memoir section 21: "Uprooted"
I waited. I slept 12 hours a night, plus it took an hour to go to sleep, and I'd stay in bed at least an hour after I woke up. So I had 10 hours to fill each day, 600 minutes. I filled several of those minutes by calculating how many minutes of the day I'd already gotten through. I had a four-hour grad school class once a week - a picture-book writing workshop, which should have been fun, but I couldn't organize my thoughts to write. But there were the 240 minutes in class, plus reading other students' manuscripts at home and writing comments. My thoughts were still slow and heavy and felt stupid, but my classmates kept saying, "That's a good idea," or "I hadn't thought of that." I didn't exactly believe them, but I knew they weren't lying, so hearing them say it balanced out to something neutral, and that was good enough.
I still tried to write: not even the picture-book assignments, just emails or pieces to my shrink, but even that was too complicated. I couldn't turn my thoughts into words, let alone sentences. That scared me more than anything else, the fear that I'd never write anything again, that the half-finished stories would stay trapped in my head forever, characters restlessly waiting for their next scene.
I went into work, though only about 10 or 15 hours a week, and after everyone else had gone home. All I had to do was feed envelopes into the printer for mass mailings, but I usually cried for half an hour because just sitting and listening to the never-ending rhythm was agony. I cried when the printer malfunctioned or froze and I had to restart the computer, had to work out where it had stopped, had to think. But eventually I would reach the halfway mark, and then I'd count down to two-thirds done, and three-quarters, and seven-eighths.
I tried to get exercise, because my shrink said it would help. It hurt to move, a stone blanket pushing down on my head and shoulders. It hurt just to think about moving, to air up the bike tires, to put on the helmet and look at the bike and think, "I'm going to have to move the pedals over and over countless times." My shrink asked, "Does it hurt any more than spending the same time in your chair unable to even turn the TV on?" He asked without sarcasm, but I heard it as a rebuke at first. Then I realized he was right. I looked at the clock when I started getting ready, and when I got on my bike I noted the 22 or 26 minutes I'd just gotten through. My odometer had a clock, and I counted the minutes, learned that I pedaled about a revolution a second, multiplied and divided numbers in my head as I pedaled, and sometimes got through three or four minutes without checking the clock.
Michele usually went biking with me, at Wompatuck State Park. We'd found the place two springs ago, sprawling woods with paved bike paths and dirt hiking trails and lots of things to discover. But I'd never had the patience to stay and contemplate any one thing. I would look forward to riding to the clearing by the pond, but after a couple of minutes I'd be ready to move on to the 10-foot boulder, or climb the hill, or ride to the far end of the park and the playground outside, where I would swing for five minutes before I got bored. I often left Michele sitting with a book while I biked around alone.
Now when we would bike to the clearing by the pond, I'd lie down on the pine needles and stare at the treetops. They didn't inspire me with their beauty; I knew the play of the branches against the blue sky and puffy clouds was beautiful, but it didn't reach me. But it did distract me. The limbs swayed repetitively, but then once in a while the wind shifted and they took a different path, and I was reassured that time was not endlessly looping the same 30 seconds. The clouds moved from right to left, slowly overtaking one tree, then another, then disappearing, and my eyes would move to the right again and find a new shape to follow. The dance engaged my mind, but didn't ask me to think.
I lay in the yard of the duplex sometimes and did the same thing. Or I would sit crosslegged and weed the flowerbeds. It was one of the few activities that didn't wear me out. Like the treetops, the task was never-ending but ever-changing, the same weed types but in slightly different places. And the beds belonged to me. Even though we were just renters, I'd planted most of the flowers myself, bulbs I'd brought with me from the old apartment in Brighton. Along with the bulbs, there were the white violets.
I grew up with violets in the back yard, and I loved the swan-necked flowers, the spade-shaped leaves. It wasn't until I moved to Brighton that I saw their pale-flowered cousins. Not entirely white when you got up close, but with delicate purple veins, like tiny embroidered handkerchiefs. They grew in the lawns of some of the old houses I walked past, and I coveted. I often halted for a moment in front of a home, imagined knocking on someone's door and asking if I could dig up a couple from their yard, but I never got the courage.
Walking home from the streetcar one spring evening, I saw a solitary plant, not in the neatly landscaped yard, but in the dirt between sidewalk and street. Even lonelier, it was in the six inches of earth between the roots of an aged maple and the street curb. There was no way the house owner planted it there on purpose; it was certainly a wild weed they'd never miss. But it was so lush, such a perfect hemisphere of dark leaves and dainty flowers, that I was nervous. How could they not want it?
But logic won out, or greed, and the next morning I put a sturdy tablespoon in my backpack. When I walked back home that night, I had the spoon out and ready. I knelt quickly, scooped up the violet by the roots, carried it home in my hands, and planted it by streetlight with my bulbs. I was nervous the next few times I passed that house, expecting someone to run out yelling, accusing.
