by Jacki Lyden
My mother's child body goes up and down and up and down on the pedals, her feet two little waterwheels. Wagner's sanitarium is beside us, a hospice, not a hospital, now, its turrets all swags and banners and fetlocks of snow. People go there to die on their own terms. My mother ignores Wagner's, as always. The snowy fields are like rows of folded linen sheets. We go past the Gothic fish hatchery and limestone hops barns that the brewing companies built here in the last century. We are in a New World Bavarian bakeshop landscape of miniature lakes, skaters, and snow-dusted pines. "Heygetinthegoddamncarthisveryinstant." I lay on the horn, swerve, cut her off. She stops, bent over, breathing funnels of ragged air into her heaving accordion chest. She straightens and stands rapt before a magnificent stone portal that marks the turn into the brewery estate. Her bike lies half-buried in the snow.
"Creative Renaissance has a decorating job," she croaks out. I hop out of the car and walk over to the mailbox where she's standing. It's Alfred's mailbox, as gaudy as a child's lunch bucket with smile stickers and pictures of cats, and cowboys wielding branding irons and springy butterflies, dozens and dozens of stickers, all colors, pink, green, and blue. She slips a letter inside the Alfred box. "To Sir with Love," it reads.
"I hope he likes it when he gets home from the French Riviera," she mumbles, a look as concentrated as an artist at the easel. She fishes a roll of stickers from her pocket and peels off one or two with her teeth. She pastes them to the box. "I do these one at a time," my mother says, "to get the best effect." I am silent, hoisting the bike into the trunk, what they call enabling her.
Later, when we get home, the cloud enters her head. She perches on the couch and I watch while it envelops her. Her mouth opens and closes as she speaks silently, words I can't understand. Gutturals drip, water sounds, deep dribbles of gibberish, as if she'd been submerged. Baba, ooooh. Kizmapro hizzim. It's enough to make you think about spirit possession. I don't want to sleep here tonight, I think. I should, though. I should sleep here always. I should lie in front of the door as Sarah's husband did last summer in Denver. Sleep on the hall steps right where Dolores found Mabel as dead as a doornail. I call Kate. We'll both stand guard tonight, sleep over. My mother's eyes are open, but she sees nothing in this room nor in this world. Whom is she talking to? Omneosis hisss gala hoa. I can catch nothing. I think of Mabel, sitting there rocking in the shawl of twilight, the flayed skin of her hands like paint peeling in the sun. I think of the night she fell dead on the stairs, none of us there. Settle down. Cannot close my eyes. Stuck. Oh. Mabel. Dolores. Me.
A PETITION FOR GUARDIANSHIP
MENOMENEE COUNTY OFFICE OF THE GUARDIAN
JANUARY 5, 1989
A Memorandum Concerning the Mental Health of Dolores Gimbels, January 5, 1989 submitted by Jacki Lyden, in conjunction with Sarah Lyden and Kate Lyden
She has been sick now since late last June and has resisted all pleas for treatment. We love her very much but want her to be hospitalized because she is verging on homelessness and malnutrition, a result of the fact that she is completely and consistently delusional. She has no automobile and is riding a bike on hazardous rural roads in subfreezing temperatures. She has ardently and skillfully denied her need for treatment, and since being fired from her waitressing job last summer has spent more than fifty thousand dollars—all her life savings, all unprotected assets—and is currently living on seventy-two dollars a week unemployment. When challenged, she is extremely threatening and hostile. She is wholly resistant to the idea of treatment, as the County must be aware. Let me refer you to her complete mental history. (See attached, 1981—commitment, Menomenee County.) Must we, or another unsuspecting person, wait for another murderous attack before the County intervenes?
