pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- BLOODSPOTTING This morning, my writing group discussed how families just accept the weirdest things and then you bring a new lover home and she's floored by the thing and says "Well, didn't you think it was weird?," and of course you did, but, after a while, you just sort of sat with the thing and averted your eyes. My example stretches all the way back to 1979, when my mother, who had attempted suicide by gentler means several times, reached new levels of paranoia and despair in between deciding, and then forgetting, which of her children was the sworn enemy, and gawd help you if that child was you (as the scars on my stomach can attest). Mama's desire to die reached new levels of desperation that year and, on a crisp September day, she picked up my father's police service revolver and shot herself in the head. I was sixteen and had left home several times by then, but was out of money and living in the den on the day she did this. I've written a detailed description of that day and the events leading up to it in my novel and have no desire to repeat them here (or in my head), but will say that, in addition to spattering blood all over the unwashed breakfast dishes, the refrigerator, the cabinets, the windows, most of one wall, the telephone, and the floor, three large spots of my mother's blood saturated the ceiling over the kitchen table near where the bullet exited through the roof. My father quit repairing things as Mama's illness progressed and I suspect dysfunction is mostly to blame for his inertia, but also believe that, at some level, he wanted to punish his wife and children. Or maybe transfer some of the guilt he felt onto us. At any rate, my father gathered his children under the bullet hole and those blood spatters—this was after he made my older sister and me clean up buckets of our mother's blood—and he told us that he was going to leave the ceiling just as it was to remind us of what we did to our mother. I warned the few people who went home with me over the years that they would be right there over the kitchen table (and that we almost always ate there instead of in the dining room), and they just stared at me, stunned. But remain there they did for the next twenty-five years. Then my father died, and I immediately purchased spackling and ceiling paint and drove home to cover these up—only my brother was already there doing it.
9:06 a.m. - 2005-04-18 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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