Rented places are not built to last. They slowly become ruined. The people who live in them tend to slide towards an inevitable ruin, until the time ripens for escape. The cheap pressure board doors, vinyl tiles in the bathroom, and general choices of convenience to the landlord contribute to humiliate and belittle the renters who, gradually, especially if those renters have children, find the walls have been punched through or knocked into and broken, the vinyl tiles puffed from water seeping underneath them in badly designed bathrooms, and that black mold has crept in and speckled doorways, and gradually, gradually ants and mice have taken over. The mice stick to the cabinets or are dragged out by the cat but the ants march alongside the doorways, up the walls, then make grand exodus-like excursions across the desert of the living room floor. My son, who is entering high school this fall, says he will not live with us if we do not move to some place more liveable, where he may have his own room, where the screens aren't busted in, and there is AC. We are renting a large one room yurt. It is the longest place I have lived anywhere as an adult- 6 years- and the time to escape has been pushed back and pushed back, and pushed back again, while I fixed what wasn't mine to fix and let the landlords replace the cheap shit with more cheap shit. Just a little more time, I have whispered to God, a little more time to give to my writing, a little more time, for my ship to come in. In the meantime I have cleaned this place, I've created beautiful gardens here outside, but the yurt itself remains in the hopeless state of being built too cheaply to last well. When people come over, not too often, but when they come, there is usually some comment about the impressive dome-like ceiling arching toward the sun roof, the light in this space, the circling shape of the pine floors. Not mentioned is how five people (five since I had a baby this February) manage to get along in one room, or why we would choose to. It's because my children have always been encamped in my artist's life. I've never had a real job; when I have worked I preferred gardening and menial labor outside so that my biorhythms wouldn't be affected by halogen lighting, so my mind and focus would stay my own. We are still, and for so much longer than I thought could ever be, living in my artist's life all together here, and it stopped being cute so long ago. But my children and I see each other for who we are and are all real with one another. I don't think my oldest son and I have ever had a better relationship. No one tears me up better than he can; he cuts right to the truth, almost always. I think he could become a comedian simply based on his anecdotes from this childhood. But he has his own dreams, they are strong enough to be his nourishment, as mine were when I was a teenager, when I long ago made a choice to live by them till whatever end. If by next year nothing happens for me and we cannot yet move, he will go, I think. Maybe to live with his dad, or my brother who has a big house, and room for him. I will sanction his severance from me, I will kiss him goodbye and cry and support his choice. I have made my family live with great sacrifice because of my dream.
This year I am putting out a novel that I wrote five years ago and let sit in silence for that long, what I think is my best work: Meadowsweet by the Road. This is the last chapter I'll feature here, as I am in the process of releasing the book.
III
A house is built above a winding lake, winding into channels, which is far below the deck of the ostentatious log cabin. The cabin is all sanded down, glossed over hickory, of many wood-faces, and it is too big. The ceiling is very high and there are carved pillars struck here and there as if holding it all up, but actually ornamental. I don’t know. It was a fine enough place to stop. My mother carried the brunt of the bags in and I had baby Sam in my arms. Pines rolled down towards the lake, and so many waving dark tips of them I could see from this height, and there was the smell of deep woods. Samuel had just started crawling so out on the deck I flapped down a quilt I had found in one of the closets of my uncle’s cabin, and set him on all fours there like a little dog. I lay down with him on my stomach, and the sun purred against us. And when it had gone to lower down over the lakes, I yawned and sat up.
“Come here Sam, it’s getting dark.”
I slung him to my hip, and we went into the well lit interior.
“Well, this isn’t a bad place,” I said to my mother, “considering your family’s usually bad taste. I mean it’s a little gaudy.”
“Oh, it’s not. It’s homely here.”
“Oh my God, mom, I wouldn’t say homely.”
“Well—want some wine?”
I set Samuel on his knees on the carpet. “Sure. What are you making for dinner? It’ll be nice to cook and not eat out.”
“I know. I was thinking we could stay a couple extra days here and relax before driving on. Why not?”
“Yeah, please. It’d be good for Sam, too. It sucks having him in the car all day when he just started to crawl. Can we go swimming in the lake tomorrow?”
“Sure.”
She smiled vaguely at me as she poured a glass of wine. Her thin hair was tucked behind her ears. The anguish she must be smothering from leaving her twenty-five year sojourn in the East where her husband finally left her seemed hidden away by the novelty of this road trip. No, not hidden away. Circling her poor mouth were more lines even than a year ago, and the lids of her eyelids, so heavy, over irises that were tawny as oak bark.
