Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) (41 page)

I’d never spoken so freely or so honestly with my mother. I’d never had the occasion, having hidden from her everything that would have brought our most starkly differing viewpoints into contact. I hadn’t known how to do anything else. The idea of debate—of vehement disagreement that gives way to understanding—was something it had taken college, and all the theories I’d thrown myself behind as a way of testing out my beliefs and the power of my intellect, to acquaint me with. Before that, I always shrank away from disputes, not understanding what they were good for. Whenever
my brothers had argued politics with my father, the exchanges had always deadlocked, with nobody shifting from where they’d started. The room had filled up with an ugly heat that the parties in question had eventually fled. When my parents had debated with the Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses who sometimes came knocking, they’d done so with the belief that they were defending the one true God against false idols and that everything rode upon not changing viewpoints, not backing down. My parents had stood firmly on our side of the threshold and the proselytizers had stood firmly out there on the porch, and eventually someone had conceded that the conversation had run its course. In contrast to all those stagnant arguments I’d grown up watching, living out what felt like a genuinely dialectical approach to conflict made me proud—not just of myself but also of my father, as though he and I were learning the terms of a language we could share. Those times, I’d harbor a satisfaction:
I am an adult now
, I’d think.
I was a child when she died
. Now I realize what was really going on: that, bit by bit, fighting with my father helped me forgive him for needing to go on living his life among the living. And it helped me to forgive myself for having been too young, too inexperienced at life, to have opened myself up with a similar honestly with my mother.

I wonder if my father felt similarly liberated, if he was at all relieved by this chance to show his children who he was or needed to be. I don’t know how to describe the deep visceral jolt—the queasy mix of shock, shame, and dread—that swallowed Jean and me when he held up the gauzy negligee he had purchased as a Valentine’s Day gift for his girlfriend. It mortified me, but it also, very quietly, reminded me that I could finally just be myself with my father, who had, after so many years of working to be more, finally let himself become an ordinary human man. That same mix of
feelings, felt all at once like a cold blast—shock, shame, and dread, followed immediately by something like permission to become more fully and unabashedly myself—arose one winter afternoon when, going through the garage pantry in pursuit of the last jars of our mother’s homemade preserves, Jean and I happened upon the place where my father had chosen to store his supply of condoms.

Before winter gave out, I decided to throw a party. There had been too much sorrow in our home, too many gatherings fueled by loss. I invited my college friends who’d landed in the Bay Area and the high school friends I’d reconnected with since my return. I wanted a total convergence, and not just of my own worlds. Conrad had by then taken a position in Pittsburgh, and Wanda had moved back to LA, but my father had agreed to be there, and so had Jean and Michael and his family. I’d wanted to cook and drink and play music in the house in a way that brought some of the life back to it. I remember sketching out menus in the days leading up to the party, just like my mother would have done. When the night of the party arrived, we stood talking in darkened rooms, the dim lights an uncanny testament to the spirit of that time, when we were still running on empty, trying to replenish something we’d eventually have to learn to live without. A couple of high school friends had brought a bottle of cream tequila with them, and I recall the timbre of my own forced cheer, trying to get everyone to join me, to drink and eat and dance so I’d have a reason, once they all left, to fall into a deep, blank sleep.

Nobody had said much about my mother. I suppose enough time had passed so that everything had already been said, or been written in cards and sent, or else left awkwardly unsaid. I’m sure someone must have offered a word or several of condolence, which I’d tried to smooth over or rush along, out of my own exhaustion
with the rituals of grief. One guest whom I’d never liked much at college—she was unceasingly competitive and blunt-minded with a slightly bullying personality—had spent most of the night talking about her upcoming wedding (I wasn’t invited; I’d never even met her fiancé), though she had found time to get in a jab about the Super Kmart she’d driven past on her way to our house. Perhaps the night was simply an attempt to pull myself back into the world everyone else still dwelled in.

I had other friends who knew what it felt like to live without a mother. Too many others. The girl whose mother had driven the burgundy Saab. And Qiana, with whom I’d walked the two blocks to high school until it became clear that waiting for her each morning would invariably make me late. Her mother had died within weeks of my mom, from an illness that had plagued her quietly for perhaps the same length of time as my mother’s cancer. And there was a girl I’d been close to briefly in the fifth grade, whose mother was there and then all of a sudden was not. And another whose father was a pilot and whose mother had once let us drink a bottle of champagne at a sleepover on New Year’s Eve. And Rose, who wasn’t a girl but a woman and who was like a sister to my sisters. They all knew what it felt like to have a dead mother. How did they describe it to themselves, this state? I barely knew. Once, I spent the evening with two of them out at the ranch that one girl’s father, the pilot, had inherited upon his wife’s death. It had been in the family for a long time, and someone needed to take it on, so he’d left his suburban tract neighborhood and moved into the big house at the end of a long row of mammoth cypresses, the same trees as grow in graveyards. The three of us motherless girls had decided to take a walk in the orchard, and because the stars were out, or because we were all three together for the first time since everything had changed, we’d started talking about our mothers.

“I think she’s there and here at the same time,” someone said, tipping her head up toward the sky—a sky the trees seemed to push farther back so that the distance we looked up toward was even less fathomable, less within our grasp.

