by Jacki Lyden
And on the flip side she has written:
To: Jacki "Ballistreri" Lyden
Merry Christmas, Asshole!
Your father was a little man. But he could carry a heavy burden. My father was Frank Ballistreri, the Milwaukee Godfather. A big man. If I DIE on Christmas Day, it's not my problem!
Jacki, you're an asshole! Your father was a nice boy.
love mom.
When our mother is ill, any script of our lives can become an interior monologue for her: a birth, a death, a passage of any kind. Here is a picture from the overflowing box, Kate and Sarah and I at Kate's wedding. The year is 1980, my mother is sick that year and often missing and Kate wants to get married. We argue. Wait until she is better, I say. Kate will not hear of waiting, Kate being Kate. November is her destiny. And who knows when my mother's touring caravan will cross the border to Well? Kate borrows a cape from Sarah and a peasant dress from someone else and stands beside her bridegroom. Standing, in fact, in the same spot and before the same altar in the Church of Cold Stars, where my mother was married—no regard for bad luck. At the last moment, just before the tiny wedding begins, my mother streaks in, cheeks painted with two high clown spots of rouge, a scarecrow in a satin brocade dress made on the Kowloon Road. And I'm looking at that dress right here.
My mother's cheeks are rubescent, her cuckoo's laugh forms a crescent in the air. "Unreal," she says, laughing at the "death do us part," laughing at the "dearly beloved," cackling contrapuntally to herself in the pews. There's a comedy in the cloud in her mind. She points at Kate's exchange of vows with her bridegroom. "That's a good one," she stage-whispers so that those near can hear. "Who's that guy she's marrying? What a schnook! Where'd she get that dress? This will never work!" I'm torn between laughter and anger. Kate is oblivious. No, Kate is not oblivious—she's feigning oblivion. Just as when she was small and the outside world made Kate turn to marble with quiet. "You tell him, Jack. I want the strawberry licorice," she whispered in confidence. The sun tattoo on her belly scorches through her wedding dress, which is fashioned from a halter top under the cape Sarah made ten years before for her home ec class. Furled laughter from Dolores. After the wedding, there is a cool and beautiful sunset. Kate and her bridegroom troop down to Lac La Jolie to have their wedding photograph taken, seated with a ginger-haired dog, their golden retriever, Mick Finn. They look young and healthy. Dolores is supposed to join them, they want to lead her to the reception at Kate's in-laws. They climb into the new husband's car and wait and wait for Dolores. Finally they see her approaching fast in her sports car. She slows down as if to stop. She waves at them, guns the engine, races past them into the sunset. Not to the sunset, Kate reminds me later. "To the El Dorado!" A happening nightclub for middle-aged singles out somewhere on Highway 100. The image of her there is entwined forever with Kate's marriage, and I think of Dolores dancing that night with a stranger under a thousand stars, with skeins of wedding finery and a ginger dog in a dress. Nothing holds still in the clouds. She could have said to her dance partner, "My daughter was married today. I wanted to be there, but I had important business elsewhere. I'm a CEO of a major food company, you know. Kate was the first of my children to be married, but it's not an institution I believe in anymore. And, boy, she had on some kind of peasant thing ... it was so funny....In a wedding reception Polaroid photograph of Kate and Sarah and me, my mother has crayoned red rings around our heads, the little saints. Her progeny, her daughters, her targets.
Tough love was working. Her supplications started. "Open House on Christmas Eve," she wrote on an invitation in the mail. Her invitation contained a prayer and small picture of forest animals linked arm in arm, looking up at the star in the east. Also bribes: "a coupon for a manicure and pedicure for the two of us at Gimbels. Signed, Mother and Dippy." And suggestions: "Christmas Open House: Do Your Gift Wrapping Early. Bring—the liver pate and cookies, wine, each other (You aren't Getting any Younger HOTshot). Pets stay @ Kate's."
The next day it's a shepherd in the mail—maybe it's Jesus?— holding out a cake, and saying: "Christmas Invitational to All! Nutty coffee will be served in English Rose of Tralee china breakfast cups—Pa Taylor's favorite! Nutty coffee is delicious! Entirely a different taste! Jacki, help yourself to the Scotch on the mantel! You don't have to make your bed! All is forgiven! Leave them laughing when you go!"
