An equal and opposite hole (2019)

It is Christmas Day in 1938. My mother is three years old. She is sharing a drawing board with her cousin Don. She wants to draw. He wants control over the markers and the eraser.

What I recognize most in my mother as a three year old is her tenacity—her heads down determination to accomplish a goal. You see her face only once, when she appeals to the adult with the camera. The rest of the time she is trying to work.

As a teenager, I spent a week visiting my mother’s parents in Chicago. I rummaged through a box of her childhood things and discovered her report cards from elementary school. Each teacher wrote almost the identical comment:

Grade 2 “Shirley is now reading well, but she is only reading books about horses. Please encourage her at home to broaden her reading selections.”
Grade 3 “I am trying to get Shirley to read books that aren’t about horses.”
Grade 4 “I wish Shirley would read something other than horse books.”
Grade 5 “Please encourage Shirley to read books that aren’t about dogs or horses.”

In her old bedroom, I found miniature farms that she and Howie had built, using wire and plaster and balsa wood and paint. They made them to scale, for people the size of a thumbnail. Each farm had a house and a barn, surrounded by trees and tiny fences. They made trucks and tractors and wagons that rolled. They made windmills that spun and appeared to be pumping water. There were water tanks and feed troughs and cows and pigs. And there were many, many horses—standing or galloping, rearing up or lying down.

My mother and her brother built these farms when they were sick. They had to have something to do. It is a family trait, this need for constant activity. They sat at opposite ends of a bed, competing for hours to make miniature versions of more and more complicated things. Both she and Howie shared, as she once described, “a creativity for combining and building things, a sense of order and process, and a real love for a project—the more difficult, the better.” They also shared a certain stubbornness. For years, whenever my mother reached a particular peak of frustration with me, she would burst out, “Howie! I mean, Doug!”

When Howie collapsed in his kitchen, thirteen years had passed since my father died. My cousin Kathy often talks about the difference these years made. “Although devastating,” she says, “the three of us were almost grown and were able to be partners in the aftermath in a way that three of you couldn’t.” As they recovered from this loss, as they struggled to survive and thrive, they were able to support their mother. Twice as old as I had been, Kathy had a close group of friends in Seattle and they just absorbed Rel, including her in everything they did together—skiing, camping, dinner parties.

In the years after my father died, my mother thought first about us but no one thought first about her. I certainly didn’t. As she shouldered the entire burden of our growing and becoming, my mother drew on the same traits she shared with Howie. Around the various intrusions of grief and anger that shook our sad family, she maintained a plan and a clear set of values, as well as two imperatives: Keep us busy, and keep us together. To this difficult project she brought her heads-down determination—that same singleness of will—and her passion for horses.

We bought one pony when I was ten, which the three of us shared.

We owned two ponies the Christmas before my father died, when he got down on all fours to be Emily’s ride. The second pony was bigger than the first, but I quickly outgrew it. A year later, we were all mounted—two ponies for my sisters and a horse for me. Sometime that year, the first year after he died, my mother created stationery for the three of us. Centered at the top, she drew the three animals side by side, facing the reader and ordered by height. The horse towered over the two ponies as I towered over my two sisters. The stationery was for thank-you notes and other letters to friends and relatives. It was also a statement of priorities. Horses were how she would keep us together. They were also how she would keep us busy.

We brought the horses to the farm in the summer, but the rest of the year we kept them at a barn in a rural town outside of New Haven. We spent an hour in the car together almost every day. Thirty minutes from our driveway to the barn. It was an old, unpainted barn, behind a post-and-rail fence. Out of the car came saddles and bridles—one set for each child. We hung them on the fence. We caught the horses and tied them to the fence. Scraped and brushed the mud off them. Put on each saddle. Put on each bridle. Then we rode about a mile and half along the streets in that town, our mother following us in the car.

We rode to a ring where we could practice. She stood in the center of the ring and watched us. Then that same ride back to the barn and then another half an hour back to our driveway, where we walked into the house carrying a saddle over one arm and a bridle over the other shoulder. The saddles dropped on the rug in the front hall. The bridles hung on a hook in the kitchen. At least one of us stood at the hook, while our mother cooked dinner, cleaning a bridle and finishing a discussion that had started in the car. Or trying to win an argument. And when dinner was ready, we talked about the individual personality of each horse we knew. “Riding is a sport,” my mother used to say proudly, “that requires you to understand another creature.”

Getting in the car and going to the barn was a discipline. No one else we knew in New Haven lived like this. We had many other things we wanted to do. But she insisted. “A horse is not like a motorbike,” she would say contemptuously, “that you can just park in a garage.” This was a commitment we made. We had a responsibility to take care of them. As a freshman in high school, I wanted to play soccer. “You can stop riding if you want,” she told me, “but then we have to sell your horse.” It felt like a decision to quit the family.

Those three saddles on the rug were the first thing anyone saw when they came to our house. They were another signpost, like the stationery, that we organized our family life around horses. Here is a picture taken in that front hall, just to the left of those saddles, early on a Sunday morning. It is dark outside. Our guests are still in their pajamas. Cousins on my father’s side, they were visiting for the weekend. We had spent Saturday together, but today was a competition, and we had woken them up to say good bye.

