Melissa Wiley
Meal Planning
Yesterday, a package of knives came. Each arrived encased in its own plastic sheathing, and each sheathing was a different color. There was a brightness to them, a promise. Once my husband saw the package, he said for once I had made a sensible purchase, as all the other knives we've owned throughout our marriage have become so dulled over time they're nearly useless now, though until recently neither one of us has thought to mind. Heading into another Chicago winter, however, we've vowed to do more cooking, to rely less on microwave meals and nearby takeout places, to finally—in this way at least—start acting our ages. We have told ourselves we're going to take more time with our domestic life, to waste less money, even if time is what we're really losing at this stage.
As far as I can tell, to more closely align our habits with our bodies now means to make things less easy on ourselves than we once did, to take less of the same shortcuts we have taken for decades, shortcuts we have long been able to get away with living in a city and staying childless. Over the past several years, my husband has accepted his own aging process with far more grace than I have, though when he might have ever gotten around himself to buying new knives to prepare more meals at home, there is no way to tell. Wanting to be the first of us to examine them at close range in any case, he whistled once he extracted the largest of the three. A butcher's knife, he called it—this one with a purple sheathing. A couple seconds passed between us in silence, and he whistled once again, saying this one had my name on it. I knew immediately what he meant and felt some of the shame and embarrassment that he must have intended.
Though purple has always been my favorite color, and though the blade of the knife had been painted purple to match its sheathing, I was aware, standing between our refrigerator and sink, that part of him regarded the threat he perceived as genuine. However much he may normally like to tease me, he didn't feel he could trust me with a knife like this. Holding the blade up to the light, confirming my suspicion, he said this would be the one that I would use to kill him.
While my initial instinct was to laugh, the wiser part of me realized the impulse was better being resisted. I told myself I owed it to him to take his feelings seriously, even if they struck me as ridiculous. Without alluding to any specific incident, without reminding me of all the anger that he often feels directed toward him unfairly, he was forcing me to acknowledge how much irritation, even fury, has arisen over the past couple years, almost always out of proportion to outer circumstances. There is nothing in his mind to explain my growing volatility, nothing to cause this. From his perspective as well as my own on most days, there is nothing to rationalize how I've started to change, as he says, even as other changes—all those in my body over the same length of time, all that might be expected for a woman in her early forties—should be obvious. Maybe there shouldn't be, but there seems to be a correlation.
While there was no need for him to confess what he was thinking, while I understood and accepted this purple knife would soon be thrown away, I doubt he could have similarly read my own mind as the purple blade gleamed inside our kitchen, there in the half light. I doubt he could have guessed how the ancient Japanese form of ritual suicide, known as seppuku or hara-kiri, most famously practiced by samurai, was the vision the knives had conjured within the privacy of my imagination. The one person in this world who knows me better than anyone else never would have suspected how the pain of deliberate disembowelment, for which I would never have the courage, was also making more sense. Not as a temptation but with a growing sympathy.
Suicide, in this or other forms, at least as a curiosity in my own case, sometimes seems more reasonable and less dramatic than it may seem to others, as little more than a hastening of the death of the body, which will come anyway, in time, to every organism. Seen from this perspective, which comes admittedly only in my darker moments, considered with almost an intellectual detachment, suicide amounts to only speeding up the process. Were I ever to put this purple knife to a use beyond cooking, directing violence toward myself rather than my husband, I would only be rendering a more passive arc of development an active one instead. In response to everything that happens both to and around me, I might finally control something. Whereas a lack of control might, in the end, be the core problem along with loss of attractiveness—with loss of the connections that had come more freely with a younger body. Far fewer people seem to notice, much less approach, an older woman. Death as invisibility.
