Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir (6 page)

Grandpa said to Daddy when he was in grad school, “If it doesn’t work out, you can always come back and work on the chicken farm.” Many a linguist friend would later tease Bill that he should have chosen the birds! But it was a sweet reminder because there was something there for him, a home somewhere that he could return to. For my mom, there was no home plate.

I started eating — and living — well, too, when I moved in with my dad. Steak and ice cream! Allowances! A bicycle! A record player! My first week there, my dad gave me my allowance and a Schwinn. I learned how to ride the thing just to get to Thrifty’s Drugstore, falling down a dozen times on a ten-block ride. Once there, I spent every cent on eye makeup and emerged elated, with pink, blue, and green powder all over my lids.

My aunt Molly, my mother’s sister, had another theory about my parents’ divorce. It wasn’t about religion, class, sexism, mental health: It was all my fault.

“You wouldn’t stop crying; you thought about nothing but yourself!” she said.

“Molly, I was only two years old!” I tried.

“What, that’s your excuse? That’s you, full of explanations!”

Even now, it makes me laugh, her reproach. My aunt Molly loved me dearly, but she wanted me to know my burdens. My mother’s relatives weren’t interested in Dr. Spock or any other child development psychologies. If you were “bad,” you did your parents a grave disservice; it was your fault that they beat you or got drunk. … If only you’d been good, if only you had done the right thing, things wouldn’t have gone awry. Children are an obligation and a curse. It didn’t matter whether you were six or sixteen, you were full of sin. If you were abandoned, it was because you deserved it, and maybe it’
d be a lesson to you.

I took this a couple ways. On one hand, when I came to my father’s house in 1972, he was alarmed that the most common expression that came out of my mouth was, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” I wasn’t being sarcastic; I was genuinely flinching. I was an expert in walking on eggshells — yet, inevitably, some would always get cracked. I never thought I’d be able to work myself out of the yolks.

A lot of people look back on their parents’ generation, the pre-Baby Boomers, the Depression babies, and say, “Well, they were all too young; they got married too soon. Everyone took one look at their draft notices and got married in a panic.” My dad said more than once, “We were both so immature.”

So yes, young and stupid. The question is, How long does that last? Maybe no one should get hitched until they’re well into their dotage.

My mom gave me a glimpse of what could’ve been, on her deathbed.

She was in hospice in a nursing home on the Iron Range, which is the mining area of Minnesota just south of the Canadian boundary waters. It’s where Bob Dylan grew up — and if you think he’s an enigma, you simply haven’t met anyone else from the Range. They are all the same. Bobby Zimmerman is a Ranger through and through.

The nursing home in Hibbing, the main town, is filled with children and young adults visiting every day; it’s not a lonely place. Family is everything up there.

Elizabeth had just a month or two left before she died. She had some lucid moments, and for a period, she could operate the phone by herself.

She called my dad. For the first time in forty years.

Bill told me this, of course — he always blabbed. He was at his desk when she rang; and this voice, one that he hadn’t heard for decades, was on the line.

When he said, “Hello, Libby?” she said, “Oh no, no, I thought I’d get your answering machine — hang up! Hang up! I can’t say this to you in person.”

He said, “Okay, I’ll hang up, and if you ring again, the machine will get it.”

She phoned right back. She spoke into the tape recorder like she was in the confession booth:

“Bill, I want you to know that, I know how I treated you when we were together. I was really cruel, all those things I said — none of them were true. The truth is, you were the kindest man I’ve ever known.”

I could hear her breath as Bill repeated her message to me. When my mom talked about their marriage, it was as if it happened yesterday instead of 1950.

“So, what did you do?” I said. I felt dizzy.

“I was really touched,” he said. “I wrote her a note. I said that neither of us was perfect, that we were bo
th haunted by our own demons. I said that we made an incredibly wonderful child, so it must have been worth it, and we could be proud of that no matter what.”

I could hardly respond. Indeed, I eventually found that letter in my mom’s apartment in Hibbing, exactly as he described. My mom kept it in a very special place; I knew she treasured it.

I was happy for her, for him. But the two-year-old inside me quaked. I had to bite my lip to keep from being a spoiler. How could they enjoy this private make-up that I had nothing to do with?

My dad got a second chance to father a little girl. He bent over backward to help me when I had my daughter, Aretha. He couldn’t wait to see us, visiting every few months even when he lived far away. He was a bigger part of Aretha’s growing up than he was of mine, and every time I’d see him sing with her, hold her little hand, play Russian Bank with two stack of cards, I’d think, This is the do-over; this is the mending. The greatest myth of divorce is that you never, ever think you’re going to see the day.

Runs Through It

Suicide not only runs “in” families, it runs through them.

— Laura Miller

T
he reasons for suicide are always distracting. But the reasons don’t seem to predict who’s really going to do it and who’s only taking you to the brink.

A terrible tragedy can befall three different people: one will insist on moving forward, another will snuff herself out, and yet another will threaten death so convincingly that you don’t know the difference anymore.

The first time I heard the phrase “suicidal gesture,” I was outraged. What do you mean “gesture”? I believed each one, every time!

