by Jacki Lyden
When my mother was sick, the connection between us could not be contained in a simple word like love or hate. In her illness her children were a manic memory, boiled in a manic brain. And yet the energy of her mania was no different from the energy that kept her up all night, superior to all other mothers, making us costumes for special occasions and inventing games to play with our friends. Now she had fled from me. And why not? She knew I was trying to trap her, waiting for her to make a false move. Waiting to slam her into what we both sometimes called the bin, the nuthouse, the funny farm, the Good Ship Lollapalooza. Lock the lunatics away, you think, and they will do no permanent damage to themselves or others. The damage grows inside, though, where you can only sense what is unseen, spreading like moss, or a spiked vine creeping over the brain and flaring down to the tongue.
I longed to know my mother's secret language when she went mad. I yearned to know its passwords and frames of reference. In the last and most desperate stages of mania, my mother's speech falls to pure sound. A guttural like Urdu, rhythmic and completely foreign. Often I can make out words, but they have no context. At such times I cannot help but go a little crazy myself. I talk to the ghosts, to the people in our lives thirty years ago, to two small girls in long grass. I mean I talk to my mother and to me. I ask us why we cannot grow up, what has happened to make the past so vexing for us both. I torture myself that she is suffering now for all the longings then, longings I helped inflict in my child life. I have become obsessed with finding her in a chiaroscuro world where, despite every art of intimacy that I have ever learned, I am in high seas. She is lost. And I cannot follow.
Yet I want to follow. For our journey, I want a map, compass, and sextant, I want a dictionary with all the common usage and formal tongues of speech in her vocabulary. I want the langue d'oc and the langue du pays, the romance and the common languette of her invented diction. I want to meet all of the people she will be meeting on her descent, as I go with her, a journalist to the last. Do I need anything in this world but notebook and pen, tape recorder and microphone? I have crossed the world dozens of times with no more than that. I am a searcher. I collect the potsherds of evidence. I take names. I want to know more about these impostors and pretenders, and what they think they are doing there dancing with my mother. Isn't it unseemly for her to do the hula, dancing the shape of stars to music I can't hear? And if any of her unseen partners gets fresh with her or hurts her in any way, I want to punch his lights out. Most of all, I want these creatures to be kind to my mother, not to disappoint. They must make up now for what was denied to her then.
In her well life, Dolores might say, "Jack, come look!" Come look at the albino squirrel! Come look at the great blue heron! He's a walking stick over the water, a minuet bird in the shallows of Lake Puckawasay, performing this parsed motion just for us. Dolores kneels on the sidewalk outside my grandmother's bungalow. "Look how the moss rose has grown again here by the pathway where I've pulled it up a thousand times!" Yesterday there was nothing but a skin of earth. Now come and look at the tenacious world blooming in her hands. And then my mother might, in a moment, a breath, slip off, growing strange gently at first and then with force, a tidal pull. It was an immanent act I could not see, the creeping voices lushly filling her, whispering, until in mere hours she was a lunatic standing stock-still at the bottom of the stairs and chattering, "I must be dreaming. I am getting a message in my curling iron. Is God trying to tell me something? Is he unhappy with me?" Sometimes she would write such questions on cards, with illustrations, and tape them to her mirror. Or she'd stare, seeing the inhabitants of Lilliput, perhaps, or the other unhealed ghosts she'd meet in those transcendent grottoes.
On that December night with the gilded Christmas tree dying downstairs, I sat at my mother's dressing table, no room for anything in my mother's mirror but myself. I pasted a roll of pink raspberry stickers to each of my fingers, like a manicure, a roll of raspberry fingernails extended one by one to wave at my image. Her room. At first I could not sense it, but the longer I sat before the mirror I felt her stare sear me. Felt it grow hotter, and start to scar, and mutate into a kind of howl in my head. Something greater than fear clutched at my throat, and I could feel my mother embracing me, invisible, pressing my arms from behind, her flesh on mine. Once, she had attacked Kate and me in a local restaurant, although, to be fair, Kate and I had seized her by the shoulders and tried to pull her bodily past the dessert cart. She was wearing nothing but a black bra underneath a peekaboo-sheer blouse and a matching miniskirt. She was trying to entice. She would have succeeded. She would not come home with us. It was late. Kate and I charged. Diners gawked as the three of us wrestled over a sofa and a lamp, gouging and scratching, red grooves on our arms, a bite mark on my shoulder, blood under all our fingernails. I felt those wounds again, felt their outlines, and heard her terrible chambered laugh as I was smothered by rich skin and mussed hair and orchid perfume. She was there, pushing the air from my lungs, my mother as Durga leering in my body, and in the force of her lust I'd be obliterated. I ran from the bedroom and the house, leaving the lights on, breathing breaths I told myself were my own to breathe, no one else's, running to the car and jacking it into reverse and roaring for the haven of my grandmother's house.
