M.E. Breen

Packing up my mom’s apartment I came across a book review she’d saved from February 22, 1998.  The illustration alone makes it worth saving: a giant, Blue Meanies-style head wailing in a pram. The book in question is The Beast in the Nursery, by Adam Phillips. The review is by Stephen Greenblatt. I haven’t read the book yet, which sounds so lame about something that came out 13 years ago, but what can I say? I’m a slow reader. I do not exaggerate when I say J reads five books to my one. I read book reviews the same way I once read Lucky magazine, so I can shop without spending money. I actually tagged pages with those “Yes” and “Maybe” stickers they provided. Tagging turning out to be a surprisingly good proxy for buying. I neutralized my desire by acting on it, and even the most inane action would do. Plus, cheap! I think the magazine would sell even better if they gave you a “NEVER” sticker too.

With reading, as with fashion, I feel like I’m perpetually working toward something rather than through something. The matter at hand, the outfit or paragraph at hand, is rarely the right matter. I always think I should be better or differently dressed, or farther along in the book. Which is weird, because with reading, I’m also always afraid of losing what I have. If it’s a book I love, I’m afraid of losing my pleasure in it by getting ahead of it, as though if I read too fast I might outpace my enjoyment. Certainly I don’t want to outpace my understanding. I do not skim. I do not know how to skim. I do not know how to extract the wheat.

Oh no. I’m afraid this is one of those moments of distressing extrapolation. I’m afraid in life generally I do not know how to extract the wheat. A teacher I loved in college confessed during an Elizabethan drama seminar that the previous night his wife had caught him counting the pages to the end of Henry VI Part 3. I remember being charmed and a bit shocked by this glimpse into privacy and domesticity. You mean you aren’t just a giant head elongated by ideas wobbling around campus on vestigial lemur feet? I also remember thinking, “Page flipping merits spousal joshing? Here is a whole different kind of person from my kind of person. Here is a person who is successful at his work because his tasks absorb him.”

That last characterization must come from my 35-year old self, not my 19-year old self.  Absorption strikes me as a distinctly middle-aged goal, and I’m pretty sure my college categories were limited to Fascinating and Boring. But I did understand, even at that age of sweet and furious convictions, that I was the sort of person who spent the time she should be reading in counting the pages left to read, and the time she should be absorbing material in speculating about what level of attention qualified as absorption.

In any case, that moment from seminar stuck with me, so, in the spirit of Phillips and therapy, let’s assume it’s important. But what does it have to do with the book review? Greenblatt defines Phillips’ thesis as follows: sad adults have lost their curiosity. Like Hamlet, they feel “How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world.” The job of the therapist, then, is to restore curiosity. Adults are all dying to get back to the state of frenzied curiosity your average kid feels about a trip to the zoo.  That sounds fair enough to me. I think for most of us, curiosity depends on the conviction that whatever you discover in your investigations will not harm you. I read an article a few months back about the mother of two boys with a vicious form of muscular dystrophy. She spent an enormous amount of time and energy trying to direct attention and funding to the disease, as do many parents in her position. The remarkable thing about this woman was that she remained an activist even after both her sons died in their late teens. Even after her first, desperate, protracted investigation revealed a problem she could not solve, a problem that caused her terrible harm, she remained curious and hopeful.

For the rest of us, I suspect absorption makes curiosity possible. Absorption in a single task limits curiosity blow back.  Comic books often use the trick of cramming ever more panels and speech bubbles into the pages as the issue progresses. The reader gets increasing amounts of information and visual stimulation, but each individual panel gets smaller and less significant. Usually the last page of the issue is a stand-alone page rather than a spread. You have to turn the second page of the previous spread to see it, and there’s something about the physical act of turning the page, that momentary delay before the inevitable outcome, that makes you catch your breath. What you see when you turn the page is a single, blown-up image, totally out of scale with the art on the preceding pages. Often the image is of the hero or villain of the moment, or sometimes just one body part, a face or a hand. Sometimes, if it’s an outer-space comic, the image will be of a planet, a huge, spiny, malevolent alien world, or maybe an enormous fireball speeding toward a tiny, imperiled Earth. If there is any text at all, it’s just a single word or line. It always blows my mind, even when I’ve seen the trick a hundred times.

