“And amazingly it almost didn’t end then,” my mom told me once. “I almost said, ‘Oh, that’s okay.’ That’s how na?ve I was. He had to sort of prompt me through the breakup.”
At eighteen, she had moved to San Francisco—the city where her mother grew up—from her home in the very sheltered Panama Canal Zone, where she’d lived as the daughter of an angry, domineering boat captain and deeply depressed nurse. She found rebellion, close friends, a good job as a medical transcriptionist—and eventually my dad, who was working at the time for a Fred Astaire dance studio and who recruited his real estate agent and my mom—her roommate—to help him get an extra twenty dollars that the studio paid for bringing in new clients.
They had a quick and rocky romance: my dad goofy and kindhearted and young, rebelling against the war and his overbearing Yankee family, my mom a little more mature and already tortured by her uncertainty around the role she was supposed to play in the world.
“The first night I spent with him I woke up to a car honking outside at dawn,” she often remembered. “He leapt up from bed and threw two pairs of underwear and a toothbrush into a paper bag and told me he was going rafting in Colorado and would be back in a week. I should have got up out of that bed and walked away right then.”
She didn’t. They got married at City Hall. They had a ball together and also fought about the meaning of “getting your life together.” I was born in 1977. In 1982, my dad working construction and my mom still typing, they came to a tenuous agreement about what that might be, and one day we hopped in our Volkswagen Rabbit with a little trailer pulling behind and drove East—to Concord, back into the arms of the family my dad had left behind fifteen years earlier. We were offered a little cottage on my great-grandparents’ estate to set up a home.
*
My great-grandparents on my dad’s side are Emersons, and RWE is my great-great-great grandfather. Speaking of Molly Pitcher’s legendary cement skirts, descending from someone who casts a shadow isn’t simple work. Like many members of my extended family, I am still searching for the edge of the shadow that Emerson casts: He draws me to him, he pushes me away. Particularly that American monolith Self-Reliance: “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” Close one eye, the iconic essay is a handbook for geniuses and a rallying cry for quirky individualism. Close the other eye, and it’s a recipe for indulgent self-obsession and a parenting nightmare: “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.”
The people: That’s what Freddy calls us when he’s not happy with us. “Benny, the people say we can’t watch any TV tonight.” They are Emerson’s descendants, too—another kind of blind spot altogether.
*
Emerson tracks me down anyway—another round of chemo, another tromp in the woods. One small spot I chant, giant eyeball crunching down the path, as though repeating the little phrase will keep me better attached to the spinning planet. But also I think of what the great man wrote in my favorite of his essays, Circles: “The universe is fluid and volatile.” I’ve been rereading. “Permanence is but a word of degrees.”
I try to hold both of these ideas like two little magnets in my hand: his and mine. One small spot and the universe is fluid and volatile. They push against each other: “One small spot” requires the constant energy to keep things contained. The “universe is fluid and volatile” is scary, but allows for the idea that there are things that cannot be contained. These two thoughts flip around and now cannot be pulled apart.
Thirty-three years ago: I am five years old, standing on a hillside with my cousins. It is the centenary of Emerson’s death, and we are all holding a giant wreath at his grave site. We are his great-great-great grandchildren. A reporter takes our picture. I remember the weight of the giant wreath and the nip of Massachusetts spring on my bare legs where I had refused to wear tights.
“The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second,” he says at the opening of that essay. Circles—like cells, like planets, like families, like the spots of light that dance in your eyelashes at morning’s first opening. He writes:
Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.
Here is the small spot; here the densest nut. Here is the musket ball hole. Here is the shape in the world of your child, you wrapped around your child. Here is the dark pool in the thickest woods. Here is the sun that sets in your eyes.
Thirty-three years ago: My mother is frowning. You should have worn tights. I am running with my cousins in the graveyard after the ceremony. “Come here,” someone whispers. It is my cousin Bonnie, who is also five. She has found a hiding spot for us. We are behind a gravestone. “Everyone will find us here, and then we will all laugh so hard,” she says—the best idea I have ever heard.
15. Shave
When the hair falls out, it is patchy and not vaguely pretty.
“This isn’t working for you, is it?” says Tita. “I think we need to give you a nice badass Sinéad O’Connor vibe.”
John performs my first official shave with his electric clippers on the front porch where I used to give the boys their trims. “Lift your chin really high and try not to breathe deep or anything.”
“No problem,” I say. “I haven’t had a deep breath in years.”
16. Empty Ocean
At chemo, they can never find my veins anymore. It’s a side effect of the chemo itself, which has a way of frying whatever it touches. Dr. Cavanaugh is resistant to my getting a port put in: “I don’t want anything unnecessary messing with your immune system at this point.”
“It’s like I’m fishing in a big, empty ocean,” says one of the nurses, examining my arm with one of their high-tech vein-finders as I stare out the window. “It’s pretty lonely in there. I’m so sorry I can’t find anything.”
Just outside the treatment area is a roof deck with picnic tables and lounge chairs and huge planters full of flowers. A family is unpacking bags and bags of Chick fil-A.
“Once we get the drugs going can I take my IV and go sit out there?” I ask the nurse. “I think the sun would feel good.”
It’s always chilly in the cancer center, and early on you learn to never say no to the warmed blankets they offer you. They might be the very best thing about the place.