Too Far Gone: A Memoir
Sheets
When my father’s mother died in 1994, her armoires were full of brand-new
sheets—not the store-bought variety, but heavy-weight, hand-made
cotton sheets embroidered with her red or white initials, or in some cases,
her grandmother’s initials. She had made the sheets with her monogram
while working on her trousseau around 1930. Her grandmother had made the
rest of those sheets under similar circumstances before her own wedding
in the 1880s. There were no sheets belonging to my grandmother’s
mother because she had never gotten married—or cared much for embroidery,
for that matter.
My great-grandmother had had five children out of wedlock by
different fathers and laughed at the men who had insisted on marrying
her—as Jeanne was a spirited beauty, several had tried, my grandmother
recalled. Jeanne’s mother raised the oldest child, my grandmother.
My great-grandmother worked all kinds of jobs and raised the rest, or
they raised themselves, as rumor has it. (Still, I loved my great-grandmother
Jeanne when I was a child. Her ferocious humor, hard-nosed common sense,
and seemingly endless lease on life gave her a charisma I could hardly
resist—she had been a bad girl and had gotten away with it, and since
she was a grownup people could gossip behind her back, but not scold her
to her face.)
When my grandmother died, her shelves held about a dozen pairs of her
own sheets and as many made by her grandmother, all heavily starched and
in pristine condition, except for having yellowed slightly. My mother
shook her head, remembering the patched tatters she had stripped from
my grandparents’ beds after my grandmother’s death. No one felt
surprised, though, and me least of all—I had gotten the “sheet
speech” too often to count: “Sheets don’t grow on trees,
Sugar Duckling. You’ve got to manage them wisely. When you get holes
in one pair, you patch it with an older one that’s got even more
holes. When you can’t patch it no more, you make dish towels out
of it. When the dish towels get too many holes in them, you use them as
cleaning rags. When the rags wear out, you sell them to the ragman. That’s
how a good woman makes a penny go a long way. Oh, and if you get a sheet
with a large tear but no missing fabric, just make a table cloth out of
it—embroidery hides all kinds of sins.”
Each week, after she was done ironing, my grandmother would let me help
her put the clothes back into the two armoires in her bedroom—even
my grandfather’s clothes went there, though her chronic insomnia
and his loud snoring had made them decide to have separate bedrooms. She
would put the sheets and clothes back onto the shelves, and then once
in a while she would bring a chair for me to climb on and have a closer
look at the piles of sheets, napkins, table cloths, and towels. “All
this will be yours when I’m dead,” she would say. “I hope
you’ll take good care of it.” I felt awed by her trust but worried
at the huge responsibility she intended to drop on my shoulders. “But
that won’t be for a long time, will it, Granny?” “Of course
not, Little Rabbit. You’ll be all grown up then.”
My grandmother had raised me for long enough that I found her penny-pinching
normal, not to say praiseworthy. Unfortunately, her sense of economy and
my parents’ chronic lack of cash flow combined to create an evil
situation for me at school. Because my parents were putting away all the
money they could to buy a house, we were always struggling to get by when
I was a child. To help with that situation, my grandmother decided that
she would make all my clothes. She was very good at sewing and amazing
at knitting, so the problem didn’t lie there. The problem, since
a sizeable problem most definitely dwelled and thrived therein, was that
she used all her leftover yarn and fabric scraps on me. I remember, in
particular, a jersey dress that had a red top, but a skirt with vertical
yellow and blue stripes. All my sweaters also had stripes of up to five
or six different colors. Personally, I found those combinations cheerful
and attractive, but the other kids teased me mercilessly, calling me a
parrot and asking if my parents were too poor to buy me clothes all of
one piece. My naïve explanation—I just told them the truth—only
made things worse. I could take being insulted, but not hearing my family
ridiculed, and especially not my grandmother, so her lovingly made garments
suffered from my school scuffles.
One day, as my grandmother was scolding me for yet another ripped shirt,
I started crying and blurted the truth. She pursed her lips and pondered
for a few seconds, and finally she said, “poverty is no vice. I worked
all my life and so did your grandfather. Your parents work hard, as well.
Our family has no debts, unlike those people with new houses and new cars
who wonder each day when they’re gonna go bankrupt. As long as you’re
clean and not torn up, you have nothing to be ashamed of, even if you’ve
got patches all over. This is what you tell those kids, and hold your
head high, too. And if that’s not enough, give them a good whooping!
I’ll mend your clothes.”
