Pears On A Willow Tree
Adam H. Fuller
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I knew Ginger was going to die when I hit page 75. And, like all Greek tragedies, her
death—every death in this book—happens off stage while we’re still with Amy in Thailand
on page 238.
I knew she was going to die because she not only hated AA, but she was completely
dismissive of it.
I’d been to enough AA meetings to know I was supposed to be sorry about the
whole thing, the fountain and the oatmeal and the shoes, but after I was finished,
I felt a smile where one wasn’t supposed to be, because, damn it, the fountain
had been fun—my friends applauding and the cop car’s red light spinning round,
me spinning with it; as soon as I smiled, there were murmurs, frowns, glances
exchanged, and the leader signed. So I added, “I never found out which of my
friends was sending those nasty pictures.”
Then it was someone else’s turn. “Hi, my name is Joleen, and I’m an alcoholic,”
she whispered. “I’m here because last Saturday night I set my baby on fire by
accident, and he died yesterday.”
That’s something I hate about AA: all those pathetic, sad people, and how now
all they’ve got going is trying to out-pathetic, out-sad each other, and me sitting
there, afraid it might rub off on me, knowing that if it did, that’s when they’d
really listen to what I have to say. [82-83]
She’s dismissive in the most petty way (“How the parking lot was gravel, so I nicked up the
heels of my shoes” [75].). And, man, listen to how loudly her eyes roll when another mother
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talks about accidentally killing her baby with fire. Yeah, Ginger was toast.
But why is being dismissive of AA a death sentence? Let’s go to the big book, Infinite
Jest, and look at a section I conveniently covered just before picking up Pears On A Willow
Tree:
The bitch of the thing is you have to want to [get sober]. If you don’t want to do
as you’re told—I mean as it’s suggested you do—it means that your own personal
will is still in control. . . The will you call your own ceased to be yours as of who
knows how many Substance-drenched years ago. It’s now shot through with
the spidered fibrosis of your Disease. . . This is why most people will Come In and
Hang In only after their own entangled will has just about killed them. . . You have
to want to take the suggestions, want to abide by the traditions of anonymity,
humility, surrender to the Group conscience. If you don’t obey, nobody will kick
you out. They won’t have to. You’ll end up kicking yourself out, if you steer by
your own sick will. This is maybe why just about everybody in the White Flag
Group tries so hard to be so disgustingly humble, kind, helpful, tactful, cheerful,
nonjudgmental, tidy, energetic, sanguine, modest, generous, fair, orderly, patient,
tolerant, attentive, truthful. It isn’t like the Group makes them do it. It’s more
like that the only people who end up able to hang for serious time in AA are the
ones who willingly try to be these things. This is why, to the cynical newcomer
or fresh Ennet House resident, serious AAs look like these weird combinations
of Gandhi and Mr. Rogers with tattoos and enlarged livers and no teeth who
used to beat wives and diddle daughters and now rhapsodize about their bowel
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movements. It’s all optional; do it or die. [357]
Do it or die.
But what if, in this case, Pietrzyk is using AA as a metaphor for family? What if
Ginger died in that car accident not because she left AA but, rather, because she left the
family, left Detroit? She went Out There,1 to Arizona. Now here’s a conspiracy: what if the
thesis of Pears On A Willow Tree is that leaving your family, it’s traditions and identity,
is karmically equivalent to quitting AA and succumbing to the Substance of spontaneous
egotistical generation? And that that is Ginger’s great crime: the spontaneous egotistical
generation, the rejection of the traditions that are handed down from a mother to her
1
“[A]nd the Crocodiles say they can’t even begin to say how many new guys they’ve seen Come In and
then get sucked back Out There, Come In to AA for a while and Hang In and put together a little sober time
and have things start to get better, head-wise and life-quality-wise. . . and then, without the protection of
meetings or a Group, in time. . . they forget what it was like, the ones that’ve cockily drifted, they forget who
and what they are, they forget about the Disease, until like one day they’re at like maybe a Celtics-Sixers
game. . . and they think what could just one cold foamer hurt, after all this sober time, now that they’ve
gotten ‘Well.’ . . . And after that one it’s like they’d never stopped, if they’ve got the Disease. And how in
a month or six months or a year they have to Come Back In, back to the Boston AA halls and their old
Group, tottering, D.T.ing, with their faces hanging down around their knees all over again, or maybe it’s
five or ten years before they can get it up to get back In, beaten to shit again, or else their system isn’t ready
for the recurred abuse again after some sober time and they die Out There. . . or else, worse, maybe they kill
somebody in a blackout and spend the rest of their lives in MCI-Walpole drinking raisin jack fermented in
the seatless toilet and trying to recall what they did to get in there, Out There; or else, worst of all, these
cocky new guys drift back Out There and have nothing sufficiently horrible to Finish them happen at all,
just go back to drinking 24/7/365, to not-living, behind bars, undead, back in the Disease’s cage all over
again.” [Infinite Jest, 355]
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daughter.
