Shoulder the Sky (2 page)

Not long after our mom died, I tried to talk to my sister, Lilly, but she didn't want to talk about it. My mother had an illness that lasted about four years. It was not cancer but it might as well have been. She had treatment and got better and then got worse and we all did very poorly in dealing with it and with her.

My father was trying, but he was already turning invisible and that didn't help. Lilly was rebellious at the time. She had even changed her name to Lilith for a while when she discovered that Lilith, in Jewish folklore, was a vampire-like killer and nocturnal female demon. Older than me, she was experimenting with drugs and dying her hair and she kept finding some new part of her body to pierce. She was angry almost all the time, which seemed all wrong to me but, as Dave would say, she was probably venting her anger about our
mother dying. Unfortunately, she was mostly angry with our mother for being so sick, and that wasn't Mom's fault.

Lilly stayed out really late, and once she got into trouble with the police at an all-night rave. That surprised me because she always told me she hated rave music. Lilly and I could never talk to each other about my mother's condition when Mom was alive. None of us were big talkers in my family. That's why Dave thought that writing would be a good way for me to “open up.” Dave didn't know about my website back then.

My mother — and I want to use her first name here — Claire — was brave about the fact that she was slipping downhill. Her paintings of the alien landscapes got much better. She tried to open up more about herself and she tried to pull the family together even as it was falling apart. My mother, I now believe, was like the sun — bright and cheery and a great warm gravity anchor that held all of us little planets in orbit. When she died, we all went spinning off into the void.

But the odd thing was that, to everyone around us, we seemed like we were handling it well. We acted as if nothing particularly important had happened. Lilly kept sulking and piercing and sometimes smoking. She went through a string of truly repulsive boyfriends, even one who was the lead singer in a band called Repuke.

My father made hasty, furtive appearances around home, slipping in and out of the bathroom, in and out of the kitchen, holed up watching hockey on TV in the bedroom, and slipping out to his van in the morning to go to work just as I was waking up — and it didn't seem to matter what time I woke up.

It was a month after Claire had died that my math teacher — the HMMWMT (heavy metal mud wrestling math teacher) took me aside and said, “Martin, you have a serious problem. I think you are too normal and it's not normal to be normal after you've had a trauma in your life.”

Mr. Miller, HMMWMT (who only mud wrestled at bars on weekends after his professional career as a world champion wrestler had ended), was one of the few people in the school kids listened to. He had once played a really nasty lead guitar in a heavy metal band called Gangrene, and they sold a lot of CDs before he retired from the road and took up teaching math. He still had a small ponytail even though he was kind of bald up top. And once every week Mr. Miller would bring in his Fender guitar and Marshall amp and try to explain algebra using some screeching distortion riffs that would bring the principal banging on the door. The principal never actually walked in to say anything, because nobody messed with the HMMWMT. But if Mr. Miller saw his boss peering in
through the little window in the door, he'd crank the amp back to five instead of ten.

It was the HMMWMT who told me I should go see a “professional” about my problem. He explained that my kind of “personal dilemma” needed something more than that wimp, Egan, our guidance counsellor, could offer. When Mr. Miller takes you aside, you listen, so I knew I had to take the advice. He recommended his old friend Dave, who had once been a roadie for Meatloaf before taking up psychiatry. And the rest, as they say, is history. Or my story, at least.

Dave and Mr. Miller agreed that I should seek out some form of rebellion to release my anger. I still wasn't sure I had anger. Hurt and disappointment, however, were present and deeply buried in the suitcase of my mind. I suppose I had learned from my father — or somehow inherited his genetic code — to keep things bottled up. We were not moaners, complainers, whiners, or wimps in the Emerson household, and I had descended, apparently, from very stoic apes, followed by a genealogical string of New England workaholics who faced life's adversities with coping mechanisms that required no tears.

