Trying

My mother stands on the end of our dock with her Minolta in hand.  She eyes the dials, a quizzical look on her face.  Trying to figure something out.    

     I call across the water.  “Ready?”

     She shakes her head at the confusing piece of electronics.  Dad bought her the camera three years earlier as an anniversary present, but despite the owner’s manual, a photography book, and Anne Rojas’ expert coaching, she’s never really learned how to use it.  I’m not worried, though.  Her outdoor shots are usually pretty good.  She lowers the camera to her side and peers in my direction.  She looks uncomfortable but determined.  She’s trying. 

     “Ready as I’m gonna be, I s’pose.”

     I’m thirty feet away, standing in a suit and tie atop a gently sloping ledge where it dips beneath the surface of the lake.  I look down as a small wave laps the toe of my shoe.  I dry the wingtip with a flick of my foot and readjust my stance.  Hands in pants pockets, I look out over the lake.  “Okay,” I yell. “Go for it.”

     “Ain’t you gonna face the camera?”

     I turn only my head.  “It’s a profile shot, ma.”

     “All right,” she says, “if you say so.”  Then, in her baby voice:  “Say cheeeeeeese!”

     I turn back to the lake and roll my eyes toward the overcast sky.  “Cheese.”

     My mother’s shooting pictures for my senior portrait.  It’s one of our good days. 

There had always been good days.  Rare as Seattle sunshine, perhaps, but forever recurring.  This knowledge—that homelife was sometimes good—instilled in me a perennial hope that it could be good again.  Hope kept me coming back each time I ran away.  That, and she was my mother.  That, and he was my father.  That, and this was my home.

     I often wonder how my life might differ had I possessed the courage to leave and stay gone.  It’s an unanswerable question, of course.  In simplest terms, each of us is a product of biology and environment, and even that seemingly straightforward combination offers infinite possible outcomes.  Had I left home at sixteen and, say, been adopted, I might have grown into a confident, emotionally steady, intellectual type—a college professor, perhaps, or a journalist or librarian.  Or an ax murderer.  You just never know. 

     What I do know, and often remind myself, is that I was an extremely lucky kid.  People made a difference.  Dad blessed me with his intellect, amiability, and gregariousness, and instilled in me a moral compass.  My teachers consistently emphasized the importance of education.  Uncle Jack and my brothers inspired me to dream of a world beyond Greenville, Maine.  Families like the Hubbards, Owenses, and Wallingfords, gave me a chance, a few hours at a time, to experience a loving home.  Charles Carter and Anne Rojas quietly stepped in to parent me when I needed it most.  And then there was Jan.

     I first met my friend Sam’s mom during the spring of my sophomore year when, while playing Nintendo at her house one Saturday night, the cowboy boot-clad brunette strutted through her front door, grabbed a can of beer from the fridge, approached the couch where her son and I were camped and remarked, in her sassy, central Maine twang, “You must be Travis.”  We struck up a conversation, and I soon abandoned my friend to join his mother at the dining room table.  Sam would need to save Zelda on his own. 

     My friend’s mom and I talked for hours.  She was bright, laughed freely, and avoided all the cliched topics on which parents usually rely when talking with their kid's friends.  To my delight, she even shared memories of The Long Branch.  I instantly liked her.

     Jan, Sam, and Sam’s young sister, Jessie, lived in a gabled ranch overlooking an open field in the woods about six miles south of Greenville.  A recent divorcee, Jan’s lack of money was visible all around.  The field grew wild.  The horse barn and four rail fence remained unpainted.  The house, with its bare plywood floors and untrimmed windows and doors, remained unfinished.  Furniture was secondhand and sparse.  Kitchen cabinets held mismatched plates and Cool Whip containers that served as bowls.  Yet, despite its starkness, I would soon think of this place as my sanctuary. 

     It's often said that men think and women feel, but Janice B. Ryder thought more than she felt.  She possessed the honesty to speak her mind and the confidence to pull it off without appearing arrogant or angry.  The woman exuded credibility.  And so, I paid attention when, mere minutes into our friendship, she became the first person to ever tell me, “Esther Wallace is a difficult woman.”

My mother doesn’t understand why we’re doing this again, especially in such dreary weather.  She devoted an entire roll of film to this project just a week ago, on a day bright and warm.  I’d posed on the lawn that afternoon: me in my shirt and tie, me in my blazer, me with my blazer slung over my shoulder, me wearing my gold rimmed glasses, me not wearing them, me talking with my hands to an imaginary person off camera.  Many of those pictures turned out well, my face well-centered and in-focus, colors so bold you could almost smell the fresh cut grass.  Any number of those pics would’ve proved perfectly suitable for the yearbook, but then I conjured this idea. 

