On Earthly Purgatory

I mean this to be more cheery than it sounds. After all, even Dante himself claims (in the Purgatorio) that there’s a way out of Purgatory (and hey, it’s no big deal; all you have to do is correct each of your inherent personal flaws). Ostensibly, paradise awaits.

I’m too agnostic to believe in an afterlife or in a God with a rubric. I believe that all of our heavenly joys and hellish sorrows are here, live and unimagined. But what I haven’t yet figured out is the lesson of earthly purgatory, or any tricks to withstanding it.

I define my concept of purgatory as all of what we tolerate in the hopes that our lives will improve, or even in the service of improving them. All of the waiting.

For me, sometimes purgatory is a budgeted obstacle, ignorable, but lately, it’s been glaring. Maybe the change came from hearing that my ten-year-old sister-in-law has scoliosis and will wear a body brace twenty hours a day for years (this seems like purgatory distilled; she’ll literally wait in a tube, filled with potential and hope for what’s outside). Or maybe it was something trivial, like learning that my building manager will soon change all the light bulbs in every apartment to cold, headachy compact fluorescents (if there is more purgatorial lighting, I don’t know about it). Maybe it was the sum of my loved ones who wait at home for absent or deployed spouses, those who drag themselves to tedious or brutal jobs in hopes of promotion, those who expect medical test results any day now, and those who find themselves lonely and waiting quietly for love, all added to my own impotent cycle of thoughts that has run me like hamster for more than two years, preventing me from going forward.

Whatever the trigger was, the details of purgatory have recently become too sharp, too overwhelming. I’m usually the one who has no problem finding joy in small moments, but right now I’m too conscious of the gray shame of the therapist’s waiting room, the sparse, improvised living situation we can’t seem to escape. I grit my teeth before the daily walk to the commuter train, knowing that some not-so-clever person will have intentionally crushed all of the snails that tried to share the dew-coated sidewalk. David Ferry says it best in his poem “Old People”:

They’re in a room full of people almost without

Any furniture, only some metal chairs,

So the walls resound and Ceberus barks a lot.

It is a nightmare of the high school lunchroom.

I start to think that no amount of reaching out to people whose purgatory has become particularly oppressive would do any good. I can’t even buy my little sis-in-law a copy of Judy Blume’s Deenie (a YA novel from the seventies about a sixteen-year-old-girl with scoliosis) because it has masturbation scenes in it and I don’t feel it’s my place to expose her to something she might not be ready for. I’ve forgotten (temporarily, I hope) how to make the best of my own comparatively mild purgatory, and I’m slowly becoming convinced that no amount of scheming and machinating will pull me out of it, that I am waiting on something external, which is scary to a control freak like me.

I know hindsight is a factor here, but I’ve never looked back at a purgatorial time in my life with nostalgia, only with reverence for what I did to get through it. But, stuck or not, I don’t want to wish time away. The only thing I can think to do during this time is give and give to the people I care about, even when people get tired of my love, or even if it makes me seem servile or desperate; doing so reconnects me with the world, allows me intimacy that I struggle for otherwise, and makes me feel productive even when I can’t do anything notable to help myself.

Ladybugs gather on the windowscreen today; it makes me think of the ladybug infestation that my friend Nicole had in her dorm room senior year in college. They just kept coming out of the wall, first ten, then fifty, then hundreds. It was like, as I said in a little poem I wrote then, “a wish made too many times.” Quietly, Nicole and I both recognized that this was the first of many signs that it was time to move on from our college-selves (the other signs were funnier and drunker). I’m waiting for that sign now, the thing that tells me that I’m ready to go ahead, to, as Mark Doty says in his poem “Fish R Us,” “want to swim forward, want to eat, want to take place.”

Ok, For Now.

Anyone who knows me knows that I love my mom with the encompassing love that I imagine mothers have for their children.

My mother has always been cosmopolitan, yet homey;  mysterious, yet warm and familiar. I love what I know about her life, and what I don’t know. She was an underwear model, a pool shark, a schoolteacher. She got so many parking tickets in college that a few cops showed up to her graduation just to put a face to the name. (“I had a Beetle,” she explains, “it fit anywhere.”)

She had me eighteen months after her brother was murdered, and she cared for me ably despite her grief.  When she didn’t like the childrens’ books that were available, she made her own and cut out pictures from magazines to illustrate them.  She stayed home with me every day while my dad worked or traveled, let me wear crazy clothes, dye my hair, be willful.  On a health kick, she started making her own orange juice; as a high schooler, I woke up every morning to a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice being handed to me by the person I admired most. I think I could never possibly thank her enough for any of it.

She was never ostentatious about her mothering, never told anyone else they were doing it wrong or made me feel guilty about the piles and piles of herself that she gave to me.  I felt loved and wanted every day, but as early as age four, I had nightmares about losing her, and it’s always been my greatest dread. My friend Michael said it best: losing a parent is the one thing  for which we still experience a child’s boundary-less fear.

