I actually am working on a book, and trying to figure out the thread of the focus. It won't be a litany of hurts, that's for sure; it won't be Pollyanna Grows Up In Hell but is GLAD, either. I'm not good at perky. I think that essentially it is The Prince of Tides without the tiger. And it may be that I wind up having to fictionalize, for the sake of some innocent relatives, and, well because the sociopath is alive. Then, too, that might be kind of fun. While I would love to write a memoir, it might be that to talk about my personal journey, it should be fictionalized; to talk about my mom, however, might be something I could tackle. We'll see.
Regardless, painting dreams seem to be taking over for now, and it's time I paid attention. Often the two forms--writing and painting--feed off one another.
But I've been so lucky to get about thirty new followers in a short time, and some of my entries might make more sense if you look at earlier ones. They might illustrate more of who I am.
I dance on the edges of things, skating the curve between the yin and the yang, the dark and the light, where life and death touch. But the only way I survived all the pain was to cling to the beauty and try to let go of the horror, swinging toward that rainbow on these slender vines of whatever beauty I could see. Sometimes they broke. Sometimes they took me to somewhere safe for a time. Sometimes they took me directly into a pile of ... not good stuff. I have lived between the extremes, but early on, it taught me to live BY extremes. Too much so often. 'Matt' once told me, "Your love, our love, this love between us was so big it scared me to death. You scared me to death. I had to run away."
SO... I did my best to kill myself off by inches in my twenties, until my broken back saved my life. It was a real, tangible problem to fight, to overcome, to conquer, instead of demons just out of my reach. And conquer it I did, for twenty years longer than they gave me to live or to walk, so far. T I'm here. I walk. I stand. But mostly, I live. And as I have said in previous comments, I use the elves and fairies, the wildflower days and the Lake, the beauty and laughter of Christmas, to cut the demons down.
Blog Entries for While I am Painting, not Writing--for those of you who are so inclined
For any of you newer followers who are interested, I've included some early entries--Losing Dad was the latest and about nine of you were around then, perhaps. I did not remember a thing about the abuse and violence until I lost my dad--Losing dad, finding therapy . This entry talks about him in a little more depth than the Slayer of Monsters under My Bed.
I could not really start the process of having the distance to write about it all until after my mom died. I was far too closely entwined with her, her struggles, her failures, her victory. HER life story. (Hence, I am kicking around tackling a memoir that focuses on her and on our relationship.) I could not separate myself properly. I include the following entry, which shows most clearly so far, the wide swings of feelings about her.
Losing Mom, finding my way
When I had lost both parents, then I opened up and began to write about it all, a bit at a time. But I let no one see. I let very few in that deeply even in talking. It took years to truly have it lose the power to hurt me. But I had my breakthroughs, and life changed. I got new tools to use to actually enjoy pastels in life. Grays even. Balance without boredom was a brand new concept to me at 37, after she died.
I think one such breakthrough came when I stopped blaming Mom for everything, that was a huge step.
Underlying Premise--I cannot blame my mother, dammit.
This next is the beginning of it for me, and it is pretty horrifying, I think... Where the terror and the sociopath were born, but also where the love was born. This was the one story that made my therapist cry, but it is pivotal to the gift I was given to cope, through the Robin Hood Days, and through the days of jumping at the too small sounds in the night, when my other brother came. Bear in mind I was perhaps a year and a half older than the me in the picture of my window box elves entry -- three and a half! I don't know that I had more than two followers when I wrote this one. Grace by Any Other Name
I blocked the incident out entirely until I was about 36, just as I did the sessions with Jack, and the rape that made me start carrying a steak knife to my room at night. No one ever said a word about the knife, a small fact that makes me wonder still. I never tried to hide it. In fact, if Jim was in the living room, I made sure it was very visible... Still, my memories were only of elves, until my father died, and Pandora's box flew open, and the demons were let loose for good.
Out of that little bitty girl came a solution for most traumas, most pain. Love. Agape, not emotion so much as the gift. The gift of love.
It was what I used over and over before each of my nine back operations--I would say the names of the people I love, over and over and over -- it was far more powerful than thinking of people who loved me. After all, who would love a woman like me anyway? They all left so fast, and it was so very hard to believe back then that there was anything in me to love ... But there was nothing hard about my naming the ones that I loved, whether or not they loved me back. It helped me get through many situations which scared me. Cover the fear with love
Funny thing is, most of those people DID love me back, and have loved me ever since. It kept coming as a shock when these women united so often, catching me before I hit the ground, over and over again. The Women
***
I think losing my daughter in 1994, just two years after her father left, broke the final dam of some sort of resistance to share my core with others. I did not think anything could ever be worse than this. (That will undoubtedly be an entry one day--one of the most bizarre experiences, aside from the worst moment of my adult life. Hearing that she was dead.) I moved to Pennsylvania six months later, learned to paint, and simply breathed. Between 1987 and 1994 I lost both my parents, had my ninth back surgery, went through psychotherapy for post traumatic stress, bought a house with my sister, had both kids leave for college, had my husband leave me for his student teacher who was Jessie's age, and finally lost my daughter.
When I wrote the poem to her in 2005 that is in the next entry, I had lost three best friends and my nephew and my brother as well. I was worn out from losing people and starting over, but I also knew I was going to lose my sister, too (I wrote about her in January of this year). (From 2000-2006 I lost my minister -- and dear friend--to suicide, two close friends, my nephew who hanged himself, my brother and finally my sister. I was kinda tired. And I was losing my ability to walk. I was starting over for the sixth time in my adult life, I felt.)
This is just a bit of a tribute to my love for my Jessica. She is inextricably entwined in my path to wanting to write again, in wanting to fly if I cannot walk. My Jess
That's enough of the hard stuff. I understand if you don't want to read any of those. I am so grateful for the support you all give me in writing, in letting me know that you don't think it a crazy idea for me to write a book. Of course, I'd have to write it anyway, because writing is what I do. I could not stop it, one way or another, if I tried. Like breathing. Like praying, singing, painting. Like loving. So if I write a book no one wants to publish or read, I'll keep writing anyway.
If I do not just go down into my studio and get started on those paintings, I will lose my brain altogether, howver. I thought I could create a schedule where I would, oh, paint in the morning, write in the afternoon. Nope. I'll do both in spurts... but as long as I do one or the other every day, then it's fine.
Okay, for those of you newer followers who don't really want to just read the heavy stuff about me, I have other entries that show something else!
NOW About Fairies or Faeries, and other Kinds of Magic
What More you Really Should Oughta Know
For those of you who want the silly and the magic, Birthing Fairies: the Honest Truth, not the Fake truth is self-explanatory. Some of you may have not had this in your education and if you have small children or grandchildren, you might need to pay attention to this factual account. Jo over at Majority of Two can corroborate that this is how they are born. She found this out in Canada, so it isn't just me.
Beyond the magic of my mother, I was also given our summers. Huckleberina Finn is a sample of that. Then of course, there was Christmas....
Those three entries are some of the shiny parts of my life.Hence my comparison of my family environment as a rain forest: lush or rotting, with little in between.
As for me, one of the pictures I've dreamed is birthing fairies... a spot on the lake that shines so clear for me still. I finally think I know how to get what I want on paper--the overbright sparkles that get larger as they come to shore. We'll see. And I finally have the right fish for my coral painting... and--Well. I just have to paint is all.
I can't walk away for two months again. Undoubtedly new things to write will start nagging at me softly, then louder I will have to come back and finish them, if only to shut them up. Do you find that, too? That a work of art yells at you to get over there and DO it? That a story weaves into your dreams and mucks them all up ? Or paintings arrive unannounced and fully blown?
Sometimes the muse is downright rude. Oh. And I've recently begun to write music for the Thursday night group of which I am a part. I never wrote music before in my life. THAT is calling to.
But the thing is? Now I am free. Free of the house that was too much for me, of having to consider anyone else in my days. I am free to fly. And that's WAY easier than walking. My friends dubbed me the Phoenix. I like that, as I said. It's mythical enough, and I am slowly working on a painting of that. Each feather is being cut individually. I work on it when I DO feel weak, when I feel that I cannot take any more pain or loss, or have one more hope placed in my hand to look at and cherish, only to have it taken away and thrown beyond my reach the moment I believe. I mean, really. Who doesn't want to be the center of her own myth? It can be useful when the darkness visits.