The words came out of my mouth before I even knew I’d wanted to speak. “I know she wanted it to be exactly like the Bible says, but I think it has to be different.” How far-off everything felt. Not just my mother and not just the answers to the questions her death had set into motion. I felt remote even from a clear sense of what I myself believed. A breeze moved through the trees. “There’s just so much out there…” I trailed off.

We tried talking our way to a sense of what we believed. We tried talking in a way that might make us feel both looked after and utterly free. Standing there, with our shoes sinking into the ground and the wind rifling the orchard leaves, with the smells of fruit and rot and the sounds of nocturnal animals going about their nocturnal rituals, we tried to say some of what we thought or felt or wondered. We tried, but it was too soon, or else the dark had rendered foreign all we thought we knew, and so we didn’t ever manage to speak of how irremediably broken we all were. Perhaps we didn’t need to.

In our silence, the darkness began to close in. I felt it all at once, like a presence that knew more than I wanted it to know and pushed up against me with the heft of that knowing. I wanted to run back through the muddy orchard rows not just to the bright, ordinary light of the house, but to a time and place when someone would be awake in a different room, calling out to us now and again, saying,
Isn’t it time you girls were getting to sleep?

CLEARANCES

A
lone in my room, by my window overlooking the rooftops and the low hills that were wet and green in the distance, reading poems to myself became a kind of ritual. The slim volumes of poetry I’d brought home with me from college offered a sense of continuity between the life I’d begun to lead on my own and the life I’d been drawn back into upon returning home. Every time I set foot in my room, it was as though I were chasing the handful of writers I’d come to know while I was away—chasing because I didn’t want to let them get away, didn’t want them to veer out of my grasp (I was certain they’d want to escape, given how little I knew how to say, and how little there was there to command their attention). Those winter afternoons spent upstairs with the pack of my most necessary poets—Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Larkin, Yusef Komunyakaa, William Matthews—were teaching me about what it felt like to try to regard the totality of something I’d only known in part. A life, they told me, is made of what happens and what is lost. Looking back, we learn to name those things, to see and understand them. We hold them for a minute, looking first with innocent, untrained eyes, but if we hang there for a while longer, we can step into a different kind of gaze, one capable of seeing what is absent, longed for, what has been willed away or simply forgotten.

The heartbreak I’d felt once my romance with my high school
teacher had been shut down marked one of my losses, as had the debilitating ache of losing love after that, again and again. I thought about those earlier losses and realized how far they’d receded not just into the past but into the distance, where feelings no longer reached. Had I willed them away, or had they simply run their course? But the loss death brought refused to recede. Death was like an indelible error no one could correct. It did not relinquish its hold on the present tense. It left a shape so deep and intricate it made no sense whatsoever to try to fill it. No, the only thing to do, I suspected, would be to move over and learn to live beside the gulf left in my mother’s wake, peering down into it at times out of need but making every effort not to topple over and fall in.

There’s a sonnet sequence called “Clearances” in Heaney’s book
The Haw Lantern
that I found myself returning to again and again. It is an elegy for the poet’s mother. I had a visceral love of one particular sonnet about the two of them peeling potatoes in silence while the other family members were away at Sunday Mass. I suppose it reminded me of all the days when I was my mother’s tiny satellite, accompanying her everywhere, happy at her side. But the poem that resonated most mysteriously for me was the sonnet that closed the sequence:

I thought of walking round and round a space

Utterly empty, utterly a source

Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place

In our front hedge above the wallflowers
.

The white chips jumped and jumped and skited high
.

I heard the hatchet’s differentiated

Accurate cut, the crack, the sigh

And collapse of what luxuriated

Through the shocked tips and wreckage of it all
.

Deep-planted and long gone, my coeval

Chestnut from a jam jar in a hole
,

Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere
,

A soul ramifying and forever

Silent, beyond silence listened for
.

What did it mean to be both empty and a source? Was there something I housed or might one day house? Something the loss of my mother would enable me to give? Or was it her loss that was the source of something? Would something worth having eventually spring from it?

I sometimes thought of how I’d chosen to look up in the first moments after her death. I had made a pact with myself that I would, wanting to show her my face, to tell her I believed she was on her way, as she’d assured us she would be. I’d turned my face up to that nowhere, wanting to feel what it housed, wanting to show that I knew it housed not just something, but my mother, my source. What hurt so much in those months after her death was exactly what Heaney’s poem knew how to name: that my gaze in those moments had been pointed up toward a place beyond my discerning, a place I’d never hear or reach or understand for as long as I was myself.

But the poem didn’t just lament that aspect of loss; it created a conundrum of presence and largeness, a realness more real than the absolutes we live by:
A soul ramifying and forever / Silent, beyond silence listened for
. Such language consoled me, and it beckoned me to the page, pushed me to test whether I might be capable of writing truths like that into being, truths that would prove better than the ones that eluded or exhausted me from moment to moment in my new life.

Reading at the dark oak desk in my room, the same desk where I’d once written letter after letter to my teacher, I felt close to something. Not my mother. I’d taken her too much at her word to believe she might still be there in the house, living beside us like a ghost. But I did feel, just at those times, a certainty that eluded me throughout the entire rest of the day. It was what I’d felt back at school, sitting in the library armchairs and scribbling poems into my sketchbook, the soul language that seemed to genuinely answer back when I called to it. Sometimes, the clarity with which I heard or felt it was undeniable. It was then, and not without trepidation, that I let myself imagine that poetry might be a means of getting from this portion of my life to the next.