Nothing Gold Can Stay

girlinwindow — By Gina Easley www.ginakelly.com

By Kim Kankiewicz

With the first lilting chords of the piano, we take the floor. The snare drum eases into a 6/8 shuffle. We melt into one another as the strings sigh the opening notes of the melody line. The horns respond with a glissando in the second verse, and we are afloat on liquid gold. We are bodies swaying in a collective embrace, in love with every-other-body in this place.

My dress is buttercup yellow, strapless with a sweetheart neckline. The chiffon skirt cascades over a crinoline of nylon netting. My hair is combed into a sleek bouffant, its curled-up ends grazing my bare shoulders. My dance partner wears a white sport coat and a crew cut. His face is indistinct, but no matter; he is not the point of this imagined memory.

The point is the convergence, the enfolding of each of us into all of us. The song, to which I have never really danced, is “Theme from A Summer Place.” In my reverie, we sway to the familiar instrumental recording, Percy Faith’s 1960 orchestral arrangement. But other artists—my favorite being The Lettermen in 1965—have recorded “Summer Place” with vocals. Listen and you will hear a song less about romance than about sanctuary:

There’s a summer place

Where it may rain or storm

Yet I’m safe and warm

For within that summer place

Your arms reach out to me

And my heart is free from all care…

•••

Since childhood, I have cast myself in fantasies with soundtracks from my parents’ youth. I was six years old in 1980, when my family moved to Nebraska and settled into the Craftsman house where my parents still live. The formal living room, unfurnished for nearly a year, was the theater where my brother and I performed “Rock Around the Clock,” “At the Hop,” and other teen anthems from the American Graffiti soundtrack.

In fifth grade, I pictured my sixth grade crush pining for me as I listened to Frankie Valli crooning “My Eyes Adored You.” Carried your books from school, playing make-believe you’re married to me. You were fifth grade, I was sixth, when we came to be. I knew no sixth grade boy would carry my school books—not least because I was the kind of kid who listened to the Four Seasons in 1985—but envisioning such a scenario made the unfamiliar territory of adolescence feel navigable. The same was true in the final months of my eighth grade year, when I sweet talked my dad into deejaying a sock hop at my middle school. With high school on the horizon, I imagined joining the letter jacket crowd, the clean-cut kids with social status. (That the sock hop itself was not imaginary is equal parts mortifying and miraculous.)

At no time were my retrospective daydreams more persistent than during my first year of college. Living in Kansas I was homesick, so homesick. Studying to the oldies and wearing vintage clothing bolstered my spirits, but the image that sustained me emerged from a trashcan in the bathroom of my residence hall. On my nineteenth birthday, I discovered a date stamp on the trashcan’s raised lid: October 10, 1967—the month and day of my birth and the year my mom entered college. Never mind that she had attended a different college; it seemed profoundly significant that this trashcan was installed when my mother was a freshman, seven years to the day before my birth.

The date stamp became my talisman. Glimpsing it as I left the shower each morning, I would borrow my mother’s courage for the day ahead. She too was homesick, so homesick, when she arrived on campus, but she came to regard her college years with fondness. In her footsteps, I would do the same. I was into The Ventures that fall, and as I ascended the stairs between my residence hall and the main campus, a mental guitar loop from their 1960 hit “Walk, Don’t Run” propelled my steps. In my sophomore year, my confidence as a returning student was affirmed when Pulp Fiction made Ventures-style surf rock popular again.

I more or less maintained that confidence through the transitions of marriage and motherhood, relocations to Colorado and Minnesota and corresponding career changes. I believed homesickness was for kids and for people who moved internationally or under duress. Even as a college student, homesickness seemed to place me in an immature minority. As an adult, I did not expect to come unmoored when my husband’s career took our family from Minnesota to the Pacific Northwest.