The demons rarely stay for long any more. And when the fires come, I FLY. Fly straight up and free.
I'll be back in a couple of weeks, but I will be following your blogs. It's how I start and end most days.
Then, too, I may be back writing sooner if new entries interfere with my dreams and then start yarping loudly at me as the paintings did!
In the meantime, as Carl would say, keep makin' art. I am so very lucky to have made blogging friends here... and I think it all started with Carl at Artistic Balance and Jo at Majority of Two. And built from there. If the blogs I follow are not familiar to you, I'd also suggest you root around among them, and give some a try! I know that reading such fine words and seeing such beautiful words have made me think more, feel more deeply--and have lifted my spirits when I needed it.
Accidental Spring
"Accidental Spring" This began as the background for painting other papers, but became something else!
Showing posts with label dying. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dying. Show all posts
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Robin Hood and Maid Marion: and All My World Grew Still
Be prepared. This memoir draft is neither funny nor light. It was difficult to write, and my guess is that it will be difficult to read. I understand if anyone chooses to wait instead for Runaways to Red Bank III, which I will put online in a couple of days! Thank you, all of you, who somehow keep choosing to read what's uncomfortable.
It is my story, and I have to be able to write "ugly," as I used to say when I could not write anything that was darker than Anne of Green Gables meets Pollyanna. As always, though, the power for me lies in the beauty, the beautiful power of my brother Jack in the face of evil. And the power of a little girl's love.
My brother's and my journey together is in bits and pieces of other blogs, but primarily in Approaching the Pain, Keeping the Love -- "I move to Robin Hood" well down, across from my Blog list. That entry holds pieces that can shed light on more about our years between childhood and his end.
'Tis I, Robin Hood!
When I was three, my brother Jack got a Robin Hood outfit. My mom and Jean Ellen made me a Maid Marion cape with genuine fake diamonds all along the bottom. Together, he and I would listen to our Robin Hood records with the books. You turned the page when Friar Tuck sang. Then we would run into the front yard where the ancient ... magic tree with roots that were above the ground, not just below it, stood.
We had adventures. Sometimes I got to be Friar Tuck or one of the Merry Band, but mostly I was Maid Marion. She was not a wimp, so I got to ride away with my Robin Hood to foil another plot of the bad Sheriff of Nottingham. We had sacks of acorns from the woods to throw to the poor in the village below (our neighbor's three horses in a corral). We smite the mighty smoke-belching Tractor Dragon one evening, sneaking out of the house just before bedtime.
Just as we were about to revel in victory, "John Harvey and Jeannette Louise, YOU GET HOME NOW!" My father's voice could be heard three towns away, we thought.
A typical ending of our days -- mostly running home.
I followed him like a puppy, and not once in my memory did he shoo me away.
I had the measles when I was four, right after we moved, and nearly died of kidney failure and double pneumonia. Jacky was by my side more often than not. A head would pop in my door. "Tis I, Robeen Hoooood!" he would cry, and bow before his lady in her room-darkened bed.
"You sound like an owl, not a hero," I'd say. And he would wing around the room "Hoooooooting" for me, making me laugh. Then I would start to cough and he would stop, a study in worry. He would sit on the side of my bed and hold my hand, stroke my forehead. I was deathly ill, but I don't remember that; I remember how kind everyone was, especially Jacky.
"Jetty, get better, now," he'd whisper. "We have to build that city for my trains, remember? You promised. You know I stink at making the trees and all the little stuff right. I just break everything. I need you." That was the thing, you know; Jacky needed me. I got better.
Our dragon-slaying days had ended, though; we had a greater fight.
The Monster who Lived in our House
Our older brother Jim was the Sheriff of Nottingham. I will never know how Robin Hood truly fared in the tower he shared with Jim. I had Princess Jean Ellen in mine; he had Jim. I was protected until she left the house when I was in third grade, at least at night. But daytime was a different story long before she went away. The Princess was seldom home in the afternoon...
Sometimes the queen fell into a deep, deep slumber, with her royal glass of amber on the table by her throne. Worse still, sometimes she went on royal errands and left the Sheriff in charge. Those days Jack's call held urgency, "Jetty run and hide! He's coming!" Wherever I was in the house I ran like hell for my daddy's bedroom closet. The back had a slanted floor for the bathroom plumbing, but there was a little ledge at the top. I could just crawl behind Daddy's Old Spice clothing and tuck myself in tight, wrapped in a sports jacket, and simply wait. To wait and wait where no one ever came.
I would hear the muffled cries, the sounds of a chair scraped over wood. Other sounds. The laugh, a barrage of staccato explosions. I tried to cover my ears. There were other sounds I could not name. I would wait in the safety of my father-smelling dark. I would wait. Wait for the only sound I wanted to know.
"Maid Marion, the Sheriff has gone!"
Out I would fly to Robin, to my brothers' room. I'd look out the bathroom window first, making sure the sheriff was headed down the road, whistling usually. Then I would go to the boy in a chair, just a boy no more than six or seven, tied up and silent, with dark eyes and long lashes heavy from trapped tears. I would untie his hands and let him be, while I fetched the cotton balls, the iodine, and held a facecloth under the cold water. I did not rush. Robin Hood did not want me to see him cry. Heroes are like that.
Our ritual was silent. Full. Maid Marion dressed the tiny wounds, and turned the dampened, cold cloth on his forehead. I would kiss the places where blood was drawn, but there never were many. The sheriff grew quite skilled at leaving no marks beyond pin pricks all over his skin. He hurt the places that never showed; it was a mission for him.
Sometimes Jim found me, but only when Jacky was not there. Besides which, Jim preferred to find me at night...
And the reign of terror did not end until I was in seventh grade, and Jim moved out for good.
Those years held too much darkness, and so I learned to forget; to forget all but the fairy tale, to forget the reasons my brother's light simply dimmed, and finally went out. I became expert at forgetting the moment something happened, keeping only what I chose. And yet, somehow we know. I began to remember in 1987, after my father died. I wrote this poem after waking from a "nightmare," however, in 1980.
Too Soon Gone...
He was only 50 and I was not yet 48. His son, John, had hanged himself in February and I had not seen Jack for several months when I saw him at the cemetery. He had aged at least a decade and could not walk without a cane. Jack seemed shorter, smaller entirely and his hair and beard were white now. But he eyes were there, the eyes that got to me always, darker brown than the deepest wood, with thick long lashes that made them stand out all the more. And they were so very large and lost that day.
He was surrounded, though, by teenagers. Teenagers with piercings and tatoos. Teenagers with pink hair, purple hair, no hair, black hair. Punked out, gangsta'd, of all types. So sweet, so tender to him. When they found out I was the baby sister of his stories they surrounded me and I saw what the real Jack's life was all about. I will not take away from the love for his children, but in the love Jack gave these emotionally bereft, hurt, abandoned, throw away children, I saw that Robin Hood lived for them. And they loved him back. His colleagues knew me, too. I was surprised, since I had been non-existent in his adult life.
When I walked to him, he opened his arms, but when he held me, I knew Jack was leaning on me, this time. And he was as nothing in my arms. I pulled away a moment, looking him straight in those grief-haunted eyes. "You're dying," was all I said.
"I'll call you," was all he said. But I knew.
His liver was shot and the only answer was a liver transplant. This was now April and he was at my house. It was late. His visits were always at night. His banjo was in his hands, because it was easier for him to talk that way.
"Why don't we test mine?" I asked. "Jean Ellen's not a possibility because of her diabetes, but I don't have diabetes."
He smiled and reached his hand out as Daddy had always done, stroking a wandering strand near my face. "No. Not a possibility. You need your liver."
"I KNOW THAT, But they can take just a lobe and--"
"NO, Jetty. NO." His voice was harsh. "No. Don't you get it? I told you. I'm not going to stop drinking. I'm not a candidate for a transplant. I don't care what they do for celebrities. It's wrong. I did this to myself and I know it. Just the way Mom did, I did this. And I have NO desire to stop drinking." He stopped a moment, and registered that I was shaking. He took my hand, again with the familiar Daddy gentleness. "Jetty, the fact is, I really don't much care about living. I've had to retire. My back is worse and pretty soon I won't be able to walk at all. I won't be able to take care of my family; they'd have to take care of me. Jetty, you gotta let me go."
And it just burst out of me, "But, Jacky, I just got you BACK!"
And we cried ...
