by Kim Adrian
“Now, Kimberli,” says my mother, “you tell me, why would she do that? What possible reason?” And for once she is quiet, her voice pointedly held in check as she pauses, presumably to let this question sink in.
I know what she wants me to say. She wants me to say that, yes, with the telling of this story, I am now able to see, finally and with perfect clarity, what she’s been talking about all these years—yes, this anecdote about a couple of completely assy dorks at Kinko’s has finally made it clear to me that everybody is in on this thing, this plan, this scheme—that those two Kinko’s employees are obviously in cahoots with DMH, which clearly proves that DMH is in cahoots with AT&T, and the whole lot of them are in cahoots with her various doctors, dentists, and shrinks. Yes!—she wants me to say, Yes! I see it all of a sudden, clear as day! I see that every single one of these people—from the customer service representatives at AT&T to the clerks at Kinko’s to your shrink to the highest-up mucky-mucks at McLean Hospital to every one of your last five or six landlords to the entire administration of your locally owned bank to some mysterious sector of Medicaid—I see that every single one of these people-slash-entities share but one single agenda, which is to put you back in the nuthouse. She wants me to say: I get it now. I finally, really, get it! And not only that—I understand the necessity of helping you with this problem, and I will put my own life on hold in order to see to it that you win these battles because deep down I am your Sancho Panza, Mom, I am!
I know that this is what she wants me to say because it is what she always wants me to say, but I do not say these things. I do not say anything for a while because my mother is talking again, repeating the whole story more or less verbatim, only emphasizing different elements, probably in hopes of giving me a fuller picture.
It’s bitter out here. The tips of my fingers are turning white. I’ve pulled the neck of my sweater up to my face to keep my mouth warm, but it doesn’t work because my breath is getting caught in it, forming tiny drops of moisture that feel even colder than the surrounding air once they cool. In my chest or my brain, I can’t tell, I feel heartbreak vying with guilt and guilt vying with impatience. Not surprisingly, impatience wins. I cut her off and say: “Maybe those kids know that you have problems, you know? Maybe they’re just a couple of bored and nasty losers working the graveyard shift at Kinko’s, and they know you have issues, and maybe they were just trying to get your goat. Maybe they thought the best way to do that would be to push one of your buttons, so they scared you, because they’ve figured out you’ve got this thing, this paranoia—”
“Oh, no-ho-ho-ho, Kimmy,” my mother interrupts. “No. No. No. No! You really don’t get it, do you? One day it’ll be too late, and then you’ll get it. You are just so stubborn.”
The Kinko’s story goes on for a while after this. Actually, it gets more complicated because it turns out there was also another customer, someone who made a big to-do over my mother’s paperwork because he thought she was taking up too much space, but she thought he was just trying to look at her stuff, so there was a scuffle of sorts, which prompted the man to make a comment about her mental health, and this, to her mind, only proved his complicity.
When David pokes his head outside to tell me dinner is almost ready, a wave of laughter spills onto the porch. The warm air from indoors smells of saffron-laced fish stew and just-baked almond cake—our dinner ahead of us. I tell my mother I have to get off the phone. She says okay but doesn’t stop talking, so I tell her I really have to go because dinner is almost ready and I should help set the table, and she says, okay, okay, but keeps talking. I say I am going to hang up now, and she says okay again, but she still doesn’t stop talking, so I say, “Now is when I’m hanging up.” But first I say, “Merry Christmas, Mom.” And then I say, “I love you.” And then I hang up.
Hollow
On a typical weekday Tracy and I would come home from school, grab some food, bring it into the TV room, and watch a string of old reruns—Get Smart, Bewitched, The Brady Bunch, M.A.S.H. These were followed by the Blockbuster Movie. After a break for dinner and a bit of homework, we’d return to our usual spots (me on the couch, Tracy sprawled on the shag rug) to watch sitcoms and family dramas. If it was a weekend, we’d stay up late watching movies, then The Tonight Show, Saturday Night Live, and Second City TV. Often we fell asleep in front of the set, waking only at the piercing noise of the broadcast signal, though Tracy sometimes slept even through that.