The county sent a social worker out to see her. I liked her. Marcia. She was five months pregnant, cheerful and can-do. I didn't know if she could do my mother much good, but she was great for me and listened empathically when I rolled out long lists of complaints. We arranged for a secret rendezvous with Marcia, who would show up at Kate's for tea. My mother would be invited too, and Marcia could evaluate her. My mother didn't know she was a social worker, of course. On the appointed day, my mother wasn't dressed too oddly, behaved well. The idea, I hoped, was for Marcia to adjudge Dolores to be sick enough so that I could at least obtain a petition for guardianship to stop the hemorrhage of money. My mother sat down and opened up her new, handmade autobiography, in which she'd invented a revised matriarchy for her life. Over another hand-drawn picture of the Déjà Vu mam'selle, this time saying, "Only the best, I'm not cheep!" and "What can I do?" she'd pasted pictures of her father and mother and herself as a baby.
MY MOTHER MARTHA
by Dolores Gimbels
FOREWARD
I have known, and not known, many men. My mother Martha "knew" only one, and that one was my father, Ray. To their dear memories are my memoirs written.
[Question: Has a book already been published with this tide by Martha Mitchell's daughter?]
My Mother Martha is a hard-to-believe account of the author's life. It relates events pulled from her mind after the passing of her mother, but which she can attest to as factual. Martha Gimbels was a small, timid woman ... unmarried when I was born. Nothing is known to me at the present of her earlier life so I begin with what I can recall clearly and eerily.
I was born! Where, I am not certain but in a house, delivered by a midwife, born out of wedlock, conceived in love.
1. Illegitimate
Martha Gimbels loved me! She loved me so much that she gave me up. Over and over it was drilled into me about the disgrace of being an illegitimate child. Almost nothing was more disgraceful, except when one party was already married and there could be no "shotgun" wedding. Mabel, my adopted mother from the moment of conception's discovery, proudly pointed to her framed marriage certificate and to me, "See—your brother was legitimate," neglecting to mention that she had born a daughter herself out of wedlock when she was 14.
Martha Gimbels was a wealthy heiress and my father a handsome truck driver during the depression. I am not sure of all her names. When I am not sure I will say so. When I am proved wrong I can be truly sorry and apologize, but it is a fact I am involved in a complex lawsuit with the State of Wisconsin and more particularly Menomenee County as a direct result of the cover-up and Mabel's obsession. She would say, "Dolores, if you only knew the truth," and cry and wring her hands. In 1929 the headlines could have been: Wealthy Heiress: Sex. Scandal. Shame.
Marcia sat listening, leafing through twenty pages of the book, with pictures, conjectures, and purple prose. Dolores Gimbels painted in the middle of the book like a belladonna flower growing in a hidden glade. Secret poison. Naked lady. Marcia chatted with my mother, thanked her, and left.
"What a nice visit," my mother said.
Afterward the social worker said to me sympathetically, "Not much we can do. Her threats are too vague. Her judgment is impaired but shrewd. I'm afraid that means it's her choice. She's going to throw lots of things away."
My petition for guardianship over her assets was denied. "It's her choice," Marcia repeated.
Her choice? Her choice is to be the CEO of a major Fortune 500 company, I say. Her choice is to send her armies into battle against the forces of Xerxes. Her choice is to send a cake shaped like a penis to her former boyfriend.
"Ain'tcha just toasted by all this, Jack," says Kate. "Dolores is such a liar. She just sat there in total denial. That book of total lies! At least at my meetings, we learn to take responsibility."
"I am not part of this family," says Sarah on the phone from Denver, when I tell her the latest. As if her sternness will change everything. "What I like each week is to know exactly what I'm going to be doing at this time next week. I write it down in a book," she says.
"You," I say, "were born on a different planet."
The process server is waiting for Kate. He emerges like a fox from the bushes with a summons for her. A lawsuit h
as been filed. He knows Kate. "I gotta ask you," he says disapprovingly. "What kind of daughter is sued by her own mother?"
Kate gives him a look, pulls the letter from its envelope and then the summons. She reads it and waves it in the process server's face. Dolores is suing to get back the car Kate bought from her.
