Diary of a Misfit, page 37
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TWO WEEKS LATER, the day before Jennifer Finney Boylan’s talk, I texted my mom. It was Easter Sunday, so I sent a series of rainbow emojis, reminding my mom that Easter was my coming-out anniversary.
“JFB will come to my class around eleven,” I typed. “Should I FaceTime you then?”
She didn’t reply, so I tried calling her late that evening. She didn’t answer. I called her the next day before class, then during class from the bathroom, but her phone rang without end the same way it had when I tried to tell her I was engaged. I hung up, sure she must be taking pills again.
The professor did not allow cell phones in class, but I tried to position mine in such a way that I’d see if my mother called. Jennifer Finney Boylan spoke for an hour, and when she finished, my heart thudded. I was mad that my mom was letting me down again, but I believed she really did want Jennifer to know how much she’d changed our lives. When the professor opened the discussion for questions, I waited for a few of my classmates to talk, then I raised my hand.
I can’t remember the exact words I used. I know I told Jennifer and my entire class about my freshman year of college. I told them my mom had written emails that said thinking of me made her want to throw up. I think I told them about the preacher and maybe the security guard who’d forced his way into my dorm room to tell me I was going to Hell.
“But then my mom saw you on Oprah,” I said.
After that, I just cried. I felt painfully exposed, but mostly I felt surprised. I didn’t know I was still upset about the preacher or the emails my mother sent. I thought I was a well-adjusted lesbian, a confident woman with a cache of silly stories I told about the years the South spent hating me.
When class ended, I approached Jennifer and apologized for crying. She told me it happened all the time. Back in 2003, when Jennifer came out, we didn’t have a ton of queer role models who made it onto shows as mainstream as Oprah, so a whole generation of people looked at Jennifer the way I did.
As we talked, I remembered something Pam Sykes had told me on one of my trips to Delhi. She’d said she wanted to ask Roy what her life would be like. How are people going to treat me? As a teenager, I read Jennifer’s book searching for the same answers. We were different, of course. Jennifer was trans, and she lived in the Northeast, but she was a lesbian, and she’d survived coming out.
When we finished talking, Jennifer offered to call and leave my mom a message. I dialed my mom’s number for the sixth time that day, then we waited until her answering machine picked up.
“Hi, Ronni. This is Jennifer Finney Boylan, and I got the chance to be a guest in Casey’s class here at Columbia. Well, I bet you’re proud of your daughter and everything she’s doing up here. I was just so blown away by our conversation. We talked about She’s Not There and Oprah and the long journey we all take to open our hearts. Thank you for a great daughter and all the work that you’ve done in the world.”
We hugged goodbye, and as I pulled away, my phone rang. My caller ID said it was my mother, but when I answered, my dad spoke.
“Your mom’s in the hospital. It’s serious this time.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
(2018)
I KNEW FROM MY dad’s tone that this hospital visit was unlike all the false alarms and forced emergencies he’d called to report in the past, but I didn’t run immediately to my apartment or the airport. I went back to class. I sat at my desk. I looked straight forward until my eyes and ears and everything else burned, then I stood, whispered a version of the news into my professor’s ear, and left.
I must have walked across campus. I must have eaten dinner and called my father back. I must have booked a ticket. The tape in my head is spliced with scenes spaced far apart, so all that comes back are borderless vignettes. I can see Jennifer Finney Boylan on the phone with my mom’s answering machine. I can see the M60 bus barreling over a bridge toward LaGuardia, and I can see my brother, waiting outside of security in the Tampa airport. He was supposed to be at the hospital. I was supposed to have taken a taxi to meet him and my dad at my mother’s bedside.
“Is she dead?”
I asked the words before I thought them. My brother put his hand on my back and told me we should walk. I asked again, “Is she dead?” My brother took a step to the left, and in the distance, I could see my father, folded. Did I walk toward him? I only remember suddenly being in his arms, collapsed and heaving. My brother’s wife handed me a stiff tissue, and for months after, I woke up in the middle of the night thinking of the hummingbird printed on it. I wiped my nose with its beak.
