Violation (19 page)

Divorced, divorced, divorced: every child in my car comes from divorce. I ask them leading questions; they are tired now and more willing to let me ask. Kristen says she thinks her parents are thirty and thirty-two—which means they were young parents indeed. But maybe she has no idea what thirty years old really looks like—certainly, if she gauges life by television and film, she can't know. All the people on television look younger than they are supposed to be. It occurs to me that it is not only Felicity and Ally McBeal who have given her the lines she should say, told her how to react to life's big moments. Perhaps she has been listening to Mom and Dad.

Middle-aged divorced parents, dating. Perhaps she listens as they get ready, worried and anticipating, and listens when they come home and unwind. Perhaps she has spent long hours watching her mother dress and take care with her face and hair, wondering aloud what to expect, whispering in her daughter's ear what to beware of and what to dread. My generation, so determined never to grow up, has turned parenting upside-down.

I never once thought of my parents as my friends, or as anyone I would want for a friend. They couldn't enter the world in
which my friends lived. This, too, has transformed into
The Partridge Family, The Brady Bunch
—and a long parade of family sitcoms. Goofy Dad and Exasperated Mom, their struggles played out in the living room. The intimacy of my mother's life was not only separate from mine in a crucial way, it was of no import to me. I took her for granted, which is a different thing altogether from taking her for a friend.

I wonder if my passengers can take anything for granted. They live on shifting sands. Alison tells Cody about another e-mail boyfriend, and he wants clarification of a point: “Is that before or after you fucked each other blue on the web?” he asks.

Ryan is eating his third Odwalla meal bar since leaving Dairy Queen.

LATER THEY
Discuss ways of harassing David. I have finally figured out that Kristen never actually met David, but conducted the romance entirely by telephone and e-mail. “My father liked him because he was so far away. ‘I like this guy David,' he told me. I said, ‘Why?' And he said, ‘Because I don't have to see him.' But David used to call me at five a.m., I mean really at five a.m., and say, ‘Are we still together or not?' and I was trying to sleep and that really pissed my father off.”

The girls consider sending David envelopes full of grass clippings, toenails, or dirt, and then discuss whether they could insert themselves in a picture of Everclear and tell David they were hanging out with the group.

“I need a digital camera so I don't have to pay for film and processing and all that,” says Alison.

“Well, you need a computer,” I say helpfully, but Alison looks at me in the mirror and says, “I
have
a computer. I also
have
a scanner and a printer and Photoshop and a CD burner.”

Of course. I recently attended a wedding of a couple in their mid-twenties. The old-fashioned, expensively engraved invitation included a traditional reply card, a tiny return envelope, and a CD of their favorite love songs with their photo on the label. This startled
me. It seemed so—it is so hard to explain why or how, but this slice of their courtship was at once too private and too casual. I felt I'd been invited into a place that belonged to no one else, by mass mailing. I am getting a bit older, and perhaps that's all that's going on here. Alison's pronouncement startled me—not the laundry list of expensive toys, but the withering suggestion of technical prowess. These are people of experience, masters of their world. And they are not illiterate, exactly: even fucking on the internet is a matter of writing down the words. She knows how to do this—how to invent, how to manipulate. I'm just not sure if she knows anything else.

A group of affluent parents in a town on the outskirts of the city have banded together to start a private school for their children—a school without computers of any kind. There is plenty of time for that when they are older, they explained to a reporter. Now is the time for fairy tales, art, music, and books. The parents all work at Intel.

When everything is recorded, when we can watch everything as soon as it happens, then every possibility lies before us. Every kind of life is visible, even as real life disappears behind the stage. We describe ourselves most easily as
like
someone else, our experiences like a story, a movie, a show. We are offered so many things to be like now; life slides by, surface by shiny surface. Teenagers may be doing nothing more than they have always done, but the world in which they do it is not the world it was.