"Yeah, well, what kind of mother writes her daughter as "Kate U. Bastard?" she asks the process server. The sun on her belly is a hard little star, shooting pointy rays.
My mother loves the law. She loves its weighty and stentorian tones, its thousand subclauses and findings of "fact." She loves its arcane legal language and references and all those dry case citings, the Code of Hammurabi. Legalese is something for her to transcribe with her shorthand, something for the windstorm of her brainpower. When she was first married, my mother was a legal secretary and learned to speak, write, and think like a lawyer. She worked for two Jewish brothers. It was as if she'd been sent to college after all, she said. She thought the brothers were fantastically kind and smart and funny and they sent baby gifts when I was born. How she cried, she said, when she realized she wouldn't be going back to work. And indeed she would have made a good attorney. I can see her as a trial lawyer, loving the fight, the confrontation. Thirty years after her first legal job, the law is still her ally, her only ally now, and on Presidents' Day in February 1989 my mother sits writing briefs on yellow legal pads at her kitchen table. Sometimes my mother is the first to bring suit, more often she is countersuing. There are so many lawsuits of one sort or another that I keep track of only the most critical. She cites Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. She works on these suits and countersuits almost every day, for hours at a time. They keep her going like a dose of methedrine. First there is the bank, which is taking her to court over unpaid checks, eyeing the home loan with which she renovated Mabel's bungalow, her equity, eyeing the second property that Dolores owns for income. That's going to go, I can see it. We can't hang on to that any more than I could have saved her pension fund or her life insurance or mutual fund. She is suing them, and they are suing her.
"John," says the banker's notes on the suit I have copied. "I have the Dolores Gimbels brief here. It's taken us four hours to Xerox and I believe it will provide excellent testimony for our case. The woman is obviously completely deranged." They're getting ready, closing in. Then there is the Menomenee County Hospital, where her countersuit over her refusal to pay has gone to the district appellate court. Her lawyer has quit now that she's ill again and sending him cookies instead of cash. But the jerk hasn't just quit: he's suing her for nonpayment, though he's collected thousands of dollars from my mother and watched while she has been forced to liquidate her assets to pay his bills, her impossible legal redemption. There are also two other lawsuits: one from the elderly couple she dinged in one of her car accidents, another from the cell phone company. In addition to the lawsuits, there's an avalanche of warning notices from creditors. Since she is in "penury," as she puts it, my mother decides that she will act as her own lawyer. And though sick, hallucinatory, her legal briefs work to the extent that they temporarily hold her attackers at bay. A giant B, giant R, giant I, giant E, giant F. These letters she arranges in a semicircle, like the epitaph on a tombstone on each brief she writes. It is a manic oratory, passing like a comet over memory and history, conflating both, spinning anew.
"Oh, you wise men of learning," she writes in her scary Gothic handwriting in her Menomenee County appellate court brief on Presidents' Day. "I am distressed that the legal system takes so long to correct such an injustice. Today, as we pay homage to our great presidents, I quote from Mr. Lincoln's farewell message to his Springfield neighbors on Feb. n, 1861."
Here I have lived a quarter of a century, here I have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children are born, and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when, or if ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being, who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance, I cannot fail. I feel that I too have been given this great task to do lest we forget our personal freedoms, a task I did not willingly assume, but now acknowledged—I cannot put aside. As I grow only older and deeper in debt—I will pursue this case to victory, with malice toward none—and charity toward all.
My family and I are estranged and my heart gets heavy, but my convictions as to the merits of this case press me on. It seems to me that if a BRIEF is limited to forty type-written pages this would approximate eighty hand-lettered pages. However, if six pages are read carefully there should be no need for addendums. Each case has its own uniqueness and therefore I cite no case law.
