For our trip across country I hitched a U-Haul to the rear bumper, and into this we crammed my mother’s books, our clothes, television, kitchen stuff, and other miscellaneous items she couldn’t bear to part with. Her plan was to find a furnished apartment in Phoenix, where General Electric had a branch office. She admitted to being a little worried she might not make quite as much money there as she did in Schenectady, but we had distant relatives who lived in Scottsdale, and they claimed that the cost of living was much lower, so hopefully the two would cancel each other out. Later, after she got established, my mother could move into an unfurnished place and have the bulk of our furniture shipped out from Gloversville. She kept this scheme hidden from her parents as long as possible, knowing they’d consider it rash and do everything in their power to dissuade her, as indeed they did. Phoenix was a big city, they pointed out, in which she didn’t know a soul. Did she have any idea what rents there were like? Where was that kind of money going to come from? In nine months, tops, she’d be broke, and then what would she do? How would she even get back home? My grandfather’s emphysema had progressed to the point where he couldn’t work anymore, and his meager pension and retirement barely covered their monthly needs. Eventually my mother would discover her mistake and rely on them to rescue her, like she always did. Did she understand that now they simply couldn’t manage to?
But all of this was assuming we’d make it there in the first place. Our whole trip, according to my grandfather, was underfunded, my mother’s calculations based on wishful thinking. Gas. Motels. Food. Auto repairs. At the wheel of our unsafe car was someone who’d had his license only a few months, and my mother couldn’t even spell me at the wheel. Did she understand that what she was proposing wasn’t just financial folly but also dangerous, potentially even tragic? To all this, my mother responded that she wasn’t a child and didn’t appreciate being treated like one, adding for good measure that their refusal to treat her like an adult was one of the reasons she was leaving. She’d carefully budgeted the trip according to the recommendations of AAA, which had even mapped out our route. And she had planned for the unexpected, laying aside an emergency fund we could dip into if we needed to. She had every confidence in my driving ability. We would go slow. We would be safe as houses.
In the weeks before our departure 36 Helwig Street, the sanctuary of my childhood, became a battleground, a place of bitter recrimination and slamming doors. The only thing that kept the arguments from escalating was that my grandfather didn’t have the breath, and after a few minutes he’d have to get up from the kitchen table, go into the living room, and hook himself up to the oxygen tank standing sentry behind his armchair. Even my mother could see what the strife was doing to him, and so a terrible silence descended that was even worse. No matter where I happened to be, upstairs or down, I was behind enemy lines and chose, coward that I was, to stay away as much as possible. It was a summer of farewell parties, of the Doors advising us to break on through to the other side, of freedom. One day, though, I came home and found my grandfather sleeping in his chair, his chest heaving violently up and down, as it often did now, awake or asleep. I thought my mother was up in our apartment, but went into the kitchen and she was sitting there with my grandmother, who reached across the table and took her hand. The gesture surprised me, because they seldom touched or talked intimately. “Jean,” she said, and waited until my mother met her eye. “This trip. You’re in no condition.”
I could have been wrong, but I got the distinct impression that my mother might be about to concede something important, perhaps a fear, or a misgiving, but she looked up, saw me, and quickly withdrew her hand, leaving me to wonder how that moment would have played out if I’d come home a few minutes later. It might have been my first intimation of how whole lives—maybe even my own—could pivot on such perfectly poised moments of stillness.
MY MOTHER’S “CONDITION.” This was something the whole family seemed aware of, but no one talked about it. One word, nerves, was evidently deemed sufficient to describe, categorize, stigmatize, and dismiss it. As a child I remember being frightened of whatever was wrong with my mother because it seemed at once serious and, for the most part, without visible symptoms. Nor, apparently, was there anything to be done about it. I wondered anxiously if I might one day come down with nerves, but from what I could gather men didn’t get them. Certain women, my mother among them, seemingly had more than their share, and if they became too nervous they could even have something called a breakdown. This had happened to other women in my grandmother’s family and more recently to my uncle’s mother, though she wasn’t a blood relation. The idea of my own mother suffering one of these nervous breakdowns was terrifying to me, because then she wouldn’t be living with us on Helwig Street but rather in some kind of hospital. Some suffering women were given electroshock treatments, after which they weren’t nervous anymore, or aware of their surroundings or that it was Tuesday. Nervous Breakdown. The phrase haunted my childhood, in part because it could happen to my mother, but also because I came to understand that I might be its cause. Her health was in my hands. Other kids were good because they didn’t want to get punished if they misbehaved; I was good because I feared that if I misbehaved it was my mother who’d be punished.
