THURSDAY, AUGUST 15, 2013
PsychoBabel
A few days ago, I was listening to an interview with Omara "Bombino" Moctar, a Tuareg musician who was on his first tour of the U.S. He speaks French but not English, so an interpreter was employed to ask him about his experience, and in particular about the presumed difficulty of connecting with an American audience when he doesn't speak their language. His wonderful response was (as interpreted), "We don't need to understand one another in order to understand each other."
Bombino's statement resonated for me because, in one of my work settings where I'm a supervisor, we've gotten some resistance to using professional interpreters for Spanish-speaking families when bilingual clinicians aren't available. (I should add that the children we treat almost all speak English; if not, we do assign only bilingual therapists.) We've had a high degree of successful outcomes for treatment utilizing interpreters; many of these clients have been able to terminate in half the time recommended by the particular treatment protocol in which interpretation is at issue.
In clinical psychology programs we have copious trainings in appreciating and honoring cultural diversity, and are induced to become aware of and confront our own cultural biases. It occurred to me that what we might have here with this push back was another kind of bias. One that could not imagine or acknowledge that there's more to being an effective therapist than understanding the words. That not understanding the language has, even, perhaps some advantages: potentially more attention to behavior and affect, or fewer assumptions about shared values and hence more openness to learning about the culture of any particular family.
As a bilingual supervisee (originally from Uruguay, raised in Canada) had edified me, the dialect of Spanish you speak can be crucial. He explained that he would use different words and a different dialect for a Mexican family, for example, than he would for one from Guatemala or other countries. In some cases a word could be offensive to one Latin group but precisely appropriate to another. I wondered how many of the bilingual clinicians on our consultation conference calls were as sophisticated with the language as he--or a professionally trained interpreter.
But this whole discussion brings me to my larger point. The therapy room is an intersubjective space. Therapist and client each have their organizing principles that commune and collide and are co-influenced. We have transference and countertransference. But therapists also try their best to, as Bion put it, enter the therapy room without memory or desire. We try to see the client, to understand him or her and reflect that back. That is the essence of empathy. A good therapist is one who will truly listen and observe and wonder. Who will be, as I so often exhort my supervisees, endlessly curious, and invite the client (and parent!) to be curious about his or her behaviors as well. To riff off of William Blake, the road of wondering leads to the palace of wisdom--or what we psychodynamic therapists refer to as insight--which is both the foundation for and the springboard to change.
I recall a related situation when I was just starting out as an intern. One of the first clients I was assigned was a 14-year-old boy who, his mother suspected, was smoking marijuana, which she believed was at the root of some behavioral issues. During intake the boy's mother inquired if I had any teen children of my own. I asked about the question behind the question to elicit her concern (it's interesting that when you do this and discussion of fears and anxieties ensue, clients usually forget about their original query--it becomes irrelevant.)
But this mother was adamant that she didn't see how I could possibly help her son if I didn't have a teen-ager myself. Perhaps she feared that I was an inexperienced therapist (which I was!) and she felt entitled to a "real" one; perhaps it was also her way of conveying how helpless and pressured she felt--since that was how she was making me feel (countertransference!). In any case, I disclosed that I did not have a teen son or daughter, and then I offered an analogy. I gently asked the mother if, in the event that she needed a cardiologist, would she only feel confident being treated by one who had experienced a heart attack? (Lame, I felt in retrospect, but my supervisor actually deemed it apt when I brought it up in group.) I don't recall the mother's response, but in any case the client was transferred to another intern at the parent's request, and I'd be dishonest if I didn't admit I felt somewhat relieved at not having to work with that parent.
I truly believe that our clients will tell us everything we need to know about them, regardless of how different we may seem. That is, as long as we're both both open to dancing with each other, so to speak. I also believe that, to reprise the title of A.O. Scott's New York Times review of Alejandro González Iñárritu's wonderful film Babel, "emotion needs no translation."
And speaking of film and language barriers, first timer Zachary Heinzerling won the documentary director award at Sundance this year for his film Cutie and the Boxer, about the relationship between two married Japanese artists, Ushio and Noriko Shinohara, whose language he doesn't speak.
In an article in the Los Angeles Times, Heinzerling describes his filmmaking technique with this couple, in which he practiced what I'd describe as Keatsian Negative Capability. He allowed himself to sit with ambiguity, to be "relatively absent," not asking them to repeat or to clarify things, and instead elicited, witnessed, and shaped a story from "a conversation they were having with each other" (he would film them and only later have their dialogue translated). Like a therapist, he created a space for Ushio and Noriko to play. Heinzerling says that the film was never intended as a form of therapy for the couple, but it has changed how they view their long relationship. I expect it changed Heinzerling as well.
TUESDAY, APRIL 16, 2013
What's Kale Got to Do with It?
I recently watched Steven Soderbergh's 2012 film Magic Mike, starring Channing Tatum, Matthew McConaughey, and Alex Pettyfer, and written by Reid Carolin (who has a small role in the film). I don't recall the reviews, except one that said it was the best performance ever of McConaughey's. And then at the end of the year I happened to see the film on the top ten lists of some indie film bloggers. So, ever curious, I eventually got the DVD from Netflix, and it sat under the flatscreen for three or four weeks. I was resistant.
When I finally watched the movie, I was more than pleasantly surprised. I kept waiting for the film to disappoint, but it didn't. It just got better and I became more and more invested. I have to say that it has one of the sexiest (involving no sex, I might add) and satisfying endings of any film I've seen in the past year. An end that's really a beginning....
Magic Mike is Channing Tatum's alter ego at the strip club where he's the star; the club is owned by McConaughey's character, Dallas. Mike takes Pettyfer's stripping newbie Adam under his wing, and also develops an attraction to Adam's sister Brooke (Cody Horn), who will have nothing to do with him. Olivia Munn (whom we love from The Newsroom, right?) has a supporting role as a Ph.D. candidate in clinical psych (!) who has the occasional hook-up with Mike.
What I like about this movie is how it resists convention. Mike is a good guy who's relentlessly good--which is not to say that he's boring or has no arc. He's saving his tips (he's amassed $13K in cash so far) to start a furnishings business (one-of-a-kind items he makes), but the bank of course turns him down for a loan. In any other movie, the character would have a postal moment, but not Mike. Because he embodies decency, kind of like a contemporary Jimmy Stewart (no, not the one from Vertigo).
The choreography of some of the dancing/stripping scenes is pretty damned awesome. And of course there are all of those pristine hairless chests and six-pack abs. But the strip club milieu is just the film's vehicle. Nevertheless, that seems to have turned off a lot of people. One friend said it wasn't for her and insisted that Channing Tatum can't act. Another acquaintance wouldn't even brook the idea of watching it, saying he was too "hetero" for the material. Admittedly, the trailer is not appealing, and it's misleading. But for what it's worth, here it is:
This resistance from friends who usually trust my recommendations/share my taste puzzled and interested me (as all "resistance" does a therapist--although in psychotherapy it's a somewhat outmoded concept--we therapists actually have to look at how we're co-constructing what appears to be patient "resistance"). Then the other day I mentioned the film to a therapist colleague (who had also previously worked in the film business), and the first words out of her mouth were, "Wasn't that a great film?" I high-fived her. I don't know that it's a great film, but it's a really good one, and I think a better one than Soderbergh's Side Effects, which I liked quite a lot. Better because you become emotionally invested in it.
Magic Mike the film is a lot like kale. Kale salad is ubiquitous now, at least in Los Angeles, but I imagine that most of us initially balked at its appeal, wholesome as it may be. (Although, ironically, the balking at Magic Mike may have more to do with the perceived unwholesomeness of the male strip club arena.) The first kale salad I made took what seemed like hours of de-stemming and de-ribbing and cutting. But now that Trader Joe's does the cutting and bagging, well, I don't know about you, but bagged kale has changed my life, and I'm eating kale salad every other week (I like to alternate with arugula). So here's my favorite recipe for kale salad (H/T Meghan at dosa for the original). It's great fresh but if you can't eat it all, it's also terrific for lunch the next day. Kale won't wilt or get soggy; it's solidly good, like Mike.
