Daughter of the Queen of Sheba

by Jacki Lyden

  In half an hour, she's at the Menomenee County Courthouse, where she is seated in court, as quiet as a communicant of the old school. She wears nothing on her head now but her invisible Divine Light, the Light of Truth. There is Judge MacGill, her persecutor, her jailer. His corrupt law steals her money and houses and lands and gives them over to the hands of her enemies and locks her in the dungeon with a little drain for her bodily fluids. How would he like it, all that persecution and humiliation. Sheba is so full of thought, so powerful with it that she is weighted down as if by gold bullion bricks, measurable physical matter, all but immobilizing her. She sits so still that it might appear as if she's thinking of nothing at all, but really she is chuckling to herself, making her pact with God. She the Chosen, She the Anointed who has come to Save the World.

  From deep in his chamber, Judge MacGill stands and eddies in his black robes, surging into the Menomenee County courtroom at Waupaca. The court reporter stares up at him through her thick glasses. The child's glasses should be removed, they're really too thick, Sheba has written of this somewhere. There is a hum in the courtroom, in each window the refracting midmorning light neatly cleaving the scene into little rectangles of faith as innocent as bars of soap lined up in a box. Everyone is respectful, everyone is orderly. You'd think you were in church.

  Judge MacGill's bailiff turns to the courtroom. "Would you all rise and face the bench?" he asks in the standard drone. Sheba stands and points an invisible zinger at him with her finger. "What's the matter, do you all have an erection for Judge MacGill?" she roars at all the sheep.

  She rifles her accoutrements from her bag, a larger one than she usually carries. "This is what we do to bad little boys," she cries, arms aloft like winged victory, brandishing a small paring knife and a cutting board. "Come here and let me cut off your curlicue!!!"

  Judge MacGill's face is as still as a fat humid morning before the rain. He could be remembering a worm he saw crawling on his tomato vine last night, or the carton of milk that his wife asked him to bring home from work that evening. He could not be where he is, in fact he must be anyplace but here, where the scene before him leaves him in wondrous suspense, touching infinity like a diver on a high platform. There is the powerful smell of her orchid perfume.

  "Hey, buster, are you listening to me?" Sheba roars below his pulpit. She waves the knife like a conductor waving his baton. The people in the courtroom, the sheep, back away from her. Baaaa! to them too. Suddenly she drops her knife to the floor, whirls to the bench, snatches up the judge's brass nameplate, the one that tells him and the whole world exactly who is presiding over this kangaroo court. Sheba brandishes the nameplate over her shoulder like a flaming sword in a painting of Judgment Day and whops Judge MacGill straight on the head with his own damn name. See if he likes it, can remember who he is, the humiliation. It all happens somehow in the cusp of an instant. A shutter snapping, more quickly than the bailiff, half slumbering at the back of the room, really knows. But now he has her, has surrounded my mother in a half nelson and wrestles her to the floor.

  She spits a Certs that she has under her tongue straight into the bailiff's face. She will not be dallied with. "I will have you arrested," she says. "I am making a citizen's arrest right this very minute! All of you!"

  And then it's over. Everyone who's been stock-still is moving, fluent in anxiety, feet pummeling by above her head. She remembers when they lived in a basement, she can still see the feet. Sheba raises up her wrists from where she lies on the floor reaching for the manacles, knowing that whatever they do to her now, they'll never think of her as powerless again.

  Sheba in the bin, Sheba on the dock. The parable of the Queen of Sheba, come to conquer. This time I felt that after twenty-five years, perhaps I had her, that I was prepared. She could not escape us, but neither would we mistreat her. They led her off to the county hospital, but there were no restraints beyond handcuffs, no straitjacket, no closed observation doors with a slot for a meal tray. The county acted with patience and caution, probably because after two years of litigation at obvious cost to herself, my mothers was not a routine case. And I think the passage of time had engendered more progressive methods, gave at least encouragement to a minimum of restraint with the mentally ill. The social worker promised me that they'd treat her as delicately as possible. She hadn't hurt Judge MacGill, other than whacking him one in his dignity. Later he would tell me, a gentle man with forbearance, "Your mother had an amazing ability to write extraordinary legal briefs, even when she was clearly very sick, and I came to admire her spunk and fight. Of course, I never expected her to attack me in my own courtroom, but she was one of my most interesting cases and I had empathy for her."

