Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance, page 25
“Though who can even say what Socrates really said?” my therapist adds. “We basically just have to take Plato’s word for it.”
My phone rings.
“Sorry,” I say, reaching into my purse.
At some point during the therapy session, my phone always rings. At first, I don’t pick up. It seems rude. But then it rings again—the sound of two bamboo sticks rubbing together because that is what phones sound like in 2013.
“Feel free to answer,” the therapist says.
“No,” I say. “It’s just my mother.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I know.”
I know it isn’t my fiancé, Ray—he never calls during a workday. And I know it’s not my college friends from Villanova, because we rarely talk on the phone anymore. We text and then meet up once a year somewhere mountainous and drink the beers we drank in college and say things like, “I am realizing now that one has to be in a mood to drink Natty Light.”
The only friend I regularly talk to on the phone now is Valerie, because sometimes, being older is like being young again. Don’t get me wrong, life is very different now—I am twenty-eight and I live in New York City and have a wonderful fiancé—yet I am back to wearing leggings and giant flannel shirts and talking to Valerie on the phone about the fanny pack she bought. “What?” she says. “It’s Gucci. It helps me hold my things.”
But Valerie doesn’t randomly call. Valerie likes to plan our phone conversations weeks in advance, only to push it off to a later day, because Valerie is tired. Valerie is a packaging specialist. She packages things for Nestlé. Snapple. All day long, she thinks about how to put things in other things, and this doesn’t seem to bother her. I mean, she loves it.
“My mother is the only person I know who calls twice in a row with no shame,” I explain to my therapist.
And then, sometimes, Mom will call a third or a fourth time. My therapist and I will just stare at the phone and wait as if there’s been some earthquake. We sit quietly and brace ourselves for each predictable aftershock.
“Is that your mother again?” the therapist asks.
Mom used to call so many times because she forgot that she called me—did I call you today already? Oh, I’m sorry. What did we talk about? But lately, her memory has been better and I’m not sure what her excuse is.
“Yes,” I say to the therapist.
I used to be afraid there was some emergency—maybe Mom was about to kill herself and she was calling to say goodbye. Or maybe Dad was dead. But now I know that Dad will never die. Dad has given himself over to life. He drinks superfood every morning, a green vitamin shake that he swears isn’t a scam. And Mom will call a hundred times just to ask what I’m eating for dinner. Or if I’ve been taking a multivitamin. And has Ray been taking one, too? Of course. Ray loves multivitamins. He swallows them whole, without water. Something I didn’t know until I moved in with him.
“You don’t have to pick up just because someone calls you again and again,” the therapist says. “You are freer than you think you are.”
My therapist is always giving me permission to stop loving Mom. That is why I go to her—she is always reminding me that Mom has damaged me, stunted my grieving process. She says things like, “Two people can’t throw up in the toilet at the same time,” and I can’t argue differently. It’s true. But then the therapist goes too far, says something like, “If another woman was calling you this much, what would you say to her?” and I get angry at the therapist for saying exactly the thing I am paying her to say.
“But she’s not just another woman,” I say. “She’s my mother.”
I end the session early and call Mom back.
* * *
“Sally, you need to come home right away,” Mom says when I call. “Your father has lost his mind.”
I wasn’t expecting that. I was expecting Mom to say something crazy about Hurricane Kathy. About how the storm is your ghost that has come to ominously hover over us. I had already prepared a speech: Mom, these names are picked out seven years in advance by scientists. It means nothing. It’s just a name. A very common name. I’m sure one of the scientists has a daughter or a niece or an aunt named Kathy. Calm down.
“What’d Dad do?” I ask.
“Nothing yet,” Mom says. “But your father wants the Norwegian maples gone before the hurricane. And he’s about to start cutting them all down himself.”
“Why?”
“He says they’re long overdue. He says they’re going to topple during the storm and kill us both.”
“Does he know how to cut down trees?”
“No! Of course not,” Mom says. “That’s why I’m calling. Very soon, your father will be dead. I thought you should know.”
“Shouldn’t you call a tree guy though?”
“You know your father. He’s crazy. He thinks he can do it by himself. He thinks he’s still Superman. I said, Richard, do you know how old you are? And he says, No, Susan. I make it a point not to keep track. And I say, Do you even know how to cut down a tree? And he says, Men have been cutting down trees since the beginning of time.”
“Well, you need to stop him,” I say.
“I can’t,” Mom says. “He never listens to me anymore.”
This is true. Over the years, Dad has slowly stopped listening to Mom. Dad blames his bad hearing, but it’s more than that. He has learned to tune her out. Last time I was home for your birthday, I listened to an entire conversation between them that went like this:
Mom: “Did you eat the chicken?”
Dad: “Everything’s electronic now.”
Mom: “No, did you eat the chicken?”
Dad: “Everything is electronic now.”
Mom: “Huh?”
Dad: “What did you say?”
Mom: “I said, Did you eat the chicken?”
Dad: “I thought you said, Did you hand in your application?”
Mom: “What application?”
Dad: “For the Golf Commission.”
Mom: “No. I wanted to know if you ate the chicken.”
Dad: “No. I didn’t eat the chicken.”
