January 2016
It’s my last few days in Cornwall. I’ve been here with Mom for nearly a month, over Christmas and into the new year. This morning, we heard on the news that David Bowie had died. Mom and I play “Space Oddity” while making breakfast, and she stops in her tracks and says, “Oh, it’s just too tragic, Bowie out there somewhere, floating in his tin can.” She walks to the window, her fingers covering her nose and mouth. I see that she’s crying, and I cry too. She turns up the stereo full blast, and we dance, occasionally laughing because it’s so silly to cry like this.
It’s been a warm winter, and when I run the ground is wet beneath my feet, the dog snapping at my ankles playfully. Looking out over the horizon, at the vast and endless sea, somewhere beyond which is America, where I will return shortly, I try to soak it all in, this moment. I’ve been so embroiled in the past that I’ve neglected the present. Writing about your past does something uncomfortable to your experience of time, compressing it flat so yesterday could be ten years back. It erases the past too, replacing your memories with the words you make on the page.
My legs are heavy and I feel drained. These past few chapters have made me sad: sad like I used to be when I was a teenager, as if I am that younger self again, and at the end of the day when I leave my desk, I can’t return to the twice-older bones of my twice-older body—all that feeling doesn’t fit in this form any longer. I’ve taken my Dad box down from the shelf, and when I peer inside, it disintegrates in my hands and that thing with black flapping wings flies down my throat and beats panic through my chest again. The creature with talons and teeth is here too, the wiry tendrils of its sharp claws gripping my heart.
It’s different now, of course, because I know that these feelings come and go, and one day I’ll wake up and they won’t be here, even if it does take me a few days to notice their absence. But when I was sixteen, I didn’t think this would ever change; I couldn’t imagine feeling better or normal, in my limited understanding of the word. Caitlin tried to talk me into getting therapy, confiding that she had done it herself after leaving home, typically taking her anger away to untangle alone. She asked, “What is it that makes you so unhappy?” and I shook my head because I didn’t know. I didn’t think other people felt this way; otherwise, how could they get out of bed every single day, and if they did, it terrified me more, because I couldn’t do it for much longer. But a few days later I would be happy again, excited about the future, and it was up and down like that for years. Mom nicknamed me Hormona, dictated by mood swings and boy mania, and Caitlin made a deal with me that if I didn’t have sex with the next guy I dated for more than six weeks, she’d take me on holiday—which should have worked. I felt this deep internal swelling, something primal and urgent, which I had no idea how to contain. Mom did; as soon as I hit sixteen, she promptly put me on the Pill.
* * *
While writing this book I keep having variations on the same dream. It’s such an obvious metaphor I’m a little ashamed on behalf of my subconscious for not trying harder. I dream I’m at a dinner party held at a long table next to a lake. It’s beautiful here, but nowhere I can place. Dad is sitting next to me, except it’s not Dad; it’s another man, who looks uncannily like Einstein, and I’m trying to explain to him why he’s not my father. In order to do so, in the twisted logic of dreams, I need to retrieve memories of my real father, so I dive into the lake in search of them, each time diving a little deeper into the swampy darkness until I hit my head on the bottom. When I come up for air, I’m bleeding, but I still have to sit there, at this dinner party, talking, explaining myself, with my skull cracked open, wiping the blood from my eyes. I never find what I’m looking for.
Before the end of my stay in Cornwall, I take a break from writing so Mom and I can go to our favorite beach, Pedn Vounder, the beach of childhood holidays now just a walk from Mom’s house. The path bisects the farmer’s field, where the unharvested cabbages have been left to rot, creating a pungent urine stench. We continue into a steep scrappy field where sheep sidestep toward the thicket for protection from the wind. It’s a sharp turn off the coastal path to Pedn, so most people miss it, which often leaves the beach empty. Mom complains that it’s getting too crowded here. “Bloody grockles,” she says, or uses the local Cornish word, “emmet,” from Old English for “ant.” Crawling with emmets. These words we’ve inherited, passed down like good manners or laughter, each standing testimony to a time in our past. I once defended my use of the word “tharn,” meaning a condition of being frozen with fear like a rabbit in the headlights, only to discover it was in fact rabbit-speak from our bedtime reading of Watership Down. Or how Cait and I only learned that it was socially unacceptable to say “pussy” in public once we were adults, because it was all we had ever called it in our household, Mom believing that no word signifying a woman’s anatomy should be derogatory or offensive. In the same way as we’ve inherited these words into our semantic arsenal, so have we inherited these places, the stages on which our past was played out.