Ohmomohmomohmom, a kind of rune with me. Where have you gone? Give me my mother back, I write in my head. Personals ad: "One mother, missing in action. Wears tiara, doesn't eat, talks at ninety miles an hour. Believe it! Answers to the name of a department store. Steals dogs, cats, and horses." I crumple the pages, toss them onto the floor at work. They land at my feet like popcorn balls. I miss the little things, of course. I want her to go shopping with me, I want her to bake me her cheesecake and not save a piece for Alfred. I want her to send me a box of Snappy Gingers and a crock of Peppercorn Butter, and not send me a bill. I want her to show up at my door with a smooth calm face like a butter pat and tranquil eyes, and say, "All that crazy nonsense, that loony stuff I did when I was sick, wasn't it wild? Didn't I make you laugh? Crazy, huh?"
When my mother writes that she has heard me speaking in Italian on the radio, who is she hearing? What is in Sheba's mind, the avenging virago? When did the world take on such strange sounds and shapes, when did invisible marauders train secret bazookas on the walls of the house, when did curling irons become radioactive, frying pans become animate, children speak in the tongue of archangels? All of this in her imagination, a place brimming with evil. Her writings reflect a wild evil that has possessed her. Fantasizing of her former boyfriend: "The child clung to his leg. 'Not here!' He said. 'Not here!'" There are more and more voices that only she can hear.
She is alone on Christmas Day, half buried in the packages she has shipped to herself. Kate has taken a peek in previous weeks, but she is sticking to our plan. Kate and her children and I hunker down in my Chicago apartment for Christmas. We imagine my mother rising before dawn to make coffee, waiting for the kettle to shriek. The rind of snow on Lake Puckawasay would look like a piece of old carpeting marked by the footprints of ice fishermen. In her fairy-tale cottage, Dolores excitedly runs back and forth, preparing for everyone's arrival. Her living room is transformed into a filigreed bandbox bursting with goodies, imaginary gifts from imaginary friends, daughters' gifts that she has sent herself: "For the Best Mother in the World, Love Jacki," my mother writes on a shiny red package. "For the best little woman in the world, Love Always, Alfred," says another. And a third: "The Chamber of Commerce salutes you! Many happy holidays to Déjà Vu!" Déjà vu.
All these passing Christmases, and I am no closer to discovering the source of her fantasies, the banshee fairy who calls her past the shoals of safety. I am no closer than I have ever been to intercepting her between the first manic episode and the last crashing embers, the firestorm I can't stop. My mother parodies safety, the perfect family, the handsome and moneyed husband, and here we are teetering on the edge. My mother is isolated in her bungalow. We, her daughters, try to make kruns kuchen on the gas stove in my Chicago apartment. The simple cake burns in its pan, comes out soggy in alternate spots. Stupid stove. Stupid apartment. Stupid life. Eight years ago we had passed this night speculating, fantasizing. Was Dolores in a Vegas casino, the Parade of Roses, having her varicose veins stripped? Christmas Eve. Kate and I go to a Spanish Mass in a Puerto Rican church. Unreal, says Kate. We can't understand, incense as thick as sand coagulates in our nostrils. Christmas is a scent too pungent to inhale. I pick up the phone and call. My mother cries, Hello? Hello? And I hang up.
Tough love sucked. We had had enough, we hated it. Kate decided to check on my mother on the evening of Christmas Day, breaking her tough love vow as she drove back to her own home in Wisconsin. When she reached Dolores's, she saw every light in the house ablaze. Dolores had also lit candles, rafts of them, and Kate could see that they'd been burning for hours, that the wax had overflo
wed and congealed into scurf on tables, floors, and shelves. Dolores had single-handedly laid out every plate, every piece of polished silver, arranged in borders and scrolls butter knives and pickle forks. She had burnished every wine glass and piece of leaded crystal, days of effort. She had made a feather centerpiece for the table, billowing up to look like frost trimmed with bubbles. The hours had passed, the day had passed. The salad greens had turned limp, the cranberry stuffing hardened like punctuation resting on each salad plate beside stale chunks of mashed potato. There was a roast in the oven, desiccated from overcooking, waiting all day. Her Christmas Open House. In case we came. She had taken a sedate scarf and wound it around her throat and pinned it with a cameo, an imitation of the picture in the cameo itself, her Victorian Aunt Martha. There were place cards for everyone, one for Alfred, others for us girls.
Dolores turns to Kate, her skin taut and translucent. Her collarbone pokes through her scarf like umbrella spokes. She gives Kate a look of stunning agony, shoulders sinking.
