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The candy hearts urge us on. “Luv Ya,” they say, so we do. Still, for all the enthusiasm, the day comes and goes with a few scraps of paper, ephemeral flowers, chocolates too good to sit uneaten for too long. These are fleeting signs of something… affection, perhaps. Perhaps guilt, if love is not true. Better not to receive them, then.
Love cannot be summed up in a dinner, or a day. Love is the simple meals, the ordinary days, the passing time and the gestures that link that time. It is the moment, repeated, that we care. Valentine’s Day is over, but true love, for those who have it, will remain.
It was supposed to be a lovely night. The weather cooperated, the trees, the soft breeze in the late afternoon. We were headed down to Providence for Waterfire, a lovely, sensual spectacle of aromatic wood crackling fire amidst the dark river water, the city, the night.
Last year, I saw it for the first time with friends, with laughter, joy. Romance would have been nice for the next time. Barring that this year, though, the kids had to see this–and wanted to–and we planned our outing. On the first attempt, it rained. Hard. Water. No fire. The next time, yesterday, only my older son was with me for the weekend, and I planned accordingly.
The trip would include a stop at a record store not too far from Providence, the kind of place that makes me swoon a bit. I spent a good deal of my teens and twenties in record stores, after all, and the faint musty scent of cardboard covering vinyl always sends me to a world that I loved so much, seek still despite the antiseptic jewel cases and online experiences that define music more appropriately today. This particular place grabs the scents of a thousand worlds, middle eastern, dust, heaven. We would do that. Then, we would have dinner downtown–my son’s choice–and walk down to the river. It was a perfect day.
For me.
You see, I had merely informed my son of the outing, not invited him. Because he no longer goes away with his sisters every other weekend, my entire life has been altered. I have not pursued my own life, so that I could attend to his. Not a small boy, but not a man, and with his challenges as I have duly noted in these pages, my son needed me, and I was there, by golly.
If you shudder as you think of what was happening here, you are not the only one. Somehow, images of me, old, living with an adult son who shuttles me around did enter into my mind. Yes, my son has bipolar disorder. Yes, he has challenges. Yes, he deserves his own life. And for that matter, I deserve mine. No, this protective stance, now, this brand of mothering/smothering is just not right.
It is fragile, I see, this line between caring and protecting. At twelve, my son was at his most vulnerable, his most depressed, his most lost. Shades drawn, he lay in bed for days, said he saw no point to life, and tried to hide from it. Wake up! Get well! Just act normal! And for all that, he could not, and I do not know why.
A lot of blame goes around when someone suffers from a mental illness. It seems so intentional, so controllable, that it just must be someone’s fault. For years we have tried to change environments, change food, change ourselves, change the rules. For years, we have struggled and disagreed and suffered and screamed and pointed fingers, and for years we prayed for help. In the end, the only thing we could do is simply to stop, breathe, and let it–this mental illness–be real. So, my son slept for nearly a year, prodded along, examined, and ultimately loved and cared for and eased back into life by people who understand him.
So, last night as I left the record store, drove past the exit for downtown Providence, north, toward home, I was mad. I was sad, self-pitying, and most of all, I was afraid. Things have been so much better, even with struggles. My son wants to be out more, to look nice, to do things. Life is not perfect, but my son wants more of it. This is so much more than he could do a year ago. So, here we were, lovely evening, about to enjoy life, damn it!
“Mom, no one goes out with their mom on a Saturday night!” Hmm… sounds strangely… normal. “Mom, I didn’t want to hurt your feelings, but I hate old records. I want my own friends.” Yes, it sounds like a teenager. “You can leave me at home. I’m not a baby.” Maybe he is right.
No, my oldest child is not a baby. He is bigger than I am now, and shows me computer games that he creates somehow, magically. I have no clue about gaming, 3D or otherwise, but he does, and I have to admit, I have come to love Mario. He tells me he wants to do this for a living, and sits with books of code, then comes to show me how he makes a car turn more sharply when its speed increases. Clever, and certainly not coming from me.
Somewhere north of Attleboro, I have calmed enough to listen to my son, and he tells me he wants to have a life, an apartment, a job when he grows up, but he worries that he will not be able. Secluded now, he fears the outside world will send him back to the depths he knew a year ago, and that the judgments will be as harsh as ones he has already known. At the same time, though, he is asking me to trust him.
