Proctor - Landslide: true stories

also by minna zallman proctor

Do You Hear What I Hear? Religious Calling,The Priesthood, and My Father

As Coauthor

I Sang the Unsingable: My Life in Twentieth-Century Music with Bethany Beardslee

As Translator

These Possible Lives by Fleur Jaeggy

Belief or Nonbelief? A Confrontation by Umberto Eco and Carlo Maria Martini

The Angel of History by Bruno Arpaia

Federico Fellini: His Life and Work by Tullio Kezich

Love in Vain: Selected Stories by Federigo Tozzi

In Every Sense Like Love: Stories by Simona Vinci

What We Dont Know About Children by Simona Vinci

This is a work of nonfiction. However, certain names, identifying characteristics, and locales have been changed to protect the privacy of the people involved.

Published by Catapult

catapult.co

Copyright 2017 by Minna Zallman Proctor

All rights reserved

eISBN: 201-695-20-70

Catapult titles are distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West.

Phone: 866-400-5351

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016952070

Printed in the United States of America

987654321

for Arlene Zallman

19342006

I didnt go to the moon. I went much furtherfor time is the longest distance between two places.

Tennessee Williams

Contents

Preface: On Faith and Reason

My kids always seem to have their most intense conversations in the backseat of the car. Or maybe thats just when they have conversations that I hear, but I suspect that it is also one of the only times in their day when they are sitting side by side, with nothing to distract them and no one besides each other to answer to. My son, Isaac, might reflect on death as we pass the graveyard between our apartment in Brooklyn and school, or he will talk about how looking at the stars makes him feel awestruck and sick with fear at the same time. The two of them will navigate our complex family structure, whos related to whom and what difference it makes. My daughter, Anna, will say how funny it is that Isaac has a baby brother shes not related to and wonder if Isaac thinks its funny and hell say no, its not funny but that in a way she is kind of related to him and yes maybe it is funny after all. Theyll review all the grandparents, living and dead, the distinctions between first and second marriages moot by now. From my point of view, theyre strolling through a minefield of bad blood, grudges, hurt feelings, and rifts. But they didnt live through all of that and so it doesnt matter. The slightest shift of perspective and its all obsolete.

Isaac, Anna said the other day, picking up one of his seven- hundred-page fantasy adventure tomes from the floor of the car, this is a terrible unicorn. She was referring to the picture on the cover.

Anna, not all unicorns are good.

No, this is a bad unicorn. Hes scary. The unicorn in the picture had blood on its horn and a fierce look in its eye.

Unicorns dont have to be all rainbows and glitter, Anna. Some unicorns fight.

No. Unicorns love people and protect them.

Some unicorns hurt people. They were just invented as characters and can be all different ways. They can even be monsters. You just think that unicorns are supposed to be all loving and perfect.

I know what unicorns are supposed to be like. Anna, who was seven, had been waging this battle on many fronts as the children around her had stopped believing in so many of the original tall tales, Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy (with whom Anna has an avid correspondence).

Anna, have you ever heard of the Brothers Grimm? Isaac is two years older than his sister and takes full advantage of his superior knowledge.

Yes, she lied.

The Brothers Grimm were two brothers who wrote all these stories, hundreds of years ago. Everything took place in ancient dark forests that had monsters in them. They invented unicorns. Anna, you should know this.

No, they didnt. Unicorns are real and they dont scare people.

They do and theyre invented! Theres a unicorn that terrorizes an entire village in one of the stories.

Isaac, do you know what the problem is? Do you know what the point is? You believe in books, right?

Right.

You believe in books and authors and words on the page.

Yes. Of course.

But thats the point, Isaac. You believe in books and II believe in unicorns.

Folie deux

The statement is pointless

The finger is speechless

R. D. Laing, Knots

Instead of kicking me out of tenth grade, or even giving me detention for that matter, Ms. Morand (vice principal of discipline) remanded me to psychological evaluation. Ms. Morand was a stealth intellectual, posing as a former PE specialist, six feet tall with an unforgiving haircut. She was frank with me: if I wasnt going to smoke in the bathroom, threaten other students with a pocket knife, or present convincing evidence of an unsafe home environment, there was no structure built into our school system to address my chronic truancy. It was plain crazy to cut classes four days out of five.

When I met the graduate student assigned to evaluate me in the broom closet off the lobby with a table in it, she seemed out of her leaguenot least because our appointment was scheduled during remedial geometry, a class Id only ever been to twice that semester. She gave me a blank piece of paper and told me she was going to ask me some questions and I should write down the answers. How many questions? I asked. Dont worry about that, she answered. Feeling for some reason like Harriet the Spy, I positioned myself in the upper left-hand corner of the paper and waited for a battery of questions.

You see how your writing is so cramped and small? I was told four questions later. It indicates anxiety, fearfulness, and insecurity.

Or, I countered, that I didnt know how many questions you were going to ask and how much room I would need.

At our next meeting, the graduate student and I discussed my nightmares. She suggested that I drink warm milk and eat turkey at night before bed. She also recommended that I start keeping a dream journalunwittingly triggering what would become a chronic lifelong hyper-responsiveness to my REM state, diametrically opposed to the intended purpose of easing my mind. I would go on to spend nights on end struggling to recapture fleeting dream imagery and speculate on its deeper, darker significance.

I was graduated to a professional psychologist, an expert in teenage girls who worked at an elite asylum for teenage girls with eating disorders, which happened to be tucked into a leafy cul-de -sac ten minutes from my house. The grounds seemed aspirationalthe institution of choice for future Sylvia Plaths. The doctors office was beige in every respect and the doctors features aggressively nondescript, beige, like his walls. How do you feel about that? he asked in our first meeting, confusing me. He rephrased, How does that make you feel?

I started cutting therapy appointments too. When he finally called to remind me that I had a contract with the school to see him, I complained that our sessions were boring, that he was boring. I hated silence and craved interaction. I told him I thought his beige blinds were better conversationalists than he was and before hanging up, for good measure, I compared him to a turtle.