Joy Enough Read online

  SARAH McCOLL

  JOY

  enough

  A Memoir

  For Duncan, Katy, and Bliss

  Some writers have a more defined sense of cause and effect. Plot. My sense of life is more moment, moment, and moment. Looking back, they accrue and occur to you at a certain time and maybe you don’t know why, but you trust that they are coming back to you now for a reason. And you make a leap of faith. You trust you can put these moments together and create story.

  —Amy Hempel

  Finally, the lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.

  —Gretel Ehrlich

  The mere sense of living is joy enough.

  —Emily Dickinson

  Contents

  Winter

  Spring

  Summer

  Fall

  Winter

  Spring Again

  Summers

  Acknowledgments

  winter

  I LOVED MY MOTHER, and she died. Is that a story?

  Story is giving a character a tangible desire, then putting things in her way. A writer I was falling in love with told me that. My desire is for my mother to live. More tangible, he says. My desire is not to forget. More tangible, he says.

  Then my desire is for her to meet the next man I love, the one I keep now that I know a thing or two. My desire is for her to see my round silhouette in a summer dress, then to hold my baby in the delivery room. In winter, my desire is to make chili with the mixture of garden tomatoes and hot peppers she calls hell that I’ve kept in the back of my freezer. Our desires are equally impossible: to freeze hell, to thaw it; to reverse time, to stop it. My desire is to have more of what I do not need, seconds of what has been my fair share: a fight, a car ride, a cup of coffee, ignored advice straight from the mouth of a grade A know-it-all.

  Or none of this. My desire is preservation, to carry her lodged beneath my breast like a bone.

  More tangible, he says.

  HER NAME WAS Allison, but her father called her Tune. My little petunia, he said.

  It was like living in a green bowl, she said, the way the valley curved out a hollow at the foot of Mt. Greylock, and another ridge rose behind the barn and silo, enclosing their loneliness. The sphere at the end of the banister was the size of a boy’s face and about the right height. She leaned in with eyes closed to practice. Ridgeview Farm was in Western Massachusetts, five long, hilly miles outside of Williamstown along the cold Green River. She let the screen door bang on her way out to the pasture.

  The air was manure and hay. It smelled of warm earth, of growing things. How do you round up cows? They are docile but slow moving, recalcitrant, with calves at their sides like small shadows. Maybe she called them by name or had the help of a dog, but somehow she herded those somnolent beasts into the barn where there were quiet stalls lined with stiff straw, and birds sat overhead in the eaves of the aluminum roof. Somehow she convinced them that was where they wanted to be.

  It was not where she wanted to be. She felt the ache at every age, when she played house with a family of her own imagined children and performed from a rock to an audience of dumb daylilies. Her father shook the ice in his bourbon-and-gingers while he told jokes at a dinner table tight with seven plates of spaghetti. But the neighborhood was empty of anyone who wasn’t a relative or slow-talking farmer. Just as her mother escaped to town each morning to swivel around an office, Tune rode a bike into thick woods. Under a slow-waving canopy, the light came through in patches. Mother and daughter’s longing was shared but unspoken.

  When Tune was an adult and her own mother died, the parked cars overflowed onto the road’s grassy shoulder, and four college presidents stood in the back of the church. Tune didn’t cry. She had lost her mother a long time ago, she said, when she understood her mother was not the kind she had needed. This is one kind of mother and daughter.

  She and I are another.

  WHEN PEOPLE SAY, tell me about your mother, which they never do, I say she was my spiritual home.

  So to say I miss her—which I often did in the months following her death, because I did not have the language to express my roiling grief—was a polite way of calling myself a cosmic orphan, like a moon whose planet has fallen out of orbit.

  My physical home: Sixth Avenue in Brooklyn, where I mark time by the trees, one in particular. The willow at Fifteenth Street is lush with long, falling maiden hair, its boughs rustling in the thawed breeze like underskirts across a polished wood dance floor. My husband moved out three months before my mother died, when the snow was still on the ground. Since then, I live alone.