In feudal Japan, when seppuku among samurai was fairly common, this method, usually undertaken to avoid disgrace during battle, to demonstrate valor and integrity, functioned as a path reserved for men alone. Even in much starker and bloodier times than our own, my willingness to perform this act as a woman would not have been necessary, would have been neither sanctioned nor expected under any circumstances, even when suicide might have operated as the only honorable way forward under an enemy invasion, for instance. Women of the samurai's same warrior class, those possessing their male counterparts' same death instinct, rather than slicing through and bleeding slowly from the abdomen, would slash their throats instead with a dagger, engaging a quicker end. This would be the type of method I would also favor, with a knife of any color, were I willing to inflict more pain on my husband than I am or ever have been, were I willing to make him suffer through my absence, to make him feel that he might have stopped me. Were I not also someone who has come to believe in karma and reincarnation—were I not someone who now strongly suspects that suicide in this lifetime will only lead to another, even more challenging lifetime ahead, inside yet another body through which I will have to surrender to the same pain again. Especially when my husband and I have found ourselves in conflict, when my life feels small and meaningless, this fear is often the only thing that stops me. This fear and dread of consequences in the next dimension. This sense I have that even the most effective means of annihilation, of escaping, will prove only temporary.
Among any culture at any point in history, there can also hardly be a less valid reason for vanquishing your own life force before life itself accomplishes the same end than inhabiting an aging body. As the unraveling progresses, as the skin slackens and hair turns gray, your corporal life is evolving day by day in only one direction, unwilling to ever pause or reverse its trajectory. Those who feel tempted to take their lives before reaching their natural conclusion, spurred by any catalyst, can take some comfort in the fact life is always working toward the same target, making steady and inexorable progress. A seppuku in its own right, without the agony of slicing through your abdomen—this may be all that life after a certain point really is, viewed in terms of appearance, of the body. A denouement, an undoing. After decades of failing to pay attention to this ongoing unfoldment, I have finally started to take notice.
Based on both books and internet searches, it seems some of my darkening emotions over the past few years may reflect a change in hormone balance, as signs of menopause are making themselves known earlier than I expected they would. Only periods when a certain underlying pain has felt too much for me—a pain for which I have never formed a convincing explanation—have been with me since my late teens, since my adolescence. These emotions—contracted somewhere inside my body, often content to lie dormant in muscle or bone, but never disappearing—have long been there without apparent external cause. On the whole, I have also taken these feelings less seriously over time as I have acquired more perspective, more experience. Over the years, I have made a more concerted effort to keep myself in balance, have summoned enough joy and meaning to offset the worst of the melancholy. The main difference between myself now, as a woman in my forties, and at other stages is that what once hewed closer to depression now manifests more acutely as anger instead, and anger always wants to keep living. Not since childhood have I probably been less in danger of ending my life prematurely, even while becoming friendlier with the concept. Even as new knives inside our kitchen evoke visions of hara-kiri.
Once you start looking for them, as I have sporadically, there seem to be endless books and websites dedicated to laying bare the particular species of rage that arrives for many women around this time, most in their later forties or early fifties. None that I have come across, however, seem to mention how an emerging capacity for a full-throated fury might also help to usher in a new awareness. None have so far confirmed my suspicion that a changing body can have the salutary side effect of forcing you to make closer contact with the life within, reconnecting with an inner flow of energy that may transcend the flesh encasing it. Even if a lowering level of estrogen can easily explain my quicker aggravation and reactivity—even if the root of my inner turbulence lies solely in my biochemistry as a woman—what this implies is that losing my fertility is a process far more profound and complicated than anyone has ever said, ever hinted. To surrender consciously to the undoing, to allow yourself to be remade without offering any internal resistance, seems to me to require just as much courage as taking a sword to the belly.
Because my life may not be as full as those of many women, aging might also present me with more disquiet, might feel more dramatic because I have never become as giving or busy with the lives of others as perhaps I should be. For someone whose career has only ever made so much progress, for someone without children and hardly any family left, for someone for whom the future doesn't seem to augur any real positive change or excitement, this time of life so far seems to essentially be one in which to get things over with—to either take the dagger to your throat or abdomen—or yield to the suicide that life is perpetrating on your own behalf, at its own pacing. Not wanting to cause my husband any suffering or torment, not wanting to be reborn again only to have to wade through the same lessons I am meant to learn inside this body, I feel I have very little choice now except to make surrender my main purpose. I seem to have no viable alternative except to die to all expectations of what might or might not still be to come—to perform this work too from inside the only real home that I seem to have here, from inside this skin. Life seems to now be obliging me to walk through each one of its rooms, to accept this is what furniture I have been given, this is what it looks like, this is how much and how little space there is, before I can even hope to look out and glimpse some stars or sunlight, before I can hope to venture elsewhere, to live somewhere more expansive, with sky for ceiling.
