by Kim Adrian
The last story I read in that journal before stuffing it in a box and shoving the box into the back of a closet had to do with my mother’s second hospitalization at McLean. This story was long and rambling—I apparently loved to ramble in my twenties. It began with me getting ready to go to a family therapy session with my mother and Mary Ann Frederickson when Rae called on my mother’s behalf to ask that I bring along an extra-large bag of plain (not peanut) M&M’s. But, she told me, it had to be a special kind of extra large bag of M&M’s: a two-pound clear plastic bag filled with smaller, single-serving sized paper bags because for some reason M&M’s in small paper bags tasted much, much better than M&M’s in large plastic bags.
“Strange but true,” said Rae. “Your mother told me.”
So, before heading to family therapy, I rushed around town trying to find M&M’s of the type Rae had described, and then I rushed to McLean. When I got there, I went not to Mary Ann Frederickson’s office but to my mother’s room because my mother said she no longer felt safe having family therapy in Mary Ann’s office because the two of us always “ganged up” on her and at least in her room she had a hometown advantage.
It was awkward doing a therapy session with my mother lying in bed in her pajamas and me sitting at the foot of her bed and Mary Ann sitting in a chair at the side of her bed. But my mother was right—the invisible bond between Mary Ann and me was a lot weaker in her room. Things got even worse once I started talking about how upset I’d been when I was thirteen years old and my mother decided to stop paying for my ballet lessons simply because I’d gotten a B+ in French. I was so distressed by this memory that I started crying. My mother said: “Come on. It’s not like you were ever going to be a professional ballerina!” That made me mad, and it also made Mary Ann mad, but our anger didn’t last long because my mother suddenly went stiff in her bed. Looking straight up at the ceiling, she flinched and cringed with her eyes wide open. Then she started whimpering and blocking imaginary blows. Mary Ann said, “Oh shit,” and called in a nurse, who came bustling in and waved her hand in front of my mother’s face.
“We lost her,” she said. Then she explained that this kind of reaction sometimes happened if things got “too intense.”
“Patients who’ve experienced a lot of trauma will sometimes slip back into some memory or other. That’s where she is now.”
It took the rest of the session, but the nurse finally succeeded in bringing my mother back to the present through a series of questions like What’s your name? and Who is the president of the United States of America? Mary Ann and I were just about to leave when I remembered about the candy and handed the bag to my mother. She was sitting up in bed again, and when she took the big plastic bag full of small paper bags full of M&M’s, she said, “Oh, goodie, you found them!”
“It wasn’t easy,” I said. Then I leaned down to give her a kiss, and she grabbed my shoulder. Very quietly, so that the nurse wouldn’t hear, she whispered: “See? See what happens? That’s why you shouldn’t get mad at me.”
Regency
My mother moved in as soon as she was released from the hospital. They wanted to live together like an actual married couple. This is why she bought two of everything (all on Rae’s dime): two claw-foot mahogany bureaus inlaid with ebony, two scallop-shaped armchairs covered in slubbed silk, two wide-screen televisions. The apartment itself—twenty-four hundred square feet—was on the eighth floor of a luxury building called “the Regency,” right across the street from the Boston Public Garden.
Unfortunately, because Rae was afraid of so many things, including urban settings and tall buildings and, especially, too much distance between herself and her psychiatrist (whom she saw daily), she never did make the move. It was all she could do, socially speaking, to have her limo driver bring her into Boston to visit my mother briefly, every other weekend. On alternate weekends she sent her driver to pick up my mother so they could eat together at her favorite steak house just a few blocks away from McLean.
Relief
“I know you don’t believe me, but there might be terrible repercussions for you and David and the kids, so when I get down to New Jersey, don’t call me. I’ll contact you by mail. I just want to protect you, and believe me, you don’t know what’s going on with your phone. If I do call, act like you hate me. I’m just so sorry I ever moved up to Massachusetts. It was a fatal mistake. But I’ve finally forgiven you. And—this is important, Kimmy—I don’t want your help. I don’t want any help from you whatsoever. I can do this on my own. I need to do this on my own. And I know you have enough on your plate.”
