34. None Of Us Will Ever Be Famous
The Year of Paying Attention
(The year is 2017.) I don’t know what to do with the rest of my life, but I’m developing a granular plan for a month of it in New Orleans. Thirty days has November, which is, at the very least, ninety meals. I fantasize about becoming a lunchtime regular in some funky eatery, the chef calling, “Hi, Tim!” from the kitchen as I come through the door. “What?“ he’ll say a few weeks later. ”You’re going back to New York? I thought you lived here!” To slow my becoming morbidly obese, I’ll buy a used bike and routinely shun my rental car. I’ll find a yoga studio, and go there pathologically. Out to live music every night seems reasonable; it is New Orleans. And I’ll find a local guitar teacher, who’ll use voodoo to bestow me with natural talent.
Daughter Ellen comes the second weekend, Sarah is set for the last ten days, and I have more friends to invite, local friends to see, and dozens of Crescent City acquaintances from twenty years of 12-step meetings — does this sound like a tedious to-do list? It’s starting to feel like one. It’s hard to overcome my need to over-plan, and leave room for serendipity. I knew this fear of idleness and loneliness long before it was called FOMO.
I read a remembrance of the late Larry Fagin in the New Yorker, by a former student of his, which described the poet as a young man in Paris. Back in New York, Fagin told his students to write every day, but only a little bit. The title of that brief article (subsequently stolen for this one) comes from something Fagin told his New School Experimental Poetry class: “None of us will ever be famous.”
***
I ought to stay out of the savior business. Nobody offered me the job. But I keep applying for it. This leads only to trouble, and I never save anybody. Yesterday, my older sister Susan sent me a lunchtime selfie with our younger sister Marianne. Susan, smiling gamely, looks like our mother. “She’s more attractive than I thought she’d be,” Sarah said. “And look at Marianne!” My younger sister looks like my father. I’ve never before noticed this, perhaps because there are so few photographs taken in the last twenty years of my sisters standing together.“She looks like she’s had enough,” I say about Marianne.
In response to the photo, I sent a text to Marianne: “How are you holding up? This picture speaks volumes…” She replied, “Time for visit to end.” In case Marianne forgot she was a grownup, capable of deciding what she wants to do, I reminded her: “You can beg off all activity today.” Later I saw I’d missed her phone call, and listened to the message: “Hello, Tim. This is your sister Marilyn (one of her pet names)… I sound just like Susan I think,” she said, and she did sound like our sister. “If I sound like I’ve been stunned by a stun gun, it’s because Susan is a stun gun, and I am the… victim… I think I can use that word accurately…”
She said Susan was seeing old friends for brunch, leaving Marianne off duty for the afternoon, “although she thinks we getting together later — which we’re not.” She sounded weary. “Yeah. I’m pretty much numb. The one good thing that she said, we were talking about siblings and stuff, and she said, I was horrible to Tim, and I said, ‘Yes you were, from his birth on. I know, she said.
“I said, too bad you can’t tell him something about that. She said, I’m going to. So… she knows. She knows. She also is a terrible liar, and she remembers everything about Mom and Dad… she was saying to me, I don’t remember any of it, I don’t remember what happened, I remember nothing, since the hospital I know nothing.
“Terrible lie. I don’t care. Anyhow. I can’t even talk to you today. I’m just — I’m just going to be calm. Goodbye — I love you. My god. I have one rational sibling. Bye bye.”
Do all families has such a history of injury and resentment? My older sister claiming to have forgotten all of the things my younger sister resents so deeply, Susan’s failure to show up during the decline and deaths of our parents, leaving Marianne to shoulder alone all of that emotional responsibility. After some sort of physical breakdown that sent Susan to the hospital for more than a week, she can claim her memory has been expunged, and so there’s nothing to be done about something she can’t even recall, right?
The very thought of my older sibling making some sort of apology for being a shitty sister during my childhood fills me with confusion and dread. What would I say in response? “It’s okay, Sue?” or, “That was forty years ago,” or “Why were you so mean to your parents for their whole lives?”
Perhaps I could say, “Well, Sue, since you’ve introduced the topic, it might interest you to know that I draw a direct line from our deeply fucked-up relationship to the dysfunctional, painful relationship I have with my daughter Lizzie.”
It’s your fault, Sue. You’ve been the bad sister, the bad daughter, the role you were assigned in our family for some sixty years – so what are you going to do about it now? Shall I pretend I’ve had nothing to do with it? Is this why I don’t want to remember things? Is this why I imagine someday quietly dying and leaving no trace?
So long as I wander this waking nightmare of fabricated versions of sisters and fathers and daughters, the actual present moment cannot exist. Sarah is herself in some parallel universe, working in her Queens studio, expecting to see me and some friends for dinner tonight. Soon enough I’ll wake up into that dimension, and leave behind this plane of permanent hurt, parents who grew old, and frail, my mother reaching out for unseen lightning bugs in the hospital hallway, her face lit with delight, her gaze on something only she could see. My father swallowing fistfuls of pills a few years later, to make his own escape, an apologetic suicide note left for my younger sister.
Of course, there’s nothing to worry about. Susan is never going to call, won’t ever broach this subject. I don’t have to decide what to say, because there’s nothing to say. In the imaginary past I wish to abandon, she is still humiliating me. The humiliation moves from generation to generation, the shame and loneliness traveling on the bloodlines from my alcoholic grandmother to her fatherless son, to the families that disintegrate or hang together ever so tenuously, the sisters and their brother who can’t be forgiven, can’t remember what happened, can’t forgive, or don’t know what the fuss is all about.
A therapist suggested the anger I was carrying like smoldering dynamite was in loyalty to my father, a commitment of sorts to John Warfield’s anger. I gasped, as if I’d been slapped, when he said it.
Next week: What Kind Of Funeral Do You Want?
