Rock in the garden (2019)

How does a personality form? We filter what we experience, and what we experience changes our filter. The colander that is my brain has different holes than yours, and life streams through it differently. Just as my pattern of holes is particular to me, so is the flotsam and jetsam that I retain. Our personalities grow in the soil of this detritus. Most of life continues leaking out, of course, but the roots of what grows there continue to change what we retain. How we leak is who we are. And what never leaks out of my brain, what I always retain, is any evidence that I am to blame.

I was this way even as a young child, long before my father fell sick. I remember playing with Mandy in the hall outside their bedroom door. Their door was shut. It was early one Saturday or Sunday morning. We started to fight and finally woke them. I heard the bed creak and his feet land on the floor. The moment he came through the door, I started fighting with him about how this fight wasn’t my fault. And I continued fighting with him—I don’t remember Mandy saying a word—until my indignant, self-righteous rage reached such a peak that he punished only me. He picked me up under the armpits, thrashing and yelling, and carried me into my room where he set me on my bed and explained that he didn’t know whether it was my fault, that he didn’t even know what had happened, but that he was punishing me because of how I reacted when he tried to find out.

In a rusting metal file cabinet, in a faded manila folder labeled “Clint: Funeral notes and arrangements,” my mother saved some of the cards she received. “The honesty of the service was certainly a fitting tribute,” someone named Betty wrote. “How wonderful to have death presented—not as some beautiful great beyond but as most of us think it really is—something to be angry about, something to hate.” This was us. We were angry at death. My father in the gas station chasing the gasoline attendant back into the office. His fury at his friend Marc for not telling him that his cancer had spread. Even his gravestone celebrated anger. Rage was grief. Grief was rage. “Anger does not need an object in order to exist—but it FINDS objects,” my mother observed at her brother’s funeral. “It is a powerful poison for survivors.” As we struggled to adapt to the hole he left behind, my anger found my mother. And her anger found me.

As a teenager, I had a dream. It was a simple dream. I saw the top corner of one blank piece of lined, loose-leaf paper. Then I saw my own hand, close up. In my hand stood a sharpened pencil. Pressing hard on the paper, the pencil drew a square. Then it shaded in the square, over and over. At school, I drew dozens of these squares in the margins around my notes, but I didn’t know why. In my dream, I shaded in the square until it was a deep black and then raised my eyes and saw my mother sitting across from me. “This is how angry I am at you,” I said and showed her the black box.

The events we can describe most clearly, years later, are events we often call to mind. It is hard now to remember the details of specific arguments. I felt so dirty and ashamed. As soon as they were over I pretended they didn’t happen, and in all the years since I have tried not to recall them. And we tend to remember what we suffer rather than the suffering we inflict. I can still describe being a victim or times when I defended myself. I don’t remember my arbitrary anger. I can’t tell stories about my many outbursts, those grief-stricken explosions, what my mother calls the thunderstorms that oppressed everyone else in the family.

Those boxes I drew and redrew were containers. That dream with my mother was a dream of restraint—the black force of my turmoil captured on paper and confined within walls the width of a pencil point. Awake, that discipline broke continually. I just would not stop arguing. If I wanted something or thought something, I just would not let it go. My mother felt constantly attacked by me: “I could not say no without a battle, and I could not say yes without feeling I was being bullied into it, which tended to make me say no.” The problem was not the power struggle, however, but how that struggle exploded. For a while, she might strike me at the height of her anger—a slug or a slap. It didn’t happen often. It changed when I grew large enough to catch her hand or push her away. Then she was afraid to hit me. She didn’t know what I would do. And neither did I.

“If there was a way to quantify the blow of him dying,” my mother said once, “it fell most heavily on you and me, just because your sisters were younger, and even two years makes a big difference at that age.” She and I should have had the most to say about him. We could have done the most to help each other. But having a conversation remained almost impossible. I still wanted her to respond to my emotion. She couldn’t. I still wanted her to say what he would have said, yet nothing she said felt enough like him to me. As I grew closer and closer to the age when they first met, she also wanted me to be him—or if not him, at least an early version of him, some recognizable prototype of who he would become. Yet I was so much less calm, so much less charming, so much less wise. And she couldn’t let me be him because then I would win our power struggle and she would fail as a parent.