Though my husband would never believe this, there are times when I almost feel as though the arising of more extreme emotions at this time amounts to a summons to clear out a karmic balance, to prepare for whatever may lie beyond the physical wreckage. The undertow of intense emotional pain, the undertow lurking behind every flare of irritation, feels both new and ancient, as though this substrate has always existed inside every cell but is fully awakening from its dormancy only now, with my waning fertility, now that nature has deemed me done with bearing children, in which I never managed to form an interest, never developed maternal instincts for reasons beyond my ability to explain but have always accepted. Never having given birth to another human, I still feel convinced a part of me has entered the throes of birth pangs. As though the miracle of death—death as a transition, death as an opening, death as a gateway to what may pulse beyond the senses—has come a little early. Sometimes even in the midst of my occasional thoughts of suicide in the abstract, in my sympathy with those belonging to the ancient Japanese warrior class, thrums a kind of ecstasy. In this heightened state of awareness, to live out an ordinary life to its finish always reveals itself as the harder, more heroic thing.
Whatever I might give birth to now, obviously there is no way of knowing yet. No new revelations or wisdom may ever even come. All that seems certain—all that might be necessary to recognize—is the need to clean out a psychic residue, which has accumulated from so many years of living, the need to rid myself of inner baggage, to make space for something else to come, whatever that something else might be, even if it proves nothing more than the breathing room of emptiness. However unremarkable outer appearances, something vast and impersonal seems to be awakening all the latent hurt and bitterness from every past trauma and pinprick. To feel and then release these seems to be the task at hand. Some days, it requires almost all my energy. My husband asks what has made me so tired, and I cannot tell him.
Even if what I am becoming is nothing more unusual or exotic than a menopausal woman, even if I am failing to evolve in any other sense, I still have found myself in new territory, and new territory demands new strategies for living. Like every other woman who has reached a certain point in her lifespan, I have been left here, trapped inside this changing form, with no way of returning somewhere more familiar, more grounded. Given no choice except to molt out of what has become an old identity, one that has dulled like our older knives over time, I feel I am already being undone to such an extent that I need to find meaning in the undoing, some version of growth amid the decay. I suppose I am seeking value, not only in myself as an older woman, but value inherent in this whole cyclical process, in which life never lasts for long in any one encasement but recycles itself endlessly, continuously exchanges once breathing bodies for fertilizer in essence.
Because my mom hardly ever talked about her body—because she always kept her focus on her daily chores at hand, never allowing herself to serve as her own distraction, never dwelling on anything she found incomprehensible or unpleasant—I have no way of knowing when her own hormones might have begun adjusting themselves to a body no longer fit for childbearing. Dead now for going on two decades, she is no longer here to ask whether her own vanishing fertility also seemed to usher in a karmic reckoning, a sort of death before death, a gateway into another consciousness, in which she may have managed to somewhat transcend her identification with her body. The woman who passed onto me her own femaleness cannot, as it is, offer any guidance, cannot impart any insight as to what you may become when everyone else can see on first glance that you no longer menstruate.
Even if she was still alive upon this planet, and because throughout her life she remained a devout Catholic with no possible interest in Eastern philosophies or religion, she never would have given reincarnation or karma any credence. She would have only told me to stop thinking about myself, about my body. She would have advised me to ignore what is happening, to apply my energy other places, in which I would have acknowledged some wisdom. My own tendency has always been to use my life and body, though, as a magnifying lens, one through which to try to glimpse the cosmic. Even if she would have provided no genuine solace, even if she herself has long since reincarnated, I am calling on whatever remains of her anyway to help me, to ease me through this passage. I am attempting to invoke nothing more powerful or powerless than a woman who has long been dead to smooth the transition, to carve out some kind of opening. I need to at least pretend she can somehow steer me toward becoming a more peaceful, less tragic older woman. One whose death, once it comes, has been earned rather than sought prematurely.
