We Find Ourselves in Other People's Stories

On Narrative Collapse and a Lifetime Search for Story

Amy E. Robillard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429649332
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

We Find Ourselves in Other People's Stories: On Narrative Collapse and a Lifetime Search for Story is a collection of five essays that dissolves the boundary between personal writing and academic writing, a longstanding binary construct in the discipline of composition and writing studies, in order to examine the rhetorical effects of narrative collapse on the stories we tell about ourselves and others. Taken together, the essays theorize the relationships between language and violence, between narrative and dementia, between genre and certainty, and between writing and life.

1 Learning to Keep My Distance

You freeze up in childhood, you go numb, because you cannot change your circumstances and to recognize, name, and feel the emotions and their cruel causes would be unbearable, and so you wait.

—Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

My father was a photographer, dedicated to the art of framing a scene, a moment, a memory. Dedicated to composition, lighting, mood, to capturing what does not stay.

My father died when I was four years old, and though I carry with me a memory of finding him lying blue on the basement floor, my brother Guy, three years older than me, carries with him the same memory of himself finding our father. “I remember going down those old wooden stairs,” he tells me. “I remember it as if I did it. I don’t know if somebody else put it in my head to make me think I remember it. Maybe we all came home at once and went down there.” My oldest sister Sue remembers coming home from school to find a fire truck, ambulance, and police car turning down our street. Panic set in as she saw them stop in front of our house. Sue remembers seeing him lying there on the cement floor, a puddle by his legs, his skin gray as the paramedics performed CPR. Tim, who turned fourteen the day before our father died, recalls only that he had dragged Dad through the store a couple days earlier because he wanted a race car set. “I made Dad take me up to Two Guys. I was being a little brat bastard and he’s limping through the store. Come to find out it was a clot. A coronary occlusion that went to his heart. A few days later Don Burgess comes up the stairs holding a huge package. ‘Look what I found for you, Tim.’ Talk about feeling low.”

When we were young and our father was still alive, he was in the hospital a lot. He had a number of heart attacks before the fatal one at age fifty. I remember picking him up from the hospital and hiding behind the passenger seat on the floor of the car and him searching for me. “Where’s Amy?” he’d ask, with exaggerated bewilderment. I’d jump up then, surprising him, and he’d laugh, and we’d go to The Pancake House down the street from the hospital.

Guy tells me, “I very vaguely remember him taking us to the park and flying a kite on Sunday after catechism. We didn’t even know him. I know he smoked a lot. I remember him smoking Pall Malls. It’s weird that Timmy and Susie remember so much.”

Guy also remembers the time he and Margie were home alone and Dad went to the store to get cigarettes but never came home. “Both of us kneeling on the couch, looking out the window saying, ‘I wonder where he is.’ I think he ended up going to the hospital. Maybe Ma was in the hospital with you or something. But I’ll never forget that day. No, that’s right. Ma called the hospital. He had checked himself in.”

The way I heard this story told was that he told Guy and Margie he was going out for cigarettes, but he knew he had to go to the hospital. He knew he was about to have another heart attack, but he didn’t want Ma to know because she would get upset with him and yell and scream. So he just left. When Ma came home from wherever she had been, she called Dad’s friends looking for him. Like she was looking for a child. Finally Ed Jubinville told her he knew where Dad was, but she had to promise not to yell at him when she talked to him. She promised. But she yelled at him anyway.

Ma hated for anybody to be sick. She felt like they were abandoning her on purpose. She was angry when he finally died and left her with five kids to raise by herself.

My father was, by all accounts, a kind man. He smoked too much, sure, but he was loving and generous, creative and optimistic, funny and fun-loving. Aside from what we inherited from him physically, the only things my siblings and I share from our father are the stories of how we lost him. The three oldest share more than that, surely. But Guy and me, we’re left with very little. The only things about which we can say, “No, it happened this way” or “No, I remember it like this” are the stories about how he died and how he snuck away to be sick in private.

Ma never told us much about him. When I would ask her questions about him, she’d respond by telling me she didn’t know or she didn’t remember, or she would try to distract me by telling me to look at the cat or asking me if I didn’t have anything better to do.

Dad died in December 1976. Five months later, in May 1977, my mother’s firstborn, my half-sister Pam, died of kidney failure brought on by pancreatitis at the age of twenty-two. I don’t have very many memories of Pam. I have more memories of Pam’s two daughters, Lee Ann and Kelly, who were very close in age to me. Pam had become pregnant at the age of fifteen with Lee Ann, and fifteen months after Lee Ann was born, she gave birth to Kelly. Pam was pregnant with Kelly at the same time Ma was pregnant with me. We three played together when we were young.