Not long ago, wandering randomly around YouTube, I found a video of two sisters watching television together, and they reminded me of us then. The girl who made the video, the one who’d set the recorder on top of the television—the older one—was using a curling iron on her hair and making occasional editorial comments about the show that was on, some kind of cartoon. But the other one just watched the screen. The girl curling her hair was probably about thirteen years old, her sister maybe eleven. The younger one sat in the corner of the couch with her arms crossed in front of her chest, and every once in a while she told the older one to shut up, but not impatiently, not meanly, in fact, in an almost affectionate way, if that makes sense. They sat in a room that looked eerily similar to the one Tracy and I spent so much of our childhoods in: small, plain, dimly lit. The video was six and a half minutes long. I watched it five times.
Home
The first family vacation we ever went on took place over Memorial Day weekend. The company my father worked for (not the tennis club but the computer manufacturer) owned a handful of small cabins near a beach on Cape Cod, and these they parceled out to their employees on a rotating basis as a reward for good performance. That weekend it was my father’s turn to take a cabin.
It was a four-hour drive up from New Jersey. The minute we put our bags inside, Tracy and I took off to explore the beach. As we walked over the damp gray sand, studded with stones and shells, I remember thinking that our family had finally arrived. I wasn’t sure where, just that we were in a better, different place. For example: I was wearing a new pair of exceptionally cute clogs, as was Tracy (they matched, like so many of our things: hers were red, mine blue, both with white polka dots). Also, we were on vacation in a famous place. Cape Cod! We were, in fact, on a “family vacation.” I think the charm of that phrase was more exciting to me than the actual experience of being there and walking on that beach, which was actually a little cold.
Unfortunately, when we got back to the cabin, it became clear that our family had not arrived anywhere new at all because even on Cape Cod things were exactly the same as they were at home, only more inconvenient, because in the cabin our mother was having a hard time finding her NR tablets.
NR, or “Nature’s Remedy,” tablets were earthy-smelling pills that cured constipation, a condition that has plagued my mother since early childhood. At the time they were as necessary to her well-being as food or water, and even though she was sure she’d packed them, now they were missing.
Tracy said something—it was supposed to be sympathetic, only our mother took her words for sarcasm and decided that she was to blame for the missing pills. She built the story incredibly quickly. Just slapped it together. And suddenly there it was: an irrefutable fact. Before leaving for the beach, Tracy had taken the tablets from her suitcase and thrown them out the window at the back of the cabin.
“Why are you such a brat? Such a despicable little brat? Such a complete and utter ingrate? Why do you want so badly to ruin my one and only vacation?”
“Linda,” said our father, “be reasonable.”
“Why should I be reasonable?” she screamed. “If she’s going to put the kibosh on my vacation, I’m going to put the kibosh on her vacation!”
Then she ordered us to look for the NR tablets outside, in a damp, leafy bank of earth that was piled up near the window. Tracy and I went outside and dug our fingers into the leaf mold for about thirty minutes or so. It was just for show, of course. I tried to lift my sister’s spirits, but she kept sniffling. After
what seemed like enough time—pointlessness goes so slowly—we came back inside to report that we hadn’t found the tablets, and our mother told Tracy that she had to sit on the bottom bunk of the bed we were sharing, in the corner of the cabin, until she changed her mind and decided to return the tablets.
“You can just stay right there until you come clean.”
I tried to advocate for Tracy, as did my father, who at the same time continued looking for the tablets in the most inane places (the medicine cabinet, the trash can, the cracks between the itchy plaid pillows of the couch). I pointed out the obvious problem of timing—the fact that Tracy hadn’t spent two minutes in the cabin before we’d left to walk on the beach, but my mother waved me off.
My father tried for a more practical approach. “I’ll go into town tomorrow and buy some more,” he said.
“They’re not going to have NR tablets in that honky-tonk town!”
