by Jacki Lyden
I told Mabel not to worry if I disappeared someday, that I would be heading to the Badlands, riding horses to check fence posts, that sort of thing, maybe teaching some small children to read and write before settling down among the Navajos, my people. Of course, I never expected my body to change and betray me as it did. While I still fantasized about escape, my plan began to seem like a cliché. What if I were discovered, or worse, broke down and called my grandmother to come get me? I dared not be uncool. Kate was cool. She was a cheerleader and gymnast. I was not cool, could not get the hang of cool, which seems to choose who it will redeem, not the other way around.
Without knowing it, I had become hollowed out when not actually angry; hollowed out with the same static sense of midwestern dread I would feel in similar small towns almost twenty years later, when I was assigned to drive from endless farm to endless farm in subzero weather to learn of ruinous debt, the death of dreams, children who had left crops for the cities and never come back. The few farm families I liked clung to their land like biblical tillers and were washed away in a flood of debt anyway. They were grit families with a grimness that went down with their poor meals like potatoes and lime Jell-O and potted Spam. Their old people lost the farms and became janitors and maids if they could still work, recluses if they couldn't. The lucky ones, that is. In one Iowa town to which I traveled, an indebted farmer had gone crazy and taken a shotgun to his wife, his neighbor, and his banker, killing them all before putting the pump action shotgun to his own chest, pulling the trigger, and then pumping the shotgun and firing again because he was only half dead the first time. Four dead, many others lost. Life as it had been lived was ending.
But in my teenage years, I shared with rural people their burning religious fervor. I read the Bible for the phrases that spoke to my least complex emotion: hatred. I had a fanatic's wish that it would engender strength. In my head I carried around a graven tablet on which I kept track of all of the Doctors hostile acts. I have not really laid the tablet down. I've entered the records of other moments: where the suicide bomber killed twenty-three in Tel Aviv in 1994, the blackened bunker where the American missile killed the Iraqi children in the Baghdad shelter in 1991—and the rim of black at the back of my eye still looks. I have seen a dismembered foot, a child's imploded plastic doll. The family of a Protestant landowner near Belfast in 1989 told me how slowly "our Michael" died, Michael who knew that his arms and legs had been blown off. And when I encounter hatred, the Doctor is always present. I can feel him surging from his living room chair, a ball of fist cutting through the chatter of a Washington dinner party, a gag lurking behind me while I speak in the measured tones of my radio voice. He is there at the checkpoint, in the smarm of some self-righteous believer. Sometimes my heart scarcely quickens thinking of the Doctor, but I can always hear his voice.
Once at a county air show I'd forgotten the prescription lotion for my face, which had been treated for acne the day before with dry ice and ultraviolet rays. The dermatologist had given my mother and me instructions to keep my skin out of the sun. But the Doctor wanted to see this show, and my mother was still hoping against hope that we might be a family. An air show qualified as a family event. This one was only three hours away from Menomenee. It was a boiling bright sunny day in early September. There was no shade in the broad fields where the planes took off and landed. I had a hat, so the Doctor would not hear of our driving home. I darted in and out of the sun, sitting in the car until the heat drove me out, trying to shelter under a lemonade stand awning. By the time we drove home, the sun was going down and my eyes had swollen halfway shut like bashed oranges. My face had oozing, blistering welts. I could think of nothing but the bottle of lotion in the medicine cabinet.
"Hurry," my mother implored the Doctor.
But he did not hurry, and by the time we reached Menomenee I had worked myself into a first-class frenzy, and my mother was frantic too. I ran into the house and flung open the cabinet door. My bottle smashed in the sink. I howled for my mother, who was just a few steps behind me, and we picked out the pieces of gooey glass and put them in a strainer. After we'd swished them around, we got exactly enough lotion to dab on one piece of cotton.
"We'll get more from the pharmacy in the morning," promised my mother. "I'll call the dermatologist." We both knew the Doctor could write a prescription, probably even had some type of lotion downstairs in his clinic. I caught the Doctor's eye before I went to bed that night. I wore his hatred like a badge.
