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West LA by Streetlight

PacificOceanThis poem began, as many of my poems do, with an image. Not just an image, but the words to express them, as well. “Maria is under the sink again.” The sentence lodged in my mind, rattled around in there as I thought and wrote about other things — whether there was milk in the house for my daughter’s breakfast, how to push through a tricky spot in a story or poem I was writing, how to fake enthusiasm for an editing client’s boring prose. “Maria is under the sink again” rumbled there, a bass note below the more pressing music of everyday life.

Within days, the phrase accrued other images — the broken glass of a tall votive candle on the floor, the strange darkness of an unfamiliar apartment at night, the black eyes that managed to look blank and intense at the same time. Each one drew me back to a night many years ago, when I was called upon to help a young woman who had lost the ability to help herself.

Another Ocean is based on a personal experience. Her name really was Maria (I will use actual names here because they are so common and widespread). The suspicious landlord was true to life, too, as was the sensation of standing amid shadows that didn’t delineate light from dark, but dark from darker against the wall, but there are elements I don’t remember. Was it a studio or one-bedroom apartment? Did we sit on a couch or a bed? Was there really a billboard hanging right over the parking lot of the building? Was the 10 freeway really only a block or two away?

Those aren’t the details that matter, though. It’s the ones that have been etched in my mind that have left their mark: how my friend, Jim, and I stood on the exterior walkway that ran the length of the building and pounded on the door. How I sent him — the immediate source of Maria’s distress that night — away once the landlord let us in. How I entered on my own. I remember how her eyes bored into me, trying to communicate the profundity of the message of love that the voices in her head were communicating to her. I remember how slight her wrist felt as I laddered band-aids over the cuts she had made there, and how the EMTs, who had seen far worse and were on just another night’s shift, commented on my handiwork before they took her away.

I never did see her again, which lies at the core of my motivation for writing the poem. Maria and I weren’t close. I wasn’t there at her door desperate to get inside because we shared a special bond. I was there because Jim panicked and called me to help him. If I ever knew the reason he chose me over our other friends, I have long forgotten it. Perhaps he wanted a woman with him, or maybe he knew that the other young men in our small circle were as feckless as he was.

We had all moved to Los Angeles after finishing college to attend graduate school. We gathered in the evenings at Kings Road Café to read, grade student papers, and gossip about the more colorful characters in our departments. Still in our twenties, we were no longer children, but we weren’t yet the adults we would eventually become.

Many people experience early adulthood as a time of expansive inquiry. We grab it as an opportunity to fully and finally separate from even the echo of parental mores and beliefs. We strike out on our own. Perhaps it’s a tragedy, or just a sad irony, that it is also a time of life when many mental illnesses first become apparent, as well.

The two converged for Maria. She was brilliant, one of smartest people I knew. She was also fragile, with a history of mental illness and suicide attempts. So when she became involved with Jim — who was not exactly boyfriend material at the time — and went off her medications, she became agitated to the point of harming herself. Jim didn’t cause her to cut herself. Her vulnerability made her unable to address even the most common of situations — romantic disappointment — any other way.

Which is how I found myself driving through the dark streets of a Los Angeles we don’t see on television. There were no mansions, no swaying palm trees lining streets with perfectly manicured lawns. None of the pop culture clichés of California living held true there. Instead, it was full of squat, uninspired mid-twentieth century apartment buildings full of people like Maria (and me). They were students on tight budgets, struggling actors, families who couldn’t afford anything else. It lay only a few miles from the Pacific, but there was no hint of salt in the air.

There was something about the confluence of all those elements — our youth, the shabby streets at night, the urgency of Maria’s plight — that lodged in my mind, even though it all happened so long ago, and I have moved, if not far away, then into a different LA, and a vastly different life.

Maria was taken to the hospital, then pulled out of school by her parents. A couple of years later — memory places me back at Kings Road Café, but memory is often faulty — I learned that she had married and had a baby. That was the last I heard of her.

