Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [8]
TOMORROW WE GO BACK TO HELSINKI. HOORAY!
And so it went. And went. I sat there on the couch, drinking wine, turning pages, waiting—in vain—for the painful introspection. What I found instead was a travelogue she had written for an imaginary audience, in which she presented herself as a globe-trotting sophisticate whose day began when she “breakfasted early and well.” I was intimately acquainted with my mother’s grandiose word choices. I do not recall being taught to use “breakfast” as a verb.
Who is she writing to? I began to wonder. Was she thinking she might one day get these books published or just pretending that they had already been? It was almost as if she had written a travel guide to advise other budget-conscious people of distinction, like herself, discriminating enough not to compromise their standards of perfection for the sake of momentary assimilation into some misguided second-rate foreign culture. And it was almost as if she took the shortcomings and discomforts of those other cultures as a personal affront.
There were no passages where she wondered about herself or her marriage or her kids. Yet she would fastidiously list the cost of every item she ate or bought or thought about eating or buying. Perhaps the entire country of Finland let her down, but she never failed to be utterly captivated by her own ability to make a sandwich.
“At about 11:30 just before we began a 125 mile stretch of desert road which did not indicate a single town in which to lunch we stopped at a real genuine dinky doo food emporium and I bought something with which to make sandwiches,” my mother wrote on her journey through the American Southwest in 1982, clearly taken by a sense of herself as a rugged pioneer.
A loaf of bread but no jug of wine, just Armour’s beef bologna, a small package of American cheese, and a cucumber. Earlier in the trip at a cafeteria in Canyon de Chelly I had taken some give-away packets of mayonnaise and mustard. Now finally a week later they surely came in handy. Somewhere en route thru that desolate Nevada stretch of road I made Gerry a bologna and sliced cucumber sandwich laced with mayo and I ate a bologna and cheese and mustard with cucumber. I was making the sandwiches while he drove, using a paper bag on my lap for a cutting board and a pen knife to peel the cucumber and cut the sandwiches. For dessert Gerry had a piece of uneaten candy and a tin of apple juice and I had some icy cold water from my thermos. Gerry was hell bent on going, going. Finally we took 15 minutes to chomp away.
To be fair, my mother’s diaries were not entirely joyless and scathing. There were passages of praise delivered whenever she encountered unassailable luxury. But her praise was hard-won. She wanted the reader to know that she was not easily duped; her educated understanding of the world could penetrate all attempts to fool her. She seemed to take pride in her ability to scratch the surface of beauty and find something disappointing lurking beneath. This was the writerly gift that she was willing to share with her myopic peers.
It might have been fun to talk to her about some of this. I would have liked to learn how her early years made her turn out this way. But her life was a topic about which she had no sense of humor. In her mind, she was one of the last of the clear-eyed uncompromised purists, the wizened survivor of countless fearlessly fought campaigns. For my mother to admit that she had flaws was for her to feel as though she were destroyed, transparent, nonexistent.
In this way she caused me to become her polar opposite. If perfection was both impossible and the only thing that mattered, then why mess with it at all? I turned into someone who not only reveled in my own imperfections but underlined them and paraded them like they were assets.
A former record executive in Los Angeles once told me about the day he had finally saved enough money to buy himself a new Porsche. When he took possession of it, its exquisite beauty so overwhelmed