Mom: “Well, I didn’t hear you.”
And so on.
“Come home tonight,” Mom says. “Talk some sense into him.”
“I can’t,” I say. “Ray and I have a thing tomorrow.”
“What thing?”
“An important thing,” I say. “A lawyer work boat thing.”
“How could that be more important than your father not falling off a ladder and breaking his neck?”
“Why don’t you just call a tree removal service? There are people who do this kind of thing professionally.”
“There are,” Mom says. “But Dad refuses to call.”
“Why?”
“You know why.”
“I don’t know why.”
“The only place in town who does that kind of thing is Bill’s Tree and Garden. And your sister’s old boyfriend runs it.”
“Excuse me?”
“Billy Barnes,” Mom says. “Your sister’s old boyfriend. You don’t remember him?”
“Yes, of course I remember him. I just don’t understand what you mean when you say he runs the Tree and Garden.”
“It means what it means! He took over the place after his father died.”
“Can friars do that?” I ask.
“How do I know?” Mom asks. “What on earth are you talking about, Sally?”
“Billy’s a friar.”
“Billy is not a friar.”
“Yes, Mom, he’s a friar.”
It had taken me all of college to accept that statement as a fact. Billy was a friar. Billy had entered the seminary! I told my new college roommate, Nicole, but it didn’t have the effect that I wanted. Nicole was not impressed. She had no idea who Billy was, and no idea what the seminary really was. “To be honest, I don’t even know what that means,” she said, and we never talked about Billy again because I didn’t know what it meant, either. When I tried to imagine Billy in the seminary, I couldn’t. I could only see him in flashes, in my dreams, in a poorly lit cave, with a single candle burning. On a shabby cot, flipping through a Bible. But then I woke up late for class, and I sat down in Nineteenth-Century Novel, where I learned about the socioeconomics of the Victorian era aristocracy, and by the end of class, Billy seemed completely irrelevant to me.
“I’m telling you, Billy runs the Tree and Garden,” Mom says.
“Are you sure? Sometimes you get confused. You forget things.”
Mom’s had some memory problems for the past few years—she forgets that she forgets.
“I think I know a friar when I see one,” Mom says. “Trust me, he had this awful neck tattoo. I said, Billy, why on earth would you do that to yourself?”
“You asked him about his neck tattoo?” I ask.
It was impossible to imagine Mom, after all these years, talking to Billy.
“How could I not ask him about it? It’s all over his neck!” Mom says. “That’s why people get neck tattoos, isn’t it? They clearly want to be asked about them.”
“I thought you hated him,” I say.
I hated him. At least that’s what it felt like in college, where I spent four years thinking only about the worst parts of Billy. Billy, in the back seat of his car, sucking on your tits. Billy, looking so proud as he climbed the stairs to the diving board. Billy, OD’ing in the pews of the chapel at Villanova, which is really beautiful, by the way. Built to let in as much light as possible. When I sat in it on Sunday nights with Nicole (she sang the mass sometimes), I felt embarrassed thinking of Billy, curled in the fetal position, drooling out his mouth onto the beautiful mahogany bench.
“Well, what am I supposed to do, just ignore the boy when I see him?” Mom asks. “I see him at the Tree and Garden all the time! It’s the only place to get flowers in this town. Sheesh. You make it sound like I spoke with the devil, Sally. Billy’s a person, you know.”
“I know that.”
I know that more than ever now that I am older. In my mind, Billy has become so small. When I’m with Ray, I can’t even remember what I had loved about Billy. I watch Ray put on his leather belt to go to work each morning and think about Billy, who used to eat waffles wrapped in plastic. Three pieces of gum at the same time. A boy who wore practice shirts every day and got a neck tattoo just because it hurts.
“Well, sometimes, I think your father forgets that he was just a boy. I think your father is going to stay mad at him until he dies. And it’s ridiculous, him going all the way to Groton just for mulch,” Mom says.
“I can’t believe it,” I say.
“I know!” Mom says. “Groton is thirty minutes away. It’s absurd.”
“I mean, I can’t believe Billy is not a friar.”
“Well, if you came home more than once a year, you might know that,” Mom says.
Now, I only go home for major holidays. In and out before the sadness can touch me. That’s what Valerie advised. Valerie’s not a therapist, but she’s smart. Studied bio. Has her own mother problems. Sets a two-day limit. You’ve got to set boundaries, she said. You’ve got to be smart. Treat your mother like she has a disease. These were things Valerie did with her own mother, and they had a wonderful relationship now. They went to casinos together sometimes and actually won money from the slots. “Make active suggestions,” Valerie said, “like, Let’s go for a walk. Let’s go to a movie. Let’s get our nails done.” But I hated getting my nails done. That makes me depressed, when the ladies at the salon called Mom Sabrina and she didn’t correct them. She just sat down and chose the same color she wore when you were alive—Like Linen—while the women tried to convince her into something new. Something new, Sabrina! Something bright! Red! Even total strangers could feel her sadness. They painted her nails red, and for a moment, while she dried her nails under the blower, I truly believed the nail salon might fix her.
