Before that, for a long time, there was no talking without fighting. We’d get on the phone, and then I and whichever of them had gotten up the courage to try to call me would spend the whole time trying to win. We didn’t know how to talk if it wasn’t about winning: who knew better, who’d been hurt more and for longer, who’d tried harder when the other person didn’t try at all. I was pregnant and already had a toddler and I was sick all of the time; I had four jobs. I told them that they needed not to call me for a while.
This is still fresh two years later. We didn’t solve it. I had the baby and felt guilty. I sent them pictures of her the day after she was born. We slowly, gradually got back in touch. They’re still mad. She calls, though, and she says they want to see us, want to see the babies. They haven’t met the two-year-old. She offers to fly us down for the week of our spring break.
I don’t want to say yes and know that it won’t go well. My husband has work on Long Island and can’t come. I think vaguely that they’re my parents and I love them; I think maybe, if we’re together with my babies, with the sunshine and the ocean, with them at work most of the time and me trying to be better, that maybe this time it won’t all go as poorly as it has before.
There is no one story so much as lots of stories, a general way of being. There is not, in direct opposition to most of the books I read until I got to grad school, a clear cause and effect. There is we don’t know how to talk to one another, the general feeling that we’re all saying the right things, trying, except all of them are wrong. The general feeling that we think and say the same words, but they mean very different things to each of us.
My parents came from nothing and worked hard for their money, which also meant they thought anyone who was not also successful was not successful because they did not work hard enough. They loved us, tracked every grade and track meet, class rank and debate win, which also meant love was wrapped up tight with winning, that one’s value was variable and contingent and could fall short at any point. Food was good but not-thin was disgusting. Flaws were fine but not ever when others might see. It was a world phantasmagoric with declarations for which one had to track and measure meaning, under which lived conditions, contradictions, a whole world of contingencies.
I was depressed is a clear, clean thing that I can say that might explain things. That my dad probably was too was not ever discussed. My whole life, I’d watched as he got sad and quiet and my mom yelled at him and he left the room and did not talk again for days. It was normal practice then for me to go into his room and beg him to come back, to come back out and ask my mom to please be nicer to him so he didn’t throw another temper tantrum, to beg him later—when she yelled again and he walked out of the house, standing in the backyard, locking himself in the garage, pulling the car over so he could get out and walk along the highway—not to leave.
And then: I stopped showing up to track and stopped showing up to school and drank more. I got in three car accidents in four days my junior year of high school and was hospitalized for alcohol poisoning a few weeks after that. I refused to go to school and had to be withdrawn. I did not feel sick so much as I felt like I’d finally stopped doing what they wanted. I felt scared and tired and wholly out of control for a long time. None of this must have been easy to try to parent. Their reaction was half to not look directly at the aberrant child, to keep me hidden, half to lash out late at night when they didn’t know what else to do.
He played victim; she got angry. I might as well die if you don’t love me, he said to me. You’re a worthless piece of shit, she said. You’re ungrateful and fucked up. It was language that she’d thrown at him when I was little, that she gave me now.
They were scared and desperate; they yelled and threatened. I never knew if I was on their team or not. If I was, they would do anything, fight for me, defend me against coaches and teachers, take me to doctors, beg me to be better. If I wasn’t, there was no end to what they’d hurl at me just to win, every error that I’d ever made but all in order, recorded and recast to show my failures in their clearest form. The worst part was always the not knowing. Not knowing if I might try again to love them, if any hint of needing, wanting, asking, would be held against me later on.
It was slippery linguistic manipulation, trying to find words but none of them quite working, love me love me, not like that, just stop it. We love you, let us love you, until it feels like every word holds its opposite inside it too. At least with hate you know what you are getting. Love like that, you forget sometimes it’s not love, that it’s empty, all words and performance, and still sometimes you grab at it, thinking maybe it will give what love’s supposed to give.
* * *
I think now that if I met them on the street I would find them completely fine and bland, just people. I would find them stunted and a little sad. They wouldn’t make me angry. It’s only because they are the place where the word “love” was built for me that I feel such fury toward them, that each time I get too close, I get so mad.
* * *
At the airport my mom cries but no one talks about her crying. She picks up the baby and my father holds the four-year-old and I stand separate with the car seats and the stroller and our bags. I strap the car seats in my dad’s Range Rover and my dad loads the bags and stroller in the back. He places the four-year-old into her seat, then asks if I can help him with the buckles, and my mother, having not let go of the baby since she saw us, settles her into the seat. We say as little as we can without ever stopping talking the whole half an hour that we’re in the car together. They ask the children all the questions. I jump in to clarify or to restate the questions to the baby when she doesn’t answer. I sit between them in their car seats and I hold tight to each of their hands and stare hard at the horizon—flat green marshland and rows of scrub trees, tall thin palm trees—so I don’t puke or accidentally say something that I don’t mean or scream.
* * *
We spend a week not really talking. Every night, when I can’t sleep, I read Henry Green, Party Going—1939, a fog has fallen and a group of wealthy people meant to go on an excursion are trapped in a hotel together; an elderly aunt might be dying and there’s drinking; a young woman takes a bath; the hotel staff pulls down the gates of the hotel and locks them, so that none of the people outside can get in.
The kids swim in the pool and at the beach and I go for long runs in the sand before they wake up. I run the same stretches of beach I’ve run my whole life, barefoot; I get blood blisters on the first couple of days, on my big toes and the balls of my feet, and I pop them and they harden over and the pain goes away. The water’s warm and I take off my shirt and shorts and there are hardly any waves. My parents go to work each day. In the morning, before leaving, dressed in her suit, wearing the lotion that she’s always worn to match her perfume, that I could smell three thousand miles away, my mom lays out cereals and fruit and bread and makes me a cup of coffee. She dotes on us. She’s bought every food I’ve ever mentioned that the children might like: cheese and chicken, avocado, fig bars. The temperature inside the house is perfectly controlled.