Lying

by Lauren Slater

  • • •

  Here were my clues. Her postcards home. She bought postcards every day and scripted out messages, her handwriting a series of careful curves. “Lovely time,” she wrote to a woman named Nance. “Dear Nance, lovely time. Lovely island. We’re purchasing a second home here.” Or, “Emma, I’m painting every day, the colors are magnificent.” And yet, I’d never seen her paint, and I’d heard nothing of a second home, but then again, what did I know? Did she paint in private? Was there a second home my parents might reveal to me? It could have all been fact. It could have all been fiction. I looked at the names on my mother’s postcards—Nance, Emma, Shelly, Judith, Lil, and said those names over and over to myself, like a song. Like words might make it real.

  We were to leave the island on New Year’s Day. We were to celebrate on New Year’s Eve, at the hotel, where the chefs were putting on quite a feast. Three whole days before the New Year’s Eve feast, management posted the menu in all the prominent places, appetizers, sherbet to clear the palate, crusty rolls, and the main course, lobster.

  My father said, “I think that’s going too far, Anita.”

  She said, “We never keep kosher outside the house. We haven’t kept kosher the whole time we’ve been here.”

  “But shellfish,” my father said.

  “A fish with a shell,” she said. “It’s no different than fish without a shell, which God knows we eat enough of.”

  “I don’t like it,” he said, but you could tell, anyone could tell, he didn’t know how to stand up to her. I hate to say it, it’s so politically incorrect, but I think if he’d been brutish, my father, she may have learned to love him.

  “Lobster,” she went around saying. “Have you ever had lobster? Dipped in butter?”

  She said it while staring up at my father, daring him to leap into the ring with her, but he wouldn’t. He had fair skin, freckled everywhere, and he spent a lot of time in the hotel, where the air conditioners shuddered and the sun came through the slats in bright chinks.

  The morning of the feast I woke early. I often did. I liked the sugar hills best at dawn. This particular morning, though, I stopped by my parents’ hotel room door. There were no sounds coming from the room, so I don’t know why I was drawn. I never went into their bedroom at home without permission. Perhaps, here, it was the quality of the silence, silence as sharp as a shout. Their room was connected to mine, and so they hadn’t locked up. I turned the handle.

  It was early, maybe 6:00 A.M. They were lying on their separate sides of the bed. My mother was curled on her side, my father on his back in boxer shorts. What was it that gave this moment its particular horror for me? They were two people in bed, bored in bed, hardly a tragedy, nothing like Northern Ireland, or Panama. But I froze. I saw the spongy pouf of my father’s stomach, my mother’s arms where the blue veins had an ethereal glow. The room was still dawn-dark, and bottles of gin stood sweating in the cooler. The room, despite her perfumes, had a sour smell, and the air-conditioning unit banged above them. The heavy hotel curtains moved in the false breeze. Slowly, my mother turned, opened her eyes. She seemed to be entirely awake, as though she’d been waiting for me. She seemed monstrous. She did not say a word. Just saw me standing there and stared, and stared, as if to say, “So now you see,” and I, well, I stepped back.

  • • •

  We didn’t have our lobster. It required bibs and tongs, scraping green gunk from dark places, and my mother, it turned out, couldn’t lower herself to partake. I could tell she wanted to, though, the same way I could tell she secretly longed to walk with me in the woods, to take in soil, to sleep the heavy, sweaty sleep of the rude and the relaxed. Instead she watched from the polite sidelines as men and women at other tables cracked open the casing and speared the white meat, holding it up like a tiny trophy before popping it in their mouths.

  No, in the end, my mother couldn’t allow herself that lobster. We ate chicken instead. There was dancing and colored lights in all the trees, and the patio stones were freshly washed. And maybe because it was the New Year, my brain gave me not only jasmine that night but many other wonderful nameless odors, so strong I felt sick in a sweet way. There was liquor galore. My mother had a thirst, she drank and drank. The pianist played many lovely songs, and she, elegant, waltzed from table to table, making comments. “His pianissimo’s a little off,” she said a little too loudly.