Having your mind blown in comics is good. Having your mind blown by suddenly confronting a problem of enormous scale isn’t so good, but that is where curiosity inevitably leads you. Most of us learn to limit our inquiries to problems with discernible boundaries, though how badly we need the boundaries depends on mood. When my problems congeal into an immense and boulder-like mass, all I want to do is watch dumb formula TV like The Gates or Supernatural and do crosswords. An actual grid! When the world seems more like a teeming hive full of interesting bees, I’m able to take some risks and chase some bees.

It’s when the world seems like a massive ball of string that you wind up like Hamlet. Having a parent die is like walking along the road and looking down and seeing the end of a rope. You pick up the rope and start to follow it, and at first you are like, huh, long rope, and then gradually you realize that the rope is everything, the road under you and the sky above you and the town in the distance ahead of you and you yourself. You are unraveling the thread of existence! You can drop the rope, but it doesn’t make any difference because you have seen how all things are connected. And then how natural, because you are sad and tired, to see the world as infinitely sad and tired.

That’s what’s so strange about all this. It is our natural human impulse to see connections between things, but the connectedness of everything is what overwhelms and defeats us. Greenblatt talks about “a problem with which Phillips repeatedly grapples but that he cannot resolve: psychoanalysis is an integral part of the culture that kills, or radically diminishes, the curiosity that its practitioners hope to enhance.” He goes on to say: “In a critique of Anna Freud, Phillips acknowledges that ‘psychoanalysis – as both theory and practice – can . . . dispirit people by making them better able to endure their ungainly fit with the culture.’”

This is the part of the review that finally makes sense for me of the idea that adults want to regain the curiosity of childhood. It isn’t curiosity we want, exactly, but the freedom of unlimited desire. As kids we could want everything precisely because we knew so little about anything.

So here we are, such weary adults,  afraid of what we might discover only because we can imagine so much.

I am moving my mom’s stuff out of her apartment. No mom, just stuff. Mom moved to Chicago last week to be closer to my sister and her family. It was a big move — she’d lived in San Francisco since 1969 — but she didn’t take much with her. Stuff, who needs it?

Me.

J and I were wandering around the cluttered, denatured apartment, trying to figure out what we wanted to live with and what we wanted to get rid of and what we would store.

“Is this going to Goodwill?” he called from my mom’s bedroom.

“What, the mattress?”

“No, the bed.”

“That’s my grandparents bed! It’s really valuable.”

Silence. I guessed he was inspecting the fine beehive carving on the four posts and the flower like a wooden brooch pinned to the center of the curved headboard. The matching mirror has a matching flower carved into its frame.

J’s taste leans more toward Danish Modern, while my mom’s parents and grandparents apparently expected Henry VIII to drop by and wanted him to feel at home.

“Maybe we could sell it,” I offered. “I could talk to an antiques dealer.”

“Mol?” J said. “I think it’s from Sears Roebuck.”

To explain how it felt to hear this I have to tell a story. I rowed crew in high school as well as college. My senior year we were really fast. We won the National championship in four person boats as well as eights. We’d never even practiced in fours until the day before race day, and the B half of our varsity eight, including me, raced in the four. I’m not sure why we were so fast. We trained hard and had a great coach and were really bonded, but that season was more than the sum of its parts. There was a magical certainty to it. I knew we were going to win. Aside from falling in love, that season is the closest thing to magic I’ve ever experienced. Anyway, early in the spring, just before racing really got underway, the varsity boat went on a retreat to someone’s country house in New Hampshire. It was hardly a house. I remember it as a single room of windows. Beyond the windows a dock stretched onto a lake as clear as the glass in the windows.

A few of us decided to jump in. I think our coach dared us. I have never been in water that cold, before or since. What I remember is how the cold synthesized everything. I know my brain and body are working together behind my back via my nervous system all the time, but on this occasion they worked together in plain sight. There was no difference between them. They were going like this:  COLD! COLD! HA HA HA! COLD! THIS IS COLD! THIS IS COLD! OUT OUT OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT! I burst out of the water gasping and almost wailing. The certainty of it all was exhilarating. I knew! I knew in my bones. Later we drank hot cocoa and cocooned ourselves in blankets and turned the heat on full blast for the car ride back to campus and never quite got warm.

