She finally interrupts me. “Where’s Mae?” she says.
Of course that would be the first thing she asks me. I lie, say Mae got strep throat. She’ll be fine, but she can’t travel.
“You were supposed to be taking care of her,” Mom says.
Really? That’s all she has to say to me? Not that she missed me, not that she’s been thinking of me, not that she’s glad I drove all the way here to see her? There’s a stack of my letters on her table. She hasn’t even opened them. I look away because if I look at her, I might lose it. I look out the window at the garden below, then over at the other side of the room, an identical bed and desk—
Jesus. There’s a woman. Has she been here this whole time? She must have been. A small woman, sitting like a statue at the desk at the opposite end of the room. She’s wearing a green bathrobe and staring straight into the wall behind me.
“Who is that?” I whisper to Mom.
Mom ignores me. She’s playing with a string that has come loose on the sleeve of her pajamas.
“Can we go take a walk in the garden?” I ask in a lowered voice, not wanting that creepy woman to hear any more of what I have to say.
Mom shakes her head. Her ugly bowl cut swishes around her face. “I’m not allowed.”
“Why not?”
She doesn’t say, keeps looking at the string.
“I’m going to get you out of here,” I whisper and hug her again.
She pushes my hand away and says, “You kept me alive, well, you got your wish. Here I am. Go back to New York.”
JOANNE WEBER
I was Marianne’s roommate at St. Vincent’s. I had been in and out of there for two years, mostly in. I retired from being an architect, and then the lack of structure, the loss of identity, I don’t know what it was, but I spiraled into a depression. I was diagnosed as bipolar. At first I was relieved that there was a name for what was wrong with me, but I’ve come to see these labels as pretty crude. Anyone with suicidal tendencies who wasn’t wearing an aluminum foil hat was bipolar at St. Vincent’s. Marianne was bipolar too. And she also had a personality disorder. If the diagnosis of Female Hysteria were still available at St. Vincent’s they probably would have used that on her as well.
I’m not saying there wasn’t a reason we were all in there. Clearly we all had some things to work out, but the categories the doctors used didn’t mean all that much. And when you didn’t respond to their treatment they took it personally. They kept upping Marianne’s dosages, even though it was clear the meds weren’t helping her. Some people would try to starve themselves until they disappeared. Marianne did that by talking less and less, until there was less of her there after a while.
When Marianne had first moved in with me, we would talk. We’d lie in our beds and tell each other about our lives before, our marriages and childhoods and so on. She talked about having children. She said it was the point when her husband finally succeeded in invading her. He deformed her—not just her body, but something at the very center of her was stretched out and defiled. I don’t have children of my own—but I could imagine feeling as she did. Even so, I was dismayed when her daughter visited and I saw how Marianne treated the poor girl. No kindness. I was pretty numb at the hospital, but that girl’s voice tore into me in a way I didn’t expect. I remember being disgusted with Marianne then, feeling like I had misjudged her. My mother had also been a very cold woman.
Now, what her daughter probably didn’t realize, what she’d probably never know, is that after she left, Marianne cried and cried, quietly so as not to arouse the nurse’s interest. And that’s when I finally understood Marianne’s behavior—a primal instinct to get her daughter away from herself and to safety, even if it meant breaking the girl’s heart.
Chapter 7
PHONE CONVERSATION
BETWEEN MAE AND EDITH
Edith: Hello?
Mae: Edie?
Edith: Yeah. Can you hear me?
Mae: Yeah. It’s not a great connection though.
Edith: I’m at a pay phone. Outside the mental hospital.
Mae: Oh.
Edith: Well?
Mae: Well, what?
Edith: Aren’t you going to ask me about Mom.
Mae: No. I know about Mom.
Edith: Do you? Well, it’s worse than in the letters. Much worse. She doesn’t seem like herself anymore. And they cut her hair.
Mae: Her hair?
Edith: Yeah. It looks horrible. And that’s not all they did to her… But you probably know about that since you’re such a genius.
Mae: I have to go.
Edith: She asked about you, of course. It was the only thing she asked. Certainly didn’t ask me how I was doing.
Mae: Dad’s waiting downstairs. I have to go.
MAE
One time, when Dad took me on a picnic by the duck pond in Central Park, I decided that I would have him to myself and I wouldn’t share him with Mom. Sitting on the plaid, moth-eaten blanket, I let Dad feed me dried figs and dates, and olives stuffed with almonds. I found the textures of these foods revolting, but I ate them and smiled my Mom smile, swallowing them quickly, so they barely even grazed my tongue. After I had sampled everything in the picnic basket, Dad looked at me with quivering anticipation as though this was my cue. Cue for what exactly, I wasn’t sure. He must have felt that something was amiss.
I sat like Mom, stared out at the pond like Mom, touched my hair as she would have, hummed a song I’d heard her hum before, but none of it was right. He was restless. He could sense that I was an imposter. He was waiting for me to do something, but as myself, I didn’t know what it was. I sighed. I stretched. I lay back down and sat back up. None of this was what he wanted from me.
