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A Memoir
KATHRYN HARRISON
Dedication
WITH THANKS TO SARAH, WALKER, AND JULIA,
without whom this book could not exist
Epigraph
The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
– Franz Kafka
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
The Children’s Room
Home for the Holidays
Interior Castles I
Seeking Rapture
Interior Castles II
Keeping Time
Tick
Siva’s Daughters
Minor Surgeries
Beach Trip
The Supermarket Detective
A Pilgrimage to Saks Fifth Avenue
Renewal
What Remains
Nitpickers
Labor
Mother’s Day Card
Keep Reading
Acknowledgments
Also by the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
The Children’s Room
The children are young enough so that the passage between our two bedrooms is still umbilical, a door through which I travel nightly once or twice, between midnight and dawn, sometimes more often. Summoned by a cry, impelled by a worry or nightmare of my own, I don’t wake fully in the journey from our bed to Walker’s (nine steps) or Sarah’s (fourteen). I kneel beside whichever child I’ve come to comfort, sometimes I let my cheek rest on the foot of the bed and fall back into my dreams. When I rouse myself, minutes or hours later, I am cold, stiff, confused. The night-light, which seems so weak at bedtime that it fails to illuminate the cars and dolls and blocks underfoot, dazzles my just-opened eyes. The entire room is gold and glowing, and I can see each eyelash curled against his cheek, count the pale freckles on her nose.
Boy and girl, they are still young enough to share this large room that adjoins our bedroom, the room that, innocent of children, my husband and I imagined would be a library. After all, it has a whole wall of floor-to-ceiling bookcases. When we moved into this brownstone in Brooklyn, I transferred novels and poems and essays from their boxes (packed as they had been shelved, alphabetically) directly into the empty cases. At last, here was a home with built-in shelves! A fireplace, and furniture inherited from my mother’s mother – antique steamer trunks, mahogany chairs and desk, a chaise longue for more desultory study – contributed to our literary aspirations for the space. Now only the chaise remains. All but the top four shelves are emptied of grown-up books and filled with toys, picture books, art supplies. I have removed novels and essays, poems and histories as I have needed to, in response to our children’s ability to reach and climb. I carried them upstairs and stacked them, ‘A’s and ‘M’s and ‘Z’s all jumbled together and furred with dust. This was the way the room was transformed from library to nursery: book by book, shelf by shelf, chair by chair. I wonder if it is by equally small increments that we become parents, as our children claim another and another sinew of devotion.
Sarah’s arrival was followed by that of her crib. Hundred-spindled, made of fruitwood, it displaced two chairs and the desk. When she woke at two or at four and called me to her, I stumbled from our bed to the crib and reached over its tall side. I took her into my arms and took us both into the chaise, where we ultimately fell asleep together, my nipple still in her mouth.
Long before she stopped nursing, our daughter began acquiring things, many of them. The baby swing and the toy chest nudged the steamer trunks to the living room; a rocking chair replaced the last of its immobile colleagues. Colin and I bought a craft table so small that even carefully folded onto the matching stools we cannot coax our humped knees under its surface, now covered with sedimentary layers of adhesives and pigment. Before Sarah was three, she became enamored of Play-Doh, paste, poster paint, acrylic paint, glitter paint, oil paint, and Magic Markers. In short order, she acquired a glue gun; a glutinous, slippery, shiny gunk called Gak; Silly Putty; plaster of Paris; a machine that employs centrifugal force to splatter paint onto whirling cards; and a little brother – all of which arrivals encouraged the exchange of the pink and mauve Oriental rug for a nearly wall-to-wall Stainmaster in a practical shade of dark blue.
