Anthropologies: Relating to her recounting and reliving

I am a slow reader with this book. Perhaps it is my own withdrawal from eight years of smoking cigarettes, that slowing of life when the body yearns and aches for something. I admittedly cannot even read the book in a linear fashion. I read it all. But I would read ten or fifteen pages, mark the page I stopped at, then skip ahead and do the same. I read the book like a person kicking a bad drug habit: without focus, without patience, caring so deeply and then not caring at all. The funny thing is, even when I filled in the missing pieces, added them to my notes on the book so that it fit into the organized chaos of understanding her life, her memoir, I feel like I read it exactly the way I was supposed to. I feel like I read it the way she may have wrote it. I read fragments, pieces, juicy details that were refined through time and the need to tell it to others.

Perhaps I read this book slowly because of the way Alvarado sketches out her world. The way that her details situate us, the readers, in her memories and thoughts. Alvarado does this in so many ways. She has these short sentences that situate us in time or in a state. “I’m eighteen.” And “It’s 1972.” These short sentences are almost always contextualized with more. Alvarado is long winded as hell and I love it. So when she gives us these short nuggets, I take them and let them sit with me. It makes you slow down and breathe. “So it has come to this. The human body, a shell.” Her moments of brevity are followed up with how she was a very old, a very tired eighteen, or about a memory that makes her never be able to forget what year it was. 

Another one of the greatest examples in the book is “Behind me, the baby grand piano; behind her, the gilded mirror.” We are given the kind of layout, set up, that a camera would have, some cinematic staging of her piece. 

But what settled deep into my body is the way Alvarado gave us long, descriptive sentences that wrapped us into her world. In the beginning, the following passage made me feel as if I was living the dream with her. The list-making is an effective way of showing the character her thought process of recounting during the dream (or in it’s recollection) but also is structured with a very interesting use of punctuation that allows us to flow effortlessly from one strain of thought and list to the next. 

“what haunts are not the dead. but the gaps left in us by the secrets of others. once, feverish with pneumonia, i left my body. and floated down the long hallway. past my parents’ room. past he bathroom. past my sisters. all empty. i had come loose in time. no one else was home: the kitchen, empty, counters clean, mail stacked neatly on the island, grocery list, tomatoes, bread crossed out, milk; my father’s office, no one, sheets of paper littered across the top of his desk, maps rolled up. the family room, tv off. the pool dark water on the other side of the glass doors. glass like pools of black and its night, late, late, and my little sister and I hear piano music coming from the living room. faint music like a song heard through a window on a summer night. 

Although I believe that this is the best way she stages the reader as undoubtedly there, as a key figure in the making of her own memory, a later section demonstrates the importance of the readers felt presence, too. When she is recalling the experience with the mysterious man from her dream, where she questions whether or not he is a ghost or if he is a metaphor for the evil that is sudden loss, she does a great job of putting the reader into an eerie setting of feeling like they are experiencing this mysterious man. The readers feeling the tingling sensation of a surprising whisper in your ear. But I cannot leave out the amazing passage of her detailing the feeling of realizing she must quit dope. 

“but then I love that way when it happen, how it happened, when it's no longer something you want something you need something need to quit. what are the dividing lines? How did this happen to us, that's what you wonder. How could we have been so stupid? Time to quit, that’s what you say. Over and over again you say this: when your arms get sore; when you no longer get high, you only get well; when everyone is looking to rip you off; when you have no money; when you’re getting evicted; when your car won't start or you run it out of oil (because who can afford oil?); when the cops come to your house in the middle of the night, the light on the helicopter so bright, it may as well be noon, when the junkie who’s selling to you tells his kid to watch the TV but the kid hears the match and turns his head and sees the flame underneath the spoon and there his mother is, standing up against the wall, checking the veins on her arms, and the dad stands up walks over to the kid, all of five years old, and slaps him, hard, and says, I told you not to look. And you think, what the hell am I doing? Living in a bad movie? Or maybe it’s the day the Diane, just out of the hospital, her fourth miscarriage, overdoses, and you have to put her in the bathtub, run cold water over her to bring her out of it. And then you watch her get on the motorcycle behind her boyfriend and you know that could be your future. You could be Diane.”

She draws us in by recounting and reliving these fragments of her life, these various moments, quite like her memoir, that create the whole story of her thinking its time to quit dope or thinking its time to tell her story. She uses second person point of view to ground us in these moments, let us relive them with her (hell, on our own). I feel as if we go through the motions of her thought processes and memories that inform this decision in such a way that the decision is created in us (and not just a simple: the narrator announces she wants to quit dope because of these listed moments). No, the reader makes the decision with her. We get find it in us to need there to be more for her than just cold bathtub overdoses and junkies beating on their kids to avoid shame. 

To go back to the slowness in which I read this book: “Or maybe something sad had already caught up with him and, as kind as he was, had sucked everything out of him and now there was only a paralysis, inertia, the inertia that was dope because, even when you weren’t doing it, it was all you wanted. The inertia of absence, like the gap a lover leaves where nothing else matters.” I have had lovers hitting rock bottom from heroin. My father has been doing heroin as long as I’ve been alive. And there is a slowness in the way we think of a life, when we are taking on this impossible feat of trying to talk to readers, I mean pull up a chair and have a heart to heart with these strangers reading your work that will somehow help you deepen what you’re talking about. 

I am also thinking about this same slowness within the intimacy in which she writes about her family. I have plenty of things that I relate to Alvarado with. But we do not have the same mommy issues or daddy issues. They are quite different and yet I feel like she was able to place us within the stories of her family enough to make us feel the type of understanding, to get the type of impact, needed to, again, deepen what she is talking about. It’s an emotional depth, a journey in the readers’ bodies that goes elsewhere, goes somewhere conceptual/intellectual pathways just don’t. 

Let’s go there: 

“Every time I want to talk to him, a little voice in my mind, my mothers?, always ask, does this matter, does this really matter, is it important enough to disturb your father?” She paces this sentence so that she can pack it full of the pauses and breaks that make her own thought processes. She thinks this, and then that, thinks about that, thinks about something else, and then finishes the thought about this. And those branching thoughts are all to contextualize the initial thought. Another example of how she is able to speak to an emotionally charged, intimate thoughts regarding her family: 

“There was something fragile in my mother, something that mad me want to protect her. even when i was very young. i knew she was afraid, afraid of loss. her life had been defined by loss. i shall not want. i imagined her saying this every night as she fell asleep, everyday as she walked around the house. i shall not want. i shall not want, i shall not want.” Here, we sink into the place she once was. Choppy sentences and thoughts, gathered from the same parts of her mind, give us both the fragments of stories about a young Beth, an older Beth, her mother in her youth (experiencing such loss), and her mother older (more jaded). The repetition of “I shall not want” makes me wonder if who and when is saying “I shall not want.”`It is the slowness of time passing.