Thesis

Contents

Foreword: Female Quixotes

Part I: Children At All Costs

Peter Pan

Like Love

Part II: Love At All Costs

Modern Fidelity

“Just What the Muscles Grope For”

Coda: Daughters of the University

Foreword

Female Quixotes

Sometime in 1997, I was in mid-conversation with a colleague when I realized I was late for my annual checkup. I remember the conversation mostly because it was one of those that floats easily across professional and personal boundaries. Through a circuitous route, we ended up talking about Tabitha Gilman Tenney’s 1801 Female Quixotism, an early U.S. novel modeled after the classic Don Quixote. At 34, the heroine of Tenney’s novel is ancient history—she has to carefully pick the “white hairs” from her “jetty lock.” She is almost as foolish as that other figure invoked by early novelists—the female pedant. It was the reference to aging that jolted me into remembering my annual checkup. I was almost forty.

We live in a time when female passion through life is not only accepted, but expected. Unlike women two hundred years ago, my professional colleagues, most in their late thirties or early forties, talk candidly and freely in academic corridors about womanly matters—romance, postmodern criticism, feminism, philosophy, sex, the best bedtime stories. Yes, sexism still exists in the academy, but times are better for women, and we know it. We fit in our world.

But that particular day, I found myself ever so slightly bothered in my comfortable world, in part because I was no longer in it. I had walked to the university health clinic complex, where the HMO office is inconveniently located in a completely different building from the woman’s health clinic, which is housed in the place where real disease resides—the hospital, whose closest neighbor is the cancer center. I had arrived just a little late to the upholstered cubicle where I gave my name and numbers in response to the receptionist’s prompts. Her third question threw me.

“Are you pregnant?”

She asked the question directly, without even blinking. Such a personal question, I thought to myself, noticing for the first time the pictures of smiling children taped to and around her computer, distinguishing her cubby from the other three identical ones. “No,” I answered, realizing on second thought that it was a fair game question. She needed to know where to send me, and in the world of women’s health, everything depends on where one sits on that slippery slope between fertility and menopause. She sent me on my way, and I walked to the hospital building, hoping I could get this annual ritual over quickly and get back to the place where I frame and pose the questions.

Once in the women’s health clinic, I was not scolded for being tardy, so I settled into the waiting room and prepared myself for what was to follow. I was neither nervous nor apprehensive. Over the ten years I’d been a patient at the clinic, I’d come to know the routine well. I’d seen several doctors—not because I’m a difficult patient but because this is a teaching and research facility. Generalists come to retrain in infertility or high-risk pregnancy and then move on to positions elsewhere. I’d been to one doctor I really liked, but I no longer qualified for him. He was on the high-risk pregnancy side of the center, the side where I’d seen the unforgettable sonograms of blighted ova—things that once pulsed in me, dead on the screen.

But I wasn’t focusing on those sonograms that day. It’s cliché, but those days are gone: we have two beautiful children, sons adopted at ages two and half and three from a Russian orphanage. I’m thankful to be on the other side, the hopelessly infertile and menopausal side, even though I and most of my friends are in some unnamed medical category in between.

I’d chosen a new doctor and expected to like her. We were close in age. I had worked with her when she was reviewing surgical options with a Russian refugee. I wasn’t there as a Russian/English translator. That had been tried, but didn’t work because the refugee left the office believing she had cancer rather than the severe dysplasia or carcinoma-in-situ, often referred to as “pre-cancer” cells. I was there because the Russian woman understood my English; I knew to speak slowly and e-nun-ci-ate, to continually rephrase and repeat the ideas I was trying to convey, to put the stress on the wrong part of the word so that pre-CANCER (as if cancer needs any highlighting) becomes PRE-cancer. I was there to translate medical English into understandable English.

Despite her med-speak, the doctor was good. I was impressed by how much time she spent with her patient, as much time as her patient needed to make the best choice, and by how persuasively she argued the more aggressive surgical loop excision or LEEP option. I was also impressed that she heard, really heard, when the refugee woman laid out a problem all too common. Her husband, who had studied and worked as an engineer in the Soviet Union, now had a job mixing chemicals, a job with few virtues except a health insurance plan. But the insurance was only covering seventy-five percent, and they were responsible for the other twenty-five percent. While she wanted the LEEP surgery to better her chances of eliminating the risk of a cancer her grandmother died from and her mother was battling, they just couldn’t afford their twenty-five percent. They had to go with the cheaper chryotherapy option, which had a high rate of failing to deter the progression of cervical cancer.

The doctor left the room to negotiate with billing up front. The negotiations failed, so she did something bolder. She waived the difference by putting a different code in the chart. She would do the more aggressive LEEP surgery and record the less expensive chryotherapy. It was illegal, to be sure, but I thought it heroic, the stuff of a novel or a film: young, attractive (a must for Hollywood) female physician battles impersonal medical institution. The script appealed to me. A female Thoreau moving to the beat of her own pulsing conscience. It made my heart beat a little fast.

When I met this doctor again, this time as a patient, she brought with her my very thick chart. I knew she hadn’t had time to read it and knew she would ask me the usual questions, the answers to which are in the file. It’s life in a university health clinic, where we enjoy good care despite such inconveniences. I’m used to med-speak and was prepared to answer everything, so we were making good time, rolling through the questions until we hit the complication: “Do you have any children?”

I did hesitate, but only for a second, two tops. “Yes,” I said, watching as she wrote, “two boys.” I could see her form the number 2. “We’ve adopted two boys.”

She paused without looking up and crossed out what she had written. “So you have no children.” It was a statement, not a question.

“No, no children,” I said, a female Judas, knowing that professional or not my days were scheduled around parks visits and preschool and meals and snacks and bedtime stories, knowing that the sun rises and sets, the moon rises and illuminates, by the light of those two boys, my children, my sons.

But behind the gold bank-vault doors of the university women’s clinic, I stuck to the only code she (so excellent a listener) would hear me say. No children. I imagined other women, their stories rewritten in shorthand, codified into pages of charts that become part of medical research, lined up, color-coded, organized, and managed.

The rest of the exam went quickly, and I was soon ready for check out. But the receptionist was on the phone. She shrugged at me to indicate that her phone conversation had gone on too long already; someone was putting a cog in their machine. “When was your appointment?” the receptionist asked into the phone, presumably not for the first time. She was wearing a white polyester uniform with a pattern of cheerful teddy bears. She repeated the question again, somewhat more abruptly this time, trying to reel the speaker in, to finish with the one on the line so she could move on to me. And then I thought I must be hearing wrong because nobody could be so brutal, “Where did you have your miscarriage? Was it here?” she interrogated. “Which doctor?” After a short moment with the receiver, she looked satisfied. She’d made her catch and with a few more efficient words, she hung it up.

She turned to me, glancing at the check-out slip on the top of my chart. “Oh,” she said. “You don’t need a follow-up. You didn’t have to wait.”

I couldn’t believe it when I heard myself thank her, when I added the “no problem.” No problem?

