These Are Not the Words

It’s January of 1963, and Miranda Billie Taylor (known to family and friends as “Missy”) lives with her parents and three cats in Apartment 5D of an East Village brownstone on Manhattan’s14th Street. Along with her best friend, Corky, she attends Friends Seminary, a private school, one of New York’s oldest educational institutions. Mom, an artist, has been encouraged to apply to graduate school to pursue her work in abstract composition, and Dad is, well, Dad is complicated. He lives a double life: by day, he’s the editor of Pepsi-Cola Corporation’s house journal, but, by night, he’s a bohemian, a drummer, a regular of New York City’s 1960s jazz scene. When Missy turns 12, he’s absent from her birthday party, but the next morning, she finds her present from him, the first of a series of poems that she places in a “heart shaped treasure box he and [her] Mom gave” (p. 25) her for Christmas. But the poem is only Part 1 of his birthday present to her. At 11:30 p.m. the next night, he wakes Missy up, and they drive to the Hickory House, a legendary jazz club, in a horse-drawn carriage. It’s a Cinderella moment, but, over time, readers see that Paul Taylor is no Prince Charming.

Sneaking a 12-year-old daughter out to a late night jam session is typical Pops behaviour. One minute, he’s excitedly deciding that the family will go out for dinner at Missy’s favourite restaurant, and, in the next, he is surly when a celebratory family portrait doesn’t quite set up as planned. His moods are mercurial, and his bursts of explosive anger are frightening. His volatility rules life at Apartment 5D, with the most important rule being, “Don’t make Pops angry” (p. 36). After Missy goes to the art studio to see her mother’s work, over lunch at the Automat, she learns the story of her parents’ whirlwind courtship and marriage. While a student at Hunter College, Mom fell in love with one of her profs and was ready to marry him once she graduated. But one night, she went to a rooftop party, and Pops started snapping photos of her. She’s stylish and elegant. Then, Pops is asked to drum with the trio set up for the night. It’s outrageously romantic, a movie moment; the music begins with “What a Little Moonlight Can Do”, and the two talk all night until the sun rises. Missy calls this tale “The Story of Me”, but she senses that there’s something missing in it. These two artists – a photographer/musician, and a painter – marry, and Miranda is born.

The late-night visits to the jazz clubs (of which Mom is oblivious) continue, as do the poems Missy and Pops exchange the day after these junkets. Sometimes Pops stays out even later, and Missy makes her way home, alone. She learned how to hail a cab when she was four, a necessary life skill when your father is an alcoholic night owl. But, during the day, life is reasonably normal for a middle-class Manhattanite. She and best friend Corky do all the things that 12-year-old best girlfriends do, and, at school, they both have roles in the end-of-year show, a play based on one of the first novels ever written, The Tale of Genji. They have been studying Japanese culture, and so they write haiku and tanka poetry to each other. Corky has a starring role – she is Lady Murasaki, the story’s author – but Missy will speak the epilogue, mono no aware. That phrase appears over one thousand times in The Tale, and it means “a gentle sadness, a wistfulness about the fleeting nature of life. Impermanence is the reality of life.” (p. 84) It is a cautionary tale for Missy’s own life.

After Pops’ return from a very prestigious photography convention, things change. He doesn’t talk to Missy, and her mother sets out new rules: be quiet, be agreeable, be supportive, be invisible. It’s obvious he’s no longer working. Pops has a plan; he’s heading west to California on a bicycle, with cargo that includes a box of reel to reel tapes, his favourite books, two full bottles of J & B Scotch, and Missy. He’s having a full-blown psychotic episode, and soon he is hospitalized. At Al’s Diner, the location of mother-daughter lunches where more and more family history is revealed, Mom tells of Pops’ mental illness and his treatment with electroshock therapy. The treatment creates memory loss, and, for Pops, it created “an emptiness. He couldn’t fill it.” (p. 108) Self-medication, through booze and drugs, was an attempt at numbing the pain. When Mom first met him, he claimed to be “a journalist studying to be a junkie”. (p. 108) Missy’s middle name is an homage to the great jazz singer, Billie Holliday, and like Lady Day, Pops can’t “live without [his] smack” (p. 16)

