driving into the sunrise, part II
(or, it’s 4:30 am on a tuesday)
Wednesday 23 August 2006 | I like a cookie
Then, when I was 13, there was Maman, the first person to teach me by example that emotions were not only acceptable but useful, and most of all essential. That playing like a metronome wasn’t what it was about. That if you touched a keyboard without showing the dark side of your heart, you left your hearers bored and unmoved. And somehow, though she never said this, I also understood that not even music would heal you unless you were willing to turn toward and explore that tangled, tender part.
My mother loved Emily Dickinson when she was a young woman - I like a look of Agony, / because I know it’s true - An entire steamer trunk, the one she took to college, filled with poetry. As a little girl I felt awed and intimidated, peeping in the closet at the locked trunk which held glimpsed pages of handwriting. Maybe not just poems—spellwork? journal entries? I don’t know, and I never will. She burned it all when she became a Christian.
As well as having feelings, being embodied, Maman made clear, was a pretty fabulous thing. I’d never seen anyone eat with real relish before, with undisguised sensual pleasure in its texture and scent and flavor. And since the winter I met her was the year of my most virulent disordered eating ever, it was eye-opening to watch her stick a scallion (a what?) into a carton of plain yogurt (what yogurt?) and crunch into it vigorously and with an exclamation. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Bear in mind that my mom could cook about six things, all of which featured fried meat in some form; and that I was, for a baroque OCD series of reasons too complicated to explain here, refusing to eat foods of color that winter.
My memory is that I subsisted on Hansen’s mandarin orange soda (which was clear), Sara Lee cheese danish (close enough), vanilla custard, and the buttered pans of candy I cooked zealously, safeguarding their purity. Surely there must have been a carrot or a ham sandwich somewhere in there, but I don’t remember anything besides white food (a mania which would seize me savagely again in 1995, between Massachusetts and Britain).
Divinity. Sticky caramels, pale with white sugar and cream. Soft ball, hard ball, hard crack. Barracading myself inside with Hanon and Bach, reciting names of constellations (Greek) and stars (Arabic) and butterflies (Latin) the way people say prayers during an air raid.
[As I type this, the Brujo has put on the MDQ doing “Love for Sale,” and wandered into the other room to look at cactus porn. It reassures me that he knows more genus and species names than any other human being I’ve ever known. At least someone else is still saying his rosary, telling the beads, staving off the darkness.]
Stunod Niknud. That’s what my second college girlfriend used to call it when we went there in the middle of the night for our interminable processing, which never seemed to lead anywhere. For some reason I always misspelled it “Nacnud,” for which she would chastise me: “Donuts are for dunkin’, not for Duncan.” This morning, when I blearily surveyed the powdered sugar, the sprinkles, ranged in columns before me, I realized I was standing on a plastic sign imbedded in the floor: AMERICA RUNS ON DUNKIN DONUTS. With a little universal human stick figure, running toward pastry. The patent inanity of this would have made me laugh aloud but by then the Indian clerk working the graveyard shift was asking me if I needed another minute. No, I said. Maple.
The DBT, as she always does, split my black-and-white down the middle. “It’s both true that telling you ‘You’re too emotional’ was completely invalidating, and not at all helpful—and, there are times when it would probably help you to have a thicker skin.”
Like, maybe, 4:30 am on a Tuesday?
I pulled over the car after Hwy. 285 yielded to a two-lane road which turned onto another two-lane road which in its turn yielded to 76 which is, as you can see from the photograph, paved with dirt. I rolled down the windows, ate my plastic donut off its plastic plate, turned up old “wistful” and watched the blue turn pink and my sizzle of tears evaporate like rain.
If I could go back in time, I guess I’d have a few quick minor errands to run (e.g., when the Republican stands over me and says with disgust, “You are sick,” I wait for him to leave the room, pick my shoe out of the broken glass, put it on, spit in his meat loaf, and then unhesitatingly walk out the front door), after which I’d need a few more days, just a few, in South Texas.