My mom set the suicide clock in motion so frequently that by the time I hit puberty, I just wanted her to get it over with. I knew it was probably my fault … she’d clarified that a million times. So be it. Call the devil, tell him to save my seat, kill yourself — at least the suspense will be over.

I imagined, a thousand times, the quiet of sitting in our apartment — an apartment we’d just moved into — after her suicide death. I would imagine it all being over. So still, so absolutely silent, for a period of time before I called the police to come to our apartment. I wouldn't want the peaceful moment to end. I would imagine this silent aftermath over and over again; it was such a comfort.

The last time my mom tried to kill the two of us was a few days after she got a letter in the mail from a lawyer. The attorney had been trying to find her for a year, which I found impressive — that she had “disappeared” us so effectively that no one in her immediate family had a clue what our address was. The attorney had finally contacted my father, who, post-divorce, spent twelve years at the University of California at Los Angeles. I guess my mom trusted my dad with our whereabouts more than anyone she was related to. Thus, the lawyer discovered our location in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

The attorney’s letter informed my mother of her father’s death, as well as her sister’s. Frannie had died first. Her father was buried in the Veterans Cemetery, and had left each of his children two hundred dollars. That shocked me, because I was under the impression that he had nothing to offer anyone, least of all his
eldest daughter. I didn’t even know he was alive — I’d never heard her mention him, except to say: “My father abandoned us when our mother died, and then our aunt Tessie came to get us from the orphanage and keep the older kids together.”

But my adorable aunt Frances — there was no further information about her in the letter, no burial information. I still don’t know where my aunt lies. She was so young — in her thirties — and she’d had three sons. What had happened?

I didn’t know; but whatever was missing, or whatever was well understood, my mother tore the letter in two. She was gunning for something right then. I crawled under the bed for a while, suspecting a blowup, but then decided getting myself to school was even safer.

I remembered my favorite photograph of my aunt Frannie, which my mom had also torn up, a long time ago, before I was born. Sometime later she had painstakingly Scotch-taped it back together.

Frannie was the “pretty one,” my mom said — and that was impressive, because my mother was beautiful. In high school, Frannie had snuck out of the house wearing my mother’s favorite sweater to pose for annual class photo. She looked great in it; her smile was like a movie star’s.

When my mom found out about the borrowing, discovering the yearbook picture, she was so enraged she tore every copy she could find into little pieces.

“It was the only nice thing I had,” she said — referring to the sweater. Another one of those “reasons” that always seemed to end a discussion. I examined the photo as best I could. The sweater is gray wool, store-bought, and utterly undistinguished to my eye except that a pretty slender girl is wearing it like it belonged to her.

I found the photo in my mother’s old shoe box. My aunt’s warm smile and the lights in her eyes were frightening to look at with all the rips and tears so clearly visible, the yellowing tape barely holding it all together.

A couple nights after the lawyer’s letter arrived, I was lying awake on my sofa bed. I couldn’t get to sleep; I kept thinking about our white Persian cat we’d left back in the States. His name was Swithin — we’d named him after mischievous Uncle Swithin in
The Forsythe Saga
.

Swithy was pure white, deaf, and had blue eyes. He was completely enchanting. I’d never had a pet before, nor did we ever stick around long enough anywhere for me to enjoy anyone else’s animals. My mom said we could feed him, if he didn’t eat too much and stayed outside. I would give him my canned peas from supper if I could sneak them into a napkin.

When Mom told me we were moving to Canada in 1970, it came as such a surprise. She said it was because of the assassinations, because of the war, because this country made her sick. But she said those things all the time — why Canada now?

I saw a letter on her sewing table from the University of Alberta offering her a position as librarian. She had been substitute teaching in high school for years. I knew she wouldn’t change her mind.

We had just “adopted” this little cat. I was on the swim team, and the coach had given me a red, white, and blue American flag swimsuit to compete in the summer races at the public pool. That very month, my mom had acknowledged that I had $75 in the bank, from all the $5 bills that had accumulated in my name from birth to First Communion. She’d suggested that I buy a bike — I’d never even bought a candy bar before. I was twelve and didn't know how to ride a bicycle. It was so exciting.

And then, it was all over. One memorable afternoon, she said that we were moving to Edmonton, that this country was abominable, that there were no jobs. She said that she’d sold my bike to help with the moving expenses, and the cat couldn’t come.

My first bouts of insomnia were in Edmonton, Alberta, a week into our new living situation. We lived in a tall apartment building on Eighty-seventh Avenue , the main street bordering the college library where she now worked.

I really missed holding our kitten and hearing him purr, wondering if he could feel himself purr even if he couldn’t hear it. I worried that he was hungry, that no one was taking care of him.

It’s odd that I remember that part so clearly. Missing the cat. I have a detailed memory of the minutes before I crept into my mom’s room, into her bed, and told her tearfully that I missed Swithy so much.

“That’s it, that’s enough!” she said. “You make me sick.” She pushed me off the mattress and shoved on her shoes, while I wheezed and apologized.

She pinched the top of my arm and dragged me out of the door.

I remember her grip on my arm — and her disgust at my blubbering. I was pathetic, I knew it, but I couldn’t stop. I could see in her eyes how loathsome I’d become. If only I hadn’t said anything about the cat, or crawled into her bed like a baby.