by Kim Adrian
Part of me understood that I should run downstairs and embrace the tall, young stranger standing in the door, but another part of me bristled at this idea. Although I wanted the presents, what I recognized at that moment, without having the words to name it, was a sense of my own will. It was exhilarating. Over my mother I chose my grandmother. Over emotion, I chose self-control. I chose choice itself.
Deny
My mother insists that her many wide-ranging physical problems would simply disappear if only she could find a doctor willing to give her high doses of intravenous super-strength antibiotics delivered nonstop for six months to a year. Whatever it takes! However, as she has never succeeded in convincing any of her many, many doctors of the existence of the systemic bacterial infection she believes has inhabited her body for several decades now, she is invariably denied this treatment.
Detective
It’s like I’m the detective but the case is impossible. Still, I’m stubborn, so I keep at it. In fact, this is secretly how I think of myself: the stubbornest detective alive. Because despite the dismal prospects, I’ve been working on this case for as long as I can remember. I know it’s stupid, but deep down I subscribe to an elaborate form of magical thinking in which words—and words alone—possess the secret ability to travel through time, which explains why, on some level, some part of me actually believes I can get back there, to the past. It’s just a matter of finding exactly the right words and putting them in exactly the right order. Not the almost words in the almost order but the exact ones in the exact order. Like a code. Once I get everything in just the right place, I’ll simply tunnel my way back. Back and back and back and back—decades before my own birth if necessary. The irony, of course, is that once I got there (I’ve thought this all through), the whole idea of solving the case would become instantly moot because if I ever actually made it, I’d finally be able to give up this fucking *albatross—just toss it, close the case, chuck the evidence—because at that point I could simply concentrate my efforts on saving certain people, and punishing others.
DMH
The central villain in my mother’s increasingly involved, debilitating, and weirdly self-fulfilling delusions is the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health, or, as she usually refers to it, DMH. DMH wants her out of the way because she knows too much. She knows, for instance, that certain doctors are criminally incompetent. Also that criminal abuses have taken place. Somehow this knowledge is worth millions of dollars, which is why DMH goes to such extraordinary, indeed almost unimaginable, pains to narrow her world. Their ultimate goal, she tells me over and over, is to land her permanently in a locked ward in a long-term psychiatric institution, at which point they will, she is sure, force-administer enormous doses of psychopharmaceutical drugs so as to render her beyond any capacity for logic, speech, self-defense, or legal action.
Domesticity
A kind of faith, in my experience.
Don Juan
Miami, Florida, 1971
A hypothetical thought: what if she hadn’t come back? What if she’d stayed there, working as a secretary, dating men like the one in this photograph: older, handsome, apparently wealthy. She looks pleased, if not exactly happy, posing in front of a large white yacht with this guy—this oily, self-satisfied guy. Smiling into the sun, she has one arm around his shoulders. Her other hand rests lightly on his deeply tanned, slightly flabby belly. He’s a bit icky: slick in a middle-aged, rich-boy sort of way, with graying chest hair and a smirk that says he’s in it for the short run. But even so, she might have been happier. We all might have been.
Doppelgängers
Whenever I see my mother by chance in cafés and gift shops, at the grocery store, or just walking along the street, I think: “She looks better than I thought! She looks fine!” I think, “She’s still beautiful!” I always slow my pace to study her in detail, though at the same time I am careful not to let her see me. She is always tall and thin with gray, shoulder-length hair, high cheekbones, and long limbs. All of which makes sense. But there are other details that don’t quite fit, which is why I study her so carefully. For instance, my mother, when I see her by chance, here or there, around town, is always very well dressed, wearing, perhaps, a stylish raincoat or pleated slacks and expensive loafers. Her hair is professionally cut, not riddled with bald spots. Also, she doesn’t hide her teeth behind her hand when she speaks, and when she does speak, she doesn’t do so nervously or for much too long. I notice all these details, and while I recognize the fact that they do not quite make sense, the illusion remains.
Sometimes, if he’s with me, I’ll grab David’s arm and say, “Is that my mother?”
“Are you joking?” he once asked.
Another time, not long ago, I was walking with my children in the little commercial center of our town when I spotted my mother in a gourmet ice cream shop. She was sitting with her back to the window, reading a Nadine Gordimer novel, slowly picking at a cup of chocolate ice cream. I stopped to study the slope of this woman’s shoulders, the nape of her neck, and the beautiful handwoven shawl loosely draped around what appeared to be a fine, hand-knit sweater. Isabella asked me what was wrong, and I said, “I think that might be *Mormor.” She said, “That is not Mormor.” I asked my daughter if she was sure, and she said, “Do you really think that, if that were Mormor, she’d just be sitting there all calm, reading a book and eating an ice cream?” I said no, probably she wouldn’t be doing those things. But I was still reluctant to leave and remained planted in front of the window until Isabella said, “Mama, it’s not her,” and pulled me along.