Three years old, the carpet already wears its history. People who do not have children will give other people’s children the sort of gifts their parents never buy, hence the popularity of bachelor uncles and courtesy aunts. Hence the glue gun and Gak. I drew the line at hot paraffin and hid the candle-making kit, but, still, we paint and draw and mold and glue a lot – every day – and the more ambitious art projects do leave incidental impressions, stains, gouges. The rocking chair, I noticed recently, has been decorated with stickers and wobbly stripes of red and green around its arms and along the sides of its seat. It has older scars, of course; this rocker was in my childhood bedroom, and before that in my mother’s. It has been glued and clamped, screwed and reglued by both my grandfather and my husband.
The baby swing and the changing table, the crib and the walker are gone now, and each of the children has what is called a ‘youth’ bed – smaller than a twin and closer to the floor. At five, Sarah is nearly too large for hers, but she’s not ready to part with it. She hated to lose its predecessor, the crib, which we tactfully dismantled long before her brother’s arrival and only after we had put together her new little bed, with its shiny, red enameled frame. We were careful to allow a full six months between the older child’s moving out of the crib and the younger’s moving in, careful that she never felt that she was forced to pass her bed directly along to another baby, but still Sarah wept when its polished wood head and foot and sides were carried from the room.
Walker, for whom a crib was never better than an inadequately disguised cage, clapped at its second dismantling. He bounced on his version of the little bed, the same as his sister’s but enameled in blue.
Between the two little beds is the fireplace, whose flue is permanently shut, bricked up. The empty hearth has become a cubbyhole for an appropriately combustible-looking collection of junked toys: Barbie’s broken refrigerator and her hot-pink range, a fire engine without its wheels, stray blocks, twisted and retwisted pipe cleaners, ravaged coloring books – all trash they cannot bear to discard. Together the objects make a blaze and jumble of color. Presiding disconsolately over the heap is the piñata from the most recent birthday party. A papier-mâché donkey with a festive hide and mane of orange and red and pink tissue paper, he was torn in two, vivisected by preschool greed wielding a broom. Now his head and tail both face out into the bedroom, so we are spared the dispiriting sight of his hollow middle. The mantelpiece above bears another rubble of objects, most of which our daughter hopes to keep out of her brother’s reach: stickers, costume jewelry, a collection of tiny plastic horses.
Propped in the center of the mantel is an old wall hanging: a wood bas-relief of a tavern, including kitchen, dining hall, and bedrooms. Every object and gesture is carved and painted with cunning attention: dinner plates the size of dimes, a butter churn with a three-inch dash, washtubs, rolling pin, crucifix, table and benches, a clock whose hands read a quarter past five, hats hanging on hooks by the door, an accordion, two flowerpots, shotgun, and stove. My grandfather, who was apprenticed in 1904 to a cabinetmaker in Berlin (he was fourteen), acquired the hanging, which was made in the Black Forest. It used to contain a working music box, and just under the eaves is a brass key that no longer turns. The hidden mechanism, with its rolling, metal-toothed platen and minuscule comb of tines, once played, my grandfather told me, a feeble polka.
As a child, I spent many hours staring at the tavern’s tiny furnishings, at once seduced and bewildered by the very nature of bas-relief, neither flat picture nor free sculpture, a dollhouse enduring an uneasy metamorphosis from three dimensions to two. Before we had children, I moved the tavern from closet to basement to guest room and back to closet, never knowing what to do with it until our children showed me.
‘Take it down! I want to look at it up close!’ one of them will say. The request is never more avid than when the children are ill, and I can remember exactly how fever enhanced the little row of frying pans hung over the stove, gilded the flowers painted on cupboard doors the size of my thumbnail. I can remember, in the glaze and glitter of their feverish eyes, but I can no longer feel the luxury of benign childhood illness, of recoveries uncompromised by meetings, deadlines, chores.
From experience, I know that if my children are not sufficiently entertained they will escape the confines of bed, and I supply toys, rescind the TV laws, and bring them from their room into ours. In our family, sick children inevitably end up in the parental bed, an indulgence intended to compensate for an ailment serious enough to mandate bed rest: a way of separating horizontal day from night, a chance to command the empire of our tall, king-size bed, at whose foot I prop the tavern.