For a second I wanted to turn and fight, to battle them, or better yet, I thought, infiltrate and break their code. But I knew I wouldn’t.

Even could I invent some new words, they would not accomplish heroic feats. Inside the center for women’s health, behind their gold doors, I am not woman enough. I am merely quixotic, my words as comic a weapon as a sword against windmills.

Part 2

Love at All Costs

“consider what else was lost, along with the sentimental.”

—Suzanne Clark, Sentimental Modernism

Modern fidelity

A few years back, my husband stopped reading my essays. Actually that's not entirely true. He actually never started reading them with great enthusiasm. I just talked him into reading three—probably exactly the number of his theoretical math publications in the field of operator theory that he talked me into slogging through. Of course, I had him read the essay about our children. “What happened to me?” he said. It's all about you.”

“Well, yes, of course. It's a personal essay. It’s just the genre. But if you want me to write you in . . .”

It took no time at all for him to refuse the offer. “I think I'm better off out of it. Your pieces are all too sad.”

He’d only read one other piece at that point—one about my mother dying. When I told him I'd written again about my mother, he said, “Uh huh,” while he watched the stock numbers race across the TV screen. When I pressed him about it again, he said, still watching the numbers, “The stuff about your mother just makes me cry.” He knew my mother.

“Not this piece,” I said. But he didn't believe me. It seems he wasn’t going to risk being waylaid by sentiment—either that or the pages were starting to add up, and reading was starting to be work.

Finally though, I think it was sentiment that made him so resistant, which put me in an odd position. As an academic trained in the late twentieth century, I had been taught to deplore sentiment with the kind of scorn reserved for Reader’s Digest condensed versions. Yet when I tried to write about my mother in a modern ironic voice, it just rang false, like a uniform that identified me with a club I didn’t want to belong to. I found myself more and more in sympathy with some nineteenth-century sentimental women writers, women like Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps whose voice changed after her daughter’s death in a train accident, or women who lost husbands and children on the violent slave auction blocks or in one of the bloodiest wars this country has ever experienced. How could ironic distance possibly suffice in such historical instances? T.S. Eliot managed it, but he was a banker, used to the abstraction of numbers.

In the aftermath of 9/11, we rediscovered sentiment, irony’s antithesis, and one hopes, we are exploring it in all its complexities. Sentiment done badly, overdone, is difficult to defend aesthetically. But is there room for women writing sentiment, doing it well, at the turn of the 21st century? (There’s long been room for male sentiment in the changing literary canon.) Can female sentiment ever be considered art?

“In Tomorrow one voice does for all. But it is a little unsure of itself; it keeps testing itself. . .”

—E.B. White, “The World of Tomorrow” (1939)

Not the least fascinating part of The New Yorker is the obsessive interest it breeds in its own history. Some former staffer, it seems, is always reminiscing about the magazine’s golden days, promising to reveal some secret about its inner workings, or, more frequently, some piece of gossip about its high-profile editors and writers. Although I live now, and have always lived, in places decidedly removed from New York City, I confess that I am one of those who eagerly awaits the newest offering from the New Yorker memoir industry.

For scholarly purposes, of course. It’s difficult to conceive of the essay’s place in the literature of the 20^th-century United States without recognizing the magazine’s profound influence. And the more I read, the more I’m convinced that the essay as we know it owes much to the love affair started between E.B. White and Katharine Sargeant Angell sometime in the late ‘20s. Katharine, who joined Harold Ross’s editorial team almost at the New Yorker’s inception, firstmet E.B. or “Andy” White when she extended an invitation for him to change his status from freelance contributor to permanent staff writers. Eventually, their workplace relationship grew into a love affair, and, as with most great western romances, it began as an adulterous one. In the summer of 1928, Katharine Sargeant Angell, traveled with her first husband to France, where, as she had planned, she consummated her first and only adulterous affair. After the time in France, Katharine returned to her husband briefly, but tiring of his repeated indiscrete infidelities, she left him. Because her husband refused to grant her the customary full custody of her children, she also effectively left them. Shortly after her divorce in 1929, she married the younger Andy White, and thereafter, denied that their affair every occurred.

Both Katharine and Andy were thoroughly modern, though in different ways. His preoccupation was, as he described in a 1936 letter to his wife, with machines that “are simply lying in wait for all of us.” Although the theme of encroaching technology influences most of his best work, including his often reprinted “Once More to the Lake” (which he wrote during his five-year interlude at Harper’s), it is perhaps most visible in his disconcerting review of the 1939 World’s Fair, in which he doubts and resists a technology-driven view of the future and, Robert Frost-like, laments the loss of rural pleasures. It’s hard to imagine what a resurrected Andy White would think of a fully technologized U.S. society as it moves into the next millennium. Horror comes to mind. But my guess is that White and other crusty U.S. moderns would have felt almost fresh again with all the scary millennial talk of disintegrating family values, scientific disasters, and other impending terrors. The technology of the new millennium—warp speed, compact volumes—carries the worry of its Achilles’ code, its alarming default set to loose a chaotic flow of information or make it disappear entirely with one trip of a binary. How much data can we fit on the head of a pin? And what do we do with it all? How much noisy data can we filter out when precise surveillance is what we need? Presumably information technology will beget an instability unknown to previous generations, a new millennial post-modernism. Post-modernism squared if you will. But despite all the talk and media hype, modernism is still very much with us. If E.B. White predicted accurately one facet of the future, it is this: Tomorrow’s voice does indeed seem singular and unsure, testing itself over and over again. Perhaps nothing reveals this better than the late ‘90s increased interest in memoir—and the literati’s simultaneous disdain and dismissal of the form as part of some new sentimentalism.

Although no less emblematic, Katharine’s modern ideas differed from her second husband’s. She demanded fidelity in a partner and wedded herself to an engrossing career. She was willing to sacrifice full control of her children’s care to secure such fidelity. This trend—women forsaking their traditional roles, entering the workplace—worried her Victorian father, who urged her to stay with her husband, to keep the appearance of marriage, because, as he put it, he hated to see her “dear children become victims to these modern ideas of individuality.” He needn’t have worried. All three of Katherine’s children grew into prosperous adults. Her son from her first marriage, Roger Angell, is a long-time fiction editor (and writer) for The New Yorker. Her marriage to Andy was long and happy, enduring until her death forty-seven years later. At the end of her life, Katharine was a sight: aged, bloated, covered with pussy sores. Yet by all accounts, Andy seemed only to see the beautiful and imposing young editor he met, wooed, and wed, the Bryn Mawr graduate who covered their bed in manuscripts.

Katharine would never become as well known as her writer husband. He survives as one of the essayists most anthologized. His reworking of William Strunk’s Cornell textbook, The Elements of Style, is routine recommended for writers, both beginning and professional, and frequently makes one or another “Best Books” list. Yet those who reflect (and reflect again) on the legacy of the New Yorker, often timidly posit that Katharine was perhaps as influential. While she began and ended her career as a writer of magazine essays, she made her deep marks through her less visible work as an editor of fiction, memoir, and casual essays at the New Yorker. For at least thirty-five years, first under the legendary editor Harold Ross and later under the equally legendary Willliam Shawn, Katharine edited and influenced.

