We're all human. There the similarity ends.
Some of our parents are Superman, Alice Walker, and Steve Jobs. Others of our parents are Sylvester, continually being beaten up by a giant mouse. Of course, usually each individual parent has its Superman days only seldom interspersed with Sylvester days. But some of us children think that life has dealt us a perpetual calendar of paper bags. Sure you can take it off on your own, but sometimes it's best just to leave it there. Sightless anonymity: don't underrate it.
Introduction
My mother met a man last October. After some ups and downs and a few ins and outs, they were married last Saturday in Connecticut.
My mother and I have not particularly got on together approximately since I began to exercise my capacity for independent thought. I have come to realize that the sheer and simple fact of my capacity for independent thought bothers her as much as the thinking I do with it.
Tainted by the enmity but powerful and inescapable regardless is the love we bear one another. The contrast between these two emotions and the veiled words with which we communicate both are the most frustrating elements of our relationship. There are bright spots too, of course, and chief among them is my sister, CLH.
Two is Enough
CLH took charge of preparing the dining hall of the camp for the reception, cleaning and stocking and decorating. She manages a fine restaurant and has been an event manager for functions large and small; she is an expert. She came home on Wednesday to do this, and on Thursday my mother and CLH sat in the dining hall, shoving back chairs and calling one another "Lardass" (my sister's coinage, natch) as they determined how much space was necessary between tables. Not that my demure mother uses such base language anymore. Also CLH took stock of the supplies in the hall.
"We'll need more toilet paper" was an important finding. My mother thought the number of rolls present was sufficient. "Mom, it's not; I know, I run a restaurant, remember?" "But a restaurant is different." "A restaurant, where people eat and drink, like at a wedding reception? Eighty people over four hours need more than two rolls."
The rest of the camp was quaint and summer campy; the dining hall must have been built in a moment of pecuniary straits. Nonetheless CLH was able to prettify the long tables with simple white cloths, buffed stainless, paper napkins she manhandled into coronets, strewn confetti, and a last, simple, creative flair: in a small fishbowl, over a layer of glass beads, floated a candle. These bowls with their candles, spaced along the tables, were quite perfect.Plus artificial flowers over the windows,
There's No Place Like Home
I really miss my town. There is no place I cherish more, no aspect more pleasing to my eyes than Old Lyme. Although this caused some tension between my sister and me, for which I take full responsibility, I escaped for a dose of Old Lyme, to sustain me not only for the weekend but for the rest of the year. On Friday morning I absolved myself in the waters of Long Island Sound, where the Connecticut River and the sea connect. My other absolution occurred in a lake at the other end of town.
On a pure and clear sunny day in September, the air and sky of Old Lyme know no rival. As I galloped across the beach to the water, I could distinguish trees on the islands across the Sound: another gift. The sky was a flawless dome over my head, and the low lapping waves of a flowing tide reflected that blue clarity. With a plunge I immersed myself in the late summer water: perfect temperature. Brisk air, warm water, unpopulated sand. Nothing lacked. Home.
Some would assign this love of land to my Irish blood. I don't know. It's a hundred years from home, what there is of it, and diluted. I wouldn't claim that I belong to the people of my hometown, but I do to the land. "Every land my imagination knew," and that is true for those whose souls have free rein. It is true too that your imagination can bring you back to the one special place, the geography of the soul.
On the way back I visited PGN. Her new spaces look opulent to me, in comparison to the old, which are familiar and both grand and shabby. And to her my connection is to the people as well as the place. Through PGN, too, I have traveled far; because of PGN I have a home wherever there is a library.
Then CLH and my mother and I had lunch at the Bee & Thistle Inn. My mother and I arrived enough before CLH that I was able to ask for and take a tour of the Inn. It is much changed since I was its familiar, haunting its passageways at all hours, but the new cosmetics look exactly right, a better expression of its time-honored personality. Lunch was perfect, and here my reminiscences end.
The Retinue of the White Witch's Army
My mother wanted her two and BDL's two daughters to be her bridesmaids. Though I balked at the number of attendants, the role gave the four of us enough in common that we could discover other alliances. Which were welcome.
