Daughter of the Queen of Sheba

by Jacki Lyden

  Crazy like a fox.

  Just before the door closes in our faces, the psychiatrist, who'll need five thousand dollars in cash just to sign my mother in, watches my mother's labile face crumple and smooth like people do when you see them walking down the street crazy, the Joker spinning inside them. "Manic depression," says the doctor, a tough Austrian, by God. "Only she'd seem to be dominantly in the thrall of the manic side of the cycle. Very rare. Bipolar, but just the briefest depressive period. No compensatory deflation. Until she crashes, of course." I study my mother in the hallway, as she smirks and makes notes in Science and Health. Bipolar. It's the first time in more than twenty years of mental illness that I've heard that word applied to Dolores. Two poles, north and south. Two maypoles twirling in the wind. I have heard other words applied to Dolores: paranoid, schizophrenic, delusional, neurasthenic, suicidal most certainly. Nervous breakdown, says a 1966 record. Hysterical neurosis, reads one 1979 chart. "Patient improved through physician consultation." Really, doc, just through chatting, must've been a miracle worker. But bipolar is a new one on me.

  The maypole flaps in my mind. There was a real maypole. I was seven in our small town, Queen of the May, with a tinfoil crown. The other children laughed and teased me and called me queenie and wrapped me in the streaming, colored ribbons. But I cannot think about this. My musty memory springs confusion. I must think about money and the closed psychiatrist's door behind us. I must think about the fact that my mother has no insurance. Can I charge her bills on my Visa? In escalating bursts of frenzy, my mother has shrewdly canceled her health insurance, and life insurance, and liquidated all her other convertible assets, like stocks and a mutual fund. As if she were performing a party trick, she'd hold up a check. "Five thousand dollars for the Mary Baker Eddy Health and Science Mother Church in Boston" (I tore that one up). She gave away a car, said, "I just can't keep up with all my charity donations!" Her divorce settlement has been spent to smithereens. The house could be next. She owns Mabel's house, but has spent a small fortune on its improvements, and the bank that holds the home loan is threatening to take her to court. Then she'll be homeless. Then she'll wind up with me! I am desperate, desperate, desperate for that five thousand. As if she'd even sign in if I had it. Who do I know who has money?

  I call the Doctor. I call him without forethought, heat-rushed and mad. They have been divorced for sixteen years, and I haven't spoken to him for twenty. It is a code of silence. Now his voice on the line is like hot water pouring through ice, through vertebrae. I feel a sharp crack in my joints. As I talk, I can see my mother playing with a Xerox machine, photocopying something from Science and Health. In a sentence I explain the situation and beg the Doctor for the money. Treacly syrup, his voice in my ear, seaming up escape routes. Our voices together for these few minutes. Beads of sweat roll down my face like bowling balls. "Gee, dear," he says, "I haven't got it." I was mad to have asked him, to have spoken to him. I was mad to have shown him our vulnerability, and when I put the phone down my palms are soaked and there's a thorn in my tongue and I feel dirty all over.

  Something skitters down the hall like a child streaking for recess—Dolores, making a break for it. She spies a lunch tray, lifts a banana, and beans it at my head. Bingo! she yells, missing me by a mile. She pounds on, half skips, little crucifixes swinging from hips and rear, a rock-and-roll escapee. My mother yells, "I hate this place. God, is it ugly. The people in here are so ugly, they must've won the National Ugliest Contest. That psychiatrist! Why did you take me to see that Nazi?"

  She prances, and I follow in slo-mo. Where are all the beefy attendants fluent in the half nelson? My mother snatches a brochure from a bulletin board, waves it at my nose. "Help Coping with Mental Illness," it reads. Mindlessly, I put it back. Dolores sprints off through the empty cafeteria, out the side exit and into the parking lot, where Kate and Sarah luckily round a corner from the front entrance like girl commandos. We trap her flat against the car, our bug! And that's where we join hands to make the ring so she can't run away. "I care about you," Kate goads the rest of us, who have not like her spent most of our adult lives in a twelve-step group for the afflicted. Kate glares at us accusingly.

  "We care about you," Sarah the lawyer says dutifully, her voice small. In ten minutes she'll be so disgusted that she'll try to hitchhike home, a thirty-one-year-old and mother herself whom I'll have to flag down a half mile from the parking lot.

  "I care about you too, Mom," I say. "Why don't you sing 'Over by the Window and We'll All Help You Out'?" An old joke of my mother's like, "Want to lose ten ugly pounds? Cut off your head!"