In May, he was admitted to intensive care, where he stayed for the next two weeks. He could not run away from me. I was editing catalogs for Northeastern University at the time, and Jack's wife was still teaching, as were all his friends. So during the day I got to see him. The first day he could still talk a little and he said he' would never go home. I saw tubes coming out of him in all directions. I knew what came next. The hepatic coma, where he could sense everything done to him, but would not be able to speak, where he might come in and out of it, but would slowly become someone who did not resemble himself. I knew the swelling in the feet, then the hands. I knew, I knew, I knew.
I said, "But why do you have to be hooked up? Why can't you just GO, Jacky?" I was sobbing. I was useless to him like this. He looked wildly at me, but speech was so hard for him.
I heard "Family" and I realized. I held his hand and said I was sorry at least a dozen times. I told him I understood and would never mention it again. I promised. He was letting his family prepare; he would let his wife pick the time. It was his last act of love--an overwhelmingly selfless act of love. We both became calm and we simply held hands in silence.
I asked whether I could come back every day and work beside his bed, if I promised not to be maudlin. Jack usually disliked company in the hospital. I awaited the answer. His eyes filled with tears and I felt him squeeze my hand. He nodded. He did not stop nodding for the longest time.
Maid Marion's Turn to Rescue
The ritual became a staple for his longest days. I would get there at about 11, after the cleaning and the poking and the prodding were done. By then there was a tube down his mouth and he was on total life support. The sound of the respirator gave us privacy. I was given permission to untie him every day for the durations of my visits. His hands danced, just as Mommy's had, only they grabbed at the wires and the tubes--randomly, not with purpose. They grabbed at the sheets resting against over-sensitive legs. I knew what to do. I was more experienced than they knew. I would create a tent of the sheet over his legs, so they would not touch the calves, so swollen and mottled purple now. I combed his hair as HE liked it, so the follicles could rest from over-stimulation.
Sometimes he got angry, because I had to grab his hands to keep him from pulling out the wires or tubes and his angry eyes were like Rasputin's. My eyes would fill; I couldn't help it. Robin Hood NEVER looked at Marion so.
I had to raise my voice to reach through this lightest of comas. I don't know why they even called it a coma, but it really doesn't matter. He had slipped into it before his mind was gone, so I could bring him back just enough, at times. "YOU HAVE to STAY ALIVE, JACK. You promised yourself. JACK. I have to keep your hands from dancing there, dance them over here!" And I would point to somewhere safe.
And suddenly, after what seemed like hour-long seconds, something would click and the eyes would soften. On the two occasions when he reallized he'd hit at me, he started to cry and I had to get him to stop by threatening to sing "Muskrat Love" to him.
Gradually the eyes would soften, the hands would drop to rest at his sides, and usually by noon he was thoroughly relaxed. I would sing softly, the songs we both knew, while I'd work for an hour or so. By around 1:00, he would drift into what looked like sleep, and I'd stay awhile longer, watching him when he looked comfortably at rest. When he could not see me cry.
The nurses saw, and would usually come over in another fifteen minutes or so and ease me out of the room so they could do their afternoon care. It was all right then, because I knew his family would be there by 3:00. They did not know I came every day.
I was his only visitor. And all I could give him were those minutes when his hands were free.
Singing Our Way Home
The day came at last; the nurse told me that his wife had made the call that morning. She had asked that they wait until after she had visited at dinner time. I asked how that could work so he would die alone, and the nurse said they expected he would be able to breathe for a little while but that the effort would be too much for him within a few hours at most. I didn't get it; I didn't have to. But I knew it would be the last day.
He was looking for me and I asked him if he would like me to sing the entire Wildflowers album. He blinked and his eyes seemed to smile. I untied his hands, but he seemed almost present there that day.
I began to sing and forgot to sing softly; a nurse came in and I began to apologize.
"No, no," she said. "May we open the curtain a little longer, so we can hear?" It made me shy a moment, but Jacky took my hand.
I knew it all by heart. We had so many songs and I could hear his guitar in my heart as I sang. He began to drift away it seemed, but, well, I AM his baby sister. I got to "The Sisters of Mercy" and deliberately botched the words and his eyes flew open, glaring at me.
I know my grin was evil. "Oh. Gee. Let me see. Squeeze my hand once, for Jetty I love you so. Twice for you colossal little bitch." Two squeezes and all was right with the world; I finished the album without further incident.
By the end, I knew he was resting, and I sang my final song, changing the words just a little. James Taylor's Close Your Eyes. I often sang that to him. Only this time I ended with my own reprise,
"Darlin' close your eyes.
You know ... I'll always love you."
I got up to go, but he grabbed me and squeezed my hand just once. I kissed him and left.
***
His wife called me at 11 and said he was going and I could go to the hospital if I wanted. I took off. I raced to the hospital, but I was too late. No, I probably was exactly on time for Jack. The doctor was removing the stethoscope and the monitor was turned off. His eyes were open.
I shooed them out and said, "Let me do this." Both had seen me before and the nurse touched my shoulder gently as she left. I slowly removed the restraints for the last time.
"Robin Hood. It's Maid Marion. Sheriff Nottingham's gone for good and no one will tie you up ever again." I smoothed his johnny and washed each hand, then gently crossed them over the sheet I tucked it around him, as if he were sleeping.
And I began to sing "Close Your Eyes" again. I heard a gasp from somewhere nearby, but I kept going. It got so quiet. I brushed his hair as I sang. His silky, pure white hair .. and I combed his beard. Robin Hood lay there so very still. And I finally got there,
"So I'll close your eyes
'll just close your eyes, cause it's all right.
I'll sing you this last love song.
But I won't sing the blues any more.
Cause we have sung our songs.
And I'll still sing your songs, now you're gone.
I've closed your eyes.
You know I'll always love you."
As I walked to my car, making this one last trip, all I could think was this:
Robin Hood slept; Marion wept. Now all the world is still.
It is my story, and I have to be able to write "ugly," as I used to say when I could not write anything that was darker than Anne of Green Gables meets Pollyanna. As always, though, the power for me lies in the beauty, the beautiful power of my brother Jack in the face of evil. And the power of a little girl's love.
My brother's and my journey together is in bits and pieces of other blogs, but primarily in Approaching the Pain, Keeping the Love -- "I move to Robin Hood" well down, across from my Blog list. That entry holds pieces that can shed light on more about our years between childhood and his end.
'Tis I, Robin Hood!
When I was three, my brother Jack got a Robin Hood outfit. My mom and Jean Ellen made me a Maid Marion cape with genuine fake diamonds all along the bottom. Together, he and I would listen to our Robin Hood records with the books. You turned the page when Friar Tuck sang. Then we would run into the front yard where the ancient ... magic tree with roots that were above the ground, not just below it, stood.
We had adventures. Sometimes I got to be Friar Tuck or one of the Merry Band, but mostly I was Maid Marion. She was not a wimp, so I got to ride away with my Robin Hood to foil another plot of the bad Sheriff of Nottingham. We had sacks of acorns from the woods to throw to the poor in the village below (our neighbor's three horses in a corral). We smite the mighty smoke-belching Tractor Dragon one evening, sneaking out of the house just before bedtime.
Just as we were about to revel in victory, "John Harvey and Jeannette Louise, YOU GET HOME NOW!" My father's voice could be heard three towns away, we thought.
A typical ending of our days -- mostly running home.
I followed him like a puppy, and not once in my memory did he shoo me away.
I had the measles when I was four, right after we moved, and nearly died of kidney failure and double pneumonia. Jacky was by my side more often than not. A head would pop in my door. "Tis I, Robeen Hoooood!" he would cry, and bow before his lady in her room-darkened bed.
"You sound like an owl, not a hero," I'd say. And he would wing around the room "Hoooooooting" for me, making me laugh. Then I would start to cough and he would stop, a study in worry. He would sit on the side of my bed and hold my hand, stroke my forehead. I was deathly ill, but I don't remember that; I remember how kind everyone was, especially Jacky.
"Jetty, get better, now," he'd whisper. "We have to build that city for my trains, remember? You promised. You know I stink at making the trees and all the little stuff right. I just break everything. I need you." That was the thing, you know; Jacky needed me. I got better.
Our dragon-slaying days had ended, though; we had a greater fight.
