by Jacki Lyden
"I can't find your size," my mother said thickly to the customer. "I can't find anything."
"Hey, Mom," I said, stepping in. "Closing time." I glared at the young customer. Test me, test my ardor, I wanted to say to her. I wanted her to know that my fingers could gouge her eyes out, my teeth could puncture her throat. The customer turned and slunk away through the racks. The next weekend, my mother swallowed every pill in the house. Ah, but she made sure I was on the phone with her as she did, her voice trailing off like the echo of a cannon shot. I frantically called the paramedics, who came and took her away and pumped her stomach as I sped up again from Chicago. The regular hospital this time. Suicide attempt, Dalmane overdose. My mother leaps and I catch. No one will if I don't. No one will save her. I longed, for the thousandth time, to re-create life as something other than this daughter and this mother.
Fishing on Lake Puckawasay
MY SISTERS AND I grew up like boys on Lake Puckawasay. My father took us fishing from the time we could walk. At dawn we dug in the moist earth of the garden for night crawlers, loose bits of dirt running through our hands, still a world without shoes in the summertime, grass and mud between our toes. Life itself seemed tangible, full of pores, the friable earth sifting through our small hands in our part of Wisconsin, saturated in black soil. Dank hosts, crumbled in the darkness before God. Each dawn, mist hung over the fields behind our house like drifting nets that caught the birdsong and the lowing of cows as they poked their noses under the barbwire fence of the farm that bordered our property. The cows, with wet muzzles and a sweet-grass breath, were always after our garden. The land sloped from the farm on the horizon to the fields, down to our back yard, rolling and lowering onto Lake Puckawasay, which ran along the opposite side of our road. We were sinking, my mother said, down into our earthly lives. She had been sinking for a while now, ever since her marriage in 1950.
One of the first stories I remember hearing from my mother was how she'd lived in a basement until she was a teenager. "I could see the feet going past me at night," she'd begin. "Shoes, all kinds. People walking as I lay in bed. When I got to be a teenager, traces of ash from the street dotted my cold cream as I lay on my pillow."
Mabel had no patience for hard times. "You always ate," she'd hiss. Mabel cooked kidneys in the basement. The smell of fried urine made my mother wretch. My mother dreamed of college, got brilliant 99s and 100s on her report cards, was so shy that she had few friends. "It's your looks," Mabel told her. "Pretty girls don't have friends." Nor did they have educations; her perfect test scores were put away in a drawer for decades until I found them. "I thought about college," she said. "But I knew better than to ask my father, and I didn't know who else to ask. The principal?" The day after her graduation, my grandfather found her a job in a bakery.
But before graduation her parents did scrape together a sweet sixteen party, and she invited an older boy she knew slightly, Patrick Lyden, to be her escort. He was nicer than the other young men, she'd tell us girls, not rough. The party was at the Knights of Columbus Hall on Vliet Street in Milwaukee. She had six attendants, all of them wearing fuchsia satin dresses they had made themselves. Patrick Lyden looked earnest in a white dinner jacket. I know these things because I have a framed photograph of them at the party on my dresser. I look at it, and I think, From these two people am I created, yet my mother said she was never in love with my father a day in her life, though she wished him well. They are quite beautiful, the pair of them, all dark eyes and hair. My father is holding my mother's hand. Looking at them, I want to cry, "Stop! Stop! You will bring each other tragedy and nothing but misery. One of you will go crazy and the other will suffer in silence forever!" But my mother could not avoid the marriage, her father had decreed it. Patrick Lyden went off to join the paratroopers in the victory forces over Japan. They floated like feathers over the earth. He wrote letters of gratitude to my mother for not sending him a Dear John note. She winced and wrote on. When Patrick returned from Japan, he stepped off the plane and my mother searched out another mans face, styling it to her memory, not recognizing my father. He was both her disappointment and her inevitability, a man at the edge of the crowd in uniform. Always in her mind a man at the edge of the crowd.