REM
I’d walked, with Oscar, our dog, across the Common to have tea with my mother because for a while that was something we tried to do. The doorman let me in; I took the hushed, mirrored elevator up to the eighth floor, then opened the door with the key she’d given me. I found her in bed, asleep, which was hardly a shock because she was almost always asleep when she lived at the Regency. I could tell she was having a bad dream from the noises she was making, but I didn’t want to wake her up because I figured that might make things worse. So, I washed the dishes I found in the sink, and when I checked on her again, she was slowly rousing. I went back to the kitchen and made a pot of Earl Grey tea and arranged it, along with two cups and some chocolate wafer cookies, on a tray and brought the tray into her room.
“Did you have a bad dream?”
She nodded. I handed her a cookie. She took a one-atom nibble. She looked old (though, now that I think of it, she was younger than I am today).
“Do you want to talk about it?”
She shook her head. But then, after a while, she said, “It’s a dream I’ve had for as long as I can remember—an awful dream.” She patted the side of her bed so Oscar would jump up. He licked her face tenderly, and she let him do it for a long time. Then she said, “I love this dog.”
After she drank some tea, she told me some more about her dream. In it, she said, she’s always young, always a girl. “I’m at a beach, or maybe it’s a pond, and there’s a man there who’s holding me down and pouring sand in my mouth so I can’t breathe. I’m sure I’m going to die, and I try to scream, but the sand is in my throat, so I can’t.” Then she stopped talking, and her face crumpled. There were lines everywhere.
“What’s the matter?”
“Every time,” she said, “every time I wake up, I want to die. I want to kill myself.”
“Do you feel that way now?” I asked, and she shrugged.
Rent-a-Tent
O—, Massachusetts, June 20, 1992
Too bad about the shrimp. Other than that, this is a great shot. Half a shrimp, actually, front and center, delicately clasped between my mother’s thumb and forefinger. Her nails are extremely long and painted, if I remember right (the picture’s black-and-white), a bright apricot color. On my wedding day she wore a pale-green suit, although here, in these distilled grays, her outfit looks as white as my dress. Around her neck is a long strand of pearls and a heavy chain on which hangs the tiny golden cuckoo clock my father bought for her, so many years ago, on a business trip to Switzerland. (“For some reason,” he used to joke, “it just reminded me of her!”) She’s got me in a modified half nelson, her nose pressed into my cheek. In many of the pictures from that day, she’s gripping me in highly dramatic ways like this. But I don’t seem to mind; we’re laughing. Our smiles, noses, and eyes line up—my mother’s in profile, mine head-on: eye, eye, eye, half-a-nose, nose, half-a-smile, smile. We hold champagne flutes, and I wonder which one I’m on; I drank six in quick succession right after the ceremony—downed them like I was dying of thirst. How I managed not to fall over in those heels remains for me one of life’s great mysteries.
Reruns
Boston, Massachusetts, 1994
On the glass-topped coffee table, there’s a bottle of organic peach nectar and all three remote controls. On the floor is a striped toiletries bag, two massive flower bouquets from Rae, a Chinese
cloisonné lamp, a jar of moisturizer, and the ever-handy dustbuster. She’s sitting in an enormous, pink, super-plush armchair shaped like a huge puffy scallop shell. I suppose she wanted an objective view of herself because she wears glasses, no makeup, old sweats, and has made no attempt at smiling. Still, the mask is there: all hard edges. With this look my mother has intimidated many a shopkeeper, waitress, salesperson . . . She must have set the camera on top of the TV in order to take the picture, prompting me to wonder—is this a portrait of her watching TV? She certainly looks exactly like what she looks like when she does watch TV. I mean, she’s doing exactly what she does when engrossed in some horror movie or old detective show—sticking her hand up into her hair, into a spot a few inches above her ear, where she “picks” one strand after another, teasing each one free from the rest, playing a little violin concerto on it, then plucking it out. A small pile forms on the floor. Thus, the dustbuster.
