Lit: A Memoir

Still, I want to show that single eye the whole tale as I know it, scary as that strikes me from this juncture.

However long I’ve been granted sobriety, however many hours I logged in therapists’ offices and the confessional, I’ve still managed to hurt you, and not just with the divorce when you were five, with its attendant shouting matches and slammed doors.

Just as my mother vanished from my young life into a madhouse, so did I vanish when you were a toddler. Having spent much of my life trying to plumb her psychic mysteries, I now find myself occupying her chair as plumbee. Believe me. It’s a discomfiting sensation.

Last week specifically: a gas leak in your apartment drove you to my place, where I was packing for a trip. So I let go my cat sitter and left you prowling old video footage like a scholar deciphering ancient manuscripts. How much pleasure your concentration gave me. From the raw detritus of the past, you’re shaping your own story, which will, in your own particular telling of it, shape you into a man.

Days later, when my taxi pulled up, you came down to help haul bags. At six-two, you’re athletic like your father, with his same courtly manner—an offhanded chivalry that calls little attention to itself. While manhandling my mammoth suitcase through two security doors, you managed to hold each one open for me with your foot. The next instant I registered—peeking from the top of your saggy jeans—the orange boxers spattered with cartoon fish from Dr. Seuss’s One Fish, Two Fish that I read you as a kid.

Inside, loading books into your messenger bag, you mentioned watching for the first time a video of Mother and me, filmed years ago by your camera (borrowed) in the crackerbox house of my kidhood. Mother was recounting her psychotic episode—the seminal event that burned off whatever innocence a kid in backwater Texas has coming.

You know the story in broad outline and have steered clear of my writing about it—a healthy fence blocking my public life from your private one. But the old video stirred something in you.

It was kind of crazy, you said.

You were wrapping up wires for one of your cameras.

I thought you meant Mother’s story of taking a carving knife to kill my sister and me when we were little. How she hallucinated she’d butchered us and called the doctor, who called the law, who took her away for a spell.

Not that, you said. Your blue eyes fixed me where I stood.

This curiosity about my family past has a new gravity to it, countered by your T-shirt, which reads, Don’t Give Me Drugs.

You told me all that, you said. The way Grandma told it was strange, like it happened to somebody else. Crazy. She said, You were just so precious, I thought I’d kill you before they all got to hurt you.

Then your girlfriend called from the next room, and the instant was over.

I’d all but forgotten the tape. So after you’d gone, I played it—maybe for the first time all the way through.

It’s a summer afternoon in a yellow kitchen we’ve yet to remodel. A few tiles still bear bullet holes from Mother’s pistol-wagging arguments with my daddy and two subsequent romances. The florid robe she’s wearing would suit a Wiccan priestess. Ditto her short, ashwhite hair, and her pale as marble skin, which still looks dewy.

She reads some gnostic texts about goddesses and gods and the Christ within each of us. She pauses every now and then to say, Isn’t that wild? or to relight her long cigarillo.

Next to her is a giant plastic sunflower my nephew gave her for Mother’s Day. She flips a switch on it, and it blinks to life, singing, You are my sunshine, my only sunshine—a song my daddy used to sing to me on the way to fishing.

Don’t you love that? she says. It’s silly, but I love it.

I ask what she was thinking on the night in question, and she says, I just couldn’t imagine bringing two girls up in a world where they do such awful things to women. So I decided to kill you both, to spare you.

How long had you been drinking?

Oh I wasn’t drunk, Mother says. Maybe I’d had a few drinks.

This completely counters her earlier version, in which she’d claimed to have been shitfaced. But I don’t press it. She shrugs at me, adding, Sheesh.

I’d never think to go over this footage myself but for you, Dev. You’re showing my life to me through a new window—not just the video, either. Your birth altered my whole posture on the planet, not to mention my role vis-à-vis Mother.

For I partly see her through your vantage. You never knew the knife-wielding goddess of death. She’s your gray-haired grandmother, the one I was always trying to protect you from, even though she was sober when you knew her. Her rages had dissipated, but her child-rearing judgment never improved.