  "Ring around the rosy," Dolores apes, slapping at our hands. "Last one down is a big fat clown. Hey, squirt, you stay at the damn hospital if you think it's so great. Yeah, good idea. Let's put Jacki in the hospital and have her head examined! See if there's anything besides old newspapers in there! An old rat's nest! Hey, do you know she had a secret back-alley abortion! How do we know she hasn't had more than one? Like one, two, buckle my shoe. Three, four, maybe more!" Particle matter moves downriver inside me. Trees slide heavily by as if on a rolling slab of stage scenery. "Last one to tag the car is it!" Dolores cries, nipping Sarah on the hand.

  "Shit. Damn it, Mom, knock it off." Sarah starts to walk. "Goddamn you. I mean, I care about you!" Sarah wanders toward the edge of the parking lot.

  We let my mother go. Sheba has won this round. Dolores shakes her car keys out of her purse with dignity and adjusts her white sunglasses. There are white gems sparkling on the corners. We're capsized in the lenses. Sarah has walked away down the street and won't get in the car. Hey, Sarah, I call, come back and get in the damn car! My mother has the keys, and that's dangerous, but I manage to make her stop and pick up Sarah. My mother drives home quietly, peering out the window as oddly as if she had been asked to spot gazelles on safari and we were some Water Bearers she'd hired for the journey. I think, I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream.

  When we get home a half hour later, my mother dashes into the house ahead of us and locks the door in our faces. We stand there. Christ Almighty. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. It's not that we don't have a key, it's that we've lost heart. My sisters and I trudge down to the pier, feeling like a troupe of very old, fat, and tired elves. Rent-An-Elf, you could call us. We perform at children's parties and loony bin lockups. The sun bounces off our house like radar, and the weather vane glows as if signaling Mars. "Make it a very large Manhattan," I tell the bartender in my mind. "A double. Whiskey, a finger of sweet vermouth—a dash of bitters." A great blue heron floats down to the pier, gilded icon bird with a sun-silvered fish wriggling down its throat. The heron often visits my mother along with a pair of "magical otters." The heron is real, the otters are not. After a while, as we girls sit in the late sun, besotted with thought, my mother opens the door, tapes a piece of paper to it, and bangs the door shut hard as if we're still after her. Fat chance. I run up from the pier over the parched lawn to retrieve what she's written. It says:

  "Hi!"______

  "This is"______

  Inviting you to a casual outdoor "supper" on my deck! I'm ever so sorry—I won't be able to reschedule at the present time as I'mbusy starting my NEW BUSINESS!!!!!!!!

  Signed,

  A former friend?

  Creative Renaissance, 4:30 P.M.

  And so we supped with Sheba, peeling her grapes and eating her pork chops on beds of rhubarb leaves, with glitter, twine, and bits of crepe paper tied round the handles of our coffee cups. Our voices trailed far into the night. Above our lamentations, my mother's voice could occasionally be heard climbing a ladder of giggles and swooping off, with a cry of "Unreal! Oh, girls, this is just unreal!" Her voice swooped farther and farther until I imagined they could hear her on the other side of Puckawasay.

  If in her well life, my mother was a struggling waitress, why then, in her mentally ill life, she wasn't. No sirree bob. She was a slick businesswoman, a jet-setter, a princess with a grow
ing empire. Never mind that her assets were vanishing. She would replace them and make more money with her Design from the Master Planner, namely God. She conceived of two businesses, both of which had roots in her well life. The first she called Creative Renaissance by Design, which would redecorate your house. The other was the Déjà Vu Gourmet Foods Division of Creative Renaissance, which I learned about when I called home one day and a strange, secretarial-type voice answered, "To which division of Déjà Vu Foods may I direct your call?" Déjà Vu. I had seen it all before, including her utter reliance on the Master Designer Namely God. He'd be paying all the bills, incidentally. If she needed something, she got it. A car, a cell phone, a secretary to sit in the kitchen and pretend there was more than one phone line? Done. Déjà Vu Foods would be a family business, my mother wrote in her notebooks. On her brief trip to Colorado to visit Sarah, she'd booked a conference room in Breckenridge for our annual Déjà Vu board meeting. We found this out later, when the bill came. Mainly we were supposed to be making Dolores's cookies and gourmet butters. My mother mailed us each her brochure. She had drawn a picture of a Golden Guernsey cow on the cover which looked like a hyperactive wildebeest with awning-fringe eyelashes. Déjà Vus mascot was a saucy milkmaid (is there any other kind?) in a tam-o'-shanter with a balloon popping from her mouth that said, "I'm a Déjà Vu mam'selle." You could say that again. My mother walked into the real Golden Guernsey Dairy offices in Wausau, Wisconsin, and presented her business plan on pink construction paper to an executive. "You give me milk, I give you gourmet butters," said the top executive and CEO of Creative Renaissance by Design, Déjà Vu Gourmet Foods Division. She crossed her legs assertively in her peppermint pink suit. "Done," said Mr. Golden Guernsey. Did he really? I don't know. I do know that at her home, Dolores worked round the clock. The secretary she'd hired was a slow thing named Evelyn, who sat for two weeks typing invoices to potential and imaginary customers. As board members, we girls got copies of Déjà Vu recipes and pieces of literature almost every day in the mail. She hand-painted hundreds of business cards, as well as little crocks, packaging materials, calendars, and mail-order how-to forms. I thought my mother's recipes were sort of fabulous.

