Riverine (31 page)

During the months after the prison visit, I squeezed my sons from time to time, worrying their futures like stones. The elder was intense and obsessive and had the capacity for extreme emotions. The younger one was calmer, tending to withdraw and ruminate if he was upset. They both sought love and praise. They both expected the world to be good and were shocked at anything that challenged that belief. Our worst flaws—my explosive reactions to perceived injustices, Mike’s stunted emotional capacity and compulsion to verify and perfect everything—flared up among their strengths. I cupped their tiny shoulders in my hands and reminded them to be kind. It was the simplest instruction or request that I could formulate. They nodded their soft skulls in agreement. I could nearly see the synapses firing behind their blue-white eyeballs. But we have no control over that kind of thing. What sticks and what doesn’t in the unseen expanse of the mind, what brief experiences get built up in memory and become the icons of a life lived. Even adults forget most of it soon enough, remembering the decades that pass only in gross summaries: the good years, the bad years, the big milestones, the few specific and vivid memories. We forget the small reasons we leave people and places, the little injustices. And we forget why, sometimes, we can’t go back. We just know we can’t. We know what happened but we never know why. Or we even remember it wrong, but that doesn’t matter: we have our truths. We realize that newness must take not only a new shape of behavior or thoughts, but sometimes even a new landscape. Place as reboot. Eventually, I think we forgive the land and the associations we have with it. We see it for what it is, what it always was: a complex terrain with a history and a future. A place where we were, for a time, becoming what we are now.

I tried to imagine the futures my kids couldn’t see coming—the boys and girls and men and women who would change my children and alter the course of their lives. I tried to imagine the kinds of people who would break their hearts and fill them with passion. What events would send them across the country in search of a place where no one knew them, where they could be someone else, anyone else. I hoped they never would feel that need. I hoped I was making enough positive associations with home, with these green mountains and this blue lake, that coming back to visit as adults wouldn’t give them panic attacks.

There are no true dive bars in Vermont, not like the ones back home. You can’t walk into public social settings here and expect to have a good time with people you’ve never met. There is no two-stepping with strangers here. I go back to Indiana to recreate the pleasurable parts of the past. To enrich my long-standing friendships with Jen and Rachel. To spend just enough time with family to remember why I love them, and why I can’t stay. For now, I’m content in Vermont. It has the familiar canvas of home—water and fields—but none of the problems.

The conversation about what a life is made of, what a marriage is made of, continues in installments. We have tried to stay apace with the inevitability of change. One night, after Mike and I put the kids to bed, this challenge seemed too large. We decided to make the problem of staying on the same map smaller. We said out loud that everything was too serious; it didn’t have to be difficult. Instead of more talking, we danced wildly in the living room to electronic music. It wasn’t a solution per se, but rather an attitude adjustment. We chose to be free from expectations that we and other people had of our relationship, our family. When we cut away what anyone might think of us, including ourselves, life became much easier. Mike asked that night whether I’d leave him for Corey if he ever got out of prison. I shared with him Corey’s “what if” advice, telling him there was no sense in our talking about a situation that wasn’t realistic. But it was a relief to know that he was open to any answer I might give. We became amenable to change—that specific change or any other—simply by identifying its possibility.

Nearly a year after the prison visit, I returned to the place where I’d sat on Frost’s lawn in awe of its storied past. This time, I was teaching at the annual writing conference for high school students. The inn on campus has an elevator now. Mostly I took the stairs while I was there, but that was only because I was in a Fitbit competition with Marcus, who was now living in Kentucky, running a scaffolding company owned by the same company where my dad worked. And I was losing.

Tom Paine, another instructor and writer at the conference, gave me some advice on the kids we would be teaching: “Keep in mind, no one has ever sat down with them and asked them what they think about, what they like to read as opposed to what they have to read. No adult has ever asked them what their dreams are. You get to be the one to do that.”