Once Pops is back home, he’s a shell of his former self, sitting around, almost catatonic. He leaves and is gone for days, and once he returns, he’s bashing his drums, playing Thelonius Monk records at full bore. One night, two strangers armed with a gun show up at their apartment, demanding settlement for a drug deal. Missy and her mom hide under the table, and Missy realizes that life has changed irrevocably. School has ended, and, in June of 1963, they depart Apartment 5D with two suitcases, leave the cats with Corky and her family, and hide until Mom finds a job and an apartment in which they can live. Their new home is 147 East 17th Street. While this is only three streets over from their previous home, in New York, three streets can take you into a different world altogether. Their new neighbourhood is not exactly a slum, but, in the 1960s, it is not gentrified. Missy and Mom are hard up; they furnish their new apartment (a walk-up, no elevator) by scavenging at buildings to be demolished. In unlocked buildings, anything you can remove with a screwdriver is there for the taking. When school starts up again, it’s now PS (Public School) 22, a different world from Friends Seminary. Grocery shopping is now a game: can they buy a week’s worth of food and still have change left from a $20 bill? Missy gets a job working at a local diner on Saturdays. The money helps, and it’s all part of a life which is “a fresh start.” (p. 158)

Although Mom took pains to hide their whereabouts, when Missy turns 13, she receives a letter from Pops. It’s full of torn up paper, like a puzzle, and when Missy assembles it, she finds a message, lines which Prospero speaks to his daughter, Miranda, in The Tempest. She reads and re-reads, convinced that she is interpreting a secret message from her father, and she plots a secret rendezvous. She has to take the subway to the Hotel Chelsea, on 23rd Street, and the trip on the crowded subway opens her eyes to a world that she hasn’t seen before. As for the Hotel Chelsea, well, it’s not Manhattan’s gracious and elegant Plaza Hotel. It has a tired, worn-down air, as do the guests who hang around its lobby. She finds someone who knows Pops, gives them a letter containing their new phone number, and ,with long practice from club night excursions, sneaks past her sleeping Mom and gets into bed.

The next day, there’s an urgent phone call. It’s Pops, asking for money because there’s an “emergency.” With the best of intentions, believing that she has the super-power to “… make him better . . . make him remember . . . bring him back” (p. 178), Missy heads for the Hotel Chelsea with $40 that Mom has stashed away as emergency money and $90 that Missy has saved from her job at Eisenberg’s diner. Pops is a disheveled disaster, a stinking, dirty junkie, and it’s a bad scene. It’s even worse when Missy returns home because her mother has discovered her daughter’s deception. To her credit, Missy tells all. Mom makes it very clear that Pops is in crisis and only hecan make the choice to stop using drugs and get better. One day, a package with a small smooth black stone appears in the mail, addressed to Missy, but with no return address. She puts the stone in her treasure box. Then, there’s the phone call from Ira, Pops’ jazz buddy and family friend, and a man with no illusions. The call is from Naples, California, Pops’ home town, and Ira is trying his damnedest to get Pops into hospital. It’s sad. Ira says, “I never lost a round in my life, but I’m losing this one.” (p.188) When Ira returns to New York, he tells Missy about Pops’ decision to stay out in California, living with a woman who is a fellow junkie. Missy realizes that life is all about choices, and that she has to choose a different vision of life, a “story without a character named Captain Daddy Pops.” (p. 196)

These Are Not the Words is a powerful, simultaneously simple and complex. It’s the story of any family dealing with addiction and/or mental health issues and struggling to keep it all together. The coping, the hoping, the optimism that, maybe this time, it will be different, are Miranda’s lived experience. The secrecy, the walking on eggshells, are classic indicators of profound familial dysfunction, and Amanda West Lewis shows it all through Miranda’s eyes. Pops’ decline is saddening, and so are the sacrifices that Mom must make. Both are talented people, and both forego their potential. Mom forsakes a promising art career, abandons the myth of fairy-tale romance, and soldiers on, doing everything she can to keep Miranda safe and give her daughter a future. While the story is presented simply, with short chapters moving the narrative along, it is subtly complex and sophisticated. The words of the haiku, tanaka, and the free verse poems that Missy and her father write to each other offer artistry that is underscored with sadness. The book ends on a hopeful note: Corky and Missy are still best friends, and Missy knows that, like Prospero, in The Tempest, her father “cannot come back until he is ready to give up illusion. Until he is ready to ask forgiveness.” (p. 205)

The publicity tear-sheet that accompanied the book’s Advance Reading Copy indicates that the audience is ages 9-12. Yes, a nine-year old could read the book, but so much would be missed. As well, this is a book for female readers. It’s definitely not “chick lit”, but Missy and Corky’s friendship, Mom’s memories of starlit romance, and Missy’s attempts to love a father who becomes increasingly unlovable probably wouldn’t resonate with a pre-teen boy.

These Are Not the Words is a library acquisition for readers 12 and up, especially those whose families are grappling with substance abuse and serious mental health issues.