Make It Scream, Make It Burn, page 16
It was bracing to show up at this old wooden house in Virginia where two people had been married for decades, settled here in a little fishing town at the tip of a peninsula. The local catch was Atlantic menhaden, which was not a kind of fish that people ate but a kind of fish that people ground into chicken feed. The local processing plant was called Omega Protein. Eliot had learned all this on Wikipedia. We joked about the name Omega Protein. It sounded sinister. But it moved me, somehow, that Eliot had gone to the trouble of looking up this town. He wanted to know something about this place besides someone died here. I got that. I wanted to know something about my grandfather that wasn’t about his death, or the mythology of his life. And it wasn’t just him I wanted to know better, but also the traces of him left in the men of my family. His ghost seemed like a way of understanding those parts of them that had always been mysterious and opaque—that had always felt far away, even when they were right in front of me.
The Portuguese word saudade is infamously untranslatable, but I’ve always loved how it describes something more mysterious than sheer nostalgia. It’s a longing not for what you’ve lost but for what you’ve never had. It’s something like homesickness, but it could mean homesick for a place you’ve never been. It’s at home in Brazil, where Marshall went when he wasn’t with his family. It usually takes a grammatical construction that suggests possession or company: you have saudades, or you can be with them. As if longing could become a kind of company. As if it could compensate for absence itself. Saudade is a name for the ache I feel when I conjure that image of my father and his father on the airfield: a little boy in awe of the sky-bound pilot kneeling next to him, eager to help him check the cockpit for cracks. I miss that airfield, even though I’ve never been there. It’s a memory that pulses inside me, even though it’s not mine. It glows with my desire to know the man and boy who live inside it.
When I was six years old and couldn’t fall asleep at night, Eliot started to sleep on my empty bottom bunk. We called it sleep insurance. It helped just to know that his body was in the darkened room with mine.
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t obsessed with Eliot’s life. He told me so little about it. I kept his senior-prom photo framed on my bureau for years, his date in a gold lace dress with gold pumps. (This was 1992.) It was endlessly fascinating to me, the question of what kind of woman he found beautiful. Bruce Springsteen was his favorite singer, so I listened to “Human Touch” on repeat for clues about his inner life. (It wasn’t until years later that I realized it might not be his favorite song.) He played on the varsity tennis team and I loved to watch him practice with his doubles partner, Amir, while I called out commentary from the sidelines. “Eliot rips a winner down the line!” I’d say, or, “Amir slaps another unforced error into the net!” I remember Amir asking, “Is she going to do this all day?” I left his actual tennis matches with my palms covered in red crescents from where I’d dug my nails into the skin from game-point nerves.
My mom once told me that when I was a baby, Eliot often cried when I cried. He was nine years old. He couldn’t calm down until I did. As an adult, he’d come to keep his feelings studiously private, as if he’d already done all the crying he planned to do in his lifetime. But I needed to remember: he had once cried for me. It was proof that I had the power to move him.
When my parents fell in love, my father was already engaged to another woman. He and my mother were working together in Brazil—a research project my grandfather had put together, focused on rural education—and my childhood vision of their affair gleamed with the luster of myth: kissing on rugged Brazilian beaches, swimming in the wild, frothing Atlantic. I even loved the part of the story about my father’s fiancée getting so angry she threw the birthday cake she’d baked for him in his face. When I was a kid, I focused on Brazilian beaches because it was easier to imagine those postcard vistas than it was to imagine my father’s fiancée asking herself what she could have done to make him love her enough to stay. I wanted to imagine the story of my own origins as an epic passion rather than an ordinary betrayal. In truth, of course, it was both. I identified with my mother in the story, because she was my mother. But for years I would be the one wondering—with my father, my brothers, my boyfriends—What can I do to make him love me more?
