by Kim Adrian
“Yes, I got them, and I know you meant well, but those are exactly the kinds of people I need to get away from.”
She is actually using the back of one of the pages I printed out to make a to-do list.
“Any more news on what’s next?”
“As a matter of fact, I’m all set to leave for New Jersey next week. But don’t worry, sweetie. I’m going to be okay. I really am. It’s going to be a quadrillion times better once I get there. And—this is important—I don’t want you to help me.”
“I can’t help you.”
“I know, you have enough on your plate.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“There’s only one thing I need you to do,” she says. “If you can just promise me this one thing, that’s all I need, and then you don’t need to feel guilty about anything else just so long as you do this one thing.” That sounds like a pretty good deal, so I ask what it is, and she says: “Just take care of Tracy. Be there for her if she needs you. You’re all she has. Can you promise me that?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I’m so relieved.”
“That’s easy, Mom. But I’m not worried about Tracy. I’m worried about you.”
The conversation gets a bit confusing at this point, but I don’t mind for some reason. She’s talking about her old landlord and the storage company and the owner of the B&B down the street. I just stand there and listen. I don’t even feel that impatient. I just want to be near her, I guess. But at some point I get a great idea, and I go inside to get a bunch of clothes I think she might like—things I don’t wear so much anymore or things I don’t really need, like a rust-colored blouse with a yellow fleur-de-lis pattern on it and a pair of brown corduroys and a blue lace cardigan I knit for myself a while ago but never wear because it’s too heavy and I think it makes me look frumpy. When I bring these things out onto the porch, my mother tries them all on. She likes the blouse but not the corduroys. She takes a gray thermal, and the sweater she loves.
“It’s beautiful!” she says, pulling it on. “How does it look? It’s a gorgeous color. Do you know the name of this color? This is a very specific blue. Prussian blue. Extremely hard to find a true Prussian blue.”
I tell her it looks great on her because it does, because even though I’m a pretty good knitter, I am not a perfect knitter, so the sweater has a decidedly handmade look, and I’ve noticed that when people wear handmade sweaters, it’s clear to anyone with half a brain that somebody, somewhere, loves them.
Quagmire
It was harder when I was a kid, but now I can tell. Now I know when my mother’s lying because of how she holds her hands or where she looks—for instance, if she looks too penetratingly at me while asserting something, I can be pretty sure she’s lying. Likewise, if she blinks in a way that seems strangely timed or if she tilts her chin slightly upward when speaking or if she closes her eyes entirely. Also, when she speaks very, very slowly through clenched teeth, she is almost certainly lying. Ditto when she speaks extremely quickly while looking sideways. In fact, I’m pretty sure my mother lies most of the time, but it’s confusing because she lies about things that make no sense, that serve no apparent purpose, which makes a conversation with her feel a bit like walking around a house with squishy floors and rotting walls because everything is constantly shifting, everything feels uncertain and potentially dangerous and most of all pointless.
The first time I caught her red-handed in a lie was when I discovered that she’d stolen my father’s laptop. She’d recently been released from McLean and was living in a halfway house in Boston. Actually, the laptop in question didn’t technically belong to my father but to the fancy New York City accounting firm she’d gotten him fired from by sending his boss the police report about the time he’d stabbed Richie. The company had been asking my father for over a year to give back their laptop, but he didn’t know where it was. Or he did know where it was—only he didn’t know how to get it back. So for a long time he just kept asking me to ask my mother if she by any chance happened to have it.
Back then, laptop computers were rare and very expensive. I knew that my mother likes rarities, especially expensive ones, and I knew, too, that she liked to hurt my father, but the idea that she would have actually stolen the computer just didn’t make sense to me, even on a logistical level, because she would have had to have snuck into his apartment when he wasn’t there, and then she would have had to have actually taken it—snuck it out—and then she would have had to have lied to me for over a year, because my father didn’t have a thousand dollars to replace the machine, and so every month or so he’d ask me to ask her yet again, and I would.
