by Kim Adrian
“Oh, I’m just so shocked!” she says, pressing a palm to my cheek. “Do you really think so?” Her index finger pensively touches my lower lip. “I have such a terrible itch!” she says, and scratches my scalp. “Do I look okay? Do I look all right?” Her fingers flutter all over my face. “Are you sure?”
Gordian Knot
We were in the hallway, near the kitchen, and I was having a hard time talking. This was so often the case when I was a kid. The words just wouldn’t come out. I knew it seemed like I was hiding something, but she was making me nervous. She’d accused me of lying, and I got confused. Looking back on it now, it seems simple enough. I’d been invited out by a group of friends for pizza. My mother had insisted that a grown-up accompany us. It had taken forever, over the phone, to work out the logistics, but finally somebody’s mother agreed to be there, only she was thinking two steps ahead, and she’d left to run some errands as soon as she’d dropped us off at the pizza parlor. Later she returned to pick us up. It was all pretty straightforward, I can see that now. But at the time my mother was impatient with my stuttering. Convinced that I was hiding something, that I was lying, she hit me. The bruise lasted for a while: a shiner under my left eye. The next week, when she was picking me up after school, another mother accused her of being a child abuser.
What made this incident stick for all these years wasn’t the blow itself. It wasn’t even my mother’s violent reaction to what had been essentially a misunderstanding. Nor was it that another adult had accused her of abusing me. No, what really got me at the time was how she related her interaction with her accuser (she’d been alone with the woman) to the rest of us at the dinner table that night—with a kind of dainty sniffing, as if her dignity had been terribly bruised, yet somehow she was holding up . . . Then she turned to me, as if I’d said something.
“I didn’t hit you, Kimberli! It was just a little slap. Maybe my hand slipped, or maybe you moved. But I didn’t hit you.” And at that instant reality—as it so often did—suddenly buckled and rearranged itself: the blow of a few days earlier was now a slap, the trajectory of which had simply been miscalculated. This was now the story, and any deviation from it, I knew, would be tantamount to lying.
Grab
M—, New Jersey, 1958
Hair unevenly chopped—there are wings and chunks and random wisps—my mother poses for her fifth grade portrait. There’s a feline quality to her face. You find it in the upswept cheekbones, in the tapering eyes. Her gaze is direct. There is still some trust in it. This photograph is small and printed on especially thin paper. There’s a cigarette burn at the right-hand edge and a tear running from the left, across her face to her shoulder. When I look at the girl in this photo, I feel like I’m trying to grab something in a dream.
Guess
Tracy and I shared a single bed for years, but even when we had our own rooms, we often climbed into bed with each other if one of us felt scared (usually me). We played a game then: pictures in the air. Car. Teddy. Mustache. Image after image etched into the darkness with our index fingers. How did we do it? How did one see what the other had drawn when it was nighttime, when we were tired, and the images, in any case, were nothing but currents of air and part of the game was to draw as quickly as possible? Just a swoosh, and there’s your bike! It’s a mystery. And yet we always guessed right. Grapes. Flower. Coffeepot. Shoe. It was almost as if we knew what the other one was thinking.
Guilt
I can feel it sometimes at the back of my neck or underneath my sternum. My mother’s unhappiness is inside me. It’s pain in my bones. Salt in my blood.
Gus
“Pop” is how my mother and her siblings referred to their father, although when I was young, I had no idea that the word Pop could be used in this way—to designate a father—and I assumed that the person my aunts and uncles spoke of so often in such high-pitched, even strident tones at those holiday gatherings, this Pop, must be a very special family friend, a colorful eccentric who had somehow inserted himself into all the family lore. Above all, I assumed Pop must be a man of deep magnetism because whenever his name came up, the air went high voltage.
One day when I was about eight or nine years old, at one of those crowded, loud, and raucous holiday meals at my grandmother’s house, I asked, “Who’s ‘Pop’ anyway?” and amid the enormous guffaws this question generated, I heard my mother’s voice from the other side of the room, quiet but absolute: “He’s dead to me.”
My grandmother called him by a different name, which I learned the day a cop pulled her over when Tracy and I happened to be in the back seat.
“This vehicle belongs to Gustaf Forsgren,” said the policeman. I could see only his belly, stretching the dark blue fabric of his uniform, and his hands, holding a pen and a small pad. “Can you tell me his whereabouts please, ma’am?”
My grandmother assured the officer that she hadn’t seen her husband in almost a decade. “Gus left me years ago,” she said, and then, gesturing toward me with her thumb, “I haven’t heard from him since before this one was born.”
H
Hair Ribbons
I’ve never met anybody who hates anybody as much as my grandmother hated the Aunts. Even deep into old age, she found ways to insert this hatred into the most unlikely conversations, wailing (always with fresh grief), “They gave me no love!”
I’ve often wondered what it was, exactly, that she meant by this. Did they never tell her stories? Or did they neglect to hug her? Or maybe, in their pale, almost ice-blue German eyes, she simply never found herself reflected, rosy and apple-like?