  “He doesn’t have much Mozart in him,” she announced at the end of an aria.

  “Anita, be quiet,” my father hissed, a chicken bone in his mouth.

  I, for my part, was mortified, because she was such a big woman with a big voice, and everyone on the patio could hear her.

  Including the poor pianist.

  “Play ‘Gay Tarantella,’ ” she shouted out.

  He did and when it was over she sighed and said, “Such heavy hands.”

  A few people tittered.

  “Music,” my mother announced to the patio, “is a delicate art form. It should breathe.”

  “Anita, we’re going,” my father said, spitting out his chicken bone.

  Everyone was listening.

  “Do you play, ma’am?” the pianist said, glaring at her. “Perhaps you could do a better job?”

  “Do I play?” she said, laughing. “What a sweet question. You are a sweet,” she said to the musician, who, by the by, was black. “You are a sweet man with many sweet things in you, but with no thunder. A man should have thunder,” she said, glancing at my father.

  “Do you play, ma’am?” the pianist said again. He was still glaring. “Would you like to play some thunder for the crowd?”

  All the waiters had stopped, and all the people had stopped eating, and the patio looked like a frozen place, a garish game of freeze tag.

  “I have my own Steinway at home,” she said.

  “How nice,” the pianist said.

  “And I’ve played,” she said, and paused. “I’ve played in … many situations.”

  “Do take a seat,” he said, standing up from the bench and gesturing to his place.

  And then she went forward. I stopped being mortified and started being proud. Or, I was proud and mortified both, and my own dizziness was getting worse. She had balls, and she had vodka. She never stumbled or slurred, though: You could only tell if you knew her, from the metal smell of her breath.

  She pushed out the seat and sat down to take it. She made a big show of positioning her hands and straightening her shoulders, just like she had practiced all those hours at home. The party waited, waited for a symphony. Waited for the maestro she’d claimed herself to be. I know I could not have seen her face—her back was to me—but I have such a clear memory, a clear dream of my mother’s face as she sat at the peak of a promise she’d made, stuck in a lie, three blind mice all she knew. Just play it, Mom, I thought. Three blind mice, see how they run, just play it and get it over with. I think she stared down at the ivory keys, the bared teeth, and all things sober passed across her face, because she did not know. She must have known she did not know. Somewhere in the world, if you pressed the right keys, or the right combination of keys, there would be thunder and Mozart, and more; there would be all you’d craved but been too clenched to take, soft songs you could sleep to, chords like a hammock, maybe, and a hand to hold, the way time slows in a tub. If you knew the right notes. Which she didn’t.

  You could’ve heard a pin drop. You could’ve heard the petals fall from a flower while we waited, and waited. Her hands poised over the keys. Sobering up. “I suppose not,” she finally said, and stood, and carefully, carefully walked away.

  That night, I had my first seizure.

  • • •

  At the school where I later went to learn about my illness, I saw movies, so I know what it is; it is not careful. You grit your teeth, you clench, a spastic look crawls across your face, your legs thrash like a funky machine, you hit hard and spew, you grind your teeth with such a force you might wake up with a mouth fu
ll of molar dust, tooth ash, the residue of words you’ve never spoken, but should have. You bite your mouth—I do at least—chew it to pieces from the inside out, a mythical hunger, my whole self jammed into my jaw.

  When I woke up my father was bending over me and then a doctor came, a guest of the hotel. He did not seem impressed. “Seizure,” he pronounced. “Rather common in young ones,” and then he left.

  I can dimly recall seeing my father’s face in the background of the hotel room, pale and shocked. My mother, as it turns out, missed that first seizure. She had fallen into one of her restless sleeps, a sleep so fractured and tentative she always had a veil of exhaustion in her glittery eyes. Sometime during the night my father must have told her; he must have woken her and said, “She’s had a seizure,” and so I waited, but she never appeared to nurse me that night, and this is a grudge I still hold.

