The Faraway Nearby Read online

  I wrote that and then went to pull the faded Polaroid out of a box and found that actually I was standing atop a tall ladder next to the tree with something unrecognizable in my hand. It was my younger brother in the companion snapshot who was standing in the apricot tree itself with the pruning shears. Memory, even in the rest of us, is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn’t catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don’t exist. After all, I had turned myself into my brother when I tried to remember the photographs. Twenty years later, he must have gone up a ladder himself to get all the fruit, every last one on the apricot tree. He gave some of the harvest to others, but the lion’s share came to me.

  Every time I looked at the mound of apricots there were a few more going bad that needed to be culled before the decay spread. The pile began to look like an organism, a human-size entity with a life of its own, the occupying army in my bedroom. Juices began to ooze out, as though I had a corpse decomposing on my floor, while the rest remained sweet, ripening in a rush as I waited for a window of time to do something with them.

  The fruit on my floor made me start to read fairy tales again. They are full of overwhelming piles and heaps that need to be contended with, the roomful of straw the poor girl in “Rumpelstiltskin” needs to spin into gold overnight, the thousand pearls scattered in the forest moss the youngest son needs to gather in order to win the princess, the mountain of sand to be moved by teaspoon. The heaps are only a subset of the category of impossible tasks that include quests, such as gathering a feather from the tail of the firebird who lives at the end of the world, riddles, and facing overwhelming adversaries.

  A cruel fairy named Magotine gives an accursed queen cobwebs to spin into thread, a mountain to climb with a millstone around her neck, a pitcher full of holes to fill with the water of discretion, tasks she must complete if the green serpent to whom she’s married is to be turned back into a human being. Such tasks are always the obstacles to becoming, to being set free, or finding love. Carrying out the tasks undoes the curse. Enchantment in these stories is the state of being disguised, displaced in an animal’s body or another’s identity. Disenchantment is the blessing of becoming yourself.

  This abundance of unstable apricots seemed to be not only a task set for me, but my birthright, my fairy-tale inheritance from my mother who had given me almost nothing since my childhood. It was a last harvest, a heap of fruit from a family tree, like the enigmatic gifts of fairy tales: a magic seed, a key to an unknown door, a summoning incantation. Bottling, canning, composting, freezing, eating, and distilling them was the least of the tasks they posed. The apricots were a riddle I had to decipher, a tale whose meaning I had to make over the course of the next twelve months as almost everything went wrong.

  Fairy tales are about trouble, about getting into it and out of it, and trouble seems to be a necessary stage on the route of becoming. All the magic and glass mountains and pearls the size of houses and princesses beautiful as the day and talking birds and part-time serpents are distractions from the tough core of most of the stories, the struggle to survive against adversaries, to find your place in your world, and to come into your own. Difficulty is always a school, though learning is optional.

  Fairy tales are almost always the stories of the powerless, of youngest sons, abandoned children, orphans, of humans transformed into birds and beasts or otherwise enchanted away from their own selves and lives. Even princesses are chattels to be disowned or sold by fathers, punished by stepmothers, or claimed by princes, though they often assert themselves in between and are rarely as passive as the cartoon versions. Fairy tales are children’s stories not in who they were made for but in their focus on the early stages of life, when others have power over you and you have power over no one.

  In them, power is rarely the right tool for survival anyway. Rather the powerless thrive on alliances, often in the form of reciprocated acts of kindness—from beehives that were not raided, birds that were not killed but set free or fed, old women who were saluted with respect. Kindness sown among the meek is harvested in crisis, in fairy tales and sometimes in actuality. I know a man who lost a fortune suddenly and was penniless with a legal battle to fight and children to support. He found that he had another kind of wealth in the ties of affection and respect he had built up, wealth he would otherwise have never seen. Lawyers took on his case pro bono, the grocery store extended credit, the schools gave scholarships, and he got by on the wealth that was invisible before the money dried up.

  In Hans Christian Andersen’s retelling of the old Nordic tale that begins with a stepmother, “The Wild Swans,” the banished sister can only disenchant her eleven exiled brothers—who are swans all day but turn human at night—by gathering stinging nettles barehanded from churchyard graves, making them into flax, spinning them and knitting eleven long-sleeved shirts while remaining silent the whole time. If she speaks, they’ll remain birds forever. In her silence she cannot protest the crimes she’s accused of and is nearly burned as a witch.

  Hauled off to the pyre as she knits the last of the shirts, she is rescued by the swans, who fly in at the last moment. As they swoop down, she throws the nettle shirts over them so that they turn into men again, all but the youngest brother, whose shirt is missing a sleeve so that he’s left with one arm and one wing, eternally a swan-man. Why shirts made of graveyard nettles by bleeding fingers and silence should disenchant men turned into birds by their stepmother is a question the story doesn’t need to answer. It just needs to give us compelling images of exile, loneliness, affection, and metamorphosis—and of a heroine who nearly dies of being unable to tell her own story.