After the paramedics took her away, I went home, got up the next morning, and went back to my studies. It’s not that the experience of sitting with Maria, trying to keep her relaxed until the professionals arrived, didn’t leave its mark on me. Even if the cuts she inflicted on herself weren’t deep enough to kill her and could be covered by a full box of band-aids, I helped save her life that night. It was that suicide attempt that ultimately led Maria to get the treatment she needed. I’m grateful to have been given the opportunity to be there, the right person in the right moment, but it didn’t have a lasting effect on my day-to-day existence.

We shouldn’t trust memory. It’s an imperfect system for organizing the narratives we tell ourselves about our lives, and yet it is all we have. “Another Ocean” can’t duplicate the events as they were. Too much time has passed. That’s why I chose to use 2nd-person address in the poem. Because although it was an experience that happened to me, I am no longer the person to whom it happened.

Still, this, like many of my poems, is drawn from a particular memory, not because I want to memorialize myself. Rather, I believe that we can access the universal through the specific. What I shared with Maria that night was an unexpected, if brief, intimacy that was only possible in that place and at that time.

When I wrote Another Ocean my aim was to capture something of the intensity of that period of life, after the cocoon of childhood has broken open, but before the responsibilities and sometimes numbing routine of adulthood takes hold, as well as its fleeting nature. It is then, when so many of us are trying to sort out who we are and who we want to be, that these moments of high drama, some frivolous and others deeply serious, abound. Some of them influence the direction our lives will take. Others speed by like cars on a freeway.

It is with a deep sense of gratitude that I can say I have never suffered from auditory hallucinations. But I carry voices around in my head too. What else should I call living with a single phrase—“Maria is under the sink again”—jangling around among all the other thoughts that flit through my consciousness until it coalesced into a poem?

When I stop to think about it, my “voices” do mirror Maria’s in one way. For a poem of mine to succeed it has to originate in that small voice inside my head, one that stays calm beneath the agitated maelstrom of thoughts and impressions, and is animated by curiosity and engagement. Maria spoke of love. Likewise, each poem I write, no matter the subject matter, is a love poem to this wild, unfathomable world into which we have all been thrust.

 

Michal Lemberger’s poems have appeared in Daily Poetry, The Bellevue Literary Review, The Rattling Wall, poeticdiversity, and elsewhere. Prose has appeared in publications including Slate, Salon, and Narratively. Her collection of short stories, After Abel, will be published by Prospect park Books in 2015. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two daughters.

 

 

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There Was No French Toast

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“Tell me what we were doing the morning we were leaving Cancun,” my husband asks, a week after we returned from a vacation.

“We were waiting in the hotel bar for the van to take us to the airport,” I reply.

“Did we order French toast?”

“What? — There was no French toast.”

“So I didn’t have an argument with the waiter about the French toast?” he persists.

“Nope.  That didn’t happen. We had breakfast in our room earlier,” I remind him.

“I thought we were in the bar and we ordered French toast,” Tom mused, “but the waiter didn’t bring it. Then he came and gave us a bill. He said we had to pay because we had already checked out. I started arguing with him. ‘You didn’t even bring us the French toast, and we are going to miss our van.’” Tom’s imagined frustration with the waiter made me smile.

“Nothing like that happened,” I said calmly. You must have dreamed it. Sounds like you were anxious about the van, about getting to the airport on time.”

“I was. But then three orders of French toast appeared,” Tom continued, crossing that line between reality and dream without a pause.

“Did we have time to eat it?” I asked, smiling.

“Of course not,” Tom huffed.

“Were you very hungry?” I teased.

“You know I’m always hungry,” he replied.

Then he smiled, knowing my occasional frustration with his digressive journeys, and said, “It’s not that I don’t remember what happened. It’s just that I need to add footnotes.”

***

Tom and I are in our Manhattan apartment, and he is asking the kinds of questions that makes me pause and pay attention, so I can figure out just how his mind is working. Twenty-two years of Parkinson’s disease is starting to take its toll. A few days before the French toast incident, we had been swimming in the Gulf of Mexico’s coral reefs. Swimming is something Tom can still do, even though he can’t walk steadily. Before the excursion, we were given a lecture on how fragile the reefs were, how susceptible to chemicals such as sunscreen and all the other pollutants we are producing.