From all my memories and best guesses, it also seems as though the end of her own fertility must have come later than my own, closer to her early fifties. Whereas when she was around my same age at present, I had been eight and nine years old. Before my world became complicated by the shadows and longings of adolescence, and as best as I can remember, my mom seemed much the same to me at this time as she had always been. Even if my perception of her was clouded by love, even if I was blinded to her aging process through a childlike worship, I know beyond any doubt she was never susceptible to my same level of rage, sometimes fury. She never appeared to shoulder, at any age, my same predisposition to melancholy, which of late has turned more active, aggressive. No one who ever knew her would have been capable of imagining her wielding a kitchen knife as a weapon.
Even if a surer, swifter current of love for my husband always comes rushing in after every emotional eruption—even if I never want to harm him or anyone else—I can also understand why he doesn't want to put too sharp a knife now in my hands. Within the past several months alone, there have been several times when I have taken a roll of paper towels and started tearing, wanting to tear at something. More rarely, I have tossed a breakable object toward the floor, simply for the sake of hearing something shatter. The fact I have needed this mode of catharsis at all has told him that something has gone wrong with me, and were I anyone else besides the culprit, I might agree. The wrongness, though, seems to lie outside my power. The wrongness, at least until I embrace further acceptance, feels inflicted.
Though my husband tends to speak volubly himself as a habit, he has recently mentioned how he feels embarrassed whenever he sees our neighbors, embarrassed from my occasional shouting. Despite how much he projects his own voice, speaking more loudly than myself on a normal basis, he has also probably earned the right to decide how many knives are kept, tossing the most lethal in garbage. More accepting of his body while more in command of his own emotions, he also seems to have considerably fewer than myself of the latter. I will never know how much of this is owing to his own fertility as a man never ending or whether it more accurately reflects him having never allowed much of the pain from his own past to have accrued in dark recesses of his psyche. Unlike myself, he may not need a purification. Inhabiting a body that has always functioned as a cooler and calmer dwelling, he similarly cannot know what it means to weather random rushes of inner wildfire, to feel the impulse to scream to cool the blaze. Even while we share a bed and life and apartment, our real homes—our minds and bodies—remain vastly different places.
Though I have yet to experience any hot flashes, over the past few years my body has still begun to run considerably warmer than his own. Often at night, I toss off my half of the covers while my husband complains his nose is cold, his feet are freezing. The thinness of the walls here means even words as colorless as these have to reach our neighbors as easily as their own often reach ourselves. I could never get away with stabbing my husband with a kitchen knife, in other words, even if I wanted to. Everyone here would know what I had done and know immediately. Mine is therefore a world without weapons. With only two sharp knives in our kitchen drawer now rather than the three that came in the package, with the purple one tossed in the trash, I am feeling less and less motivated to start cooking rather than walk somewhere for takeout, rather than warm something in the microwave. Despite the promises we have made to finally start acting our ages, I have always had a deep aversion toward meal planning. Preferring to wait and see what I'm hungry for in the moment instead, my plan now is to wait and cook once the knives have been forgotten.
Filth and Cleanness
One day, they are simply there—the maggots—thousands of living threads. Pale and slender and writhing, they look intent on weaving themselves into a living blanket behind our pie cabinet's glass doors. At eight years old, their movement toward wholeness seems clear to me. The maggots are working toward a vaster goal, one both within and beyond my comprehension. All of these living larvae look bent on eventually connecting to the same underlying organism. I will never know whether my mom saw something similar when she was the same age as I am now, when her skin appeared firmer than my own now seems, when none of her hair had yet started changing its color. More than likely, though, on that Saturday morning when she brought me close, recruiting me as a witness, she had seen nothing more than a mess inside her cabinet, one she hoped to do away with before my dad saw the maggots for himself and started fussing.
Though she and I never talked about how they may have come to be here, of course some flies must have flown in. The day before or a couple days prior, some flies, some of them pregnant, must have slipped inside our pie cabinet not long after my mom had opened its glass doors, after she had also failed to close them. From watching her as closely as I must have done around this period, when my memories of her still remain their sharpest, I was aware that she was the only person in our family who ever bothered with this pie cabinet where no pie was ever kept. This, for her, was a private place, though one that was an open secret.