It turned out my classmates weren’t particularly impressed with my
grandmother’s wisdom. Kicks and punches were about the only rhetoric
they understood, anyway. As was bound to happen, my mother, who was also
my teacher, finally overheard some of those comments in the schoolyard
one day. She said nothing, but slapped the guilty party so hard that his
head jerked back and his face bore the imprint of her hand for two days.
After that, she never again let me go to school wearing clothes my grandmother
had made. I ended up having two totally separate sets of clothes, one
for home and one for school, and I knew better than mixing them up or
telling my grandmother what was happening.
Another sticky point between my grandmother and her daughter-in-law was
that my grandmother did all her laundry by hand, the small items in the
kitchen sink and everything else under an open shed behind the house.
Every Tuesday morning, even in the dead of winter, she took the sheets,
my grandfather’s work clothes, and other heavy items down to the
shed where she kept a wood stove and a large metal boiler. After lighting
the stove and putting wood in it, she brought three buckets of icy water
from the well to fill the boiler, added some soap, and put the boiler
on the stove for the water to heat up, which took a good hour. During
that time, she went back home and prepared lunch. When the water was finally
hot, she put the sheets and clothes in. They had to simmer for about twenty
minutes to ensure complete sanitation and cleanliness. Then, my grandmother
used old rags to grab the boiler. She took it down from the stove and
set it onto the concrete floor to cool down. Full of hot water and clothes,
the boiler easily weighed over fifty pounds.
That routine panicked my mother, who was much frailer than her mother-in-law
and kept imagining awful accidents—third-degree scalding, back injuries,
or maybe a crushed foot. My grandmother, who weighted about two-hundred
and twenty pounds and was strong as a horse laughed it off, “Don’t
worry, Honey, that’s really nothing. I’ve lifted much heavier
loads, and I’m still here to tell the tale.” “Still, Granny,
you really should be more careful. Why don’t you buy a washing machine
and some of those nice new polyester sheets?” my mother would reply.
“On my dead body! Washing machines are for the rich. As for those
new sheets, the neighbor bought some, and she told me they got holes after
she washed them twice!” The bickering went on until my grandmother
had her first heart attack at sixty-five. When she came back from the
hospital, my grandfather and my parents had bought the washing machine
and installed it in the kitchen behind her back. “I won’t use
it!” she shouted angrily. She did, though, after sulking for a few
days.
Eggs
(1975) Until I was nine or ten, I spent at least two days a week at my
grandmother’s house. For the most part, I had a great time there.
My grandmother was not liberal, but she understood children. She would
let me watch her cook and explain the recipes to me, “See, you need
to be very gentle with this type of batter. I mixed it just enough so
all the dry ingredients got moist, and now we’re going to pour it
into the pan. We need to be careful baking it: twenty-five minutes at
most; otherwise, the top will turn black real quick.” We tended to
the hens and ducks together, and she would let me pick up the eggs from
the nests and put them in the basket she carried. She also taught me how
to crochet and the basics of sewing. Being with her meant being safe from
other children and not having to play by myself unless I wanted to. A
far cry from school and my busy mother.
One day—I was seven—I was playing dress-up in the house. I was
wearing my grandmother’s wool shawl with long fringes and prancing
around pretending to be a knight wearing a cape. I paraded from the kitchen
to my grandfather’s room, which was next to it, but as I passed a
little side table near the wall, the fringes of the shawl got caught in
a wicker basket that contained about a dozen eggs, stored there because
my grandfather’s room was cooler than the kitchen. The basket was
light and toppled over. I can still hear the sound of the eggs crashing
on the floor, not all at the same time, but in groups of three and four—the
pops of the shells breaking, their content flowing, translucent and vivid
yellow on the shining red tiles. Everything was over in seconds, but seemed
to last a lot longer. I watched the last few eggs fall and splatter in
slow motion.
I was horrified at what I had done, and my grandmother’s reaction
devastated me further. I was expecting her to be angry at me and to give
me a good lecture about the necessity not to run inside the house and
to pay attention to where I was going, but instead she shouted at me at
the top of her lungs, “You’re impossible to manage! I’m
going to phone your parents to come pick you up as soon as I’m done
cleaning your mess. Get out of my sight!” I fled to the dining room
at the other end of the house and flung myself down on the easy chair
to cry.
Finally, after what seemed a century, but couldn’t have been much
more than twenty minutes, my grandmother came into the dining room to
talk with me. Her anger had abated somewhat, but she still looked sad
and grim. I sobbed, “I’m so sorry! I won’t do it anymore.
