Boxed in you were: somehow, I wanted to leave you out of all my narratives. My mother, you had me ripped away from you by your dysfunction. Why do children think they could have changed adult circumstances? What liar creeps in and whispers in their ears that this awful thing is their fault? The last I saw you, a little woman in a coffin, boxed in you were. Cancer dead you were. This was a week after you had died, and I was in uniform and being trained to do something for a war. Emergency leave, a plane ride, and friends of relatives whom I had barely known picking me up. Straight we went to the funeral home. Your husband thirty years older than you was there. He was a little old man—not my father.
This was gaunt bare treed winter in Iowa. My memories of you, the good ones were only Texas. You would pick me up as the train came through Winfield. Then we would ride down to Ft. Worth, my aunt, your sister would pick us up and take us to Grandfather’s in her Cadillac. You were always warm. I looked forward to this once-a-year ride by train to Texas. Once there, you would cook, and I remember peach pies, from my grandfather’s peach tree, my grandfather was always laughing, and my grandmother was always laughing at my grandfather. They had a parakeet named Bildad.
You would go through a couple temporarily successful treatments with AA and the Catholic Church that helped you, and then you would invariably relapse. As I grew up in Oregon, you would call me from Iowa sometimes drunk. I never knew what to say. The times you were not drunk were of course good. You had several periods of two or three years of sobriety. You always talked to me as if I were older than I was. You had a matter-of-fact manner that was so very personable. When I had left Texas for Oregon you were already back in Iowa, you were pregnant with my brother that summer. I had no idea. After you gave birth, you explained it over the phone to me. You said you had loved a man that did not want to stay with you, and you would take my brother, and love him, and keep him and you were not one bit sorry, you laughed a little and said he was really cute. You sent regular pictures of him to me.
He is dead now too. This same dysfunction as yours killed him four years ago. I am long past calling addiction anything other than the human condition. Even the finger pointing about it that our family did, that all families do—all that is part of the same condition. Alcohol counselors with a rote of AA treatment does work for some. In our human blindness we cannot see a cause that kills like a virus everyday with its effect—we face horrors daily that are not of our making.
However, my brother one summer, when he was about nine years old on my uncle’s ranch in Oregon, your nephew Jerry’s wife saw him playing. He had a gallon glass jar in which he had placed a great number of butterflies he had caught. He would open the jar carefully and let one flutter into his hand, then he kissed each butterfly as he let them go—one by one.
He came to live with my aunt and uncle as did I for largely the same reasons. The difference was he was in an orphanage when my aunt and uncle got him out. They cared for him and loved him, and I was leaving out of High School when he came, out in the world out into the Army and I probably let him down. I did not know what to do. Since then, I loved him and helped him, and he helped me, and everyone knew him to be a good man. He was a Marine then spent 35 years logging. It was that he had been scarred by dysfunction and carried an orphan heart as did I. It was my great wish and prayer that he be healed of this awful psychic wound in his life as I had dealt with this in my own. It was not the case. In your dysfunction and abandoning him for days, in your binges when he, at five years old had unspeakable things done to him by a neighbor. He never told me about this until about two months before he died. He struggled with alcoholism as you did—for him that was a part of it. When he was working, he did not drink. Finally, the binges between work caught up and his liver gave out, dying in his sleep with three empty whiskey bottles and a plate of half-eaten food in small apartment in Fairbanks, Alaska. It took us four months to get him cremated and sent home.
I know you would have never wished this on him, or an orphan heart on either of us. I have no one to ask why this all happened, I always loved you, but I never in my memory longed for you. I am sure there is something wrong with that—but it will just have to do. Oh, my brother John is dead now as well.
You were forty-nine when you died. My father died at forty-two. I told you over the phone that he was dead when I was thirteen. You wept inconsolably into the phone. That was evidence of your deep love for him. That is all I have of your love for him that brought me into this world, except the one picture I have of both of you together. You beamed with him by your side, you were both at the dam site near Winfield, I am perhaps two, my father is holding me, and you were gorgeous. I think of this backward projection as an organic thing, it is the sometimes-real answer to despair, that what was once good can be good again and if it was once good at least it was once good. The stories, the ill effects, that sadness, the let-downs of loved ones, all coalesce and the bright smile from the wrinkled Kodak of you and my father, this I have still.
The Iowa frozen ground was waiting for you. I did not break down that day. Just me, and the little old man. You were the black sheep alcoholic sister. Your wealthy sisters would not come.
The cemetery loomed up as we entered the ground of the Rock Island Arsenal where the little old man, your husband at death, a WWI veteran had you buried. The gate guard gave a crisp salute to the hearse—that was somehow comforting to me in uniform. We continued to the gravesite. Cold hard earth, and a hole in it.
I could not think of you. I flew back to Oregon and made love to my girlfriend each afternoon, for a week, while her mother was at work—for a week, I forgot about you in her arms.
INSTANT NOODLES 