by Jacki Lyden
"And do you call them cancer cells?" I asked.
"Well, not to their face," he spluttered.
After the story aired, many of the "cells" wrote to me for years, and one of them, a bank robber and reputed prison leader of the Aryan Brotherhood, sent the clown painting. I was going through my neglected mail and happened to unwrap it on my mother's porch a day or so after we'd taken her to see the psychiatrist. My mother, scribbling nearby on one of her sketchpads, looked closely at the clown picture and picked it up. She gave it a long, cockeyed scrutiny.
"This clown," my mother said, "is speaking to me!"
"Really," I said. "What's he saying?" Ears on alert.
"He tells me I have a message from God," she said, eyes sumptuous with light. But God had so many messages for Dolores that summer that the switchboard jammed. She vanished in the night. It was a couple of days before we knew she'd gone to Marion, USP. How my mother managed to drive her Toyota Supra nearly five hundred miles to Illinois when she could not hold a thought in her head steadier than a dust mote, I do not know. Marion is in a lonely spot, a federally protected swamp not far from the Kentucky border. Even if you know where to look, it is still down the moseying roads where we lock the dark secrets of our human failures. Yet somehow, Dolores, who had had her own experience with incarceration, managed to make out the tiny signs that form a Hansel-and-Gretel path to the prison. The forest there is so overgrown and spangled with moss that it should be renamed the Big Bad Woods. My mother, avenger of the wronged, pressed the intercom button at the gate, announced herself as the daughter of a certain Mafia chieftain known as "Big Tuna," and was denied entrance. She would have been alone in that swamp, she told me later, but for the helicopter that she claimed followed her for ten miles out beyond the dogwood trees and marshes. And it would not surprise me if it had.
Not long afterward, I found that the reputed head of the Aryan Brotherhood who'd sent the clown portrait wrote my mother tender letters of his great love. My mother responded with letters about magical otters, blue herons, and thunderstorms that frightened her cat, Thorny. He probably thought it was code. This man, in prison since the age of eighteen, had convinced himself that I had posed as someone else to tell him of my romantic love for him. And that in order to do that, I was now writing him under an assumed name—my mother's. I gasped at his longing, for his greatest passion was his fierce yearning for freedom, a convict's impossible dream of space and hills.
"So sorry, but you are not writing to me," I answered immediately when I put it all together. "You are writing to my mother, my actual real-life mother. She's not well. She thought she could spring you from prison. I know it's odd, but things on the outside are crazy too." He apologized profusely and immediately sent my mother four old-rose trees, a Rosa Mundi, an Empress Josephine, a Gloire de Dijon, and Noisettes. Each a different hue. "Now, pink," my mother had written that summer, "that's the color of renewal, and white ... that's a pure strong statement without fear." She planted the rose trees beside her front walk, and they bloomed luxuriantly, a color riot, until they were slashed down by a Wisconsin ice storm that came the following spring. We never heard from the Marion prisoner again, and for all I know he is still there, in that other world, in a cell half-buried in darkness.
That was the summer my mother bought the racehorse (a quarter-interest, actually) and the summer that she changed her name legally to Gimbels, for Gimbels Schuster, and for the name of the distant aunt who she had decided was her real mother. It was the summer she wrapped herself in a sheet and did a rain dance for her former boyfriend, and it began to rain. It was the summer she was teaching the special course about Divine Love, and the meaning of Colors. "This course will be taught by me or I will not be the teacher," my mother wrote. "Now we all know that Creative Renaissance by Design is a special gift from the Master Planner to promote healing. This will be a family corporation. I have already instructed my daughter Kate. BLACK, for example, will indicate a lack of fear. That's a strong statement. WHITE will denote a pure, unadulterated color." It was the summer she spent a night in a county lockup when she became delusional and agitated at a library. "You don't know who I am," she cried. "I am Mary Baker Eddy's daughter. I need to get to the Christian Science Mother Church in Boston!" It was the summer I walked into work in Chicago, and the NPR national editor was on the line, saying, "Jacki, someone has just called and told us that if you don't cover the big Pabst Brewery summer parade, Gimbels Schuster is going to pull out all of its funding from NPR. Do we get money from Gimbels? Should we do it?" (An editor long gone, I might add.) It was the summer the county's social worker who I called pleading on an almost daily basis reminded me that I could not commit her until she constituted a clear fatal threat to herself or others, and so we lived with her, frightened and giddy, waiting for her to do us bodily harm.