•••

Here is a partial catalog of things that have made me cry since we moved to a suburb of Seattle last year: a parking structure where all the spaces are compact, because I miss the ample welcome of a Midwestern parking lot; the opening page of a novel dedicated to “the great state of Minnesota”; an area car show, because it was to St. Paul’s annual vintage car show as “Rock Around the Clock” is to the entire American Graffiti soundtrack; a photo of John C. Reilly, because I once noticed that Minnesota’s eastern border looks like his face in profile.

I am ashamed of my emotions, ashamed that I am not content to live in a comfortable house in a safe neighborhood between the Puget Sound and the Cascades. Our new hometown has good schools, a downtown with an art gallery and a live theater, hiking and biking trails, a farmers market. Our new neighbors build community in many ways—educating and caring for children, volunteering at the food bank and soup kitchen, protecting natural resources, creating art—and they have welcomed our participation in these activities. We’re surrounded by beauty: trees, lakes, mountains, and a creek where the salmon run every fall. My husband says he is still astonished that we get to live here.

I know how he feels. When we moved to Minnesota, I was overwhelmed with gratitude. We arrived in autumn, my favorite season. I basked in the low-angled sunlight reflecting off St. Paul’s Como Lake, the red and gold leaves crunching beneath my feet as I circled the water. Our family picked apples at a local orchard, watched squirrels and birds at an urban nature center, and met other families at a park where my son learned to ride his bike. In winter, the season that defines Minnesota for people who have never been there, we discovered sledding hills and indoor playgrounds, and the tropical plant room at the free-admission conservatory, where anyone could find warmth and color on a bleak day. We found that we lived among neighbors who would clear our driveway with their snow blowers without being asked.

But I loved Minnesota before I experienced those things. I loved it before I lived there because my grandparents had called it home. I had spent Christmases and summer vacations with them, and with the aunts and uncles and cousins still living throughout the state. I knew something of Minnesota’s history and its coalescence with my family’s history, and so moving there felt like a homecoming. Moving away felt like an evacuation, like being emptied from a vessel made from parts of myself.

I assumed that these feelings would fade after a brief adjustment period. Months after moving, I wrote off my ongoing melancholy as stress or Vitamin D deficiency. When it occurred to me that I might be homesick, this self-diagnosis seemed so implausible that I Googled “adult homesickness” to verify its existence. My search turned up several recent articles on the subject, including an op-ed in The New York Times by a writer named Susan Matt. Based on a decade of research, Matt concluded that feelings of displacement and depression are common among adults who relocate. Yet we are reluctant to acknowledge “the substantial pain of leaving home” in an era that regards mobility as a virtue.

Matt’s byline referred me to her book, Homesickness: An American History, in which I read about homesick colonists and nineteenth-century immigrants. I learned that homesickness became taboo in the twentieth century, when embracing progress meant surrendering ties to the past. What most interested me was the connection between homesickness and nostalgia, which are literally synonymous. The word nostalgia was coined in the seventeenth century as a diagnostic term describing a painful longing for home. It combines the Greek words nostos (“return home”) and algia (“pain”) and remained in use as a medical term through the Civil War. It was only during the rapidly changing twentieth century that nostalgia gained distinction from homesickness—longing for a lost time as opposed to a lost place.

I recognize these desires as twins, but how do I understand twins born years apart? What does it mean that I am nostalgic for a time before my own birth? It’s notable that when I cry for Minnesota, I am moved by my sense of its shape, of a history that predates my life by decades. Like the homesick freshman I was, I am again sustained by popular music of the past. I recently bought a turntable and have acquired on vinyl the greatest hits of Bobby Vinton, Herb Alpert, The Brothers Four—artists who were on the charts the year my dad graduated from high school. My most common earworm, the song that both rouses and soothes my sentiments, is “Theme from A Summer Place.”

•••

In 1960, when Percy Faith recorded “Summer Place,” my grandparents owned a creamery in Fingal, North Dakota. My dad was fourteen years old. His parents had purchased the creamery when he was four and would operate it until 1968, when my dad was in college.

