To encourage immunity to my American environment, I was sent to a prep school whose motto was “College Begins at Two.” At that age I was taught to offer my right hand to the school’s headmistress while plucking at the side pleat of my gray jumper with my left and bending my knees. In other words, at two I learned to curtsy like a proper British child. By the time I graduated from high school, I’d worn successive sizes of the same navy wool uniform blazer and white oxford shoes for fifteen years, I’d taken six years of Latin, eaten countless Bird’s custards and Peek Freans and scones spread with Tiptree Seville Orange marmalade. I’d hidden a decade’s worth of smoked tongue sandwiches from my classmates (leaving them in the bottom of my brown lunch bag and throwing them away, still wrapped) and made my way through thousands of Sunday dinners of roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, boiled potatoes, and green beans cooked until they were gray. I spelled color colour and said “tomato” the wrong way, and my grandmother could be assured that I was not an “American Brat.”
Of course, increasingly, I longed to be exactly that. At school I was as desperate as any other child to fit in, and so being American seemed essential. Brattiness, too, offered seductions to a child raised on didactic British storybooks that featured such cautionary heroines as Rude Polly, stigmatized by large Ps and Qs sewn on all her clothing, one for each Please or Thank You she forgot to say. I saved my weekly allotment of television for Friday night’s broadcast of The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family, because the children in those shows seemed so American. Based on reports from classmates, Love, American Style and Laugh-In would have served me even better, but, as my grandmother made clear, those shows were so vulgar that they were broadcast late at night, while decent children were sleeping.
I spent a lot of time alone as a child. The characters in the books I read were very real to me, more than my classmates or neighbors, as were the people in the old photographs in the boxes upstairs: my grandmother and her sister and cousins in Shanghai and in Hong Kong, picnicking on the shores of Japan’s Lake Chusengi, or on Lake Como in the Italian Alps. There were others of my quiet grandfather in Germany’s Black Forest, fishing in British Columbia (where his brother was a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman), or in Anchorage, where, in 1915, he worked as a bookkeeper for the Alaska Engineering Commission.
My grandmother’s directive that I form myself in opposition to my environment was hardly necessary. Already I understood myself as a creature apart from the other children I met. Not only had I sprung from old-world, other-world, grandparents—my mother’s position in relation to me was increasingly sororal, caught as she was in chronic adolescent rebellion—but there was the mystery of my father, whom I never saw and about whom I knew little. If I heard his name, it was in the context of one of the relentless, vicious battles between my mother and my grandmother, arguments that, until I was six and my mother moved out, went on without interruption.
Frightened by the fighting, I took the ready example of my grandmother’s home that opposed the world around it and learned to make a similar home within myself, an interior landscape into which I could disappear with increasing ease. This flight was aided, unexpectedly, by my religious instruction. On weekends I was remanded to my mother, who insisted on Saturday ballet lessons and Christian Science Sunday school. An indoctrination that stressed mind over matter with chilling effectiveness, Christian Science was something she’d inherited from my Jewish grandfather, who had been married before, to a Christian Scientist with whom he fell in love when he was twenty-five and living in Anchorage. She died and, perhaps as a form of clandestine mourning, he kept her faith; he passed it on to the child of his second wife, my mother.
This is me, this is you. This is me, this is you. I would whisper this to myself as I sat at the kitchen table, eating breakfast. Or perhaps I only thought the words: a first prayer, a determination to draw a line between myself and the two women I loved. Christian Science doctrine ennobled my desire to ignore anything in my environment that troubled me; it raised denial, that most primitive of human defenses, to a form of worship.
If it became dangerous later on, living inside my head served me well as a young child. I was happy when immersed in fantasy, in storybooks and, later, textbooks. And I loved school, where I was encouraged to be self-contained and where I grew increasingly agile at expressing myself in words, especially those written on paper. It was in school that I began to create another home—abstract and lacking in material dimension, but utterly manipulable by me—on the page.
