by Jacki Lyden
Mabel's currency consisted of fried perch fillets and pork juice jelly, five-dollar bills from her pension check squeezed into envelopes licked for wandering grandchildren, and ice-cold bottles of Blatz. The sweaty things, the sugary sticky things you could hold, were what Mabel gave. Her pennies were the buttons of her button box, her jewels the chicken wishbones drying on the windowsill in case of urgent need. "Make a wish, Jacki, any time. I got lots of wishbones." Mabel stuck bits of African violet in old milk cartons, watered them into a moldy muck that never sprouted, hid cigarette butts under stacked towels, her gin bottles among the boat cushions beneath the stump of wasps' nest down under the porch. Restless, she would tie on her rain bonnet and get into her "good" cloth coat, the one that twenty years earlier had looked striking on Dolores, zebra stripes of orange and black. On grizzled Mabel, it was a carnival awning. Then out to her Chevrolet over the slick roads. If Dolores were unwell, Mabel could be seen stalking her down the streets of Menomenee, a muttering old tiger on the prowl, hem bedraggled and tilting forward on her brogues as if there were always a wind against her. Which in a way there was. Mabel braced herself by cursing under her breath. Life, she believed, was not something you stood and thought about. It was something you threw yourself into, like a vat. I used my grandmothers home as mine, dragging summer crowds of gangly friends up from the city, bivouacking on the porch floor, crashing in the country to run about in halter tops and short shorts, to make love amid earthworms and mosquitoes, ride horses in the woods of the kettle moraine. We put the boat out on the lake, swatted fly balls with baseball bats under night swallows. One summer at dawn I looked up, startled, from an act of seduction, riding a billowing blanket on the porch, only to see Mabel's face pasted on the window, reminded of the lust in her own past.
"If I were twenty years younger, I could go for you," she told a baldheaded friend of mine from New York, giving him the eye.
"If you were twenty years younger, you'd still be twenty years older than he is," I roared.
Momentum, tilt ahead. It's a bond we all shared, grandmother, mother, and daughter. In her own way, Mabel tried to get to the bottom of Dolores's breakdowns, find out who had come and stolen her beautiful offspring, left her this raving changeling bawling for its ogre parents. In the end, Mabel could not keep up, forgot and poured too much gin in her cup, fell off her chair, decided I would make a better detective and she a better reporter of events as she saw them. Because she was wildly prone to exaggeration, she compounded folly with falsity. What was real and what was not blurred by day's end when Mabel told it. Other times, reality simply didn't matter, got scraped with the plates into the sink. Mabel broke her hip, but who knew, Dolores shushing her, telling her to quit hollering, she'd arrange to bring her supper in front of the Ted Mack Amateur Hour. Shut up with you, Ma. It was true that Mabel had broken her hip, but none of us believed her.
Dolores once told her, "You are not my real mother," and produced a whole notebook of her imaginary family led by her "real mother," her Aunt Martha, from a branch of the family as dull as church hymnals with pilgrim virtues. "My real mother was a godly person named Martha, like Jesus' aunt," my mother would tell her own mother. "Nothing like you."
Physical, shrill, incantatory, cursing, Mabel railed at life out of a sense of her fleshiness in it, sensed life was to be used like something tactile, like soap made out of animal fat or shoes made from wading boots, which she wore. Strip the rubber, sew it. Make do, use the wax paper to cover the windows if you don't have plastic, use the plastic twice if you rinse it off, store the bacon fat in tin cans, not those ones, they're for worms, give me that chicken fatty tail on your plate cuz you'll just waste the best damn part. Smack and suck, Mabel tickling the pope's nose with her tongue. "The reason I don't have any wrinkles," she said to me once, confiding—she had almost none—is because I have used Noxema and water since I was sixteen." I couldn't imagine a product having been around that long.
"Jesus Christ, if you dassn't gonna close the refrigerator door, I'm gonna take a goddamn shovel and hit you with it. I'm so hot one minute and cold the next. Burnin' up and then flippin' freezing. It's for the birds, bein old. Don't get old, it stinks to high heaven. Jesus Christ, my neck feels like your damn horse kicked it. Jesus Christ, I'm going to pee right here in my pants if you dassn't come out of that bathroom." Other times, running into the house, "Open the can! I gotta go!"