  COCONUT BUTTER

  1 stick (¼lb.) Wisconsin AA butter, Golden Guernsey of course!

  ½ Cup of Clover Bear honey

  1 oz. coconut flavor

  freshly grated coconut

  Mix together and be a little coconut!

  For your dining pleasure!

  And there was Sweet Lemon Butter and Raspberry Blossom ("spread on MY banana bread, MY mixed fruit," my mother wrote on the handmade menu). Country Herb and Apricot Butter, Almond Butter and Black Peppercorn Butter—which was delicious. And then of course, the concoctions named after us: Peanut Sarah's Creamy Butter Cups, Farmer Kate's Buttermilks, and Jacki Promises (customers had to request this one sight unseen; they could get a sample of anything else). Also Black Walnut Logs, Snappy Gingers, Raspberry Hearts, Date Diamonds, and Mabel's Sulze (meat juice jelly, not a big seller if you weren't born before 1915 in Bohemia). But my absolute favorite recipe was Thorny's Revenge, named for her cat, Thorndike-Barnhart, who was rechristened that summer as my mother had been paging through the dictionary while working on her "new language." She phoned one of my friends at NPR to tell him about it. "You wouldn't believe the new language I'm inventing," she'd said. "You could broadcast it!" Anyway, Thorny's Revenge was a butter full of secret Cajun spices. On one little crock, my mother attached a tag that said, "Eat Until You Explode!"

  And Creative Renaissance-Déjà Vu Foods got results! My mother waltzed into the Toyota dealership in Menomenee, as crazy as a loon, and piff-pop-zip, handed them her Creative Renaissance business card, "Creating custom surroundings to fit your lifestyle." She left with a twenty-six-thousand-dollar fire engine red Toyota Supra with whitewall tires and spoiler and a turbocharged engine. She was flying! "Evelyn!" she commanded her secretary. "Here's another letter from Judge MacGill who wants me to pay Menomenee County Mental Hospital only about a billion dollars." "Judge Meant Daze!" she wrote on a slip of paper to enclose with his bill. "Send him an invoice for two thousand dollars' worth of product and one designer sweatshirt. Here's a bill from my lawyer. He's a schnook, always wants money! Give him an invoice for five hundred bucks' worth of Thorny's Revenge and Jacki Promises! And how about a nice crock of Lemon Butter?" And on it went. They sent her a bill, and she sent them an invoice—the mortgage banker, the savings bank, the lawyer and the sleazy brokers, the doctors, the billing office at Menomenee Hospital and then the collection agency with the threatening letters, the car dealership, the department stores and local merchants, even her dentist. Evelyn, as slow as she was, wised up after a couple of weeks, quit, and hopefully billed my mother for her time. My mother billed her back, sent her an IOU for Snappy Gingers, a coupon redeemable for other hand-made goodies. She couldn't waste time with bills, she had a thousand things to do. The butters would come in hand-thrown crocks, the cookies in decorated containers, Ant Trap Zap! She would do it, she could do it, build an empire, build a business, line the stores with special mouthwatering treats she'd concocted herself, the kind of self-invented entrepreneur that you read about in the pages of Money magazine, and it would be a family corporation. We would be wearing matching outfits to the ribbon-cutting, Mary Baker Eddy would head the board, Alfred would finally come forth and escort her to the Inaugural Ball for Déjà Vu at the Pfister Hotel.

