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This writing was accepted for publication in the 84 page perfect-bound issue... Down in the Dirt magazine (v120) (the November / December 2013 Issue) You can also order this 5.5" x 8.5" issue as an ISSN# paperback book:

Order this writing in the book Drowning (a Down in the Dirt collection book)		get the 297 page July - Dec. 2013 Down in the Dirt magazine issue collection 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

A Norman Rockwell Life

Carol Smallwood

    Excerpt from Lily’s Odyssey (print novel 2010, http://www.amazon.com/Lilys-Odyssey-Carol-Smallwood/dp/0984098453) published with permission by All Things That Matter Press. Its first chapter was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award in Best New Writing.

    When I saw Dr. Bradford next, I said, “I keep running but I know I must face what happened.”
    “Obsessive drives are to get a sense of safety.”
    Yes, I’d read that too—you’re trying to relieve what you fear—if I rescued a cat or plant, I felt rescued.
    “Your uncle was a sick, distorted man and his problems were put on you. He was insecure and defensive so he controlled people.”
    Yes, Dirk, the psychologist had called him grotesque—I’d had to keep reading the word in the dictionary because I hadn’t been able to see how it applied to him.
    I smiled and said, “I know how the sailors sailing with Christopher Columbus felt about falling off the edge of the earth.”
    He grinned and said, “You can keep sailing. They’re always options in every situation. You were a victim as a child and didn’t have a choice but now things are different.”
    “I often have a dream of seeing someone in the doorway of my bedroom and not being sure if it’s Cal or Uncle Walt.” I felt something warm descending my nose, grabbed a tissue from my purse, and lifted my head. It was a nosebleed.
    He paused under I lowered my head, removed the tissue from my nose, hoping I didn’t have any blood on my face. “Do you remember what happened with your uncle?” For the first time I saw something in his eyes I didn’t like.
    “Whatever it was probably happened when I was very young. My pictures when I was about four look haunted. My first memory was wanting to walk to my grandfather’s and my uncle’s hunting dog standing in my way.”
    I was grateful the look in Dr. Bradford’s eyes left because they reminded me of Uncle Walt’s. And didn’t know if I was grateful or not for being too old to have him look at me like the Doctor or Dirk had. He probably sensed I wasn’t comfortable because he quickly asked, “Did you find the Phoenix Meeting Room?
    “Yes, but the people there were in their forties returning to become technicians.” I laughed and added: “At least I probably made them feel younger. I called the psychologist you mentioned and went to a play.”
    “I’m pleased you acted on things so quickly.”
    “It’s still hard for me to think anything’s wrong because I’ve been told I had a perfect life,” resting my eyes on the books lining his shelf because they looked so solid and reliable.
    “The All-American Norman Rockwell life, when in reality it was out of Stephen King.”
    I thought it was clever of him to bring up comparisons like that with someone taking an English class. And it made me remember the last Christmas present Uncle Walt and Aunt Hester had given Cal and I was Norman Rockwell’s Marriage License—the one with the woman standing tiptoe in heels signing with the man’s arm around her. As things worsened, seeing myself reflected in it became more and more ironic.
    “I haven’t read Stephen King.” I thought those who did were just looking for sensationalism but perhaps I was too afraid, feeling the old fear grow of being at the edge of a cliff. “How do I accept what’s happened? I know it’s what I have to do but I don’t like the cognitive way of the psychology professor advocates because it seems like brain washing.” I frowned and sighed. The psychology professor had said causes were unknown so you had to practice behavior modification. “I want to know the cause, but I can see how symptoms can just become habits.”
    “Why not write letters to your uncle and husband and say what you feel. Keep writing them and you’ll soon see the anger in the letters lessen.”
    “I often have dreams of being stuck to Uncle Walt with stringy mucus that won’t let go, or his hair falling over his face leaning over me in bed. Of being in a boat and seeing it split apart near my feet.” When I clenched my hands, I’d forgot the bruise on my thumbnail. My fingernails started splitting down the middle vertically about the time obsessions started—I don’t know if it was from biting them or what, but they now looked like illustrations of those bumpy shifting plates under the earth in National Geographic. A thread-like piece of nail rose in the middle of my thumbnail like smoke from a volcano. I’d tried cutting it but it was too short and filing it made it bleed.