When I was eleven we moved from our shabby big house to a smaller one in a less expensive neighborhood. The move was postponed until my grandparents could no longer pay their property taxes, let alone keep the place in repair. My grandfather, whose genius for numbers, for fast and accurate calculation, was paired with profound naïveté, had invested their savings unwisely, buying faltering stocks and turning down a chance to make millions. Given the opportunity, in the forties, to buy a corner lot on the Las Vegas Strip, he decided against it, considering the place too crass and tawdry to ever catch on. And my extravagant mother, who could always solicit a loan as a surrogate for love, had been wasting money with a vengeance.
The new house was, I thought, ugly. It lacked the imaginative details of the one we left, the house my grandparents helped to design and that included hidden cupboards and leaded glass windows made from the round green and brown and blue bottoms of old bottles. The light from these windows poured color into halls and the old foyer, which had a floor of highly polished flagstone, a red and purple Bokhara rug just inside the big front door. This rug was laid on the stones without a pad between, and many times each year someone came in the door and immediately slipped and fell on the shining floor. I’d heard the plumber’s skull hit with a thud separate from the impact of his metal toolbox; I’d watched Aunt Pat’s purse pop open and spray forth a glittering shower of pillboxes, loose change, lipsticks, smelling salts, gold comb, and a matching compact. Once it was the pediatrician, Dr. Aldrich, fat and sly and sadistic—he’d hide a syringe behind his back and ask if I’d like a “surprise”— but, regretfully, I missed his fall, confined to bed with yet another case of tonsillitis. The three of us, my mother and grandfather and I, were supposed to be Christian Scientists, but my grandmother didn’t believe in Mind Over Matter. In fact, she found matter ascendant. When I had a fever she called the doctor.
Matter over mind: the rug looked beautiful on the polished stone floor and there it stayed. “But why didn’t she put something underneath, to keep it from slipping?” a friend asked, years later. I shrugged. It was a reasonable question, but one applied to an unreasonable house. She never did. She was kind to the victims, offered ice wrapped in a towel, ginger ale, cups of tea, pieces of shortbread, but the rug, like an outsized banana peel, remained where it was.
In its whimsy, the first house encouraged escapism; the second was just another landscape. To pay off debts, my grandmother sold most of her antiques and carpets—including the murderous one in the foyer—and replaced them with more practical and serviceable things. Long spoiled by eccentricity, both in family and furnishings, I found the attempt at convention confusing. For a year after we moved, I woke up in the morning and didn’t recognize my new room with its pale blue rug and one too few windows. The worst of it was the wallpaper chosen by my mother, with climbing vines of huge roses made sinister by the botanical exactitude of their stems and leaves, their saber-like thorns. Realistic or not, the thorns offered the paper no protection; within a few years it was hanging in shreds around the two “cat trees” in my room, feline gymnasiums from whose highest perches kittens rappelled down what was left of the drapes, using their claws to catch threads and swing to the floor.
Even when the cat population dipped to eight or nine, there were always two warring factions. An older generation had full run of the house, with the exception of those rooms in which the younger animals were corralled: my bedroom during the day, and the den during the night. These two rooms were separated by a staircase, up and down which the cats were herded with the incentive of a meal awaiting them at their destination. Transfers were dramatic, if not exactly eventful. Real skirmishes between the older and younger packs were rare, but my histrionic grandmother screamed a lot anyway. “Oh Schatzie! Oh Jessica! Oh Tomita! Come here! Oh! Oh! She’s got her by the neck!” In my role as grudging shepherdess, I sometimes drove one herd into another, hoping for diversion, but no more than hisses were exchanged. The cat wars were largely imagined by my combative grandmother. Perhaps, in my mother’s absence, the house was too quiet for her.