It was almost dawn, and Mabel would be up waiting for me. Often at dawn, no matter how much she'd drunk the night before, Mabel would bake bread. I wanted to touch the roughness of her baking boards and touch the flour to my forehead as if it were Ash Wednesday. I rolled down the car window. The snow was still falling, cloaking all that was raging and burning, like the secret trembling in my head and the mother inside me. I wanted the car to fill with snow, to drive headlong into it, one hundred thousand miles an hour. Swathed in snow, wrapped around us like a beautiful winding sheet, the car and I would dive down—and then no more thought. But I saw that I was already at Lake Puckawasay, which was as still as a chapel.
Much later that morning, my sister Kate arrived at my grandmother's and listened while I described our mother's house. "I have a hunch Dolores tried to go to Las Vegas," Kate said. Kate lived nearest of all to my mother, but was not considered the arbiter of my mother's destiny. She had at that time just moved back from a commune in Oregon, where she'd run naked and eaten wild plants and roots and renamed herself "Ka." Ka had acquired a sun tattoo the size of a grapefruit on her belly.
"If you hold up a piece of cucumber, Jack, you can see the sun particles in it," she'd once said, doing so and squinting at it with one eye. Another time, as we were quietly riding our horses in the woods, she declared, "The reason I am so subservient to men is that in my previous life I was a geisha."
But I loved Kate. I felt responsible for her, as I did for Sarah too, but Kate and I were closer in age, thirteen months apart. When Kate was small, she had been so shy that if a stranger looked at her, she'd close her eyes and stop breathing, huffing only in little gasps like a cornered animal. I have a memory of her fist in mine when she was a kindergartner, too frightened to ask the counterman for the root beer barrels and lemon drops behind his glass case. Kate closed her eyes against the world, mute. I'm six and she's five. Sunlight sluices over her as she stands amid the tin pails and bridles of the general store, her feet making not a sound on the floorboards. Sssh! Jack, someone might hear us! Tiptoe quietly.
And then, one day, Kate turned thirteen. Her biceps balanced her on the parallel bars, her legs scissored the gymnasium air, and Kate was a star. Cheerleading, acrobatics, tumbling. The muscles corded over her. And then the jumbled kinetics of teenage years, the hoodlums on the fringe, a boy who died of alcohol poisoning as he froze sleeping in his car. Kate's best girlfriend and three others perished in a boozy prom-night car wreck. A canyon opened in my sister. Kate swallowed pills. After high school, Kate became Ka. Layer by layer and year by year, she'd given up her shyness for an amalgamation of white witchcraft, Taoist philosophy, Rosicrucian prayer and study, vegetarianism, and whatever else she found interesti
ng. She was brilliantly good with the tarot, she had the gift. She had her own visions. These were her defenses against my mother.
"She's been talking about Las Vegas for a while now," Kate repeated in a focused, un-Ka-like way.
I explained to my sister that I hadn't done my usual thorough investigation at our mother's house. "I had a panic attack in her bedroom. I dreamed she was devouring me, and I wasn't even asleep. I ran out of there like there was some nighthawk at my heels."
"You saw the forces of darkness itself," Kate said, being Ka again.
"I saw myself," I said. Going crazy. My mother had been completely well until the age of thirty-four. My secret, fathomless fear was that I would reach that age and follow suit. I had less than a decade to go.
I called the airport. It was closed by the descending blizzard, and that was some comfort. I sat down heavily. I was the oldest, stiffest twenty-six-year-old in human history, chastened by the limits of my mortality. My mother could fly, she had wings that stretched to the Strait of Magellan. I had braggadocio that said, "Only I can save her." But I did not know how.
"I saw how she decorated the tree," said Kate, who'd visited my mother earlier that week. "It's a real doozer." She grinned.
"A doozer for a schmoozer," I said. "There're some interesting food items on that dining room table too. By the way, have you seen your baby bracelet recently?"