"I was buried alive after that marriage," my mother would say. "Really dead out there in the country." She pined for city rhythms, for its shopkeepers and cinemas and cheer. I can remember her describing roller-skating on a sidewalk in Milwaukee before I had ever tried it, the look on her face as she renavigated the sidewalk cracks she'd leapt over as a girl. To her, birdsong on the shores of Lake Puckawasay was a dirge. Her father had been shot through the heart in a bar holdup, a rare thing in 1950. Now she and Patrick lived in the little house that her father had been building as a retirement cottage, thirty miles out from Milwaukee. The house had no entrance facing the road, but edged toward the world like a shy schoolgirl. The door was on the side, opposite the neighbors, and the Jimineys could watch our every move through the picture window. It was a house adjacent to fields—burrs, Scotch thistle, marshmallow, timothy grass. The foot sank through the lawns; darling tiny toads crawled up a child's ankle. Swampy land no one else wanted but workmen on the line at the Milwaukee breweries. Some were G.I.s who threw their deeds for a dollar into the chips of a poker game after their shifts had ended. Even older were the asphalt fishing shacks on the road, like rotting teeth amid the neater white bungalows. Other homes looked more like boat wrecks.
At first my mother tried to make the best of being stuck in the fields like a radish, living on a lane of shacks. She covered the sofa and chairs in gay jungle-print fabrics and put green ceramic panthers on the mantel. Outside, the elderly men on our lane congregated, sharing memories of the fields and factories near Kiev or Tirana or Gdansk. They sat around in card games on lethargic afternoons, leaning against the shacks that eventually became permanent homes with the addition of a little more tar paper, a little more asphalt. They said things like "Deal me oncet" and "What's your name, little girl?" and, to one another, "An old bohunk like you dassn't smell so good." The sweat came through their clothes until they reminded me of oily sausages wrapped in butcher paper. Sometimes they took their teeth out to show me, strings of saliva like dew gleaming on their dentures. Mabel, astonished to find herself a widow at fifty, amazed my mother by marrying one of these gnomes, Louie from Czechoslovakia. She moved into his bungalow on Lake Puckawasay and didn't leave until she died thirty-four years later. My mother wrinkled her nose and said now that her father was dead, my grandmother was turning into a fishwife.
To amuse us on long afternoons when we heard the cowbells tinkling through her bedroom window, my mother staged fashion shows. My mother had been a runway model at Gimbels for three seasons between the time of her marriage and my arrival. I could listen for hours to my mothers tales of parading in costume while ladies lunched on petits fours and miniature sandwiches, filling in order blanks with doll-sized pencils. My sisters and I would pull on white cotton gloves and our Easter hats and play the part of the ladies as our mother twirled on the living room carpet. We dipped our crayons into notebooks, pretending we could write. Dolores modeled sundresses, capris, and sheaths she'd sewn herself, on a runway we made by laying boards over building blocks. "And then, girls," my mother recounted, "I would pivot and turn, like this." A quick pointing of the toe and a twist on the balls of her feet. "Can you do that?" I was six, Kate was five, Sarah only three. "Pivot and turn!" we shrieked. "Pivot and turn!"
My mother let us raid her hope chest, a huge cedar trunk at the foot of her bed containing, among other things, her wedding trousseau. We put on her dainty slippers and satin wedding gown and veil, which we tried to avoid trampling on the stairs up to the attic playroom, the fifteen-foot-long train flowing like gallons of the thickest cream. My mother had paid the photographer extra to make her wedding picture look like an oil painting, and the satin of her dress had the luster of baby teeth. That was how it was. Even when she h
ad almost no money, she had the kind of style that got people to look twice.
"Pivot and turn!" we screamed. "Good!" sang my mother. She was not like the other mothers on our road. She painted her fingernails as red as crayons, redder—as red as a cluster of scarlet tulips. And her toes, too. She wore pedal pushers and stiletto heels, and shaved her arched calves with a pink General Electric razor, a concupiscent thing. We leaned against the bathroom door and begged to be allowed in to help her shave her legs and hook the eyelet at the back of her neck. Always, before she went out in the afternoon or evening, my mother chose a purse that matched her blouse, dumping tubes of lipstick and mascara from one to another. When you get an eyeful, fill your pocket.
