The Wave: Chapter 30
(Re)Making Love: a serial memoir
Come in the middle? Here’re links to ➡️ Chapter One, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9 , Chapter 10, Chapter 11, Chapter 12, Chapter 13, Chapter 14 , Chapter 15 , Chapter 16, Chapter 17, Chapter 18, Chapter 19, Chapter 20, Chapter 21, Chapter 22, Chapter 23, Chapter 24, Chapter 25 , Chapter 26, Chapter 27, Chapter 28, Chapter 29
The Wave
The dream couple, Barack and Michelle, vacation in Martha’s Vineyard or Hawaii: Malia’s head has sprouted almost above her father’s shoulder—she’s tall and willowy, feminine like her mother, lithe like her father. In a photo, gorgeous Michelle followed behind the two with her arm around Sasha: all the “girls” wore shades as Barack waved from the tarmac at the camera.
He did not wave as he boarded the helicopter on a trip to fly with his family to Camp David while health care reform and the war in Afghanistan loomed. He was, or at least I inferred, burdened by the weight of reality.
But I recall his wave.
I recall my sister’s wave before she got on the plane to Ethiopia, willowy at seventeen, three days before her eighteenth birthday that she would celebrate on her arrival and where she would marry. Her fiancé was in the Army on the base—gone!—in Eritrea. Thirty-five years later she would die on a gurney, legless and about to lose her arms because the blood from her heart could no longer reach her hands, blue with loss and the diabetes that took her life in 1993.
Her wave, full of hope and risk—that fearless wave. I write a postcard to her now: Wish you were here.
Trite but true.
How do I deal with all the leavings?
How do I deal with the desperate longing for a new beginning?
How do I deal with the shame of Internet dating that resulted in my daughter’s assertion, “You are fickle, your fickle ways,” said in merited disgust. “You have been in love and out of love.” She recounts: “The psychiatrist who one day is the love of your life and the next, dangerous to your life. The college professor who one day is the love of your life and the next . . .” Need she or I go on reporting how I failed? How she must wonder, I suspect: Who is this woman I have called my mother?
Obama and Michelle remain the prince and princess in my tale of woe. But the Obama in real life took what some say was way too long to get the appointees of his administration in place.
Who are the appointees in my real life?
D., ephemeral?
I spent another Saturday night with him and I wrote him on Sunday morning:
“D.,
“It’s hard for me on leaving you, as you could see yesterday. Sometimes, as over this weekend, it is also hard for me to be with you. I think that is because you are not yet able to be fully with me, to express the “need” to be with me in some way that makes sense to me, to put words and gestures around the need. You did seem to do that Saturday when you came over to me, when you sort of asked to stay, when you most poignantly laid your head on my chest. I needed to be cautious because if you had stayed, I would have given myself to you body and soul. That is what I want to do, need to do because I love you, flawed as I am, flawed as you are.
“I sense that I must take on—but you point out when I say this, ‘unfairly to yourself’—the blame for what seems lacking, something nameless, something I think, must be my fault and that needs to be ‘named.’ That doesn’t mean I need to ‘understand’ or have full disclosure about your journey toward your self, or in any way invade your privacy, but something seems withheld, almost as if to accept comfort from me would be to accept blame on your part. I am to blame. I must be. And I don’t want you to take on my blame or yours with the stuff (talking, touching) that would help us both.”
M.
D. replies:
“I have held back, I think, because I tend to see our relationship as ‘all or nothing.’ That my approach to you in any measured way would mean or be interpreted as full engagement—and be found lacking, because it is not yet full engagement. I have tended to be silent to protect that space I need to work through my personal past for a while [what does he mean by that? for what is between us is personal. Don’t we share the past?], but I hear from you that, if I am present, you can also be present and help without full engagement. I do know what full engagement means and looks like, and I don’t want you to think that I want something short of that. I am trying to get to the point of full engagement, and need some space—not totally—still to get there. I tend not to talk about that because I think it’s hurtful to you, even though it has nothing to do with you and is not a rejection of you.