  But in the first weeks of spring, a heavy perfume hangs in the air on the corner of Fourteenth Street, and I stop on the sidewalk outside the Italian restaurant. Honeysuckle. The thick fragrance is unmistakable, but I cannot see the blooms, as if someone is calling my name who has not yet stepped into view.

  WE REHEARSE OUR adult lives from the beginning. Mine was a game in the front yard. Into a bucket go sharp holly leaves, cedar chips from the flower beds, errant sticks, fistfuls of clover—never can find the lucky ones—rippled pink blooms from the crape myrtles, and pale yellow honeysuckle blossoms. The bush forms a lush border between our house and the neighbors next door. One for me to eat; the stamen like a slide whistle and tongue touched to the drop of nectar. One for the bucket, and the blossom drifts to join the lawn detritus. The afternoon is a quiet expanse, the house emptied of my older brother and sister at school, my younger brother not yet born. I pause to watch doodlebugs dawdle along the pebbled surface of our front porch. Then into the kitchen, where my mother smears peanut butter on white bread, drips honey, and sinks a knife to cut fours. It is just the two of us, and I am out to make something, too. My bucket slides under the tap, there is a rush of hot water, and I stand as if at a cauldron with my witch’s brew, stirring with a wooden spoon until there is a fierce swirl at the center. Lunch, she says, and my sandwich is on a blue and white plate. Stew! I announce, vainglorious at my own creation.

  HER FIRST MEMORY is of ants, of watching a single-file parade inside the trumpet of a daylily. Theirs is a bicentennial farm. For two hundred years a single family has pushed orchard apples through a food mill and lined the cellar shelves with canned pole beans, slipped from the barn roof, and died in labor. When my mother is older, she will bring her own diapered children to the top of the same hill and slide daylilies behind our ears, and many years after that, I will sneak away with my husband from a barbecue and lie down with him in the shadow of a tractor. But the first thing she remembers, she tells me, is the ants, their fluid line like pen ink, a whole city inside a bloom. It is June, and the sheets are snapping dry on the clothesline.

  This is a memory of a memory, an image of my mother’s childhood inside an image of my own, like nesting matryoshkas. When I hear about the ants, my mother is dropping me off at school. I am in fifth grade and fat, and Anne Murray’s Greatest Hits is in the tape deck of her white Ford Taurus. I have a lavender backpack with neon zippers on my lap, and even I know it looks cheap. It’s raining, and I am nearly late for the second bell, the drop-off traffic snaking around the block, and my mother won’t stop talking.

  Your first memory, she goes on, is significant. She’s getting her masters in social work and spends the evenings hammering away at her typewriter, smoking cigarettes. I don’t ask what she thinks her ants mean. This is how she and I talk, about what things mean, but today I’m distracted—by the time, by the distance to the side door if I get out of the car and run, and mostly by the rain, which will soak my white t-shirt, under which I am not wearing a bra because no one but me has yet noticed I need one.

  The
adults in my life are themselves distracted. My father drives a Cadillac as long and silver as a shark. But last week he picked me up for Wednesday night Hamburger Helper at his apartment wearing pants I’d never seen with a hole in the crotch. He talked about money, why Christmas would be different this year, and asked why my mother keeps writing hot checks at the grocery store. I don’t know what a hot check is.

  The morning in the car my mother asks what my first memory is and waits for the answer like it matters, the windshield wipers like a metronome. How is a memory different from a photograph or a story you’ve been told about yourself? I am nine going on ten and beginning to get angry, not just at the rain that morning or the delay, but at a growing sense of life’s unfairness. Our house is filled with moving boxes, and letters from my father’s law office arrive by courier at the front door. I am more interested in visions of on and on, like this: I imagine sitting in front of a television. On the screen is a person watching television of another person, seated on a couch, watching television. And so on. I tell my mother I would like to minor in philosophy. She thinks this is funny, but I find it all very deep.

