Book Lover. Karen Mack
river on some weird joyride gone slightly amiss.
“Smile,” my mother said abruptly to my sister, Virginia, when she saw her sucking on her lip. Virginia chipped one of her two front teeth in the accident but, other than that, we were both unharmed.
“Wider. I can’t see.”
“Do I have to? I don’t feel like smiling,” Virginia said, and stomped her foot in the gunk.
“She doesn’t mean smile, like ‘BE HAPPY,’ stupid,” I scoffed. “She means open your mouth so she can see if you’re bleeding. Geez!”
“Well, I’m not,” she retorted, but I could see she was now in tears, rubbing her nose and eyes with her mud-stained sweatshirt.
“Does it hurt?” I asked sheepishly.
“No, it doesn’t hurt, Dora. I just don’t like it here. It’s creepy and I want to go home.” She was scared, my mother was dazed, and I, as usual, was completely detached—a knack I have since perfected in order to deal with life’s crushing disappointments or precarious entanglements.
“We’re okay,” I told her. (I was always telling her that.) “Anyway, Mom’s the one who should be upset. Dad is going to kill her.”
“No, he’s not,” my sister replied. “Maybe we don’t even have to tell him.”
“Are you kidding? Look at the car! This is the second one she’s ruined this year.”
Meanwhile, my mother was standing behind our belly-up, bashed-in, virtually unrecognizable vehicle. “Oh my lord,” she suddenly exclaimed. “Your father’s new clubs are in the trunk. Now, did he tell me to take them out this morning? … I can’t remember ….”
When the police finally arrived with a tow truck and an ambulance, my sister and I clambered up from the muddy riverbed and bundled into a squad car while my mother stood outside wrapping her long mohair coat around her. Her tone was shaky as she ran her hands through her matted, blood-soaked hair and I suddenly realized she had hit her head. The idea that we had been involved in a near-fatal accident never entered my mind.
At the time of the crash, we were in east central Pennsylvania, ninety miles northwest of Philadelphia. It was an area known as the coal country of Schuylkill County, where rolling green pastures were blighted by deep brown scars, heaps of piled-up slag, and decaying railroad tracks. Even the billboards were battered with peeling, unintelligible messages from a bygone era. We were headed for Pottsville to visit the dilapidated childhood home of John O’Hara and I remember feeling relieved that we probably wouldn’t be touring this author’s home anytime soon. I’ve since learned that O’Hara called Pottsville a “god-awful town” and couldn’t wait to get out.
My mother told the police that she was looking down at the map from the Philadelphia Historical Society, and when she looked up we were plunging into the dark, swirling waters of the Schuylkill River. I guess they believed her, because the cop pointed out that we were a few hours from the spot in Chadds Ford where Andrew Wyeth’s father, N. C. Wyeth, drove his car onto a railroad track with his four-year-old grandson in the backseat. The car was smashed to smithereens by an oncoming train and no one ever knew whether it was suicide or just a freak accident. Why he insisted on telling this story in front of us, I will never understand. But it sure cheered my mother right up, with her penchant for literary legends, and she subsequently peppered him with questions.
Later that night, my father joined us at a nearby motel and her mood darkened as she argued with him about her drinking. “The girls are fine. I was just distracted.” We knew her distraction was in a neat little silver flask. She gave more of the usual denials, and my father responded with patronizing disdain and exasperation. He left home for the first time shortly afterwards.
Life after that deteriorated into a series of dramatic comings and goings, yelling and screaming, doors slamming in the night, and then silence. The mornings after always felt like a hangover, my sister and I staring numbly at each other, avoiding the unmentionable.
My mother stuck it out, however, always the martyr. She was part of that upper-middle-class Northeastern generation of women who believed life offered them no decent alternative to marriage, motherhood, or homemaking. In the coming tumultuous years, she and her circle of friends survived divorce, widowhood, disease, children who disappeared or disappointed them, and children like my sister and me, who chose careers and moved away.
In those early days, though, this was just one of many literary tours that filled my childhood. While other kids were spending July at the shore and August at summer camp or in the Poconos, we squandered all our free time visiting the family homes and haunts of famous writers. We trekked through their gardens (they always had gardens), had drinks at their local taverns, peeked into their bedrooms, and bought souvenirs and postcards from whoever was hawking them nearby. My mother always quoted extensively from their works while my sister and I huddled bleary-eyed in the backseat and played with smuggled Barbies.
Such lofty-minded trips generally culminated in long, uneventful weekends at secluded B&Bs that backed up onto cornfields or auto salvage lots. Most of the time, my sister and I were at such loose ends we’d resort to reading the dusty, yellow-paged Penguin Classics or Reader’s Digest condensed books that filled the shelves in the main living room, occasionally ripping out the pages and making paper hats, boats, or spitballs. When we did venture out, we’d generally wind up walking through deserted towns, past vacant shops and abandoned gas stations.
My mother was always searching for something that would give her life weight, that would take her away from her life of desperation and domesticity. I spent years buried in books, trying to avoid a similar fate. Then, all at once, there was this flash of certainty and the fuzziness disappeared. Robert Frost said, “What you want, what you’re hanging around in the world waiting for, is for something to occur to you.” That’s what happened. All of a sudden, something occurred to me.
“All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality,
the story of escape. It is the only thing which
interests us all and at all times, how to escape.”
∼ Arthur Christopher Benson (1862–1925) ∼
Women do different things when they’re depressed. Some smoke, others drink, some call their therapists, some eat. My mother used to go ballistic when she and my father had a fight, then she’d booze for days on end and vanish into her bedroom. My sister was more into the global chill mode; give ’em the silent treatment and, in the meantime, gorge on frozen Sara Lee banana cake. And I do what I have always done—go off on a book bender that can last for days.
I fall into this state for different reasons. Sometimes it’s after an “I hate your fucking guts” fight. Other times it’s symptomatic of my state of mind, ennui up to my ears, my life gone awry, and that feeling of dread whenever I’m asked what I’m doing. How can anyone sort all this out? All things considered, I’d rather read. It’s the perfect escape.
I have a whole mantra for my book binges. First of all, I open a bottle of good red wine. Then I turn off my cell phone, turn on my answering machine, and gather all the books I’ve been meaning to read or reread and haven’t. Finally, I fill up the tub with thirty-dollar bubble bath, fold a little towel at the end of the tub so it just fits in the crick of my neck, and turn on my music. I have an old powder-blue plastic Deco radio near the tub that I bought at a garage sale in Hollywood a few years ago. The oddest thing: the radio only receives one AM radio station, which plays jazz standards from the forties and fifties, and it suits me just fine.
Within my bathroom walls is a self-contained field of dreams and I am in total control, the master of my own elegantly devised universe. The outside world disappears and here, there is only peace and a profound sense of well-being.
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