CLEARANCES

Alone in my room, by my window overlooking the rooftops and the low hills that were wet and green in the distance, reading poems to myself became a kind of ritual. The slim volumes of poetry I’d brought home with me from college offered a sense of continuity between the life I’d begun to lead on my own and the life I’d been drawn back into upon returning home. Every time I set foot in my room, it was as though I were chasing the handful of writers I’d come to know while I was away—chasing because I didn’t want to let them get away, didn’t want them to veer out of my grasp (I was certain they’d want to escape, given how little I knew how to say, and how little there was there to command their attention). Those winter afternoons spent upstairs with the pack of my most necessary poets—Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Larkin, Yusef Komunyakaa, William Matthews—were teaching me about what it felt like to try to regard the totality of something I’d only known in part. A life, they told me, is made of what happens and what is lost. Looking back, we learn to name those things, to see and understand them. We hold them for a minute, looking first with innocent, untrained eyes, but if we hang there for a while longer, we can step into a different kind of gaze, one capable of seeing what is absent, longed for, what has been willed away or simply forgotten.

The heartbreak I’d felt once my romance with my high school teacher had been shut down marked one of my losses, as had the debilitating ache of losing love after that, again and again. I thought about those earlier losses and realized how far they’d receded not just into the past but into the distance, where feelings no longer reached. Had I willed them away, or had they simply run their course? But the loss death brought refused to recede. Death was like an indelible error no one could correct. It did not relinquish its hold on the present tense. It left a shape so deep and intricate it made no sense whatsoever to try to fill it. No, the only thing to do, I suspected, would be to move over and learn to live beside the gulf left in my mother’s wake, peering down into it at times out of need but making every effort not to topple over and fall in.

There’s a sonnet sequence called “Clearances” in Heaney’s book The Haw Lantern that I found myself returning to again and again. It is an elegy for the poet’s mother. I had a visceral love of one particular sonnet about the two of them peeling potatoes in silence while the other family members were away at Sunday Mass. I suppose it reminded me of all the days when I was my mother’s tiny satellite, accompanying her everywhere, happy at her side. But the poem that resonated most mysteriously for me was the sonnet that closed the sequence:

        I thought of walking round and round a space

        Utterly empty, utterly a source

        Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place

        In our front hedge above the wallflowers.

        The white chips jumped and jumped and skited high.

        I heard the hatchet’s differentiated

        Accurate cut, the crack, the sigh

        And collapse of what luxuriated

        Through the shocked tips and wreckage of it all.

        Deep-planted and long gone, my coeval

        Chestnut from a jam jar in a hole,

        Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere,

        A soul ramifying and forever

        Silent, beyond silence listened for.

What did it mean to be both empty and a source? Was there something I housed or might one day house? Something the loss of my mother would enable me to give? Or was it her loss that was the source of something? Would something worth having eventually spring from it?

I sometimes thought of how I’d chosen to look up in the first moments after her death. I had made a pact with myself that I would, wanting to show her my face, to tell her I believed she was on her way, as she’d assured us she would be. I’d turned my face up to that nowhere, wanting to feel what it housed, wanting to show that I knew it housed not just something, but my mother, my source. What hurt so much in those months after her death was exactly what Heaney’s poem knew how to name: that my gaze in those moments had been pointed up toward a place beyond my discerning, a place I’d never hear or reach or understand for as long as I was myself.

But the poem didn’t just lament that aspect of loss; it created a conundrum of presence and largeness, a realness more real than the absolutes we live by: A soul ramifying and forever / Silent, beyond silence listened for. Such language consoled me, and it beckoned me to the page, pushed me to test whether I might be capable of writing truths like that into being, truths that would prove better than the ones that eluded or exhausted me from moment to moment in my new life.

