Dang girl I miss you so much. I think about you all the time.
I probably don’t have to tell you how fast time goes by, how six years can seemingly just disappear – I know you have little ones (3?) so you know how that goes well enough – but I really don’t know how it’s been this long since I last talked to you.
Crazy.
I left those mountains and have lived here in Portland since ’02. It’s where I grew up and it’s very nice to be home. Gradually I’ve started carving out a niche for myself, though that’s taken a lot longer than I thought it would. I think it would have gone differently and more quickly in a place not so familiar; I spent too much time trying to reconnect with old friends instead of making new ones. But a lot of that was about me trying to reconnect with my old self too, needing to remember who that twenty four year old was who left here for the mountains in the first place.
Then, one day, a few months back, I finally saw her. I was driving down 47th Street past Providence hospital, and she was pushing an empty stroller towards the Montessori school, to pick up her little boy and take him home. Car must have been broken down again, or maybe she doesn’t have one presently. And even though I knew she paid more in tuition for her child’s care than she did her rent, and even though I knew she was a finger-snap away from falling apart any minute, I sure couldn’t tell by watching her walking down the street. It was one of those spring afternoons when people who survive long rainy winters are foolishly friendly and cheerful, and there was that in her stride, but something more too. I could tell she sure does love that little boy, and even though the future’s as clear as that day’s sky, and she can plainly see the years of pain ahead of her, she’s trucking along anyway.
I was surprised by her grit. How had I forgotten that? Is it because my story gets real convoluted when I have to explain how that spirit got destroyed that fast and hard? It is, actually. That’s still the hardest part there is.
But it was a kick to see her. Nice kid.
A couple of years ago when my niece and nephew were nine, I nannied for them one summer while my sister-in-law finished school. One week I gave them a tour of their daddy’s hood. First we went to the Ramona Beezley park, then to visit a childhood friend, an older woman who had a swimming pool so we loved her dearly and it delighted her to see the children, then to my brother’s high school and finally past the house where we grew up. Ironically, that very day, the wrecking ball was demolishing our grade school. At the time I thought that’s what made the whole neighborhood seem strangely surreal, the houses shabby and small, no sidewalks, unimproved side streets, a weird dull pallor I contributed to the dust from the demolition.
When my brother came to get his kids the first thing Sara said to him was, “Daddy! You never told us you grew up so poor!” Marty said well we didn’t have much that’s for sure and it blew my mind. Poor? Hunh? It was the first time I’d seen my world that way at all. (Not that I necessarily agree; we were just a regular working family like anybody else).
I’ve been doing a lot of that these years, seeing my world through different eyes. In doing so, sometimes it’s so unbelievably distorted I don’t know how to absorb the shock and I have to look away. I have though, at least, arrived at the place where I can admit to the distortion without a truck load of shame attached. That makes it easier to go about the task of making myself whole again. It’s quite the journey.
I sure did get lucky with my boys though. It’s funny, while they were growing up, and you probably know this from your own mothering, you work so dang hard to give them as many good things as you can, all the while perched on this tiny slab of thin ice that you’re sure could break at any moment, and drown you most certainly would because it seems as equally likely that some ulterior incident will completely ruin them for good, and there’s not a single moment when you consider it to be luck. It’s all your constant and obsessive attention to them, all the bargaining you do that keeps it all in balance.
If it was luck, hell. How fair would that be?
Now, however, I think it was mostly a whole lot of luck. Not to say I don’t honor the contribution I did make as a good mom, but from this distance I see it’s much more precarious than I could accept at the time.
They’re the nicest guys all grown up. Josh and Melissa moved from Los Angeles to Tacoma a few months ago, bought a house and their first baby is due April 18th. They met while working at Symantec, geeks both. Josh landed in Los Angeles after returning to Portland from Okinawa a couple of weeks after I got here, winter ’02, with a Marine Corps regulation ruined knee and the sweetest lab-type dog named Dixie. I like to joke that I got my money’s worth, hiring that guy to take out his knee, but what really happened was he smashed into the side of the mountain climbing some part of Fuji. During the first couple of weeks alone, that the Marines were in Baghdad, Josh lost several comrades. His unit was the first to go in.