My mothers vanity was blond wood with a half-moon of mirror, big enough to accommodate her reflection and the reflection of her three little girls. We'd hand her her gilt brush and attend her, gazing up as she let us guide the brush through her long auburn hair, which fell in thick waves down her back. Outside, the cows grazed in the fields, but inside the room was chartreuse and maroon and rows and rows of bottles lined her vanity. A tall, amethyst decanter. A slim black Chanel No. 5 bottle, like Marilyn Monroe, my mother's favorite actress, no doubt had. And there was a crystal atomizer with a gold silken sphere attached by a tube. I picked it up to squeeze it, anointing us with Youth Dew. My mother contemplated our reflection with huge, steady eyes. She had a mantra.
"Always remember," she often said to us solemnly, "that you are the most beautiful woman in the room," and in her case it was true. I knew it as the gilt brush glided through her hair, as her hands pushed tortoiseshell combs into the auburn mass to hold it up. Men doted on my mother, rushed to pull out her chair or bring her a cocktail she'd refuse, all to linger for just one moment in her eyes. To look at my mother was to know purity and energy. She believed. But we had to be ready. Finding me slumped in a chair, sounding out the words in a book, my mother would say, "Do something!" and snap her fingers. Do something wonderful, she meant. Do something gorgeous, and do it with style. It seemed a worthy mantra then for all of life.
The vanity was a hallowed place of thought and imagination for my mother and sisters and me—a place of costume and escape, a sorceress's ball, a witch's teacup. We could enchant ourselves there. If my mother braided her long hair, pinned it up, then tied a scarf into a bow on her crown, and donned long hoop earrings, she emerged as Carmen Miranda. "Now there was a character, even if she wasn't pretty," my mother said. Carmen Miranda meant South of the Border, a place of señoritas and mantillas and high cactus, where women in long dresses danced to marimba music. My mother, the timpanist in the Menomenee Legion Band, owned a pair of red maracas. She shook them as she sang the Chiquita Banana jingle. "I'm Chiquita Banana, and I come to say, Bananas like to ripen in a certain way."
Her dreams infused mine in front of the vanity, protean dreams with a hypnotic beat, like an oracle leaning down to say, "Whatever there is, is out there. It's not here. Not here." Dream songs, lullabies, soothing and deceptive. How often I have hummed them to myself, waiting in a palace anteroom or at a border checkpoint, waiting to put questions to an Arab king or British prime minister, waiting for the man described as a terrorist or the woman described ... how? How is the woman described? Often she never is. I hear them ululating. I wait and wait and find myself humming the Chiquita Banana riff as I travel the long hot highways of the Levant, plunging from the Syrian plain down to the Jordanian wadis, plying memories from an old lakeshore in Wisconsin. I am waiting for the door to open and the women with their tasseled pencils to take notes. I stare down at the cheap leather bag I bought in Damascus to hold my tape recorder. My high heels are dusty, no time to paint my ragged nails. "You are the most beautiful woman in the room," the mother in my head insists. And promises and promises, hoping I will believe in her assurance as an entitlement of my own. I look into a Gaza taxi's rearview mirror, and my mother's eyes look back.
By contrast, my father's dreams were as plain as the thousand freckles on his arm, as solid as his fist that threw mock punches, built sandboxes, unhooked fish from the line. "Monkey pile," my father would yell, flopping onto his belly in the middle of the living room. The salt on his skin in our mouths, his freckles over our eyes. He was a canopy for us under any hot sun. "Dr. X! Attack, girls! Right hook to Dick the Bruiser! His guard is down, he's taking a nap, playing to the peanut gallery. Left hook to Dr. X!" My father organized us into the skins and shirts, taking sides. He loved the glamour of wrestling on TV. For Halloween, he was Gorgeous George, wearing a long blond wig and his red hunting underwear. "Cry uncle," I'd holler, tackling him at the knees when he came home from work. "Porky Pig!" he'd say. "Donald Duck!" And then my father underwent a transformation.
Hammering nails into the roof of a friend's house, my father, always impulsive, suddenly stood up. Perhaps someone had called to him. Perhaps he had a kink in his spine, or he needed to piss, or his throat was parched for beer and his freckled skin was sweating. He never remembered the reason for the moment that changed time for him. His foot slipped. He went hurding down the roof, landing on his skull on the sidewalk, frying his cranium. For weeks he lay in a coma, thrashing under foot and wrist restraints with the world a distant sea. Then gradually he swam back to the light with thick, choppy strokes. His eyes opened. He was back on land.
