Third Class Superhero (14 page)

It will probably happen in this house, with my mother and me and no one else to witness, or, if we're lucky, in a hospital, with a nurse and possibly even a doctor standing by. It will be a surprise, no matter when or where it happens. And when that deck gets reshuffled, in the chaos, in the maelstrom of flying cards, I might have time enough to grab just one card for keeping, one card to hold on to. If the cards are cut the way I think they will be, then the eleven seconds spent tying my shoe while my mother looks on will be as good as any.

***

As much as I wish it were true, it is just not the case that I am infinitely inconsolable—not only are my consolations finite, it's almost embarrassing how modest they are. Sustained melancholy is tiring. As much as I wish I could, I cannot make a story out of everything.

***

Some Notes on the Practical Limits of Longing

I used to think that every time I left my mother, it broke her heart. The truth is, it doesn't really break either of our hearts. I wish it did, but it doesn't. We are a family of two, each of us alone in the world but for the other, and yet leaving is somehow bearable. Too bearable. Unbearably bearable. It almost breaks my heart how bearable it is. But it doesn't, maybe because we both have our own lives, lonely and quiet as they may be. Or maybe because it just is not very practical to let our hearts break, once a week, right on schedule. Whatever the reason may be, the fact remains that it does not break my mother's heart and it does not break my heart, and that's almost enough to break my heart.

***

Some Notes I Try to Shoehorn into Every Story I Write

All of my stories start out as uncarved blocks of time and end up as (i) a finished sculpted figure and (ii) a pile of leftover pieces. When I'm done cutting and chipping and breaking, and for the first time step back to look at what I've made, I am always disappointed. The figure I've carved is never what I thought it would be. What I thought was form is a twisted, grotesque shape, and what I thought was rich particularity is no more than an accumulation of idiosyncrasies, and what I thought were bold lines turn out to be jagged edges. Details that should be in the story are not, and details that were necessary have been left out, and details of both kinds have been lost, wasted, misplaced forever, unexamined and unexplained.

***

Definition of Frictional Loss of Time from the System

A secondary effect. An indirect source of lost fictional material. A by-product of the differing rhythms of (i) humans and (ii) the machines humans use to connect, record, and transport themselves. Physical constraints include maximum operating speeds and minimum latency periods. Waiting at stoplights, waiting in elevators, waiting for phones to be picked up. I have lost innumerable stories to these frictions, the miscellaneous seconds and minutes dissipating like heat.

***

57m 44s

The first story I ever lost to the Premature Good-bye was at the airport, the day I left for medical school. After a long and tearful good-bye, it was announced over the PA that Flight 2011, offering nonstop service from LAX to Logan, had been delayed for an hour. My mother and I looked at each other, unsure of what to do. After so much hand-wringing and wishing for an extra minute with each other, here we were presented with an entire hour, out of thin air. It was slightly embarrassing to have so much time and nothing more to say. We sat silently in our chairs, and then, after a minute or two, I wandered over to the magazine stand to browse. My mother bought a candy bar and walked over to watch the planes taking off. When it was finally time to go, we parted amiably, like acquaintances. I said I'd call and she just nodded.

What started out as a moment of departure and loss, a potential short story, withered into a nonevent. It was not unlike what happens when two people who have just parted ways realize they are leaving in the same direction. Some people will turn to each other and give an awkward little chuckle, as in, ha-ha, we said good-bye but here we are, walking together.

Some people, however, for reasons that can't be explained, will continue to walk in the same direction, side by side, neither one acknowledging the other. It's as if some Designated Time of Leaving has occurred and can't be repeated.

***

Some General Notes on the Use of Particulars

There are stories about other people's mothers that are well told, that I can relate to, see points of intersection, say to myself, once or twice or five times,
yes, yes, true, yes, that's right, mmhmm, yup.

Then there are stories about other people's mothers that are so well told that immediately after reading them, I go to my desk and throw away everything I am working on, in a fit of self-disgust.

***

Some Notes from the Preempted Stories File

And then there are those stories, other people's stories about their mothers, that are so well told they have the alarming and uncomfortable effect of making the hairs on my neck stand up, of giving me goose bumps on my head. They make me sit up when I read them, repeatedly, obsessively flipping back the page to look at the name of the author, to stare at it as if to ask,
Who is this person who knows my own mother better than I do?
When I am reading these stories I want to stop, I need to stop, because each word is like a tiny injury, a sharp, angled blow to the edifice of my ego.