KALE SALAD FOR TWO
Chop a couple of cloves of garlic and toss them in a small frying pan with a tablespoon or so of olive oil and a half cup of panko (fancy Japanese--they do make a difference) bread crumbs. Stir until the breadcrumbs are toasted, about two or three minutes. Set aside.
For the dressing, chop a shallot (not onion!) and combine with the juice of one large lemon; whisk in a tablespoon or so of olive oil and salt and pepper to taste. Let sit while you assemble the salad.
Fill a bowl with pre-cut washed kale (or do it yourself if you must), and lightly salt and pepper it. Add a half cup or so of crumbled feta cheese, and a handful of finely grated Reggiano parmesan. Throw in some toasted pine nuts and, finally, the bread crumbs. (You can add leftover chicken for more protein. Bacon rocks as well--Trader Joe's also sells convenient no-nitrate pre-cooked strips.)
Whisk the dressing again and drizzle it over the salad. Then toss it all with your fingers, the way all the happenin' chefs do these days. (At least that's what Nancy Silverton recommends--that and salting the greens before you dress them.)
Then pour some more of that bodiful red you've already been sipping, roll with your resistance (a term from motivational interviewing--scroll down that wiki page) and slide the Magic Mike DVD into your unit. Then, afteryou've done it all, leave me a comment and let me know what you think.
BTW, it may very well be McConaughey's best picture so far....
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FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2013
Foyer Amour
Over the weekend I visited the home of some relatively new friends for the first time. As I walked into their 1920's Spanish, I recall that the first words out of my mouth were, "You have a foyer!"
The rest of the rooms radiated from this wonderfully free space. One might say unusable space, because the family needed more room, and this was not a viable area for, say, an office. But one could also imagine a gathering of people there drinking champagne, turning to smile at you as you walked in the door....
The truth is that, ever since seeing the film Amour, I'd been thinking a lot about the foyer in that film and how it functions. About why writer-director Michael Haneke and his production designer chose/built that apartment set. And why the foyer is so large with respect to the rest of the couple's apartment--aside from the desire to have Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) have space enough to try out her motorized wheelchair in the scene depicted above. I've been thinking about its windows that blow open, and the pigeon that the husband, Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant), so carefully and patiently cloaks and releases. About the fact that the foyer is the room that is almost broken into at the opening, an omen that Georges and Anne choose largely to ignore...or perhaps more accurately, to accept without alarm, which seemed very foreign to me (pardon the puns).
In many ways the symbolic significance of all of the above in the film seems obvious, almost simplistic, heavy-handed in description. But in Haneke's meticulous and unsentimental (some have called it "clinical") depiction, the result is, rather, restrained and mysterious.
A foyer, from the 19th century French word for "hearth" or "fireplace," was designed to be a place of transition from the cold outdoors and the fireplace-heated rooms beyond. The concept originated from the theater--where audiences went for warmth and repose between acts. And now, of course, it's where we spend intermissions and, on occasion, gather for receptions after performances.
As blogger Joseph Craven puts it in his terrific post, in a home the foyer is a "prelude," a "preamble": "The foy-yurrrr is the handshake of rooms."
In Amour, the foyer is certainly emblematic of Anne's transitional state between life and death, and the death-in-life (that apparently useless space) that old age and illness force some of us to endure. My friends need more space in part because they're contemplating taking in an ailing parent. My own 92-year-old stepmother, when she could last speak to me on the phone, said she wished the Lord would take her. Until then, she's in her own private little purgatory in a convalescent home, confined--at least physically--to the space between a bed and a chair.
I prefer to picture her dancing a polka with my long-deceased father in a grand and slightly tacky Italianate foyer.
Update 2/24/13: Click here for a link to article on Amour's production design: the apartment is a replica of Haneke's parents' in Vienna, and it was built on a sound stage. Haneke's wife was the set decorator.
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SUNDAY, JANUARY 20, 2013
Watch This Movie and See Me in the Morning
He came across as a bright and affable man, so his question shocked me. Still, I became defensive and began to justify: I told him I had worked in film for many years before I became a psychotherapist, and that I had a blog devoted largely to film and music. And that, practicing in Los Angeles, I have had many patients who are in the entertainment industry, and that I sometimes use films in my practice.
Later I thought about how odd the man's question was--yet perhaps how common it is for the lay person to think that a therapist is some kind of alien being. I recall meeting a man at an art opening who was overtly flirting with me. Then he asked what I did, and when I told him, his body visibly recoiled, and shortly thereafter, he drifted away. One didn't need a psych degree to get that his body language and behavior revealed someone who had a slew of things that he wanted to stay hidden. I also recall a colleague complaining that, on dating websites, she felt that indicating she was a therapist put her at a disadvantage.
So why is this the case? Do people presume that therapists will be constantly analyzing and critical of them? Do they think we have x-ray eyes? Is it that there is still, except in Argentina (where everyone goes to therapy) and Woody Allen films, a stigma and ignorance surrounding psychotherapy?
In a related vein, I'm often asked how I ended up doing such "diverse" things as going from teaching English to working in film and television to becoming a therapist. My stock reply is to point out that all of these endeavors are connected. In studying and teaching literature, my focus was on character and story (well, form and structure as well, but those are integral to everything else). What's film but narrative and characters and visual structure? And now, I'm privileged to have patients share their stories, and a large part of my role is to help illuminate their themes and patterns, as well as to understand their characterological or personality structure and their organizing principles.
Therapists need not only to be able to empathize and analyze, but we also need to be able to imagine deeply--how else are we to be capable of illuminating? I recall a session of group supervision as an intern in which we watched a videotape of a fellow intern with one of her patients; he was dropping reference after reference about which the young intern had no clue, but she had been afraid to show her ignorance by asking her patient about them--not only what he was referring to, but what they meant to him (aside from the fact that he seemed to have an erotic transference towards the intern and appeared to also be trying to impress her). Needless to say, the supervisor encouraged the intern never to be afraid to ask, for if we are fearful, how will our patients ever get over the fear of revealing themselves, of speaking the unspeakable? As David Schnarch posits in Passionate Marriage, unless we can tolerate the anxiety of this constant revelation without any assurance that the other will still love us, there is no possibility of intimacy.
The best advice the supervisor gave that day was to tell the group,"The more you learn about everything, it will make you a better therapist." Amen. And that is what makes the liberal arts invaluable. That, and curiosity.
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MONDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2012
Meeting the Monolith
I had befriended a twenty-something woman in the class who happened to be a close friend of my beloved St. Mary's English teacher, Mrs. Nuelsen. So I ran back to the class for help and the friend--let's call her Kirsten--offered to put me up for the night. My stepfather was at work on the night shift at the factory, so my mother had no means to come and get me. In fact, we didn't even call my mother--life pre cell phones!--until we had gotten back to Kirsten's apartment, where she kindly spent a good deal of time on the line reassuring my mother while I wilted with embarrassment.
Kirsten brought me a pillow and some blankets for the living room couch, and then she looked puzzled, as if she'd forgotten something. She apologized, "I'll look, but I don't think I have any pajamas."
I cannot tell you how this admission shook up my virgin teen world. How could she not have pajamas or a nightgown? Did they sleep without clothes?
Really, I was that naive.
I think Kirsten finally did come up with something for me to wear so that I didn't have to sleep in my skirt and turtleneck sweater--in those days my mother wouldn't even let me wear jeans to work at the mod boutique, where the entire staff wore bell bottoms. So I changed, and lay on the couch, and it was quiet, and then I could hear Kirsten and her husband in bed...talking. They talked and talked and talked. For what seemed like an hour. I couldn't hear anything they were saying, but the idea of a man and a woman in bed talking was a complete paradigm shift for me. It suggested a level of intimacy that I knew my parents--my mother and father, my mother and stepfather--had never had. I just knew this in my bones.
Think of it--a man and a woman could lie in bed without their clothes on and talk!
And so came the third epiphany: that no relationship, however emotionally intimate, is perfect.
After breakfast, Kirsten and the baby drove me to St. Mary's, where I went straight to the office to get a pass because I wasn't wearing my uniform.
And my parents picked me up after school, and told me that the Buick had been erroneously towed by the New Haven police, even though I had been completely legally parked, my parents also learned. And that they had yelled at the cops for leaving a young girl alone on the streets in New Haven at night. These were the cops I'd seen drag Jim Morrison away by the hair at the New Haven arena, after all.
