“Hi, Mom.”
I told her where I was.
“Do you think this has to do with writing?” she asked.
She sounded surprisingly calm. She knew that I was trying to write a book for my dad.
“No. Yes. Yes, but if not this, then something else would have brought me here,” I said.
“I’m glad you’re responsible,” she said. “There’s no shame in what you’re doing. Do you want me to fly up there? I will.”
“No, Mom, it’s fine.”
“Did my letter upset you?”
“Letter?”
“I sent you a letter. You’ve been asking me to write about my childhood. So I did. Well, I mostly wrote about meeting your dad.”
“It must have arrived after I came here.”
And then I told her about my visit to Newburgh.
“It was odd, being there,” I said. “His grave next to hers is still empty.”
“He never compared you with her. He adored you. You were the most perfect person to him.”
How could he not compare me?
I compared everyone with him.
•
“I knew something was wrong,” my mom tells me on the phone, bringing up the hospitalization. “I left a message with Chris. I told him he was going to be in big trouble if he didn’t tell me what was wrong. I figured you were making him hide something from me.”
“He kept telling me that I should tell you.”
“He’s a good guy. Your dad would have loved him.” She pauses. “You can always tell me if something is bothering you.”
“I know.”
“When your dad didn’t feel well, he wouldn’t say anything. He didn’t like to show weakness. It’s not good to hold stuff in.”
DAD
“My mom is visiting me in New York for Christmas,” I reminded my psychiatrist. “Is there any way I can leave here this week?”
I’d been asking this question every few days for almost a month. I expected to hear another “possibly” or “we’ll see.”
“I think so,” he said, which sounded more hopeful; I noted it in my journal.
But first, he said, another psychiatrist—“the leading expert on borderline personality disorder”—wanted to interview me.
“You definitely have a severe form of bipolar disorder,” my psychiatrist said.
The question was whether I also had borderline personality disorder.
Grief seemed to me my primary diagnosis.
Jeanne seemed to me my secondary diagnosis.
But I agreed to review my story with another psychiatrist.
I sat at the head of a long table, in a private conference room. The borderline psychiatrist, a balding man with bright eyes and thin-rimmed glasses, sat to my left. About eight doctors, most of them young, also sat at the table and listened as I explained the history of my racing thoughts and hallucinations.
“The first time I experienced them, I must have been eleven or twelve. But back then I didn’t think they were worth mentioning.”
I talked about Jeanne, the house fire, and Genie.
“Any sane grieving person would question these coincidences, likely see them as signs. I think they are signs. If you think it’s a delusion, that’s fine.”
“You keep mentioning that your father died ten years ago,” the borderline psychiatrist said. “Why is this fact important?”
“The night before he died, I promised my dad I would write a book for him. I should have completed it by now.”
Before I left the next day, my psychiatrist told me, “You don’t have borderline.”
I wanted him to say: You don’t have your dad. That’s your illness.
MOM
Chris borrowed a friend’s car and picked me up from the hospital. As we drove back to our apartment, he kept reminding me how much he’d missed me. His eyes were red. He hadn’t slept much, I could tell.
“I was miserable without you,” he said. “At one point you told me that you thought you belonged in the hospital, that the other patients understood you.”
I’d forgotten about that.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I know it was harder for you than it was for me.”
I didn’t know if that was true.
As soon as I stepped into our apartment, I noticed a thick envelope on the kitchen table.
“It’s from your mom,” he said, and I hurriedly opened it.
•
My mom’s letter sounds like she’s sitting across from me, when really she wrote it six hundred miles away. It begins, “I’m going to start the story of when I met your Dad.” “Dad” as opposed to “dad,” “Dad” as opposed to “Father” or “father,” he becomes at once casual and powerful, as he was in life.
“I know I’m making mistakes here,” she writes. “I’m not a good writer.” Yet her tall, black cursive looks confident, rarely tipping right or left. The stems of her h’s, t’s, and l’s touch the faint blue floor and ceiling of each ruled line.
“Believe it or not,” she writes, “when I was in high school I used to write stories but was never encouraged to go anywhere with them.”
My mom knows how to tell a story: “Terry’s Dad died and he wanted to get married right away. He called the Judge, a gambling buddy of his, and asked if we could be married right away. He didn’t want to travel to New York not being married. Terry was big on respect.” For that brief moment he isn’t my “dad” but rather the name on his gravestone. Maybe she wanted to avoid the hard alliteration of “Dad’s Dad died.” I doubt she intended to break the illusion he maintained: that his life began with me.
She wrote the letter, it seems, in one sitting, with at least two different black pens. On page twelve, the ink fades then darkens with “red geraniums.” “He planted one hundred and fifty of them in our backyard,” she writes. “Then he wanted birdhouses. The yard was full of them.” I remembered now. I called him “Landlord of the Birds.”
One memory leads to another memory, and another: “Finally he got his eye. He still rode the rides with you at Cedar Point. Every once in a while he would wake me up during the night because his eye fell out. We used to laugh.”
