All the letters I sent you this year were conceived of extemporaneously and sent on the day of the new moon each month, without too much forethought and little editing. Today’s grief is an exception. I wrote it three days ago from my parents’ house in New Jersey. When you receive this I should be on the road to Peru’s Sacred Valley.
It’s the last new moon of the year.
I don’t sleep as well and as deeply anywhere as I do in my childhood bedroom, even if the new mattress my mother put in is weirdly plush and the body sinks into it, leaving the imprint of a criminal, wherein the crime is the unique sloth of a fully grown professional woman. The feeling of utter relaxation comes from, I realize after I sleep another 9-hour shift, the fact that I never have to feed myself in this house, and I rarely have to keep time. In my apartment, I set the clocks and clean the bathroom. Any moldy lemons are my fault, as are dead plants, and missed flights. At my parents’ house, there is a stove, of course, and there are many timepieces, but they all seem sort of distant, vaguely irrelevant. This place falls under the purview of a higher power, the highest, really, as far as I was once concerned.
In this place I am eternally the lowest level line cook, my only job is to dry lettuce or portion out the noodles or blow skin off roasted peanuts. I have the self-assigned responsibility of memory keeping and observational humor, but if I were sitting in the driver’s seat or put down my credit card at lunch, if I were to choose the wine or make the coffee, it would mean something in the pecking order had gone deeply amiss. I’m convinced this would be true even if I had a fleet of my own children. In this house, motherhood does not trump hierarchy.
A psychologist might suggest that another reason I sleep so hard and deeply at my parents’ house is a feeling of safety. I would argue this was hard earned. I’ve been an anxious sleeper since childhood. Looking back the thing that really seemed to scare me was being the last one awake, seeing other people sleeping peacefully in another world and being unable to bridge the gap between us. For many years I would go to bed with all the lights on, and my father’s job was to come by and turn off the light and close the door after he was sure I was asleep. Many times completing this task caused the cycle to start anew. I was afraid of open closets. When my paternal grandmother died we were in southern California for the funeral. I was lying with my mother in my uncle’s house and she said she dreamt my grandmother was hanging in the closet. I hastened to close the closet door that night before bed, and every night after that.
I dreamt once that while I was doing homework in the family room, my mother making dinner as she did every night, I heard the garage door open and the sound of the door knob rattling as my mother entered the house, as it did every night when she got home from work. In the doorway was another woman taking off her shoes. The imposter — she had long black hair like the Jade Fox in Crouching Tiger, which my mother would never allow — claimed to be my mother and started across the kitchen to go upstairs to her bedroom closet and change out of her work clothes and make dinner. But, my mother said, I’m Mother. Who are you?
This week I felt dread in the house again. On Christmas afternoon, my brother in law said he felt nauseous. Over the next several hours, down they went, one by one, as a stomach flu ripped across the eleven east coast family members. I watched as each was claimed, the sounds of cries and bodily fluids filling the night. At 5:30 I woke up to go to the bathroom and could hear a nephew somewhere in the house suffering through mortifying grossness. Only my sisters and I remained unaffected. I thought, this was the beginning of an apoca-horror movie, a contagion that touches everyone but those who are the exact combination of half my father and half my mother, I have to call my brother, I need to find the pattern, so we can save humanity.
I went to the basement to look for some fish and felt the hair stand up at my left temple, I turned and saw my ancestor standing in the doorway of an unfinished side of the basement I never dare to enter. He was young with thick black eyebrows, dark and slender with long arms in a big dirty white shirt. He said wordlessly, someday soon, you’ll need to do better than keep time with letters, you'll need to make more than sentences. The time is approaching, the day is closer than you think, when you'll be the one in charge.
Thanks for another year of grief. Next year the letters will come on a new schedule, potentially in a new form. Stay tuned.