Hillbilly Gothic

by Adrienne Martini

  My grandmother has also steadfastly refused to teach me how to cook, especially how to cook anything Italian. Her rationale was that I would go to college and hire a chef once the time came to forge out on my own. I wouldn’t be stuck with long days of nothing but housework, like she was. Along the same lines, I wasn’t supposed to get married because that would lead to kids, which leads to being trapped in the house. A good education would free me from the burdens of being female, which, to her, meant years of drudgery and boredom. She started lighting candles for me when I moved to Texas with Scott and was convinced that I’d made a huge mistake that only the Lord could undo.

  Adults, however, truly bore the weight of her rules, especially her two sons and stepkids. She clenched an iron fist around my dad’s life when he was a kid, and she and my dad will always be at loggerheads. It got worse when my “blood” grandfather died when my dad was young. From that point on, fear drove my grandmother to new levels of Machiavellian machinations. It was she who decided that he’d go to Pitt to study engineering, because these choices were safe. He’d be close to home and guaranteed a decent job. My dad wanted to go away to study acting, but she refused to sign any of his applications. Family gossip swirls with allegations that she threatened him with either a wooden spoon or a chef’s knife when he was insistent about doing his own thing. On the one hand, the image is hysterically funny. My father is a big, strong, barrel-chested guy, and was even more so as a teenager when he was working as a lifeguard. My grandmother is, on a good day, five feet tall and weighs less than a hundred pounds. On the other hand, it’s profoundly sad. My dad has always been a firm believer in doing one’s duty, no matter how unpleasant, but I wonder how it would have all turned out if he’d just turned his back on her demands and walked away. How different would his life have been?

  My grandmother also picked my father’s bride. That’s overstating it a touch. She didn’t pick my mother out of a mail-order catalog, but she was very specific about the type of woman my father was to marry. His bride would be, in her words, “white,” which is to say that she wouldn’t look Italian. My grandmother’s only goal with this edict was that her grandchildren turn out white as well. In her eyes, there was no need to create another generation of dark, swarthy people who would always be marked as immigrants. It worked. My cousin Albert and I appear to have no particular ethnicity at all. But if you met our fathers, there’d be no denying our background.

  Beyond that, she also had stringent household rules. No one was allowed to breathe in the living room, unless it was a major holiday and the house was full of people wanting to sit down. If mathematicians were allowed to examine the upstairs, they would have marveled at her ability to keep all of the Oriental rugs’ fringe perfectly parallel. The upstairs bathroom, where my grandfather found her in a tub full of her own blood with slashes in both wrists and ankles, was only for baths. Showers were to be taken in the downstairs bath. The place was always immaculate. You could, if so inclined, eat off of the spotless garage floor. (This genetic quirk failed to find me. Sometimes, I’m not sure if we should eat off of our plates.)

  The same unforgiving dogma ruled her personal life as well. Everything—from sheets to underwear—was neatly pressed. You could cut bread with the seams on her pants. Her hair was always done and her gray roots never showed. If she felt she was getting too heavy, she’d simply stop eating breakfast and lunch until she was back in fighting trim. With the perfect clarity of hindsight, it’s no wonder that pictures never show her with a smile. I can’t remember a time when she’d simply throw back her head and laugh.

  Yet she wasn’t distant, not with me, anyway. During the heat of my parents’ divorce, I spent a few nights at her house. After a shower in, of course, the downstairs bathroom, I started crying. Because of some grandmotherly sense or very thin walls, she knew to come down and check on me. And for a good hour, we stayed down there. I, wrapped in a towel and sitting on the closed toilet. She, standing and holding my head on her shoulder. It is the most loved I’d ever felt until I met my husband.