Rather than any pie or anything else I may have wanted to eat, all we ever stored here was a set of dishes that were seldom used. All were painted with the same clover pattern, all the clovers painted the same dull umber rather than the emerald green that I always felt they should have been instead. My mom, when I once asked her, said they were a wedding gift from a distant cousin, someone several years older than herself and who never married. Though I believe I never met this woman, though in person she may have been winsome and lovely, whenever I looked toward this set of dishes and was reminded of her existence I always envisioned her with a lazy eye and pitted complexion, as someone I should have felt some pity for, if only because she had mistaken the umber clovers as attractive and appealing, though the mistake was understandable given her own lack of prettiness. Her life, as part of me believes to this day, must have been a bleak one for her to have forgotten the color green even existed.
Because most of the time my mom preferred using a set of ceramic plates whose edges were ringed with pink roses instead, a set kept inside another cupboard altogether, the only reason that she normally ever opened the glass doors of our pie cabinet was to reach a certain jar of flour, stowed beside a serving dish. Whereas all the flour she ever used for baking was kept in a nearby pantry, what was stored inside this much smaller jar served another purpose, a trick she always said she learned in college. Whenever her hair grew greasy and she didn't feel like washing it, she would take a pinch from this reserve and sprinkle it over her head. She would then shake her head a little wildly, filling the air with what then would replicate light snowfall inside our kitchen. It was a shorthand she seemed to relish, a vestige of a past and a history that belonged to herself alone, a relic from a time that had nothing to do with the world she shared with her two daughters and husband.
In a world of four people alone, a nuclear family whose nucleus was often free from visitors or any outside interruption, my mom was the only one of us who had not grown up inside these walls, the only one of us who might not have always felt at home here, the only one who may have at times longed for elsewhere. My dad, on the other hand, had lived nowhere else apart from four years at a college little more than an hour away. Once he told his parents he was getting married in his early thirties, they had offered him their home as a wedding present and built themselves a much smaller house half a mile down the road, making themselves our nearest neighbors in the process. While my sister and I both to this day recall the surrounding silence of where we lived as deeply comforting, for my mom the stillness may have revealed other aspects, depending on her mood or the mood of her marriage. The thickness of the enveloping quiet may have proved so complete and so constant at times that it lacked all tolerance for alternative ways of being. A place that for her husband and daughters embodied peace and permanence may have felt all too isolated to her at periods.
From my own adulthood, having lived for decades in a city, I believe I can see this. While all her life before her marriage apart from her own four years at a nearby college was lived in a town only ten miles north of our farm—a town with nothing in my eyes to recommend it, a place that I would call isolated in its own right—and small as the difference between her two homes may have been in any wider context, her difficulty making the transition from town to country was still always as good as written in the jar at the bottom of our pie cabinet. From the beginning, her home here may have belonged too much to her in-laws and her husband to feel quite her own, though she never would have complained about this. As far as I remember, she never complained about anything. Little wonder I cannot recall any of her own reactions to aging.
Almost as a symbol of her life before she became a wife and mother, the jar of flour kept among the clover dishes also pointed to just how little she enjoyed washing her hair or body. Even as a child, I was aware this idiosyncrasy arose from her earlier life only ten miles away from our own, a place that seemed soiled and noisy in comparison. Growing up in a home with dirtied siding halfway between a church and a gas station, raised by a single mother who suffered from alcoholism as well as related depression, bathing for my mom had hardly ever existed. My maternal grandmother, who lived in the same house until her death in her late eighties, rarely tended to her own hygiene. From the smells of both her home and her body, even as a child it was always easy for me to see how her daughter never came to regard ablutions as necessary. However much my mom may have outgrown and transcended much of her early circumstances, she clung on strangely to this one facet. The trick she always claimed she learned in college could have only resonated to begin with because she had never washed her hair much anyway.