I like to believe that, as her youngest child, I was my mother’s comfort during this incredibly difficult time. That she was depressed should go without saying. I think now about the serpentine nature of the processes I’ve gone through grieving losses while surrounded by a supportive husband and friends, a therapist I trust deeply and completely, all while living in a culture far more educated about just how crucial grieving is to a healthy life, and I want to travel through time to hug my young mother, about the age I am now as I write. If she talked about her grief, it was minimal. If she processed it at all, it was likely very briefly with friends who probably couldn’t understand and, with the best of intentions, encouraged her to move on for the kids’ sake. Sue remembers Ma telling her, not days after Dad died, not to cry. “I think she just didn’t know what else to say to me, didn’t know how to show compassion maybe?”

It really is no wonder, then, that she wasn’t a good mother. I mean, how could she be?

*

Most of us don’t have very many memories before the age of three or four. The abuse surely began after my father died. Thus, nearly the entirety of my childhood memories includes the abuse I suffered at the hands of my older sister, Margie, five years older than me. She would have been nine when our father died.

I remember it was a Sunday night, and Timmy was supposed to be babysitting me, but I don’t know where he was. Guy was upstairs, Susie was out, and Margie was beating me. She was chasing me around the kitchen table, punching me when she caught me, and I was screaming for someone to help. She wanted me to shut the fuck up. I screamed louder. She ran into the living room and grabbed Ma’s chair, the one she always sat in when she wasn’t sleeping on the couch. She lifted it over her head and made her way toward me. She was going to hit me with the chair! I ran out the back door screaming. She opened the door and dragged me back in, squeezing bruises into my arm. “You’re fucking dead.” My heart was pounding. I had nowhere to go. I kept screaming for my mommy. She punched me in the nose. It started bleeding. She seemed satisfied to have drawn blood. I went to the couch to sit and cry, the snot mixing with the blood, all of it dripping onto my shirt and onto my bare knees. I tried to convince myself that if I just sat here long enough and let Ma see what she’d let happen to me, she would do something. She would make it stop.

Instead, when she saw me, she told me to stay away from Margie. “Mind your own business and she’ll leave you alone.”

Susie and Margie shared the room next to mine, and the house was configured so that to get to their room, they had to go through mine—just a few steps, but enough to make me feel like I could never really shut the door or shut them out. My door was always open. Actually, all three bedrooms upstairs were connected. Inside Susie and Margie’s room was a door that led to Guy and Timmy’s room, but it wouldn’t have made much sense for the girls to walk all the way through the boys’ room to get to theirs, not when it was so much easier to walk through mine.

Bedtime. Margie walked through to her room. “You little shit. You’re dead.”

Middle of the night. Margie walked back through to the one bathroom in the house. “Little fucker. Fat shit.”

Back to her room. “Skank.”

Morning. “You’re dead, you little shit.”

And so it went. Always. I wonder now if her insults became so habitual as she walked those couple steps through my room that she said them even when I wasn’t there.

She was always hitting me for no reason, punching my arm or my stomach, and I’d cry out for my mother, and my mother would tell me to stay away from her, to go do something else. She threatened to kill me always, telling me that as soon as Ma left, I was dead. I feared for my life before I could walk to school alone. She beat me in front of her own friends, and when they begged her to stop, she simply didn’t hear them.

She instilled in me a white-hot self-hatred that has taken years to dissolve.

I understand now that Margie did what she did to me out of fear and insecurity, out of a desperate need for discipline and care. I understand that she had the same mother I had, the same mother who was terribly depressed by two suffocating losses, either one of which would have been more than enough to turn what might have been a good mother into a bad mother. My sister’s abuse shaped me into a person deathly afraid of conflict, convinced of her own insignificance, fatness, ugliness, and stupidity, persuaded that she was completely on her own in this world because nobody would help her when she needed it most. Ma told me to stay away from her, so I tried. I was a kid. I believed that if I did what my mother told me to do, I might be okay. I turned to reading instead. I read and read and read. Reading helped me keep my distance.

The librarian at the Willimansett branch library loved me. She encouraged me to read above my grade level, and she put aside new books she knew I’d enjoy. I’d read all the V.C. Andrews books by the eighth grade and was particularly haunted by My Sweet Audrina. How could the parents convince Audrina that it was her sister who’d been raped in the woods and that she was the second Audrina? Imagine how much her parents had to love her to do such a thing. My librarian lived over on Pickering Street near Julie Veremey’s house. Julie and I would ride our bikes down her gravelly street, and I would fantasize about her seeing me and inviting me in to pore over her bookshelves and take whatever I wanted.

I read to escape my family life. I read to escape Ma and Margie and Guy and Timmy and Susie. Sometimes Mindy, our cat, would sleep on my bed as I lay in it and read, but mostly I was alone and that’s the way I liked it. Leave me alone. When I was deep in a book, I was in another place, a place where parents loved their children and sat with them at the breakfast table, a place where siblings gave each other cute nicknames like Fudgie or Tootsie or Beezus and nobody got beaten for it. In my books, parents told kids to be kind to their siblings, and if they weren’t, they’d be grounded. If I’m completely honest, I’ll admit that to this very day, I’m still taken aback by true stories of siblings who love one another or, more to the point, by true stories of siblings who don’t recall with deep resentment their childhoods together.

