My mother was my father's third wife. My father was my mother's second husband. My mother was forty and my father was forty-two when I was born. Today, preschool halls are filled with gray-haired parents in their forties and fifties-parents who've lived whole other lives before their children were born. But back then, this made my parents different. It also made them stay married over many years of a contentious relationship. They each saw themselves as having failed before, and those perceived failures bound them together.
My father was the scion of a deeply religious Jewish family. My mother was not a believer, though she went along for the ride. She was fun-loving, glamorous, and wanted to wear a beautiful dress and be the belle of the ball. He was quiet, introspective, thoughtful; she twirled around the room, singing, arms flung wide. They fought. Oh, how they fought-endlessly, bitterly, in harsh whispers. They disagreed on most things, but the single source of their greatest conflict was me.
Until I was twelve, I was sent to a religious day school where I spent half the day learning in Hebrew, and the other half in English. At thirteen, my mother presumably having worn my father down, I began to attend a local prep school where both Jews and girls were a new phenomenon. But my awareness of myself as an outsider was in full flower long before this. When two people who shouldn't be married to each other bring a child into the world, that child-I'm distancing myself here, making myself into a character-that child cannot help but feel as if she's navigating the world on a borrowed visa. Her papers aren't in order. Her right to be here is in question.
Whether at the yeshiva or the prep school, whether within the quiet walls of my family home or circling the neighborhood on my bike, wherever I went I felt like a foreign correspondent on the sidelines of my own life. I spent my days observing. I took note of the way Amy Stifel tilted her head to the side when she laughed; the faded rectangle on the back pocket of Kathy Kimber's jeans that was the exact shape and size of a pack of cigarettes; the fact that the Spanish teacher always looked like she had just stopped crying. At home, I studied my parents. My mother's posture was ramrod straight, her jaw lifted, her mouth curved into a small smile as if at any moment a camera might be pointed in her direction. My father seemed to slump as my mother grew taller. He gained weight, his belly straining over his belt. She started making more trips into New York City, where she took art classes, saw a therapist. His prescription bottles took over the kitchen counter, replacing garlic tablets and Vitamin E supplements.
Some Day This Pain Will be Useful to You is the title of my friend Peter Cameron's novel. Looking back now, from my writing study on the second floor of my home on a hill, I see a stone wall, the bare branches of a white birch tree. I see climbing wisteria on the split wood shingles of our roof. It's a school holiday, and my husband and son are out to breakfast at a nearby diner. The dogs pad around in the next room. A cappuccino in a small ceramic mug brought back from a trip to Italy has grown cold by my side. It's a day. A day full of writing, reading, thinking, driving, of a child's piano lesson, a holiday party later on. A day that holds me, connects me to the spinning world.
So the pain did indeed turn out to be useful-but only later, much later. At the time, it was more complicated than I had tools for. I worried that my parents would get a divorce. Sometimes I worried that they wouldn't get a divorce. I regularly imagined that my father would die. Never my mother, only my father. A series of images ran through my mind like a looping reel of film: my father, clutching at his chest, falling over on the sidewalk. My father, collapsing on his way to synagogue. When I wasn't preoccupied with my father's death, I thought about my own. I was certain that I would die very young. That something was already wrong with me. I poked and prodded at my body. Was that a lump on my thigh, or a mosquito bite? Every headache was a brain tumor. Maybe I would just disappear.
I endured these fantasies and premonitions by writing about them. The stories I made up were medicinal. My inner life was barbed, with jagged edges. Left untended, it felt dangerous, like it might turn on me at any moment. Intuitively, I understood that I had to use it. It was all I had. By writing, I was participating in a tradition as old as humanity. I was here. Hieroglyphs on rock. I was here, and this is my story.
