me feel better about being the mom that I was, and I sang louder than ever.
The mother of Madame de Staël also relied on books to figure out how to raise her daughter. She turned to the writing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and especially the guidelines he set forth in his novel Émile, to steer her child straight toward a fulfilling existence. According to biographer Gray, the mother misinterpreted Rousseau’s dictates completely, but never mind. Her daughter came out of childhood with high wit, fast intelligence, big ambitions, and most of all, great enthusiasms.
Madame de Staël wrote in a letter, “Enthusiasm is the emotion that offers us the greatest happiness, the only one that offers it to us.” I’ve tried to instill in my own kids unguarded glee about and curiosity in what happens around them every day. After all, what is curiosity but an enthusiasm to learn and to know?
Anne-Marie had boundless energy and endless curiosity for new ideas and new ways of looking at things. That enthusiasm drove her in her work, and in her relationships, although its flip side—her boredom with old tropes on tired themes—sometimes made spending time with her unnerving. I’d sat through dinners where she got up from the table, fed up with stagnant conversation and in search of someone more stimulating to talk to. For those of us who knew her well, the signal was clear: change the topic or else. It wasn’t hard to find a new topic. Anne-Marie was always ready—and enthusiastic—for new ideas, and happy to come back to the table. I want my kids to be more diplomatic at dinner parties, but to be always open, like their aunt and like Madame de Staël, to new and different ideas and visions and goals.
I also want my children to feel grateful for all that life offers. In The Laws of Evening by Mary Yukari Waters, I found beautiful illustrations of such gratitude. The stories in The Laws of Evening are set mostly in Japan, ranging in period from the days before World War II through the war to the years after. Waters’s characters have witnessed death on scales ranging from intimate (children, father, mother, s
pouse) to national (the horror of Hiroshima). None of her characters is fearful of death, but they display different responses of expectations, regret, or acceptance: “And she was thankful to whoever had left this signpost to testify that he, too, had known this limbo for which there are no words; that through the ages others had known it and that by her own humble path, she had come to the right place.”
Despite their varied interpretations of death, Waters’s characters share a reverence for life. They are deeply grateful to be alive. As one character explains, “The dappled leaf shadows moving over the earth like dark cells, the entirety of this garden harmonizing and fusing . . . In the end, being alive is what matters.”
One of Waters’s characters quotes a haiku by Mizuta Masahide, a seventeenth-century samurai and renowned writer of haikus. I seriously considered having the verse painted over our kitchen doorway: “Since my house burned down / I now own a better view / of the rising moon.” A better view: that is what I wanted my kids to have. Not to see the worst of what circumstances rendered for them in their lives, but the best. Resilience in the face of disappointment.
What else did I want for my children? Haruki Murakami writes in his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running about how, having decided to become a writer, he stuck to his goal with singularity: “You really need to prioritize in life, figuring out in what order you should divide up your time and energy. If you don’t get that sort of system set by a certain age, you’ll lack focus and your life will be out of balance.” Having decided that for him writing would be the focus of life, he dedicated himself to it, understanding that there would be other aspects of life that he must give up. He can’t give up running (prone to chubbiness, he runs to keep the weight off), but socializing and staying up late at night are activities he cuts out of his routine.
“He doesn’t try to do it all,” I explained to Jack that evening at dinner.
We’d had a special meal in honor of George’s birthday, a continuation of days of festivities in his honor. There had been a party at school, a get-together that afternoon for friends, and now this dinner with his family. Over the weekend there would be one more celebration with my parents and Natasha. I’d made a slew of ice-cream cakes and invested in an allotment of Nerf guns and ammo (bubbles and piñatas wouldn’t do it this year). I’d hung the birthday banner that would now decorate our kitchen through the summer. All four boys were born in the summer months, and Jack’s birthday at the end of August rounded out the season. The weekend—and the summer—was just starting, and I was already exhausted.
Do it all? Who was I kidding? Between Meredith, the four boys, and my parents, most weekends our house is filled to bursting. In the summer more guests come, mattresses laid out across floors and towels piled high in bathrooms. Food is in constant demand, with milk, bananas, orange juice, and bread at the top of the list every single day. Mess builds up, spreading throughout all the rooms: spread-eagled books and dismembered toys, used glasses and discarded newspapers, and laundry, laundry everywhere. Kids track in dirt and leaves, and cats throw up in corners, leaving chewed-up grass in tiny mounds of offering. Every two weeks a Brazilian friend comes to the house, setting her cleaning crew to work with an efficiency and discipline I envy. Within twenty-four hours after they leave, chips have been retrod into the rug, cooking oil has splattered its way over the oven and across the counters, and another cat has thrown up another hard day’s work of chewing.
“No one wants you to try and do it all,” Jack said to me firmly, watching as I licked the last of the ice-cream cake from the tin tray. I had better start running, I thought to myself, adding one more daily activity to the list.
“You mean I shouldn’t try to read and write and see friends and hang out with the kids and feed the family and do the laundry and cook great meals—”
Snorts from Peter and Michael, but I forged on.
