by Mark Slouka
It was something. It wasn’t enough. Though they explained some things—allowed me to draw a line between the causes in column A and the effects in column B—the pills weren’t enough.
They were the accelerant, not the match.
XLV
I THINK IT’S FAIR to say that sex was always a problem for my mother. A kind of haunted haven.
She was Gretel, wandering out of the forest where bad things had happened, only now the story had changed: In this version she was dropping bread crumbs so she could find her way back. She didn’t want to drop them. She couldn’t stop herself. Each one tied her to the thing she’d escaped from.
Looking back, I see that some of the bread crumbs were more telling than others, but they were always about fear.
Homophobia was a theme. When I was in third grade, for example, she worried a good deal about my friend Kevin. Had I noticed anything strange about him? Some boys had certain “tendencies”—she didn’t expect me to understand. It was just that she’d seen us wrestling in the yard and, well, his head had ended up in a place it shouldn’t have ended up; anyway, now that she thought about it, she’d prefer I play with the other boys. And because I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about and didn’t really care about Kevin one way or the other except for the fact that he’d let me win when we flipped for baseball cards, I did what Mommy said.
Kevins were everywhere, apparently. My college roommate was a possible Kevin, what with that gold chain he wore around his neck—this or that acquaintance showed unmistakable signs. My father’s Kevin-ness, of course, came up as predictably as crocuses in spring: just as Dad was literally color-blind, he was blind the other way—you know. Gina Lollobrigida could walk in front of him stark naked and he’d never see a thing.
Nor were Kevins restricted to the, ahem, male gender: a certain salesgirl at Macy’s, helping her try on a blouse, had touched her inappropriately; a notorious lesbian at Teachers College at Columbia (where my mother received her librarian’s degree) had “cornered her” in the stacks. And so on.
If it’s easy for me to make light of now (my mother escaped the stacks unscathed), it’s because condescension masks complicity. For a long time I bought this “deviance” narrative (as common in the general culture then as the notion of, say, black inferiority twenty years earlier), just like I did all the others she told me, because there was profit in it—Daddy’s less-than-manliness, which she described to me in detail, reflected well on me. By the time I appeared in the crosshairs and my own sexuality became a cause for concern (did I have other friends besides my roommate?), a lot of opportunities for doing the right thing had passed me by. It’s one of my regrets, and if it’s true that mine were only sins of omission (I didn’t care enough to argue with my roommate’s typical—and, under the circumstances, deeply ironic—Jamaican homophobia), they’re no more excusable for that.
But if the Kevins were a problem, the Amys and Maries of the world were, too. More, because I obviously cared for them. Because they’d take me away. Because I’d go willingly, betray her. Because it was an inescapable fact that (insert the Czech version here) “your daughter’s your daughter the rest of your life; your son is your son till he takes a wife,” and as it was written (somewhere) so it must be. Betrayal was obligatory.
That I wasn’t thinking of matrimony that summer at Twin Lakes when I was twelve didn’t really matter—it had begun. The process that would leave her alone, broken, forgotten. She wouldn’t let me go easily.
I didn’t realize this. I was too busy listening to Bread’s “I Want to Make It with You” on the radio. I was standing under the paper lanterns, frozen like a frog in the flashlight’s beam by my first actual glimpse of a “woman’s” breasts. I was lying out on the float dreaming of ways to impress her (this girl with breasts)—imagining what I might say to her if she ever actually noticed me, what she’d do if I ever found the courage to take her hand.
The rainy August day in 1970 that I bicycled over to the deserted “campus” from our house to hang out with Karen, her brother, Kevin (a different one), and their stepsister, Laura, I had no idea what I was getting into.
The afternoon passed quickly, I remember, with the clouds flying low over the late-summer fields and the rain pattering on the tin roof of the rec house where we played game after game of Ping-Pong, no doubt yelling and insulting each other the way twelve-year-olds always have and will. I have a vague memory of showing off, tirelessly—giddy as a colt in clover at finding myself in the company of not one, but two pretty girls, one of whom I liked, and the other who liked me. I have no idea what we talked about and it doesn’t matter. All I recall—and this I recall so vividly—was an odd and oddly unforgettable thing that occurred later in the afternoon during a pause in the rain.