But he never heard another word. My first-grade teacher drew me a diagram. There was an anvil in my father's ear, she said. I knew what that was. And there was a small tympani drum, exactly the kettle-shaped kind my mother played in the Menomenee Legion Band. There was another instrument, the organ of Corti, which was the nerve of hearing. I thought of Corti as an Italian gentleman, dapper and with a mustache, who gave organ lessons in the large empty recital hall at the back of my father's brain. But the organ, the anvil, and the drum which performed all the chords and songs of the sounding world had shattered, and could not be put back together again. He was Humpty-Dumpty. My father had lost all his notes.
When he came home from the hospital, after being gone longer than any time I'd ever remembered, Patrick Lyden was not a canopy of shade against a harsh sun. He did not hoist us girls up to him in a bunch, as he had always done, and call us his Three Stooges. He moved slowly, a Mr. Potato Head, a pink bald bulb covered with fuzz. Stitch marks showed on his scalp like a baseball. He sat at the kitchen table and we crawled onto his lap and he pressed his ears, tiny velvet wings, to our mouths. We told stories into his ears, crossed the ocean there. His fingers rested lightly on our throats, and he told us to say our names and sing to him. He shook his head, and then he closed his eyes and told us to walk across the wooden floorboards. He said he could feel the floorboards thumping in his own feet. I recall that his gestures were like a swimmer's. The water came up higher. He was a man in a river.
My father waited for his hearing to come back. You could feel him waiting, as you can feel impatience on the platform when the crowd grits its teeth for the train to arrive. Not long after his return, I saw my father at the big picture window that looked out to the Jimineys', the older neighbors across the lawn. There was a bird feeder beside our house. My father whistled to the birds, but I knew that his hearing had not come back because his whistle, which had always been so wonderful, was a braying, shrill sound, like a chair being pulled away from a table too quickly. The finches and the blue jays darted away. My father stood motionless with his hands in his pockets, stock-still and ultimately defined. His hearing was not going to come back. His mission had been completed and he knew now what he was. He was stone-deaf. He was twenty-nine years old. He laughed.
When he spoke, his speech was as slurred as if he had inhaled one of the spring rivulets running down to Lake Puckawasay. Our conversations spun wheels in the murk of his syllables. If I wanted to talk to my father, I had to get someone else to write down the words I was desperately eager to spell. I loved the alphabet, the very notion of shapes that stuck to the sounds in the air. Now I needed that alphabet so that I
could write to my father. "What does it sound like when you listen, Dad?" I asked him. For my father often stopped and listened, pointing his head at where a thickening reverberation seemed to promise a lost sound. We were sitting on the back steps. My grandmother wrote my question down for my father. My father shook his head, unable to explain. A babble of speech played harshly between his ears. But later, he brought home a conch shell.
"If you had ever been to the ocean," my father said, "it would sound like this." Actually the words came out as they always did now, in a monotonic gurgle. "If youah hayd evah been to the owshun," and he passed the conch from child to child and ear to ear. "It wouyld ... sahnd ... lawke ... this. And inside myah hayd," said my father, dripping the speech, "Awe cahan heah the wayves!" And a wavelet boomed out, widening his voice.
So my father had a conch shell for hearing and waves for a voice, and my mother had a vanity and a mirror that could see the world. The words between them grew fewer and fewer, like broken threads that frayed the bonds of intimacy. My father was like a guest picking his way, uncertain whether to sit back in the most comfortable chair or perch on the corner settee. One Sunday after church, my sisters and my mother and I were having our usual languid afternoon in front of the vanity, stringing odd buttons into necklaces, wearing our Stardust Memory plastic high heels, when my mother turned slowly around, and said, "Do you girls know what divorce means?" At six, I had never heard the word. "Divorce is when two people can't live together anymore," she said, looking straight at me. "Two people who are married. It means Daddy won't be living with us anymore, though he'll always be your father." Her voice made the room tilt sideways.