Into and Out of the Vortex
Let’s start with the tornado.
I’ve written about it—my earliest memory—in poetry and in prose, never quite knowing how much of it is, in fact, memory, and how much of it is received narrative from my mother.
The rough details: a house in Lexington, KY, a father away on business (again), a purple sky, a green sky, the sound of ice hitting the roof, the eerie absence of birdsong, standing in front of a cracked-open window, my mother scooping my infant sister from her crib and pulling us both into the hallway where she laid us down, pulling a mattress over herself and us while the wind shook the house.
Obviously the house stood and all was well. My mother always said there were 13 twisters circling Lexington that day. Circling but never touching down.
I’m starting with the tornado because that’s how we finished the third interview, which we recorded on December 18, 2020, with mom recounting those exact details, confirming the things I always thought to be true.
Or, continuing to animate the story as she remembers it.
See how this is slippery?
Mom: “Your father was a…um…What was your father?”
She’s struggling here and at first I can’t tell if it’s because of the cancer in her brain or the outlandish difficulty we’ve always had with accurately describing him.
Me, laughing and trying to hide from the possibility that it is her brain: “I DON’T KNOW, MOM!”
Which has always been the sticking point of my relationship to/with him.
Mom: “Your father was an intelligent, educated, worldly man.”
Sure. He was also emotionally withholding, snobby and, apparently, when mixing pot with martinis (his favorite, she tells me), just plain old mean.
It’s one thing to have a vague sense of your parents’ unhappiness, but quite another to have the specifics dragged out into the light of day by the woman who survived, in both senses of the word, it and him.
I had to watch this interview in two parts because the first half enraged me so. We were covering the years 1969, the year my parents got married, to 1979, the year we moved back north from Lexington, KY when I was in the fourth grade. By the time I was in 7th grade, I knew for certain—because I observed it and I trusted my observations— that my parents had a profoundly unhappy marriage. I remember, in fact, the very moment this knowledge settled on me. I was leaving the house through the door to the garage. I could hear them fighting upstairs. I paused there, halfway in and halfway out, running my hand over the walls of the archway my mother had painted with sharp stucco when we moved in. Always a dangerous space. I never understood the choice to invite injury like that, particularly with kids in the house.
A lot of unsafe things happened before that moment, unbeknownst to me, beginning before they even married. Ha ha, like the hilarious story about how they met because dad and his friend had “flipped their car, completely shitfaced” in front of her parents’ house. That’s how she always relayed it to me—as if it were the funniest thing in the world to get drunk and crash a car.
Spoiler alert: not the first or last time he did that. Or she did.
Spoiler alert: still not funny.
But the details she shared during this part of the interview made me hate my father (who I loved and hated and still love and hate and this is the way it goes with some fathers, I guess) a little more.
About his marrying her when she was pregnant (with a baby they lost who came before me): “I think he would have been very happy for me to leave him alone so he could run away.”
About him drunkenly telling a friend of his over dinner (that she cooked, naturally) at their house, “Yeah, you should just take her. I don’t want her.”
HAHAHA! What’s the matter? Can’t you take a joke!
Hilarious.
About his remaining married to her while simultaneously opting out of any emotional responsibility to her or to us: “I wasn’t his choice, Sheila, and that’s okay. You can’t be everyone’s choice.”
True statement, mom, but it is very not okay that he treated you like hot garbage.
My god. You deserved more.
Since the tornado story was my earliest memory, it fueled my imagination consistently as I grew up. I used to try to imagine what it would have felt like if our house had been snatched from its foundation like Dorothy’s was in The Wizard of Oz. What it would have felt like to be tossed into the wind on my bicycle. Would I be able to peddle fast enough to keep up? Would I be able to breathe? Would I know where I was when I landed? Would I land at all?