My father had left four years earlier, but it didn’t break the good ol’, self-sustaining, dogged routine of waking in the morning, making coffee, going to work, coming home, drinking wine, petting the animals, and watching TV until she was tired, or falling asleep with a book in her lap and a pillow tucked behind her head, the thin rail of her neck tossed back on the pillow, in the light of her bedside lamp, the shade musty, a little burnt. But what a slow and final breaking had come at last. She could have stayed—her children had left home, and the bloated mortgage in his name fallen into delinquency, but she had had a good job, a few friends, she could have gotten a little place. She loved the little roads and dark woods of the East, the corn fields up against the roads, the decaying farmhouses, and shadows like long pendulums that the cows cast from the crests of the hills. She could have stayed. It seemed to me she had packed up and moved to oblige my whimsy to take a road trip, the trajectory of her life maybe thrown away on it. Whatever her shadowy motivation, she was now moving across the country, and though it was fancy for me, it was a straight, unerring—a fatal road for her.
What routines lay in store for her there, in California, amidst her relatives? Strange lady, it’s possible it never really mattered. Her routines and little marks, even her relationships, so easily wiped away. Her reality more in those fairytales, in her romance novels, her mind really bonded to idealistic landscapes, and reductions of figures: hobbits, elves, bountiful maidens, men of the woods, spirit animals. To such things her heart flew, like a child’s heart, or an adolescent girl’s. And as if playing at life her decisions were innocuous, though nothing is really. Her mortality was as marked as those who treated themselves and their time very gravely, and her actual face bore what her mind would hide from her.
“Are you glad now that we left?” I asked her, tasting the wine.
But perhaps she is more free than others, than I, like the sea—the lack of her fingertip, the absence of recognition in her eyes, perhaps she is the sea. And the serious and unserious events blend for her, so there is no distinction, as the sea erodes its colonies, its ruins, the same, indifferently.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she answered, with a little shrug, “we’ll see.”
“You don’t care. Don’t you have plans, or drive or something? What are you going to do when you get out there if you don’t have drive?”
“You know what I’m going to do. Sister’ll help me and I’ll look for a job and then get me a place.”
“I know, but don’t you want to shape your life into something in particular or is it all just random?”
“What do you mean random?”
“I don’t know, it seems random to me.”
“Well, Jessy,” she breathed.
“Maybe you’ll find a boyfriend out there who drives a pick-up or something. They all drive pick-ups out there.”
“Oh no, I don’t think so. I have enough in my life with you kids. Wouldn’t want to share someone else’s kids.”
“What does that even mean! Your kids! We’re all in our twenties and none of us live with you and it makes no sense. God damn it makes no sense.”
“Oh, calm down.”
“It’s terrifying to me. If you don’t have intent then whatever you encounter just shapes you, and you think that whatever you ran into is what you are. And getting older is just like a caving in. Where’s the magic? Don’t you know people can reshape things as they please for themselves, that you can literally remold your life? Don’t you know you have power? You’re leaving the home you shared with your husband for twenty-five years, mom, and moving back around your family, sure, but it’s a changed place. You haven’t lived there for a quarter of a century. That old boyfriend of yours isn’t that far, is he, Tom? Who flies the jets?”
“Oh, Tom. No… no.”
Maybe she is the sea but her placidity, the dissolving indifference of the sea is a deep offense to me. Her consciousness so transparent it never reflects, as the sea not reflecting consumes and consumes. Is the ocean not a violence? Could it not be whipped up to swallow the whole world? Yes, but when forced, condensed with other elements. Its true nature is a rhythmic swallowing, an indifferent crushing, which also, gives birth, nourishes all life. I am young, I want pain of clarity, to be sharp hard composite, diamond-shaped; at least to live for a time as the hard composite of myself, impressed finitely, defiantly, in the open air. Her road, of the great swallowing sea, the death of herself in it, scares me. I must abandon her. But where? On the open road? Or when she drifts absently and predictably to some blank shore? Behind my quick anger about her was something not fiery at all, but hard and cool, a foreboding this time, a real foreboding. I was afraid that there was no shore, that she had not a hard enough will, not enough tangible reality in herself to build anew. I watched the muscles cresting on her freckled throat as she took a sip of wine.
“Let’s sit out on the porch at least and eat dinner,” I said.
“There’s no lights out there. They didn’t install outdoor lights yet.”
“So? It’s bright enough with the stars.”
If I pushed enough, as one might rub wood quick enough to lose sense of the grain, I turn her hard, I get a reaction. I was the thing that wore on her, the rocks that suddenly entrapped her with hard faces. She sighed and turned off the electric burner. “Whatever you want—”
So we ate outside in semi-darkness, Samuel on my lap picking at my plate. We sat on the deck with our plates on a low table, like the Japanese. Linny had never done anything like this and she was clearly perturbed, but I pushed her to break her conformity. I was so angry with her. The intense happiness of the summer in our old house was gone and she endured my unrest with a glance of deep frowning, her stoicism opposing my rage. But she was given me, her daughter. I am driftwood thrown into her stagnant water, breaking myself up in her, while she is so absorbed and indifferent. And I would like to break her but there is nothing to break. Like the sea, resisting me in her pure abstract.