Together then the Whites helped shape the voice of Tomorrow; together they made voice in the U.S. essay tradition a family affair.

“Episodes of love . . . appear in the modern, rational conversation the discourse of our times, as something to be gotten over, grown out of.”

—Suzanne Clarke, Sentimental Modernism

It was just a little more than three decades ago, close to half a century after Katharine and Andy shook things up with their affair, that “modern ideas” spread into our small town in California’s rural San Joaquin Valley. That famous New Yorker cover, the one where most of the U.S. becomes a suburb of New York City, had suddenly become not simply funny, a classic instance of ironic overstatement, but instead prophetic. Even as an oblivious teenager I could feel the change advancing, like the overblown menace in some sci-fi horror flick. The town banded and resisted—eyes became more vigilant, ears listened for the slightest indiscrete whispers, relatives worked with even more energy to patch up marriages or hurry them up.

It was during this time, in the mid-seventies to be exact, that I found myself part of a family watched. It was through no indiscretion of ours: my father died suddenly and young, leaving a young wife of 42 and four children ranging in age from 9 to 17. No longer traditionally nuclear, we became the real thing—unstable, potentially reactive. We attempted a kind of micro level détente, doing the best we could to maintain appearances, to fashion ourselves the picture of stability. My mother stayed away from the desperate restlessness of singles groups located in larger neighboring cities. She continued to attach herself awkwardly to the couples with whom she and my father had socialized. She argued and split with a family friend, a widower who had taken up with someone younger, beginning a new family even as his old one crumbled from neglect. Still, we sensed she was restless. The very air we breathed supplied us with our foundations: a nuclear family had to be paternally secured. We felt the town’s watchful eyes. We felt the change coming. And, of course, change inevitably came, first with Don, the odd divorcé in town, and then with Bernado, a married out of towner. It came and stayed until fidelity and adultery themselves promised a kind of stability.

From the beginning, Don promised nothing and threatened everything. He was clearly not head-of-household material. He was a “diversion”—a new word for us—one that our mother couldn’t or wouldn’t be argued out of. Equally baffling was his interest in her. She had been considered a beauty, but that was years and four children before she rallied around her “family is enough” flag, before we even knew her. We had to accept the testimony of others and the evidence provided by amateur photographs or those professional ones that pastel color over black and white. Four grown children later, at forty-five, she still had thick red hair and green eyes, but she was battling a 40s spread I now know well, the crowding of the lower teeth, the receding of the jaw line, the sagging jowls so typical of aging women in the Machado clan. And there was Don, a mere pup of thirty-nine, handsome, trim, fit—and ridiculous. Those who cut their literary teeth on the New Yorker might see in this depiction a typical therapy case: Young adolescent girl can’t come to terms with her mother’s sexuality. But for a rural community, that’s urban myth, and this is an aggie story, which means, sex wasn’t the problem. Families were made in the backseats of cars and confirmed at the church altar. It was the restlessness that came with it, something even the young in farm communities could ill afford. Their livelihood demanded that springs be brief, summers long. But in those changing ‘70s, spring seemed to lengthen. Anything could happen and something more did. Three dates into the Don affair, Bernado showed up, “an old friend,” in San Francisco on business, “in the neighborhood,” a mere three-hour car drive away.

If Don had little to recommend him, Bernado had a lot. For starters, Bernado and my mother had been in love twenty years earlier. And now they were in love again. I could tell from the glances they exchanged, glances like I’d seen only in movies. Bernado had brought along a past, a passion ready to spill. And odd as it may seem, like Katharine’s illicit French tryst, the possibility of adultery promised stability for the first time since we left, suddenly and unprepared, a widowed family.

III

“Modernism inaugurated a reversal of values which emphasized erotic desire, not love; anarchic rupture and innovation rather than the conventional appeals of sentimental language.”

—Suzanne Clarke, Sentimental Modernism

So these are love stories, which push the generic edge of the essay’s boundaries as we navigate through postmodernism into the new millennium. Narrative, the essay can sustain, but something like love, especially this kind of love, the very goo of women’s magazines that seem not to have progressed beyond the slow drip of Victorian sentiment? This essay form that’s been celebrated from Montaigne on for its elasticity, is it really that plastic? What of what Katharine White called that “certain masculine detachment,” that “virtue” she strove for both in life and in the New Yorker reminiscence pieces she edited, those that came to define the modern U.S. essay? In an irony worthy of modernism, Andy “What Do Our Hearts Treasure” White was a sentimental Cornell man; his wife was a reserved, avowedly unsentimental Bryn Mawr woman. The times, perhaps, dictated the pattern. Although White is best know for his ironic humor, his essays, particularly around and after the Second World War, might better be characterized as attempts to modernize sentiment. While perhaps not dripping with the teary emotion of late 19^th-century prose, his essays show other features of sentimental literature—the bourgeois retreat into self, into the inner life, and conversely, the humanistic impulse to establish sympathetic connections with other thinking, feeling selves. As a man, particularly as a young man, E.B. White was able to make frequent, unexpected retreats, even to take what he called his “year of grace,” a time in which he sought to “forswear certain easy rituals,” including work, marriage, and family. His letter proclaiming and justifying his “Year Off” to his wife might serve as a defense for the essayist.

As a young woman, Katharine hadn’t the luxury to be an essayist. Nor had she the inclination. Her Bryn Mawr education and her own quest for truth had taught her to suspect her Victorian upbringing with its beautiful, nebulous sentiments. As a retired editor, Katharine wrote garden essays for the New Yorker (they’re published now in a volume with an Afterword by Jamaica Kincaid). In these essays, not surprisingly, she practices what she’s penned, eschewing the personal and sentimental. As Kincaid puts it, White reveals “herself only as she was in the garden; so passionate, but again only as she lived the life of a gardener.” It’s all we’ll ever see of Katharine White’s passionate side. Despite flashes of nostalgia for New England girlhood, her pieces remain safely tethered in the horticultural and botanical language of gardening catalogs. She left sentiment to Andy.