We round a corner and see a large standing stone on the cliff edge, something you can touch and feel the breadth and weight of history, its geologic longevity making a mockery of the insignificant span of our lives. After a narrow squeeze where the spray of yellow gorse grows up thick on either side of the path, its honey sun lotion smell surrounding us, we reach the first viewpoint down over the beach.
Mom always said beauty is wasted on children; they don’t see farther than their own noses. Countless car journeys with Cait and Evan squabbling (“Stop torturing your sister!”) or Cait and me in the backseat quoting the entirety of Monty Python’s Holy Grail to amuse ourselves, and all the time Mom crying out from the front “Look around you! Look at this scenery!” We would look out the window and see some hills and greenery and maybe some sheep, none of which impressed us.
But all her efforts at shoving nature in our faces paid off; I stand on the edge of the cliff looking over Pedn and it takes my breath away. A pocket of golden sand tucked between steep stacks of mighty rocks, the sea a perfect, clear aquamarine cutting the beach into patterns as it ebbs and flows, forever afresh and mesmerizing, and it makes me feel like everything is going to be okay.
When we were little and Mom was taking the brunt of our upbringing on her shoulders, the burden of our family secret, I wonder if she drove us the six hours along the motorway down to this perfect beach of hers because when she stood here, she felt like everything was going to be okay too.
Shortly after we had that big fight, Mom and I took a weekend to go to the seaside together, not this beach but another nearby in Devon. I remember we walked back up the coastal path once the afternoon heat had retreated into the sand beneath our feet, leaving the air around us to slowly cool. We sat on the hood of the car to watch the sun set, and I played Smashing Pumpkins’ “Soma” on the tape deck, which was exactly how I felt at that time in my life, and I wanted Mom to hear the song, because perhaps it would help her understand, I thought (not yet having worked out that the way I felt was the same way every teenager has forever felt). As we lay on the red hood of Mom’s old Toyota called Trevor with the music on full blast and Billy Corgan wailing about being all by himself, a sense of equilibrium settled between us for the first time in many months, and I remember the world looked so beautiful, the sun seeping its deep pinks through the shallow waves and the dark shadows settling into the ripples in the sand.
Even though it’s January, by the time Mom and I scrabble down the rocks to the beach, we’re warm enough to dare each other into the sea. We pull off our socks, roll up our jeans, and run into the icy Atlantic water, screaming at the cold, retreating, laughing, egging each other on a little further, as the family of seals watch from a distance, their eyebrows raised mockingly.
* * *
Back at the house, Mom and I make dinner together, slipping into our routines from when we were living just she and I in Forester Road, reveling in the well-worn grooves we once carved out. I make a salad while she rolls the heavy pages of pastry around a bundle of salmon and rice to make koulibiac, an old Russian recipe Grandma once taught her when Mom and Dad were first together in New York. Grandma all but adopted Mom, this waiflike British runaway, into their family. Mom says she remembers once walking in on Grandma and Grandpa taking a nap cuddling like a pair of chubby spoons. They slept entwined like new lovers every night for their entire five-decade-long marriage, and she had never known two people to be in love like that before, her own parents’ marriage ending acrimoniously. Mom only ever settled into love like a cat perched on the end of the bed, willing to be stroked but ready to take flight. At one boarding school they called her the Cat That Walks by Herself, her very own Rudyard Kipling character, walking by her wild lone through the Wet Wild Woods and waving her wild tail, and it became one of her self-reference points, like childhood scars and stories you’ve told so many times you forget the truth of them.
Now that I’m older, this independence inspires me; it makes me less scared for what the future might hold, because if Mom can be happy down here in the boondocks by herself, then maybe one day I can be too. We’ve grown so similar. She’s a few inches taller and my hair is dark, but our shape is the same, our skin too, dry on our shins from the winter cold, cracked like parched earth. We have exactly the same feet and the same hands with our paper-thin nails, and I have a cherry red mole on my inner thigh in the same place as hers.