"Ma, your mouth is a sewer," Dolores would say, her lips curled in one of her great lady acts.
My mother said to me, "She didn't used to talk like that when my father was alive."
"Better a sewer than thinking I should only wipe my ass with silk handkerchiefs," my grandmother spit back. Mabel could thrust, Dolores parried mightily. Oh, those better mothers! Mary Baker Eddy, the Christian Scientist Church founder, or Martha, Jesus' aunt, or family trees in which powerful Mafioso fathers took care of little Dolores and gave her ponies and presents and spoiled her rotten. Sometimes, unwell, Dolores would rant and blame Mabel for lost opportunities, crushed hopes, attacked her general deportment, her bone sucking, her oily beads of perspiration, the rags tied around her head. But most of the time, whatever else, there was a loyalty between them that braided them together as tightly as a cable.
"She hates me," Mabel said.
"She hates me," Dolores said. "A handful"
"A drinker."
"A liar."
"All the same, she's got pluck."
"A feisty one," Dolores recalled. "Gotta say that."
Mabel died alone in the middle of the night, in the middle of a thought, in the middle of a dream. A dream in which she escaped from the house and followed Sheba on the bright path across the lake, hardly minding as the lily pads crunched and toggled beneath her feet. Her voice as thick and resonant as the croak of a bullfrog, as regular. Vanished in a second, never tarried, swept out of life with the same burst of energy with which she'd entered it. "I know how to die," she'd be saying to herself. "Ain't nothin' to it!" Burst the invisible band of energy that holds us to earth. Halted the tympanic beat of the heart. Mabel makes communion with eternity, wishes she could use her body twice, smooth out the old skin and start over with somethin' good, but if not, be scattered as fertilizer for the neighbor's tomatoes. She didn't want to leave the children a bunch of old bones and carcass good for nothing and expensive to bury.
Kate and my mother called me in Chicago. Kate in her chopped staccato, that way she has of feeding her words back into herself through her teeth: "Mabel called me and Dolores last night and said she'd had the paramedics over cuz that she couldn't breathe, y'know? I offered to go over, cuz I made her some dope brownies and I wanted to give her a copper bracelet for the arthritis, but she said no, she was tired. Had the runs. Well, she wasn't tired exactly. More like dying."
"That's right," Dolores chimed in on the line. "I called her three times last night and she never answered, so I knew she was dead."
"So Dolores went over in the morning."
"I figured if she was dead, what could we do about it? Revive her? She was eighty-four!"
"And Dolores found her just inside the door with her coat on, like maybe she wanted to go out for a drive in the car." But she'd lost her license six months before, doing sixty-five in a school zone, cops no longer amused. Mabel grounded and brokenhearted about it, waiting up by her mailbox on the road, waiting for us to come pick her up, not wanting to waste the time it would take to get out of the house and into the car and out again, ready, stamping the ground under her rain bonnet, a goer.
Mabel always said, "When I die, Sarah gets the bookcases, the lamps, and this box of junk. Kate gets this box of recipes. Jack can have the old books. Want to take them now?"
"Shall I take the sofa you're sitting on, Gram, d'you need it right now? Maybe you'd like to sit on the floor?"
"When I die, don't spend no money you ain't got on some fancy funeral. Who's going to come anyway? Don't stand around yammering. I dassn't want any priests or
religious types. Just read a prayer or somethin'."
"Don't worry," we'd say. "You'll be put out with the newspapers up by the road. We'll lash you to a treetop in a red blanket like the Menomenee used to do, down by Puckawasay. You'll be a chrysalis, then a moth with scarlet eyes on its wings. You'll live forever, Gram. You'll live longer than me. You're too stubborn to die, Mabel."
"So I called the funeral home and the guy came over and right away he wants to talk money," my mother fumed. "Was that guy a jerk or what, Kate! Wants to put her in a casket and charge me two thousand smackers! Has the nerve to say, 'My kids need shoes!' I said, 'Well, my mother's not gonna pay for your damn kids' shoes!' I stood arguing with him by the front door where I found her. Really, Mabel's just lying there. Kind of indecent. I pulled her dress down, I propped her up a little at the foot of the stairs, and I covered her with a quilt. Nice enough."
