Writing Is My Drink (21 page)

me most were the very things that connected me with all the

people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”

5. If you are a mother, write on this topic: How has being a

mother inhibited you as a writer? And how has being a

mother fueled you as a writer?

6. Have you limited your own writing to protect your own

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mother? And yes, even after they die, sometimes we still re-

main very busy protecting our mothers.

7. Answer this question as quickly as you can: What do you

want to write for yourself? What is your vision of that project?

What’s the tone of it? What does it feel like to you?

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11

A Couple of Irishmen

Walk into a Bar

The first thing I noticed about Frank McCourt was his voice, or

rather my dad’s voice coming from his mouth. I guess it makes

sense that they would have similar accents: Born within a few

years of each other to Irish parents, both Bill and Frank spent

part of their childhoods in Ireland and part in the New World.

It all made perfect sense, but the logic didn’t muffle the impact

or negate the sense I had that for a week of the summer of 2003,

Frank McCourt became the pinch hitter filling in the dad-sized

hole in my heart.

The location for my Frank encounter was the Southampton

Writers Conference. For this one July week, I slept in a cinder-

block dorm room by night and sat at a desk in Frank’s memoir

workshop by day, there in the Hamptons, perched on a tiny cam-

pus flanked by mansions just a few miles from the fabled beaches.

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Truth be told, I’d arrived at the feet of the master not much in

the mood for learning. I’m not proud of this, as I’m not proud of

other times when I’ve been too self-absorbed to notice meteors

streaking across the sky or yawned in the face of a perfect sunset.

But being ashamed doesn’t change the fact that I was restless and

irritable from waiting, waiting, and waiting to hear if my agent

thought my manuscript was ready to send out. The book was a

memoir about motherhood called
Light Sleeper: The Making of

an Unlikely Mother
. Getting to this point had been a long uphill push—writing the manuscript, finding the agent, and then revising the manuscript based on her recommendations. Besides my

impatience with my dragging-feet agent, other problems clam-

ored for my attention too. Every time I called home, something

seemed irreparably off with my husband and me. An ominous

cloud hung over every conversation. I’d hang up knowing there

was a problem, and then call back and say something like “Is it

just me or was that weird?” and then it would get worse. Then

I’d hang up and lie on the bed with the sinking heart that knows

something is wrong, even if that something cannot be named. I

felt insanely far from home. I wanted desperately to go back and

make it all better, but I also knew that going home, which would

inevitably come at the end of the week anyway, would do no

good at al . In the midst of all this, a group of us writers went to a local Long Island dive bar one night, and an older poet grabbed

me out of the blue (real y, no flirting, nothing) and kissed me

long and hard like an errant messenger sent with a partial an-

swer to that What’s-wrong? question that had been dogging me.

This was the agitated state of mind I brought to Frank’s

memoir class. I had a strong sense that I was a person waiting to

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be blasted from one location to the next. In my delusional state,

I thought that rocket boost might be about to take me from ob-

scurity to literary glory, though the truth was I was about to be

blasted from marriage to divorce.

Frank’s class, I realized very quickly, was no place for the

mental y restless. An accomplished and languid storyteller,

Frank could easily take an hour of class time to tell a story or

five. As he told us about his life as a teacher in the New York City public school system, a divorce, family entanglements, and what

some priest back in Ireland thought of
’Tis,
I anxiously waited for class to start, for him to tell me what I needed to do to become published in a big way.

At some point, I think during class two, I realized: This real y

was
it
. Frank was a storyteller.
Angela’s Ashes
was the stel ar success that it was because Frank knows something—everything—

about how to tell a story. Sometime during that class, as Frank

taught us everything he knew about setting, dialogue, pacing,

and theme by laying his stories down before us one by one, my

resistance wore down. I regressed further and further back in

time until at last I landed back at the dining room table where

my dad had routinely held court for hours. Plate pushed aside, a

pack of Peter Jacksons in front of him, my dad could tell an end-

less story, pausing only for emphasis and to take a long draw off

his gin and tonic. Like Frank, my dad’s Irish accent was diluted

by North America, a tendency toward the emphatic rather than

a true brogue. And now, listening by the hour to Frank, I was

back home with my dad once again.

Our home—the patched-together family home that my

mother and stepfather created together—often had the atmo-

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sphere of a pub. Stray work associates regularly congregated

in the living room during cocktail hour for a couple rounds of

7&7s or gin and tonics or Molson Old Style served in frosty

steins. Out would come an array of savory snacks, perfect for the

adult drinkers’ numbed palette: picked eggs and herring, pep-

pery crackers, smoked almonds, sardines dripping with oil. A

blue cloud formed under the ceiling as the ashtrays filled. In our

basement was a player piano around which a handful of forty-

somethings would cluster late in the evening, singing along to

“The Caissons Go Rolling Along” and “You Must Have Been a

Beautiful Baby” as my dad pumped the pedals, a smoke hanging

from his lower lip. These were the good times: These moments

of frolicking entertaining were what my parents were destined

to create together, and when they were living out their twinned

fate, I felt free to live out my own.

