But our lives don’t belong only to us.
And yet, we are here to tell our stories and in this way to make sense of our lives. So how do you tell a story when you know that telling it will bring other people sorrow? Is it better, in the end, to just be silent?
Like I said, maybe I’m the wrong guy to ask.
* * *
My sister was currycombing her horse, and then the horse broke loose. Had a bee stung him? Checkmate galloped suddenly down the driveway and into the road and was struck by a car and killed.
* * *
And so. Let me now draw the curtain on our family, as it was, and allow a few years to pass.
Time heals some of the wounds that the world gives us, but not all of them, and some we keep forever. Incredibly, a few hurt more the longer ago they happened.
It is true that it is this business of being hurt, and healing in the aftermath, that gives us our character, our strength and wisdom. And I say, Hooray for wisdom! Hooray for strength!
But which would you choose, if given the choice between wisdom and happiness? Is illumination really all that great a consolation for heartbreak?
Anyway, I know which one I’d pick, if given the choice.
Which I wasn’t.
* * *
Now we are teenagers. Those odd children that we were—a nerd and a prodigy—have disappeared, or maybe it would be better to say receded.
We have moved from the house where I spent the long days wandering around a forest with Playboy and instead settled into a decrepit mansion on what is called the Main Line, the series of swanky suburbs outside of Philadelphia.
By the time we move, between my eighth- and ninth-grade years at school, the changes in our family are well in motion. My hair is growing longer, and I’ve swapped my plastic nerd Mr. Science glasses for little wire rims. I am a willowy, feline creature.
Incredibly, one of the moving men begins to flirt with me, under the belief that I am a hot, if flat-chested, teenage girl. But in this matter his hopes prove nugatory. When his discovery is made clear, he looks at me with anger and loathing, as if his disappointment is something I have somehow done to him on purpose.
My parents always told me the reason we moved was that the Earle estate had been sold to developers and that whole empire I once ruled in my splendid isolation was shortly to be transformed into lots of little subdivided lots. But I wonder, looking back, if perhaps that home was too synonymous with the people we had been and all at once—cruelly, randomly—stopped being?
In the summer of 1972, the Rolling Stones tour America, and our world bursts wide open. My sister comes home with Hot Rocks, and Sticky Fingers, and Let It Bleed, and suddenly the house is lousy with Mick Jagger. Cyndy develops an affection as well for Mott the Hoople, and the Who, and David Bowie. One night, we stay up late together to watch Dick Cavett interview Mick on TV. It is hard to say which one of them is more charming.
Also, there is Jesus Christ Superstar, which my rock-and-roll-hating father grumpily admits is a clever piece of music. Parts of it are in 7/4! he observes approvingly.
The house, in Devon, is haunted: by ghosts, by the residue of its legendary former occupants, the Hunts, and of course by us. Within a year or two, Playboy will also be among the dead, along with, heartbreakingly, my sister’s dog, Chloe, who has some sort of malfunctioning pancreas, the direct result, I suspect, of the overbreeding that Disney’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians makes endemic. To our new house, with its long, creaking stairs and many unoccupied, leaking rooms, we have brought Penny, who now waddles in and out of a dog door in order to squat, tremblingly, in a fenced-in area adjacent to the house. Every couple of days, my mother goes out to this place—she calls it “the kennel”—with a shovel and an aluminum bucket.
Here are the things we have not brought to Devon: The Venus flytraps. The rocket arsenal. My model trains. My clock shaped like an owl with the eyes that tick left, then tick right. The saltwater aquarium with my seahorses clinging by their tails to plastic seaweed.
In a storage room on the third floor, next to the room where I now live in a chamber covered with posters