Of course, my grandmother and I had our own fights, especially about what she considered my abnormal social life, her fears that I was a lesbian. Like her sister, Cecily, whose homosexual love affairs had stigmatized her family, I was bookish and seemingly disinterested in boys, two sure predictors of lesbianism as far as my grandmother was concerned. And I never invited my friends over to our house—not because, as she suspected, we were hiding shameful intimacies, but because there was too much to explain at my house. Too much that was impossible to explain. Tandem litter boxes—three pairs—were one thing, embarrassing but hardly noteworthy in comparison to the bits of raw meat stuck to the door frames, the chairs, and any intact wallpaper. For her cats my grandmother ordered pounds of beef heart and lambs’ kidneys from the butcher and picked it up fresh every other day, and she cut the meat by hand into little pieces. Raw organ meat has an adhesive quality, and she got the stuff on her hands and her sleeves, so that she unknowingly anointed whatever she subsequently touched with flecks of raw meat that dried and stuck with surprising tenacity. If I tried to peel one off the wall, the paper came with it.
No one ever won a fight with my grandmother, and as I was as stubborn as she, our inevitable conflicts ended in a draw, always the same, no matter how the argument began. She’d scream, “I took you in! I took you in! You ungrateful girl! Don’t you understand, I took you in!” And I’d yell back, “Why don’t you throw me out then! Just throw me out! I wish you would!”
Sometimes we were less articulate. My grandmother was superstitious and considered opening an umbrella in the house far more unlucky than breaking a mirror or walking under a ladder. Once, in the throes of a wild rage, I seized my grandfather’s big black umbrella from the hall closet, pointed its tip at her heart, and opened it. She screamed and staggered so dramatically that I did it again. And again. Summoned from the garden by the noise inside the house, my grandfather found us, each clinging to one end of the half-furled umbrella. Laughing and crying at once, I had the handle, while she, supporting herself with a chair back, held the point, directing it, like a loaded pistol, away from her body. “I took her in!” she gasped.
“Throw me out!”
We said these things, but (or because) there was no place else I could live. The first time my mother had an apartment that included a room for me was the year I went away to college. I used the room’s closet to store clothes I no longer wore, a gesture we both understood as polite. My mother, who never remarried, had for years been locked in a relationship with an alcoholic who never divorced his wife, with whom he had a son my age, a male mirror to my fury and alienation. Not that John and I ever saw one another. We never once shared a meal with his father and my mother. I think all of us suspected we were unequal to the charade of family.
To illustrate how difficult a child John was, my mother told me that he had stolen all the silverware from his mother’s kitchen and sold it back to her as she needed it, piece by piece. “Can’t we ever get together?” I asked, not the response my mother had imagined—and we didn’t—but for years I fantasized about such a meeting, the chance to congratulate John or, better still, apprentice myself to the mastermind of so elegant a campaign of manipulation.
I understand now, as I did not in the days that I was treading carefully over her carpets that bore fresh vacuum tracks, that superficial order was what my mother needed to shroud the waste of her youth and beauty and intelligence. At the time, she made me feel like Pig Pen from the Peanuts comic strip, someone around whom swirled clouds of dust and grime. When I looked into her mercilessly polished mirrors, I never saw a face but a composite of mascara smudges, stray hairs, and misplaced freckles. I slept at my mother’s only a few times, and on each of those nights home from college, after she’d gone to bed I’d lock myself in the bathroom, sit on the counter with my feet in the sink, and squeeze clogged pores on my nose and chin until they bled, something I couldn’t do in a cramped dorm room or the vast and drafty communal bathrooms.
I took three years off between college and graduate school. During those years, both my mother and my grandfather were dying. It was time given to memorizing rather than to grief, which makes its own appointments. I was trying to learn all I could of what—who—would be taken from me. I wanted to be left with at least an accounting of what was lost. But the deathwatch required a sort of self-imposed anesthesia. What I felt penetrated only so far; I didn’t allow it to touch me, hidden as I was, deep inside myself.
One day I came home from the hospital to have tea with my grandmother, but when I entered the kitchen, my grandmother didn’t have the kettle on the stove, there were no cups or cookies on the table. She held a sheaf of papers in her lap. “Why didn’t you ever show me these!” she said.
I shrugged. “What are they?”
“I found them in your desk. Years worth! And you never showed me one. Why?”
I took what she handed to me: twenty-four gold honor roll certificates, one earned each quarter of every school year from the seventh grade through the twelfth. “I don’t know,” I said.
