I promised I'd write 50m000 words in November! Argh! i figure that's about 162 pages or something. Anuyway, today I'm in the mood for writing, or I was.
All I ever wanted to do was tell my Family's Story. Which means, I wanted to tell the story of my four brothers' and three sisters' lives--not even my parents' story, but my siblings'. They were substitute parents for me in mabny ways. Wanting to tell the Family's Story has always held me back. I realize now that I have only my own story to tell--only my own--that's all I've ever HAD to tell, to give. Even if I were to try to tell the stories of my brothers' and sisters' lives, I'd still be telling MY story because all I can do is tell you the way I have taken in their lives.
When you live in a big family and are born near the bottom of the pile, you are kind of infused, maybe even infected, like with a virus. The virus is The FAmily, and you never get over it or outgrow it. I can remember visiting my Family in California, even after my mother had both died. I felt the Family Glop invading me before I'd even arrived, and after I'd arrived, I was desperate to maintain some kind of protection from the Glop, from being sucked into the quicksand that has no visible shape or smell or color but which is no less--and probably more--powerful for not having a physical form. I can remember at the airport, on the way home, the Glop still pulling at me--I remember grabbing a paper napkin from one of those airport cafes and trying to write down impressions, snatches of dialogue, the patterns I'd discerned in the way my brothers and sisters interacted with one another and with me. How urgent I felt to get it down, to get it out--away from me--to push back against the Glop!
The Glop is comprised of patterned ways of being. For instance, when I telephone one of my two remaining sisters now (the third is in a nursing home and for all intents and purposes 'gone'), I know exactly the tone of voice they will use and the tone in which i will respond--regardless of what we say to each other, regardless of the content. We could be calling to communicate tragedy, to recommend a good book, to pick a fight--the tone in each case is entirely predictable, and it feels like a kind of slavery, a kind of bondage, there is no freedom in it.
I am not here talking about a tone of voice, per se--the timbre or quality of someone's voice is beyond their control, I think. I guess I am talking about the patterns of affect communicated by the tones of voice used. Either Betty or Sharon at this point will answer a call from me with, "Jeannieeeee," with a higher pitch on the Jean, then sliding into a lower and extended 'eeeee.' The affect is....what? Surprise? Like I never call? Yes, perhaps some surprise, since I don't call often, but the tone conveys oh so much more than that.
Each is telling me something like this: that they are surprised I am calling since I've moved back to Chicago and presumably do not wish to be part of the family anymore, for which I am culpable, but for which I am forgiven because of their love for me. The tone says, "Come home, come back to the Glop." And there is nothing in it, nothing, that is spontaneous, that belongs to that unique moment in time in which we happen to be speaking on a telephone to one another.
Is it just that I've 'grown accustomed to [their[ voice,' like Professor Higgins grew accustomed to poor Eliza's? I don't think so. The voice thing is just part of it. There are patterned ways of behaving, too, and patterned ways in which I RESPOND that drive me nuts. It's as if I have no control over myself but am somehow induced into responding however I do. This is true of all families; to escape these patterns, we leave home. Then we try to set up the same patterns with whomever we meet or marry. It makes one ponder the meaning of 'free will' indeed.
And how DO I respond to my brothers, to my sisters. What is the 'phatic communication,' to use an old Hayakawa expression? To my sisters I think I am saying, "I am not you. I am not like you. I think even that I do not like you. But I love you, and I would be hurt if you didn't say you loved me. I reject you and all that you stand for, but you are not allowed to reject me. I still depend on you, on my relation to you, and I am furious about that. Remember that I am superior to you--smarter, left home more completely but still have not forgotten my roots, still share the Family sense of humor. I still want you in my life, even though I have left you, and I don't know how to have you in my life." That is the 'music' behind whatever words I use.
But to my brothers: that is harder. The eldest is now dead, thank God. He can no longer terrorize my life or my dreams. In fact, he has been out of my dreams now for about 15 years, but for many years before that, I would wake startled, feeling that "John is here," the way I felt from the age of about eight or nine through my teens and early adulthood. I know the older brothers and sisters would be shocked at my saying 'Thank God' that John is dead, and I do not say it with any malice. I didn't hate him, in the end--he was too pathetic a figure. There was so much intelligence, charm, wit about him, in spite of the schizophrenia that made him the terror of my childhood.
Yet I can be thankful that he is gone from my life permanently. I will never again receive an embarrassing letter or package, as I did all through college and even after, marked with large, elementary-school handwriting in three or four different colors, with sayings, quips, added here and there, sometimes salacious ones. I don't ever have to find one of those missives in my mailbox again and try to hide it so noone will know that I have a crazy brother, one who has power over me.
I can sleep in my bed, safe from his attempts at intrusion. I no longer have to ask the question, "Where is John sleeping?" to know where I can sleep, how I can be safe from his nighttime wanderings. Never again do I have to come home to a house we worked hard to clean, to hold together, to decorate, to find that he has sawn off some part of the furniture or to smell the pure bleach he has poured onto the kitchen floor to 'clean it.' I don't have to stay up to all hours listening to his theory for doping out the horse races, 'the red ball' and 'the blue ball' theories, watching him draw crayoned symbols next to particular entries in the racing form, only to have him accuse me of [patronizing' him by my forced attention.