Near Medway, I feel the night air as the sky turns to a purple glory, and my frustration returns. A beautiful night, gone, wasted. So many nights, so many fears, tears, worries, and here I am, here all alone with nothing of my own to show for it. Sniff sniff. I am crying, and my son points out the moon. “Mom, you’re like that sky now, dark and sad, but we kids are like the moon that loves you. Look how beautiful the sky is.”
And with that, I see not a small child who needs me, but a young man who has a lot to give the world.
Salt of the earth, it enhances the nuances of flavor, like turning the bass a little higher to feel the rhythm, like cold raindrops on a chilly morning. You, im Voraus, verlorner Geliebter, in my bed.
The night was chilly, not cold, and the oil expensive. A comforter would do then, and you, the luxury of you wrapped around me, then beside me with your hand low on my back, my hair tangled, sheets tangled, legs tangled, then drawn in to roll into a sleepy embrace. Objects appeared one by one: the lamp on the nightstand, the vase on top of the cabinet, books—first shapes, then words themselves—on the shelves, clothes of vague colors on the floor. The light stayed low. Early, too early, we said, and fell back into a sigh and sleep, attempted, never recovered though with senses awakened by that early morning fog, dew, finally yielding to steady rain and a tight pull in my belly as I felt your hot breath soft on my neck.
I long for this, long for the love that holds this warmth, this vulnerable privacy. I long for coffee in bathrobes, company, bathrobes dropped at the shower’s steam promise of hot water shared, hair wet, kisses more urgent as the wanting becomes violent, and that mist again against the dark morning. You, flowing, ebbing, in the rhythm of a quiet day, you rolling in, out, never ceasing, always returning, always departing, but differently. You, your treasures, scents, sweat, traces of you, presented in lingering moments ever nearer. You, treasures purloined, perfume, notes in pockets remaining as your last finger lets go of mine. You run, late, giving in to the day, the door slamming shut behind you. I should, too, but no, not yet. I stay longer, soak in the warmth of a moment. You, whoever you are, wherever you are, wherever you go, whenever you come home again, you, I long for you.
Here she comes again, no bike helmet, but that would be très uncool. The neighbor kid is cute, I’ll admit. You know the type: dark hair, impish smile, the middle school principal knows him well enough to know where he is after school, generally an area off limits during the rest of the day, where older kids hang out. That type. Trouble.
Of course our neighbor never notices how many times she has come past here, which she does not realize is probably a good thing. She is hardly the type to get noticed, after all, shorts and a t-shirt from Target–I don’t even remember what color. Hair like dark sand, not chocolate or golden, drab. And she would die of embarrassment if anyone asked why she keeps riding past. But still, there is something to this girl, something special about the way she looks back, out of breath, when she reaches the end of our short street, looks at her watch, checks her time, keeps going and assumes, like all kids who have crushes, that no one thinks it’s odd that she is doing time trials on a street so many blocks away from home. She thinks no one has ever done that before, that no one notices a kid riding up and down in front of another kid’s house.
My summer for the crush was when I turned twelve. He was the lifeguard, and tossed a Nerf ball back and forth to me in some act of mercy. He was eighteen, about to go to school in California. I listened to old Beach Boys records, partly because he looked like Al Jardine, really, just like him. The lifeguard’s family was so much cooler than mine, no grass in the front yard; they had wildflowers. Of course I knew his phone number. I got up the nerve to ask his mom if he was home the night before he left for college. He talked. On. The. Phone. To me. And that was it. Never saw him again. I used to see their mom swimming laps at the Y. I understand the girl with sandy hair. I myself still live under the assumption that no one in my crush’s family ever realized I was doing anything other than riding past to go to the pool.
Our pre-teen visitor has gone by once more, but it is close to five o’clock. She may come by once more this evening, hard to say. Maybe not. Maybe life is waiting for her, too, right around the next corner.
Pig is ready with the enchiladas.
Enchiladas are served.
And now, the best part:
Enchiladas are gone.
enchilar “1. to season with chiles; 2. (Mexico) to annoy; 3. to sting, burn.
A simple meal in the final execution, the preparation of enchiladas in my house was a labor of love. On a busy evening, it could be quick: a jar of sauce, pre-grated cheese, onion, whatever else was left to throw in, roll them up, stick them in the oven, and they were done. Sometimes, though, I made the sauce myself, boiling and scraping out the chiles, shredding the chicken (roasted–perhaps not traditional, but certainly tasty), softening the onions, nearly caramelized (again, maybe not traditional), before adding them to the cheese and chicken mixture, the mild peppers.