In all thirty-one pages, only one word is crossed out: “me.” She writes, “I know you believe in God and that’s what keeps me going. I know I’m going to be with me him.”
“Me” seems a fitting mistake. After he died, half of her followed him to wherever she believes he is.
“I talk with your Dad every night,” she writes. “His T-shirt is under my pillow and I love him just as much. Isn’t it sad that I can’t remember truly being happy until I was 39 and marrying your father.” There’s no question mark.
•
My mom visited me in New York. My journal is mostly empty from that time. A sentence fragment here and there: “Nice to see Mom,” “Writing, thinking, too difficult,” “Need new medications, or need to stop taking these,” “Attempting to keep it together for Mom,” “Mom needs to believe I believe in God, so don’t tell her I only believe when manic.”
The longest entry from that visit: “My mom’s hearing in her left ear is gone entirely. My dad’s left vocal cord, then his left eye. What is it about the left of them? What will be left of me if I lose her?”
•
When I was a girl, my mom and I took long walks through town, and I’d listen to stories of a childhood so different from mine.
“I wouldn’t wish how I was raised on my worst enemy,” my mom tells me on the phone.
She mostly lived at her great-grandmother’s house, a couple of blocks away from her parents’ house. Well into her eighties, her great-grandmother cleaned houses for a living, and sometimes went away for entire weekends because of work. When that happened, my mom stayed at her parents’ house. There, she slept with a steak knife underneath her pillow.
Late one night at her parents’ house, when my mom was twelve, one of her mother’s boyfriends woke her by pullin
g the sheets off her bed and told her, “My, my, my, someone is getting to be a big girl.” My mom stabbed him in the shoulder with the knife. He ran out of the house, and when her mother learned what had happened, she beat my mom.
My mom had three siblings: Butch, Donna, and Eugene. “Eugene was so sweet,” my mom says. “He’d give you the shirt off his back. But my mother, she was cruel, absolutely cruel to him. He had epilepsy and would get real bad seizures. He also was what they called ‘tongue-tied’ back then. He had trouble speaking. She actually told the neighbor children to call him a ‘retard.’ This one time, she held his arm against a burning-hot space heater. He was seven or eight. I think he took change out of her pocketbook to buy candy. It was awful, the burn marks on him. The old man”—my mom rarely calls him “dad” or “father”—“he didn’t do anything about it. He knew. He just didn’t do anything.”
The last my mom heard, Donna was living in Indiana with her sixth—or maybe her seventh—husband. Donna and her children have been arrested “too many times to count,” my mom says. A decade has passed since Butch showed up at my mom’s back door, shouting and high on something. She didn’t let him in because the local police had already warned her that he could be dangerous. Eugene died at thirty from a grand mal seizure.
“Why do you think you didn’t end up like Butch or Donna?” I ask my mom.
“When I was a kid I’d go into the attic. It was a big attic,” she says. “I’d sit there and write—make up stories, or play games by myself. I just hid. I had to get out. Our house was so filthy. You would not believe how filthy it was. Water bugs crawling out of the refrigerator. That’s why I try to keep everything clean. And we didn’t have locks on our doors. We lived across from the train depot and bums were always coming off the trains, trying to get into the house. I was often left alone. I had a dog to protect me. My mother, when she was home, which was rarely, had all these guys with her. The old man didn’t care. He was living with his parents, and they took Butch. They didn’t want me because I was a girl. Donna and Eugene weren’t born yet. My great-grandmother was afraid something would happen to me with all those men around. She went to a judge by the name of Baxter. He told her to ask my parents if she could take me, and if they said no, he’d draw up the papers to grant her custody.”
My mom’s parents agreed to the arrangement.
“I adored my great-grandmother. She worked most of her life. Then, after I turned thirteen, her health got real bad. Doctors said she had ‘a hardening of the arteries.’ It was probably Alzheimer’s. She was starting to lose it. She moved in with my aunt and uncle. So I had to go back to my parents’ house.”
My mom wanted to join the navy after high school. She wanted to travel. Her father said no. So she perfected her typing skills and lined up a position as a secretary in Washington, DC. Her senior yearbook legend reads, “Has secretarial hopes.”
“The old man scared me out of it,” she says. “Told me how dangerous it was. ‘You’re going to get raped there,’ he said. ‘DC is so dangerous,’ he said. He’d never been. But then he also told me that the day I graduated high school I was on my own. So he didn’t want me in the navy, didn’t want me in DC. I felt stuck. He was having a fit because I didn’t want to get married. He said I’d be stupid not to get married.”
My mom had been seeing a boy a few years older. He seemed nice enough, but not someone she wanted to spend the rest of her life with.
“The old man said, ‘He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t smoke.’ As if that mattered. A lot of good that did me. You know, the only time I can ever remember my mother giving me advice was on my wedding day. She said, ‘You’re making a mistake.’ I wish I’d listened to her. I think I got married at six thirty at night. I don’t think he and I were even talking that day. After the honeymoon, he changed real fast.”
Sometimes he beat her until she turned black-and-blue.