So now I knew this, too. Lake water in March in New Hampshire is cold. My family’s stuff is cheap.

I stood there after J spoke, my hands clutching the spaghetti of extension cords and power strips I’d collected from all around the apartment. I think I said something like, “Oh,” or, “No it’s not,” but my brain and my gut were in accord: Cheap. Cheap, cheap, cheap.

But why did I care? Why do so many people care? Why was Antiques Roadshow such a hit? I don’t think it’s about money, but I do think it’s about capitalism, and the way the market can clarify, or let’s say, overlay, the great mysteries of love and attachment and duty. If an object has no market value, then its only value is the sentimental value I assign it. An expensive thing, a rare thing, would always have a steward. Someone else would care for it, for a long time. But this bed — the only living person who cares about it is me. If it passes away from me, it loses its history, and without its history, it becomes junk. It becomes inanimate. I kill it.

Well, you might argue, it’s already inanimate. It’s a bed. It’s a mass-produced bed. And if I carry the individual history of the bed in my mind, why do I need the object? If I need a reminder, isn’t it something I might as well forget? Besides, this bed has a sad history. But what if we only keep the things with a happy history? What kind of a life are we pretending we’ve lead?

And then there is regret, the specter of regret, that drives so much. I might need it later, or want it, or miss it. I might miss it like the body of someone I love. But I don’t have room for it. I can pay to store it, but I don’t want to sleep in it. And when, really, will we have a house with a designated guestroom? We don’t want a house that big. We want to live in our neat ship’s quarters, sleeping below, lounging above deck in fair weather with the ship’s dog and cats.

For five minutes Friday morning, we thought we might need to evacuate because of the tsunami. The cops had closed the beach and the Great Highway, and no one really knew what was coming. Minute six, everyone went back to drinking coffee at the Java Beach cafe. But during those five minutes, I did not think about a single object in my house except for the double-wide pink cat carrier and how fast I could run uphill with that thing banging my knees.

I’ve believed my whole life that the furniture in our house was valuable. Really valuable, like . . .like. . Vermeers.  All those years, we were sitting on Vermeers. I’m sure my mom never suggested anything of the kind, though she did speak reverentially of Dede’s Lowboy and Baps’ Highboy. Or maybe she was just speaking referentially. Maybe the magic in the words came from me. I know perfectly well my mom’s grandfather Baps owned a hardware store, but how could something called a Highboy not be expensive? The people who once owned these things are all dead, and with the exception of my grandmother, I know them only from photographs. If a person had her photo taken in 1901, let me tell you, she dressed to the nines. Even babies. My grandmother, nine months old, in a long white gown and lace cap, looks, well, rich. How could a baby like that wind up sleeping in a bed from Sears Roebuck?

Can I give up the baby, and the old woman, and the bed? Do I let the mirror go too, so they might travel as a pair, and keep each other company? But will anyone else notice the matching flowers? Do I keep the mirror with me? Ghosts don’t usually haunt people. They haunt houses. They get trapped in rooms or mirrors. If only.

O fahter, fahter
gone amoong

O eeys that loke

Loke, fahter:
your sone!

In case you’re wondering whether your friend Molly has been recently, indelibly humiliated, I can tell you. She has. It happened last Friday.

But who sits around wondering about other people’s humiliations? Humiliation is like a plantar’s wart: from the outside, a mere speck on the sole. But from the inside! Your whole weight rests on that thing. You can’t take a step without it forcing itself to your attention. And what is it, anyway? Is it a protrusion or a perforation? Did it come from you or did it happen to you?

Years ago my sister and I went on a bicycle trip together in Europe. My sister was reading Simone De Beauvoir’s memoirs and told me a story from one of them. Here’s how I remember it:

Simone and Sartre liked to go on long bike rides together. Sartre was faster than Simone, and often he’d get lost in thought and bike away far ahead of her. On one of these trips, when Sartre was out of sight, Simone rode her bike into a ditch. She knocked out one of her teeth. There was no one around to help her, but somehow she got herself home. Several months later she noticed a lump on her chin, like a giant pimple. She squeezed it and out popped her tooth. It hadn’t been knocked out, but in, and traveled through her gums to the surface of her skin.