But I remembered bringing them home from school and, without showing them to anyone, hiding them in the drawer of the desk where I’d earned them. When the stack got too high, I threw out the thick envelopes in which each had been presented. My life at school, an interior life, writing papers and earning the grades that ultimately made me valedictorian, was private. I did my homework alone, behind closed doors, and when my grandfather offered me rewards for straight A’s, I turned them down. They were mine, those A’s, and couldn’t be bought. Report cards, certificates, letters of acceptance to colleges and universities—had my grandmother looked, she would have found these in another drawer—were documents of a life I guarded against my family.
“I’m surprised you went through my desk,” I said, and my grandmother put her face in her hands and cried.
In graduate school I met the man I would marry, though when I arrived in Iowa City I was preoccupied with the past, hardly acknowledging a future, which, in any case, I was too tired to consider. I went to the university housing office to pick up a list of possible rooms to rent. The first, owned by Mrs. K., a widow, was listed at $140 a month, furnished. It was on the top floor of her small clapboard house on Ronald Street, and its ceiling sloped steeply over the twin bed on one side and the chest of drawers on the other, so steeply that you couldn’t prop a mirror on the dresser, nor could you sit up in bed to read. The bed’s frame was iron and evoked sanitoria dormitories; its mattress was very soft. Getting out would mean rolling out, toward the center of the room, where the ceiling was higher. The room’s molding, baseboard, and doors were all painted mustard yellow, a choice inspired, I concluded, by the wallpaper, whose design of black and green and brown and yellow paisley was so hideous that it made my big shredded roses, still hanging in my grandmother’s house, look almost pretty. The walls and ceiling of the room were covered in bilious swirls printed unevenly on the paper, their black outlines missing their colored middles by as much as a quarter of an inch. To look more than passingly at this two-dimensional rendering of nausea, or of desperate depression, induced eyestrain and then vertigo.
The toilet and shower were on the first floor, which Mrs. K. shared with the downstairs boarder, a slight Korean woman studying engineering—I never learned her name. And there was, Mrs. K. showed me, an auxiliary toilet in the spider-infested basement. Set in the middle of the cracked and sweating concrete floor, among cobwebbed boxes and broken, mildewed chairs, it had a plastic shower curtain that could be drawn around it for privacy.
The pinched bedroom, its awful wallpaper, the visit to the dank basement: none of these galvanized me, as they would today, into a search for a less dispiriting home. Instead, Mrs. K.’s basement seemed to leach the last reserves of my energy; climbing back into the light, I realized I didn’t have whatever it might take to save myself from another home so peculiar and embarrassing that I wouldn’t consider asking friends over.
I signed a year’s lease, agreeing to take the room and thus to share a tiny kitchen and eating area with A., the other upstairs boarder. A. had the nicer bedroom, painted blue with a large window alcove and hanging plants. The week I moved in, A. was visiting her family, so all I could glean of her was that suggested by the few personal effects in the blue bedroom. The bookshelf by the bed, neatly made, tucked tight, held a King James translation of the Bible, eleven self-help books, one Adele Davis cookbook, a variety of analgesics, and a box of pink scented Kleenex. On the back of her door hung pajamas and a plaid bathrobe. When A. herself arrived, she told me she had been an undergraduate for seven years, so far, without declaring a major. I soon learned that the work that A. found more engrossing than her studies was the maintenance of a detailed health log, a daily, sometimes hourly journal of her premenstrual symptoms, and a condition newly identified by American doctors: TMJ, or temporal-mandibular-joint syndrome, which A. believed was contributing to her incapacitating headaches.