  WE ONLY EVER WRITE one story, the writer I was beginning to love told me. Several months after my mother’s death, looking through stacks of paper in her sewing room, I found a yellow folder. “The Life of Allison Marie Young,” she wrote in felt-tipped calligraphy pen, “by her daughter, Sarah.” This was my third-grade project. Tell me what you were like when you were my age, I asked, then neatly wrote the most interesting parts on ruled notebook paper beside crayon illustrations. She sank a homemade raft in the Green River and sat astride her cousin Bonnie’s pony. Bonnie looked good in cheap clothes, my mother always said, and that’s all I know about Bonnie.

  Tell me what you were like when you were my age, I asked in high school. We did most of our talking in the warmth of the car, waiting for a school bus that stopped a distance from our house. My mother wore her nightgown beneath a down parka and spilled tea on the floorboards. On the first hot day, the scent of sour milk haunted the car. She babysat, she said, and when the kids went to sleep, she ate leftovers from the fridge, didn’t wash the dishes though she had a feeling she was supposed to, and thumbed the parents’ copy of Tropic of Cancer for the sex parts.

  Ice crystals scattered on the windows like field-borne burrs. I had woken that morning from a dream, I told her, in which I stood in a tunnel, my arms wrapped inside the peacoat of a boy as a train barreled toward us. “Well, that’s obviously about sex,” she said. And then, “Here comes the bus.” I slumped on and into the first seat, perturbed. She could decode my subconscious, so why did hers seem so opaque? I wrote a poem, which is what sixteen-year-olds do, and left it at her place at the kitchen table one night before bed.

  “Dear Sarah,” she wrote in a letter she slid under my bedroom door. “If it seems that I am vague about my childhood, forgive me. It’s only that there is not much to tell. I was dreamy and lonely and liked to read magazines and ride my bike.”

  I did not know how to ask a question impossible to answer. Can you explain what people mean when they say, You are just like your mother?

  Now she is dead, and unable to answer, and still I cannot stop. There is comfort in asking. The possibility of discovery seems, at once, as real as the night sky and as difficult to measure as love.

  Another surprise sewing room find, the motherlode: beside the plush camel chair she dozed in at the end, her head tipped back into the afternoon sun, a bag from Stop and Shop. It was overstuffed and heavy, filled with knitting needles, leather-bound journals, drafts of letters to doctors, friends, her therapist, my father. There were five copies of her divorce papers, and two day planners from the 1980s. Neon Post-its popped from the pages like flags.

  “Hope now?” she wrote on a small piece of lined, monogrammed notepaper in her thirties. “That I won’t just die and become fertilizer—that I won’t be forgotten as if I had never lived. That I’ll give good people to the world. That things will become clearer to me, that I’ll understand better. It really bugs me that I don’t understand everything already.”

  It bugs me, too.

  SHE TOLD THE STORY the same way each time, with the freshness of someone relaying details the next morning from a dormitory hall phone. Now seems as good a time as any to mention she was an unreliable narrator, but here we go.

  Heat blasted through the vents in the dashboard and the windows fogged with their girl talk, headlights blunted by a vortex of snowflakes. Someone reapplied lipstick while someone else announced street names as the signs came into view. My mother buttoned her purple maxi coat. The heavy dorm door creaked open, and my father stood in the stony hallway with a thick red beard.

  I could feel his hot breath on my cold cheeks as he said, “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

  When my father was on chapel duty, they sat in the back pew, cookies inside their coat pockets. He was so handsome, one of my mother’s classmates said later, she wanted to put his head on her mantle.

  This was one of my mother’s truisms: A person will reveal everything you need to know about them within the first twenty minutes. The trick is whether or not you’re paying attention.

  After coffee, my mother grabbed a toothbrush and toothpaste from her purse.

  Don’t you want the flavor to linger in your mouth? my father asked.

  On she went to the bathroom, maybe noticing a moment where pleasure locked horns with practicality, but maybe not.

  And so it was the same for me, a daughter like a rerun.

  “It’s weird, Allison,” one of her classmates said at a reunion, when I was my mother’s date, flipping through magazines on a dorm room floor and swinging my legs in the air. “It’s like it’s you thirty years ago there on the floor.”

