Paradise, Piece by Piece Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR PARADISE, PIECE BY PIECE

  “Peacock writes vividly, sensitively, poetically, recreating her life as artist and woman.”

  – Publishers Weekly

  “A courageous and elegantly written memoir that explores the distinction between motherhood and womanhood and celebrates the path of the artist – as a self-defined complete woman.”

  – Gail Sheehy, author of The Silent Passage

  “Molly Peacock is an award-winning poet who has written an autobiography that reads more like a classic coming-of-age piece of fiction….An intriguing and convincing memoir.”

  – Saskatoon Star-Phoenix

  “This is writing close to the heart, close to the bone; writing that comes from wisdom, tears and laughter.”

  – Lorna Crozier

  “In a prose juicy with sensuous life and vivid with the stunning metaphors that characterize her poetry…Peacock rides the narrative thread of her decision not to have children. The thread expands into a rich tapestry of her life….”

  – Toronto Star

  “Read it for the power and beauty of a writer’s magical way with words. Read it whether you are a mother or not….”

  – Common Ground

  “[An] interesting and engrossing life story.”

  – Winnipeg Free Press

  “Peacock’s memoir is big as any in life – an affirmation to all woman, childfree or otherwise.”

  – Susan Musgrave, Vancouver Sun

  “Peacock understands that lives are narratives that proceed from a plot laid down in childhood. Breaking free from her own tragic childhood takes her almost a lifetime – but she shows us that we can exorcise the emotional debris of the past.”

  – Rosemary Sullivan

  Also by Molly Peacock

  Poetry

  The Second Blush

  Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems 1975–2002

  And Live Apart

  Raw Heaven

  Take Heart

  Original Love

  Prose

  Alphabetique: 26 Characteristic Fictions

  The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72

  The Private I: Privacy in a Public World

  Paradise, Piece by Piece

  How to Read a Poem…and Start a Poetry Circle

  Copyright © 1998 by Molly Peacock

  Cloth edition published 1998

  Trade paperback edition published 1999

  First published in 1998 by Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc., New York All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Ebook ISBN 9780771072253

  Cover design: Leah Springate

  Cover image: cherry blossom in a jar © Ruth Black / Stocksy

  “Merely by Wilderness,” “There Must Be,” from Take Heart. Copyright © 1989 by Molly Peacock. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. “Waking Up,” “Blush Blessing,” from Original Love: Poems by Molly Peacock. Copyright © 1995 by Molly Peacock. Reprinted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  McClelland & Stewart,

  a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited,

  a Penguin Random House Company

  www.​penguinrandomhouse.​ca

  v4.1

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Molly Peacock

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  i. A Girl’s Garden of Reasons

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  ii. The Poetry Womb

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  iii. Pruning the Family Tree

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  iv. Paradise, Piece by Piece

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  FOR MIKE

  “A No uttered from deepest conviction is better and greater than a Yes merely uttered to please, or what is worse, to avoid trouble.”

  —MAHATMA GANDHI

  In beginning to write this book I wanted to tell the story of a decision—how I chose not to have children—and found myself telling the story of my life as a poet and teacher, and as a sister, daughter, lover, friend, and wife. This led me to face two necessities: saying the truth as I saw it, and protecting other people’s lives. The central family players—my parents and sister, grandparents, cousin, and my husband, Mike—are all undisguised. The names and identities of the other people are altered to protect their privacy.

  When I was three, I decided not to have children.

  I knew that goodness had a shape, and I could draw it: a circle. Very goodness was a tighter circle. Its grip was so snug that there wasn’t any need for skin between me and what I was being very good for.

  Now, sometimes the difference between how I see my life and how others see it is this tightening of the good that needs no skin. Others see skin as the body’s border, a boundary between them and the world. But as a little girl I knew it was permeable, and sometimes felt that I did not have a hide at all.

  “You were so good when I was pregnant,” my mother said after she reappeared from her terrible banishment. Polly had hemorrhaged and vanished to the hospital for a cesarean section and partial hysterectomy. With my premature new sister, Gail, stowed in an incubator for two months, our mother returned to me in the spring of 1950. Bandaged and in pain, Polly refused to set foot in the hospital, convinced my little sister would die if she did. And so my mother, half inert, lay in bed while I played on the floor nearby, no more than a foot or two distant, watching for Gram to bustle in from next door with our breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. Shocked by Polly’s ghost-like figure, I played the role of child-near-her-womb, a little homunculesse at her feet, with crayons, cutout dolls, and picture books. “You are so good,” she moaned.

  But what good was skin? It only prevented me from getting closer to her. If only I could read her mind. How much better I could anticipate her groans and shift just slightly as I cut out another outfit for my paper doll. To be permitted to be near her meant I could not jump or yell, but I had no use for that. I wanted to be good! Now and then my father emerged from the local bar or from his shift work to disturb our honeymoon, but like a ripple he would quickly go—except for one day, when he brought Gail home. After two whole months of never being touched, she was weak and fretful and terrifyingly small.