  In those days my mother’s condition felt like a fairy-tale curse that nothing could break, though it could be accommodated. The apricots, however, something could be done about. It wasn’t that they were so hard to deal with as fruit, but that they seemed to invoke old legacies and tasks and to be an allegory, but for what?

  2 • Mirrors

  That vast pile of apricots included underripe, ripening, and rotting fruit. The range of stories I can tell about my mother include some of each too. If I had written about her earlier, the story would have had the aura of the courtroom, for I had been raised on the logic of argument and fact and being right, rather than the leap beyond that might be love. I would have told it as a defendant, making my case against her to justify myself, who stood so long accused of so many sidelong things. Some of the urgency to be justified in my existence and to survive has fallen away, though the story remains, a hard pit after the emotion has gone.

  There are other stories, not yet ripe, that I will see and tell in later years. Once the apricots arrived and I began thinking in fairy tales, I shocked myself by recalling the couplet from “Snow White,” “Mirror, mirror, on the wall,” because that conjunction of mothers and mirrors made me recognize how murderous my mother’s fury was. She was devoured by envy for decades, an envy that was a story she told herself, a story of constant comparison.

  She was a great believer in fairness. At her best she stood up for the rights of the oppressed and at the worst begrudged me anything I had that she thought she hadn’t had. Envy was an emotion, and she turned her emotions into reasons and reasons into facts and believed facts were obdurate, unchangeable things, even as her emotions changed again and again. Those emotions metamorphosed into stories and the stories she told herself summoned emotions long after the events.

  Stories rode her, she was driven by stories—that beauty was the key to some happiness that had eluded her, that she had been done out of something that was rightfully hers, whether it was her mother’s favor or her daughter’s golden hair. Stories were a storm that blew her this way and that, but she believed in their truth and permanence—she had always been miserable, always happy, her life had been good, had been terrible, she had never said such a thing, felt such a thing, and though she brooded on slights for decades
, she could never remember her own rage the day before.

  My story is a variation on one I’ve heard from many women over the years, of the mother who gave herself away to everyone or someone and tried to get herself back from a daughter. Early on she assured me that she had measured me as a toddler, doubled my height, and deduced that I would be five foot two, seven inches shorter than her, when I grew up and that my hair—white blond in my first years, lemon and then honey and then dirty blond streaked by the sun with gold as I grew older—was going to turn brown at any moment.

  This short, brown-haired daughter she decided upon was not terrifying, and she envisioned a modest future for me and occasionally tried to keep me to it. I remained a couple of inches shorter than her until her posture sagged, but she remained preoccupied with our relative heights. Once when I came over for a family dinner she seized me at the door and dragged me in front of a mirror to make sure she was still taller, and she called me “Shortie” well into the era of her Alzheimer’s disease. It was my hair, however, that was her great grief.

  Her dark hair had lovely russet undertones when she was young and turned white early. She dyed it light brown for a couple of decades before I persuaded her to let it be. The first time I saw it white, when she was about sixty, I was astonished at her beauty, like a marble statue with blazing blue eyes. Having paler hair than mine changed nothing. She imagined blondness as an almost supernatural gift, one that I had no right to receive since she had not, and she brought up my hair in countless unhappy ways over the years.

  My hair was dyed, was brown, was unfair, was wrong, though there were a few years when she was angry about my eyebrows instead, beginning with a moment when I’d taken her out to breakfast and out of the blue she snapped, “It’s not fair you got those eyebrows.” Giving her breakfast did nothing, since I would not, could not, give her or give up my arched eyebrows or convince her that her own straight eyebrows were fine.

  For mothers, some mothers, my mother, daughters are division and sons are multiplication; the former reduce them, fracture them, take from them, the latter augment and enhance. My mother, who would light up at the thought that my brothers were handsome, rankled at the idea that I might be nice-looking. The queen’s envy of Snow White is deadly. It’s based on the desire to be the most beautiful of all, and it raises the question of whose admiration she needs and what she thinks Snow White is competing for, this child whose beauty is an affliction. At the back of this drama between women are men, the men for whom the queen wants to be beautiful, the men whose attention is the arbiter of worth and worthlessness. There was nothing I could do, because there was nothing I had done: it was not my actions that triggered her fury, but my very being, my gender, my appearance, and my nonbeing—my failure to be the miracle of her completion and to be instead her division.

  “Resentment is a storytelling passion,” says the philosopher Charles Griswold in his book Forgiveness. I know well how compelling those stories are, how they grant immortality to an old injury. The teller goes in circles like a camel harnessed to a rotary water pump, diligently extracting misery, reviving feeling with each retelling. Feelings are kept alive that would fade away without narrative, or are invented by narratives that may have little to do with what once transpired and even less to do with the present moment. I learned this skill from my mother, though some of her stories were about me, and of course my perennial classics were about her. My father was destructive in a more uncomplicated way, but he is another story. Or maybe he is the misery at the root of my mother’s behavior, and he certainly made her suffer, but there were people and historical forces at the root of his, and that line of logic goes on forever.