My dad had a magnetic personality, a restless curiosity, and

a laser focus for the cares and concerns of others; people flocked

to him for his stories and for his counsel. I, too, loved listen-

ing to him, but when there was no party, I felt like my role of

conversation partner/listener went from optional to mandatory.

My parents couldn’t exist alone together; they needed the oxy-

gen an audience can provide. When I was in the twelfth grade,

the jubilant pub nights faded away when two things happened

that abruptly changed the course and tenor of my family’s life:

The first was when my dad was transferred from his downtown

executive position to a mill manager’s position in a damp mill

town on Vancouver Island.

Outrageous independence was the expected norm for youth

both in the single-mom family I’d known in California and in

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the pub night family of my teens. It was, partly, the times. When

I tell family tales from the sixties and seventies, people some-

times nod and say glibly, “That’s how it was back then.” But my

family took this laissez-faire parenting to an extreme. For ex-

ample, shortly after my mom and Bill married in a California

ceremony without any of their children present, I flew alone at

age ten to my new home in Canada. While our newly wedded

parents slowly honeymooned their way up the Pacific Coast

Highway, I was fetched from immigration at the Vancouver air-

port by my sullen, newly minted teenage stepsiblings, who were

solely responsible for my care during my first week in my new

home in a new country. Not exactly
Leave It to Beaver
material.

And our move during my senior year to Nanaimo, once

known as the heroin capital of Canada, was not much different.

For some reason, my parents weren’t ready to make the move

themselves in time for my first day of school. So I ferried over

alone from Horseshoe Bay to Vancouver Island with my dad’s

late-model Renault and spent the night before the first day at my

new high school alone in the Port-O-Call motel on Terminal

Avenue. My mom told me this would be “exciting.” I found it

“terrifying.” However, because I was told it would be “exciting,”

I couldn’t register my terror ful y, only noting a peculiar numb

sensation in my limbs as I pointed the Renault north toward

Nanaimo District Senior Secondary. My new school was the

gathering point for every working-class teen within a forty-mile

radius of wet fir trees surrounding the epicenter known as Har-

mac, the union mill where my father would soon become one of

the loathed group known as
management
.

Overnight, our home had gone from urbane social hub

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to pioneer outpost. Once in a while my mom would drag in a

neighbor woman for a glass of Chablis or my dad would bring

home one of the other managers from the mil , but for the most

part we were on our own. All of my friends were back in the city,

and I was floundering around the hal s of my new school with

no clue how to make friends with kids who drove Ford F-150s

and listened to Black Sabbath. The three of us were stuck with

one another.

But it was more than the move that turned the lights out on

the party and moved my role of listener up to front and center.

Much more. Just before my dad’s job change, my twenty-three-

year-old stepsister, Barbara, who was living in Vancouver attend-

ing her last year at university, started to get sick. She couldn’t eat and began to lose a lot of weight, and then tests confirmed the

worst: It was cancer. It’s strange how the mind can remember

so many details and yet be unsure about a crucial sequence of

events, but I’m fairly sure that it was in our first few months in

our new mill town life that we realized that Barbara’s cancer was

terminal.

As hope for her recovery faded, the light within my dad—his

seemingly endless energy and optimism—began to go out. His

withdrawal from life was palpable. I felt desperate to hang on

to him, to keep alive some semblance of the happier times, but

I was also preoccupied with problems of my own. For the first

time ever, I could say without exaggeration that I hated my life. I despised my new school and couldn’t see any hope of the situation improving. My mom’s suggestions of “conversation starters”

and joining clubs were absurd. As the city slicker, I had as much

chance of cracking this social scene as I had of getting invited

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to Buckingham Palace for tea. I missed my old life, Kansas and

Auntie Em, and all I could think of was how to get back, which is

what I did several hours of a day in my dark basement bedroom,

listening to the rain thrashing against the windows and
The Best
of Bread
on auto repeat.

The social buoyancy of our city life had held us together, and

here in our new isolation we seemed less like a family and more

like three desperate strangers on a train to nowhere. Barbara’s

illness also exposed the fissures in our blended family. It was my

dad’s daughter who was dying, not my mother’s. My dad was

howling sad without the ability to howl. My mom wasn’t
as sad
.

It wasn’t that she wasn’t sad: She was sad in the way one is sad

when losing a stepchild one does not get along with particularly

wel . My dad’s was the wrenching grief of a parent losing a child.

The dark subtext below the disparity between their emotional

states was something that no one—no matter how much or how

little they’d had to drink—ever mentioned the fact that Barbara

and my mother had never liked each other very much. No
Brady

Bunch
episode had covered this one.

While my sister’s dying was my loss as wel , it was silently

understood to be a mitigated loss; after all she wasn’t real y

my sister, and she’d only been my stepsister for seven years. In

the hierarchy of loss, mine barely registered, which made me