A. didn’t share the journal’s entries with me, but she left it open on the table at which we ate our separate meals. And, as this seemed to me a tacit invitation, I read the entries, as many as I could stand. Then I went into my room and lay on Mrs. K.’s iron bed and looked at the paisley wallpaper and observed that, for the first time in my life, I lived in an environment that reflected how I felt, at least in those months following my mother’s death, when I was as flat and dizzy, as unfocusedly black and brown and green and yellow as the terrible walls around me. I went to classes, did the work required of me, socialized halfheartedly with other students, walked up and down and around the few streets of the college town, often not seeing houses or people or even the twisting river because my mind filled abruptly with an intimate and frightening clutter of bedpans, catheters, sores that would not heal, oxygen tubes and pills of all colors, enough medication to require a written dosage schedule; it was too complicated to rely on memory. All of these scrolled through my head silently, like slides.
At Mrs. K.’s house, I closed my bedroom door behind me, coming out only at night, while A. and Mrs. K. and the Korean girl slept. I made tea on the burner and drank it at the little table placed between refrigerator and sink. If there had been an oven, I would have done what my grandmother forbade, set it to broil and rested my feet on its open door. I examined the food A. kept on her shelf of the refrigerator. Sometimes I tasted what she brought home from her parents’ house, slices of turkey and cold potatoes left over from family dinners. I’d peel away an inconspicuous shred of flesh and chew it slowly. Rather than go downstairs or into the horrible basement, I peed in the sink—an acrobatic transgression, I had to climb onto the counter and over the dish drainer—and by that feral gesture I made the kitchen mine.
I felt a mean delight in doing something I knew would horrify A., whom I had begun to hate for losing herself in obsessive worries about her body. Would I have had more compassion for her suffering were I not myself enduring the tenth year of chronically relapsing anorexia, my own secret notebooks given over to calories consumed, exercise accomplished. “Ten years,” I’d whisper to my reflection in the mirror. “Ten,” trying to frighten the woman I saw, the one who had spent a decade within the careful confines of self-denial, a decade within a deliberate internal architecture assembled to protect and contain. I hated A. because she provided a vision of myself more valid, and damning, than what I saw in Mrs. K.’s mirror, its silver backing peeling off in circles and offering a fragmented image, unreliable as that cast back by a pond’s ruffled surface.
Can you see yourself in a mirror the way you can in someone’s eyes? When, on our third date, my future husband came up Mrs. K.’s stairs, Colin’s expression of surprise and, worse, pity made me abruptly aware of the room in which I lived. He spent one night on the awful bed, and the next morning he handed me his house key. We never discussed our living together before I moved in, any more than we talked about marriage or parenthood before they were done. Certainly we loved one another, but we’d loved other people. Our bond was that we recognized each other, completed one another. I knew with whom, if not how, to make a home, and took it as a betrothal when we shelved our books together and discarded the duplicates.
We moved from Iowa to New York with a small U-Haul truck filled with boxes of books, a bed, two desks, and five thrift-store chairs—all of which were together worth less money than it cost to transport them. Their value was that they were ours, they were what we shared. Colin drove the truck; I flew ahead of him to find an apartment in New York City. I had five days. The place I chose was in Brooklyn and included a tiny garden in which Colin grew tomatoes and basil, cucumbers, zucchini, and even a few token ears of Iowa corn. The garden was crowded, but inside, the few rooms were only half filled by our things. A friend donated a couch; we bought a table and bookshelves at IKEA: bland things of unpainted wood. The apartment never transcended its haphazard, junky quality, and we lived in it for only two years.
As we sat together at Colin’s parents’ dining table, addressing envelopes for wedding invitations, Colin’s mother suggested that I register for gifts. There were so many things we needed, and others that we didn’t. I agreed, very tepidly, and put off the chore because (I thought) I was uncomfortable suggesting to friends and family what they might buy for us. But wasn’t the deeper discomfort that I had little sense, really, of what made a household? When a friend, the same who gave us her couch, realized that I might never accomplish the trip alone, she forcibly accompanied me to Bloomingdale’s, where vistas of beds and sofas invited stupor. I walked behind Lori, resisting the urge to take her hand. How easy to sink into cushions, fall as deeply asleep as Dorothy in the narcotic embrace of the poppy field separating her from Oz’s Emerald City, and from what she longs for: to find her way home.
