Hey, everyone, this week's post marks our one-year anniversary! Hooray for us! Hooray for you! Thanks for reading, and thanks for sharing your work with us.
A reminder to those of you in and around the Hub of the Universe (or at least of the Cambridge-Boston-Quincy metropolitan area): Come by Crema Cafe in Harvard Square this Saturday, September 13th, for a Meeting House meet-up and informal reading. We'll be at Crema (27 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA) from 10:30 till about noon. So bring some writing, bring a friend, have some coffee and a scone, and have some fun.
This week, we have an essay by Lisa Braxton. An award-winning journalist, former radio news reporter and announcer, television news anchor and reporter and editor of scholarly journals, Miss Braxton is currently manager of public education projects for the nonprofit National Fire Protection Association, based in Quincy, MA. Miss Braxton's articles have appeared in Black Enterprise magazine and other publications, and her short fiction and poetry have been published in Foliate Oak, Snake Nation Review, New Works Review, 63 Channels, and other journals. Miss Braxton earned her master’s degree at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, her bachelor’s degree at Hampton University, and is currently enrolled in the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University.
Read on!
Barriers
Not long after I had finished college and had begun my career in journalism in Virginia, I flew home to Connecticut one weekend to spend time with my parents. While there, I took a walk around the old neighborhood. Not much had changed. Kids played basketball in the street. Dogs barked and clawed at the fences their owners had installed to keep them under control. An ice cream truck glided over pot holes on the next block. I came upon the white Cape Cod style house with the green shutters where I had spent so much of my childhood outside of my own home. It was Fern’s house.
Fern and I lived three doors apart when we were growing up. I remember the day in the late 1960s when my mother dressed me in one of my favorite short sets, took me by my chubby hand and walked me down the street to meet Fern. I was five and she was four and a half. Fern was playing in the living room, wearing blue and white seersucker when her mother invited us in. She asked me to play Barbie dolls with her. The friendship was sealed over cups of Kool-Aid. Over time, we’d spend long afternoons splashing around in her family’s above-ground pool, jumping rope in her driveway, doing the hokey pokey at the local roller-skating rink and giggling half the night during sleepovers in her basement.
Eventually our childhood play gave way to long conversations on the phone about the cutest guys at high school and who we could get to teach us the latest dance steps before the Saturday night parties we would attend.
Later, we looked through college catalogs together. I enrolled at a university 500 miles away from home in Virginia. Fern went to a college only 20 minutes from her parents’ house. I spent one weekend with her at her dorm first semester freshman year and then invited her to my parents’ house later that semester to meet a college classmate who flew home with me for the Thanksgiving holiday. After that, my contact with Fern tapered off. I began to revel in the college life. I became editor-in-chief of my college newspaper, a student leader, and an on-air personality on my college radio station. On my brief visits home, my focus was on my new friendships and activities at school. I didn’t think to call Fern.
But years later, walking past the green-shuttered house on that weekend trip home, I grew wistful for her friendship. I longed to see Fern. I had heard that she had gotten engaged and I wanted to share in her excitement. When I called her, she and her fiancé came right over. They were holding hands and seemed very much in love. Observing them, I tried to grasp how it must have felt. At the time, I was conflicted, trying to maintain a relationship that I wasn’t certain I wanted to be in with a commitment-phobic guy I’d met at work.
After Fern told me about their wedding plans, I asked her, “How do you know when you’ve met the right person, the person you want to marry?”
She gazed lovingly at her fiancé and said, “You just know.”
Months later, after I had flown back to Virginia and decided to recommit myself to making my relationship work, hoping that if I persevered, this gentleman would one day marry me, my parents told me that Fern’s fiancé sang to her as she walked down the aisle. They had been invited to the wedding. I hadn’t. I chalked it up to Fern wanting to stay on a budget and only inviting people who lived close by. I told myself this to drown out the thought that Fern didn’t value our friendship as she once had.
Soon, the newlyweds bought a home in the suburbs and adopted a child. I would think about Fern on my return trips home, but I figured she wouldn’t have patience for an old friend who was still single and going through pitfalls and disappointments in her relationships. The sting of not being invited to the wedding and the fact that she didn’t contact me over the proceeding years reinforced this notion.