Living in the Land of Babylon
MY MOTHER TRAVELS in her imagination as I have traveled in my life. There was a time when two weeks in one city seemed onerous to me, when the rhythms of it got overly familiar and strangling and tired. Often I have kept my passport in my purse, as if by looking at it and its strange visas I might confirm that this real world, the North American one in which I temporarily find myself, is not the real world at all but a kind of large airport holding room for tomorrow. Tomorrow is a country of its own, but I always think I belong there, taking up residence until it no longer pleases me. In that sense, I wonder if I am like my mother. "Go out," I remember her saying in our small town. "Go away from here, leave, do anything!" I have done anything. I have walked on the bar and crushed a cowboy's glass in the middle of a great prairie of nowheres. Been mugged by car hijackers in Dublin, interviewed the head of Sinn Fein, Gerry Adams, in Belfast wearing one black shoe, one brown—all I had left after the Dublin mugging the day before. Jumped into pools in my underwear at dawn in Amman, and had the PLO pick me up in the middle of the night in Tunis to drive me around in a limousine with the windows blacked out before a meeting with Yassir Arafat. I've pulled on the now-fraying Armani suit bought with Gulf War profit in Rome and forgotten about amoebic dysentery precisely long enough to interview King Hussein of Jordan in his palace. Excellent eminence. I have driven five hundred miles through the desert to Iraq, retching under a scarf by the roadside, spitting out Mr. Johnnie Walker while confirming virtually every stereotype of the wanton Western female correspondent for my Arab driver. Arriving in Baghdad, I am wracked with sweat and chills. Cover up, the driver says, for I am so hot I've shed my jacket. Cover up! "Here to cover the war, or crew for Oxford?" the Independent correspondent jokes at the Al Rashid Hotel. I smile. I don't care. I have been here before. It seems like a millennium ago. Thugs in shades stand around in the lobby, extortionists, spies, and torturers. We know we can touch bottom in Iraq. We know this is the date palm swamp. Here is my translator, a good man, a Christian whose family was sent to prison and the front with Iran to force him home from studies in London. Then he was imprisoned and given a choice of rape by a Tikriti goon or a bottle. We meet in secret near the San Raphael Hospital. "I want to get to America," Paulus says, deliberately giving an interview critical of Saddam to an Italian TV station. I tell him there is no chance. In Amman, I mention his name to our embassy in Jordan, which doesn't want to know, and to the Brits, who put him on a list. A month later he will make his escape from Iraq, get to Jordan, and there's a call for me from the International High Commission on Refugees in London. Yes, they say, we will help him get to America, and he calls me one day from Michigan Avenue in Chicago, where I am living, and says, We're here, the wife and children too. One chance in hell to redeem the saved.
If only I could save my mother, make some intercession with the International High Court on Reason Against Insanity. When I travel in far places I am not certain who I'm remembering. The mother from my childhood who sang Carmen Miranda songs and baked banana bread in the middle of the night to soothe nightmares? Or the mother who speaks in tongues and dresses up in the b
edsheets and thinks she's a queen or a bride or the daughter of Mary Baker Eddy? How can I be sure who she is when I'm on the other side of the world listening to language about human shields and burning up half the earth and drinking the blood of the fallen infidels? You'd think it was the Crusades all over again. What I want to do is vanish, wander into one of these fantastic marketplaces, these souqs, and shroud myself in one of these black chador things and lean against the wall where they've painted slogans in ocher denouncing the infidel in a script I'll never understand though I try— kaf alif noon, letters that sound like music, wah, ein, rah —and I don't know who I am anymore or whom I'm thinking about and half the world's gone crazy anyway, and that's one very big hangover I have. Who is she really? The question makes me feel at home here seven thousand miles away under the date palms in Iraq, where boundaries have dissolved overnight and everyone longs to be someone else.