But here’s the thing about conditions, especially pervasive, largely asymptomatic ones: over time, when the worst doesn’t happen, they gradually lose their power to terrify. They simply become part of the landscape—as real as anything else, but also as ordinary. I observed that my mother’s nerves were cyclical, like the moon, waxing and waning, and by paying attention, I could tell where we were in the cycle. Which in turn suggested that maybe her health wasn’t in my hands, at least not entirely. True, it was in my power to make things worse, a lot worse, if I chose to, but I couldn’t make them much better. There were other forces at work, as powerful and inexorable and impersonal as gravity, as regular and predictable as the tides. And most of the time she seemed fine. At some previous low point she’d confessed to our family doctor that the stress of being a single mother and, in addition, working full-time sometimes made her awfully nervous, and he immediately prescribed a low dose of phenobarbital. Over the years these dosages incrementally increased, and in due course barbiturates gave way to newer drugs like Valium. Afraid of becoming addicted, she cut pills in half when she was doing well, but then upped the dosage when she “needed help.” Eventually she developed a tremor in her hands, though it was never clear to me whether this was due to stress or the medication she was taking to alleviate it. Most of the time her condition was part and parcel of our lives, a subtext that under the right circumstances might become a text.
And, on occasion, a screeching ALL CAPS hypertext, a gale of fury and paranoia and accusation and heartbreaking despair. “I can’t take it anymore!” she’d scream. “Doesn’t anybody understand? I can’t take it!” Sometimes these episodes had specific triggers—a raise or bonus at work that she expected but that didn’t come through, or I’d get into some kind of trouble at school, or a GE man she was dating would break things off, or she’d be blindsided by some unanticipated expense. But more often what she couldn’t take anymore was vague, almost global. She felt it as a weight whose source might be too much responsibility or accumulated disappointment or mounting despair. Whatever was wrong or out of balance would grow slowly until suddenly everything in the world was wrong, and utter panic would ensue. Wild eyed, she’d often fix her gaze on me and ask unanswerable questions: “Don’t I deserve a life? Am I so different from everyone else? Don’t I deserve what other people have?” As a boy what scared me the most about such questions wasn’t that I had none of the answers my mother so desperately sought. No, it was that it didn’t seem possible for these questions to be asked without consequence. What would my mother do if I couldn’t manage to console her? “Doesn’t anyone understand that things have to change?” she’d wail. “That something will happen to me if they don’t?”
B
y the time I was in high school, though, this much had become clear: in fact, nothing was going to happen. At least nothing as dramatic as her hysterical questions implied. Because the result was the same every time she had one of these meltdowns. The morning after she’d appear at the breakfast table, so exhausted by what she’d been through that she could barely lift the coffee cup, but her emotional equilibrium for the most part restored. “Ah, Ricko-Mio,” she sighed, using her pet name for me. “Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be fine.” She’d give my hand a reassuring pat. “Last night, after you went to bed, I gave myself a good talking-to.”
That phrase always gave me the willies, because it squared with nothing in my experience. As a boy I’d had a condition of my own, a terrible temper, and knew firsthand what a near-total loss of control felt like. My mother’s meltdowns could be scary, but at least they were analogous to something I myself had experienced. But I’d never given myself a good talking-to. For that to happen there would have to be two of me, and I was always one, even when unhinged. I understood that my mother’s phrase could be interpreted as a figure of speech, though I also suspected that fundamentally it wasn’t. She wasn’t thinking things through more calmly or considering things from a new angle due to conscience, rituals I was conscious of and familiar with from a fairly young age. But I’d never given myself a dressing-down. There was simply no other me to assume the talked-to position. If I deserved a lecture, there was no me to give it; if I had one to impart, neither was there another me to receive it. Somehow, my mother was able to do that. More bizarrely still, it worked.
It just didn’t last.
