39. Identity

It’s still strange sometimes to be free of obligations. The person to whom I was married has no idea of where I am or what I’m doing. The phone calls to friends and workplaces stopped a long time ago. I’ve not only liberated myself from marriage—It’s easier when you don’t have children or property, as I didn’t—but that somewhere, actually at various points along the way, I’ve shed most of the bonds I had with other people. It wasn’t a conscious choice, but I don’t regret it now.

Now I understand why people stop visiting the gravestones of family members and friends. It’s not just because survivors move away, at least geographically, from the dead. After a while, it’s not possible to mourn, or even to recall or forget. The person you knew no longer exists and can’t come back. In fact, they can’t be replaced: Someone or something merely substitutes for something. I guess we’re all substitutes for something or someone.

There was the girl my mother once was; there were the people she’d been before she met the one who fathered me; there is what she might’ve been if she hadn’t known him or given birth to me or anyone else. I’d heard stories that she’d had a boy or a girl: someone who’d been taken for her or whom she gave up. I found photographs once of a curly-haired (wo)man/child, wrapped in something that looked like a butcher’s apron with a picture of a tree—I don’t know what kind—painted on it. I guess that rules out the abortion story, which I’d never believed anyway.

She walked in. What were you doing in there? You left them on your dressser, I claimed. What were you doing, looking there? Couldn’t help it: the door opened that faded wood dresser top, I explained. Normally, she didn’t leave anything there, so of course those photos caught my attention. Whose pictures are those? I wondered aloud.

Mine.

Couldn’t’ve been: the face was too round, even for such a young child. Eye sockets too flat. And I didn’t think my grandmother—or just about any other mother—would’ve dressed her kid that way, not even if her husband or boyfriend or whomever chopped meat by day and silk-screened T-shirts by night.

What followed was the one moment of true hatred I ever felt toward her. It’s one thing to finesse one’s way around something a kid might not understand or be ready to hear—or something one simply isn’t ready to explain. But she never did that before, or after, so I knew she was lying. Why?, I still ask myself. Not many things could’ve changed what I felt for her, not even finding out she’d given a child away or killed it. I would never’ve told anyone else about something like that.

I didn’t tell when she thought she had a malignant tumor. Or when she said she’d sung or performed other jobs—That’s all they were, she said—or hinted at whom my father might’ve been. I also never told what I heard of her conversations with any of the women who would attend her funeral. She knew this, and some time in my teen years she stopped gesturing me away when I chanced upon one of her encounters.

I also never mentioned the things she said about a certain man whom I can only assume was my father. They met in school, in a dance hall, or on some long-since-closed ride in a seaside amusement park: The stories varied. Or maybe they just met one evening in some nameless stretch of sidewalk, or another evening somewhere else.

I’d seen him—I’m sure of it. Everything about my face, except for my knobby chin, I got from mother. Her hair was straight and fine, his splayed with an ever-so-short arc from the top of his head down to his ears. So I know I didn’t get my coiffure from the haircutter my mother used to take me to. His dark brown hair differed from hers only when he didn’t shave for a day or two and the nearly orange fields in his stubble reflected the rusty undertone of his hair.

When I was a child, my hair glowed nearly as russet as his flecks. As I grew older, they darkened like tree trunks after sunset. And when he lost the locks from the top of his head, the fringe around the crown just above his ears glowed brighter and curled at his ears.

Mother didn’t have to chase me, even though I always wanted at least a glimpse of him, the way most people choose to view tigers in a forest or sharks on the continental shelf: close enough to know what they are, but at enough of a distance for a head start.

38. Birth

 

Now that she’s gone, there’s one less date to remember: Mother’s Day. It’s the one and only holiday I cared about in any way. Whether or not you share other people’s beliefs, you’re forced to observe their holidays because stores close, people leave for vacations and other trips that may or may not have to do with the observance of their holy days (What does going to Miami have to do with Yom Kippur, anyway?) and they eat foods they wouldn’t touch at any other time of the year. Christmas, New Year’s Day and the days for saints and about declarations of independence, “discoveries,” “victories” in battle and other forms of homicide and rape—all of those celebrations mean nothing to me.