Quoting from the Church Manual by Mary Baker Eddy, Section 23. "If a member of this church has a patient whom he does not heal, and whose case he cannot fully diagnose, he may consult with an MD on the anatomy involved. And it shall be the privilege of a Christian Scientist to confer with an MD on Ontology, or the Science of Being."
Page 484:6-9 of the Christian Science textbook: Science and Health with a Key to the Scriptures:
Question: Does Christian Science, or metaphysical healing, include medication, material hygiene, mesmerism, hypnotism, theosophy, or spiritualism?
Answer: Not one of them is included in it.
Page 468:25-1 Question: What is life?
Answer: Life is Divine Principle, Mind, Soul, Spirit. Life is without beginning and without end. Eternity, not time, expresses the thought of Life, and time is no part of eternity. One ceases in proportion as the other is recognized. Time is finite, eternity is forever.
The Court will note, that appellant repeatedly acknowledged her religion; read daily from her Bible and Christian Science textbook; and on one occasion signed a "Consent to Medication" under threats and duress, which she later withdrew. This case is a flagrant disregard for the fundamental principles of liberty upon which this country was established—by the very presidents we pay homage to today.
Signed, Dolores Gimbels, Esquire
My mother's a wraith, a poet, a magician. She is as destructive as Shiva's consort Durga, riding her tiger, slashing with eight or ten arms, a potent force of nature sheaving houses into sticks. She's a big bad wolf with long and pointed ears, a curly-headed little lady who appears each day in bizarre costume wearing badges of her previous existence at the courthouse in Big Bend, asking the clerk to notarize her lawsuits. ("I'm Dolores Taylor Gimbels Ballistreri. Will you please file this?") She's becoming anorexic, her breath is the breath of the damned. Once she was a mother who cut up old ball gowns to turn her daughters into Miss America contestants, but that was long ago in a country I shall call Then. This new time is out of time, irreal time. "Irreal times," says a female Iranian professor in Tehran taking her lipstick off to go out on the street. "Ive coined this word because our lives here are so irreal. I'm going out, so I take my makeup off." She scrubs her lips.
This new time is hallucination and mist. A cloud from the real world, like those I have entered myself.
Heart tight. October 23, 1994. Tel Aviv. Dizengoff Street. Breathing normal. Afternoon show filing time: 6 hours. First report from now for Morning Edition: 45 min. How many dead? What sort of explosive, how much? Where is the bus? Stop, record ambulance siren. Record man, broken English, blood-spattered. "I sit in café over there and the bus come and I listen to the bomb. People, help me help me help me the back door." "You pulled the victims out of the back door?" "Yes. I look, no head no arms no feet. I have problem looking. You go Jerusalem, bomb; you go Tel Aviv, bomb; wherever you go in Israel, bomb. Bibi, Bibi over here! This corner! Hang on, I'll do English in a minute. Gotcha. I told Mr. Rabin repeatedly, Gaza has to be closed, and cleared. Cleared, I say, if they can't be contained. This is the direct responsibility of Yassir Arafat and the Labor Government. Miss, you're how old? 23? From New York? Yes. I was there at 9 o'clock in the morning. I saw decapitated bodies. The police weren't there. It was disgusting. Organs on the gro
und. The body without an arm and without a head right outside my store. And now I don't know. This thing, this terrorism, it's coming to my own home, where I live, where I live. It's coming to where I live."
Oh, but the end of safety comes to us all. Right to where we live. My dear, someone once said, security is superstition. The fearful are caught as often as the bold. And only faith defends.
They see her every day, dressed in bright colors like a parrot, head cocked as if on a perch. My mother haunts the courthouse. She has become the avatar of her own illness. Florid painted lips, an exotic bird with a ribby cage of vertebrae. "File this, please," she insists to the clerk, her smile as hot as the burner on a stove.
FEBRUARY 22, 1989
COURT OF APPEALS IN WISCONSIN
DISTRICT NO. 2, STATE OF WISCONSIN, DEPARTMENT