My mother invariably mentions hair ribbons when attempting to explain the animosity between the Aunts and their only niece. Her reasoning runs like this: The Aunts were so young! Still just girls themselves when their sister died. The family had so little money to begin with, and then along comes little Ellen, so sick. She was always being taken to the doctor. There was no money left over for things like hair ribbons—the sorts of things young girls need in order to feel pretty, in order to go out in the world and be courted. It’s odd, but this explanation never seems to vary, even in inflection.
Hair Shirt
As a child—so the story goes—Grandma Ellen was bright, studious, and especially good at English. She did so well in high school, in fact, that she graduated two years early with a full scholarship to Hunter College in New York City. But instead of accepting this gift, this unheard-of opportunity (she was the only one in her family to make it through high school, let alone be admitted to college), she ran away from home. Why? My mother has always explained it this way: She was just looking for love. Love was all she wanted!
That my grandmother refused the scholarship is uncontested in family lore—I’ve heard the story dozens of times. But what she did next remains a mystery, mostly because she herself told two very different versions of what happened. In one version she took an eight-day train ride from New York City to New Orleans, where she worked for several years as a lonely secretary, saving money and occasionally going to the movies on weekends with her roommates, who were also lonely secretaries. The second version (which didn’t surface until she was an old woman, at which point she told it frequently) follows the first up to a point: she still went to New Orleans, she still lived and worked with other women, but instead of taking a job as a secretary, she became a prostitute. And in this story it was as a prostitute that she eventually met her future husband.
I have often wondered how my grandmother settled on that particular man. Maybe she smelled it right away—his misanthropy. Maybe she could tell he liked to swim upstream, like her. Or maybe she thought he’d be her stream, her river of swill. Then again, maybe her calculations were far less complicated than that—maybe she just thought, with the shortsighted vengeance of a child or in any case an emotionally stunted young woman: He’s perfect! The Aunts will hate him!
Halos
M—, New Jersey, circa 1961
Nine kids posing
with popsicles in someone’s backyard. This photo is black-and-white, but the fixer must have been off because everything is a tad pink. My uncle Nils and aunt Becky are easy to spot—they’re the only ones who had dark hair as children. And there’s one of the neighbors’ kids: a toddler pixie with bows twisted into her hair. My aunt Elsa, about eight years old, sits in the front row with her legs bent under her—one hand clutching a popsicle, the other her crotch. At first I thought my mother must be one of the older girls with shiny bangs—all giggles, shoulders hunched—but according to the list of names on the back, she is the serious-looking one on the far left, wearing cat’s-eye glasses, a sailor shirt, and polka-dot pants. All the other children are so completely in this moment—squinting, laughing, licking, frowning, crouching, biting, twisting . . . Certain things are made obvious by their expressions, their wiggly gestures. The grass, for instance, is clearly ticklish, the popsicles melting, the sun hot—it burns halos in their hair. But my mother is very still and holds her popsicle to her lips as if she were merely testing its temperature.
Hand
The party had something to do with the Unitarian church we’d for some mysterious reason started attending. Our religious days didn’t last long. Just a few months. But in the thick of it, my parents hosted an afternoon gathering for their fellow parishioners. There were daiquiris for the grown-ups, lemonade for the kids. Watermelon. Potato chips. I forget the guests—they were strangers—but I do remember feeling mortified in front of them when my mother suggested that I touch a huge caterpillar I’d discovered sunning itself on a rock. As long as my hand, freakishly fat, murky grayish brown, it was dotted with tiny white nubs and covered in a fine, silvery fuzz.
“Don’t be such a Goody Two-Shoes,” said my mother. “It’s just nature. Touch it!” Then she took my hand and put it on top of the caterpillar. “Hold it!” she said, and she pressed down on my hand. I felt the animal give under my palm. It was warm from the sun and incredibly soft, fleshy but resilient, silky and slightly prickly and dry. I sensed tiny muscular vibrations streaming through its body, and when I lifted my hand, its presence was imprinted there.
“That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“No.”
“You shouldn’t be so afraid of everything,” she said. “She’s afraid of her own shadow,” she told a nearby guest.
After that I wandered around the yard for a few minutes, pretending to be interested in different things—grass, whatever. I knew she was watching me. I knew she was waiting. I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction. But in the end I couldn’t help myself, and I ran upstairs to scrub my hand.
Hannah Levinsky
We moved a lot when I was growing up. It was the drugs, I think. The Valium. That’s my theory now. My mother’s behavior must have raised a lot of eyebrows. Probably it worried people. Landlords. Once, as we were moving out of an apartment we’d rented for only a single year, my mother told me that the landlady was a witch. A crazy drug addicted old witch. That’s a signal. I knew it even then. Externalizing her own most suspect behaviors and pinning them on someone else. Then again, it could have been my father’s drinking that made our landlords think twice.
However, we did manage to rent one place for a stretch of almost five years. This was a comically ugly house, three stories tall, located on a two-lane turnpike in a modestly affluent, midsized suburban town in northern New Jersey. I have since searched for this address on Google Maps and found that in “Street View” it actually seems a rather handsome place. Since the time we lived there, someone has painted it a beautiful shade of light gray and trimmed it in slate blue. But back in the day its stucco slabs were scrambled egg yellow, its shutters brown, its front door a dull, depressing orange. Its only points of beauty as far as I was concerned were the Japanese maple in the front yard, the gravel driveway (full of quartz crystals if you looked closely), and the weedy field that stretched, it seemed, forever back behind the house (though Google Maps again proves me wrong).