I asked Lilly to take me somewhere to have my nose or my ear pierced but I chickened out when I saw the young woman — not much older than Lilly — who was about to do the job. She claimed to be a professional, but
I could tell that she had been drinking. I came home without a puncture or laceration and so I failed to get my anger out by means of primitive body defacement.

Every day at noon, however, I had watched the teenaged smokers from my school march in a purposeful but ragged procession towards the woods, where they would smoke away lunch hour instead of sitting in the cafeteria with the rest of us eating cafeteria food or scarfing down homemade mock chicken sandwiches. I had a kind of breakthrough one day there in the cafeteria, unwrapping a sandwich I had packed that morning: bologna with relish, pickles, mustard, and salsa. The sandwich reminded me, with the force of a hurricane ripping the roof off a Florida condominium, how much I missed my mother's vegetarian sandwiches.

My mother had been a vegetarian, although she could never fully explain why. She wasn't an animal rights person or a gung-ho health nut. But she had met a woman who claimed to be a shaman, and the shaman (who sold real estate for a living) told her to cut down on the meat her family was eating. My father, not wanting to cause an argument, went along with it, even though he was a great lover of nearly raw steaks consumed on family pilgrimages to Ponderosa.

The sandwiches my mother created for me were fashioned from homemade brown bread, lentils, sprouts, tofu, three kinds of pickles, salsa, and relish. The other
kids all had great pity for me, but I had eaten the sandwiches dutifully.

Until my mother was too sick to make them. Then I was on my own with bologna or mock chicken, but I could never face tofu in the morning. And what was left of my family had regressed to white sliced bread as well.

So I was eating lunch with the Egg Man — my friend Darrell — who had his usual egg salad sandwich (but that was not why he was called the Egg Man), and studying the various varieties of pickles as they fell from my sandwich. The cafeteria was loud and making my ears ring. Dave and Heavy Metal Math were still occasionally hounding me about my normality, and I had my own private disappointments with the failed piercing. The Egg Man was going on and on about how to fool search engines into sending people to his site — which was then an odd combination of images of movie stars from the fifties in bathing suits, reposted tirades against marijuana, sound bites from NASA, and his own personal rants against cellphones. Through the window I could see the parade of smokers heading to the woods. The guys were all stoop-shouldered and the girls wore short skirts and multilevel shoes that seemed completely wrong for tromping into the semi-wilderness. But they looked deliberate and determined — and I decided I wanted to be one of them.

School and smoking have never had an easy relationship, as far as I can tell. Bathroom smoking was always a covert activity where someone eventually got caught and got into trouble. Kids used to be able to smoke outside of some schools — right on the grounds — but nonsmoking perimeters kept spiralling outward from school buildings. Fortunately, as long as you didn't live in a big city, there always seemed to be some nearby woods to sneak off into for a smoke.

The principal knew who smoked where at our school. So did the guidance counsellor, Mr. Egan. Heck, all the teachers knew. Lectures had been delivered in hallways more than a few times. Once, the HMMWMT walked out at noon hour to try to convince the smokers that they were ruining their lungs, shortening their lives, and even promoting possible future sexual incapacity. But they wouldn't listen even to him. And if you couldn't be persuaded by the HMMWMT, no one was going to change your mind.

But remember, Dave and Heavy Metal had told me I needed some kind of rebellion, and today was my day. I left the Egg Man to dream on about ways to fool the new search engines and I went to the woods to smoke.

They all stared at me at first. Some of the guys laughed but took elbows in the ribs from girls who knew about the death of my mother. Intuitively, they knew why I was there. Bill, a guy I'd known since elementary
school, shook a cigarette out of a pack and handed it to one of the girls. I was a little surprised to see Scott Rutledge there. Scott must have arrived by his own alternate, less conspicuous route. That's because Scott was the one kid in school that everyone admired. Teachers liked him. Girls adored him. He could clown with the hooligans but he was also kind to the geeks.