“I wish he wouldn’t do that,” I once complained to David. “If she says she doesn’t have it, she doesn’t have it.”
“Of course she has it,” he said. “That’s the sort of thing she does.”
But every time I asked her, she said she didn’t have my father’s stupid laptop, and what would she do with his stupid laptop anyway, and why was I always taking his side, and when in her entire life had I ever known her to steal anything or lie about anything?
Still, the issue of the missing laptop just wouldn’t die because my father was persistent. Or maybe he was desperate since he’d have to pay for a replacement if he couldn’t return it. So I kept finding creative ways to ask. For instance: the move up from New Jersey had been rushed and confused. Maybe it got shuffled along in the rest of her things without anyone noticing?
“No, no, no, Kimberli! I don’t have the man’s laptop. Seriously—how would I even get his laptop in the first place? I mean, you’re saying I stole it, for god’s sake.”
Then, one day when I was visiting her at the halfway house, she asked me to look in her closet for a blanket to put over her because she was lying in bed and felt cold. I went over to the closet she’d indicated and pulled a comforter from the top shelf, revealing in the process a dense black slab of plastic.
“What is this?” I said, marching over to her with the laptop in my hands.
“Oh, please, Kimberli. You poor fool. What’s the big deal? He owes me way more than that.”
“I can’t believe you lied to me for so long!”
“You are so naive! Anyway, why shouldn’t I? He’s the lying cheating scum. He’s the stabber. He’s the drunk. He’s the liar. Not me.”
Quandary
It is very simple to be happy, but it is very difficult to be simple.
—Rabindranath Tagore
Queen
At the halfway house, she got the idea to dig out her jugular with a pair of cuticle clippers (pedicure variety), but the jugular is located deep within the tough and intricate anatomy of the neck, so she didn’t get further than the first layer of muscle. Despite this, medical records state that she was officially dead for almost two minutes due to the effects of shock. This, in any case, is what my mother has always maintained.
Soon she’d be back at McLean, but first she was sent to a regular hospital to get patched up. When I went to visit her there, the nurse on duty asked me which patient I wanted to see. I said my mother’s name, and she looked puzzled, so I gestured feebly toward my neck, and she said: “Oh, the drama queen. The queen of drama.” Then she led me to a large double room that my mother had, for some reason, all to herself. The sun was setting outside the tinted window, but there were still several bright strands of lavender and fuchsia near the horizon.
“Kimberli,” she said. She sounded disappointed. I figured her tone was probably a reference to her suicide note: a four-page letter addressed to Tracy and me listing our many filial faults. I threw this letter out long ago, but I remember the gist of it: we were selfish, dishonest, judgmental, untrustworthy, uncaring, disrespectful, and entirely lacking in perspective. But mostly, we just didn’t love her enough.
“How are you?” I said, but I was speaking nothing. Canned blah. Pseudo words. My mother shrugged. I moved to kiss her, but this too was pure gesture
; I merely hovered briefly over her shoulder, then pulled away. There was a massive chunk of gauze stuck to her neck with three strips of white, semitransparent tape. Under the tape her skin was purpled and puckered. That’s mostly what I remember from that visit: the skin, the bandage, the clouds outside. Also: just wanting to get the fuck out of there before the sun went down.
Quiet Room
I’ve rarely known my mother to be quiet. Sometimes, yes, when she’s really nervous, she’ll hold her tongue. For instance, I’ve seen her quiet around David’s family, when we occasionally used to have holidays together. Yes, around my husband’s well-off, articulate, highly educated, suavely boastful relatives, I’ve seen her be very quiet. But there are only two subjects about which she is reliably reticent. One is her childhood poverty. The other is her father—or, rather, the things her father did to her. About these acts she has only spoken to me very briefly and in the broadest of terms. To fill the horrible blank spot in my mind, I have just a few details. A chair by a bed. A grown man’s stubbled cheek. His dirty nails. The smells he left on her. Smells that rose up around her on the school bus in the mornings. Mostly what she has told me—what she has whispered—is: I felt so ashamed.