My grandfather was a butter man. He bought cream from farmers, pasteurized the cream in a heated vat, and churned it by the ton. By hand, he scooped butter from the churn into 64-pound boxes that were trucked to school cafeterias and military bases. He kept two boxes from each churning and parceled that butter into one-pound cartons sold locally. The town was proud of its butter, deeming it the best around. Fingal butter was served in restaurants and at the Woolworth counter in Valley City. Fingal natives who had moved to Fargo or Grand Forks filled shopping bags with Grandpa’s butter on return visits. At a reunion just months ago, a former classmate showed my dad a yellow carton with a Fingal Creamery label that she has saved for almost fifty years.

Butter unifies. It absorbs and concentrates flavor. It creates texture and emulsifies, blending ingredients that would not otherwise mix. A man who makes butter connects farmers with townspeople, towns with cities, schoolchildren with soldiers. The butter maker’s family is embraced. His wife is esteemed, his children golden boys and girls.

This is the refuge I seek in my father’s past. I want to know the butter maker. I want to break bread with the butter maker’s family. I want my children to walk to school with the butter maker’s children. I want to be the butter maker, and the butter, melting into the place where I belong.

•••

I have become a broken record. At some point the longing to be absorbed becomes self-absorption. I must reconcile my butter-gold narrative with reality. In 1960, Fingal was homogenous as milk. I imagine it was possible there to feel separate from the world, from the civil unrest churning the nation, from the state’s native population. Even so, I hear whispers of Fingal residents who did not find sanctuary in small-town North Dakota.

Nostalgia is too easy. It saddens me that the Fingal Creamery ceased operations in 1970, two years after my grandparents sold it and returned to Minnesota. But to romanticize an era when mom-and-pops outnumbered franchises is to overlook disenfranchisement. My own comfort and safety are not enough, after all. I am out of my element where I live now, like frozen butter unevenly spackled on toast, and maybe that is the point. Maybe I am here, in this place and time, to be uncomfortable in a culture consumed by comfort. Frozen butter will keep safe indefinitely, but safety is not its purpose. Butter is for flavor and texture, qualities that are lost after too long in the freezer.

In other words, it is time to expand my soundtrack. I’ll always have a soft spot for golden oldies. But there are living voices singing songs I want to hear, street musicians and symphony members I want to know. I want to feel the pulsing of every drum in the beating of my heart. If the asynchrony is jarring, I am ready to be shaken.

•••

This is KIM KANKIEWICZ’s second essay for Full Grown People. While writing it, she discovered that The Brothers Four are from Seattle and are still performing. She has tickets to attend a Brothers Four concert the next time her parents are in town and hopes to hear a live performance of her dad’s favorite road trip song, “Blue Water Line.”

Eye of the Beholder

By Kim Kankiewicz

I wait in a lobby with purple carpet and rounded walls and a magazine rack stuffed with picture books. A fifty-gallon aquarium nests in a cubby four feet above the ground. Orange and green nursery school furniture occupies the central space, surrounded by clusters of adult-sized chairs. I am thirty-five years old and the only patient here without a parent.

My life story could be set in eye doctors’ offices. I’ve been pinned by technicians to a reclining chair in Phoenix as my first ophthalmologist dropped atropine into my pupils. I’ve written fawning essays about an eye doctor in South Dakota who nicknamed me Trouper. I’ve leaned into tonometry machines in Iowa and Kansas, with medical students lined up to scrutinize me. I’ve mourned for an eye doctor in Minnesota who died of cancer. I’ve formed an uneasy friendship with the wife of an eye doctor in Nebraska who had an affair with his nurse. I learned I was pregnant from an ophthalmologist in Boulder reviewing pre-operative blood work.

In all those encounters, I’ve never been the right age for my eye clinic. As a child with glaucoma, I grew accustomed to being an anachronism. Among the crepe skin and hunched backs, I was pink cheeks and muscled legs. It was one of the ways my visual impairment made me uncomfortably visible.