Sartre wrote, "...man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world, and defines himself afterwards." Thanks to a '64 Buick and those cops, I'd had an existential surge.
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SUNDAY, JUNE 17, 2012
Frank
He kept a bottle of Anisette in the refrigerator and took swigs of it when he had a cold.
He bought me the black patent leather party shoes I coveted, which my mother wouldn't let me wear for fear that they would ruin my feet.
He used to hawk spitballs out of the '53 Buick.
When we had roast chicken, he would finish off the bird, then wash and dry the wishbone for us to pull. When he broiled steak, he'd assert that a little burnt fat was good for you. Once, family members complained that the Thanksgiving turkey was pink and undercooked; he said that was so it wouldn't be all dried out when reheated for leftovers.
One evening he took me to a narrow lot between two buildings downtown that had been turned into a trampoline attraction. Two rows of trampolines flush with the ground. We jumped around in our socks for about an hour. It was swell.
He worked full time at the Avco factory, where they made aircraft engines, but he also had part-time jobs on the side. On Saturday mornings he drove a canteen truck, and sometimes I went with him. He'd always give me one of the cherry popovers. He once attempted to start a rubber stamp business; headquarters was a bench in the basement across from the coal bin, where I'd hang out with him and test the stamps. Every so often he'd shovel some coal into the furnace during cold months.
When he took me to the package store with him, I agonized over my voting for Miss Rheingold every year.
He had a tattoo of an anchor on his arm, which is puzzling, since he had been in the Army.
He was the polka king.
My mother couldn't dance because of her heart condition. They fought instead. Once, hot soup from the pressure cooker was thrown. It wasn't pretty. I was 5 or 6 years old, and I recall crying and screaming bloody murder from the other room for them to stop.
My parents eventually got divorced and, after a few years, my father remarried. He introduced me to Mary by having us all sit in his car parked in my mother and stepfather's driveway. This mild-mannered Italian woman became his polka queen. The photo below was taken on one their visits to me in Columbus, Ohio when I was a graduate student at Ohio State in the late '70s. After driving 13 hours from Connecticut, my father bounded in laughing, toting his portable bar.
"Who wants a highball?" he announced to me and my boyfriend. That was Frank in a nutshell.
I believe I have his eyes and, less fortunately, his lips.
I wish he'd been able to protect me from my mother.
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SUNDAY, MAY 13, 2012
Stefanie (But Everyone Knew Her As Helen)
It's true. My mother's name was Stefanie, but everyone, including family members, called her "Helen." I'm not sure how this began, but I suspect it was just easier for her co-workers in the B. F. Goodrich rubber factory, where she hoisted mattresses on the night shift. I found one of her paystubs from 1960. For a 41-hour week, after putting $30 in a savings club, her take home was $58.39.
She smoked Camels. She made pies, always in twos: apple and lemon meringue. She had an appreciation for crystal stemware and china--she had three or four sets. For everyday, though, it was the Melmac.
My parents met at a Polish Falcons dance. My mother used to tell me that the main reason she married my father was that he could speak Polish, and, second, she was desperate to leave her aunt's house. She said she grew to love him. Later she outgrew it. To say that the relationship was volatile would be a vast understatement.
She liked clothes and was a trouper of a shopper. Once a year we'd take the train in to New York from Connecticut and spend the entire day hitting all the department stores on the upper east side. We'd walk for miles with our growing booty. At the end of the day, if I blew my nose, the tissue would be filled with soot. I wondered how New Yorkers lived, inhaling all that grime.
But she was also practical and frugal. Once, one of my Christmas presents was a box filled with necessities like Tampax and deodorant.
Speaking of Christmas, each year she would create her signature tree by draping it with Angel Hair, a fiberglass web that refracted light and gave the tree a magical glow. And made her itch for days after handling it.
We liked to paste S&H stamps into the little booklets together using moistened sponges. Then we'd go to the redemption store and pick out stuff.
My mother always wore the same coral lipstick, which she applied with a brush to her perfect lips. She used to spit into her mascara pad to activate it, which grossed me out. Her favorite fragrance was Tabu.
When I dusted my parents' room on Saturday mornings, I would sometimes try on my mother's padded bras over my clothes and dab on some Tabu.
My mother was extremely narcissistic. She felt that she had been cut out for better things and that her side of the family was classier. She was always the center of attention. I hated her guts the night she took over my slumber party by telling her stupid ghost stories, enthralling my guests. I secretly reveled when she ended up in a neck brace after trying to show my cousins and me that she could do cartwheels better than us.
My mother was highly extroverted and social. If we stopped at the Macy's lunch counter on one of our shopping excursions, she'd be best friends with the woman next to her by the end of the meal. This drove me crazy with embarrassment, and, perhaps because I also felt ignored, propelled me into introverted sulks.
My mother also had a borderline personality disorder, which I attribute to abandonment issues. As my mother told it, she was deathly ill with rheumatic fever as a girl, and she overheard my grandmother say, "It would be better if she died." There were about sixteen other children, give or take; she'd have been one less mouth to feed. When she was 14, my mother left to go to work on a farm in Austria and was effectively adopted by the family who owned it. I guess that sent my grandmother a message.
As a result of the rheumatic fever, my mother had a damaged heart valve and was prone to spells. When I was 12, a year after she married my stepfather, Bob, she had open-heart surgery and the valve was replaced with a plastic one. My stepfather and I spent so much time at the hospital that the staff would let me make toast in the kitchen on her wing. I loved toast. It was comforting.
Years later, when I was already grown and out of the home, my mother's doctors feared that she had another damaged valve, and they urged her to go in for tests. She stubbornly insisted on waiting until fall, wanting to spend the summer with my stepfather at their camp in Maine. She collapsed on the kitchen floor one day in June 1974; it was a fatal heart attack. She was only 49. Although my stepfather had found my mother's affective instability so intolerable at times that he threatened to leave, he never got over losing her; Bob withdrew into major depression and died of cancer in 1997.
My mother's borderline features made her mercurial and terrifying. Once, enraged that my closet wasn't up to her standards of neatness, she went truly Mommie Dearest, hurling everything out the closet and beating me with the wooden hangers. When we were moving into the house Bob built for us (in the photo above), his buddies pitched in to help. One of them nicked a piece of furniture trying to navigate it through the doorway, and my mother lit into the poor guy with every swear word in her repertoire while the rest of us cringed in horror.
When I was 9, my mother took me to see Psycho one evening. The audience at the Capitol theater in Ansonia was mainly teenagers on dates, and they gave us weird looks that made me embarrassed to realize how inappropriate this movie was for someone my age. The film scared the bejesus out of me, and we both loved it.
My mother was an excellent seamstress who taught me the craft. We'd peruse Vogue and Butterick patterns together at the fabric store. In my Mod wannabe days, she sewed me a Mary Quant dress with a white collar and cuffs. I still have--and can still fit into--the Nehru jacket she made for me out of an India print bedspread--replete with fabric-covered buttons.
I never told my mother that my older (reliable, responsible) friend Frances didn't drive us to Woodstock and that we hitchhiked from her apartment in New Haven instead. Not because I feared my mother's reaction, but because that experience was mine alone. And if anyone thinks I should have fessed up, well...that's just cracker shit.
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SUNDAY, APRIL 29, 2012
With and Without You
The therapist's job is always to foster a healthy attachment. The therapeutic relationship, we are taught, is supposed to offer the patient a "corrective emotional experience" (Franz Alexander). Yet, ironically, as Costin also points out in her book, the therapist must remain unattached to the results of therapy and not become invested in changing the person. Nonattachment being, she reminds us, one of the main spiritual principles of Buddhism.
Similarly, the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion exhorted analysts to enter the therapy room each session without "memory" or "desire." In short, without an agenda. In practicums, therapists-in-training are taught to follow the client's lead, to track the client, to not distract, or avoid, or force an agenda. But then we do have an agenda, aka the treatment plan, whether it's for the client to begin relying on herself and so stop starving herself, or to function through depression, or to be better able to tolerate anxiety. If we're trained in Evidence-Based Practices, we're in most cases required to be more agenda-focused in the sense of utilizing techniques in a highly structured, time-bound manner. But we still cannot become personally invested in the outcome. Yet how can we not? (Therapists deal with this, and with their emotional responses to patients, by examining their countertransference.)
