Читать книгу The Sharp End of Life - Dierdre Wolownick - Страница 10

I BURNED ALL MY bridges when, at twenty-six, I moved west from New York City to southern California. There weren’t many to burn, and I wasn’t aware of doing it. Being aware of what was going on with the people in my life wasn’t my strong suit. I could talk for hours with anyone about music, art, languages, literature, geography—but people? Not part of my life experience.

It would take a few painful, wrenching decades to reach the conclusion that I had never had a normal human relationship. I had filled the emptiness at home with other endeavors—music, painting, languages—and so hadn’t noticed the lack.

Our parents wanted only obedience. Their philosophy of child-rearing was simple: a child who caused no problems for their parents was “good.” One who caused problems was “bad.” Simple as that. The corollary to this obedience-centered philosophy was that adults didn’t talk to children. Children couldn’t reason like adults, so their input simply wasn’t necessary during adult conversations.

The saddest part was that they really believed this. My father summed it all up for me once, when I asked why they never considered our opinions—my brother’s or mine—when making decisions that affected all of us.

“Why would I? You’ll never be my equal,” he said.

My mouth probably dropped open when he said this. I was in my early twenties.

“You can’t be,” he explained further. “I’ve had so many more years’ experience than you.”

That philosophy justified my parents’ making all family decisions. My mother, in particular, carried it to extremes. She told us all when to get up—she had the only alarm clock in the house—and when to go to bed. She told us when to eat, where, how to prepare the food, and in which pot or pan. She told us what to wear and when to brush our teeth. She always told my father when it was time to go dress or shave. And he did. Everyone did what she ordered. No one in our house had any decisions to make on their own, all day long. She made them all, for all of us.

But their biggest job, my parents often told me when they thought I was adult enough to understand, was to criticize. To my mother, especially, this was completely clear: “It’s a parent’s job to criticize their children. To make them better. How else will they learn?” This philosophy also meant, as both of our parents stated many times, that children became full-fledged adults only when their own parents died.

I was twenty-five when my parents decided to retire to my mother’s hometown in Pennsylvania. They planned everything out for all four of us. John, the boy, would get the family house where we’d grown up, in New York, because he would have a wife and family to support someday. I, the girl, would move with them. In their eastern European mindset, the girl stayed at home until she married, wherever that home was. Then someone else took care of her.

But I was a high school teacher by then, as was John. My choice to stay in my job in New York made no sense to them and was probably the first time I’d ever completely refused to go along with their decisions.

So our parents moved to Pennsylvania, John stayed in the family house, and I got the street. I was on my own.

A YEAR LATER, I met the man I would marry, while visiting my aunt and uncle in California. When I first met Charles Honnold, I still hadn’t had much experience making decisions about my life. I had no one to talk to and no basis for understanding anything about this man, so different from any man I’d ever known.

Charlie’s powerful shoulders and sheer physical presence filled a room in a way that I’d never seen in any of the small, slight European men I’d dated. Huge, kind doe eyes and a thick, black mustache fought a hero/villain battle, but his voice was deep, resonant music. Basso profundo, I called it right from the start. He thought that was silly and called me cute. No one ever had.

But it was just a summer vacation. He was a friend of a friend, recommended as a travel guide for my trip west. We camped and hiked in the Sierra Nevada, waded in its icy lakes and streams, held down our tent against wild desert winds, walked across the Golden Gate Bridge. My adventure there, with him, bore no resemblance whatsoever to my life in New York. And then I went back to Queens, to the house I shared with a roommate. To real life.

What an empty life it was! All winter, as the metal garbage pails clattered down the street in the unrelenting wind and I shivered in the snow and slid on the thick ice that coated the sidewalks, I thought about California. And Charlie.

