Naples, Florida
Recently I was looking at photograph of three women of my family, and myself at about six. The ordinariness of the picture stays in my mind. It says much more than any photo lined up on the beach or at a wedding reception.
It is a hot day. It is vacation time Naples, Florida. It is a long, long time ago and I don’t remember anything particular about that day.
But I know everything about the feeling of that day, and other days like it. And I know that there weren’t enough of them. This is at least due in part to my mother, Deborah Love’s, difficult marriage, (her third), that left her questioning everything about herself, including her origins in St. Louis.
Three generations of Love women are pictured. By the standards of today, these women did not have very long lives. My grandmother Mary Love, having a rest in the chaise, died at 76, and my mother did not attend her funeral. Her daughter Muffy, face down and sunning, died at 74, and her sister Deborah Anne, my mother, at 44.
I can’t seem to forget the female-ness of the scene. I always felt starved for the just-girls kind of hang out that so many took for granted. I never got enough of it, of really belonging, without having to say or do anything. Or at least, a reasonable appearance of not having to say or do anything. Just a sort of animal wallow.
Muffin’s hair drying in pin curls, sunbathing on her stomach. My mother in the middle, probably trying to get me to do my math homework. Having a go at it, at least.
None of us were aware of time passing. No one was thinking, oh, someday someone will look at this picture and be living a completely different kind of life. Or, we couldn’t have known that Debbie was going to become distant, and only had about six years, and Grandmother had only two. And we wouldn’t have discussed it even if we had known. For the moment, Debbie and Rue were visiting, and Muffy was here, and…
Everyone has a seat or a place to be. That little chair might be Muffin’s or it might be mine. In any case—I am supposed to be there. No one wished that I weren’t. I have a pixie cut, and I am wearing a Mexican dress I wish I still had. My mother is protecting her hairstyle with a fat hair band, her legs crossed, her long arched feet visible, her bathing suit straps tugged down to avoid tan lines. Behind her, legs also crossed, shod in white cloth shoes, my grandmother is watching my mother and me. Around her head, a corona of gray. She didn’t care about tan lines, I am sure.
It is possible to see the ties, and the contentment.
The flip flops chucked here and there on the hot tiles. The straw bag on its side. The Florida sun beating down. We were probably on the driveway side of that small ranch house to catch the sun. It was an investment property that my grandparents lived in for a few years. A Mandarin couple lived in the basement as domestics, and drifted around unhappily. I later found out that my banker grandfather had written to Chiang Kai-Shek, and he had sent these two refugees. The house had a great, looming Banyan tree and a lawn of strange grass that was thick and springy between my toes. There were no pets. Around the base of the Banyan tree was packed dirt, which led to a big canal that fed into the ocean where the club was, with coquina shells in the fine sand. My mother had hired a nanny for me whom I liked. Her name was Flossie, and she was very religious and apparently, she taught me about God. I would say, the Lawd is my Shepud, I shell not wont,” which made my mother laugh.
That’s about it.
The picture speaks of life without reflection. The participants are not ruminating about each other, at least, not at the moment. No statements are being made. Not having to do or say anything—unreciprocated, not reflected upon or reflective existence. There is only the mood of a certain block of time, with certain people, who were taken entirely for granted—as if they were going to be around forever. Like furniture. Like houses. Like the ocean.
It is a novelists’ job to interpret ordinary days, to turn them around, to group them together and gather themes about them, put them in chapters and make some sense of them, and clap bookends fore and aft. And at the end, the reader will expect the hardest thing to deliver—closure. An explanation and a justification for it all.
It is Kate Atkinson’s particular wizardry that doesn’t deliver any of that and steals the show anyway.
Her weaving technique is mostly set in the uneventful day to day. Her conceit is that a placid and unremarkable present overlays crystal clear interior spaces where people are buffeted around, dragged down, buoyed up, and ultimately destroyed by time and circumstance.
In Life After Life, she does something I don’t think had been done before in fiction. She kills off one of her main characters over and over again, in many different ways, and mostly, they don’t see it coming. The poignant detail of her writing shows that no matter what they wanted, or thought they wanted, it was all right there as they lived it—they were on the tip of time. I find myself wanting to embellish, “on the crest of a wave,” or “perched upon eternity,” or some sort of tripe. It is one of the hardest things to know, or even to understand, how one really has only the lead role in one’s own story until it’s over. Uh-oh, another metaphor. Sorry.
In all of the workshops and conferences I’ve attended, and there are many, a big no-no is variable points of view within a story or chapter. Atkinson breaks this rule. She’ll go over a seemingly simple experience, a walk, a conversation, and show what each one believes happened, or believes about the other’s motivations and perceptions and reasons. She’ll throw in a flashback that lasts three pages, and seamlessly deliver the reader back into the narrative present. She’s able to do it without being confusing because each character is distinct, as is their place in time.
This can work on a micro or macro level. She can fly back and forth between what happened earlier in the week, or over monstrous stretches of time, while keeping anchored in a narrative of say, a husband and wife getting ready for bed, having a conversation about their children, or not being “a good mother” in a commune, then losing a husband after his swim and wishing he were dead, then feeling crestfallen when he appears. No detail, no matter how large, is overly accented, which would tear the fabric of a narrative that is already taking wild chances with time and place. It’s fairly understated writing. The tone changes minimally, the transitions are so smooth they never seem like authorial choices; they seem as though we have just gently alighted here or there invisibly to witness happenings, thoughts, the way people, time and events intersect, or don’t intersect. It’s like watching traffic on a vast freeway, because of the time shifts we have the privilege of the pulled back perspective, and zoom in to see how it felt, how it was, what was pleasurable, what was satisfying, what was enraging, what was a total loss, what was tragic. We sometimes know about the tragedies before they happen, then read helplessly on, wondering when the accident, the pile up, the thing from which there is no recovery will happen and how it will happen. Where most writers would sneak up on tragedy, building to the climax, Atkinson delivers it as dispassionately as a bird leaves a turd.
The two novels of the Todd series, Life After Life, and A God in Ruins, run consecutively. I’m sure it was helpful to have the constraints of traditional marriage and rigid British society before say, 1960, and the drama and tragedy of two wars for one’s setting. Nonetheless, it’s hugely impressive.
It took me awhile to realize that though we mostly lost touch with my Love relatives, and they didn’t live extraordinarily long lives, my feelings of perplexity and loss were not unique. That no matter how long particular intimacies last—there’s always a sense of being robbed when it ends, even if everyone lives to be 100. When it’s over and not coming back, there’s a sense of being stolen from. Because one absolutely did not know at the time how much change was coming, and how foreign and familiar the original, from which everything evolved, would seem. Somehow in these scenarios, it was all taken for granted. There was no acknowledging moment, or if there was, it was maybe a bit choreographed and not as memorable. Mundaneness is almost always the most important factor in a narrative that sneaks up on you. As for ourselves, we might look back as I have and say Look! We were ordinary together. What more could one wish for?