And Then Things Fall Apart (13 page)

1. She was madly in love with someone. He died in a car crash. Totally distraught and heartbroken, she married his best friend, who happened to be a real jerk.

2. She was a cub reporter for the
Chicago Tribune
in the 1950s. She covered premieres at movie theaters downtown and interviewed the celebrities who attended.

3. The first person she interviewed was Tab Hunter, and she was so starstruck that she couldn't ask him anything except, “What is your favorite color?” and “Do you prefer blue- or brown-eyed girls?” At the time no one knew that he was gay.

4. Later she was a stenographer at the Chicago supreme court and recorded a lot of depressing and bizarre cases.

5. She had what was known as a “nervous breakdown” when my dad went off to college. Shock treatment, injected sedatives, the whole
Bell Jar
.

I KNOW!!!!!

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FOUR HAIKUS FROM GRAM'S CLOSET

GREEN GINGHAM DRESS WITH
BRASS KNOT BUTTONS, 1952

Sweet sixteen party,
Sipped root beer floats through long straws,
And called them black cows.

 

LINEN DRESS WITH PETER PAN COLLAR
AND BLACK BOW, 1956

First job interview,
Took personality test.
The best job ever!

 

PURPLE AND GOLD PLAID
DRIVING COAT, 1957

First date with true love.
Fed zoo animals corn, months
Before the car crash.

 

STRAPLESS BLACK SILK DRESS
WITH DEEP KICK PLEAT, 1958

Its plunging neckline
Showed creamy décolletage.
Mother hated it.

When I packed to come here, I threw enough crap into a bag to get me through a week because I wasn't planning on an extended stay. I didn't even bring my iPod. Now laundry must be done, and so, I am doing it. Laundry is something I like to do. It is very straightforward. Toss it in. Add soap. Wait. Remove. Dry. Fold. When the clothes come out of the dryer, they don't even smell like you anymore, so it's like they are brand new. At home I like to use eco-friendly dryer balls or lavender sachets instead of dryer sheets. But I am a stranger in a strange land. I make do.

Gram's basement is low ceilinged. The basement has its own entrance from the driveway, a sitting room with a bookcase and an easy chair, a closet, and a bedroom with its own bathroom. That is Dad's room—aka Quasimodo's Lair. The rest of the basement is unfinished and that's where the washing machine and dryer are.

I have to pass Dad's room to get to the machines, and I hold my breath as I walk past it because it is so intimate and humiliating to see what he has been reduced to. When my parents were trying to fix things in counseling, I thought,
Well, if they did break up, maybe it wouldn't be so bad.
I imagined my dad would get his own apartment in the city with an amazing view of Lake Michigan and stereo system and a maid service. This bunker is beyond my comprehension.

I'm feeling better but still pretty weak. I pop my clothes in and lean against the washer, suddenly exhausted. The basement is full of stuff, like one giant garage sale. There's a Ping-Pong table. Dad used to talk about how he and his brother used to play all the time, but I didn't think there would be an actual table down here. There is a box of miniature records in a little square box with avocado green stripes. The Monkees. Fleetwood Mac. Kiss. Kiss? Dad liked
Kiss
? There are boxes of books—yearbooks, college annuals, cookbooks. Wardrobe boxes full of clothes. Boxes of dishes. Dad's whole childhood, pretty much, pushed against the perimeter of the building.

And then I realize I am not alone.

Uh-oh.

There it is lurking in the shadows, the overstuffed leather chair that used to be in our house. It's a huge reclining thing that Coffee chewed a chunk out of when she was a puppy. Mom and Dad had it repaired, and I guess Dad, in a fit of
righteous entitlement, shoved it into the back of the delivery van and brought it here. To languish in his mother's basement. That'll show 'er.

Seeing it takes my breath away.

It doesn't belong here. It's ours. From before. When Coffee was a puppy. When we were a happy family, living our ho-hum nondramatic lives. Ours. Us. Yours. Mine. What's the difference? I run upstairs to escape the basement, swampy with my dad, to wait for the stupid clothes to finish the cycle. I am totally sick to my stomach.