‘Why,’ Walker asks, as I asked my grandfather, ‘are the flames right on the pot?’ A tiny black kettle hangs in the kitchen over kindling the size of matchsticks, its underside painted with tongues of red and yellow and orange.
‘Because,’ I say, not finishing the answer any more than my grandfather did – in 1904 they didn’t have cellophane for fake fires.
Not only my own childhood is recapitulated in our children’s bedroom; their father’s is here as well. Along the top shelf of the bookcase are twenty-nine bottles and nine glass inkwells, anywhere from ninety to a hundred and twenty years old. Clear, clouded, blue, green, amber – old enough so that none are actually colorless, so that even plain glass has acquired a purple tint. Though they were dug from old dumps, none are chipped or broken. There are hundreds of these bottles in our house, most packed away, all of them together representing thousands of hours of my husband’s childhood, countless afternoons spent on his knees, alone or with a friend, excavating the past.
Time continues to possess and confound and mystify us. It passes, of course, with a relentlessness familiar to all grownups, but never more than when compared to the clock of childhood, with its burden of hours to be wasted, a burden compounded by the as yet misperceived vagaries of hour hands and minute hands and calendars. Questions of measurement include: When will it be Christmas, summer, Friday, my birthday? Dinner? Young children float on an ocean unmarked by adult dates and appointments. Sarah stands at the front door, dressed to go, whole hours before a birthday party. Walker looks out the window of the car, uttering ‘Are we there yet?’ while still in our neighborhood. He cannot imagine that his parents treasure long car rides for their enforced enclosure, their near-idleness.
But childhood has many hours that must be filled. Is this one reason for our curiously misguided idealization of it? Waiting for important phone calls, we read professional journals while riding our exercise bikes. Dinner cooks slowly in the Crock-Pot while I fold the laundry, catch the lead stories of the six-thirty news, and police the crayon situation (she takes his reds, he breaks her blues). How different from the time when we drooped over banisters, loitered limply at the back door, moaned, ‘But I have nothing to do. I’m so, so, so bored.’
While our children wait to be older, imagining perhaps that grown-up busyness is a measure of happiness and freedom, they are amused by Barbies and blocks and crayons and tiny cars, by trains, stuffed animals, picture books, dress-up clothes, beads, stencils, pipe cleaners, fire engines, balls, balloons, putty, puzzles, and puppets. All of these, in every state of disrepair (Madison Avenue Barbie reduced to a gruesome paraplegic, her hair matted into dreadlocks), form a tide that washes over the surfaces of their room. Beds, tables, chairs – nothing is uncovered, clutter is fierce, the room infrequently tidy. Still, ‘What a great room!’ people say when they enter for the first time. The walls are decorated with Babar and Mickey Mouse and Beatrix Potter, in determined contrast to my own room as a child, with its one print, entitled In Disgrace, of a little girl, face to the wall, blue sash drooping, socks rumpled, sad-eyed puppy at her scuffed heels. Flanking this print were two framed prayers by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. Of a troubling and final nature, each seemed to indicate that I was not long for this world.
As a small child, I was high-spirited, careless, clumsy, and often in ‘Coventry,’ my British grandparents’ way of saying ‘the doghouse.’ Even without the solace of canine sympathy, I knew myself to be that painted, rumple-socked girl sprung to life. Who needed to tell me that I was my mother’s disgrace? She was pregnant and unmarried the summer after she graduated from high school, and every look she gave me was one of regret. My mother’s parents reared me to be all that she was not – responsible and studious and steady – and they decorated my childhood bedroom to exclude the whimsy revealed in photographs of my mother’s room, with its three dollhouses and trunks of dress-up clothes. Before I could read, I had a desk, a bookcase, and edifying messages on the wall – none of which helped to keep me out of the trouble I was bound to find.