It was a meal that I had loved for a long time, and perfected during the Colorado years, in a land of hedonism and endless meal choices. It was there, watching Mexicans, many nearly invisible in the kitchens of a town many could barely afford to live in, that I was inspired to find the secrets. It was there, in the only affordable living space, a cheap deal in the land of plenty: the trailer court, that I first made enchiladas.
The trailer court was not my first choice for a home, snob that I was (well… not snob, to be honest: I was actually afraid of the trailer court). The trailer option did allow us to stay in town, and after a bit of arm-twisting, my then-husband convinced me that it did not have to be the place of tornadoes and dysfunction that I had grown up experiencing it to be. No, this was the West, not the Midwest, and things were different.
And different they seemed in those early days. I frolicked in the kitsch, put a clichéd pink flamingo out front, and started cooking. I became pregnant, blurred my doctoral dreams, nodded gazedly to the sudden move across the country. Boston. I was in hub heaven. I could still finish my work there, and made arrangements. My advisor said a class at Harvard could help me through the classical language requirement. Harvard! Imagine that.
The enchilada ingredients were harder to find, at least then, at least within walking distance of our house.
Fast forward several months. The baby was pushing to come out. Someone was asking me to sign something. A purchase and sale agreement was Fed-Exed to northern Vermont. “Why there?” you ask. Hell if I knew. I cannot even remember when I stopped asking those questions. The town we landed in was one of so many places where we picked up real estate brochures: Charlotte, Cheyenne, Guthrie, Belfast–at least this one was not a ranch. We could have landed anywhere, back in those days that any vacation could become the next home sweet home. Vermont seemed nice enough, though a bit lonely as the summer faded. I loved being in Boston. My then-husband enjoyed those pre-child moments, too, took long walks, played drums with a friend, went to car races with his brother on Saturday nights, tried to forget the doctorate he quit. No teaching work in Boston, he said, said we could not afford to stay, said we had to move. No job in Vermont, either, not for a long time. The house was a dream, a true beauty, the village isolated, dotted with dairy farms and cross country ski trails. Hard not to love, but to stay there? Babies came, many babies. I loved them well, loved them as if they were all I had. And maybe then, they were.
I was making enchiladas, my gloved hands dipping the tortillas into the sauce, then filling them with the chicken, cheese. Gloved hands—I had learned my lesson years earlier not to mess with chiles without some defense.
“What the hell are you doing?”
I was making dinner. I was cooking his favorite dinner, our favorite dinner, kids waiting, watching, wanting me to finish quickly. The oven was preheated, the side dishes were cooking, a salad waited on the table already.
“Those are gloves for cleaning toilets!”
I had two pair. The yellow ones for cooking, the blue for cleaning. Both were beneath the sink, on separate sides. Two pair: these were the yellow gloves.
“You are an unfit mother.”
He grabbed the dish from me and dumped the enchiladas into the trash. My older son yelled “NO!” while the others cried. I watched in horror as my husband, ‘till death do us part, ripped open hot dogs, baked beans, told the kids not to move. No one did. I saw the look in his eyes. I thought how I had bought the hot dogs the day before, at a grocery store seventeen miles away, thought how he was lucky there was something else to eat. My son said he wanted enchiladas, and I feared for the kid. He saw the look, too, bit into a hot dog, tears streaming down his face. I sat in the stairwell and sobbed, curled up as tight as I could, looking for a safe place, and there was none.
“If no one is going to eat, it’s bedtime.”
It was 6:30 pm. The kids did not argue, the four of them in the bath together. I went into their room, trying to put our life back together, convinced like so many other times, that it never really happened.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
My husband pushed me into our bedroom. I wanted to say goodnight to the kids. I heard myself protesting as he shut the door on me. I know I was yelling please. The key turned and locked.
“You are not safe to be around children,” he told me.
I thought maybe he was right about everything he said until then. I had told people I needed more help, found help. Four kids under six, one noticeably disabled. A woman came from the school, said we were a family, and had to work together. I cried. He was busy, I told her, had to leave early in the morning, and was tired at night. I was trying. She said I was a great mom. How could I believe what she said, if what he said was true? I begged for help. He told me I was telling everyone our business. I found help, strong women who helped me, who glanced knowing looks first at one another–then at me. He hated the invasion of privacy. I thanked God for the help. He said I was lazy, an unfit mother. I had tried to be better, but trying was never enough, never would be. I stopped making enchiladas, and the love in my heart seemed gone forever.