What did force my attention to him anyway? Why was I the 'chosen' one to sit with him late into the night, he in a t-shirt and boxer shorts that offered all too open a showing of his penis. His bony adam's apple stuck out of his neck, and he reflexively and obsessively wiped his nose with his hand. Often he smelled of excrement because he didn't wipe himself well at the toilet. He was the tallest of the four boys, six foot three; I was the tallest of the four girls, five ten and a half. Is that why I felt I had to sit up with him? He asked me to; that's all I can say, and I didn't feel free to say no or it's too late or I have to get up to go to school or work tomorrow. I was afraid of him, and he knew he had power over me.
When we live through traumas in our early years, we never think to ask, "Where were the others? The parent, the sibling, the grandparent, the witnesses: how did they feel? What were they thinking? Who left me alone to deal with what I couldn't?"
John was fifteen years older than I. He had power over me. Perhaps he had less power with my older brothers and sisters? Did anyone even know that I was sitting in the breakfast nook of the kitchen of the house we had finally been able to move into, the window to the backyard dark, having to peer closely at the insane markings of a madman and pretend interest, even excitement, over what he was imagining to be true? And if they knew, why didn't anybody try to help me out? Or was there a rotation worked out that was unknown to me--did the others have to take their turn listening to the red ball and the blue ball theories? Not my older brothers, certainly. They had power over John, although John was the eldest, and Bill and Paul three and five years younger. They were younger, but they were sane, they were healthy, they had jobs, they had lives; that's why they were more powerful than their eldest brother.
Al, perhaps, the youngest of the brothers, only three years older than I and the only brother to whom I felt close, the only one who didn't threaten me: perhaps he had to wait up to listen to John's horse racing theories. Sharon, the baby, was always too fragile for anyone to demand anything of. Betty and Helen were in and out of the house as they went in and out of their marriages, not home consistently enough to be drafted into horse-racing-theory duties. And he would not have asked Mama.
John never called Mama by any maternal label. He would sometimes refer to her as "Mrs. Wishard," or "Ruth Wishard." When we were younger, he talked about the King and Queen, apparently referring to our parents. Yet, when my father paid a visit to the one and only house we'd ever owned, after many years' absence, John used 'Dad' and so sweetly and simply wanted his attention. His father was no doubt forgiven because he wasn't around. My mother, who wrapped his urine-soaked garbage in fresh newspapers to that the garbage truck would deign to pick up our trash, never merited a loving glance, not even a name: not Mama, to John, nor Mom, nor Mother, nor Ma. His rage at her must have burned with white-hot intensity. Yet it was never my mother that he threatened, physically. He was hospitalized the first time after having pushed Betty--an act he later denied and probably in all honesty could not remember.
He was not physically violent, for the most part. But he slammed doors so hard they became shaken off-plane so that they wouldn't close correctly anymore. He banged the doors to express his rage, which he often formulated as one kind of prejudice or another, identifying the perpetrators of the horrors against him with which he had to live, the takers-away of his life, the robbers who had left him poor and empry, as the Mexicans when we lived near the Mexicans or the "Negroes" when we lived near black people. And he terrified us when it was just girls living at home--my mother and we four sisters. He slept on a bed in the street-level San Francisco basement at that time (you can see that I do not want you to believe that we mistreated him), and he would come roaring up the basement stairs, naked from the waist down, demanding that one of us couple with him, and slamming the doors, as usual. Then we would lie awake in the two befdrooms upstairs (we all slept with one another since there weren't enough beds to go around), the lights off, not daring even to get up to go to the bathroom, praying that he would settle down, hoping that he would not hurt us.
Yes, he was in the hospital many times, but in those years, in the '50s, they didn't have the drugs they have now. They gave him Thorazine, and that helped a little; it kind of slowed him down, But he wouldn't stay on it. After the last hospitalization, he decided not to come back home to live--this hurt my mother's feelings, but it was brilliant for him. And it saved my life; I can see that now. Perhaps it saved his too.
He died only a few years ago, from stomach cancer, in a public hospital in Sonoma, where he had become a fixture in the community. The doctor who ministered to him called Bill, an attorney, to say that John had told the doctor that Bill had Power of Attorney for Health Decisions. It was clear that the doctor was willing to believe that such a document existed, and for the best reasons: he recognized the schizophrenia. He also recognized that my brother was very intelligent, that he depended on his family in many ways, even though he lived apart, and that he was quite sanely making use of my brother's intelligence in order to help him feel solid in the decision he'd made not to have surgery--a decision the doctor said would have been his own, had he found himself in John's situation.
I spoke to him once before he died. He called me by my first name, Marilyn--he was one of the few that ever called me that. And his message was the same as the one I heard coming from my sisters and from my brother Paul : he quite explicitly said, "Marilyn, you are part of this family." I had said nothing to inspire that comment, but apparently they all could read my mind, even my crazy brother. And even though he had decided many years before i did not to live with the others, he could still make me feel guilty for not 'being a part of the Family,' as he--and the others--perceived.
It is interesting that two of my brothers have not expressed to me some kind of disappointment or judgment or opinion, even, of my seeming to have split myself off from the rest of the family. Bill has tried to leave the family for his whole life, with variable success during different phases of his own life, and Al I think has never perceived me as having 'gone away' in any important way, no doubt because I feel close to him.
You see, it felt to them like a sacrilege for anyone to 'leave the Family,' as it came to feel to my nephew a sacrilege for me to have left the Lutheran faith. Adherence to the Glop, identification with the Glop, was a way to hold the Glop together, but also a way to hold oneself together: I am a part of this Family, therefore I am. In how many plays or novels has someone been ejected from a family! "You are no longer a part of this family!"--words that inspire fear, shame, dejection, humiliation, even despair. But to leave voluntarily--ah, that is a different story.
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