In the Beginning
The way marriage is promoted you’d think partners had never disappointed each other, that no life union had ever disintegrated without egregious and sinister interference. Marriage advocates have never felt the silent resentment build in the car until it clogs the air like London fog; or maybe they have, and their misery wants company.
Wait, let me start at the beginning.
See, in the beginning my parents hadn’t met. No, wait, in the beginning my father was married to someone else. Hrm, in the beginning my grandmother and my grandfather fought.
Yes. In the beginning our forebears fought. Or maybe one harangued and the other drank, fighting noise with silence. There is a silence that lets things pass like water and a silence that hurls things back, like a drink or an ashtray or a handful of kitchen scraps.
Disbelieve those who tell you silence is passive. Children can still hear the cacophony between you. Their memories are more easily graven than your own, and harder to scour.
In one beginning my grandparents fought and in the other I have no grandparents. Between the forebears of the latter beginning there was only the silence of abandonment. That was the silence my grandmother heard. There is nobody left who knows or remembers what my grandfather said.
In the beginning his name was blotted out from the earth. Cast from Eden, my grandmother was not allowed to take it with her. (Does the avenging angel cut the apple from the sinners’ hands? Is that why we come into knowledge feeling so maimed?) Did he know of my father? Does he suspect we exist? Without a name there is no provenance. Without provenance, there is possession but no ownership. In the beginning my father was uprooted. In [From] that primordial exile I have no name. I am possessed but orphaned. What is it like to have no beginnings? My father is an orphan and I am a bastard. It is always the way after Eden – angels, orphans, bastards.
Ah. That is why Eden remains so inaccessible: it is not a place I have ever been. I am not even sure which of my ancestors was the last of our line to inhabit it.
