DAMAGE

Abstract

3 7 R D A M A G E M A R I B E T H F I S C H E R The beautiful plate I cracked in half as I wrapped it in tissue paper – as if the worship of a thing might be the thing that breaks it. – Laura Kasischke, ‘‘After Ken Burns,’’ in Space, in Chains ‘‘I know my mom was really weird about your last novel,’’ my eighteen-year-old niece, Abby, said to me on New Year’s Day as we hurried through the grocery store looking for the ingredients to make a dessert involving cereal, pretzels, and M&M’s coated with chocolate. ‘‘But I’m so grateful that you wrote it.’’ The comment stopped me. My novel had devastated Abby’s mother, my younger sister, in ways I could never have anticipated. Although I understood my sister’s pain, which was searing and nuclear in its bright, awful power, I’d been shattered by her reaction . On that day in the grocery store, almost six years had passed since the book was published. My sister and I had reconciled, but it was a shaky reconciliation based on the unspoken agreement that we not talk about the book again. Ever. I glanced at Abby, thinking how much she resembled my 3 8 F I S C H E R Y sister – the same thick blond hair, pale skin, petite frame. I also saw in her glimpses of my nephews, her brothers, bright funny boys who had died two years apart from a genetic disease. There was something of Zachary in Abby’s solemn gray eyes, and as she turned to grab a shopping cart I saw in the upward tilt to her chin a flash of Sam’s elfin mischievousness. Loss unspooled inside me. And grief, a word that seems both ancient and timeless. I think of fossils, a seashell discovered on a mountaintop, the bones of dinosaurs buried beneath subdivisions. Maybe there’s no such thing as healing. Life goes on, we move forward, but traces remain behind, the shape of grief pressed into a word, a memory, an ordinary moment. Abby’s comment unearthed in me the understanding that I’d never gotten over what had happened between my sister and me, had never really healed. I knew my sister hadn’t either. Perhaps because healing involves forgiveness, and there was no one to forgive because there was no one to blame – except that wasn’t exactly true either, was it? At first, I didn’t know how to respond to Abby’s comment. She’d been casually asking how I was, what I was writing, and I’d responded just as casually, I thought; things were good, but I was frustrated with my writing. This last part, about my frustration, was an understatement, like saying there’s a small hole in the earth when I was talking about the Grand Canyon. What I really felt was despair. Had Abby heard this in my voice? For nearly two years, I’d been struggling to write. I’d get an idea and begin, but within weeks, sometimes days, I’d feel the energy seeping away. The word miscarriage comes to mind, though I resist it. Not being able to write is not like losing a child; nothing is like losing a child. Still, when I picture those mornings of trying to write, of sitting alone at the antique table in the kitchen, I feel it in my gut: the sinking sensation of oh no and not again and the dread as I stay very still, trying to will words onto the paper even as another part of me knows that what was vibrant and alive just moments ago is slipping away. In the past few months, I’d become almost afraid to write, for it seemed the minute I began putting ideas into words, I ruined the ideas. I think of butterfly collectors pinioning wings against black velvet, of John James Audubon killing the gorgeous birds he D A M A G E 3 9 R longed to paint, and I wonder if it is always like this – we damage what we...