Friday, March 21, 2014

On Influence

I have never put my head in the oven, not even to clean it. That’s what the self-clean function is for. I have lived comfortably beyond the age of thirty, never sunk into the kind of depression, clinical and of-the-ages, that drives a mother to throw open nursery windows and stuff rags under the door separating kitchen from living quarters where her two babies sleep. Never had cohorts who offed themselves, too, in garages and off bridges. Never needed time in a ward for the mad.   

Beyond my twenties when melodrama was a blood jet, when every chord struck was minor, I never thought I would be done with this, never thought, “Here, pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.”  I have never had a daddy with a Meinkampf look. Mine was pretty much a Jew, though in absentia before I was born. Not dead, just deserted. I never laid flat the patriarchy with a sing-song rhyme, was never scraped flat by the rollers of wars, wars, wars. Never spoke like Cape Cod royalty, raised in a clapboard den of privilege, though what good it did her. My upbringing was purely blue-collar, white-trash dysfunction, though my early childhood, too, was sealed…off like a ship in a bottle—beautiful inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth. Except I never became bitter. Never despised what I lost for how it shimmers like green meadows glowing… a bush of flies. I could not make an object of my girl-self.

I never had a husband whose body hurts me as the world hurts God, who left me for a woman who mimicked my suicide after outliving the Holocaust, only taking her four-year-old daughter into the gas with her, tragedies unfolding again and again like little bloody skirts. Never had a husband whose words competed with mine. I never managed to churn out two inches of pages, a tome, of lineated grief. I have barely managed a half-inch. My thirties, for what it’s worth, were feminist-approved. I didn’t even marry until she was dead seven years. Didn’t have my only child until she was already dead eight. My boy is Right, like a well-done sum. A clean slate, with his own face on. He will never inherit a curse; he may be ordinary.

I will never be conjured by teenaged girls in their attic bedrooms, girls disgusted by their parents and cheerleaders with ponytails, eyes ringed in black, toying with the idea that dying is an art. My only novel will never compete with Catcher in the Rye. I have never needed shock therapy. I will never be portrayed by Gwyneth Paltrow in a movie that romanticizes my death and turns writer’s block into an opportunity for baking. Will never have my death mocked by cinema as something radiant and well-earned. My son will never hang himself in Alaska, the family legacy of depression snuffing out my Nick and his Candlestick. We will be lucky.

I am not her nor will I ever be. I will never spend my last winter churning out the best work of my life in a nightgown in a drafty room, will never succumb to the cold. We ran away from it. I took my boy into the sun instead. My lines are not driven by fever. I will never be Sylvia. Will never walk through the valley of the shadow of death stalked by infamy. And though my career be damned, at least my family thanks me.

No comments:

Post a Comment