the half truth of a whole life

Unedited, unrevised, unrevisited works… mostly from college.

elegy for a life projected:

I was born in Waco, Texas. My dad was in law school at the time, and shortly after I was born we moved to Austin. I don’t know how old I was when we moved, if I cared enough about the detail I could call and ask someone. I know that I was born before the move. I know that Charlie, my younger brother, was not born. Charlie was born when I was about to turn three. So somewhere between the ages of one and three we moved to a small house by a creek. David, my older brother, was also already born. That is called natural order. Being older, he was born first, then me, and lastly Charlie.
As a family we moved seven times after that, once because we needed something bigger, once because we needed something smaller, and the rest because we didn’t have anything better to do with our time. My mother was a housewife, the professional kind, and in her spare time she liked to find houses that were unlivable, the neighborhood eyesores, and move us into them. After we moved in she would set to work transforming them into the most spectacular properties around. She was a hero to the neighbors who sandwiched us. They often praised her work, commenting on how they thought they were going to have to live next to the local dump forever, and then she changed everything. We thought she was amazing too, we just couldn’t figure out why we had to live in the houses while she transformed them. We often went months living five people to a bathroom, or weeks without a kitchen or running water. We had a sense of camaraderie, mostly because social engagements were limited.
When the same person designs each of your childhood homes, you develop a strange sense of connection with design and decoration. While most people remember a tree in their backyard, I often have trouble remembering which backyard went with which childhood home. My parents had a number of forts built for Charlie, and I can remember the way that the forts looked sitting in our backyards. They are vignettes, perhaps captured from sitting in the living room, the memories framed by the window panes on the French doors.  Charlie’s first “fort,” which was actually a tree house, was in a tree. It was the only one ever built in a tree. The successors were all planted firmly on the ground. I can imagine that my mother had time to think about the dangers of a tree house, and the lapse in judgment she must have been exhibiting in order to agree to elevate it, and consequently decided it was never to happen again. It could have been the catalyst for the move, who knows. Needless to say, the rest of Charlie’s forts were merely playhouses, the kind you would provide for a girl, only manlier, because my mother left the wood unpainted. It was rustic and woodsman-like.
The front doors, however, were red.
In each of my houses my mother installed built-ins. She loves built-ins. In our bedrooms we would have a wall of built-ins, some with cabinet doors, others simply for display. In my mother’s spaces, the living room and the den, they were always the same: half and half. They would extend from floor to ceiling and wall-to-wall and she would always have them painted white. The top half of the built-ins were for display, the bottom for cabinets. The cabinets held games, namely Gestures, a favorite of my mother’s, and my parents’ old photo albums. Pictures of their college days, old high school friends, and dozens of white wedding albums were stacked in the underneath cabinets. In the living room, there was always a cut out large enough for whatever TV we had at the time. The TV cabinet had retractable cabinet doors. My mother liked to hide the TV, as though people would think it was tacky that we owned one. As though everyone in America didn’t have a television prominently displayed in his or her living room. The top half of the shelf was the most important, though. Each of the grided cubbyholes was home to a perfectly orchestrated collection of chochky. I once saw my mother taking a picture of one of the shelving units before packing it up for a move. She had a gift. There was nothing campy about the items in the shelf; they were each unique and recognizable from the houses before. Pictures of family weddings matted and framed, balanced on first edition Emerson that my mother “happened upon this one time.”  It neighbored her leather bound Agatha Christie collection crutching two Spode Vases. She found tiny replica suitcases made of real leather, complete with tiny luggage tags and perched them next to an antique ice cream maker she wanted so badly that it was the only thing she asked for at Christmas. It only cost $48. We couldn’t figure out why she didn’t just put it on her American Express. Nothing looked cluttered or tacky. Those shelves were what always looked like my house. If you looked closely or perhaps if you knew the family closely, there was a story to be decoded within the shelves. Books that my mother thought we should read, or philosophers that she knew would shift our paradigm, those elements of lesson were coupled with our photos. My portrait facing a cast iron statue of Mark Twain and then laying between us, like a bridge, or perhaps an olive branch, The Elements of Style.