Resignation
The quality of elegance is the one my mother has always valued above all others, and when she was much younger, she seemed to me to physically embody it. But over the years, as she’s lost more and more of her teeth, as her finger- and toenails have become warped with fungal infections, as her hair, now a light, pewter-gray, has assumed stranger and stranger shapes on account of her homemade haircuts and decades of trichotillomania, as her posture has become lopsided with age and whatever is going on with her inner ear, she looks not so much elegant as crazy.
The first time I understood that strangers, people on the street, saw her this way, I was in my midtwenties, working part-time at a bakery and part-time at a library. My mother had landed in the psychiatric ward of a city-run hospital. When she was on “good behavior,” she was allowed outside for short periods of time during the day, so we’d arranged to meet for a cup of tea one afternoon at a café just a few of blocks away from the hospital and not far from the library where I worked.
It was a warm spring afternoon. Extraordinarily lucid. One of those days when everything—the air, the clouds, the cars and people and trees and everything, all of it—seems happy and relaxed and charged with sex or life or both. My mother was forty minutes late, but she’s always late, so I wasn’t worried. I sat at a table near the window and looked outside for a while, then I flipped through a magazine and read about a movie star’s messy divorce. After that I looked up to find her crossing the street against the light. It was a complicated intersection, and as she navigated her way through it, she wore an expression of intense determination, glancing neither right nor left. An eighteen-wheeler shuddered to a halt in order to avoid hitting her, but when the driver blasted his horn, she didn’t seem to notice, just kept marching across the street with that stern look still on her face, eyes fixed on the door of the café.
“I’m sorry I’m late!” she said when she reached my table. She explained that she’d had to wait in line for her meds because the nurse dispensing them had been completely disorganized and so passive-aggressive. I noticed that she’d dyed her eyebrows; they lay on her forehead like two small black caterpillars. She wore a Hermès scarf to hide the bald spots on her scalp, but the silk had ridden up to reveal two pale egg-shaped areas anyway, one on each side, and these looked so vulnerable that I reached across the table to tug the scarf down.
“It was a little crooked.”
She came to this café often, and I noticed that she was careful to greet everyone who worked there in a friendly manner. One waitress returned her greeting with a gentleness that struck me as almost maternal, then furtively glanced at me.
“You dyed your eyebrows,” I said.
“You like? Everybody says they make me look exotic. Oh, Kimmy, I’m so glad we could meet like this.” She reached across the table and grabbed my hand. I told her I agreed about the eyebrows—they did look exotic. Then I complimented her outfit—a fluffy aquamarine jogging suit with pink piping and a French logo across the chest that Rae had bought for her. After we’d finished our coffee, we decided to get some ice cream at a shop down the street, and as we walked along the sidewalk, she put her hand in the crook of my elbow, and I gave it a gentle squeeze against my ribs. Suddenly it occurred to me that our fellow pedestrians seemed to be giving us an especially wide berth. Searching my mother’s profile, I saw things there I had never noticed before—a childlike quality but also a kind of ingrained sadness. I looked closely but couldn’t find a trace of the woman I’d known when I was growing up. The ghost of what she’d once been—quick, demanding, cruel, beautiful—seemed to have gone completely out of her. At the ice cream shop she ordered a vanilla malted, giving detailed instructions to the college kid behind the counter—two shots of malt but only one scoop of ice cream, and fill the cup not quite all the way to the top.
“I know how to do it,” said the kid.
“Not for me,” said my mother.
“I’ve done it for you before,” said the boy, tonelessly.
“No, you haven’t!”