  “Hold her neck! Hold her
neck! Don’t let her head roll!” Where was her neck? When I shifted to look, Gail’s head began to loll, and I froze again, not watching her, but the adults, arguing what to do. “She’s too young to hold a tiny baby!” Gram snorted, “Ted, watch the baby!” My father fetched a pillow at his mother’s orders and jammed it beneath my holding arm, heaping Gail on me, me heaped on Gram’s bristly couch. Then Gram snatched the swaddled lump, and Ted, Polly, Gram, and Grandpa closed ranks around my sister—a series of backs, rumps, and legs, like the great gray ends of elephants circled around the newborn in Dumbo.

  —

  “You used to wear diapers,” Polly reminded me, “just like your sister.” We were in the front hall that linked our half of the house to Gram’s next door. By the time we got to our own kitchen, I had gotten an idea: I’ll ask to wear diapers, too, and Polly obliged me. The problem was, my new sister’s diapers wouldn’t fit. What could we do? Polly grabbed a striped terry cloth dish towel and two enormous safety pins and pinned the towel around me. I had no underpants on. No top, no socks, no shoes, only the towel diaper, just like a baby. The towel was saggy, with loopy legholes you could see up.

  Into our part of the house descended my great-uncle and great-aunt and my father’s cousins and my uncle and his fiancée to mill around the bassinet set up in the bright June kitchen with its green linoleum floor. Through the doorway, in the living room curtained heavily against the light, I sat in an overstuffed chair in a sea of beige wool rug and slumped, bicycling my legs out of the diaper-towel, eyeing the relatives, noticed by no one yet. My towel had stupid orange and yellow stripes. Not pure diaper white. Not really real. I’m really not a baby anymore. My father’s smooth swimmer’s body went upstairs to the bathroom, ignoring me as he walked past, swigging his beer, though he saw me on his way back to the kitchen and leaned his flushed face into mine to say, “You wanna be a baby too?” letting a surprisingly thin laugh escape from his dense body.

  No, I did not want to be a baby anymore. Flapping out to the kitchen, I announced to all present, “I want my clothes on.”

  “Oh, you want your diaper off, now?” My mother smiled. And so we went upstairs to retransform me, leaving Gail in the bassinet to be admired, while I lay on the bed upstairs, attended to, united with my dark-haired Polly as she undid the safety pins.

  Pressed to the linoleum floor with a coloring book, I spied on my two-year-old sister from under the kitchen table. As she skidded noisily by on her new wooden wheel toy, my father came in from his job with the Niagara Mohawk electric company. Out scraped his chair from the table. In scraped his chair with him on it. When his beer bottle thudded above my head, I swiped my crayons back from his workboots and uniformed pant legs. From deep under the table roof, I peered at Polly’s loafers moving back and forth at the stove. She was not wearing socks, even though it was winter, and this was Buffalo, and that kitchen floor was cold.

  Blue snowlight outside; hot noisy yellow light inside. Gram’s head of tight gray curls lingered in the doorway of our living room. Heat haze in the kitchen, then the spatter of floured chicken pieces as they hit the oily stomach of an iron skillet. Everybody was tired or angry. The squeal of the wooden wheels of my sister’s ride-on toy distressed even me.

  “Can’t you make her stop? I just got home!” my father cried out.

  “For Christ’s sake, she’s only two!” my mother said, not bothering to turn her plaid flannel back from the sizzling stove. If I looked up aslant, I could see her almost fully: black curls above a man’s workshirt and old wool slacks. The light got yellower and the spattering louder, almost as loud as the wheels that ground against the linoleum and the bang of the empty beer bottle on the table.

  “Don’t ever have children, Molly,” my grandmother declared, “unless you want to.”

  “That’s right. Don’t let nobody say you have to have kids,” her son affirmed.

  I often heard from my father, “Don’t ever have children, Molly.” My grandmother punctuated this with “unless you want to.” And my mother said, “You can always do anything you want.”

  I’m not sure other families discussed having children with their kids as frequently as mine did, but I heard again and again in various ways from these three people that having children wrecked everything. Or this is how I interpreted “Don’t ever have children, Molly.” I looked at my little sister as she zoomed across the linoleum and hated her even more. I looked at my father drunk, and my mother frightened, and thought: Their lives would be better if they didn’t have kids. Their lives would be better if they didn’t have her. If they didn’t have us. Didn’t have me. Their lives would be better…I’m not having any children.

  Somehow at five, I was past childbearing age.