Which to me, though understandable, is sad enough. But there’s more: it’s this detached voice, this anti-engaged view, that’s riding the binary code into the new millennium. For a time, to be sure, in the ‘50s, the majority of the New Yorker’s readership consisted of suburban leisured women, but Tom Wolfe exposed the magazine’s “whichy thicket,” its embedded relative clauses and womanly curves, and flushed the magazine out from it. Still, what feminine style (and experience) Wolfe picked up on was only faintly etched on paper; New Yorker prose merely stood in relief to the manly modernist literary style in vogue. Katharine White can be (and has been) accused of many things, but overt sentimentalism and girliness are never among the charges. During her years at the New Yorker, Katharine, along with celebrity editors like Scribner’s Maxwell Perkins, helped to blue-pencil a detached “masculine” voice straight into U.S. letters, where it has remained, to spite Wolfe’s claim, the essay’s sine qua non. The speaker of an essay, writes Phillip Lopate in his influential introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay, “must above all be a reliable narrator”; essayists must earn the reader’s trust. Such trust, he continues, “issues, paradoxically, from their exposure of their own betrayals,” linked to the “insensitivity that wounded another, a lack of empathy, or the callowness of youth” (xxvi-xxvii). While “[s]ome vulnerability is essential to the personal essay,” the form involves “rough handling,” which “begins with oneself”: “There is a certain strictness, or even cruelty at times, in the impulse of the personal essayist to scrape away illusions” (xxvi). Lopate’s introduction, an important addition to essay criticism, demonstrates that even postmodernism, with all its unsuppressed huffing and puffing, couldn’t topple the detached worldy-wise White voice. Indeed, if postmodern has accomplished anything, it has made the accepted voice of the essay, that voice of Tomorrow, even more detached and more masculine, swelling to hyphenated, hopped-up-on-testosterone, rough cruel ranges. Can an essay or piece of creative nonfiction survive, thrive, without Katharine’s detached masculine voice? Can it engage sentiment without falling under the weight of a weepy female voice? Without being served up as some kind of chicken soup? Or will criticism keep the essay, the widely touted most protean of protean literary forms, in check, making it impossible as Suzanne Clark claims, “to talk about women writers and the sentimental without eliciting the modern response,” that “knee-jerk reaction without parallel in literary criticism.”

We’ve turned the millennial wheel and are deeply into the rhetoric of new terroristic technological times. Perhaps this manly expansive form can stand just a little female sentiment, even if it be infused with what one Harper’s editor calls “estrogen logic.” Reading the 75^th anniversary issue of the New Yorker, which featured among other pieces Wendy Wasserstein’s moving piece about her daughter, suggests that perhaps even this august venue is toying with (returning to?) ways of embracing the sentimental. Perhaps, as it seems in the academy, we really are on the edge of a new millennium where essay writing is concerned. A few semesters back, I went to hear a lecture by an eminent literary scholar, a theorist. He read from his work in progress, a memoir—not a strange thing for an academic to be doing these days. It began in a detached enough way. There were enough references to The Great Gatsby, Booker T., and Du Bois to keep the undergraduates in the audience flipping their notebook pages and dropping their pens. There were enough theoretical framings and reframings to let the scholars in attendance know that he wasn’t giving up his literary heavyweight title. But toward the end, the voice of the piece shifted. And while, granted, the death of his father was presented through the obligatory detached images—a literary device Phillip Lopate thankfully taught me to suspect—the voice was anything but detached. Dare I say it? It verged on the sentimental. When he finished reading, the auditorium was silent. The undergraduates had stopped rustling their papers sometime earlier. The theorists posed no elaborate questions. The writers didn’t workshop the piece. Instead, an audience sat silently in a university hall, indulged in oxymoronic thoughtful sentiment. Manly sentiment.

“Modernism reversed the increasing influence of women’s writing, discrediting the literary past and especially that sentimental history. Women themselves participated in this unwarranting.”

—Suzanne Clarke, Sentimental Modernism

A few months after Bernado’s visit, my aunt was fishing for information. “So you were there. What did they talk about?” I knew she’d already tried to fish my mother dry, thrown her hook into the mirage of details that my mother could condense and evaporate at will; details materialized, dripped with promise, only to evaporate, leaving just the faintest trace, no conviction of fact. While Don had diverted us, Bernado unified and strengthened us. I was again my mother’s daughter. I offered only the most cryptic leads, “They talked about grandma.”

It was true. He did talk about my grandmother, and even more surprisingly, he did like her. I met my grandmother for the second time when she moved from the East to the West Coast, the result of a much-whispered about nervous breakdown. It was a move she didn’t want to make and made for the worst reasons. She didn’t want to leave her people—even if most of those she was still speaking to were in the neighboring cemetery. Every Sunday after church, or at least during the Massachusetts growing seasons, my grandmother took her family to the Portuguese cemetery, where they picnicked and tended the family graves: plucked weeds, fed and pruned roses, trained vines, and planted annuals. It was a ritual that ended when my mother followed my uncle west. My grandmother still visited the graves, but now the neighborhood had changed; a tall fence, capped with barbed wire surrounded the cemetery and the low cement base was spray-painted in graffiti. She was afraid to stay, so she packed her pictures, most of people who had lived, but some of coffins and gravestones beautifully tended. She headed west to join us in the San Joaquin.

At first, my parents intended to find a new house with a mother-in-law apartment. But after a few short months of staying with us, those plans were cancelled. The children make me nervous, your husband doesn’t make me feel welcome. She opted to live alone in a small house, was compelled to, she might have said. She complained constantly about how lonely she was, about her daughter’s failing, about our ruffian upbringing, but mostly, she complained about my father. If my mother had to marry a worker, my grandmother felt, he at least ought to be a good one, good at everything from fixing a TV to repairing a toaster, patching a roof, pruning a tree, or unplugging a drain. All of which he did, but my father could never please. My grandmother believed that she had provided my mother opportunities to better herself, and that my mother, despite her beauty, had married her working equal and sealed her fate with children. In response to the announcement of my birth, the third such in three years, my grandmother wrote a short note: “There is a way not to have a baby every year.” To really feel the sting, my mother emphasized, one had to know that the note was from a devout Catholic.

What I didn’t tell my aunt was that my grandmother took up so much of the conversation because she was instrumental in my mother’s courtship with Bernado. Of course, my aunt knew this already. My mother and Bernado had first met, it seems, at a dance hall during the Korean War. As part of some war effort to boost morale and rally the troops, my mother would join other young women on a bus ride to the hall, dance the night away with soldiers (heavily chaperoned, I was assured), and return home by bus. Most of the men she never saw again. But Bernado was different. On an extended leave, he became a lodger at my grandmother’s house, though whether before or after one of those dances, I’m not certain.

The setup sounded somewhat shady to us: a romantic liaison between a young woman and a soldier who lived in her house? We’d seen the movies. Then we saw photographs of a romantic outing Bernado and my mother spent at the shore. There’s the classic looking late-40s black car, not new but impressively polished, there’s my mother in a Lauren Bacall-type suit, her slim, leggy body reclining into the car, mirroring its curves, or draped elegantly on a large rock with waves crashing in the background, and there is my grandmother in almost every picture, dressed tall in a light suit, pocketbook clutched firmly between both hands at her waist. Of all the pictures taken that day, only one is of the lovers, a shot of my mother wrapped loosely, relaxed into Bernado’s left arm, the car and the bridge in the background. My grandmother took that picture. Their whole relationship unfolded under her solid gaze. Without it, they had crumbled, though not without great effort on her part to put them together again.