  We flew back to Boston the next day. How did I feel? Shrinks have been asking me that question for decades now, as though the origin of whatever mental miseries I might have are linked to that first fall down. How did I feel, the shrinks ask, and offer me some Dilantin; you must be depressed, the shrinks say, and proffer me some Prozac. How did I feel? I’ll tell you. We were in a plane, going backward. Before, I had watched the tawny sun lionize the sky, and now, through the Boeing’s bubble windows, I watched it set; I watched it soil the sky and burn up a bird and take every cloud and taint it. We zoomed through the air, held up by nothing but hope, and at any moment, I knew, we could crash.

  Also, my head throbbed. Someone was playing the piano in my head, and the wooden notes kept bonging my brain.

  I puked in a bag and that gave me some relief.

  My mother must have heard me puking, and said, from the seat in front of me, “Just give the waste to the stewardess, Lauren.”

  We landed in the dark. We took a taxi home in the dark. That night, finally, she came to me. She stood over me in my bed for a while, and she seemed entranced. Or maybe it was I who was entranced. No, I think it was her, actually. She stood over me, her eyes roving me from head to foot—this daughter of hers, this grand mal, this big badness—and then, finally, she touched my head like it was hot.

  • • •

  In Beth Israel Hospital, where my mother took me the next day, I sat in a small room and drew clocks, and houses, and put together red cubes to make red-and-white patterns. “What happened?” my pediatrician, Dr. Patterson, asked.

  “I smelled something funny,” I said. “I remember, before I fell, I smelled a funny thing.”

  “What was it?” he said.

  I searched for the words. Now I know that, prior to seizures, in states called auras, people frequently smell strange things. I’ve been in seizure support groups and heard the wackiest olfactory tales, the woman who was hounded by the smell of charred steak, another by the odor of a past lover’s shampoo. The smells live, and though doctors claim they are purely physiological phenomena, without mental meaning, I cannot help but think the smells have significance; we smell what we want, or cannot allow ourselves to want; we smell our own stink, we smell our sin, we smell the tang of an unspoken hope.

  “Lobster,” I said.

  “You smelled lobster,” the doctor repeated, writing it down.

  “Lobster?” my mother said. She raised an eyebrow. She was holding her square purse to her chest.

  “Yes,” I said. “I smelled the lobster. I smelled salty lobster and butter.”

  “Lobster and butter, what a meal that would’ve been,” my mother said.

  The doctor looked up, confused. “Excuse me?” he said.

  I giggled.

  “And the green gunk too, I smelled that.”

  “That’s enough, Lauren,” my mother said. “You’re losing your credibility.”

  But she had a small smile on her face, and, well, just for the sake of the story let’s say she even licked her lips a little bit, and that was the first time I realized how, through illness, I might be able to give her good food.

  • • •

  There were a lot of tests—the Wada Test, the Ray Figure Drawing Test, the Wechsler Memory Scales Test, the Digit Span Test. I took an IQ test, where, according to my mother, I scored in the genius range, but we all know she never told the truth. I had an electroencephalogram, little suckers hooked up to my head and my brain waves rolling out of a machine like a receipt from a cash register. Ribbons and ribbons of brain waves, and later, when the doctor showed them to us, we could see, my mother and I, how in some places the waves were smooth, but in others, spiky as stiletto heels, and in still others, a series of rapid round u’s, like this—UUUUUUUUUU—a language gone awry.

  “She has epilepsy,” I heard her whisper to someone on the phone, Nance, maybe, or Emma. “She has epilepsy, but so did van Gogh, you know.”

  She asked for a clipping of my brain waves and took them home, and a change came over her. She seemed to almost like the illness. She seemed disgusted, which I would have expected, but then a moment later, I saw her looking at me with wishes in her eyes, as though she, too, might like to drop and thrash, to break the brittle caul of cleanliness and artifice.

  “Will, Lauren,” she said to me, “use your will to get you out of this.” She practiced the piano and, even with my seizures, took me skating so I could be a skating star. One morning, though, before we dressed to go out to the pond, I saw her tracing my brain’s undulations, those sleepy dips, those troughs filled with earth and snooze, sex and spasm, and I’d say she smiled then.