  Because I felt that perhaps I shouldn’t have been born, there were many parts of me that waited decades to arrive. Even in a passing conversation about a garden, the phrase “dead in the bud” can stop me for a second with a metaphorical chill. There were many ways I struggled not to be dead in the bud. I knew quite early I was engaged in a test—later on, people would call it “survival”—but I felt I would be alone in it, as alone as each person in my family was.

  Now, so many years later, at my dining room table eating a piece of gingerbread from Emily Dickinson’s recipe—a woman who recommended that we look at life aslant—I have an additional interpretation of my father’s exhausted, frustrated statement against having children. It gave me a choice. I could be a mother, or I could choose not to. In the same moment that he implied he did not want me, he set before me the option of saying no to being a parent myself. My no could open a door for me, one that was closed to him. My mother lectured me about how I could be anything I wanted to be. And he concurred. I took this to mean that they couldn’t be what they wanted, so I was to make up for them.

  As it turns out, my choice not to have children has defined my adult life. It’s been like hacking through undergrowth while walking down a hardly used, perfectly paved way. The seeds they planted yielded a terrifying wilderness, but what they said also constructed a kind of brick path that gave the wilderness a vista, and defined the tumble of flora. In fact, on that path my choice not to be a mother became more of a discovery of a decision. My refusal came through love, terror, shame, enchantment, and a kind of paradoxically fulfilled emptying. I had to make the choice from so far down in my own core that I was never wholly aware of it. It took insight to see and release it—an insight I didn’t always have. For this is a decision you do not make once, but many times. I would leave the idea of not having children behind, only to face it again and again as I went on. Some people would say that calling such a process a “decision” is ambiguous. Was it really a choice?

  If someone were to ask me why I could feel increasingly whole even though I was making a radical refusal, I would have answered that each time I said no, I felt a more complete sense of who I was. But if at any of those times someone had asked me if I felt like a complete woman, I would have hesitated before answering yes.

  Polly settled down with her library book, deep in a red upholstered chair with doilies on the arms to cover the cigarette burns. Gail napped next door at Grandma’s, Ted worked far away, down in someone’s basement reading a cobwebby meter for amps and volts. Polly wore his dark green T-shirt without a bra and a pair of baggy jeans. She pushed back her shiny black hair with its exciting streak of gray to the left of her widow’s peak. The wall behind her was forest green, dark as the T-shirt. In 1952 no woman on Gunnell Avenue in Buffalo, New York, went braless, wore jeans, bought red chairs, or put them in deep green rooms—all to the point of sitting down to read a library book and pop an occasional chocolate-covered cherry into her mouth after she finished her cigarette. She’d whizzed through her housework, then stuck the dinner fixings on the counter. She was alone, alone and happy to be in her own world.

  Little mouse at her side, I tried to read a letter that her mother, Grandma Ruth in the country, had sent me, but I wasn’t in school
yet and didn’t know how. I had my pencil and my drawing pad. I was using my inner resources. Polly loved people who sat quietly using their inner resources. But I can’t read! In exasperation I poked through the carefully constructed boundary of her concentration. “Read it to me, Mom,” I whined. “Read it to me, Mom, OK?”

  Her hazel eyes were trained on her book.

  “Read me Gram’s letter, OK?”

  When I placed the letter on top of the open book, my mother turned and read it aloud. I’d never gotten one before, and I wondered what to do with it.

  “Well, when you get a letter, you write back,” Polly explained.

  “OK,” I said, picking up my pencil, making stray letter-like lines on the page. But my lines were disappointing, not like real writing.

  “Why don’t you draw Gram a picture?” Polly lazily said.

  I always draw pictures. Babies draw pictures. “No! I want to write a letter back!”

  “Oh, all right, here’s the alphabet, Molly.” She scrawled A through Z across the top of the paper. “Now, write DEAR GRAM.” She underlined the individual letters. Of course I couldn’t remember the order of “Dear Gram” out of ADEGMR, but I tried to figure out for myself how to write them, and after a fashion, I covered the page in cuneiform. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done and I was pleased. And Polly was pleased! The writing drew a smile from those straight, slightly purplish lips whose carmine lipstick had disappeared to find a better home on the filter tips of cigarette butts in a square glass ashtray, an ashtray so heavy that when my father let it fly against the wall in an argument it didn’t even break. Nothing broke the pleasure of our solitude. Like two sides of an open locket, the side that reads, the side that writes, my mother and I lay inside the red and green jewel-box of the afternoon.

  The mutual possession of our selves, without the diverting presence of my sister or the inflaming presence of my father, gave me the sense, reinforced by Polly over and over again, that this was how one ought to live. “Everybody should have their own room,” she would say. “The only way for a family to survive is for each person to have their own place.” My mother had never heard of Virginia Woolf. She didn’t have a room of her own as an adult until she was nearly fifty years old, divorced, and with her children grown.