see, I say.
I wait.
—Did she say anything else? I say.
Alonzo shakes his head.
—Honestly, he says, Paula could be wrong. She’s been bad lately. Ranting. Going on and on. Crazy, says Alonzo, whose face has now become sympathetic, who seems to be thinking of doing something disastrous, like patting me consolingly on the shoulder. Fortunately, neither of us moves.
—Yes, I say. She could bewrong.
THEN
There are some people who ascribe to their suffering the particular cause of a difficult childhood. Kacey, for example, one of the last times we spoke, had recently come to the conclusion that her troubles began first with our parents, who abandoned her, and then with Gee, who, she said, never loved her, and may in fact have disliked her.
I looked at her, blinking, and said to her as levelly as I could that I grew up in the same household as she did. My implication, of course, was that it is the decisions that I have made in life that have placed me on my specific path—decisions, not chance. And that although our childhood may not have been idyllic, it sufficiently prepared one of us, at least, for a productive life.
But when I said this, Kacey only buried her head in her hands and said to me, It’s different, Mickey, things have always been so different for you.
To this day, I don’t know what her meaning could have been.
In fact, it is possible to argue, I believe—if we were to evaluate who had the more difficult childhood, whatever that may mean—one might find the balance tipped toward me.
I say this because, of the two of us, I am the only one with memories of our mother, and very fond ones at that. Therefore, the loss of our mother was difficult for me in a way that it would not have been for Kacey, who was too little, while our mother was alive, to recall her.
----
—
She was young, our mother. Eighteen years old at the time of her pregnancy with me. She was a senior in high school—a good student, Geealways said, a good girl—and she had only been dating our father for a few months when it happened. As the story goes, it took everyone by surprise, and no one more than Gee, who to this day narrates the shock of the news with urgency and grief. No one believed it, she says. When I told them. They all said, not Lisa.
Gee was just religious enough to make an abortion out of the question. But she was also religious enough to be enraged by the pregnancy, ashamed of it, to see it as something to hide. The year was 1984. Gee herself had been married at nineteen and had had Lisa at twenty, but times were different then, Gee liked to say. Gee’s husband died very young in a car accident—I wonder, today, if he had been drunk, since Gee often mentions his drinking—and she never remarried.
I used to imagine that things would have gone differently for Gee if her husband, our grandfather, hadn’t died. So much of her life has been governed by the need to simply keep her head above water: to put food on the table, to pay bills, to pay down the debt that she constantly incurs. If she had had a partner in these endeavors—someone to add a paycheck, someone to mourn alongside when her only daughter died—perhaps her life, and ours, might have been better. But this sort of idle speculation might be pure sentimentality, for to this day Gee claims she has no use for men: thinks of them only as obstacles in her path, nuisances who are only occasionally necessary for the propagation of human life. She mistrusts them implicitly. Avoids them when possible.
The only thing she really got out of her union, it seems, was the ability to say that she had been married when her daughter was conceived— married, she explained, often, thrusting a finger into an invisible chest. She had done things correctly.
When Lisa delivered the news of her pregnancy, therefore, Gee had insisted on a wedding. Gee had met this Daniel Fitzpatrick ( this Daniel Fitzpatrick was how Gee permanently referred to our father) only once
I wait.
—Did she say anything else? I say.
Alonzo shakes his head.
—Honestly, he says, Paula could be wrong. She’s been bad lately. Ranting. Going on and on. Crazy, says Alonzo, whose face has now become sympathetic, who seems to be thinking of doing something disastrous, like patting me consolingly on the shoulder. Fortunately, neither of us moves.
—Yes, I say. She could bewrong.
THEN
There are some people who ascribe to their suffering the particular cause of a difficult childhood. Kacey, for example, one of the last times we spoke, had recently come to the conclusion that her troubles began first with our parents, who abandoned her, and then with Gee, who, she said, never loved her, and may in fact have disliked her.
I looked at her, blinking, and said to her as levelly as I could that I grew up in the same household as she did. My implication, of course, was that it is the decisions that I have made in life that have placed me on my specific path—decisions, not chance. And that although our childhood may not have been idyllic, it sufficiently prepared one of us, at least, for a productive life.
But when I said this, Kacey only buried her head in her hands and said to me, It’s different, Mickey, things have always been so different for you.
To this day, I don’t know what her meaning could have been.
In fact, it is possible to argue, I believe—if we were to evaluate who had the more difficult childhood, whatever that may mean—one might find the balance tipped toward me.
I say this because, of the two of us, I am the only one with memories of our mother, and very fond ones at that. Therefore, the loss of our mother was difficult for me in a way that it would not have been for Kacey, who was too little, while our mother was alive, to recall her.
----
—
She was young, our mother. Eighteen years old at the time of her pregnancy with me. She was a senior in high school—a good student, Geealways said, a good girl—and she had only been dating our father for a few months when it happened. As the story goes, it took everyone by surprise, and no one more than Gee, who to this day narrates the shock of the news with urgency and grief. No one believed it, she says. When I told them. They all said, not Lisa.
Gee was just religious enough to make an abortion out of the question. But she was also religious enough to be enraged by the pregnancy, ashamed of it, to see it as something to hide. The year was 1984. Gee herself had been married at nineteen and had had Lisa at twenty, but times were different then, Gee liked to say. Gee’s husband died very young in a car accident—I wonder, today, if he had been drunk, since Gee often mentions his drinking—and she never remarried.
I used to imagine that things would have gone differently for Gee if her husband, our grandfather, hadn’t died. So much of her life has been governed by the need to simply keep her head above water: to put food on the table, to pay bills, to pay down the debt that she constantly incurs. If she had had a partner in these endeavors—someone to add a paycheck, someone to mourn alongside when her only daughter died—perhaps her life, and ours, might have been better. But this sort of idle speculation might be pure sentimentality, for to this day Gee claims she has no use for men: thinks of them only as obstacles in her path, nuisances who are only occasionally necessary for the propagation of human life. She mistrusts them implicitly. Avoids them when possible.
The only thing she really got out of her union, it seems, was the ability to say that she had been married when her daughter was conceived— married, she explained, often, thrusting a finger into an invisible chest. She had done things correctly.
When Lisa delivered the news of her pregnancy, therefore, Gee had insisted on a wedding. Gee had met this Daniel Fitzpatrick ( this Daniel Fitzpatrick was how Gee permanently referred to our father) only once
Similar Books
