Don't Go Crazy Without Me

by Deborah A. Lott

  Every time Nathan proposed a visit to our house, my father made excuses. He blamed his brother for thwarting his efforts to search out more medical treatment for his mother. I spoke to Joey on the phone nearly every day but was embarrassed to tell him about my new obsessions. I was still mad at him for making me look at Rebecca’s dead body. He felt fine, glad he had said goodbye, and I couldn’t get the image out of my mind.

  When I wasn’t fixating on my grandmother’s body, I was thinking about her house. When Uncle Nathan and my father had been cleaning it out, Nathan had asked if I wanted anything of Rebecca’s to remember her by. I thought about the things she’d tried to give me in the rest home and how my father had taken them away. I contemplated what other object of hers I might want. Her lace-up old lady shoes? Her saggy rayon dresses? The yellowed rayon slip that she wore over her small sagging breasts? I pictured those breasts, which I had seen one night accidentally while she’d undressed in our house. In their color and elongated shape they looked a little too much like the way mine were developing. I feared that I had inherited them rather than my mother’s far more desirably ample mammaries.

  I’d always admired the multicolored set of coasters that sat on the shelf of Rebecca’s cabinet. Did I really want them? They felt the most neutral of her objects since we’d never used them. Even still, my grandmother’s spirit so imbued her things that I could not imagine them divested of her. She must still be in them, and maybe she could haunt me through them. Maybe they were contaminated with cancer germs. If cancer could be contagious, maybe death could be contagious as well. So I had told my uncle I didn’t want anything, and now I felt remorse. Rebecca had to be as insulted by this rejection as she’d been when I refused to eat her boiled chicken. I’d been so afraid of her haunting me through her things that I’d rejected them, and my rejection only made her angrier, so now she was haunting me as revenge. “I’ll show you for not wanting to be reminded of me,” I imagined her dead self saying.

  As my father dissolved under the weight of his refusal to let go, the unwelcome image of my grandmother in her grave began to invade my daylight hours. As that image and my guilt over rejecting her converged, I devised a corrective penitential ritual. I could banish the images of her body from my mind by forcing myself instead to remember every detail about her house and her possessions. Remember this moment; remember this moment, my father had taught me. Maybe I could make time go backward.

  In my mind, I would traverse the thirteen hundred square feet of her 1924 Spanish style house over and over again. Walk up the three bright red painted steps to the front door. Open the door, acknowledge its fine cherrywood finish. Take the crystal glass knob in my hand and gently shut the door as I come inside. Enter the living room; remember the intricate, red-and-maroon-patterned Oriental rug. Let my eyes become lost in its maze vines and branches, its swirls that looked like birds’ wings and beckoning fingers. Walk over to the round mahogany table with its scary claw-and-ball feet. Pull on the gold ring in the mouth of the lion’s head to open the drawer. Inside the drawer, just like always: two decks of canasta cards with a faded pink rose design. Walk across the room, remember the polished hardwood floors; remember the mantel with the pictures of the grandchildren. Recreate the exact order of the school pictures: there’s me in fourth grade, looking happy, and then fifth when the enemas started and I butchered my bangs, and Paul in junior high, and Ben’s high school graduation picture. In a larger gold frame, there’s the baby me sitting in a diaper on a rolling lawn of dichondra.

  Go to the glass closet, pull on its doors, and feel that little catch at the end as they open. Ah, the nauseating whiff of mothballs. Stroke the soft black sealskin fur of Grandma’s coat. Her lustrous, East Coast-weight coat that she was going to wear when her dead parents came back for her. Maybe she’s with them now.

  Go into the kitchen with its black-and-wine-colored, signet-patterned linoleum. Turn the metal handle (notice the drips of paint on it) so that the ironing board comes out of the wall; don’t forget the old-fashioned toaster with the folding sides and the wire frames for the bread. Down the hall to the bedroom of the sex games with Joey, and then that other bedroom, the one that smells of talcum powder and rancid toilet water. No, no, no, still too afraid to go in there. Go into the bathroom instead. There’s Rebecca’s toilet with the S-shaped neck that juts out under its bowl as if her toilet had swallowed a snake. And the bowl’s irregular mineral stain, like a gray moth splattered flat on the porcelain. Listen to the toilet make its hollow ghostly hum. Think about all the bad things that happened in this toilet, that happen in the toilet of my own house every night.