When CLH first heard their names, Gretchen and Heidi, knowing nothing else about them except that every female Alsatian she's ever known has had such names, she dubbed these defenseless women the German Shepherds. Furthermore, both of us protested the term "bridesmaid." Though I am younger than CLH, I am married and she is not; thus she calls herself the spinster. And I am 29 (I do protest; I shall be so only for a year), so I called myself the hag. This for when I was not calling us, in parallel to the German Shepherds, the Irish Setters.
Besides that the White Witch's army comprised Ghouls, Boggles, Ogres, Minotaurs, Cruels, Hags, Spectres, and the people of the Toadstools, and Incubuses, Wraiths, Horrors, Efreets, Sprites, Orknies, Wooses, and Ettins (and Spinsters and German Shepherds),* another reason to belong to it is that it was in opposition to the rest of C.S. Lewis's propagandish Christianity. Disclaimer: I love Aslan, I know Jadis is evil, and I tend toward Aslan's and espouse none of Jadis's beliefs. Allow me the parallel, because Lewis's cookie-cutter religion is as unexplained and thought-suppressing as my mother's newly-espoused creed.
So although my mother designated us "Maid of Honor," "Matron of Honor," and two "Bridesmaids," Hag, Spinster, and German Shepherd are our names for ourselves.
And yes, Gretchen and Heidi know the nickname. That was one of the first indications the alliance would work. Each side was prepared to dislike the other, having had the other pair forced down our throats for months. When we were introduced, they quickly distanced themselves from us (to be fair, we weren't the ones scarpering), which was fine with us, but then somehow, not long after, when we were stuck in a room together, enough sardonic comments were made by the good daughters to make the excesses even of the bad daughters look tame.
Yes, there are the good and the bad daughters. What CLH considers the usual older-to-younger sister relationship is reversed in Gretchen and Heidi. Thus Heidi is the better behaved, the higher achieving, the good daughter, and Gretchen and I are the rebellious ones who will react, kneejerk-wise, into doing the polar opposite of whatever we have just been told to do. Or so say our sisters. One churchmember, surely thinking herself quite witty, exclaimed that we are now a Brady Bunch. Besides that we are not step-relatives, being independent enough to choose our own families, we had evolved way beyond the Bradys. CLH, of course, being perfect, is Marcia, and Heidi, being the youngest, is Cindy, while Gretchen and I, in the middle chronologically while always feeling second-best, are naturally Jan. "Marcia Marcia Marcia Marcia Marcia!" Except that is too simplistic. We are the Addams Family's conjoined-twin cousins. Unfortunately my suggestion that we each claim one of Meg Jo Beth or Amy fell flat. Mary Laura Carrie and Grace didn't go over well either. After that I shut up.
On Friday after decorating and before meeting the German Shepherds, my mother and sister and I spent some time by the river. Again CLH tried to ask exactly what being born again meant to our mother, who was unable and unwilling to elucidate. She said she had studied the Bible for several months before. I asked which of the two contradictory human creation myths in Genesis her religion espoused. She didn't know. I suspected the rib one, because it's easy to infer subordinacy from it (and the pastor's wedding sermon proved me right), but she didn't know. I asked about a few of the other inherently contradictory ideas in the Bible, such as David's polygyny (she didn't know the difference between bigyny and polygyny or between either and bigamy; I didn't bring up biandry) and the monogamy elsewhere espoused. She had no answer. I asked whether her religion interpreted the Song of Songs as religious devotion or sexual love. She had no answer.
Saturday morning dawned not quite as beautiful as Friday, but my mother exclaimed, "Isn't it a glorious day." While she chowed her bacon-and-eggs breakfast, DEW wandered by to ask her a question, and my mother answered it with her mouth full. So DEW asked, "Excuse me?" Whereupon my mother repeated her answer, still looking down at her plate, and with her mouth still full, but louder and more shrilly. I looked up at DEW and repeated my mother's answer at a reasonable volume, enunciating and making eye contact. DEW thanked me and wandered away again. I said to my mother, "I think Granny would understand you fine if you looked at her when you spoke instead of looking away or having a mouthful of food." "I'll thank you not to tell me what to do," retorted she. I regarded her steadily for a bit while I reined myself in. Then I said, "I wasn't telling you what to do; I was making a suggestion. There's a difference." No response. Just chawing at her cholesterol and pork fat. No acknowledgment, no recognition, not even a rebuttal. I stood up, saying, "And you wonder why we don't get along." And I walked away too.