“Your grandmother was persistent.” Bernado, it turned out, loved to tell our family stories. “Your mother had moved to the West Coast, met your father and was about to be married. I was set to marry May. Your grandmother and I had remained good friends. One night, right before your mom’s wedding, your grandmother called me, particularly urgent, ‘You’ve got to stop all this, Bernado. Do something. Go out there. Stop her from marrying that man. You must.’

“Of course, I told her I couldn’t possibly do that. She was furious—didn’t speak to me for a month.” He dropped his head and shook it, looking genuinely disturbed to remember the breach.

“A month? How often were you talking with her before?” I asked, mystified that anyone would find a month’s reprieve from my grandmother a hardship.

“I told you,” he said, chiding me as if I weren’t paying quite enough attention to the details. “We were good friends. I talked to her almost everyday.”

“Everyday?”

He waved me off—hopeless—and continued. “Your mother married your father and your grandmother started talking to me again. I invited her to my wedding, though I was thinking she’d certainly decline.”

She accepted, apparently, all too well. She attended his wedding and a week later came for an extended stay with him and May. Bernado was in the awkward position of telling his new bride that his ex-fiancé’s mother was coming to stay; he couldn’t even say for how long.

“Why didn’t you just tell her she couldn’t come?” I asked.

He paused. No doubt this possibility had crossed his mind. “I liked your grandmother, and I had lived with her, and she was finally speaking to me again. I knew May wouldn’t be excited about the prospect, but I thought she’d just adjust, just as if my mother or her mother had come to stay.

I rolled my eyes, teenager style. He kept on as if I hadn’t.

“May did make an effort. But not enough for your grandmother. She left in high dudgeon after only one week. ‘This is not the welcome I expected.’” He sounded surprisingly like her as he mimicked her voice. “’Your new bride doesn’t want me here. I knew no good would come of this marriage. You should have married Chris.’”

Bernado joined us as we laughed, embarrassed yet again by grandma’s theatrics. “What was she thinking to go stay with you? Amazing.”

Then Bernado stopped laughing. He grew serious and looked at my mother, another movie glance, “She was right to come stay with us. She was right on all counts.”

None of us was surprised when the next night, Don, my mother, and Bernado returned from dinner at an expensive, elegant restaurant—Bernado’s invitation, Bernado’s treat—with the gay divorcé Don fuming childishly, formally vanquished.

“The sentimental acts as a pivotal ground in a battle over literary and moral value.”

—Suzanne Clarke, Sentimental Modernism

Modernism had suddenly hit, delayed yes, diluted yes, but powerful just the same. All the rules we had lived by were qualified, or off the books entirely. My mother grew up Catholic and superstitious, but by 1976 she no longer believed in purgatory or saints’ intercessions or divine apparitions or papal prohibitions. While my grandmother was part of a generation that knelt its way up the church steps on Our Lady of Fatima’s feast day, my mother was among those new Catholics who wanted our dear lady out of the church. We no longer brought flowers to the virgin’s statue on the first of May. We mocked anything vaguely Marian.

And yet, and yet. We couldn’t settle comfortably into modern doubt. Even anti-Marian sentiment couldn’t hold, as we learned when my mother’s best friend Sunny died from a slow, lingering colon cancer. Those watching felt relieved when Sunny slipped into unconsciousness; they dreaded the moments she awakened. Then a few days before her death, Sunny woke up and smiled. “Don’t you see her, Chris?” That beautiful woman, sitting in the tree outside. I always knew she would be so beautiful.”

“Yes,” my mothered had answered. “She’s beautiful.”

“So you really think she saw the virgin?” I asked mockingly when my mother finished telling us about it.

She gave me that look, left brow arched just so, the look she reserved for uppity or ill-behaved or down right foolish children, and then said slowly, in a low voice, “Does it really matter?”

I was looking for certainties in uncertain times. Yet even when I tried to be flexible, to float with undulating life events, I came up rigid and wrong—like I did after my grandmother’s death. My grandmother moved west on the stipulation that she be buried back east. When the time came to make the arrangements, my mother discovered that transporting a body from one coast to the other is neither inexpensive nor uncomplicated. “Don’t do it,” I said, with little respect for the dead. “She’ll never know.” It seemed an appropriate thing to say in post-Vatican II times.

My protean mother, however, morphed once again. This time, at least, I didn’t get the look. Instead I got superstition, which is a kind of faith. “If it’s possible to haunt,” my mother laughed, “your grandmother will.”

And so in late twentieth-century America, out of fear of spooks, our family had a body transported back east, to be placed where she could rest, rather than wander or shriek or, worse still, meddle.

As if to compensate, when my mother died, she left instructions to be cremated and (postmodernly) scattered. When I look back at such shifting years, I realize that for all of the stories told and retold upon Bernado’s return, one thing remained unspoken: the act that drove him and my mother apart in the first place. It was no tragic cinematic miscue, but an act of betrayal simple and classic. When Bernado left my grandmother’s house to return to active duty, he left for my mother and grandmother the promise of upward mobility, the hope of marrying up. As my mother soon found out thought, while on active duty, Bernado was very active indeed, carrying on most actively with his superior’s wife. It was an indiscretion my grandmother with her modern worldly ambitions could forgive (men in the heat of battle, fate looming large, the terror of imminent death). What for my grandmother was indiscretion for my mother was cardinal sin. For six months after breaking off her relationship with Bernado, she lived with her mother, becoming in nineteenth-century romantic heroine fashion increasingly wan and weightless, until modern times caught up and named the illness “colitis,” diagnosed its roots as “nerves,” a popular illness, E.B. White’s letters teach us, in mid 20^th-century America. “I never realized nerves were so odd,” wrote White in 1943, “but they are. They are the oddest part of the body, no exceptions. Doctors weren’t much help, but I found old phonograph records are miraculous. If you ever bust up from nerves, take frequent shower baths, drink dry sherry in small amounts, spend most of your time with hand tools at a bench, and play old records till there is no wax left in the grooves.” Ten years after E.B. White’s attempts, my mother found her own cure. She moved to the west coast, as far away as she could get from her troubles—both of them.

When Bernado returned that night after twenty years, my mother was not looking for an affair to remember. Instead, she was gathering her children around her in an act of self-definition. Her life had not ended in betrayal. She had been fruitful and multiplied. Her children would rise up and call her blessed. (Bernado and May were childless.) It was vindication, pure and simple. Only it was bound to backfire because by nature she wasn’t vindictive. Furthermore, the happy family unit so necessary to vindication was starting to unravel after her husband’s death. What’s left in the face of such realism but religion or romance? She had tried religion, but when the church experienced its crisis in authority, she defaulted to romance.