Our kitchens were efficient masterpieces. We had warming drawers before anyone had heard of them. We could offer guest three different types of ice from the three separate icemakers that my parents had installed (as one never knew whether occasion would call for squares, half moons or just regular ice). Behind the cooking range there was a Darth Vader contraption that would rise up at the touch of a button and suck the smoke from the room. I would often just push the button for the sheer delight it gave me. At fifteen, girls don’t get jealous of other girls’ double ovens. I could run amok showing the under cabinet lighting and power strips. We just delighted in how nifty it was that we could keep our food warm for hours in a drawer.
Milly started working for my family when my mother was pregnant with Charlie. Charlie was born in 1986, right around the time we moved to the house by the creek. She was my childhood nanny and housekeeper, but she was never my maid. While Milly did do a great deal, she did a great deal of telling me what to do as well. If I weren’t awake when she was ready to do a load of sheets, she would tell me to remove myself from the sheets so that they could be washed. If I was unresponsive, I joined the piles of dirty sheets on the floor. Milly was never mean or harsh to me, but she was a black woman with I think seven, maybe eight, kids, and all of them had subsequently had children. She was generally not in the mood to wait around for anyone to grace her at him or her convenience. After I had a driver’s license, Milly would announce to me, generally around noontime, what she had in mind for lunch. It was my duty to go and get it. When I left for college, Charlie took over Milly’s lunch duty. This is also natural order.
When we were living on one of our houses, the one we had moved into because we needed something smaller, my mother rescued a baby bunny. It was not the first time my mother had rescued something small and close to death. We had a variety of bottles and rubber nipples around the house for just such an occasion. She had rescued squirrels and cats, perhaps a opossum once, though the memory is vague.  When I was eleven, away at summer camp, I received a series of letters about a baby goat my mother made a family pet. The goat had a brain tumor, though I was never certain whether we discovered this detail before or after making it a part of the family. Letters being delivered to a ranch road address aren’t always sequential. Maisy the goat died within a month of moving in with my parents, before I even returned home from my camp term. I received a letter commemorating the event. It was a letter I didn’t share with my cabin mates, it was just not the sort of thing I thought they could relate to. Maisy was one of the more obscure things my mom had done, but it made sense to me. At any rate, it sheds light on why the bunny incident would be so insignificant. The bunny began as just fetus looking creature. My mother spent her every waking hour and energy bottle-feeding the bunny, trying to keep it from dying. It didn’t die, and eventually it started to sprout real ears and little bunny fuzz. We kept it in the warming drawer in the kitchen with the drawer propped open. It was a homemade incubator. We told Milly about the bunny. She gave us a lecture about queer white people and sick habits; she probably thought we were on the road to some family behavior becoming of Fatal Attraction. Milly thought it was important to constantly remind us just how ridiculous we all looked. She was not listening very well about the bunny, though, too busy murmuring and looking disgusted. She closed the warming drawer while she was cleaning the kitchen. The bunny baked.
It’s hard to recreate my past in a way that makes anyone understand the comfort of expectation. In eight houses, eight different rooms, some that I shared with my brothers, two yellow, one green, one pink, one purple, another in yellow, one beige, there was streamline consistency. In all of those houses there were the same rules, the same furniture, the same problems, and probably, most importantly, the same me. It did not matter to me where we moved. I did not feel uprooted; my equilibrium was never off. Looking back I feel like it has something to do with essence and familiarity. My houses smelled the same, they were filled with the same people, and I got into trouble for the same things. The color schemes were the same. Sautéed Mushroom and Cocktail Onion were reoccurring living room colors. Every house I ever lived in had shutters. Usually black, but sometimes they were a dark green. My house on Oakhurst had a red front door. Trailridge had a green front door and the kind of front stoop that was perfect for pumpkins. I was not allowed to put posters on the walls in my rooms. I was expected to make my bed, and keep my room clean, even if Milly was there. I was never fond of the stringent way that my mother insisted the house be run, but I benefited from the way the houses represented us. There is psychology involved in the reasoning and the explanation, but for now, it is what it is. My mother was obsessive about the look of her homes. I would have never been embarrassed if someone were to drop by unannounced. I am constantly embarrassed when people drop by my apartment now. My bed is hardly ever made, dishes stacked in the sink, and piles of laundry are everywhere, but I still don’t hang posters on my walls.
