by Marin Sardy
* * *
—
I thought, Well, you know, maybe it’ll go away. And it didn’t.
* * *
· · ·
I didn’t know that there were medications. I didn’t know there was a body of knowledge about it. I didn’t know people could be treated and recover. And I didn’t know that there was a variety of mental illnesses, each with its own characteristic pattern.
* * *
—
There was practically no understanding. People were referred to as being crazy. And that was a very bad thing. People who were crazy got locked up. It was almost a moral—there was kind of a stern feeling. If people were crazy, you didn’t want them around. They should be taken care of discreetly somewhere else.
* * *
—
That was the basic default position: You just didn’t notice it. It was a shameful condition. It was something that, like having a relative in the state penitentiary or—there was no understanding that it was an illness, that it was a treatable illness. And there wasn’t a lot of sympathy either.
* * *
—
Those were the days when things like this happened because a mother’s love was withdrawn or whatever. Nobody saw it as a chemical imbalance or anything like that.
* * *
—
More time passed, and it became clear that your mother was ill. And I didn’t understand, I didn’t understand the illness. I didn’t understand how ill she was.
* * *
—
Now, is this supposed to come from one side of the brain?
* * *
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And of course, your grandparents were pretty much in denial. Your grandfather was always trying to put a different explanation on it, which I understood more when Tom got sick because that’s what I was doing, in retrospect. Trying to explain this behavior by every damn thing. He’s like me, I can remember going through that, yada yada yada. You just don’t want to believe it.
* * *
· · ·
You know, my maternal uncle was psychotic—Perry, right. So there was mental illness in our family, but we avoided the subject. I think Mother faced it more than any of us. But she felt that burden of shame that people did in her generation, and she didn’t talk about it. Didn’t talk about Perry much.
* * *
—
I was in therapy. So a lot of times the therapist would say, “You know, your sister is mentally ill.” And I would say, “No, no, that’s the way she is.” And they’d say, “No, this is different.” So that gave me the confidence to say it to other people in the family.
* * *
—
I didn’t know anything about anybody’s mentalities, and I don’t think Bob did either. He always thought she was sick, though, after she became delusional. I would be trying to convince her: “Mari, that couldn’t possibly be true.” And he would say to me, “Don’t. She won’t hear you.” And she didn’t. That was the hardest thing for me. To realize that anyone as bright as Mari could believe things that were absolutely unbelievable.
* * *
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I think anybody who was around her found themselves feeling like Okay, this is somebody who’s mentally ill. But what are you going to do about it? Because she doesn’t want to do anything about it. So do you call up and have some kind of intervention where people come up with handcuffs and cart her off? I don’t even think you can do that.
* * *
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I think honestly I was in high school before I ever told myself that Mom has a mental illness. I don’t think I ever thought of her like that. I don’t think I was able to think of it like that.
* * *
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I didn’t really know what the terms meant, but I do remember once, I’d say something about Julie and she’d say, “Oh, well, you know, that’s the other Julie. Not the real Julie.” And I thought, Whoa! That seems a little schizophrenic. And she decided Chris was related to Queen Elizabeth. But I never cared. I just thought somebody should see her, and try to figure out what it is, and see if there are any medications that can help. You know, experiment. I just wanted somebody to experiment.
* * *
· · ·
I’ve never really confided in anybody what it’s like to have a schizophrenic mom. I mean, I’ll talk to people about it. But there’s just too many pieces. To me that’s—that’s in the therapy realm.
* * *
—
The first person I ever told was Lindsey. I remember being in the car, driving back from I think the mall, shopping. And I just got overwhelmed. Overwhelmed with kind of a grief. I remember putting my head down like this. I didn’t realize I was doing that and then Lindsey was like, “Adrienne, are you okay?” And I was like, “Yeah, I’m fine.” We went into Kim’s house and I went up to Kim’s room and I started crying. Crying and crying. Lindsey came up and was like, “What’s wrong?” And I was like, “My mom is sick. My mom has an illness. My mom is mentally ill.” It was the first time I ever said that out loud, to anybody. I was fifteen, I guess.
* * *
· · ·
I’d seen a lot of similarities between me and Mari. I used to always say, “The difference between me and Mari is, there’s this edge—of reality—and it’s scary to me.” I really, really felt I understood how she could see the edge. But I also had no interest. My instinct was to go the other way. If I got a sense I was getting close, I was like, back. She doesn’t have that.
* * *
—
I’ve never really thought about how she receives it all. Whether she just comes up with this stuff, or actually does hear a voice that explains it.
* * *
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I mean, you could see how they’d been constructed. At one point she told me that there were flying pigs at the ranch. And I happened to be in, I think it was Denver, and there were these big bus ads showing flying pigs, and I thought, Maybe she picks up that kind of image and carries it around until she can fit it into a delusion.