  That’s what I’m thinking about as my father is explaining what happened that day in the tub in her house. He may have provided more details, but I was too busy processing how someone who seemed to have her life in such total control could ever be unhappy. But as a kid—even a college-aged kid—there’s so much you don’t see until you grow up and get some distance. If I recall correctly, I made some wisecrack as soon as my dad finished talking. A microsecond later I was apologizing for it, stammering that I didn’t really know what I was supposed to say next. I still don’t know. There is no formal etiquette for dealing with these sorts of things.

  Instead, my dad and I stared at the television for a bit. He made a cocktail for himself and was sure to put a couple of maraschino cherries in the bottom of the glass. At some point, I reached over, fished them out, and ate them. It is one of our rituals. There is comfort in rituals.

  That evening, we drove downtown to the loony bin where my grandmother was being kept. There are some sentences I never expected to utter in my life. That is one of them.

  At this point, I’d love to write a nice long descriptive passage, where I paint photo-realistic word-pictures of my grandmother’s hospital. But, back then I was still trying to wrap my head around what had happened and paid virtually no attention to where my dad drove. I want to say it was to Western Psych, but can make no promises. Suffice to say, it was downtown. We parked in a garage and walked a block or two in streetlamp dark to the hospital.

  The images that come to mind now to describe the ward itself can’t possibly be real. My memory tells me that we walked through modern glass doors into a Gothic stone church, complete with flying buttresses and gargoyles. The nursing staff was out in the open at a modern-style reception desk. We had to wear stickers that identified us as guests. We were told where my grandmother’s room was, then walked down long hallways lined with torches and tapestries. Other patients passed us, some wearing khakis and button-downs, others medieval robes. All are obviously mad.

  We stopped just short of the end of the hall, where a huge day room featured a TV in the center with the volume up to 11. My grandmother’s room was the same amalgam as the rest of the décor, with one sleek glass wall at the front and three stone walls on the other sides. A small, clerestory window was fitted with diamond-mesh reinforced glass. There were no curtains or sheets on the twentieth-century hospital bed. The ceiling was too far away to see.

  I know this isn’t real, but this is all my mind will let me remember.

  My grandmother was unrecognizable. I’d expected her to be sitting primly on the end of her freshly made bed, fully herself in appearance and temperament. Instead she was pacing the tiny cell, wringing her hands like Lady Macbeth. She was wearing jeans, a sweatshirt with stains on it, and slippers. Her wrists and ankles were wrapped in gauze. What really blew the rest of my mind was her hair. Until that moment, I’d forgotten that my grandmother had gone completely gray in her early thirties. Her hair, as far as I was concerned, was always an auburn color. Now she looked like a punk rocker, long white roots with red ends. And she was talking, endlessly. About nothing, really. I’m certain she didn’t even know we were there.

  Other family members wandered in. My stepaunt, who had great connections at the local hospitals through both her job and charity work, had a rundown of possible next steps. While she and my dad hashed through the options, I escaped outside and sat on the steps inhaling great gulps of cold December air. People passed on their way to somewhere fun or someplace safe. Eventually, my dad pulled up with the car. We drove home, but didn’t speak much.

  My holiday break passed quickly, which was a blessing. My favorite high school job, which was at a bookstore in the mall, still had need for me during that Christmas season. I took every hour I could get, simply so that I had something productive to do. Most nights, I’d just flop onto the couch, too tired to move. I visited my grandmother only once after the first trip.
By then, she’d been transferred to a more traditional, suburban hospital, where the linoleum-lined rooms were sparkling white and fiendishly clean. Big windows looked out onto the parking lot and a tiny, snow-covered swath of lawn.

  My dad and I stopped by shortly after she’d been for a shock treatment, which meant that she was groggy and confused. It was easier to take, somehow, than the manic babbling. Now she looked ill, like any other hospital patient who was receiving life-prolonging but exhausting treatments. I could pretend that she had cancer or heart disease, some kind of tangible disease that could be pointed to and blamed.

