I’m still drawn to—since childhood—violet and lavender accents: hand towels in a guest bathroom; O’Keeffe’s leaves and Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes; the insides of Dumbo’s ears; Sherbrooke metro’s louvered ceilings; Helen Frankenthaler’s rinsed, puddled shores. Agnès Varda in a crowd.
Recently, my mother said to me while driving, “People don’t change.” I had just seen someone from my past, and the encounter had been tense and artificial. We labored, he and I, over niceties. Listening to him felt like work. It was as though we were both trying to retrieve a mutual tenderness that had fallen from our hands and rolled into a storm drain. How unfamiliar it now was to merely look at him, and as it happens, unresolved arguments that now felt colorless managed to creep back in. We weren’t fighting so much as reusing old motivations to rile the other person up. Like testing to see if they still worked. It was, I’ll concede, wonderfully juvenile. Unfortunately, the verbal construction of rehashing—of jaggedly saying something again and again, just differently—debilitates. We returned to that whole district of emotions, long forgotten. It was unavailing. Impaired and confining. It’s bunker-speak. “Let me rephrase” might be the tautest way to try to win someone over.
So I listened to this person I once called “Baby, Boy, Babe” until I’d hit my limit or, perhaps, found my stride. I interrupted and said something rude. Cutting, cruel, and unnecessary. How else to protect the momentum I’d accumulated over the last little while? I’m sure there’s a better way to do it—to be gracefully immune—and yet, these rare mutinous flashes are satisfying. We both agreed it had been unwise to meet up. “A bad idea,” he said. Foolish, I later told my mother.
*
“I’m telling you,” my mother insisted while we were stopped at a red light. “People don’t change.” My mother was, I gathered, speaking about someone from her past in order to empathize with mine. It’s been lovely in adulthood to share this changed design for connecting with my parents. I am now in possession of a history that, like theirs, often pulls. We can relate without laying bare all the details. Like speaking alongside; a new responsiveness that doesn’t pry.
Because even though I am still their youngest—taller, wiser, yet happiest when I am barefoot in their home eating sliced fruit—I have outlived an impasse; many even. I can identify what constitutes a dilemma, a big drama, and the difference between the latter and a minor, reparable scrape. Like the stuff that goes on in those early-morning hours, eased by tequila’s burn and a decoy debt to stay out. Like the hurt we cause when we’ve been enduring too much in silence and have started to trust our own fixed claim that everything is okay.
But being barefoot in my parents’ home. Eating fruit. Standing barefoot just outside the front door. Is there a symbol for return more comprehensive than that? It’s pleasure mingled with nostalgia and the quick fix shelter provides—how it lightens but also strikes at the heart. How standing barefoot on the steps outside is repossessing for both the parent who is admiring and the child—now grown—who has come around to “home,” not just as a place but as an idea she can tend to. A belief that it’s possible to let one’s guard down and enjoy the emotional knowledge that orbits a home and the memories, while not all good, that confirm her. The sound of onions browning on the stove and the charismatic flop of a daughter’s shoes kicked off by the door safeguard the story of a family.
But.
But. While my mother said, “People don’t change,” what she meant is, I’d estimate: I shouldn’t try to change a person. That the effort exerted is often ineffectual and upsetting. Nobody adjusts himself or herself, unless prompted first, by some interior gurgling. Some deep mobilizing. Urgency forms in the belly. And change, I’ve come to understand, rises up like nausea: the promise of relief is what makes it bearable. The body’s clever ways for communicating shifts can make a person crazy, but also move a person toward life.
In suggesting I shouldn’t attempt to alter how this person from my past thinks or finds his focus, my mother also meant: Be wary of overvaluing what he gives. Be cautious of how proportioned my ability to love is with how impressionable I become. What moves him to create belongs discretely to him. What lights him up from inside and incites growth is what will ultimately specify his dimension. Not me.
I think that’s what my mother meant, anyway. And as she kept driving and our talk turned to dinner, I stayed half present, obligated to my nerve center and that funny way a car’s window offers a scrim for me to solemnize and star in some mini scenario. To emotionally migrate yet stay put. Because the gray zip of highway, those accompanying blimp clouds, and a passing swath of people all provide the perfect blur for seeing things not as they stand but as I’d like them to, in time, reel out.
What is it about moving on that maroons me? What is it about recuperating from a failed relationship that feels nearest to a slow-drip, unconcealed crack-up? Are the many lives we’ve lived immortal? And which is more crucial: That I regenerate or that I carry? That I hold true, build upper-body strength, expand on my catalog of what I consider fun, or wear more navy because it’s not quite black and faintly adjusts frame of reference, and hesitates between looking meant and like a mistake. Or do I squarely retain this person—his textures, how he concentrated my world. Or do I develop an improved tendency for reclaiming myself? Do I double over, obsess, fly in the face of, listen to my mother, be still?