Our daughter was still in the crib when I bought the giant Mickey Mouse decal, cut him out of the vast sheet of adhesive-backed vinyl, cut out each one of the rain of yellow stars that falls around him, placed them all with care as she watched from behind the polished bars of her crib. By design, the room is filled with happy nonsense, and yet Sarah seems already the studious child I was meant to be. ‘I’m going to my office,’ she says of her own art desk, a red-and-yellow-and-blue-and-green one, whose surface includes a light box for tracing. Sometimes she traces pictures, more often words, sentences. Her long hair falls around her while she works, hunched over in concentration, the light under her carefully moving pencil shining out through the dark strands.
‘What are you doing?’ I ask.
‘My work,’ she says.
We redress the hurts of our own childhoods; we do it even with abundant evidence that our efforts rarely matter. Last Christmas, in the guise of Santa Claus, I bought Walker an inflatable clown. Three feet tall and weighted with sand at his feet, he is the type of long-suffering companion who, when hit, pops back up. Having struggled under the seen-and-not-heard rule that hopes to cure little girls of untoward zest, I found the clown irresistible. But the only time our little boy pushes him over is to use him as an inflatable log, a kind of bench. ‘What’s the matter with him?’ he asks me. ‘He won’t lie down.’
‘Here,’ I say. ‘If you hit him, he pops up again.’ I demonstrate. Walker gives the clown a casual smack, shrugs. Every once in a while, passing through the children’s room, I push the clown over, watch him rise cheerfully, inviting another assault.
I find that I come into the children’s room when I am alone, anxious. Sarah and Walker are in school, the house is quiet. I put off work to sit in the chaise or lie on one of the beds that are so short I must curl, knees drawn up, to fit. Sometimes I tidy the room. If I can locate all the pieces of a board game, find both the left and the right of Barbie’s pair of pink plastic pumps, my worries are somehow lessened by imposing order on chaos – even this happy chaos – by my ability to find something we assumed was lost. I especially like to complete the puzzles, whose pieces are always scattered. Colin’s mother gave each of the children a wooden one, featuring a child of his or her own gender standing undressed before a closet. The little boy has interchangeable trousers and shirts and pairs of shoes, seven of each, and the little girl can try on skirts, jackets, dresses, and shoes.
For many months, the red cowboy boots have been missing from among the puzzle girl’s accessories. One morning, I find the piece lodged under a baseboard in our room and feel a tiny leap of joy: the redemption of recovery. I go to put the piece away, so eager to press it into the empty boot-shaped space that as I cross the threshold from our room to the children’s I almost miss what I am walking over. At my feet is a life-size version of the puzzle I am hoping to complete.
At five, our daughter is just beginning to understand herself as a creature of infinite possibility. We, her parents, each year let go of things we will likely never do, another trip we may not make, another sport we’re too old to take up. But Sarah is just learning of her choices, all of which she relishes, lingers over. She asks to be wakened early enough to consider every option of what to wear to school, and on the floor of the room she lays out possible outfits: shoes, tights, dresses, pants, shirts, socks. She does it for herself and for her little brother, and, after they are dressed in the outfits they have picked, and are gone, the rejected clothes remain.
The room I see is this: their sleeping selves are laid out, pajamas on his bed, nightgown on hers. Among table legs, train tracks, and Barbie gear, his blue trousers and race-car shirt pose solemnly. The shirt’s long sleeve reaches toward that of his sister’s pink pullover, carefully tucked into the waist of a black skirt decorated all over with pink flowers. A second-choice skirt – she prefers the longer, purple one – it floats above the legs of red tights, legs splayed crazily as if in flight from this room, as if to remind us, and the attentive boy evoked by the posture of those empty dark blue trousers, that she is leaping forward into life. Soon she will not live in the bedroom next to ours. Soon she and her brother will have separate rooms, later separate homes and separate lives. This room will, perhaps, become the library we once planned, the chaise re-covered in a sober leather or corduroy.
