A secret, a surprise, and the art of being discreet
by Aimee on August 31, 2011 in Portland
I’ve always been suspicious of families—the way they keep to themselves, make their own rules, and employ powerful narratives of loyalty and betrayal to secure intimacy. I don’t mean just the gross families, the Maleskos who live in the hovel down the street, storing garbage in the side yard, never opening their shameful curtains, and holding hands with their slack-faced teenage sons in public. Everyone’s suspicious of them. I mean the nice people, too. The evening shade drawers, the genteel, just-family-on-Christmas types, the self-assured and self-contained clans who are surprised to discover they believe blood and marriage matter more than friends and partners. After all, they think of themselves as progressive. Nice families with thoughtful parents—the kind who slowly but surely convince their offspring that the values and behaviors being passed on—cultural, religious, ideological, political—are correct and crucial and that deviations from the metaphorical roads the family travels are hurtful. “How can you do this to me?” Here is the circle of trust. Here is how we understand family. Here is how my grown-up friends and acquaintances find themselves making choices troublingly yoked to a need for parental love. “I can’t do that to my parents.” They’ll tell you so themselves. They can’t help it.
I’m outside these narratives. Our family held nothing carefully, least of all its members. I saw my brother toss a cat against the wall; I once tossed my brother into a metal garden container in our weed-choked front lawn, giving him stitches over his eye. We were less kind with our words. And my own mother preferred hostility to loyalty and in general seemed to want to escape the grind of family life. As an adult I did what she didn’t; I slipped away righteously and quietly and never looked back.
I wish! The righteousness, if there was any, came from the hubris of youth, and there was nothing subtle about my split from them—it was wrenching. Even the most abhorred children cling to their parents. Feel the force, Luke, Obi-Wan counsels, but Darth Vader counters: Luke, I am your father. Search your feelings; you know it to be true. There is the force, and then there is the force of family.
Just this summer as we drove through Warm Springs on our way to Crescent Lake, being full of thinking and literature and love, I suddenly had tears in my eyes for losing not my mother but the trace of her—in which the memories I’m left with are only lessons, notes to myself.
Yesterday in the kitchen standing in the morning light in her summer dress Georgia said: “sometimes I try to remember being a baby or before I was born and I can’t.” I explained to her a theory that figures memory as coincident with language, in which pre-language memories are either difficult to access or don’t exist. “So most of your memories—myths aside—probably don’t date to before you were two, when you began to have (control of) language.” I didn’t like to cut off her imagination—sometimes science feels like that.
I don’t know if my pre-language mother was any better than my post-language mother, but I don’t recall a trusting love for her—something I sense Georgia has for her parents. Instead my memories are thin and made of longing and demand. Heidegger argues that poetry matters because it attends to the trace of the fugitive gods—its function in our destitute times is to point out the clues to a rupture that we no longer remember (gods? But then a sorrowful gasp of realization: Gods). That’s sort of what happened on this long drive with my family in our old car through a high desert reservation—a land itself attentive to loss—it was as if the drive made appear and then caressed the outlines of loss, the loss of something I’ve long made my peace with. I don’t miss my mother—I barely even know she’s missing. But occasionally I feel a deep mourning for losing track of where a great love was meant to grow.
I lived with my maternal grandparents during my last year in high school and stayed with them—they lived a few blocks from campus—for most of college. Tucked away in their cellar in a box left behind was the only diary I’d ever kept, a short and inaccurate record of my eleventh year. When I was in my late twenties, the hard-backed diary—it had a kind of blue-checkered cover with a Holly Hobby-esque figure and a tiny, gold-colored plastic lock and key—went missing from the box. I lived in New York by then. Also gone from the box was an old doll, which is how I knew my mother had taken both. Goodbye Mrs Beasley. Goodbye Holly Hobby.
I visited enough. We sat together eating sandwiches, the kind made by old women in New England who grew up during the depression. Tuna mixed with yogurt instead of mayonnaise; cucumber and margarine; cream cheese and olive. “Oh, Aimee,” my grandmother would say in her high shaky voice, “so glad you could come. And, my, isn’t it nice your mother could join us.” It was my grandmother’s right to continue to reintroduce us over the last 23 years of her life, during which time I reminded everyone except her that I no longer had a relationship with Judi. I don’t begrudge her, now. She was a woman who said everything without saying it and although small she could keep both Judi and me quiet in her presence. “That last box of yours,” she continued kindly, “you should probably take it back with you, Aim. We’ll start to clear out the house soon.” Maybe Judi had been helping them begin organizing to move to a smaller, one-story house. I can’t remember. But suddenly my mother brightened, pushed her thin brown hair out of her eyes, and said, “Oh. Right. I sold the doll in it.” Ha ha. It sounded like a punch line. My mind searched the box, fluttering over high school notebooks and a few adolescent novels before reaching the diary.
This is a small sad story, like that box. Judi was known for disappearing things: husbands, pets, and words. As children we knew, but we usually didn’t contest her claims. The number of times she’d been married hovered in the air between us but mostly we dared not offend by mentioning it; when she said the dog she’d acquired a few months earlier had run away, we nodded, later passing information to each other— “I saw that dog with another family in Brattleboro last weekend” —a conspiratorial whisper from Perrie or Jenny; we cried when at the last minute she denied having given permission for something we looked forward to, but we were powerless to change her mind again. She didn’t beat us, I wasn’t afraid of being hit. But the lying that accompanied her was regular, defended, and tangled. I was a child, and children are, oh I don’t know, gullible, malleable, hopeful, easily confused, always already complicit. Judi was inflexible, even a bit maniacal, and I suppose I was often near the edge of reality, trying to make my way by being careful.