  That’s always been the biggest bugaboo with psychiatry. Until recently, there was nothing visible to pin it on, other than ethereal theories about imbalanced levels of black bile or demonic possession or lack of moral fiber. Now, very, very tenuous inroads are being made into what happens chemically and electronically in the brain to cause mental illnesses. MRIs can show striking differences between a “normal” brain and one that is depressed. Serotonin and cortisol seem to be involved on a molecular level, but no one’s certain how. While these theories are only slightly better than blaming bodily humors, their grounding in accepted clinical science makes mental illness seem like more than the result of an overactive imagination.

  While we know precious little about the base causes, we know even less about cures. For a few years at the turn of the twentieth century, lobotomy was a popular treatment, especially for “hysterical” women. Hacking through a small part of the brain’s frontal lobe did not help the patient feel better, but it had the twin advantages of making her not care about her madness while also making her fairly docile.

  Popular treatments midcentury were less grotesque but not much better. As the country entered the age of plastics, the “chemical lobotomy” of Thorazine offered some hope to people with severe mental illnesses. Thorazine quelled suicidal impulses, but caused the patient to shuffle, drool, and stammer. One psych nurse I met during my very own stay in the nuthatch was old enough to remember working the floor as a young nursing student, surrounded by vacant, twitchy patients who could do little but stare. It’s not surprising that most people would rather be completely barmy than forced onto drugs that strip the rest of their life from them.

  The options are better now, even though researchers still don’t know exactly how most of them work. Modern pharmaceuticals are a heck of a lot more subtle these days and come in as many flavors as ice creams at a Baskin-Robbins. There are drawbacks, certainly. They are probably overprescribed because they are cheaper than other forms of therapy and are dished out even for the mildest blue mood. Most drugs do have some side effects, ranging anywhere from chronic cottonmouth to weird sexual dysfunctions. Still, for the truly ill, they can offer hope.

  The biggest drawback to most therapeutic drugs is that they take so long to begin to work. Someone who is actively suicidal is as likely to wait three to six weeks for relief as a toddler is to eat a big bowl of broccoli and liver. Sure, it might happen. But the odds are greatly against it. This is where shock treatments (or Electroconvulsive Therapy, ECT, to be more politically correct about the nomenclature) can come in. ECT sounds just as barbaric as a lobotomy, and, on some levels, it is. The image of Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as he’s getting strapped down and zapped like Frankenstein’s monster is haunting—and it is a film I can never watch again. Actually, I can’t watch it because of that and the fact that Danny DeVito, who could easily be my father’s shorter twin, plays a character named Martini. Cuckoo’s Nest will never be in my DVD player. It cuts too close to some barely scabbed-over wounds.

  ECT proponents preach that it isn’t just torture loosely described as therapy. The patient is given a short-acting cocktail of a sedative and a muscle relaxant and so isn’t even vaguely conscious during the treatment. Two electrodes are placed on the head, usually on the temples and/or forehead. Up to a minute’s worth of current passes through the brain to create seizures. The patient doesn’t violently twitch or shake, however, because of the nice drugs. And that’s it. Half an hour later, the ECT receiver is conscious, if a little bewildered. Although by the time your options include ECT, you’re usually already bewildered, so it’s hard to say which comes first.

  The bitch of ECT is that it works. No one really knows why. It is counterintuitive medicine, certainly, and the first guy who tried it was the spiritual cousin of the first guy who ate a lobster. On some level, ECT is like chemotherapy, in which injecting poison into your bloodstream can be beneficial.

  ECT isn’t without side effects. Improperly done, it is brutal and can leave the patient stripped of most of his memory. Life is full of risks, however. Sometimes you have to just choose the ones you can live with.

  Nonetheless, it is not easy to imagine my grandmother in a tiny, dungeonlike room, strapped to a metal table and repeatedly jolted with electricity. Even the realities of ECT are not the stuff of bedtime stories. But there was nothing I could do about it, other than brood, which I’d honed to a razor-sharp skill during my teen years. I bolted back to college as soon as break was over and flung myself into that life. There, I went to class (mostly) and studied (mostly), but I also found a place to escape. Deep in the bowels of the arts building was a theater. And in that theater were theater people, the geeks and weirdos and divas who enjoy pretending to be something other than they are in order to tell a greater story. This dank room could be transformed into an Edwardian garden or a sandy beach, far, far away from reality. The draw was magnetic.