If my mother’s paranoia is an ever-enlarging imaginary world taking over her mind (and I think it is), at the center of this world stands a locked ward, and in the center of the locked ward there is a quiet room. A quiet room is where troublesome patients are put in psych wards. Acting out? Screaming your head off? Losing your shit completely? You’ll get put in a quiet room. My mother has spent significant chunks of time in several quiet rooms, in several hospitals, but it’s my impression that all quiet rooms are more or less the same: small and bare, they contain nothing but a mattress, to which patients are often strapped with four-point restraints, then left alone until they “calm down.” This might be for a few hours or it might be for much longer than that. A quiet room is a kind of inverted straitjacket: an environment in which, so goes the thinking (clearly wrongheaded), you cannot possibly hurt yourself.
R
Rae
“Hi, I’m Rae,” said Rae, as she stuck out her hand. I liked her immediately because who does that? She pointed to her sweatshirt, across which were stretched the letters MIT, and said, “I teach there.”
“Oh? What do you teach?”
“Physics.”
I believed her because she was clearly eccentric, and I figured MIT physics professors are probably eccentric as a rule. Plus, she’d been scribbling in a notebook, so everything kind of clicked. But in reality Rae was not a physicist. She was a patient, like my mother, and she’d come out of the ward to sit in the underheated waiting room in order to spy on me as I waited to see my mother because even though theirs was a locked ward with plexiglass windows and stainless steel mirrors, Rae was such a long-term, good-natured, reliably amenable patient that she was considered low risk and the staff buzzed her out whenever she wanted.
Half an hour later, in my mother’s room, Rae blushed when she admitted that she’d just wanted to see what I was like because she’d fallen in love with my mother and they wanted to live together as soon they got out of the hospital.
“Does that sound okay? Is that okay with you? I want to ask you for her hand. I want to marry her. If that’s okay.”
My mother was standing in the corner with her arms crossed, nodding madly.
“Sure, if that’s what you both want,” I said, and in my head I was thinking: Wow, my mother is gay! Wow. I was thinking: This could be the answer to so many things, so many problems. I was thinking: If she’s gay and she never acted gay, maybe all her anger, all her rage, all her crazy, will lift away if she starts acting gay, maybe being with this odd but strangely charming person is all my mother really needs: someone sweet and non-male. And most of all, I was thinking: Maybe now she will get better.
But my mother isn’t actually gay. She’s savvy and manipulative, and she’s also intelligent, and sometimes she’s sweet, too, and for some reason Rae saw the intelligent and sweet parts of her. Maybe she even saw the savvy and manipulative parts but didn’t care. Because I believe Rae actually did love my mother, and in her own way I think maybe my mother loved Rae, too, though probably not sexually. In any case things did get a whole lot better after Rae came on the scene because Rae was not only loving and charming in a strictly schizophrenic sort of way but extremely wealthy as well. So wealthy, in fact, that for a good stretch of years—four or five—she paid for my mother to live at the height of luxury (at least when she wasn’t in psychiatric hospitals), in a spacious and handsomely appointed apartment full of gourmet food and silk rugs and expensive furniture. During the same time period Rae sent my mother elaborate bouquets of flowers every week and, less frequently (but still pretty often), small but heavy boxes from top-notch jewelry stores. And this was a high point for my mother because, of course, life is just so much easier—particularly if you’re sick or addicted or frightened or haunted—when you’ve got some money.
Rag, Rag, Rag
Tracy came out to stay with us for a few days, and the first thing on her agenda was to see our mother, so after we picked her up at the airport and dropped her bags at our apartment on Beacon Hill, she called McLean to plan the visit. She didn’t stay on long. I could hear from her end of the conversation that things were tense. When she slammed down the receiver without saying goodbye, I asked what happened.