Mabel looking out at the lake. I am in the boat, Gram, waving to you. Sheba is just a hint of porcelain on the water.
"So we called the county coroner and found out all the doofus had to do was take her to the funeral home and sign the death warrant," my mother said triumphantly. "And do you know what that costs? Fifty dollars! Even, no tax. That's all I had to pay! 'You cheat,' I said to him. 'You give me her body back this instant! My mother would rather ride with me than with you anyway.
"We wrapped her back up in a blanket and carried her into the station wagon. The funeral home people came after us then, gave us a cardboard box to put her in," Kate said. "Mom says, 'I bet Mabel's having the ride of her life!"'
"Stepped on it, you know, just to please her, the old lead foot. I didn't drive like some old crappy funeral procession. Cut in on a few people, gave her a few last thrills. I know she was happy. I know she'd be proud of me. She kept saying, 'Don't spend money you don't have, Dolores, don't make yourself broke any more than you already have.' If I pay twenty bucks a month for the next two years, I can afford this cremation."
"When we drove up to the gate at Wisconsin Memorial," Kate said, "all them people had quite a turn when they saw we had Mabel in the cardboard box. I guess they don't get too many ladies driving their own granny in like that. But you know, we kind of had fun. At least we were with Mabel all the way to the end of the line, weren't we, Dolores? Kind of like accompanying her on her spiritual journey."
"I put her ashes in the wall out there," my mother said. She hadn't buried Mabel next to her beloved Ray. "Too expensive, and it's done with," my mother said.
I wanted her to scatter Mabel's ashes over Lake Puckawasay on a gust of wind.
For how many years—five, ten?—I've reached out to the telephone, but Mabel has stopped answering. I want to tell my grandmother, "Oh God, you won't believe it, what she did today. She took that little cross from Louie's room and nailed it to the old totem pole. She tried to write a check for five thousand dollars to charity. You oughta see the negligee she bought! I tried it on and took it back. She stole another puppy. I fell out of love again. Kate threw the tarot and your card came up the sun card. That's the best! We deal your tarot cards all the time, Gram, we're trying to keep track. Kate saved some marijuana for your arthritis and a new potion she's making out of Chinese herbs. Look, here is your Woolworth's foot powder. I have it here in this box with all your stuff. Your painted lady figurine, your picture of Ray on your twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, just before he was gunned down, next to Sarah's baby bracelet—can you believe she's a lawyer?—and Dolores's high school report cards, those glowing scores. What are these squirrel steaks doing in your freezer? Throw them out, for the love of God, they look like roadkill. Call me at seven A.M., Keokuk, Iowa, the Holiday Inn, next week Thursday. My assignment is another farm story, endless pain between the furrows. Did you ever think about your red-haired baby girl, the one your father took away on the train? Did you think about those dead and lost when you were dying, Mabel? Or did you think of those living? Did you think about us?"
Instead I close my eyes. Your memory, a cotton rag around a cut.
Mesopotamia, Carthage, And Thebes
DELUSION is a pretty thing. It keeps molecules afloat, pulling lives forward to a shining distant point. To the thorny gates of heaven, perhaps, if the delusion is great enough. Or to the mere quiet that pools at the end of the day, if the delusion is smaller. I am rustling through my boxes, breathless, dizzy, spilling out letters and records, charts, diaries, legal briefs, all of it color-coded and cross-referenced from the year 1988, the year my mother began to revise her history. The year she decided it should all make sense. No, not ill, not ever. Here is the letter from January 27, the one that she wrote on her birthday, a testament to her life's ardor. Woman Edits Own Life, Creates New History.
"I want the right to be a little crazy at times, like everybody else—without doubts! My problems were drug-related. I alone sensed it. Only me. You children with your questions regarding my behavior at times are the worst insult of all! You all feared it might happen again!"
