The Sharp End of Life. Dierdre Wolownick
out on the sidewalk. I watched how they built skyscrapers through holes in the wooden walls that separated Manhattan’s sidewalks from construction zones. I crossed paths with actors and singers I recognized. It was a different world from Jackson Heights, and I relished every difference and every opportunity to learn about the larger world.
My mother loved meeting the friends I brought home. To someone housebound like her, they must have seemed fascinating—from different parts of the city or the world, different cultures, backgrounds, languages. She’d ask question after question about them and their life, and get them to talk about the places she would never see. What kid wouldn’t love that? And I would listen. And serve more cookies. And wait to have my friends to myself.
Sometimes she wanted to sketch them, do a charcoal or pastel portrait. What kid could resist being the star of a portrait? It was flattering, and different, and none of them ever said no.
And I waited.
My mother’s parties were like that, too. Everyone loved to party at our house. My mother knew how to draw other people out, to make sure they had fun. So my friends loved my mother, were flattered by her interest in them, and never seemed to notice that they had very little time to spend with me when they came to my house.
Having friends never became part of my life.
three
I BURNED ALL MY bridges when, at twenty-six, I moved west from New York City to southern California. There weren’t many to burn, and I wasn’t aware of doing it. Being aware of what was going on with the people in my life wasn’t my strong suit. I could talk for hours with anyone about music, art, languages, literature, geography—but people? Not part of my life experience.
It would take a few painful, wrenching decades to reach the conclusion that I had never had a normal human relationship. I had filled the emptiness at home with other endeavors—music, painting, languages—and so hadn’t noticed the lack.
Our parents wanted only obedience. Their philosophy of child-rearing was simple: a child who caused no problems for their parents was “good.” One who caused problems was “bad.” Simple as that. The corollary to this obedience-centered philosophy was that adults didn’t talk to children. Children couldn’t reason like adults, so their input simply wasn’t necessary during adult conversations.
The saddest part was that they really believed this. My father summed it all up for me once, when I asked why they never considered our opinions—my brother’s or mine—when making decisions that affected all of us.
“Why would I? You’ll never be my equal,” he said.
My mouth probably dropped open when he said this. I was in my early twenties.
“You can’t be,” he explained further. “I’ve had so many more years’ experience than you.”
That philosophy justified my parents’ making all family decisions. My mother, in particular, carried it to extremes. She told us all when to get up—she had the only alarm clock in the house—and when to go to bed. She told us when to eat, where, how to prepare the food, and in which pot or pan. She told us what to wear and when to brush our teeth. She always told my father when it was time to go dress or shave. And he did. Everyone did what she ordered. No one in our house had any decisions to make on their own, all day long. She made them all, for all of us.
But their biggest job, my parents often told me when they thought I was adult enough to understand, was to criticize. To my mother, especially, this was completely clear: “It’s a parent’s job to criticize their children. To make them better. How else will they learn?” This philosophy also meant, as both of our parents stated many times, that children became full-fledged adults only when their own parents died.
I was twenty-five when my parents decided to retire to my mother’s hometown in Pennsylvania. They planned everything out for all four of us. John, the boy, would get the family house where we’d grown up, in New York, because he would have a wife and family to support someday. I, the girl, would move with them. In their eastern European mindset, the girl stayed at home until she married, wherever that home was. Then someone else took care of her.
But I was a high school teacher by then, as was John. My choice to stay in my job in New York made no sense to them and was probably the first time I’d ever completely refused to go along with their decisions.
So our parents moved to Pennsylvania, John stayed in the family house, and I got the street. I was on my own.
A YEAR LATER, I met the man I would marry, while visiting my aunt and uncle in California. When I first met Charles Honnold, I still hadn’t had much experience making decisions about my life. I had no one to talk to and no basis for understanding anything about this man, so different from any man I’d ever known.
Charlie’s powerful shoulders and sheer physical presence filled a room in a way that I’d never seen in any of the small, slight European men I’d dated. Huge, kind doe eyes and a thick, black mustache fought a hero/villain battle, but his voice was deep, resonant music. Basso profundo, I called it right from the start. He thought that was silly and called me cute. No one ever had.
But it was just a summer vacation. He was a friend of a friend, recommended as a travel guide for my trip west. We camped and hiked in the Sierra Nevada, waded in its icy lakes and streams, held down our tent against wild desert winds, walked across the Golden Gate Bridge. My adventure there, with him, bore no resemblance whatsoever to my life in New York. And then I went back to Queens, to the house I shared with a roommate. To real life.
What an empty life it was! All winter, as the metal garbage pails clattered down the street in the unrelenting wind and I shivered in the snow and slid on the thick ice that coated the sidewalks, I thought about California. And Charlie.
That winter, we wrote. Often. Postcards filled with run-on paragraphs in tiny script, long letters, Hallmark cards with writing on every available side and in every direction, notes scribbled on the back of class handouts. I told him about the wet, whirling snow that made chaos out of the bridge traffic, the biting, subzero wind that rattled windows and made my eyes water if I ventured out, and about lighting a match to heat the key so I could put it into the frozen keyhole of my car door. He told me about his last basketball game out in the warm sun and his drive to the beach to read on the warm sand. And how hot it was out on the tennis court.
In the spring, he helped me apply for jobs all over southern California, where he worked. The fact that I could teach French, Spanish, and Italian and direct school musicals gave me an edge, and I ended up with several offers to choose from.
I had wanted to live in California since I was five, when a new family moved to our block. The father was a professor who had taught in Kenya for a while, and they were all on their way home to California after a few months in New York.
They could have been Martians, for the stir they created. They were all blond. I had seen blond hair in real life a few times, but only on women, and my mother always said it was applied from a bottle. These people really had blond hair, all seven of them!
The kids played out on the street with us for the few months they lived in New York. But they weren’t like us. Even their names set them apart. The boys were called Bryce, Curt, Brad, and Judd. One short, punchy syllable each. I’d never heard anything like it. The girl, a little older than me, was Janelle. They didn’t sound like real names to us. In our world, kids were called John, Paul, Giovanni, Kazimir, Angela, Peter, Mary, Joseph, Athena, Wanda, Helen, Agnieszka . . . even Dierdre. Names with thousands of years of history. Names that had evolved over millennia, from all over the European world. These kids’ names came from the movies. From California.
In high school, I had wanted to go to college at UCLA. California. The land of exotica. Palm trees. Earthquakes. People with blond hair and strange names. I didn’t know what to expect from a place that bizarre, and I didn’t care. It was as far as I could get