  It wasn’t only envy. When I was thirteen, my mother told me that the doctors had detected a lump in her breast. I found out decades later she had first told my father, whose lack of sympathy over this was part of what precipitated their separation and protracted divorce. I didn’t have much sympathy either; it was not that I refused to give it, but that there was none in my equipment yet, perhaps because I had experienced so little of it.

  When she didn’t get what she wanted from me that day she told me her medical news, she flew into a blasting fury that I remember, perhaps incorrectly, as the first of the long sequence of furies at what I was not or what she was not getting. I can still picture the two of us in front of the terrible house painted with the tan paint that had never dried properly so that a host of small insects stuck to it over the years. Now I can feel for that distressed woman who had no one compassionate to turn to, but at the time I just felt scorched and wronged. As it turned out, the lump was benign; the relationship, however, was malignant from then on.

  Thereafter, she often visited her fury at others or at life upon me. She took pleasure in not giving me things that she gave to others, often in front of me, in finding ways to push me out of the group. She thought she would get something through these acts, and maybe she got a momentary sense of victory and power, and those were rare possessions for her. She didn’t seem to know she also lost something through this strategy. In the decades that followed, I nursed her through other illnesses and injuries she kept secret from her sons, and during the worst of them, not so many years before the Alzheimer’s arrived in force, she berated me for not feeling enough for her while I was tending her.

  Sometimes it’s valuable to return to the circumstances of childhood with an adult’s resources and insights, and that time around I realized that I could not feel at all. Not for her, or for myself, except a dim horror, as if from a long way away. I had returned to the state in which I had spent my childhood, frozen, in suspended animation, waiting to thaw out, to wake up, waiting to live. I thought of her unhappiness as a sledge to which I was tethered. I dragged it with me and studied it in the hope of freeing myself and maybe even her.

  She thought of me as a mirror but she didn’t like what she saw and blamed the mirror. When I was thirty, in one of the furious letters I sometimes composed and rarely sent, I wrote, “You want me to be some kind of a mirror that will reflect back the self-image you want to see—perfect mother, totally loved, always right—but I am not a mirror, and the shortcomings you see are not my fault. And I can never get along with you as long as you continue demanding that I perform miracles.”

  I had brought her a copy of my first book and she responded by berating me for not visiting, though I had dropped it off late at night and knew that I would have been unwelcome at that hour. Had I visited at an earlier hour she would have found fault with something I’d done when I was with her. And had I not given her a copy, another failure could be charted. There was no winning, just some decisions about how to lose and how not to play. I have seen people with charismatic or charming parents forever hovering in hope of validation and recognition, and I wasn’t waiting for those. I just wanted the war to end.

  Long afterward I got asked over and over the most common and annoying question about Alzheimer’s, whether she still recognized me. Recognition can mean so many things, and in some sense she had never known who I was. Much later, when she couldn’t come up with my name or explain our relationship, I didn’t care, since being recognized hadn’t exactly been a boon. In that era, I think my voice and other things registered as familiar and set her at ease, and perhaps she knew me more truly. And perhaps I her, as so much that was superfluous was pared away and the central fact of her humanity and her vulnerability was laid bare.

  Who was I all those years before? I was not. Mirrors show everything but themselves, and to be a mirror is like being Echo in the myth of Echo and Narcissus: nothing of your own will be heard. The fact usually proffered about Narcissus is that he was in love with his own image in the mountain pool, but the more important one is that in his absorption in his reflection he lost contact with others and starved to death.

  Glace, the French word for ice, can also mean mirror. Ice, mirror, glass: the glass coffin in which Snow White lies dorm
ant, poisoned, might as well be made of ice, as though she were frozen like those bodies in cryogenic storage, waiting to be thawed when their disease becomes curable, or those mountaineers frozen into the ice at altitude. You freeze up in childhood, you go numb, because you cannot change your circumstances and to recognize, name, and feel the emotions and their cruel causes would be unbearable, and so you wait.

  Ice, glass, mirrors. I was frozen, or rather thawing. I was a mirror, but my mother didn’t like what she saw in it. I think of human psyches as landscapes, and to the question of whether she was happy or unhappy, I think that others encountered her in a flower-spangled meadow that was highly cultivated, if not artificial, and I charted the authentic swamp of her unhappiness far away in another part of the landscape she herself did not care to know.

  If my mother had chosen a fairy tale about herself, it would have been “Cinderella,” the story of an overlooked, undervalued girl, a delicate child made into a workhorse. My mother’s older sister was a lively girl off on her own pursuits; her younger sister was, in her account, the cosseted baby who grew up to look like her twin but was thought of—at least by my mother—as the pretty one. It was mostly confidence that made the younger girl take up eyebrow pencils and pretty dresses, while her older sister hung back; they were nevertheless close and fond.

  From the time I was a small child, my mother would absentmindedly call me by her little sister’s name, so that I was cloaked in a jealousy and attachment that had been born more than a quarter century before me. My mother in her own stories was the freckled, skinny one on whom her mother leaned, the mother who sometimes kept her home from school because she was sickly, or for company, or to take care of her little sister. When my mother was ten, her father died in a construction accident and her mother had to go to work, another abandonment for both of them.