LEARNING TO CRY

When I was fifteen, I started daydreaming so thoroughly and compulsively that I sometimes worried about myself. The dreams involved a brave and darkly handsome hero trudging on bare bloody feet across a desert of endless deprivation with the cruel marks of an enemy’s whip on his bare, muscular back. Then another hero, almost equally handsome, finds him and rescues him and they cling to each other, sobbing. I had this or some similar home movie going in my head in school one day when a nice girl stopped by my desk and exclaimed, “My God, Nancy, what’s the matter?” Nothing, nothing at all, I told her, stricken with embarrassment. I hadn’t realized how my mind movies showed in my thin face and wide eyes. From then on I tried to limit them to bedtime, when I would choose one (I had numerous variations) and then lie awake half the night suffused in emotion.

My bed was usually the motel’s rollaway cot, unless it was rented out. Then I slept on a sketchier folding contraption, a lounge chair, often in the basement during tourist season. In the wintertime I slept in one of the motel rooms, sometimes so cold that frost formed on the inside of the windows. I had no room of my own. Let’s not fault my parents; their financial struggle might have been partially imaginary, but they could not help being old and shortsighted. Working with them to make a go of the motel gave me the satisfaction of a good job well done. But socially, my teen years were pretty bleak. No fashionable clothes, no friends, no boys. The main source of love and joy in my daytime life was my lop-eared, oversized Sheltie dog, Betsy, who would sleep under my cot as I fantasized the nights away.

When, thanks to my thrifty parents, I went away to college, I assumed they would keep Betsy for me. Meanwhile, I did my best to make up for lost time, and succeeded: clothes, dates, friends instead of daydreams. Things had changed. I had changed, or so I thought until one day in my junior year I got a phone call from my mother – and in my family, phone calls meant bad news.

She told me she had given Betsy away.

What? Betsy was my dog; Mom couldn’t give her away, and I, now a changed person, was not going to let her. I would insist she had to get Betsy back. I was opening my mouth to do so as Mom hurriedly spoke on.

“...to a nice, nice lady, and she tied her out to a picnic table and Betsy jumped up on the table and down the other side and the chain was too short and she strangled to death.”

Oh, Betsy. I pictured my stupid dog, white fluff of her underbelly exposed, hanging dead. Of course she was dead. Mom would not have told me she gave my dog away if she hadn’t died. She would have waited until I came home for a holiday. Where’s Betsy? Oh, we gave her away, sweetie.

Every inflection of my mother’s telephone voice begged me not to react. Not to be angry and not to cry. We didn’t do emotions in my family. For years I had been the de facto mother and Mom the little girl I was not supposed to hurt, but never so much as at that moment.

I went along. Rather woodenly said it was okay. I hung up the phone and pretended nothing terrible had happened. I did not cry.

I hadn’t changed much after all.

While still in college I married a man very much like my parents, and after I graduated, my life became rather bleak and, just as before, I daydreamed compulsively. Eventually I tried to offload the daydreams by writing them down. I wrote THE SILVER SUN, then THE SABLE MOON, then a prequel called THE WHITE HART.

I scored my first publishing contract when I was twenty-five years old. My father had recently died of congestive heart failure. (I did not cry.) At the time when I became “Authorized,” my mother was sixty-five years old.

Now I am sixty-five.

I did not think about any of this until after I started re-reading THE SILVER SUN. Did my sixty-fifth birthday trigger the impulse that made me pick up the post-adolescent “starter” book I had not bothered with for decades?

I expected to be judgmental about the writing. What actually happened I did not expect at all:

Re-reading THE SILVER SUN, I underwent a breathtaking shift in viewpoint. I felt as if I was my own mother reading my first novel for the first time and finding out. . .enormities. To heck with the imperfect prose; the sheer vehemence of the emotions blew me away. Who was the changeling child who had written these mythic fantasies so deeply textured with generation after generation of magical princes questing for wholeness? The tortures I inflicted on my characters, the intensity of their suffering, the heroism of their sacrifices, the extremes I put them through... I seemed to be saying, indeed I seemed to believe, that one must become godlike in perfection to find love. Or even to deserve it.

Good Lord, what had been going on in the young woman who wrote that book?

Even armored as she always was in Buddha-like serenity, I think Mom must have felt something of this sort, sensed something disturbing. While giving me placid credit for having written and published, she did, back in 1977, have one hesitant question. “Nancy, how. . .why. . .what made you think of those awful punishments?”

Punishments? Ordeals, I would have said, or tortures, or torments, but punishments? It was a term one would apply to a child, and maybe that was what set me off. Quite spontaneously and untruthfully I told her, “They were what I thought you and Dad were going to do to me if I misbehaved.”

She showed no sign of being shocked or hurt, but I’m sure I did hurt her. Well, good. That was what she got for giving my dog away to some dumb woman who killed her.

The pity of it is, Mom and I never had a chance to talk things out in any other way. By the time my writing finally revealed my selfhood to me, helping me to become whole and take ownership of my anger, Mom had developed senile dementia. She sat and smiled but she was gone. I cried for her many times during the twenty-some years before she finally died.