We moved once more–my choice this time. He gave me one present that last year we spent together. It was a pig.
The pig was a baking dish, made in Chile. It was shown in the Williams-Sonoma catalogue with enchiladas in it, he said. He asked me why I never made them anymore. Until I started the process I once loved, I had forgotten why myself. I never did find those gloves.
Last week, though, I did find the pig on top of my kitchen shelves, never used. I went to the grocery store yesterday, and bought the tortillas, the cheese, chiles. I have it all, watched the kids devour something similar at a Mexican restaurant not so long ago. They are ready for this kind of meal, and at last, so am I. Tonight I am making enchiladas.
When M. failed to answer the door, her daughter did not find anything strange. It was often that the old woman was napping, or upstairs and not quick to descend. A key turned the door, and all in the house was quiet. Did M. have an appointment she forgot to mention? Had a neighbor called? The youngest daughter opened the garage door to see if the car was still there. It was. And behind it, she found the carefully laid out cot, the empty bottle of sleeping pills. The keys were still in the ignition, but the gas had probably long run out.
The death was a tragedy, we all knew. M. was not so old, after all, in splendid health, we thought. It took a long time for anyone beyond the one daughter and her husband to realize that it was a suicide, and as it was, few people were ever supposed to know. The death by one’s own hands seemed too messy, too questionable, too unsuitable for a reputable family. And yet, the daughter who found her mother cold and inexplicably dead that morning said that she would have done the same thing.
Up to the time I knew of the suicide, M. seemed an amazingly resilient woman. Letters and other documents found after M.’s death hinted at a less than auspicious diagnosis, perhaps from a cardiologist. One thing was certain, though: M. had said many times that she never wanted to be a burden to her children or anyone else. She had enjoyed a high level of independence her whole life. What did life mean to her if she needed assistance?
A suicide must always leave questions unanswered, but the questions it poses reach far beyond the life that is taken. I was surprised to learn that the daughter so fully supported her mother’s actions. Her own pronouncement of similar suicidal intentions if faced with similar potential dependency cited anthropological examples of the practice of “going off to die.”
I was judgmental of the dead woman, hurt. How could someone I loved and admired not let the people who loved her actually care for her when she needed them? What makes life worthwhile? Can we even answer those questions ourselves?
Life can be intolerably painful in so many ways. I cannot imagine what for certain caused M. to end her life, or what I would do in her place. After the suicide, though, the context of the family began to make more sense, and I was out of context. Never being a burden seemed more a selfish thing, never allowing another person to extend a kindness, to serve a meal, to make a bed: not good enough, perhaps? Not thoughtful, but selfish. Always giving, but never receiving: yes! there is a selfishness in that. The familial stoicism was overbearing; pain, heartbreak and illness were impossible to discuss aloud, but were whispered in tributes to the character of those who hid their weaknesses. Bad things simply did not exist in that make-believe world.
Oh, demons exist everywhere, but they become dangerous when they are hiding. Everyone knows about the bear hunt:
“We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. Oh no! We have to go through it!”*
Go through! Go through! Go through this life. Why hide? I want to love, and I want to rejoice in the real connections we have, the efforts we make, the love we give to one another… and the love we courageously take.
*From Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury, We’re Going On a Bear Hunt, 1989.
The men in suits were out again today. I see them often in my neighborhood, as I pass several funeral homes any way I turn to head out into the world from where I live. This morning was a sunny, cool morning, and the men today were attired in a professional black: older men who own proper suits for such occasions, men who are accustomed to facing the end of life.
A morbid curiosity leads me into the lives that will be remembered on mornings when the hearse is parked out front. I cannot help but wonder what happened, and why. The cars and the people who gather lead me to assumptions, some ordinary, some tragic. Some days I can barely make it through the streets as cars hunt for parking, fire engines or police cars line the streets, people walk sadly to that one place. Tragic. Sometimes, there are few cars, a few people out front, some laughing, some smoking, some simply quiet. Ordinary.
Morning suits are for funerals. The evening suits are of a different sort. Visitation brings the stragglers, the people who appear because they know they should, the ones who would have, should have made it to the hospital earlier, the young people dressed in the best they can muster, reluctantly inching closer to the door to pay respects that they barely know how to pay. But they do.