For a long time, I was angry at my father for his restlessness, his absences, and his countless infidelities. But by the time Marshall died, I’d begun to acknowledge how many similarities existed between us. We both liked our work. We both liked our wine. I was not entirely unlike him in what I sought from the world—what I felt I was owed, or didn’t owe anyone. I had always sworn I wouldn’t repeat the mistakes that had run roughshod over my family, but I found myself more than capable of cheating on boyfriends—there I was, the first time, mouth tasting like cigarettes and orange soda and liquor, waking up next to an Irish guy who had just ridden his motorcycle all the way across Latin America. It was almost liberating that I could no longer judge my father for all the times he’d done something like this too. It’s not that seeing yourself becoming your parents doesn’t mean you can’t still be angry at them. In fact, it can make you even angrier. You made me this way! But it nagged at my judgment like a hair caught on the back of my tongue.
If I spent my twenties becoming more like my father, Eliot had already spent his twenties becoming his opposite: a committed monogamist with a career in investment banking and designs on a house with a white-picket fence. I saw Eliot’s identity as an inverted inheritance—this desire to become the things his father had not been.
A month before Eliot’s wedding—when he was in his early thirties, and I was in my early twenties—we had a conversation about relationships, one of the most revealing talks we’d ever had. I told him my white-room theory: I wanted to find a guy with whom I could spend three days in an empty white room and not get bored. I’d just ended a relationship in the way I had begun to end relationships, the way I would keep ending relationships: getting out once I got bored. Once I wanted out of the white room. My invitation to Eliot’s wedding had my ex-boyfriend’s name on it, because we’d been together when it was sent, but I was going to the wedding alone—and proud of going alone—because going alone meant I wasn’t settling, and I thought settling was one of the worst things that could happen to a human being.
That day we talked, before Eliot’s wedding, I asked him what he wanted. Why was he marrying the woman he was marrying? He said they had similar visions for the life they wanted to build; they had compatible values and like-minded approaches to practical things like finances. When I was twenty-one, that sounded like the opposite of romance: similar visions for the life we wanted to build. Looking back, at thirty-five, it seems like everything.
They had their wedding in Yosemite, and I ended up delaying the ceremony by half an hour because my bridesmaid’s corset tore as I was zipping it up. My future sister-in-law was gracious. We’d fix it, she said. And we did. Another bridesmaid was a seamstress; I was literally sewn into my outfit. Even though I told everyone I was mortified at delaying the ceremony, secretly I was a little proud. I was a force for chaos, for disruption, for whatever the opposite of settling was. I was unsettled, hard to contain, recently single, breaking seams.
In truth, the ceremony was beautiful. I remember seeing how happy my brother looked, and my sister-in-law; realizing how little I knew of other people’s hearts, how little I knew of my own. At their reception they served apple pies instead of wedding cake because they both preferred pie. Another shared vision. When I cried that night, brimming with vodka and chardonnay, I kept mentioning my ex’s name in conversation just so everyone would know that coming alone was a choice I’d made. I used the toe of my sparkly party shoes to grind cigarette butts into the redwood planks of a deck that overlooked rippling green meadows gone dusky in the twilight. It was so beautiful. I was so drunk.
Back then, life existed most forcefully for me in evenings like those: bleary nights when I confronted the difficulty of love—my broken heart! my ex’s broken heart!—and felt existentially alone, and drank enough Absolut to tell everyone I was feeling that way. But as the years unfolded, life started to seem less like something that crystallized in these cinematic moments—weeping in bathrooms, or gesticulating with a glowing cigarette tip against the backdrop of a darkening summer sky—and more like something that accumulated across broad swaths of ordinary days: morning commutes, school pickups, the heat of my little nephews’ bodies pressed against mine on couches, listening to The Lorax, asking for apple pie instead of cake on their birthdays.
