Friday, August 12, 2016

Fighting my way out of Far Rockaway



            “I can’t keep seeing myself dead.”  This was what the medic in Tim O’Brien’s book about Vietnam, The Things They Carried, says when he has picked up the pieces and plugged up the holes of too many bodies to count and he’s beginning to imagine his friends dead and finally himself as nothing more than meat for jungle bugs.  Brian, a student of mine is writing about this book in a thesis that analyzes the ways writers use humor to cope with horror.  The book is very moving but not funny … not to me.  I feel like I have just come through a struggle that for five years has felt like I was battling for my own life.  The battle ended with a sabbatical during which I was using an academic project to free myself from dependence on an abusive therapist, but he called every day and tried to insert himself into every thought, every insight.  He even called himself the “midwife” of my project.  Even though I was working well and keeping him at bay, the nightmares worsened.  I could taste something rotting in my body.  The taste (or was it a smell?) worsened at night.  I felt like I was dying inside.  I tossed and turned, imagining the feeling of being buried, in a casket, watching my funeral from a distance.  The image of myself dead met me everywhere.  I concluded that I was damned and that God was punishing me through my own body.  I knew that whatever was causing these thoughts had to stop.  I knew that somehow I had to get out, get free—of him.  The only way I could stop the thoughts was by working.  Writing—about Shakespeare and the Bible—was my way to hold onto my life.  So I understand what Rat Kiley, the medic, was going through when he said, “I can’t keep seeing myself dead.”  Rat shot himself in the foot to get helicoptered out of the jungle to a hospital in Japan.  “I thought I could be a good friend to you,” said my abuser, who, at the end left me to live or die … alone.  “No one gets out of these situations without external help.”  “He confabulated everything, making himself your husband, father, even God, how could you have chosen?”  “But you were working yourself free.”  These are the things people (counselors) say to me to help me live.  Jesus walked into the house where a young girl had died, “Get up,” he said with authority; and she lived.  For years I’ve imagined myself as Jacob wrestling with the angel.  Now that I am beginning to read the New Testament, I am trailing Jesus, longing to touch the hem of his garment, believing that with just one touch I, too, might live and stop seeing myself dead.

            The second time I saw S-----, I told him about the way my father died—in his sleep when “us kids” (myself, three siblings, and our Florida cousins) were in a rental cabin in the Adirondacks.  We found him.  I touched death and drew my hand away quickly.  Horror.  Liveliness gone.  Dead.  There was no more warmth in my life.  Childhood ended when my mother came to pick us up, pack up, and soldier on.  We carried away from that cabin more than clothes, towels, lamps, pots and pans.  No time to unpack the emotions.  No grieving and no depression allowed on Mom’s watch.  “This happens to lots of other families.”  Reality hit.  I hated myself for the selfish thought, “how will I go to college?”  I told all of this to S----- and cried.  Years later, he told me that the story of my early loss moved him because he, too, had lost a parent early.  His mother.  He felt bonded to me.  As the years went by, we often spoke about the losses that bound us to each other.  I wrote him a letter once in which I tried to explore our different ways of handling loss:  I held mine close (to the point of writing a dissertation about elegy and the female complaint) while he ran from his loss (leaving Far Rockaway far behind).  "I didn't know how sad I wanted to get," he said when I pressed him to explain why he had never helped me with my problems.  He brushed them aside and redirected me to focus on him, "us," and our study of philosophy, literature, and finally, the Bible.
            Reading scripture together, working on a project with a completely engaged older man could not help but remind me of those lost days when I suggested to my father that we build a greenhouse, and we did it together, raising plants from cuttings in a little house (90 degrees in March, heated by a chicken brooder).  Being with S----- was a fantastic way of resurrecting the dead parts of my life:  he played my father—magically returned—and my husband full of desire for me.  “All kinds of feelings come up in therapy.  The patient transfers her attachment from people in her life to the therapist, and those feelings should get talked about.”  S----- did not help me talk about the holes in my life, he filled them with fictions and with promises of an impossible future … because nothing is impossible with God.  To disconnect was to suffer the loss of my father all over again.  To succumb to him (as I did) was to lose myself, to die.  

            The war is over.  But is war ever over?  Do we ever forget the comrades we’ve lost?  My new therapist urges me to grieve.  She is different from my mother.  Tim O’Brien helps me to understand how soldiers, whether or not they have been directly responsible for death, absorb responsibility.  Several different men in his company believed they let his friend, Kiowa, sink into a field of shit where he suffocated.  They didn’t do it but they did.  In a similar way, I assume blame for what happened.  I chose to go.  I chose to let him use me.  I chose him over God.  Even though people say that I could not choose.  Even though I was battling.  Even though I was open about my struggle.  He was the therapist, and I kept turning to him for help, but he never reached out a helping hand, only a grasping violating one.