  As this ritual overran my life, I became more convinced that my dead grandmother was behind it. Why wouldn’t the dead long for reunion just as the living did? If the power of that longing could deform my father’s life, what could it do to a dead person? In horror movies, being dead brought out the worst in people. What if my dead, zombified grandmother was possessed by all the worst traits she’d manifested in life? What if she was critical, puritanical, unforgiving? What if she hated me for my youth, lack of discipline, messiness, incipient sexuality? What if that bride-ghost-witch wanted to shah still me for good?

  Rebecca came to me one afternoon after school during a nap. I was dreaming when I first saw her, a nimbus of fire surrounding her head as she floated behind my bed, dressed in her white burial gown. She held up her hands that glowed with an electrified yellow-white light. As I sat up in bed and opened my eyes, the image remained, and she conveyed her intentions: she wanted to pass death onto my mother, and then through my mother—whose tender touch I would not be able to resist—onto me. I screamed, and the image dissipated.

  When my mother and Paul came running into my bedroom, I sobbed.

  “Grandma’s ghost came to get me,” I said.

  “You were dreaming,” my mother said.

  “My eyes were wide open,” I protested.

  “Then you were dreaming with your eyes open,” she said.

  My father, narcotized by a heavy dose of sleeping pills, never awoke or heard my screams.

  “I believe you,” Paul said. “Don’t be afraid, Grandma came to visit me too.”

  She had come to him in the stunning black-and-white plaid taffeta dress with the puffy sleeves she’d worn to his Bar Mitzvah party.

  “She said, ‘Don’t worry about me, everything here is hunky-dory,’” Paul explained. “Isn’t that just how she would have put it? Hunky-dory? You shouldn’t be frightened of Grandma, she’s with us all the time.”

  Paul’s words made me even more hysterical, but he would not stop talking.

  “I know, let’s have a séance and try to find out what she wants. We can call in a medium from the Science of Mind church.” Paul had begun to develop an interest in all things metaphysical.

  I howled with a whole new level of terror.

  My mother shook her head. “Does everyone in this family have to go crazy at once?” she said.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Grief Fails to Stop Time

  Despite our efforts, my father and I failed to stop time. Another birthday arrived on the anniversary of my grandmother’s funeral, and I entered ninth grade. My dead grandmother rituals faded as they had to compete with homework, and crushes on boys, and muffled telephone conversations, and my drive to have a regular teenage life. Wendy and Joey and my writing sustained me.

  Writing had become the way I shored up an otherwise shaky self. I wrote poems in my head during PE, after the baseball team captain sent me so far into the outfield—to avoid the likelihood of any balls requiring my services—that I encroached on another class’s game. I wrote poems in my bedroom at night when I felt wounded by what I perceived as my mother’s betrayals; I wrote about the unseen-by-others deeper meaning in things. My poems rallied in support of the underdog, the misunderstood: Laugh at my wet eyes / Cry out abnormity / I’ll spit on your gray / And answer non-conformity. They reeked of my obsession wit
h death and possessed a fair quotient of adolescent melodrama.

  I wrote in the persona of an orphan, inspired by the cheesy Keane print of a huge-eyed, sad girl harlequin that adorned my bedroom wall as my patron saint. The girl in the painting, like the speaker in my poems, was an unloved, misunderstood waif. I wrote in the persona of a child grieving and then turning away from her mother, whose true state she finally recognizes: Look up at me, mother, and feel a moist eye / look up at me, mother / for mother I cry / . . . so bury your face / and I’ll cover your head. I must walk alone now / for mother you’re dead. I wrote as the confused, estranged girl who, à la some episodes of The Twilight Zone, suddenly realizes that she is dead herself: Don’t hate me / Don’t hate me with wet eyes / Talk to me / Don’t let me cry / . . . . I’ll never know why you were that way / Why did you have to go? / Because I’m dead, you wouldn’t stay?

