A gangly, silver-haired man wearing a pastel sports jacket and khakis secured by a nylon, Boy-Scout-beige belt floats into the row in front of me and sits down. He removes from his messenger bag the necessary provisions. A distressed, leather-bound notebook. A weighty-looking, black-and-gold pen with the circumference of a small spyglass. A thick manuscript swollen with a map of coffee stains, its bottom-right page corners curled up and over like breaking waves.
And a tin of Altoids.
He swivels his chair to face me, hoists one tanned, bare-ankled, boat-shoed leg over the other, tacks his head slightly to the right, and drapes an arm over the back of his chair, leaving his hand loose and dangling and carefree.
I can’t tell if we’re about to make writerly small talk or sail the Amalfi Coast together while drinking Prosecco.
“So,” he begins in his sandy Southern drawl, “what is your book about?”
I look down at my empty legal pad and plain Bic pen. “Oh, I’m not writing anything. I’m just here to soak things up, learn some stuff.”
His face contorts with confusion. I have knocked the wind from his sails.
“But, don’t you want to be published? Why else would you be at this writers conference?”
I tilt my head and take him in. I wonder if he wants the real answer. The one with the locked attic door, the ribbons of paper, the chipped crystal, the shattered glass, the soaked carpet, the bare walls, the trembling hands.
The launching of inanimate objects.
Shall I tell Less Likeable Andy Griffith about the night that brought me here? The night I made the pieces of my past fly?
I would need to start with some background. I would need to begin by telling him—and this is where the conversation would get dicey, where he would begin to regret his question—that my mother fits at least six of the nine DSM-V criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and that there is a solid argument to be made for a seventh.
That, because being a writer means needing other people to read and appreciate your work—requires, in my reductive mind, some level of narcissism—the whole endeavor of doing the thing that I love most requires that I wrestle my genetic fears to the mat like a wily MMA fighter.
That some days, I just want to abandon writing and work for the Internal Revenue Service, where no one cares about being liked.
Should I tell him how confusing it is to be raised by a narcissist? That, when you are always thinking about how not to become a narcissist, you kind of become one by default? Georgia said as much when she disowned me, and she is the expert, after all.
You think you’re better than all of us, she told me.
Do you think you’re special?
“Do you think you’re special?” is what my new friend Andy would probably ask me, rolling his eyes to the fluorescent heavens above. “This is a writer’s conference. Everyone here has mommy issues.”
I suppose I could present Mr. Coastal Living with the list of ways I have ghosted my own life because I have had no answers for the riddle of me, the problem of her, the identity she has tried to define. Or I could just quote her directly.
We used to have a writer in the family.
It’s not like you’re actually a journalist anymore.
Obviously, Randy’s time is worth more than yours.
I could tell him that I am bruised inside, but I am healing. That I am trying to find my way back to writing. That I have come here to rescue myself, and I am so, so close to the shore. That I have built a lifeboat, and I am here to see who would like to climb inside it with me.
But I sense that Matlock is not ready for all of this.
Instead, I chirp: “I mean, if I’m happy with what I write, why does it matter if anyone else reads it?”
His eyes paint themselves with horror and repulsion at my bullshit response. He spins his chair ever so slowly away from me as though one false move will bring a contagion of irrelevance to every writer in the room.
I laugh. There goes our trip to the Amalfi Coast.
***
The instructor for our session on “Writing Objects” arrives; she is about my age. She has written a beautiful book about the passing of her antique-store-owner parents, and about the stories they left behind in their collection.
She wants to know what we think about legacies. What we would write about legacies.
“What happens when the history and generational connection of an item is disrupted? Does it mean the same thing in your house as it did in your grandmother’s? Does it lose its value if it leaves your family? Does it lose its influence if it loses you?”
Family heirlooms have been making me twitchy of late. If my place in my family was a myth, if it could be so easily discarded, surely its totems were falsehoods, also. I didn’t want to carry that past anymore, and I didn’t want my children to one day carry the hurt of mine.
