I imagine that once the craziness of moving to another country is done with, I will have ample quantities of free time to fill. And you know what they say about idle hands and our good friend Lucifer.
So I considered taking up tennis to stuff into the void but rejected that after a lengthy and deeply felt conversation with myself about how I just won’t look good in those tennis whites. Also? it’s tennis, a game (or is it a sport? a game that’s a sport? Jesus, like it matters) I have a contentious relationship with, since it was the only “B” I ever got in high school. It wasn’t even a “B;” it was a “B+” which was so cheap and shoddy on the part of the bastard who gave it to me because he could just have easily given me an “A-” and thus not ruined my perfect GPA. But that fucker never did like me, and when he found the opportunity to screw with me, he took it. Naturally. Probably Jesus told him it was okay, since I was such a troubled girl, one who needed to be reminded as often as possible of her flawed soul, even if the smudge was simply a teeny tiny problem with accurate serving.
See? No tennis. It’s just too painful.
My next plan involved me and a guitar. Yes. Again. But my friend whose name is not really George offered me a brand new free acoustic which is surely another sign from the universe that my future should include fronting a rock band. How long will it take me to learn the 5 chords necessary for most music? A month? I think I’ve got my keyboardist and back up singer nailed down. Now I just need a couple more members, right? I’m planning on picking them up at the Zurich public library which seemed, last month, well-stocked with angsty youth I could probably convince to make beautiful music with me. Music. The kind with notes and shit. What were you thinking?
The biggest obstacle here may be my inability to compose songs. I’m not too anxious about the melody, since I plan to do a lot of screaming into the microphone. Kind of like Courtney Love only without the heroin. It’s the lyrics that stop me cold. Perhaps I need a great trauma for inspiration: “I’m so lonely/I’ve got no friends./Will this fucking winter/Never end?” Too linear? Yeah, most of the best music hardly even makes sense. So how about: “Fire on the mountain. Water in the hole/Digging underground you’ll mine no coal.”
Fine.
Time for a new plan.
There’s always the option of writing the next great not quite American novel. I could do that, I suppose. Except that for the longest time, I’ve never had a story to tell. Rephrase: I’ve never had a story that interested me enough to tell. This weekend, though, W and I went out to dinner with friends, and they told me a tale of such delicious potential that I’m almost compelled to turn it into some kind of fiction. Because that’s how it feels. Like something you’d read in a book: 50-year-old married father of 3, Ph.D., financial wizard, comes out of his very old closet, leaves wife and kids, moves to Boys Town, Chicago’s gay neighborhood, and joins his company’s Out and Proud club, a club peopled with men much younger and better groomed. That’s all I know. Just that.
I find myself fascinated by the possibilities, by all the characters I could create. I’m not shocked by his choices–I know well enough that every person is capable of every thing. But how does one do that? Exist like that for 25 years or more, pretend to be something you’re not or lie to yourself about who you are? What does that require, what kind of willful blindness from all the players, what kind of compromise and turning away from the mirror? Maybe it wasn’t even like that. Maybe it was somehow different, a conscious choice by consenting adults to fulfill a socio-economic contract until the time was right to dissolve it. Maybe he just now decided he’d met the love of his life and that love was a man. Maybe he’s never felt like this before.
But the writing of it, it requires choices. Not a list of speculative “maybes.” A definitive perspective, characters with clear inner lives and thoughts and motivations. A story can’t stay amorphous and fluid forever. It has to find its center, follow a narrative arc, reach a conclusion. A story needs decisiveness from its teller. And I have a difficult time shutting the door on all the other options. I have never been good at decisions.
Perhaps I should rethink tennis.
Or the rock band.
Or …
Sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry.
I haven’t been in Zurich this whole time. Came home jet lagged like a motherfucker, had too much school work to catch up on, and then the girls and I went on a mini vacation to Palm Springs. Just got home last night.
Zurich was an amusement park ride of “holy shit, this place is stupid beautiful and I want to marry it and have its gorgeous little European babies which I will feed only Prosecco, cheese and these tiny little French macaroons” to “I will never live here, please don’t make me move, I’m not moving” with a soupcon of everything else in between.
We found a lovely and amazing school for the girls. I made a few friends. Everything else will take care of itself. It has to.
Now the long slow march to the end of living here, in this way, begins. We’ve booked our tickets to Zurich, flying out on New Year’s Day, which seems fitting. A new year. A new place in the world.
We’ve started planning our last dinners with friends. Making room for family at the holidays. Sorting through our endless piles of shit. Choosing the things we’re sure we can’t live without. Which, in the end, is really just each other. And those of you I can take along, tucked in my pocket, close to my warm hip.
I’ve got big pockets.
This is really happening. I’m really moving.
It will be okay.
I’m heading to Zurich tonight to spend a week hunting my future happiness.
On the agenda:
- Finding the one school that will be perfect in every possible way, thus resulting in perfectly joyous and perfectly well-adjusted children who will grow up …. perfect.
