Shadow Box (A memoir) by Amanda (Introduction and Part of Chapter 1)

SHADOW BOX

I always wonder if, on my death bed, I will flash to a highlights video of my life – the faces of my sweet daughters, being passionately slammed against the wall while kissing a semi-famous actor, my stoic Swedish husband crying during our wedding when the Rabbi said, “take her sacred as your wife”,  or cuddling my preemie-baby when she finally came home from the NICU on Thanksgiving Day. All of these memories swim inside me.

Past loves are precious like that. Even if you have ended a relationship, if you truly loved another person, part of them remains with you, sleeping beneath your skin. This shadow love occasionally breaks the surface for air and pops into your psyche, like Peter Pan drifting in your window.

I didn’t meet my husband until one month after my fortieth birthday.  I wasn’t a naive virgin.  I had been engaging in serial monogamy since I was 15.  

In the 70’s and 80’s, it was far easier to get over people.  Before the internet, if you broke up with someone or vice versa, you probably never saw or heard from them again.  The rare newsy blurb about them in your college alumni magazine arrived like ice water dumped on your head – a sick pit in the stomach flash, “he’s married!” or “I can’t believe she started a rock band!”

If they dumped you, it was in your best interest to pretend they died in a fiery car crash or vanished without a trace.  You could enter the Witness Protection Program and you never had to find out what they amounted to.

Fast forward to 2015, when I am sitting at my computer Googling the current sale price of my ex-boyfriend’s house and silently lamenting that when we were dating, we ate at Arby’s Roast Beef, and now he is running one of the top real estate companies in Dallas and probably taking his wife out to 5-star restaurants. I had seen pictures of her on Facebook under a shag of bleached blonde hair, perfecting her smoky eye and redecorating their kitchen.

Two weeks prior, I had been followed on Twitter by an ex lover who had tantalizingly almost left his wife for me but chose not to.  He also friended me on Facebook.  This set off a waterfall of questions inside my head. “Well, obviously he was thinking of you,” my best friend Alicia chirped on the phone.  I had to agree with her.  It was hard to know what to make of it, but she was probably right.  Yes, he had thought of me, at least for a split second.  He must have Googled me to find out where I live and what I’m doing.  But he was still married to HER.  He may have followed me on Twitter, but he didn’t follow me when it counted. He devastated me and was as cold as Antarctica.  I couldn’t forget the mummified look in his eyes when he told me, in the lobby of the NYC Hilton on 6th Avenue, that we couldn’t be together.  I was crying. We were surrounded by a cartographer’s convention, and maps were unfurling all around us. My life was unfurling too.  

Exciting as this blast from the past was, I knew deep down that just because he followed me on Twitter didn’t mean he loved me all over again.  He was just clicking a mouse. Took him one second.

Something about him following me reminded me that he was still out there.  Something about knowing he was still out there made me think about him.  Something about thinking about him made me remember that it was not all sadness. There were glorious moments.  And so the shadow love emerged within me, quietly at first, and then stronger.

At first he came to me in dreams. The teasing, the courtship, the ecstasy of being in love, and also the devastation when he turned his back on me.

Something about remembering made me remember, not only him, but also others.  His following me on Twitter made me follow myself into the past. At night, in the twilight moments of sleep, l  I would drowsily, secretly flip through the loves of my life.  

One Sunday, I wandered into a flea market on Columbus and 76th fenced inside a schoolyard. In one booth, a woman made tiny boxes of miniature rooms. She called them shadow boxes and said I could provide my own pieces of jewelry or photographs and she could shrink them down.  I had seen a museum show of the artist, Joseph Cornell, who created boxes of objects he called shadowboxes.  He collected baubles and knicknacks and magazine cut-outs to create dreamlike visions of nostalgia. I guess one could call the objects vintage – treasures that had a previous life, that mattered to somebody once. At my current age, it occurs to me that I may also be vintage.  I also mattered to somebodies once.

I think about the single pearl earring that sits sullenly in my jewelry box that I can’t seem to throw away.  There is really no reason to keep it.  An ex-boyfriend gave it to me for my birthday, when we were on the verge of ending our 6 year relationship.  Wherever I look at that one earring,  I am taken on a trip of remembering how he resentfully described standing on an hour long line at the jewelry store to buy them for me, and how inappropriate I thought that was, how we made love all weekend in my mother’s Park Slope Brooklyn apartment on the pull out bed, enrapt in anxious yearning.  It was the next-to-last time I ever saw him.  That earring is a bittersweet journey, yet one I seem compelled to take once a year or so.  Its unpairing mirrors our unpairing. 

Maybe all human beings are like walking shadow boxes … a locket, a torn photograph, a single earring, an empty bottle of perfume. Little compartmentalized vessels of experience.

After that Twitter follow, I found myself dreaming of my lost loves.  Sometimes I stole them away from a current wife or girlfriend and we were gloriously reunited. Sometimes we had an Adele-song-like confrontation. Some nights I hurtled back into the past remembering how it felt to be in love in a doorway or on a commuter train.  Sometimes we had a conversation that has waited a lifetime.

In this time travel, I examined the genesis of my capacity to love another.  So, I’m going to start at the beginning.

BECOMING A PERSON IN ROCHESTER, NEW YORK

MY HEART BELONGS TO DADDY

Every girl’s first love is her daddy.  Mine was a psychiatrist.  Any kid of a psychiatrist knows that being the child of a psychiatrist means that you' re basically being raised by a mental health professional sans mental health.  Your shrink parent will most likely not apply his mental health training to your parent-child relationship.  My Dad was charming and hard to reach.  He had a fabulous sense of humor, played the piano completely by ear in a Rogers & Hammerstein style, and has always liked to be mostly by himself.  I worshipped him because he was such a captivating personality and like the Shamrock Shake at McDonald’s, he seemed available for a limited time only. Personality-wise and looks-wise I felt more alike him than I did my mom. I got my sense of humor from him. I got my nose from him. We played and sang together from the time I was two. 

Like a fish in his tank, I grew up inside the bubble of my father’s narrative. He was a storyteller, and told more stories about my own mother than she ever told about herself.  He often repeated  a story about the day I was born.  He was in the waiting room of Strong Memorial Hospital, and he was watching the Johnny Carson show while he waited for my mother to give birth.  Men were not allowed in the delivery room in those days.  Johnny Carson was out that night, and Ed McMann, his sidekick, was also missing.  Doc Severensen, the band leader, had to host the show, which my Dad claimed really shook him up because that was unprecedented. It made him think that things were off kilter in the universe on the day I was supposed to be born.  I was being induced because I had been in there for almost 10 months and my time was up. When the waiting room phone rang, he was profoundly relieved to hear from the doctor that I was normal with all 10 fingers and toes. The day they drove me home from the hospital it was snowing hard.  My Dad drove the car over the wintery lawn and right up to the apartment steps, because it was so icy he was worried my mother might slip and drop me in the snow.  He said I looked tiny and red, like a little turtle, and he thought they should put me in a glass terrarium and give me fish food, but mom said no.