Change comes, wresting the known from the unknown, cracking the world off at its axis. The farmhouse washes away in the flood. The farmer pulls the shotgun trigger. The mother screams a bloody litany, the pickup rolls into the lake, and finally, one night, the Doctor sought me out. That was an event so rare that I immediately felt as if we were scouts from opposing armies, squaring off in a foreign battle zone. He looked directly at me, a challenge. I felt my tongue get thick.
"Where's the paper?" he said. The tone of warden to inmate, but the fact remained that he had talked to me. He had acknowledged me, and I was both triumphant and scared. He would have to talk to me now; he had cracked at last. The paper was in my bedroom, and I ought to have remembered to return it to the living room. It was an unspoken rule that I never broke. I saw my opportunity.
"In my bedroom," I said, thinking.
"Get it," he said. His coldest voice. I went and fetched the newspaper, walking with the slowest step possible.
"Fold it," he commanded. I folded it. Not well.
"Fold it straighter," he said.
"You mean so it looks like I haven't touched it?" I asked. Suddenly I was giddy, I was laughing, released. The absurdness of our years together seemed to be collecting into words like a geyser, words I never thought I'd have the nerve to say to him. I was sick of being frightened of him.
"Your paper? Should I fold it so that it looks like an airplane, or a hat you can wear? Like Yankee Doodle Dandy! Shall I fold it up this way?" I ripped the paper in two. I spit the words at him, little marbles zipping from their slingshot right into his eyes.
He leaned over and grabbed my throat and cracked my head sideways. His hands were a collar around my neck, and he dragged my head down the hall. I felt the hair lift away from my scalp and my feet were not on the floor. Pink lights flew past, old dreams, snapping dogs and invisible pookas. And then we were in my bedroom, the Doctor and I, my bedspread like a lagoon, my beautiful petrified rock balanced on a promontory above it. I grabbed for the rock and, feeling it in my hand, was in Communion with it. It was a shelf of land below a submerged continent, a piece of earth like a dagger. I swung it in his direction, hitting nothing, dropping it as my breathing got harder and my lungs threatened to burst.
"You big oaf," I gasped absurdly, and I bit him, getting at least one of his hands off my neck. I couldn't bring myself to call him anything worse. I got a clear look at his eyes and, seeing the dead-on hatred, I kneed him in the groin. But I could not get to his head, which was above me at an unbreachable distance, like the top of a pyramid. I could not implant the petrified rock into his skull and rip through the gray matter like some sort of high priest. He had me by the hair again, was lifting me off the floor. And then the wall came smashing into my face, flattening the left side of my jaw. The pain was like colliding with a truck. I heard Kate screaming, "Stop, stop, you're going to kill her!"
I thought he would at least try. He threw me down on the bed, his fist knocking everything off the shelf just above my head and from somewhere, I heard my mother imploring him, "Please, please, please."
He turned away from me and grunted, and suddenly sauntered out of my room, a room so much more vacant without him. I wanted him to come back, I wanted to finish it. He pushed my mother into the wall as he went. I was very much alive. I ran past my mother, who was crying in Kate's arms.
I stumbled to the bathroom, half dazed, locked the door and peeled off my clothes. I lay in the shower until a lake formed under my head, the w
ater a cooling rain on my face. I thought of the Queen of Sheba and quetzal feathers and why hadn't I seen her in so many years? A long time later, but only minutes really, I realized that the bones in my jaw had been whacked out of joint and I could not fully close my mouth. I reached up and put my finger inside my cheek. On the left side was a sort of hollow spot where the jaw should be, where the Doctor with his deft thumb and forefinger had squeezed tight at the juncture of upper mandible and skull. Looking back, I believe that, as a doctor of osteopathy, he knew how easy it would be to dislocate the lower left jawbone from its socket. For half a moment, I thought of going out and asking the Doctor to push it back. But then I thought I would rather rot in hell. I got out of the shower and took the sagging lower jaw in both hands and shoved it hard, back to the right and up, looking in the mirror. In a second there was a crack. I could open and shut my mouth again.