But for now the children are here, in this room next to ours, his bed only nine steps from the one in which we sleep, hers fourteen. I measure these steps, walk them like a prayer. How mysterious to have arrived in this place, this family, a child who never played house, who never held a doll, who never, not once, imagined herself a mother. How did it happen? From the shelf the puzzle girl returns my stare, her closet complete, her serenely smiling face as enigmatic – as exotic and unexpected – as a totem’s.
Home for the Holidays
Long after my friends and schoolmates had outgrown Santa Claus, I still believed in him. It was a secret, potentially embarrassing faith, one encouraged by my grandparents who beieved that, in other ways, I’d been forced to grow up too quickly. My parents’ marriage ended when I was six months old, in 1961, in a community where divorce was still more scandal than commonplace. My mother’s mother and father raised me in the house where she herself had been raised and where she lived until I was six. As I grew up, I saw my father only twice, and my mother’s leaving was something I precipitated, unwittingly, one Christmas morning.
I’d woken up too early. Hours before dawn, I crept down the hall to the fireplace to see if my stocking had been filled. Outside, the winter sky was still black; wind rattled the windows in their frames. The stocking was heavy, stuffed with promise. Having touched it, I found I couldn’t let go, and I lifted it from the nail and carried it to my mother’s bedroom, next door to my own. Her room was utterly quiet; there was no sound of her breathing. Her bed, when I felt it, was cool, flat, empty.
Filled with dread – where could she be in the dark, wide night? – I went to my grandparents and woke them up.
‘Mommy’s not here,’ I said. ‘Mommy’s gone.’
As soon as my grandmother turned on the light, as soon as I saw her face, I knew that I had made a mistake. I hadn’t saved my mother from whatever I was afraid might have befallen her. Instead, I had betrayed her.
She returned at seven, slipping through the kitchen door, her white Christmas Eve dress looking rumpled and dingy in the gray light of morning. The ensuing fight was spectacular, even for old enemies like my mother and grandmother. Loud enough to be heard through two sets of closed doors, it featured words I didn’t know, words that rang with complex menace. Assignation. Promiscuity.
Each Christmas Eve, after I was asleep, my grandfather would take off his shoes and dip them in the ashes left from the fire. He carefully made footprints that led from the hearth across the beige carpet to the tree and back, then wiped the soles clean. He ate the cookies I’d set out on Santa’s plate, shook crumbs on the tabletop, crumpled the napkin, drank the cold cocoa. In the morning, I noted all these signs and believed in them.
My stocking brimmed with gifts wrapped meticulously in marbled Florentine paper tied with narrow ribbons. I opened them slowly, with unnatural, unchildlike care. Inside were tiny carved bears, sets of colored pencils too small to sharpen, books the size of postage stamps. Always, the guiding aesthetic was of a life made as small as possible: an electric lamp complete with three-volt bulbs the size of apple seeds. It didn’t matter that I had no dollhouse to plug it into. I didn’t want, ever, to test it.
Adults find it difficult to reconcile the simultaneous knowing and unknowing that is inherent in faith. Children rarely try. I had many opportunities, even invitations, to conclude that it was my mother who filled my stocking. And I was old enough to have heard for years the playground challenge: You don’t believe in Santa, do you? Well, no, I didn’t, and yes, I did. What I believed in was some thing I identified as Santa Claus, having no more sophisticated language to articulate what I now understand as a longing for the ideal home. To me, this platonic space was so far away that it appeared as small as a dollhouse, but it was the place where my mother and I would someday live: a home too small and controlled to contain quarrels or tears.
The Christmas I was nine, my dark-haired, white-skinned mother went to Jamaica with a man I didn’t know and came home on New Year’s Day, her hair streaked blond, her white skin brown and peeling. In her absence, for which she tried to apologize with brightly painted maracas and pink shell bracelets, my grandmother had filled my stocking. On Christmas morning I saw right away that something was wrong. It was too lumpy, the things it contained too big: hair bands and candy, perfume, a matching pen and pencil set – nothing I wanted.