Life with Sudden Death. Michael Downing
counting the red construction-paper covers or the flowering-vine border I’d drawn around the title, “The Story of My Life (8 Years).” I shoved it aside on the dining room table.
Read it, my mother said.
I read it. I figured this humiliation was fair punishment for my griping, and it was. Along with a lot of thanks to Jesus and Mary for their help along the way, I’d made up eight acts of kindness or generosity and attributed one to each of my brothers and sisters and included their dates of birth in parentheses. Those pages also contained more hard facts about my father’s career than I could claim to know as a senior in high school. And at the bottom of page three, I’d crammed in a P.S. about my godfather, an uncle who was the captain of an icebreaker. In the printed edition of my life, he did well, though I barely knew him. When on land, he lived in California with no kids of his own, just a wife who dyed her hair blond. I only remember one of his visits. He wore his white Navy uniform and hat in the house and promised to take me on a voyage to see polar bears, and then he never turned up again.
My mother said, Notice anything?
I listed the document’s literary demerits.
Anything else?
I hoped we weren’t going to discuss the cover art.
She nodded. She said, There’s not a single mention of me. She cracked a smile. She added, Not a word about what a great job I did. You’d think you never had a mother.
I’m sure I tried to explain away my oversight, but I don’t remember what I said.
My mother assured me she was not insulted. I believed her. We sat for a while in a familiar, companionable silence, just looking at each other. It must mean something, though, she said, letting her smile fade. She was drawing a blank.
2. Other People’s Parties
By second grade, I considered an invitation to a birthday party an imposition. After my father died, cleaning the house and fixing up the yard took up most of my family’s time on Saturdays, and a lot of kids in my class chose to pretend they were born on Saturdays, as a way of attracting bigger crowds to their birthday parties. The worst ones began with hand-delivered envelopes you couldn’t open because the kid had finally found a use for all the Easter Seals his parents had bought from him during our annual sales event.
Sister Jeanne Arthur did not allow mail delivery during class time because too many kids ended up with hurt feelings. You’d find the party invitation in your desk after lunch with an RSVP demand, usually in capital letters or underlined. If the kid was unpopular or not well known in class, he’d spend the rest of the day distracting you with notes asking if you’d received the invitation yet. The only way to protect yourself was to raise your hand and ask Sister Jeanne Arthur to remind you what the punishment was for passing notes.
Sister Jeanne Arthur was popular and strict. She was bigger than anybody else at Notre Dame grammar school, and she used size to her advantage when necessary. She never hit second-graders full-force, but she’d just as soon punch a sixth-grader as look at him, and if anyone brought a radio or a weapon into school, Sister Jeanne Arthur was the one they sent in to steal it from him by force.
Sister Jeanne Arthur had rules for just about everything, including gifts for the teacher. Gifts didn’t work as bribes on her, but they were a good way for second-graders to practice the Golden Rule. She let us know she was pretty well provided with rosary beads and holy cards, and she had to share any cash she got with a houseful of other nuns. Unless it was a lot, money wasn’t going to do her much good. She knew children often had a hard time picking out the right gifts, so she saved us the trouble by asking for potato chips, and she hinted that the State Line brand was especially worthy of our attention.
My mother admired Sister Jeanne Arthur for knowing exactly what she wanted. She also admired this trait in total strangers at the supermarket who “moved along at a decent clip” instead of blocking the aisles while making up their minds. My mother always knew exactly which item any person with a brain in her head should buy.
If you were ever confused about a choice, all you had to do was examine your conscience. This worked for all the Downings we knew, except me. I was about three when this became apparent, and the story was retold a million times. Unfortunately, my father was still alive when this happened, so it was probably one of the few things about me that stuck in his mind for eternity.
I had to be punished by my mother because I wouldn’t stop asking to try on the boxing gloves my father had bought Gerard for his tenth birthday. I was sent to the laundry room to examine my conscience. This was not my first trip to the isolation booth, but my mother had never closed the door between me and the kitchen before. I admit I was probably sobbing and ruining the party atmosphere.
Things went wrong immediately. I got distracted by the idea of turning the laundry room into my private bedroom. In part, I blame the bleachy darkness, which made me think of nighttime and clean sheets. When I lay down on my back on the cool linoleum between the laundry machines and the built-in cabinets, I fit perfectly, with room to spare for growth spurts. I folded my hands behind my head, bent my knees, and crossed my legs. Directly above me, I noticed, the ceiling light had already been outfitted with a pull-chain. If I added a shoelace, I’d be able to operate it as a nightlight. If I drummed up a decent pillow, the world would be my oyster.
A knock at the door brought me to my feet. Somebody, not my mother, said, Are you done examining your conscience?
I remember almost nothing of what happened next. It’s just a story told about me. I don’t even remember my father being in the kitchen, so if I ran into him when I was released, I hope I was polite. I doubt it, though, because I do know I was panicky. I also remember that Gerard’s new inflatable boxing bag had been attached to the door of the built-in broom closet in the kitchen, and it was hanging there like the shiniest apple on the forbidden Tree of Knowledge. And I remember one other detail. I remember clearly that I did not know the meaning of the word conscience. Still, it was nobody’s fault but my own that I had wasted my prison time on another of my many home-makeover fantasies.
Either my mother or my father asked me if I was sorry for causing a ruckus. (The sources vary on this point.) Everyone agrees that I said I was sorry, acing that test. But my mother expected our A’s to come with plusses, so she tossed me a bonus question: What do you want to say to your brother for interrupting his birthday party?
I screamed, I want boxing gloves.
I won a return trip to the isolation booth. The story leaves me stranded there, cut off from the family, wanting things I should not want.
After my father died, instead of missing him or the status and money that accrued to us during the last years of his life, most of my family just stopped wanting the things we didn’t have—hence their attitude about strangers at our parties. It was not economic or space constraints that dictated our policy. It was our good fortune not to need outsiders to gin up a celebration.
Anybody can turn necessity into a virtue. My family could perform moral alchemy, turning anything that was not available to us into a vice. I never mastered this skill. I constantly craved what other people had, but I also craved the heady feeling of being a Downing—being morally superior to people who craved that stuff. I wanted it all. I wanted to live above reproach with a heated in-ground pool in the backyard.
By second grade, I knew it was not okay to want all the right things and all the wrong things. Managing my irreconcilable longings was going to require some fancy footwork. The world was famously a minefield of sinful pleasures for normal Catholics, but our family catalogue of shameful indulgences went way beyond color television sets and jewelry. It included pets, family vacations, and grandparents.
The H. family up the street had a live grandmother, and they kept her in the other side of their duplex house. As I understood this arrangement, they’d installed her as a built-in babysitter. I never had any live grandparents, so it was lucky I came from a family that didn’t need the kind of help they could offer. Nana spoke to us only through the window screens, like a prisoner, to tell us