Threepenny Review
, Fall 2002

At first glance, any essay about how technology is changing experience—especially one from the point of view of one generation watching another—is stale by the time it is finished. But this essay feels more relevant to me as the years pass. My grandchildren are now the age of the young people in this essay, and the same conversations occur. The same divisions in what we value and fear exist between us. I imagine they have always, in their way, existed between generations, and always will, but the risks of what we can lose, the investment in what is already lost—this feels enormous to me at times. And at the same time, I am one with these young people, longing for and inventing and demanding my future.

     
Violation

MY SISTER WRITES TO ME OFTEN THESE DAYS, THOUGH
most of our communication is business. Our father died several months ago and she is his executor. Back and forth my brother and sister and I go about annuities and armchairs, social security numbers and thank-you notes, the debris of death. This kind of business, weighing the heft of memory, is never indifferent. The armchairs, the thank-you notes—each leads us back to something else, things of vaguer shape and sharper meaning.

She is angry. She is especially angry about my newest book, and she is also just angry. A river of old pain long staunched slides out easily now, in brief fragments, disjointed rambles, long commentaries. In the dismantling of houses and bank account, we dismantle long decades of false courtesy, too.

Almost all this talk, these complaints and sorrows, come to me by e-mail. E-mail is a strange construct for such strong feelings, but these odd missives are what I have. In the midst of her coded address at the top of my screen, I see the time she sent the note. Often she writes to me after midnight. I imagine her alone at the desk in her dining room in the poised silence of the night, her eyes intent, while her teenage daughter sleeps and the jittery dog shifts at her feet. I imagine the pool of light reflected on the French doors behind her, blanking the empty yard, shading the day's dishes, the dog's bowl, the emptiness. I imagine this, knowing the room, the dog. The night. Knowing her.

She has no idea, I think, how artless her words are, how
revealing, and so she sends them into the ether assuming they will never return. They slip in a series of resentful taps onto the screen shimmering before her. That screen, that dim room, seems to be such a private and solitary place. It is exactly this privacy, this solitude, I violate.

She hates my “nasty little book,” she writes one night. “You are airing family business in public—like it is the truth, when it is your opinion.” Later: “That book really hurt. Those were your thoughts, not necessarily truths.” Another day: “I have to live in this town, not you. I don't think a lot should have been said, whether true or not.” A few days later: “Don't use my name in a book again without my permission.”

She is sixteen months younger than I, truly my little sister, still half a head shorter than I. When she is angry, she moves, and her words roll across a room or the page in one long, unpunctuated injury. They arrive in my study heavy and solid, as all words are. With what she believes to be vapor, she protests the permanence of what I say.

FAMILIES ARE DREADLOCKED
worlds; they tangle together so finely one cannot always get through. It is not easy to have a writer in the family; I understand this. Nor is it easy to be the writer in the family; writers charge themselves with the burden of a family's unspoken story. We can bury it in fiction or parse it into poetry, but form doesn't hide as much as we might like. No matter how plain or muted the source of our material appears to be, the people in our lives know themselves to be material. We who write know them to be, and knowing can make a writer shake with terror. If we aren't careful, it can make us into monsters.

For the memoirist, for those of us doomed to the first person by our cracked talents, the obvious questions of disguising characters and shifting locations shouldn't arise. Our questions are simpler, perhaps harder. The territory of what we have experienced is a restricted one for a writer—but so full, so rich, so slippery and unclear. The intimate and hidden interest me; the ordinary interests
me, because it is so strange. I've never wanted to write anything else, never begun to mine the vein of what just happens each day. But being bound to experience as a source of material doesn't save me from betrayal. Writing about myself, I betray my past and everyone in it; I am betrayed in turn by the limit of my memory, my small, human needs.

Like many others, the chorus of my family has several interlocking lines:
How could you?
whispered as quietly as thought.
That's not fair,
intoned in a young and injured voice.
That's not true.
For how little we talk to each other about what really
did
happen, or about what is happening now, our arguments seem always to be about exactly those things.

When I have allowed myself to consider, even a little, what I do from the point of view of my characters (that is, portions of manuscript, narrative devices, people I love), I am wrapped in worry. Is it true? For a long time, this was my rigid concern. Every word, the tone, an adjective: is it true? But simple truth can be a terrible harm. I began asking: Is it fair? And fair to whom?