            After probing my wounds with my new therapist last week, on the drive home to Flint my mind drifted back 36 years.  I was in the car, riding shotgun.  Pop was driving through the village of Warrensburg.  We were headed back to Indian Lake where he would die that night—just hours away.  I remembered vividly the black thunder clouds over the mountains.  I remember the chill that comes before a summer storm.  From the backseat, my little cousin, David, asked me why I didn’t go to my Junior Prom, and my father, who understood my shyness, reached over and squeezed my knee.  He had just taken me back to Glens Falls to have my nose cauterized because it had been bleeding for days.  Driving north to Flint, I marveled at how vivid the sights and feelings from the last bit of time I would ever spend with him still were.  That sky was the last evening sky my father would ever see.  The night of August 18, 1980, it poured all night.  We were stuck in the cabin (no late night fishing off the dock), and he talked to neighbors about his recent (minor) heart attack and, unbeknownst to me said (I learned later) that he was ready to die … that he had raised four good kids.  I had had insomnia all week.  This was my first experience with sleeplessness which has become chronic.  The night he died, although I had not slept in five nights, I lay awake in the loft of Camp Mary listening to rain fall on the tin roof.  I heard Pop fiddle with the stove somewhere around 4:00 and imagined him in the kitchen of the cabin, the ash on his cigarette glowing in the dark.  The next morning, the coroner said he probably died around 5:00, which would have been just when I fell asleep.  I’m not aware of feeling guilty, but perhaps the guilt is too deeply buried.  What I think about is that I felt the coming storm—lay in wait for it, bled beforehand—but was helpless to do anything about it. 

            For years I knew that there was something very wrong about the relationship with S-----, but I couldn’t do anything to save my soul and myself.  I had thoughts of death.  I considered taking my life.  I imagined myself damned in hell.  But I kept dutifully writing him letters and kept reluctantly making the drive to East Lansing.  Long ago in graduate school, I had an Irish classmate.  We agonized about boyfriends and oral exams over beers in the Irish pubs of Brighton, surrounded by very drunk and rowdy guys who painted houses for a living and did other hard labor.  “You have an amazing survival instinct,” she told me once.  I caught the echo when my new counselor said, “You are a survivor.”  What triggered my survival instinct that got me out of hell (I hope) was S----’s carelessness.  In a phone conversation after his wife had discovered some emails and determined to put an end to what she concluded was an “emotional affair,” he told me that he would be devoted to my memory and compared himself to Joe DiMaggio, who took flowers to Marilyn Monroe’s grave five years after her suicide.  That remark told me that, on some level, I had become his mother, and he wished I would just die.  The impact of that bullet, made me realize that, more than wanting him as a friend, more than anything else, I wanted to live.

            I asked him to mail back some special things that I gave him:  a picture of me as a child, a wooden pen box from Kazakhstan, a silver filigree pointer for reading the Torah, a patchwork quilt, and a framed postcard of the Tent City (circa 1915) at Far Rockaway Beach.  Seeing the returned postcard hurt most of all.  It was something like a relic or the sign of my absolute devotion.  I’d fallen in love with the idea of him and with the sound and smells of his seaside home.  “Just a finger of sand at the edge of Brooklyn,” where he was taught by Irish nuns, where he found a rowboat in the reeds, where he loved a girl across the street, where he swam across the channel, where his mother got sick.  When he saw her in the hospital for the last time, she came down to the lobby looking tired.  She died.  He did not seem to know exactly what killed her.  But he went to the synagogue three times each day. It was the right thing to do.

                        “… no matter where I wandered
                                                off the chart
                        I still would love to find again
                                                that lost locality

                        Where I might catch once more
                                                a Sunday subway for
                                                some Far Rockaway
                                                of the heart.”

            I made pilgrimages to Far Rockaway four times!  The first time I went was when my sister got married.  I’d ask S----- to try to draw a map of the world he inhabited at seven years old.  Holding tight to that map as I climbed off the train at the end of the line, I emerged into sunlight.  I felt like Gilgamesh who after an endless journey through dark mountains enters the garden of the gods.  It was magical.  When I found the postcard on ebay I was even more charmed.  The idea of a makeshift life on the beach, living in tents, like Israelites in the wilderness struck me as a beautifully impossible fulfillment of all my erotic and transcendent yearnings.  The tent symbolized sacred, moveable, space made in-between two people bound by countless silken ties of love and thought. 