“This one time my mother saw my bruises. She asked what happened. ‘Oh nothing,’ I told her. Well, she told the old man. He called me and asked, ‘What’d you do to him?’ My mother grabbed the phone from him and I hung up. The old man blamed me.”
After my mom miscarried, her first husband invited his friends over to celebrate.
“I didn’t have a happy life,” my mom says, “until I met your father.”
She wears my dad’s wedding ring next to hers—to this day.
NINETEEN
Chris and I go out for lunch at a restaurant near our apartment and talk about writing.
“It’d actually be more experimental,” I tell Chris, “to write a memoir that makes the author almost incidental, or invisible. So most things meta in memoir—a conversation like this one, for example—are pretty conventional. It’s nothing more than hindsight perspective.”
“Will you mention I have washboard abs?” Chris asks, taking a bite out of his burger.
“What?”
“If I’m in the book, give me washboard abs.”
“I’m not going to deliberately lie about a minor physical detail.”
“Come on.”
“Okay. I’ll figure out a way to say you have washboard abs.”
DAD
A few weeks after my mom’s visit, I stopped inside an antique store in my neighborhood. On the top shelf, next to a cameo glass lamp and a folded afghan, sat an anatomical model of the human eye. I reached for it.
“Here, let me help,” a man said, and put it in my hands. “You can disassemble it and everything.”
I lifted off the eye’s upper hemisphere.
“I was talking to a customer the other day who was an eye doctor,” the man said. “She said they still use these things in school.”
“My father had an artificial eye,” I said. “He could still cry from it on account of this part here, the lacrimal gland.” I pointed to the flesh-colored piece sticking out of the upper hemisphere. “I think that’s why, at least. I can’t remember anymore. Is there a part missing? Something about it seems off.”
“You just reminded me,” he said. “Somebody was carrying it around the other day and dropped it.”
He reached behind the shelf and picked the blue iris off the floor. I wanted it to be brown, like my dad’s.
“I’ll give it to you for seventy,” the man said, “if you pay cash.”
I agreed. I ran across the street, withdrew one hundred dollars from an ATM, and returned to find the eye wrapped in tissue paper and bagged.
I carried it to the nearby park and sat with it on my lap, my mind racing from eye tissue to tissue paper to I need to write about my dad’s eye on paper.
MENTAL ILLNESS
A photograph of my dad and me hung on the living room wall in my apartment. In the undated photograph, we’re kneeling on the grass. I’m in a white sundress. He wears a white dress shirt, slacks, and sunglasses. He’s holding our mutt, Gigi. I look to be six or seven. The fence that he built—the fence that stretched across our driveway to protect me—is behind us. Behind the photograph was a decorative peacock feather.
“Did you put that there?” I asked Chris.
“What?” he said.
“The feather.”
“You probably put it there and forgot,” he said. “Why is it important?”
“The eye-spotted feather of the peacock tail, peacocks are male, my dad’s eye. Don’t you see?”
I searched the room. I turned over pillows. I wanted to find more feathers.
Chris was writing.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“I’m writing this down. It’ll be useful for your therapist.”
•
As I signed in at my therapist’s office, I overheard a man say, “I think March 2.”
I looked over. The two other men with him laughed.
“You think? You better know,” one of them said.
I told my therapist, “That was a sign. Jeanne died on March 2.”
I looked down at my notebook: “Tell therapist—cosmic coi
ncidence.”
“And today,” I said, “a ‘cosmic coincidence’ was reported in the New York Times. Parts of a meteor fell into Siberia, and an asteroid is passing by Earth.”
I looked down at my notebook: “Tell therapist—elephant whisperer.”
I read aloud what I’d written: “The ‘Elephant Whisperer’ Lawrence Anthony died on March 2 last year. Two herds of South African elephants that Anthony rescued stood together near his house several nights after his death, according to his son. My last day at the hospital, a social worker distributed the story as part of an exercise. Anthony was sixty-two. My dad turned sixty-two the year I was born.”
I looked down at my notebook: “Tell therapist—Genie/Jeanne.”
“And Genie, G-E-N-I-E, was a sign that I was getting closer to my half sister.”
I handed him a typed letter by Chris, which explained the peacock feather incident, in addition to listing my symptoms, such as: “suddenly laughs without knowing why” and “assumes everyone hates her.” According to the letter, I told Chris: “I feel overwhelmed . . . the world is giving each of us clues/symbols for us to find, we each have to find them. I’m finding my clues . . . the world isn’t only offering clues to me. I’m feeling guilty that other people might not be seeing the clues meant for them.”
My therapist looked at me, and in a kind voice said, “So what if they are signs? What then?”
I reminded him that Jeanne’s childhood home caught fire the day before I interviewed her neighbor Bette. Also, the third floor caught fire—and that was the floor my dad lived on when Jeanne died.
“What if it’s a coincidence?” my therapist said.
“How? I reached out to Bette, and the same day—that evening, actually—the house caught fire. Then the next day I learn all of it. And Bette wasn’t in Newburgh. So it’s not like she caused the fire.”
“I didn’t say—”
“I might be missing out on other signs,” I said.
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