  Death had become the deus ex machina, the surprise punch line in my poems. When I wasn’t already dead in my poems, I was contemplating it, as a suicidal girl who drowns herself in the ocean and attains merger with the All: And could a meager no one hope for more / than living to reflect the sky . . . . / My skin turned to cold, I felt no chill / Around great ships and in the small meek bays / I floated with the sea’s unchanging will. I felt alienated, but I also felt aloof and superior—a teenager willingly getting soaked in a downpour while her shallow, plebeian classmates congregated under a protective awning, or a girl dissecting a worm in her biology class and seeing the beauty her classmates missed: Was there beauty in its living / Was there beauty in its dying / Would I ever know the beauty anymore?

  At around this time, another “I” began to emerge in my writings, not an orphan or a defiant child, but an oppressed, noble black man. As my mother ironed yet another endless stack of my father’s handkerchiefs one night in the living room, she and I watched CBS news reports on the integration of schools in the South. Surrounded by federal marshals, neat and well-dressed black students entered the schools amid jeers and taunts.

  “It’s not right that they should have to go through this just because their skin is a darker color,” my mother said. “Those white people are just ignorant and cruel.” My mother deplored injustice, especially that wrought by stupidity and selfishness. Though my father claimed to be a champion of the downtrodden, he had a blind spot for the plight of black people. Recounting his childhood in Detroit, he’d claim, “Those shvartze children tyrannized me.”

  My father’s racism sickened me; from the mid-1960s on, I had begun to identify with the black children we watched on TV, and with the civil rights cause. Of course, I didn’t really know anything about being black; apart from a housekeeper who’d come for a time to help my mother with the cleaning and spoke with a thick, sludgy Southern accent, and the smiling, obsequious man in Montrose who shined shoes and made keys from a wooden shack at the back of a parking lot, I’d never even met any black people. The only encounter I’d had with any African American community was when we drove through the segregated shantytown of Pasadena on our way to my pediatrician Dr. Hoffington’s office. From the car window I could see ramshackle houses and barefoot children playing on peeling stoops. During the 1960s and long afterward, La Crescenta remained without a single black resident.

  Not knowing any black people did not stop me from projecting all my outrage, indignation, rebelliousness, and anger into their cause, nor from appropriating their images for my own personal use. I felt Othered and, in La Crescenta at least, they seemed the ultimate Other. If I was going to feel outcast anyway, it seemed far preferable to be a strong black man who could scare my La Crescenta neighbors than to be a timid, awkward little Jewish girl who kept trying to fit in. If I were black, I would no longer have to agonize over whether I was being rejected because I was Jewish or because I was unattractive, because I was crazy, or because I had a weird, deformed father who put on a little boy suit at my only birthday party, because I could not shake the reputation established by crying the entire first year of school—as well as large parts of first and second grade. I could stop wondering if my classmates would accept me if I were more athletic, or ever got real boobs, or were somehow more like them. If I were black, I could not pass no matter what I did, so would be relieved of the burden of trying to. Ironically, imagining myself as an oppressed black man liberated me.

  Ninth grade homeroom: 9:00 a.m. The teacher called me up to the front of the room. I was having my period and was convinced that when I stood up, every boy’s eyes in the class would be riveted on the telltale triangular outline of my sanitary belt and bulky pad, perhaps even a misshapen stain of blood seeping through my skirt. There was that old problem of things not coming out when you wanted them to, and rushing out all over when you didn’t.

  At the sound of my name, two boys, one of whom sat beside me, the other behind, pals who relished heckling and hounding me, began to confer. I stood up, sensed a warm gush of blood, reflexively put my hand on the back of my skirt to hide any seepage, and heard the boys whisper and laugh.

  I felt a hot acrid blast of shame. What did they see? What did they know? One of them spoke under his breath, but pointedly loud enough for me to hear. “Nigger lover,” he said. The other snickered and put his hand over his mouth to hide his laughter from the teacher.