This is the psychotherapist's unique dilemma--to foster attachment, and to be attached and not attached at the same time. In some ways, though, this may be the key to any healthy/good/successful relationship. As David Schnarch points out in Passionate Marriage, a relationship requires two differentiated individuals--otherwise all you have is fusion. Differentiation (a term Schnarch borrowed from Murray Bowen) refers to the ability to maintain your unique self in relationships, and it involves balancing two basic forces or needs--the drive for togetherness and the drive for individuality. We're all wired for autonomy and attachment. Keeping these balanced is the trick. Schnarch's elegant premise is that, in order to have any kind of truly intimate relationship, you must be differentiated enough to tolerate the anxiety of constantly revealing yourself to the other without any assurance that the other will continue to love you.
Jack White, in his brilliant new song "Love Interruption," sings, "I won't let love disrupt, corrupt, or interrupt me anymore." One can't help but smile at the slight pause before "anymore":
That's the chorus. But the rest of the song is about the craving. We crave the intensity of love, or falling in love, but, alas, it is a "falling." An all-consuming, sometimes destructive, distraction. At some point we may lose ourselves. That fusion blights our souls and corrupts us. "You gave it all but I want more," U2 sang 25 years earlier..."I can't live with or without you."
I once had a patient who was so emotionally fused with his mother that he couldn't imagine how he could continue to live if his mother died. (And he would say "if," not "when.") Once, he had tried to individuate by fleeing from her to another country--you can run but you can't hide, as the saying goes. And then there are those who try to escape fusion by making non-attachment a way of life.
Starting in 1994, Leonard Cohen spent five years in a monastery (the Mt. Baldy Zen Center). He was ordained as a Buddhist monk and took the name Jikan, meaning "silence." Ha! Some wiser part of Cohen knew that he was not ultimately suited to this path. In fact, Cohen reported that his teacher Roshi told him that he knew how to work but not how to play, and so sent Cohen down the mountain to take tennis lessons.
As Cohen sang, "There ain't no cure for love." So we might as well let it roll us over slowly...and then learn to play with our beloved.
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SATURDAY, JULY 24, 2010
Grace
She walks to the market in her Cowdillac T-shirt. She’s had it for years but couldn’t describe what it looks like without looking down at it--a vintage Cadillac painted in cowhide on a faded cerulean background. She’s forgotten; it’s been so long since she thought it was funny and her mother bought it for her. Now she just throws it on. It’s an around-the-house T-shirt, not for around-the-town. She wears it when she doesn’t care what she looks like, even though when she looks her worst there is a loveliness about her.
This morning, fresh-scrubbed except for her unwashed golden hair pulled back in a ponytail, Grace is beautiful. Her tawny legs are thin yet strong under the boxer shorts and she is the kind of girl men remember falling in love with in high school.
Grace is fifteen and has the rest of her life and the world ahead of her. She has been coming to the summer place in Cabo San Lucas with her mother, Rose, since she was four years old. Since before she can almost remember, though she does clearly recall one thing earlier: lying on her back in her crib, watching the shadow forms projected by the Calderesque mobile one of Rose’s men had made out of a clothes hanger and found objects. She remembers feeling content, yet wondering why no one was coming to pick her up and hold her; why a breast wasn’t offered to suckle. Years later she surmised that her mother had probably been engaged in sex that morning, one of the few when Grace hadn’t awakened wailing, as her mother claimed was Grace’s M.O. Grace remembers the utter peace she felt that morning, absorbed by the floating cardboard amoebas, the unfiltered cigarette, and the tiny gear, all connected by clear filament suspended above her.
Now, unlike that day, Grace is impatient. Even on vacation she takes long strides; her gait is purposeful. It is a kind of game. My goal is to get some leche for my granola. Local milk for the La Brea bakery granola her mother splurged on for the summer. It is the only kind of cereal Grace likes, though she is not fussy about anything else. Clothes--T-shirts, for example--she wears until they tear or Rose throws them in what she calls the “rag-and-bone shop” to be used for cleaning. Grace doesn’t indulge in buying make-up like her friends every time she goes into Sav-On or Thrifty. Instead she gets Rose’s cast-off thirty-five dollar Chanel gloss-and-lipliner compacts which Grace decides, as Rose did, don’t suit her anyway. She uses only the gloss, when her lips get burned from the sun.
This morning, fresh-scrubbed except for her unwashed golden hair pulled back in a ponytail, Grace is beautiful. Her tawny legs are thin yet strong under the boxer shorts and she is the kind of girl men remember falling in love with in high school.
Grace is fifteen and has the rest of her life and the world ahead of her. She has been coming to the summer place in Cabo San Lucas with her mother, Rose, since she was four years old. Since before she can almost remember, though she does clearly recall one thing earlier: lying on her back in her crib, watching the shadow forms projected by the Calderesque mobile one of Rose’s men had made out of a clothes hanger and found objects. She remembers feeling content, yet wondering why no one was coming to pick her up and hold her; why a breast wasn’t offered to suckle. Years later she surmised that her mother had probably been engaged in sex that morning, one of the few when Grace hadn’t awakened wailing, as her mother claimed was Grace’s M.O. Grace remembers the utter peace she felt that morning, absorbed by the floating cardboard amoebas, the unfiltered cigarette, and the tiny gear, all connected by clear filament suspended above her.
Now, unlike that day, Grace is impatient. Even on vacation she takes long strides; her gait is purposeful. It is a kind of game. My goal is to get some leche for my granola. Local milk for the La Brea bakery granola her mother splurged on for the summer. It is the only kind of cereal Grace likes, though she is not fussy about anything else. Clothes--T-shirts, for example--she wears until they tear or Rose throws them in what she calls the “rag-and-bone shop” to be used for cleaning. Grace doesn’t indulge in buying make-up like her friends every time she goes into Sav-On or Thrifty. Instead she gets Rose’s cast-off thirty-five dollar Chanel gloss-and-lipliner compacts which Grace decides, as Rose did, don’t suit her anyway. She uses only the gloss, when her lips get burned from the sun.
Rose is not rich but has always worked and had what she refers to as “fuck you” money. She has told Grace that having this is basic to a woman’s well-being and freedom. Not so much from men but from the vagaries of The World. Rose insists that it is hard out there, but Grace at fifteen sees only blue skies and glides through life. She sometimes thinks this annoys more than pleases her mother.
Rose has been down a rather rocky road. Her first husband, a man she had been “terribly” in love with from high school, committed suicide when he was just twenty-three. Afterwards Rose had a series of affairs and conceived Grace, whose father was Rose’s comp lit professor. Rose’s family promptly ostracized her although they continued to send her money. She moved into a commune and gave birth to Grace with the help of a hippie midwife and the midwife’s boyfriend, who held Rose’s hand through the “blessed ordeal,” as Rose put it, and ended up with a bloody palm. Telling that part always made Rose laugh.
For a while after Grace was born, her mother was with a gentle man in the commune who, Rose thought, was more drawn to Grace than herself, which she confessed she had somewhat resented. Rose left the commune after she got her degree; she took her own apartment and put Grace in daycare. Rose got a tedious job at a bank which she described as “sticking pushpins in a map,” although Grace thought there had to be something more to it. Eventually Rose landed a position as a graphic designer for an ad agency and married Tad, one of the account execs. Tad was sweet with thick dark blond hair and he liked to roughhouse with Grace and teach her how to play softball and rollerblade. Grace sensed even then that Tad really wanted a son. Grace liked Tad deeply, but after seven years her mother grew discontent with Tad’s exhuberant predictability. Rose was at the time in her mid-thirties and, Grace suspected, tired of his eternal boyishness, and yearning for the kind of “terrible” love she had had with her first husband.
“Where is the goddamned intensity in this life,” Rose once asked the inside of the refrigerator, angry at having forgotten what she gone to retrieve, no doubt ruminating on what she had lost.
So they took an apartment in the city and left Tad with the house in Oakland. Grace still imagines Tad watching sports on TV, despondent, running his hands through his dishwater hair. One day she would sneak back and visit and call him “Daddio” and he’d give her a sip of his beer as always and ask about her mom. They’d shoot some baskets and he’d invite her back for some of his atomic spaghetti but Grace would know he’d never be up to making it without her mother.