The Monster who Lived in our House
Our older brother Jim was the Sheriff of Nottingham. I will never know how Robin Hood truly fared in the tower he shared with Jim. I had Princess Jean Ellen in mine; he had Jim. I was protected until she left the house when I was in third grade, at least at night. But daytime was a different story long before she went away. The Princess was seldom home in the afternoon...
Sometimes the queen fell into a deep, deep slumber, with her royal glass of amber on the table by her throne. Worse still, sometimes she went on royal errands and left the Sheriff in charge. Those days Jack's call held urgency, "Jetty run and hide! He's coming!" Wherever I was in the house I ran like hell for my daddy's bedroom closet. The back had a slanted floor for the bathroom plumbing, but there was a little ledge at the top. I could just crawl behind Daddy's Old Spice clothing and tuck myself in tight, wrapped in a sports jacket, and simply wait. To wait and wait where no one ever came.
I would hear the muffled cries, the sounds of a chair scraped over wood. Other sounds. The laugh, a barrage of staccato explosions. I tried to cover my ears. There were other sounds I could not name. I would wait in the safety of my father-smelling dark. I would wait. Wait for the only sound I wanted to know.
"Maid Marion, the Sheriff has gone!"
Out I would fly to Robin, to my brothers' room. I'd look out the bathroom window first, making sure the sheriff was headed down the road, whistling usually. Then I would go to the boy in a chair, just a boy no more than six or seven, tied up and silent, with dark eyes and long lashes heavy from trapped tears. I would untie his hands and let him be, while I fetched the cotton balls, the iodine, and held a facecloth under the cold water. I did not rush. Robin Hood did not want me to see him cry. Heroes are like that.
Our ritual was silent. Full. Maid Marion dressed the tiny wounds, and turned the dampened, cold cloth on his forehead. I would kiss the places where blood was drawn, but there never were many. The sheriff grew quite skilled at leaving no marks beyond pin pricks all over his skin. He hurt the places that never showed; it was a mission for him.
Sometimes Jim found me, but only when Jacky was not there. Besides which, Jim preferred to find me at night...
And the reign of terror did not end until I was in seventh grade, and Jim moved out for good.
Those years held too much darkness, and so I learned to forget; to forget all but the fairy tale, to forget the reasons my brother's light simply dimmed, and finally went out. I became expert at forgetting the moment something happened, keeping only what I chose. And yet, somehow we know. I began to remember in 1987, after my father died. I wrote this poem after waking from a "nightmare," however, in 1980.
Brotherssong
A hole fills my heart where a childhood should breathe
and a blood-dripping moon floods my dreams.
The bats start flying
In the house of my death and the songs of my night spin to screams.
There's a blank at the table where my brother's face should feed;
his hands in my night sprout to claws.
Then the bats start biting while my brother grins on
while the moon drips blood from his jaws.
A newspaper breathes where my father's face should see,
a dead wind rattles at the door.
While the bats bite deeper and my other brother screams
the half moon's bleeding on the floor.
There's a dead mouse in the dark where my other brother cries
and Mother grows drunk on the tears.
While my father keeps reading and my brother grins on,
while my other brother withers with the years.
Too Soon Gone...
He was only 50 and I was not yet 48. His son, John, had hanged himself in February and I had not seen Jack for several months when I saw him at the cemetery. He had aged at least a decade and could not walk without a cane. Jack seemed shorter, smaller entirely and his hair and beard were white now. But he eyes were there, the eyes that got to me always, darker brown than the deepest wood, with thick long lashes that made them stand out all the more. And they were so very large and lost that day.
He was surrounded, though, by teenagers. Teenagers with piercings and tatoos. Teenagers with pink hair, purple hair, no hair, black hair. Punked out, gangsta'd, of all types. So sweet, so tender to him. When they found out I was the baby sister of his stories they surrounded me and I saw what the real Jack's life was all about. I will not take away from the love for his children, but in the love Jack gave these emotionally bereft, hurt, abandoned, throw away children, I saw that Robin Hood lived for them. And they loved him back. His colleagues knew me, too. I was surprised, since I had been non-existent in his adult life.
When I walked to him, he opened his arms, but when he held me, I knew Jack was leaning on me, this time. And he was as nothing in my arms. I pulled away a moment, looking him straight in those grief-haunted eyes. "You're dying," was all I said.
"I'll call you," was all he said. But I knew.
His liver was shot and the only answer was a liver transplant. This was now April and he was at my house. It was late. His visits were always at night. His banjo was in his hands, because it was easier for him to talk that way.
"Why don't we test mine?" I asked. "Jean Ellen's not a possibility because of her diabetes, but I don't have diabetes."
He smiled and reached his hand out as Daddy had always done, stroking a wandering strand near my face. "No. Not a possibility. You need your liver."
"I KNOW THAT, But they can take just a lobe and--"
"NO, Jetty. NO." His voice was harsh. "No. Don't you get it? I told you. I'm not going to stop drinking. I'm not a candidate for a transplant. I don't care what they do for celebrities. It's wrong. I did this to myself and I know it. Just the way Mom did, I did this. And I have NO desire to stop drinking." He stopped a moment, and registered that I was shaking. He took my hand, again with the familiar Daddy gentleness. "Jetty, the fact is, I really don't much care about living. I've had to retire. My back is worse and pretty soon I won't be able to walk at all. I won't be able to take care of my family; they'd have to take care of me. Jetty, you gotta let me go."
And it just burst out of me, "But, Jacky, I just got you BACK!"
And we cried ...
In May, he was admitted to intensive care, where he stayed for the next two weeks. He could not run away from me. I was editing catalogs for Northeastern University at the time, and Jack's wife was still teaching, as were all his friends. So during the day I got to see him. The first day he could still talk a little and he said he' would never go home. I saw tubes coming out of him in all directions. I knew what came next. The hepatic coma, where he could sense everything done to him, but would not be able to speak, where he might come in and out of it, but would slowly become someone who did not resemble himself. I knew the swelling in the feet, then the hands. I knew, I knew, I knew.
I said, "But why do you have to be hooked up? Why can't you just GO, Jacky?" I was sobbing. I was useless to him like this. He looked wildly at me, but speech was so hard for him.
I heard "Family" and I realized. I held his hand and said I was sorry at least a dozen times. I told him I understood and would never mention it again. I promised. He was letting his family prepare; he would let his wife pick the time. It was his last act of love--an overwhelmingly selfless act of love. We both became calm and we simply held hands in silence.
I asked whether I could come back every day and work beside his bed, if I promised not to be maudlin. Jack usually disliked company in the hospital. I awaited the answer. His eyes filled with tears and I felt him squeeze my hand. He nodded. He did not stop nodding for the longest time.
Maid Marion's Turn to Rescue
The ritual became a staple for his longest days. I would get there at about 11, after the cleaning and the poking and the prodding were done. By then there was a tube down his mouth and he was on total life support. The sound of the respirator gave us privacy. I was given permission to untie him every day for the durations of my visits. His hands danced, just as Mommy's had, only they grabbed at the wires and the tubes--randomly, not with purpose. They grabbed at the sheets resting against over-sensitive legs. I knew what to do. I was more experienced than they knew. I would create a tent of the sheet over his legs, so they would not touch the calves, so swollen and mottled purple now. I combed his hair as HE liked it, so the follicles could rest from over-stimulation.
Sometimes he got angry, because I had to grab his hands to keep him from pulling out the wires or tubes and his angry eyes were like Rasputin's. My eyes would fill; I couldn't help it. Robin Hood NEVER looked at Marion so.
I had to raise my voice to reach through this lightest of comas. I don't know why they even called it a coma, but it really doesn't matter. He had slipped into it before his mind was gone, so I could bring him back just enough, at times. "YOU HAVE to STAY ALIVE, JACK. You promised yourself. JACK. I have to keep your hands from dancing there, dance them over here!" And I would point to somewhere safe.
And suddenly, after what seemed like hour-long seconds, something would click and the eyes would soften. On the two occasions when he reallized he'd hit at me, he started to cry and I had to get him to stop by threatening to sing "Muskrat Love" to him.
Gradually the eyes would soften, the hands would drop to rest at his sides, and usually by noon he was thoroughly relaxed. I would sing softly, the songs we both knew, while I'd work for an hour or so. By around 1:00, he would drift into what looked like sleep, and I'd stay awhile longer, watching him when he looked comfortably at rest. When he could not see me cry.