I want to stop but of course I cannot stop, I cannot do anything except continue reading, word for word for word, until I am gulping the words down in whole sentences, accumulating injuries. And at some point I realize I am mouthing the words as I read them, even before I read them, and I wonder,
How am I doing this?
and for an instant the thought occurs to me that this person must have stolen my brain waves or at least my hard disk but that reflexive suspicion is quickly replaced by the realization that abstract premises, that is, potential stories, exist independently of the would-be writers trying to capture them. Whereas I had seen this uncarved block, waiting to be worked on, but had passed, unsure of what to do with it, someone else had taken that block and broken it open, chipped away at it, chiseled it into individual words, feelings, moments, people. Someone has beaten me to the punch and I am left to find another way to tell the story of my mother.

***

Autobiographical Raw Material Unsuitable for the Mining of Fiction

"The Definitive Story of the Particular Sadness of My Mother" sits on my desk, uncarved, shiny and untouched. I have no idea what it's supposed to look like when it's done. I don't even know where to begin.

This is the extent of what I know: It will be complicated. It will have to include:

— a hysterectomy,
— ovarian cysts,
— a middling job neither menial enough to be comic nor substantial enough to take seriously,
— three quiet, unmarried sisters, mysteries to each other and themselves,
— scattered friends who slipped into acquaintances as years went on,
— my father, who ran away and reportedly drank himself to death.

It will probably also have to include the day my father left. That he shaved, showered, ate breakfast, kissed my mother on the cheek, grabbed his briefcase, and went out the door. That we knew he wasn't coming back. How the kiss on the cheek gave it away, because he had never done that before. It will have to include the fact that before my father had reached the corner stop sign, my mother was in my room giving me a look that explained that we would never again utter his name. Not out loud, not to each other, not in the house.

It may also include the following: how I told myself that day that I would work hard, study hard, learn to write. That I would get good enough, steal enough from others, and someday make a story out of the random and arbitrary disasters of my mother's life. I would put the pieces in order for her—act one, act two, scene four, scene five—fill it all in with the right colors. The story of my mother should describe how we silently agreed that I was going to make sense of it all, sort out her life and come back one day and say, Look, this is why this happened and you did this much, and you were the most this, or the least this, and this mattered and so did this. It should explain that we both kept hope that there would come the time when we'd have some long stretch of hours, or days, or a week, to sit in a quiet room and I'd tell my mother the story of her life, recite it back to her, a new thing, show her where it was funny and who mattered. I'd show her the one story in the world in which she was the main character, because she was too tired to keep trying to do it herself. I came back from college and I went away again and came back again and moved back in and then moved out. The whole time I was collecting details, piecing them together in little clumps, here and there, starting to see the beginnings of a plot.

Then one day I woke up and my mother had gotten old. And I had become not so young. And I went to my desk to look at the story and there were hundreds of new pieces, a secret store of senseless hurts, routine indignities, pointless hours. All of my work, all of the partial narratives I had been pasting and stapling and forcing together, it was all junk. "The Story of My Mother" had to include more fragments, more ingredients, more random intervals than I had ever imagined. And right then and there, I realized for the first time that I was not good enough to write it, realized that it was quite possible I would never be good enough, even if I had a thousand years. I realized that writing the story of my mother will require someone who can leave it all hanging, someone comfortable with ambiguity, someone with the ability to leave things out. I don't know how to do any of these things.

This is what I know how to do: cling to sentiment, collect the scraps, stockpile every last anonymous moment in my mother's anonymous existence. I've created a big box for it all and labeled it Miscellaneous. And in that box are millions of files, one for every unclassifiable moment in my mother's nonfictional life. Every eleven seconds a new file is created. I label it whatever seems appropriate. This is what I've settled for: the secret, deluded hope that someday, if I keep all these useless bits together and stare at them long enough, I'll figure out how to arrange them in just the right way.

I would like to thank Frederick Barthelme, Mike Czyzniejewski, Karen Craigo, Mark Drew, Tom Dooley, Rie Fortenberry, Ander Monson, Christina Thompson, and Valerie Vogrin for publishing some of these stories, and Carol Ann Fitzgerald for her encouragement, which has meant more than she probably knows.

I am greatly indebted to my agent, Gary Heidt, for his insight and for taking a chance on me, and to my editor, Stacia Decker, for her patience and intelligence. Thank you to Sara Branch, Lynn Pierce, Jennifer Jackman, Jodie Hockensmith, Scott Piehl, and everyone else at Harcourt for their efforts and for giving me this opportunity.

Shout out to Mark Forrester for being a good friend and an even better reader. Thank you to Rachel Sarnoff for her enthusiasm and wit. Thank you to my brother, Kelvin, for the lifelong conversation. And thank God for my wife, Michelle, the funniest person I have ever met.