On the morning of the day when I’d later read in the campus theater—a place I never thought I’d be, doing something I never thought I’d do—I rode the elevator downstairs for coffee. I saw, posted above the elevator buttons, the name of the company that now owns the company where my father works as a successful sales rep, and was momentarily astounded. My father was a carpenter, in the beginning. Before he was a foreman, then a superintendent of a scaffolding company. Before he was a golfer and a regional scaffolding sales rep who ended up making more money than he’d ever dreamed possible. Before all of that, he built things with his hands. He never once said to me, sit down, let me tell you about this book I’m reading. He never asked what my ideas were, or how anything at all in the world made me feel. He never asked what my dreams were. But he had paid cash for the balance of my college tuition that wasn’t covered by scholarships. He had paid more into my kids’ college funds than I myself would be able to contribute over the next ten years. He never thought for a moment, to my knowledge, that he’d done wrong by me in any way. Or if he did, he never said so. He taught me how to swing a hammer, how to build a wall, plumb and true, spacing the studs sixteen inches from center to dead center. He taught me how to carry on, no matter what happened. How to survive a flood, or a life. The building skills have not proved all that useful yet, but that is the knowledge he could offer me. I recognized the holding company’s name in the elevator because it had, fifteen years earlier, provided four years of scholarship money for my college tuition, a ride up, a way out.

Someday
, I thought, looking up at the plastic placard,
I’ll build my sons a treehouse from a pile of wood and no one will know where this skill came from
. No one will know that it will be designed in the likeness of the fort I’d built with Corey and Marcus a thousand years ago with my father’s tools. Our fort was an escape from our lives, a place to pretend. But theirs will be a place in the sky where they can read their books and spy their futures in the shapes of clouds.

Burroughs and Gysin thought their cut-up approach helped discover or decode the heart of a given text. It revealed what the words really meant, which of course was not exactly what they said. Burroughs thought the form might help a writer divine meaning through what he called “folding in,” or inserting text from the same story in places where it would fall out of time with the narrative, creating a chaotic kind of flashback or flash-forward. He said of this method, “When you cut into the present the future leaks out.” The description of how he used this approach in fiction is not unlike what creative nonfiction writers and lyric essayists today term segmentation or collage, where digressions both related and seemingly unrelated to the essay’s main subject are interspersed without regard for the strict constraint of the linear narrative. These digressions begin to make sense both in the context of the surrounding white space and juxtaposition against other segments, and in the essay’s future paragraphs, its central concerns, its end. I invited Corey to cut into my present by bringing him back into my life, and a new future leaked out. A new story emerged.

Shortly after my prison visit, a friend asked if I could take her sons fishing. Our families had moved to the state around the same time, and we were all still adapting, sampling the culture. Auditioning new friends as if we were holding casting calls. “We bought all the tackle,” she said, “but Adam and I don’t know how to use any of it.” Her husband was a professor; she was a bilingual digital strategist for nonprofits. They were both loftily educated, their young children adorable, eccentric geniuses. There was the caveat that they were vegetarians and wanted the fish to be released once they were caught. “I think we can manage that,” I said, though I had wanted to show them how to clean a bluegill with a teaspoon.

We drove to a pond a few miles from Lake Champlain, where the four boys would be able to wade into the water easily. They huddled around as I sorted through their tackle box for supplies. I moved the deepwater lures aside. “Those are for boat fishing,” I said. I pointed at the plastic triple-hooked lures. “You boys aren’t old enough to use the jigs yet.”

Their eyes widened at the foreign terminology. They protested, defending their choice of lures as
shiny
and
cool
. I loved the way they loved these objects whose functions were completely unknown to them. They loved them at face value, for their sleek shapes and colors and the pure beauty of their design, as they loved anything at that young age: found lengths of string, plastic eggs, sea glass, discarded pieces of tinfoil that could be molded into robot appendages, and a thousand other objects that would, someday, form the backdrop to their remembered childhood—holding not all, but some memories, not all, but some truth. I selected weights and bobbers for them instead, drawing the fishing line through the eyes of their poles and showing them how to knot the line to secure the clasp as my father had shown me. It would be years until they could tie the knot themselves. But they would remember, I hoped, the way my hands worked the line, the silver clasp glinting in the sun. The soggy sandwiches we had for lunch that tasted good anyway. The way we laughed when my younger son held a fistful of earthworms and named each of them Slimy.
This is Slimy, and this is Slimy. Say hello to Slimy
.