We’d been hanging about in a half-mowed field by the mess hall when a field mouse bolted out of the grass, realized its error, then pinballed between us like a cartoon. I grabbed it—because that’s what I do, grab things—and being a manly sort of mouse it promptly sank its little yellow incisors into my thumb, earning itself a quick trip, airmail, back to its home.
I was ripe for humiliation, just sitting on the trip-wire chair like in the old carnivals, ready to be dunked by the first good shot. What could possibly be less cool than grabbing a mouse, getting bit, and actually yelling out with surprise and pain? To my amazement, nobody took me down. Kevin held his tongue, the girls made a fuss over me: I was bleeding—wounded. Out of nowhere, Laura produced a tube of antibiotic cream and a box of Band-Aids. Sitting opposite me on the wet grass, she took my hand in hers—I was sure she could hear my heart pounding like a tom-tom in my chest—cleaned off the bite, then slowly, tenderly (with Karen leaning over to offer advice), made me whole.
It was only then that I noticed the time: I was almost an hour late already. Still dazed—more in love than I’d been before, though with whom I wasn’t quite sure anymore—I jumped on my bike and flew the five miles back to the turnoff to our house by the lake. Would that I’d kept going, joined the circus.
My father wasn’t home. My mother was. I barely recognized her.
I was late—why was I late?
I was sorry, I stammered, I’d forgot, I didn’t mean—
“Co je s tebou?—What’s the matter with you? Why are you so flushed?”
“I’m not, I just—”
“Why do you have that look?”
“What look? I don’t—”
“What happened?”
“Nothing happened,” I said, raising my voice, because something had happened, a girl had held my hand, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, nothing happened—”
“Who do you think you are, taking that tone?”
“I’m not . . . I don’t—”
“Listen to yourself—why are you overreacting like this? Tell me what happened! What happened with those girls? Were you alone? Tell me!”
I don’t remember if she smacked me, but if she had, it would have been a relief. It went on. It was the first of its kind and it came out of nowhere, a vicious, crying fight—me doing the crying, of course, humiliated, guilty over thoughts I’d been harboring for weeks (but how could she know?), old enough to understand what she was implying, too young to not be ashamed of having imagined it.
There’d be a long line of Karens. When Linda, to whom I’d declared my love the third week of my freshman year at Ardsley High School, came to our house with a friend of hers—a kind of designated speaker who managed to squeeze out, “Hi, Mrs. Slouka, can Mark come out to play?”—both girls were sent packing in no uncertain terms. When Denise, who I dated in college, surprised me by catching a bus to Bethlehem one evening on a whim (bringing flowers for my mother), she was told she was not welcome in our house and could make her own arrangements for a place to sleep. When I wanted to visit Amy in California, who I missed desperately, funds were withdrawn and roadblocks erected. When Marie, a girl I’d fallen in love with as a twenty-one-year-old
in Czechoslovakia, left a message with my mother asking if I’d meet her at the Brno train station to say goodbye (I’d written, after weeks of arguments at home, to break off our relationship), I wasn’t given the message, nor told that she’d waited for me that afternoon until many years later when a friend of my mother’s told me the truth.
Looking back, I see it as a kind of tug-of-war, with my mother on one side and the handful of girls I’d known and cared for on the other, pulling me, through kindness, decency and just-plain-normalness toward the man I’d become—the man, ironically, my mother had once intended me to be. That they squeaked out a victory still fills me with gratitude.