I remember one funeral, years ago, sitting in the front in a mint green dress with a boyfriend nearly as young as I was. I smiled as seemed necessary, waited, made the uncomfortable friends feel that they had done the thing I most needed them to do—and they had—which was just to be there, however they could manage. I thought on that day how short a life can be, how precious the few moments we have in this world are, and how fragile our abilities remain with us. It was nearly twenty-three years ago now, a death on Flag Day, a visitation on Father’s Day, a funeral on a quiet day when the world began again in a new way for me, with a strange sort of beauty that comes only when you know that someone you love has at last been given the peace that life never offered.
“That night we moved closer to the border, and clear across the prairie, at the very edge of the horizon. We could make out the gas fires of the refinery at Missoula, while to the south we could see the lights of Cheyenne, a city bigger and grander than I’d ever seen.
I felt all kind of things looking at the lights of Cheyenne, but most important, I made up my mind to never again tag around with a hell-bent type, no matter how in love with him I was” (Sissy Spacek as Holly, in the movie Badlands, 1973).
I recently had a moment of fond reminiscence of dangerous days, the thrill and passion of grasping tight while the wind and the world hit me head-on. Then I woke up.
There are all sorts of reasons that taking off in pursuit of adventure may seem like a fine thing to do, but in the end, most of them seem to involve running away from, rather than to something. The vague idea of adventure was a dream I inherited, a place I guarded in the back of my mind as an option whenever I was faced with too much unhappiness in too short a time.
Until I was in my late 20s, I never did much more than ponder that option. A few times, I felt myself drawn to the flame, flittering perilously close to entanglements that would break my heart, and did—but not irretrievably so. I jumped a few times, but felt that elastic pull back, bungeeing me back into a predictable existence to idle on the lookout for my own truth.
I wonder sometimes if it is a part of growing up, or if it is a part of growing up unhappy that leads a person find truth in sublimation. Sometimes I find that truth in words, my own words, a world on a page, or in a heartbeat, a smile, a carefully placed step and a song, a moment of pure grace. This is a sort of joy.
Try as I might, though, I never found joy on the back of a motorcycle, holding on tight while someone else drove through the unknown vistas and back roads. I did venture once, untethered at last, straddled the back seat of an adventure and never went home again. But where I ended up after that, I expected to stay.
I guess I should have known this was not a ride meant for settling, for bonding, or for discovering ourselves. The never-ending voyages tugged, threatening roots that grew ever deeper. “Why leave? Why not stay and see the flowers, the fruits, this life we created?” I wondered. Garden with me.
“Come alongside me,” he said, and I followed, while I still could. The urge to flee returned tirelessly, a malignant tumor, seeking still more—but what?—some indefinable thing that could ravage me in the process. One day, farther from joy that I ever imagined, I stayed behind; he left. But he could come home, to walk among it, to reclaim this life, this beautiful, imperfect life that had grown, with the weeds and thorns to disparage. He could come home, if only to pick the best fruits from among them, to look at love and believe it would always wait.
I wonder, what hidden parts of ourselves only find expression in actions that seem to defy what life passes to us, even what we choose? I wonder what makes us feel more alive when we speed through space, feeling the vibrations through our skin, into our minds, testing the very limits of our physical life, and abandoning in those sublime moments all that has meaning here on Earth.
And then… what makes us feel justified to return, perhaps unscathed, perhaps damaged irreparably, always hoping to be cared for and loved by the ones we left behind…. or at least, not forgotten?
I wonder what the seeker seeks, if he even knows, or is it the search that he lives for, the never-ending journey? What comfort does the road bring? Perhaps it is the moving skylines, the exchangeable faces, the well-polished security of the new and unblemished. Perhaps the road brings an illusion of perfection, and the safety of never truly being known.
“Heavenly shades of night are falling,” indeed.
I am shivering, holding onto a cup of hot tea on my back step, spoiled after the summer like conditions that woke up the trees this week.
It is quiet here, a different house without movement or voices, but nice for one evening.
Just before I took this picture, the neighborhood was cast in dramatic shadows, as the sun peeked out from behind clouds that have now disappeared. The sun has gone now, too, and this light is all that remains of the day. The leaves of the Japanese maple opened just a little today, promising more.
More. More spring, more warmth, more quiet, more voices, more love, more “rendezvous beneath the blue,” more you, whoever you are, wherever you are, more.