And so it was that she and we were seduced into a decade-long affair with a married man. He continued to live on the East Coast, she on the West. A few weeks here and there, she met him for trips, at mountain lodges, in romantic cities, at trendy spas, trips from which she returned radiant, beautiful. Still, it was also a family affair, destined to carry me to the New Yorker’s world. I made my first airplane ride to New York City to visit Bernado. We stayed at an old hotel within walking distance from Radio City Music Hall. He took us to see the World Trade Center and the Statue of Liberty, to Little Italy for dinner. One night he gave my sister and me—both now over 18—cab fare to get from the Music Hall to our hotel. We pocketed the money and walked to the hotel, staying close to the crowds on the street. A real blood father couldn’t have been angrier. “You did what? Don’t you know that’s not safe? I see I can’t leave you two alone again.” And he didn’t. For the rest of the trip, he was our constant escort. We overlooked the fact that the other fifty or so weeks of the year, we traveled unescorted. We didn’t talk about the fact that he was married to someone else. We fantasized a family, whole, unassailable, protected; our father rich, our mother good-looking. It was a beautiful family, the one my grandmother dreamed into being. For ten years, we continued that family affair, that powerful maternal legacy created and sustained by my grandmother, who now lay in a family plot overgrown and untended.

Now we were in most of the pictures. And we weren’t nearly so vigilant.

The spider, dropping down from twig,

Unwinds a thread of his devising:

A thin, premeditated rig

To use in rising.

And all the journey down through space,

In cool descent, and loyal-hearted,

He builds a ladder to the place

From which he started.

Thus I, gone forth, as spiders do,

In spider’s web a truth discerning,

Attach one silken strand to you

For my returning.

—E.B.White “Natural History”

Truly disaster should have struck. But it didn’t, or at least not right away and not in the ways one might expect. Like the White’s affair, it was all more predictable than that. Yes, the affair went through the usual stages of fire and fizzle. But after several years had passed, when I’d ask about Bernado, my mother would just shrug, or say “the same,” or say nothing at all. While she may have been angry at some point, after a decade she wasn’t. Nor was she bored. I could tell by the sexy edge in her voice during their occasional phone conversations. It was just that now, ten years later, the rules had changed again, and what she had with Bernado just didn’t fit, in her own words, “just wasn’t enough.” The New Yorker influence had waned, geographical boundaries had recoiled. We were all about stability now, celebrating three marriages—mine, my brother’s and hers. Bernado didn’t disappear entirely. But this time, when he just happened to be in the neighborhood and proposed a dinner engagement with my mother and her soon-to-be husband, she flatly declined. At one point, Bernado spoke of remarrying himself (the object of his affection was a much younger nurse). “You’ll never do it, Bernado,” she told him (and us). “It involves divorce and you’re too constant. Besides, you’re not in love.” He wasn’t and he didn’t. No longer the wan heroine or the distressed widow, my mother was running the show now. Bernado had to take his place in the background. And this held as long as she was doing the directing. But things come along and shape people and their lives, whether they will have them or not. In my mother’s case, it was A.L.S., better known by the man who gave his name to it, who raised the disease from the obscure pages of medical pathology to the high profile of cultural myth. “Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth.” In 1939 Lou Gehrig uttered his farewell address to the newsreel, and audiences wept for their misfortune. Three years later, the country wept again as Gary Cooper recited the same words to end Pride of the Yankees, a film that became a classic (nominated for eleven Oscars) and perpetuated the public mourning. Who is this drama is defining whom?

Lou’s Gehrig’s is not a disability, but a fast, slippery slope of disease, taking, in my mother’s case, speech, then swallowing, then breathing within a year’s time. It is a disease worthy of a name with the power of 493 home runs behind it. And it brings with the weight of sentiment, the raw, attached love I felt for my mother. And while to say so outright might send us too uncomfortably close to the world of ladies’ magazines and chicken soup, it’s a truth that I must stake. Yet there is a kind of sentimentalism I resist, even as I’m making the case for more literary room for it. My mother was twelve years old when Pride of the Yankees debuted. She lived sixty-five years without Gehrig’s iconic disease and one year with it. Is it possible to pay tribute to her life, to compose, as she did, her first sixty-five years without that final year that recasts the others into a tragic, weepy script? It’s not a disinterested question. Will all my years of living and narrating myself change in the last hour, with one mistake, with one assault, with one accident? Will I have no say at all about how my whole life story is told?

Sometime in the last year of her life my mother said what most people say in such circumstances, remember me as I was, not like this. I wanted to comply, but I doubted whether I could ever see anything but this final sight: her with the voluntary muscles of her respiratory system degenerating into paralysis, each breath labored, beginning now in the constriction of her lower throat, rising with her shoulders, finishing with the amplified echo, the loud shhhhhhh of the ventilating machine—breathing that should be done and not seen, now seen and heard, done badly. On the night before she died, I arrived late to spell my niece who reported that my mother was agitated, readjusting over and over the mask of her ventilating equipment. My niece had given her a sedative, which was slow to take effect. But in a little while my mother seemed to drift into rest, unpeaceful as it was with the Sisyphean labor of her breathing.

Then I saw it, a letter from Bernado lying casually on the table. I assumed she’d already heard it, but I read it aloud anyway, mainly to blanket the equipment’s sound with my own voice, but also to conjure different times. I don’t remember the exact words of the letter, but his letter did what just minutes before seemed impossible. It conjured her lithe body, the one he caressed on the dance floor, the one he held at the beach with my grandmother smiling on. For a time, the breathing machinery faded. I knew then why we’d let him in, a still-married man, despite the watchful eyes of the town. A New Yorker by birth, he was every bit the modern essayist, composing a beautiful woman from a tragic widow. And here he was doing it again, this time magically, movingly, turning Lou Gehrig’s tragedy into a love story. What more could one hope for from a lover, from a father?

Certainly, that’s got to be enough. It’s much more than many people will ever have. But I suspect my mother in her latest incarnation would have pointed to the actions of a traditional grieving husband, silent tears by the bedside and such. As always, I want to figure her out, know exactly what she would think, fix her ideas and make them stick. And, as always, I can’t be certain, not even now when her life is completed and whole. I see the voluntary muscles of her left brow arch in just the right way or hear her voice low and slow and insistent—“Does it really matter?”—knowing that no matter what answer I give, her very question makes its relative and unstable. We are still so thoroughly, so helplessly modern, on the one hand, fighting belief and sentiment, on the other, placing our belief firmly in the prediction that science and technology will take us on thrilling rides to virtually new expanses. We hesitate and speculate and worry even as we’re carried along.

And yet, I know this with certainty: The new millennial electronic age will cause nothing more unstable than the old “solid” ways of loving and grieving. And if that’s too sentimental a point for the protean essay at the dawn of a new millennium, then maybe we’re just not ready to essay in it. Writing about late nineteenth-century sentimental novels, one literary critic reflects that “sentimentalism is what remains, or becomes possible, only when everything else has been lost.” Maybe our cultural memories are too short, too feeble to remember what we lost in the last millennium or even the last decade. Or maybe we remember, but don’t allow ourselves to feel it, and this distant, detached stance is our late twentieth-century contribution to literary history: a cold war, a cold people, a cold literature. We are essaying with all our new technologies into a new millennium, but we can expect the same old unsure voice to repeatedly greet us, unless we’re willing to detach occasionally from detachment and irony—to engage loss and employ the depth and gendered range of sentiment.

