Notes to Self

http://www.greetings.ca/no-dirty-dishes-day-012056.php

Just the other day, I was sitting in a discussion group in which participants were asked to close their eyes and think back to their childhood homes, as far back as they could remember.
 
Not anticipating that the next step indeed would be to wander around the house, I'd already instinctually started doing so, happily walking from room to room, stopping here to touch the windows sill, there the banister.

There was the black asbestos tile of the kitchen where, at the age of seven, I remember falling down and chipping my tooth one Easter morning; my brother and I had been was chasing each other in our socks.  There was the bare, beige, asbestos tile floor of the sparse living room where the old couch was quickly falling apart.

Next, in my mind, I wandered upstairs to the landing with its sunny window, and then around the bend where I walked into my teenaged brother's small, carpeted room next to the bathroom, snooping around the odds and ends on his dresser while he was out with his friends as he often was.Next, I stepped into the larger middle room that contained two matching beds, where my "Irish twin" brother and I shared our space and where he would spend afternoons inventing crazy names and scenarios for all of our stuffed animals, most of which were dogs of all shapes and sizes.  Finally, I stepped around the corner from our room to open the door to the sunny, gray, wooden attic stairs leading up into the light.

But I wasn't really supposed to just wander around the house, solitary;  what we were really being instructed to do was to look for the people we would find in that house -- people who had the biggest effect on our lives.  And as we found them, we were supposed to have specific types of conversations with them.

That's when a few strange things happened, some of which I understand, and some of which I don't:

No matter how hard I looked, two of my three siblings were always missing. Why the oldest was missing makes sense to me:  he was seven years older, a teenager, and unlike anyone else in the house, he had his own room.  In real life, he was often out riding his bike or skateboarding with his friends, just like any kid his age might be.

I couldn't understand why I couldn't place my sister, though.  She was the youngest and slept in my mom's room.  Was this the reason? The thing is, my mother  was unemployed and depressed and never left the house, and my sister wasn't old enough to go to school yet, so surely she was always around.  Why couldn't I find her, even when I searched?

In fact, the only sibling I could find was the one who, ironically, is distinctly missing from everything now -- missing from week-long family gatherings, missing from phonecall exchanges.  Missing from my life.  When we do see him every few years, he is easily agitated and short-tempered. But when I close my eyes, what I see is that he is having our stuffed animal dogs interview each other, and he seems happy.  He makes me laugh.

Mostly, unsurprisingly, it's my mother with whom I converse.  There are things I want from her.  I want her to treat me like a human being, not just some kind of cooperative instrument of "God's will."  I want her to tell me about her own life, about falling in love, falling out of love.  I want her to seem human to me in every dimension and to acknowledge that I'm human too -- that one day I'll fall in and out of love, that I will have dreams I'll want to pursue.   I want her to give me some idea of what the world outside this house might be like.

Unlike in real life, she thanks me for my insight and says she will try.  Like in real life, she then pats me on the head, calls me smart, and tells me she loves me.

But the part that scares me most is this:  I try to get her to walk with me to the living room.  Every few minutes, I try.  I try to picture her walking up the stairs to the sunny landing, but she won't.

No matter how hard I try, I can't get my mother out of the kitchen -- the kitchen where, when she's not patting me on the head, she is raging over a sink full of dirty dishes, over thoughts of my father, her hands wet and slippery, making so little progress, her tears silent.

Hiring Trauma Scene Cleanup (and a Good Attorney)

Soon after Steven had moved out – but nowhere near soon enough -- I'd worked up the nerve to tell the hipster tenants upstairs that they would be writing their rent checks to me from now on, now that I was a few months into a better teaching job, finally earning more than my previous $34,000, and would be the one paying the mortgage – my soon-to-be-ex-husband, Steven, having moved to Boston in the fall. 

 

So I took charge of the house – the holes in the walls and ceilings, the stacks of drywall piled in the central hallway – cheerfully proclaiming that the basement – full of almost all of his possessions (most of which he had never taken), including piles of salvaged doors and 12 cans of deck stain (even though we 'd never had a deck) – was the last place where my divorce would be final. 

 

Really,of course, I'd meant this as a joke. I hadn't realized at the time just how far from funny all of this would actually be. Or do I really mean just how funny? Once life reaches a certain point of absurdity, the horror of it all becomes almost a parody of itself. Little did I know how much trouble his piles of belongings in the basement would eventually cause me. Little did I realize that almost three years later, his things would still be down there and I would, in the middle of contemplating a refinance that might allow me to pare down my number of tenants to one so that I might live in peace – no more stomping around above me, no more stereo speakers making the ceiling above me vibrate – find myself actually asking my friends, “Do you think it will reflect badly on my credit report to have a company called 'Trauma Scene Cleanup' appear on my Master Card bill?”

Of course, I'd thought the company's name was supposed to be ironic when the other contractor I'd been working with referred me to them as a resource for people dealing with what he called -- based on my detailed description of the state of the basement that was causing me so much trouble – hoarders. There it was: it was official; I had been married to a hoarder. Ironic, in some ways. It seemed as though Steven could let absolutely nothing go except for me. 

 

Professional psychotherapy has this way of hinting at unhealthy behavioral patterns that one should come to recognize in one's life, for the purpose of breaking them. So the point, I suppose, is that things do not merely happen to us; rather, there must in fact be something that we are doing to attract certain elements into our lives. And so, for my part, I began to recognize a way of inviting, into my life, the love of men who are, by their own admission, even, incapable of it. 

 

Which I suppose sounds like a feat to be proud of. I may as well be saying that I am single-handedly responsible for the final conversion of the entire nation of Israel, or that a gay man, for one moment having gazed at my voluptuous derriere, would realize he has in fact been very much straight.