The truth never goes back together in the same way. I cannot close my jaw without cracking it, without feeling a sideways motion as it slips with a small click back into place. A maxillary surgeon once offered to fix it, saying he would have to break the mandible and rewire it and that if he did not do so an excruciating arthritis would set in when the cartilage was finally gone. Something to remember the Doctor by in my old age. But I do not see why, having failed to vanquish me thus far, I should worry about arthritic pain in the future and, besides, the maxillary surgeon may well have been dead wrong. I feel my jaw click sideways and out of a sea of dreams old memories are rendered clear. In my jaw, I feel my old stone diary, my fossils and the place I was finally made real to him. I put my hand on my jaw and feel the smooth surface of my petrified rock. If he never knew my middle name, if he never knew what I liked to read or dream of, if he never noticed the color of my hair or the sound of my voice, if in fact I never existed for him, which I am sure I did not, then I can open my mouth and remember that I was real. I was there. It is the opposite of love, that click in the bone, but it is where love is supposed to be. For years thereafter, I often found that violence accompanied love. A blow always shocked me, but it reminded me of something, of how much those who deliver one really are, in their hearts, consumed with desire. And that was something I understood because at fourteen my desire for vengeance had nearly consumed me.
My family had already become to family life what a black hole is to a star. We had burned ourselves through at the center, but we were of the same shattered world, exiles who could not escape one another, and so we continued in orbit. After that night, the Doctor looked neither at me nor at Kate, nor at Sarah, nor really at my mother, ever again. He never came near us and we stayed out of his way. Our eyes slid by each other, avoiding connection. This was the calculus of our space. The Doctor had my mother carry his meals downstairs, where he ate alone in his office in the clinic. My mother lived in limbo. She put up seasonal decorations, took them down, put them up and took them down again. The tracks through the house happened centuries ago; no one deviates from the Mesozoic footholds on our rotating piece of planet. Kate swallows pills, dozens and dozens of them, is rushed to the hospital. The Doctor does not look up from the Milwaukee Journal. "My daughter tried to commit suicide," my mother says in little words that sound like flies in a jar, but the Doctor never listens to her.
Nor does he listen when she speaks more loudly in secret rhythms. Only I hear her, and recognize sounds that are her private mysticisms. The actual crumbling down of her real life gave her a kind of momentary boldness. My mother stalks through the back yard in her nightgown, scattering the pages of a dictionary she's made in her notebook. She finally works up the nerve to ask the Doctor, "Are you happy?" No, he says, he is not happy. My mother discovers another woman's photograph. The Doctor has a parallel life in a parallel universe and a parallel woman in a distant state. A parallel family. Your children, he tells my mother, are venomous snakes, your love is poison. The drama is over at last. He leaves her, or rather, it is we who must leave the Doctors residence and return to the cornfields. Divorce, which my mother had hoped would never return, that blue cutting word slicing the world in two, has come again.
My mother puts on waitress shoes and takes jobs to pay the bills. In the Depot restaurant, she wears a mini train conductor's outfit and little engineer's hat. She likes the job, she babies her customers. In the German restaurant where she works at night, she puts on a dirndl and apron. She always has at least two jobs. My mother is just turning forty. I am seventeen and in college. As the months pass into spring and summer and fall again, one of her patrons threatens her with a death X ray, or a crossbow. The patrons turn into bandits who wear white fedoras and who plan to rob my mother of her life. And the telephone hisses and Mabel cries and the words I hear are Can'tcha come up, Jack, can'tcha come up.
I visited the Doctor once, twenty years later. He was broken, and for a man who had made a small fortune, nearly broke. I went to his new condo on Lac La Jolie, which, oddly enough, was built on the site of the convent that had been torn down all those years ago. He occupied their flower garden, one of the very spots where I used to hide. Now it was the Doctor's turn to hide, along with his TV, in the room farthest away from La Jolie and its expansive views of sailboats. His new wife lived with him, the woman from another state. She hated him and bled the rest of his money and he hated her. He used a walker. He'd had a massive heart attack. Don't go, my mother pleaded, protecting a memory after all that time.