“And keep the house from absolute neglect and filth, weed the garden, and make the beds—”
“Hey,” interrupted Martin. “I make my bed, and I help with weeds.”
“Yeah,” said George, “and I made the treat bags for my birthday party. I always make my bed, and I bring my dirty clothes to the laundry room.”
“You all have been great,” Jack said. “I know Mom appreciates all your help.” A look over to me.
“Yeah, I do,” I said.
And I realized George was right. He had put the treat bags together all by himself, and come up with all the activities for his party. I’d only had to supply the artillery. Jack would cook lunch for our weekend party, and the older boys were on cleanup duty. No one had complained or probably even noticed that the birthday banner this year was not adorned with the multicolored streamers or pumped-up balloons I’d always added on in years past.
A year ago the clutter of postcards, coupons, and school flyers moldering away on my kitchen counter, the piles of school papers and projects and bills growing higher on my dining room table, and the dancing gray elephants of dust in the corner (to say nothing of the regurgitated grass) would have driven me mad. But this year, I sighed dramatically and said, “What the hell—I’ve got better things to do.”
Somehow, in some miracle wrought by reading, my messier life was affording me a better view of the rising moon. It was a very, very good trade.
“I’m lucky. I’m doing what I love, reading a book every day. And you guys are helping me do that. I bet Murakami never gets the kind of help I get. That’s what a family does—helps each other.”
“Are you lecturing us?” George asked, his eyebrows shooting sky high and his mouth making a straight line of consternation.
“No, I’m thanking you.” Okay, maybe I was lecturing. But I was also sharing. Sharing everything I was learning during this year of reading books, every chance I got. We were figuring things out together, making it work. Resilience, enthusiasm, gratitude, focus, independence. A strong foundation of family love. I’d found these components repeated, again and again, in the books I was reading. The ingredients for a satisfying life. And I’d added a little household mess into the mix, a leavening agent for the filling cake of existence.
On the last day of June I read Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams Stories. In the story titled “On Writing,” I found an homage to summer as it should be, and I remembered my own Midwest summers. Mornings spent out on the grass of our backyard, reading in ratty old lawn chairs; afternoons spent down at the beach, swimming in the cold waters of Lake Michigan; evenings when we hung out on the back patio, feeling the heat of a midsummer night settle in around us, playing Monopoly and Life, talking and laughing until late.
I wanted that again, summer days spent “just lying around,” like Nick Adams. I still had my kids home with me, for at least one more summer. There would be more birthdays to celebrate and cakes to bake, more places I had to drive, more meals I had to cook, and more clothes I had to launder. But I would make sure to also make time for all of us to go swimming or play a game or just lie around in the hammock or on the grass, reading. Our times spent together would never be forgotten, and the lessons of love and security, of easy bliss and simple joys, would always be remembered.
Chapter 17
Fireflies Dancing Across the Lawn
Maou cannot help but think of nighttime as it was then, there in Onitsha: the fear and jubilation it gave her, a shiver along her skin. Every night, since their return to the south, it is the same shiver which reunites her with what has been lost.
J. M. G. LE CLÉZIO,
Onitsha
LIVING IN A BEACH COMMUNITY, MY FAMILY DOESN’T USUALLY go away in the summer. But during this summer of reading a book a day, I was getting myself away, far away. Books were my comfort this year, and my counselors in how to live, but they were also providing the vacations that I needed. In the hours while the kids were at camp, hanging out in their rooms, or running wild through the yard, I was traveling across miles and across years, and finding new and old places to visit. “
There is no frigate like a book, / To take us lands away,” wrote Emily Dickinson. I was taking that frigate full steam ahead.
I went to Italy with William Trevor in My House in Umbria, where I saw “a yellowish building at the end of a track . . . curving through a landscape of olive trees and cypresses . . . broom and laburnum daub the clover slopes, poppies and geraniums sprinkle the meadows. . . . The hill continues to rise gently, and there’s a field of sunflowers.”
“Mom!” George’s voice cuts into my reading, pulling me back to the here and now. “What’s for dinner?”
Hmmm? “Pasta, I think . . . just drizzled with a bit of olive oil.” I shut the door to my music room, and I’m back in Umbria.
Traveling by steel ship, I crossed an ocean to reach Nigeria in J. M. G. Le Clézio’s Onitsha. It was a rough journey: “Day after day, only this hard sea, the air moving at the speed of the ship, the slow path of the sun across the steel walls, its glare bearing down upon forehead and chest, burning deep inside.” But oh, what I saw when I got there: “At sunset the sky darkened to the west. . . . Downstream the river inscribed a slow curving line to the south, as vast as an arm of the sea, with the hesitant traces of small islands, like rafts adrift. The storm swirled. There were bloodied streaks in the sky, gaps in the clouds. Then, very rapidly, the black cloud went back up the river, chasing before it the flying ibises still lit by the sun.”
Tolstoy and the Purple Chair Page 16
