Creative writing

First of all, then, I perceived that I had a head, hands, feet, and all other members of which this body-which I considered as a part, or possibly even as the whole, of myself-is composed. Further I was sensible that this body was placed amidst many others, from which it was capable of being affected in many different ways, beneficial and hurtful, and I remarked that a certain feeling of pleasure accompanied those that were beneficial, and pain those which were harmful. And in addition to this pleasure and pain, I also experienced hunger, thirst, and other similar appetites, as also certain corporeal inclinations towards joy, sadness, anger, and other similar passions.

-Rene Descartes, Meditations, VI

What my mother actually said was that she'd made all the wrong choices. And then she looked right at me and said, "If only I hadn't gotten pregnant." After that, I didn't figure there was anything a body could answer to the force of her regret, and that's when I decided I couldn't tell her about the boy with the one gray eye and the one brown eye who'd knelt in front of me where I sat on the porch and laid all his desire in my lap. "What's so hard to understand? I want you," Frankie had said, "like an animal." When I wrote that line in my journal later, it struck me as funny. I wondered whether there was a manual somewhere that taught you about the mechanics of loving, how to make your body melt with the force of a feeling that is beyond language, beyond thinking. But I'd never gotten to that point.

When Frankie had laid his head in my lap, mostly all I could think of was how embarassed I was and how I'd hoped my brother wouldn't come outside. The other thing I thought about was my mother. At some point, she must have learned what the body in love does, must surely have been caught and taken up by that wave that crested and fell, leaving me to grow in the dark of her body.

My mother has never gotten over the way luck and other people have fouled up her life. Her favorite saying is, "If it's not one thing, it's something else," which she says with a tired boredom that sucks all possibility out of the air. I was one of those "things," a "something else," a detail of her life she both depended on and resented. I gave shape to her life, but only after having misshaped it first.

Once, when I was little, I watched my mother watching Judy Garland on television. I'd started out fascinated with the way Judy moved between the heartwrenching and the comedic, but what fascinated me most of all was the way she touched everyone: her arm around a back, her hand laid on an arm, a shoulder.

My mother blew a short snort of disgust. "She's so . . . so corny."

Somehow, her inflection of the word made up for its descriptive weakness. "Why does she lay all over people like that? I tell you," she continued, still staring at Judy's image, "nothing worse than not to be in control of yourself. Look at her!"

Looking back an it now years later, I think that what my mother couldn't stand wasn't so much the touching, but that Judy seemed able to forget the ways destiny, the world, and other people's plans and lapses had messed with her; she could forget it when she sang. I think my mother couldn't tolerate the idea that one could lay one's burden down and stand there naked, so to speak, in the moment, carried out of one's self and the details of life. I think she truly didn't understand why someone would want to do that because so much of her own life and self had been shaped by what had gone wrong, by what had been done to her, by what she would never be free to do. Giving all that up, even for a little while, would have been like losing herself in the anonymous expanses of the COSMOS.

But that one day in fall when I turned sixteen, I started thinking that maybe what my mother was missing was a story to tell herself about her own life. What she had was fragments. My father had left her five years before, and the last thing he'd said to her as he slipped out the door was, "I'm tired of hearing the same shit over and over again. You're like a broken record. Nothing changes. You'll never change."

I decided to write the story of my mother's life. An English teacher at my high school had asked us to write a family history, focused around one family member and starting as far back as we could. I couldn't go back very far with much detail or sureness because my grandparents disliked talking about anything before the war, when everything stopped for four years. My mother's life started there, in the barren wasteland of Tule Lake.

"I want to write your life story," I told her.

She turned from the checkbook she was balancing at the dinner table. "What? What for?"

"It's something for school. We're supposed to write about our family "

My mother folded her hands in her lap, sighed, and looked out the kitchen window. The late afternoon light planed her face and washed out the color of her hair. "My life is my own business. I don't need all your teachers reading about it. Besides," she added, boredom edging her voice, "I haven't done anything worth writing about. I was born, went to school, met your father, got pregnant, got married and, eleven years later, got divorced. End of story."