But I have been outside of everything from the beginning — except the system of love. My mother’s love and care for all those years, my father’s mildness and iconoclasm, have allowed me the audacity, the courage to do what I must. But I resent, I do, that it should have to take what seems like so much more than even the ordinary courage just to be happy. Just to live. Things most take for granted. Still I am grateful for the confidence to be flexible, to do what I must, without inordinate anger or fear.
The future for you, but not only for you.
Stamped on the street some years ago before Gay Pride Weekend: Every Kiss a Revolution.
The jig, I’m afraid, is increasingly closer to being up. As soon as cloning is perfected. A sheep now made from two eggs… Dolly.
Ate for lunch today many turkey sandwiches.
When I was little my mother was always pregnant. No one ever explained to me how this happened, and my assumption of course was that it was all some cruel and useless roulette: God would decide and that was that. The question was how to hide from Him, how to make yourself invisible, inconspicuous. All women victims of His Whims. My mother always seemed to me exhausted, burdened. All the responsibility fell to her. It was a terrible thing. I felt for her a great deal.
When I was little, and God was big.
Our lake life. Bliss in every way. Except — something nags, gnaws — even in my preconsciousness, when I was very, very young. Why are there always so many babies? We live — minuscule, laughable creatures on that bobbing platform in water at the mercy of that whimsical, practical-joking God — women do, girls do, even here in Paradise, in bright light, next to shining water. I am always braced for the news: we are having another baby.
I decided early on through sheer will, through presence of mind, sheer attentiveness, whatever it might take, that I would not allow this to happen to me. I remember as a little girl repeating it in my room over and over and over. Casting spells to keep Him away. I would ask Mary when the time came to intercede on my behalf. So enormous a hindrance to living one’s life, children seemed to me. I could not have been more than eight years old at the time.
And when I got my first period at twelve years old, one of the first things my mother said to me was, now you can have a baby. I sat at the dark keyboard practicing my scales, and wept.
And a few years later when she comes into my room and asks whether I would mind sharing my room with a new baby. Yes, I say, I would mind. The child never arrives. I do not ask why.
A cautionary tale I took to heart.
I think of my mother often these days. That she did not have a mother to talk with, to console her, to reassure her as she went through her pregnancies. And pregnancy of course brings up one’s own mother hundreds of times.
No feminine support of any sort for her back then. I feel her loss more keenly now than ever before. A loss now over fifty years old.
Poverty. A mortally ill mother. Other things, unmentioned. The saddest of all childhoods.
I tell them on the way to the concert that in this child I will have a part of them always. I picture their deaths, the way I did obsessively when I was little. This makes me weep uncontrollably as we drive through the darkness and the cold. I am a child again. Completely vulnerable. I have always loved them too much. My father is beginning to speak again. He has found the way to voice his concerns: what about money? What about my writing? What about my health? Will it be dangerous?
The most difficult things about having a baby at my age are, first, conceiving at all; second, keeping the child, that is, not miscarrying in the first trimester; and third, getting past the possibility of birth defects. All those old eggs, etc. All that bad environment on the body. All the compromised earth one has taken in having lived this long. Oh, God. The third is the only real worry now.
And money? It comes, it goes, there is nothing really that can be done about it. At least I have a so-called real job. My writing? I pretend I am not worried about it. It will make my writing better, I say, having no real idea what I am talking about.
Apparently if I can make it through the first trimester and the amniocentesis, then I am as home free as anyone ever is in this. Some risk, but not undo. He is concerned about me. I am his daughter. His firstborn. Of course.
Exhilarating to finally be this near to having a child on my own terms. To have made the whole thing up.
The Lord is with thee… Never have I understood these words as I understand them now. Certainly someone, certainly someone or something is with me. The light is with me — at least that.
That I had walked at 4 A.M., most terrible hour of the day, of the night, in utter fear and dread, in utter sorrow, scarcely breathing, to kiss my dead friend good-bye, and that now I walk through that exact door again in such elation and hope, and some fear also. It does not seem possible, not in one lifetime. West Twelfth Street. Saint Vincent’s Hospital.
That same threshold.
No visitor’s passes needed to visit the dead. They direct me solemnly an alternate way. I still remember.
A journal is interesting in that it records the instants of life as they pass. And an instant of thought and of writing as it takes shape, the words as they form. Fragile, evolving, and in motion. Continuous and discontinuous. Stated, erased, restated. Not made or shaped as fiction for the most part is. Not one invented thing. As much as is possible.
An honoring of the contingent, the mark on the page — without embellishment, without revision or amendment.
The revolving doors were locked at 4 A.M. Michael and I had breakfast together afterwards. Patrick later in the hallway, because I went back, because I could not leave yet. Where is Gary?
He’s been taken to be cremated, I think.
I am losing a certain edge. What a relief to be a little free of myself. A break from the intensity. This bovine happiness. I think about trying to complete Frida but it seems far away — and I’m really too sleepy. I am only grateful that I finished every single aspect of Defiance before this all began. It would not have been possible to keep up the tautness of mind, the high rage that fueled it, the extremity of emotion. Even back then I had to work hard to keep up that emotional tenor. I am frightened to even read from it out loud with this child in me. I do not want her to hear. I can scarcely believe I was once, and not so long ago, the person who wrote that book. When the (extensive) corrections to the galleys arrive for checking one final time I only glance at them with my side eyes.
I did my best. Especially considering part of me was never there for it. I knew even then that I was writing for the last time in a quaint and fast-waning tradition: the conventional novel. Well, conventional more or less.
Is it not the oddest combination of tenderness and resignation, the way I feel now?
I feel at last prepared, when the time comes, to die. I know it will be all right. God bathes us in hormones for death. Of this I am quite certain now. And protects us. As I am protected now. All worry has dissolved. I hover above the world without a care.
The quality of the fatigue, which is different than any other: the fatigue after hard work in the garden, or after swimming, or after writing, or the fatigue that comes with concern or worry. It is like none of those fatigues. And the quality of hunger — as if one is eating for one’s very life. The urgency of the need for protein. These have both been revelations for me — but perhaps the most extraordinary of all is the quality of music. Listening today to The Magic Flute. Almost impossible. Unbearable in its beauty. Unable to contain my emotion I wept into my bathtub in Providence, where I sat trying to — what else — read student papers. I remember after Gary’s death how it was nearly impossible to listen to music. Music too beautiful then, too, but in an entirely different way. That music should exist at all seemed an impossibility.