A few years after his wedding, I asked Eliot to lend me enough money so I could take a two-month trip to Bolivia. He said no. “I have enough money for the trip,” I explained helpfully. “I just need money to pay rent when I get back.” He still said no. I felt judged, I told him. He said that I shouldn’t ask for a favor unless I was okay with hearing no. I started crying—I’m sad at you, I used to say to my brothers when I was young—because some part of me knew he was right. It wasn’t needing the money that made me cry so much as the thought that I had disappointed him. I’d spent so much of my life straining toward his praise like a houseplant leaning into sunlight, begging for something from that voice on the other end of the line—not just love, but the assurance that I deserved it.
When Marshall was dying, nearly two decades after my parents had divorced, my mother wrote him a card that she asked me to read over his body. “Thank you thank you thank you thank you,” she wrote—one thanks for my father, and one for each of the children they’d had together. Her words created a solid surface around the hollowness in me where grief should have been. “I’ve always admired your willingness to dream big dreams,” she wrote. His body on the bed seemed so unbelievably small. I touched his arm and held his hand, but could not bring myself to touch his face.
Beneath my feet, his basement was full of the detritus of his ongoing projects, their uneasy marriage of mania and brilliance: a library of sandpaper so he could make his own nail files, index cards scribbled with to-do lists, Send Israel-Palestine Resolution to Senator Warner; Finish Afghanistan Exit Plan. He could make you see the wonder in anything, my aunts told me, even a little bug or a weed. The poem they read to him as he was dying—with its gull’s way, its whale’s way—didn’t end with the whetted knife of wind or the vagrant gypsy life. It ended with rest: And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing, fellow-rover, / And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.
The day after he died, I made brunch for everyone, fried oysters, palming the glistening ovals of muscle and crusting them with bread crumbs, willing them to become something edible. I wanted to be useful. I wanted to feed the bereaved. I’d bought these oysters from a gas station near Rappahannock, where the man behind the counter sold me a glass jar full of their slippery bodies and then announced to me, for no apparent reason, that he wanted a root beer and a moon pie. The world seemed full of desires that couldn’t always be explained, but could sometimes—in surprising ways—be met.
Over oily breaded oysters, Kelda told us Marshall had always talked easily about the early years of his life—his childhood, his service in the Air Force—but there were thirty years he rarely spoke about at all: the years of raising his first family. When my father heard that, his face showed no expression. Later that day, when I saw an empty wine bottle in his hotel room, I thought of his face at the table. What lay behind it? His empty bottle summoned all the empty wine bottles that I’d dumped in neighbors’ recycling bins during the months my grandmother was dying, many decades after she and Marshall had divorced, when I was living in her home and caring for her imperfectly, as best I could. My grandfather was the only other person in my family who’d ever gotten sober, but I didn’t know anything about what sobriety had been like for him. Had he also drunk seltzer water straight from the bottle? Had he also spent days in an apartment that smelled like too much toothpaste, remembering his bungled love affairs? Probably not. He’d had his own, worse journeys.
Among other things, sobriety was teaching me that I loved nothing better than telling inflated stories about my own ordinary dysfunction. And maybe I’d corralled the men in my family into another one of these tales: the story of a little girl yearning for elusive men—the pilot, the frequent flier, the silent voice at the other end of the line—whose bodies and attention were often directed somewhere else. But the story was more complicated than that. Because at some point I’d developed an attachment to the state of yearning itself. I no longer desired presence; in fact, I often had no idea what to do with men when they stuck around. It was like staying at my father’s apartment for a single night after months away from him. Everything was uncomfortable. There was no food for my school lunch, only chardonnay in the fridge. I just wanted to go home. It was easier to miss him than to have him close.
It was years before I discovered the second definition of the word saudade. In this meaning, saudade doesn’t describe longing for any particular object, but longing for that very state of yearning. As critic F. D. Santos writes: “It is no more the Loved One or the ‘Return’ that is desired. Now, Desire desires Desire itself.” This kind of desire doesn’t know what to do with being met. It has trouble with the proximity of white rooms. It can’t see the ways in which elusive men sometimes show up. It has trouble fitting their presence into the frame.