Mother never told me her birthday, possibly because she knew it’s the one date to which I’d pay attention. And somehow or another I managed to get through those years without knowing the date anyone else came into this world. I might know for a moment—Some kid in school would talk about a party or some such thing—but I’d forget almost immediately.

In fact, I know the date on which I squeezed between walls of her birth canal—I’ll say only that it was a murderously hot day, just as her first hours must have been, I’m sure—I know it only because some teacher—Mrs. Kilmer, the first lay teacher I ever had—said something about how other kids and I who were born during the summer weren’t going to have celebrations in school. Wouldn’t you like to tell the class what day it is?, she cooed, while looking away from me. I sat silently, my hands folded. Some kids giglgled; she hushed them and waited. Perhaps you need a moment to remember, she sighed. Ten other kids in that class of twenty-nine recited, on cue, the July and August dates on which they’d been born. Then she turned toward me. Maybe now you can tell us….

All that year, I hardly spoke at all. Mrs. Kilmer, it seemed, called on my only for questions about math, Latin and religion. I never knew the answers because I didn’t care about religion and I was simply hopeless in the other two subjects. Then she’d snap and point to someone else and I’d slink back into the dark silence behind my eyes.

Actually, I can remember one other time she called on me. What are you seeing now?, she demanded. A blackboard, you… Should I mention the other kids, I asked aloud: I didn’t want her to wonder aloud whether I wasn’t thinking about her question. Uh, blackboard, wall, American flag.”

What did you see before that?

I stared at her through the glaze over my eyes.

I mean, before you woke up… Some kids tried to conceal snickers. What did you see with your eyes closed?

Nothing.

You never see nothing.

Well, you know, just blackness.

What did you…Realizing it was pointless to ask, she dropped the question.

And—oh yeah—I remember her expressing that cloying, contemptuous form of pity that I later learned to call condescenscion. Don’t be afraid to tell me…Then she’d remember what she was getting herself into. She didn’t accept “nothing” for an answer and I wouldn’t give it. It seemed superfluous, like most things I’ve said and many of the people I’ve said them to.

And so with birthdays. I could never see any reason to demarcate it from any other date on the calendar. At some moment I can’t remember, I left or was pushed from a place to which I couldn’t return, no matter how much I imagined it, if I could’ve imagined. I am in this world and can do nothing about it. I have no control over whether or not I will inhabit any other reality. Why make a big deal over any of it?

Mother would have none of it, either. She never made a fuss about aging, which makes sense when you realize that during my late adolescence she didn’t look any different from my earliest recollections of her. They are, I suppose, what some embalmer thought he or she was seeing before my mother was set before me and those other women from this block.

How could any embalmer or funeral director see what Mrs. Littington, the lady whose name I never knew, or anyone else—including me—had seen, much less make any attempt to recreate it? Now I understand why people—usually women—take at least one look at the face in a casket, then pull themselves away. Trying to substitute some made-up image for the ones you hold in your mind: That’s what’s so intolerable, especially for the people closest to the deceased.

So what are you celebrating, then, when you celebrate someone’s birthday? Or your own, for that matter? Of course, when I was a child, I couldn’t articulate the reasons why I didn’t want to celebrate my birthday. I simply couldn’t understand why it was so important for anyone else. Someone gives you a cake moistened with food coloring; you have to thank people for giving you things you didn’t ask for.

So I’ve never done birthdays. Now, Mother’s Day, that’s another story. Why that date among all others? Well, I’ll say that I try to be as unsentimental as anyone can be in honoring or making some attempt to honor her. Honestly, I never quite knew how to do that, or how she'd feel if she knew that I'd wanted at least one day of the year that was about her, and only her. I had my own reason: I knew I couldn’t always, no matter how hard I tried, obey the few rules she had for me. I also knew that I couldn’t satisfy her unspoken wishes—after all, I did leave this block and I’ll never have children.

One of the few dictates I’ve heard from a religious person that I’ve made the effort to remember came from the priest who presided over the wedding of Mrs. Rolfe’s daughter. Remember, the commandment doesn’t say obey thy mother and father. It says to honor them.” I got the idea, although I never did figure out what sorts of actions honored one’s parents.