My mother had been dead thirty minutes or an hour, I no longer remember which. “While you were in the air,” my dad said. There was no reason to go to the hospital, so we went to her house, to the lanai I’d promised her I’d see someday. She’d described it as something fancy, proof that her life had taken a sharp turn up, but I saw now what no wicker furniture could conceal: The lanai bore a striking resemblance to my grandmother’s carport. I lowered myself onto the concrete and listened as my brother called my mom’s sisters. She didn’t make it, he told them. Her esophagus was torn. She went into surgery and never woke up.
I didn’t ask a single question. I always ask questions—it is my central, and perhaps most annoying, trait—but I couldn’t bear to know any details because details would have made it real. As long as I didn’t know how my mother died, as long as I didn’t see a body, I could pretend she was on vacation somewhere. I could pretend I would see her again.
I called my thesis advisor. I waited for Frankie to arrive. I made hash browns with American cheese, and I lay on the carpet and watched my dad and brother, grown men sharing one recliner, sob into each other. One of us brought up the Bee Gees. When Maurice Gibb died, my mother sat on the end of her bed, sobbing, for three days. Maurice had also died after an emergency surgery. He was fifty-three, the same age my mother had been earlier that morning. Was she still fifty-three? Would she always be fifty-three?
“At least Barry Gibb is alive,” I mumbled from the floor. “She never had to live in a world without him.”
The pain I felt was too deep to put words to, and even now I can’t describe it. I wasn’t shocked, exactly. As a kid, I had always expected my mother would die young, and now she had. But the timing felt wrong. She’d been doing better, I thought. Her voice sounded clear every time we talked on the phone, and I’d just seen her two weeks before. She had a job and a lanai. She wanted to watch me graduate. I couldn’t bring myself to reckon with the hole my mother’s death had suddenly carved inside me, so I closed my eyes and imagined her dancing.
The last night I saw her, in Miami after my brother’s wedding, she grooved in the street because it was her first time drinking Hennessy. One of my brother’s neighbors, a man under house arrest, had sent his girlfriend for a bottle, and when the man screwed off the top, my mom shimmied across the road and asked for a taste. She said, “Can I try that?” and “What did you do to get an ankle monitor strapped to your leg?” He said, “Cocaine. One shot or two?” He eased the liquor into a red Solo cup. My mother swallowed it in a gulp. A teenage boy played rap songs from a car parked in the street, and my mom held up the empty cup, then leaned. She said it burned. She asked for a second shot. The headlights were a spotlight, and when the man tipped the bottle, my mom drew me close. We drifted over the gravel. She said she was finally happy, that she was working and living and trying new things. I believed her because I wanted to. She had eaten Korean food and mussels in DC; now she was tasting Hennessy. When my cab pulled up at the end of the night, she ran after me. “Wait,” she said. “There are things I’ve never told you.”
Lying on my mother’s floor in Tampa, I wondered what she’d wanted to say. I’d laughed or winked that night in Miami. I’d finally allowed myself to believe that my mother would last. We had time, I’d thought. We finally had time. “Call me,” I’d said, but she never had.
I sat up, and I remembered that she’d told me on our first trip to Delhi that she’d been drawn to Roy because he kept a journal, just like she and Cam had. It was a hobby my mom had passed down to me when I was young. She bought me my first diary—a denim-covered book with a girly clasp—the summer before I started fourth grade. My parents moved too often to hold on to much, so I’d lost that journal years ago, but suddenly I suspected that my mother probably kept her old diaries. I crawled toward the recliner.
“Do you have any of mom’s old journals?”
My dad told me to check the closet. My mom kept shoeboxes on the shelves, and he thought he’d seen leather-bound books in one of them. I made my way to their bedroom, still on my hands and knees. I pulled down a Keds box full of empty pill containers, then I reached for a bigger box that must have once held boots. I’d never seen my mom wear boots. She liked flashy, bedazzled sandals, the kind I once told her I assumed a mermaid would buy as soon as she got legs. The shelves were high, so I hit the box until it fell into my arms. Inside, I saw three wide books with padded covers. They didn’t look like the journals I kept or the marble composition books I imagined Roy used, but I felt desperate, so I told myself these books must hold some answers.