I watched the guides plop Tom’s thin frame into an inner tube and ease him off the boat into the water. I thought about my husband’s fragility, wondering what pollutants were responsible for his condition, but of course I know the causes are more complex. His mind sometimes appears to be eroding the way the coral reefs are quietly losing their substance. Small amounts of data seemed to be shifting location and drifting into the larger aquatic flow inside Tom’s head where they take on new shapes, offering creative, if dislocated, readings of events.

The inevitable course of the disease notwithstanding, I find myself curious, but also anxious, about how best to find a bridge between his world and mine. I imagine that the changes in Tom’s brain are perhaps shifting geological plates, something not as final as what is happening to the coral reefs, suggesting the hope of a new formation, overlapping connections, not just irretrievable loss.  

Weeks can go by with barely noticeable differences in the way we are living our lives; then, suddenly, Tom says something that reveals an abyss between us. It’s disconcerting to be confronted with a partner who suddenly seems to be standing on a different land mass, or not on land at all, but in a fast-moving stream or turbulent ocean, leaving me behind. I’ve learned, though, that it’s best not to tell Tom he is imagining things, because, for him, in that moment, they are real. When he tells me, for example, that there are people in our room, I go along with the story, asking him to describe them, then noting when he tells me they have disappeared. I remind myself that the doctor says it’s not dementia but medication related confusion, usually only temporary. So far that has been true, but the looming fear of changes, in the secret places of Tom’s brain that I cannot see, remains.

Although my husband is a relatively quiet person when awake, when he is asleep, he is loquacious. Sometimes he gives a lecture to a class. And in the best dreams, he is laughing and smiling, even opening his eyes as if he is trying to invite participants in the dream to come to share a glass of wine on our balcony. Recently, however, he described a frightening dream. He was being transported by strangers to a place where he would not be able to navigate, as the destination required climbing up a rocky mountain. He flailed in his sleep, shouting at his captors to stop. Of course, Tom immediately understood why he had a dream that demanded an impossible physical feat. The disease haunts him, even when he is asleep.

What interests to me, as his partner, in addition to the actual terrain of his excursions, both sleeping and waking, is my job: how I can successfully bring him back to common ground. Chatting about daughters, grandchildren, or pointing to something silly our miniature schnauzer is doing, does not always work. But if I ask him an intellectual question, another part of his mind immediately goes into gear, and the professor husband with whom I have shared ideas for twenty-five years emerges intact.

Recently, I asked him to explain Michel Foucault’s “repressive hypothesis” to me. After a moment’s careful thought, he said, “What Foucault means is that the things that we dare not do control us.” Marveling at the succinct clarity of his answer, and the sly way Tom always inserts his interest in what is culturally forbidden into conversation, I also think, sadly, about all the things my husband dare not, cannot, do anymore.

It remains immensely comforting, though, that Tom’s deep intelligence is intact. He pursues my question about Foucault, launching into a more elaborate explanation:

“In The History of Sexuality, Foucault describes a French boy’s dalliance with a local dairy maid and his consequent interrogation by the police, a typical teenage event becomes a ‘perversion’ in the eyes of the French government so they arrest the boy. The French philosopher uses the story to show how our desires are pathologized.” “Feminists,” Tom adds, in one of his “footnotes,” “critique Foucault’s position, arguing that what the boy did was nothing short of rape.”

Suddenly, once again in the “classroom,” my professor husband gives an explanation of a theory and then a memorable bit about recent scholarship. His response to my question is not exactly a return to common ground, at least not for most people, but for me it is a sign that cognition is working.