So, warts and tooth pimples. What am I getting at here? Why so disgusting? Disgust and humiliation go together, pair style. Which makes me think of another book, the graphic novel Black Hole by Charles Burns. I would say Black Hole is about how disgusting and humiliating it is to be a teenager, except that isn’t quite right. Lots of TV shows and movies and books are about the horror show of adolescence, but they are goofy, nostalgic, arch, meta, allegorical, whatever it takes to create a feeling of distance between the viewer and the characters. Even my beloved Buffy positions itself as a commentary on adolescence, not as the actual awful experience of adolescence. But Black Hole is the awful experience.  Burns’s art is full of sickening whirlpool effects, plus gaping wounds, peeling skin, tails, ruffled gills, strange fur pelts and sprouting horns (ok, there is some allegory). Even the normal looking teens, even the pretty ones, have terrifying mouths. When I wasn’t reading the book I put a magazine on top of it so I didn’t have to see the cover. Turning each page I felt dread about what or who I might see, a particular kind of stomach dread not unlike my holding-loaded-tray-wearing-uncool-Gap-jeans-looking-for-a-seat-in-the-dining-hall-freshman-year-at-boarding-school dread. Burns wants you to feel fifteen again: chronically nauseated.

But I couldn’t stop reading Black Hole, either, which is why I think it has the perfect title. Here there be totally monsters: loneliness, alienation, confusion, lassitude, hopelessness, grief, doubt, boredom, compulsion, misapprehension, bumps and ditches, all familiar, crummy, and unavoidable to adults, but awful in their newness to teenagers. Imagine that first glimpse of all the unhappiness the world contains — not the unhappiness you yourself contain, which a child understands as well as anyone, but the unhappiness of other people. Life does start to look like a hole from which nothing can escape.

Of course, hang around long enough and you figure out the hole is not a hole at all, but a tunnel. Some of the teenagers in Black Hole emerge into the bright light of adulthood, literally: they wind up in the desert. They are permanently changed, but whole, and in some ways better. In other words, they grow up, which in Burns’s world means living with the new parts that have grown from their bodies. Others never see a way out and decide it’s better to die than keep falling.

As humiliating as my experience last Friday was, there’s something invigorating about that level of shame. The intensity is interesting. I feel as sick at heart as any teen. I feel sort of excessively alive. But because I am also, thank goodness, an adult with a fully functioning set of gills, I get to be philosophical, too. The shame can be felt and observed at the same time. As I remember the end of my sister’s story, when De Beauvoir’s tooth bursts from her chin, she holds it up and says, “Ah, well, so that is what became of it.”

Last week I had 17 rats in my bathtub. It was like something out of a dream. A nightmare, really, but not for the reasons you might think. Rats I have loved include Boybee, Borka, Creamy Boy, Creamy Girl, Monsieur Raton, Joker, Sam and Caliban.  Caliban was a tan hooded rat who lugged a ping pong ball-sized, apparently benign tumor around for months before it burst and crystallized into something that looked a little like an ice sculpture and a little like the most disgusting thing you’ve ever seen in your life. Caliban was unfazed. When I came home on breaks from boarding school I took him and his brother Sam with me when I walked the dog. Sometimes they rode on my shoulders, but more often they curled up in the hood of my giant green Dartmouth sweatshirt.

When my sister went off to college, Caliban and Sam went with her. They were pretty geriatric by then, but something about the dorm (maybe the closest human equivalent to an actual rat’s nest?) inspired them to chaos. Money began disappearing from people’s rooms. There was a thief on the floor! Girls glared at each other in the hall. But the thief was Sam, whose nest of chewed greenbacks my sister eventually discovered in the underside of her roommate’s mattress. Then there was Caliban, who waddled down the hall one day and ate a girl’s packet of birth control pills. They found him in a coma on the girl’s floor. They thought it was the end. My sister brought him to the vet in a shoebox.

The vet looked at Caliban and shrugged. “Have you tried baby food?”

So my sister held an open jar of turkey flavored Gerber’s under Ban-Ban’s nose, and sure enough, his nose quivered, his whiskers quivered, he opened his beady eyes! He outlived the lithe and dapper Sam. He outlived our expectations. And when he died, his passing was mourned, or maybe cheered, but certainly observed, by a dorm full of Stanford students.

