by Jacki Lyden
She was never crazy. She was stressed and overloaded, neglected, abused. Her doctor-husband gave her the wrong drugs for the rheumatic fever, for being his little doll, a doll with insufficient stuffing in the 1960s, twenty years before. My mother writes, "He brought me Ritalin for narcolepsy and I didn't know what it was. I looked it up in the dictionary. It said 'narcolepsy: an uncontrollable need to sleep.' With the Ritalin I was flying! Hands and feet so swollen I had to crawl from room to room to put the children to bed. He said I had rheumatic fever! He gave me Indocin to relax my muscles! And then the Cogentin, Haldol, Prolixin." ("Indocin," writes an esteemed doctor whom my mother persuades to send a letter of testimony on her behalf, "causes delusions, feelings of unreality, hallucinations.") "And what of my ex-husband who began this whole process of unwarranted incarceration? He kicked my children across the room. He lifted them by their hair and threw them against a wall. He tromped on their dog. He exerted extreme mental pressure on all of us." Spinning, swinging from his arms over a sea of grass.
My mother goes on in her open letter to her children: "I have decided to ask you girls for something you may not be able to give me. Eight years ago today I was released from Menomenee County Hospital. I want your understanding. I gave you fragmentary information, hoping you would understand, but you didn't. I am not, and I never was, crazy."
Never crazy. It never happened to you. Ant Trap Zap! It never happened to me. We'll throw out those old pages and get some new ones at the K Mart. There is a life I'd like you to try, size six. We can always take it back if it doesn't fit. You will be a housewife heroine, pushed into adversity by a demanding doctor-husband and prescription drugs, and I will be free forever from the taint of your insanity. Prescription drugs, I tell my friends confidently. Misdiagnosis. Miss Diagnosis. Clodhopper attendants, Nurse Ratched on the case. Dolores naked and chained in a pit. Lions and tigers and bears. In my heart, Sheba is no bigger than a baby's tooth that I might wear around my neck, a reliquary of delusion. She never came, I never saw her, my mother was never, ever ill. For months, I tell myself that this is what I truly believe, and my mother visits her lawyer as if he were her savior, filing motion after motion. He entwines his hand in hers when they have tea. The lawyer says that he will exalt her for all posterity and be with her through all the ages. And I wait, we all wait, while Sheba smiles.
July 1988 unfurls around us like bolts of bright cloth sailing into the air, exuberant and tactile. My boyfriend and I and our friends flee the sweltering city. We are to pick up my mother on a Saturday evening for Heritage Days, the carnival held over the Fourth of July holiday in our small town, a new name for the same fair where Kate and Sarah and I became Miss Americas. It's the kind of night in which you can feel the sounds of summer and its peeping reverberations kissing your ear. Now that Mabel is dead, my mother has moved into Mabel's bungalow. She has carted away decades' worth of hunting and fishing and summer detritus, consigned Mabel and Louie to the spirits of Lake Puckawasay, had the outhouse hauled away, thrown the frozen midget squirrel steaks into the garbage. Zap! Old Mabel's refuse heap! Dolores works her real-life magic—makes the bungalow airtight and converts the attic into her airy upstairs boudoir, layers the porch floor with Mediterranean tiles, adds dormers and a bathroom and a skylight and bay windows that face Lake Puckawasay and its lilies. "Come on up," I say to my friends. "Water-skiing! Horseback riding! Utter relaxation! Meet my mom!" Bivouac here from the thrum of our busy urban lives.
But when we arrive, the house is dark, opaque in every window but the one where I think I see a candle glow. "Perfectly ordinary," I lie chirpily as I turn on the lights and invite my friends to sit and have a nice cold beer, Mabel's old housewarming. I spot a dictionary that my mother has opened and see random words brushed with pink Hi-Liter. Stupidly, I close it, sacrificing clues. "Thirsty?" I smile, handing round Pabst Blue Ribbons, imitating ordinariness.
"Mom?" I call upstairs, my intestines coiling like a garden hose. No answer. "Be right back," I say, giving my friends another grand smile. Phony wattage strains my face. "She's primping, probably." I snap on the stairway light and climb to my mother's attic bower, wet my lips. "Mom?" I can feel her waiting for me at the top with a garden trowel in her hand. How will I explain it to my friends if she pops me one? I round the top banister.
