Don't Go Crazy Without Me

by Deborah A. Lott

  “Is it cold outside? I don’t want to catch a chill,” he said, as I took his hand and pulled him toward the front door. All I could see were those little open mouths crying.

  My mother was already standing beside the nest when we arrived at the base of the tree. The birds had not given up, had not altered the alarm-like pitch of their cries. My mother looked at the birds and then at my father. Some understanding passed between them; my mother went back into the house and my father started muttering to himself. He sounded the way he did when he got off the phone after a business call and repeated everything he’d said and everything the other person had said, tilting his head from side to side to indicate the shift in speakers, and even laughing over his own jokes a second time.

  Then we began to move quickly, trudging around the side of our house, up the hill toward the garage. He kept tugging at my wrist, until I had to almost run to keep up with him.

  “Where are we going, Daddy? What are we doing?”

  My father completely intent, eyes cast downward, lost to me. We trudged into the garage, where he reached into the dark corner (where the black widows crawled) and got a shovel. Then we were moving again, the fingernail of his almost-thumb digging into my wrist. Then down the side yard through dirt and rocks and dead ivy, breathing hard with our effort, until we were back in the front yard again.

  My father held me back while he crudely scooped the shovel’s blade under the nest. Then we were in motion again, the birds’ nest precariously balanced at the edge of the shovel’s blade, bouncing as we went, birds still chirping. I worried that the nest would fall, but I could not get around to the other side to protect the birds, my father held me so tightly in his grip.

  “Where are we taking the baby birds, Daddy?” I asked. “Where are we going?” I had seen Mr. Wizard on TV feed a bird with an eyedropper. But we were not going toward the house, toward safety and warmth and my mother, toward the soft cotton lining, toward mushy bread and warm water put into an eyedropper. We were ascending the rocky hill at the edge of our property, behind the garage.

  Up here, there was no grass, only dirt, rocks, and weeds, rusty tin cans, an ant hill that swarmed with red ants, and a rusted, off-kilter clothesline. At the very edge of our property, marked by a barbed wire fence, stood our cement incinerator. Up here, it always smelled of burning garbage.

  Before what was happening could register, my father had let go of my hand and was holding open the door of the incinerator. He propped the shovel blade in the open door and pushed hard until the nest with the baby birds inside it slid down the chute. The birds, mouths still open, fell down into the incinerator, where the hot coals burned.

  The birds slipped the same way I slipped down the slide at kindergarten, no stopping once I had started—easy and smooth and quick. Gone. Forever.

  Had I really seen what I thought I’d seen? I tried not to picture those birds’ open mouths filling with red heat but I inched forward instinctively, and my father put his hand across my chest to stop me.

  It was the same reflexive gesture he’d used the day of our car accident. My father had been driving the way he always drove, alternately distracted and vigilant, prone to what my mother called “sudden stops.” Gas pedal to the floor as if he were going to accelerate forever, and then, amazed that a red light or another car had appeared in his path, he would push the brake to the floor. No sooner would he brake than he would be accelerating recklessly again.

  His hand that day had not stopped my forward momentum. We were late to make the post office’s last pickup, speeding through a narrow alley when we sideswiped a car coming in the other direction. I had been sitting on my knees on the front bench seat and flew forward. As my front teeth hit the unforgiving cold metal dashboard, a hard shock of pain vibrated up into my teeth and then through all the soft places in my mouth.

  My father jumped out, incensed to confront the other driver. “Can’t you see I have a child in the car?” he said as he slammed the door. I sat frozen in my seat crying hysterically, as blood, saliva, and tears mingled in a pink stream from my mouth and nose onto the dashboard, onto my hand, onto the brand new baseball jacket with a tiger embroidered on it that he had just bought me. The same day he’d taken me to the barbershop with him and impulsively gotten me a boy’s haircut. I’d been stroking the short hairs at the back of my neck at the moment of collision.

  My father banged the incinerator door shut and dropped the shovel. “Did you know your cousin Stewart got a high fever just from touching a sick bird? Birds carry terrible diseases,” my father said. His own words ignited a spark in his brain. “You didn’t touch them, did you?” He shook me hard by the wrist. The spark from his brain jumped to mine. Did I? I could imagine touching them; I could imagine exactly what they would have felt like.

  “How close did you get to them? Tell me!” He was trying to shake the answer out of me. “Oy Gevalt, did you put your face down next to them?” The pictures flashed in my brain: my hands patting their heads, my mouth breathing their air. What happened to them might be contagious; I already felt sort of sick, sort of bad; was I sad or was I sick? Could I even tell the difference? Something sank hard in my stomach and then fluttered up again.

  “I don’t think I touched them,” I said, and my father didn’t wait for any more of an answer. He dragged me toward the back door of our house, screaming Eva’s name until she came out the back door and stood on the stoop.

  “Shhh,” she said, “Gotteniu, the neighbors are going to hear you and call the police.”

  “Wash her hands,” he said. “She got close to those filthy birds.”