D.”
I slept and dreamt after D. left me on Saturday night. I suppose this is one of those classic dreams like the airplane dream:
I’m driving a big dark grey car—not like my father’s Chevy, not a big rectangle, how I always thought of that bulky car he loved. I’m driving a hyperbolic bullet, sleek and large, probably a Toyota on a road that is soon covered with snow. I tell myself to slow down on this surface but can’t keep my pedal off the metal. The snow is filling up my side windows and the rear window so that all I can see is forward. I know this is not a safe way to drive but I keep going though I don’t know where I’m going except that I am on Route 66. As the snow begins to fly off my peripheral windows and my vision opens up, I realize I’ve passed a store at a mall where I’m trying to meet my parents and my sister. My sister waves from an unknown location. I know I need directions.
I know my parents and my sister are dead. This thought is always a sad thought, sadder now that my husband has left me. When they died, I mourned their loss but had a sense of safety in my marriage. Now that is lost. My loneliness is profound, not unique, but profound.
I must stop the car and get directions. When I do, I discover—the way dreams work— that I have driven onto the top of the drugstore soda fountain counter like the one where my father and I used to eat coddies and drink chocolate sodas on Dolfield Road in Baltimore while my mother got her hair done next door. He liked the chocolate soda better than I did. I always wanted an ice cream soda and he could be counted on to get me one.
I am lost but dream: D. waits with his arms open. He kisses me full on the mouth, deeply, with desire, and with admiration if one can feel that in a kiss. I think one can.
He is so slim, so beautiful and in real life so totally unattainable.
I send him a poem by Auden with the note: Remember this? Here is a brief excerpt:
Lullaby
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
. . .
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost. . . .
“Remember?” I ask.
M.
And he replies:
“Think not lost, perhaps nearly born.
D.”
I recall D.’s heart, his being like the drift of the Caribbean sea over the sand, the strand of light that reaches through the clarity of that sea. His touch and his kiss that once expressed his clarity that took me in its sight and held me so that I let go, floated in its buoyant assurance.
I may not know what I’m doing but I do know that what I’ve just written bears itself on the incontrovertible.
I must understand the multiplicity of irreducible people, of the irreducible D., and that my humanity lies therein. We will not have perfection in discourse. But I must seek humanity in discourse. That responsibility weighs heavily on me as I think it should.
And so, I wave. I wait for the sea.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material in chapter 30: W.H. Auden: Excerpt from "Lullaby (1937)", copyright 1940 & 1968 by W.H. Auden, from Collected Poems of W.H. Auden by W.H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, Inc., and the Wylie Agency for the estate of W.H. Auden.
Coming next: Chapter 31: “One Game at Time” Table of Contents
Love,
Super discount: If this memoir captures you, might you think about helping me?
I could write an essay in itself about the responses I felt this week reading. Having read over a span of 30 installments so far, I have an internalized feeling of how long Mary has been living through all of this Though I don't actually have a clear sense of that, emotional time is its own dimension. Shall I admit I feel frustrated annoyance with the Garbo-esque D.? I admit it. Does he refuse to admit a process of disaffection when he says it isn't Mary but him? Does it feel like he's torturing her by remaining in her life and in some ways close but not truly intimate? That he's being unfair to her? And Mary's loneliness, parents and sister gone, and now husband slipped away, without their comfort to seek. And Mary dreaming and trying to make sense of it all. And my knowing sometimes there is no sense to be had but the sense we do literally *make* of something in order to put it in its place, somewhere, and move on. I'll stop.. I can't go on. I'll go on. Next week.
One of your most beautiful posts, Mary, and amazing for what it triggers—in a meaningful, positive way—in me. That last line is Wow! In rewriting, revisiting our past, I wonder what discoveries we make or what was once blurry is now so, so clear. How time and space works.