“I've become like Bampaw,” said Mozie, my grandmother. “He would walk through the house, turn on all the lights, turn off all the radios, and leave.” My 92-year-old grandmother repeated this a couple of times. As I am reading this story again, I am wondering if she really repeated it or if I just imagined her repeating it, and why I find it important to think that she repeated it. As I answer that question, I realize I want her to repeat it because I wasn't listening. I want her to repeat my grandmother's story of what her father would do when he visited the house she had set up near Dallas, TX, with her husband and two children because, though I really was listening, I think she didn't feel heard, because I didn't respond. What my grandmother doesn't understand, and what I may never be able to convey to her is that what she said actually affected me enough that I would write it down as an introduction to this story, and that it would actually serve as a catalyst for the ever-growing and evolving story cycle I am now involved in writing. I want her to know that I was listening. I want her to see this sometime. I want her to know that I am a sensitive person, and that though I often seem angry at my grandmother, in fact, often am, I really do love her. In fact, her dark family stories, told with a black humor, are the greatest influence on my writing. I like how I alternate the words “writing” and “listening” in this opening paragraph, so that they dance together.
My great-grandfather must have liked light but not sound. He must have been a visual but not an auditory learner. That is a clever phrase, and a cute observation, but what proof do I have from that statement about his learning style? Instead, I should say “might” instead of “must.” Bampaw was the mayor of Olney, TX. He was also a teacher. Mozie shared her memory of her father, Bampaw, when she walked into the room. She didn't say “hello” or “do you have enough light to read?” This may have been because she was being sarcastic and in a bad mood. She also had a minimalist way of expressing herself. Mozie's youngest daughter, the baby, the one her immediate family had called “little sister,” in other words, my mother, was dying of stage four liver cancer. “There is a stage five,” Mozie said. My mother, whom my grandmother and I both referred to by her first name, Karen, was on the couch in the living room, propped up by pillows, skin jaundiced, eyes bulging, belly distended with fluid. I wrote a blog post about an appointment my mother had to drain some of that fluid from her abdomen. I wrote it two days after abruptly ending a visit because I was freaked out about the possibility of staying in Carlsbad forever, getting a job at WIPP or taking courses in heating and air conditioner repair, and marrying a redneck. That seemed, at the time, a fate worse than death. My fear is understandable considering some of the things I was exposed to in college, enlightened ideas such as vegetarianism, which I will discuss later in this essay.
I was ignoring Mozie by escaping into a book. This was typical behavior for me. Books have always been my love, my drug, my passion, my escape. By describing her father's behavior, it seemed to me that Mozie was bringing death into the bedroom I and my brother had shared when we were growing up. My brother and I had slept at opposite ends of that oblong bedroom when we stayed at our mother's house. She had custody of us on Tuesdays and every other weekend. In the bedroom I used to share with my brother, I was reading my younger brother's high school English textbook in light too dim for her taste. Meanwhile, my brother was driving from El Paso, TX, with his wife, Katharine, and two daughters, my nieces Brooklynne and Hailey Faith. My brother, Stephen, told me that his older daughter, 4-year-old Brooklynne, had asked if he had a sister. Brooklynne would call me “sister.” Someone I let read a draft of this story expressed surprise that I sometimes referred to my mother by her first name. “I can only imagine what that dynamic was like,” he'd said.
I'd slept the night before in the twin bed that had previously belonged to my brother. My brother and his family would only stay during the day when they arrived later that afternoon, after lunch, missing the altercation between me and my uncle. My brother and sister-in-law would set up a playpen for my younger niece. They would not stay at my mother's house. While sitting outside at the round concrete table and benches in my mother's neighbor Julie's front yard, full of neatly mowed carpet grass, while we were discussing what to do in the situation we were faced with, in which my mother did not want to admit that she had terminal cancer, and wanted to believe that Jesus would heal her instead of getting chemo, my brother said that he hadn't realized how bad the house was until he brought his girlfriend and now wife Katharine there. Then he saw it through her eyes. Katharine was not there to hear him say that.
My daybed was gone. As proof that I was an adult, and not moving back home to live with mommy, I had badgered my mother into selling or donating the day bed, just to get it out of the house, just so I wouldn't have that tie of dependence. My father had done his best to instill in me the idea that I was not my mother's little girl, and that it was unhealthy for her to treat me as such. When I told my mother that, she would just say that what I thought of as her treating me and talking to me like I was a child was really just her talking to me kindly.