    When I went to the Phoenix Meeting Room no one was around but a plant was. I went and got potato chips even though I knew such action meant “they” (whoever they were) still had me; another part of me felt it didn’t matter what I did. That I had no business moving and I’d never belong. That I should go back to Nicolet City and preserve the Norman Rockwell facade as the adopted daughter of a respected uncle and first wife of a respected husband. I’d still have position, be accepted, and never have to show ID.
    I had more freedom than I ever had: I no longer had a job I didn’t like, had enough money to live on, and didn’t have to worry about supporting Mark and Jenny. But I wasn’t getting much sleep because I kept hearing my writing professor discuss Oedipus blinding himself when he’d realized he’d slept with his mother. Freud wrote of totems being erected by primitive clans—you had to mate with outside your totem clan: if you belonged to a bear clan you got someone in an eagle or turtle clan.
    When Cal and I returned to Nicolet City, he must’ve realized my past with Uncle Walt. He must’ve seen Aunt Hester’s jealousy and resentment of me glaring through her one good eye—she’d lost the other driving to Mass on a weekday when a White’s Dairy truck hit her. Jenny was born after we’d returned to Nicolet City—that’s when my symptoms started after Cal began distancing himself. And having a girl brought back my own childhood.
    Sequencing things together like that reminded me of the inevitability in Greek tragedy my professor outlined on the blackboard. But that brought up something equally unthinkable—Cal’s actions. When Cal saw me drinking and taking sleeping pills he must’ve known the danger of the combination. He refused to move later when I told him what I was finding out in therapy; had he decided I was damaged goods? Doctor had said, “Cal had the right to chose whether to help you or not.” I was granted split custody as long as I stayed in Nicolet County—surely he’d known what that’d do? Why had he vowed, “I’ll get your ass in a sling so low you’ll never get up?”
    I asked Dr. Bradford, “What other awful things do I have to discover? I can’t relax much because I keep steeling myself against something too awful to take, but how can I find out what’s wrong when part of me fights finding out?”
    Didn’t he know, or didn’t he want to say, what else was in store for me? I’d never lost the old fear of falling into a black hole. Doctor had said reality wasn’t too far from how I saw things and what people feared was often worse than the truth—so why couldn’t I, as my brother said “just get on with things.”
    “Your uncle and husband were Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde characters. They were sadistic and manipulative but presented a respectable front.”
    I shook my head. “How do you accept something like that? I remember my friend, Caroline, telling me ‘they’re out to crack you’ but I didn’t believe her. How do you accept that about those closest to you?” Something warm descended my nose—another embarrassing nosebleed.
    “Do you get nosebleeds often?”
    “No.”
    After it’d stopped, Dr. Bradford continued. “You can’t do everything at once. Just take it step by step.”
    “I don’t know if I can accept what they were because it leaves me with nothing. With no floor, no ground to walk on.”
    “Write out your feelings. Take all the time you need. The more you do the more you’ll find that you’ll lose your need to rescue things.”
    I nodded while I jotted down on paper I always kept out for notes: “Write what you feel:” students were limited to thirty sessions and I couldn’t afford to miss anything.
    “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
    “Just a brother. He’s a bishop in Milwaukee.”
    “He must be capable to have become a bishop.”
    “Yes.” But I saw Vincent’s hair that had pathways like long grass someone had walked through; how lint collected on his black clothes. I hadn’t seen him since he’d become a bishop after Uncle Walt’s death, and wondered again how much Uncle Walt’s contributions to his parish had to do with him becoming a bishop.
    It wasn’t until a few more sessions that I told Dr. Bradford about Doctor and Dirk. Doctor was a psychiatrist I’d seen after Jenny was born; Dirk was a psychologist I’d seen when Mark and Jenny about to graduate from high school. They’d made advances.
    When Dr. Bradford asked if there’d been something in Uncle Walt’s past I said, “I never knew his mother and father but heard his mother was called ‘the ice queen.’ Uncle Walt adopted my brother and I after my mother died trying to save a strain of lilies when their nursery burned after my father was killed in 1942.”
    “In the war?”
    “The Battle of Midway.”
    When I finally got the courage to write the letters to Uncle Walt and Cal, I filled them with Uncle Walt’s worst swear words. I didn’t write legibly because it’d been too awful to have anyone read. I wrote quickly for fear of being struck dead for going against: “Honor Your Father and your Mother,” and “Love, Honor, and Obey.” I was almost overwhelmed by the blinding anger, so deep I didn’t think I’d ever reach the bottom. Yet even when I wrote the worst words, I was conscious of a holding back, of wanting to keep some of the most appealing illusions, a holding out for the Norman Rockwell life.

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