“Sometimes, objects can be items we want to part with,” I say. “And that is their meaning.”
“Absolutely,” she agrees. “Who has examples of that?”
Me. I have examples of that.
Weeks earlier, during one particularly stormy night after my excommunication, I had gone to my attic office. I passed a beloved photograph hanging in the stairwell of my father and me, the only family-of-origin photo I have not yet removed from my walls and tables. I am 3 years old and my dad has boosted me into the sky so I can better see the Bicentennial parade. My mother despises this photograph.
I adore it.
I patted its frame with affection, and then I closed the door behind me.
The bookshelves behind my desk held dozens of stories I had loved or learned from, with cover images I had memorized. I could trace my dreamer’s life across their broken spines, picturing the porch swings and L trains and quiet corners I had read them in.
But intruding among these chapters of who I had always been were traces of who I no longer was, objects I had held onto out of obligation rather than identity.
A heart-shaped crystal box engraved with my initials perched in front of my copy of A Room With a View. I held the small, weighty box in my palm. It was empty and still gleaming after more than 30 years, with no imperfections. A gift for some occasion from my parents—high school graduation, perhaps. It was the sort of thing I never knew what to do with except pack and unpack and repack it across every city and dorm room and apartment and home I’d ever known. It seemed a precious thing I should hold dear, but all it had ever done was sit idle, waiting for the light to grab it.
I closed my fingers around the heart and pitched it hard across the room, tweaking my shoulder. I was shaking. I knelt on the floor behind my desk and let something wholly unfamiliar come alive in me. I began to pull every memory from its hiding place.
And I began to destroy them one by one.
Does it lose its influence if it loses you?
All my life, I had made myself small, governed by hesitant emotions. I had questioned my body’s right to align with its feelings, to be wild or seething or scandalous. My muscles had never learned how to scream and tear and kick to fight for my soul. I was startled by how little my limbs had known of this purpose, how odd their movements now felt alongside the maroon-black flares in my heart. How could one person be filled with such magma for so long without sweeping away every physical thing in her midst? How was anything around me still standing? How was I?
I had stashed a picture of my parents under a bookcase weeks ago; I plucked the frame from its hiding place, heaved it across the room, and watched the glass explode into chunks near the heart.
I lifted a crystal paperweight in the shape of a cupcake, also a gift from my mother, and launched it with as much violence as I could muster in the same direction.
I kept going.
I pulled a book of sonnets with a vaguely poetic name, like The Beauty of Love, from my shelf. According to its inscription, my mother had given it to me for Christmas in 1994.
“Writing is your thing,” is what Georgia used to tell me when I was younger. “We’re related to Shakespeare on my side, you know.”
The book’s thick, plastic-coated pages were scented, and the Victorian lady in the painting that graced its cover looked as bored with me now in my animal-like descent as she had since we had entered this arranged custodianship. She had not liked me as a goody-two-shoes or a grad student or a new mother, and she did not care much for me now that I was a middle-aged woman spiraling out of control and swearing with alacrity. Frankly, I did not appreciate the judgmental look on her face or how she insisted on living in the past. I thought her tiny, cinched waist was ludicrous.
We looked at one another, nodded our loveless goodbyes, and moved on — she to the wastebasket, me to bigger prey.
Writing is your thing, she told me, before it truly became my thing. My North Star. Something reliable that could save me. Like a map or a lifeboat. A thing: difficult to understand, to describe, to hold onto.
Like love.
Hiding between a volume from a 1995 Edward Hopper exhibit and Interpreter of Maladies was a small quote book called The Wisdom of Mothers. As a rule, I do not assault books; I could not even bring myself to tear up a school workbook. Books have always been flesh and paper to me, and I carry them like porcelain dolls.
But this one …
I ran my fingers slowly over it with last-rites solemnity. And then I ripped its elfin pages out in ravenous chunks. I tore them again in halves, in quarters, as small as my trembling fingers could manage. I severed the innards from the spine and scattered them like confetti. It was a wild act for a good and quiet girl like me, tempestuous and murderous and somehow euphoric. I reveled in each rip. At last, I aimed at its dark green hardcover, where the dedication inside read, “To Elizabeth, From Mom With Love.” I strained and strained to pull its spectacularly strong binding apart and did not stop until my tears splotched its shredded remains.
