I called it my Vagabond Year, imagined it as an journey of rebirth and renewal, though some part of me knew it was also a flight from a self turning 60 with disappointed dreams. I’d spent a summer in New Zealand while the States went through winter. Then a second summer traveling around the United States to all the places I’d lived in my life. After a few weeks on the East Coast at my sister’s house readying for my launch across the Atlantic. I planned to finish my wandering year in Europe where my family still had ties and where I’d been happy studying and living abroad.
I watched the trees drop their foliage as I packed bags for my immanent departure. The weather may still have been hot, but the autumnal rains had come, pounding the leaves into mulch, burying the seeds and berries. As the leaves that hid their nature fell away, the trees announced themselves, their weight, their strength. All their budding, greening, and withering was just for show. The truth was in the sky peeping through or shining past the upright sentinels like the rays behind the heads of saints. When the branches were bare, the dance between them was clear. Subject and space carving patterns of wood and light.
My October 2 birthday loomed, the big 60, while I lingered at my sister’s house alone. She’d gone on a trip with a friend, and they wouldn’t be back by the actual day. So I did what I’ve done more and more as I get older: I decided to take a solo trip and make a solitary celebration. I rented a car to go visit my alma mater in Williamsburg and drove off in the rainy morning mist.
I’d lived in Williamsburg twice. My family moved there when I was 2 and left when I was 7. Ten years later, I returned for college.
The childhood memories are fractured and spare. My brother, Mikey, figured large in them, larger than my sisters being closer to my age. In the 50s haven of a brand new house in the new Skipwith Farms development, when I was four and my brother was nine we played unsupervised outside in the wooded lot next to our house.
Mikey had a BB gun and hunted birds. I tagged along with what in memory was a dreamlike quiet and floating detachment. We visited the corpses of past kills and he hunted for new ones. I learned the phases of bird decay as they returned to the earth bit by bit. I cannot find the remnant of any thought I had looking at the dead birds. Perhaps I shut my wondering mind because of what I might see. My young self, like my grown self, was small and quick. My voice light and high. I still chatter aimlessly like a bird sometimes. I was a surprise baby and had dethroned the young king at 5, and I suppose his heart still resented what I took from him.
There was my mother’s dog, a Welsh Terrier named Belle. She bit my father once when he was raging at my mother. My father never forgave the dog, even after she chased off an intruder who came with smiling menace into our house while my mother and I were there alone. The sound of Belle’s low growl and her nails scrabbling on the hardwood floor upstairs sent the man out the door in a hurry. My mother adored her but when we moved away, my father insisted we leave her behind. My mother found a farm where the widow doted on her, but still she wept bitterly over leaving Belle behind.
This was the second abandonment my mother agreed to. The first was of my eldest brother, Joe Paul, who had gotten meningitis at six months and the fever fried his brain. Mother spoke of the light dulling in his eyes, of the doctor weeping and telling her he would always be a “vegetable.” She kept J.P. at home, refusing to institutionalize him as a baby. J.P did learn to walk eventually with a lurching gait, canted to one side but upright on his own. He learned to speak and dress and every picture of him shows a happy boy. We now know it was the institutions that robbed even undamaged children of growth. Certainly, the heroic efforts of my mother allowed him to fill out as much of his potential as remained. By age fourteen he had developed to about a four-year-old level and could speak and walk and dress on his own.
But just before we moved to Williamsburg, at the urging of the family to consider the happiness of her other four children, Mother agreed to have him institutionalized. This was in part because J.P. was entering puberty and my mother was not sure how to handle it. But also because of the times. Handicapped children were not seen or heard of in 1950’s middle-class America, as if they didn’t exist. So the family minus one had packed up and headed south.
My college years in Williamsburg were, by contrast, a remarkably uninteresting time. I was only 16, vain to have matriculated so young but otherwise having no idea why I was in college. I went because to not go would disappoint my parents. I majored in drama, secure in the expectation that I would be welcomed and nurtured as I had been in high school. The theater department did have its stars, but I was not one of those few students the faculty designated as talented. I did have an amazing year, a period of enormous growth, when I spent my junior year in Montpellier, France. But really, I couldn’t wait to graduate, certain that once I left, I’d never set foot in a classroom again.
For all these layers of personal history in Williamsburg, returning there on my 60th birthday was a hollow experience. The Wonder Bread world of the 50s was as gone as Shakespearean England. I had lived it but could not relive it. The house in Skipwith Farms was stately with age, the wooded bird graveyard had a house on it. As for the people in those memories, only my two sisters remained of my birth family. My anchors to the childhood era - my brother, my parents -had evaporated.
I visited the theater building where I spent most of my undergraduate years. It was too early in the semester for the frenzied preproduction activity that would keep students and faculty there at all hours. I wandered through the empty rehearsal rooms, scanned the walls of photographs from past productions, finding the black and white ones of shows I had been in. They were flat and faded like some Depression Era artifact.
The theater stage was dark, with only the lone ghost light shining from center stage. Undergraduate school was a time of intense emotional pain for me, no doubt mostly self-inflicted with of the misery of unmet desires. There again, at the remove of decades, I found a null space. It turns out the the residue of misery is nothingness. Emptiness. As if misery eats the years where it lived leaving nothing behind but stolen time.
It was raining when I walked out in the evening. I drove into Colonial Williamsburg and treated myself to a birthday dinner at Chownings Tavern. The costumed performers, theater students from the college no doubt, played minstrel and server. I ate alone and paid, taking no souvenirs.
Susan diRende’s writing has received recognition from the Philip K Dick Awards, Artists Trust, the Seattle Arts Commission among others. Her artwork has been in shows in New Zealand, Belgium, Mexico, and the US. Recent publications include The Dewdrop, the Pine Hills Review, and The Gaze Journal. She travels the world with no fixed abode.
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