You Could Make This Place Beautiful

by Maggie Smith

There’s no such thing as a tell-all because we can only ever speak for ourselves.

Narrative is an accumulation of knowledge about the future. —Sarah Ruhl

How I picture it: We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves—all of our selves—wherever we go.

“Maggie’s laugh sounds like someone stepped on a crow,” he said, and we all cracked up. The bride’s laugh was the loudest in the room, black and feathered.

When they finally held her up, showing her to us over the surgical drape, I said, as if I recognized her from someplace, “Violet!” We’d had a short list of names for boys and for girls, but when I saw her, I knew her name. I knew her.

I was supposed to be at VCCA for two full weeks. But on the ninth night, I woke up around 2:00 in the morning and felt inexplicably frantic. I had no idea why, but I knew I had to leave. I packed my things, left a bottle of wine and a note for my new friends, and slipped outside. It was pouring rain on Mt. San Angelo, and the road winding down the mountain had no guardrails, and there were deer crossings, and I had to creep along to stay on the road, but I kept going. I drove straight through to Bexley, about seven hours, and arrived at my house late morning. I knew it was naptime at the daycare, so I waited an hour, then went to pick up Violet. I cried when I saw her. We both cried. She looked somehow different, older, to me. Later, talking to my husband about how Violet did while I was gone, he told me she’d been fine all week but had woken up around 2:00 that morning, crying, inconsolable. This is a story about magical thinking. She called me down off the mountain in the rain.

Trungpa writes about torma and don. “Possession” is the closest translation for the Tibetan word don—a ghost that causes misfortune, anger, fear, sickness. When you have a don, you are the possession. The anger possesses—owns—you. Torma means “offering cake.” You offer the torma to your don. You feed the ghost that does you harm, “that which possesses you.” Giving it a little something sweet is a way of saying, Thank you for the pain you caused me, because that pain woke me up. It hurt enough to make me change. “Wish for more pain,” a friend’s therapist once told her, “because that’s how you’ll change.” It has to hurt so much that you have to do something differently. The pain forces your hand.

I’m adding my sadness to the list of things we’ll never get the sand out of. Like anything you take to the beach, it’ll be gritty forever.

For months, maybe even years, I folded and folded my happiness until I couldn’t fold it anymore, until it fit under my tongue, and I held it there. I kept silent in order to hold it.

Somewhere at the center is the tiniest doll. Love. The love that started everything. It’s still there, but we’d have to open and open and open ourselves—our together selves—to find it. I can’t bear to think of it in there somewhere, the love. Like the perfect pit of some otherwise rotten fruit.

We can endure anything if we know when it will end.

The long pink line where my daughter left my body, then my son, tells a story. A door opened, then shut, then opened and shut again. But I have stood ajar since the moment I became a mother.

The divorce is a continuation of the marriage. Something set in motion years ago that continues.

Once while turning around in the alley, I saw a man come out of his house into his backyard, wearing a button-down shirt and tie on top, plaid pajama pants and slippers on the bottom. I was wearing a sleeveless dress, rainbow-striped tube socks, and turquoise and pink roller skates. We made eye contact across the alley and both started laughing. We were zooming in our own ways.

He packed everything he owned. He left us plenty of material.

A friend posted on social media around that time: How many moms are crying in bathrooms? I think moms crying in bathrooms during the pandemic could be a coffee-table book. A very thick coffee-table book.

My lawyer and my dentist retired in the same month. If you knew how much I’d been grinding my teeth because of the divorce you’d understand why this was a problem.

I have to trust this: If what I give my children is love, then they’re receiving it. If I seek to understand them, then they will feel understood. Embraced. Fathomed.

There are years that question and years that answer. —Zora Neale Hurston

In any mystery, the answers tend to arrive in disguise. So often they’re clothed in trouble. Why do answers wear trouble so well? Maybe because they need to get our attention.

I can’t help but think of the “multitudes” Walt Whitman celebrates in himself. Sometimes I’m weary of how torn and pieced and layered those multitudes feel, how fragmented and contradictory in ways that thrill me and scare me,