I mulled over the Las Vegas notion. Of all the poses my mother adopted, none frightened me more for her safety than that of a certain feigned raciness. In her real life, my mother was flirtatious in a sort of Doris Day style, but an utter pot of milk on the follow-through. In her mentally ill life, she was outrageous, a cocktease, an imaginary mistress and feather-boa operator. I could just imagine her telling a blackjack dealer at Circus Circus, after she'd bet the house and lost, that Alfred of Milwaukee brewing fame would soon show up to pay the tab. Cleavage from here to South America. Say she picked up someone, a farm implement dealer from Wichita, his face a smile like a half-pulled zipper. He would regard her as booty, a crazy slot machine for combine salesmen. I saw her make an escape, talons over his eyes. When ill, she had the strength of several men. She might say that she had a Mafioso boyfriend coming over to break his thumbs. In her mind, it was just possible. Bones would be broken, or worse. I sat and thought of the headlines in the Menomenee Herald. "Local Woman Terrorizes Las Vegas Casino." "Six-Foot Pookas Nibble on Mob Bosses." The fear was bunching up again in my throat, buttoning itself in.
My grandmother interrupted my line of thinking. She came trundling up the unfinished stairs of her dank basement with a basket of laundry, in her stained pinafore and baggy anklets as resigned as a charwoman, an elderly scullery wench in servitude to my enchanted mother. Mabel's dark green glasses, lenses the color of smoky forest glades, were askew, always a sign of alarm and rattled thoughts. Mabel looked as blanched as I felt, the rheumatism collar around her neck reeking of Ben-Gay. She took another step and emerged from the darkness, dropping the laundry basket, and her hands darted over the kitchen basin like crazed water spiders, going for her pills.
"So," she said, sitting down heavily. She spilled a mess of socks into her apron, Molly Malone and her oyster shells. She took her teeth out of her mouth and put them back in. "We dassn't know where she is. She ain't called. Kate calls and thinks she dead. Then she calls and says she's dead. Then you call and she ain't dead. I feel like a truck backed over me seven times. So who's goin' over to clean up your mother's house? Or are you just goin' to leave it like that?" Kate and I got ready. Mabel had been ready for hours. Bake bread, drink a little whiskey, and go. That was Mabel. All her life she'd lived for thrills, and my mother gave her plenty of them. And not cheap ones, either.
In the end I did not want my grandmother to see Dolores's house until Kate and I had cleaned up as much as possible. There are things that even seventy-eight-year-old mothers do not need to see or know about their daughters. The lingerie came down from the tree, except for the topmost pair of panties. We found them gaily defiant, like our mother at her best. I collected all of my mother's scribblings ("God is love." "Keep your hearts and minds filled with truth." "Wisdom is the principal thing, therefore get wisdom," Proverbs 4:7) and put them into my keepsake box, where I saved all evidence of my mother's mental health. The torturous food was swept into garbage bags. We aired out the dining room and kitchen. I dutifully called the sheriff to say that Dolores was missing, hoping the phony car accident might rouse some interest, but clearly he was not going to look for her on a snowy Christmas Eve day unless I came up with a scenario of immediate danger. The sheriff knew my mother and had come to admire her never-say-die lunacy. His own mother was "that way," he once confided to me. Bought a condominium in Florida with a second mortgage no one knew about. She had other delusions of grandeur too, once going to the beauty parlor asking to look like Jean Harlow! Charged the equivalent of her life savings on her credit card. Once they got "that way," you had to sit back and see if they didn't wander off buck naked. If Dolores really stabbed someone, he might come. Meanwhile, lock up the knives. He said I was to call him when things got really bad, "You know, if she comes home and is kind of aggressive."
So like tribal villagers trying to appease a distant god, Kate and I prepared the foods for Christmas that my mother would have made had she been well and home. I thought of our household arts, begun in a Betty Crocker cookbook for children in the 1950s, standing on a chair, my mother whipping icing as we made igloo cakes and painted-face cookies. Now, I suggested to Kate, we might put our snacks on some kind of pedestal outside the house and see if Dolores were lured by our offerings of midwestern savories, oyster stew, Swedish meatballs, Mexican dip (which I am sure no Mexican has ever heard of), and spritz cookies squeezed to look like camels and hearts and one with blue sugar spelling out Dolores. Dolores Come Home. I made one that said, "Surrender, Dolores." I saved a few of the joke cookies to see if anyone would notice. Kate and I made rum punch and waited for Sarah to come home from law school. "Surprise," I hooted at Sarah when she walked in the door. "Who can identify the owner of the Christmas panties?"