The first was a yellow scrapbook my mom had kept for most of her childhood. She’d taped in pictures of her sisters trudging through the snow in Germany, and she’d left comments throughout in the same loopy handwriting she used to use to fake doctor’s notes to get me out of PE. She’d described a Charley Pride concert and a meeting of the Beta Club, and then, on one red page, she’d written in the center, “Because you are afraid to love, I am alone.” I flipped through to the end, but I didn’t see any other hints about her loneliness. Who had been afraid to love? Cam?
I wanted to reach through time and space to tell the teenage version of my mother that she wouldn’t feel that way forever, that she’d find love and have kids, and she wouldn’t be alone. But what did I know? Maybe she never shook that feeling. I’d never been able to. I’d been so sure when I met Frankie that she was the cure for my lonely aching. I’d buried all my pain in her, and I’d even pretended my pain had never existed. I’d wanted to be happy and normal, but something still haunted my edges. Maybe my mother had felt the same way.
The second book was mostly pictures, and the third was a Thomas Kinkade fill-in journal called Mother’s Memories to Her Child. She’d answered seventy pages of questions about her childhood and mine. She’d loved the livestock show and playing Chinese checkers, and her favorite thing to wear was overalls—“cotton or denim.” She wrote about her parents and the first job she ever had. She washed steps when she was ten. At night, she hid in the bathroom so she could read.
“I feel like I grew up with you,” she wrote on one page, ostensibly to me. “I always loved the times you made me laugh, cry, think, and dream like no other person in my life.”
I had spent a decade and a half wishing my mom loved me the way I assumed Jewel had loved Roy. I’d held on to the bad things—the times my mother hit me, the way she’d once whispered “I hate you” into my ear as I lay in bed—and I’d mistaken her pain and addiction for a lack of love, but holding the little book she filled out, I knew that I had what Roy had with Jewel. Maybe I was an accident, and maybe I couldn’t heal my mother, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t loved me. It didn’t mean she didn’t want me.
I skimmed forward and backward until I landed on page 46 and an entry titled “My first broken heart.”
Cam Milton. His death remains my biggest break.
I sank into the carpet, then I lay there under a curtain of my mom’s nightgowns, turning the word “break” over and over in my head. Had she always been broken? How did her esophagus tear? I assumed that pain medication was somehow involved, but I wasn’t ready to ask my dad if I was right. A few years earlier, a friend of mine at The Washington Post had written an article that said white women in their fifties were dying at greater rates than ever before. We’d gone out for sushi while he was writing it, and I remember feeling a sense of dread. He’d profiled one woman in Oklahoma, and I’d wondered, but didn’t ask, if that woman’s children had also suspected their mother would die early.
I closed Mother’s Memories to Her Child, and as I reached to tuck it back into the box, a letter fell out. I recognized it as one she gave me when I was sixteen and she was thirty-five. It was two pages, typed in Comic Sans and filled with misspellings and missed commas, the kind of grammar mistakes my mom hated, the kind of mistakes I’d never seen her make.
Dear Casey,
I am writing this to you for so many reasons that I barely know which one to begin. As you know, I have been very depressed lately and I have had some thoughts that are less than healthy. But I am writing to you because I have the most trust in you than anyone in the whole world. I have been half out of my mind in despair. Not because of any one thing exactly but with so many things weighing so heavily on my mind, I guess it’s been like that old favorite pair of blue jeans, you see the wearing and tearing on a daily basis, but decide it is okay to wear them one more time because well they’re not ripped and then one day you go to pull them on and the seams in the rear end just sort of tears wide open. Does that make sense? I hope so because it describes exactly how I’ve been feeling lately. The only thing is I’ve had this almost uncontrolable urge to help that seam rip open. And for that I am sorry. (one very big reason for writing)
I know that my depression has put you in the position of being embarrassed greatly and it has made you make excuses for me. I know it has caused you to pity me and probably even has probably brought shame to you. For all of these things Casey I am sorry more than you’ll ever know. I am so proud of you and of the woman you are on the verge of becoming (reason 2) almost envy the children you will one day have, because they are going to have one hell of a mother. You are probably the smarted person I know and I may not always let you know that I think you are so smart and that I value your opinion very highly.