Dos and Don’ts
Do not lose yourself in the past. Do not lose yourself in the future. Do not get caught in your anger, worries, or fears. Come back to the present moment, and touch life deeply.
—Thich Nhat Hanh
Don’t regret what’s happened. If it’s in the past, let it go. Don’t even remember it!
—Rumi
Dote
Tracy and I shared the room my father’s sisters had slept in when they were young, with its two matching brass beds, two white chenille bedspreads. Our father slept in the room he’d had in high school: a spartan space that just barely fit a single bed, a dresser, and a small wheeled table on which he kept a typewriter.
We didn’t see him much during the years we lived with our grandparents. He was working a lot of the time—no longer in the gravel pit, though at the same business (a large computer company), only now he was a gofer in the accounting department. But even at night he wasn’t around much. That didn’t matter because my grandfather was, and my grandfather read books to me and showed me how magnets worked and tape measures and the garage door. He let me peel back the soft yellow paper from the red wax marker he kept in his shirt pocket and doodle with the chunky carpenter’s pencil he kept next to it (both of these being objects of supreme fascination to me). He taught me how to tell when a tomato is ripe by its smell and how to approach a dog so it doesn’t get nervous (offer your hand below the level of its snout). At night, after Tracy was in bed, I’d watch TV with him, sprawled on the living room rug, while he sat in his armchair, smoking a cigar. I was happy to watch whatever was on—the news mostly. Normally, he didn’t talk much, and he laughed even less. But when All in the Family was on, he chuckled a lot, and so did I, not because I got the jokes (I didn’t) but because I listened to the laugh track for my cues.
Drenched
It’s not my memory—it’s my mother’s, and it is very dim. I see it as if from behind a Vaseline-coated lens, drenched in sepia. But still, it’s part of my experience, if only because I’ve heard the story so many times. The image annoys me, no doubt because every time my mother evokes it, she cries (even to this day). It goes like this: the first time I saw her after she returned from Florida, I was six years old. She was twenty-four. For some reason we were very far away from one another on the gravel road by my grandmother’s house—my other grandmother’s house. My mother was wa
lking in one direction, and I was charging toward her from the other, as fast as I could. The sepia tones are so deep, I can hardly make out a thing, but I know (because she has told me) that when I reached her, I leapt onto her and hugged her with my arms and my legs, like a little monkey, and didn’t let go for a long time.
DUI
My mother’s 2004 steel-gray Honda Accord is sitting in her parking spot in the lot in front of her apartment complex with four flat tires. It’s been like this for six months because she decided not to renew her license. When I ask why, she says, “I don’t expect you to understand.”
Dulce de Leche
It’s only early December, but they’re forecasting a huge blizzard to hit Boston tonight, so David and I decide to run some groceries over to my mother. Neither of us is looking forward to the visit, which is why we promise each other we’ll stay no more than five minutes. We’ve bought most everything on the list she gave us, including a bunch of cleaning products (dust wipes, tissues, paper towels, disinfectant spray, rubbing alcohol, cotton balls, oven cleaner), as well as a bag of gorp (cashew–banana–white chocolate chip), two frozen pizzas, a loaf of sourdough bread, a half-gallon of milk, two gallons of water, frozen mushroom lasagna, a pack of English muffins, an extra large jar of honey, extra chunky peanut butter, a microwavable bag of rice pilaf, a pint of Dulche de Leche ice cream, and one phone card.
Although it’s late afternoon, my mother answers the door in her bathrobe. This isn’t surprising. What is surprising is how small and frail she looks, even though she’s looked this way for a while now, and probably what I should really be surprised by is the fact that I’m still surprised. Her left eye is deeply bloodshot and noticeably smaller than the right, but it still seems in slightly better condition than the last time I saw her, although the iris itself looks weirdly mineralized, and the skin surrounding the eye is loose and very chapped.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with it,” she says when she catches me looking. David and I sidle into her crowded kitchen, past the movable butcher-block counter piled high with cleaning supplies and overstuffed boxes of ancient paperwork, and she starts talking the way she usually does—without pause or grammatical contour. “I can’t see out of it at all, and sometimes it just drifts over to the side for no reason. And when I squirt saline up inside the lid really, really forcefully, all these little tumors fall out, all these little white tumors—I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this, oh, gorp, I love gorp, water, great.”
“Here’s the phone card,” says David, digging it out of his coat pocket.
