A Crystal Cave

Whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on in ’56. Dad’s radio station turns to a Top 40 format, and he wants out. WCCO-TV snaps him up as on-camera weatherman and movie host. (He also tries to create a children’s show featuring himself as a friendly pirate, but no go.)

The Olders are now in high school. Tom’s a freshman at the military academy, Pogo’s a junior, and Kako graduates in June. The phone is either ringing or monopolized, and there’s a flurry of shaving, corsages, and other dating accoutrements. Well, not so much for Kako. She has steadily gained weight and lost confidence.

For graduation, Mom and Dad buy her a suitcase and take her out to dinner. Just the three of them. The kicker comes over dessert.

“I’ve decided to become a nun. A Benedictine.”

Clink go their coffee cups. They are openmouthed.

“Honey, you’re too young,” Dad insists.

“No I’m not. I turn eighteen in December, and I can enter then.”

“I know it sounds exciting now, but please, honey, wait a year. You need to live a little.”

“I’ve lived enough to know it’s what I want, Dad.” She is adamant. She wants to be out of the house and free of her undeserved duties of motherhood, but of course cannot state her true feelings. So she insists on her “vocation.”

They are unable to sway her. This tenacity is the surprise in Kako’s character. For all her apparent malleability and acquiescence, my sister is a mass of granite when she wants to be.

That summer is the last one she’ll share with the family. We have a picnic and fly kites—the one and only time we ever do so, renowned in family lore as The Day We Flew The Kites, as if such exotic activities were only possible once.

That December she becomes a postulant at The Priory in St. Paul.

•••

Years later, after Kako’s left the convent, we talk.

“When did you know it wasn’t for you?”

“The first day. The nuns had assured us that postulants kept their hair, and then cut ours off the very first day. We felt so betrayed. We were prisoners. Even if we wanted to leave, we couldn’t go back in the world with no hair.”

“What about your vocation?”

“I never really had one. I was fat. Who would ever want me? That left two choices: teacher or nurse. I hated blood, and thought if I were going to teach, I might as well be a nun. So I stayed.”

Within six months, unbeknownst to us, she’s drinking heavily, and will for several years.

•••

Early in 1957, Mom finds she is pregnant yet again. Ro is born at the end of September. That year Jim, three, suffers a hernia and is hospitalized for the first time. I start first grade.

In 1958, Mom makes a New Year’s resolution to “make carbons of the family activities, similar to what we used to do with the Journal”—a weekly update for relatives and another record of illuminating detail.

That April, Mom, Ro and I (age six) fly to Omaha so Aunt Irene and Uncle Harry can meet the baby. Here she addresses Aunt Irene about our departure from Omaha:

“Do you remember how (Irene) looked when we got on the plane?…navy blue coat, her shiny patent leather ‘party pumpers’ and the white Easter hat with daisies all around the brim? She looked like an angel—fond mother talking—with her curls cascading down the back. Well, we got on the plane, fastened the seatbelts, and she turned to me and said “I’m tired of fighting with Skipper, but if he starts anything, I’ll put up my dukes!’ I just gasped—the visit was over and so were the elegant manners!!”

I clearly dread returning to my brother’s bullying, but “fond mother” gasps at my manners. She wanted a dainty topiary to grace her wildboy park. Instead, I’m a mess of kudzu sprawling wild in all directions, useless to clip.

But Skip makes me so mad all the time because what did I ever do to him? He likes to hurt me: Paper Scissors Rock to lick his fingers and slap me hard on the wrist or pretend to be nice then whack my cheeks or put his arm around my shoulder all “Pal-sey Wal-sey,” then trip me.

Why can’t he be nice like little Jim who has no mean bones and whose jokes aren’t funny, but so cute. Tries to help you, not jump to scare me, pound on top of me, Dutch Rub Wrist Burn try to make me wet my pants.

But Mom says if you can’t say something nice about someone don’t say it at all, so I won’t.

Six months later:

“This will be a big week, for Saturday morning Irene makes her First Holy Communion. She can’t wait…she is on a diet, now—overweight—and is being so careful about what she eats.”

But my feelings can’t be let out, so my beautiful Swiss-dot First Communion dress has to be.

•••

I start having terrible nightmares and can’t fall asleep. Things I see on television are the ostensible cause—scary Jack-in-the-box Twilight Zone, Johnny Tremain spilling molten silver on his hand, a Bonanza where a guy’s paralyzed—but no doubt I am responding to my local bogeyman brother and other inexpressible fears.

