"I wonder sometimes if I'm the only one spending my life making the same mistake over and over again or if that's simply human. Or do we all tend toward a single besetting sin?"*
I remember in high school sneaking into my mothers room. She was gone a lot, not out of town but she left for work before I went to school and she came back a good three hours after. I had the house to myself, most of the day if I decided to skip school. We spent our evenings always in the kitchen, always cooking together. She cooked and I did the talking. Then we ate and she went to sleep downstairs and I went into the loft and stayed up at night looking things up on the internet and then in the morning it happened again. But mostly during high school I skipped class. I was a straight A student and everyone trusted me and honestly it didn't matter or even come up. Sometimes when I stayed in I'd go in her bathroom, which always seemed the most private area of the house, and look through her things. There was one basket of earthy, woven material, something that she must have got on the sailing trip, and I'd look through it. There were a few necklaces (silver) and a few pendants that seemed to be from unknown islands. Tahiti? I didn't know. I won't know. I'll never know the intimate details of those places my mother went to. I know that she was there, I know she tied up the sailboat to unknown docks, swam to unknown beaches, I know she was in love. I have the pictures, to prove that they sailed around the world together. In the pictures, they are in love and they are young and they are in places I'll never go to. Especially not now. When I was that age, at that time, I had already thought about their comings and goings, and I had plenty of time to think about their divorce. I had already lived through it. We had the shells around the house, the tapestries and the photographs. But in that basket that my mom kept in her bathroom I found all the unknown details, the things and totems I didn't know or understand. The only thing I could recognize in the basket was the ring. I knew the gold ring was when my dad asked her to marry him, when they were really in love. I always picked it up, I always tried it on- skipping school before my mom got home, before I snuck out to punk shows (through the bedroom window, over the garage, she already knew).
That Christmas when my mom handed me the small box, I expected something small, but not the small gold ring inside. She said, "you're twenty five, and I don't know what else to give you." It was the engagement ring, very simple, and yet the ring I'd always put on secretly, thinking about her and my dad, thinking about their trip, when the 36ft sailboat crossed the whole world with at first just them, and then finally me, inside its hull. I shouldn't have to explain how much I cried and cried, and have never taken the ring off since.
2. One evening in my early twenties, I was sitting in the bathtub with my nose just below the water, eyes above, knees peaking out over, and just sort of floating with myself which has been something I've always liked to do. I've always liked to be in water. But I was sitting inside the tub and looking at the white porcelain container I was in and suddenly this wild memory came back to me, of being completely inside a very dark blue ceramic container. I remember the bathtub completely. It was very high, and tiled, which is unusual at least in Florida, and I remember when I got to the house that belonged to the tub always immediately wanting to be inside it, probably for the way the dark blue tiles turned the water in the tub a mysterious, middle of the ocean hue, and then floating inside that space for hours. The memory of the dark blue tiles came back to me, slowly (tidal) probably because it took me so long to realize that the tub belonged to the house that belonged to the woman that my dad was cheating on my mom with.
I don't know what it's like for other people when they realize they're becoming someone they never wanted to be. I know how it felt for me, but how it happened isn't even something I'm capable of figuring out yet. But I remember an evening where I was literally begging someone I was in love with not to leave me. I don't know if that means anything to you. Let me start over. I was on my hands and knees, in an apartment I paid for surrounded by all my shitty possessions. I remember thinking I needed to sweep the next day, because there was cat hair all over the room, and I remember even thinking that whatever was coming next, it involved sweeping. So a part of me was being rational. The other part of me, you could argue, was drunk, or deliriously in love, or horrifically in love, whatever way you could choose to describe it- I can only say that I felt like if this person walked out that door and left me that I would absolutely without a doubt die (I didn't, and that was the worst part). The next day, when I woke up alone on the floor (getting a white cat was stupid but then I guess you could also argue I've never really been alone) I had this terrible memory come back to me of me, maybe around eight or nine, peering out of my bedroom door and seeing my mom on her hands and knees begging my dad not to leave her. I remember even the memory itself bothering me for so long, because my mom has always been such a strong person (she raised me after that for eight years) but we had never talked about it. I felt like, much like all my biggest fears, that everything had come full circle and I was the person she would never want me to be (that actually might still be true but let's come to that later). I pulled myself up by my boot straps (literally) and charged my phone and called her about it. About that night when I saw her begging my dad not to leave. Much like any memory, I had gotten it all wrong. My dad, as it turns out, had already gotten four DUIs that year, and was drunk and trying to leave to go the blue bath tub woman's house. My mom was just trying to get him not to drive drunk, and was trying to protect him.
After my mom got laid off from her job in Melbourne she moved to North Carolina to be closer to her family. In Asheville she briefly joined a dating website but canceled, because she thought she didn't have the time. Somehow, the only person that emailed her the whole time kept emailing her and bugging her for dates. They ended up bonding over cast iron skillets and kayaking. When he asked her to marry him last year (she was 60) she said yes. When I went to the wedding, on the outer banks of North Carolina, she gave me a small gold ring. It belonged to his ex wife, who died of cancer, but it's an opal, and apparently good luck when you give it to other people, and he wanted to welcome me to the family too, so we both got gold rings that day. I shouldn't have to explain how much I cried and cried, and have never taken the ring off since.
*Karen Joy Fowler "We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves."