  When we reached the door, my mother asked him a question with her eyes, and he shrugged his shoulders and said one word in Yiddish, “Fertig [It is finished].” My mother did not ask me how the birds were. She was not waiting with soft cotton to make them a nest. Instead she took me into the laundry room and stood behind me, in front of the oversized stained-gray laundry room sink. I rest ed my head against her white apron, against her soft, full, warm body.

  “Wash them thoroughly,” my father said, standing behind us, supervising.

  My mother worked her fingers between each of my fingers, glided her thumb over my palms, and into the tender pads on the inside surface of each hand. She maneuvered our hands so she could pick up the soap again, resting it in my hands that were resting in her hands. Then as she moved her hands over mine to make the suds, I gave up all volition, let her move my hands as she would, allowed my body to sink into her body, allowed myself to sink into her.

  “You know, the mother would never come back for them. Once they fell out of the tree and became contaminated by the smell of human beings, she would never take them back. And they were too little for us to take care of them.”

  The birds’ mother abandoned them because of something they’d had no control over. I wondered if it had been my smell that condemned them.

  We went into the dining room, where my father and brothers were waiting at the dinner table, forks in hand.

  “You look like a bunch of lions at the zoo waiting for the zookeeper to throw a slab of meat into the cage,” Eva said.

  I had seen protection and destruction in my father mixed in a combination I could not reconcile. It should have made me wary, I should have begun to wonder more about the contradiction between his recklessness and his obsession with outside contamination. But I was only five; I could not afford to question. Whatever my father did, he did to keep me safe, I told myself.

  Still, that night, for perhaps the first time, I could not bear to look at him.

  Present, Kitchen, 9:00 a.m.

  I’m sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee, watching the birds at my backyard feeder, when anxiety rushes over me. Is it the product of too much caffeine too rapidly ingested, or of too much rumination? I can never tell what’s physiological and what’s induced by what I’m thinking. For me the feedback loops are endless.

  I attempt mindfulness meditation;
focus on the breath coming in, the breath going out, stare at one neutral spot on the wall, slow down my breathing, follow my breath. As I do so, everything calms down, and I find stillness. Then my anxiety is replaced by a wave of sorrow. Longing, longing for all that is lost, longing for what I never got, retrograde longing. I call my brother Paul.

  “I had a dream I was back in the house again,” I say.

  “Whenever I dream about Ira, he’s tormenting me,” Paul says.

  “Whenever I dream about Eva, she’s starving me.”

  The old alliances remain entrenched. To Paul my father was a villain, a maniac, a sadist, my mother a hapless martyr. To me, it remains much more complicated. Despite everything, I still love my father. But I do not miss him the way I miss my mother. Every day, the longing. My unabated mother-hunger remains insatiable.

  Paul and I reminisce. About the house, the neighbors, minor events that we may well be the last people alive to remember.

  “How can we be nostalgic for our childhood when so much of it was terrible?” I ask Paul. “We’ve fetishized our childhood, even the terrible parts,” I say.

  “It wasn’t all terrible,” Paul says. “Besides it’s the only childhood we’ll ever get.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Storytellers

  It was Saturday morning and my father had promised to take me to the library. I’d been trying to coax him out of the house since early morning but by the time he shaved, and stanched the bleeding—he was a reckless shaver—and took a shower, and lay down to recover from its enervating effects, and combed his hair and admired his own image in the mirror, and ate lunch—all the effort of getting ready had left him famished—and lay down for another brief rest to aid his digestion—it was mid-afternoon. We were finally in the car when he complained of an onslaught of debilitating thirst that necessitated his running back into the house for a slug of the Vernor’s ginger ale he’d grown up drinking. “I don’t know what it is about Vernor’s,” he said, “but it always has a revivifying effect.”

  The La Crescenta library resided in a dilapidated old clapboard house a few miles from ours. As we rode, I felt obligated to read every street sign and billboard we passed. Words had ceased being decorative markings, as indecipherable as trees. Everything around me, everything in the human world, cereal boxes with their coupons to be mailed in for toys, the labels on my clothing, even the insignia on our car, had revealed themselves as assemblages of letters demanding to be sounded out phonetically, their meanings released.

  A flash of unexpected movement at the right side of the car startled my father out of his reverie, and he came to just in time to slam on the brakes. STOP on the red sign screamed in my brain. A group of girls walked in front of us in the crosswalk, oblivious to the near miss, on their way to Monte Vista’s playground. This crosswalk was the same one I had walked in on my way to school on those rare occasions I was ready to leave when our neighbor Lucy and her siblings knocked on our front door at the remarkably early hour of 8:00 a.m. These children in front of us now walked just as Lucy and I had walked. They were in the same place now that I had been in then. I traveled instantly into their bodies and could feel the breeze on my legs, sense the car’s hot breath, smell the groves of olive trees that surrounded us. At the same time, I observed them from the elevated vantage of our car, buffered by thick glass windows. My perspective shifted back and forth: in the car observing, inside the girls walking through the crosswalk. Time slowed, and the girls came into sharper focus. I saw the fine blonde hairs on their legs, imagined I could smell the Juicy Fruit gum on their breath.