"Paul Marshall Lyden," read the obituary in the Menomenee Eagle. "Born 1899, died Oct. 29th, 1988. Family from Clifden, County Galway. An Irish wake is planned for Saturday evening. Bring canned memorials to the Menomenee Food Pantry! He leaves four granddaughters, Sarah and Kate and Jacki Lyden, and Dolores Gimbels of Menomenee."
It was a small thing, I told myself, and it didn't matter. My mother had placed an obit in our local newspaper for my paternal grandfather, making us her sisters. Clues like this baffled me. It was true that my grandfather had died, hanging on until shortly after I'd come home from covering the Olympics in Seoul. I'd taken him to Ireland and his ancestral town three years before, just the two of us. (We're on our honeymoon, he'd say to one andall, isn't that something? Or, You know what Pat said to Mike when he came to America and saw grapefruits for the first time? Gee, they're so big, wouldn't take very many of them to make a dozen!) But he was my paternal grandfather, not my mother's father, and Paul Lyden and I had grown close only in his very last years. Nor was my mother, I pointed out to an editor at the Eagle, our sister. Didn't anyone check these things?
"You never know anything with her," Kate said. "You only know that you never know."
My mother is a worm in our brains that makes us crazy, Kate and Sarah and I. The person she was is vanishing, and I think I am vanishing too. I get a letter from her telling me that she recently heard me on the radio, and did not know until then that I had learned to speak Italian. I get letters all the time, circulars for Déjà Vu Foods, recipes for love potions, tips for looking more beautiful, dresses she's cut from magazines and mailed to me as things I might like to have, or that she will promise to sew for me. She calls my sisters and me laughing in the middle of the night, talking about people we don't know.
"I feel helpless," Sarah told me on the phone from Denver. "I'm angry at God or whoever. I can't clean up after her anymore. I feel like her problems are my problems, just like when I was in law school. I wake up, I'm with her. I go to bed, I'm with her. I've got my own family now. I'm supposed to be independent."
"Well, all I can tell you," said Kate, another day on the phone, crunching a Farmer Kate's Buttermilk from my mother, "is that yesterday I bought her old car, kinda t' give her some money, and then she called the police and told them I'd stolen it. That was tootin'! Except, y'know, the police, they don't even believe her no more. Then she comes over in a black leather miniskirt and this hot pink blouse open to there and she looks so coy and so cute I wanna slug her. Y'know how that feels? She wants to help me look for a kitten she let loose in my back yard the day before. And worst of all, she never, ever, ever says I'm sorry. Y'know?"
That was the fall we tried tough love on my mother. We'd make her ask us for our help getting treatment. We would isolate her, make her beg for it, her and her damn magical otters and great blue heron, her Creative Renaissance and endless parcels for Alfred—tennis balls, swizzle sticks, cuff links. The sheriff would call Kate to "come look at this here room a junk I got for that man." No more of her one-sided dialogue with the courts and businesses and oddballs who yammer into my ear day and night through her. Our mother, the small-town pariah. Let her loose, as Lear was abandoned by Regan, Goneril, and Cordelia, until she is by law a danger to herself or others. Lethal, the Queen of Sheba. The tough part we were good at, but I must say the love suffered.
NOVEMBER 5, 1988
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
Dear Dolores:
Kate says you wonder why you don't hear from me anymore. I'm terribly sorry to say I've had it. I'm exhausted by your stubborn, stupid, childish refusal to get help for your obvious mental problems, problems even you admit having. Pride, I think, is a big factor. You relish denying treatment. You love having me jump through hoops. When you decide to get help or let us get help, I'll be there. We all will be. Until then, you're my nightmare. You're not the mother I remember nor a person I'm proud of.
Love,
Jacki
P.S. I won't be coming home for Christmas.
