How strange. Here I thought I had today's entry all planned out, and when I finally got to the actual writing part, I got kind of ugly stuck, so I erased it all.
It's been Valentine's Day all day today, and the social media has been flooded with saccharine gooey love things. Which gooey things I find irksome and provoking.
I thought I might escape such droolings by going to the gym, but even there, one of the trainers was running about, handing out individual Hershey's Kisses, with an additional 'affirmation' attached to the pull string that's supposed to help unwrap those foul waxy lumps of faux chocolate. I put mine in the pocket of my gym shorts and kept on with whatever form of legalized self-torture in which I was involved at the time. About an hour later, when I'd finished with my cardio workout -- using the treadmill, and watching the Discovery Channel with the sound off while I count to 100 over and over again -- I remembered the chocolate treat, and pulled it out of my pocket. It had survived the workout intact, and I think the confirmation was something like 'I like myself better and better every day'.
For some reason, even though I knew what I was supposed to understand -- that the 'I' was 'me' -- this read to me like something I might overhear someone saying to themselves, unaware of being overheard, in an elevator. If they'd written 'You like yourself better and better every day.', if might have made more sense. Even though it still would have annoyed me.
I'm just not very happy with being emotionally strong-armed, I think. And it seems that I've always been like this, since I was a kid. Whether it's Mother's Day (don't get me started) or the Fourth of July, the main point of the day seems to call for a harsher light than I know is intended -- so that I can see through all the gauzy illusion, to the less-than-attractive reality lying beneath.
In any event, I survived my workout and my bit of waxy chocolate-flavored goodness, and then did some errands on the way home. Even the Pathmark was filled with those helium-filled mylar balloons, all red hearts this go-round, and there were bunches of flowers on sale... I thought, for an instant, of getting something -- a box of candy, or some silvery inflated nonsense -- and giving it to the folks working behind the deli counter, but I just wasn't in the mood. I bought John cereal and soup instead, and some toothpaste and some lemons, and came home.
And then, instead of lounging about uselessly for the rest of the day, I became a veritable whirlwind of (relative) productivity. Changed the bed clothes and started the laundry (it's almost done by now), vacuumed in two rooms,emptied various trash cans, put out the recyclables, washed the dishes, and fed myself a sumptuous dinner -- if only to make sure that the rest of the sausages I bought for our Shrove Tuesday dinner didn't end up rotting in the fridge. I feel a bit overstuffed, for now. And just a tad sweaty.
And of course I'm thinking about the entry I began, and then erased. I'm almost afraid to bring it up, because I suspect (a) that I've already talked about it before, and (b) you will think that I'm feeling sorry for myself, and (c) shouldn't I be over this already, as the things I'm talking about happened over fifty years ago? Time healing, as we're told, all wounds.
Except that, recently, and as though something wants to attract my attention, there's been an improbable upwelling of statements like this: 'There are some wounds which time cannot heal.' Or, 'There is no such thing as closure.' (This, from one of this evening's reruns of Law'n'Order, as a matter of fact) Or, 'It's not true about time 'healing' the wounds left by certain memories...' Although in the case of the last, it's not the memories that are painful, but the reality of the events from which those memories have sprung.
I have a difficulty with love. Or, to be more specific, I have a difficulty believing in, or comprehending, or receiving love from someone else.
Often, when someone has expressed affection for me, I feel awkward and stupid, because I know there's supposed to be something going on inside of me emotionally, but instead I feel the sensation of being filled with pieces of old Army blanket -- dense and impenetrable, opaque and without any resonance at all. This is quite shaming to me, and even at this point in my life (though I don't want to leave you with the impression that, as I pass the halfway point of my 6th decade of life, people are throwing themselves at my feet with broiling declarations of undying passion every hour of the day, but still...), this inner dullness confuses and disappoints me.
Of course, I can trace this love-related inner deadness back to a brief series of events. These are the things I'm afraid I've talked about before, and am afraid of being a bore, if I bring them up again. Even though I, personally, love to hear the same story over and over again. Rumplestiltskin being a particular favorite. Straw into gold indeed.
I don't know what my story would be called. It would be something about a kitchen, and about casual cruelty.