One year, a mutual friend told me that Fern had prepared a lavish feast for Thanksgiving Day and had invited a number of family and friends. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be her, in a secure marriage, raising a child, and living in a home that I owned and could be proud of. Another friend later told me about a conversation she’d had with Fern in which Fern talked at length about her daughter and the joys of motherhood.
Years went by, and after several job changes and relocations to different parts of the country, I was offered a position as an anchor/reporter at a television station near my hometown. Still, I did not contact Fern. Every time I thought of her accomplished personal life, it became progressively embellished in my mind and served to magnify my perceived failures. I began to feel that I could never face Fern and decided that I wanted nothing to do with her.
Then one evening after work, as I was driving down the street to my parents’ house, I noticed a line of cars outside of Fern’s parents’ home. I assumed it was a social gathering. Over the years her parents had had numerous club meetings, dinner parties, birthday parties and cookouts, so it didn’t seem unusual to see so many cars there. As I drove past the house the front door opened and I saw the guest entering the home hug the person who answered. I assumed it was an old friend being reunited with a member of Fern’s family.
When I got to my parents’ house, my mother informed me that she had something to tell me and that I should sit down at the kitchen table. It was then that I figured that it must have something to do with all the cars I had seen. Had someone fallen ill? Had there been an accident? Did one of Fern’s parents die suddenly?
My mother sat across from me with a solemn expression and her hands clasped. I began to dread what was coming. After a long pause, she began. “It’s Fern,” she said. “She’s dead.” Another pause. “She committed suicide.”
My hand went to my throat as I fought to steady myself, to catch my breath.
“When the police arrived,” my mother continued, “They had no doubt about what Fern had done. There was no question.”
I was shocked, incredulous. Later, I was told that Fern had been unhappy for some time, that her marriage had fallen apart, that she and her husband had been keeping up appearances for years, that he was threatening to leave, that months earlier she had attempted suicide but had been rushed to the hospital in time.
I was stunned. I thought back to the day that she and her fiancé had come by to see me all those years earlier. I found it impossible to link up the joy of that moment with the reality of the tragedy that had just occurred. I couldn’t believe that the little girl whose laughter I could still hear and smile I could still see in my childhood memories could find herself trapped in a deep, dark emotional corridor filled with so much pain and hopelessness that the only solution for her was to willingly hasten her own death. I didn’t understand how someone who had the family life and financial security for which I had longed for so long could be willing to leave it behind.
I sought counsel from the pastoral staff of my church, co-workers, and family members. Months later, I was on my way to cover a story for the evening newscast, riding in the news car driven by the videographer I was working with that evening. He inadvertently drove past the church where Fern’s funeral had been held. I was immediately taken back to the moment before the service when I saw the hearse parked in front of the church. I became hysterical and my co-worker had to pull the car over.
Time passed and Fern’s death continued to gnaw at me. A friend who knew Fern’s family phoned me one day and I shared my feelings with her. She invited me to go with her for a walk near the woods to enjoy the fall foliage.
“You see those leaves?” she said, pointing toward a stand of trees in the distance. “They’re beautiful aren’t they?” And they were. They were bursting with pungent shades of burnt orange, mauve and pale yellow. I wished I had brought my camera with me. My friend continued. “But when you walk right up on those leaves, how do they look?” I stepped close to a tree and examined the leaves. They were ravaged. They had jagged holes left by insects. They were pock marked, misshapen, withered at the edges and crumbling from dryness. “From a distance,” my friend continued, “Fern did seem to have the perfect life and the perfect relationship. It’s easy enough to give that impression when you’re wearing your public face. But up close, behind closed doors it wasn’t perfect at all.”
I have stopped trying to fathom why Fern couldn’t persevere, why she couldn’t just divorce, move out, focus on her child, channel her energy and hurts into her career or church life. I’ve stopped all of the conversations in my head that begin with the phrase “If only.” I’ve stopped beating myself up for not staying in contact with her.
Instead I’ve looked for and found powerful lessons from Fern’s decision that have helped me with my personal growth. I have reflected on the choice I’ve made to forego marriage with any number of individuals I’ve met over the years who were clearly unsuitable. I now see my path as prudent. And I am certainly not a failure, as I had once thought. I don’t idealize the institution of marriage the way I used to. And I’m not so quick to make assumptions about the lives of those around me based on what I see in front of me. I’m also not as quick to minimize my importance to people or my ability to make meaningful contributions to their lives.