"Hey, Mom, what's going on up here? Holding a seance?" How I hope not.
My mother sits resplendently before her mirror next to a small candelabra, drawing a mole on her face, moistening the thick air with a perfume atomizer.
"Hi, shrimp," my mother says without looking at me. "Smell this! It's called Enchantment! What do you think?"
What I think is that she is the regal queen of her destiny, her face brilliantly made up beneath a Marie Antoinette wig, or rather, as she pirouettes, candelabra in hand, I see that it is her hair, impossibly waved with gel into so many tight pin curls that she appears to be wearing bicycle gears. It must have taken hours. A side curl is pinned over her ear. She makes it dance on her shoulder, like a long piece of ermine tail. "Like it?" she says. "Pretty foxy." Then, ahead of me, she floats down the stairs.
Here she is. My mom, the One and Only!
Inside the mask of my mother's delusions, she smiles. My guests stand agog, rapt, bewitched by a woman who appears to have abandoned her bridegroom on the wedding cake. She is made of hairdo and lace rosettes, her decolletage is a scimitar, suspended for battle. My mother has stuffed her curves into a black bustier with garters, which dangle over a transparent lilac half-slip. Underneath, some sort of pantyhose hide any real nudity. Yet the suggestion remains, and I look around uncomfortably for a raincoat. On her cheek is the fake mole the size of a shamrock. Coquette on Mars.
"Welcome," says my mother to my guests, in a throaty and expansive voice. "Who's ready for Heritage Days?"
"Mom's a little overboard in the costume department," I say to my friends.
"Who's ready for Heritage Days?" my mother asks. The young woman who is my friend Alex's date lattices her fingers over her eyes, chirruping and peeping. "Ahahahaha," she burps nervously, like a little frog.
"Cover up," I yell at my mother. "Now!"
She gives me a coconspirator's wink. "Welcome to my party," Dolores says to my friends. "Would anyone like to have a snack? Don't mind Jacki, she's a prude. Alex"—she's known him for years—"will you be my date until Mr. Alfred of Milwaukee brewing fame arrives? You're such a gentleman." Alex is an old flame of mine, was my date at Sarahs wedding. A boon road companion and fellow fisherman, he's known me long enough to know something of my mother's prior proclivities. But the emphasis has always been on the word prior. Still, Alex, a true gallant whose own inner resources are vast, realizes how much has suddenly gone wrong.
"My pleasure, Dolores," he says courteously, slightly bowing. A saint. The bald spot on his head flushes a little pink halo.
I run around the house peeking into closets, trying to find a bathrobe, a large towel. Should I pull down the chenille bedspread and roll my mother in it as if I were trying to put out a person on fire? I yell at my friends to sit down, have a Coke. But who am I kidding? We are all gob-smacked, giddy, laughing hysterically. I could drink a pitcher of Jim Beam with a very small twist.
"Who are you?" I hiss at my mother in the kitchen, twirling past my boyfriend, who has finally recovered enough to offer her his jacket. He's an older guy who I've been seeing for a while, and he and my mother plainly adore each other. He's in it for the ride. He edits a major men's magazine well versed in the lingerie look. Perhaps he's partly responsible for the Victoria's Secret display before me. "Psssst. Who are you?" I hiss again at my mother. "Kitty on Gunsmoke?"
"Let them eat cake," whispers my mother, fluttering false eyelashes and talking to no one. "I want to go to Heritage Days. Benjamin," she wheedles my boyfriend, flaunting her bosom beneath his nose, "how do I look?"
"In my opinion, Dolores, you are somewhat underdressed," he responds in his nasally Harvard accent. (And
to think I fell in love with him for lines like that.)
"Would you cover up?" I snap. "Get something decent on! Or you're not going to Heritage Days! You look like some kind of a floozy!"
"No," says my mother, "I don't think I will. Just because you're an old fuddy-duddy. You're not the Queen of Heritage Days, I am." She parades slowly around the kitchen, past the plaque that says "Lord Bless This House" and the ceramic swan holding paper napkins and the antique tackle box displayed on a shelf. The ordinary things of the past. Now she pretends to braid her Marie Antoinette forelock.