You
can skip this paragraph if you're easily squicked. CLH has found an enthralling
new product by a company called Bioré. Bioré makes a strip that
you apply to your nose or chin for a few minutes. It bonds to the dirt in your
pores and so, when you tear it off, your blackheads come too. Now, I am a picker
and a peeler. Cuticles, scabs, split ends, whiteheads, peeling sunburn, I love
it all. So of course I was fascinated with the possibilities. We gummed ourselves
up in the parking lot of the Old Lyme A&P (where we'd found the plunder)
and considered what to do with ourselves for the next 15 minutes while we dried.
CLH suggested going to Bump-bump's grave, but I thought we didn't have enough
time. We didn't go there--visiting our grandfather's grave with sticking plaster
on our protuberances?--but do have lovely photographs of ourselves in the parking
lot of Old Saybrook's Dock 'n' Dine. Finally the strips were dry and we tore
them off. Now CLH has been using Bioré for several weeks and her pores
are clean; this was my First Time and my strip was lovely. A stalagmite field
of blackheads. At any rate, we had cleansed our pores for God.
The Communion Bread Was a Hamburger Bun
This is really the only thing you need to know about the wedding. It is the defining element. I don't know, and wouldn't be told if I asked, if the pastor forgot bread and scuttled at the last minute to a nearby house and borrowed a crust of bread, any crust, in order to have communion. I don't know. He had the right sort of cup for the Kool-Aid [presumably; because no alcohol is allowed, unless the camp is so hypocritical?] and a clean white cloth to cover the corpse, anyway. Actually I don't think transubstantiation is a rite of this faith (but I doubt if my mother knows for sure), so the leftovers weren't a corpse and the act wasn't cannibalism. So I didn't have to look at a tattered Wonder brand hamburger bun and think that there lay the body of the Son of God.
That the communion bun was a hamburger bun outweighs the abridged version of the Decalogue that hung over the altar. This fact eclipses the Miami Vice garb the pastor favored (both at rehearsal and the wedding the next day) and even rivals the inclusion into our mother's vows of the verb "obey." Even Laura Ingalls Wilder wasn't married with the promise to obey. Also I quote from the pastor's sermon: "As Christ is the head of the Church, so man is the head of woman." (That parallel would be faulty cause and effect even it weren't stupid.) But wait, isn't that a Catholic hypothesis? Maybe that hamburger bun was long pig. Oof.
Doing Chick Stuff
CLH and I saw our cousin Michelle for the first time in years at this wedding. Her father walked his sister, our mother, down the aisle (During rehearsal our mother did have the spine to say she didn't want the question "Who gives this woman in marriage?"; but the pastor didn't know how to proceed without it. Figuring out how the bridal couple could reach the altar without that query took him about five minutes.) Also, we had our friend RRP there for moral support, as Gretchen and Heidi had their friend Sue. So during the reception, which was hot, tedious, and interminable, the seven of us escaped to the river to do chick stuff. It felt exactly like skipping school. No one swam.
During a lull the day before I said I was going to go for a swim. My mother told me nay. "Why not?" I asked; I had come home to swim in my favorite waters. "Because," she replied, as willing to articulate, to be fair, and to make sense now as she was when I was a child. "I need better reasons than that, Ma." Finally she was able to sort out some thoughts behind her gut feeling, which effort must have been considerable and of which I was proud. She cited the river's current and suspected uncleanliness. I told her I understood that she didn't want me to, but that being 29, I was not obliged to obey her, and having been a self-reliant human for at least 21 of those years (that I can remember), I could make my own decisions. Also I asked her if she understood that I would swim because I wanted to swim, not because she didn't want me to, which was true but which she seemed to interpret as antagonism.