"You didn't come to eat, did you?" my mother mutters hoarsely. "Nobody came to see me on Christmas Day. Nobody, all day. No phone calls. It was just me and Thorny." Her face, ruined and labile, winks like the northern lights, from light to dark and dark to light, clouds racing over it. Her mouth crumples, eyes seal shut. Her forehead presses down on one of the chilly polished plates, and her hands clench and push to either side of her temples, and she cries a river for all that she has lost. Oh, tough, tough love.
***
Once I got into a fight with a man. I don't mean a kind of verbal fisticuffs, senseless and slashing, I mean a calculated fight we planned in unspoken agreement over dinner in Aleppo, Syria. We were war correspondents. I guess you would have to call us that because the Gulf War was on and we roamed Arab capitals and because wars were in his case a specialty and in mine something of an inner and natural dialogue. There are parts of the world that are settled, and call for a kind of civility and conformity to the rules or norm. And there are parts of the world that are unsettled, and call for self-invention on a daily basis. You make your own rules, and if you are scared or lonely it is best to let no one see that. Your first rule, always, is to get the story. In the lacunae of the day, you get each other's story because you are living on the surfeit of your own adrenaline and lust. After two bottles of Lebanese wine, Ksara red, mezze, kibbe, pigeons with raisins, he said, "You know, Lyden, I'd like to know how tough you are, what drives you," that sort of nonsense. It was just our nerves rattling around. I'd been talking about my stepfather. I can't think why, a part of the arid desert perhaps, or the blood color of the rock. "You're tough!" the correspondent gibed at me. But in those days I was tough, or thought I was, or I would not have wound up in Aleppo in the middle of the night with a man who loved battles more than anything in the world, and made his own when they didn't exist. We drank more and more Ksara, and somewhere in the predawn hours he said something about my essentially loveless nature, or how else could I have treated my stepfather with such disregard?
"Creepo?" he said. A matter of transference: I lashed out. He pinned me so I couldn't move, but I could move, and I knew he wanted me to try. I kneed him in the groin as we rolled down off the bed and he was still then, half moaning. I ran and got another hotel room, bribing the management not to tell him where I was. I passed the night reliving old memories in my bathrobe in the strange room until he came to find me hours later and dragged me back upstairs.
"I bribed the management even more money than you," he boasted. "They asked if I wanted to find my wife. I said you bet I do."
Beg pardon, you have a wife? I'm not it. I told him how tough I was.
He said, "Take your best shot."
I kicked him in the head, and he went down in a flash.
The next day he apologized and I apologized and believe I forgave him and he me, for always, and we shared a star-sized hangover and the leers of the Muhabarat as we rode down with two of them following us in the elevator.
"I consider last night doing my part against the Islamic movement in this country," he whispered.
But we knew what we were doing as we did it—he was provoking, and I would therefore have to attack him. Provoke, attack, conflate. That was the underlying dynamic I felt with Sheba: when she provoked me, when she eluded me, it made me want to pounce on her all the harder. For a moment, for many such moments, I wanted to sink my teeth in her flesh, bind her and conquer her. I packed for Bab al-Hawa, Gate of the Winds.
Sheba, rising and hovering, mist off the lake like a winter evanescence, ice her shroud, assumes each dawn is the shape of a new destiny. Wherever you go, hey, that's where you belong. Whatever you believe, that's who you are. "Come and get it, I'm out of gas!" my mother writes one morning in lipstick on the windshield of her car. That was back in the fall. Since then, the repo man's been on the case. The sporty Toyota and the cell phone disappear. My mother hauls her old bicycle out of the garage and takes to the winding back roads of Menomenee County as winter sets in. She rides the eight miles to Kate's house, her hair lacquered with wind and frost into an atomic shape, her feet pumping up and down like Ferris wheels.
"She wears all her antique jewelry when she rides that bike," Kate reports to me. "Her father's gold pen on a chain, Ray's antique stopwatch, pins and necklaces from when she was in high school. Cripes. Now she's gone and lost it all. Every day she comes over hollerin' and cryin' and sayin' another piece of her life is missin'." Dolores has become the local pariah, the woman in the pink snowsuit on a bicycle, the woman caught stuffing hot dogs into her parka at the supermarket. Kate phones. "Can'tcha come up, Jack, can'tcha come up?"
Kate's voice is a tourniquet being pulled taut. Kate implores. "She don't eat anything I take over there. She's starvin', a bag of bones. You better come home." From Kate's description, I know that Dolores's eyes are like rocket fire, her mind full of afterburn. She doesn't care about insolvency. "I hope Menomenee County has a big tent," my mother tells Kate flippantly. "I hope when I lose this house they make a big space for Thorny and me in the poorhouse! And my business, of course! Creative Renaissance from the Clink!"