  Nigger lover? It took a moment to sink in. It wasn’t a term I’d ever heard. At first, all I felt was relief that they weren’t making fun of my leaking female body. They hadn’t spied the thick, growing-ever-soggier pad stuffed between my legs. After that first flush of relief, though, the vileness of the slur soured in my ear. But then I felt a rush of a different sort of feeling. This accusation was novel—different from the “kike” and “penny pusher” and “Christ killer” that Paul and Ben heard more often than me. Outrage surged through me, and then turned into righteous pride. Being hated for what I believed, for who I loved, for a cause I embraced, gave me a potency that did not come with being hated for something essential and unchangeable about me.

  There was a whole political movement growing in the world outside of La Crescenta that these doofuses knew nothing about. I’d watched it on the television news and sensed it in the music. I would be part of this big, powerful new family of social activists, black and white together, locking arms, singing “We Shall Overcome” and marching fearlessly through the streets. I could choose this, as I had not chosen being Jewish, or small or unathletic, or anxious.

  I turned back on my heels and glared. “What’s wrong with you guys?” I said.

  Change was afoot for my father too. Not only could he not stop time, he couldn’t even keep his own grief frozen. I thought of Great Expectations and the way time had stopped for Miss Havisham at the instant her betrothed abandoned her. And yet nothing could keep her wedding gown from turning to dust around her. My father’s grief had transmuted into a pervasive hypochondria. Whereas vague and ever-shifting symptoms—my father’s, but also my brothers’ and mine—had always provided the background noise for our family’s life, now my father’s hypochondria intensified into an agitated preoccupation with every sensation that came with being in a body. According to his moment-to-moment reports, it hurt to walk, pee, talk, breathe. It hurt to be. He felt nauseous, dizzy, “on fire.” Pain shot through his head; reverse peristalsis threatened the meager forward momentum of his digestion. When he retched theatrically and ran for the toilet, I screamed and held my ears. When he said he felt fire in his loins, I saw the flames.

  For many months my father had cried out repeatedly that all he wanted was to die and be reunited with his mother. Now he seemed terrified at the prospect of his wish being granted. Feeling himself destined to develop the cancer that had taken Rebecca, Ira read every minor twinge as its harbinger. The more inward he turned, the more amplified the sensations he perceived. He could feel wayward cells mutating, tumors taking up residence in his colon, his bladder, his brain. He could see them.

  “It’s cancer, I know it,” he said. “I’m just
not sure where it is.”

  Thus began my father’s odyssey from doctor to doctor, specialist to specialist to confirm the dire diagnosis. It wasn’t as if there were nothing wrong with him; the doctors found plenty—allergy and asthma and irritable bowel and prostatitis and borderline diabetes and high blood pressure, not to mention obesity, and his ever-worsening addiction to painkillers and sleeping pills. Today I think they might well diagnose fibromyalgia or an autoimmune disease. At that time the doctors chalked up all his symptoms to hysteria. They tried to reassure him that he wasn’t dying, and their dismissal only made him more depressed and paranoid. Since the doctors had nothing else to offer, he medicated himself with more and more painkillers and sedatives, which he obtained through a sympathetic and equally addicted local pharmacist.

  “I don’t think anyone can really save me at this point,” he said, “but don’t I at least deserve some relief from the pain?”

  “This isn’t the first time he’s done this,” my mother said. I sat across from her at the family room table while we drank tall glasses of milk and ate pieces broken off from the giant bar of Hershey’s chocolate she always kept in the refrigerator. My mother and I could bond over food—sweet, then salty, then sweet again.

  “Your father had a similar episode a couple of years before you were born,” she explained. It had started, she told me, when a client had jabbed my father in the ribs after he’d told her a joke.

  “Was the joke dirty?” I asked.

  “Does your father tell any other kind? I don’t think she was all that offended. It was a playful jab. Gornisht mit gornisht.” [Nothing from nothing].

  The typical pattern: an expression of unbridled impulse followed by regret and the fantasy of retribution.

  “Your father couldn’t let go of it; he magnified it in his head.”

  After the jab, Ira began to complain of a diffuse assembly of symptoms: shortness of breath, pain across the chest, weakness, and the conviction that he was dying. He stopped working and took to his bed. For months, he went from doctor to doctor, telling them the story of the joke and the jab. They examined him and X-rayed him and tried to reassure him. Maybe it was a bruise; it would likely go away.