  “You,” she said to me, all sternness, “need to learn to pull yourself together.”

  But she touched my head gently now, like it was hot, like it was cold, like it was warm, like it was whatever she was not, a wild and totally true world in there, a place she had forsaken for artifice, etiquette, marriage, mediocre love, and which I had returned to her; here, Mom; have my head.

  • • •

  She was right. A lot of famous people have had epilepsy. Take Dostoevski, for instance. He had a serious case of it. Saint Paul probably had epilepsy, and from its craziness he crafted a world religion. Van Gogh, of course, had epilepsy, which may be why he is the van Gogh we know, a painter of tilted stars, low-hanging moons, fields full of flowers and blue vortexes that take all sensible shape away. If you look at a van Gogh painting, you might get a sense of what the world looks like as you go down. In the weeks that followed, it kept happening to me. I was a wrong girl, I flamencoed on the floor, feathers came out of my ears, and my body made music, made thunder and sleep, made Mozart, my hands curled into lobster claws.

  Epilepsy shoots your memory to hell, so take what I say, or don’t. This I think I recall. One week after Barbados, after her failed music, the vodka, her empty eyes in the hotel room, I woke from a long seizure on the floor. Every muscle ached. There was blood in my mouth. I opened my eyes and saw her standing above me, staring at me, probably, for a long long time, as just a few days earlier, in the Basien dawn, I had stared at her. I had looked into that hotel room and seen how all her energy was really deadness; not me. I was a girl in motion. I was wrong and dark and full of smells. When a seizure rolled through me, it didn’t feel like mine; it felt like hers—her ramrod body sweetening into spasm. She gave it all to me, and I returned it all to her, this wild, rollicking, hopeful life, this Chuck Berry blast, all striving sunk to the bottom of the brain’s deep sea; crack a claw, Mom.

  Rest with me when it’s over.

  This, the gift I gave you.

  How we held each other.

  PART TWO

  THE RIGID

  STAGE

  CHAPTER 3

  LEARNING TO FALL

  My mother believed that will, not love, was what made the world go round, and I agreed. I was a wrong girl but I had always worked hard at what I did. I owned a pair of skates, nubby tights, and a white muff made from real rabbit fur. I had gotten my ears pierced when I was only eight years old, and all dressed up in my skating outfit, I looked l
ike a holiday.

  Before and at first even after my seizures started, I skated at a pond. For years my mother had been buying me books about champions, the biographies of Dorothy Hamill and Estelle Drier. At home my shelves were stocked full of fame, and when it came to the ice, my mother thought I had potential.

  Skating is a sport of bones and grace, a sport where you fly on water like a prophet but fall, sphincter first, on the solidest surface. It hurts and you have to push yourself. You have to push yourself first to go out in the cold, and then to walk over a place where, right beneath, sharks and whales are waiting for you, and then to leap against your better judgment, when your whole self is longing just to nap. The place was called Dehaney’s Pond, and it was always beautiful in a winter way. Each December, January, February, reeds crackling like whiskers in the winter wind. “Spin,” she would shout, and I did it. The more it hurt, the better I was. “Leap now,” she would shout, “with your toe turned out,” and I did it, even when my lungs burned and my lips lost all their moisture; I did it until I went far away, far, far away to someplace silver, and beyond pain.

  Will is what makes the world go round. If you want something, push, pull, shake and scrape until it forms. The same holds true for the soul. The soul is a pile of moist manure, and only by tilling and shoveling might you turn it into gold. The work was hard, hard! But the possibilities—limitless, a fairy-tale world where you could endlessly become.

  I worked. For my whole life, in sickness and in health, I had worked at being bad and good and strong. I was my mother’s girl. Before the epilepsy came on hard, I skated, and I had my own private sports as well. “The Jews,” my mother liked to say proudly, “marched forty miles in the snow without shoes.” When I was very little, maybe six or seven, I had taken to marching around our yard, barefoot in the snow, for no other reason than it was just the way to live. Either you did it or you died.