The transitions were nonchalant. My parents twice moved while I was camp. I came home, looked around, and after I was convinced that they had not left any of my stuff at the old house, I would unpack. Once my parents forgot to tell me that the house was going on the market, and once the house sold without it even being for sale. The bottom line is that it was just never a big deal.
It was never a big deal because necessity never drove my family to move.
We weren’t crossing socioeconomic lines. Naturally there was a slow rise into nicer houses and neighborhoods, but I never moved because my dad lost his job or because we could afford the mortgage. I could expect that with each new house there would be two navy leather chairs in the family room. My parents king size, four-poster bed would be moved into their room, and the dining room table and chairs would find a place in the nicest room the house had to offer. Details would go up. After the furniture was in place, the boxes of little tiny details would be unpacked. The built-ins would take shape. The A. D. Greer painting would hang to a nail and books would find their way into bookshelves, onto coffee tables, and into antique magazine holders. Any unsettling feelings would subside as the familiar paint colors would be contracted onto the walls. Expensive crown moldings and mini-additions would allow the houses to take on a personality. We would get all settled in. The neighbors would know when the lawn started to look nice.
So expectation became a factor in my life. I wouldn’t call my life luxurious, but it was recklessly convenient. My parents moved two months before I started college. The house was catalogue. Sautéed Mushroom painted brick with black shutters, the two navy leather chairs faced the built-in shelves, and the television was tucked behind two retracting cabinet doors. It was our largest television to date and still my mother managed her favorite illusion of all: the all-American television-less family. The kitchen opened up to the living room and it had all three ice makers, the requisite warming drawer, two ovens, and under cabinet lighting. There was a new state-of-the art Darth Vader range vent. My parents designed an outdoor kitchen with a hearth, two grills, wood burning ovens, and expansive stone patios and fireplaces. It was the most dismal house that we had ever bought, and it ended up the apex. Charlie was the last of the kids left, waiting there to go to college. My parents said they had found the house they were going to stay in. I somehow got used to the idea of coming home being a house. I didn’t realize that what I was used to coming home to was a way of life. It was the interaction with my surroundings, but more importantly, coming home meant a place that freely reflected memory, people and familiarity.
As a family we moved eight times. I have moved eight times since moving out of my parent’s house. David has moved a couple of times, mostly just from apartment to apartment, and Charlie moved into his dormitory at the University of Texas. My dad has moved once, and mother also moved, but separately.
This is what happens to a seemingly well-adjusted, introspective person when things like this happen: questions start to swirl in the air at breakneck speed, and frankly most of them don’t end in tears, but fear. When you identify yourself as a person of things, not materialistic, but vested in the personality of character, the nuance of detail, what do you do when those things are gone?
My mother bought a town house. It is too small for the large scale, somewhat grandiose furniture from our houses, and now most of our furniture is gone. There are no built-ins. It wouldn’t matter, those pictures are from a life, of a person, that would be inappropriate to display in her new home.  It is not the home of a lawyer’s wife. It is not the home of upper class, roasted lamb, stone patios, crown molding, Baccarat vases, or navy blue chairs. My details don’t live at her new house.
