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.

Unmasked

James Baldwin in Letters From a Region of the Mind makes the observation that “Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within,” which, on the surface, strikes one as sentiment bordering on the sentimental, as something pat and easily contained on a bumper sticker. Yet, as sentiment, the statement is emotionally accurate. James Baldwin knew the human heart.

Consider this: How much safer were you before love? And then: How much did you wish to cast off the hockey mask and enter the frays of romance, or of childbearing, or, even, of loving a pet that you knew would die before you? We walk around, before love, safe behind the armors of loneliness, and we ask those we deem worthy to strip it all away so that we stand there, a throbbing heart, exposed, the cages of our safety masks and curved ribs as good as gone.

Thus here I stand before you— world, fates, family— all of my masks gone, stripped down to the skin, and I ask, meekly, that you let me be in my nakedness or that you wrap me in the blankets of goodwill. Spare me the excoriation. My husband, late forties, the man I hand-picked and pursued, has just competed in a triathlon, and he is vital, a force, more alive than anyone I know. I see him pushing past all probabilities in terms of mortality, so when he rides his motorcycle home from the hospital at four in the morning after a long night of work, steer the drunk drivers the other way. 

And my son, my one and only child, the one who has already scared me, scarred me, with health concerns and mortal danger, let him outlive me, let him mourn and miss his long-dead mother. He is everyday getting farther away from that proverbial well that wishes to suck him down into darkness. Abnormal MRI, seizures, autism: He’s shrugging them off like a coat he has outgrown. In Mexico, when he fell into the deep-end of the pool, his father watched him plunge below the surface only to paddle up to where he was able to hoist himself over the side of the pool, away from tragedy and back into the waning sunlight. World, fates, family: Be safe and let me be safe.

And my two dogs? The smaller brown one has many years ahead of her. My old, white dog turned twelve last month, and I can see her eyes going milky. Her back legs slip out from underneath her, and I have to hoist her up. All ninety pounds of her. She has gotten more nervous with old age, and she can no longer hold her bowels very well. She doesn’t mean to shit on the floor, and I can feel her shame. She knows something is wrong. I clean it up with no admonishment. I just stroke her until I see her tail wag. In truth, I think she has another two years in her. When I picked her out from the homeless man’s litter twelve years ago, she could fit in a cat carrier. I was not projecting this far into the future; I did not think of her death. I just wanted to let a little love in.