That winter, we wrote. Often. Postcards filled with run-on paragraphs in tiny script, long letters, Hallmark cards with writing on every available side and in every direction, notes scribbled on the back of class handouts. I told him about the wet, whirling snow that made chaos out of the bridge traffic, the biting, subzero wind that rattled windows and made my eyes water if I ventured out, and about lighting a match to heat the key so I could put it into the frozen keyhole of my car door. He told me about his last basketball game out in the warm sun and his drive to the beach to read on the warm sand. And how hot it was out on the tennis court.

In the spring, he helped me apply for jobs all over southern California, where he worked. The fact that I could teach French, Spanish, and Italian and direct school musicals gave me an edge, and I ended up with several offers to choose from.

I had wanted to live in California since I was five, when a new family moved to our block. The father was a professor who had taught in Kenya for a while, and they were all on their way home to California after a few months in New York.

They could have been Martians, for the stir they created. They were all blond. I had seen blond hair in real life a few times, but only on women, and my mother always said it was applied from a bottle. These people really had blond hair, all seven of them!

The kids played out on the street with us for the few months they lived in New York. But they weren’t like us. Even their names set them apart. The boys were called Bryce, Curt, Brad, and Judd. One short, punchy syllable each. I’d never heard anything like it. The girl, a little older than me, was Janelle. They didn’t sound like real names to us. In our world, kids were called John, Paul, Giovanni, Kazimir, Angela, Peter, Mary, Joseph, Athena, Wanda, Helen, Agnieszka . . . even Dierdre. Names with thousands of years of history. Names that had evolved over millennia, from all over the European world. These kids’ names came from the movies. From California.

In high school, I had wanted to go to college at UCLA. California. The land of exotica. Palm trees. Earthquakes. People with blond hair and strange names. I didn’t know what to expect from a place that bizarre, and I didn’t care. It was as far as I could get from New York, from my parents, and still be on the same continent. That was my goal.

But it wasn’t allowed. I was told it was too far. Too dangerous for a girl. Too heathen. And the kicker: too expensive. Whatever their reason, my parents wanted me nearby. Decades later I learned that their plan had always been for my brother to go to college—so he could better support his future wife—and for me to marry after high school and have children. In my parents’ world, girls lived at home until that goal was achieved.

Fortunately for them, I didn’t know about their plan. Had they explained it to me then, it might have driven me to go to UCLA even without their consent. As it was, I settled on commuting from home to Queens College, with the proviso that I could spend my junior year in France with the study abroad program. An equitable compromise since they were, after all, footing the entire bill except for the bit of scholarship money I’d won.

By my midtwenties, I was teaching in New York and paying my own bills. I’d met Charlie while on vacation, and our nonstop barrage of letters and cards had worked their magic. I had no trouble finding a job in southern California, and I shared my decision to move with my parents the way they’d always shared their decisions with me. I announced that I was moving and began getting ready. I simply had no idea that it could be done any other way. My parents never said anything, positive or negative, about my fait accompli. In my family, no one ever said a word about anything that mattered.

In a few short weeks, I packed or gave away everything I owned and drove west to my new home. To compensate for the large cut in pay I had to take, the school I ultimately chose had offered me free lodging. I would live in a Mediterranean villa nestled in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains in the town of Sierra Madre, near Pasadena.

After the kids went home for the day, I shared the villa and park-like grounds with Joyce, another teacher. We could run on trails under exotic trees I couldn’t yet name or play tennis on one of two courts or pick avocados and oranges off the trees. I had seen orange trees only twice, on vacation in Florida and in Rome during my one Christmas abroad. There were even olive trees, which I had never seen growing before. An alleyway of carob trees filled the whole park with the rich, chocolatey, homey scent of fresh-baked brownies. My new life was a delicious, idyllic fantasy.

And the central focal point of this idyll was Charlie. We spent all our weekends and free time together that year, and under the potent spell of the magic of this new life, we decided to share our lives forever.