  The split of consciousness brought forward a torrent of words: There was the I who experienced and the I who described. The I who could travel beyond the self into another. The I who could travel backward and forward in time through language. The sentences raced ahead as I struggled to keep up. I memorized each in turn so I would not forget it, and then repeated it, along with the next one, and the next one, until I realized my descriptions had become a story. When we reached the library, I hesitated to get out of the car—what if my story could not survive against the roar of language inside that building? Would I forget it when tempted to read all those other stories?

  As soon as my father and I got home, I bounded out of the car. As my mother greeted us at the door, I announced, “I’ve written a story: A Girl Goes to the Library.” I began to recite: “A girl was in the car with her father on the way to the library. They stopped at the crosswalk for some other children. It was the same crosswalk the girl had walked to school in with her friends.” My father then instructed my mother, “Evvie, get a pad, quick, write it down.” My mother sat in her office chair, my father paced—their daily working mode—as I stood and dictated it.

  Creating the story carried the joy that came from slowing down time, from being simultaneously inside experience and separated from it through language. In my story, the I became a she; the story allowed for the possibility of multiple perspectives, of different narrative versions of reality. But quickly the innate pleasures of story were conflated with the rush that came from outside approval. My father’s grandiosity fed my own: I was a genius just like him; we would be rich, famous. I would no longer be different-strange from the other children in La Crescenta; I would be different-special. My father quickly took possession of A Girl Goes to the Library. He got on the phone and read it aloud to Rebecca and Uncle Nathan.

  While he bragged and fantasized about the incipient fame and fortune that would come from being the genius father of a genius child prodigy, I set out to illustrate what was going to be my first storybook. Books had to have pictures, after all. Though I could not duplicate the fleshly three-dimensionality of those girls’ bodies in the crosswalk, could not render depth of field, or even come close to representing the elegant bulges and curves of our new white Buick station wagon, that flat block of white that I drew to represent the car pleased me. The crayon’s red came close to the red of the stop sign. When I looked at my drawing, the girls’ practically stick figures with brightly colored triangles for skirts, the crosswalk represented by stark black lines across the bottom of the paper, I saw through the drawing to the reality I remembered.

  The act of drawing felt nearly as exhilarating as writing, the pleasures of creation not bound to the quality of the final product. I approached my father eager for more praise. He was still on the phone when I shoved the drawing in front of him. He pushed it away. I pushed it in front of him again, held it right up in front of his face.

  “Daddy,” I said.

  He ignored me.

  “Daddy, look what I made,” I said, “I’m illustrating my book.” Without pausing a beat in his telephone conversation, he held the drawing out before him, and then cast it back to me again. “This looks like any ordinary child could have drawn it,” he said.

  That summer Ira convinced Eva that we needed to break in our new car by driving to Las Vegas, a place high in his affections for its singular dedication to hedonistic fantasy. While the other children in La Crescenta came back from summer break reporting on family camping trips to Yosemite and the Grand Canyon, we returned every summer to Las Vegas, to the girly shows and slot machines and 24-hour buffets my father loved.

  Years later, in the midst of my father’s mental decline, thinking it might “turn him around,” my mother would orchestrate a trip there that would prove to be our last as a family. It was disastrous; Ira threw dishes at Ben in a restaurant and then refused to leave the hotel room.

  In the summer of 1960, my mother drove the entire way. She and Ben loaded the car, making me a bed in the back, where I lay wedged between our suitcases. I grew drowsy, watching the shadows of the city’s lights move across the ceiling over my head, and listening to my father’s gleeful anticipation of the plush rooms, the glitzy shows, the garishly lit casinos, the tummel outside that would finally match the tummel within.

  As we drove on through mile after mile of dark, empty desert, the headlights il
luminating only cacti and billboards promoting the turnouts for roadside attractions, Ira sat in the passenger seat, scanned a newspaper, and lay out our itinerary: “If we can get there in time, we can still see the Folies Bergère at midnight, and tomor row night we’ll take the kids to the dinner show of Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé.”

  As the number of miles till Las Vegas steadily diminished on the highway signs, my father began to sweat. “We’re going to go through Death Valley,” he said, “the lowest place on earth.” The road blackened ahead of us as the sky filled with stars. At about midnight, we reached the sign that read Death Valley.

  “Pull over, Eva,” Ira said. The combination of being wound up by the prospect of all that fun, and then frightened by the thought of Death Valley, demanded a ritual purge. My father opened the car door, got out, and vomited. The hot air blasted us, his retching the only sound in the empty desert. He got back into the car, wiped his mouth, blew his nose, and took a swig of Coke. He looked more rejuvenated than ill, his cheeks pink, and his skin less clammy.

  “The low altitude gives me asthma,” he said. “It makes it hard to breathe.”

  “Seems like the gunk sitting in your lungs from the smog gets loosened here,” Eva said.

  At 2:00 a.m., we checked into the Riviera, a then-swanky hotel on the strip that my mother briefly protested was beyond our means. Our suite had white French provincial furniture accented in faux gold leaf. My father took a bath in the oversized bathtub, wrapped himself in a plush white bath towel, ordered food from the 24-hour room service, and then stood on the outdoor terrace. With the desert air blowing on his face, he experienced what appeared to be a moment of contentment.