“Just What the Muscles Grope For”

there is no such thing as memory: the brain recalls just what the muscles grope for: no more, no less: and its resultant sum is usually incorrect and false and worthy only of the name of dream

William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

My husband did eventually read “Modern Fidelity,” and he found himself appalled not by my sentiment, but by my lack of it. “Janet,” he said, looking at me like I was a stranger, “what about your dad? How could you represent this other guy so fondly?” My husband and I have been married for over ten years now, so I can understand his anxiety. It’s not that I haven’t tried to write about my father. I have. But because he died when I was young (just thirteen), I have few memories. Yes, I could write a profile based on family stories. Or I could write a story about a father-daughter relationship in arrested development. That one is scripted: A textbook study we were—my packet of will, my sharp edges of self-definition grating against him. But that’s not the piece I want to write. I want to write an essay about him, in part because I long for the detailed memories. It’s a chicken-egg thing: I want the details to write the essay, but what I really want are the memories an essay is built on.

After “Modern Fidelity,” or rather after my husband’s reaction to it, I wanted to try again to compose something about my father, and so I’m making another stab at it. It’s slow going, this essay writing about my father. I’m reaching back into memory, but the pickings are few. I want to work without photographs or family stories. I struggle to make sense of the few impressions that did form and grow impatient that they aren’t more significant. Why these? Why not others, surely more telling? For example, I remember the breakfast my father made the day my brother was born. I try to make the event meaningful, but given that I’m working with oatmeal, it isn’t easy. What made this memory stick? And then I slowly compose some sense: he was home. We were a working-class family, scaling our way into the middle class. Overtime was more usual; Christmas and Easter were the days off. But that morning in 1963 when my brother was born, my father was home and he fixed oatmeal for three pre- and elementary schoolers, adding too much for the “dash of salt” required by Quaker Oats. Naturally, we complained. “Just use more sugar,” he said, in the same voice I use when my youngest son asks, “What kind of oatmeal?” as if there were any choices in my kitchen. That morning when my father fixed the oatmeal, I would have been almost four years old. I don’t have many pure memories of him, but this one I am sure of. It rests in my taste buds.

Other memories are fixed in less physical places. They’re linked with attitudes, with postures, with acts of self-definition. My father struck me, really struck me, only once, but the memory isn’t located in the flesh. There’s no pain associated with it. He hit me, but I felt my strength. I had, after all, moved him not just to feel anger (any of my siblings could do that), but to strike me on impulse, something he had never done and didn’t want to do. Although we stress the vulnerability of teenage girls—the dangers in the world, the dangers of seduction, the dangers of wrong place, wrong time, the “trouble” girls can find, the unspeakable troubles—thirteen-year-old girls, those somewhat protected at least, feel power, and rightly so. My father struck me, but I pulled together every bit of self I had; I stood and didn’t flinch. I was solidly me in a way I never had been.

It was me against him. Or rather, me against them. My father somehow always comes through my mother. The day they took me shopping for a winter coat stands out as a bit of cherished dependence in my war of independence. There I was sandwiched between my parents on the bench of my father’s Ford truck, not in the camper with my brothers and sisters, separated from my parents by a sliding glass cab window and an intercom. I was sitting right there in front, as close to the stick shift as I could get without driving myself. This was a remarkable event. I was absolutely alone with my parents. We were headed out of town. And to top it off, I was to receive a new coat, not a hand-me-down. I have no idea why I alone made this trip. This I remember, though: My mother selected the coat. It was a navy blue pea coat, such as my father might have worn at age seventeen, shipping with the Navy to engage the Koreans. I wouldn’t have known a pea coat from a flea market, but my mother was filled with such specialized words—not shoes, but pumps or loafers, not dresses, but jumpers or A-lines, not a hairstyle, but a Gibson Girl or a Page Boy. I don’t remember what the coat looked like, navy blue with anchor buttons I imagine, but I remember the feeling of trying it on and spinning in the mirror as my parents looked on with admiration, with approval, at my thirteen-year-old body, which made even a navy pea coat look a thing of female beauty. It was an amazing show, an oxymoronic display of confident, oblivious self-awareness, and I was the star.

So I’ve got oatmeal and a pea coat. I also, of course, have memories of his death. I was in junior high when he died and obsessed with grief and melancholy—and Faulkner. Ay, grief goes, fades; we know that says a character in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!—and never, to my thirteen-year-old mind, was the problem more clearly stated. Faulkner’s novel is a study in arrested development, a study of loss and reconstruction. Between grief and nothing, one character ventures, I will take grief. That was the choice I made—at least then. That was the choice I wanted, even as I knew that middle-class adults in the early ’70s had discovered a whole range of ways, a whole market of talk-therapies to mediate grief. I didn’t want to survive the feeling or talk about it; I wanted to indulge it, to stand in a driving rain, not to take sick or emerge dry, but just to soak, immerse. To do anything less seemed to me to diminish the importance of a life, my father’s life. Sure it was age (and reading) that drove such a feeling, but it was also culture. My grandmother and her other Portuguese friends wore black and wailed from the back of the church, clutching their rosary beads. My mother had grown conscious in the ‘60s. She was new world, not old. She pulled bright post-Vatican II clothes from our closet and found someone to play a guitar at the wake.

I wanted to wail like my grandmother, but like my mother I was more hip than that, so dressed in creative writing black, I recorded things—his truck pulling into the driveway just as it had every day (only this time, of course, someone else was driving), the platters of ham and potato salad and donuts that filled our refrigerator and spilled into the neighbors’, my search for empty space in our neighbor-filled small suburban California house (euphemistically called “ranch-style,” although we owned just a patch of lawn in the front and rear). I remember doing this recording—it’s important to me—even though I no longer have what I’d written. I recorded everything in pencil and folded the wad of paper not in halves, but fourths, making very few words of the original recoverable when my mother pulled the folded record out of a pile of family treasures ten years later. Since then, I have misplaced it, perhaps I even threw it away. So the words are gone, but it’s important to me that I did purely and simply record the truth, as it happened, as it unfolded. I chose grief and made it live. And though I recognize this as juvenile behavior, I still admire the tenacity and veracity of those lost recordings. It seems that some memories, that memories of sacred things—like people—should be preserved in a space of the brain where images and dreams and fictions can’t filter through. It’s a quixotic wish, a regressive one, but it’s why the memory of salty oatmeal for me is crucial. I’m certain I neither dreamt, heard second hand, imagined, nor transposed the salty-sweet taste of over-salted oatmeal. The rest, granted, I’m less certain about.

For instance: here’s another memory—my father working in the yard of our 1600-square-foot home. Our house, like all the houses in the area, was built on the San Andreas Fault. The sidewalks were uneven, jagged paths, a challenge for feet, let alone skates. We also had a brick patio, one my father laid with his own hands. In the center he built a wishing well, also of brick. Just like the sidewalks, the patio wouldn’t stay level. Every year, he pulled up the bricks again and laid them down, level. One year he tried setting them in sand because he thought it might be more forgiving. It wasn’t.