But when we returned to the house, she was the same except now her nails were red. Her fingernails were dazzling as she heated up soup in the microwave. They were the hands of a happy woman who was in control of her life. But I knew better than that. I was like a geologist who studied Mom’s body for many years; from a distance, the landscape looked still and calm. A lovely day out. But I could see the earthquake begin in her shoulder, the slow curve of her back. When she turned around, her mouth cracked and her face crumbled. And then, of course, the flood.
“Mom,” I say. “I should go. I’m already late for dinner.”
“Oh,” Mom says. “What are you and Ray having for dinner?”
We are having Lemon Chicken. Something Ray makes once a week. He puts chicken and vegetables in a pan, squeezes lemon on it, and calls it Lemon Chicken.
“So the man cooks,” Mom says. “That’s wonderful. Your father never cooked. He’ll cut down all the trees in our yard by himself, but he won’t make himself a proper meal. Would it have killed him to just make himself a meal?”
“Mom,” I say. “He’s not dead. You’re talking about him in the past tense.”
“Well, if you don’t get here soon, Sally, he will be dead!”
I hang up the phone and take a breath and practice the truth aloud—that is something the therapist makes me do. She believes we can recite the truth over and over again until we believe it.
“My sister, Kathy, is dead,” I say, to myself, to nobody, to my feet. “And Billy is not a friar.”
Then, I let the truth go. I walk home through the crowded city streets to have Lemon Chicken with my fiancé.
I haven’t told Ray that I started seeing a therapist, even though it was his idea.
Ray thought the therapist might help me figure out if I want to have children or not. Ray wants to have children. He wants to be with a woman who wants children. At night, in bed, Ray says things no man has ever said to me before, like, “I want to have a family with you, Sally,” and he says them very easily, as if they come naturally to him and maybe they do.
But then I say things like, “Okay. But what if they die?” which Ray finds concerning. Ray says, “Maybe these are things to ask a therapist.”
“How would the therapist know if my children are going to die?” I ask. I’m only joking. But this is the one thing Ray doesn’t like to joke about.
So I found a therapist. But I didn’t tell Ray, because I knew that every time I came home, he would expect me to know whether or not I wanted to have kids. Every time I walked through the door, I was supposed to have more clarity about who I was and what I wanted from the world. But so far, the therapist hasn’t helped me figure much out. Mostly, she just spews awful truths about the world.
“Sometimes, children die,” the therapist says. “It happens.”
“That’s very comforting,” I say.
“I’m not here to comfort you, Sally,” she says. “If you want comfort, there are big pillows you can buy on Amazon for that. I’m here to help you navigate reality. And reality can be quite painful.”
I nod.
“In reality, children sometimes die. And as Americans, we don’t have a great way of dealing with this. Other cultures, they do. They understand this reality. In Ancient Greece, so many children died in infancy, people were advised not to love them until they turned seven.”
She said it was too painful—dangerous, really—to love children before you knew they would live. And I didn’t bother asking the obvious question: Can a person really do that? Withhold love from a person they truly love?
I already knew the answer. If I have learned anything in the years since I’ve seen Billy, it’s that you can stop loving someone if you need to. You can stamp love out of your brain like a tiny fire.
* * *
Over the years, Mom taught me how to do this. Mom did it herself. First, she started with those little white pills that helped her sleep, and then she moved on to the little white pills that helped her get through the day, and then there were the little white pills that counteracted the effects of all the other little white pills, not to mention the cocktails at four. That’s when she would call me. I could hear the ice jingling in her glass. It was clearer than her words.
“Hi, Sthally,” Mom said.
This was what Mom sounded like when I was in college. This was why I found ways to get off the phone. I was busy—taking more classes than I should. But mostly, I couldn’t bear the sound of Mom’s voice, how one word slipped into another. I couldn’t bear to answer the same questions over again: What classes are you taking, Sally? What are you majoring in? Since when do you do the school paper?
Modern Poetry. English. Since sophomore year.
And then: “I have to go, Mom. Sorry, I have a thing.”
On weekends, I went to parties. During snowstorms, I sledded down the quad hill. During summers, I went kayaking. I spent long hours in the newsroom, debating obscure things (does “people problems” have a hyphen?) and reporting on stupid things with gusto, like the arrival of Dunkin’ Donuts to the student center or the group of boys who refused to wear anything but shorts during the winter. They claimed they didn’t feel the cold. There was a scientific name for this, which I forget now.
“Interesting,” I said. “Very interesting.”
I interviewed a girl in my Latin class who was raised by bears in Alaska. A girl in my bio class who had once been in a cult.
“Mostly, I have fond memories of the cult,” June said. She remembered feeling a real sense of community. Like everyone in the cult was her mother or father. “I remember painting a lot. I remember building fences. I remember being surrounded by people I loved all the time. Everything was communal. Even parenting.”
Interviewing people for the paper, I learned, was not so different from our conversations at night across our beds. I was good at it—trained since birth to be curious about the lives of others. And in college, my questions won me a lot of friends. People loved telling me their stories for the same reason you loved telling me your stories. I gave people the space—literally five hundred words on the front page of the paper—to celebrate who they were. To listen to the things about them that nobody else would listen to.