At the end of fifth grade, Mrs. Lefebvre filled out a reading certificate for every kid in the class, writing the number of books each kid had read during the school year. When she called me up to her desk to receive my certificate, she told me that she’d had to estimate because every time she looked up at me, I was reading a different book. She gave me my certificate and told me she was proud of me, that I should be proud of myself. In the blank space reserved for the number, Mrs. Lefebvre had written 80. My teacher was proud of me.

*

Margie and I played “the dying game” a lot. This consisted of Margie lying on the floor and me jumping on top of her as hard as I could until she couldn’t take it anymore and she’d declare herself dead. I’d stop jumping then. I was never on the bottom in this game, only Margie. It was as though only in play could I become the aggressor. Only when it was make believe. When it was for real, I never stood a chance.

*

When I was seven years old, Ma met a man she wanted to marry, and when she told me, I remember asking her if this meant I would have a new daddy. Warren had a wooden leg, two grown children, and three grandchildren, the oldest, Nina, who was my age. Warren moved in and he seemed to like Sue and Tim the best. I know he didn’t like me much because I was, as he said, spoiled rotten, and I ate too much candy, and my mother gave me everything I ever asked for. He didn’t like the way Guy and Margie talked to Ma. In the beginning Ma would make me kiss him goodnight before bed. This strikes me now as sweet, an effort, anyway. At the time, though, I hated it. His cheek always smelled like smoke and was rough from stubble. He didn’t seem to like it much more than I did.

My memories of Warren and Ma together mostly have to do with the Sunday drives the three of us would take through the towns of western Massachusetts. We’d pass what I used to think was the pie maker but was actually some kind of water treatment plant on the way to Atkin’s Farms in Hadley, where we’d buy apples and cider donuts and sometimes cider. I could always count on Ma to get carsick on these Sunday drives, and that usually meant that we’d stop for something to eat to soothe her nausea. An ice cream at Friendly’s usually did the trick. My favorite was chocolate with chocolate sprinkles. Astonishingly, Ma would complain when she asked for a small cone and they gave her too much ice cream. She’d always say that she’d hate to see the large.

I’m not sure when Ma began cheating on Warren or how I found out about it. It just seems now that I always knew about Hank. And later Merrill. I don’t remember the day I met Hank, but I do remember him driving me back to college more than once after semester breaks. He had a clothing rod in the back of his car that he was very eager for me to use to hang my clothes on for the ride back to Worcester. I’d met Hank many times before this, and I think I was the only one of us kids who did.

As I grew up, Ma told me in so many different ways that men were bad news. She’d tell me directly to stay away from men. We’d be watching television together, and she would never fail to comment on the male characters who did things wrong, saying, “What a goddamn idiot.” We’d be in the mall together and she’d see a man walking our way and she’d say, too loudly, “Jesus Christ, he’s ugly.” She’d say, when I’d complain about something Warren had done, “If he had a brain, he’d be dangerous.” Men were no good, stupid, idiotic, and generally ugly.

I remember one day when I borrowed Guy’s van to drive myself back to Syracuse, where I was working on my PhD. It was a beat-up old thing, but it would get me where I needed to go, so I didn’t care. The passenger door was held on by a combination of bungee cords, canvas straps, and duct tape. When Ma saw the door as I was leaving to get on the road, she said, “Good. That way no man can jump in and get you.”

But. They were also necessary. “Marry a rich man,” I heard countless times as I grew up. “Make sure you marry a doctor.” Susie used to tell me about how Ma would warn her not to go behind the bushes with boys. I never heard that one, but I was told more directly not to get pregnant before I got married because she sure as shit wasn’t going to take care of any babies. Over and over again, I learned that I needed to marry a rich man who wouldn’t get me pregnant before he married me.

It wasn’t hard to attribute this to Pam. Pam had gotten pregnant when she was just fifteen, and her boyfriend Don got her pregnant again nearly immediately after Lee Ann was born. Sue tells me that Ma forced them to get married. Two weeks after Pam gave birth to Kelly, she was in the hospital with failing kidneys. She was diagnosed with pancreatitis. If this had happened to her while she’d been pregnant, they both probably would’ve died.

I’ve always known that Pam died when she was twenty-two. Kidney failure brought on by pancreatitis, I told anyone who asked. I...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Learning to Keep My Distance
• 2 Searching for Stories
• 3 Witnessing the Collapse
• 4 Narrative Fragility
• 5 We Are All Telling It Slant
• Epilogue
• Index