Where is she in herself? Riding horses, loving some young man in the wild, shooting arrows from a bow? We sipped our wine on the deck, and ate, while the lights of the interior radiated from the windows, while the stars dripped faintly down. Samuel squirmed in my lap. Anger is how I sensed what moved in me: it may be that she birthed a daughter who was pure antagonism to her nature, that is pure heat, that the ocean birthed fire, and we can never meet. I have already lived many more lives than her, even having a third of the time she’s had. She exists for me like the mocking silence of the sage before the sensualist; she is Alyosha to my Dmitri. At dull moments she sees my eyes darken inexplicably, for a black storm she didn’t ask for. Poor woman, I drain her happy sea. Yet it is a strange phenomenon. How she makes me sink. When I am not with her I feel less absurd, more even-keeled, but to remember her is like a memory of sinking, and up births my rage. She makes it clear to me with her doe-eyed glance, her quiet submission to an uneventful life, that I have struck my lot in the realm of fire and passion, which is not the only nature of the world; most of the world is the sea. But so long as she lives I cannot bear her calm, or any calm, though I wished sometimes for such drifting sagacity as she possessed. It was becoming apparent that even my own deep intent was not what I thought it was, but just an antagonism to hers, and so—not real—and so, tragic. We looked with pity on one another. But nature would dry her up, as it dries up, as the sun hotter and closer each year dries up all the smaller bodies of water, slow. And when that happens she will take my heat with her. And when that happens her rain will finally touch me.
“So we’ll stay a few days and go to the lake and then to New Mexico?”
“Sure, yes,” my mother said.
“All right mother.”
I swam in the lake the next day, while Samuel played on the shore with my mother. Underneath I saw, passing in the deep water, the hard yellow shells of turtles. When I kicked back to where it was shallow, I had Samuel come to me and held him laughing up above my head. My mother did not swim. She took pictures. She was bystander, a watcher.
“Why don’t you get in?”
“Oh, I’m all right here.”
“Mom, it’s good for you to swim. To get cold and then warm up again. Come on.”
But she would not. I dropped Samuel off with her and swam deep again under the water. It was cool, very clear water, for the lake was fed by many channels. And the sun broke through it in chains, like columns down into the water.
Afterwards driving back there was traffic. Winding up the mountain we had to pass through a tourist town of pop-country concert halls, memorabilia shops, and mini golf courses. There was only one road and the cars were jam-packed on it, making a film of gasoline in the air. Waiting in the car, with her, made me boil up. Samuel was sleeping in back. This was my mother’s road, because of her lack of inertia. She gets caught, and flexes her one little talent of dissociative patience. When our roads converge too absolutely, and I am caught with her, she is my dam.
“I can’t take this. I can’t take this!”
Placid, she answered, “well there’s nothin to do.”
“Yes there is. I can walk.”
I threw open the door and slammed it. I am the dark, blind, nosing about worm, driving holes and tunnels through her soil, forcing her water down somewhere definite. Always the same way I react to her, again, again, unconscious, again, like a drill, and finally driving her to deep-set anger, for she has it, as fire-plates burn under the ocean. It’s sullen and repressive, but she has anger—then I feel her presence. Get angry mother. The heart needs some rich warm blood to keep it alive.
I trudged up the road, alongside the idling cars, blades of shine. I could not very well see. The heat conditions made the air swampy. Nature had been so desecrated here except for the natural rise in the earth, as that was hard to force, but the trees, the surface of the land, all manipulated and wiped out for big roads, shopping centers, amusement parks. But nothing aggravated her, my mother, who thought it was well enough people should make money. Though they have to desecrate where the spirit dwells to do it! People that are too adrift, like she is, get caught by the materials of the age; they seek their shapes in the things available to them.
My mother used to wear a nightgown patterned with buttercups, which hung from her thin, her younger self’s shoulders. She is bending over her black coffee in the kitchen, drumming her clean fingernails over a newspaper. There is still the crack in the panes of the skylight above her head, for that was many years in slow making. Perhaps I am across from her. “Don’t you want a job? A schedule?” she asks me, “to give your life some meaning?”
“Oh! Is that where meaning comes from! Employment! Assigned banal duties!”
The irony is that from the surface I appear the drifting one, indifferent and drifting, though I was really searching, searching with no compass and no precedent for the meaning beneath this random oscillation, this—as the land gives borders to the sea—arbitrary containment.
The line of cars started to move. I walked ahead, careless, smoldering. I felt enormous as these cars, the energy in my limbs spiraling out enormous, burning me up as fossil fuel burns itself up. My shoulders burned in the sun, and the top of my dark hair taking in the heat. Walking up the noxious road the air should be black with fumes, but it is not. So much creeping and killing is invisible, or it is always invisible, only one must be aware enough to smell it, with instinct developed enough to skirt it. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the red Hyundai, and my mother’s deep frown through the light-glare of the windshield. I opened the door and tossed myself next to her, and slammed the door shut. She drove forward, saying nothing, though I felt I had hurt her. I was arbitrarily defining her too, in that incisive way that seems so often to define us—by pain. I felt sorry. I turned my head around to look at Samuel. He was sleeping.