If nothing else, I came to realize that a parent, whether or not he or she is biological, is the first person you see in your earliest recollections. And the last you see when you close your eyes to this world. There’s nothing you can do about that; youcan only acknowledge it, or better yet, celebrate it. You never need anyone else, really. I guess that’s the reason why I’ve never worried about spending this moment, the next moment or my last, alone. It’s also the reason why waking up in a cemetery didn’t disturb me. The people in them (assuming, of course, they’re there) were as ephemerally a part of my life as anyone else was. And the dates on their tombstones simply mark the moments when they moved, like an empty railroad car from a yard toward the first station or the first point of collision, and when they exited, like that empty railroad car, from the last parts of their trip and returned to the colorless, soundless solitude.

So Mother’s Day, I decided, is the only day that should be differentiated from all the others. I try not to talk to anybody unless I absolutely have to, but on her day, I’d speak to her, and only to her. Actually, if I could’ve I would’ve probably spoken with nobody but mother until the day of her funeral. Maybe I’ve succeeded. The few people with whom I’ve spoken since her funeral were women.

Sometimes I get the feeling they talk only to members of their own gender, too. They may answer, or respond to, men’s questions—or at least those of their husbands, sons and nephews. Those neighbors and friends of my mother hear the stories of conquests, of wrongs done by bosses and family members, of injuries caused by accidents and fights. But when they say I’m not well, it’s that time or simply I want to lie down only they could understand each other in the way my mother did.

I’ve tried. It’s all I’ve ever known how to do.

37, Crossing

There comes a day when you realize you’ve lived your entire on this block. It could come some Tuesday afternoon in the office. Or you may see it when waves roll on some shore you didn’t grow up with. And you realize you couldn’t have done anything vut take those steps down to the bones, the foam, the stones and perhaps the sand that are inevitable once you’ve crossed the place where an avenue and a boulevard collide at oblique angles with the street that you’ve lived on. No one ever tells you what’s on the other side; they only tell you not to go there.

You wake from a dream and somebody asks you about it but you’re not sure why. You’re not even sure of what you’ve dreamed; no one can tell you how those stories end. You only know that you begin some place you thought you’d forgotten and proceed through people you haven’t thought about since you left the block. Or even before that.

It all puzzles, frightens, infuriates and annoys me. Now I understand why mother stayed through all those years, alone, with me, alone with me alone. And why she kept me, even when she couldn’t afford to replace the clothes I’d just grown out of, much less the Catholic schooling she provided until there wasn’t money for anything else.

She knew something that men very often act upon but women understand intuitively. What other kind of understanding is there, anyway? What other kind of understanding does anybody need? Anyway, she told me this once: Any memory is paid for. Those recollections that people use to comfort themselves: That’s all they are, re-collections. The pieces, the shards, all picked up and rearranged, whether by reflex or design, into the stories other people use to acquit themselves or the world they’ve lived in. Things could’ve been better or worse, or they are. Either way, people sill conclude that they’re where they’re supposed to be or that they’re going there and that God, or whoever, is leading them there and providing them with everything they need along the way.

I don’t long to go back to some Garden of Eden that I never saw in my life. By the same token, I don’t regret anything. That’s helpful, in a way: I expect nothing of the future, not for myself or anyone else.

There are a few indisputable facts about my life, and they’re not on any certified documents. And they’re not the sorts of things that someone will find by making inquiries or by questioning me. Even knowing me, whatever that means, wouldn’t be enough. Of course I was a child and I grew. And what of it? What other incontrovertible facts are there? Oh, I was enrolled in school X for however many years, but how much did I attend, and how much did I learn? Even that’s not something I know for sure. I’ve never completed any sort of diploma, and to some people that means I don’t have any education or intelligence. Maybe I don’t. But that doesn’t worry me now, and I won’t argue the point with anybody. Maybe I’ve learned a few things; maybe I haven’t.

And what of it?, I ask again. If I have an education, it explains some of my life; if I don’t, it explains other things. Mother was protective, mother was domineering, mother was projecting. And….I was sensitive, I was a sissy. Which label suits your explanation of me? Or mine of you?

Someone, somewhere always has a label to stick on you. Once they’ve named you, they’ve tamed you. That’s what they know about you, and if they think they’ve tamed you, they also think they’ve solved you.