I didn’t do it on purpose, I promise!” It was our usual policy
that only willful mischief was an unforgivable offence, but errors were
to be explained and corrected, so I could feel relief creep into my soul
as I pleaded my case. Everything was surely going to be fine—it had
to, hadn’t it? However, my grandmother just sat down on the guest
bed (the dining room doubled as a guest room) and shook her head wearily.
“I know,” she said, “but you’re old enough to learn
that mistakes are not always excusable. You’re responsible for the
consequences of your actions, no matter what.” She said nothing more
before she left the room. I don’t remember whether she called my
parents.
Daffodils
(1978) I have always found daffodils almost supernaturally entrancing.
For me, the daffodil conjures up not only the priceless jonquil diamond,
but also the thick, golden carpets of flowers hiding the forest floor
in April. My father would take me there, if I had been good, and we would
gaze at the yellow and emerald expanse under the solemn trees. The forests
of my youth covered half of the land and gave to us generously, yielding
chestnuts, mushrooms, colorful leaves, wild strawberries, and glorious
winter memories when the snow weighed down bushes and tall trees, but
they were also dark and damp—thicket rather than canopy. In spring,
however, all the bets were off when the daffodils bloomed in clearings
streaked with sunshine or glistening with rain. In spring, all the melancholy
of the year ran for its life, and the ground looked as if a patches of
the sun had landed there and made themselves a nest. We admired our fill,
and then, very carefully, we gathered three bouquets, one for my grandmother
and two for my mother.
The bouquets were so huge that my father’s big hands could barely
contain them, but he was an organized man and never went on such expeditions
without twine and his pocket knife, so we always ended up with orderly
round bouquets, so gorgeous and professional-looking they would have cost
twenty dollars a piece in a flower shop. When we were done, we left—and
the daffodils were so numerous and densely pressed together under the
trees that our visit was totally undetectable.
Every time, before we left the forest, my father would take a bottle of
water and a piece of soap out of the car and wash my hands thoroughly—daffodils
are powerfully emetic, and he didn’t want me to put my hands in my
mouth and get sick. The year I turned ten, however, he forgot the water
at home. He knitted his brows and concluded that I was old enough to behave
until we reached my grandmother’s house to drop her bouquet off.
I nodded obediently and climbed into the backseat. I was intrigued, though.
What did the daffodils taste like? How much would you have to ingest to
actually throw up? I discretely brought one hand to my mouth and gave
it a little lick, which proved very disappointing—no bitterness,
no taste of any kind, except a vague green flavor, so faint it was more
a smell than a taste. I gave my hand a second lick, but nothing more happened.
Then I decided to stop, as I didn’t really want to experience the
medicinal property of the daffodils first-hand. For a couple of minutes,
nothing happened, but then I only had time to tell my father to stop the
car and rush back into the woods.
When I came back, my father shrugged, “guess you couldn’t leave
it alone, could you? Well, now you saw for yourself. I bet you won’t
try that again any time soon.” I felt silly, and we agreed not to
mention this little episode to my mother because we were afraid she might
throw a fit and forbid us from gathering daffodils the next year.
Three days later, on a Saturday morning, my mother took one of the bouquets
of daffodils to her classroom, so we could all paint it. A few years earlier,
my mother had gone to teacher’s continuing education classes to learn
more about the visual arts. Just the commuting had been a pain, so she’d
applied herself and committed to memory the least little tip the artist
in residence had mentioned. Out of that course sprung the daffodil assignment—fully
grown and bearing arms, as it were. My mother was on a mission as she
instructed us on how to paint the glass vase, render the water, and even
get right the funky angle of the stalks diffracted by water.
I looked at the vase she had put the flowers in and found it insufferably
bland—a-run-of-the-mill vase from the nearby supermarket. I had seen
more appealing specimen of the species at home and in my grandmother’s
house: antique crockery pitchers with chipped rims; a blue glass vase
bearing the symbols of the 1870 Commune on its flanks; a brightly enameled
Art Nouveau tall number that could house huge bunches of chrysanthemums,
and many others—my mother actually had a very nice collection.
Unfortunately, obedience was not my strong suit. Later in life, my stubborn
nature and feistiness would prove valuable assets, but for the time being,
they regularly led to my mother scolding me in front of my classmates
and pulling my hair and ears at home. I lived wholly in the present, however,
and did not spend much time worrying about the consequences of my actions—and
that glass monstrosity was definitely not worth the effort. Therefore,
the vase on my painting ended up short and pot-bellied—and—purple—deep
purple with a black stripe on the rim and a vigorous bunch of daffodils
exploding on top of it.