What happens when the history and generational connection of an item is disrupted?
A box of old greeting cards.
I fished out a thank you note from 2017. There she was, thanking me for helping her after her knee surgery, for making her banana bread, for the hours spent by her side. Reading the first few lovely lines in her proper cursive, I felt a softening, guilt at what I wanted to do with that folded piece of cardboard.
I kept reading.
“Nice to know I created such a thoughtful daughter,” she wrote at the end with a haughty flourish.
I was about to tear it down the middle like an unsolicited credit card offer. But then the next card in the box looked up at me and begged … whispered … soothed:
Wait.
To My Granddaughter, it read.
My grandmothers’ shaky, angular penmanship, the struggle to mark their love as they aged, was so beautiful I wanted to cry. Their jagged signatures were somehow closer links to them than the photographs I owned, words that were worth a thousand images in my mind.
I wondered if they had ever known these feelings, the twisted-up specters of anger that had been following me around, trying to be heard while the world was shushing me and telling me to behave, to get in line. I wondered if these ghosts were a terrible hand-me-down. I wondered if they were the legacy of all the women in my family: My mother’s mother, whose own mom died when she was 10, leaving her rudderless.
My father’s mother, who everyone whispered had suffered a nervous breakdown after the divorce. Did she? Or was her only struggle raising three boys in the home of her domineering father because she couldn’t afford a place of her own?
Who got to write her story? Because I know she didn’t get to tell it herself.
My own mother. Bullied. Belittled. Intractable. Talented. Fierce. Born underestimated. Tortured by envy. Always wanting her due. Coming of age in a world that believed her body did not belong to her, a world she confoundingly defended, a world she still defends. Coming of age in a time and a place where no one told her to chase her dreams, to read books on the L, to get a room with a view, to bet on herself even if no one else would. A place where no one dared her to turn the narrative upside down.
Did she look back at her limits and grow resentful of her youngest daughter’s generational luck? Am I anywhere near as tough as her? Because, damn—what my mother could have done if she had been given the chance.
And who would I become in this line of grief? What was my part in this legacy of lost women? What about my children, their lives?
What would I do with my mother’s erasure of me?
I looked around. I had knocked over a three-legged side table in the corner when I threw the cupcake, and a puddle of water from an overturned cup now gathered among the shards of broken glass and torn bits of paper that littered the room. I was proud of my mess.
I climbed up to my desk chair, found a notebook and a good, flowing pen, and bled myself onto the page as I had not done in years. What sunk into that pulp was a choppy stream of consciousness, all bitterness and bile and chum: short, salty lines of repressed sorrow, an old child’s pain burning and then peeling under a hot new sun.
I thought it was about my mother, what I wrote. But it was about her mother, too, and her mother before that, and all the mothers who polished and gleamed and chained themselves to what little they were given.
And it was for all the daughters who watched them, who felt them, grasping for control of their own stories.
It was a lifeboat. My thing.
Do Not Touch (a mother’s instructions)
The piano. The Wedgwood plates. The Victorian figurines. The music box. The crystal bowl. The candy dish. The brass sconces. The ceramic vase. The embroidered pillow. The cream-colored couch. The curtain sheers The cherry coffee table. This room.
The centerpiece The candles The good china The company silverware The crystal glasses This facade
Your purse, grocery bag, platter, or phone on my clean counter. Your unwashed Diet Coke can to your mouth. Your dirty phone to your face. Your sweating water glass on my sofa arm. Your hiking boots on my stairs My padlock on your liberation.
Anything with downy ears and four legs. Anything that moves in nature. Anything covered in muck. Anything blowing in the wind.
My dulling reflection. My hazy faults. My broken bits. My lost shards. My big white lies. My phantom hurts. My distant dreams. My thin skin. My false ego. My true self.
Me.