His mouth was pursed in frustration. I was doing the same thing I had been doing, how did he know that I wasn’t her? My eagerness to please only irritated him. Finally, he said very quietly, almost inaudibly under his breath: tell me that you don’t love me, that I’m a bore, a mistake, that you should have never come.
I did not want to say or even think these things. I felt humiliated. My love must have meant very little if he was willing to contaminate it with Mom’s cruelty. But I couldn’t say no to him. I’d do whatever it was he needed and so, I let Mom’s tentacles tighten around my throat and force those words out of me: I don’t love you, you’re a bore, a mistake, I never should have come.
He wanted me to hurt him, so I did. I said all that he told me to and more, and with each terrible thing that came out of me I felt myself inflating bigger and bigger, until I was the size of a float in a parade and he was cowering in front of me. I had never before felt this kind of excitement. I was both omnipotent and completely out of control. My skin was on fire. I couldn’t breathe.
AMANDA
I was on my way to visit Dennis’s old high school when, by pure luck, I spotted him and Mae, spreading out a blanket by the edge of the pond in Central Park. I rented a paddleboat and tried to float by them casually, but they were so engrossed in each other that they didn’t see me waving. I made several loops around the pond, but each time I passed, they didn’t look up. I could have called to them, but I knew that I needed to tread lightly. There are only so many times you can plausibly run into a person. I turned around and began to head back to the boathouse when I heard shouting. Their idyllic picnic had, in an instant, transformed into a fight. His daughter looked wild, clawing and kicking him while he tried to fend her off. I jumped from my boat and ran to them through the shallow water. Dennis’s face was bleeding. They both seemed dazed when I pulled her off of him and then she took off running. Dennis looked at me, but I don’t think my presence even registered. He staggered after her, leaving behind all their belongings. I called out to him but he didn’t turn around.
Later that evening I came over with Rose to return the picnic basket. The house was in disarray. I remember the cat’s litter box had overflowed and those dusty pebbles were scattered through the living r
oom. It was pretty early, but Mae was asleep, snoring. I washed all the dishes while Rose and Dennis talked.
“She’ll stay out of your way. She wants to help you write your book,” I heard Rose say. And when Dennis tried to protest, she wouldn’t hear of it. “Stop being so selfish. Stop it. You owe that girl a home. Look at this place.”
He promised he’d hire a housecleaner, but Rose wouldn’t budge. Dear Rose, sweet Rose. I don’t know what would have happened without her intervention.
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
[September 7, 1980]
Cassandra Speaks;
By Dennis Lomack;
p395.
By this point, our culture has become inured to the mating rituals of hippies, but Lomack has found a new way to make his readers squirm. In his latest effort, Cassandra Speaks, Gregor, a cuckolded revolutionary is tortured by his young wife, Cassandra. We’re back in the South from Bonfires but two decades later. As the naïf transforms into a vamp, Gregor transforms into a ghost, literally, of the man he once was. The mixture of fantastical and prosaic has certainly been done before (ahem, Kafka), but not quite like this.
In one scene, Gregor watches as Cassandra picks up a “malcontent with a ravaged face” in a bar. Gregor follows them to the man’s apartment inside a seedy house on stilts, a flood zone equivalent of the Baba Yaga’s hut atop chicken feet, and watches through the window as the ugly stranger makes love to his wife. The apartment has no furniture, only an enormous red paper umbrella, “the kind of thing you would find in a tropical drink or in a bordello,” hanging upside down from the ceiling lamp and casting a pink glow on the copulating bodies. Yet, it is the scene that immediately follows this, of Cassandra and Gregor walking home together, that’s even more unsettling. The tenderness between the two of them has its own violence. It is this very tenderness that prompts Gregor’s transformation into a ghost.
Once a ghost, Gregor gives up his own earthly pleasure in order to possess his wife’s body and force her to have relations with others so as to experience these infidelities with her. Gregor’s possession of his wife seems a clear metaphor to the writing process itself, where Lomack inhabits the minds of each of his characters and is forced to experience life through them, possess them. Maybe the act of writing forces empathy but it does little to mollify his deep rage…
THERAPY NOTES FOR
MARIANNE MCLEAN
May 4, 1997
Third session in a row in which Marianne refuses to speak.
I asked: how are you feeling? Is there anything you would like to discuss? Silence.
The new medication has side effects (bloated face, waxy and gray skin, unpleasant twitching). Between that and what she did to her hair (chewed it off with her teeth, according to the nurses), her stay here is negatively impacting her appearance.
However, this doesn’t mean she isn’t getting better. Improvement is rarely linear.
I read to her from a transcript of an earlier session, one in which she was more forthcoming:
My father never talked about my mother. It made him too sad. She’d died so suddenly: a defect in her heart. I never asked him because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. I didn’t want him to think that he hadn’t been enough for me because he had. He had been enough. Dennis had this idea that having children would replace the void left by my father’s death. But, of course, it just dug two more holes.
I asked her if she would care to expand on this. She shook her head.
Maybe she could write a poem about it? I offered her a pen and paper but she didn’t move.
We sat the rest of the hour in silence. When our time was up, I told her that if she wanted to get better she’d have to start working harder.
Then, finally, she speaks!