Reading at the dark oak desk in my room, the same desk where I’d once written letter after letter to my teacher, I felt close to something. Not my mother. I’d taken her too much at her word to believe she might still be there in the house, living beside us like a ghost. But I did feel, just at those times, a certainty that eluded me throughout the entire rest of the day. It was what I’d felt back at school, sitting in the library armchairs and scribbling poems into my sketchbook, the soul language that seemed to genuinely answer back when I called to it. Sometimes, the clarity with which I heard or felt it was undeniable. It was then, and not without trepidation, that I let myself imagine that poetry might be a means of getting from this portion of my life to the next.

The day to day of my life was not unpleasant. Jean and I had become so close, so candid with one another, and so much like genuine girlfriends that the twelve-year age difference separating us seemed almost to have vanished. She, my father, and I had finally reached a kind of peace, living together in the house that had belonged to my mother more than anyone else. When Dad was there with us and not at his girlfriend’s, the three of us ate meals together on the dishes that were my mother’s, set the table with linens that were hers, and moved in and out of rooms where objects that had been more hers than ours leaned out from every crevice. We were happy. As happy as we could or ought to have been, anyway, eating our meals, drinking our wine, and watching our movies together, or else going out, each alone, into his or her own private version of the night. Sometimes, Jean and I spent evenings with our father and his girlfriend, evenings where the four of us were content, laughing at the stories that emerged from the new life our father was living. Together we accepted the terrible, immovable fact that our mother would not, could not ever, come back. It wasn’t a grim peace. It was simply our lives picking up again after the standstill of shock. The way a train that has sat stalled on the tracks, its lights dimmed and its engine dawdling and a restless impatience or an angry helplessness gripping the passengers waiting in their seats, suddenly lights up and moves forward again toward its destination.

One afternoon, Pastor Gainey came by to check on us and found me home alone reading a Jane Austen novel. I had baked a lemon-cornmeal cake, and the kitchen sent that smell all through the house. It was long enough after the funeral that we both felt free to be smiling and cheerful. I had just taken a job as a substitute teacher, and the fact of having someplace to be most days gave me confidence. Though the visit didn’t warrant such a show of formality, I set out my mother’s silver coffee service.

“Someone’s going to snap you up one of these days and marry you,” Pastor Gainey said, chuckling.

I could tell he meant it as a kindness. It made me feel all of the sudden like one of Austen’s heroines, like I might be inching my way toward my own plotline, and I felt a shiver of anticipation. I still didn’t have any clear plans. I hadn’t felt capable, in my final months at college, of making any. While my classmates had been applying to graduate schools and internships or setting up jobs in journalism or finance, all I’d been able to do was tell myself I was going home to be with my mother. It was a decision no one had asked me to make; it had made itself. I was going home to my mother. I was going home. That was as much of the future as I could bear to see. But that was already months ago. Now, my mother was gone and I was still at home, still uncertain whether I had the wherewithal to pick up and move forward. In that state of mind, Pastor Gainey’s comment teased me into imagining, for just a split instant, that the vague, faceless force of the future might all along have held something in store for me. Yet as the thought spooled forward, I started to feel afraid of what it would mean to stay there in my hometown for too long and to get snapped up and married just the way that I was: dreaming of doing things (of writing books, to be specific) but having done (and written) next to nothing. It also made me mindful that living in my childhood home was saddling me to the different selves I’d been in that house through the years: the obedient schoolgirl, the surly adolescent, the adult in whom something critical had been stamped out by grief. The longer I thought on it, the more Pastor Gainey’s remark struck me as a warning.

In the weeks just before Mom had died, I’d sent off a slapdash application to the creative writing program at Brown. It was the only writing program I was even remotely familiar with, from my visits to Providence before my boyfriend and I had broken up. I’d done a hasty job, as if sending the thing off quickly might diminish the guilt that had come from plotting out my own future in the midst of such an all-consuming present, a present during which nothing but my mother’s dwindling life should have mattered. How odd that fewer than three months sat between where I had just been and where I now found myself. It was January. A new year. There was still time to do things properly, to choose another program and put together a solid application that might serve as the bridge to carry me forward and away.