My dad moved into an embarrassing vaulted ceiling one bedroom. The king size, four-poster bed takes up almost his entire bedroom, but it’s only a six-month lease. He does not have built-ins, but he does have the television. It is prominently displayed on an entertainment center, much like the ones you see in bachelor pads.
And then there are my memories. What do I do with those? When my parents don’t want to remember their pasts, don’t want to talk about our summer vacations, that time my mom brought home the goat with the brain tumor, or the time my dad spilled cashew dressing on his new suede shoes, where do I put those memories? The sadness of being offered my parents wedding albums rivals the fear that if I do not take them that memory will cease to exist, because neither of them cares to hold on to it. In those pictures, taken twenty-five years before we moved away, there was the potential for a life. It was my life projected. It was the life that I saw in every house that I ever lived in, and the life that came to expect to see in every house I would ever come home to. It was the life of those two people, my parents living the average of all things wonderfully estimated. But now I have a life uncertain. Where once there was all that, I now have a bachelor father and divorcee mother and two homes with no details, and nothing that wants to reflect the memories that we spent our whole lives trying to make.
Truthfully I thought we were too old for this, or at least at a certain age we would have out run problems like this, but we didn’t. There is no home for holidays, and the hardest thing about adjusting to the life ahead of me is burying the life that I projected.

sketching a picture of hopeful familiarity in the graveyard of joy carcasses.

I’ve always wanted my Christmases to look like Norman Rockwell collector’s edition stamps sent across-country on red envelopes stuffed with cards of three kids with a dog, a Labrador, named Jack, and maybe the tail of a cat that wouldn’t stay put for the picture. Her name is Grace. I always want the tree to smell like deep pools of sap, the way it would smell in Vermont in the middle of the Christmas Tree Forest right after it was cut, as the family dragged it to the car, trying to figure out how on earth they were going to tether it to the top.
I still hold out for some of these things. I am impregnated with the writer’s imagination, and the notion that at one time Christmas really did smell like cinnamon and Yankee Candles. I didn’t imagine that we took pajama rides in the Suburban, driving around to see every holiday light in the city. We did. What I cannot imagine, or remember, is when it was that one of my brothers decided it wasn’t even worth finishing their homework early so we could go on our pajama ride. That is all it took. Even I know it was social suicide to go on Christmas light pajama rides with your parents, but that’s why we didn’t tell anyone. We weren’t supposed to stop going altogether. Christmas and Halloween used to be seasons, not just days, and for a short period of my life, I thought who I was on October 31st made and difference in the universe, and I was right. The hardest part of my hopefulness is that by believing that it was once that way, I feel certain it can be that way again. It gets hard to hold out hope.
I didn’t foresee the holidays that have come more recently. I’ve sat in a number of eighty degree Texas Christmases and looked out the window at a merry-less holiday season, but Texas looks merry-less in the dead of draught season. It is not something that can be helped. We sent out our last family Christmas card in 2004. It was a good thing we did. We should have put our parents in the card, as well as the dogs, but we didn’t. It was just the three kids, sitting on a cliff, our feet dangling near to the water. But even still, even when there was nothing at all to ho! ho! ho! about, I kept thinking that if someone would just light a damn candle, or if they would have at least taken the time out to put lights on the outside of the house, we would all start to feel a bit more festive. It all starts with a little bit of external merriment and moves it’s way inward. I kept telling this to them.
What is worse about expectation is that as you grow up, you are dragging yourself along a road that starts to pile up with the scattered carcasses of the joy of the people you know and love. As my mother and father, and eventually my brothers gave up on my Rockwell stamp, my Haunted Houses and my Easter egg hunts, they neglected to observe that I had not in fact joined them. I was still trying.