It’s only now, reflecting on this that I realize how good I got at navigating the vortex. How I really didn’t have a choice. When the wind whipped up, Dad grabbed an airplane that would take him to any other part of the earth farthest from where we were. Mom grabbed a bottle of wine and didn’t let go for years. I won’t speak for my sister here, but she sure had her own unhealthy coping mechanisms. Me? I went and married the boyfriend my father disapproved of five seconds after he died (and didn’t let go for years).
But, wait, the wind is turning again.
My mother tells me that the years we spent in Kentucky were the happiest of their marriage. She talks about the friends she made in the neighborhood, the women who shared coffee in each other’s kitchens every morning after their corporate husbands headed to the office. How they cleaned each others’ houses and watched each others’ kids. How happy she was to volunteer at my school and make finger jello for all the kids in enormous jellyroll pans. How much she loved being our mother.
I remember it this way, too.
She tells me—and this is as shocking to me as the cruelties described above—that during those years, on their wedding anniversary (Valentine’s Day), they would look at each other and say,
“This year has to be better than last year. Was this year better than last year? We would say, yes. It was always better.”
I have a small box in my heart in which I keep the few trinkets of memory or story that convince me there was ever love between my parents. First, I cried when she handed this one to me. Then I tucked it gently inside.
I don’t know why it never occurred to me to research the tornado story properly. During the interview, mom says it happened in either 1973 or 1974. She says, with great confidence, that it happened on April 21. Off to Google I go and it only takes a moment to confirm that there certainly were tornados (26, not 13) circling Lexington in April (3rd, not 21st) of 1974. The event that formed my first memory was in fact the 1974 Super Outbreak which spawned 148 tornados, 30 of them at F4 and F5 intensity in 13 U.S. states and Candada during one 24-hour period. Some reports call it the most violent tornado outbreak in recorded history, causing 330 deaths, countless injuries and one billion dollars in damage.
Is this why I went on to have a morbid fascination with natural disaster movies?
The thesis at the heart of almost everything I’ve ever written about my father is that I did not, could not, truly know him. Partly because he didn’t want to be known, partly because (I now believe) children aren’t supposed to know everything about their parents, and partly because he died so very young. His life was a short, powerful storm that altered the landscape of my own.
My mother, though, was a different kind of weather, one with cycles and patterns. Seasons. Some seasons saw her protecting us with her very body, others had me wresting her car keys from her hand on the way out of the restaurant, had my sister driving her to and leaving her at a rehab facility where she’d get her first shaky, inconsistent taste of sobriety.
Twenty-nine minutes into the fifty-four minute interview, we are both a little breathless. She has just finished talking about some crappy thing my father did or said, and I have just told her that I’m still mad at him. She’s been rubbing her head a lot during this call because her hair is about to start falling out. She says her scalp feels tender and tingling and she knows it’s about to go.
As I watch this part, I feel a sudden warmth and happiness that I get to spend this time with her, strange and painful though it is to do that three years after her death. Weirdly, we’re laughing a lot through it.
Sheila: This is fun. It’s fun for me to hear these stories.Mom: It’s fun for me. I want you to know who I am. I don’t want you to be imagining “what was my mother like?” one day. Did my mother really fall down and hurt her knee and nobody cared? Did my mother really do this? Did my mother do that? I want my daughters and my grandchildren to know who I am.
In the video, I assure her that she has done that by being so forthcoming with us for so many years. She goes on to say what she always says—that it’s because I make that easy for her. And I respond like I always do—by insisting that she is the one who has done the hardest work. This is the cute game we played for so many of her last years. Thank you! No, thank YOU!
But then she says the thing that makes me gasp and sob while I’m replaying it:
“You could have walked out of my life and never come back. There’s a lot to unpack.”
She’s right on both counts. And the truth is, I did walk away, several times. And I did consider never coming back.
And god, yes. There is a whole lot more to unpack. It seems like she wants to start doing that now, but no, we are not going there yet. I am not ready for that yet. So I just say, smiling, “Yeah, there is but we’re still in the 70’s, so stop.”
She laughs and agrees.
We continue to peddle into the swirling wind.