Immediately she sent back all the cards she'd kept that all of us had ever sent her in the previous thirty years. An overflowing box. Three decades' worth of Christmas cards and Halloween and St. Patrick's Day remembrances. Even the plaster casts you make with your hands and spray-paint gold in kindergarten. Corny, but then we were corny. Early stick-figure drawings with blue faces; poems composed in doggerel. My mother included a poem she said she'd written for me on my birthday that year while she was sick, styled in the kind of rhyme that leaves the listener bug-eyed: "Lord, give me a heart that is heavy no more, and wisdom to know that on wings I can soar. Love opens the door to sweep shadows away, where music and laughter brighten each day..." A good thing she doesn't know her own mind, I say.
My baptismal announcement then arrived at my door, a 1950s puffy white satin card with a pink baby lying in a blue forget-me-not cloud. Above the baby, in red ink, on the envelope: "Jacki must keep first name given her by her parents, may choose middle name and last name. Learn more, read more, about God! For GOD's SAKE." Inside, she wrote "Church of God" in red ink over my baptismal name. She changed our family name to that of a well-known Milwaukee Mafia mastermind. Here was the Mother's Day card I'd sent her the year before. "To the Best Mother in the world," my card read, "who is one of a kind." Undeniable.
Her accompanying note said, "You can have all these BACK! I can't feel the messages in them anymore!" The handwriting served as a clue, for when my mother is sick her penmanship eclipses with her brain. Scary block capitals scrabbled down the page like cockroaches after a bit of meat, her plump child's cursive tossed on the page like boudoir pillows, and there is the nightmare zone of an upended Gothic alphabet with wavery spiderlegs. Inverted word sequences distort like a hall of mirrors: W.O.W. = M.O.M.!
NOVEMBER 15, 1988
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
Dear Mom:
I got your package. I'm sorry you can't feel the "messages" from those cards anymore. I'm sure there are feelings underneath the present tension we both still have. We love you but perhaps you don't realize that your behavior is totally out of line and stressful in the extreme. We will miss you this Christmas, always our special time, and I hope you will use the solitude to reflect on what harm you are doing to yourself. You need to be in treatment. We want you back, the real you. Let me know what I can do to help.
Love,
Jacki
DOLORES TAYLOR GIMBELS
LAKE PUCKAWASAY, WIS"WE-CAN"WIN!
DECEMBER 5, 1988
Jacki:
This is not a hate letter, this is a hurt letter. You have hurt me to the point where I must say I do not want you to come here for Christmas. I never asked you to be my keeper—and I still do not. I have repeatedly told you how I feel and you ignore it! You are not welcome here for a while! You owe me money for Déjà Vu cookies—none for a dress I am not making you. Perhaps it's my fault you are so callous and self-centered. In fact, I'm sure it is, but as the oldest you think you can boss everyone around and I don't want anymore of your bullshit and "concern." So screw you! I'm not your mother and I'm
not fifty-eight!
Dolores
I am raving, quarreling with the lost. I send my mother a pamphlet, a brochure about lithium. I have gotten it from a telephone help line, something I have seen on the bus from the office to home. I am clutching at straws. I would buy leeches if I thought they'd cure her. "Try this, you'll like this," I write to my mother, enclosing the pamphlet, as if I were offering her a Big Pineapple Hawaiian Vacation! Miracle Cure Included! I write, "Lithium is a natural salt that works on your biochemistry the way insulin works on a diabetic. As you can see, tens of thousands of people suffer from your same illness. The good news is you're not alone!" Hallelujah, Mom, you can rejoice. Insanity. Blasting the familiar turf like fire or flood, a hot lava flow concealing everything, removing the tree from the path, the path from the mountainside, the mountain itself. Waiting for the future to be invented from entirely new ground.
"LITHIUM WORKS LIKE SALTPETER ON THE 'HEAD,'" my mother writes back on an envelope. Inside, she has made her own version of the pamphlet I've sent her:
Manic-Depressive: A mental disorder, extremes of joy or rage, uncontrolled and often violent activity having or characterized by alternating attacks of mania and depression ... as in manic-depressive psychosis—an unusual fondness or craze, as for BIG MEN, soft lights, dancing, music, laughter, good times, good health.