From an age maybe even younger than my own when we found the maggots, she must have taught herself to maintain serenity amid disturbances. Because of how much more quickly she always came than her oldest daughter to acceptance—because toward her childhood and her mother both she never seemed to hold any resentment—some few flies circling our kitchen while she was washing dishes never would have registered for her as an irritant. Even in her early forties, when she may have also started feeling some of the effects of waning estrogen, she would never have minded some buzzing of a few insects. Owing to circumstances beyond her control, from an early age she had learned to put things into proportion. Whereas I still swat at every fly that comes near me.
It was essentially her purity along with a lifelong aversion toward bathing, then, that led to the larvae. Were she not standing beside me when I confronted the maggots, even at eight years old I might have screamed and overreacted once I noticed them wriggling through all those cups and saucers, through all those ugly dishes. As it was, my mom's presence alone must have made them seem as though they might have been weaving themselves into a living blanket. Maybe her proximity alone distorted them so as to appear as if they were moving toward some species of wholeness.
Though we never talked about them afterward, once she had rinsed all of the infected dishes in our yard with the hose, once she had cleaned them in our sink with vinegar, she also stopped applying the flour inside our kitchen whenever her hair grew greasy. My dad had always hated this habit, saying she was turning herself gray too early. Now before work in the mornings, she would step into our yard instead and drop a pinch of flour onto her crown. As though she were a priestess bestowing some kind of benediction, as though she were acting as her own fairy godmother, she anointed herself with a light dusting of powder that may have been intended to make her into a princess but never quite succeeded, never made her more than ordinary. Gazing at her from our kitchen window, to my eyes there still seemed to be something holy in it. Though she kept her hair cut short, she would toss her head and shake what hair she had as though it had grown long and lustrous, as though she were becoming a mermaid in some enchanted kingdom rather than continuing another day in her life as a middle-aged Midwestern woman preparing herself for her work at a junior high school in the 1980s. Wearing corduroy pants and a wool cardigan, her shoulders and hips would loosen as she performed a ritual that I knew I was not meant to watch or study. I believe this was as close as I ever saw her to dancing.
The Opposite of Pain
This morning, my husband caught me wincing as I tried to open a bag of coffee. Because he knew the reason—a hangnail that I had ripped from my thumb three days ago—he walked without saying a word over to our junk drawer and from there extracted a needle from my sewing kit. A day earlier, I had made the mistake of sharing with him how even something as basic as putting on a sweater could, from this hangnail alone, now send a wave of pain down my arm, down the side of my body. Several times in the twenty-four hours since, he had taken hold of my hand at random and held up it to his face, saying that I had failed to remove the hangnail completely. Now before I drank my first cup of coffee from a bag that I could not seem to open for myself, he was finally going to do something about it.
With the rim of my thumb still pulsing after he had agreed to open the bag of coffee for me, he stood and held the sewing needle to a flaming burner. Announcing he was going to cauterize the wound, his voice was pitched at a volume that sounded excessive until I realized this was his way of drowning out anything I might have to say, his way of overriding any potential objections as I kept repeating my thumb hurt enough as it was. However trivial and even pathetic, the soreness from nothing more than a hangnail was still too raw for me to tolerate him now probing my skin with a needle. Even in the moment, part of me also felt the pain from something so minor to be emblematic of potentially our whole dynamic, particularly at this stage of life we have reached together, experiencing it from such disparate perspectives in different bodies. However little there may be to justify my overreactions, I seem to be developing a thinner skin, seem to keep weakening. While losing its elasticity and smoothness, my skin now does a poorer job too of protecting the softer internal things, increasingly failing to separate inner world from outer.
As my husband came and held the sterilized sewing needle above me, as I kept telling him that I didn't want this, eventually I sighed as I realized I would have to raise my voice to make him listen. To keep the needle away, to avoid the pain it would inflict, I would have to shout or come close to shouting. As now happens all too often, I felt forced to do something dramatic in order to convince him to take my feelings seriously, to do what I wanted—in this case to return the needle to the sewing kit, to leave my thumb to heal at its own pace, however slowly. After an exchange that became much more heated than it needed to become, creating unnecessary tension in us both, he walked into the living room and turned on the TV, saying nothing more. Not for another hour did he explain how he had only wanted to stop me from hurting. He may not feel what I feel, he said, but he knows I'm sensitive. However much I may think he lacks empathy, part of him realizes my low threshold for pain keeps getting lower.