“Have you decided what you’re doing yet?” Mom asks as we eat.
I shake my head. “No, not really.”
“You better hurry up: your train is in the morning.”
“I have the next three months covered.”
“Well, that’s a start.”
“I’m going to stay with Caity for a month and she’s helping me with the book, and then to Evan’s in London, so I’ll be there when the baby is born”—Mom squeals, excited about the imminent new recruit to the family—“and then back to New York, I guess. I don’t know. When I’m here it’s hard to remember why I go live on the other side of the world.”
“Don’t go!” she says, her voice shrill with enthusiasm. “You can live in Evan’s spare room and be an excellent auntie, and you’ll have this book finished in no time.”
“It’s like I’ve succeeded in completely ungrounding myself,” I continue. “I can live anywhere I want to now, but there’s no specific reason to go anywhere, so I just float, or perhaps tread water is a better metaphor…”
Mom sighs. We’ve been having variations of this same conversation all month. I moved to the States two years ago, because I wanted to know what it meant to be American. I always said I was American when people asked about my muddled accent, even though I hadn’t lived there since I was a baby, and as soon as I arrived in the States, everyone assumed I was British, and now when people ask where I’m from, I don’t know how to answer. My work as a travel writer enables me to go anywhere, but compulsion keeps me moving. Every few months that internal ratcheting up, which I’ve inherited from Mom, grows too pressing to ignore, and before I know what I’m doing, I’m off again. I’ve moved nine times in the past two years alone. I guess I finally succeeded in becoming less attached to things.
“As much as I want you to stay, I think what you need is to get a place of your own, something stable, and stay still for long enough to figure out what you want from life, which it’s very hard to do when you’re constantly negotiating your next move.”
“That’s rich coming from you,” I joke. “I can’t remember a time when you haven’t been house hunting.”
“Yes, but it’s different,” she says, splitting the remaining salad between our plates, giving me the more generous share. “A sense of home is incredibly important to me. I did move around a lot, but when I got somewhere I very much nested. Many of my moves were for financial reasons too—I needed to sell the houses in order for us to have money to live, and on and on.”
“Baby boomer ruining it for the rest of us,” I jibe.
“I was never a natural traveler like you and Caity.”
“I don’t think I’m a natural traveler either. I think it’s just willfulness, like I feel I ought to see everything. I would be happier if I could stay still for five minutes.”
“Go back to New York,” she says decisively, “get an apartment, and just do it. No more of this back-and-forth nonsense.”
I pick at the pie in front of us, cutting away bite by bite rather than helping myself to another slice, feeling anxious. I have the same sense of panic whenever I leave Mom’s, like I haven’t invested enough in being here.
That night we practice our duet one last time. We’ve been playing the same piece on the piano every visit for nearly a decade now. It’s Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G Minor. We start well together, and around page four it starts to sound closer to interpretive jazz, and snorts of laughter break through the huddled quavers. We shout out the numbers of bars, trying to locate each other amid the staves, and by the time I turn the page, one or the other of us is still scrabbling to catch up, but then we’re off again and we cheer. We never get any better, but it doesn’t matter. I imagine we’ll be playing this symphony until one of us drops dead or, worse still, our fingers grow too stiff, but I can’t bear to think of it. I don’t know where my life will circumnavigate back to without Mom to anchor it.
* * *
I wake up early the next morning, because I’m due to catch a train to London, and my brain won’t let me sleep when it knows it’s moving.
Life is reducing back down to that one giant red suitcase.
I make Mom a cup of tea and bring it to her in bed, telling her to “budge up, fatty!” and make room for me. We prop ourselves up on our pillows, teacups in our laps, the dog stretched between us, occasionally wagging her tail in hope of a run, and we natter over the quiet mumble of Radio 4.
This is home, I think.
Right now, this moment.
Through all the moving and the chaos, through everything that happened in our childhood, there was only one constant. Home with a capital H will always be wherever Mom is.