The joke, of course, is that the diary was written to be read by her, or by someone, which was a source of shame to me later, as my authenticity took a long time to emerge. The book had come in the first place as a gift from one of her friends because I’d gone into the hospital for two months with a broken leg that summer between fifth and sixth grade. And in a way I used it to protect her, mimicking her explanations for things that happened that summer and beyond. “Mom said she would visit today, but she’s too tired and not feeling well.” “Mom goes out every night. She needs a break.” My book of secrets was a collection of my mother’s claims. Meanwhile the social worker who visited me regularly in the room I shared with a series of temporary roommates kept assuring me it was natural to have feelings of frustration and fear. He meant the injuries and the hospital stay, but I didn’t know what he was talking about. I wasn’t relieved to be there, but at eleven years old my problems lay elsewhere. In any case, I understood the diary’s purpose even if I could only approximate correct use. I’m not the only one whose first conscious performance of self replaced the “self” with echoes.
Maybe the idea of legitimate privacy was new to me; maybe childhood is filled with a sense of being both alone and watched. Yes, after checking the box down cellar, I stood in my grandmother’s kitchen and heart beating loud in my ears said to Judi that I knew she’d taken the diary. I felt silly for caring, silly for saying what I couldn’t prove, silly because there was no room for any of it. It was, I suppose, just my point of view. My grandmother turned to the window, busying herself with some task, and my mother’s eyes grew wide and her face shut and that was the end of it.
What about that embarrassing diary compelled her to disappear it, I wondered. What needed to be disremembered? I thought of the time, drunk and angry, she’d given me a black eye. I was sixteen and next day she said she hadn’t. I suppose that was her point of view.
When I was growing up, I couldn’t explain my house or the people in it even when I wanted to. Those who listened seemed to have no context for understanding, but most people couldn’t listen—they looked away with the rest of us or out the window with my grandmother, wanting to ensure families their privacy in part to protect themselves. Even the more obvious problems, those not difficult to tell, became unintelligible in our pinball machine.
Secrets hurt, Georgia’s teacher told her last year. A classmate had confided in Georgia, telling her some awful way she’d treated another of their friends and asking G not to tell. Lonely Georgia, who’d suffered at the hands of these girls herself, was torn. Stay loyal to friends to keep them? Betray a teacher who’d always been true? Reluctantly, she talked about it over dinner and next day we helped her tell Amy, her teacher, who sat down with both girls to sort. But the cultural nuances can pile up, and we’re still going over the differences between keeping a hurtful secret, keeping a surprise for someone’s birthday, and being discreet when discussing other people or events. I think of the children I worked with in a domestic violence shelter in Maine, whose mothers were finally revealing the abuse they’d hidden from friends, families, coworkers, doctors, grocery store clerks, and themselves. Having kept it quiet for their mothers, the children were on their own path, learning how to ward off the pain of secrets in favor of the pain of transparency. After all, transparency hurts, too. Accountability hurts. We like it better not just because of its ethical superiority, I think, but because at least it doesn’t linger.
And what’s wrong with transparency? What’s wrong with breaking down the barrier between the public—or public performance—and the private? What do I care if my neighbors see me eat a TV dinner every night? Or read a book. Or fold the laundry. What do I care if they think we put Georgia to bed too early or give her too many treats?
As a child I was led to understand that applying for welfare was humiliating precisely because it gave the state access—a kind of entitled, quid-pro-quo access—to one’s family. Where everyone else got to close the curtains, we were exposed. We were humiliated. I don’t remember being weighed when my mother took us with her to fill out the paperwork, but I remember her anger each time she talked about it over the years. They weighed my children! What did it signal, this sudden scrutiny? This complete access? What right? What loss?
But I keep my distance, like everyone else. At home we have a ”no secrets in the family” policy, but I hear myself say to Georgia, ”Her family makes different choices,” when she wants to know why so-and-so gets to say stupid, carry a disney princess backpack, and jump off the swings. I’m polite. I don’t stare. I keep Bowers v Hardwick and Roe v Wade close to my heart.
Trouble is there’s a line and unless you’re looking—unless you see what happens to so many children in so many families— you might not notice it’s been crossed. The privacy accorded to family life in this country, the culturally sanctioned freedom with which the (legal) family is allowed to conduct itself within an essentially private sphere and the personal retaliation—usually alienation—directed at family members who defy or discard the psycho/social limits established by the family bind love to suffering. You’re in or out; you’re with us or against us.
In the end, Luke reclaims Darth Vader and transforms the traitor back into the parent. If Luke is cast out for attending to the force of family (“don’t give in to hate,” “you must finish your training”), he returns to us as a completed hero, having used the force to discover his sister and save the rebellion, the galaxy, Anakin, and himself. While I find the story of faith (“I know there is good in you”) and redemption (“But I want to save you,” says Luke; “You already have,” Vader tells him) compelling, I couldn’t care less about his family. My vote is for the moment when Luke, pursued by Vader as he tries to destroy the first death star, looks up to discover Han Solo blasting Vader off course. “You’re all clear, kid. Let’s blow this thing and go home!” Loyalty that chooses—what a glorious surprise.
