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Pomona College Magazine is published three times a year by Pomona College
550 N. College Ave, Claremont, CA 91711
Online Editor: Mark Kendall
For editorial matters:
Editor: Mark Wood
Phone: (909) 621-8158
Fax: (909) 621-8203
PCM Editorial Guidelines
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of births or deaths.
Phone: (909) 621-8635
Fax: (909) 621-8535
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The Discovery of Life
Review/ Alicia Metcalf Miller '61
My Life on Mars
By Alicia Metcalf Miller '61
Plume/ 288 pages/ $14
Review by Anita Comtois
What do we do when our life is falling apart? Those moments in time when
we recognize that the decisions we have settled for, accommodated,
ignored or otherwise justified suddenly go awry and we are left with the
bare-boned truth that we are spiritually and emotionally bankrupt. This
is a question we all face at least once in our lives, and it is just
this kind of journey of self-discovery that Alicia Metcalf Miller ’61
takes us on in My Life on Mars.
In her thoughtfully crafted work, Miller sets forth the story of Eliza
White, who at middle-age appears to have everything one could want. She
is a successful author of children’s books, a wife and mother of three
with a home and good friends in Santa Fe. The novel begins when she
receives a call from her mother, whose friend and companion has just
died, and Eliza offers to return home to Edgecliff, Ohio, to lend her
support. The truth is, Eliza’s children have left home and her marriage
is in ruins. We sense right away that this is more about Eliza’s need
for love and caring than it is about tending to her mother. After all,
home is where we always look for—and sometimes find—love, safety and a
sense of place.
 Eliza’s story is one we have heard before, but what makes this work
particularly interesting is that Miller tells this story with a complex,
rich and subtle sensibility that makes this quite another—and infinitely
more interesting—journey. Miller allows her characters to breathe—to be
vulnerable and to understand and grapple with the ambiguities we all
face in our relationships, be they with parents, children, spouses or
others important in our lives. It also reminds us of just how resilient
we are in relationships, despite the adversity and disappointment we all
experience in interacting with others.
Eliza learns that her husband is once again having an affair shortly
before she leaves Santa Fe. Their conversation—and her reaction—reveal
the curious ways in which we respond and cope with difficult news.
First, when Sam acknowledges the affair and says
“Oh-my-God-Eliza-I’m-so-sorry-so-sorry,” Eliza realizes that “it was all
I could do not to comfort him.” At the same time, she acknowledges that,
“By the time of the Denise incident, I realized that what I valued most
about Sam was this: He left me alone. … When the strange perfume came
along, I found myself overcome by conflicting emotions: curiosity about
whose perfume it was, embarrassment, shame and plain indifference.”
Shortly after Eliza’s arrival in Edgecliff, her mother falls and breaks
her hip. This incident means that Eliza must extend her stay; it also
means that she must get the family home ready to sell now that her
mother acknowledges it is time to let it go. This gives her the
opportunity to explore her life on Mars—the street on which she was
raised—in ways that are quite unexpected. The street name, of course, is
no accident, given the estrangement Eliza is experiencing in all aspects
of her life. She is alienated from her husband, her children are off
making their own lives, her feelings for her parents loving yet
unresolved, and she has an antagonistic relationship with her brother,
Bin. If that weren’t enough, her work as a writer is not going well. And
so she finds herself emotionally frazzled in a town aptly named
Edgecliff—her hometown and the place from which she jumps into a new
life.
The notions of home and place, in fact, are a consistent and important
theme. How it is that we understand them. What it is that gives us a
sense of place and belonging. In going through the family belongings and
learning things she had never known, Eliza thinks about how her parents’
lives came to be what they were, and how their own notions of home had
informed not only the decisions they had made but how they defined
themselves and became the parents they were to her and her brother.
In describing her father, for example, Eliza notes that “my father
attended eight different schools in four states before he was nine. A
feeling of belonging—that deep sense of place that frees us and enables
us simple to be—was something my father never experienced growing up.”