I suspect my rat nightmare isn’t really about rats any more than those dreams of losing your teeth are really about teeth, but it fits with the story so I’ll tell it. In the dream I have pet rats in a cage in the basement.  I’ve forgotten about them, and the scary part starts when I remember they are down there.  I realize I haven’t given them food or water for years. There is a chance they are still alive and can be saved if only I can get to them, but, because it’s a nightmare, I can’t.

As to the 17 actual rats and how they came to be in my bathtub: last week one of my neighbors moved out.  I sometimes refer to this neighbor as the Agent of Chaos, and other times, when I’m really mad, as Grendel. Our little complex contains five apartments, six tenants, three dogs, two cats, and one garden. The garden is our Heorot. We tend it together. We roll out the trash, we pick up poop, we lop and weed, we make sure the gate is latched. Beyond the gate are streets full of strangers, and beyond the streets the wide water.

The Agent of Chaos does not help take care of the mead hall. Sometimes she invites creeps over.  I resent this for several reasons, but mainly because it brings out my most provincial, isolationist, suburban lawn-defending, Miss Marple-loving, Neighborhood Watch-assembling, small-minded, small-hearted self.  You could say about Beowulf that Grendel’s Dam is the dark mirror image (mere-image!) of Hrothgar and the in-crowd at Heorot. She wants the same things they do — to keep her stuff safe in her mere-cave and defend her family — but, and I think this is the key difference, her definition of family is too small. She’s too exclusive. She’s not generous. So, ironic twist! If my chaotic neighbor is Grendel, I am Grendel’s Dam.

To further confuse things, my neighbor has a lovely ten year old son who lives with her part time. She also has way more pets than I realized. A chinchilla, something in a terrarium, and two cages full of rats: two big males in one, and a female, Spike, and her sixteen babies in another. My neighbor’s move played out like a terrible, compressed version of her chaotic life: lots of screaming and crying, and moving too slow and then having to move too fast because the truck was due back. Her son, trying to help, started to carry the cage with Spike and all the babies in it out to the truck. This was not a quality cage. I inspected it later, and the plastic tray at the bottom attaches to the wire top with what are essentially twist-ties. The cage fell to pieces on the garden path. Spike bolted. The babies groped around on the bricks. Everyone was shrieking. I ran out in my socks and started scooping up baby rats. My neighbor, hysterical but resolute, dove into the Agapanthus again and again until she emerged holding Spike aloft. My neighbor’s ex, her kid’s dad, who was helping with the move, dripped sweat, swore, and reassembled a flattened shoe box into a temporary rat house. Meanwhile, the clock was ticking on the truck.

“Go!” I told them. “I’ll take care of the rats.” But the kid had counted the babies, and there were only fourteen.

“Go!” I said again. “I’ll find them.”

I put the rats in the shoebox into the bathtub and shut the bathroom door and locked the dog and cats in the bedroom. I washed the heck out of that cage. I put clean newspaper in the bottom and tore up one of my softest old t-shirts to make a nest. I put clean water in the dripper and cut up an apple and filled a little dish with peanut butter and another dish with Blueberry Pumpkin Golden Flax cereal that costs $6.99 a box. Then I went to transfer the rats. They were squeaking before but now the shoebox was dead quiet. A second or two passed when I felt exactly like I did in my nightmares. I’d forgotten something essential. I’d left them too long. There wasn’t enough air. The shock was too great. I was scared to open the lid of the box, really, genuinely scared.

Spike was lying on her side looking fatigued. The babies were nursing like gangbusters.

I left them alone to finish and went out to look for the two missing babies. First I looked all over my neighbor’s apartment, because she thought they might have gotten out inside. Then I looked all over the garden. I crawled around on my knees. I looked for an hour. Really I only looked for fifteen minutes, but fifteen minutes of semi-hopeless looking feels exactly like an hour. I saw an angle worm sticking out from under a leaf. That was weird. It hadn’t rained recently. I moved the leaf. It was not a worm! It was the tail of a baby rat, nervous and hiding his face, but very much alive. I took him to see his mother in the bathtub. Spike was done nursing so I transferred the rats to the cage. Spike immediately threw the cereal all over her children and pigged out on peanut butter.