The nurses saw, and would usually come over in another fifteen minutes or so and ease me out of the room so they could do their afternoon care. It was all right then, because I knew his family would be there by 3:00. They did not know I came every day.
I was his only visitor. And all I could give him were those minutes when his hands were free.
Singing Our Way Home
The day came at last; the nurse told me that his wife had made the call that morning. She had asked that they wait until after she had visited at dinner time. I asked how that could work so he would die alone, and the nurse said they expected he would be able to breathe for a little while but that the effort would be too much for him within a few hours at most. I didn't get it; I didn't have to. But I knew it would be the last day.
He was looking for me and I asked him if he would like me to sing the entire Wildflowers album. He blinked and his eyes seemed to smile. I untied his hands, but he seemed almost present there that day.
I began to sing and forgot to sing softly; a nurse came in and I began to apologize.
"No, no," she said. "May we open the curtain a little longer, so we can hear?" It made me shy a moment, but Jacky took my hand.
I knew it all by heart. We had so many songs and I could hear his guitar in my heart as I sang. He began to drift away it seemed, but, well, I AM his baby sister. I got to "The Sisters of Mercy" and deliberately botched the words and his eyes flew open, glaring at me.
I know my grin was evil. "Oh. Gee. Let me see. Squeeze my hand once, for Jetty I love you so. Twice for you colossal little bitch." Two squeezes and all was right with the world; I finished the album without further incident.
By the end, I knew he was resting, and I sang my final song, changing the words just a little. James Taylor's Close Your Eyes. I often sang that to him. Only this time I ended with my own reprise,
"Darlin' close your eyes.
You know ... I'll always love you."
I got up to go, but he grabbed me and squeezed my hand just once. I kissed him and left.
***
His wife called me at 11 and said he was going and I could go to the hospital if I wanted. I took off. I raced to the hospital, but I was too late. No, I probably was exactly on time for Jack. The doctor was removing the stethoscope and the monitor was turned off. His eyes were open.
I shooed them out and said, "Let me do this." Both had seen me before and the nurse touched my shoulder gently as she left. I slowly removed the restraints for the last time.
"Robin Hood. It's Maid Marion. Sheriff Nottingham's gone for good and no one will tie you up ever again." I smoothed his johnny and washed each hand, then gently crossed them over the sheet I tucked it around him, as if he were sleeping.
And I began to sing "Close Your Eyes" again. I heard a gasp from somewhere nearby, but I kept going. It got so quiet. I brushed his hair as I sang. His silky, pure white hair .. and I combed his beard. Robin Hood lay there so very still. And I finally got there,
"So I'll close your eyes
'll just close your eyes, cause it's all right.
I'll sing you this last love song.
But I won't sing the blues any more.
Cause we have sung our songs.
And I'll still sing your songs, now you're gone.
I've closed your eyes.
You know I'll always love you."
As I walked to my car, making this one last trip, all I could think was this:
Robin Hood slept; Marion wept. Now all the world is still.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Flying into Dawn: Memories of My Sister
I've tried a dozen times to write about her, to capture her. What it was to have a sister who lived her life with on section of her soul in past lives, one part in this life, and one part in whatever came next. She always expressed her spirituality in terms of our being on an eternal continuum, that this time here, now, was just a section along the way. She'd have visceral feelings of déja vu, but talked about them to very few people.
She was seen as odd. Well, she WAS odd, and I've always felt that our world would be infinitely better with more odd souls like hers. She was incapable of violence. Seriously incapable. As she said, had she ever been attacked, she doubted she'd have even put her hands up to protect herself. "I'm a vessel in this life; I have received gifts and lessons, then I pour them out in teaching and in my art. That is what I am. I do not understand all this talk about life being an 'adventure,' that we must all somehow go after things because they are a 'challenge.' I loathe those words. I do not care to be challenged. I want to do what I want to do, nothing more. And of course nothing less!"
She once took an Italian class with her best friend, in her twenties. I was in college at the time and she came to pick me up one Saturday. She often did that; come to rescue me on a Saturday morning and we'd go for "a drive." Once from Storrs, CT all the way to New Hampshire and back, just so we could walk on the beach on the island for a bit.
But this time, she was laughing because Nancy was furious with her. It seemed Jean Ellen had received a C+ on an exam and was happy with it. Nancy had studied for hours and hours for her A and could not understand why Jean Ellen had gone out dancing the night before. Jean Ellen's response? "I am not taking this for certification or credit or pride. I simply want to be able to go to Italy and understand what they say and be understood. Nothing more. I don't care about the grade."
Nancy, apparently yelled at her and said, "How can you NOT want to do better than that? The professor even told you you could be the best in the class if you studied."
Jean Ellen looked at me and I smiled at her. I understood Nancy because I was more like that, but I knew my sister. "You have never cared about being the best in the class in your life."
"Right. It's an irrelevant argument to me."
"Now if the Professor had told you that the Italians will not want to TALK to you if you do this poorly---"
"I'd have given up the dancing. Grudgingly, however."
We once spent an entire drive making up swear words because we were bored with the old stand bys. We were headed to the Cape and on the other side of Providence, RI, I found the one. "BULL DROOL." Yup. That was our keeper of all of them. Unfortunately my sister began to laugh so hard, she drove into a small ditch and it took ten minutes to get OUT.
By then, though, I was able to make her laugh at everything. I think I was about 25 and she was , then, 34. I turned to her and said, "You know, from now on, I bet I can say the word 'apple' to you in a certain tone and you will always laugh." She shrieked.
Two days before she died, she was feeling very sad and frustrated. She could no longer speak very easily, the tumors having spread higher in her central nervous system. A visitor had tried her patience to the point where I literally escorted the woman out the door and told her that she had to listen to ME about leaving and that she could come back once more if need be, but only to say good bye. The woman was furious because she felt my sister was "faking."
I sat on her bed, stroking her forehead, her tears rolling unrestricted... I dabbed them because she had long since lost the ability to use her hands. I took her face in my hands and said, "Apple."
All was right in our world.
***
For my graduation present from college, Jean Ellen took me to Paris and Portugal for six weeks. I had not flown since I was sixteen, but had slept through some of that. Jean Ellen had us leave at night because she said I HAD to experience flying straight into dawn. I thought she was nuts, but was accustomed to her living on some sort of poetic edge I didn't understand. We were drawing on the plane a lot. We often drew left-handed, just for practice, to free up the right brain. She taught me about asymmetry when I was seven.
"Which of these arrangements is more appealing?" she had asked, showing me a drawing of a wall with three equally sized drawings of flowers, and one with three differently sized drawings, arranged so there was balance. I immediately chose the one with the different sizes.
"Why?" she asked, a teacher then, at only sixteen.
"That one's boring. Blah. I like this one." She was pleased with her Jetty and said, "You are an artist, Jetty. You just don't know it."
We did a similar lesson with incomplete line and then she taught me to make paper doll clothes in pen and ink, using lessons of incomplete line, and observing how various fabrics draped and how folds REALLY look, that really there were very few straight lines when it came to people....
Anyway, so on the plane we played with our left hand drawings and were laughing, when suddenly she said, LOOK OUT THE WINDOW...
I had the window, in front of the wing and could see where we were going... We were flying into a pool of red, and there was a line in the sky between dark and light, between night and day and we jetted into dawn, just like that... I began to cry.
Jean Ellen said, "THIS is why I had to bring you. YOU are the only other friend I have who cries at flying into dawn."
Friend. I was my big sister's friend and nothing from then on would ever be the same.
We flew straight into dawn, and we took Paris by storm, these two odd sisters. We drew with our feet when we were rained into the apartment one day. We spent three HOURS drawing with our feet. We bought rabbit at the grocery store and brought it home to cook. It was sold in PARTS, so we didn't have to deal with it as an animal... we thought. But when we opened the package, its little HEAD was there, with teeth and ears. Jean Ellen covered its head with paper towels and quickly chopped it off and threw the head down the garbage shoot. We prepared it with garlic and seasonings and wine. We had fresh vegetables and rice. We drank a bottle of wine before we even ate...
But we took one look at supper, at each other and went, "BUNNY." So much for that.