Time for me to come up. I haven't seen her in three months. I fly over the roads. She's modeling a bright yellow swing coat when I walk in early on a February Sunday afternoon. Pivot and turn, girls, pivot and turn. The coat blooms like a flower around her thin shoulders, flares and closes around her, vaginated, jack-in-the-pulpit. My mother, I remember her, inside this half-emaciated little woman. "Like it?" she asks me. "Like my coat?" The Christmas surprises that Kate saw weeks ago are still all over the house. A teacup dangles from a candlestick on the mantel, a teacup I bought for her in 1960 at Gimbels Schuster's Secret Santa Village. It was my first purchase, ever, from a special store for kids, a secret honeycomb of kid-sized things. An elf land is remembered here. My mother pivots and turns again. "I made this coat," she says. Perambulations, attempts to look pretty. "Like it?" I do like it. It's my mother there underneath the reductions of mania, aged about twelve, trying to look so pretty. It's been so long since I've seen her. I move to embrace her, trace her ribs with my fingers, so bony, so much like a fish swimming upstream, and I place my fist in the cavelet below her collarbone, feel the current of blood below. I see the way her lips curl back from her gums and the puffy weal where they pull from the teeth, the brittle dullness of her hair. Her subcutaneous fat is gone, her breasts are flat, she suffers from vitamin deficiency. My hand rubs inside the back of her yellow coat collar, touches something familiar, a garment label, Gimbels Schuster. "You didn't make this coat, Mom," I say. "You bought it." Not that it matters, except that it's more money she doesn't have for a coat she doesn't need. I remark on this absently, trying to make conversation.
"So how'd you get it?" My voice is sharper than I wish it were.
"Shows what you know, Miss Voice of America," she snaps, stepping back. She whops me so sharply on the side of the head that a contact pops out. I am on my knees, looking
for the lens. "I'm bored," says my mother. "Think I'll go for a ride." She is frantic, thrumming with energy. She runs around the table, drops the lemon yellow coat from her shoulders.
"Wait, goddamit, will you?" I cry. I'm talking to an empty room.
She has on a jean jacket underneath her coat, and some gloves are in her pocket, but that's it. I'm blind and ambushed as she runs outside and I search for my lens. She gets a three-minute head start. The door she left open is refracted in my one good eye. Finding my lens, I plunge after her into the icy air. I catch up to her in my car on County Z, the narrow and zagging road to Menomenee, see her on her bicycle. My tires screech on ice. Wheels slide on each curve. My coming after her doesn't stop her. She pumps the bike up the hills, stands triumphant like a child, bangs her skinny butt on the seat going downhill. Eddying in the hardened snow. I slow down and open the window. "Hey, get in the car, goddamit," I yell. "Get in the goddamn car!"
She ignores me. I'm blue from cursing, sky blue with the cold. I could run her into the ditch. I think hard about it. Satisfying, murderous. We ride on like this in the twists. I keep pace with her. Dolores is wind torched, Sheba implacable, the skin of her face as purple as a peeled beet from the cold and exertion. Get in the goddamn car now! I'm roaring. My throat is dry and sore. Blood vessels pulse like fireflies inside my head. I nose the car over, threatening to push her into the ditch. It's more difficult than you'd think, than in the movies. If I miss my aim and kill her, run her over, then what? Her bones are beneath the wheels, and I'm as murderous as she ever was. Daughter Flattens Lunatic Mother on County Back Roads. Two miles. Three. Past the little string of pearl lakes frozen hard, like the teeth in her manic smile. They are the lakes of my childhood, where my mother brought us swimming in that heady azure summer of freedom before she married the Doctor. Four miles. Five. There was a red waterwheel in one lake, Lake Ipesong, and if you climbed it and pitter-pattered it with your bare wet feet, slapping them down on moist black rubber, dripping and giddy, it was only a matter of time before you fell off into the waters of the waiting lake. Sinking beneath the shining surface, eyes open, searching for a mother going past on a bicycle in the twilight world rising to meet you. The red wooden waterwheel churning the bicycle wheels in the snow. The family up around the Christmas tree, the children tumbling end over end in the snow. Myself on a bike in the curves, trying to escape Creepo, to run away from home. Mabel, taking the S curves at sixty miles an hour. They took her license when she sped through that school zone beyond Wagner's. She was eighty-four. They should have done so. Still, it took the life out of her. All of us, the racing women.