It wasn’t easy. Or pretty. The tug-of-war would go on for years. As I began pulling away from her (she’d make sure of it), my mother found herself fighting a war of attrition against any and all, deploying troops in direct proportion to how much I actually seemed to care for the girl in question, resorting to propaganda, risking everything until, at long last, reality outran apprehension and I met the woman I’d marry. By this point, almost Lear-like, she was striking around herself with anything that came to hand, even at one point summoning up a grotesque and flatly unbelievable anti-Semitism as if that might somehow carry the day. I fought her to a bloody standstill (neither of us inclined to give by this point), then realized that the person I was marrying—vestigially Jewish, utterly kind—was invisible to her. She was flailing at ghosts—reason had little to do with it.
And what ghosts they were—whispering, suggesting, drawing vague connections between memory and nightmare, then pulling them tight. . . . All the years I knew her, for example, whenever she needed to pull a sweater over her head, she’d first carefully gather it up in a thick necklace, then tear it over her face like something on fire. There had been that time, she’d say, when she was still just a little girl, when “a stranger” had trapped her in her own dress. Since then, she couldn’t stand the feeling of being closed in. And so the blouses and sweaters and sweatshirts came off the way they did.
And then the sweater got caught on a necklace, or an earring, or just slipped out of her hands. The panic—wild, flailing, drowning panic—was instant. A lamp smashed, an earring tore. My father, leaping to help, took an elbow in the face.
Which was bad enough. What terrified me then—what terrifies me still—was the sound she made, trapped inside that sweater. She wasn’t screaming; she was whimpering.
At the last minute, forced into it by my father, she came to our wedding. A wonderfully still, sun-filled, early-October morning. I have a photograph of her sitting next to Leslie at lunch after the ceremony that day in Charlottesville. She talked to the bride about death for two hours—not the usual topic for wedding lunches—and the photographs bear it out. The Czechs have an expression for it—strhanej obliej—a face like something torn down. The look of a world ending, of bottomless despair.
It was only recently, while going through the mildewed suitcase of old pictures we brought back from her house in Vydí, that I recognized that wedding-day look—a look of grief bordering on terror—on another photograph: It shows my mother, supported by my great-uncle Pepa, walking in to her father’s funeral.
XLVI
THERE ARE THINGS YOU bury, things you wall up. Because you have to. It’s not a choice.
Neither is unearthing them when the time comes.
I remember the rainy afternoon my mother and I spent sitting in the median of the highway outside of Rotterdam as one of the most surreal of my life. It didn’t get better. She was bottoming quickly, rocked by storms I couldn’t see, turning on me in ways I hadn’t known before, with a kind of out-of-body ferocity, then slipping into a state of weeping depression bordering on catatonia. I fought back when I had to, tried to comfort her when she turned the guns on herself. Neither made the slightest difference.
I can’t convey the helplessness of those days any more than I already have: the hours of silence, my mother driving with the tears rolling out from under her Jackie O. sunglasses, her face twitching and flinching to some inner dialogue as I try to hide inside my 1980-era headphones (plugged into a little tape-player by my feet), listening to America’s “Horse with No Name” and imagining myself with my friend Geoff in the High Sierra. Trying not to notice that the tears have stopped, ominously, trying not to feel her rage gathering but seeing it everywhere, in the bunched-up lines of her mouth, in the more relaxed, ready-for-battle slope of her shoulders, knowing it’s coming. . . . The ocean is a desert with its life underground. . . .
I can’t tell you if it was that night or the next. I can’t tell you where it was—somewhere in Germany, I think. I just remember my mother, though barely able to speak by now, getting the room. A small hotel by the side of the road. Darkness outside. Wooden floors.
There was one bed, possibly queen-size, maybe larger. And because my mind desperately wants to be elsewhere, I suddenly see Steve Martin and John Candy in Planes, Trains and Automobiles walking into the motel room they’re forced to share for the night and panicking when they see there’s only one bed.
I don’t know if I offered to sleep on the floor, if it even occurred to me. I don’t remember if we ate something. All I remember is getting to the room and my mother being terribly disturbed by the bed, raging at the hotel people, then me—muttering something about how this explained things, why I hated her—and me not knowing what the hell she was talking about. After the days in Rotterdam, the craziness in the port, the madness in the median, the endless fights, I was completely drained—wanting only to sleep till September when I could be done with this fucking insanity and go back to school. There was plenty of room, I said.