Chris and Amy have Baby J who is, currently, insisting that he just be called “J” considering he is now three years old. My god Erin talk about roosting chickens. Jefry (not my misspelling) is carrying so much potent DNA I don’t see how he can walk. Actually he never does. He runs. And talks. And talks. I was always expecting that from spawn of Josh but Chris’ kid got it too. Hmm. Makes you wonder doesn’t it.
These two met at a rave Chris was throwing in Boise eight years ago. They’ve never spent a day apart since. Poor Amy – she didn’t know wtf to do at first. I’m sure she fantasized about Josh and me disappearing from the face of the earth but knew she didn’t want that really, us being Chris’ favorite kin and all. And Chris had such a hard struggle for a few years there, it busted my heart so bad, but man did he pull through. He is so fucking amazing. His integrity is astounding. He, too, like Josh, can’t really walk straight – Chris fell twenty feet off a ladder a couple of years ago trashing his ankle completely for good. Neither of my boys will ever ski, climb tall mountains or jump from airplanes and that’s all a-okay with me. Amy, though, can and does. Parachuted just a few months ago and crashed hard off her horse a few weeks ago, blacked out, then cussed Chris out later for calling the ambulance.
But they’ve all got such big love, compassion, loyalty. And my boys are so good to their wives; you can’t imagine my relief at that.
I spend all my free time with them, every long weekend, holiday. We talk on the phone every few days. We were all together in Tacoma a few weeks ago and C&A told me they’re moving to Portland as soon as their house sells! My mom believes Josh will follow suit one day but I’m not so sure about that though once his baby’s here who knows what new paths he’ll consider. He’s incredibly paternal – he’s been wanting to be a daddy since he was about ten.
Getting on top of my game, though, gets easier each day. Last September, a year ago, I started writing Obsidian and immediately the distortion started to disperse. I slept through the night for the first time in seven or eight years. The nightmares subsided a little also. And I haven’t sat in my car in the parking lot at a grocery store or at the bank or wherever, either, since then, too immobilized by anxiety to get out and go in. I don’t know how many flipping times shit like that happened, and it’s so horrible, scary, and embarrassing, and it hurts really deep to be that afraid. And to be that looney and locked into some weird immobilization that honestly, nobody can understand, except for a shrink on the rare occasion I have the $ to pay for an appointment. I did have an all-out attack last spring but I live in hope; maybe that was the last one.
I’m still pretty nervous about people liking me, making friends with me, but I’ve taken a couple giant steps with that lately. I doubt I’ll ever even date again and I’ll never get married (are you kidding? I’ll get Curtis’ social security if I don’t and don’t you think that’s sooo appropriate?) and I suppose that would be considered a lingering “fear of intimacy” by the pros but, in fact, it may just be my preference.
God, Erin, I think of so many things. Like, “I wanna be Bob Dylan, Mr. Jones wishes he was someone just a little more funky.” I think I sent you the drawings I did of that whole theme. But Jesus man. Us sitting on my back porch at the picnic table reading your novel and the wind caught some of the pages and we scrambled to pick them up. And then climbing over my back fence CLIMBING OVER MY BACK FENCE to avoid having to pass by the front porch to get to the sidewalk. What the holy fuck was that? WTF was it?
Crazy. Just nuts.
And hanging at EMU with Rebecca and Nancy and wasn’t there somebody else? And every single damn morning you would saunter through the door to that 50 minute Lit class, ten minutes late, with your hair wet and your jacket unzipped and your cup of coffee and you never once were a bit embarrassed. And every week of that same Lit class a response paper of mine was read as a “good example” and I swear I was more impressed with your nonchalance than my achievement!