I sometimes hesitate even to say I write memoir these days. The current fashion in the genre is for extraordinary detail in a distinctly fictional voice, and what I write is nothing like that. Looking backward, it seems to me that I've written very little about my family—either family, the one I came from or the one I made. I've crept so cautiously around them that several people—including my sister—have complained that I left them out of stories where they belonged. Several readers have assumed I was a recluse of some kind. There are many kinds of recluses, of course. Part of me is a plain coward. Part of me is constrained by notions of duty and integrity. But I am also constrained by my own reserve, which comes partly from the knowledge of exactly how untrue and unfair all writing is. The book is not the life; the writer is not the person. The mask is not the self. So who are the characters?

My sister's anger now is rooted less in my recent book than in the vignettes themselves, and all they imply. My few, carefully shaded words loom large to her: a passing reference to my father
drinking his “hair of the dog” each morning, how he irritably waved the carving knife at me during dinner. Clues, hidden—but, like me, she knows where the bodies are buried. There is nothing oblique to her here. My brother, the eldest and most likely to remember what I remember, has never said a word to me about my work. Craven, I haven't asked.

In 1995 I wrote an essay called “The Basement” for the anthology
Home.
I sent my sister a copy last year after long consideration, and she has been coming slowly to the boil ever since. In that story, I describe her at age six as “squeamish, chubby, pale, and black-haired—she's the one left out, the baby.” She is aggrieved over this line; she has been wronged. Every word chosen creates a world. Selection is all and only what writers do; nothing is neutral. Objectivity is the biggest lie a writer tells. My sister's anguish is that of the silenced defendant, listening to the eyewitness tell lies. We all know how unreliable eyewitnesses are, but we listen anyway. We believe—we condemn. “I was
not
,” she says now. “
Not
like
that
.”

The real betrayal of all nonfiction writers is that we forget. Days pile atop each other, knocking things out of the way—and we forget. In the end, it's not our parents' criticisms or our siblings' anger that breaks us, but our own—our own endless punishment of ourselves, the grand and self-absorbed masochism of people who struggle to say it just right. We will inevitably fall into the cracks between every possible solution—every safe place. We fall between cowardice and kindness in our desire to be fair; between courage and cruelty in our need to tell the story. We are betrayed by our own amnesia, by the fact that one can never be sure. I don't believe, though, that our greatest fear is being wrong. We're afraid of speaking at all. We are more afraid of what others will think, whether they will still love us after we speak, than we are of being wrong when we do.

For years, students in my writing classes have asked me the same questions I continue to ask myself. In an elementary school classroom on the Oregon coast, the small desks shoved to the side
in the cool, sweet air of a summer morning—in a basement meeting room of the Unitarian church, the walls covered with cheerful slogans about kindness and honesty—in a humid conference room in upstate New York where the heat lies upon us like wool—I am asked the same questions: “What if I don't remember exactly?”

“What if people disagree about what happened?” They have begun to worry about fragments and dangling plotlines, the gaps like broken typewriter teeth in the stories they want to write. A few already have the nagging suspicion that the fragments aren't in the writing, but in themselves. When the conversation gets rolling, there are other questions: “Isn't it okay to make up the details?” “Isn't memoir better with dialogue?” “Why not fill out a little?” Why not?

Nonfiction—not false. But nonfiction is never exactly true—the writer's own perfume lingers on every word, gently and insistently filling the reader's head with one person's singular world, shared by no one else. Easy enough to take what we do remember and fill it out, fill it in, with period detail and nicely timed entrances and inner monologues. This is the stuff of good drama—exactly the kind of drama my students want to write into their own memoirs, the kind they hope to get past me. They admit that they don't really remember things in great detail. The details they add just
feel
true, and therefore must be.