  FOR TEN YEARS, I was crazy about one man. He becomes my husband. I go wild for his hands, the way he ties a square knot, and how, when he holds a drink, he smiles at me slyly from the side of his mouth.

  Just like my parents, dumb with infatuation and blind to early evidence of their failed future, my husband and I can’t see what’s clearly coming: that he will spend more time writing code at his computer than in my company, that I am relatively unambitious, and, not Chinese.

  When we’re in the dark of it I say, “Let’s do something fun.” And because we are so far down, I don’t even know what that might mean. So I ask him, “What’s fun?”

  “Fun is noodles,” he answers, his Chinese mother’s phrase. Chow fun, mei fun. The only way to have it is to eat it. A month later he has emptied his closet, and two months after that he pushes a thick manila envelope under the door of our apartment. Inside, divorce papers and a bar of dark chocolate. Not fun.

  Each morning, I slip a silk blouse over my head and ride the subway to an office in midtown. I am the editor in chief of a website about food, and I cannot eat. In the office bathroom, I sink to my feet. At my desk, I lean my head toward my knees. My mother says my body is processing the pain.

  And then one day, because I cannot bear masking my personal mess at the office again, I get off the D train at Grand Street by the stinky fish vendors and walk across Nolita to a coffee shop on Mott Street. When I swing the door open, I look up into the face of a man.

  “Hi,” I say. I am breathless from the cold.

  “Hi,” he answers, and he bares his teeth like a friendly wolf.

  I think I can feel his hot breath on my cheeks.

  We do not fall in love. Or we do, and it doesn’t last. What matters is this: I’ve been slapped by white sun, and for weeks my mind is blank-frantic, whirling like an empty spin cycle. Yet what I feel is full.

  Call this boy-crazy, as I usually do, and it’s a bone-deep embarrassment. Call it the life force, as my mother did, and it’s elemental—proof I am alive, that the heart beating inside this chest is a woman’s.

  HERE’S SOMETHING a woman can do: birth boy, girl, girl, boy. I am that second girl. She let the first three of us unfurl with ra
ndom assignment of Xs and Ys. For the fourth, she got serious. She wanted us lined up like von Trapps, longed for two more sons but would settle for one. Her old-timer gynecologist had strategies to determine sex, and so my mother nodded, sitting in a cotton gown on his examining table, the opening in front. He mailed instructions, the letter stamped at the post office on June 27, 1986. Postage was twenty-two cents.

  “To favor conception of a male: (1) Intercourse at or as close to ovulation as possible with prior abstinence during the cycle, immediately preceded by an alkaline douche of water and baking soda. (2) Intercourse with female orgasm. (3) Deep penetration at the time of emission.”

  Now for the fun part. It must have been the following January when my mother placed a call to my father’s law office saying he was needed at home. He was due in court, so when he hung up, he placed a call of his own. Your Honor, he said, and told the truth. More remarkable still, it worked. That is the story of how we got my little brother, Bliss, and how we became a complete set.

  We made our home in glitzy Dallas, where only maids waited at bus stops, though we did not call them maids, we called them housekeepers. In our neighborhood, sixteen-year-olds woke to luxury cars in the driveway, the hoods festooned with giant red bows. My mother enlivened errands with a new bumper sticker: NUCLEAR WASTE IS FOREVER. At night, my parents fantasized about returning to San Antonio or Austin, where they had been young and poor and happy. We stay.

  Ours was a monkey house. Someone was naked or dropping the fire ladder from a third floor window to escape. There was dog shit on the Oriental rug and an empty roll of paper towels. My mother weaved herself in with husband and kids in a watertight web. We hollered down the hallway, shoved. She said, Give your sister a hug and say you’re sorry, and we rolled our eyes. When the country station was on in the kitchen after dinner, my parents danced the push. My father’s loafers shuffled across the black and white tile floor. The soles sounded like leaves rustling along a riverside. Farm lore says when the silver undersides turn face up, it’s going to rain.