I felt inordinately proud of my achievement, so when class ended and my
mother started reviewing our pictures after the other children had left,
I went to look over her shoulder, vibrating with excitement when she reached
mine. She shook her head and said, “Look at that mess! Can’t
you follow directions just once in your life?” I was disappointed,
but not crestfallen, “But, look, mum, mine is so beautiful! The other
ones are all the same.” My mother’s mouth flattened into a crimson
lipstick line, but she said nothing more, so I went back to whatever had
been on my mind that day—drawing, reading a new adventure book, plotting
revenge against one or the other of my classmates, or some equally enthralling
project.
Maybe an hour later, I went back to my mother who, by then, had pinned
all our pictures on the wall of the classroom. I looked for mine, but
couldn’t find it. I asked her where my painting was, but she answered,
“I’m sorry. I couldn’t post that.” “Fine,”
I said, sulking, “Give it back to me, then.” There was a half-second
of silence, and then my mother said, “I can’t.” “Why?”
“Well, your daffodils weren’t bad, and Bruno’s vase was
fine, even though his flowers were terrible, so I just pasted your flowers
on top of his vase, so that you could have something of yours displayed
on the wall like everyone else.” I looked at her with such amazed
shock that my jaw went slack. “Aren’t you happy?” she asked.
I turned my back on her and went straight to my crayons to draw another
huge bouquet of daffodils—in a purple pot, with a shiny black rim.
Bully
(1978) That the incident happened was entirely my fault, or perhaps my
choice. How it slipped into existence in such a peculiar and altogether
mysterious manner, however, was due to chance, or mere bad luck, or Fate.
His first name was Désiré, which means “Desired,”
but his last name was “Côtelette”—“lamb shop,”
in French. Desired Lambshop. Why his parents had yoked together such a
disastrous conceit was anyone’s guess, since they were dead.
He lived with an uncle and aunt. His aunt had three children of her own
and also tried to raise him and a foster daughter—five kids, all
in all, on a measly farm about the size of a mini-golf course. After changing
Désiré’s bed sheets for the fifth time that week, his
aunt had called Child Services to get some help with his bed wetting.
He was promptly removed from her care and sent to a center for mentally
deficient, deviant, and violent youths. He remained there for eighteen
months, until some big wig inspected the place unannounced and found no
classes held, children tied up to beds, unchanged diapers, hunger, cigarette
burns, and rampant sexual abuse. The center closed, and Désiré
Côtelette returned to the school my mother ran, having lost two
years of education but acquired quite a reputation—some kids saw
him as a martyr, others as a gangster. For the most part, he just felt
victimized and developed a blanket hatred for educators, teachers, social
workers, cops, and anyone getting a paycheck from the government. He even
detested mail carriers.
I was not attracted to his gangly thirteen-year old body, his pale, non-descript
face, his brown eyes and brown hair—so similar to mine, to everyone
else’s. In a country where blond curls and blue eyes were coveted
attributes, more than enough to ensure the popularity of their owner,
Désiré was just one of the mud people, a kid of local, peasant
stock—without beauty, without brains, without manners. No, what fascinated
me was his secrets, the things that had happened to him during those two
years between my mother’s school and my mother’s school, the
mysterious circumstances that had caused all his classmates to move on
while he lingered in limbo, growing in no way that anyone could tell,
except bodily—reflexively, as it were, not unlike a plant.
At first, he smiled at me, said a word or two, maybe vaguely flattered
the director’s daughter felt interested in him. That fragile peace
didn’t last long, however. Soon, all our differences—of sex,
age, education—reaffirmed themselves. He told me to leave him alone,
that he had nothing to say to me. I can’t remember what I asked him,
but I’m fairly sure it was improper and insensitive.
Never one to heed a warning or take the prudent course of action, I kept
following him around and asking questions for the next few days, until
finally he turned against me, snarling and baring his teeth. He accused
my mother of lying to him when she had expressed interest in his problems—why,
otherwise, would she have abandoned him in hell for a year and a half?
I didn’t know, at the time, that she had actually located him and
vainly tried to rescue him—she was only the director of a small primary
school and didn’t have the power to alter that kind of decision.
Anyway, had I known and tried to explain, he would probably have accused
me of lying. My denial would have been for nothing. He had already been
broken and made the decision to remain that way. I was quite the terrorist,
back then, and had a rather chivalric notion of my mother’s honor,
which was to be defended at all times and at any cost. I charged and started
punching him. A teacher saw us and broke us apart. With characteristic
rashness, she assumed Désiré was bullying a smaller kid
and punished him. What the fight might not have done, that last bit of
unfairness accomplished. I stood silent—one never ratted, even to
make things right—while he chocked on self-righteous outrage.
