Hystera

by Leora Skolkin-Smith

  The tears are rolling down his cheeks, Lilly had thought on the train that morning. Even here, as she sat on the train and waited for her stop, she could hear her father’s thoughts. Where is Helen, where is your mother? It’s not snowing, but the roads are dangerous. Where’s Helen? Lilly could hear him as if he were inside her and his thoughts were hers. Something in these three years since his strokes manipulated that, and now she was a medium for her father. She knew her father was walking with his aluminum walker into the living room right now, and that the sun was coming through the oval windows of the colonial house. Will your mother come home? he will ask her when she arrives, Lilly thought, then he will wait for Lilly to answer him. Has there been an accident? My brother Leon talks to me at night in dreams, and I have no will to live. I want to write my story. It would make a great novel, he will tell her. Helen was a dish when I first met her…. Oh boy, we were wild. Lilly, you are my confidante now and dearest girl. How did I manage all these years? Could Lilly show him how to write his novel? She’s the one in the family who writes all the time. Would Lilly help him tell his story?

  When David possessed Lilly, it was through her whole body, and she couldn’t stop the flow of her father into her. A brain-damaged man cannot speak his mind; he must go through someone else. It closes in on them, the house. A brain-damaged man exposes all his secrets. And I can hear inside my father, Lilly thought. She wondered how much water her father must drink to make so many tears. Joe and Larry were his good friends, he is thinking now…. And when he thinks of them, his tears might stop. Helen couldn’t even write her name when I first met her…. How did I do it all these years? She is still a dish, your mother, what a behind she’s got on her. She was pretty as all get out. What was she doing marrying a kook like me?

  Her father wondered about death. He told her. And he wanted them to know—Helen and Lilly—that for all the selfishness in him, his state now was something he could not control. My brother, Leon, a Republican, always said I wouldn’t amount to anything. You remember him at the hospital, Lilly? Leon didn’t give a damn. I wish him luck and he’ll need it….

  By the time the train pulled into Valhalla, three stops from Mount Kisco, the teenage girls were dozing off, and in her mind Lilly was going through what she would do once the train arrived in Mount Kisco, her own stop. Lilly watched the town of Mount Kisco appear slowly from the shortening distance. A rusted old fence was around the ghetto houses up on a hill past the train tracks, and the clapboard houses looked splintered and fenced-in as if an explosion had taken place, molding a dark cavity of poverty and peeling shingles and isolation. The tree branches stretched cadaverous into the lit sky where the shanty houses of the poorer Westchester stood.

  The train halted at the Mount Kisco depot, and Lilly disembarked into the bright Westchester sunlight. She signaled for one of the taxis, and then she was a passenger again, on her way to her parents’ house in Bedford.

  The taxi passed the familiar century-old estates, the gargoyles and birdbaths, the lawns of affluent Bedford as Lilly’s feelings ran amorphous over the acres of ravines and creeks. But the air was savory again as she remembered it, the pungent maple of the wooded expanses filling her. Someplace Lilly heard dogs barking.

  Time had gone by so rapidly. Her father awoke from his coma in 1971. In the town of Bedford that summer, three years prior, families were collecting cans of pork and beans and powdered milk for the planes flying into Biafra. The magazines at the beauty salons and town country clubs were a couple of years old and filled instead with the story of Mary Jo Kopechne drowning at Chappaquiddick with Ted Kennedy, and with Woodstock. Images of Mary Jo Kopechne swam inside Lilly’s head now—the photographs of the well-dressed senator leaving the scene of the accident.

  Lilly always wondered how she would remember Bedford when she was older. The grass that was like delicate watercress. The trees—fragile, precious. Sugar maple trees, white birch and ash, evergreens and weeping willows, nature that was slender and sweet. The town’s enclave of old colonial-type shops housed fragile china frogs and hand-blown glass paraphernalia, golden urns and even crucifixes from earlier times. There were still an old mill farmers’ library and the Village movie theater, which played a Rock Hudson and Doris Day movie called That Touch of Mink when Lilly was thirteen. But in the 1600s, renegades, sorcerers, and witches were said to populate the area.

  By noon, the taxi had pulled up to the Weills’ sprawling white house, and it looked deserted. The taxi stopped by the path steps to the front door and let her out. Lilly felt the beginning of the long afternoon ahead like a weight larger than she thought she could endure.

  The stone walkway was overgrown now with weeds, ugly stalks of green where ants crawled and circled, as if confused. There were no flower cups at the top of the stems anymore. Beyond a distant stone wall Lilly could still see the forest she used to walk in with her close friends from the high school: the nature in the near distance had remained clean—far enough away from the peeling paint of the house (which blew off in the winds and landed in shreds and clumps on the porch and grass), the unkempt rock gardens growing wild and crude.

  As David and Lilly sat opposite each other at the dining room table that afternoon, they drank hot cocoa Lilly made for them in the kitchen. The afternoon light was jittery on her father’s diminished gray hair, giving it almost a halo, a celestial absolution. As he talked on monotonously, making little sense, rambling, Lilly turned to watch the branches of her favorite white birch tree with its shredding bark wave in the wind outside the bow window.