During the first three years we lived at this address, I attended the Franklin Pierce Elementary School, and at the Franklin Pierce Elementary School I had one teacher who didn’t know how to spell the word freight and one teacher who was dying of cancer and for this reason often posed existentially baffling questions and one teacher named Hannah Levinsky, who let me read under her desk, near her stockinged feet (she liked to kick off her loafers), every day for as long as I wanted—sometimes an hour, sometimes more, sometimes twice a day. In addition, Mrs. Levinsky spent a long time every week talking with me about the books I was reading—Nancy Drew mysteries, Old Yeller, Tom Sawyer, One Is One, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. I think it’s fair to say that I never felt safer—more simply at ease—during the years we lived in the stucco house than when I was tucked under Mrs. Levinsky’s desk, curled up near her bunioned, slightly sour-smelling feet, squinting into the dimness, reading as fast as I could, one book right after another.
Hatred
The phone rings, and I wish I’d let the machine get it because it’s my aunt Becky. Even though she was my favorite when I was a kid, I haven’t spoken to her in years because after Isabella was born, I decided to avoid my mother’s family as much as possible. So, needless to say, things are awkward at first. The point of her call, my aunt tells me, is to see if I might be able to convince my mother to sign something—an insurance claim on the land my grandmother’s house stood on before it burned down a couple of years ago. There is some money available, she explains, a few thousand dollars per sibling, but this money can only be dispersed if all the siblings sign the claim, and she’s having trouble getting my mother on board.
“I thought you might have better luck.”
“I doubt it. But I’ll try.”
After that we try to catch up. She asks about my kids, and I ask about my cousins and their kids, her grandchildren. She tells me she’s playing a lot of bridge these days and that she is happy. I say I, too, am happy. And then for some reason—I’m not sure how we got here—we’re talking about *mental illness.
“You do realize that nobody on either side of the family was ever mentally ill before your mother,” she says in a way that strikes me as oddly preemptive. I ask if she’s sure, and she says, “Of course I’m sure.”
“But your fa-fa-fa-father.” The word comes out of my mouth like that, as if spoken by a stuttering comic book character. “How do you explain the things he di-di-did to you guys?”
“Oh, he wasn’t crazy!” says Aunt Becky, practically spitting the words into the phone. “He was just a bastard. I mean, he was just a really mean bastard. A goddamn bastard. And alcoholic, of course. And excuse me for saying so, but basically addicted to sex. But he wasn’t crazy.” Okay, I think, so we have different definitions of crazy. Then I ask whether or not she thought my mother had seemed at all off-kilter as a kid.
“Oh, god, no! I mean, we were always saying things like, ‘What are you, crazy, Linda?’ But we didn’t really mean crazy. Still, she was always doing these crazy things. I think it had something to do with . . . I don’t know if you know this, but for some reason our father just hated your mother. I guess because she hated him. The rest of us, if he came home drunk, we’d all pretend to be asleep, but not your mother. She’d just get right up in his face and start yelling at him. I don’t know why—it always ended the same way. He used to throw her across the room. I mean throw. Just pick her up and spin her around over his head and then throw her down, hard. Sometimes he threw her down the stairs. And I think—I think all those impacts. I’m not sure, but I’ve always thought—they must have done something. I mean to her brain.”
Haywire
There have been at least a half-dozen official diagnoses, though none of them have ever truly fit the bill. I guess this is why Tracy sounds kind of excited when she tells me she thinks she’s finally pegged it. We try to talk every weekend. Our conversations usually go this way: my sister tells me about her work; I tell her about mine; we talk about her
dog, my kids, and what we’re both making for dinner. Then we talk about our mother.
“My friend Mary found it on the web. It’s called ‘delusional disorder.’ She matches all the symptoms.”
“Like what?”
“Like paranoid but about non-impossible things. Things that could actually happen but that are extremely unlikely. That’s why it’s so confusing.” I can hear her clacking away on her keyboard, then she reads from her computer screen, her voice going in and out of focus as she skims the page: “Delusions of inflated self-worth, power, or knowledge . . . Jealousy . . . Delusions of persecution . . . Convinced they’re being malevolently treated . . . Somatic delusions including medical conditions.”
“Sounds good,” I say. “Sounds good.” But to be honest, I don’t actually care what it’s called. As much as I understand Tracy’s excitement, I stopped worrying about the official name for whatever’s wrong with our mother a long time ago. In fact, at this point I almost prefer whatever she’s “got” not to have a name or a clear set of conditions because the way I see it, she is what she is. An imagination gone haywire. A body of confusion. A wreck of a story. A mother. My mother.
Heart
It was the weekend. I know because we were all home, cleaning different parts of the house, and that was a Sunday ritual. Suddenly my mother called out, “Jake! Jake!” Her tone was interesting—frantic, even frightened. Tracy and I came running downstairs and watched as she showed our father something in the cramped half-bathroom off the foyer.