Then Rose met Paul and, as she put it, all hell broke loose in her gut. Grace thought that was a pretty yucky way to talk about love or passion but her mother said she would understand when she was old enough to read D.H. Lawrence. “There’s nothing nice or pretty about love between a man and a woman,” she cautioned Grace.
“Then why--”
“Because it’s brutal and wonderful. And necessary. Trust me--that’s everything you need to know.”
Paul was an artist, a painter with a small local reputation and, fortunately, a larger family inheritance. He was tall and rail thin with a ponytail like Grace’s. He wore mostly black and had the kind of off center looks which Grace noted older women referred to as “attractive” or “compelling.” She liked that Paul talked to her as if she were an adult, which was flattering. Unfortunately, Rose’s fire for Paul burned out quickly.
The one constant in Grace’s life aside from her mother was going to Cabo in the summers. The men were not allowed. The first time, Grace and her mother had camped in a desolate area with no running water, but Rose declared that no picnic. (“I’m afraid the Woodstock Years are over, Grace.”) The next year Rose found a tiny hillside bungalow which they had rented every year since. It was spartan yet lovely, and close enough for Grace to walk into town.
Grace steps into the tiny corner market where Carlos holds court. He likes to impress Grace with the latest CD’s in his collection. He’ll hold up his newest acquisition but Grace never has the heart to tell him she played it to death six months ago. This time, as always, Grace, being kind, nods and goes with Carlos out the back of the store where they sit on webbed beach chairs and listen to the music on the portable disc player strategically placed in the dirt between them.
Later, Rose wonders why it took Grace an hour to get milk; when Grace explains, she gets a lecture about sublimating one’s own desires to please men.
“I don’t have those kinds of desires,” Grace says, huffily, lying. “And Carlos is a boy, not a man, anyway.” She wonders what set Rose off.
“What kinds of desires do you have?” Rose wants to know. “The desire to be left alone, missy, huh?” Rose baits Grace and then attacks her mercilessly with tickling, sending Grace into paroxysms of delight.
In the evenings they sit always with their legs dangling off the porch, watching the sun set “über das Pacific,” as they have jokingly come to refer to it after Rose saw Grace poking through an old copy of Nietzsche. Her mother would be working a Cuba Libre and Grace would sip what her mother called a “Liberated Cuban”--Coke with lime, “mit out” rum.
“Don’t you mean a Virgin Libre?” Grace once asked her mother. “A virgin is liberated, Grace. Don’t ever think otherwise.” Grace had gotten peeved because she then knew that Rose could tell she was still a virgin. Grace knew a couple of other fifteen-year-olds who weren’t. She wondered if Carlos, a year younger, was experienced or not.
“When you lose your virginity?”
“What.”
“What happens?”
“You know what happens, sweetie.” The endearment was rare, cutesy for Rose, but then she was on her second Cuba Libre.
“No, I mean the all the other stuff,” Grace pleaded, wanting to be let in on the secrets.
“You’ll find out soon enough.” A different, clipped Rose kicked in, and she had that same puzzled, vacant look she had had the time she spoke to the interior of the Frigidaire.
“Isn’t it peaceful here without the men,” Rose sighed. Grace leaned her head on her mother’s shoulder; she did indeed feel utter peace. Like the morning in her crib she had never told Rose about.
Grace stared at the pink eraser speck on her black desk. Black was a void, but black collected. Bits of things. Smudges and fingerprints. Her mind was black. Everything stuck to it. Already she felt the memories like palpable ghosts.
Grace’s mother was sick. Rose would cough, pretending to have TB, which she believed a more romantic disease than cancer. Grace said nothing but bought cough medicine and put it on her mother’s night table next to the long candle gathering dust in its hollow. Rose never acknowledged this gesture of Grace’s, but Grace saw her swig the cough syrup from time to time and it made her happy, as if Rose were knocking back another Cuba Libre. Rose, former hippie, career artist (Paul had been the “pure” artist--or “Ivory Tower” artist when Rose had been annoyed with him), hard-as-a-rock mother was taking Grace’s gift as a cure.
Grace secretly hoped it would work. Her mother had a strange mind, Grace thought, and hence, it followed, a strange body. Grace thought it might just be possible. So much so that for Grace the cough medicine replaced prayer, which she was not expert at, gleaning only what she had from Rose’s long-lapsed Catholicism. Grace appealed only to the Virgin Mary, an indirect approach but the thing that made sense for a girl to do. As her mother had told her more than once, women need to support each other. Grace came to imagine Greek columns in the shape of women. Men would probably design them as giant Barbie dolls. You can’t trust the world to men, Grace was sensing on her own.
They stopped going to Cabo. The times in Baja had come to represent well-being. Rose and Grace would run around half-naked, but now that her mother had only one breast, they no longer did so. Rose couldn’t bear it, even though Cabo had never been a place for the men.
Grace wondered sometimes what Carlos was up to. Whether he had inherited the tiny market. Or become a drifter, which is what the now embittered Rose said all men were at heart, although she was the one who mostly left them.
“They come and then they drift off,” she would chuckle as she exhaled smoke. It wasn’t until years later that Grace got the sexual entendre.
Grace suspected that Carlos was not the drifter type. She could see him running marlin fishing excursions for tourists. But at night she could only imagine him sitting by himself in the beach chair, listening to his latest CD. She wondered if he ever had thought about her sexually.
In the winter, Rose met Ken. Well, didn’t exactly meet him. He was one of her doctors. A resident. In his presence Rose referred to herself as his “casualty” case. Ken seemed embarrassed by this. Grace commented upon it and Rose said it was because doctors were never taught bedside manners. Grace asked exactly what she meant.
“It’s simple, sweetheart,” her mother said. “They’re taught everything except how to relate to people.”
Nevertheless, Ken and Rose did begin to relate, even though he was quite a bit younger than she. After Rose’s mastectomy, when she absolutely refused reconstructive surgery or even a prosthesis, she would see Ken from time to time for coffee. A series of dinners ensued.
Grace had reached an age at which she was starting to date. One night Grace was in her bra and panties picking out an outfit. She caught her mother staring at her breasts. Rose said that at Grace’s age she used to stuff her bras with tissues to fill them out. Now she would need a boxful. Rose laughed and Grace knew it was to cover a potential crying jag.
Grace left with her date as her mother began the makings of a martini. She was becoming quite a drinker. Instead of cooking she made a new cocktail each day. A Grasshopper. A Rob Roy. The Bartender’s Guide had become Rose’s bible, but to Grace’s relief, Rose, feeling ascetic, limited herself to one cocktail per night. Still, the liquor cabinet was overflowing. There were even bottles of gin and vodka in the freezer. Coconut creme for piña coladas. She drank everything but Cuba Libres.
One night, when Grace’s date dropped her off after a kiss or two and some awkward fondling, she heard strange sounds coming from the living room. It was summer and only the screen door was closed. Grace stood there a moment, puzzled by the noises in the dark. When she realized they were the sounds of sex, she didn’t at first know what to do. Then her eyes adjusted and in the moonlight she could make out her mother and Dr. Ken, as Rose referred to him, on the couch together. Rose was on top of him, unclothed from the waist down, her T-shirt knotted up around her slim rib cage. Dr. Ken was moaning as if in pain, but strangely, Rose was silent. She moved rhythmically, as if in a dream state. Grace knew it was wrong to watch them but she was afraid that if she moved they would hear her and the spell would be broken.
“Then why--”
“Because it’s brutal and wonderful. And necessary. Trust me--that’s everything you need to know.”
Paul was an artist, a painter with a small local reputation and, fortunately, a larger family inheritance. He was tall and rail thin with a ponytail like Grace’s. He wore mostly black and had the kind of off center looks which Grace noted older women referred to as “attractive” or “compelling.” She liked that Paul talked to her as if she were an adult, which was flattering. Unfortunately, Rose’s fire for Paul burned out quickly.
The one constant in Grace’s life aside from her mother was going to Cabo in the summers. The men were not allowed. The first time, Grace and her mother had camped in a desolate area with no running water, but Rose declared that no picnic. (“I’m afraid the Woodstock Years are over, Grace.”) The next year Rose found a tiny hillside bungalow which they had rented every year since. It was spartan yet lovely, and close enough for Grace to walk into town.