One of the last bits of advice my mother had offered me was to go to grad school. “Further your education. Nobody can ever take that away from you.” She said it one afternoon while we sat together on her bed, though we seldom spoke, in those days, about what I should do with my life. For my part, I was afraid to make reference to the time when she would be gone. It was too painful a reality to try to peer into, let alone speak of. But she was being practical. She wanted me to understand that I’d have to look after myself at some point, to climb back onto the day-to-day world I’d been yanked from by her illness.

“Mom wants you to think about applying to law school,” Conrad mentioned, a day or two later, when he and I were alone. The prospect of studying law chilled me, but I decided that taking half of her advice and going back to school would be one way of honoring her wishes.

My mother. There were things that had worked their way out of hiding after she died. A notebook dug up from a drawer, in which she had written, Maybe I can publish my cookbook! A paperback, covered in a sheet of Sunday comics and barricaded behind wigs and handbags in the top of her closet, that turned out to be a modest sex manual entitled Nice Girls Do; it struck me as so innocent that I’d felt a wave of almost maternal compassion for her. But these things were finite. They only pointed me to the woman I had known, when what I wanted and needed were things that might give me a sense of my mother as someone I might still come to know.

Sometimes, when my aunts called from New York to check in on us, I’d ask them to tell me stories about my mother, about what she was like before my siblings and I were born, before she fell in love with my father, when she was still just a girl.

“When we were little, Kathy loved to play ‘hospital.’ She’d lie down and make us cover her with a quilt and tell us to go get her a handful of raisins. She’d pretend that was her medicine.” “Before Kathy met your father, there was a boy she used to talk to named Napoleon, and another boy named Willie James.” Tidbits, anecdotes that felt like stolen glances of my mother. The phone calls with my aunts—conversations that were friendly, jovial, not quite motherly but nurturing in a different way—also helped flesh out my idea of who my mother’s sisters were, not just in relation to my mother but as people, women, characters in the stories of their own lives: Ursula, who taught kindergarten in Harlem; Evelyn, whom my mother, I suspected, had been closest to; Lucille and June, who lived together in a house just north of the city and who were sisters in the way twins are sisters—two halves of an apparent whole—though they weren’t twins and probably didn’t think of themselves that way; Carla, right around Jean’s age and still marveling herself at the spectacles and the plenitude the city had to offer, who’d driven me on a tour of Harlem at night; and Gladys, who had flown to California to shepherd Mother back to New York and who once looked at a pair of pointy-toed boots I was wearing and said, “You could put your foot dead up someone’s ass in those shoes.” My aunts held facets of my mother in their voices and their stories and in their very bearing. They were women in whom I might catch glimpses of my mother—and to whom I might reveal myself with the courage and honesty I lacked when my mother, their sister, was alive.

I decided to apply to Columbia. Every chance I got, I tinkered with my essay. It wasn’t a personal statement in which I was asked to tell about myself and my relationship to poetry. The application asked for a brief commentary upon a book of contemporary poetry. I chose Dock Leaves, a slim volume by a British poet named Hugo Williams. It was dedicated to his mother, who’d died the year before mine, a fact that had disposed me toward a feeling of kinship with the poet—or gratitude that I might get to tag along as his poems did the work of grief and commemoration. I turned to the essay eagerly during quiet moments—and, to be sure, I had nothing but time. By the time it was done, and I sealed everything into the big white envelope, the gesture felt not so much like a wish or a shot in the dark as a prayer.

Months later, not long after a terse form letter of regret from Brown reached me, I received word that I had been admitted to Columbia. Holding the envelope in my hand, I convinced myself to trust that the angels my mother saw that night in her room had been right. I convinced myself to trust that they had been speaking to me through her. At the time, the thought of them there in the room with us, in their perfection so thorough it could only sit outside of this human plane, had cowed me. Now, needing them to be right, not knowing what I’d do if they were wrong, I submitted to them, took them at their word. I claimed them as my angels, imploring them to give a piece of my mother back, to show me that she was still available to me—not locked in the past tense, but rather eternal and ongoing. A soul ramifying and forever / Silent, beyond silence listened for.