So then I ask you to suspend your disbelief. Just as in my very being I have asked these men to suspend their lack of ability to love, I ask you for just a moment to suspend your doubt of my suspect story. 

 

It was April Fool's Day and during a chilly afternoon walk shadowed by our doom-filled topic of conversation in which the word “divorce” first appeared, that he responded to my plea in the guise of a proclamation, “but see, that's precisely the problem. You love me. But I don't love.” 

But perhaps it takes one to know one, as the old saying goes. Who am I to criticize others for inappropriate affect? The contractor who had referred me to Trauma Scene Cleanup must have thought I was a truly insensitive person; I'd laughed. He'd given me the name of the company, and I'd laughed!

 

In my defense, I have to say that it was only when I looked at the website that I realized that yes, while they did in fact work with issues of hoarding, they also cleaned up after actual suicides and murders.

And so it was official: my life was a trauma scene.

But I am beating around the bush, just as I had been beating around the bush with 90% of the people I know. I'd laugh and tell them about Trauma Scene Cleanup. I 'd say Steven was a hoarder. I'd even go as far as to tell them it was the clutter that was causing me so many problems with the house. I 'd tell them how I was so busy working on the house over the Christmas break that I'd quit running for a month and lost twelve pounds, which was when I'd get the concerned looks: “But Reluctant Entomologist!" they'd address me, gasping,  "you can't afford to lose 10 pounds.” They were right. I've made mysterious references to the problem, “too horrible for words” – references almost as mysterious as the problem itself. 

 

This has been a story of divorce, yes – but divorcing what, precisely? A husband, certainly. His belongings. The hipster tenants who'd been grandfathered in under Steven's regime. Perhaps some feelings for several insufficiently supportive people along the way. But there's more.

Time flies when you're racing against it – to keep a handyman special of a house from falling in on itself, trying to keep it rented, wondering whether whatever was left after the mortgage was paid each month would ever add up to enough to pay a divorce attorney once Steven had been gone for the two years that New York State required, at the time, to first pass in order for me to have the abandonment grounds I would need in order to have him served.

In other versions of this story, things turn out differently -- but for what little I know, in those versions, things are worse; who's to say they're not? In other versions of the story, things happen for which Hallmark has invented a line of greeting cards.  (Is that better or worse? I try to imagine the cards I could have collected -- perhaps having sealed each in a small, bug-proof Ziploc bag before putting it on display:  "Congratulations on your Divorce!"  one of the more cliched card might say.  Or perhaps, "Thinking of you and hoping you are not contemplating suicide." What about, "My deepest condolences for your loss, both of $30,000 and your mind"?  "In this time of your old and hopeless house being infested with blood-sucking insects, even though we are staying far, FAR away, please know that our thoughts are with you.")

I struggle for a way to end this -- but nothing works.  So I keep writing, clinging to the only thing I know I still haven't entirely lost.

Oh God of All Fonts? Hello?

"Edit HTML"? Behind-the-scenes code vomit? What?

Where I was Headed

image from Wikipedia

I was pretty far uptown already, pretty far from where home was now. It was Sunday afternoon, and it had only been a coincidence that an invitation from a friend had landed me in the general vicinity of my old haunts. It's funny to me now that when I'd been so young and first moved to New York to go to graduate school, Brooklyn had seemed so far away. Hell, the whole rest of my life had seemed so far away.

I'd be lying if I said that any of my thoughts that Sunday had been epiphanies. Rather, there had for years been this recurring thought, image, memory – one that I've always associated with innocence.

Seventeen years ago, I was twenty-two years old and had just moved to New York, having only been here once before (by way of Port Authority on a Greyhound bus my senior year in college – immediately getting on another bus to catch my semester abroad flight that was leaving from JFK that night). Within the first twenty-four hours of having come to New York to live, I remember, after having opened a few of the boxes that I'd piled in what would now be my bedroom in the big, empty graduate housing apartment (where I was apparently the first roommate to arrive), the first walk that I remember taking was to Columbia's great sunny steps in front of Low Library.

I'd sat there with my journal, I remember, fully aware of the fact that I had no idea what lay before me – not in terms of this graduate program I was starting, not in terms of what I'd do for money afterwards, not when it came to where I'd end up living eventually (or how on earth I'd be able to pay for it), and certainly not in terms of any kind of long-term love. It was all incredibly vague, and in a way that was good at the time, because by vague I also mean very far into the future, which meant that despite how scary and uncertain it all was, there was doubtlessly plenty of time for all of the pieces to just magically fall into exactly the right place.

That's the moment I think of when I think about having first moved to New York – the late August sun shining down onto that wide space that opened onto the center of campus. And now, on a Sunday afternoon, I was passing through the neighborhood and had decided to walk through the gates to get to my train.

It's been nearly twenty years. The steps were to my left now. The sun was in and out, out and in.

There were things I hadn't even thought to wonder about back then. Like whether or not I'd be divorced or find myself in danger of losing my job or my house, or whether I'd get bedbugs and almost have a nervous breakdown, along with other medical scares here and there that might really take a toll on my life. I'd been afraid enough back then, without considering all of that! Afraid enough, but that's not to say sufficiently afraid.

For years now I've been thinking, some day when I find myself in the neighborhood, I should really spend some time there, just sit there quietly. Not with a book or a journal. Just sit there. Just look around. Just wait. Would I ever really remember what it had been like then, who I had been?

So I did sit, and I waited to remember some premonition I might have had back then, some inkling about what my life had in store for me. But the epiphany never came. Not this time, anyway. Maybe if I'd sat there longer, if I'd had more patience that day – but I guess I didn't. Not yet. I stood up and walked toward that subway station that would bring me home.