Grace steps into the tiny corner market where Carlos holds court. He likes to impress Grace with the latest CD’s in his collection. He’ll hold up his newest acquisition but Grace never has the heart to tell him she played it to death six months ago. This time, as always, Grace, being kind, nods and goes with Carlos out the back of the store where they sit on webbed beach chairs and listen to the music on the portable disc player strategically placed in the dirt between them.
Later, Rose wonders why it took Grace an hour to get milk; when Grace explains, she gets a lecture about sublimating one’s own desires to please men.
“I don’t have those kinds of desires,” Grace says, huffily, lying. “And Carlos is a boy, not a man, anyway.” She wonders what set Rose off.
“What kinds of desires do you have?” Rose wants to know. “The desire to be left alone, missy, huh?” Rose baits Grace and then attacks her mercilessly with tickling, sending Grace into paroxysms of delight.
In the evenings they sit always with their legs dangling off the porch, watching the sun set “über das Pacific,” as they have jokingly come to refer to it after Rose saw Grace poking through an old copy of Nietzsche. Her mother would be working a Cuba Libre and Grace would sip what her mother called a “Liberated Cuban”--Coke with lime, “mit out” rum.
“Don’t you mean a Virgin Libre?” Grace once asked her mother. “A virgin is liberated, Grace. Don’t ever think otherwise.” Grace had gotten peeved because she then knew that Rose could tell she was still a virgin. Grace knew a couple of other fifteen-year-olds who weren’t. She wondered if Carlos, a year younger, was experienced or not.
“When you lose your virginity?”
“What.”
“What happens?”
“You know what happens, sweetie.” The endearment was rare, cutesy for Rose, but then she was on her second Cuba Libre.
“No, I mean the all the other stuff,” Grace pleaded, wanting to be let in on the secrets.
“You’ll find out soon enough.” A different, clipped Rose kicked in, and she had that same puzzled, vacant look she had had the time she spoke to the interior of the Frigidaire.
“Isn’t it peaceful here without the men,” Rose sighed. Grace leaned her head on her mother’s shoulder; she did indeed feel utter peace. Like the morning in her crib she had never told Rose about.
Grace stared at the pink eraser speck on her black desk. Black was a void, but black collected. Bits of things. Smudges and fingerprints. Her mind was black. Everything stuck to it. Already she felt the memories like palpable ghosts.
Grace’s mother was sick. Rose would cough, pretending to have TB, which she believed a more romantic disease than cancer. Grace said nothing but bought cough medicine and put it on her mother’s night table next to the long candle gathering dust in its hollow. Rose never acknowledged this gesture of Grace’s, but Grace saw her swig the cough syrup from time to time and it made her happy, as if Rose were knocking back another Cuba Libre. Rose, former hippie, career artist (Paul had been the “pure” artist--or “Ivory Tower” artist when Rose had been annoyed with him), hard-as-a-rock mother was taking Grace’s gift as a cure.
Grace secretly hoped it would work. Her mother had a strange mind, Grace thought, and hence, it followed, a strange body. Grace thought it might just be possible. So much so that for Grace the cough medicine replaced prayer, which she was not expert at, gleaning only what she had from Rose’s long-lapsed Catholicism. Grace appealed only to the Virgin Mary, an indirect approach but the thing that made sense for a girl to do. As her mother had told her more than once, women need to support each other. Grace came to imagine Greek columns in the shape of women. Men would probably design them as giant Barbie dolls. You can’t trust the world to men, Grace was sensing on her own.
They stopped going to Cabo. The times in Baja had come to represent well-being. Rose and Grace would run around half-naked, but now that her mother had only one breast, they no longer did so. Rose couldn’t bear it, even though Cabo had never been a place for the men.
Grace wondered sometimes what Carlos was up to. Whether he had inherited the tiny market. Or become a drifter, which is what the now embittered Rose said all men were at heart, although she was the one who mostly left them.
“They come and then they drift off,” she would chuckle as she exhaled smoke. It wasn’t until years later that Grace got the sexual entendre.
Grace suspected that Carlos was not the drifter type. She could see him running marlin fishing excursions for tourists. But at night she could only imagine him sitting by himself in the beach chair, listening to his latest CD. She wondered if he ever had thought about her sexually.
In the winter, Rose met Ken. Well, didn’t exactly meet him. He was one of her doctors. A resident. In his presence Rose referred to herself as his “casualty” case. Ken seemed embarrassed by this. Grace commented upon it and Rose said it was because doctors were never taught bedside manners. Grace asked exactly what she meant.
“It’s simple, sweetheart,” her mother said. “They’re taught everything except how to relate to people.”
Nevertheless, Ken and Rose did begin to relate, even though he was quite a bit younger than she. After Rose’s mastectomy, when she absolutely refused reconstructive surgery or even a prosthesis, she would see Ken from time to time for coffee. A series of dinners ensued.
Grace had reached an age at which she was starting to date. One night Grace was in her bra and panties picking out an outfit. She caught her mother staring at her breasts. Rose said that at Grace’s age she used to stuff her bras with tissues to fill them out. Now she would need a boxful. Rose laughed and Grace knew it was to cover a potential crying jag.
Grace left with her date as her mother began the makings of a martini. She was becoming quite a drinker. Instead of cooking she made a new cocktail each day. A Grasshopper. A Rob Roy. The Bartender’s Guide had become Rose’s bible, but to Grace’s relief, Rose, feeling ascetic, limited herself to one cocktail per night. Still, the liquor cabinet was overflowing. There were even bottles of gin and vodka in the freezer. Coconut creme for piña coladas. She drank everything but Cuba Libres.
One night, when Grace’s date dropped her off after a kiss or two and some awkward fondling, she heard strange sounds coming from the living room. It was summer and only the screen door was closed. Grace stood there a moment, puzzled by the noises in the dark. When she realized they were the sounds of sex, she didn’t at first know what to do. Then her eyes adjusted and in the moonlight she could make out her mother and Dr. Ken, as Rose referred to him, on the couch together. Rose was on top of him, unclothed from the waist down, her T-shirt knotted up around her slim rib cage. Dr. Ken was moaning as if in pain, but strangely, Rose was silent. She moved rhythmically, as if in a dream state. Grace knew it was wrong to watch them but she was afraid that if she moved they would hear her and the spell would be broken.
Rose was holding Dr. Ken’s arms down so he couldn’t caress her. Finally she sighed with some kind of resigned relief and then Dr. Ken grabbed her behind and moved his body hard against her and he groaned, startling Grace. Finally he pulled Rose down to him and stroked her hair. It was not very different from the way Rose used to stroke Grace’s hair.
Grace tip-toed back down the front steps, opened and slammed the car door in the drive, and took her time walking back to the front door. A light went on and Grace walked in. Not skipping a beat, Rose asked Dr. Ken--both now clothed but disheviled--if he’d like another drink. He said no, he had early rounds, and bid them both goodnight, looking meaningfully at Rose, a look which Grace knew Rose could not, at this juncture in her life or health return. Grace kissed her mother on the cheek and went to bed. Grace would never lose the image of her mother riding Dr. Ken, mixing her pain with pleasure. That night, Grace found her own desire and fell into her first adult sleep.
The next morning the world was different. It was Saturday, and Grace slept in, but not so late that she felt loggy. She loped down the stairs and felt with pleasure the movement of her breasts, whole and free. She stopped at the bottom of the stairs and put her hands on them a moment, feeling herself with joy and experiencing for the first time the power of her youth and beauty. What it meant to be young, the future full of mystery and promise.
Grace walked into the kitchen to find her mother haggard, a cigarette hanging limply from her mouth.
“Morning, Sunshine,” Rose said. Grace took the cigarette out of her mother’s mouth and threw it down the disposal. She didn’t know where her mother had gotten it. She knew Dr. Ken didn’t smoke.
“Does it really matter at this point?” Rose asked rhetorically. Grace got some sourdough bread from the fridge and put it in the toaster. Her back turned, she said, “I saw you and Dr. Ken. On the couch last night.”
Rose looked at her daughter hard.