We sat at the Champs y Lysée (Sp--I'm lazy) and we sketched. I sketched an aging hooker, about fifty pounds overweight, with a ruffled hat and a tiny silk bag on a long ribbon, SKIPPING through the park. I wrote poetry and she sketched the gardens at a tiny restaurant across the street. We'd count the languages at the cafe outside the metro stop at La Place de la Concorde... We had affairs, each of us, with a different waiter at the local restaurant called Le Tahare, around the corner from our apartment. The place was our uncle's, but he was in the states with his wife and daughter for the summer. Two young women for ONE MONTH in Paris. Then we flew to Portugal, northern Portugal. Viana do castello. All the houses were limestone or marble, and there was a castle on the mountain that, at night, shone white, floating above the town. We were the only American tourists there for the annual August holiday. The town was in a triangle between mountains, a river, and the sea. I sat the beach and everything was BACKWARDS because I faced west. I'd not been to California, just the East Coast. A young man ran across town to get me my cigarettes and would not take a tip. One left tips in an envelope for everyone, at the end of one's stay. The head waiter, wine steward, and hotel manager treated us to our last two days at the hotel because we had been so much fun. We'd been fun? I knew what it was to be a princess for that week.
We played. We walked. We drew. We spoke to everyone we met, especially shopkeepers and hotel help... they took us on little side trips to "nowhere," and my sister and I felt that no one had ever had such fun before, nor been treated so wonderfully. I can still see the castle, shining bright white against the mountain at night, floating over the equally shining town.
We left Lisbon during the socialist overthrow of the Portuguese government, an experience of its own, and finally boarded an old DC 10 cargo plane for home. The stuffing was coming out of the seats, but we were safe and boarded. All we could talk about was the magic, as we left the revolution behind.
And we flew home straight into night; still we felt our hearts leap nonetheless as the plane flew low over the coast and we saw the glittering ribbon that was home.
I do not know how to describe the sister who thought that the greatest gift of the second half of the twentieth century was her baby sister Jetty. I was beautiful to her, some sort of jewel that went unappreciated in the world. She did not understand how men could be so cruel to me... she felt it was that they couldn't bear someone so open and loving. I tended to think it was that I had bad taste and was stupid, but I Much preferred her take on it. She mourned my not pursuing art, but understood. In our family the cutthroat comparison factors made us avoid taking up another's interest. Daddy wrote. He, Jack, AND Jean Ellen were teachers. Mom was a math genius... so was I, but I hated math. Mom wanted me to go into that because she hadn't. Jack played guitar and banjo and clarinet. I tried not to duplicate. Daddy sang in the Robert Shaw Chorale... So, while I could sing, paint, write, and play the piano... I avoided pursuing anything much. I was afraid. I blame no one but me. I saw how brutal Dad could be when performance was not perfection. He never really appreciated my sister's worth because she was severely obese and he could not admit there was beauty there. LOTS of men could, but not Dad. And of course that hurt her.
But Jean Ellen and I found our balance with one another through most of our lives. We were each other's number one fan. She was the sort of teacher who bothered to show up at a student's HOME when she feared the girl was suicidal. She was the kind of teacher who did not sleep until she had corrected her papers and made comments that were positive on every single one, even those who failed. She started preparing for September on August first. "I have to find something new to do, even though it's the same curriculum. If I am stale, then it will be stale to my kids." She taught all out, with all of her soul, just as she drew and painted with nothing held back.
I learned all I know about letting myself live with every fiber of my being from her. She was not brave in the conventional sense... until it came time for her to leave. She did not mourn that her life would end at sixty-two. She said, "I have done every single thing I ever wanted to do except go to Athens. EVERYTHING. I was an artist, a teacher, a big sister. I went to Paris six times. I went to England and Italy, to California, to the wild west. I made love and was loved. I have you as my sister and I've had you taking care of me these last years, no matter what. YOU have made sure I could stay here, where I wanted to be. My adventuress, my phoenix. I kept clipping your wings. When I go you will finally fly. Promise me you will fly."
The day she died I brought in all her favorite music--Harry Belafonte, and folk music. I kicked people out and told the nurses that she could not have anyone but me from then on. I sang to her, "Close your eyes." I stroked her head. She began to drown, though, along toward midnight. She choked. The nurses managed to get her cleared out a bit, but had gone down to get some horrible equipment for the next round. Jean Ellen, who was SO READY to go, was fighting for breath.
When the nurse left, I took her face in my hands and shouted, "LOOK AT ME!" Blue eyes wide and startled... My brown eyes hard and determined.
"They have gone to get some medieval atrocity to help you keep breathing. Jean Ellen. Remember? You want to go, so for God's sake, get the HELL OUT OF DODGE!"
The smile appeared. She breathed. She choked. She breathed in a long breath... and nothing happened...
My sister flew the hell out of Dodge, straight into morning...
The Nurse came in as I said, "Well, sure. FINE. Be that way." And I was closing her eyes. All she said was, "Well, you two are certainly related."
But when I looked into her eyes from my sister's, the smile flew away and she said, "I'm shutting the door for a few minutes, dear."
I sat with my sister and sang that song "Close your eyes, you can close your eyes, it's all right." I sang to her, as I had to my brother, just four years before. I rocked and I sang for the longest time, and I drew a pen and ink picture of flowers, all in a tumble, beautiful, overabundant, asymmetrical, with incomplete line. It began almost going OFF the sheet to the left, but the images became less complete, fading into white space to the right. She had come from someplace full, that she remembered and used to tell me about, and had filled my life and hers with more beauty than twelve sisters, then faded bit by bit before my eyes, two years before she died, moving away from me, from all of us, leaving this part of the continuum. I drew and I sang and I cried because I could not see where she'd gone. Fading into white, a picture still being drawn by her, but incomplete for me... for me, left behind.
Before I left the room for the people to take her away, all I could think to say was, "I'll fly into dawn, honey. If it takes me til I'm ninety, I promise. I'll fly."
I kissed her now closed eyes, put the portrait on her chest, and walked into my mourning.
At dawn.
She was seen as odd. Well, she WAS odd, and I've always felt that our world would be infinitely better with more odd souls like hers. She was incapable of violence. Seriously incapable. As she said, had she ever been attacked, she doubted she'd have even put her hands up to protect herself. "I'm a vessel in this life; I have received gifts and lessons, then I pour them out in teaching and in my art. That is what I am. I do not understand all this talk about life being an 'adventure,' that we must all somehow go after things because they are a 'challenge.' I loathe those words. I do not care to be challenged. I want to do what I want to do, nothing more. And of course nothing less!"
She once took an Italian class with her best friend, in her twenties. I was in college at the time and she came to pick me up one Saturday. She often did that; come to rescue me on a Saturday morning and we'd go for "a drive." Once from Storrs, CT all the way to New Hampshire and back, just so we could walk on the beach on the island for a bit.
But this time, she was laughing because Nancy was furious with her. It seemed Jean Ellen had received a C+ on an exam and was happy with it. Nancy had studied for hours and hours for her A and could not understand why Jean Ellen had gone out dancing the night before. Jean Ellen's response? "I am not taking this for certification or credit or pride. I simply want to be able to go to Italy and understand what they say and be understood. Nothing more. I don't care about the grade."
Nancy, apparently yelled at her and said, "How can you NOT want to do better than that? The professor even told you you could be the best in the class if you studied."
Jean Ellen looked at me and I smiled at her. I understood Nancy because I was more like that, but I knew my sister. "You have never cared about being the best in the class in your life."
"Right. It's an irrelevant argument to me."
"Now if the Professor had told you that the Italians will not want to TALK to you if you do this poorly---"
"I'd have given up the dancing. Grudgingly, however."
We once spent an entire drive making up swear words because we were bored with the old stand bys. We were headed to the Cape and on the other side of Providence, RI, I found the one. "BULL DROOL." Yup. That was our keeper of all of them. Unfortunately my sister began to laugh so hard, she drove into a small ditch and it took ten minutes to get OUT.
By then, though, I was able to make her laugh at everything. I think I was about 25 and she was , then, 34. I turned to her and said, "You know, from now on, I bet I can say the word 'apple' to you in a certain tone and you will always laugh." She shrieked.
Two days before she died, she was feeling very sad and frustrated. She could no longer speak very easily, the tumors having spread higher in her central nervous system. A visitor had tried her patience to the point where I literally escorted the woman out the door and told her that she had to listen to ME about leaving and that she could come back once more if need be, but only to say good bye. The woman was furious because she felt my sister was "faking."
I sat on her bed, stroking her forehead, her tears rolling unrestricted... I dabbed them because she had long since lost the ability to use her hands. I took her face in my hands and said, "Apple."