The kitchen was in the new house we were living in, after we left 222 S. Jackson St, in Belleville IL, and moved to a tract home on Lilac Drive, outside downtown some way. The house was a ranch-style place, with wall-to-wall carpet, and endless squabbling between my parents, about why my father didn't earn more money. I was getting to know a new group of kids at a new school, where I was starting the fourth grade.
My dad worked in St. Louis, and was away long hours. While he was gone -- he worked weekends as well as week days, much of the time -- my mother would bring her boyfriend to this new house, and my three brothers and I would be shut up in our bedroom, the door being locked from the outside, and she and that other man would go into her bedroom right next door, and it would drive me so crazy, hearing them squealing and laughing, that I would pry open our little bedroom window, push the bunk bed safety railings out, and use them as an escape slide, so I could run around in the back yard and be busy not knowing what in fact I already knew.
My mother had already told my brothers, my sister and me that she was getting a divorce. My brothers and sister were too young to understand what she was talking about, but I wasn't. She also said that, when she left -- this was, after all, what divorce was all about, people leaving -- she would take one of us, one of her own children, with her. Just the one.
I was about to have my ninth birthday, and with every ounce of energy that an eight-year old boy, on the brink of nine, could muster, I strained and concentrated and focused on being the unquestionably best boy of all time. The best boy anyone had ever seen. The best boy anyone could possibly imagine. The best boy, forever, and under all conditions.
So perhaps it's understandable that, as we were sitting down to dinner one evening, it being just my mother and the children, and some weeks after her announcement about the sweepstakes she was running -- first prize being life with her, the object of my fiercest love -- and as she was dishing up the meat loaf and the french fries, she began to coax my little sister, all of four years old at the time, to tell her brothers what her new last name was going to be.
"Go on, honey -- tell them what your new name is gonna be..."
My little dark-eyed, dark-haired sister, whose head barely came level with the table top, sitting on her chair, pulling at her pink dress, uncomprehending anything beyond the fact that her mother was talking to her. As I recall it now, it was as though I'd suddenly become cold and hollow inside, with a long, stony spiral staircase running from my head, down and down, far beyond where my feet should be, and there was something rolling slowly down those stairs, irresistibly falling, and I never expected to see it again.
Within a month, the family had cracked apart, and my brothers and I got into a car with my father, and drove away. My brothers have never seen their mother since.
But for me, it was different. About thirteen years after we drove away in the black car, and after I'd finished my military service, I obtained my mother's address, with the help of the American Red Cross. I kept her address and phone number on a little piece of paper in my wallet. It was like some delicate explosive device that I had to handle with extreme care. And one day, I went into a phone booth and dialed the number. Spoke with the girl who'd worn the pink dress. Made a date to have dinner with my mother and sister, for the first time in over a decade. And as I was leaving, my mother called me back to the front door of her trailer. 'You know I love you,' she said.
Well, actually, I didn't know, to be perfectly honest. Though I hadn't been any more inundated with protestations of love then, than I am likely to be today, I had already become inured to that sort of inner deadness, where the subject of love was concerned. And here those most potent of words were coming from the lips of the woman I'd idolized, had loved more than Jesus -- 'You know I love you.'
Happy Valentine's Day. She might as well have been reciting the Hebrew alphabet.
Because, I believe, something happened that afternoon, at that dining table in Illinois, while the meat loaf got cold on my plate, and the ketchup started to separate. To say that I was stunned is to make a profound understatement. I must have sat there, virtually frozen, for minutes. Not that she would have noticed, so focused was she on primping my sister's hair, and cooing over her, and puffing out the sleeves on that pink dress.
As for me, as for what love could be doing for me, at that particular moment, and for long long afterwards, here's what I would rather had happened:
While the woman is talking, and her children are having their dinner, she walks to the counter and opens the cutlery drawer. She chats about plans to move, and plans to pack, as she selects, from the clump of utensils, a long bright blade. She laughs about the new clothes she and her little girl will need to buy, as she walks back across the room, to stand behind the chair in which her oldest boy sits. Daydreaming aloud once again, about the pink Cadillac she'll one day own, she grasps the boy's dark blond hair with one hand, and pulls it back and down, so that if she were to tilt her head, she would see his eyes looking directly up into hers.
And then she slits his throat.
Perhaps we'll talk more about this, once the Valentine's tide has gone out a bit more.
© 2013 Walter Zimmerman
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