GETTING MARRIED IN PENNSYLVANIA the following summer was my gift to my mother. She’d been planning and dreaming about it for years and loved telling me all the details. How Lobitz would do the catering—he’d gone to school in Hazleton with my mother—and how he’d catered my cousin’s wedding and it was so beautiful. There had been all the Polish food and a band from Philadelphia at the reception. Mine would have one, too, someday. It didn’t matter to me. I would have happily eloped. And Charlie’s whole family was against organized religion. A big church wedding was anathema to him.

Fortunately, my mother approved of the gown I’d bought in California. The rest, though, brought out tsk-tsks and pursed lips.

“No, no, you can’t wear a veil like that. It’s old-fashioned! And look, look how skimpy it is, here.” She poked so hard that she pushed her finger right through the veil. “See? See how skimpy it is?!”

So now it was useless—I couldn’t wear a ripped veil to my wedding.

And sandals! Beautiful, patent-leather, shiny sandals from California.

“No, no, no—no one wears sandals to a wedding!” More pursed lips and head-shaking. “Have you ever seen a bride in sandals?”

I had to admit I hadn’t. I’d seen very few brides in my life. But my mother knew clothes; she had made my clothes for me for over twenty years. Every Sunday she carefully perused the New York Times fashion section for ideas. Her biggest delight was to greet me after school with a new blouse, dress, or pants that she’d made that day. Sometimes they fit and I loved what she’d made, sometimes they looked awful and I hated them. But she’d worked all day on it, so to her my lack of enthusiasm made me “an ungrateful brat.” I was her doll, to dress and show off.

Nothing had changed. She was still the adult. I was still the child.

During that week, not a word was exchanged about people pledging to love each other for life. Or love, devotion. The future. Not a word. They were still the adults, who had nothing of import to say to a child.

As always, my mother and I spoke only of the details, the chores, the doing. Never the thinking or the feeling. Life, for my parents, was in the details. I was a kid again, and I longed, ached for someone to talk to me, to care about my opinion, my feelings. Adult to adult. About something that mattered.

I could have initiated it. But I’d never learned how, and I didn’t want to start something that my mother or father might not be able to finish. I didn’t want to mar this perfect time that she’d dreamt about and planned for so long. So I let my parents be. I followed their rules. I kept the peace.

MY MOTHER COULDN’T DANCE, so I had seen my father dance at only a few family weddings or parties. But it was important to me, even if I didn’t quite understand why, to dance with him at my wedding. We had rarely done anything together, and I thought a dance after my first dance with my new husband would be something meaningful we could share.

When the emcee announced the first dance of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Honnold, I didn’t recognize a single note of the waltz I had requested. The band was winging it, having clearly never heard of the piece I’d chosen. My father took over from Charlie after a few minutes. I was surprised at how smoothly he moved, guiding me easily across the floor. I had rarely seen him smile so much. Through his warm fingers, I seemed to feel all the things that he never dared say. All those years of remote silence melted away as we shared our first, and likely last, significant moment together.

Only the love came through. I knew they both loved me as much as they could. Either of our parents would have died for my brother or me; they loved us that much. I had never doubted that. They just didn’t know what to do about it.

Charlie and I left in a rush after the reception, to drive to New York. From there, we set off for our honeymoon in the Caribbean Islands. We quickly changed our clothes in the large room where we had stored our suitcases and dashed out to a waiting car, driven by friends from out west who were on the same flight.

I didn’t understand what had just happened. I knew it was the end, but of what, I wasn’t sure. I was just beginning to comprehend the devastating absence of connection that my parents had taught me to live by. But I still didn’t understand how that would affect the rest of my life.

In the car, glimpses of what I had lost, and what that loss might mean, began to crash over me, wave after wave. It felt as if I’d just left a funeral, not a wedding. A monumental sadness gripped me, wracked my body. I cried, as softly as I could in the back of the car, for all the things no one had said when I was young. I cried for the father and mother I’d never had. For the emptiness that had been my life. I cried all the way to New York.

Charlie just held me and let me cry. He never asked why.