This next part is where I am asking you to let me able to trust you more. I don’t want you to repeat any of this to anyone. I put the vial of Stadol in your room this morning because I feel like it will be safer in your room than anywhere else. I realized this morning that if I don’t reach down and grab myself by the bootstraps, I may not make it out of this depression and haze. The past week, you have shown me so much love and support that I don’t know where I would be without you. When you’ve laid with me while I just cried for no reason this week and just have listened to me babble, you have made more difference than anyone has ever made in my life. I now really know that I can make it and that if I need help you will be there to try and support me and for that I thank you (reason #3 and main 1) I’m giving you the stadol because I want you to see that you can trust me and that I am going to try to get myself together. I promise to you that as of today I will never try to or even think through to try and plan to physically harm myself again. I won’t be in the bed as often when your friends come over. I know they may find the fact that I really have legs hard to believe. (God that sounds like a title for a Jerry Springer show). I don’t want to spend so much time in bed and I don’t want to be depressed any more. But most of all I don’t want to die, I want to Dance!
I promise to you that now I’ve realized that I will do everything in my power to pull myself together. I love you so much Casey. Please forgive me.
I’m older now than my mother was when she wrote that letter, and when I first read it after she died, I felt an immense amount of empathy for both of us. I’d always told myself that I was a bad daughter. I didn’t answer the phone when my mom called, and I didn’t do anything to stop her from taking pills. I didn’t love her in the ways she needed to be loved. I didn’t even know what those ways were. Now, when I read this letter, I want to tell my teenage self that I wasn’t a bad daughter. I want to forgive myself for the things I didn’t do. I want to go back and tell that teenager it’s not her responsibility to solve her mother’s addiction. But who else did my mother have? Was it my fault that she didn’t have a better life? In an alternate reality, one in which Cam lived and my mother never went to the park and met my father, a reality in which I never arrived, maybe my mom would have gone to college and become someone stable. I’ve spent more than a decade tracking my family’s problems back to the roots, and I still don’t know who to blame. Is everything a function of poverty? Would my grandma have been more loving if she’d never picked cotton? What if her dad had never left for Washington? Was Louisiana itself—a state built on oil and bigotry—to blame? At Columbia, I read three dozen books about the South. I took a whole course on American poverty, and I read countless papers on cotton, and I still don’t understand why exactly my mom lived and died the way she did.
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I DON’T KNOW HOW long I lay there in my mother’s Florida closet. I must have eventually crawled out. Frankie must have arrived. I fell asleep, or I didn’t; I don’t remember. Suddenly, it was daylight, and I was in a pool. I dunked myself and stayed below the surface long enough to turn my brain black. My memories stutter forward after that. A classmate sent flowers. My advisor ordered groceries. I turned my phone off and asked Frankie to tell my best friends to stop texting me. I wanted to live in my memories, and every electronic ping tugged me out of the past.
One afternoon—I can no longer remember whether it was the second or third or fourth day—my dad, my brother, and I sat in the lanai and discussed a memorial. None of us could afford a funeral. My dad owed something north of ten thousand dollars for the medical bills my mom had accrued, and my brother had drained his savings to pay for the wedding. I hadn’t worked since I moved to New York, and I was down to my last two thousand dollars. My dad wanted to cremate my mom because it was cheaper and because, he said, that’s what she wanted. I’d never talked to her about it, but I could imagine her hating the idea of being penned into a plot somewhere. She was too restless to linger. Still, I wanted a marker. I hadn’t seen her before she died, and now we weren’t having a funeral, and it felt as if she’d disappeared. How could someone whose presence had loomed so large in my life leave behind no trace?
