Dolls in the Attic

In my parents' attic, I had stored a trunk full of stuffed animals and my Ken and Barbie dolls. Ken and Barbie had lived up there in the dark together for a very long time, like the V.C. Anders children. Perhaps it deepened their love. Perhaps it made them mad and drove them to unwholesome things. But I hadn't had the heart to throw them out for so many years because they had been my friends. I couldn't say exactly when that feeling ended. Maybe never. All I ever wanted was to be as cool as Barbie, and now Barbie is just a bendy lump of plastic and she's gone. It isn't throwing out my 35 year old toys that bothers me. It's just that they are 35 years old... I didn't see it coming.

Oh, and about Detroit...

My friend is still in Detroit, by the way--the one I mentioned in the last blog post. We don't speak anymore, but I'm not sure why. Because she's there, and I'm not, I guess. But I can't imagine it's gotten much better for her. Whenever I hear about Detroit, it's something that causes me anxiety. There was an item in the news this fall about a Florida prosecutor, coach of youth league teams, father of three, busted getting off a plane in Detroit bound for a liaison with a five year old girl. The girl's mother was a cop posing on the internet as some incredibly foul skank who would actually pimp out a little girl to strangers for, what? It didn’t say. For a hundred dollars? Five? What kind of price do people put on these things? So this "mother" who was actually a cop offered a daughter (who didn't exist) up for sex to whatever child-snatching perv comes along… (how must she have felt, this cop, when someone really did come along? There are things in this world you don’t want to believe. But you have to. You have to believe that there are really such mothers, and there are really such men...and you have to have some really good method of coping with your soul sickness when you go home at the end of the day. I used to feel that way, after a day of working at certain crime-sodden newspapers.) But don’t leave me, now. I'm asking you to think about this for only a moment. Good necessitates evil, you know, so here's what our goodness hath wrought: He wore a goatee and he shaved his head and he had these two little slits-in-a-wrinkled-puff sort of eyes, and he told that fake mom he thought he was chatting with, “I’ve done it plenty.” He said “I’m always gentle and kind,” but what kind of kind can he think he is being when he violates a little girl? “Gently?” I know I know, I don’t want to think about it either but here on earth, it’s what they’re doing and we have to know this. The man who wants to do this thing will never go away. It doesn't matter that in the end, he hung himself in his jail cell. He will be with us always. And I read the story about this guy thinking, Oh my dear sweet vengeful fucking God, strike him dead right now, let him die, because it says right there in the New York Times that he came to Detroit bearing a Dora the Explorer doll to give his victim. I wanted to cry. He had a Dora the Explorer doll. A Dora the Explorer doll. I would have wanted that doll. I want that doll now. All the dolls I ever had are still up in my parents' attic. Okay, so I didn't really have many dolls; mostly just stuffed animals. But I would have wanted the Dora doll. I want right now, and I want one to give to all the little girls of the world, so that Dora can tell them to go out there and be someone, explore, discover the world, know that it is wonderful, and that you are wonderful, and that it’s good to be a girl. It really is. But it isn’t always safe. It may not ever be safe. Not really. There is no such thing as safe. When you’re five, you can best hope for love and protection. And there, there, there, is the real origin of all these anxieties. If you're reading still, read on--but don't tell me I'm nuts to worry all the time, about everything. It's just like, cleaning out my parents' attic, you know? It's there. It isn't going to go away, unless I plow through it, and let it go, and hope it doesn't all just get piled up again somewhere else for me to throw out all over again, later.