Our worst arguments shared one feature as they escalated: A certain shapelessness or shape-shifting quality. She was my mother. Then for a moment we were somehow partners. And then she became my mother again, without either of us acknowledging or even understanding the transition. This happened, for example, when we fought about money. Around the time I was fourteen or fifteen, she opened a checking account for me and deposited a certain amount of money each month that I was supposed to use for everything except groceries and major purchases. But she did not clearly define what counted as a major purchase. Was a winter coat a major purchase? Were boots? What if I wanted to add bookshelves in my room? These still felt like purchases a parent should make for me. Writing a check for them myself, even out of the money that she had given me, felt like I was being asked to partner with her financially, as if I had a job, as if I were an adult. I reacted like a child—but with a slashing, infuriating confidence in my masculine authority.

Once we argued about a purchase in a mall. Loud and relentless, I didn’t care what other people heard. I walked out of the store. She collected my sisters and just left the mall. I was fourteen. We were in downtown Chicago. She left me there as if I could find my own way and drove back to her parents’ house on the other side of the city. I had no money in my pocket. Even if I did, I didn’t know the public transportation system or my grandparents’ address or even their phone number. I finally borrowed money from a stranger and got the phone number from Information and she came to pick me up, still furious and silent.

One afternoon, on the long bus ride home from middle school, someone who had been my closest friend suddenly attacked me. He had shoved me from behind in class that day, when the teacher wasn’t looking, and I didn’t understand it. I thought it was an accident. Much taller than me at the time and much stronger, he picked me up now and hurled me down the aisle of the bus. When I stood up, still bewildered, he hurled me down the aisle again, snickering and sneering as the other boys laughed. Then he sat down next to a girl and started talking to her as if nothing had happened. The seat in front of them was empty. I stepped up on the empty seat, as if on a stair or a stool. He raised his head to look at me, and I kicked him between the eyes, my heel hitting the bridge of his nose and snapping the frame of his glasses. I sat down against the window and cried until we reached our stop. We had the same stop. I never spoke to him again.

This was how far I would go. This was how hard I shoved off into the current of my anger. I never deliberately hurt anyone in this way at home, but when I lost my temper no one knew where I would stop. Suzanne has often said to me, “You underestimate how overwhelming your anger is.” As I grew larger, my size invested each conflict with a sense of menace, and my family experienced me as physically threatening, particularly Mandy. We had always fought. I had often been punished for hitting her. But now I terrified her. It made my mother furious that Mandy was afraid of me. Utterly frustrated, desperate to shape me still, she worried about what kind of man I was becoming.

During that dark, damp winter in Oxford, for months after my Uncle Howie died, I relived my early teenage years. Remembering my own wounds and not hers, I wrote my mother three or four letters, almost as angry as I had been as a teenager. She wrote me back. We spoke on the phone. We had no dialogue still. We never came to a consensus about what had happened, a story that we both felt was close enough to true and fair. But for decades she saved those letters. Why am I doing this to myself? she would ask each time she opened them again. She finally threw them away a few weeks after I fell sick because they were too painful, because she still couldn’t understand them, and maybe because this wasn’t how she wanted to remember me.

Knowing how frustrated I feel to be trapped in the hospital and how much I miss being in the woods, Mandy texts me pictures from her walks in the morning. Her pictures have captions such as, “Wind marks in the snow this a.m.”

She checks on me frequently and visits me often.

She labels each meal she brings. Her labels are sometimes strictly descriptive:

And sometimes evaluative:

She also cooks for my family. They were eating a meal she had made for them when Caleb said, “Aunt Mandy’s food doesn’t taste the same when she isn’t here to criticize her own cooking.” I tell her this story from my bed and make her laugh.

