The Furious Spinner

As I wrote the previous post (Hmmm), about being punch drunk, I was reminded of a book I wrote a couple of months after 9/11. My father was quite ill, and Mario and I drove home to Michigan to visit him. It was a horrendous visit, and when I returned here, I wrote a novel about it in 17 days. I had never written a roman á clef before–always thought it was a bit weird. But I had to write about this visit. I wept and laughed the entire time. It was great to write about family stuff and old lovers crap. Plus I did a good job of showing what it's like to live with a chronic illness. It's a good portrait of someone who is (literally) sick and tired. Writing it was very freeing.

When I was finished, I was terrified. I let three people read it beside Mario. All of them were shocked. Two of them wouldn't talk to me about it. All said the visit to my family was so exquisitely rendered that it was just too horrifying realistic. Most of us have had awful Earth-shattering visits home. I've never sent it out for publication and probably never will. There are a few scenes about toeing the line, I thought you might find interesting. The first part begins when our hera (me, although she isn't named in the first half of the book) has just arrived home after driving five days driving cross country. Her father is ill. Her mother is watching the war on television. She is exhausted and thinking about her life. Here it is:

The thing with chronic illness, I supposed, was one did learn to have a life in spite of it—it was like you had to make room for another person. You had to let go of control. Had to.

Although I still wrestled with it.

Hey, motherfucker, leave my body and let me be who I was meant to be.

I refused to believe I was meant to be this.

As if something guided my life.

Like my imaginary biblical Eve, I no longer believed in God.

When the World Trade Center towers had collapsed, I screamed, “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” pointing my middle finger at the heavens.

Which I also did not believe in.

Yet the childhood memory of being in the great imaginary father’s arms was comforting, blissfully certain he would always care for me no matter what...as long as I toed the line, so to speak.

I smiled to myself. My mother flipped the channels. Toe the line. How fitting, I thought, remembering where that expression had come from. Prize fighters stood with their toes on a line facing each other and beat one another bloody until one of them fell down. Then they got a thirty second break, so they could go back to their corners. Then up again for another beating, slugging it out at the line. The fight was over when one of the fighters was unable to get up from his corner and toe the line.

I was not willing to get beaten and bloody just to toe the line. I did not believe one was cleansed by suffering. It did not make one pure. Or Christ-like. I was not holy because I had suffered. Nor was my father.

And neither of us deserved it. Suffering just happened.

If God was trying to teach me a lesson...

HE HAD FAILED.

Besides I didn’t believe in him.

I believed in the loving arms of Mother Earth. I believed in the liveliness—the sentience—of Nature. But I did not believe she was omniscient or omnipotent.

Because if I did, I would have to conclude—as I said before—that She was a mean motherfucker, too.

That is when I believed anything at all.

My father had always gone to church. Any town he visited he found a Catholic Church. He had his own personal relationship with God or Jesus. And he kept it to himself. I admired that and hoped his beliefs brought him solace in the middle of the night when he awakened in terror.

I received no such solace during those moments. To be starkly alone. To see clearly how hideous things had gotten. To know in those moments you have seen life as it truly was until the feeling faded and you weren’t sure which was the truth: the horror or the ignorance of the horror.

Just as those moments when I was outside and the trees seemed to be talking to me, the crow cawing specifically at me, the wind asking me to dance, and I was absolutely certain of the absolute truth of it: life is joy.

Until the moment faded.

I looked at my parents. I would do almost anything to relieve their suffering.

But I knew the moment I stepped into the house they did not want me there. Who would want company when they were ill? But I would do what I could to make the visit easy.

I would try

to

contain

my

Self.

I swallowed hard. Were those feelings trying to come up?

When I was younger, I sometimes felt such a rage that I was certain I would kill someone. After all, I used to hit Diana, make Eve cry, cause my mother to pop pills, and make my father angry.

Wasn’t it me who made fun of an old boyfriend—once, the only time I ever made fun of anyone—and shortly after he was killed in a car accident. I was scared of my grandpa, and he killed himself. Wondered outloud why Uncle Tobias didn't just kill himself since he had such a miserable life. And then he did.

“That’s called magical thinking,” a therapist told me once. “Something a two year old does.”

“So you’re saying I’m a fucking two year old?”

“Or someone hurt you when you were two.”

“Oh no. I’m not going there again. As far as I know, I was safely protected by family my whole childhood. My depressed, unexpressive family, but family nevertheless. Even my sister Abby says she kept Uncle Lamentable from touching me when he babysat us. Made sure she protected me—he put the pillow over her head instead of mine while he did things to her private parts.”

Only later I was the one gasping for breath while Daddy tried to shake the air back into my lungs.

Me who blacked out.

Woke up with a gasp, slapped across the face with cold water.

I kept trying to be in the world.

To toe the line.

Save the world.

Right hook. Left cross.

Marched for causes.

Pow! Bam!

Fought environmental campaigns.

“Oh folks another blow to the heart. Won’t the referee stop this?”

I wrote about horror.

I tried to toe the fucking line.

Blam!

Someone had to do something.

Wham! Bam!

I was the privileged class, after all. Born in the good ol’ U.S. of A. into a white middle class family. I had a responsibility—

“Oh! She’s been hit below the belt. She can’t take it, folks. She’s folding. Folding.

“And the crowd roars as she crumples to the ground. Over the line! Over the line! Someone has dropped her robe over her. The Queen of Hearts. She’s no queen, today, folks, she just can’t take it. What a wimp. What a failure. She is

Down

for

the Count.

She can’t hurt anyone now, folks.”

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