“She said she wants me to get ready for our visit.”
“What’s to get ready?”
“That’s what I said. But she said ‘curlers and makeup.’ I said I wasn’t going to do anything but get in the car and drive to the hospital, and she said, ‘I don’t want you to look like a jerk!’”
I tried to give Tracy a hug, but it just made her stiffer. “Do you want to punch a pillow?” I asked.
“No.”
“Do you want to squish a banana?” There was a bowl of them right in front of us on the table. But she didn’t laugh.
When we got to the hospital, Tracy sat next to our mother on her bed, David sat on a chair, and I sat on the arm of the chair. The first part of the visit consisted of our mother nagging Tracy about what she was going to do with her life because she’d recently dropped out of the University of Chicago. Tracy said she was thinking about getting a teaching degree at the University of Illinois, then moving to New York City to be closer to our father.
“Do you really just want to be a loser for the rest of your life?” said our mother. “Don’t you have any ambition at all? Don’t you realize what a quality mind you have? Why can’t you just go back to the University of Chicago and get a real degree?” My mother can get a lot of words out of a single lungful of air, so without pausing for even a fraction of a second, she also added that she didn’t like Tracy’s eye makeup and that her shoes looked like clown shoes and when was she going to stop trying to hide behind her hair?
It seemed to me that Tracy was handling all of this pretty well. In fact, at one point it even looked like she was going to give our mother a kiss because slowly, very slowly, she reached toward her to brush her hair away from her face. But she didn’t kiss her. Instead, she just stared at the pale, slightly bubbled, star-shaped scar on her neck.
“Ah. I knew this was coming. Satisfied now?”
“No,” said Tracy. Then she put her hand up to the scar and touched it, like a blind person. Then she pinched it, hard. My mother yelped, and Tracy said, “Now I’m satisfied.”
Rage
I wish I’d started practicing yoga in my twenties because if I had, I would have enjoyed my twenties a lot more. But I didn’t. In my twenties I did other things. One of them was to write every day in a journal. Recently, I found this journal, and when I tried to read it, it was like looking at oil, if my eyes were water. I had to really concentrate simply in order to read a single sentence, and when I finally managed to do this a few times, I realized why all those words I’d written when I was twenty-three, twenty-fou
r, twenty-five, repelled me so much. They were filled with *anger. I told long, boring stories about my anger, also a few interesting ones. One of the interesting ones concerned a woman I ran into on the T one day who claimed to have gone to Barnard with me, even though I had no memory of her.
“Are you still with that guy?” she asked. “That same guy?” I sensed in her curiosity a nasty streak, but she was beginning to click into memory, so I said yes.
“That’s fucking amazing!” she said, so loudly that people all over the train looked at us. Then she asked, “Do you still fight all the time?”
“No,” I said, as coldly as my shock would allow, although a more truthful answer might have been, Not quite as much.
In another entry I describe how I once fought with David when he had traveled to Mexico City to do some fieldwork for grad school. The plan had been for him to call me as soon as he arrived, but he got caught up with other things and didn’t get in touch until two days later. When he finally called, I screamed so loudly, for so long, with such unbending fury, that I didn’t hear the pounding at the door. It was only when someone started trying to bust it down that I went to see who was there.
“It’s the police,” came the answer, and indeed, when I opened the door, there were two nice young cops sincerely wanting to know if everything was okay, if I was all right. Snotty, tearful, exhausted, abashed, I explained that I’d been in a stupid argument with my stupid boyfriend on the stupid phone, but they insisted on searching the apartment to make sure I wasn’t hiding anybody. I think they thought I was being hit and that maybe the person doing the hitting was counting on me to cover for them. I don’t know. It was unclear. In any case it was only after they’d searched the whole place that they left, although not before helpfully suggesting that next time I might consider shutting the windows before I fought with my boyfriend.