- - - - - - - - - - T A B L E++T A L K What advice do you have for parents of children ages 10 to 15? Discuss raising "middlers" in the Mothers area of Table Talk
- - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y A feel for a good story
Labia envy
Leap of faith
The high priestess of free love
Fat chance
- - - - - - - - - - Mamafesto
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A SEPARATE PEACE | PAGE 2 OF 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - One afternoon, while my patient sister sat with my senile grandmother in the nursing home, I sorted one more pile of bank statements. That time I found accounts I was not supposed to find -- accounts in my sister's name, my brother's name, in both their names, co-signed by my father. There was nothing in my name, and I sat and looked at this slim hill of paper and felt for a brief moment that I had slid all the way out of the family, after all. I stood up to him when I was 9 years old. I stood up, quite literally, at the dinner table. He had lost his temper without warning, as he often did, and grabbed my little sister by the arm and started walloping her, and I found myself on my feet, pounding the table and shouting NO, shouting STOP, and when I shouted, "You can't do that!" I felt it in my marrow. And the strange thing was that he really did stop. He stared at me, and for the first time, I wasn't afraid. I was heady with rage. He stopped, though not for long. I had grown big with fury. Somehow he knew that, and mostly left me alone. That visit, a few years ago, my sister left and I stayed behind; it was really my turn. He was in the hospital and I cleaned and sorted and remembered my mother. I made lists and telephone calls to accountants and relatives. Late at night, I paced, home alone, unable to shake the furtive feeling as I poured out a glass of his whiskey and watched his old John Wayne movies, violating the forbidden corners like bad girls do. Breaking the rules, like the bad girl I always was. I packed him a bag when he was well enough to go to a nursing home for a few weeks. When I took it to him, I said, "Dad, your bedroom is a little worse for wear. Maybe we could get it painted." And he growled, low like a dog, "What the hell were you doing in my bedroom?" Some time ago, I was a nurse. I worked a lot with old men, and I liked them. It was touching work, tricky work. I thought of it watching the nurses move him from bed to wheelchair, and I remembered the intimacy and the worth of small mercies. I remembered the dark amusement I often felt, the black jokes life makes on all of us. I was supposed to be amused at his cranky insults, the crust of resistance. I was, I am. I always was supposed to smile at the raw, cruel humor he's hit me with all these years like a fist. I have to tell the truth here; nothing else seems worth telling. The truth is that I do not love my father. He is familiar to me, and I understand the comforts of the known, of what we learn to find ordinary. For years, I longed to love him and be loved in return. But I don't, and am not. I feel what can only be called a sense of duty, a conventional and unimaginative state I wouldn't have understood too many years ago. He and I were bound together a long time ago. I have spent many years facing up to my own anger, slowly taming it. I find myself at peace with him. I found peace not just by accepting the wounds of our relationship, but by accepting the gifts. In fact, he gave me many things. He made a cage for my pet lizard, and he made me water skis and taught me to use a hammer and took me for rides on the fire truck. I am a writer in part because of him, and these stories. Sometimes, when I talk about family, I say, "family of origin," to distinguish from the one I created for myself after that. We say that to mean the place where we began and what a simple wish that is -- that we all originate at birth, immaculate. But the beginning isn't there; it's just part of a river of people, thousands of them in the end, merging into each other. All we can ever really know about our families is that our parents were once children, marked by their parents, and they simply go on, marking in turn. I found peace, with my origins and myself, by simply taking hold of who I really am and cherishing that and all that made me. I cherish my brother and sister, whose struggle was different from and also very like mine. I work at cherishing my father, in whatever way I can. When I left after that visit a few years ago, I stole the box of college photographs and clippings, and I look at them now and then, at their smiling, handsome faces full of the future.
There was only one way for me to escape the gravity -- I rocketed out of
there, I lit the fuel of fury and exploded and got away, and for years I kept
roaring on into space, farther and farther out. Now I'm almost out of fuel,
slowing down, taking a bearing on the next place to go.
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