So Awfully Happy

"Did you have to give up all your jewels when you were divorced?"

"Divorced---?" Susy threw her head back against the pillows and laughed.  "Why, what are you thinking of?  Don't you remember that I wasn't even married the last time you saw me?"

"Yes; I do.  But that was two years ago." The little girl wound her arms about Susy's neck and leaned against her caressingly.  "Are you going to be soon, then?  I'll promise not to tell if you don't want me to."

"Going to be divorced? Of course not! What in the world made you think so?"

"Because you look so awfully happy," said Clarissa Vanderlyn simply.

---Edith Wharton, The Glimpses of the Moon (1922)

Wharton's novel about the possibility of love in a culture of divorce.  Here, a child who has been abandoned (for all practical purposes) by her mother, mistakes newlywed bliss for the exuberant freedom of the soon-to-be divorcee. 

Empty as Lettuce

 "Over the weekend, while the Baby sleeps, the Mother and Husband sit together in the Tiny Tim Lounge.  The Husband is restless and makes cafeteria and sundry runs, running errands for everyone.  In his absence, the other parents regale her further with their sagas. Pediatric cancer and chemo stories: the children's amputations, blood poisoning, teeth flaking like shale, the learning delays and disabilities caused by chemo frying the young, budding brain. But strangely optimistic codas are tacked on---endings as stiff and loopy as carpenter's lace, crisp and empty as lettuce, reticulate as a net--ah, words.   'After all that business with the tutor, he's better now, and fitted with new incisors by my wife's cousin's husband, who did dental school in two and half years, if you can believe that. We hope for the best. We take things as they come. Life is hard.'  

'Life's a big problem,' agrees the Mother....Together, the parents huddle all day in the Tiny Tim Lounge--no need to watch Oprah. They leave Oprah in the dust.  Oprah has nothing on them.  They chat matter-of-factly, then fall silent and watch Dune or Star Wars, in which there are bright and shiny robots, whom the Mother now sees not as robots at all but as human beings who have had terrible things happen to them."  

---Lorrie Moore, "People Like That Are The Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk" in Birds of America (1998)



The title of Moore's story references a comment made by a friend of "The Mother " who is surprised by the "bromides" through which the parents in the ward narrate their experiences. I read that after the publication of the story, that some parents at a hospital near to Moore became upset, thinking that her critique was directed at them.

There is something about Moore's piece that seems to hover at the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction and that could lead an unknowing reader--one unfamiliar with Moore-- to misread her piece and its genre.  I suspect though that these parents correctly surmise that Moore's intent is to expose the conventions of tales of illness (the mandate to "stay positive!"  is fairly conventional these days) to reveal the lack of control that underpins such talk, such posturing.  Yet she also shows that the parents' platitudes serve as important guideposts as they navigate through their harrowing journeys.  For the Mother, who has not yet been fully inducted into this world, they can only seem horrifically discordant, part of the nauseous atmosphere of the ward.

Wine of Christ

"We'll see how the surgery and histology go.  Then we'll start with chemo the week following.  A little light chemo:  vincristine and----"

"Vincristine?" interrupts the Mother.  "Wine of Christ?"

"The names are strange, I know.  The other one we use is actinomycin-D. Sometimes called 'dactinomycin.'  People move the D around to the front."

"They move the D around to the front," repeats the Mother.

"Yup!" the Oncologist says.  "I don't know why--they just do!"

"Christ didn't survive his wine," says the Husband. 

"But of course he did," says the Oncologist, and nods toward the Baby, who has now found a cupboard full of hospital linens and bandages and is yanking them all out onto the floor.  "I'll see you guys tomorrow, after the surgery."  And with that, the Oncologist leaves.

"Or rather, Christ was his wine," mumbles the Husband.  Everything he knows about the New Testament, he has gleaned from the sound track of Godspell.  "His blood was the wine. What a great beverage idea."

"A little light chemo.  Don't you like that one?"  says the Mother.  "Eine kleine dactinomycin.  I'd like to see Mozart write that one up for a big wad o'cash."

---Lorrie Moore, "People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk" in Birds of America (1998)

Moore's story originally ran in The New Yorker; while there are many passages that more adequately capture the subject matter, tone, and unique style of this piece, oddly enough, this is one that I recall from my initial reading of the piece in the magazine over a decade ago.  Moore's depiction of the typical Oncologist as part mathematician, part "mad, overcaffienated scientist" is exemplified through this dialogue in which the doctor's superficial and somewhat lighthearted description ("Yup!") of the chemotherapeutic agents stands in stark contrast to the desperation, confusion, and enervation of parents in the pediatric oncology ward.

The story is told through the perspective of "The Mother," a writer whose point of view shifts precariously between the darkly comedic and the abject.  Her eighteen month old son has been diagnosed with Wilms' tumor, a kidney cancer, and the reader follows her on her dizzying journey into the pediatric oncology ward and the experiences of parents who endure the ineffable.  The narrator's stream of consciousness disorients and then reorients the reader, revealing that what seems as surreal as a nightmare is actually a reality.

The next entry will also come from this piece. 

Iridescent

"You and Tobias are hopping around in the sprinkler.  The sprinkler is a magnificent invention because it exposes raindrops to sunshine.  That does occur in nature, but it is rare.  When I was in seminary I used to go sometimes to watch the Baptists down at the river.  It was something to see the preacher lifting the one who was being baptized up out of the water and the water pouring off the garments and the hair.  It did look like a birth or a resurrection.  For us the water just heightens the touch of the pastor's hand on the sweet bones of the head, sort of like making an electrical connection.  I've always loved to baptize people,  though I have sometimes wished there were more shimmer and splash involved in the way we go about it. Well, but you two are dancing around in your iridescent little downpour, whooping and stomping as sane people ought to do when they encounter a thing so miraculous as water."

---Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004)

Sunlit raindrops (and hummingbirds and opal rings) embody the fancy and wonder we attribute to childhood. Baptism, of course, is a renewal of the human spirit--the process of beginning again.  I love the gentleness of this passage.  But most of all, I appreciate its seriousness in praising the sprinkler for its production of rainbows rather than for its hydration of plants. 

On Creativity

Constructiveness is as genuine and irresistible an instinct in man as in the bee or the beaver. Whatever things are plastic to his hands, those things he must remodel into shapes of his own, and the result of the remodeling, however useless it may be, gives him more pleasure than the original thing. The mania of young children for breaking and pulling apart whatever is given them is more often the expression of a rudimentary constructive impulse than of a destructive one.

--William James, The Principles of Psychology