The truth is, the elusive men in my family also showed up plenty of times. Marshall built a second family and loved his daughters well. Sometimes he escaped to Brazil, and sometimes he escaped to his basement projects, but through it all he built a thirty-year life in an old wooden house by the Chesapeake Bay. My father was often gone, but there were plenty of times he was there—making me ramen and popcorn for dinner when my mom was out of town, or waiting in the hospital cafeteria during my heart surgery, years later. If I was attached to stories about my restless father and his restless father, then maybe once my grandfather died I could let him live as something more than myth, more than godhead; and maybe I could let my father live as something more complicated and contradictory as well, which is to say: devoted, imperfect, trying his best. Maybe I could start to see that while I had been longing for him, he’d been longing for me as well.
Two days after our grandfather died, Eliot and I woke up early to go running in the rain. “I love running in the rain,” I told him, even though I didn’t. I just wanted to be a person who loved running in the rain: stoic, unflappable. Eliot asked if I had a rain jacket. I didn’t. He gave me his. I got soaked anyway. We both did. He got more so. Our shoes slapped sodden on the dirt road and brown grass, then on the asphalt two-lane highway, past wooden farmhouses. I resolved to run until Eliot suggested we turn around, which meant we kept going. Eliot regularly ran marathons. I’d already traded my running regimen for a smoking habit. Once we got back to the house where we were staying, I asked Eliot how far he thought we’d gone. He guessed four miles and I guessed seven. It’s always been this way: He undersells himself and stays in it for the long haul. I want credit and tire easily.
Before we got back, however, before we even turned around, we followed the highway turnoff for Omega Protein. We followed asphalt through the trees until we spied the plant itself: a collection of squat towers—huge boiling vats, probably—and a posse of forklift trucks, a few rusted boats. “What if we were spies from a rival fish-processing plant?” I asked him. “How would we take this place down?” We speculated about angles of approach, scaling chain-link fences, spoiling tanks of fish with something rotten. I have always liked laughing with Eliot because the way we laugh remains somehow untouched by the differences between the lives we’ve built. Eliot was one of the first people in the world I ever found hilarious.
We passed a tiny airfield at the edge of the Omega complex. It was patchy with grass and soggy with rain. It wasn’t a mythic airstrip. It was more like an abandoned soccer field. It insisted on the muddy ground more than it suggested the possibility of leaving it behind. Who knew who flew there, or why? It was a field where fish were ferried to the sky in boneless lumps; where men who would someday be grandfathers did things they would someday tell their grandchildren about: carried briefcases full of Atlantic menhaden or documents they would or wouldn’t send to congressmen, documents that would or wouldn’t save the world. The world would keep on needing saving. We kept on running. The sky kept on raining. We knew the sky would keep pulling men into the clouds and sending them back underground. We knew that life was a long trick that ended with a dream; living was a gull and a whale and a whetted knife of wind.
Everyone had always told me about Marshall and the sky. It was the perfect metaphor: he was a restless pilot. But on that day, the sky felt too easy. It turned everything weightless. It felt more honest to stare at a closed place below it: the patchy grass surrounded by a chain-link fence, at the fish plant, in the rain.
Each time I try to write an elegy for my grandfather, it ends up becoming a thank-you letter to my brother instead. I want to tell him: Thank you for having sons in fleece pajamas. Thank you for being a good father, and for refusing me that loan—or at least thank you for telling me I needed to be okay with it. Thank you for staying married and not needing your marriage to be a white room in which you’re always entertained. Thank you for showing me that settling was just a story I told myself about other people’s lives. Thank you for crying when I cried, when you were young and I was younger, and for understanding why I didn’t cry at our grandfather’s deathbed. Thank you for giving me your rain jacket and your prom photo and your apple pies, and for sleeping in a bed below my bed, years ago, when I didn’t know how to get through the night.