Remember those dreadlocks you found in that loft where you lived?
I might have told you this, I don’t know, but after I returned from Camp Pendleton, after the siege, back to the Baker house, the was a pile of papers in the baby nursery that filled the floor about a foot or so deep. He’d taken everything else from the house, stripped it except for every single piece of paper out of every box our family had collected, report cards, photographs, bills, handmade Christmas ornaments, bank statements, tax returns, letters, LETTERS! all scrambled together in a big jumbled pile. It took me weeks to sort through it. And I’ll never forget how many minutes it took my mind to wrap around one particular letter because it was one I’d written to you, put in an envelope, addressed, stamped and set out for the postman. Except it never did get mailed. But it had been opened. There wasn’t just one letter like that, there was a dozen or so and after I started reading one of them I stopped and put it down. Because things became real clear real fast.
I got so scared that day when I realized that he’d snagged all those letters I’d written to you before the mail got picked up. And it wasn’t like I’d been living without fear before that. But hell, you know what was in those letters? Do you remember that time, what was it, 97, 98? Somewhere in there. You were back in New Paltz for good and subbing I think. I don’t know – you’ll know. But I was planning my whole fucking way out of there. I wrote to you how I had money stashed away, a couple of pre-approved credit cards, Chris’ I.D. and mine in some safe place, wrote you the details of his violence, how it had accelerated even more. I told you how I was getting more scared than I’d ever been, worried that he would figure out my plans to leave and that if he did I would probably pay for it so bad. I wrote down the details, how if we left without a car where we’d go which was different than if we left with a car. And which car. I told you how I had my journals already in a backpack, our clothes and other stuff in another. I wrote to you because I needed to have the plan on paper and because I needed to write because it made me feel better, more proactive, and I wrote to you because I needed somebody else to know.
I remember, a couple of times, wondering why you hadn’t written back or, if you had, why you didn’t say anything about what I’d written to you. I also remember, really clearly, how I would think about those letters and say to myself god he’d kill me if he ever got a hold of one of these.
So there were all those letters – not every single one I’d written to you, some he hadn’t intercepted. I know you got some of them because I had the ones you’d written me back. But I was sitting there in the nursery, it was August and hot up in that room, but all of a sudden I got so cold knowing that he’d known all along what I was trying to do, how I was planning to leave him one last time, and it was creepy and alarming and I see now how I started down a whole other road that day, where I began to live as though I would never really get away from him, never. That he’d gone to that extent to return home after I’d left to see if I’d set mail out meant to me that he had it in him to keep me in his sights forever. When he got married last summer, that finally started to go away, a little anyway. Maybe it never will completely. I don’t know.
Other stuff, too, that he’d taken without me knowing. Birthday cards from my parents. So they hadn’t forgotten my birthday for ten years after all. So much of this was easy for him, I understand now, because after those dozen or so years of living far away from my city, first to the one mountains and then further still, to the others, nobody knew what I was up to anymore, didn’t really even know where I was. I tried keeping up at first, I’d drive with my boys back to Portland, visit my parents, see my friends, but life got harder every year. Then I stopped trying.
I met you in Paul Dresman’s survey class you know. I’ll bet you’ve forgotten about him. And Bob was in that class. Remember Bob? Dark haired, older, he sucked up to Dresman so bad. Neither of them had ever had an original thought in their lives. Dresman was such a dog. What a goof. Jesus he trudged through that early American Lit as stiffly as those preachers whose sermons we were studying.
Everything about the university was gold to me. Ralph Salisbury took me in, I worked my butt off for him, trying to find a way to write. He hooked me up with Kittredge up in Missoula, the plan was I’d go study up there, write and workshop, get my MFA, get a job, get a life. They compared me to fucking Carver for godssakes. I wanted it so badly. I wanted it so much. I kept thinking fuck man this is so fucking righteous I can’t believe this is happening I can’t believe this is true. One afternoon I gave Ralph’s wife, the poet Ingrid Wendt, a ride from the U to her house up the hill. “So Ralph tells me,” she said, “that you are quite possibly the best writer he’s ever taught.”