The Doctor didn't look at me when I came in. He didn't look at me as I spoke to him. He lay staring at the TV, eating sugar cookies. He acknowledged my presence and went back to the TV and asked me to hand him the bag of cookies. I used a few to coax him and his walker into the living room, lurching him past all those old cowboy paintings now moved to these walls. I made him sit in the environment of the lake, the day, the world. I recited the headlines of my life, my geographic patchwork. He ignored what I had to say as he always had.
"You'd better get married pretty soon," he said, "if you want to have a baby." Then my jaw opened with a click. I smiled, and I said, "You used to hit me, remember that? For years, usually when I wasn't looking, always at the base of my skull. Finally you tried to kill me. Remember? That night you kept banging my head against the wall, over and over."
"No, dear, I never did," he said adamantly. His mind was going. I looked at him, an old man. Remarkable in his late age, his head still dense with shiny brown hair, not a single gray strand on him, and him in his seventies.
"We tried to kill each other once," I insisted, sharing it. "You wanted me to die, back in those days." I'm meting it out, trading it. After all, I wanted him to die too. There's something coiling in him, his eyes burn into mine. I have nothing to lose, he can do nothing to me now.
"I wanted you to die too," I say.
"No," he says. "I never did. Never hit anyone. You're wrong." He suddenly shifts direction. "You know, after my heart trouble, there's an awful lot I don't remember." And then, "I was too hard on everyone," he says, and gives me a sharp look. The old freezing wind. "You don't think you were responsible for some of the trouble?"
"I don't think children are in a position to take that kind of responsibility," I say evenly. I know he remembers. I can feel him remembering all of it, stacking his memories around him like bricks.
He snorts. He says he should never have left my mother; that was a mistake. He wonders if I will come to visit him again. His world is his TV room, his car, the places where he can hoist himself with his walker. My mother waits on him when he comes to the restaurant alone for lunch, or for dinner with his new wife, the one he left her for. My mother is pleasant to them, and gets the orders promptly, and when the Doctor is alone she treats him especially well. But you would not guess that long ago they were married. You would never guess the way she fell for him. You would never guess the hell it was, the way she makes excuses for him.
I say good-bye to the Doctor, leave feeling unfinished and hunched in my skin. I don't get back in the car. I know I wil
l never see him again. I brood beside the waters of Lac La Jolie for a long time, until I am myself again, the girl I was.
My mother's hand was like a bisque cup, all porcelain. And Christ Jesus appeared to her like a tall white vision, there in that town in the darkness. She said I am the Queen of Sheba, and I offer to each of my daughters a country. For you, Jack, Mesopotamia. In my head, I tell her I accept.
Hitting the Road
WHEN I WAS ABOUT NINETEEN and my mother was forty-two, we would both have considered ourselves to be in the very middle, the very center of our lives. I would have considered it the middle because I could not have imagined any sort of life after forty. By then I assumed marriage and children would have retired me from the fray. I would plod on, ruckled and hunchbacked toward death. Why I should have thought that when my mother was at that very age and moment, her children nearly grown, her marriages behind her, putting together her new modeling portfolio, I'm not entirely certain. I could give you her snappy portfolio right now. Photos fall out like six kinds of brochures for holiday resorts at Camp Dolores. The woman in the photos looks ten years younger than her age, a bit of family legerdemain, the result of genetic effervescence and the refusal to know what time it is. And then there are her poses—sailor-ing behind the wheel of a yacht, billed hat atop burnished hair massed into cumulus clouds; her head at twelve o'clock, as the merry-go-round on which she rides sweeps her arms out like the hour hand. In this photograph, she is an errant milkmaid, swinging on a swing, inexplicably flouncing a red apron over a black dirndl—that is my mother at forty-two. She is still young. The grin on her face says, "Isn't life a bowl of plums?" She's determined to swing, bounce, scamper into the future as if the past never existed, wipe out time in institutions—the institution of marriage, number one, and second, the institution of the county mental hospital. And if the means to do this is to edit history, then who better than one who can create and re-create herself? Woman Invents Own Life Story. The night before I left for college, my mother called me aside. "There's no money for college," she said. "I lent him your college fund to buy a boat and he won't give it back." I vowed I would leave. And yet what kind of gypsy looks for excuses to run home, her mother's gold earring in her ear?