"A masterpiece," said Sarah, dropping her suitcase and looking around in total amazement. She knew my mother was gone. "Mabel called and put Mom on the phone a couple nights ago. She was crying hysterically about this party no one came to. I was trying to get ready for my torts final." She really never forgave Dolores for her poor grades that year. But then, I told Sarah, she needed to roll better with the punches.
Sarah was twenty-three, smart, and in her first year of law school. She believed, wrongly, that law was a career that would be free from surprises. Wildly caustic, willfully sensible, she had walled herself in against my mother, who kept poking through the chinks. I shall have none of this, Sarah insisted to herself, annihilating our mother in her head, plotting her own life like a graph, with flowcharts, balances, and columns carried forward into personal dividends. "You see, I just want to know this week precisely what I'll be doing next week at the same time," Sarah once said to me earnestly. Sarah would separate the wheat from the chaff, the loonies from the bin, and become a lawyer, intent on a world full of order and things that matched. My mother knew this, even when unwell, and nailed Sarah neatly, once leaving a red satin bustier on the doorstep of Sarah's apartment in Milwaukee. Often, my mother had some legal work she thought Sarah should do on behalf of her many lawsuits, which my mother neatly wrote out on yellow legal pads and delivered at dawn. My mother had learned law as a legal secretary. Sarah admired my mother's logical briefs even as she fortified herself against Dolores, not always successfully. Once, when Sarah was in junior high school and Dolores was sick, Sarah wandered into the best clothing shop in Menomenee and pilfered everything she could get her hands on, grown-up stuff that she could never have worn. "I couldn't help it, Jack," she explained to me when I went to fetch her after the store manager's summons. "The clothes were just flying onto my body, Jack." She was fourteen then.
/> "Can't you do something?" Sarah said to me now. "I feel like her life is consuming mine. I study torts, and she calls up and says she's suing the town of Menomenee for towing her car when she left it on the sidewalk. I've got a nuisance complaint filed by Vinter's Toy Store last month because she's left Lurex G-strings on their shelves. Or she calls up and tells me to sue her plastic surgeon because her ears aren't on straight, one is an inch higher or lower than the other. Or she tells me that now that she's admitted her Mafia connections I should write some Mafia guy named Frank Parmenetti because she's going to inherit his money. She'd like to have it now in small bills tied with garters. Blue ones. Do you think we should get some kind of restraining order so I can study?"
"Gee," I said. "I'm sorry you're so inconvenienced. Study harder, and when you get to be a lawyer, we can keep it all in the family. I'll write an exposé, Kate can tackle her, and you can defend her." I suppose this has come true, if not in that order. But I had no good answers for Sarah then. The law of Wisconsin which governed our lives stated that not until my mother became an absolute "threat to the life of herself or others" could we commit her. And so each time we waited and agonized, watching as her money drained away, commiting acts that would have mortified her had she been well. We tried to compile evidence, planning for the moment when she was a significant threat but not so significant that someone was hurt, or hurt only mildly. Which was a trick for us in itself.
We celebrated Christmas by christening the tree "Alfred," by putting more rum in our eggnog, and then having an extra glass before midnight Mass. Mabel had extras of extras and fell asleep in a chair. We put all Dolores's favorite Christmas records on the stereo, hamming it up on lines like "She sees you when you're sleeping, she knows when you're awake" or "I saw Mommy kissing Santa Claus!" Every time someone bumped the sofa or jumped onto the stairs, needles flew from the tree so that before long the bare branches held one pair of panties like the Lambda Chi flagpole. Hard to acknowledge, hard to believe that she was not home with us, she who so loved celebration, who would drive thirty miles out of her way to get the right Christmas ornament. We had teetered before, a matriarchal family on a rubber raft in roiling water, but Christmas was the Eucharist of faith over chance. We had without fail always spent it together. Now she was out there somewhere in the snow, a delusional night thing. I entertained myself with fantasies of her scrunched in the plastic chair of a soup kitchen. More likely she was at the Ritz-Carlton in Chicago, eating off silver chafing dishes and taking calls on her pink toy telephone from her broker, who was helping her buy Majorca. She'd believe both that it was for sale and that she could buy it.