All was right in our world.
***
For my graduation present from college, Jean Ellen took me to Paris and Portugal for six weeks. I had not flown since I was sixteen, but had slept through some of that. Jean Ellen had us leave at night because she said I HAD to experience flying straight into dawn. I thought she was nuts, but was accustomed to her living on some sort of poetic edge I didn't understand. We were drawing on the plane a lot. We often drew left-handed, just for practice, to free up the right brain. She taught me about asymmetry when I was seven.
"Which of these arrangements is more appealing?" she had asked, showing me a drawing of a wall with three equally sized drawings of flowers, and one with three differently sized drawings, arranged so there was balance. I immediately chose the one with the different sizes.
"Why?" she asked, a teacher then, at only sixteen.
"That one's boring. Blah. I like this one." She was pleased with her Jetty and said, "You are an artist, Jetty. You just don't know it."
We did a similar lesson with incomplete line and then she taught me to make paper doll clothes in pen and ink, using lessons of incomplete line, and observing how various fabrics draped and how folds REALLY look, that really there were very few straight lines when it came to people....
Anyway, so on the plane we played with our left hand drawings and were laughing, when suddenly she said, LOOK OUT THE WINDOW...
I had the window, in front of the wing and could see where we were going... We were flying into a pool of red, and there was a line in the sky between dark and light, between night and day and we jetted into dawn, just like that... I began to cry.
Jean Ellen said, "THIS is why I had to bring you. YOU are the only other friend I have who cries at flying into dawn."
Friend. I was my big sister's friend and nothing from then on would ever be the same.
We flew straight into dawn, and we took Paris by storm, these two odd sisters. We drew with our feet when we were rained into the apartment one day. We spent three HOURS drawing with our feet. We bought rabbit at the grocery store and brought it home to cook. It was sold in PARTS, so we didn't have to deal with it as an animal... we thought. But when we opened the package, its little HEAD was there, with teeth and ears. Jean Ellen covered its head with paper towels and quickly chopped it off and threw the head down the garbage shoot. We prepared it with garlic and seasonings and wine. We had fresh vegetables and rice. We drank a bottle of wine before we even ate...
But we took one look at supper, at each other and went, "BUNNY." So much for that.
We sat at the Champs y Lysée (Sp--I'm lazy) and we sketched. I sketched an aging hooker, about fifty pounds overweight, with a ruffled hat and a tiny silk bag on a long ribbon, SKIPPING through the park. I wrote poetry and she sketched the gardens at a tiny restaurant across the street. We'd count the languages at the cafe outside the metro stop at La Place de la Concorde... We had affairs, each of us, with a different waiter at the local restaurant called Le Tahare, around the corner from our apartment. The place was our uncle's, but he was in the states with his wife and daughter for the summer. Two young women for ONE MONTH in Paris. Then we flew to Portugal, northern Portugal. Viana do castello. All the houses were limestone or marble, and there was a castle on the mountain that, at night, shone white, floating above the town. We were the only American tourists there for the annual August holiday. The town was in a triangle between mountains, a river, and the sea. I sat the beach and everything was BACKWARDS because I faced west. I'd not been to California, just the East Coast. A young man ran across town to get me my cigarettes and would not take a tip. One left tips in an envelope for everyone, at the end of one's stay. The head waiter, wine steward, and hotel manager treated us to our last two days at the hotel because we had been so much fun. We'd been fun? I knew what it was to be a princess for that week.
We played. We walked. We drew. We spoke to everyone we met, especially shopkeepers and hotel help... they took us on little side trips to "nowhere," and my sister and I felt that no one had ever had such fun before, nor been treated so wonderfully. I can still see the castle, shining bright white against the mountain at night, floating over the equally shining town.
We left Lisbon during the socialist overthrow of the Portuguese government, an experience of its own, and finally boarded an old DC 10 cargo plane for home. The stuffing was coming out of the seats, but we were safe and boarded. All we could talk about was the magic, as we left the revolution behind.
And we flew home straight into night; still we felt our hearts leap nonetheless as the plane flew low over the coast and we saw the glittering ribbon that was home.
I do not know how to describe the sister who thought that the greatest gift of the second half of the twentieth century was her baby sister Jetty. I was beautiful to her, some sort of jewel that went unappreciated in the world. She did not understand how men could be so cruel to me... she felt it was that they couldn't bear someone so open and loving. I tended to think it was that I had bad taste and was stupid, but I Much preferred her take on it. She mourned my not pursuing art, but understood. In our family the cutthroat comparison factors made us avoid taking up another's interest. Daddy wrote. He, Jack, AND Jean Ellen were teachers. Mom was a math genius... so was I, but I hated math. Mom wanted me to go into that because she hadn't. Jack played guitar and banjo and clarinet. I tried not to duplicate. Daddy sang in the Robert Shaw Chorale... So, while I could sing, paint, write, and play the piano... I avoided pursuing anything much. I was afraid. I blame no one but me. I saw how brutal Dad could be when performance was not perfection. He never really appreciated my sister's worth because she was severely obese and he could not admit there was beauty there. LOTS of men could, but not Dad. And of course that hurt her.
But Jean Ellen and I found our balance with one another through most of our lives. We were each other's number one fan. She was the sort of teacher who bothered to show up at a student's HOME when she feared the girl was suicidal. She was the kind of teacher who did not sleep until she had corrected her papers and made comments that were positive on every single one, even those who failed. She started preparing for September on August first. "I have to find something new to do, even though it's the same curriculum. If I am stale, then it will be stale to my kids." She taught all out, with all of her soul, just as she drew and painted with nothing held back.
I learned all I know about letting myself live with every fiber of my being from her. She was not brave in the conventional sense... until it came time for her to leave. She did not mourn that her life would end at sixty-two. She said, "I have done every single thing I ever wanted to do except go to Athens. EVERYTHING. I was an artist, a teacher, a big sister. I went to Paris six times. I went to England and Italy, to California, to the wild west. I made love and was loved. I have you as my sister and I've had you taking care of me these last years, no matter what. YOU have made sure I could stay here, where I wanted to be. My adventuress, my phoenix. I kept clipping your wings. When I go you will finally fly. Promise me you will fly."
The day she died I brought in all her favorite music--Harry Belafonte, and folk music. I kicked people out and told the nurses that she could not have anyone but me from then on. I sang to her, "Close your eyes." I stroked her head. She began to drown, though, along toward midnight. She choked. The nurses managed to get her cleared out a bit, but had gone down to get some horrible equipment for the next round. Jean Ellen, who was SO READY to go, was fighting for breath.
When the nurse left, I took her face in my hands and shouted, "LOOK AT ME!" Blue eyes wide and startled... My brown eyes hard and determined.
"They have gone to get some medieval atrocity to help you keep breathing. Jean Ellen. Remember? You want to go, so for God's sake, get the HELL OUT OF DODGE!"
The smile appeared. She breathed. She choked. She breathed in a long breath... and nothing happened...
My sister flew the hell out of Dodge, straight into morning...
The Nurse came in as I said, "Well, sure. FINE. Be that way." And I was closing her eyes. All she said was, "Well, you two are certainly related."
But when I looked into her eyes from my sister's, the smile flew away and she said, "I'm shutting the door for a few minutes, dear."
I sat with my sister and sang that song "Close your eyes, you can close your eyes, it's all right." I sang to her, as I had to my brother, just four years before. I rocked and I sang for the longest time, and I drew a pen and ink picture of flowers, all in a tumble, beautiful, overabundant, asymmetrical, with incomplete line. It began almost going OFF the sheet to the left, but the images became less complete, fading into white space to the right. She had come from someplace full, that she remembered and used to tell me about, and had filled my life and hers with more beauty than twelve sisters, then faded bit by bit before my eyes, two years before she died, moving away from me, from all of us, leaving this part of the continuum. I drew and I sang and I cried because I could not see where she'd gone. Fading into white, a picture still being drawn by her, but incomplete for me... for me, left behind.
Before I left the room for the people to take her away, all I could think to say was, "I'll fly into dawn, honey. If it takes me til I'm ninety, I promise. I'll fly."
I kissed her now closed eyes, put the portrait on her chest, and walked into my mourning.