Upstairs it's better. It's sunny. Clean. There is life up here. A television, a telephone, and a refrigerator full of delights. My nausea passes, leaving hunger in its wake. No time like the present to make my first Bell Jar recipe: an “avocado pear” with a hot soup of French dressing and grape jelly melted together and poured into the little bowl the pit makes. I know. But still. Avocados were Esther Greenwood's favorite “fruit.” Who thinks of avocados as fruit? The same people who think of tomatoes and zucchini as fruit. It's like thinking of bacon as cake.

I think the avocado was a big deal in the 1950s. Like, a new thing that was getting imported from Mexico and Cuba or something. There were a lot of avocado green items in the fifties—dishes, Oldsmobiles, suits, dresses, etc. In
The Bell Jar
, after Esther has her freakout, and throws all her clothes out a high-rise window, she fills her suitcase with two dozen
avocados that were a gift from her slutty friend—yes, that Doreen. And she carries this heavy suitcase around with two stripes of BLOOD on her cheek from a fight she was in with a woman-hater the night before. Who IS this Esther Greenwood? She is AMAZING.

Sometimes I just like the way Sylvia uses words. I don't mind that sometimes I have no idea what the hell she is getting at. This did not stop me from scribbling the most shocking and heartbreaking poems from Ariel on my tights with black Sharpie marker and wearing them to school. Which got me a dress code violation detention, and freaked Matt out so much that he started walking me to my locker between classes so I didn't get picked on by upperclassmen or do anything “crazy.”

There's no actual recipe in the book, so I am winging it. I am, unlike Esther, a decent cook. It's in the genes, I think. Both my parents can whip up an amazing dinner for six from a box of pasta, a head of garlic, and a bottle of wine. So I have no qualms about my own skills. I slice an avocado in two, circling the knife around the bumpy skin and twisting the sides apart. I squirt some French dressing and a spoonful of grape jelly into a sauce pan and turn on the heat, stirring with a fork, heating it up until it is all bubbly and a dark maroon color. I find a pink plate with gray starbursts on it from Gram's Smithsonian-worthy collection and place my little avocado pear in the center and then slowly fill the little
cup with the hot syrup. I raise my fork in a kind of toast to Ms. Plath and took a bite. Here are my findings:

Sofa.

King.

Delectable.

 

AVOCADO PEARS

On Sundays in August
You stick to the glass
Of my eye,
A stubborn raindrop.
In the center a void for me to fill
With salty sighs,
As translucent and blood-tinged as
   pomegranate seeds,
Each as soft and crunchy as hindsight.
My trajectory is undefined.

Although I did not have the forethought to pack my iPod, I brought my broken cell and charger. I found them last night in the bottom of my bag like giant (dead) cockroaches and, for the hell of it, plugged the phone in before bed.

Technology is weird. On the one hand it's really amazing. You can call, you can text, you can order boots online with your mom's credit card and they show up at your front door the next day as if you made a birthday wish and it came true. You can look up information instantly. How to tune a ukulele? How do you talk to your father after he cheated on your mom? What are the chances of a premature baby surviving after being in the NICU for two weeks? That kind of thing.

But then, technology is stupid, because it takes up a lot of time and can totally isolate you. I don't really need to tune a ukulele. I could have written an award-winning ten-volume series on the impact of Sylvia Plath on modern fiction in
the hours I have frittered away becoming a fan of ridiculous pages on Facebook.

Technology's supposed to be all about connection. Right? Connection, speed, and connection speed. I mean, Matt and I text all the time, but what are we saying? Nothing, really. I mean, really? Not much. Once, Nic texted me to invite me to the grand opening of some vintage boutique on the North Side, and I texted her this: “K.” I was late meeting Matt and was in kind of a hurry, which is what texting is for anyway. Because I didn't text “OK! XXOO!!” she thought I didn't really want to be there, when the truth was, I couldn't wait to join her. So, believe me, I have found out the hard way that emoticons and over-the-top cheerfulness in texts are socially necessary or people will think you're pissed off at them.

