Sugar in My Bowl (24 page)

For a while, scared by my emptiness, I dated a straight-arrow friend who couldn’t understand why I was skipping calculus for the second time that week. I didn’t want to be a good girl anymore. I wanted to smoke and drink and have migraines and talk late into the night about Baudelaire and the Replacements, and, above all, I wanted not to be a child.

I thought my mother’s words that day were a challenge I could meet. Sixteen years later, I think she was right. I couldn’t do anything like she did when she was sixteen. While she was still a student, my mother ran off with a teacher at her Catholic high school. That teacher is my father. My mother met him when she was sixteen (I think) and he was twenty-two.

A straight-A student, the oldest of six in a traditional Irish Catholic family, she was caught in class one day writing a letter to her then-boyfriend about smoking pot with some friends. It was the late 1960s; she was a junior. The changes that were stirring up the country had reached suburban New Jersey towns like the one where my mother grew up. Even good Catholic girls like my mother, who dressed in brown saddle shoes and proudly displayed her merit badge on her sweater, were swept up in the shift. Whip-smart, bored, she wasn’t quite tuning in and turning on, as the phrase went, but she was lighting up in more ways than one. I imagine, though she never said this, that she observed that many young women around her became housewives and spent the days doing errands and defrosting meat, while the men around her got to have careers and influence. I imagine she found the first prospect unsettling.

Enter my father.

After the nuns confiscated the letter, my mother was distraught: Her strict, conventional father would not be happy when he learned what it said. One of her friends said, “You should talk to that young new Latin teacher, Mr. O’Rourke; he might be able to help you.” My father was just out of college and had returned home to teach for a year or two before finding his way out of the suburbs. My mother was beautiful, with dark hair and an aquiline nose. (In pictures from the time, she looks like Ali McGraw, except perhaps prettier.) I imagine he took a look at her and decided to help. Was the letter in an envelope? he asked. Was it addressed? Yes. Then the nuns had no right to open it; that was mail fraud. And with this, his rebellious sense of justice was awakened.

The nuns agreed not to call my grandfather.

That summer, my mother and father began meeting up, ostensibly to study Greek together.

In my father, my mother immediately saw someone who could challenge her. She once told me that she married my father because he was the smartest man she’d ever met. He was a college graduate, a Latin scholar, a bit of a rebellious wiseass. Though they grew up in towns separated only by a river, Middletown and Red Bank, and both came from Irish Catholic families with six children, the similarities largely stopped there. My father’s home was self-consciously intellectual: filled with books, wine, the sound of opera; the walls were covered with prints of ancient Italy, whereas my mother grew up in a family characterized more by warmth and witty chatter; its hearth, appealingly, was the pool out back where my mother’s many sisters and their friends congregated.

The tutorial quickly devolved to my parents driving around in my dad’s car, smoking pot, or parking on a dirt road near a horse farm to sit under a tree for hours.

One thing led to another.

Like most scandalous family stories, my parents’ story did not arrive intact. My brother and I had to sniff it out in pieces. Growing up, I always yearned for my parents to have a romantic story like the ones I read in books. One day, when I was ten, my friend Marian called me up, an air of intrigue in her voice.

I could tell she was dying to tell me something.

“Did you know your parents eloped?” she finally asked.

At this point,
elope
was to me a thrilling word. It sounded like something a mysterious gazelle or eland might do—at once ethereal and passionate. I made a disbelieving sound.

“Eloped!” she continued. “Your father was a teacher at your mother’s school and they ran away together! They had an affair and were discovered and
ran away
. Stanley told my mother.” (Stanley was a friend of my parents.) I was confused, but I believed her: Marian had always been the one who knew adult secrets. (In the second grade, in the classroom loft, she asked me, “Do you know where babies come from?” I paused, sensing a complicated answer. “SEX!” she whispered.)

The story trickled down to us bit by bit, usually when my parents had had an extra glass of wine. First my mother told me she was married at nineteen; then eighteen; then, finally, seventeen. At Easter one year, my mother and her sisters made margaritas, and as the lunch grew festive, Joanne, the second oldest, said, “But nothing beats when Barbara snuck off every day at Cape Cod to see Paul . . .” and we heard the story of how my mother got my father to come to Cape Cod the same week that her family was going, and then invented a friend, Mary Jane, whom she’d met on the beach, and whom she would go to “play with” every day. This plan backfired: my parents found out. My aunts laughed uproariously as they told the story. It is a funny story, a good story—a story about family and surviving and surprise. But it was also odd to be sixteen listening to stories of your mother’s sexual exploits—with a teacher. The parental pretense that sexuality doesn’t exist, that it is something I should be careful about, had gone up in a whiff of smoke, drained like the dregs of a margarita, as my mother told her sisters to stop, covered my ears, laughing, clearly enjoying herself.

She was a bad girl, I see. And I also see that she still likes the memory.