At dawn.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Spring and the Celebration of the Mother of Mother
I keep thinking that I have written about this subject before, but perhaps it was not here. I think it was probably to someone in an email, or for another project. If I have, I'm sorry, but the story as written here, probably has a different rhythm, and the details will have shifted in emphasis. The truth of my grandma remains the same. I miss her sometimes still, as her joy for simple pleasure reaches through the decades and grabs me by the heart.
The Seasonal Dance ©2009
Here it comes again,
When spring smells stronger than fear,
And familiar dampness spreads like wine through veins.
Here it comes.
Again.
The season of loving
kills sobbing, and shoving
the pains of loss into a drawer,
I taste the juice of spring,
blasting death—through the greening of grass,
and the yellow of branches ready to burst
with a sun-filled cacophony of over-bright flowers
that will fall to substantial new growth.
Here it comes again,
When spring Heaven beats loneliness,
for the company of colors too noisy to tolerate gray.
Here it comes.
Again.
The dancing in gardens
of steaming up-turned earth,
with worms wriggling back to the dark,
I dance my own ritual to birth—
Through the smoothing of edges, and clearing of space
around shoots fairly aching to breathe;
through the weeds that have crowded their colors too long;
I discard what we no longer need.
Here it comes again,
When spring trumpets louder than pain,
for this birth that defeats any winter’s worst freeze.
Here it comes.
Again.
I associate Spring with my mom and with her mom... And I know it's Fall, but there is something about feeling one is coming to life again. And perhaps I am.
Seems appropriate somehow to write about Grandam M., Mom's mom. When I was little, Grandma did the coolest thing for Jack, me and our friends. I was probably about Eight. When she would come, she would take out her teeth AND her glass eye to show us, and tell us all about them. AFTER she put them back. Then she taught us "After the ball was over..."
She also took me on my first wildflower walk and for some reason, all I remember is that the field was full of vetch, which I thought was a completely gross name for such a gorgeous violet flower. Vetch. She also used to buy Jackie and me toys at Wallach's grocer, the corner equivalent of Seven Eleven® back in the late fifties. Mr. Wallach, like our neighbors two doors over, had come to our country during WWII, and, while he was a little scary, he still knew all our names and what we liked best for candy, and when we'd come to the store looking for milk and bread. But Grandma would buy us stuff. My favorite was the plywood plane with the elastic-driven prop, and my very first kaleidoscope ever.
We cut home through the field and I kept falling into holes because I was busy looking at the vetch through my toy. Grandma kept talking about daisies, Queen Anne's Lace, and "verdure." God forbid she said something like "all the green" or even "greenery." No. Verdure.
I once told her, "Grandma, you speak in crossword puzzle words."
"Yes, darling girl, I do. But isn't it more fun than just using the same old words all the time?"
I shrugged, but I kind of thought she was right. She and my mom fought constantly. Dad said, "Jean, the truth is Helen just isn't all that bright."
Mom would hold her palms out and just go, "AAAAAAHHHHHRRRRRR."
My favorite fight was this one. I have no idea what the fight was about, but my mom was in the kitchen and Grandma was at the table, eating her obligatory soda crackers in milk... this means it was around 3:00. I walked in from school, and I was around 12. I had recently realized I'd outgrown Grandma, because she had been on and on about trains the last time I'd seen her. Mom had taken me with her to Grandma's little efficiency flat and she'd dragged me into her bedroom, shouting, "Darling GIRL! Look at this!"
I waited and waited. Suddenly, there was a train. Yes. A train went by. Her hands went up in our familiar gresture of delight, "Dighdy dighdy DOH!" She would sing her arms abover her head, twisting her hands and arms from the elbows. I could not figure out why she loved the trains, but I managed to go, "Yeah, Grandma, that's great!" while humming the Twilight Zone music in my head.
She did that, though, over her soda crackers and whenever we had string beans. I just didn't get the thrill, but that was Grandma.
I walked into this fight, however. And Mom went, "MOTHER! You KNOW I am right, why MUST you persist in arguing with me."
"JEAN. I am your MOTHER. I don't care whether or not I'm wrong. Even when I'm wrong, I'm RIGHT."
And she got up in all the mighty dignity her 4'10" allowed and stomped out of the room.
I stood there just looking at my mom, who stared, mouth agape, back at me, until we both started laughing so hard we had to cover our mouths.
But this was Grandma.
***
I grew back into her, though. When I was about 31, I went to see her in the nursing home, one town away from us. She was in a full-care facility by then, and was 92. Her one eye had little vision, she'd had a hip replacement, but was pretty well lame. I know she was in pain, but something had happened when she hit 85.
We'd thrown her a big party, and she turned to my mom at the banquet and said, "Dahling girl, everything else is just gravy. I think I better make up to you now, while I can."
I was sitting across from them, and I felt I was watching part of movie, shot through one of those hazy filters--the kind that used around movie stars before you could simply touch up their faces in editing... Everyone else seemed preoccupied with their own conversations. Mom was looking at Grandma with an expression close to shock.
"Mother, it's all right. I know you--"
"No, Jean. It isn't all right. I've mistreated you your whole life, making you not go to college, but sending your brother. Always fighting. Always angry with you. I love you. You're my Jeanie. My girl. Right now, today, I'm changing. Dahling girl, it's never too late as long as I'm breathing and I'm not going to do that to you any more."
My mother cried and grabbed her mom. And Grandma never fought with her again. They had another nine years of something very special.
But I knew she was fragile seven years later, and I had an impulse to visit her one May, because it was lush everywhere, and because the lilacs were in bloom. I grabbed and armful from a neighbor's yard, because she called me her "lilac girl."
I found her in the rec room, bowling. Yes. Table bowling. I stood at a distance, while four people cheered her on, shouting, "Come on Helen. Just one pin. Come on, you can do it."
She missed the table, forget the pins, which sent her into "Dighdy, dighdy, DOH." And delighted laughter.
"Grandma," I said, thinking dementia was now hardcore. "What are you DOING? I thought you didn't like bowling anyway... and--"
"I HATE, bowling, Dahling girl, oh, LILACS! My lilac girl, oh, pretty." And she handed them round and looked at my confused face, squinting her eye, trying to focus. "What's that you are wearing? Purple and blue. What a pretty blouse. Oh, dear, you just make my heart dance."
Now, really. Who gets to hear that from anyone? But I was on my one track. "So if you don't like bowling, why do you?"
She simply shook her head at me and said, "Because that's what they HAVE. They have bowling, so I bowl. I sure as hell am not going to sit in my room and die. They have bowling, I bowl. they have rhythm band, I clop. They have ring toss, I toss."
She saw I was not smiling. She did not see the tears filling my eyes.
Suddenly, she whipped something out from underneath her lap robe. A large trophy. "Besides, where else could I get this!"
Engraved on a brass plaque, no less, were the words, "World's worst bowler in the history of time"
And we laughed. She wanted to walk to the courtyard that day. This meant it was a very good day for her. Mostly she leaned on my arm, but since she was, by now about 4'8" and weighed only 85 pounds, it was no trouble. I don't think it would have been any trouble to me if she were twice her size. She used her cane mostly to point out the flowers, daffodils, scilla, and a few peonies were coming out early. It was one of those springs that had come in a jumble, when suddenly the temperature jumped to 80 degrees for five days in a row, so the plants were confused. No gradual spring, this one. It was more like a Beethoven symphony--all the stops were pulled out. Or perhaps Vivaldi.
When I took her to her room, I helped her onto the bed and she asked that I open the drapes. Her roommate liked the dark, but she was home for an overnight. Grandma drank in the light, turning her hands in the warmth of the day. I sat beside her and something made me start to cry and I rested my head beside her there. I felt her hand stroking my hair, like a breeze, she was so gentle.
"My lilac girl, my little girl. Your mother ... she's not lilacs. She's peonies. She is all bright colors and so ripe she cannot bear up under the weight of her beauty." I started at such a description. I didn't know Grandma knew my mother so well.
Then she sighed, and I looked up at her. She was crying herself. "Grandma? Are you all right?"
"Of course, dear. Of course. I'm old. You know I'll have to leave soon. But the hardest thing of all? To leave all these colors. How can I leave all these bright shining colors behind?"
And this was Grandma.
***
If I am to be poor, if I am to live at the mercy of others' care, if I am to find that my world grows smaller before my time? I will do it like Grandma— with unbridled joy, and clinging to all the colors she saw through her one half-functioning eye. Her eye was the truest of any I have ever known.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)