You still think it’s funny that she let you screen—at age eight—the über-violent Pulp Fiction because she found your interest in nonlinear film methods artistic. But I’d stood before her sputtering, What about the sodomy, Mother?

From the corner of the room, you asked what exactly sodomy was.

Mother said, When the man hurt the other man.

You asked her if it was the guy with the bondage ball in his mouth.

Jesus, Mother, I said. You see!

Well, he was interested in the movie when his cousin talked about it, Mother said.

It’s a testament to your desire to avoid further conflict that you waited till we were on the plane to tell me she’d also shown you—at the outset of our visit—a pearl-handled revolver in her pocket-book. Her rationale? She didn’t want you coming across it in her purse.

I’d never go through Grandma Charlie’s purse, you said.

Still, you considered the pistol incident something I’d want to know, while you reassured me you were disinclined to play with a loaded weapon.

Mostly, Mother couldn’t hurt you. But I both could and did.

The time I’m mostly thinking of, you were barely four, which—I would argue—is less like being a miniature person than like a dog or cat who can talk. Your father and I were coming to pieces, and not long after, you came to see me in the hospital.

You remember the embossed smiley faces on my green slippers. You remember the red-haired woman so psychotic she once landed in four-point restraints just about the time you got there with your Ninja Turtle lunch box, and you could hear her howls.

We had a picnic one summer afternoon when you visited, and the hospital grounds so evoked the playing fields where your father distinguished himself that you told your teachers at daycare that I was at a slumber party at Harvard.

We both remember, albeit in varying tones of gray and black and shit brown, the misery I mired us in.

That’s the story I want to tell: how I started getting drunk. How being drunk got increasingly hard, and being not drunk felt impossible. In Odyssean terms, I’d wanted to be a hero, but wound up—as Mother did—a monster.

But because of you, I couldn’t die and couldn’t monster myself, either. So you were the agent of my rescue—not a good job for somebody barely three feet tall.

Blameless, the Greek translators call it. That’s what Odysseus wished for his son, Telemachus: to live guilt free. As a teenager myself, reading how Odysseus boffed witches and fought monsters, I inked the word blameless on the bottom of my tennis shoe. And my favorite part was always when he came home after decades and no one knew him.

As you get older, you look at me more objectively—or try to. As I become strange to you in some ways, you’ve become more familiar to yourself. Maybe you could loan me some of the shine in your young head to clear up my leftover dark spaces. Just as you’re blameless for the scorched parts of your childhood, I’m equally exonerated for my own mother’s nightmare. Maybe I can show you how I came to peace, how she and Daddy wound up as blameless in my story as you are.

Before you left the other night, you added—in the form of afterthought—what was, to me, the most dramatic news I’d heard that night: after the tape of your grandmother, you’d read nearly fifty pages of my own memories.

You added, I’m gonna use that and some footage of Grandma for my documentary class.

I watched you disappear down the stairs and wanted to call you back but thought better of it. Your girlfriend was with you, and you were so loaded down with bags and equipment. And something about those orange boxers with their cartoon fish—they draw from me such a throat-clenching nostalgia for a younger version of you—an image at odds with the man you are.

You’re disembarking now, I can see it. Maybe by telling you my story, you can better tell yours, which is the only way to get home, by which I mean to get free of us.

SIDE B: THEN (#ulink_cd05275a-9194-5b04-803d-963aa4691aaf)

At the end of my drinking, the kingdom I longed for, slaved for, and at the end of each day lunged at was a rickety slab of unreal estate about four foot square—a back stair landing off my colonial outside Cambridge, Mass. I’d sit hunched against the door guzzling whiskey and smoking Marlboros while wires from a tinny walkman piped blues into my head. Though hours there were frequently spent howling inwardly about the melting ice floe of my marriage, this spate of hours was the highlight of my day.

I was empress of that small kingdom and ruled it in all weathers. Sleet, subzero winds, razor-slicing rain. I’d just slide a gloved hand over my tumbler, back hunched against the door. I defended my time there like a bull with a lowered head, for that was the only space in the world I had control of.