By Abby McIntyre-Tsiang
To read Zadie Smith is to understand the freedom in Tulips and Christmas and Sadness. It is to realize that to relinquish control is to gain freedom.
Zadie Smith’s peonies were my lilies of the valleys, and then, were my tulips again. To a lesser extent than the ape from Jardin des Plantes, and to a lesser extent than the confines of gender, my miniature cage of circumstance was a flower. Zadie Smith and I would both ask Aretha Franklin, what makes a 'natural woman’? Are they formed by the together-Christmases before the wars? Are they formed by bubbles? Privilege, suffering, sea foam? Are they formed by their natural (natural being redundant of course -- “a man is a man is a man”) male counterparts? Obviously not, would say the logical and feminist part of my brain… but is there not some joy in being partially defined by something outside of your control? “Sorry I spat on your father’s grave -- I’m a gemini''. I was born in May, and I had been told from a young age that the birth flowers for May were tulips. I’ve often thought tulips are tacky and simple; “a child could draw it” as Smith aptly describes. Years ago, birthflowersbymonth.com shared the shattering revelation that tulips were not, in fact, the birth flower for May. Rather, lilies of the valleys represented May: the delicate, unique, snow-born blooms, and they therefore, partially, represented me. Confused, but honestly somewhat righteously, I asked my mother why she had told me the wrong flower was mine for all these years. She replied: well, they just remind me of you honey. Unlike Smith, I found a bit of comfort in this partial natural control of my identity. Meaningless as a flower is, it allowed me to extrapolate the qualities of lilies of the valleys and morph them into defining aspects of my personality. As self-absorbed and superstitious as it was, maybe now I wasn’t as basic as a tulip, but as unique and sincere as a lily of the valley. However, Zadie Smith and I have been through enough family christmases to know there is a certain power and omniscience that mothers hold. Why tulips? She explained the way my father had laid them on the hospital nightstand table when I was born: delicately, arranging them so their blossoms would point towards the window. She showed me old Whig Standard clippings of a young me patting the earth down around a tulip bulb in my yellow raincoat, the caption describing “April Showers, May Flowers.” She reminded me of chasing rowdy squirrels away from half-eaten bulbs, and the exasperated sigh and head shake, my small hands holding my hips indignantly. A Zadie Smith-like “Spring rose in me”, and there was a freedom in accepting this truth-lie behind my tulip.
My family allows a kind of lie to bloom in the absence of truth. Zadie Smith knows “we are deluded”, but that “this delusion is necessary, if only temporarily, to create the mold in the first place, the one into which you pour everything you can’t give shape to in life.” My grandmaman’s mold is the tin that holds her home-baked, Christmas cereal mix. The tin, like Christmas, gives shape to the year, to the expectations of the meal and the season.
“My god, Christmas is heavy,” said Smith. It is heavy holding the nothing where the truth should be. It is heavy carrying 10 plates to the table and forgetting. My arms are sore with the weight of the tenth plate I carry back to the cupboard. And, Christmas is heavy with the heft of the laughter that fills the house, a ten pound weighted blanket that compresses your lungs and hurts your cheeks.
There is unity in the opposites of truths and unsaid, absent truths. Truth: my grandmaman loves all the books my family writes. She loves my brother Isaac’s comic books on poop and farts, and my mother’s poetry about springtime and feminist rage and my anxiety and her non-fiction on ancient China. Absent truth: the memoir my step-uncle wrote means we cannot mention him around my grandmaman. Truth: my step-grandfather was a war veteran with PTSD who loved my grandmaman like she did him. “Soulmates” she engraved on his urn. Absent truth: his PTSD and her love do not excuse his crimes. Truth: my grandmaman listens. Absent truth: my grandmaman does not listen to things she does not want to hear. Truth: my grandmaman eats with us everyday. Truth: the absence of truth eats us. Truth: when my step-grandpa was alive, my step-uncle and my mother would sit down with my grandmaman and try to explain the suicides and overdoeses of his children, and how he broke his young girl. How half of his children did not survive him. Absent truth: with shaking hands, my grandmaman holds a shield of hatred and denial: I don’t want to hear you speak ill of him. The war is Christmas, explains Zadie Smith. Truth: When I was young, I would sit on my step-grandpa’s knee so he could show me bugs under a microscope. Absent truth: my step-grandfather should not have been around children. Absent truth: no one can make my grandmaman hear this. Truth: my grandmaman makes her old-family-recipe special cereal mix for Christmas every year. Truth: she brings it over in a tightly sealed tin, metal edged -- the outside carefully decorated. She sets it on the table in place of her understanding. Truth: its salty sweetness dissolves on our tongues, and it’s delicious.
Truth: Suffering is universal. Zadie Smith tells us, “If you didn’t know better, you’d say the gods of tragedy and comedy had a hand in it”. She is a better person than I am, able to see the loneliness inside the petrified amber core of Jeff Bezos's heart, the dying flutter from the wings of his almost imperceptible empathy-mayfly. We all suffer, says Smith, and we all suffer in different ways, each equally valuable and deserving of recognition. My mother’s suffering is quiet, sharp and eloquent. She excises it from her body with a sterile and finely sharpened instrument, and lays it down delicately on paper. She swaddles her suffering in baby feet and grappling hooks and glass bottles on trees. My mother knows how to step into the Controlling Experiences Department with her poetry keycard. She clocks in her sorrow, and then she clocks out, carrying on with her day: noogying my brother, and later, stroking my head while we watch our murder mystery show. Rarely have I seen my father’s sadness. Sometimes, a strike fails, and the phone will ring with tear-stricken voices explaining that either there will be food for their children, or a paid rent. Not both. I see his sadness in the drinking-bird slow release of his head to rest on the table at dinner. I just need a minute. My sadness, I hold like a breath. I smother it out in pillows, or I choke on it, and my throat constricts around its sharp edges. I gag from the pervasive stink of it; it hangs onto me like AXE deodorant on a middle school boy.
Like my mother, my brother attempts to control his emotions tightly, but does not know when to release them. They are too many, too strong, and he is too young, and too Isaac, to lay them down carefully. When my father asked Isaac, will you be sad if Abby moves away for university? He responded with mock cries, his “boo-hoos” sneering and ladled with sarcasm. Standing in front of him, you could see the sarcasm drain out of him, each individual stage of his emotions turned from bitter derision into what could only be called utter despair. His eyes slowly squeezed shut, the corners downturned. His mouth gaped like a dying fish and then mimicked that over-dramatized theater mask -- as if he were starring in Antigone. The wails wracked his body, and he grabbed his knees tightly, averting eye-contact, attempting to catch, capture, and return these treasonous sobs whence they came. He had never known such loneliness. To relinquish control is to gain freedom. My family forgot about poetry keycards, and heads on tables, and suffocation, and sarcasm and we joined suffering bubbles, and we cried.