There is one fight from those days that we all remember. If Mandy and I started talking about that fight now, sitting together in my hospital room—if we stopped talking about my treatment or our families or her walks in the woods and tried to agree about exactly what happened then, all her caring and concern and all my gratitude for her help would seem to disappear. We remember it differently. Most families live with locked boxes like this, where two versions of a story cannot exist simultaneously. One version has to be wrong for the other to be right, and if you have to choose one you will only choose your own. This is my version.

My mother is standing at a sink full of dirty dishes, sobbing. She is yelling at me without turning around, both hands braced on the edge of the sink. When she stops yelling, she yanks plates up out of the pile of dishes and whips them across the kitchen. They are heavy stone plates—an earthy, somber brown. They look like they wouldn’t break if you threw them. Each one clanks as she pulls it free. Each one shatters when it hits the floor, splattering soap and bits of food.

It is evening, a winter evening, long past dinner, but no one has eaten. We have been arguing in the car—the family, the four of us. I don’t remember why. I stayed in the car after everyone else left. I don’t remember how long. I have just come inside. I am standing in the front hall, my back to the front door, looking straight into the kitchen at my mother and the sink.

We have been alone with each other for three years now. It is late in my freshman year of high school. I provoked this argument, the one that started in the car, and then I escalated it again and again. But now I am listening to my mother break plates. Now I am watching Mandy yell at me also, tears streaming down her face. I see Emily traveling silently up the stairs to hide. And now for me this argument ends. Something has to be done. Order must be restored. So I start into the kitchen to make her stop.

There are two entrances to the kitchen. One from the front hall—a straight line that ends at the sink. The other after a turn at the sink. Turn ninety degrees to the right, pass through an old-fashioned pantry, and leave the kitchen into the dining room. You can run in a circle around the first floor of the house—kitchen, pantry, dining room, living room, front hall, and kitchen again.

Mere seconds is how long my intervention lasts. Out of the dining room door I come, leaving Mandy hurt and sobbing on the floor.

Inside the kitchen, my mother has found a broom. Flipping it around, she holds the broomstick down near the brushes with both hands, like a baseball bat or an ax, and comes out after me. I am walking through the dining room into the living room, following that circle, when she cracks the stick over my head.

I turn to face her, a few steps onto the living room rug. She is raising the broomstick to strike me again. As she starts to swing again, I push her away. But she loses her balance. She falls backward. Falling, she strikes her ear against a stereo speaker, and for a moment lies motionless. She lies motionless and I stand over her, the one who did this. The broomstick, dropped while it was still behind her head, stretches back into the dining room.

From flat on her back, she props herself up to sitting, one hand and then both hands holding her right ear. The sharp edge of the stereo speaker has cut her ear. It is bleeding profusely. I remember watching my mother come back into her face. Her regard for me and my future returns, and now I hear her regret. “It isn’t your fault, Doug,” she says, blood seeping around her fingers. “Don’t think this is your fault.”

She asks me to call our next door neighbor, the man whose doorbell Emily used to ring with a book in her hand. I call the neighbor. He is a state court judge. He comes. He judges me. Her ear needs stitches. She drives herself to the emergency room. I leave the house and walk the streets of New Haven until late at night, imagining the worst I could do to punish myself.

No fight ever matched that fight. Nothing was ever as bad. Broomsticks, tears, and bleeding ears were not our everyday life. But this was what grief looked like in our family. It looked like chaos. And it felt like my fault. What shaped my perception of this chaos, of our rage and confusion, was a crushing sense of failure. My father had asked only one thing of me. Worse than that, he hadn’t even asked. He just believed. And yet the jagged rock cropping out in her planted garden, the end to the ordered and controlled family that my mother had once envisioned, was me. None of this would have happened if I knew how to control myself. I should have been able to control myself. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t be a good man.

In a drawer below the linen closet lay a double-barreled shotgun—taken apart in a carrying bag, behind a quilt that no one used. It had been a gift from my mother’s father to my father. When the house was empty, I would sneak the gun out and assemble it on my bed. Then I put it away.