Beyond beds were housewares, table after table set with empty plates and glasses and looking to me like a judgment: a sneering jibe at someone who so many times had refused food, especially in company. If what I ended up selecting proved useful, it was only that I responded, zombielike, to sensible promptings.
Once we were married, Colin and I moved into a brown-stone that my grandmother helped us to buy and that included a ground-floor apartment in which she lived for the last two years of her life. Her furniture, shipped east from Los Angeles, overflowed its rooms into those above, and it wasn’t until we built a house on the north fork of Long Island that, for the first time in my life, I had to face the task of filling an empty house. It was a second home, a place to be used only during the summer and for weekends, but still, we needed furniture on which to sleep, sit, eat. We needed shower curtains, wastebaskets, wineglasses. We needed a refrigerator and a stove. Though I was in my thirties, the mother of two children, though the summer house was to be the fifth home I shared with my husband, I’d never before had to consider all that went into a home. What was required, and what was comfort. I showed little aptitude for the task. I bought appliances and beds, a secondhand dining table, chairs, and couch, and then inertia set in. Or was it paralysis?
Five years later, I’d made little progress. In apology for the missing chests of drawers, I gave everyone a twelve-pack of plastic hangers from the supermarket. What clothes we couldn’t hang or throw over closet rods, we dropped on the floor. I left my underwear and nightgown in my overnight bag, as if to announce what I felt: that I’d only just arrived. The children, who, as it turned out, were not yet tall enough to reach the hangers, each had a box to hold underwear, pajamas, clothes.
I could have bought dressers at IKEA, where Colin and I went to buy beds, but I didn’t want all the furniture to match; I thought it would look like we lived in a motel. At least that’s what I told Colin afterward, but at IKEA I was speechless. I fought the dangerous desire to lie down in the guise of testing the firmness of a mattress and tried to complete one of the little white forms we were given at the entrance to the immense warehouse. It looked like a scorecard for miniature golf, and came with a stubby, eraserless pencil but was intended to be filled with the stock numbers of the items we wanted. Colin asked me questions, simple ones like: “How about this?” which I met in glazed silence. At some point he took off alone, in frustration, and I sat in a chair the color of oatmeal and watched the children, who used bunk beds as gym equipment, until he returned and I gave him my scorecard, unchanged from when he last looked it over.
The one room of the summer house that I outfitted fully was the one in which I wrote. It had a table and a chair, a shelf for books. A neighbor, after visiting several times and noting that the walls remained unadorned, invited me to select what I wanted of her paintings, stored in her basement. Sensing my inertia, she escorted me home with three and watched as I drove nails into the plaster.
“How about here?” she said, trying to guide my hammer to the blank white wall of the study that my chair faced. But I resisted. I didn’t dislike her painting, an abstract of red and blue, but I hung it on the wall I never see, the one at my back.
I still live in my work. I make the page my home, just as I did when a schoolgirl, writing book reports, history essays. I carry drafts of novels out to dinner, the movies, even the market. When I travel, I open my folders on planes and trains and in unfamiliar rooms in countries whose languages and food are unknown, and I feel at home, immediately comfortable.
There are dangers to interior castles, I know. I find my thoughts return to the one frank conversation I had with my mother in the last year of her life. In trying to explain why she had always been so remote, my mother told me that inside herself she had discovered a fortress, assembled brick by psychic brick to defend herself against my grandmother. “The problem is,” she said, starting to cry, “I don’t know the way out. I’m stuck inside myself.”
What were they made of, my mother’s internal walls? An obsession with order and cleanliness, with polished surfaces and tasteful things placed just so. An opera aria—Puccini not Wagner—a shimmering edifice of perfectly rendered female notes: emotion she could enjoy without owning, enjoy because it was not hers. A hollandaise even better than the last and the right wine to complement it. My mother’s was a system, like my own anorexia, that delivered safety in perfection, and that purposefully left no openings.
And what of a writer’s walls of language? Must I remain vigilant to ensure that what I’ve built inside myself continues to be a home and not a trap? Is it safe to assume that if words can make a wall, they can also make a door, the passage out, or, for readers, in?