But I don’t get the whole story until soon after I turned seventeen, when I have my first serious boyfriend, M. I’ve just graduated from high school, and my parents and M. and I are out celebrating at an Italian restaurant. In love as the young tend to be, fiercely, narcissistically, M. and I have been, for three months, all over each other—“Nice neck arrangement,” my English teacher says to me one day, and I don’t know if she means my plastic green beaded necklace or the blooming red mark on my neck. I just remember the nervy, jangling feeling of being in love and seeing the world through parallel eyes for the first time. I remember walking along the street near his parents’ house, smelling honeysuckle in the air, thinking I would never be elated in this way again. His parents had read an e. e. cummings poem at their wedding, and one day he read me cummings (like so many adolescents in love). It seemed to capture the novel (to us) erotic atmosphere through which we moved:

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

any experience, your eyes have their silence:

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me

though i have closed myself as fingers,

you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

That summer night, at an Italian restaurant with my parents’, there’s a charge in the air, a nostalgic alertness. We are nearly the same age they were; we have the same grave sense that our love is not a mere adolescent romance, that it has a depth that will be hard to replicate as the years go on. M. and I recently had sex for the first time, in my parents’ bed—ostensibly, because I had a twin mattress—one weekend when they were away. Looking back, I am struck by the Freudian oddness of it all, struck by how innocently (is that the word?) children model themselves on their own parents, even when it comes to sex, with all its incestuous implications. That night, they tell us about how they met, sneaking off into a world of their own making, convinced no one else’s rules were right for them. It resonates with us. M.’s therapist is sure our relationship is going to end soon, when we are separated by college, but I, at least, am still persuaded it will last forever. And so we take comfort—encouragement—from my parents, as if we
are
them, or will be.

But we weren’t them. I loved M., but part of me felt I was losing myself. My interest in him sometimes seemed like a negation; in darker moods, it seemed to pose a threat to my autonomy, my need to be a person who could make her own choices. We broke up at the end of my freshman year in college.

My parents’ story is romantic. But it is also a story of sex, of impermissible sexual attraction, for all that it may also have had an intellectual component; in my father’s brilliance, in his education and interests, my mother saw a world beyond frozen vegetables and dinette tables and the limits of her Catholic school. Whatever we call this connection, it pushed against all social forces that wished it to go away and insisted on creating a world, the world we, their children, grew up into, a world that was ours and yet remained somehow exclusively theirs. Like lovers in the garden naming the world, they renamed each other. She became “Kelly” or “Kel” rather than “Barbara.” He was “Pablo” rather than “Paul.” Channeling his inner Irish aristocracy, he began signing his letters to her “the Prince of Breiffni,” which was, in fact, his rightful title, if you followed his family’s genealogy back to before Oliver Cromwell burnt the family’s castle down to its foundations—four hundred years ago.

It is peculiar to grow up and into a story like this one. What seems like your staid family becomes your strange family. You exist because of a risk taken, heeded, hewed to. The risk, of course, is sexual. After all, the relationship my parents had would not now be condoned by any institution or family. While most things that gave Catholic parents pause in 1966 (birth control, sexual content in movies or books, etc.) are now part of popular culture, this one is not. The idea of a twenty-something college graduate having sex with a sixteen-year-old girl would seem worse now than it did then; then, at least, more women got married young, and political correctness and the work of second-wave feminists hadn’t made us hyperaware of the fraught power dynamics in such a relationship—hadn’t made us more concerned with safety than with freedom.

Even so, their affair carried its risks for my mother. She would tell me how she nearly didn’t graduate from Barnard, so caught up was she in her married life. I remember seeing how inflected her coming-of-age was by my father’s sense of himself; she told me about being intimidated by his friends when she first moved to New York. For some reason, it made me nervous about ever being be-holden to a man.

All loves come to an end, even when we don’t want them to. Last Christmas, my mother died after two years of “battling” cancer and almost forty years of being married to my father. In her last months, my father had found it difficult to go to the hospital with her for doctor’s appointments. I didn’t understand it. Then two nights before she died, while she was home in hospice care, I woke up on the couch to see that my father had come down the stairs and was standing in his sweatshirt, looking at her in the darkness, fists punched into his sweatshirt pouch, shoulders hunched; he stood like this for minutes, gazing down on her sleeping face.

She died on Christmas Day. Two nights later, I saw M. again. There is a truism, dating back to something Freud observed in “Mourning and Melancholia,” that grief makes you either sexually voracious or frigid. I’m not sure either applied to me, but I can say that in the month around my mother’s death a strange thing happened: I became preoccupied with M. We had run into each other in a coffee shop a year earlier. Shortly before my mother died, we began to go out now and then, and one night we kissed over dinner. It was eerie, like standing with one foot in the past and one in the present. He smelled the same. The pleasure of being with him again contained an undertow of sadness: to look at him was to feel all the time that had passed, and also how our deepest impressions of the world run just below the surface of our mind like a humming electric wire, there to be touched at any time, capable of shocking us into feeling. Half out of my mind as I was with grief, it spoke to me.

Two days after my mother died, M. came up to Connecticut, where my parents lived. He arrived on an afternoon train, laden with bagels. I had not eaten a meal since my mother died, and after he toasted them we ate them thick with cream cheese and lox, and then, like teenagers, went to the basement rec room and hung out with my college-age brother, watching TV. It was comforting, this recreating of childhood innocence, this hiding from the upstairs, as if we could go back through time. I felt like I was made of glass. I sat next to M. carefully, leaving a gap between us. That’s right, he murmured. God forbid you touch me. And in that moment my younger self flooded back. I laughed; the first moment of solace since my mother had died.

That night, we slept together in a dark room that seemed darker than any I had known. In
The New Black,
the British psychoanalyst Darian Leader notes that “promiscuity and dissipation are simply mechanisms of denial. We search frantically for substitutes for the lost loved one, to obliterate our feelings of loss.” It’s funny to read these clinical words months later, seeing how they describe dispassionately a chaos that is so threatening, so overwhelming, it seems only another’s body can help assuage it. In this case, it was as if, somehow, in being with him, I were my mother, being a seventeen-year-old again, as if I had made
her
decision, and that could bring her back. I was also aware that we were enacting a scene I had seen many times over—maybe once, even, in a movie I had watched with him, when we were seventeen: there is a funeral, and a woman and a man in a car, and they have sex in the car on the way back from the graveyard to the family. How odd. Now, improbably, after all that time apart, we were those people; that emotion the film captured, the black hole inside, was now in
me
.