When I say that Mozie brought death with her into the room, I mean she was remembering the dead. Her father was deceased, and, at age 92, she soon would be also, and I felt no compassion or caring for her whatsoever, only annoyance at being interrupted. If I did have feelings in this instance, they were too painful to acknowledge. In some cultures it is not acceptable to talk about the dead. For example in the Navajo culture, traditionally if a family member dies in a hogan, the family movies out and burns the hogan down. It is also not acceptable to use skulls or skeletons as imagery in traditional Navajo culture. I learned this from a woman in my Drawing 1 class at CNM. A friend I used to have who was Navajo was not traditional. He told me so. It became obvious that he was not traditional, looking back, because we would joke about skulls while hanging out, and while he was helping out at a haunted house to raise money for the relatively progressive sobriety community he participated in. We were stuffing clothes with plastic grocery bags to achieve a corpse-like effect. He was saying something about a skull, which I can't remember, and which is probably not relevant. “Not a real skull,” I said. “Yeah, a real skull,” he said.
I think that the fact that I was reading my younger brother's textbook in the bedroom we used to share shows that I have arrested development. A review of Jeanette Winterson's new memoir Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal seems to suggest that the idea of someone who escapes from their miserable childhood into books is a tired cliche. My ex-boyfriend Jason the Cab Driver, who was interested in what I wrote if it was about sex or about him, would say that reviewers say a lot of shit. What matters is if you can get your shit published. Fuck em, he'd say. Hand 'em their balls on a silver platter, too. The sentence before the previous ones reminds me of how the Native American author Sherman Alexie determined he would leave the reservation after he was assigned a textbook in school that had previously been his mother's. He didn't just say “fuck you” to everybody and leave the next day after finding his mother's name in the textbook, however. He did find a way to get transferred to a school of all white kids, though, which he wrote about in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which I have not read. That story reminds me of a Jeff Foxworthy joke: “You might be a redneck if you walk to school with your father because you're both in the same grade.” My brother is 28 years old and a US Army Captain. For some reason I am obsessed with age, so it bears mentioning here that I am 32. It is a difficult situation to be in when you feel in some ways inferior to your younger brother. My brother spent a lot of time away from home, while I spent a lot of time in that house keeping my mother company and listening to the horror stories she told about her time spent hospitalized in a mental institution in San Antonio, TX, against her will. My mother's house had mustard-colored shag carpet that hid hardwood floors. I noticed the hardwood floors in the closet on my side of the room and suggested to my mother once that we could rip out the carpet. It would take too much work, though, because the floors would have to be sanded down and polished. My mother liked the warmth of carpet, also.
Meanwhile, while as an adolescent and teenager I was keeping my mother company and listening to her tell me her troubles, my brother was throwing himself into small-town life the best way he could, without becoming an alcoholic or meth head or getting some girl pregnant. He played sports—baseball, football, wrestling, even though he often sat on the bench—and got a job at a local barbecue house called The Red Chimney. At this point the reader might want to know what Hellish backwater I had for a hometown, so I will reveal it: Carlsbad, New Mexico, home of the famous Carlsbad Caverns. Also home to the low-level nuclear waste deposit site WIPP, which is the city's largest employer. I am being facetious when saying it was a Hellish backwater. We had the Pecos river park, after all, and some nice, rolling hills on the edge of town. Though there was a nuclear waste dump outside town, there was no oil refinery, so we were better than the nearby town of Artesia. However, no aliens had landed in our immediate vicinity, so we were not as cool as Roswell. All we had was a cowboy whose horse stumbled on a hole in the ground. Said cowboy discovered Carlsbad Caverns. At first, the people only thought to mine the cave for its bat guano, or batshit in other words, but eventually they made the caverns into a full-fledged tourist attraction complete with elevators and an underground lunchroom, at which my brother worked one summer, and where I failed to get employment because I didn't do well in the interview.