No joke. Me.
But I was right. It wasn’t really true. It wasn’t really going to happen.
1993. Early ’94? You graduated. So did Darryl Brown. Did I tell you about him? Probably not. If I did, though, you’re the only one I ever told about him. Either way, I’ll tell it now.
So I got into Ralph’s advanced fiction writing class. He chose around fifteen of us based on our submissions. I’d slipped mine under his door the last night before winter break. It took me about an hour of working up my nerve, sitting on the stairs of PLC, but finally I had to just do it because I was going to be late getting home.
We went back to Baker for Christmas, that long drive over mountain passes, the Cascades, Ochocos, Strawberries, then the Blues, on the two lane highway slick with snow. My first night back there was the one where I had the dream about Shannon, where she told me I had to write something called Obsidian, and that she hadn’t committed suicide that she’d been killed by her boyfriend when they were both really high.
Back at school, a note was left on the door to my house, and it was from Ralph saying I’d been accepted into his class. We didn’t have a phone then. The first night of class he told me that I’d be workshopping my story first and in fact, he’d already run off copies for everyone. Oh my god. I was so nervous.
So then, as you know, everyone takes turns commenting on “the work” and that’s when I met Darryl Brown for the first time. He was like, whoa this story is so fine and crap like that.
But it was mostly all a blur. I’m shy anyway, but I was so completely shut down during that time, always anxious, always scared, that I had a hard time remembering reading the story out loud at all. Then, a couple of weeks later after class, I heard somebody following me down that long, dark hallway in PLC that goes towards the bus stop where I was headed. Naturally I was sorta freaked out but not that much so I stopped and turned around and it was Darryl Brown. He says, hey, wait, I’ll walk with you.
And so it went. Darryl Brown started showing up to PLC an hour early like I did to read over the stories and Darryl Brown always walked me to the bus stop and if I was on my bicycle that night, Darryl Brown started walking me home.
Now you would say, as anyone would, that it’s pretty obvious Darryl Brown was interested in me. No rocket science there. Except it never once crossed my mind until several years later. Darryl Brown was this so cute guy. He was probably eight or ten years younger than me, finishing up his MBA in computer stuff, he was so smart and young and very cute like I said, so I never even considered he had a crush on me. He kept saying how much he dug my writing and so I figured that’s what it was about.
Then one night Darryl Brown invites me to go hear some music after class. I tell him I can’t. I don’t remind him I’m married because in my mind at least, it’s not that sort of an invitation. Then one night at class he announces that he’s inviting us all over to his house, that he’s making up some food and we’re going to hang out and tell stories and be hip and act like writers. Later, I tell him thanks but I can’t make it and he asks why and I say it’s too far away and I don’t have a car (though I do) and he says well, I’ll pick you up and I think dang, I really should go to this even if I don’t want to because that’s part of the gig, got to make friends and try and least pretend to have some social skills so eventually I agree.
Meeting him on the corner in front of the bookstore wasn’t any more covert behavior than I employed when doing anything outside of my domestic life, but as much as I despised myself for acting that way, it was less traumatic than coming out and telling Curtis where I was going. That just flat out didn’t fly. I probably met up with you in some similar situations (though you did actually venture into my homes, there weren’t many like you). When he showed up I was kind of surprised but never thought, even then, that I was in any territory other than hanging out with friends. Stuff for school. And when we got to his house and it was still early for people to be showing up, he asked me to help him cook and I did and he put music on and poured wine and he was lively and funny and I do remember thinking jeez this guy is really friendly, really nice, but I didn’t take it personally at all.
And so then there was the party and afterwards he took me back to the corner by the bookstore. And then we had another term of creative writing together, and he kept hanging out with me and we really did become good friends. And then he graduated and I didn’t talk to him again for a few years.