This last month, she’s had dizziness, a perceived (though not actual) loss of balance, and paresthesia in her legs and arms. None of the “easy” stuff explained it (Lyme disease, diabetes, a traumatic injury, etc.).  Neurological problems are common in her family; her  father died from complications from Myasthenia gravis in his sixties, and her mother died from a likely combination of Altzheimer’s and Parkinson’s in her seventies. My mother is about to turn 68.  Here we go, I thought.

I did research like every panicked family member does; I knew that the neurologist was thinking brain tumor. I was thinking brain tumor too, except I was willing it, if it was there, out of her sweet head. Into an MRI machine my poor claustrophobic mother went, as if she were, as novelist Scott Spencer says (in his painfully good novel A Ship Made of Paper), “tossing up [her] life, seeing where it would land.” On the phone after, she asked me questions about work, covering her fear. I answered her questions, suggested trips to Ikea and visits with my dog, when what I was really doing was freaking out.  I’m sure we both spent this time not sleeping and eating nothing but the Halloween candy we bought too early.

I won’t make you wait like I waited: the MRI was clean. She’ll do some nerve conduction tests, but a recent neck and spine xray (done a few days before the MRI) now suggests that the problem might be arthritis in her neck pressing on her nerves. What if we all cried ourselves to sleep for a month over arthritis?  I’d be very happy about that.

So she gets a reprieve, one that I’d have traded anything for her to have. But for how long? As Oskar Schell (in Jonathan Safran Foer’s knockout of a novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) says, “The towers are burning, and we’re all trapped.” Eventually the news won’t be good, the problem not minor. How will I help her then? What on earth will I do to show her that she doesn’t have to worry about me, that I want nothing more than to give her what she needs?

And, another question: why have I been so lucky? Now that we’re both adults, my mother and I have a keen radar; we show up at the same places all the time without planning it. I’ve begun to ask her questions about her life, things I’ve always wanted to know. These things are gifts that not everyone gets. I have several good friends who have lost their mothers, either in childhood when they needed them most, or at some critical moment in young adulthood. We’ve never talked about it, but I imagine that these friends would have done anything to have their mothers walk them down the aisle, or have them by their side when their marriages failed, or have them present and smiling encouragingly at the birth of a grandchild.  If I could give these things to my friends who have lost their mothers, I would. I would move the Earth to do it.

For now, I get to continue; it is a luck I don’t feel I necessarily deserve.  Someday soon I’ll know the depth of this burden, will know the truth of a poem from Barbara Helfgott Hyett’s book Natural Law in which she laments the loss of her parents; in it, she describes herself  ”dancing in the living room to no one’s praise.”  But for now, I’ll do right, I’ll make the most of it.

“You gotta to go to Ypsilanti to find out the future,”

according to Chloe, a character from Charles Baxter’s novel The  Feast of Love. This novel was published in 2000, and it was a National Book Award finalist, which didn’t mean that I’d ever heard of it or seen it (because I hadn’t).  I picked up my copy at a used bookstore in Columbia, Missouri, where I was visiting my friend Nicole to help her pick out paint colors for her new house and cruise for amish furniture (I can’t believe I thought they’d have a website).

It was by far the best book I read all summer. Moments from it occur to me when I find myself in the same situations as the characters, which happens more often than I ever would have thought (and which also means that it’s a damned good book). On Thursday, I was on the commuter rail into the city for my longest workday of the week, and I was feeling tired and reluctant. I thought about the book, and about how one of the protagonists (a fortyish coffee shop owner) asks his father if he ever feels completely unmotivated for his job, and the father says something that I’ve been mumbling to myself over and over:

“Son, Monday morning is Monday morning. Everybody’s got to do it. There are no solutions, there’s only the work.”

I’d been mulling over that last part especially, the idea that “solutions” and “work” are opposites, which led me into  existential, IWW-esque pondering about the nature of work that I won’t subject anyone to (what is my “work,” exactly?).

Instead, I’ll tell you what happened next. At the end of my long day, while waiting for the train to go home, I stood near a group of tables in the train station. I usually wait outside near the tracks, but the temperature had dropped in that tricky early fall way.  A woman sitting at one of the tables had a book open in her lap, and, being nosy, I looked down at the book from where I was standing to try to figure out what book it was, and if I’d read it.

You know where this is going. It was, naturally, The Feast of Love. I’ll bet you even know what page the book was open to (I’ll give you a hint: “There are no solutions, there’s only the work.”)

It was all I could do to not yelp, “Oh, that’s a GREAT book. You’ll LOVE that book.” It’s in my nature to freak people out (I admit), but I try to collar this tendency when strangers are involved. But it was so tempting, the way it’s tempting to tell anyone who is about to do something that you did and loved how wonderful the experience they’re about to have will be.  To kids going away to college, I want to say Glorious!  Do everything, say yes, don’t miss one hour. To people falling in love for the first time, I want to say These startling moments make the rules from now on.

At these moments, I’m nostalgically jealous. I get this same feeling on a smaller scale with books that I’ve loved and that my friends are just reading for the first time.  I love giving my friends copies of books that I’ve read a million times, books that I know are capable of changing one’s shape, and I love when my friends trust me with the books that have changed them.