But Ginger isn’t the only one to commit this psychic crime and pay a steep price.
Let’s look at Helen’s deliberations about leaving Detroit to “retire” in Arizona with Ginger.
First, the true chronology:
1967, “Those Places I’ve Been”: Helen contemplates leaving Detroit after the passing
of her husband. She buys new luggage and packs it but doesn’t commit yet. The
chapter concludes with her having a breakdown of sorts.
1967, “Wedding Day”: Ginger gets smashed and makes a fool of herself during her cousin’s
wedding reception. It’s not mentioned in the book, but I suspect this is the moment
that makes Helen reconsider moving to Arizona: she sees how necessary it is for her to
stay in Detroit and help her niece prep for a rushed wedding.
1969, “Blue Beads”: Helen’s mother, Rose, dies. Helen rises up a rung on the matriarchal
ladder, continuing to cement her importance to the family in Detroit.
1974, “All I Know To Tell You”: Helen is called up to resolve a serious money dispute
between nieces June and Marge. This is after she patched up another dispute between
her own sister Wanda and Wanda’s mother-in-law.
1979, “I Want You To Have This Now”: Helen develops dementia and is sent to live
in a retirement facility.
If the book were in true chronological order, “Those Places I’ve Been” would be the fifth
chapter (out of 16). Here we see Helen attempt to come to grips with the recent passing of
her husband. Her sadness transmogrifies into regret for letting Ginger leave, and she begins
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to imagine what life is like outside of Detroit. The stress and depression eventually lead to
a breakdown of some kind. But then, over the next six chapters, Helen discovers her place
and importance in the family, often acting as a peace maker in reconciling disputes among
younger relatives. It’s not until the eleventh chronological chapter, “I Want You To Have
This Now,” that we see Helen succumb to dementia with no one in Detroit able to care for
her. The one person who should be there to care for her, Ginger, is the one who ends up
putting her in a retirement home. It’s a sad, tragic ending to a strong character’s life, a
mother undone by the betrayal of her daughter.
But chronological order is not how the chapters are arranged. Instead of watching
Helen grow into her matriarchal role, we’re treated to the reverse: a strong mother slowly
undone by the abandonment of her daughter. Finally, in overwhelming grief over the death
of her husband and the departure of her daughter, Helen begins the process of moving to
Arizona in chapter 10. The next chapter, “Things Women Know,” is a quick dash back to
the depression era as we watch Rose demonstrate all the things a mother must do for her
family, to feed them and to clothe them and to teach them. Given that the next chapter is
“I Want You To Have This Now,” this return to Rose and accounting of Rose’s sacrifices for
her family in chapter 11 is a harsh rebuke to Helen’s arguments for leaving Detroit; Pietrzyk
is directly contrasting the two women now. Then, “I Want You To Have This Now”: Helen’s
punishment for even thinking about leaving her family. She’s shipped to a retirement home
by the one child who she was willing to abandon Detroit for. That’s too ironic not to be
karmic. Too ironic not to be what Pietrzyk intended.
Again, chronologically we have the story of a mother growing into her role as a matriarch only to be struct down by her daughter’s betrayal. But, the way how the book is
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arranged, we instead have the story of an established matriarch who is slowly ground down
by her daughter’s alcoholism and abandonment. And when she decides that instead of trying to bring her daughter back home into the fold she should try going to the daughter and
leaving the family and Detroit, it’s at this point, after the decision, that she’s sharply by
her own mother and then struck down with dementia. You can’t leave the family, Pietrzyk
says. You can’t go Out There.
So where does this leave us with Amy? She left her own mother, so why hasn’t she
suffered the karmic penalty? In this case, she’s the corrective tissue that reconnects her own
daughter back to the family. Initially she’s sticks with her own mother until she’s 26. At
which point Ginger’s alcoholism becomes the reason Amy bolts for Thailand. But while in
Thailand, she does the leg work of writing letters to everyone in Detroit and calling home to
Arizona. When Ginger dies, Amy returns to the States for good and, by herself, sets about
the work of rectifying Ginger’s belongings—work that Ginger shirked when she put Helen in
the home.
In the last chapter, it’s not clear where Amy is in the present, but it certainly isn’t Arizona (when has it ever been “gray and drizzly—the kind of day you expect will be forgotten”
in Arizona?). We don’t know if she’s returned to Detroit, but we do know that, wherever she
is, she now has her own family—husband and daughter—and that she’s doing the things a
mother should do with her daughter. Again, it’s very Greek tragedy-esque: Pietrzyk as the
angry god demanding blood retribution is finally appeased when the blasphemers are finally
smitten and a young hero steps forward to right the wrongs of the past. Amy is that young
hero, and she clearly gets the message: “Do it or die.”