     My mother snaps two quick photos and I ask her to hang on a sec. 

     “Are you getting the lake?” I shout.

     My photographer smiles.  “Of course I’m getting the lake.  It’s behind you, ain’t it?”

     “I mean—”  I try to think of the word.  I know even less about cameras than her.  “Like, don’t zoom in on me.”

     “All right,” she sighs.  “Have it your way, I guess.”

     I pause for a moment.  I want to tell her to keep me near the left side of the frame, but I’m not sure if that will mess with her ability to focus the lens. 

     My mother grows impatient.  “You want me to keep goin’ or what?”

     To heck with it, I decide.  The yearbook staff can crop it.  “Yes,” I answer.  Again, I position myself sideways to the camera.  Straight-backed, I twist my torso slightly and look to the islands.  “Ready.”

Despite her knowledge of my mother, Jan--for a time, anyway--held out hope that my situation would improve.  At one point, she even suggested my mother and I see a therapist.  She knew a good one, she said.  In Skowhegan.  “I went to him when I was going through my divorce,” she said.  “He’s a great guy.  Wicked down-to-earth.” 

     I shook my head morosely.

     “There’s no shame in asking for help,” Jan said.

     “Oh, I know that.  And you know that.  But…”

     “You don’t think Esther will do it.”

     “Not a chance.”

     My friend’s mom shrugged.  “Well, go by yourself then.”

     “Yeah right,” I muttered.  “She’s not going to let me drive to Skowhegan.”  A sixty-five-mile, ninety minute, one-way trip. 

     “Take my car,” offered Jan.  She lit a cigarette, tilted her head back, and blew a smoke cloud at the ceiling.  “Jesum Criminy, I’ll even pay him if you need me to.”

     I knew nothing about mental health therapists or therapy.  In fact, Jan was the first person I ever knew who’d sought such help.  Or, perhaps more accurately:  she was the first person to admit it.  The idea of sharing my troubles with a stranger intimidated me, but I was desperate enough to try anything, and Jan’s offer to pay made me think there might just be some value to it.  Still, I wanted to avoid indebting myself to a person I barely knew.  I would ask my mother.  It took me three days to work up the gumption.  She responded exactly as I’d feared.

     “I don't fuckin’ think so.” 

     I burst into tears.  “But Mom!”

     “Hey, they ain't a goddamn thing wrong with you,” she said.  “Except you're an asshole, maybe.” 

To my mother’s credit, she eventually agreed to my therapy.  Also to her credit:  she drove me to the appointment and paid for it.  She sat in the waiting room while I met with the therapist, a mild-mannered, sixty-something man named John.  John asked a series of general questions from an intake form, and then I gave him a verbal synopsis of my life, focusing on my troubles since dad’s stroke.  When, toward the end of our hour, John suggested that I grieved the person my father had been, I cried because someone had finally said what I’d been feeling for months.  Interestingly, I told him little of my mother, except to say that we fought a lot.  She most certainly was a difficult woman, yet I continued to believe that the power to make her happy rested with me, that I needed to do better, that I needed to change.  Not her.  It was never her. 

     John’s statement about my grief became my personal narrative, the story I told myself and others, the way I made sense of my life.  It’s a story I’d believe for years to come, and for good reason:  it seemed to explain my troubles perfectly.  I never realized that my struggles predated dad’s stroke, or that my mother may have contributed to them.  Perhaps John would have discerned these things in time.  I like to believe he might have convinced my mother to participate in family therapy, or individual therapy.  He might have taught me that not everything was my fault, might have begun to disassemble the shame machine my mother had built in my brain.  Sadly, he never had the chance to form such goals, never mind achieve them.  Two days after my therapy session, my mother and I fought again.

     “Ain’t this sweet,” she snarled.  “Haul your ass to Skowhegan for couns-lin and for what?  Sixty bucks—fuckin’ gone!”

     I never saw John again and wouldn’t see another therapist for a dozen years. 

Of the twenty-four photos my mother shot a week earlier, more than a dozen would make perfectly suitable senior portraits, but I’m hesitant to choose any of them because they just don’t feel right.  In every picture, I look like a kid basking in the afterglow of a glorious, happy-go-lucky four years.  This is not how I view my high school career.  Yes, I enjoyed some good times, and yes, I’d made some good friends.  But my happiest moments and greatest successes seem distant memories, and I’ve come to think of high school as a long, painful trial I’d somehow endured.  I want my senior picture to reflect this.  A few hours spent brainstorming and the idea comes to me fully formed.  All I need is a dark, cloudy afternoon.  When such an afternoon finally arrives, I ask my mother if she’ll snap a few more photos. 