He looked at his coworker, a girl in a ripped-up T-shirt with a little metal stick through her nose, and, without making even the slightest effort at discretion, rolled his young, arrogant eyes in an enormous arc.
Responsibility
It was 2:00 a.m. and I was tired. All I wanted was to climb back into bed, curl around David, and go to sleep again, and that’s what I’d told the cop (except for the part about David).
My mother had been released from the city hospital a few days earlier. I figured she was safe and sound, reinstalled at the Regency, only now this cop was telling me she’d been arrested for DUI.
“Someone already posted bail, but she has no way of getting home tonight—no money for a cab, and she can’t drive, obviously.” He then explained my options: I could pick her up, or I could not pick her up. “Some guy named Ray” was supposedly going to send a limo to take her home in the morning, so it was really just about the one night.
“So, what do you say? You want to pick her up?”
“I don’t want to do anything.”
“I get that.”
Something about the way he said these words made it seem like he really might, which is why I asked him if he thought was it wrong of me. I really wanted to know.
“In my experience,” he said, “it rarely makes a difference what you do in this sort of situation with addicts of this type. You should probably do whatever you need to do for yourself.”
The next day I told a friend, my best friend at the time, about this exchange.
“What a bad cop!” she said.
“No, really. He was a good cop.”
We used to twin dress, not on purpose but just because we liked the same things and our budgets were similar. We were walking down Newbury Street, both wearing cropped green sweaters and black flats. Everything slightly different but essentially the same. We also liked the same books. The same movies. The same artists. The same makeup lines. The same recipes.
“Some things are just the way they are,” said my friend. “Mothers are mothers, and daughters are daughters. It’s nonnegotiable. You have responsibilities. I don’t care what that cop said.”
This friend, incidentally, had a needy but not a crazy or addicted mother. She had a mother who sent her care packages and who paid for her graduate school and who visited her once a month in order to cook stews and casseroles that she then packed in her daughter’s freezer in single-serving-size plastic containers.
“You have an obligation,” she insisted, “to take care of your mother, no matter what. It’s just the way it is.”
“But she keeps doing things like this. Like driving under the influence and getting arrested and fighting with everybody and trying to kill herself and calling just to yell at me, just to tell me I’m a terrible daughter. And actually, you know, I actually have other things to do. I actually have a life I should be living.”
“But she’s your mother!” said my friend, who at that moment, I realized, might not actually be my friend, despite her swea
ter.
Restoration
On my father’s refrigerator is a sheet of paper with various inspirational quotes typed out on it. One of these refers to his favorite poem, by Walter de la Mare; it reads, “The Mermaid Is Here Today.” One, lifted from an obscure movie directed by John Malkovich and having something to do, I suspect, with my father’s tendency to fall for much younger women, says, “She’s just a young girl, 62% water . . . and you could have been president.” There are a lot of other quotes, all in different fonts and typefaces, but the one that my eye always lingers on longest, the one that makes me feel the solidity of the years behind us, is from the Bible. “I will restore to you,” it promises my father every time he reaches for the skim milk, “the years that the locust hath eaten.”
Robe
The desk clerk at the Regency caught up with me one day, just as I was about to punch the elevator button for the eighth floor, to ask if I could do something about my mother’s behavior.
“It’s getting stranger,” he said. Then he described her leaving the building a few days earlier—a stormy February day with temperatures in the teens.
“I asked her where she was going, and she said she had to get some ice cream.”
“That’s basically all she eats,” I told him. “Ben & Jerry’s pistachio ice cream. Also peanut butter. Those are her two food groups.”
My mother had told me all about the ice cream, so I told him about it too: Ben & Jerry’s has many famous ice cream flavors, I explained, but pistachio is not one of them, and yet in my mother’s opinion it is the very best flavor. Unfortunately, you can only get it at their retail stores, not in the supermarket, which is why she feels so lucky that there’s a Ben & Jerry’s right around the corner.