The Afterlife: A Memoir - Softcover

Antrim, Donald

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312426356 ISBN 13: 9780312426354

Publisher: Picador, 2007

Synopsis

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

In the winter of 2000, shortly after his mother's death, Donald Antrim began writing about his family. In pieces that appeared in The New Yorker and were anthologized in Best American Essays, Antrim explored his intense and complicated relationships with his mother, Louanne, an artist, teacher, and ferociously destabilizing alcoholic; his gentle grandfather, who lived in the mountains of North Carolina and who always hoped to save his daughter from herself; and his father, who married his mother twice.

The Afterlife is an elliptical, sometimes tender, sometimes blackly hilarious portrait of a family--faulty, cracked, enraging--and of a man struggling to learn the nature of his origins.

About this title

About the Author:

Donald Antrim is the author of Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, The Hundred Brothers, and The Verificationist, and is a regular contributor to The New Yorker. He lives in New York City.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One
My mother, Louanne Antrim, died on a fine Saturday
morning in the month of August, in the year 2000. She
was lying in new purple sheets on a hospital-style bed rolled up
next to the green oxygen tanks set against a wall in what was
more or less the living room of her oddly decorated, dark and
claustrophobic house, down near the bottom of a drive that
wound like a rut past a muddy construction site and backyards
bordered with chain-link fence, coming to an end in the parking
lot that served the cheerless duck pond at the center of the
town in which she had lived the last five years of her life, Black
Mountain, North Carolina. The occasion for my mother’s
move to North Carolina from Florida had been the death of
her father, Don Self, from a heart attack, in 1995. Don Self ’s
widow, my mother’s mother, Roxanne, was at that time beginning
her fall into senility, and was, in any case, unequipped to
manage the small estate that my grandfather had left in her
name. What I mean to say is that my grandmother, who came
of age in the Great Depression and who brought away from
that era almost no concept of money beyond the idea that it is
not good to give too much of it to one’s children, was unlikely
to continue her husband’s tradition of making large monthly
transfers into my mother’s bank account. Don Self had kept his
daughter afloat for a long while—ever since she’d got sober,
thirteen years before, and decided that she was an artist and a
visionary, ahead of her time—and now, suddenly, it was incumbent
on my mother to seize power of attorney over her mother
and take control of the portfolio, a coup she might have accomplished
from Miami but was better able to arrange through
what in the espionage community is known as closework.
Four years later, Roxanne Self passed away. The funeral was
held at the Black Mountain Presbyterian Church in September
of 1999. A week after that, my mother—barely days after having
got, as I heard her proclaim more than once, “free of that
woman, now I’m going to go somewhere I want to go and live
my life”—went into the hospital with a lung infection and
learned that she, too, would shortly be dead.
She was sixty-five and had coughed and coughed for years
and years. There had never been any talking to her about her
smoking. The news that she had cancer came as no surprise. It
had grown in her bronchi and was inoperable. Radiation was
held out as a palliative—it might (and briefly did) shrink the
tumor enough to allow air into the congested lung—but my
mother was not considered a candidate for chemotherapy. She
had, during the course of forty years of, as they say, hard living,
progressively and inexorably deteriorated. The story of my
mother’s lifelong deterioration is, in some respects, the story of
her life. The story of my life is bound up in this story, the story
of her deterioration. It is the story that is always central to the
ways in which I perceive myself and others in the world. It is
the story, or at any rate it is my role in the story, that allows me
never to lose my mother.
With this in mind—the story of my mother and me, my
mother in me—I will try to tell another story, the story of my
attempt, during the weeks and months following her death, to
buy a bed.
I should say to keep a bed. I bought several. The first was a
big fat Stearns & Foster queen from Bloomingdale’s at Fiftyninth
Street and Lexington Avenue, in New York City. My
then girlfriend, R., came along to the store, and together we
lay down and compared. Shifman? Sealy? Stearns & Foster?
Soft? Firm? Pillow top? I watched R. crawl across a mattress;
she bounced up and down with her ass in the air, and I found
myself thinking, delusionally, about myself in relation to my
mother, who had died the week before, At last, I’m free of that
woman! Now I’m going to buy a great bed and do some fucking
and live my life.
Two thousand dollars.
Three thousand dollars would have got me a bigger, fatter
Stearns & Foster (and, by extension, a bigger, fatter amount of
comfort, leading to more contented sleeping, a finer state of
love, and, in general, a happier, more productive life) or a