“I didn’t mean to...eavesdrop--”
“Peep,” Rose interrupted.
"I didn’t peep. I came home and you were both just...there. I didn’t know what to do.”
“That’s euphemistic.”
Grace turned around, angry, but Rose was suddenly wistful.
“I’m sorry, Gracie.” Rose hadn’t called her that in a decade. “It’s not like the old days anymore. You know, B.C.” Before Cancer.
Grace said softly, “Mom, when are you going to stop feeling sorry for yourself?” Rose looked at her only child with more determination than Grace had ever seen in her mother.
“Never. I’m entitled to every shred of that particular emotion.”
As if on cue, Grace’s toast popped up. She buttered it in silence and gave her mother, now buried in the daily crossword, a new preoccupation, a bite. Then Grace took the funnies. It was almost like the old days.
Rose and Dr. Ken became quite an item that winter. He even came over for Christmas dinner, which Rose cooked full tilt for the first time since she got sick. Grace invited her boyfriend, who was coincidentally also named “Ken.” Instead of calling the doctor “Ken” and Grace’s beau “Kenny,” Rose referred to them at table as Ken I (her man) and Ken II (Grace’s).
“Ken II, would you like some more turkey?” Rose’s politesse didn’t betray a hint of irony or humor. But when he said yes, he would, Rose told him to just go ahead and help himself.
“Carve away,” she laughed, a little high from the Nouveau Beaujolais that Ken I had brought to the feast. The teens were offered some, but Ken II asked if he might have a beer instead. Grace held her breath. She didn’t know how much accommodation Rose could muster these days. Grace was embarrassed herself by his juvenile request and his naiveté.
Ken I was concentrating on scooping a crater in his mashed potatoes for the gravy. Rose appeared not to have heard Ken II and just poured a little wine in both the kids’ glasses. Ken II shrugged and clinked glasses with Grace.
After dinner Rose declared herself exhausted, just exhausted.
“I cooked all day and it’s over in less than an hour. Don’t you find that absurd?” she posed to Ken I, who looked bewildered, his mouth full.
“I think this is the best Thanksgiving dinner I ever had, Mrs.--” Ken II started.
“Please.” Rose hated to be called “Mrs.” But Ken II thought her response had to do with modesty, so little did he have a sense of her.
“No kidding. I wish my mom could cook this good.” Grace winced at his grammar. Why didn’t you say well, she thought. She glanced at her mother, who told her with her eyes to dismiss the lapse. Rose liked Ken II. She wouldn’t have called him Ken II if she didn’t.
“So the upshot is, you guys will have to clean up.” I’m done in for the rest of the day.” And with that, Rose retired to the living room couch, where she turned on the TV with the remote. This was rude and odd, because Rose never watched television. Grace knew something had forever changed. The two Kens kept eating, blissfully unaware of the irony of a woman with one breast retiring to what she had always called the boob tube.
As Grace and her boyfriend picked up the plates a few minutes later, Grace was touched to see that Dr. Ken had put his hand on her mother’s forehead. He wasn’t checking for fever. It was more priestly, like he was blessing her on her journey.
They took one last trip to Cabo. As always, it was without the men. It was the spring following that Christmas, and Rose was due to have her remaining breast removed when they returned. Dr. Ken had begged her not to wait for “the operation”(“Call it a goddamn mastectomy--you’re a doctor,” Rose had cried, collapsing into his arms and beating her fists against him). Grace had never seen her mother so angry, so beaten down by life. But now, here in Cabo, Rose seemed some particle of her old self again.
Shortly after the holidays Grace had lost her virginity with Ken II. She knew she wasn’t in love with him but something in her was ready and she knew he was the right one, with his sweet gangliness and the cascading cordovan-dyed hair that she loved to watch sweep across his face. She didn’t tell her mother about it. But she knew that Rose knew, because the morning after, Rose did a very strange, wonderful thing: she brought Grace French toast with cinnamon in bed.
When Grace was little, before she was allowed to operate the toaster oven or knew how to cook anything, she would sprinkle cinnamon on bare bread and bring it to her mother in a colander (she couldn’t reach the cabinet with the dishes), a morning offering. Rose never minded that the colander leaked cinnamon all over the covers and she ate the dry bread with gusto, even when Grace forgot the orange juice to wash it down. Grace would take a bite of her own piece and let the bread stick to the roof of her mouth, savoring the cinnamon. It was like a few years later, when she secretly went to Mass with a Catholic friend and Jesus-in-the-form-of-a-Communion wafer got stuck to the roof of her mouth, and she wished she had gone to the Protestant service where they purportedly got some wine as well. Grace never told her mother about that.
On this Cabo morning Rose had made a breakfast of fruit and Mexican pastries, and they ate in virtual silence, scrunched together in Grace’s twin bed. Occasionally they would look at each other and smack their lips and smile. Afterwards Grace lay on her mother’s flat right chest and stroked her, and the two fell back to sleep.
They were awakened by the telephone ringing.
“You get it, Grace. I’m sure it’s your man calling for you.”
But it was Carlos. Grace had looked him up. He said he was now training to manage his uncle’s restaurant and invited her there. Rose said it was okay, she just wanted to sleep, so Grace went down that afternoon.
Carlos had a girlfriend, Almia, who looked at Grace askance but had no need to: Almia was very beautiful, with long shiny dark hair and heat in her eyes. Grace would always be pretty, but she knew she would never exude that kind of heat, though she might feel it inside. Sometimes when she touched her breasts, thinking of her Ken, she would feel a spark, a line of electricity that traveled straight to her womb. It was odd, though, how it happened more when she thought about Ken touching her than when he actually did it. Her breasts made her feel sexual. She understood now what her mother had lost.
“You bring your mother here to dinner,” Carlos told her. “I’ll make sure it’s special.” Grace thanked him and left under Almia’s intense scrutiny of the gringa.
Carlos kept his promise and treated Rose and Grace well, giving them the best table in the house and refusing to let them pay. Almia, it turned out, worked there as a hostess. She wore a fashionable slip dress with a tiny T underneath.
“Your friend Carlos has found himself quite a sultry woman,” Rose commented over the flan. Grace bristled over Rose’s assessment of Almia as a woman, knowing that Rose still considered Grace girl or at best a “young woman.” Then Grace wondered if she was jealous of Almia because she was sultry or because Grace herself was somewhere attracted to Carlos. But she dismissed this, thinking that if she had to wonder it probably didn’t exist.
“But she seems not to be Carlos’ type.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Grace was annoyed but Rose either didn’t pick up on it or ignored it.
“Well, he’s sweet. I always imagined him with a more naive girl, a warmer type. Like you.”
“You think I’m naive?”
“Not exactly. But you have a purity about you that suggests innocence and naiveté. I think your soul is pure in ways that mine never was.”
“It is not.”
“I meant it as a compliment, Daughter.”
Her mother took her hand and Grace let her hold it. Shortly thereafter they thanked Carlos and Almia, bid them goodnight, and walked all the way back to their bungalow. Cabo was so built up now that there was a lot of ambient light. Yet you could still see the stars and feel your wonderful insignificance in their universe. The night was dry and fragrant and full of the sound of waves. Carlos had this every day. Grace wondered if he realized this.
The day before they were to leave Cabo, Grace went down to the pier to watch the marlin fishers (as Rose called them--”fishermen” was not acceptable). When Grace returned she spied her mother on the veranda, basking in the sun like it was a memory. Rose was topless. Grace’s breath stopped. On her mother’s chest was an obscene fissure, as if someone had tried to butcher a woman into manhood. Grace couldn’t stop staring. It was the first time she had seen it. Her mother’s left breast lay flat and low, but it was still part of her womanhood. It was as though the other half of Rose had been plucked by some cruel Grecian god or beast. But as Grace stood and looked, the scar turned beautiful in the hideous bravery it objectified. It was like a road, or a mountain range on a map. Not neat and straight, but very much the road and range of Rose’s fractured life. The remaining breast simply seemed tired in comparison. But the longer Grace watched, strangely, Rose seemed to her whole. Rose was luxuriating in the sun as she had in her young years, without loss and anger.
It was at that moment that Grace realized that her mother was going to die. When she seemed the most alive of any time in recent history. Grace knew, too, that Rose did not intend to return home, would not have the operation and let Ken I or any other man take her remaining breast and still love her. She was whole within herself but outwardly she was, would always be, a broken woman.