Sweeping out the attic

Every time I have moved, it has caused panic. Wait, that's not entirely true; between the ages of 22 and 30 I must have moved 10 times, and that was not so big a deal, except that each time I seemed to have doubled the amount of stuff I'd acquired. But once I actually started feeling happy about who I was and where I was--once, that is, I quit work, moved to the city, and started grad school--I found that I stopped wanting to move. Moving didn't just mean getting a bigger apartment or a new roommate, it started meaning something more like ripping up the plan and starting over. It happens despite everything--despite all that Peter Pan stuff about not growing up, ever, about not wanting to "settle" the way our parents all "settled." The thing is, when you like where you are, leaving holds less appeal. Even when you're leaving for something that looks pretty good--who knows? There are no promises. You could be making a dreadful mistake. You could fuck it all up and never get it back the way it was when it was good, but you left. That happened to my friend M. when she was courted by a newspaper in Detroit--God, they begged her to work there--but it was some sort of mean trick, I don't know, she finally took the job but wehn she got there all those people who begged her to come to Detroit acted like they hated her guts, gave her a chair that didn't even swivel, stuck her at a desk in a back corner and dropped by twice a day to yell at her. In New York she had known famous people. Now she was thinking about becoming a physician's assistant and living in a cream-colored brick house among brick houses on a street among many streets in a suburb among many suburbs of a city that no one goes near if they can help it. It was as if she was dropped into a bubble of despair and turned into a speck in it and disappeared. I saw the panic on her face, last I saw her. They'd started her on some mood-bracing meds but they hadn't kicked in yet. She was drowning. Well so when my parents decided to move, it was with good reason--they need to live somewhere safer for them as they were getting older and having trouble getting around, climbing stairs and such. It's all good, really. But pulling up anchor on that hulking ship of our house, which I grew up in with my brother and where they had lived forty years: that was a massive job, and like a tidal wave, bound to come back at us later once the seismic shifting work of cleaning the place out was done. They'd lived there 40 years. They had saved every single scrap of Christmas wrapping paper any of us had ever peeled off a gift--they made us unwrap slowly and then fold the paper up and put it in a box and the boxes went up to the attic for safekeeping and re-use. The attic was full to the rafters with Christmas paper and similarly saved useless things, but, that was the life my parents lived: The just-in-case life. The maybe-we'll-need-it-someday life. And someday had come and gone and the ball of string had only grown larger, the boxes heaped up higher, the carpet scraps grown heavier and riper with mildew, none of it used. I had to go dig them out. And I knew as I did this that the emotional impact of heaving out a houseload of stuff saved for the someday that never came, this revelation of the passing of our lives, it was definitely going to hit me hard, later. I've known others who went through it and they assured me it would suck. But for most of the fall, all I could think of was my poor parents, drowning in all this stuff they still didn't have the ... the... guts? nerve? heart? the sense to throw out. I had to go help them. I didn't want to but I had to. Somebody had to. It was a pretty big house and they could barely climb the stairs. So everything I had to toss out for them, for all of us, (my baby blanket, wedding gifts that mom had not really ever taken out of the boxes, candles half-burned at Thanksgiving dinner 1974, 57 gallons of slightly used house paint, old suitcases full of heirlooms my mother had saved and had no one but me to give them to, the electric frying pan she cooked nearly all our meals in, when we were all a family, and the spices in the kitchen that were maybe 53 years old) the fact that all of this was chalking up a mark on some deeply held internal anxiety scorecard in my gut--that was something I'd just have to think about later, when the work was done.

Rats the size of donkeys

You know, when my Aunt Joan was in Thailand, I bet she saw some rats.

Signs

One day last fall, around the time my parents came home from a summer of packing up and selling off their summer home and started packing up our regular home to sell it and move, I started seeing signs. I knew that was a bad thing. If I start seeing signs, I'm usually looking for evidence "out there" to confirm something I am trying not to feel.
I learned about signs the hard way, back when I was very young and I saw so many signs all the time that I had to talk myself out of looking for them. Things had stopped having clear meaning; everything was open to interpretation—the placement of a plant, the timing of a traffic light. I had to accept that if, for example, I was thinking that so-and-so reminded me of a horse, and then I saw a horse, even a rocking horse or a horse on a bathroom towel or something, it did not mean anything. I might want it to mean something, in order to give a sense of living power to the universe, but, sometimes a horse is just a horse.
Then came my relapse in the crisis of 1996; I was driving my car home to New York from Boston that difficult fall and I came to that point on the Westbound Massachusetts Turnpike where the big signs—the actual road signs, big green ones suspended on steel posts—say, Albany this way; New York that way. I was trying at that time in my life to decide whether I would leave New York for Albany, where a job waited. But it was breaking my heart to think of leaving New York, where I had an amazing apartment in Park Slope. I mean, this was the kind of brownstone garden apartment with a fireplace and French doors that other people get but the rest of us only dream about. And living in it, there was a girlfriend—a girlfriend who seemed to hate everything I liked in this world, but then went sort of catatonic when I mentioned the possibility of leaving, so that I might pursue the things I liked without disturbing her any longer, or making her go to see movies she despised. She would give me this ghostly dumbstruck panicked look and say, "fine." And then say, "don't leave me." And then we'd cry until we had to lie down.
I had the sick feeling that if I left we’d both die pretty fast. I can tell you—I will tell you, eventually, in the future of this narrative—that this girlfriend, R., taught me almost everything I know about panicking: how to do it, how to let it take over your life, how to prostrate yourself utterly to her highness, Anxiety, though I don’t blame R. for giving me this capacity; I was a very good student. Anyhow, that was the crisis, that year; that was the fateful fork in my personal road: move for a job with good benefits and earning potential, or stay stuck and aimless and emotionally hogtied in an incredibly cool New York apartment, and when I saw that sign hanging over my car, I became so distracted by it that I forgot to exit at all. New York: apartment, demon lover, unemployment? Or Albany: security, sanity, obscure dying city where not one of my friends will ever visit me again? And in my fog I ended up not exiting but staying on the road to Albany, when I was supposed fork right and go back to New York.
Wait, so I was heading to Albany. So, was it a sign?
Were the signs telling me that I should go to Albany instead of New York?
For a moment, instead of feeling irritated that I was now about to drive 120 miles or so out of my way (for, in my mental fog, it took me a long while to realize I had failed to turn south), I was not distressed but relieved. Here at last was a SIGN. My decision was made. Twenty pounds lifted off my shoulders. Hey-hey! But…
Or, but, wait. Wait. It was a "wrong turn." I was going to Albany because I’d made a “wrong turn.” Was heading for Albany a “wrong turn”? Was this the true “sign”? New York was home, and Albany would never be more than a mistake, a wrong turn.
I felt a terrible panic. The answer was unknowable. And meanwhile all the cars around me seemed so clear about where they were going, seemed not to sense danger all around, though it was always there. I was swept along with them; it was all I could do, just drive along in that steel pod, trapped with my uncertainty. There was a sign in there, by god; the answer was one of those two things that hung over me, but which? Which sign? I had no idea. I knew then that all I really was, in my car and in my metaphor, was lost.
And so I hated signs, then. I swore off them.