The name, the label is a lot easier to carry, to remember, than what’s been named or labeled. But some—most—people confuse it with a memory, which is an experience remembered. Mother told me that, or something like that, once. That it’s all about pain: the method of payment extracted for true, precise memories. Pain: that which can’t be transformed, transmitted; that which no one can take away. I don’t think anyone can ever share it. Pain is always solitary despite—actually, because of—all those people who devote themselves to muting it in other people.

What of all of those people who visit strangers, or even friends, in hospitals and nursing homes? Or the ones who try to feed and teach the children in the gutters of places no god would ever go anywhere near? Now, I know I never lived in such poverty, and somewhere along the way I stopped feeling guilty over the fact that I never did. Actually, I never had such pangs, not on my own anyway. There was somebody, usually a priest or a nun (when you’re a kid, that person is an adult)  who resents you for…existing.

Some people don’t remember their own pain, don’t feel it. Even after suffering through the deaths of people they’ve known, or their own selves, they only have some story, some name that someone else gave them to describe the experience. And what someone else told them to feel. I guess that’s a pretty good definition of guilt: what someone else told you to feel.

So that’s how rich girls end up in the gutters of Calcutta. And how people end up at the bedsides of people they barely know, or don’t know at all, mouthing platitudes when what the person in bed needs, more than anything, is sleep. Or at least rest.

And so they recollect someone else’s suffering, or more exactly, some image of it. Or some way, perhaps in which the person expressed his or her suffering. Out of naivete, out of ignorance, sometimes out of condescension, disrespect or contempt for the other person, they try to quell their cries, their bodily contortions, the look in the eyes of a person in pain.

Truth is, the only way you can end another person’s suffering is to kill him or her. And even then I couldn’t tell you for sure: What happens when a person stops functioning in ways we’re accustomed to seeing? I don’t know.  But I do know that a person’s pain can end only when it’s run its course. There’s nothing anyone can do to change that.

Any attempt to end another person’s suffering and pain is therefore an act of the basest sort of arrogance and self-righteousness. What right have I, or anyone else, to deprive another person of his or her experience, of memories—the only things that a person can truly claim to own?

Mother understood all this, I’m sure. And that’s why she never left this block. You never realize you need to hold onto anything until you have recollections. And the more you describe them to yourself, to anyone else, the further you stray from them. And the more you try to base your relations with other people on them. Really, you can only have a memory of the present, however long that moment may be. On the block where I grew up, it lasts until you leave. Until that moment when you cross that intersection, traffic circle or boulevard, and see a side, coast or any other boundary you’ve never seen before, you don’t have a past. And, of course, when you don’t have a past, you don’t have a future. To remain on this block, you don’t need either one: In fact, they’re burdens.

Once you make that crossing, you see that your street and others end or continue under different names. And another street, avenue, boulevard or perhaps a highway opens in front of you. Then there’s no choice but to follow it.

Mother really was right. She’d always told me—no, wait a minute, she never did that; she just somehow made it known to me—that I shouldn’t cross, that there was nothing but trouble on the other side. As if she should worry about trouble! She, raising me by herself, told me never, ever to answer the door. Or the phone, not unless I was expecting a call. There’s no telling who’s on the other side, who’s lying in wait.

How did she know? There is always trouble, only pain on the other side. Suffering: It’s what nobody and nothing can prepare you for. Some can warn you, but only about what they’ve known. They can never tell you what your own individual death—which is to say your life—will be. Nor can they describe their own in any way that will help you, that will change the outcome of your tribulations. All anyone can offer is his or her recollection.

Now I understand why I feel uneasy on those rare occasions when someone who’s never seen this block asks m to describe my experiences or my dreams. And why I came to distrust them much more intensely than anyone I knew on this block—that is to say, all of the women, including my mother, in the funeral parlor,  I haven’t met anyone away from this block whom I needed or who needed me. The things they told me, I could’ve heard anywhere, really, even from the men on this block, however briefly they stayed. And anything I’ve told anyone since those days could’ve been uttered by anyone, anywhere. The stuff they could understand, that is. And that doesn’t include mother or anyone who came to her funeral.

And the women at the funeral: Could they’ve steered, consciously or not, some piece of me—whatever they grasped, for whatever reasons? The one whom the teachers kept after school: Most of the time, I didn’t understand why.