My mother wasn’t talking anymore. She was staggering with exhaustion, forcing this fake-sounding cough she always deployed when overwhelmed, attacked, betrayed by the world. Asking—hack, hack—for sympathy—she was ill, couldn’t you see?—even as she cut you.
She’d taken some prášky, she said, coughing. Some pills. She got stranger, mumbling to herself as if I wasn’t there, then looking at me like she couldn’t believe I was her son. She didn’t know what had happened to me—how I’d come to be so full of hate. Become such a liar. She had to sleep. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.
I fell into bed, sank deep, then woke into the near dark. It felt late. I was lying on my side, facing away from my mother. The bed was trembling in a way I thought at first was her crying, but wasn’t. Then I heard her breathing and understood what I was hearing and after that I didn’t hear any more. It went on a long time. I didn’t move. I lay there, frozen, until it was over and then for a long time after that and then I fell asleep.
I didn’t mention it to a soul. I didn’t write about it in my journal. Some things you just wall up. They don’t exist.
That night didn’t exist for thirty-five years, until the summer of 2014 when I saw my mother in the care home, then went through the devastation of her villa in Vydí. In some way those two things together—seeing her, then seeing the place she’d lived in—kicked a window in the wall, forced me to see things I didn’t want to see. Drowned kittens in a pail. That night in Germany.
I’ve tried to convince myself it didn’t happen. Because I don’t want this memory of my poor mother who, at that moment, in her insanity, probably didn’t even know I was there. Because I don’t want this picture of myself, helpless, terrified at the age of twenty-two.
Now that it’s mine, I’d like to core it out of my brain like a tumor. I can’t. Acknowledging it is as close as I’ll come. It’ll have to do.
XLVII
IN ONE OF MY favorite Kafka parables, a powerful messenger is summoned by the emperor and given a message to deliver. He starts off immediately, “thrusting out one hand, then the other,” pointing to the imperial star on his breast, but though the crowd parts before him, obstacles flower, the way thickens with history and men. It will take him years to make his way through the inner courtyards, and beyond these are others, vaster, more crowded
, and beyond them others still . . . it will never be. The imperial message, meant expressly for you, can never arrive.
I always believed the imperial message answered the riddle of the self; that breaking open the seal, you’d know who you are.
Then again, what would be the fun of that? And why would you believe it? Better to cobble the answer yourself, take your enlightenment as it comes.
Sometimes enlightenment can arrive in humble packages, plainly wrapped. I was thinking about where fate or foolishness had brought me a few winters back—it’s a kind of hobby with me—when a line from a third-rate John Fogerty song forced a small recognition: It took years of effort, to become the mess that you see. I was rowing nowhere at the time, sitting on a machine in a freezing, glassed-in porch in a rented house on the Canadian border. The machine had a handle attached to a chain, a sliding seat, and a small screen which kept track of precisely how far I hadn’t, in fact, gone, and how many calories I’d burned not getting there. I was dressed in thermals and a winter hat. In my mind, I was outrowing Newt Gingrich and the president of a small liberal arts college in Annandale-on-Hudson who I believed to be a pompous ass. It seemed normal.
It was then that Fogerty, forty years past his Creedence Clearwater days but still playing the “rambunctious boy,” knocked on my door. It took years of effort. . . . Yes, well. Whose effort was the question.
Dusk, the sky like a bell, heat rushing up from the earth. An introspective season. The snow on the roofs in the last light looked blue; a single window shone from the house across the way. At twenty below, my students had told me, soap bubbles crystallize and quietly shatter.
My father died before the next snow.
Short of an imperial message, I wonder what can explain us? The way we are with the world, the bickering parts? Is it all just Mummy and Daddy, forever shouting up the double helix to our room? Is it something chemical, ironic by virtue of its smallness—too much garlic down the umbilical cord? Did some pudgy-legged deity, pulling apart the primordial Play-Doh, pause in mid-mitosis, and laugh? And lay us aside?