That’s the image, my father with the level, laying and relaying bricks. I might know it from watching him, from hearing his impatient responses to me as he worked, from the sense of being unwanted, even as an observer. But then again, I might know it from my mother, explaining to me after my father’s death that Type-A personalities are destined for something killing—a heart attack, a stress-caused cancer—my mother, laying out the moral that it doesn’t pay to strive for perfection in an imperfect world. Maybe. Or maybe, I think then and now, it’s just plain foolish to build a brick patio on a fault. I could and can draw my own conclusions, and sometimes my own images. Because Faulkner had it right, I knew it already, had learned, absorbed it already without the medium of speech somehow from having been born and living beside it, with it, as children will and do. I didn’t need my mother to lay it out word for word, to wrap his life in layer upon layer of late 20^th-century sense. I just needed and still need to remember what wasn’t articulated.

It’s difficult to unwrap, but beneath all the layers of telling and retelling rests this: A level is a neat tool. My dad’s had a yellow bubble right in the center, and at the slightest move, it would move off-center, off balance. In general, he yelled a lot and cursed. He scowled and frowned, leaving deep lines in his broad forehead even at forty years of age, lines replicated now in my own forty-something broad forehead.

Thirty years after his death, I find myself trying to conjure him, but this time the memories, what few there are, surface without Faulknerian heat, without the ability to evoke grief, let alone sustain it. Between grief and nothing, it seems, I have chosen the all-too-human and adult and middle-class healthy choices that rest in between. Thirty years later, accurate and faithful recording doesn’t work; memory is too feeble, the human spirit too resilient, religious faith too strong, the human capacity for art and narrative too entrenched. The very tools of essay writing—memory, accurate recording, doubt—seem to fail. I cannot conjure him, I can only compose him, create him or some idea of him. I can’t write an essay about him, only an essay about trying to write about him, another essay about essays, a genre I didn’t intend. What I really want, my fantasy of the straight-up bona fide essay, won’t emerge because I can’t separate my own memories from photographs and family legends. As important as visual and verbal memories are, I still retain that juvenile conviction that something else matters more, something with more heat.

This weekend I went out of town for work, leaving my husband and my two sons, age nine and seven. If I don’t return, I thought, what will my boys remember? Certainly they would carry something of their time spent with me, but it will only partially be carried in the narratives my husband tells or the visual record of family photographs, in those home-movie versions of me. Instead, I imagine that sensations will sustain and carry me, keep my presence in them—the tastes of certain foods, the other-worldly impression of attending a performance, the smoothness of skin stroked, the tension of a hand too firmly grasped, the kinds of “living beside it” experiences that we intuit vaguely, dreamlike, without the presumed accuracy of careful articulation, without the presumed verisimilitude of photos.

Your illusions, two characters in Absalom, Absalom! discover as they piece together the memories that become the many conflicting stories in the novel, are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory. I’ve got the stories and photographs; I have the illusions: it’s the bones and flesh I want back. And occasionally, I can still feel, things like sitting on my father’s lap, not as a very little girl, but as a coming-of-age adolescent, sitting on his lap regressively, as if I were still a small girl of five or six, sitting on his lap, grooming him the way monkeys pick at each other at the zoo, discovering every clogged pore or stray hair that needed attention. I am no longer small, and he is no longer a little girl’s daddy, but I can feel again the sensation of sitting on his lap, the comforts of being wholly dependent. I feel it as a moment of flawed beauty, a willing suspension of independence, personhood, a brief lived fiction. It’s as close to an essay as I can get, but it feels just like laying bricks on a fault.

Coda

Daughters of the University

It is fall semester, almost midterm, and a fellow tenured faculty member is returning to town and to her classes for the first time since the first week of the term. She is apprehensive, she tells me, about facing her classes again. She’s talking to me because I have had a fall like hers, a fall during which my mother died of a lingering illness.

“It’s not like the first-day jitters,” she emphasizes. “These faces should be familiar.”

They are not.

We go back over old ground. “You did the right thing,” I assure her. “How could you have been anywhere else?” We talk about how impossible it is at times like these to live in two so completely different worlds. In one, we are daughters, not yet forty, caring for our mothers who will die soon—tomorrow, a week from today, two weeks. In the other world, we are professors, with pride in our records of strong teaching. We know that while the research will wait, the students do not, cannot.

How, we wonder, do we explain to our students, not the duty children have for their parents, but the exquisiteness of care, of reciprocating stroke by soft stroke what we have expected and received all our lives? How to explain that drafts dates, editing sessions, and midterms have all but been erased by the drip drip drip of morphine or the endless shhhhhh of ventilating equipment?

“My undergraduate students gave me a card,” she says. “I feel relieved.”

“Yes,” I answer, “my graduate students gave me a card when my mother died.” But what I am really thinking about are the departmental summaries of my teaching evaluations from that semester, the semester we adopted our second son, the semester my mother was felled by A.L.S.. (As a matter of procedure for merit and post-tenure review, one member of our department’s executive committee summarizes each faculty person’s evaluations. Overall, it’s a good policy; even the most “disengaged” of colleagues can’t completely escape student opinion.) That semester I had two classes, an undergraduate seminar on writing about place and a graduate seminar for first-year teaching assistants. The undergraduates who didn’t send a card were, in their evaluations, generous to the point of fiction. The graduate students, on the other hand, had mastered the course content. Their evaluations, according to the department summary, were clear, direct, unambiguous—and damning. They noted (accurately) that I was unenthusiastic, underprepared at best, frequently absent (a month’s worth to be exact—two weeks in Russia adopting Sanya, two weeks for my mother’s death).

I promised myself not to look at the original evaluations and filed them unopened in the drawer that holds the record of fifteen years of mostly strong, successful teaching. What could I possibly learn from those evaluations? That the university has no policy for caring for sick family members? That the university doesn’t support adoption, offering as it does only “sick leave” for pregnant women who do that “sick” thing of giving birth? That I could, at the very time we adopted a sick child and needed money for travel home, take the federal family medical leave—several weeks without pay?

But none of this is before me now. A grieving friend and colleague is, and such thoughts offer little solace. I search for something else to say, but my second attempts aren’t much better. I want to tell her that this thing we are living will not conform to a university bulletin, that we are living drafts in progress that will become final, irreversible products, but not under the pressure of the last day to drop or the last day to withdraw. Again, no comfort there.

So instead, I offer her the only timely, practical piece of advice I can think of: I counsel her not to read her semester evaluations—not even the departmental summary of them.

But she’s back to her classes now, back to the semester calendar, and she is thinking about that card. I can tell she will read them—and I know that someday, I will read mine because we are orphans now, daughters of the university. We are good girls. We fit in our world—or maybe that’s just our own postmodern quixotic desire.

Works consulted