She said she did not want to get better. And, that if she wanted to be dead, she should have the right.
I cleared her of this misconception. She does not have the right. Not in the state of Louisiana.
MAE
Then, one day, Amanda was back. She would take care of me, Dad said. Can you imagine? That lank-haired ghoul ministering to my needs.
I tried to protest, but Dad wouldn’t hear of it. He was getting to a point in his novel that required his full attention, and Amanda had offered “very generously” to make sure “everything else” ran smoothly. “Everything else,” being me. She made herself indispensable. She made him lunch from recipes Rose gave her and left it by his door, cleaned and fixed things around the house, and took me to my photography class. Most importantly, she made herself scarce when Dad needed me to be “Marianne.” They must have had some sort of understanding.
Otherwise, Amanda was always in the apartment, making me feel self-conscious as I sat on the floor outside Dad’s room, waiting for him to open the door. “Mae” had begun to feel as much of a performance as “Marianne.” I sat there, the embodiment of sweetness and innocence, posed in a patch of sunlight, playing with the cat. When Dad came out to use the bathroom or put his empty lunch tray on the counter, he would pat my head or say a few kind words, but he only really noticed me when I was “Marianne.”
Though I was expected to keep “Mae” and “Marianne” separate, after the picnic, certain things from “Marianne” began to bleed into me in ways I couldn’t control. I kept returning to that moment of Dad, down on his knees. I would find myself thinking about the look on his face, which now I recognize to be a combination of arousal and despair. At the time I couldn’t have articulated this, but thinking about it made me slightly nauseous and excited. My heart would start racing and I’d find myself doing things that I didn’t understand to relieve the strange pressure building inside me. I’d press myself against the doorknob or the lip of the dresser and rock back and forth. I had no frame of reference for what I was doing. I was so sexually innocent, I’d never even kissed a boy. And yet, when Amanda caught me humping the dresser, I knew to feel ashamed. I’d blushed and pretended I had been dancing.
In the evenings, Amanda would go back to whatever hole she’d crawled out of. Dad would sit in his room, typing, and I would lie in bed, feeling Mom’s lust descending on me like dread. I began to have dreams in which I was Mom, and Dad was doing the things to me that he did to her in his books. In these dreams he was a blurred hybrid of himself as I knew him and himself from the old photographs I’d seen.
So much of my art is about this subject, and yet I still find honesty difficult. I said dreams, but that’s not really what they were. I was awake. I said dreams because it felt so much outside of my control. Just like if I say that this lust belonged to Mom and if I think of it as hers, as this external force, it wouldn’t have been mine.
EDITH (1997)
It’s strange seeing my old neighborhood from the window of the truck. I watch in a daze as we drive past a couple kids running through a sprinkler. One slips and falls, starts to cry, the other keeps playing like nothing happened.
How can Mae be so calm when Mom is rotting in there? Literally, rotting. Even if you can’t smell it, you feel it. The line from Mom’s letter about the molecules from the hospital becoming part of her. That woman screaming on the second floor is in me. And Mom’s roommate, her dead skin cells and spit cells, they’re in me too. Can Charlie tell that I’ve been contaminated?
Charlie breaks the silence. “So, how w-w-was she?” he finally asks.
“Not good.” As soon as I say it, I feel like I’ve betrayed her. Why am I telling him anything? He will probably just leave me. Why would he stick around. “But not bad either. She’s definitely not crazy, not like the other people in there. She can just be selfish sometimes.”
He nods. Why is he nodding?
“Not selfish, that’s not what I meant,” I say.
“Well, k-k-killing yourself is a selfish thing to do.”
What is he talking about? I move my hand away from his. He’s acting like he knows us, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t know anything. And, she didn’t kill herself. If she had killed h
erself, she would be dead.
“I’d rather you didn’t talk about my mother,” I say.
He apologizes and tries to put his hand back, but I don’t let it near me. It’s so rough. I can’t believe I was just touching it. I can’t believe yesterday those freckled, boney fingers were inside of me. They twitch now in his lap. How vile.
“You can let me out here.” I open the door before he stops all the way.
Someone’s car is parked by the side door. An old black Honda. Strange. It must be the DuPres’s. The dad is a mechanic and they have a constant rotation of cars they need to park off the street.
“Is that yours?” I hear Charlie’s voice behind me.
“No. A neighbor’s.”
I’m about to get the spare key, but something catches in the corner of my eye. Rope. Rope hanging from a branch in the oak tree. And attached to the rope… a tire. A swing. What’s wrong with me, panicking like that at the sight of a swing? But where did it come from? It’s not ours. Who put it there? Also the DuPres? They have two boys, but why wouldn’t they put it in their own damn tree?
“What are you d-doing?” Charlie asks. He’s holding my bags, standing by the side door.
“Nothing.” I let go of the tire, go get the spare key hidden behind a rock under the back porch. I don’t bother to explain why I had lied about the spare key last night, and he doesn’t ask.
I can’t tell at first what’s wrong. The smell inside the house makes me uneasy. It smells like Vicks VapoRub and fish. What could we have left out to make it smell this way? Charlie follows me up the side steps into the kitchen.
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