But then last fall things began vaguely to become invested with meaning to me, and I knew that I was on an emotional precipice. Things started to turn ugly, to take on a certain gloom. Were there signs that a bad change was coming? I was walking my dog Colby in the park and lately, I noticed, there had been a lot rats around. Big gray rats the size of squirrels, foraging around in the dead leaves. They really looked a lot like the squirrels, these rats. I often had mistaken them for squirrels at first glance and I had been happy to see them outside, scampering about in the leaves, getting ready for the big change in life—the change to the dark, cold winter days, the days they had to simply survive. The squirrels and the rats were busy. But the rats, well, I thought the rats should not prepare to survive the change. They should just die.

There were big gray rats in the leaves of Bennett Park. I had to look twice to know what I was seeing, as they blended in so well with the squirrels. The rats, I noticed, had adapted squirrel-like attitudes. They sort of hopped along, taking long bounding strides over the sidewalks and jumping off into the weeds to sniff around, their pink noses in the air. It was late September, and acorns covered the ground. It seemed as if the rats were gathering up the acorns, just like squirrels do, instead of just grabbing hunks of garbage and running behind a rock.
I saw a rat dash over to the base of a tree and just sit there, looking around, catching his breath, blinking into the blue sky. He did not hide, the way rats hide. He sat up and checked things out. Farther along the path, a rat shot up from a patch of grass, and after sniffing around he scootched up to the base of a tree, found another hole, and disappeared back into the ground.
Now of course I see that many trees have little holes, right at their base, and that I realize it is quite possible that rats live in all of them—all the holes, in all the trees. Rats like little hobbits. I stopped letting my dog go near them, then. The trees. The rats owned them. They were taking over. It felt ominous.
And then one day in early October, an acorn fell and hit me right on the head. It seemed funny. I said to my dear S., who was walking with me, “The squirrels! They’re attacking!”
But then I started to wonder. Could it have been a rat up in the tree? What if they had studied the squirrels to the point where they, too, took to the branches and ran through the treetops?

The rats in the trees would eventually get smart enough to drop down on our heads. They would. If the rats climbed the trees, they would eventually attack. And they could win. Finally, they would have the benefit of surprise; they would take over.
I didn't want to stop liking the park. But, I had thought of this. And the world seemed to be turning into a strange and hostile place.
I have seen people sit in the park and feed the rats. One rat, anyhow. An old person, and a hungry rat, keeping each other company. How lonely it must be to be old, if you feed rats for company.
I studied the treetops. The leaves were changing, as they do. Everything changes. Or, no; things stay the same, unchanged, for a very long time and then, BAM all at once, things change. And suddenly rats fly. And I never thought my parents would sell the house I grew up in. I mean, I knew they would. But not really. And I think about it and try to make everything that is happening all at once make sense in one brilliant uniform theory--everything is a sign, everything ties together and it's all invested with meaning, it all adds up to something I can understand. But what strikes me as I pack my parents up and throw so much of our collected lives into the trash, is that really, nothing means much at all. There are no signs, there is no meaning. And that idea has it all over treetop rats in the world of truly scary.