The opposite of pain isn't pleasure, I've decided, but an absence of all feeling altogether. I say this based on the fact my thumb rarely knows pleasure, only pain gone absent. My thumb has never been an erogenous zone or organ, is not a feature of my body I normally even notice. All my life I have taken its shape along with the horizontal indentations in the skin beneath its nail for granted, regarding them as ordinary to the extent I have regarded them at all. It is only recently, in the past few years alone, that have I started to wonder whether they are further evidence of this slow dying that will never reverse course, that intends to take me other places, exchange one dwelling for another.
It is late October now, with the trees at their most incandescent, when to witness all the decay at hand feels both natural and soothing. At this time of year above any other one, it seems both clear and painless that, if they only lasted, all forms—all bodies, all encasements, even those of trees and vegetation—would eventually become a prison, their own tyranny. Without the surety of a death to come, there would be no possibility for escape or return to something larger, less restrictive. Nothing but goodness probably can come from there being only so much and so long of anything. Everything reaches a point when it needs to stop developing, commence diminishment. Having still failed to remove the hangnail myself completely, the skin surrounding it now is forming a callus. Over the past several hours, the skin encircling this upper portion of my thumb has turned so tough it hardly feels anything. I know this only because the relative sensitivity of my other fingers offers such a contrast. Of the opposite of pleasure, there must be infinite degrees of nothingness. Levels of discovery.
Harmless Temptation
They are truth tellers, the apples covering our kitchen walls. For me, they always have been. Though, all told, they have said very little—they say nothing—they have still conveyed all the truth we ever really needed to know. Hanging there, imprinted on our wallpaper, suspended midair without any trees or tree branches behind, these honest apples were always hanging from nothing then, free floating and wholly surrendered to the void. Their allegiance to the truth and truth alone may have been all that ever kept them from falling onto the floor at our feet, all that ever saved them from bruising themselves among our chair and table legs.
Examined closely, each apple looks to be a small red planet, though most are also clustered too tightly together not to be in danger of colliding with each other's orbits. Or maybe they were never planets at all, but something much smaller instead, closer to the particles that dwell inside an atom. All along perhaps, the apples may have been both microcosms and macrocosms, impossibly large and impossibly tiny. To my younger eyes, they always looked in any case too small as well as too enormous to be capable of dissemblance.
Lies for me, though, always seem to occur more in the middling places. Whereas even in my most mundane moments, as I was growing up with my family, our life always seemed to contain too much love and, embedded in that love, too much potential for suffering for any real ordinariness to occur. Probably the same holds true for us all at bottom. Probably for anyone, life cannot become commonplace until we lose our sensitivity to each other and each other's frequencies, until we teach ourselves to no longer pay attention to how the vibrations emitted by each person automatically combine to form a home's constant background music, which only ever goes unheard for being heard on a constant, continual basis.
Looking back to my childhood now from this many decades later, it often seems as if everything about my early life had to happen, as if everything that now exists in my memory alone always needed to be there, including all of the apples on our wallpaper. Maybe this would not seem as true had my parents not both been gone as long as they have. But for most of my adult life, neither has been here to remind me of other potential alternatives, to steer me closer to their lived reality, away from all the illusions that balloon inside my own head. Without them here to supply a corrective version of events or possibilities, it now seems as if they must have had no choice in all those choices that they actually made, however trifling.
Concerning the apples, my mom once told me she had chosen this pattern for our kitchen over all the others that her favorite uncle could offer from his inventory. From often visiting his hardware store with her after school, the hardware store he owned and managed with his younger brother, I can imagine how limited the selection must have been. His dozen or so rolls of wallpaper occupied only a small corner near the light fixtures, near the few lamps and sconces, which no one ever bought or dusted. Among the patterns of pale flowers and plainer stripes, the apples may have easily been the only wallpaper suitable for a kitchen. Even though they always told the truth, though their virtue was manifest, there was nothing particularly fetching about them visually.