About a week after I dug it up, the dirt was freshly disturbed by the tree trunk, and my shame overwhelmed me. Then I looked closer; there was a trail of dirt into the street, with a tire track. A car had driven up over the curb, spun its wheel where the violet had been days before, and left a deeper hole than the one I'd dug. If I hadn't stolen it, it would be dead.
The violet seeded itself many times over in Brighton, and when I moved to Quincy, I transplanted a dozen or so of its offspring. Now, two years later, they were in a neat semicircle under the lilac bush, obviously tended and loved.
The landlord hired a company to landscape, and mainly they mowed the small yard and took away the autumn leaves. They mowed on one afternoon in early fall while I was in the living room, motionless as usual at my computer. The mowing stopped, but about half an hour later, I realized their truck was still there. They were putting down mulch in the flowerbeds. My heart flickered against my collarbone as I looked out the dining room window, because I already knew what I'd see. They'd raked the bed under the lilac bare, bare of old mulch, bare of the violets.
I was screaming before I was out the kitchen door. "What did you do with them? The plants, here?" I pointed.
"They were weeds."
"No they weren't! They were on purpose! I planted them there on purpose!"
"I'm sorry." He was sorry, I could see it, but it didn't change anything. "I thought they were weeds."
"Where are they?"
"It's all in the truck already." He motioned helplessly over his shoulder. I shoved past him, feeling his fear, glad he was afraid for a second and then forgetting him entirely. The bed of the truck was piled with grass clippings and old mulch and dirt, bushels of it. I climbed in, bare feet and long skirt, pawing through the top layer, knowing I looked like an animal, but I felt like an animal and I wanted him afraid again.
It only took a couple of minutes to find the first heart leaves. But they were ripped off their plants, perfect and useless. I raked through with my fingers, feeling for clumps in the mulchy dirt, looking for the clumps with their white silk roots. I found one, another, a couple more. I kept looking, almost giving up before finding another, which propelled my search longer. A few minutes later, without warning, the energy suddenly left me. I knew there were more violets than the handful I held, but I didn't have the strength left to keep looking. I crawled backwards out of the truck bed. I was too tired to look at the landscaper, to scare him anymore. I was too tired to open the garage and get out the trowel, and the tubers were so tiny, anyway, so I turned the top inch of dirt with my index finger, making a new semicircle, struggling to determine which end was up on the plants with no leaves, covering them gently, thinking of graves.
When I stood and turned, the landscaper was waiting tentatively about six feet away, a shovel bridging the gap between a his hands and small wheelbarrow of mulch beside him. He was still afraid, but it wasn't fear of me anymore.
"Do you want... I could spread a little mulch? Maybe it'll help? I'll be careful?" I nodded. He held a shovelful over the bare dirt and shook the shovel gently so the mulch sifted down almost like dark snow. I turned before he finished and went back inside.
I called my shrink, but when he called back I had no words, just low, guttural howls with each breath out.
"Violet. You don't have to talk right now. Just breathe and it'll come out in a minute." I couldn't bear to wait that long; the words were crushing my head from the inside. He kept saying, "Just keep breathing, hold it for just a second if you can." Somehow the howls became howled words, still incomprehensible, but something he could ask me to say again, and when I recited them back, I could tell what I was saying. I told about the violets, but I was stalling.
"I want to get out the razor blade."
"I know."
"No you don't!" I hadn't known I'd been waiting for him to say it so I could yell. "It won't work!"
"What do you mean?"
"I can feel it in the drawer, and I want to get it out and make a slice and be numb, but I can tell, I can, it's like I've already done it and it didn't work, I still feel it, I still, it hurts, I hurt, I can't make it stop."
"Even when you cut yourself, you mean."
"I can't not feel! I want it to stop and I can't make it stop!"
"Are you in your room?"
"No." Why did it matter?
"But the razor blade, it's still in the desk drawer in your bedroom."
"Yes!" Why did it matter?
"So you haven't cut yourself."
"It won't help!"
"But you can tell that now? Before you did it, before you even went in the same room, you knew."
I rubbed my temples. "I, yeah. I don't understand, what does it matter?"
"It doesn't to you, not now. Now you just hurt, and you want it to stop, and you can't make it stop." I hadn't realized I'd stopped crying until I felt the new tears. "You can't see now how much more healthy this is."
"It doesn't feel healthy."
"No, it feels like shit." His voice had that musical tone that usually went with his laughter, but this time there was a hard edge, a metallic glint. "It'll probably feel like shit a lot. And I'm going to tell you something else you really don't want to hear."
"What?"
"I'm proud of you." I put a hand up in front of my face as if he could see me. "You don't have to hide."
I hiccupped a laugh. "Yes I do."
"Well, yeah. But I'm still proud of you."
Originally posted at http://violetcheetah.dreamwidth.org/57469.html. Feel free to comment there
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