"I've been preparing all day," my mother says, patting down a quaint little yawn that plays, one can only say, merrily about her lips. "And I don't even have a maid or a charwoman to help me up there in the garret. So you best take me to the party, shrimp, or you'll disappear. I'll have to put you in the dungeon or the vault or the iron maiden thing and cut your head off. To Heritage Days! I've got a date with Alfred there, and we're going to rumble to the rumba. We're going to knock 'em into kingdom come."
I am buttoning her into a long blouse, right over her bustier and see-through slip, buttoning her up as you would a child going out to play in the snow. The blouse is some kind of paisley sixties tunic. Now you hardly notice the garter straps on her thighs. And I am laughing. Because I would rather go with her in her bustier and tunic than leave her at home with the candles, because I believe that the normal society of our small town—the butcher and baker and candlestick maker—just might jolt the delusions storming the Bastille in her mind. Because I'm relieved. An obsessive part of me wants to see the Queen of Heritage Days in action. All during the drive up from Chicago, I had been repeating the phrase to myself, "She was never sick in her life, never sick in her life." For five months I had joined the revisionist campaign of her history, banished every scene of her insane past as inadmissible evidence, mistakes, false memory, hysterical and collective neuroses. Scrubbed the pantheon in my memory free of goddesses and mothers with tiaras on their curls. How much I had needed her to play the role of sane mother, wronged mother, constant mother, good mother.
Now I put this crazy little apparition in the car with the rest of us, wondering if Marie Antoinette will pass with the night, an accidental phantom who detoured here, scrounging a bit of cake, perhaps. Or will she hang around for months until we lock her up and throw away the key? I am already composing the letter in my head. "Dear Menomenee County Mental Hospital, my mother has been countersuing you under the misapprehension that she was never mentally ill. Unfortunately, recent events suggest otherwise. Please come and haul her away in one of your oxcarts!" But off we go, to the carnival where I posed as Miss America at the age of five and my mother now reigns as Queen of Heritage Days. How secure I felt as we ventured out, what comfortable old ground we were on, the parade ground of poses. My mother and myself and this tilting at windmills. Doña Quixote and Señorita Sancha Panza off through the Estremadura. When I had tried to convince myself that she'd always been sane, it was like letting go of a religious faith, as if I'd become a heretic. The past went blank, and I'd lost my entire concept of Oz, or the Sargasso Sea, or Byzantium. It was boring and sterile and promised a future of more of the same. Now Sheba had returned to my family as our little maid, our Alice and her White Rabbit on Lake Puckawasay, Miss Bo Peep, our Madonna dressed in fetish paint, spinning on her jewelry box, our whirling mother.
At Heritage Days, we sat at tables under tents, planting ourselves around my mother, barring further contact with the crowd. Oddly enough, she didn't stand out all that much in the dark. It was rather like sitting down with a medium who is in filmy contact with another world. My mother did a running commentary on the antics of unseen players. "Unreal," she'd say. "See that woman with the big red nose?" But there would be no woman with a big red nose. She ordered us to bring her lemonade and roast corn on the cob and bratwurst cooked in beer. She insisted on dancing with Alex, and in a gesture for which I shall be forever grateful, he gave her his arm and two-stepped with her smoothly to a cowboy waltz; he was a great dancer. I saw a few heads turning, though not as many as I had expected, and the look on Alex's face said only slightly, "Help, I've been cast in a Fellini film." Alex's high forehead declined toward Dolores's marcelled curls. I could see her lips move as she chatted away to him, something about the meaning of various colors. "Pink is very important," I heard her say. "My babies were pink. They still are." She closed her eyes often when she spoke, reaching for focus. "Of course, pink is also a blood derivative, and if you spill some pink on the floor, or, say, for example, the kind of negligee you would wear on your honeymoon, it's very hard to get out." My mother had had such a bridal nightgown and kept it for years in her cedar chest.
She wanted to wait for Alfred and dance with him when the cowboy band started up again. As many times as Alfred had broken her heart and never arrived, she always waited anyway. Sometimes I waited for him too. I thought he might pull up in a pumpkin shell coach-and-four, wearing a waistcoat and cocked hat, only that very morning turned from pond frog to prince. Lake Puckawasay had plenty of pond frogs.
