You can’t get it right, only so you feel okay if you stop. Everything goes wrong. Glue spills or your hand wrecks the line. All you want to do is throw the whole thing out because you spent all this time and all you have is something ugly. Sometimes you feel so bad and mad you never want to make another thing. Stomp outside to play or read your book.
But nothing’s interesting or your eyes can’t keep on your sentence and then you know you want to get it right so try again. And sometimes it’s pretty good.
Next is our bathroom, big enough to walk back and forth of it. Our shower never works, so there Mom hangs her nylons.
Over the tub are sticker penguins washing who smile at you when I take my bath. What I love of baths is: to have bubbles and to wait until the water is almost gone and slip and slide back and forth it feels so slick and good.
Also in the tub, play with submarine I sent away to Kellogg’s for which just put baking soda in and it swims but took so long to come now I don’t send away even for sea-monkeys.
The best of all is thick mirror of the medicine chest. Swing it open, put your eye on the edge and see a whole green city of skinny green bars with no end. If you have to stay home just come to the mirror and go way far into Infinity City.
The blue colonial wallpaper in Mom and Dad’s bedroom is punctuated by crucifixes, saints, and the Sacred Heart. Over the glossy cherry bed, a laden bookshelf sports a fluorescent tube for bedtime reading. Smells of pipe tobacco, Coty face powder, and personal parental scents.
They, too, have a window seat, where the Infant of Prague resides off-season. We bring Him downstairs for special occasions. He has a whole set of vestments for the liturgical year in purple, green, and gold brocade. I love dressing Him. Later, our first portable television finds a spot there. Reverberating here still is the gushy joy I felt when Mom invited me up to watch An Affair To Remember with her.
A triple mirror sits atop Mom’s vanity table, which features a gold-doored triptych of the Blessed Mother, as well as Cherries in the Snow lipstick, tiny gold safety pins, drawers for cosmetics, lacy slips, and prosaic underwear. Red slidey tray of mascara which she can’t apply without tearing up, so she stops. An atomizer with a fleshy tasseled bulb. Evening in Paris, White Shoulders. Chanel No. 5 is her favorite.
Dad’s chest of drawers is covered with bent pipe cleaners, handkerchiefs, coins, and Clorets. What coins pass through his hands, he examines. The best he keeps, inserted into blue numismatic books.
•••
They’re gone. Look in their closets, Dad’s of suits and shirts and wood egg things to go in shoes and Mom’s of dresses and dusters and pedal pushers, poinky shoes and puffy party dresses. Right here I played doctor with David H. but lucky they never found out. Up top in a round plastic box: two velvet hats and collar of foxes with feet, eyes, and teeth who are biting each other’s tails in a row.
When I go in their closets, it’s like they are there.
With twin bunk beds and a single, the boys’ room sleeps three brothers at any given time—first Pogo and Tom and Skip, then Tom, Skip, and Jim when Pogo leaves. A constant complex of smells—brass polish, shoe polish, sweet-smelling Butch Wax, Brylcreem and adolescence. All my brothers attended high school at a military academy and the required paraphernalia—clips and brass bits and hats and uniform sashes—spills from the room. Here’s the fold-down desk Tom built to map and shelter the family genealogy on which he labors. Saggy chenille bedspreads, but topnotch uniforms, clean shirts, the cleanest in the house but for Dad’s immaculate blue shirts—blue because he couldn’t wear white on camera.
Behind this glass-knobbed door, a set of stairs leads to the desiccated, suffocating air of the attic—cardboard boxes, bins, outgrown moth-eaten whatevers, troves of old letters, a tatted blouse or two belonging to a grandmother. Place of discomfort and mystery—only utter summer boredom drives us up there, usually on solo expeditions.
•••
Oh, and the first floor sunroom? This glassy front room, ornamented with a few bony African violets from the last church bazaar, is lined with yet more bookcases holding Maryknoll Crusade magazines, atlases, a trim set of Britannica, and a ten-volume set of The Book of Knowledge (Great Saturday afternoon fodder. Did you know the Pyramids were so old they were in black and white?) We watch TV here, too, but that’s not why we’re here now.
This room compasses more of Mom’s creativity than any other—she sewed these green slipcovers, made these muslin café curtains with Greek-key trim, and braided this huge rag-rug on winter nights watching Dad’s Gold Award Theatre.
But best of all, on particular afternoons she lifts the center handle on this prosaic oak desk. A hidden hinge squeaks, a hidden spring twangs, a rough cough of metal. A whoosh of steely, oily, inky odor, and out of thin air, it appears.
Nothing in our house matches the theatricality of the typewriter ascending though its trapdoor in the desk, or the satisfaction of its thunk as it lands squarely in place every time, ready for action.
I love when Mom gets a phone call just as she’s about to type, and I’m alone with the olive green L.C. Smith Secretariat. How pleasing to caress its toothy keys and fondle the silver oval on the carriage return.
Even more compelling, the orderly crescent rib cage of typebars, alluring to me as ship’s hull to sailor. Keys are mere pictures of letters. Here’s where they actually live. I love stroking that intimate arc, then pressing a letter into my fingertip, just to see. Wanting to press them all into my hands. Nudging a cluster of keys simultaneously to watch the bars rise and catch each other, releasing them back to their personal places.
My mother feeds this sturdy friendly animal fat sandwiches of onionskin and carbon paper and thereon types “The Family Journal,” a one-page newsletter of The O’Brien Household as dictated by her children.
Whatever else my mother could or could not give, she gives me this symphonic experience of writing, a big production marked with clacketing keys and the thrilling ding! of the carriage return. A returning carriage. Which carried words. Which are important. Which are important to write down. Which are important to share.
It doesn’t happen often. But it happens. It almost makes up for not flying.
Montana, Day One: Tenting Tonight
After setting up camp we all drive a half-hour to the little town of Seely Lake, where we gobble down decent pizza.
“How will Mom know we’re alright in the wilderness?” asks Derek, Don’s ten-year-old, a sunny buzz-cut towhead boy, even-tempered, slim. Leopard to his sister Lauren’s lioness.
“Show him the GPS, will ya Mike?” asks Don.
“Sure,” says Mike, pulling it from his pocket. “Once a day, I’ll perch this doohickey on an open spot. The satellite’ll beam ‘We’re OK’ to Jolyne. Then she’ll email your Mom and everyone’s spouse. It can also say ‘Send Help’ if we need it and show our coordinates.”
Satisfied, Derek folds in another slice.
•••
Later on, Jim and Ro and I stop at a bar overlooking the lake and share a sunset drink on the deck. They know I’ve been working on a family memoir. I confess my trepidation. “I don’t want the people I love most to stop speaking to me,” I tell them. “I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.”
“You can’t worry about that,” says Ro. “Write what you have to write. People will understand.”
“Write whatever you need to,” says Jim. “If my life can help somebody else, I’ll be happy.”
Hearing this from the two of them, even my DNA relaxes.
•••
The stars are just beginning to appear when we get back to camp. Mike drives the trailer over to the