Dad, not Mom, is always the one who comes in to say it’s all right.

“Where’s your rosary?” he gently asks. Crammed in a drawer to hide its spooky green phosphorescence, but I can’t tell him that. To read, he hands me a parish bulletin with plans for the new church; to sleep with, a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

•••

Church I pretty much like. Our house is always messy, even though Anna comes on Tuesday, which Mom makes us clean up before she comes, but church is always clean and peaceful, except when they remind us how bad we are, which is mostly all the time.

Oh I wish I were as good as Cinderella and be happy and quiet to do my work and dream but I get so mad.

My brothers get to rake and mow which who wouldn’t rather have burning leaves or cut grass smell, warm sun like pancake syrup or cheeks tight shoveling clean snow, instead of skinny sad sunlight on davenport, the dust you dust dries up your nose or stupid vacuuming.

Outside, someone laughing running down the sidewalk, but kitchen scrub brush croaking like a broken locomotive over dirty gray linoleum, stinky water dirty, everything wet, won’t suck back in sponge, stupid floor won’t come clean.

After floor, sit with tired legs apart. Mom comes by, flops them together, “Be a lady quick!” Everyone says how cute Ro is how sweet Jim is how funny Pogo is how kind Tom is how holy Kako is how smart Skip is what about me? I turn into a tornado with blades of anger flying out, wanting to break a window in the sunroom, rumble the neighborhood down, getting madder screamier whirlier can’t stop I’ll explode. Mom throws cold water on me. I stop. I have to. To breathe.

Then sour hurty feeling. Devil’s horns prick my conscience for doing bad, which you have to feel though it hurts because otherwise his horns wear down and you do bad all the time and don’t feel it.

Jesus is the first I learned how bad we could get. Because Jesus is as good as we could get. He didn’t do anything to them, only tell stories, do miracles, love everybody, and only got mad once, which why kill Him for that? Thorns in His head, heavy cross, nails in hands and feet, hanging bleeding dying, which why? He was the best man ever. Plus God.

Our sins crucify Him again and again.

Hard to sleep.

•••

The anxiety is not just mine. Pogo develops psoriasis. Skip is getting fatter. Jim continues to injure himself in ways large and small. Mom describes him asking for a Band-Aid for a scratch. She doesn’t think he needs one, but he says, “Look, there’s the blood charging out, now I need one.”

By age four, Jim has bitten his nails to infection. The doctor finds them nearly gangrenous and Jim is promptly hospitalized again. He confides, “They say if I’m good, they’ll let me keep my fingers.”

•••

The truth isn’t found in the carbons of her letters.

Nor is it dramatic in an ordinary way. We’re not hit, there’s food on the table. We even have fun.

But we’re like the little monkeys with the wire mother. Mom’s soft arms weren’t for hugging, but for folding at her chest; her mouth not for kissing, but compressed in resignation—her chief expression in thirty years of snapshots. She could let life through her body, but not up against it. And all our bodies knew it.

The distance a mother keeps from the bodies of her children is the distance they will keep from their own.

I have seen her icy even with her own grandchildren, shudders sickening through her at their embraces and requests. I have seen her fidget with a baby on her lap as though he were a frozen tuna.

Mom sprang from her own thorny landscape: a lonely girl, longing for family, trained as the ladiest lady, all dainty napkins and luncheons, seashell soap, scalloped dishes, all that is breakable, linen, or white.

Her heart is a cave of crystal we come crashing through.

Children were her childhood dream but her waking nightmare—dirty, shitty, boisterous, sneezing, laughing screeching farting weeping swearing.

But no child knows this kind of thing. She simply knows, no matter what, that it’s her fault.

•••

A mother’s love: the fundamental promise of the animal kingdom. Every childhood emblem: robins in the nest, the nuzzling foal. Instinct powerful enough to lift a station wagon off a child.

Something made my mother flip the station wagon onto me. I must be flawed, I must make up for it: entertain, inspire, make proud. What if the baby robin pulled a rabbit out of the nest or the foal turned cartwheels over the field?

You are not of my species.

But I am. Just bind my wings with wire. Chain my hooves to a stake in the ground. See?

Except it hurts. Movement unimpeded is the first promise of the physical, preceding even motherhood.

Kick and scream all over the floor, lovely floor, welcoming sweet bams of fists and feet.

Which does not win her. But which wins relief.