Once again, everyone but Mandy and I are smiling. The two of us are dressed to ride. Emily is coming with us but not riding. I am condescending to join the picture with all these younger girls, and I will walk away as soon as the shutter snaps.

Horses are anxious, reactive animals whose first reaction is flight. On that ride from the barn to the ring, a large truck that didn’t slow down could panic a horse. The truck might come banging around a corner, and the horse would bolt, iron shoes slithering on the pavement and one of us clinging on top, certain for a moment that the horse would slide under the wheels. On the street or in the ring, the pony Mandy rode would start running away and not stop. We took riding lessons at that time from an older woman who had been trained in England but didn’t have much to teach. She would watch Mandy gallop helplessly around the ring, offer no useful advice, but repeat again and again in her fake British accent, “Trot, Mandy! Tttrrottt!” These experiences intensified her sense, as Mandy remembers, “that horrible things were going to happen and no one was going to help me.” And so did my explosive, disruptive anger.

We spent long hours, almost every day, together as a family. Many of those hours were spent in a car. Much of that time was spent arguing. And most of those arguments were between my mother and me. People who saw us arguing said later how obvious it was we loved each other, but the complexity of our intimacy confused us both. It felt like a horse bolting and then running away. There was hardly anything we couldn’t argue about—the meaning of a song on the radio, some article in the newspaper about why people stood facing the doors in an elevator rather than each other, the amount of taxes in the price of gasoline, or what I learned from riding without stirrups. Whatever it was, neither of us could stop. “In terms of intensity,” my mother told me once, “you inherited that from me rather than your father.” Being an adult, she restrained herself for longer than I could. I remember her driving head down, trying to concentrate on the road the way she tried to work on that drawing board, while I verbally assaulted her.

Two active, involved parents enforce a system of rules and regulations—a kind of domestic deep state. Lose one of those parents, and you lose more than half of this system. With my father gone, my mother and I fought like a brother and his older sister. And Mandy defended her. “You were kind of withering toward her,” Mandy remembered. I was withering toward them both. Closer and closer to the size of a man, I spoke with a definitive male authority, wielding weapons handed me by the broader culture—scorn, condescension, contempt—which my mother tolerated, having tolerated this her entire life, until she couldn’t. What should have been a stable conversation, an ordinary exchange of views, would then explode. By the time my mother finally lost her temper, I was fighting with both her and Mandy.

For many of these years, we drove a Ford Econoline van with captain chairs in the front and two rows of back seats. I would be in the passenger seat, slashing at my mother. Mandy would be in the center of the seat behind me, straining forward against her seatbelt to defend her, while Emily stayed wedged in the farthest corner of the last row, her head down in a book. Even after we parked in our driveway and the argument moved inside, she often remained there reading, the light above her seat still on, the engine ticking and snapping as it cooled off in the darkness.

All the intensity of mine that my mother could control when I was four or six or eight had become ungovernable as I grew taller than her and stronger than her and louder. Lost and long gone was her thought and care about every word. Now she just wanted some kind of control herself, any lever that came to hand. So in her panic and anger and fierce determination still to shape who I would become, she would say more than she should. One of the things she would say—maybe in the kitchen now, maybe still in the front hall—was, “You wish I had died instead of your father.” She might say this shouting or crying. She often said it in a tone that was utterly matter of fact. And it would stop me. I had no answer.

I once found a photo of myself before I could crawl or talk, while I was my parents’ only child. I might have been sitting propped up in the corner of a couch or raising myself off my stomach and lifting my head at the same time. The photo had come unglued from the album, and on the back was writing in her hand and then in his. She described how I already loved my father more than her. Then he found some space to explain, in a firm but gentle way, why this wasn’t true. Underneath her tenacity lay this raw anxiety about who she was and how much I valued her. Even as the mother of an infant, she assigned herself second place. And now that he was dead, she felt certain he would have done a better job. Her son believed that the wrong person had died. To her that was just a fact. She said it then. She still says it now. Yet it remains so far from the truth.

She would have left an equal and opposite hole in the family. Would my father have understood those traits she and I shared, without her to explain them? That intensity. The constant activity. That heads down determination to achieve a goal. Would he have understood, as instinctively as she did, my obsession with completing that cabin? And there was one winter when I spent weeks alone in my room building a miniature barn out of balsa wood. I constantly ran out of balsa wood and she constantly drove me back to the store that sold it. What he contributed I did miss intensely. I didn’t miss her contributions because she was still there.

Telling me that the wrong person had died was like telling an amputee, “You wish you’d lost your right leg instead of your left.” No, it felt different than that. It felt like she was telling me, “If you are so angry about losing your left leg, then you won’t mind losing your right one as well.” My bed in New Haven was next to the window above our driveway. Occasionally, but not often, she would go out for dinner or to the theater. I would look out the window at the empty space in the driveway. Then I would lie awake in bed until I heard the car and knew she was home.

Yet I was almost always angry with her. And I could not explain why.