  On the locked ward, Sheba sits waiting. Forty-eight hours until her commitment hearing. Avenged. Her notebook is open.

  I, the Lord Your God, am a jealous God and ye shall have no other Gods before me. THANK YOU FOR LISTENING. Glenn the psych aide is tearing out my pages as fast as I can write them. Menomenee Hospital says Dolores's suicide records read: she was a patient of Dr.———. Wrong! D, wrong, alcohol? I'm not sure. Many discrepancies. Someone is stealing my jewels. Dolores insisted on some furniture for herself and the children as she had owned home and furniture at time of marriage. Was Koehn, my former boyfriend, a Russian spy? Cain, you killed your brother. Cane, Kane, Cain. He worked for the KGB. Take vitamin E oil. It will keep your skin looking young and supple. Whisper something sweet in a loved one's ear. Hold hands. If you don't smoke your pipe, and just wear it in your mouth, it's like jewelry!

  In Marcia the social worker's opinion, the courtroom spectacle was "for the best. I think this is a cry for help. She could have really hurt someone in there, but she used her imagination." Yes, I said on the phone, it's for the best, thinking of all the 1,001 near misses, the interstices of threat and suspension of threat. A relief to think only of the physical world in connection with Dolores, flooded with her stacks of bills and threatened legal actions, which I'd started to photocopy and keep at the office. The night before her court hearing I drove home to Menomenee, and the next day Kate and I sat while yet another judge, not MacGill, questioned my mother. Her language by then was unbroken surf, ladyfinger waves, captured only when she wrote things down, and it was clear to me why she wasn't talking much at the hospital: she couldn't answer the questions. She'd lost the sequences of speech. Whole paragraphs of her thought dissolved into a hypnotic and unrepeatable riff of babble, labials and hisses and murmuring diphthongs, quite untranslatable. As if the Queen of Sheba, cornered, had come rushing out in dreamspeak not understood by real-world people. Real-world people can't hear the timbrels and glockenspiels that the Shebas of our moment dream into our existence. Sheba braves reality with nothing more than blobs of paint and whole vaults of imagination, and, when her dream world turns dark and full of rage, we await her reality with our own speechlessness. It's the same in war zones, where you wait for the irrational to reign, to invade.

  My mother's head bobbed up and down as she sat at her hearing, her eyes seamed shut, her chin tilted toward the ceiling. When she did open her eyes, she had trouble fixing on then human beings in the room before her. "Ohzenor rata bizza hum," my mother spoke under her breath, as her eyes closed. "Brew ola, ta deum orso," clacked her laughing tongue. Her smile screwed itself so tightly to her face that it reminded me of the grins of petrified heads. Even her hair seemed rusty, not her own. And as I have been before in her presence, I am oddly admiring and drawn to her. There is no denying that I am absurdly proud. She is so ill, so gone, so bravely lunatic and indefatigable. And I wonder, will we ever get her back, back from that Wide Sargasso Sea in which she swam and sailed and drifted beyond the realm of mortal thought?

  You may recall the fairy tale of Elsa and the swans. Elsa wove the jackets of stinging nettles for her six brothers, young men whom an evil sorceress had turned into swans. She wove the jackets at night in secret, her hands bleeding, not bending from her task. Transformative
jackets she made after her day's labor when she thought no one was looking, and her stepmother the sorceress chided her for her raw hands, never knowing that Elsa was weaving the jackets of her undoing. Elsa had seven years to reverse the spell before the enchantment became permanent, and during that time her brothers the swans circled the earth. They saw much human vagary. They saw humanity's lusts and betrayals, its wars and famines, and also the sweet defining moments of tranquillity and victory. As men, they had no power to travel the earth with omniscience, but as swans, the sky was their orbit. When Elsa finally threw the jackets over them, rimpling all but the arm of the sixth brother back to manhood, their journey was complete.