  I didn’t tell anyone about my grandmother, even when they’d ask about my break. There was too much stigma attached to spill the details. No one could possibly understand, no matter how many different ways I tried to explain it. And then I’d be marked as crazy, too, simply because of our relationship. I still snort at the irony of the whole thing, of being ashamed to tell my theater friends—most of whom have never been poster children for effective social adjustment—that I was related to real-life lunatics.

  By the time my first year was over, my grandmother was back home. The first few times I went to her house to visit, she was anxiously flighty and unable to stay in one place. But she got better. She had therapy and drugs. She relaxed into her life in a way that I’d never have expected. She still kept her house immaculate, but her extreme rigidity was gone. Disorder wasn’t her boon companion, but she could at least let it in the door, if briefly. We were able to sit in the kitchen and talk. Sometimes we’d even talk about feelings.

  Would she have preferred that the whole thing had never happened? Sure. Everyone in the family would. I would prefer to look like Heidi Klum and live on ice cream. I’d prefer to have not had a breakdown after my child was born. Life as a whole really doesn’t care what your preferences are.

  Still, the changes my grandmother’s episode wrought were largely good ones. Her memory isn’t what it used to be, but it’s hard to tell if that’s a function of age or ECT. She is, however, alive. So there’s that.

  9

  Disorientation, thy name is Tower 4.

  Despite having lived a good thirty-plus years on this planet, a more heartbreaking moment than when the glass doors were locked behind me with my family stuck on the other side I’ve never endured. Yet the fact that this hurts so very, very much proves that I am not as far gone as I’d thought. It would have been nice to have my husband around to hold my hand for a few minutes, just to remind me that, in another life, I was human and loved. But sometimes cold comfort is all you can get.

  I’m crying, of course. It’s what I do now. It is my vocation. I should hire myself out to funerals as a designated mourner.

  My bags, which include the suitcase that Shelley packed and my everyday work bag, are taken from me by a nurse. My work bag can’t be classified as a purse. This L.L. Bean briefcase/security blanket is usually full of paper and pens, a microtape recorder, some gum, and other ephemera, like the card of the greatest cabbie in London and random phone numbers. Lat
ely, it has included an overstuffed manila folder devoted to all of the paper that I’ve accumulated over the last two weeks, all of the insurance forms and the baby’s birth certificate, for which I keep meaning to find a safe place. Full of the documentation that I was a reasonable person at one point and all of the mementos said reasonable person had accumulated, this bag disappears into the nurse’s station, a big glass fishbowl in the middle of the ward. It and my overnight bag are searched while I am led away to complete still more paperwork.

  Describing the sensory assault of a psych floor can be difficult, even for those in complete command of all of their faculties. But this is what I recall: a short, dead-eyed woman, who is so affectless that she could easily be one of the patients, leads me down the hall for questions while an older, badly sunburned woman wearing short-shorts and a tank top, with ratted dyed-blonde hair, paces around the perimeter of the nurses’ station, muttering nonstop under her breath. Even though I had a few chemically induced hours of sleep the night previous, I am exhausted. The place smells like stale fried chicken and antiseptic. The fluorescent lights give everything a greenish haze so that we all have the skin tones of 3 a.m. Wal-Mart shoppers. We wind up in the “arts and crafts” room, which is full of pipe cleaners, construction paper, markers, and tape. She clears a space on the small round table.

  “What year is it?” Her voice never rises above a monotone.

  “2002,” I say.

  “What is your name?”

  “Adrienne Martini,” I say, and I start to launch into my usual explanation that “Yes, it’s just like the drink” and “No, I’m not all that fond of them” but never get the chance.