“Well, I’ll buy you something else. Milk of magnesia.”
She grunted and told him not to be an idiot.
Tracy lay in the bottom bunk crying quietly, and I lay next to her. There were still a couple hours of sunlight left, but the day was effectively over.
Eventually, my father found the pills. They’d slipped behind the silky lining in a corner pocket of my mother’s suitcase.
“Oh,” she said. “So that’s where she put them.”
Hope
The “only way of knowing a person,” said Walter Benjamin, is to love them without it.
House
Y—, New Jersey, 1979
We’ve just finished making the gingerbread house—there’s icing stuck to our clothes and splattered on the wall behind us. Tracy and I—eleven and thirteen years old, respectively—sit on our father’s lap, one kid per leg, each holding a curious, tentative forefinger to his mustache. We stroke the black bristles as we might touch some small furry animal, a mole perhaps, and we are—all three of us—laughing. The flash makes a double flare in the lenses of his glasses, but behind them you can see that his eyes are closed. His arms are wrapped around our waists—both Tracy’s and mine—but the thing is, we’re really too big for this, and he has to clasp his hands tightly to keep us from slipping off. His fingers are knotted together, turning pink.
*
Making a gingerbread house from scratch is a long, involved process. The first thing you have to do is to bake several large flat slabs of gingerbread. These will be the walls and the roof. Next you have to let the slabs dry in the oven on the lowest setting. Then you have to glue them together using royal icing. It’s only after the house has been assembled and the royal icing has dried that can you even begin to think about decorating.
My father was assigned the job of building the house itself, sticking all the slabs together with the “mortar,” but there were problems. For one thing the royal icing we’d made was too wet. It was thin and slick. Also, there were so many pieces—two roof slabs, four wall slabs, and a bunch of fussy chimney bits. In short, no matter how ingenious he was about propping things up with cookbooks and cans of soup, the whole thing kept falling apart—first this side, then that side, first the roof, then the walls. After a while, my mother started in with some hurtful accusations regarding his ineptitude, and these comments, of course, threatened not only the success of the entire gingerbread project but the general mood as well, which until that point had been fairly festive. Yes, for a while things were looking pretty bad, but somehow my father kept his chin up, and when it became clear that the propping idea was never going to work, he just sat down and held the whole thing together with his hands until it dried. This took at least an hour, maybe more. And all the while his glasses kept slipping down the bridge of his nose in the steamy air of the kitchen, and Tracy and I kept pushing them back up for him and scratching his cheek when he said it itched, and my mother kept snapping pictures, and there was a lot of laughing because there was icing everywhere, in his hair, on his cheeks, in streaks and globs on the front his sweater, even in the shiny black bristles of his mustache.
Hubris
I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.
—C. G. Jung
Human Being
Personally, I am a slow forgiver. Maybe reluctant is a better word. In my efforts to become a more forgiving person, I have discovered a trick that provides a fair bit of traction in any forgiveness project. In my embarrassingly large collection of self-help books, this trick is frequently referred to as the cultivation of gratitude. What’s most curious about this process, in my experience, is that even tiny amounts of gratitude can expand to perfectly useful proportions with surprisingly little effort. The biggest challenge can be finding something to be grateful about in the first place, no matter how small, although there’s a trick for this as well, which is to “accentuate the positive,” as the saying goes. True, there are situations in which it might take a bit of effort to figure out what “positive” there is to accentuate, but I’ve found it’s generally worth the search.