Her mother, on the other hand, “came from a small town in western Ohio.
… The name of the street where the house stood bore her own last name.
That experience gave her a sense of home that no other place could
rival…” Eliza says, “So there I was: a child with a father who had
little notion of home, and a mother with one so firmly rooted in her
memory that no other place would do.” Later on, in conversations with
her brother, Eliza learns that neither of them had ever felt at home in
Edgecliff. She says that “there’s always been a drabness about the whole
place, something melancholy,” and Bin replies that “it reeks of
attenuated desire”—a state of mind that describes them both.
Eliza also discovers another sense of home in Edgecliff with Rabi, the
young neighbor who falls in love with her. A Palestinian by birth, he
has lost his home, and yet he “had a knack for being so at home in
himself, he seemed to put everyone at ease.” Later on, as their
relationship grows, Eliza realizes that “without knowing it, I had been
looking for something to hold all the turmoil I’d been feeling. And
Rabi, so at ease with himself despite his history, offered me what I >>
couldn’t find in my childhood home—something rock-solid, uncomplicated,
enveloping, safe.”
She has the opportunity to reevaluate her own memories, the childhood
perceptions that have informed her life. She looks again at her mother’s
seeming indifference, and her father’s emotional distance. “I believe my
mother was interested in my life, but with her eyes shut, she was
strangely remote. I know now that she was sick and holding herself in;
but then, with a child’s logic, I suspected she was shutting me out.” Of
her father, she says, “I loved my father with the kind of intensity
reserved for things just beyond your reach.” When she learns that her
father had a longtime affair with Mary, a family friend, she
“experienced a strange sense of relief: My father had been human after
all. He’d had a life; he’d had an affair.”
She recognizes that memories can be faulty: “Children—and I know this
from my own—are given to grave misinterpretations. Their memories turn
the odd moment into longstanding tradition; the isolated swat into
frequent spankings; the cry of a frightened adult into anger; the
preoccupied parent into someone who doesn’t care about them.” This
mindfulness clearly allows her to reevaluate the decisions she made
based on childhood experiences and thus rethink her future. Feeling
unloved and unable to reach others, after all, makes us vulnerable to
ambiguous, if not bad, life choices. A strong sense of self, on the
other hand, opens the door to all kinds of possibilities.
In the end, Eliza realizes that “I had come to Mars depressed, confused
and nearly out of steam; certainly I hadn’t been thinking about love.
Yet look at all the love I’d discovered. The secret love between my
father and Mary, which revealed he was far more human than I thought. A
saner, less needy love for my children, which I’d arrived at once I
stopped pouring all my frustrations over Sam into their absence. Peace
with Bin, whom I’d always loved but had never completely trusted. And
this: a renewed flowering of love for my mother—a rare gift I hadn’t
expected—after years of taking her for granted. As for Rabi, did I love
him? I wasn’t naďve. … Yet on some level he seemed to understand me in
precisely the ways I had always wanted to be understood. … He startled
me awake when I hadn’t realized I’d been sleepwalking. Was it possible
to confuse gratitude with love? Of course, I thought, of course. But the
whole question of Rabi could wait.”
Just before they leave Edgecliff, her mother (who paradoxically calls
her “Sister”) asks her to sketch the house. The way Eliza does it
reflects the fact that, in the end, we are able to redefine not only our
memories, but our perceptions of what is possible in our lives. As she
is drawing, she realizes that “… as I sketched, the trees around it
became leafy, not barren as they actually were; ivy surrounded their
trunks the way it did in the summer. … Summer, spring: What did it
matter? I wasn’t a camera. This was the way the house begged to be
remembered.”
It is, finally a story of redemption, of finding solid ground, that
place of integrity that, at the end of the day, is probably all we can
ever claim as home. As her mother says when they leave Edgecliff for the
last time, “The sky’s the limit, Sister. Who knows what the future
holds? … This is such an adventure!” |
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