            Before I unpacked the box of returned tokens, I bought I bottle of wine to dull the pain.  It was working.  I couldn’t look long at the postcard which once reeked of meaning.  Now it was just ephemera.  Gaudy colors on cheap paper.  Its living soul had dribbled away.  But I remembered that I had taped a quotation from Romeo and Juliet to the back of the postcard.  The line (still there in my handwriting) was Juliet's, spoken when she wakes up in the tomb after drinking the sleeping draught that makes her appear to be dead.  “I do remember well where I should be, / And there I am.”  When I selected that quote, I was really in love and committed to my pact with the impossible.  I never thought of Juliet as naïve; she was rock solid, real, pure, and took a courageous leap of faith.  Wide open and vulnerable—so many things could go wrong (and they do)—she trusts.  So did I.  When I gave him that card and inscribed the lines on the back side, I really believed that I would land in soft sand after my leap.  Things went wrong. 

            Now I wonder if, in choosing that line, I was prophetic.  The night Juliet drank the drug, she was full of anxiety and thought she might die.  The next morning, her nurse and family all believed she was really dead.  But she came through an experience that is only like death to LIFE.  She WAKES in the tomb: it is the faithless Romeo, the Romeo moved more by his own fantasies and fears than by the lively and loving Juliet, who is dead and can no longer feel the brush of parted lips.  My lips are still warm.  And I pray God will put a new song in my mouth and give me the courage to sing it.  My body will not be a sheath for Romeo’s dagger nor will I be any man’s dead mother or play Marilyn Monroe to his Joe DiMaggio.
 

            As I finish this blog, I see, more clearly than ever before, the dangers of loving literature.  I believe that fiction can be used to deepen our relationship to real life, but it must not become more important than life.  Literary characters can seem deeper and more beautiful than human beings.  We can know them in ways we often cannot know the people in our lives, and, as a result, they seduce us.  S----- turned me into Ruth (renaming me for the character in the biblical book).  Ruth is a loyal daughter and a lively redeemer whose redemption begins with surviving loss—the death of her husband and the bereavement of Naomi.  Ruth is a Moabite, and the women of Moab are, to the Israelites, whores capable of luring chosen men into the worship of idols.  But Ruth proves that the “other” is really the face of God and a force of God in the world.  Ruth teaches me many things, not least of all that I am Mary Jo and neither Ruth nor Juliet.  I am Mary Jo—daughter of Joseph.  Mary Jo, who worked with Joseph every summer to plant and tend the garden surrounding the statue of Mary at Our Lady of the Annunciation in Queensbury, New York.  Papa was a Lutheran, but he knew, without ever spelling it out, that it was more important to be in church—even a Catholic church—and to put his arm around the daughter next to him in the pew.  Being in the presence of God is what matters—in a church or in a garden.  It doesn’t matter if you fall asleep and even snore during the homily.  It doesn’t matter if the sun is hot and the weeding interminable.  What matters is being with God and with one another in His dazzling theater for worldlings, reading His book all around us.  Even in thrall to a false god, I never lost my love of His book.



3 comments:

  1. Mary Jo,. This is sad and hopeful and beautiful!

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  2. Mary Jo,. This is sad and hopeful and beautiful!

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  3. The word "survivor" is one I am very wary of, especially coming from a therapist. But you are indeed a survivor. You give the phrase "living in hell" new meaning.

    I hate to say it but, well first of all, humans aren't really designed for modern society, referring especially but not exclusively to capitalism and American capitalism but don't get me started. So we are all damaged to one degree or another, especially if you happened to be female or some form of minority. I am not entirely aware of where I was going with this but I did very much feel, until I got to the end where perhaps I change my mind, that God seemed to be both part of the problem and part of the solution, so that maybe God had to be cancelled our of the equation altogether.

    You make this all so real and frightening, even if we don't completely understand everything. I did wonder how, besides the literal coming storm, how you knew the figurative storm was coming. Was it hearing part of your father's conversation with the neighbor?

    You are careful to hide the abusive therapist's name, but you do spell it out toward the end.

    This does feel like I have violated your privacy. But that is what great writing can do. I, too, expose my secrets in my completed novel, although not so ruthlessly. At the risk of being utterly selfish or even callous, I more than ever want you to be read my novel, as a paid editor or whatever. After all, your house is in my novel, although I relocate it. Weird that it takes place in 1981 too.

    Just one more thing. The "This happens to lots of other families" quote bothered me especially. For some reason. Why do troubled people go into psychiatry? Btw the protagonist of my novelwho, I literally destroy along with his hospital, is the protagonist of my novel.

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