So I finally finished reading "The Pines" by Robert Dunbar. I read it so many years ago, long before I knew what it would mean to me, that it was strange reading it again. like drinking wine that isn't yet ripe. But I digress. It's probably more honest to say what I originally thought So here goes. This book is about a woman who had a son who is borderline "retarded," who doesn't communicate in a way she understands, who needs help. So she wants to commit him to an institution, but her family insists he communicates just fine and she doesn't see it, so she hesitates, lets her son stay at home with her, and basically leaves him in the care of her sister in law.
It's easy to see as a reader now that her son is evolved beyond what she can see or understand, and he is communicating more than what she can grasp, but as a reader back in the past, I wasn't emotionally ready to accept that she is too overwhelmed to see the truth. Reading the book now, it is clear that whatever is going on with her son is beyond human scope to understand, so it's really no wonder that she's confused. He is only moderately verbal, and he stutters and stammers and often rocks back and forth. She sees these as signs of his disability, but I see that he's frustrated by his inability to communicate clearly. He talks often of "Chabwok," and I knew right away what he was referencing, but she and her sister in law just think this is some kind of imaginary friend.
I see now that they're not really being malicious. Especially the sister in law. She loves her nephew, she just doesn't understand him. She comes from a rural area rife with inbreeding and huge families with many children who are often neglected and abused. It's just how she grew up. I can imagine how she views everything through her own experience. When you grow up around extreme poverty like this, you get used to a lot of things that others might find abhorrent.
Athena, the mother, is a whole nother ball of wax, as my grandma used to say. She comes from another world, far apart from the squalor she sees living in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. Athena grew up mixed race, disabled, and she seems to have had to fight for every ounce of respect she has in her life. I see this now, but when I first read the book, I just saw a neglectful mother who doesn't ever clean the house and lets her son live in an unsanitary hovel because she doesn't think he's smart enough to know the difference.
A lot of what I'm noticing now is how I see the book now, with all my life experiences, vs. how I saw it years ago when I first read it. It's hard to find sympathy for a woman who discovers her own son has wet the bed and leaves him to lie in his own filth, since her sister in law will stop by in the morning to clean him up. I'll be honest with you. I hated her after that scene. Now? I still don't think it was right, but...I get it. I understand in a way I didn't before. I've been so depressed I didn't want to clean the house or even take a shower. I don't have kids, but I imagine if I did, I would struggle to care for them too. Like I said, I don't think it's right, but I get it now. I understand how cleaning one spill can seem like a herculean task, so you leave it, and the next spill, and the next, and before you know it you're surrounded by so much filth, why even bother cleaning anything?
I spend a lot of time talking about Athena, the mother, because hating her was so central to why I didn't like this book back when I first read it. I mean, she sacrificed her own kid because of her inability to deal with his care, and she rationalized it by convincing herself that he was so "retarded" that he didn't know the difference anyway. I've spent years living around a little girl who is "mentally handicapped," who does a lot of the rocking back and forth and humming and stuttering that the boy in this book, Matthew, does. She is one of my favorite people in the world, and she's survived through doctors who have said she doesn't understand much, she doesn't have the intelligence to comprehend much, and she's proven them all wrong, and she's a teenager now who thrives beyond what many ever thought possible. I was also a little girl, mocked and tormented for every "weird" or "wrong" thing I did, told I was a freak, that I was disgusting, that I was a "bad girl," and that anyone who loved me would stop once they really got to know me and saw how sick I was.
All of this is to say that I don't have a lot of patience for parents who put this kind of baggage on their kids. I'm much older now, I've obtained my GED, graduated college with a 4.0 grade point average, and come a long way, lightyears away, from the ten year old paging through outdated textbooks from the local elementary school, teaching myself to read and write. I'm a fully functional adult now, living on my own, and I have very little patience for people who learn even a tiny bit of my story and presume to tell me what I need to do to "forgive" or "move on" or whatever the hell they think I need to do with my life. The truth is, I've been there and done that. I get where my parents messed up, understand why they did it, and I love them and don't hate or blame them anymore, mostly because it would be a waste of time. Whatever happened I survived, and they won't ever admit where they screwed up, and hoping for some kind of Hollywood ending where we all hug and cry and learn and grow would be silly. It's never going to happen, and I've made my peace with that.
Except.
Except somewhere, deep down inside me, there's still that little girl who thinks this can't be right, something's wrong, and there's got to be a way I can cry or speak or explain it to someone that will make them see the truth. Then the clouds will part and the darkness will fade and someone will understand and fix whatever is bad, and everything will be good instead. Because that's what happens at the end of the movies. No matter how bad everything gets, how terrible, something comes along that will save the day and will make everything that feels wrong feel right again.
Yes, I'm pushing 40 now, and I realize how ridiculous that is, but the part of me that hid deep inside underneath the hard outer shell that grew to power through the horrible things and protect the softer inside, that part of me will always want to cry and scream when things are wrong in the world, because that part of me wants to believe that anyone who sees the wrong will immediately know that it's wrong, and will want to help make it right.
"What the actual fuck does any of this have to do with "The Pines"?" You may want to ask. Only this. That inner scared little girl didn't like Athena, the mother in this story, and so she made sure I didn't like the entire book. Didn't like its tale of lost people living hard lives in impossible conditions, confronted by a horror they didn't understand and reacting the way most people do: with anger and ignorance borne of fear. I didn't want to like the main character, and I didn't want to forgive her and root for her, even after she began to see the error of her ways.
We're like 5765444 paragraphs into this post, and I haven't even talked much about what happens in the book. A part of me doesn't want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't read the book, and another part doesn't want anyone to decide this book isn't worthy of future scrutiny just because it's a horror novel. People still do that. And there's no escaping the horror in this book. Boy is it a horror novel. There's blood and guts and semen (oh my) and people running around being eaten by monsters, and dark, whispered legends of things that go bump in the night. And because these characters are human, they don't always do the right thing, even often do the wrongest thing they could do, and they have to suffer the consequences. It's messy and icky and it makes me tired and sad. It's really no wonder I didn't like this book when I first read it. I wasn't even within shouting distance of my right mind back then, and this book hit me in all the right places and left bruises. Not a pleasant experience.
The thing is, though, that something inside me must have seen what was good in this book, because I never forgot it. And I thought of it often. It even became one of those books I give to other people, hoping they will read it. Like missionaries who go door to door handing out the bible, I hand out books like this. Because sometimes I meet people and I look into their eyes and I see flickers and traces of the little girl I used to be, who was afraid of monsters while simultaneously being afraid that she was a monster herself, and who thought no one would ever understand. I know that ache of loneliness, and I know how much it hurts, so sometimes I fling books into the void to tell the void I'm not afraid of it anymore, and this is one of those books.
Whatever happened and whatever I thought I understood years ago that I'm only beginning to understand now, this book helped me get from there to here, and for that, I'm eternally grateful.