"I won't leave," my mother said, digging in her tiny princess heels as if to spike herself to the bedrock, her size quinn feet hooked around her chair. "I wont, absolutely. I'm having fun, and you always want to spoil everything whenever I have a good time."
"Fine," I said, staring like I barely know her. "Walk home, see if I care." I imagined her bumbling the mile of rural route back to the bijou bungalow, silver sandal heels like diamond drills in the pebbles. Garters snapping beneath her tunic while dark cars pass that look to her like spaceships cruising the back roads for human specimens; she looks to them like Tinkerbell.
We left without her and went to the outdoor drive-in, the Scottie. While I ordered chocolate jimmies on my cone, while I watched the 1988 crop of cheerleaders serve us our root beer floats and Scottie Twosome hamburgers, I thought of how she must appear on the highway, a runaway from the court of Louis XVI. I thought of how my mother and father brought us to this drive-in so many years before, how Kate and Sarah and I crawled on the roof of my father's car and ate there with ketchup and soda dripping down the windows and nobody minded at all. But that was at the very beginning, before everything became the way it was now. She could burn the house down for all I cared, her little garters jingling against her skin. I could feel them as she trudged home, slapping her thighs, slapping and jingling as if they were the coins of her realm.
It is a week later, and we are at a private mental hospital in Milwaukee. Kate locks hands with me, and I lock hands with Sarah. We form a small ring, and inside that ring is our mother. We are catching a mermaid in a net. I begin to walk, and then my sisters crab sideways. Slowly we move like dancers around the mother in our midst. Ring around the rosy. "I'm concerned about you," Kate says loudly and solemnly. Pocket full of posies. "I'm concerned about you, too," Sarah says, and I say, "And me. I'm concerned about you as well!" Yes, I'm concerned about you, all right. My concern is that I would like to tie your garter belts around your neck and leave you like Mrs. Rochester in the attic. Later, we could do a family reenactment of Jane Eyre and perch you on the roof while we set the house on fire. We chant "concern" like "Row, row, row your boat," like Mabel yelling, "I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream," Louie singing, "I like bananas because they have no bones." Me singing back, "I hate peaches because they've hearts like stones." My mother is a monument, face to the sky. Ignoring us. Never seen us before. Pretends to file her nails and holds up her hand to see if she's made a half-moon shape or a teardrop.
All afternoon, my mother has been talking to a psychiatrist, for we have tricked her. She thought we were taking her for lunch, and we ambushed her and brought her instead to a private psychiatric hospital, our captive. Take that. When she realized what we'd done, she stuck her tongue out at us and made her when-she-was-horrid face. She was dressed all in white—white sarong, with the straps twisted over her shoulders like a jungle vine, a lar
ge fake gardenia in her hair, white stockings and sandals. A missionary from God. She carried Mary Baker Eddys prayer book, Science and Health. A crucifix swung from one hip, a Jerusalem cross from the other. She could have been a Lyndon LaRouche airport proselytizer. In fact, for a day or two we lost her when she camped out at Billy Mitchell Field in Milwaukee, somehow—we never found out how—procuring enough money without a credit card or bank withdrawal to fly to Denver to attend Sarah's back yard barbecue.
"Hi," she said to Sarah and her astonished guests. Doing the wigging out. "I'm Dolores, Sarah's party-girl mom! Do you know that Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy tells you to go away evil, come back love? Science is the blessing. I am teaching a course about the meaning of colors and moods. If you are in a downcast mood, think pink." Sarah and her husband had her for three days. So that my mother couldn't escape at night, Sarah's husband slept in front of the door.
Ah! but now we have her where we want her. Sarah bribed her back to Wisconsin from Denver, and we frog-marched her to a shrink. "Of course this all seems a little odd to my girls," my mother explains at her appointment. Eyes to heaven. Clouds enter her mind. There are things she can't quite see tossing inside them. The shrink scribbles notes. "There are so many things I've never told the girls about my past. I'm a marked woman. They're not familiar with counterterrorism like I am. I've found electronic bugs in bars of soap. You know, I used to be the victim of secret medical experiments conducted by my former husband. But now I'm a devout Christian Scientist. Go away evil, come back love. Even if you ordered me to take medication, I would have to tell the court that it's against my religious principles." She opens her Mary Baker Eddy Health and Science book. Cast out the evildoer, heal thyself!