Tom is retired but still teaches one class a semester at the college where he has spent the last thirty-eight years. Students haven’t complained, so the momentary shifts to an alternate reality, the “footnotes” he adds to some of our excursions, do not seem to occur during class. If he can still talk to students about Don Quixote and Hamlet and ask them to write about the difference between these two heroes’ understanding of madness and reality, surely his “coral reefs” still have plenty of dendrites. Recently, however, even though his students wrote him a warm letter of praise at the end of the semester, his college decided it was time for him to stop teaching.  Tom was annoyed at the bureaucracy, and personally hurt, but I was relieved for his physical safety — traveling back and forth six blocks alone on his scooter had caused me much anxiety.  But now a new set of concerns arose about the need for stimulation — how would he remain intellectually active?

These events lead me to ponder the terrain of our future. On a day Tom has been teaching or working on a half-finished manuscripts on self-portraiture in the Renaissance, I feel that we are on terra firma. Other times, when Tom asks me a question that make me feel more like I am standing on a diminishing piece of ice in the arctic. I have never stood in the arctic, but I imagine it to be firm yet somehow porous. It is unclear just when a large piece of ice might sheer off into the ocean. As I wrestle with these images, I realize that while Tom is crossing into realms whose foundations are uncertain, I remain on dry land, relatively speaking anyway. And yet, we are together, perhaps closer than we have ever been, trying to navigate this stage of our lives together.

Most of the time, Tom’s excursions only last a morning, or, at most, a day, and then they vanish, a brief snow shower, and we begin again, exchanging ideas about Obama’s decision to cut Medicare or whether Hillary will run for president in 2016, and I am lulled into complacency — until the next question. Like the one about the French toast we didn’t have in Cancun.

 

Phyllis van Slyck teaches English at LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York.   She has published essays on Henry James and on pedagogy in a variety of academic journals including American Imago, Change Magazine, Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, The Henry James Review and Profession.  She is currently writing memoir pieces on family matters, in particular, a series on living with a partner with Parkinson’s Disease.  Email: slyckvan@gmail.com

 

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ESSAYS | Writing the Silence

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http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zoroastrians'_Tower_of_Silence.jpgSilences have always been uncomfortable with my mother, as though ticking down to an explosion. We seek to fill them with idle chatter, always careful to keep it surface level. So much still remains unsaid that its breadth terrifies me. I catch her as I caught my poem, Mother Never Smoked A Cigarette, in bits and pieces that I parse together like an omnipresent jigsaw puzzle.

After a brief errand in lower Manhattan, we eased in to a pew in St. Paul’s Chapel as sightseers — the memories must have been so powerful that she forgot our vow of silence. Looking straight ahead, she said, almost to herself, “This is where we would come to take a break. It was always so quiet in here. They would give us bottles of water. No one ever spoke.”

Mouth slightly agape, I was overtaken by a moment that wasn’t mine to remember but the stained glass windows that had resisted cracking under the debris, shone the same kaleidoscope of light onto the church floor. The same pews. The same light. Me, in the presence of her past. Me, sitting with the Police, Firemen, and volunteers in a moment that denied linear time to hang in permanency.

I would only have but a moment, because I watched the thoughtful gaze of my mother’s subconscious ripped back to the present with a head shake. No, she would not go back there.

That singular yet collective experience is why I write. I write to fill in the spaces we aren’t supposed to talk about.

Of what was the dust made that caked their clothing?

I write against their need for silence.

What would their first uttered syllable sound like?

I write against a typical point of view.

What power did their collective consciousness have on that space and one another?

I write to reveal the layers of life that exist beyond a snapshot of time, place, and person.

What setting houses a confusion of death, friend, inorganic, particle, and breath?

Write it with me: the chapel could hold maybe 75 workers in the old pews; some sitting, some laying and layered in debris and dust. Bottles of water, cold in their hands, given out by church employees and relief workers. The stained glass cut out the reality behind the walls but let sun in to spot the floor and pews and workers with bits of color like a faded garden falling to seed. And the quiet, the hammering quiet of bodies that need to break down but won’t.

Rest time ticked down like mine and my mother’s silence — they would have to walk back into what I could only imagine was a literal layer of hell.