     “Now, why would you want your pitcha taken in the friggin’ rain?”

     “It’s not raining yet.”

     “Well, it’s gonna, just as sure as hell.  That sky’s coal black.”

     “Please?” I whine.

     She shakes her head as a small, mystified smile forms on her lips.  I know what that smile means:  she doesn’t understand me.  “Suit yourself, I guess,” she says, finally.  “Let me finish my smoke and I’ll find my camera.”

I’d known Jan but a few months when I arrived on her doorstep one afternoon after an especially ugly fight with my mother.  We talked for a long time.  Eventually, I mustered the courage to ask to spend the night. 

     “Of course,” she said, scoffing at the question with a wave of her hand.  “Any time.  You don’t need to ask.”  I thanked her, and then she brought me to tears. 

     “I’ve actually been thinking of asking if you want to move in.”

     I’ll never forget the talk that ensued.  Jan called me “a good kid,” and “wicked smart.”  She told me how, during his eighth grade year, Sam would come home from school and “whine about  you kicking his ass in Algebra.”

     She lit a Parliament.  I dried my face with a sleeve of my sweatshirt.

     “Travis,” she continued.  “You need to listen to me.  I know you love her, but your mother’s toxic, and there’s not a friggin’ thing you can do about that.  She’s never gonna change.  It’s not gonna happen.  And you know what?  Bill Wallace would tell you the same thing.”

     I asked about Sam and Jessie, how they’d feel about me living there.

     “Jessie’s too young to care,” explained Jan.  “And I’ve already talked to Sam.  It’s not a problem.  He understands.  He gets it.”

     Jan emphasized that there was no pressure.  I could move in if I wanted, whenever I wanted.  Like her son, I would need to help with the horses, fill the wood furnace, pick up after myself, and go to school every day.  “And no smokin’ pot,” she added.  “Those are my only rules.”

     I wanted to take Jan up on her offer and, eventually, I tried.  But although I liked the situation very much, I returned home in less than a week.  Shame helped fuel my return; shame for thinking I’d abandoned my father, shame for thinking I’d hurt my mother.  More than anything, though, I returned home because I missed the familiar.  My normal may have been ugly, but it’s all that was truly mine. 

     Even though I never lived there, Jan and her family allowed me to come and go as I pleased.  But despite spending hundreds and possibly thousands of hours at their house, I almost never stayed overnight.  Not even the most vicious fights with my mother could keep me from returning home.  Time and again, I ran away to Jan’s only to phone my mother at some ungodly hour and beg her to come get me.  And no matter how much anger she harbored, or how late or early the hour, she always answered the same way.

     “Yep.  Be there shortly.”

     My mother could stay mad at me no better than I could stay mad at her.  She too, I think, found hope in our good days.   

For the remainder of high school and beyond, I dropped by Jan’s nearly every day, often multiple times per day.  If I arrived when no one was home, I might ball my varsity jacket into a pillow and curl up on the sofa just to listen to the silence.  Sometimes, I’d place Jan’s rocking chair between the two tall stereo speakers and blast her old Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel albums and let my imagination soar.  In summer months, I would open the never-used back door and sit on the threshold with my legs hanging where the yet-to-be-built steps belonged, and with the quiet of the house at my back and the open field before me, I’d smoke cigarettes and watch butterflies dance in the shimmering heat, and The Emptiness seemed a mere bad dream and not something that ruined your life.  

After our photo shoot, my mother asks why I want my picture taken on such a dreary day.  I shrug and say, “It’s just something different, that’s all.”  I hate to hide the truth, but I don’t know how to explain it in a way she’ll understand. 

     “It just don’t make no sense to me a-tall,” she remarks.  “Whatever floats your boat, I guess.”

     What divides us feels wide as the lake.  Still, it’s one of our good days. 

One picture turns out exactly as I’d hoped—toes to the camera, chest and face to the lake, shoulders sloping gracefully against a backdrop of mist.  The wind catches the wave of my hair.  My suit looks tailored. 

     Clothes make the man.  I close my eyes and can almost hear my Dad say the words. 

     The camera captures me in full color, the world upon which I gaze, in shades of iron and ash.  I’m ready to leave behind all this darkness and stride into my future.  It’s no accident that I pose with my childhood home at my back. 

     I think I can start anew.  I think I can escape.  I do not yet know that The Emptiness lives inside me.