  The table was set, as if it were before. Old polished silverware, dabs of pink copper stain remover still on the knife and spoon handles, the forks’ prongs. It was the day the housekeeper came. Lilly heard shuffling and sneezing, the off-and-on of the vacuum cleaner from the living room.

  “What’s the point?” David had asked her suddenly, looking up from his cup of cocoa. “Your mother left the house again. She works in that travel agency. She will go away again. Tell me if I was a good father.”

  “You were a good father, Daddy,” Lilly had said.

  “Your mother hates me. She sleeps in our old bedroom alone with that Sony television. The little one, I mean that looks like a box. Is it a television? Or does your mother just tell me that to get rid of me? She watches it so she doesn’t have to listen to me anymore.”

  “No, Daddy. She just gets tired. She always liked to watch television.”

  “I want to buy tickets to get out of here,” her father said, and then he started crying.

  “Tickets?” she had asked him, finally standing to go over and quiet him. His face was a pale map of flaccid veins, his skin so thinned she could see his veins as tributaries crisscrossing on his cheeks and forehead—on his long nose, under the unshaven gray bristles on his upper lip, his chin.

  The basement door had been closed for months now, and the snow gathered on the basement’s outside door, freezing the bolts so that it could not be lifted from the outside anymore. Lilly had wondered if the frost had so damaged and rusted the door’s hinges, it was sealed forever.

  The maid left by 2 p.m. Lilly and David were still at the dining room table talking.

  “Where’s your mother? She needs to come and help me,” David went on. “Tell your mother I am a broken man. Let me tell you a story of a man who lost his whole life—” The suffering on David’s face was constant, pulling at him in abrupt shifts of intensity.

  Lilly took his fingers under her right hand on the table and felt how cold they were, as if they were back in the hospital bed, three years before.

  “I have only survived through my family love,” he had said, but his expression was hollow, as if he were reading Hallmark cards. “Yes, my family has rescued me. I was a broken man,” he started to cry again. Then Lilly saw that the cup of cocoa had scorched a corner on his thin lips, which began now to redden and then grow swollen.

  “Daddy, what happened to your mouth?” Lilly asked him, a
larmed.

  “What?” he asked.

  “To your mouth,” she said. “What happened. Is the cocoa too hot? Daddy?”

  “It’s your mother,” he said, bowing his head. “She makes me cry. We used to date and now she wants nothing to do with me.”

  “You mean Mom?”

  “Yes, I think she went away.”

  “No, no, Daddy. She’ll be back tonight. She’s at work.”

  “What kind of man would let his wife work? You see what I mean?” He pushed his cup of cocoa away, making unnatural, strident heaves from his chest. “I’m so confused,” he said. “Will I be better?”

  He had made Lilly feel important. Sometimes David had given Lilly something she never felt. It could have been that he was now “dating” her, she had thought, almost laughing out loud that day at the strangeness of his loosened feelings.

  “Let’s see,” he had continued, after long minutes at the table passed. “I think you’re the one who understands me. We suffer in the same ways.” When he talked like this, the room seemed to warm, the drifts of snow at the window looked startlingly like white gold. “I’m sick, aren’t I?” he asked her again. ”But love has saved me.” Then he began another monologue, stiffly mumbling through his lips.

  “Your mother always resented my intellect. She was an ignorant woman, and an hysteric,” he explained to Lilly. “I’m a destroyed man. With only the love of my family to keep me going.” Had he been a good father? He pleaded with Lilly, “Please tell me that I was a good father.” Lilly believed she would suffocate listening to him again. Helen hated him because she resented and misunderstood him, he went on, continuing, “Your mother was so bitter, she even wanted to go back to Israel. Your mother is a very ill woman.” Helen needed help since the day he married her, and he had once tried to find Helen a good psychiatrist in Westport but she wouldn’t go. Did Lilly know that?

  Later, Lilly helped him with his walker, taking him into the mudroom through the kitchen. Where he had fallen the night of his accident was now a bare, bloodless spot, smelling of Lestoil. She made him a light supper: a glass of orange juice and a sandwich of Brie cheese on rye bread with mustard and tomatoes. She left them and some Pepperidge Farm cookies on his tray in front of the old television with rabbit-ears antennas in the mudroom with him. She helped him adjust all the static on the TV, and then the six o’clock news came on. They watched an accident scene in Brooklyn live on The Channel Two Evening Report. Then Lilly went upstairs. Her father had tired of talking so much again.

  She was returning to the scene of a crime she had committed as if in her sleep three years before, Lilly told herself, kneeling by the old bathtub that since had been scrubbed so raw, it looked like it was made of a rough white stone. She ran the tub water and listened to the hissing and creaks in the old water pipes, thinking this water had seduced her once. She was sure the tub had not been filled since that evening three years ago. There wasn’t even a bar of soap on the rim, and Lilly wanted to cry uncontrollably, staring into the tub’s deep space, which seemed vast as death.

  Inside her parents’ bedroom, a green valise was still filled with the gifts for family in Israel that Helen had bought before David’s accident. Helen never fully unpacked it since the night of David’s accident.