It was about that time that David , my older brother, who was around twelve, decided that he was too old to make Christmas Eve forts. We had slept in forts since before I could know anything different. David’s room had trundle beds that would pull out providing an amazing structural support system, and so long as you didn’t hit the release lever with your head or a wayward arm, they wouldn’t collapse. Only one year did Charlie get pinned beneath the trundle fort. His screams were muffled by the enormous quantity of blankets we had stolen, and no one was worse for the incident, save Charlie himself. Truthfully, Charlie and I could have continued to make forts on our own, and probably did, but David didn’t stop there, he denounce the ritualistic gift unwrapping, something that doesn’t need explanation, and the stocking unstuffing. What David never realized was that at twelve years old, he may have felt too old, but at ten, I was not done mapping out the most silent and complex path from our door to the presents. My days of Yule Eve camo espionage were far from over. David pulled the plug on us when Charlie, our youngest brother, was only eight. He was still reeling from the Santa might be Dad thing the year before.
David became a joy carcass. One of many. The next year my mother announced she was not going to “do” stockings, as though they were an optional and altogether disposable part of Christmas. Immediate joy carcass. That year it was only I who seemed to care that my mom had, on a whim, decided to eradicate the stocking. Charlie fell by the wayside not long after. I have no doubt that David was pressuring him, and the Santa thing had never settled well. By the time mom abolished stockings, his resistance had grown thin.
I could not ever join them, though. My joy is rooted in nostalgia, understanding my fear of what it means to give up on something so unreasonably, and the kind of person that would make me. Some years I would walk down the hall on Christmas Eve and stand in their doorways in the dark, wondering what they would say if I woke them up asked, at seventeen and twenty-two, if they wanted to build a fort, or go pillage our stockings. Looking at my brothers, they looked like men inside my brother’s beds. David replaced by a gorilla with a tattoo over his right breast. Charlie, my baby brother, half passed out with his lanky feet hanging off the edge of the bed. When we were not home my mother used the room as a guest room. She still called it “Charlie’s room.”
My parents told me that Christmas would feel like Christmas again when I had kids of my own. That is a reassuring thought, unless I wasn’t sure I was ever going to have kids of my own. In some way I have kept in the forefront of my mind that I may have bad eggs or an insufficient personality, and have therefore thought that evoking festivity has to come from something I can recreate. In all seriousness, it is how it gets hard to hold out hope.
It’s frustrating. It is frustrating, most of all because this is not a Norman Rockwell collector’s edition stamp. We are never going to look like that. My goddamned cat will never remain in the same frame as my dog. I have tried, year after year, to make things feel like Christmas, feel like anything really, but they won’t. I am perpetually staging the scenarios of perfection, but the music never cues in, or the snow doesn’t fall at the right time, or as the case may be, it never snows, because it never has snowed. I’m lucky if its below 65° on Christmas day. The smell of spice cake never wake us up at 8AM, gathering us around the tree in anticipation. I still try, because I still remember what it feels like to be so completely taken with anticipation that a single day can carry you through a season.
By the time I was ten, and my entire family had abandoned me in their graveyard of joy, my parents have developed a rule. We weren’t allowed to even consider waking them up unless we had first started making their coffee. It stifles the spirit to walk past your stocking, drooping with the weight of its goods, to go to the kitchen and start a pot of Folgers. This was before Starbucks. Now, or the now of when my parents could still be found at the same address, they would buy Starbucks’ Extra Spiritual Holiday Roast, or something. After I was good and scarred by the Folgers rule, they went to Williams-Sonoma and bought one of those coffee pots with a timer. It would grind the beans and brew a perfect pot of coffee with no stocking-robbed child having to measure out any scoops. My mom now has custody of the self-motivated coffee pot, which is fitting, since she instigated the Folgers rule. My dad bought a fancy pot that makes coffee and keeps it hot for up to six hours in a NASA engineered thermal pot. That is fitting, as well.
The shit-hole holidays weren’t a conspiracy. I wanted to shake the males in my family because between them they had nineteen feet and almost six hundred pounds and they couldn’t manage a single strange of lights on a one-story house. It was not conspiratorial, though, it was sheer laziness. Truthfully, I take credit for my part. When I let something ride, I lose sight of where it started and the expectations grow to something much bigger than the original ever was.