Now back to the story. As an undergraduate at New Mexico State University, my brother joined the Kappa Sigma fraternity and ROTC. He married his college sweetheart, a sorority sister he met at a campus Greek event. He served in Iraq. He's now a husband and father to two children. Compared to him, and especially as viewed by society and my Republican relatives, though I haven't taken a poll, I've done nothing with my life. Compared to my brother, I feel like a failure. At the support groups I sometimes attend, until I get frustrated, bored, or angsty and drop out, they always tell me not to compare myself to other people. I dropped out of college. It took me eight years of on-and-off school to earn a BA in English that hasn't brought me much in the way of gainful employment. I spent five years on Social Security Disability. I protested the invasion of Iraq at Kirtland Air Force Base. At UNM, I joined the Progressive Student Alliance and Amnesty International. I took classes in women's studies. I participated in Take Back the Night rallies that called attention to campus rapes. The ostensible purpose of the rallies was to make it safer for women to be out alone at night. I did question what we were doing, however. I remembered reading in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, a dystopia about a future takeover of the United States by the Moral Majority. In that novel, feminists and conservative Christian moralists become allies against pornography and rape. There is a scene where the handmaids, women who were unmarried, lesbian, or otherwise immoral by the new society's standards, attend a rally where they are told that a man is a rapist. They proceed to tear him to pieces and kick him to death. In the mob, the protagonist questions whether the accused man is really a rapist. Might he instead be a political prisoner? Might he simply be a scapegoat?
I bought a “Take Back the Night” poster at a Philadelphia thrift store. I was living on Social Security Disability benefits by this time, and had a Section 8 apartment in Albuquerque, NM. I was visiting my dad and stepmother in the railroad suburb of Ridley Park, PA, and my dad and I were exploring the touristy section of Philly near South Street with its quirky shops. It was a good time I wish I could repeat, but I feel that it is lost to me because of some of the paranoid accusations I brought up in other sections of this memoir I am writing, which I foolishly allowed my stepmother to read. I learned something from doing that which would be common sense to most people: people don't like reading negative, insulting, or unflattering things about themselves in your writing. I became a vegetarian after seeing a demonstration by PETA about cruelty to animals in slaughterhouses. It was simple in the student cafeteria to order a garden burger instead of a hamburger, and they were tasty. It was a fairly easy transition to make also because my stepmother was a vegetarian. I had a conversation about vegetarianism with a new friend in the dining hall, and automatically became defensive and tried to justify it, but then she said that she was a vegetarian, too. The summer after she met, she interned at Farm Sanctuary, a farm for animals rescued from slaughterhouses. While my friend remained a vegetarian, I did not. It was partly that I succumbed to easily to lowbrow societal pressure. The guys I tended to attract were generally Republicans who preferred simpler food they didn't have to think much about, like ham sandwiches. They were also usually Evangelical Christian. My one real boyfriend in college was a vegetarian, however. It was mostly because he was East Indian, a Brahmin, the highest caste, and a Hindu, though American, born and raised in Nashville, TN, which he said was the headquarters for Gideon's Bibles. He told me this when I expressed trepidation about him meeting my mother and stepfather, Christians who did not believe in the separation if church and state. It was his way of trying to reassure me that he'd been exposed to Christianity before, and it didn't freak him out. It was nice of him to make such a gesture, but I was too freaked out about him being my boyfriend to be able to express my relief, if I even felt relief at this at the time.
My boyfriend and I had the conversation about vegetarianism before we were dating, when we were volunteering together answering phones for the Agora Crisis Center, the UNM student-run crisis hotline. I was expressing the distress I felt over animal experimentation and how we were forced to study it and hear lectures about it, though not participate, in one of my courses, which I attended with the friend who later volunteered at Farm Sanctuary. My future boyfriend's father was a doctor, so he believed in traditional medicine, and also believed that animal experiments were necessary to advance medical procedures and develop better medications. He then asked if I was a vegetarian. As with my friend in the dining hall, I got defensive, and rattled off a list of reasons, assuming I'd get hostility from him, but he just listened to it, then simply stated he was a vegetarian, too. “That's part of being Hindu, isn't it?” I asked. “It's part of being a Brahmin,” he said.
It seems that in different ways my brother and I were both concerned about what the outside world would think of us. We both worried about what our significant others would think about our mother. My brother became ashamed of the poverty we'd grown up in part-time. I was self-conscious about the religion because of the politically correct people I had become involved with. We both found more acceptance than we thought we would. I was unable to accept the boyfriend who seemed to accept me, however. My mother's message and belief that women should submit to their husbands has made my relations with males, even as friends, uneasy. Her disapproval of gay or lesbian relationships made it difficult for me to explore dating women as an alternative. My emotional closeness to my mother, because of my failure to play sports because of my lack of coordination, for which my father made me go to physical therapy as an attempt to remedy, made it difficult or impossible for me to leave her values behind. When I experienced difficulties when I did attempt to abandon her values, I felt that God, as a strict, loving father, the kind that is unacceptable today, and in fact considered abusive, was punishing me in the same way that Mozie's father, Bampaw, punished her with a belt when he caught her walking with a boy. I will get to that story in a bit.