* * *
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I think she understands that there are a lot of people in the world who don’t believe these things are true, and she has to be pretty careful about those people. Because they’re the ones who think that there’s something wrong with her. And I think she puts me in that group.
* * *
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Mostly I just resisted. I just felt like the situation was oppressive. Just always, knowing it wasn’t her fault was a hard thing for me. Because knowing that, I felt a sense of obligation that I should be okay with it. And I wasn’t.
* * *
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It was a different kind of tension. It was just being in the flow of her illness, and really going with the flow of her illness. Constantly metering how present or non-present she was.
* * *
—
I think it’s very hard for her to maintain normal for long. We go out to lunch, she gets so excited, you know, she gets dressed up. And then after fifteen or twenty minutes I have a feeling like, she’s getting tense. It’s getting hard to talk in a normal fashion and make normal conversation. I just feel badly. I say to myself, Probably the best thing to do is just see her one-on-one. Keep it simple.
* * *
—
I met a guy—he has a son in his fifties who’s schizophrenic. We had a brief get-together and he said, you know, “We try to get them into our world and they try to get us into theirs.” And this is what Tom did. And this is what your mother was doing.
* * *
· · ·
I think both Mother and Dad really searched for why. And of course, it’s an illness. You know, you don’t feel that way about diabetes. But I think they will always, and maybe al
l parents will always try to figure out, What was it?
* * *
—
But you know, there’s mental illness on Dad’s side too. My aunt Helen had a serious breakdown as an adult. She had to be hospitalized. It was bad enough to affect who she was for the rest of her life. So I have always felt that Mother shouldn’t feel like it’s all on her side. And also I feel like this is good for you to know, because of genes.
* * *
—
I wish I could tell you more, but I really can’t. As to what her brain was like, I haven’t the faintest idea.
* * *
· · ·
There are times it’s irritating. She got on one about Jeff when we were getting married. Like, come on, I got a lot going on. I don’t need you telling me that Jeff’s going to jail in a month. That his ex-wife and he weren’t divorced, and she had committed a crime, and he had said he would go to jail for her. Which is sweet. She likes Jeff. But I guess for all of us, it’s a little less cute when it involves you personally.
* * *
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I think she likes just very passing acquaintances. And people like her. And she is always so very neatly dressed, but very conservatively. In late years, I’ve thought people might take her for a little nun.
* * *
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She’s amazing. She’s lived with us off and on. She’s lived near me. And I have gotten frustrated. But it doesn’t faze her. When she got upset with me, it did faze me—but when I’ve gotten upset with her, it’s like just right over her head.
* * *
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I do love her. But I find that her will is so powerful and inflexible and difficult to bend to—that’s when I get into trouble. When I have to be with her for a period of time, I just start feeling like I’ve been run over, and I don’t have any voice, and I have no opinions that count, and I start feeling really weird. It’s the boundary thing. And she just mows you down. And that’s not good.
* * *
—
She did tell me once I’m not who I think I am—but she likes me anyway. Which I thought was so touching. It really was.
* * *
· · ·
I feel, gosh, she’s missing so much.
* * *
—
But you know, it’s weird. We’ve lost something. We’ve lost this person in a way, that was so dynamic and, in my opinion, brilliant. Somebody who was really, would stand up to anything she didn’t agree with. And I think still does, but on a much—I don’t know. I feel that there’s so much about her I don’t know.
* * *
—
You know, she doesn’t want to change. This is who she is. And the Mari that I remember is just gone. There are parts of her, still. But I was just going to have to stop wanting her to be the way she was, because it wasn’t ever going to happen. And now I feel like she’s sort of this familiar stranger.
* * *
—
I think the way you have to look at it, the only way I can deal with it—you have to consider it a story. It’s just what happened. It may not be the way you wanted it to be, but it is what happened. It’s the way life is.
The Wildcatter
What I know of my mother’s father rests on the tangible. Objects such as the ones that filled his mansion at the ranch in New Mexico that we called Circle Diamond, the family home, where he resided when he wasn’t at his Los Angeles offices or traveling for business. There were sleek leather sofas and abstract paintings and Navajo blankets that smelled like nothing but themselves—a smell that hit me once in a Santa Fe rug shop and made me feel that he was there in the room. It has always been as if through his objects he spoke to me, though I do clearly recall his voice, soft and patient before a stroke pulled down his words and slowed them to a warped drone. It is the things, the touchable, graspable things, that most seem to be from him, of him.
