Margaret Robison - The Long Journey Home: A Memoir

The Long Journey Home is a work of nonfiction. Some names
and identifying details have been changed.

Copyright 2011 by Margaret Robison

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

S PIEGEL & G RAU and Design is a registered
trademark of Random House, Inc.

Portions of were originally published in Renascence (Winter/Spring, 1993).

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission
to reprint previously published material:

Harvard University Press: There is a pain so utter from The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition by Emily Dickinson, edited by Ralph W. Franklin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), copyright 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College.

Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., and Harold Ober Associates Incorporated: Four lines from Dreams from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, Associate Editor, copyright 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Print rights in the United Kingdom and worldwide electronic and audio rights are administered by Harold Ober Associates Incorporated. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., and Harold Ober Associates Incorporated.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Robison, Margaret.
The long journey home: a memoir / Margaret Robison.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-922-2
1. Robison, Margaret. 2. Robison, MargaretChildhood and youth. 3. Robison, Margaret
Family. 4. Robison, MargaretHealth. 5. Women artistsUnited StatesBiography.
6. ArtistsUnited StatesBiography. 7. Women authors, AmericanBiography.
8. Young womenGeorgiaBiography. I. Title.
CT275.R7435A3 2011
975.8043092dc22 2010029327
[B]

www.spiegelandgrau.com

Jacket design: Abby Weintraub
Jacket images: courtesy of the author (girl), Ronnie Sampson, Viridian/iStock Vectors/Getty Images (bird)

v3.1

For Pat King

Why are you here?

A young psychiatrist sat across from me, clipboard propped against his crossed leg. My friend Helen and Dr. Turcottes daughter June sat beside me, silent. My son Chris stood in the doorway, his adolescent face earnest and distressed.

Because the Amherst water is polluted, I replied flatly. Because the rain is poisoned.

Dr. Turcotte sat across from me, sleeping, his chin resting on his chest. Lamplight glistened on his thick white hair. It was he who had driven me to this psychiatric hospital, who had driven us all, me in the backseat silent.

Because I have a therapist I wouldnt recommend to the devil, I said.

The young psychiatrist wrote something on the questionnaire clamped to the clipboard.

I did not tell him that a bomb as large as the one that leveled Hiroshima was about to go off anytime.

My son shifted his weight. Behind him, in the hall, a nurse pushed a cart full of medications past the open door.

The doctor looked up from his questionnaire. Religion?

With my breath I lifted a hot-air balloon off the ground and was keeping it afloat at a safe height. The balloon basket was sturdy and well insulated. If I can keep my son, friends, and myself in the air until the danger is past, well all be safe, I thought.

Religion? the doctor asked again.

I take the best from each and throw the rest away, I answered sullenly. I dont remember how long I kept the balloon aloft, but I was exhausted from the effort.

What day of the week is this?

I dont know.

I looked down at my bandaged fingers and left wrist. I had burned my fingers by holding them against the coils of a small electric heater in my kitchen. Before or after this I had pressed a burning cigarette into the flesh of my left wrist. But I have no memory of doing these things, only a memory of lying on a table in the hospitals emergency room while a doctor dressed the wounds. Self-inflicted wounds. I looked down at the bandaged evidence, feeling a mix of incredulity and shame.

Whats todays date?

I dont know.

The doctor scribbled something on the paper again.

My mother never knows the date when shes writing or painting, Chris said. His statement sounded like a plea. What he meant was that I didnt keep up with the date even when I wasnt crazy.

The bomb didnt go off. How hard I worked, using my breath to keep us so high for so long.

Now I was in a decompression chamber. People came and went, saying nothing. No one understood what was happening to me. It didnt matter. I didnt expect them to.

Breathe, I told myself. Just breathe.

My son and friends left the hospital for the night.

I stood before a mirror, talking to myself, gesturing with both hands. But when I try to remember what I was telling or asking my image in the mirror, when I try to go back to enter this experience again, I am able only to stand outside my body. Like someone floating above a car accident, looking down at her crushed and mangled limbs, I can only observe. I feel nothing. But when I look into my eyes, what I see there is terror.

M OTHER STOOD AT THE TOP OF THE LADDER, SCRAPING WALLPAPER OFF the living room walls with a putty knife. Uncle Franks wife, my Aunt Mary, came through the unlatched screen door without knocking.

She looked up at Mother.

Louisa, I just want you to know that youll never have a house as nice as mine. Mother looked down at Aunt Mary, who stood with her hands on her hips, a white leather handbag looped over one arm. She was dressed in a red-and-lavender polka-dotted dress and white sling-backed shoes. I tell you this now so you get all such thoughts out of your head from the start, Aunt Mary continued.

Mothermarried three months and already six weeks pregnant with mewas wearing a sweat-drenched cotton housedress. Scraps and curls of wallpaper lay around the ladder. All afternoon shed been soaking down the layers of old, stained paper and scraping them off; rose-colored stripes and rosebuds, formal bouquets and baskets of violets, bits and pieces of Richter family history were now strewn on the floor.

Aunt Mary was much older than Mother, who had married the youngest of the three sons in the Richter family. Daddy and Uncle Frank were partners in a produce business. With their sister Bamaher real name was Alabama Margareteliving miles away in Columbia, North Carolina, Aunt Mary was reigning matriarch, and according to Mother she intended to keep it that way.

Mother climbed down the ladder. Why, Mary, she said in what must have been that sweet tone of hersice water running just beneath the wordsa new house is the farthest thing from my mind. Im just trying to get this dirty old place clean and decent before the baby comes.