“Thank you so much. This I really need. This is crucial. Jerry came over to try to fix my phone last night and he says it’s all clear but he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” Jerry is her landlord. “Now, Kimberli, please I just need to ask you one thing when you talk on the phone.” Here she gestures to the door, which we left open, and asks David, in a whisper, to shut it, presumably so that no one can hear what she is about to tell us. “I know what it’s like, I used to complain about my mother to my sisters on the phone all the time, but please, please, please, I’m asking you to please refrain from doing anything like that, from talking about me on the phone to anyone at all in any context whatsoever because they’re listening and you never know when they’re going to pick up. I got a phone call just last night from the fake 911, not the real one, I could tell because it had the 508 area code, and it was a man and a woman and they were mocking me and laughing, so nasty—you wouldn’t believe how nasty people can be. The woman was just cackling and they were saying Even your daughter hates you even your daughter thinks you’re crazy, you’re so far gone everyone knows you should be in the hospital! Now you know that’s not right—911 shouldn’t be calling me! I’m telling you they’re all in on it. I can’t tell which line is safe and which isn’t, and now even the television is affected—I don’t know how they do it, but the ads late at night, I don’t know why anyone would go to the trouble, but they’re directed at me. I know that sounds crazy, but you’d have to see them, and then you’d know. But only late, late, late at night. These crazy ads. At least the local police finally cleared my computer line, but AT&T is relentless, I mean they are re-lent-less. It’s a no-good company. I’m telling you, they’re rotten to the core, but they’re working on it now. They’re investigating so you know it’s the truth because they wouldn’t spend good government money researching this if there wasn’t something to it. So now do you believe me?”
I am, as is usually the case during such exchanges with my mother, transfixed, you could even say hypnotized, by her words, some part of my brain trying to make sense of the complicated technical terms she keeps trotting out, city codes and even some sort of statute at one point. There are also many more observations about her hometown police force and how helpful they can be on occasion as well as references to vague governmental agencies that I’m not sure actually exist. I feel rooted to the spot, just trying to take it in, searching—as I suppose I’ll do for the rest of my life—for a thread of logic, no matter how tenuous, but David is doing what he always does when my mother talks like this, which is to say getting itchy and impatient and increasingly determined to get us out of there.
“Linda,” he says, speaking over my mother in a loud voice. “Linda, we have to go.” My husband is very good at saying these words and can say them steadily over and over, which I have trouble doing. He can also say the related and equally helpful sentence, “Linda, you have to go,” in precisely the same manner on those occasions that demand it. Four or five times, he repeats this sentence about us having to go, but she doesn’t seem to hear him. When she starts telling us for the third time about the man and the woman who called her from the fake 911 to say that her daughter hates her, David tugs the sleeve of my coat and I begin walking backward. And that’s how we leave her apartment, walking backward with my mother still talking at us. Even when we are out on the front stoop, and then when we are in parking lot and she is on the front stoop, she continues talking, only louder, in fact, now she’s shouting to be sure we hear. The snow has started to fall in soft, ragged, nearly golf ball–sized clumps, and this strikes me as magical and beautiful but also mysterious and sad. David and I walk through these tumbling clumps across the parking lot and get into our car, and still my mother keeps talking. Arms crossed over her chest, she’s talking about her all her favorite subjects in quickening spirals—phones, police, doctors, infections. Her words make faint clouds in front of her. It’s only when David starts the engine that she says anything resembling goodbye.
“Okay, okay, okay,” she says. “Okay, thank you for all this. Thank you for the gorp and the water and the paper towels and the ice cream and especially thank you for the phone card because I need that more than anything else and say hi to the kids or at least say hi to Isabella because probably Isaac doesn’t even remember me anymore but say hi anyway and drive safely.” Then she blows us a kiss, and I blow one back, but it’s lame because my face won’t move.
E
Edelweiss
After she came back from Florida, my mother lived for several months with the Aunts (see *German, *hair ribbons) in New York City. Every couple of weeks or so, my father would drive Tracy and me into Manhattan for a visit. I remember these encounters as being vaguely stressful in the sense that our mother was almost a stranger to us by that point and at the same time extremely keen on impressing us, which, as every child knows, can be terribly exhausting. On one of these visits we made an Easter Bunny cake covered in coconut flakes, with jellybean eyes and black licorice whiskers. On another, she took us to the Empire State Building and bought us tiny paper bags stuffed with roast chestnuts—cottony, smoky, and sweet. Another time we climbed the Statue of Liberty, and once when I came into the city alone, without Tracy, she took me to get my hair cut and curled at a fancy salon. Afterward we went to dinner at Maxwell’s Plum. I had a hamburger, she had a salad. There remains one photograph from this outing. We are on the sid
ewalk, in the sun. I wear a green sundress embroidered with small white flowers. My hair is softly curled around my face. I’m studying something inside a bag I’m holding. My mother wears linen slacks and a raw silk blouse. Her dark hair falls in front of her face as she bends to hug me. She smells like Jean Naté.
Effective
On our fifth or sixth visit, Tracy and I brought matching calico-covered suitcases. The plan was for us to sleep over. But our father had no sooner dropped us off than our mother led us right back to the elevator and outside again, then onto the street and up to a rusty brown car I’d never seen before. It was crammed with boxes, suitcases, blankets, pillows, and clothing. She told us to climb in, then piled more things on top of us—dresses and blouses covered with slippery plastic sleeves. “The three of us are going on a great adventure,” she said. “We’re going to live in a wonderful little house. It’s perfect—you’ll see. It’s on an adorable street full of children exactly your age! Won’t that be fun?”