  I think of their journey as a parallel world, like the trajectory of my mother's mental illness. To turn Sheba back into Dolores, to turn a swan back into a human being, my sisters and I had to make an invisible net without her knowing it. Call it a straitjacket, the fabric of our reality. Some of its strands were our stories, the mundane family ones that filled in human memory, and other strands were the spinning narratives of testimony on behalf of the insane, the jokes we told one another and tales remembered back to my mother even when she couldn't understand our language. I would put into this tightly woven fabric the things we told the judge in court, our testimonies of her previous life in the real world. Instead of nettles that stung our hands, we had lithium. Dolores had never been given lithium. Lithium is the stinging nettle of our modern reality, the sorcerer's brewing green liquid that banishes evil spells. My mother doesn't especially like taking lithium—she sometimes complains that it makes her left hand tremble—but she takes it, every day, three times a day.

  Her transformation back to reality was as gradual as the lengthening of the late spring days and as I imagine the swan's return to human form would be. First you recognized a shape—an arm, belonging to the general universe of human limbs, then a hand, your own hand in the particular. Then fingers, and fingernails with half-moons surfacing beneath them. As Elsa's brothers returned to human form, the days passed, yours to name and know, and you would once again understand the concept of tomorrow. Yet as you looked at your hands and thought of your days, you would remember that you had once lived in realms that other humans could never imagine, that you had had for a time an inhuman body. You had been inhabited. You would see the feathers beneath your fingernails or at least imagine them there in that white delicate trace of half-moon like a broken wafer. You would see that you had had wings that once made silhouettes against the moon.

  When my mother was committed after attacking Judge MacGill, I would visit her at the Menomenee County Hospital and we'd walk. We'd walk over the broad green lawns and see where the violets were stabbing into the aprons below the oak trees. We'd see where the grass was the deepest, truest shade of emerald. At first my mother always gazed into the distance and often pointed to the horizon. "See that big black dog out there with a duck in its mouth?" she might say. But there would be no big black dog with a duck in its mouth. Nor did I ever see the stranger she was sure was following behind us. I never saw the invisible tent in which men with secret zinger pistols fanned poison darts at us as we walked into the shadows of the early summer twilight. The staff, this time, did not appear to be literally wrestling her into submission, nor was there any such need. She did not attack them, grabbing tables, chairs, anything sharp. She took her medication, went to group therapy, and when she had an "evil" thought, she'd write it down in her notebook, her palimpsest, as my mother tried to edit out the winged and astonishing parts of her speech, those that struck their own rhythms, rushed ahead in her mouth, squawking and honking in place of her own voice. The people who'd figured so mightily in her fantasies began to reassemble into normal color, size, shape, and human dimensions. The Judge. The Lawyer. The Neighbor. The former boyfriend. The ex-husband. Her daughters. Alfred—she was embarrassed to death over her fantasies about that man and sent a note via the sheriff apologizing. But when she was in the hospital, it was a long time before she could separate her visions from her human memory. She might say, "Jacki, didn't ———have a gun in his pocket when he came to see me? Didn't so-and-so threaten me at knifepoint? I'm sure he had a gun. I can see the gun, I can tell you what it looks like."

  No, I'd say, and no and no. No one had a gun. No one harmed you. She thought at last about her brain, with its chambers and synapses and endorphins waving in a wind of passion like curtains in a tempest, and the rooms inside her brain, furnished with a million transcendent scenes that flickered as she walked from chamber to chamber. "The doctor says it's just a condition," she said of her bipolar diagnosis, "like diabetes or high blood pressure. I just have to take the lithium for it, like people take medication for their hearts." Yes, I said, yes and yes. Forever. Forever, my mother said, sounding sad. And more than sad: mortal and finite. I think it was the first moment that my mother ever accepted mental illness as a condition of her life, and it came after so many seasons of insanity. Yet each time she thought the craziness would never come again, that Sheba was gone forever, kept out by good intentions and reams of effort. And each time, she remembered very little of what had been done or said when she was sick. Which I regret. She doesn't remember in any specific way the costumes and speeches and strange migrations, the visit to bail out a prisoner or attempts to steal a horse or set a feast for Mary Baker Eddy. What she remembers is the feeling that she could set the world on fire, that she could paint what people were thinking and feeling, that she had the physical prowess of three—that she felt wonderful. That she was brilliant. That's what she remembers.