I don’t write for solace or catharsis, I write from a sense of immediacy. I write like there is a gun to my head and my life depends on creating a voice that transcends language. I subject myself to its heights and depths because the world is too beautiful and too terrifying not to render it into words. I have chosen to inhabit the quiet spaces and observe. I want to tell you what I’ve seen and what I know is possible.

But here is the noise that silence spins around: My mother worked mandatory 12-hour days, 7 days a week. First, she was bussed to Ground Zero; her two firemen brothers, there, somewhere heaving and sifting with her, pushing out memories of childhood and realizations of shared experience. Later, my mother and countless other officers were stationed at the Staten Island dump, then reopened, standing for hours at a conveyor belt looking for body parts. My mother in a hazmat suit with an air quality meter strapped to her chest like a bomb. When she started beeping, she had to lead her crew down to safety as soon as possible. They waded through images of that conveyor belt as they waited for gases and dust to settle. Our car, the one she drove to the site, smelled unholy for weeks. I choose not to describe it here, allow for my own silence, my own realizations.

And then I come back to the body, the flesh and reality. My Mother has “9/11 Cough.” A constant echo of incessant hacking lingers in the background of my adolescence. It went on for years. She always smelled like cough drops. Her body was desperately trying to rid itself of something, fighting invasion. She refused to put herself on the list of “injured.” I know her well enough to understand that it was mixture of refusal to admit she had been altered by that day and the pride of a laborer, insisting they’ve been left no less able to work and provide. In the present, this is my tactile. I deny the future every day of my life.

There is so much silence to write in my mother’s story. I cling to the facts and what I’ve experienced to keep building my truth. All writers do this to some degree— inhabit spaces outside of their body. Keat’s called it Negative Capability but I consider it the most important mechanism a writer will employ in their career.   Interconnectedness is the cornerstone of literature.

It is easy to lose our sense of connection when the physical world seems set up to distract us back into ourselves. I’ve always felt that literature’s place in the world is defined by its ability to reestablish our bonds and guide us towards seeing ourselves in the narratives of others. If it fails, we fail.

There has been nothing singular about my life experience — I am the collective. I was raised by varied people who married in and divorced out from disparate groups. I was constantly exposed to a plethora of mental eccentricities, maladies, and socialized quirks. I come from a place that is NYC but entirely not NYC; that resists urban, suburban, or rural. I come from a place that is coastal, not salt nor fresh, but brackish straight through to the center.

I come from a place that is still Republican, that is mostly lawless, that is violent yet tender towards families. I come from a place that has its own sense of virtue with social laws that supersede written laws. I was raised in no less than 4 religions with training in others. I am an only child (biologically) with four brothers and sisters. I make the sign of the cross and curse in Yiddish. When I try to write the poverty of my childhood, it reads like the South.

As I attempt to find my place in adulthood and as writer, I am left reconciling all the pieces of others that I have brought with me. My sociological experiment of a life has trained me to write the silence and fill in the gaps of experience. I’ve only just begun.

My mother’s story is my story, in so much as our lives, as all lives, are connected. I have no right to information she won’t share, but not having that leaves a hole in my narrative and sense of self. She has bricked off my sisters and I from those weeks and months following September 11, 2001. Maybe she is afraid of what will happen to her psyche if she opens those flood gates. Maybe she knows her daughters couldn’t handle it. Or maybe it is a solemn thing to be revered and never shared.

What then of life? Silence is exclusion and we lose entire portions of humanity when we exclude voices. Histories lost and rewritten, a singular view of the world cultivated and fostered as universal. Never wonder why you don’t recognize yourself in those narratives; you weren’t considered.

What chasms do we create between our bodies and the world? In that negative space sits friction, gasses, particulates, and a lost opportunity to understand the depth of human experience. Until we can connect with every person we encounter daily, learn their narrative and figure out which pieces of them fit in to us, we must continue to read and write literature. We have to let our stories live outside us, reaching.

What sits in your silence?

 

Jen Fitzgerald is a poet and a native New Yorker who received her MFA in Poetry at Lesley University.  She is the Count Director for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. Her work has been featured on PBS Newshour, in Tin House, and AAWW: Open City, among others.