I laugh when, two decades after my diagnosis, I find myself the lone adult patient in a room full of children sporting eye patches and doll-sized spectacles. The mother next to me, a nervous twenty-something, glances my way, and I pretend to be amused by the book I’m holding. I hadn’t considered what should have been obvious when I scheduled this appointment: a specialist in strabismus, colloquially known as “lazy eye,” is primarily a pediatric ophthalmologist.

This is confirmed when the doctor enters the exam room twenty minutes later. He is wearing a Mickey Mouse tie. He skims the pages in my fat file and wheels his chair over. We sit knee to knee as he shines a penlight into my blind eye, then studies it through a scope.

“Working around your other surgeries, I can get you to eighty percent alignment,” he says.

“Would this be covered by insurance?” I can see nothing from my right eye, which is why it’s wandered further off kilter every year since the surgery in my teens that marred my appearance without saving my sight.

“It’s medically justifiable,” the doctor says. There’s some practical benefit: face-to-face communication would be less distracting for my conversation partners. And my blind eye takes in just enough light to claim a functional benefit.

Realistically, though, strabismus surgery won’t improve my vision and isn’t necessary. I knew this when I made the appointment. What I am contemplating is, for all intents and purposes, cosmetic surgery.

•••

I once vowed, horrified when a classmate had breast implants before she was old enough to vote, that I would never opt for surgery that wasn’t medically necessary. My smug self-assurance came from an unusually informed perspective. By my twenties, I’d lost count of the eye surgeries I’d endured. Enough to have preferences regarding anesthesia. (Fentanyl is nice.) I knew that surgery is always nightmarish, recovery always excruciating.

The collective experience of surgery made me feel like a cadaver, indifferently carved open and sewn back together. When the doctor in Boulder joked that mine was his first pregnancy announcement after screening for six thousand cataract operations, I wasn’t impressed. I was just glad to be distinguishable from the other 5,999 patients.

Only on the operating table did I want my handicap to stand out. Everywhere else, I wanted to appear intact. I tried to achieve this by excelling in school, performing onstage, and ultimately starving and exercising my body until it collapsed and I left college for bulimia treatment. Eating disorders are complicated, their genesis complex, but I know mine originated between an exam chair where I squinted against the light and a school hallway where I wore sunglasses indoors, between a hospital bed where I wanted to be conspicuous and a waiting room where I did not.

Healing from an eating disorder is simultaneously complicated and simple. Recovery is a lifetime process, but it often comes down to treating oneself with both gentleness and brutal honesty. I’ve acknowledged my self-absorption, my complicity with a system that values women’s adherence to narrow standards of beauty above all else. Most of the time, I resist preoccupation with my appearance by throwing balled-up socks at the television when a woman is blatantly objectified and asking myself who would possibly benefit if I were more attractive.

Who will benefit if my wonky right eye is aligned with the left one? I don’t believe anyone has ever been too distracted by my lopsided gaze to maintain a coherent conversation with me. I suspect some acquaintances have not even noticed what feels to me like a huge deformity. Despite the growth I think I’ve experienced, I have to consider that in the end this surgery is nothing more than vanity.

•••

The operation takes place at a children’s hospital. The intake nurse, who rarely needs to differentiate between patient and child, talks to me in a high-pitched voice. Even when she catches herself, she seems unable to adjust her register. To add to her discomfiture, I am accompanied by my mother because my husband was called away on out-of-state business. My mother has experienced nearly as many eye surgeries as I have and is worried primarily about finding her way back to my house if I’m not lucid enough to navigate. She comforts me, unexpectedly, in a way my husband could not.

“It’s a simple repair,” she says. “Nothing to feel conflicted about.”

Mothers don’t cause eating disorders, but if you made a list of the ways they might contribute to them, very few of those factors would apply to my mom. She has an incomprehensibly easy relationship with food. She makes healthy choices as a way of life. I don’t recall her uttering a single deprecating remark about her body or mine. The closest she came to criticizing my appearance was asking semi-regularly, “Is that what you’re wearing today?” as if I’d donned a costume to amuse her before dressing in my actual clothes. (Retrospective photographic evidence explains her bewilderment.)