I fear it every day and every hour, a metronome clicking on a back shelf. True, it has been eight years since the sheriff's deputy and the stout matron fetched my mother and took her to the sanitarium. And how willingly I have consigned my mother's lunacy to a bizarre pastiche of memories: The Christmas tree bobs in the plaster of paris, and from its mizzenmast branch droops a pair of panties. My mother cocks her head under a darling little hat that says "Thorazine" as she answers the murmuring voices offstage. My rude memory, so totally in disarray, envelops the dreams with the facts. Over the years, other people's stories weave into the spaces, from the roads traversed mile by endless mile for the radio. In the interval of years, I have become an intimate of those in confinement. Incarceration of any kind lures me. The young inmate at Marion who sits sweltering all day, naked, filing a hacksaw key from a toothbrush that fits like a comma into his rectum or cheek or nostril. He will escape, he will. He thinks about it day and night. He will stab the guard, climb over the wall through the razor wire, grab, he says, at all the pink colors he is losing out there. His arms are chained behind his back, he wipes his sweating head on his knees. He will leave and take me with him, and after I leave him I go home and dream that my cat, Tealillie, is as large as my horse, Shadow, and that she is running through the fields outside the prison to me in a waiting car and she leaps to the window and shatters against the glass. Or the sixteen-year-old in the Kalispell, Montana, jail who believes he is the next Messiah. Escape, he says, I must escape, and in his mind he walks under the scrubby trees, hails a passing car, and is gone. In reality, he hits his head against the wall until he is dead. I lean closer to the tellers of these tales, position my microphone. I breathe the air they breathe. I feel what they are imagining for their lives, something bigger and greater and as free as high-flying kites. Imagination is their benediction, delusion their Host, but faith crumbles and betrays its followers. No pink colors left to grab. In every story behind walls is a fantasy of freedom. And why not? I have my own delusions of escape, of freedom.
Delusion is the total revision of history, my mother's ultimate escape. By 1988, she has encoded a new past for her present and it does not include twenty years of speaking in tongues to angels and archangels. She is passionate and willful and as determined as Job. She rips up the commitment bills that the county mental hospital spits out and eventually takes her to court to collect. "What will I pay, Mr. Administrator," she writes, "for being manacled behind my back, forced to defecate on the floor, to eat food shoved through a slot in my door like a common criminal? Thorazine forced down my throat, tranquilizers shot into my hip? I will ask you to pay me to remove the shame, the fear, the torture from my records! I will offer not to sue you for further damages. In the way of cash, I OFFER NOTHING!" Though indeed she has paid thousands, hiring a lawyer to help her "fight back and exonerate my good name." The hospital counters that she is creating "a smoke screen of allegations which will only reinforce your erroneous thought process and forestall any further tr
eatment."
We'll see who blinks, says my mother. She is having another birthday, she is marching into the future like a Christian soldier. She is fifty-eight. She collects the fragments of what she deems is her real story, her true life, thinking she will write her life, beginning and ending with that single line, "Children should be seen and not heard." Her legal bills cost her dozens of double shifts at the restaurant, cantilevering the heaviest trays to her shoulder. Her bunion grows, her feet swell, and she develops a nasty chest cough she cannot shake. At the end of each day she is exhausted, falls asleep on the living room floor with her clothes on. She spends hundreds of hours and all the money she earns on her cause of the New Self."THIS CASE IS NOT ABOUT MONEY!" my mother insists to me in slanted capitals in her birthday letter. "If I die before the trial—I want the case to go on! I will continue to fight for the disaccreditation of this institution!" My mother's pages, sent to me, pulse with her vitality. I imagine her nailing this tract to an oak door, like Martin Luther at the Reformation. I imagine her making a great split in what was and what will be.
And I am thirty-four, the age at which my mother first became ill. Her face bends down next to mine. I search the mirror on rising to claim my lips and eyes as my own, fixed on straight while I wait and listen. Am I going to go mad? The voices that come to me are only the old lisps of memory. Mabel cursing in her kitchen. "Jaysus, dassn't tell. Dassn't say nothing!" Dolores singing in hers. "I love you a bushel and a peck." The wind moans, and I hear the lake whispering the heavy-footed dialogue of our former selves. The one voice that speaks clearly is my mothers. You wronged me, she says. You betrayed me. And astonishing even myself, I decide that she is right.