  "When I was sick I knew I could walk for miles without getting tired," my mother has told me. "I knew I could ride a horse as fast as the wind. When I was in the hospital I could play Ping-Pong and never, ever miss the ball!" She remembers the sense of omniscience that made her feel as though she could walk through fire. That is why she has saved, as I have, the notebooks and writings, drawings and files, which are the cryptography of that other life. They are her canon, her psalms.

  The day my mother came home from the hospital, after a month or so, was a big day, a day of cooking and cleaning and getting ready for reentrance into family society, and when she came in with Kate, we put our arms around her. She had gained weight but was still so thin that I thought of the rhyme "Step on a crack, break your mother's back." She was a person whom strong emotion would buffet, with a fragile face that had in it the expectation of bruising. But she looked all around her, touched the objects of her home, a few of which I left as I found them because I wanted to remind her. They appeared to have lifted and resettled into place as if by gusts of wind: a doll's teacup hanging from a candlestick, a cross with a cameo necklace twisted over the crucifix.

  "I'm home," she said, "I'm home. I'm home after what seems like such a long, long time." Her eyes were clear, her face composed. Our mother was back. It had been nearly a year since I came home to find Marie Antoinette seated before her vanity, dressed in bustier and garters. Sheba would be out there somewhere on the road, blazing proud. I realized, not for the first time, that I'd very much miss her. I've never wanted her back, with her echo chamber voice and her claws, but I miss her power, her redemption of the mundane, and there are moments when I close my eyes and, thinking of her magnificent transmutations, feel that Sheba has never left.

  It was hard, of course. After the earthquake, the story begins, after the tidal wave scours the beach, after the fire. After the war ends, the memory of war begins and never ends. My mother lost the second house she owned and most of her life savings, including what she'd saved for retirement. She was bankrupt, and the bank could have foreclosed on Mabel's bungalow, on which my mother had taken out a home improvement loan. I argued with the bank—in a small town, after forty-odd years of residence, this is still a personal conversation. They held off taking Dolores to court, and eventually, she paid or settled what she could on most of her debts. I wrote to each and every bill collector, exactly three dozen of them, and
offered fifty cents on the dollar when I could or how-dare-you-sell-a-crazy-woman-a-car-type letters when that seemed more appropriate. Miraculously, almost every creditor was willing to accept some money rather than nothing at all. It was seven years before my mother ever got another credit card, and she still treats it as though it were breakable.

  People forgave her. My mother was so clearly desperate to get a job. She started waitressing again immediately when she got well, and kept that as her night job, working sixty hours a week when most people think of retiring, until a couple years ago. During the days she got another job, and because in her well life she is a charming and amazing force of nature, she got a good one: assistant to the executive of a software company. She's become responsible for getting flagpoles painted and parking lots cleared of snow and checks mailed out and she can find things in the office that other people have lost. She dressed as a man last Halloween, she wins raffles. She gets up at five A.M. to do her face and hair and exercise, is at her desk by eight o'clock, and never leaves before five, filling the vending machines, renting out office space, organizing her boss's life as efficiently as she once sewed up her own in costumes of fantasy. She has collected all the crazy recipes she'd made when she was ill and tried them again, sane. Pretty good! Could she really have made a go of it with Déjà Vu Foods? "I can cook well even when I'm sick," my mother maintains, and with the exception of anchovy cookies I'd say that is true. My mother and I take our coffee out to the deck of the Dolores-Mabel bungalow and sip from what is left of the Think About Me cups. We think about her. She started over, right where she'd begun on Lake Puckawasay, and it is Menomenee County that changes around her, sold to the highest bidder, transforming lakes and forests and farms into an uninspired, multiplexed, strip-mall suburban welter. Only my mother's small town survives as a reminder of the past, and just one of the farms remains from her days as a young bride, when the fertile reaches of so much farmland threatened to bury her alive.