And Then I Told Some Truth

If there is any substitute for love, it’s memory.
Joseph Brodsky

This is not the story I planned on telling. (But Carolyn Online inspired me.)

In the version I meant to tell, the growing up was like literature. There was Johnny Cash and oil paint, the Philippines and California, stretched canvases everywhere and Mexican tile to lie on in the sun. There was money but it wasn’t gaudy. It was old-school money: beat up Fords, cranky houses, everyday antiques, new ambition. We were big-boned and athletic, not debutante material, and the parents were proud of that. Our dining room table was gigantic, an epic table, and it was filled with curries and pork rolatini, gazpacho and beets: hippy food cooked by people who traveled the world. We hunkered down and shouted out answers to my father’s questions about, you name it: current events, geography, physics, religion, politics.

Then we moved. Home.

Salty neighbors shot off cannons at holidays or birthdays or just because.


Aunts and uncles arrived by boat with gin and tonics in old mayonnaise jars. Ghost stories were plentiful. Once when the house was split in half by rain – by that I mean, it was literally raining in the front yard and not in the back – our grandmother yanked out foul weather gear to put over our bathing suits and we switched back and forth between the clothes, running like crazy people between the two halves. We would stand one arm in, one leg out, half wet, half dry.

There was alcoholism but it was shushed until it caught up with us. There were secrets about mortgage loans and communists and there was furniture pettiness but that caught up with us too. Always lurking there was the truth, but my mother had a huge laugh, they danced together in the kitchen, he smoked cigars, and they never yelled.



It was good.

A memoir loads itself with facts of the heart and the head, and it never looks back: it is faithful in its telling. I don’t know that I can write a memoir. For me, the facts of my life have shifted and become, at best, just sanded down bits of maybe memory and maybe truth.

What I do know is that one day -- that one day being six months after I married the Stud -- my father, after a nothing fight about cigar smoking in the house, told my mother he was leaving. She said, “To the store?” He said, “No, forever.” A few years after that, he copped to an affair.

And that's when I knew that dullness reigns. Not everyday dullness like dishes and gutters, but that true tragedies are rare. Most of us come undone in regular ways. And for my family, even us, we all lived up to the statistics about divorce and adultery, death and cash flow, estate planning and drug addiction. I’ve read this story a hundred times.

But then....

One night in my living room, my father confessed again: to post-traumatic nightmares, scars from bullet holes, briefcases full of cash, and a bargain with the government of St. Croix. After that, that one night when my husband and I couldn’t even whisper in our bedrooms because our hearts were so loud and furious and chattering, the story became something else.

So, I think there are two ways to tell a story. And it’s not just the difference between a lie and a truth. I doubt there has been a good story ever told that was only about black and white. Ancient fights and heartbreaks and tragedies are by definition fuzzy and confused and awkward looking back.

As he tells it, my dad was optioned by the government, sanctioned by the state, and trained as a Bad Boy. It doesn’t mesh with my version of our lives, or my mother’s version. So what I knew, I don’t know: it’s my anti-memoir. And it has nothing to do with the truth. Maybe.

But, oh.my.God. I just wrote some of it down. Scary. And scared.

You love me still, anyway? Right? Right?