After that, he saw to it that my life became hell. As usual, my mother
felt that she shouldn’t intervene. Her colleagues thought differently
and generally rescued me when he started beating me in their presence,
so he became more devious, trying to catch me in the few half-hidden spots
of the trapezoidal schoolyard; for example, he would beat me up after
chasing me up the stairs leading to the two terrace classrooms. The town
was built on a steep hillside, and from the bottom of the stairs, where
the two other classrooms and the schoolyard stood, teachers could not
see what was happening eight feet higher on the terrace. Students were
forbidden from going there without a teacher, but someone managed to disobey
almost daily. Sometimes, Désiré also got to me while the
powers that be were watching an energetic soccer match or were already
busy breaking up some other fight. I wasn’t exactly up to the task:
ten years old to his thirteen, a scrawny girl for all my pugnacity. He
pummeled me every time. Sometimes I felt fear and ran; sometimes anger,
so I fought back with all I had. Occasionally, I wasn’t the only
one limping away. By tacit agreement, we never hit in the face, which
would have prompted the teachers to intervene more decisively. Everything
else was fair game, though.
After four or five months, our private war ended on a rainy February day.
The air was cold and a listless drizzle had been falling since six that
morning. Recess brought its usual chaos, and just a few minutes after
we left the building, the drizzle turned into a steady shower. Rainy days
were always a scary affair because the teachers huddled together under
the porch of the second classroom to try to keep dry and gossip more comfortably,
which made them lose sight of about half the yard. Obeying my mother,
I stayed away from the adults, putting myself in a rather dangerous position.
My only option was to stand at some distance, but directly in their line
of sight. I walked around a bit, so I wouldn’t look lonely and asocial
enough to prompt yet another command to ‘go play with the others,’
but I tried to stay right where they could see me through the rain and
thickening fog.
All of a sudden, the soccer players moved their game right between me
and the teachers—who were so taken with their conversation that they
weren’t really paying attention to anything, anyway. I felt my cheeks
heat up with panic, and rightly so. Almost immediately, I spotted Désiré,
running for me. I took off and crossed the width of the yard, a decidedly
bad move that took me farther and farther away from the teachers. I reached
the grey wall of the towering, two-storey school building and started
angling my flight back toward the adults who were then about eighty feet
away when he finally caught me, grabbing my jacket and shoving me into
the corner between the school building and the high wall of the yard—our
school was old-fashioned and dated back to the Third Republic. It was
entirely fenced off with eight-foot concrete walls—though we really
didn’t know whether those walls were supposed to keep intruders out
or us in.
My head banged sonorously against the zinc drainpipe that came down from
the roof. A foot or so above me, the drainpipe was badly damaged and had
developed a great leak. Water started pouring on me, its icy bite numbing
my scalp and face. I looked down and saw the iron grate of the drain I
was standing on. I looked up and saw the steel-gray sky, pin-pricked with
rain. Finally, my eyes settled on Désiré’s face, a
blank mask that evinced nothing, not even anger. For a few seconds, he
just stood there, holding me in place under the downpour, but otherwise
keeping still. Finally, he screamed, “I’m gonna kill you!”
The loudness of his voice startled me as much as what he was saying, if
not more; I was the one who had blabbered, so far. He usually just hit
me—or maybe grunted when I hit him back and bruised something.
I don’t think I believed him. No one had threatened to kill me before,
ever. Dying was an abstract concept, something that happened only to other
people, and only when they got very old. But then, he put his hands around
my neck and started applying pressure in slow increments, and all of a
sudden I knew exactly what he had in mind. I thought of the useless teachers
on the other side of the yard. I thought of how completely trapped I was,
and how exhausted. The past weeks had been rough. Being involved in a
couple of fights a month was one thing, but fleeing someone and getting
hit almost daily had gotten old fast. I felt a strange detachment come
over me. I had a moment of perfect, passionate clarity and saw that I
did not care about my own life. I felt no fear whatsoever. I looked him
squarely in the eyes and said, “go ahead.” He believed me—we
were, after all, close enemies and had never lied to each other. Or maybe
his own experience with pain and having your bluff called told him that
I was in earnest. He shook his head slowly and declared, “I’ve
seen loonies before, but you sure take the cake.” He let go of me
and walked away. After that day, we still fought once or twice, but the
feud was over—all the heat gone, as if it had never been.