nearly top-of-the-line Shifman. The Shifmans were appealing,
thanks to the company’s advertisements describing traditional
(anachronistic?) manufacturing details such as the eight-way,
hand-tied box spring; and to its preference for natural fibers
(compressed cotton and wool) over synthetic foams.
“What do you think, hon? Do you like the pillow top?”
“The big one over there?”
“Yes.”
“That one’s great.”
“How long will one of these things last? Did the guy say?”
“Donald, get the bed that feels best. You’ll be able to buy
other beds later.”
“Later? What do you mean, later? Later in life?”
“If you get a bed and you don’t like it you can send it back.
Look. You have thirty days. People send beds back all the time.
That’s what department stores are for.”
“Right.”
“Donald, this is something to be excited about! You’re buying
a great bed for yourself. You deserve it! We should celebrate.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you okay?”
“Huh?”
“Do you want to try them one more time?”
Which is what we—and, increasingly, I, alone—did. I
bought bed no. 1 using my debit card in early September 2000,
went home, called the store, and refused to have it delivered,
then went back and upgraded, in late September, to another
and more expensive bed (the pillow top), and refused to have
that one delivered, after which I set out on what amounted,
in retrospect, to a kind of quest, or even, one might say, a
pilgrimage, to many stores, where I tossed and turned and
held repetitive, obsessive conversations with professionals and,
whenever possible, patient, accompanying friends, my lay public,
about beds. Three months passed, during which time I
came to learn more than I ever thought I would about mattresses
and about the mattress industry in general—not only
about how and where the beds are made but about how they
are marketed and sold, and to whom—and, as it happened, I
learned about other things besides actual beds. I am referring to
blankets, pillows, and sheets.
It might be helpful at this point to say that, during this time
that was described and possibly defined by compulsive consumerism,
I had a keen sense of myself as a matricide. I felt, in
some substantive yet elusive way, that I had had a hand in
killing my mother. And so the search for a bed became a search
for sanctuary, which is to say that the search for a bed became
the search for a place; and of course by place I mean space, the
sort of approximate, indeterminate space one might refer to
when one says to another person, “I need some space”; and the
fact that space in this context generally consists of feelings did
not prevent me from imagining that the space—considered,
against all reason, as a viable location; namely, my bedroom—
could be filled, pretty much perfectly, by a luxury queensize
bed draped in gray-and-white-striped, masculine-looking
sheets, with maybe a slightly and appropriately feminine ruffled
bed skirt stretched about the box spring. And I imagined, quite
logically, considering my grief over my mother’s passing and
over my participation, not only in the event of her death that
August morning but, as a child and as a man, in the larger narrative
of her lifelong self-obliteration through alcoholism and
alcoholism’s chief symptom and legacy, rage—I imagined, or
fantasized, that, once cozy and secure in the space filled by the
bed, lying alone or with R. atop pillows stacked high like the
pillows on beds photographed for home-decorating magazines,
I might discover who I would be and how I would carry on
without my mother, a woman who had died in a dreary house,
in an uncomfortable bed.
There was not much that anybody could do. My mother in
the final years of her life had become drastically paranoid. She
cultivated or was the victim of episodes in which she conversed
with figures from mythology and religion, including the Virgin
Mary. Trained as a tailor and costumer, she crafted bizarre,
well-made garments that resembled and were meant to be
worn as vestments in spiritual ceremonies the purpose of which
remained unclear. Everything about these garments—the
winglike adornments festooning the back panels, the little
baubles and totem objects depending from the sleeves or the
lapels, the discordant color palettes displayed in fabric pieces
stitched one atop the other like elements in a strange collage—
spoke to a symbolism that was deeply private. Worn in public,
these robes and gowns were guaranteed to cause unease among
people accustomed to functioning in society at large. If my
mother wore, to an Asheville concert or museum opening,
a dark-purple jacket fastened with clown-size buttons and
adorned on the front and sides with crisscrossing strips of Thai
silk in tropical pastels, a jacket emblazoned on the back with an
enormous white medallion topped with gold cloth gathered
and bunched to resemble a floral cake decoration, then finished
with more strips of colored silk tied off and hung with drapery
tassels descending to varying lengths beneath the hemline, she
was not merely acting as a free spirit and doing her thing; she
was repudiating the patriarchy and proclaiming herself an artist.
Her power to drive people away was stagge...

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0312426356
• ISBN 13: 9780312426354
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208