During my most recent Christmas at home, Rock Bottom Christmas we’ll call it, my family was more hostile towards my desperate, borderline elfin, attempts at festivity. David, the older brother and original joy carcass in my immediate family, refused to agree to the Christmas day plan that I had proposed. It made sense to me that we would all be up by ten. As per every year, we had to be at family dinner by one p.m. and there were going to be four of us trying to shower and get dressed. Charlie  takes an exceptionally long time in the shower, due in part to his Tourettes, due in part to his manly love for Dove exfoliating body wash. Being up by one meant that we could gather jovially around the tree and exchange gifts. Afterwards we could saunter to the kitchen for breakfast. We would be able to shower and get dressed and be at my grandparents with no problem. David decided to be a fat, hairy, gorilla-joy carcass-ass.
Though not verbatim, his response was in the vein of no. We were not going to do it that way. And why? Because we had never done it that way. We were never up by ten in our real lives. David likes to differentiate between real lives and something not clearly defined, what I am assuming are fake lives. I’d be interested to see what David does in his fake life. He continued to explain to me that not a single Carsey was ever jovial before 4 pm, and if I wanted to cook for us I could be in charge of that part, in which case, okay, he agreed with the eating. I’m fairly certain David eats heartily in both of his lives. As Dave continued to splatter my shoes with his word vomit and I continued to fixate on his ass-ness, he pointed at the Christmas tree. It was the first real Christmas tree that we had owned in over a decade. Our parents had bought a beautiful fake tree with little white lights long ago for various visual and allergen reasons. The tree that Dave was pointing at had huge colored lights. It was lopsided in its stand because Charlie had helped my mom nail it in. Charlie nails things like he showers. Girly. But the tree was covered in tinsel. The shiny shreds of metallic plastic that we had only seen in seventies movies before that Christmas. We thought that mom hated tinsel. We thought she thought it was trashy.
“Look around you, Caroline. Does this strike you as the sort of year where perfection makes any sort of difference?”

I recognized his point. It was important to me not to falter, but I understood where I had taken my need for material festivity. He felt like he was coping and I was decorating. But I was hurt that he had missed my point. No one was trying; furthermore, no one had been trying. The way I saw it, in my family if you were striving for perfection you were going to achieve glorified mediocrity. I did not expect us to be perfect, we were all standing around in merry flesh tones, I just felt like if they had not have given up, if they had given some effort, maybe things wouldn’t have gotten so bad. In my mind, I had compromised a lot, this was no where near the holiday season I had in my mind, but in some way we had allowed what was going on inside our house become our house, and our Christmas. I knew that neighbors, the crappy ones who didn’t come to block parties and had no sympathy or manners, drove by and remarked about the lack of lights. It was not about them. I wanted to lure deer in front of their cars, but I didn’t want to put decorations up for them. I wanted to put decorations up for us.
I didn’t matter if our decorations were perfect. They weren’t. Our tree was lopsided. It mattered that we did something. Every year at Christmas I stand in front of the clock at the microwave and I watch with anxiety as the neon yellow numbers get closer to the 26th. Every year I get tense and I look around wondering what I didn’t do or who I didn’t call. I will try to occupy myself intensely so that I do not think about the time, but it only makes me think about it more, and I inevitably go and stand in front of the clock and watch the last few minutes of another Christmas walk off the microwave.
Feeling old or sad at Christmas is a growing pain. But looking at the clock and watching the last ten minutes of my last Christmas in my house walk into the last twenty-one years of my life is bigger. It is heartache. It is a time in my life that I did not feel silly crying. And I did not feel silly about wishing that we had put lights up. It was my last Christmas there with what was left us.
David stayed loyal to his joy carcass self, and we were late to Christmas dinner. In January my mom and I got out two boxes and took down the tree. She filled one and put it in the attic and I put the one labeled “dad” next to the front door.