- Interviewing prospective friends. I’ve got meetings (and by meetings I mean, social engagements) lined up with people who are Italian, American, Dutch and Swedish. Some of them are couples with matching names.
- Ferreting out actual Swiss people in Switzerland.
- Changing W’s name so it matches mine.
- Consuming my weight in cheese and hot chocolate mit schlag (even if I have to pretend I’m in Vienna for the “mit schlag” part).
- Oiling the rusty chain on the bike of my college German.
- Contemplating Jungian psychology, Dada and the ethics of a banking system that condones hiding Nazi war loot.
What am I missing?
My uncle Takeki died last week.
I didn’t know him really. He and my aunt were missionaries in Brazil; our peripatetic paths seldom crossed, usually once every ten years at my grandparents’ house in rural Pennsylvania, where we’d lurch awkwardly at picnic tables laden with hot dogs, relish and fresh-picked corn, struggling to think of things we had in common.
Talking to Takeki was never easy. English was his third language, one he never quite mastered. He was a Japanese war orphan, shipped to Sao Paulo in his early teens, after the devastation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. My aunt met him when she was teaching English as a second language in a missionary bible college. He was her student.
How did he lose his parents? Were they burned in front of him? Did he come home one day to find his house still and quiet, the dust motes shivering in the single tragic beam of sunlight that stabbed the gloom?
And why Brazil? How did he travel there? Maybe he endured a long and rocking voyage by sea, crammed into below deck bunks, sharing fetid air exhaled by people breathing loss. Perhaps he climbed up a shiny new plane, gasped with an unexpected admixture of terror and delight as the wheels shuddered off the ground. I don’t know how he got to Brazil. I don’t know what he did when he arrived. I don’t know if he lived in a refugee camp, if some family–perhaps gracious, perhaps petty and greedy and grasping–took him in. I don’t know his stories.
*****
Takeki wasn’t my aunt’s first love, however. She had already been smitten with a little Brazilian boy rescued from the favela. She took him home with her, fed him and held him and fought off the demons of his cursed childhood. Tried to refit the pieces, tried to love him back together.
Sometimes there just isn’t enough love to make a broken thing whole.
But I don’t know my cousin’s stories, either, not really, only ever hearing snatches whispered among grown ups in corners, loaded words like drugs and theft and satanic possession.
*****
I mourn the passing of my uncle in the detached way one apprehends a death that is so far removed. My aunt lost a husband, my cousins their father; surely that is sad. And I am sorry for them.
Because I love narratives, however, what I mourn more–selfishly–is the loss of those potential stories. Someone, a real writer, should have collected them all before he died, I think, written them down. Given them to me, even though they are not mine. I have no claim to them. Still I covet them, hungry for the myths and adventures and allegories they could contain. What might they have meant to me, if only I knew more than the vaguest of details?
When I was in grammar school, I loved books about children who had escaped or survived the Holocaust. My favorite was When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. How I wanted to be poor Anna, driven from her home in Germany, forced to leave her beloved stuffed animal behind. I longed to be Jewish, to suffer like she did, and then, ultimately, to triumph. I thought I wanted to be in a story about suffering.
Except I already was. I was far away from my parents most of the year, haphazardly cared for by people who were mostly well-intentioned but overwhelmed and who believed in a world where children should be spanked for dropping pencils, for not brushing their teeth, even for hateful looks. I’ve been known to throw a hateful look. Or two.
It wasn’t the suffering I wanted, then. Not really. It was the nobility and courage, the rising above that I craved. Or the validation that I was truly, underneath all the rebellion and sass and anger, lovable. Worthy. Good. In some small dark place in my sad little 9 year old heart I half believed that if I were presented a big enough challenge, I would finally be able to prove myself to the dorm parent who told me that he loved my sister like his own daughter but that I was something else all together. To the mother who wrote that I was “bad” on the back of a picture she sent to my grandmother. To all the missionaries who looked sideways at my wild and wicked self and shook their heads. Tutted. Tsked.
I never quite achieved that approval, no matter how I tried. Because the girl who wanted to be sweet and compliant, the girl who yearned for approval, was too often over-ruled by the one who hungered to escape the forced homogeneity and the hypocrisy and the robotic thoughtlessness that fitting in required.
For so long I’ve rejected that tensing kid in the time out chair, her defiantly swinging legs scraping out a black rhythm on the wall. She caused me so much trouble, made boarding school so much harder than it had to be, I’ve thought. I’ve wanted her gone, utterly. If she disappeared, I would finally be graceful, charming. I would fit. I would fit wherever I go. So I cringe when I am reminded by someone of her, become defensive, prickly. I kick her in the face: begone you little devil child, get thee behind me. But she is resilient, that one. She’s lost some teeth. Her right eye is a thundercloud of bruises. Her nose is crooked. Yet there she sits, swinging and grinning and daring me to hit her one more time.
She is resilient. Just like all the other me’s. The one who secretly admires her. The one who pretends she doesn’t exist. The one who pulls out a crisp piece of paper and scrawls it full of fresh spring stories.