The hardware store, narrow and with a tin ceiling, lay within walking distance of where my mom had grown up living with her mother, and from the time she was twelve years old until she married she had worked there almost every Saturday. Helping customers and running the cash register, she had often told me this was something she loved doing, even after she became a counselor at the local junior high school in her twenties. For two decades, she had made this place of bolts and wrenches a kind of second home. While originally, as an adolescent, she may have needed it as a respite from her mother's drinking and depression, this simple place also had the benefit of showing her how to repair things, how to fix what otherwise may have seemed broken irreparably.
From all that I ever absorbed through his presence, my mom's Uncle Joseph was someone who knew things but did not express them. Knowing his niece was moving only twenty minutes away, from this town to the country, he might have sensed she might get lonely there at times, at least in the beginning. For the bulk of every Saturday, she now would have to help her husband with his farming instead. Though she would still be using her hands—using them to improve things—her quiet uncle also may have suspected some of the challenges on a farm and in a farming marriage. He might have known they would prove thornier, more unwieldy than those posed by his customers, more so than her own mother in some ways.
My great uncle must have met my dad several times before my parents married. He must have had some passing and anodyne conversations with someone who seemed in many ways his opposite, someone much larger of build, ebullient and booming. Yet with the understanding that comes to those who keep mostly silent, I like to imagine that Joseph would have intuited my mom's need to use all her training now as a counselor, deploying all her psychology to allow my dad to seem to solve things while she remained the one who solved them. She would have to demonstrate rather than teach him how to apply wallpaper without any clusters of apples overlapping each other or falling out of orbit, without the seams of their atoms making themselves visible. She would have to show my dad how to do this along with so much else without appearing to show him, while cutting the wallpaper herself, pasting it to the wall after taking precise measurements, all while listening to him talk of other subjects. Applying this same technique to every aspect of their life together, Joseph may have gathered she would survive in the country even if she never mustered much of an interest in farming, never particularly longed for the bucolic.
Driving up to visit me in Chicago once I moved here for college, there were several times when she admitted how much she would have enjoyed living in a city, having access to some of my same luxuries and conveniences. But because of where almost all my memories of her lie, in a rural setting, I cannot really imagine her living anywhere apart from where she did, anywhere less isolated. Because everything that ever happened now seems as though it had to be this way, I cannot envision her walking only a few blocks rather than driving ten miles to buy groceries. I cannot picture her bloated with the kind of leisure that would have ever allowed her to visit a museum or meet a friend for coffee. If she ever sipped a cocktail or a latte, I never saw this. She never was able or would have spoiled herself under any circumstances, as I have. Sometimes I think she is the one thing in my life I haven't taken for granted.
There was never any time, none I ever noticed, for any idleness except for an hour of TV in the evenings, no opportunity she ever had for straying from the narrow path of goodness. For as much as she heard about sin at church every Sunday, she was never given the option of sinning. No money was ever wasted on coffee bought from a shop that existed exclusively for that purpose rather than the instant kind she made at home, once the teakettle would start to scream and ululate. Maybe I'm wrong, but I doubt she ever reflected on the joys that temptation alone might have bestowed. All the apples in our kitchen, unlike those in Eden, all her life remained a harmless temptation. They offered no promise of further knowledge, but at least they told the truth. I still cannot say exactly what that truth is, but I can sense it. Something about what holds you aloft, about how to hang suspended without any trees behind you as a support system.
By living with a certain amount of emptiness, my mom never grew greedy for pleasure. She never became addicted to small extravagances or the life of the senses. Abandon pleasure too early, however, and it stays away, stays abandoned. Much like the serpent who seemed to know enough to bother tempting Eve rather than Adam, pleasure has its own intelligence, aware of whom to approach and on whom not to waste any energy. My mom was someone on whom too much pleasure would have been wasted, though she was such a person by training. She never would have survived her marriage if she wasn't. She never would have married my dad and moved so far away from other houses, though there were likely many weekends when she still missed the hardware store, missed her old work on Saturdays. However much she may have regretted their end, she also would not have dared to ask herself, while painting the barn or pulling thistles in our pastures, what she might have given to have been selling bolts or wrenches, to have helped another woman choose so much wallpaper that it bordered on decadence.