So that when Maman says slowly, Honey, this morning I got a terrible shock. I couldn’t stand up by myself. And I suppose now I have to ask, was yesterday the last time I’ll ever stand up? Could this really be the end? this time I don’t say nothing and look down, completely gobsmacked, but instead move around to the side of the bed and take her hand and say quietly, You know what sweetie? I think it probably is. And then say what I’ve said a thousand times before, but to say it with deliberation and totality:
Lady, you saved my fucking life. You rescued it from where it lay flapping and wiped it off and returned it to me, you gave it back into my hands and my mouth and my eyes and my ears. You taught me the 
difference between bravo and brava, that strawberries can be dipped in sour cream beaten with brown sugar and lime juice, that Chopin is Bach’s bad sister, twisted backward with the volume knob turned up. You told me my SAT scores were good (no one else knew enough to know that) and that I was smart and that I should probably try to go to college somewhere outside Texas. You showed me how even I could be pretty, taught me cute and French and chic, gave me two couture dresses and lingerie and scarves and earrings and a bunch of off-the-rack stuff and more importantly showed me how to wear it all. You were the first person before whom I ever had the nerve to open my face up and sing, and who cupped my face in her hands afterward and said, astounded, Sweetie pie there’s a great big voice in that tiny body. Who played for velvet-voiced Ray singing limpid Schubert lieder and for me belting out “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child” with every shred of melisma my white-trash voice could muster. You were the first person to say I love you and to hug me gigantically and unreservedly, the first person to give me a fluffy bathrobe and the key to your house and say, You are the daughter of my heart and anywhere I live is your home too.
Drowsing, murmuring, almost asleep, the last time I sat by her bed: …and then there you were, in the middle of all that mess, so bright, how we’d sit down and you would play and it would be like magic. Just magic, bébé.
As I turned twenty and then thirty and then thirty-five, there were hard things, too. Her alcoholism, her almost inconceivable financial irresponsibility, her still believing herself victimized—by a marriage that had ended twenty years previously, by her daughters. In illness and partial recovery, what became querulousness, neediness, unchecked anxiety. A naked kind of using, of greed, gradually revealed as pain and sickness stripped away her social persona and left her with the bones of her unmet desires. Death wasn’t the retirement she’d ordered. It wasn’t how the story was meant to end. God only brings us good things, darling. We are going to beat this cancer. We brought her home after months in the hospital and she looked at our weepy faces and said, alarmed, Did you all really think I was going to die?
Sometimes I think she really thought would live forever, playing her Steinway and drinking white wine with an ice cube in it.
None of that is negated, how she could be petty and self-centered and immature. Her daughters know this even better, I don’t doubt. For the most part, as the chosen daughter (pointing at her breastbone, Dear one, you are right behind here) I was shown her best side.
But that’s not what I wanted to remind her of, her many weaknesses. I wanted to tell her from any depth I have, with any strength I have, with all the love I’ve been given, thank you.
I know I’d already done it, again and again, for 25 years. I wish I’d done it once more.
The DBT keeps saying dubiously, You don’t seem to like writing very much. Are you sure this is what you want to do? I avert my eyes, change the subject. I don’t tell her, Of course not, but it’s the consolation prize. Because there’s no point in it.
When maybe 22, I remember telling Maman I wanted to be Joni Mitchell. She looked at me worriedly, lips pursed, forehead creased. Is that true, sweetie? Are you sure? I thought the rest of the sentence was going to be “…because you don’t have a chance in hell,” but looking back at it, I imagine it was equally likely she was thinking, “…because I don’t want you to be poor and frustrated for the rest of your life.” She hated trying to survive as a musician as much as she hated being a teacher, could not understand that Z loves teaching high-school Spanish, how she could find it fulfilling. “But teaching is such a miserable job, honey,” she’d say, uncomprehendingly. “I know,” I’d reply, beating pillows or changing IV lines or uncapping bottles of pills, “but she loves it. And she’s really good at it and you can see how happy it makes her.” “I guess you’re right,” she’d say slowly. “But it’s so wretched, I just can’t understand….”
I’m twenty years too old and no one ever thought I could do it anyway, except the Parisienne. I’ll have to stick to my tournament of hunchbacks.
At seven-thirty I returned to the bed of the Brujo, who, still fast asleep, spidered me again in a powerful groggy embrace until I remarked mildly that my right tit was being crushed, whereupon he let go and slept happily on. As, eventually, did I.
There’s no moral to the story. There never really is. Sometimes things feel vibratingly redolent, deeply significant, portentious; you want to pull out the dusty old taped demos and listen to them all and try to understand if there’s anything valuable there, pull out twenty years’ worth of journals and scan them, looking for anything remotely interesting or smart that might be gleaming out from in there, quit your job and go backpacking for six months, confront your parents, run away with the circus. Mostly, being grownup seems to mean you don’t usually do these things. Mostly, you suspect it to be merely the errant cranial molecules, tumbling around and turning cartwheels in there, looking for their synapses, swollen and lost. Mostly, you just kind of drive around for awhile and then drive home. Mostly.
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