  Helen finally came home by 8 p.m. Lilly was already in her old childhood bedroom, undressed for bed. Her mother took her dinner upstairs where she could watch her Sony TV. Lilly heard her in the hall.

  “Lilly, are you here?” Helen had called, and Lilly leaned out from behind the door for a brief moment to assure her mother she was there.

  David wandered into Lilly’s bedroom an hour later. And Lilly looked at him thinking, Why am I a trash bin? They could throw anything into her. She could be emptied. She could be filled. She could be carried from here to there with nothing but their waste. She didn’t know whether her father had urinated in his pajamas before he came into her bedroom that night. Helen had buried herself by then down the hall in reruns of The Perry Mason Show; its theme music blared like a foghorn. The sticky but wet secretion from David’s penis had flooded his pajama’s crotch even before he sat on her bed. It could have come from his nose, Lilly had thought, or other orifices. The stain she suddenly noticed must have been there before he came into her room and not while he was with her because it was crusted, half-dry.

  The moon came in through the oval window of her bedroom, and she had remained still, feeling the moonlight reflecting off the window glass and shingles of the house, as she could not keep her eyes off the blot in the place where her father’s organ was cloaked under cloth and darkness. He continued to sit on the edge of her bed, talking to her, unaware. He did not touch her, and she knew that his discharge was not from arousal by her, as it had been there before he came into her room. He talked as if she wasn’t really there.

  David left her bedroom by midnight, but the image of his secretion had remained with Lilly. Lilly urgently started searching through her old dresser drawer for some paper to write on. She rifled through the loose socks and nightgowns still left in there from other times she slept over, but she found nothing to write on. It brought her to tears, when rummaging through useless knickknacks she had packed into old shoeboxes in the closet, that she still could not find any paper, pencil, or pen. The desperation became a burn inside her stomach. How could she forget to bring her notebook with her, she asked herself. Why did she forget?

  “He doesn’t realize what he is doing.” It was Helen’s old, firm self returning when her mother burst inside the bedroom door, the TV in her arms. “He molested you.”

  Lilly had heard him in her mother’s bedroom. Helen must have seen David’s pajama crotch stain before he went back downstairs to the mudroom. The TV had shut off, and they were arguing.

  “Mom, no, that isn’t true,” Lilly protested. “He was not molesting me.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Helen said.

  Lilly felt as if she had been pierced. “Mom—”

  “No, no darling, I am not talking about me blaming you. Shah! I’m going to sleep with you now here! I must save you, I will protect you from him. We will watch the TV and go to sleep together now,” Helen finished, bringing the tiny TV into her bed, clutching it, its cord dangling on Lilly’s bedroom floor where Helen had moved a bureau to plug it into a wall outlet.

  Helen slid under the wool blanket with Lilly, balancing the TV on her belly, and turning it on so that soft voices could be heard inside it, from an old movie or show. Lilly didn’t look. Her mother’s legs were so warm against Lilly’s cold thighs. They could hear David below them by then, under the floorboards.

  Why did her mother still smell so good? Lilly had wondered. It made Lilly angry, the fragrance of Helen’s love. A vaginal scent got loose, too, with Helen’s sweat; it grew, embracing and gratifying. Lilly remembered Helen’s hands in the basement, over her bookbinding tools in the afternoons when everything around them seemed to be soft and dozy. Or, in the living room, the laughter of her mother in her summer dresses, laughing and drinking iced tea with half a lemon floating in the glass in the living room—the watercolor painting of Jerusalem behind her on the wall. The warm love from her mother swelled in Lilly’s memory, a mixed blur—Helen taking her for St. Peter fish fillets at a seaside restaurant in Haifa the few times her mother took her to Israel as a young child, her loud breathing in a bed on the other side of a hotel room back then, too, near shutters, over the ancient streets. Lilly could somehow remember such details, but they were dis-joined from any continuum of experience, just pieces of memory loose in her head. She could not place them in time.

  There was something awful about her mother’s warmth now. Something when they were lying together now made Lilly’s heart beat too fast, a feeling too heavy, like a torrent, or like a violent blaze in her bowels. She wished she could feel the way it had been when she was young with her mother.

  “What are you thinking about, darling?” Helen asked Lilly after a wh
ile. The television perched on her mother’s stomach above the blanket began to play the late-night news. “Did your father touch you? Did he?”

  “He didn’t touch me at all, Mom.”

  “Did he hurt you, your father?” Helen asked Lilly. “The doctor told me; this is from the brain damage.”

  “No.”

  “He is someone else now, not your father, you must remember this. This bad man is not really who he was. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.” Helen stroked Lilly’s mussed hair and Lilly lay under her mother’s soft touch, which soon brought Lilly to the center of absolute inertia. Both of them resided now in a permanent hardship, Lilly had thought, like an eternal winter. Helen eventually picked the TV off her stomach, and Helen’s right arm spanned across Lilly’s shoulder blade as Lilly turned on one side under the wool blanket, the hiss of the cruel March cold at the window. “Poor darling,” Helen kept saying. “My poor, poor little Lillian.”

  A yellow light came through the window by 3 a.m. It cast a dry, pasty sheen on them both, Helen and Lilly, as if the eye of the moon had a cataract.