Knot

Recently, I had a friend take a close look at my left eye after noticing extra red near the lower lid. I had been out skiing in full sun that afternoon and was worried that I had somehow done damage– more than was already there. Initially, when I was around 10 years-old, I had burst a blood vessel in that eye. Here’s the tale of that:


 It was a summer night on the farm. Mom was sitting, smoking a cigarette in the enclosed porch that ran down a chunk of the side of the farmhouse. I was sitting with her. My father must have been away on business and my two siblings were away wherever. My grandmother, an ogre of solid and terrible mental brutality was staying with us as she did now and then. She was elderly and hunched, which doesn’t mean anything, except that it fit slim with her personality. She was never the sort you would look to for comfort had you skinned a knee, or given yourself a sliver during a noteworthy tree climb. This was in stark comparison to my other grandmother, my mom’s mom, who was kind, birdlike and delightful, so I knew nice was possible.  I don’t know what the hell my father was thinking, having the ogre stay with us. She wielded judgement and cruelty down on my mother like she had the right, which she didn’t, but my father didn’t stop her. He couldn’t. Or wouldn’t–I don’t know exactly. She was mightier than all. Yes, she was a lawyer, and a suffragette, but she was also a bully and an asshole. The woman had woven the limitless potential of her two brilliant, sensitive offspring into straight-jackets that imprisoned them in mere ideas of themselves–suffocating anything full and vibrant. She cheated the world on that one. I am told that even her husband, my grandfather, shrunk from her–walked a few steps behind in order to keep and hold the little bit of himself that she allowed. I wish I had met him. He died the year that I was born.


 It was quiet that night except for the frogs in the pond telling tales to each other. My grandmother was enthroned in the living room listening to the radio. There was a window into the living room at the west end of the porch, and light from it reached toward us. The wallpaper in that living room had repeated forest scenes on it, so you could think that my grandmother was a dark beast camped on a trail somewhere, collecting brittle bones, and throttling whimpers from unsuspecting prey, but the piano in the near corner of the room broke that image. It was mom who played. She could launch into some Gershwin, or Bach, and would often stop in the middle of cooking a meal, walk to the piano with her apron on, leaving whatever cut of beef she was busy destroying to roast or boil unmonitored toward its leathery end, in order to sate her desire for music. Mom wasn’t a great cook. She was a better pianist, and I was going to say that this wasn’t useful here, but really it is. I think her thriving, the creative arc that she had foolishly assumed that she could continue, was flattened when my grandmother got at her. The whole party seemed to stop–three great kids and a mother who all seemed set on having fun. 



This night, mom was clearly bushed and fed up with all of it. “I just don’t want to live anymore,” she said, to me, her young daughter who had no business fielding such a line. In those days, I was busy reciting TV commercials by heart, mimicking Don Adams from Get Smart–basically trying to be a kid. But I took the line, “I just don’t want to live anymore,” lofted without any reason for me to doubt. I stood and moved myself into the living room. I can’t remember if I walked, or ran–I just seemed to get myself there somehow. Then, up and out of me came a wash of rage and hatred more powerful than I felt my child-body frame could house. I was out of control, and hollering enough to bend the drawn trees on the wallpaper. I remember the look of fear on my grandmother’s face–that terrible, pruned face. I stopped when my nose started bleeding. I was crying so hard that I had difficulty seeing. The next morning, I noticed the knot of blood vessels in my left eye. 



Through the years, I would see the knot, remember that night, and then lean the memory up against other terrible events that happened through the years like records in a milk crate. Each one had a specific feeling to it, and each had been set in motion by the thoughtless, arrogant monster, even posthumously. I hadn’t thought of it much until the other day, flagged by the seeming ocular irritation. The beats of that specific night on the porch are still clear and brutal; those kinds of things live lush lives in memory, the body wrenched out of childish play with unfair emotional violence, and the experience stored and locked at a cellular level.



How idyllic and lovely would it have been to have had skiing in sunshine as the only scenario brought to mind by my concern.