There is no reason why it should be this way. His life was well recorded, more so than most. Journalists reported on him, quoted him, in midcentury magazines and even a biography he hired a reporter to write. The book is excellent or awful depending on what you want from it. It contains many dates, many numbers. But I am bad with dates, forgetful: He was born in 1917 or 1918 or 1920. He died at the age of ninety and I was there. I helped swab the dry lips once the unconscious body would no longer will the tongue to wet them, watched him exit the world. I remember the precise shape of his open mouth and how it stayed that way despite my uncle’s efforts to close it once he was gone.
My overwhelming sense of him was whiteness. White hair, white Stetson, a preference for white foods like potatoes, vanilla ice cream. The unimpeachable whiteness of his Swedish lineage, so that nothing stood in the way of his rise. What particular Chicago neighborhood he came from, I can’t say. But I know my family’s immigrant stories, the rough shape of them just like so many other immigrant stories. The father gone to work as a bellboy at fourteen, working his way into banking. A gifted son, on scholarship at an elite school. Talent and charm. And then fortune came as fortune so often does in America, fast and beautiful.
Wildcatter is the word I most closely associate with him. Wildcat, used as a verb, then a descriptor. To go wildcatting. To be a wildcatter. One who wildcats. It brings to mind a creature, rangy and lean, point-eared, suggesting stealth, feline grace. In many ways this is the wrong image. Wildcatting is prospecting for crude oil—analyzing the geology of an area and then drilling test wells where the rock is the right age and formation to signal the possible presence of a reserve. Being a wildcatter required intelligence, perseverance, nerve. But there was also the glamour of the oil business in the age of the automobile, and the word captured that glamour.
His full climb took decades, started with one refinery. Unglamorous, situated in a small town in the western desert—a place that at first felt barren and lonely to my grandmother. But with some fine-tuning and a few innovations it kept him flush enough to buy more refineries, then a plane. He hopped around the West, well to well, dig to dig—years and years when wildcatting was more like a bad habit than a job, years of failures when all the money came from the faithful refineries. He once said that he must have dug two hundred dusters before he hit his first gusher.
This is where the story begins to sweep me away, invariably, and I lose track of what I might have intended to critique. I am along for the ride, repeating the myth as it has always been repeated. Because it still stands in for history, and because it is thrilling and potent and it makes me feel—here it is, the bare truth of it—special.
I know the names of the biggest oil fields, the biggest events. Empire Abo, that first gusher. Then the major purchases, the business deals. Atlantic Refining Co., in Philadelphia. Richfield Oil, in Los Angeles. The merger he orchestrated, creating the Atlantic Richfield Company, ARCO—I’ve hunted down the year: 1966. The logo I have known forever—a square that is tilted to resemble a gemstone, facets cut through with curved lines that suggest freeways, forward momentum. I first saw it decorating the highball glasses in the Big House at the ranch, or painted on the sides of private jets I was sometimes ushered into. And the name—ARCO, all-caps, Helvetica font—emblematic of an era, an ideal, a belief that the progress of modernity was arriving, exactly then, at its ultimate destination.
* * *
—
The twin pillars of the old ARCO Towers and Plaza rise in parallel from the northwest side of Flower Street in Los Angeles, close enough to the 110 freeway that they are among the most visible skyscrapers in the city, easily seen by anyone skirting downtown. Their design is what I have always called “seventies architecture,” though I only saw them for the first time as an adult, never having visited my grandparents at their beachside apartment. The towers are, officially, Corporate International style—solid shapes of dark glass and deep green marble, squares
within rectangles, a grid of straight edges, tall plain boxes, unattractive at a distance. Even up close, the polished stone offers little purchase. The buildings are not welcoming—the scale is unforgiving, their simplicity severe. But if you walk through the plaza between them and go around the wide porticoes to the back, you find that there the buildings are sunken beneath street level so that it is quiet, and the dark stone benches in the garden echo back the street sounds so that they come like the striking of distant chords. Here the broad rectangles of the benches and columns form peaceful geometries, separating trees and gardens of long grasses and occasional bursts of flowers blooming orange-red, the color of the sculpture between the buildings, at the center of the plaza.
The sculpture rests on short posts that descend, nearly invisibly, into a round, shallow pool, so that it seems to hover on the water. It is a bright and smooth-surfaced structure, consisting of two spiral-staircase-shaped segments that wind up from opposite sides of the pool toward one another until they meet at the top, long edge to long edge. Two sets of eighteen steps that slowly twist into an architectural embrace. The thing is beautiful, intriguing, exciting. The shape you see changes utterly as you walk around the plaza. Here it is broad, with the space between the two shapes forming an archway that I would surely walk through if it weren’t for the water. From other angles it is a tight, compact, energetic helix that bulges in different places depending on your position. I love it absolutely.