For example, I have come, in recent years, to consider myself very fortunate to have in my possession a certain fork that once belonged to my mother’s father. This piece of cutlery, which looks like something out of a fairy tale—out of some woodland cottage, with its four long iron tines and its dark wooden handle decorated with a small pewter cross—is what I use every time I make a pie crust or a batch of cookies, as it is ideal for cutting butter into flour. I suspect my maternal grandfather came to own this fork as part of his personal mess kit when he joined the Portuguese merchant marines, with which he sailed for several years despite the fact that he was, by birth, Swedish. This is just a guess, however. I know nothing, really, about this fork except that it once belonged to my mother’s father. In any event I like this fork. It is my favorite fork, both because of its Germanic woodland cottage vibe and because pie crusts come out just right when I use it. I am therefore grateful for this fork and take some time to remind myself of this fact every time I use it, and every time I remind myself of this fact, I also think about my maternal grandfather, whom I never met but who was, after all, a human being—one who had to run away from home at the age of thirteen because he was afraid of his own father, whose beatings (at least according to the stories he told my mother and that she later told me) were daily events. I don’t go far in these imaginings. Usually I just catch a glimpse of him—my grandfather as a boy standing alone on the deck of a great ship, his blue eyes looking up at the sky or out to the sea. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that since I have been appreciating the fork he once owned, something in me has started to soften. Just a little, because it’s a big thing. Maybe the biggest thing in me. But a little and a little and a little adds up. And I do bake a lot of pies.
Humiliation
Terror comes in two sizes. There’s the big kind: gas attacks, earthquakes, a stranger with a gun. And the small kind, personal and rich with shame. It was the small kind of terror I felt whenever my mother threatened to “get out the scissors.”
Tracy and I would beg her not to do it—“No, no! Please. Not the scissors!” It sounds comical now, but at the time to watch her cut up one of our father’s business suits was like watching someone kill a small animal, some helpless thing. Snip, snip. It doesn’t take much to do a great deal of damage with a sharp pair of scissors, and as the scraps of charcoal gray, navy blue, or pinstriped black fell to the floor, a terrible humiliation filled the room. My father’s symbolic castration was clear enough to us even if we didn’t know that word. Screaming, spitting, his cheeks bright, almost cherry red, he would pull at his own face as he stood over her while she kept working the scissors, cool as an insane cucumber.
Afterward the sense of impotence that settled over the whole house was horrible. Entire chunks of my childhood passed under the spell of that emotion. What I remember about it now is looking at things through it, like a lens that turned everything pointless, even the most innocuous details: the moist sugary shi
mmer of my mother’s wax begonias, for example, or the nylon quilting thread of my flower print bedspread or the pale, nearly iridescent part in my sister’s hair or the ionic blue glow that washed over us as we lay sprawled on the brown shag rug in the TV room, watching hour after hour of it didn’t matter what.
Hunger
Y—, New Jersey, 1979
The flashbulb’s light bounces off my forehead, my cheeks, my chin, the tip of my nose. It glows on the inside curves of the white serving bowl in the foreground and throws my shadow against the wood paneling behind me. My arms, sticking out of the puffy pink sleeves of my baby doll pajamas, look disproportionately thin. My hair is damp, my face chubby-cheeked and flushed; it seems as if I’ve just taken a shower, which makes me wonder if I’d recently come home from ballet class. There’s a glass of milk next to my plate and a balled-up paper napkin in one hand. I’m smiling in the special way I’d contrived to hide the fullness of my lips: a constricted grimace. But despite this put-on, I really do look happy, which isn’t surprising since it was dinnertime, and dinner, especially during those years we lived in the stucco house, was often a source of good feelings, good times.
My all-time favorite meal was meat fondue: bits of chicken and beef skewered on long forks, submerged in bubbling oil to fry until lightly caramelized at the edges, then doused with creamy sauces made with horseradish or curry or tomatoes and chives. Chocolate fondue ran a close second: a bittersweet pot in which we smothered apple slices, orange sections, strawberries, bananas, and broken halves of coconut cookies. Two fondues for my birthday was a tradition for many years, and they were wonderful meals, even if my father did once burn his tongue on the fondue fork twice in one sitting because he’d had too much to drink and kept forgetting you can’t eat off the same fork you’ve just plunged in roiling oil. I can still see the pale double Y scorched on his tongue. But why bring this up? The thing that mattered was the conviviality. Fondue is a slow meal. Each morsel a miniature event. You have to take turns. Forks get mixed up. Negotiations are made. The discussions can take a long time.