Now I was determined to make this family whole. I went back to the garden. I was onto their ratty tricks now and peered under leaves and squinted at the dirt and poked at things. But no baby. My knees had pebbles stuck in them. The soles of my socks were wet. I decided to take a break and sweep the path, which was still sprinkled with rat cage detritus. I went to get the broom. The broom was leaning next to a drainpipe. Guess who was hiding under the drain pipe?

Reader, I united them. I never felt so good about anything in my life. When I told my neighbor’s kid I had them all, he threw his arms around my waist and mumbled “I love you” into my stomach.

When I told J the story that night, he said, “You know what character you would be in a book?”

“No,” I said. “What character would I be?”

“Ratticus Finch.”

The great-hearted lawyer. The people’s defender. Out of the garden, out of the mere, into the world!

I was sitting around feeling purposeless this afternoon when somebody knocked on the door. Presents! I thought, because we are expecting a package from J’s mom full of all the things we couldn’t fit in our suitcases after Christmas in Michigan. (If you want a good Christmas, go to Michigan.)

It was a present, but not in a box. A young woman was standing on the doorstep holding a dog. I recognized her as one of the hip kids who live next door. We wave sometimes but had never officially met. Her name is Kalina.

“Is this your dog?” she asked. YES, said the heart. No, said the mouth.

Kalina was having a rough day and wasn’t permitted to have pets in her building and her landlord lived right upstairs. She didn’t know what to do about this dog she’d found wandering our block. We were the third house she’d tried.

TAKE, said the heart. I took.

Kalina and I exchanged numbers. I said I’d call Animal Control and see if anyone was missing a dog matching this description. She said she’d make fliers. We’d touch base later.

It was sunny and warm so the dog and I stood outside on the steps for awhile. I’ve never really liked small dogs, unless a) they live in Michigan and answer to the name Andrew, or b) are short haired caramel colored lady dachshunds who tuck their silky weary heads into your chest and close their eyes and sigh from the pleasure and relief of being lifted off the cruel pavement at last.

She was sort of Titian-haired. She kept her outfit neat, even after hours of sleuthing. She had a sensitive face. She knew from mysteries. We would call her . . . Nancy Drew.

“Nancy,” I asked. “Are you ready to meet Truckstop?” She was.

Truckstop was an angel. She only growled twice, once when Nancy Drew got too close to her Kong, and once, more mysteriously, when Nancy Drew got too close to a blue plastic bag lying in the middle of floor.

Didi was less angelic and gave Nancy Drew a whap!whap! right in the kisser with the old orange paw. Nancy Drew made kind of a big deal about it, but in Didi’s defense, claws were sheathed.

Big Cat just stared her Good Will Hunting genius janitor studying the physics problem on the blackboard stare.

So! We were a family. J was in. Nancy Drew licked his cheek when they met and then fell asleep with her chin in his palm.

No one had filed a report at the pound. I gave them my number. My heart beat a subliminal message over the line: NEVER CALL ME.

I took Nancy Drew on a walk around the block, to see if she might lead me to her house. She said she preferred our house. I asked the guys in the surf shop if they knew her, but, no, dude, they did not know her.

I went home and put three locking doors between Nancy Drew and Truckstop. First I gave Truckstop a peanut butter Kong and a chicken liver because she is Now and Forever our #1 Most Special All Tan Everything, and then I hustled through my dry lock and gave Nancy Drew a little dish of kibbles, which she scarfed. I noticed a flea on her flank. I felt a flare of hope. Maybe she was really lost! Maybe she’d been out wandering the streets for days. Maybe someday I would love her with the special tenderness my heart reserves for the flotsam and jetsam of the animal world.

5pm rolled around. It was J’s turn to walk Nancy Drew around the block. Truth be told, I was a little exhausted from supervising canine interactions. When one dog can actually swallow the other dog whole, you do need to supervise. I took a shower. I was mid-shampoo when I heard the front door bang. Something about that bang– so definitive, so sorrowful yet resolute, told me all I needed to know.

“Nancy Drew?” I quavered.

J stuck his head in the door. “Ginger. Her owner was running around the neighborhood with a collar and leash.”

Oh Nancy, Oh Nancy,
Oh Nancy Nancy Drew:
What in the world
Would we do with you?

But I liked your little face
Pointed like a ratty’s;
And I liked your pretty ways
And your coat which was natty.

You had a gentle air
And eyes moist as the dew;
Oh golden snuggle bear!
Your real mom says you chew.