Grace went back home without her mother. Dr. Ken cried and wanted to pack and go get Rose, but Grace put her arm on him, and whatever love and self-absorption he was indulging was replaced by sudden clarity.
“Your mother...” was all he said, shaking his head, full of commiseration and appreciation.
Grace had asked Carlos to look in on Rose, and when she got very sick he called immediately and Grace went back down and clasped Rose’s hand in the local hospital, watching her accept death, finally content in her railed bed like a crib.
Grace, feeling a woman now, goes in and closes up the bungalow. She finds her old Cowdillac T-shirt in the rag-and-bone shop, smiles, and tucks it in her backpack. She understands for the first time why her mother had never brought any of their men here. It was Rose’s way of reminding herself that we live and we die separately, not in a commune or even a family but in the bed we have made our self.
“I think this is the best Thanksgiving dinner I ever had, Mrs.--” Ken II started.
“Please.” Rose hated to be called “Mrs.” But Ken II thought her response had to do with modesty, so little did he have a sense of her.
“No kidding. I wish my mom could cook this good.” Grace winced at his grammar. Why didn’t you say well, she thought. She glanced at her mother, who told her with her eyes to dismiss the lapse. Rose liked Ken II. She wouldn’t have called him Ken II if she didn’t.
“So the upshot is, you guys will have to clean up.” I’m done in for the rest of the day.” And with that, Rose retired to the living room couch, where she turned on the TV with the remote. This was rude and odd, because Rose never watched television. Grace knew something had forever changed. The two Kens kept eating, blissfully unaware of the irony of a woman with one breast retiring to what she had always called the boob tube.
As Grace and her boyfriend picked up the plates a few minutes later, Grace was touched to see that Dr. Ken had put his hand on her mother’s forehead. He wasn’t checking for fever. It was more priestly, like he was blessing her on her journey.
They took one last trip to Cabo. As always, it was without the men. It was the spring following that Christmas, and Rose was due to have her remaining breast removed when they returned. Dr. Ken had begged her not to wait for “the operation”(“Call it a goddamn mastectomy--you’re a doctor,” Rose had cried, collapsing into his arms and beating her fists against him). Grace had never seen her mother so angry, so beaten down by life. But now, here in Cabo, Rose seemed some particle of her old self again.
Shortly after the holidays Grace had lost her virginity with Ken II. She knew she wasn’t in love with him but something in her was ready and she knew he was the right one, with his sweet gangliness and the cascading cordovan-dyed hair that she loved to watch sweep across his face. She didn’t tell her mother about it. But she knew that Rose knew, because the morning after, Rose did a very strange, wonderful thing: she brought Grace French toast with cinnamon in bed.
When Grace was little, before she was allowed to operate the toaster oven or knew how to cook anything, she would sprinkle cinnamon on bare bread and bring it to her mother in a colander (she couldn’t reach the cabinet with the dishes), a morning offering. Rose never minded that the colander leaked cinnamon all over the covers and she ate the dry bread with gusto, even when Grace forgot the orange juice to wash it down. Grace would take a bite of her own piece and let the bread stick to the roof of her mouth, savoring the cinnamon. It was like a few years later, when she secretly went to Mass with a Catholic friend and Jesus-in-the-form-of-a-Communion wafer got stuck to the roof of her mouth, and she wished she had gone to the Protestant service where they purportedly got some wine as well. Grace never told her mother about that.
On this Cabo morning Rose had made a breakfast of fruit and Mexican pastries, and they ate in virtual silence, scrunched together in Grace’s twin bed. Occasionally they would look at each other and smack their lips and smile. Afterwards Grace lay on her mother’s flat right chest and stroked her, and the two fell back to sleep.
They were awakened by the telephone ringing.
“You get it, Grace. I’m sure it’s your man calling for you.”
But it was Carlos. Grace had looked him up. He said he was now training to manage his uncle’s restaurant and invited her there. Rose said it was okay, she just wanted to sleep, so Grace went down that afternoon.
Carlos had a girlfriend, Almia, who looked at Grace askance but had no need to: Almia was very beautiful, with long shiny dark hair and heat in her eyes. Grace would always be pretty, but she knew she would never exude that kind of heat, though she might feel it inside. Sometimes when she touched her breasts, thinking of her Ken, she would feel a spark, a line of electricity that traveled straight to her womb. It was odd, though, how it happened more when she thought about Ken touching her than when he actually did it. Her breasts made her feel sexual. She understood now what her mother had lost.
“You bring your mother here to dinner,” Carlos told her. “I’ll make sure it’s special.” Grace thanked him and left under Almia’s intense scrutiny of the gringa.
Carlos kept his promise and treated Rose and Grace well, giving them the best table in the house and refusing to let them pay. Almia, it turned out, worked there as a hostess. She wore a fashionable slip dress with a tiny T underneath.
“Your friend Carlos has found himself quite a sultry woman,” Rose commented over the flan. Grace bristled over Rose’s assessment of Almia as a woman, knowing that Rose still considered Grace girl or at best a “young woman.” Then Grace wondered if she was jealous of Almia because she was sultry or because Grace herself was somewhere attracted to Carlos. But she dismissed this, thinking that if she had to wonder it probably didn’t exist.
“But she seems not to be Carlos’ type.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Grace was annoyed but Rose either didn’t pick up on it or ignored it.
“Well, he’s sweet. I always imagined him with a more naive girl, a warmer type. Like you.”
“You think I’m naive?”
“Not exactly. But you have a purity about you that suggests innocence and naiveté. I think your soul is pure in ways that mine never was.”
“It is not.”
“I meant it as a compliment, Daughter.”
Her mother took her hand and Grace let her hold it. Shortly thereafter they thanked Carlos and Almia, bid them goodnight, and walked all the way back to their bungalow. Cabo was so built up now that there was a lot of ambient light. Yet you could still see the stars and feel your wonderful insignificance in their universe. The night was dry and fragrant and full of the sound of waves. Carlos had this every day. Grace wondered if he realized this.
The day before they were to leave Cabo, Grace went down to the pier to watch the marlin fishers (as Rose called them--”fishermen” was not acceptable). When Grace returned she spied her mother on the veranda, basking in the sun like it was a memory. Rose was topless. Grace’s breath stopped. On her mother’s chest was an obscene fissure, as if someone had tried to butcher a woman into manhood. Grace couldn’t stop staring. It was the first time she had seen it. Her mother’s left breast lay flat and low, but it was still part of her womanhood. It was as though the other half of Rose had been plucked by some cruel Grecian god or beast. But as Grace stood and looked, the scar turned beautiful in the hideous bravery it objectified. It was like a road, or a mountain range on a map. Not neat and straight, but very much the road and range of Rose’s fractured life. The remaining breast simply seemed tired in comparison. But the longer Grace watched, strangely, Rose seemed to her whole. Rose was luxuriating in the sun as she had in her young years, without loss and anger.
It was at that moment that Grace realized that her mother was going to die. When she seemed the most alive of any time in recent history. Grace knew, too, that Rose did not intend to return home, would not have the operation and let Ken I or any other man take her remaining breast and still love her. She was whole within herself but outwardly she was, would always be, a broken woman.
Grace went back home without her mother. Dr. Ken cried and wanted to pack and go get Rose, but Grace put her arm on him, and whatever love and self-absorption he was indulging was replaced by sudden clarity.
“Your mother...” was all he said, shaking his head, full of commiseration and appreciation.
Grace had asked Carlos to look in on Rose, and when she got very sick he called immediately and Grace went back down and clasped Rose’s hand in the local hospital, watching her accept death, finally content in her railed bed like a crib.
Grace, feeling a woman now, goes in and closes up the bungalow. She finds her old Cowdillac T-shirt in the rag-and-bone shop, smiles, and tucks it in her backpack. She understands for the first time why her mother had never brought any of their men here. It was Rose’s way of reminding herself that we live and we die separately, not in a commune or even a family but in the bed we have made our self.
“....Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.”
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.”
--William Butler Yeats
(c) 1995 Sharon Moore
Originally apppeared in
A Room of One's Own
Fall/Winter 1996
Vol. 19:3
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