Patrick Flanery - I Am No One

But of course I said nothing, smiling with what an English friend in Oxford once called my ‘shit-eating grin,’ and accepted another helping of mashed potatoes.

Peter’s parents were staying for the weekend so I agreed to take my mother back upstate on Friday morning, which meant she would be with me overnight, no great burden since we get along well despite her occasional obstreperousness, and in fact when I bought my house outside of Rhinebeck earlier this year I knew there would be a certain pleasure in locating myself close enough to my mother to be able to see her easily without ever having to stay under the same roof. Some parents and children adapt to their mutual adulthood and find ways of living together, or spending extended stretches of time in their respective homes, and this has as much to do with the children learning how not to act like children as the parents learning how not to treat their children like children in constant need of correction and advice, which is to say that both sides have to learn to respect each other and the fact of their mutual adulthood, at least until the parents, if this should chance to happen, begin that terrible descent into their second childhood, during which they may wish, quite sincerely, for their children to become parents to them, as payback for that earlier relationship of care and protection and nurture.

My mother and I have reached the stage where I can happily have her stay in my home for a few nights and stay in hers for a similar period, but more than that and we risk killing each other because my mother has never quite believed in my adulthood, and, although she was happy to accept a car service from her granddaughter for the trip to the city, is wildly independent at the age of eighty-three and so remarkably intact both physically and mentally that I have not yet been faced with the prospect of assuming a greater burden of care.

Now, I wonder, should that stage ever come, will I be at liberty to assume the responsibility, or will it fall to my daughter? More likely, I think, now more than ever, my fingers aching from the effort of this composition, moving the pen across each sheet of paper, Meredith will bear the burden for us all, her parents and grandmother, the choices we have each made throughout our lives, our chickens all coming home, at once, to roost.

‘You’re looking well, Jeremy,’ my mother said after we had finished dinner and moved to various corners of the living room for coffee and digestifs . ‘You look like you’ve lost weight.’

‘My weight is not open for discussion.’

‘It’s a compliment!’

‘It’s a backhanded compliment, mother. It’s a compliment that implies the person being complimented was once fat and has now improved himself.’

‘Don’t be so stuffy!’

‘It’s not polite to talk about people’s weight.’

‘But you’ve always struggled with your weight, Jeremy, so I thought I was giving you a compliment. You look slimmer.’

‘I have not always struggled with my weight.’

‘Well, you did yo-yo while you were in England. All that ale, I suppose, and the fish and chips.’

‘I ate fish and chips once in a decade and probably drank one pint of beer a year, if that.’

‘You don’t have to be so defensive. Why are you so defensive with your own mother? Can’t I talk about my son’s health?’

It went like that, circling round the same misunderstanding, or shifting perception of the offensive thing my mother had said. This was usually the tenor of our conversations, for as she has grown older she has, like a child, lost her filter, says whatever she thinks regardless of the feelings of the people around her, and yet, also just like a child, is so quick to take offense if she herself is criticized that we can very quickly come to grief if we spend too much time alone. There was the strong possibility that one day soon she would say something offensive over the phone — for instance threatening the life of a politician in a completely unthinking way — or write something similar in an email, which would draw the attention of whoever might be listening and recording. Is it so fanciful? I no longer think so.

By that morning, having listened to Mr. Wald and Michael Ramsey’s curious intervention in the conversation, I felt certain that my paranoia was not misplaced. Perhaps in not so short a time my mother and I will both be detained, required to prove our innocence or, worse, to reveal whatever we know — which, I am sure, is nothing. Would you — whoever you may be who eventually reads this, either friend or foe — force my mother to scribble away in a room her account of me, of what she knows of my recent life, even if it was clear she knew nothing? Or is clarity a quality in which people like you no longer believe? Do you require that the world is endlessly gray, every person potentially shading into the categories that merit your attention, all of us, every one, people of interest?

Thanksgiving was in fact quite a happy day, without any arguments or serious conflicts, the presence of Michael Ramsey that morning being the only wrinkle in an otherwise unremarkable gathering, and I had no doubt that I was the only one disturbed by him.

Before leaving Meredith and Peter’s, my daughter drew me aside in the kitchen and asked what had happened during my appointment with the neurologist, Dr. Sebastian.

‘There’s nothing physically wrong with me. The scan — I mean I haven’t had the results, but nothing is going to show up.’

‘Oh good, what a relief. Did she have any thoughts about what might have happened? It still seems so strange.’

‘She advised me to see a therapist or an analyst. It’s not because I’m crazy, but she thought it was possible that something traumatic might have happened recently, or because of some past trauma — I don’t know — my memory might have blocked out the exchange with my student on Saturday. The brain does funny things.’

Meredith scrunched her nose, almost as if she’d drunk too much and was struggling to focus, though I knew this was not the case. She was making faces because she was concerned and during such intense family gatherings her emotions tend to rise even more powerfully to the surface. I knew she preferred not to cry in front of other people, even her family, and it was this she was trying to forestall, as much for my sake as to protect her dignity, perhaps precisely because it happened so frequently in the past, crying was as much a part of her childhood and adolescence — though I remind myself how much of that latter period I missed — as was laughter or ordinary sulking, but in the years of her adulthood I had seen her cry two or three times at most, out of frustration and concern rather than sadness, and I did not want to force that response again, especially not on Thanksgiving of all days, when the kitchen crying-fest between parent and child is as well worn a cliché as the drunken relative who makes a scene before passing out in the guest bedroom.

Meredith made a look halfway between disgust and despair, as if she were considering the possibility that rather than being afflicted by a degenerative disease, her father might instead be crazy, and imagining all the implications of this alternative decline and diagnosis, the ways in which I might suddenly be inaccessible to her just when she thought I had returned as a full participant in her life. One wants to offer reassurance in the face of such paralyzing alarm and since I was certain there was nothing physically or psychologically wrong with me, and the confusion with Rachel was the result not of my own mind but of some incursion into my private messages, that the real issue was the fact of my being surveilled and followed and fucked with by persons and entities as yet unknown, I reached out to my daughter to give her the comfort and reassurance I thought she needed.