Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness

Voices

Voices Somehow it feels right for me to transcribe this story ofmy mother's word for word, like a naughty child staying after school to write his crime on the blackboard. "Boy, I was awful," I tell my mother on the phone after I finish this task. "That's not you," she says. "Yes, it is. That's me all right. I remember. What a brat. IfI haven't apologized to you before, I want to do it now." She laughs. "Listen, Robin, you don't need to. You were pretty sweet most ofthe time." "You don't remember," I say. "That's me." She's the one who doesn't remember. Maybe she needs to think I was sweet. On the other hand, maybe I need to think I was awfuL "He comes around in the end," she says. "Mack redeems himself." "Maybe," I say, unconvinced. Ofcourse, not everything happened exacdy the way my mother depicts it in her story, but there are echoes. My sister's suicide attempt. Her voices. "Well ifyou won't take me, I'll go myself." I can still hear Nola saying that as she walked along the highway toward her Guru's telepathic voice. "Really, I think it's a beautiful story," I say. "I don't know ifyou remember this," she says, "but I couldn't talk when Nola died without crying. It took months. Finally, I wrote this story, and I knew I was getting better." * * * I examine my mother's story and focus on what Stella tells Nancy, "IfI had thought my work was more important than those I loved I never would have married or had children. I wanted you to be born." The people I love are part of my work, as they're a part of my mother's work. It's hard sometimes to separate the two. 270 Nola 271 Almost every line has something for me to decipher. I look again at the line about Nancy's voices: "the message garbled, idiotic," and I think that yes, this was especially terrible to all ofus, my sister's voices. As I reread the story, something nags at me, a line I remember reading , but one I can't remember transcribing. So I go back and read the original tearsheet of my mother's story against the version I've transcribed . Finally, I find the passage and restore it: Nancy giggled, beaming as Mack sat next to her, lifting her hand, caressing it, as he began to relate one ofhis ludicrous stories ... My ludicrous stories. All of our stories are ludicrous whether we change the names or not. My sister tells me ludicrous stories, even now, through her autobiography, and it's these I'm drawn to because these stories are what we shared, what we believed. And I have to think there was something beautiful in our acceptance, our surrender to the fantastic. I want to believe in them. I want to say this was not all her imagination and my imagination, that magical things happened, that there were forces good and bad operating on us all the time, that Nola brought them into my life. Even with Nola's voices, what I remember as the bleakest period, it was not all bleak, and she reminds me ofthis in her memoir. A very strange thing was beginning to happen whenever I looked at Guru's picture. Again I wondered whether it was my imagination and finally knew that this was impossible. I began "hearing" Guru's voice in my head. telling me to come to the Centre of Being ... assuring me that I was being properly guided. One evening I sat down amazed at what had begun to take place whenever I looked at Guru. and decided that I was going to find out definitely whether he was communicating with me or not. I gazed steadily at the picture for half an hour. very careful not to let extraneous thoughts interfere or be miStaken for the messages. The voice of Guru. then other voices. began to emerge like some new exotic growth. from the piCture ; at the end of the half hour they were so loud and insistent that I could scarcely sit still in the bathtub (after my staring session). where I was trying to wash up before bed. I still remember the soap flying in between divine imprecations to do this or that. trying to scrub my body while they insisted on purifying the...