Though I don’t believe in coincidences, I let that strange moment of connection in the train station go unsquealed-over.  I’m hoping in exchange for my restraint, I’ll be rewarded sometime soon with the  moment’s meaning. Was it a warning? A suggestion?  Let’s have it, fate. Or do I need to go to Ypsilanti to find out?

My Last Words on Living in the City

(In the style of old radio broadcasts, some of these posts will be true stories rather than updates.)

When my neighbor had his psychotic break (calling his mother and blathering in some invented language, then threatening suicide and disappearing), the cops used my tiny studio apartment as their home base. Unable to locate the roommate or the landlord, they were trying to decide if they should break down the door. They sat awkwardly on my bed and couch, getting up periodically to check the hallway one more time.

I couldn’t help them; I didn’t have keys, and at that point, I didn’t even know his name. My only encounters with the twenty-something guy (who I’ll call Kal, because he looked like Kal Penn from Harold and Kumar) were in the middle of the night, when he’d drunkenly pound on my door, sometimes hissing “I know you’re in there.” I’d get up, push my bureau in front of the door, and go back to sleep. I expected him to someday threaten to huff, puff, and blow my house in. I was twenty-two, finishing up a limbo year before starting grad school. I worked at a grocery store that required a Hawaiian shirt as its uniform, and I had just broken up with a guy who’d turned out to be gay. It took me two horror-movie days after move-in to catch the giant Peruvian centipede that had arrived in an imported couch. It wasn’t the time of my life.

I also wasn’t much help because I was drunk; the cops had knocked authoritatively on my door at about ten pm, in the midst of some pre-gaming my friend Evan (who was visiting from New York) and I were doing with a Tupperware of White Russian and some unforgivable dance music. When the po-lice had knocked, my first instinct was to say Shit! Hide the keg! This time, we were legally drunk in both senses, though neither the idea of a suicidal neighbor nor the seven cops perched on my yard sale furniture created a party atmosphere, even with Nelly still playing in the background. This was the summer of 2001, before 9/11 changed everything. Now I look back on those cops lolling around helplessly in my apartment and am amazed; surely today they’d have broken the door down, and maybe had guns pointed.

When the roommate came home (we’ll call the roommate Andy, since he looked like a handsome college friend with the same name), he handed over his keys to one of the officers. The cops left behind indents in my bedspread when they got up en masse to see what would happen. When the door was opened, an odor of urine wafted from inside, and on a second inhale, there was also the smell of vitamins, a medicinal smell. Kal wasn’t in the apartment, dead or alive, but he’d pissed on the floors in every room. He’d upended furniture and shattered hanging artwork. He’d pulled all of the houseplants from their pots and gathered them into a decorative bowl with a candle burning at the center. Leaning against the wall in front of the bowl was a framed line drawing of Al Pacino in Scarface. Kal had crushed a bottle of Vitamin E gelcaps onto the kitchen counters, and the ooze had spread into the stove. The whole apartment had a sort of static around it, like a crime scene before you know what the crime is.

Satisfied that Kal wasn’t there, the cops dispersed (Kal would be arrested later that night on an Amtrak train in New Jersey after breaking one of the train’s windows in a rage). Andy went to his girlfriend’s place for the night, and Evan and I, we went out; the city moves, and we moved with it. The next day, after taking Evan to the bus station, I came home to activity in the apartment next to mine; Andy and his girlfriend Rachel were cleaning up the mess Kal had left. They had Bob Marley going on the stereo, and were wearing latex gloves. I introduced myself, offered to help, and then had five or so of the only meaningful hours I’ve ever spent with strangers.

I brought my cordless phone with me because I was still taking calls from my ex, but when the phone rang that night, I didn’t answer; I was wrist-deep in vitamin E, trying to muck it out of the stove-wells. We sang along with the music, and Andy, shaken by his friend’s mental collapse, found ways to make sympathetic jokes (“He knows something I don’t about Pacino,” he said, getting ready to dump the homage Kal had created).

When the place was clean, Andy made kichari; he said all of our livers would feel better once we ate it, and though I have no idea what my liver feels like, I felt good, warmed, less isolated in my chosen city than I’d felt in the whole year I’d been there. We had seconds and thirds while Andy and Rachel talked about Kal, filled in the vaguely menacing sketch I had of him with more human details. I went home with a recipe and a mildly less cynical worldview.

The spell broke, as all spells must, when Kal arrived home a week later. I’d been back a few times to see my new friends, but to Kal, whose head was shaven, and whose desk was now covered in amber pill bottles, I was still the weird girl-recluse next door. They both moved out on schedule at the start of September, and I started grad school. I never heard from any of them again; I don’t even remember their real names. But before that week, I knew the city as a solid, solemn place, where threat was commonplace, and where the soft insides of others’ existences were unknowable. I learned that even in a harsh place, you have to make yourself a little bit weak to know anyone, and there I was, made vulnerable finally by someone else’s nervous breakdown and a handful of mung beans.

Not a Mommy Blog

“‘Tell me,” he wanted to say, “everything in the whole world.”

- from  Orlando by Virginia Woolf