I say no. I always say no. Essay and memoir writers don't mess with plot or chronology, don't invent dialogue or combine characters. One wrestles with words, molds language, atmosphere, tone, suspense—not history. The bones of the story are already there, laid across the table, and to bare it exactly is the writer's role. Nonfiction is supposed to tell the truth—and telling the truth is what people
suppose
us to do. I have been stricter, even puritanical, about this than many writers I admire. (It does not escape me that obsessive concern with facts is an antidote to chaotic childhoods. Finding one's secret turmoil to be the mundane anecdotes of psychology textbooks isn't quite a cure.)

My students are disappointed when I answer their questions. Many clearly not only want me to say yes, they expect me to
say it: yes, you can create, invent, conflate; yes, you can fill in the details. They are surprised when I say no.

Instead, I tell my students to write down all they
can
remember, all of it, to put everything in, all the chaff, all the crap, all the garbage. Only then do you find the wheat, the treasures. Wheat and chaff are entwined and must be thrown to the wind in order to separate. Put it all in because you may be wrong about which is which. Figure out your agendas, your vengeance, your grief and desire. Use the confusion and forgetfulness, the sound of crickets in August twilight, the thud of a heavy shoe stopping outside your bedroom door. So goes my lecture, and my students nod and write it down. Wheat, they carefully note. Chaff. Sound of shoes.

Our lives are uncertain, I tell them. Make that uncertainty part of what you tell. Believing that, taking it as my own measure, I am a liar, too.

A FEW MONTHS
after my father died, my brother and sister and I were cleaning out his house. My father had lived alone for the last twelve years of his life, shrinking in on his grief at my mother's death and his fifth decade of alcoholism. His house was not dirty, thanks in part to my sister's regular visits, but it was as untouched as a crypt. A layer of dust covered almost everything—my mother's books, his record albums, the cans of soup in the pantry, all gray with a fine, silky silt. His suits were wrapped in dry-cleaning plastic years old, and his bedroom was piled high with mail-order travel and history books still in their cardboard packages, books he couldn't be bothered to refuse. When we began cleaning his house, we were literally dismantling it. I gathered up an armload of books from the position they'd been in as long as I can recall, and I half expected the house to come down around me, its structural integrity suddenly gone.

I bought my siblings lunch at the brewpub where the Sambo's used to be. Perched up on teetery bar stools, we finally began talking about the furniture, the old dusty house, and what to do with it all. On the rare days when we are all together we are in a
web made more of the tension between us than the strengths of our bonds. I hold each of our quiet conversations or pleasant hours as though they were ancient papyrus about to dissolve; I hold them with great care because they are so few. I was glad to be there, to be doing this, eating bar food next to the shiny vats of ale in the building that once upon a time had been the orange diner we hung out in after high school. The change from then to now measured the arc of my life. I was more than ready to tackle a project that had begun to seem more like archeology than grief. Do you want the green chair? one of us asked, and the mood was generous, without rancor. Do you want the kitchen table, the circular saw, the car?

Then this happened.
We go back to the house and into the kitchen. I lean over the tiny kitchen table with its uncomfortable wrought-iron chairs and ask my sister, “Do you want this table?” And she loses her hold all at once, flaring like a gas main, and stomps past me as heavy and hard as my father had stomped, knocking the chairs aside. I feel a strange peace. I am standing at last in the DMZ of my own history, the small neutral territory where enemies meet and no one is right and no one is wrong.

“I already
told
her!” she shouts to my brother. “No one ever listens to me!” Together they run out to the yard. I'm standing in the kitchen door watching through the window as they yell at each other. I can't hear the words. Then my sister peels out of the driveway in her Ford Explorer, almost taking my brother's foot off where he stands, broad-shouldered, hands clenched, watching her go.

HOW CAN I
tell my sister that I'm not writing about her at all? I'm writing about me—who she is in my life and work is not who she is in hers. The me you see is not the me who sees you. My students ask over and over again. I answer them. But I don't believe what I say. My sister would tell a different story about that day; a story with a different moral, a different wound. How can I blame her? (Do I pretend that I am above blaming? What a comfortable place to be.) Alexander Smith called the essayist “a law unto himself.”
We've heard it all before—we've
said
it all more than once, to each other, to our angry sources. Grist to the mill.