My Body(28)

I knew that my parents had been on again, off again for years before my mother became pregnant with me and they decided to get married. I understood that even before I was born my existence was the essential glue of their relationship. After every such explosion, which usually ended with one of them leaving, the other would turn to me to plead their case or to air their grievances. I’d listen, performing my role dutifully, feeling a queasiness that would stay with me for days.

I remember sitting at the kitchen table, a glass of juice in front of me, as my mother organized printouts of exchanges between my father and various women (ex-students, former lovers, some random woman he met on a plane) that she’d found by breaking into his email.

“Is he crossing a line?” she asked.

Lines were never clear between us. The house didn’t help: it was a place with no boundaries. Children who grow up in homes like mine, just them and their parents with no separation, physically or emotionally, become experts in a very particular type of seeing. We learn to see things that are hidden, and things that aren’t there at all. We become particularly sensitive to the moods and emotions of others. We are nimble and excellent at shape-shifting. We oscillate between feeling special and feeling alone. We feel simultaneously capable of both saving and destroying those we love.

On some nights, I’d stare up at the underbelly of the roof and be unable to soothe my uneasy mind to sleep. I’d lie in bed, restless and sweaty, my thoughts racing. Eventually I’d call over the stunted wall between my room and my parents’, at first quietly and then louder and louder, hearing the sound of my voice travel along the underbelly of the roof.

“Mom … Mom? Mommy!”

I’d wait, fretful and curled up until she’d come into my bed. “Do you have the woozies?” she’d ask, as hot tears streamed down my face. I’d nod and clutch at her.

The woozies was what I called the anxiety in my belly, because the feeling reminded me of being carsick “and a little sad,” as I’d explain. We used the term regularly.

My mother had her own struggles with the woozies, something I knew from a young age. It had been so bad that she had once stayed at a hospital. She told and retold the story like a bedtime tale. “I checked myself in,” she’d begin, and I’d picture her head against a stiff white pillow, her tanned arm circled by a patient wristband. I imagined my father entering hesitantly, with gift-shop flowers she wouldn’t like, wrapped neatly in newspaper.

“I graded all my papers from my hospital bed and got them back to my students in time.” I envisioned the thick stack of papers next to her legs, on top of the white blanket.

“We were worried you’d inherit all that, and I’m so relieved that you didn’t! My depression went away when you were born. It just went away because of you.”

I became used to the idea of being an antidote for both my parents. One evening, I must’ve been about fifteen, my mother and I were chatting in the living room. She sat curled up in her chair, which was always next to my father’s. Her eyes shone as she cradled a glass of wine in her hand. Golden light fell across her nose and forehead. She was relaxed, I could tell.

“Your father and I have said if anything ever happened to you, we’d kill ourselves.” She spoke matter-of-factly. “That would be it for us, there would be no reason to live.” She lifted her glass and took a sip.

“I don’t want to be your only reason to live,” I said, haltingly, stumbling over my words. I tried again; “I don’t want to hear that.”

“Oh, Emily, I wasn’t saying it like that.” She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. Still, I got the sense that, striking out on my own, leaving them—leaving the house—would kill them.

After I moved out, my father told me: “First it was just me in the house, then your mother, then you. Then our first dog, then a cat. Now you’re gone, and the animals are dead and buried in the backyard. One day soon, we’ll be dead, too, and then it’ll just be the house.”



* * *



My father always joked about dying early. “I won’t be at your wedding,” he’d say. “Big guys are like big dogs! We don’t live that long.” But over time, as I became twentysomething and my parents hit their sixties, it became apparent that his health was actually stellar. My mother, on the other hand, was beginning to have more and more complicated health problems with each passing year. Her father (“a small dog,” my dad would have said) had lived to 103 and had not had so much as a single cavity over the course of his life. We’d always assumed that my mother’s later years would be much the same as his had been. She was wiry and driven, and her hair was still thick and grew lusciously on her head. At first, her sixties seemed to suit her, as if she’d reached the age she was always meant to be. She looked like a poster child for the Golden Years: she was going to finish the book she’d been trying to write since the Berlin Wall fell in 1991 (my birth year); she was going to start working out and making new (women!) friends.

But instead of long lunches with these friends or afternoons spent writing at her desk, she became increasingly preoccupied with arranging medical tests and meetings with specialists, trying to find ways to manage the pain she had begun to feel in her back and hips. Doctors were quick to diagnose and cut open my mother’s body: she had three hip replacements and neck and back surgery in five years. It seemed every ailment led only to more complications. As her energy faded and her pace slowed, she became steadily more infirm, depressed, and confused.