It was Scott who flipped a cigarette my way. A lighter flared, and I leaned and sucked at my very first tug of smoke. Everyone waited for me to cough, but I did not. Only a wisp of tobacco and nicotine had passed my lips and descended into my lungs. But I exhaled with enthusiasm and took a second drag. People nodded and approved. I felt like I had been accepted into a sacred religious cult.

The girls all tried to look sexy (or were sexy, depending on who it was) and the guys all looked like actors who played the roles of young thugs in made-for-TV movies. I didn't try too hard to look cool because I knew I couldn't pull it off.

The conversation was mostly about how ugly all the teachers were and how messed up the school was. There was universal agreement about those two subjects. I offered no opinions but was halfway though my second cigarette when the bell rang. Amazingly, the thugs and chicks (the guys actually got away with calling girls “chicks” in this primordial world of green leaves and
ritual smoke) all dropped their butts, ground them into the rich forest soil with heavy heels, and turned towards the school. Scott nodded at me and headed off for his circuitous path back to class.

Somebody slapped me on the back. “Back to the hellhole,” Bill said.

“What it is,” someone else said.

A couple of girls pulled out mirrors and lipstick as they walked. For the first time in my life, I was viewed as being at least semi-cool by the other kids in the cafeteria as I walked back into the school with the smokers. And I felt a kind of pride.

My mother would have been appalled if she could have known. It had been a rapid descent from tofu and brown bread to this tobacco wasteland. My father would simply not have believed I smoked, even if I lit up in the living room and inhaled a pack of Marlboros, puffing smoke in his face with every lungful. The truth is that I didn't like the smoking part, but I felt pretty good about the camaraderie. I wished that non-smokers could sneak off into the woods to stand around and not smoke and that this would somehow be considered dangerous and even sexy. But the world is a funny place, eh, and things don't always work out the way you want them to.

And you'll be disappointed to learn that by the time I got back to math class, where Heavy Metal was
tuning up his Fender for geometry, I felt let down that smoking had not made me feel angrier about anything. I knew I was still holding it all back, a great dam against some flood that Dave explained should come some day, a flood I needed to be prepared for. But it wasn't today. My mother was still gone from the world and I had somehow accepted this fact with only a lingering twinge of self-pity. I was still acting way too normal for my own good.

When I told Dave about the smoking, he looked concerned at first but then cleared his throat and said, “I think this is actually a good thing. A few more bad habits and we'll have you cured.”

I knew that Dave was not like conventional shrinks. He said he tried to come up with creative approaches to problems, approaches that might seem totally whacked to some. But he was confident that he was on the right track with me.

“What exactly is it you're trying to cure me of,” I asked, “aside from my problem of being so normal, or at least appearing to be normal?”

“Sheesh,” Dave said. “Maybe cure is the wrong word. I'm just trying to help. It has to do with your mother, remember. You must miss her a lot.”

“I do. Every minute of the day.”

“That's good.”

“It is?”

“You loved her?”

“Of course; she was my mother. Did you love your mother?”

“I still do.”

“She's alive?”

“Yes. Nearly eighty. She still tells me I need a haircut every time I see her.”

“You do need a haircut. For an old guy, you look a little flaky with that shaggy mop and those sideburns.”

“You think I should look normal?”

“No. Maybe not.”

“Meanwhile, back at the ranch...” he said, which was Dave's way of trying to get back on subject — this issue of me and the fact I'd been acting so seemingly normal, which seemed to upset everyone so much. “How do you feel about this smoking thing?”

So we did that one long and hard. Maybe I was acting out my anger and my hurt. That was the theory. Dave didn't have to give me a lecture about the fact that my smoking career should be short. From the start, I knew I couldn't commit myself to the smoking lifestyle. I was pretty sure it wasn't worth lung cancer and sexual dysfunction.

My only true commitment to the smoking world was love of the foray into the woods at noon hour and
then right after school, a quick couple of puffs with the gang at the designated spot near the bus garage followed by running for the bus with nicotine breath. Sometimes it was me keeping pace with Scott Rutledge, which must have raised a few eyebrows at the mingling of such strange companions.