  Kate and Sarah and I watched like village girls under a spell as Dolores spent her money as wildly as King Croesus. Bankruptcy loomed, but credit creaked on. One Saturday I stopped in and found my mother in her kitchen, surrounded by pyramids of carefully stacked purple coffee cups. She smiled at me. On each cup, she'd had her motto tastefully inscribed. "Think About Me," said the little cups. "Think About Me, Think About Me, Think About Me." Five hundred times over. "Think About Me."

  Oh, Mother, as if we could ever think about anything else.

  In the summer drought of 1988, the Mississippi River below Cairo, Illinois, shrank like a worm in the sun. The dryness and heat bleached out every green thing in Wisconsin like a faded daguerreotype. Farmers pursed their lips and filed for crop insurance and slaughtered their beef herds. Lawns looked like pipe tobacco. The great blue heron delicately mud-hopped on Lake Puckawasay. On their reservation up north, the Menomenee chiefs did a rain dance, a wasase, slipping their bodies into the dank snakeskins and turtle shells cast off by dying animals. The eastern half of the nation was parched for water and farmers cursed for it. I flew to Mississippi to do a story about tugboats trapped by drought on the southern end of the river, clogged for miles and miles outside Greenville like a child's bathtub traffic jam. Flawn, my sound engineer, and I met a Cajun tugboat captain, Tom, who navigated the Smokey Joe. Tom, the socialite of the river, ferried us up and down muddy troughs of water while blaring "Proud Mary" by Ike and Tina Turner. Tendrils of the Mississippi beat over our bow with trumpets, spoons, and cockscombs of spray. We were rolling, rolling down the river, microphones on, listening for the sounds of river life, water life, worlds we create. Then we transferred to another boat, the Dread Jadwin, the Coast Guard's big dredger, which looked like an antebellum steamboat. Flawn and I ate ham family-style in the old-fashioned atrium, and I tried to decipher the Louisiana bayou accent of the Dread Jadwin's captain, which was even thicker than Tom's: "This heah bigaloo than ya'll kinsee. Hae mose red bees and rise!" Something about the food.

  The heat and the thick hours of time clung to our bodies like wet wool suits. The Dread Jadwin, shuddering, shived a deeper channel into the river bottom. By midnight, the trapped tugs and barges slipped away one by one, beads falling off a string, and they floated their names out to the Coast Guard's radio as they passed. Echo Prince. Smokey Joe. Arabella. I sat on the Mississippi banks and waved good-bye to our friends and thought of Think About Me coffee cups and my mother. As I have done from so many, many places that she has never seen. Yet Sheba is a
s close as a breath. When I watch the Hamas gunmen, Izzedine al Qassam, shoot into the air at a blazing rally in Gaza; when I stare at an empty courtyard, palm befronded, gold and blue mosaic where the American hostages glumly sit around a swimming pool in Baghdad; when I climb, half shrouded, away from Tehran on hiking trails past the spring poppies in the El-burz Mountains, I think about her. She could do anything, go anywhere, become anyone. She does not even have to leave home to do it. And I wonder who is the greater chameleon, my mother or me.

  Her delusions choked around her mind that summer like the loosestrife attacking the cattail patch on Puckawasay. Hours got lost in her mania, days rose and sank there. There was the clown incident. The painting was one of those embarrassingly cloying ones that belongs on black velvet. The clown had tangerine hair, deflated teal inner tubes for lips, oval white eggs painted around his eyes, and little shamrocks meant to remind me of Ireland. Someone had sent the clown painting to me as a present, a someone who lived in what was deemed to be the toughest prison in the United States, if you believe the federal Bureau of Prisons. (A lot of state prisons would vie for the honor.) I'd done a story on the United States Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, back in 1986, then the Bureau of Prisons' successor to Alcatraz. Marion had had systematically tighter and tighter lockdowns under highly questionable circumstances until riots ensued and the inmates in the worst ward went crazy and murdered two guards. Then the guards went crazy in retaliation, raping prisoners with riot batons, smashing false teeth, beating people already chained in leg irons. The press had been kept out for over a month while bruises and broken bones healed, and Amnesty International would eventually condemn the prison, the only such distinction it made in the United States. Afterward, nearly all the prisoners spent twenty-three hours a day in cells in which they could take one step in one direction and three in another. The warden told me with a straight face that the director of the BOP in Washington had said that Marion was where they "had to keep all the predators, all the cancer cells, and if you don't contain 'em, they spread."