Back at the reception, folks were dancing, which I thought was great. CLH had brought a Frank Sinatra disk, thinking that couldn't offend even any Maranantha types in attendance. Gretchen and Heidi had retched at Ol' Blue Eyes, but I think they'd forgotten the generation gap. When "Summer Wind" ended so did the dancing; I don't know why. It's not as if the electricity had gone out, as it had in the morning, before the ceremony, and then again at the beginning of the processional. BJWL had said there'd be no dancing. I guess not.
The wedding didn't provide a whole lot of obviously, directly ludicrous divertissements, but still in context and as an Event I am so glad RRP was there. I need her semi-objective perspective to point out what was truly and pathetically ludicrous and what was simple happenstance. She was a witness that the hamburger bun was not a figment of my tortured imagination. Furthermore, she drove me home when the rest of the chick retinue went out to relax in a more hedonistic manner. We caught up. She understands me. I love RRP.
Nicky's Really Fun Now
What with the alliance with the German Shepherds and lack of outrageous hilarity at the nuptials, Saturday night was calm and a time for me to confront the fact that for better or worse, this has happened. Yes, it is difficult for me to cut my mother any slack; but though you've read this far perhaps you can believe that this union gives me cause for concern (unexamined religion, shaky finances, liability...) as well as cause to gripe. So that was Saturday night.
Sunday was my day and it was fun. I saw my friends at 3SK and they lent me a car for the day; I baptized myself at my lake; and when I arrived at the beach with the picnic, TJZ had just arrived. We gossiped companionably. I love TJZ. Not only is she the first UC friend I made all by myself, she is the second oldest overall. And she teaches. Sure she infuriates me sometimes, but that's healthy. While we talked I watched for the arrival of a baby. Finally I saw a VW Golf and the hind end of someone leaning into the back seat, as if to remove a child. "That's a baby!" I exclaimed, and so it was. ABW and NKW had arrived. ABW had written me a few months before that "Nicky is really fun now." And so he is.
This was NKW's first visit to the sea (or to the Sound, at least, which might not count as sea) and then the Connecticut River. We built sand castles, investigated rocks, met a toad, climbed some stairs, saw boats and a train, and watched the bridge go up. Then we went to Hallmark's for some restorative dairy products.
(When I went home in May, BJWL put a stick of an oily yellow substance on the table. I picked it up speculatively, asking, "Is there any dairy product in this item?" CLH cracked up, and then BDL, and once he did, BJWL understood it was funny too. But no, there was nothing dairy in it. If I were going to die of heart failure (which I doubt), I would rather have eaten butter along the way. So now any dairy product restores CLH and me.)
I considered it very healthy of me that I didn't look back when we left White Sands, nor the River, nor Hallmark's, nor Old Lyme at all. It is my home and where I belong, but I have come to realize I can make my home almost anywhere. Dorothy Gale was partly right, but whoever said "Home is where the heart is" was right too.
Nicholas surprised me with what a little boy he already is, having forever abandoned the newt-in-a-carseat impression he did when I first met him, last summer. And when next I see him he will be more mobile than I. This time the stairs were an exciting challenge: sometimes a knee up, sometimes a foot, but he got to the top. Plus next summer he'll say more than "ball."
Aftermath
And so it goes. CLH has received a postcard from our mother honeymooning in
beautiful Fresno California. I haven't received one; I wonder if I have finally
been too mean? The card reads "All my ^our
love, Bname ^Mom and Husband." (Says
a reading man with whom I work, "Be glad Saroyan didn't collect hamburger
buns." William Saroyan was from Fresno.) I figure she crossed out the "my"
to draw attention to the "our." I can't figure why she forgot her
appellation, unless she filled out a bunch of cards at once and then personalized
them with address and proper epithet.
(C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, New York: Collier Press (MacMillan), pp. 132 and 148) I don't link to Amazon for this because the books have been renumbered. WRONGLY. I don't care if CSL wanted them this way, as I have heard rumored. He was WRONG. If he wanted The Magician's Nephew to come first, he should have made sure that that was the best book. If you read The Magician's Nephew first, where's the magic in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and the others? Or maybe he didn't want magic, the proselytizing prig.[back]
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