It didn’t matter where we were fishing, only that we were there, doing it. Likewise, it didn’t matter where Corey was—how many miles away—for me to keep him close. I wrote to him to tell him about the funny things the kids had said and done on the fishing trip. I told him about the water snake they had tried to hypnotize with a whispered charm. The way their words were magic, and, conjured in the correct order, could light fires or send snakes to sleep. The way the boys hopped like frogs and covered themselves in mud. The way they never minded mud, or noticed it as something to be washed away. Here, I can give them the best of my own childhood, an idea of what life by the river was all about, but without any of the problems.

In the letter, I asked Corey if he remembered the angelfish I’d kept as a kid and whether he remembered carrying me home that day I thought I was dying. We had added the crawdad and the bluegill to our fish tank. For each of three days, one of the fish turned up dead. Marcus and I awoke to the crime scenes: a single wrecked claw and scattered scales remained as evidence of the slaughters on the first two days. When only the two angelfish were left, the female taunted the male. Her tail hung clipped and loose as she swam toward him and away from him. On the third night, they turned on each other in a fevered and bloody fight. Only the female fish survived. Remnants of the male trailed behind her, entwined in her silky fin like a battle flag.

Versions of small portions of these essays have appeared in
Sundog Lit, Tampa Review, Hippocampus
, and
Essay Daily
. I thank the editors of these journals for publishing this work.

Thanks to Lana Popovic, my brilliant agent. Thanks to Brigid Hughes, the prize judge. I am grateful to Fiona McCrae, Steve Woodward, Jeff Shotts, and the whole Graywolf Press team for their extraordinary vision and support. To my teachers and mentors, Charley Kerlin and Bill Mottolese. To those who generously read many incarnations of this work or otherwise supported and inspired me in the making of this book: Rachel Carter, Stephen Cramer, Matthew O’Connell, Shelagh Connor Shapiro, Keith S. Wilson, Brooks Rexroat, Shannon McCarthy, Kate Sykes, Christopher Castellani, and Michael Jager.

Special thanks to Amedeo D’adamo and Melissa Falcon Field. Without them, this book would have remained in a folder on my laptop.

Endless thanks and love to my parents, my aunts, and Mike, who have made writing possible for me. Thanks to Corey, for his support and consent in telling this story.

Raised in the rural Midwest, Angela Palm owns Ink + Lead Literary Services and is the editor of
Please Do Not Remove
, a book featuring work by Vermont writers. Her work has appeared in
Brevity, Paper Darts, Midwestern Gothic, Sundog Lit, Essay Daily
, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Champlain College and lives in Burlington, Vermont.

Riverine: A Memoir from Anywhere but Here
by Angela Palm is the 2014 winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. Graywolf awards this prize every twelve to eighteen months to a previously unpublished, full-length work of outstanding literary nonfiction by a writer who is not yet established in the genre. Previous winners include
Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight
by Margaret Lazarus Dean,
The Empathy Exams: Essays
by Leslie Jamison,
The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness
by Kevin Young,
Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays
by Eula Biss,
Black Glasses Like Clark Kent: A GI’s Secret from Postwar Japan
by Terese Svoboda,
Neck Deep and Other Predicaments
by Ander Monson, and
Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir
by Kate Braverman.

The Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize seeks to acknowledge—and honor—the great traditions of literary nonfiction. Whether grounded in observation, autobiography, or research, much of the most beautiful, daring, and original writing over the past few decades can be categorized as nonfiction.