Darryl Brown went up to Missoula that next year and started school fall of ’95. I was supposed to be there by then. I never showed. I had no idea he was planning on Missoula, he’d never said so when I talked about wanting to go there myself. I don’t know how long he stayed in school though a few years later I found out from a mutual friend (who gave me his contact info and said, Look him up. He’ll want to hear from you!) that he spent some of his time there house sitting for Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid. Trippy. But I could see it, could see him fitting in with them. He really was exceptionally likeable.
I email him from time to time. Once he sent me a compilation cd he’d made, this must have been like late ’99. So I wasn’t yet totally hip to the compilation cd art form and his blew my mind. Even now, all these years later, his still rates in my top 5 of extraordinary comp cds.
Once I got brave and emailed him saying thanks for being a good friend to me. Brought it up even though I still felt like there had been something I should be ashamed about, being friends with him, brought it up even though I was hesitant to open my heart up that much. I wanted to ask him if it was true, if he’d really had a crush on me, but I’m sure I lost my nerve and didn’t do it. It was probably one of those emails that went on too long and got mushy but he wrote back and said that reading it made his day. He’s still a computer guy, and a potter too, living now in Arizona. He still makes comp cds and will send me one as soon as I send him one of mine. I’ve been meaning to but I’ve been busy! Hell, that was three years ago. He likes my paintings a lot and had plans to be in Portland awhile ago to see them in person and to bring along his very lovely wife and two young sons but they didn’t make it up that year. Someday, though, I’ll bet.
So I lost both of you at the same time. You and Darryl Brown. That day you and I met at Guido’s, when we met there so we could say goodbye because you had graduated and were going back to New Paltz, I remember walking home afterwards and I couldn’t help it, I started to cry. There’s only been a few other times when I’ve felt loneliness that profoundly, grief that deep. I didn’t really think I’d ever see you again. That you were able to show up at my house in Baker that next summer after listening to Mr. Jones and Me for nearly four hundred miles (and actually getting the Counting Crows finally) was unreal. Such a good time in spite of the crazy, dark-souled men. Those were the best days I ever had living over there.
Well, Erin, how is that French/Polish boy of yours? Man, did you fall hard for him or what? What a love story you’ve got going on. And your children!
I’ve read your work from time to time and it’s really wonderful, really good. I remember when you first started writing for the newspaper. I have not, however, read your book and have no excuse except I keep meaning to put it on hold at my library and haven’t yet done so, obviously, but I will. I did read an article in the NYT when you were covering your mayor up there, and it seems I read a great review of your book too, or maybe it was an interview. Atta girl. You were always so cheeky, so smart. I miss you very much.
Somehow I doubt you’ve yet to make a real conversion to communicating via email though I’ll bet you’re better at it now than a few years ago. Sitting down to this letter here, and the handful of others I’m working on also, is the first letter writing I’ve done in years and years. Well, since I used to write to you, actually. Everything’s email for me. But my contact info’s below so I hope one of the ways works for you. My commitment to this form is because I’m sending Obsidian out by snail-mail and letters seemed appropriate.
All right kiddo, thanks for indulging me by reading through this. Christopher is planning a road trip for us next fall; he has (or is going to get? I can’t keep up with him…) a RV and our destination is NYC. All I know is we’re hitting New Orleans on the way there and Minnesota on the way back. He has very definite ideas so I’m leaving it all up to him. My brother and family is living on a sailboat in Virginia so there’s that stop, and a favorite friend moved to NY from Portland a few weeks ago so I’m hoping to see all of you then.
Hope to hear your news soon,
L.
I remember you liked the socks. I remember you said you wore them the whole time you were pregnant until they had holes. I still knit socks. I’ll send some along next time.
PS: Chris says to say hi. He says to remind you how you went to Boys Jungle with him one afternoon while I was giving some lessons.