I didn’t understand my own feelings about my eye disease, and I hid them from my mother. She hid from me the likelihood that I’d be blind before adolescence, the plan to relocate to a city with a blind school, the fears that she was inadequate to help me survive. What I saw was my parents’ unwavering presence. Intuiting that my vision was at risk, I was unworried. My parents would take care of me. Little did I know my mother felt as insufficient as I did.

The surgery is not as simple as my mother predicts. Through the haze of anesthesia, the operating team’s conversation sounds graver than usual. The operation, I later learn, lasts an hour longer than scheduled. When I awake, my surgeon explains that he discovered additional real estate left from previous operations. He’d altered his game plan to avoid damaging a shunt. In practical terms, this means more pain and less certainty of success.

It will be days before my eye turns from blood-red to white, weeks before I can peruse the lasting impact of surgery. Will it noticeably change my appearance? Will it change anything else?

“I’m glad you could be here,” I tell my mom, when she has driven us home without a wrong turn.

“Me too,” she says.

•••

My children are solicitous when they return from a friend’s house after my operation. This is their first brush with eye surgery, and their concern charms me. I explain the procedure as my mom defined it for me, as a repair. They don’t know the surgery is an attempt to improve my appearance; I won’t let on that I wish to be beautiful. It’s an intermittent desire, one that no longer defines me, yet I’ve gone under the knife to satisfy it.

I want to spare my little girl from measuring her value in a mirror, but Signe is learning, inevitably, that beauty matters. She has confided that she hopes she is pretty enough to have friends in kindergarten. I stumbled through what I hoped was an appropriate response, enumerating the qualities that make her a good friend. She looked unconvinced.

When Signe stared at my face a few months before surgery, I thought of an essay by Alice Walker. Walker dreaded the day her daughter would notice her mother’s disfigured eye, just as my daughter was noticing mine. The pivotal moment in Walker’s essay is when her daughter remarks, “Mommy, there’s a world in your eye.” I shouldn’t set much store by this atypically affectionate account of Walker’s relationship with her now estranged daughter. Even so, I was crushed when my little girl said, “Your eye looks scary.”

She recognized my hurt before I masked it and apologized for days afterward. I reassured her she’d done nothing wrong, talked about how differences make us beautiful, told her my blind eye reminded me to be grateful for the eye that can see. But she had observed that deep down, I too hope I’m pretty enough to belong.

You won’t find integral as a synonym for beautiful in any thesaurus. In my vocabulary, they share meaning. Integral means both whole and essential to the whole. If you are integral, you are complete, and the world would not be complete without you. What I have learned over years of reflection is that when I long to be beautiful, I long to be integral.

•••

Three weeks after surgery, my irises are horizontally aligned so closely you might think they were allies. The overall effect, however, is unremarkable. My right iris remains a paler shade of green than the left. My right pupil is still the black-marker dot of a child’s drawing, never dilating because it never beholds light. My right eyelids, stretched and sliced over decades of treatment, still gape like snarled lips.

As a child, I heard a doctor say my disease could “burn out” by adolescence. I imagined a celebration, like a sweet sixteen party with balloons and cake, attended by my friends, my doctors, the aunts and uncles who inquired about my eyes during holiday dinners, the teachers who had visited me at the hospital. Now, as an adult who should have outgrown such naive fantasies, I had let myself believe again that a single moment in my ocular history could unbreak what came before.

Most days I am reconciled with the badge of my brokenness. Most days understanding my desire for beauty as a desire for wholeness is enough to make peace with it. Most days I believe I am integral to—and through—my mother and daughter and every woman who wants to be integral, too. But some days I close my eyes, unseeing and unseen, and dream of revision.

•••

KIM KANKIEWICZ has written for Brain, Child, Denver’s Westword, the Saint Paul Almanac, and public radio. She is a recent transplant to the Seattle area, where she hasn’t yet found an eye doctor.