And don't even get me started on all the lead and chemicals and plastic and sweatshops and brain damage from it all. For all I know, my aunt's excessive cell phone use and Aurora's early arrival are totally related. The sonar from deep-sea oil rigs confuses dolphins so they get lost in the middle of the ocean. When I watch cable, I tune in to a minute of one show, switch over to another for a minute, a commercial comes, and I switch to a third. I toggle back and forth from one program to the other—essentially missing everything in between worth watching. Is this rewiring my brain? Probably. At least I read. Reading is perhaps the most
still, concentrated, thoughtful thing I do. Eating? Talking? Kissing? Thinking? All low-tech activities that are cool.

 

Dear Technology,

I think you are great, but I don't really think this relationship is working.

It's not me, it's you.

Good luck in the future!

Best wishes,

Humanity

But then there're pacemakers, wireless ambulance tracking, laser beams, synthetic skin, and other advances that might one day save us and our environmentally degraded earth. All I know is, I have been without decent cable, cell phone, and Internet access for more than two weeks and I am still alive. I mean, Gram has lived practically her whole life without computers, Internet, GPS, and ATMs. Like a pioneer. Eating hardtack and hand-churned butter, getting up to change TV channels. I'm surprised she can operate a microwave. She looks things up—are you ready?—in a variety of bound paper resources known as a “phone book,” a “dictionary,” and a “cookbook.” How quaint.

Technology is supposed to be controlled by humans, and then, just like in
The Terminator
, it comes to life and tries to kill you. Imagine my heart attack when my phone—cracked
battery cover, missing # key, and all—vibrated back to life at three in the morning. Even though I wasn't even half awake, like a robot zombie I grabbed it and checked my messages, voice and text. All I could think was
Matt, Matt, Matt
and how much I missed him and wanted to hear from him. Anything to let me know that he can't live without me and that everything is A+ with us, and all couples have bumps in their roads and we are just as in love as ever. This is what his messages said:

MESSAGE 1:
[email protected]? RU stil >8-< @ me?

MESSAGE 2:
w'r @ d lake house 911 OK? If u wn2

MESSAGE 3:
S yr hair stil pink?

MESSAGE 4:
Do U H8 me?

MESSAGE 5:
Whatev duznt [email protected] Nyway

How romantic. I have written reams of poetry about him, and a ream is five hundred freaking pages.

His happily married parents have a house up in Michigan they escape to every summer. I've only heard about it. I've never been. I used to think that if I were going to sleep with Matt, perhaps the lake house, or at least the beach, would
be a great place for both our first times together, but I guess I missed my golden opportunity by getting the goddamned chicken pox.

“Whatever”? “Doesn't matter anyway”? He didn't hear from me in fourteen whole days and he assumed the worst? And the worst isn't chicken pox and the NICU, etc.? The worst is me ignoring him? Where is the empathy? Where is the worry? RU OK, my darling Keek? Will you ever 4give me? How I miss U!

Jock asshole.

So I texted him this:

Ive d chikin pox
4 real
V sick @ Gram's
ParNts stil breakN ^
MayB we shd 2

Short and sweet. When I first typed it, I thought I didn't really mean it, about breaking up, but now I know I totally did.

Breaking up. It sounds so juvenile, but believe me, I need a break from him and his mouth and his charm and his utter disregard for my well-being as he plays checkers in the lodge, aloe vera on his sunburnt nose. And what is up with him giving up on me so easily? One freaking fight, lovers' quarrel, dustup, and he's all, “Whoa, dude. Not worth the trouble. I
didn't sign up for this.” If anything, he should be sending me bushels of Billie Holiday hair gardenias and spiky-tongued birds of paradise, red roses, and purple starfish mum bouquets. He should be making it up to me on a daily basis for the relationship-long deception he pulled with me.

Trouble? I'll give you trouble, jackass.

All the tension, the sharing, the staring at each other's bodies in the light and in the dark, the kissing, the L, the wine, the poetry. I'm thinking about it now, and I wasn't going to type about it because it is too embarrassing and demoralizing. It is too textbook. It fits too well into my Esther Greenwoodian summer so that it seems totally contrived and ridiculous. I have been tying my brain in complicated sailor knots trying to make sense of it while simultaneously striving to avoid thinking about it.