THE CONFLICT BETWEEN my mother and grandparents came to a head in the week before we were scheduled to leave. Given that our future well-being, if not our very lives, was being wagered on an ill-conceived cross-country journey, their final battle was over something relatively insignificant: my mother’s furniture, the stuff we weren’t taking with us in the U-Haul and that she couldn’t afford to put in storage. She wanted to store it in Helwig Street’s small, dark, dank basement, but my grandfather said there was too little space, that with all that furniture stacked down there, it would be hard to get at the furnace, should it need servicing. But more likely he hoped that when it came down to selling all her worldly goods for what little they’d bring, my mother would finally see the folly of the whole enterprise and come to her senses. Instead, she assured them that this was the last time she’d ever ask them for anything and promptly called a man who dealt in used furniture. He came to the house, looked everything over critically, and concluded that he’d be doing her a favor, really, just to haul it away. There wasn’t much of a market for such old-fashioned stuff, he claimed, and a lot of the pieces sported dark cigarette burns, courtesy of my father, who couldn’t be bothered to use an ashtray and who managed, despite his brief tenure on Helwig Street, to leave his mark on flat surfaces in every room.
By the time we got to Ohio, naturally, she’d decided the guy was a highway robber. She’d waited too long to get a second appraisal, and he’d known we didn’t have time to haggle and would take whatever he offered, no matter how unfair it was. No doubt he’d spent a leisurely morning sanding the burns off the arms of our furniture, which was not old-fashioned but classic, timeless. By now he’d applied a coat of polyurethane and was selling it for three times what he paid us. Ten times, probably. And this was money we could use, she admitted, because of course by Ohio she knew that my grandfather had been right. Everything was costing more than she’d budgeted, and she now feared we might have to dip into the emergency fund, which she at last revealed was my college money. All because of a thief. “Gloversville,” she muttered, shaking her head in disgust. How lucky we were to finally be shut of such an awful, awful place.
WE WERE SCARED, if not nearly as scared as we should have been. It was beyond lunatic to set out in a vehicle as dubious as the Gray Death with a novice at the wheel, on a twenty-five-hundred-mile journey. In the weeks before our departure, I’d gotten on the Thruway a few times to get used to interstate driving, but usually got off again at the next exit and returned home. I knew we were budgeted, as indeed we always were, right down to the last nickel, and it seemed a waste of time and gas to drive to Amsterdam, pay my toll, and then turn around and drive back. Those short trial runs weren’t a waste, though. I at least got a sense of how much faster everybody else would be going, that even eighteen-wheelers were going to blow by me like I was standing still, and that even a vehicle as sluggish and heavy as the Galaxie could be tugged into their wake. I also learned to stay in the right-hand lane and to disregard the pissed-off expressions of impatient drivers who’d get trapped behind me, then roar past with horns blaring and middle fingers erect. What that relatively benign stretch of Thruway could not prepare me for, of course, was the white-knuckle traffic in and around major cities, nor for the trailer I’d be towing.
Nor could I imagine that while my plan to poke along in the right lane would work well enough most of the time, I’d eventually have to change lanes and learn on the fly how much space between cars to allow for both the Death and the trailer. Our first day on the road I must’ve nearly caused a half-dozen accidents, and the drivers I imperiled by unsafe lane changes, their red faces contorted with rage in my side-view mirrors, retaliated by laying on their horns before swerving in front of me to see how I liked it. One man I cut off pulled alongside and powered down his window to yell at me, but then didn’t. I don’t know if it was my age and obvious inexperience or my bewildered-looking passenger, but the righteous fury instantly drained out of his face, and I could read his thoughts clearly. Whoever we were and wherever we were going, we weren’t going to make it. “What’s wrong with all these people?” my mother kept wondering. “Why’s everybody so mad at us?” I didn’t have the heart to explain what I was only just coming to understand myself: we were a genuine menace.
On the morning of the second day, studying the course AAA had charted for us, she said, “I don’t know why they want us to go around all these cities. The road we’re on goes straight through. Why burn all that extra gas?” Her question got answered that afternoon in Indiana when we decided to ignore AAA’s advice to loop around Indianapolis. Immediately we found ourselves locked in a sea of angry city commuters, and to my complete surprise the right-hand lane was no longer ideal, because it would end abruptly, forcing us to exit—or, rather, another driver would have. I, however, had no intention of getting off for the simple reason that we didn’t want to. Putting on my left-turn blinker, I simply held my course, in effect creating my own lane, until one of the drivers in the lane I was determined to merge with, fearing death or dismemberment, let me in. “What a good driver you’re becoming,” my mother said every time we didn’t have a wreck, and I couldn’t tell if she was trying to bolster my confidence or actually meant it.
What we worried about even more than accidents were the interstate on-ramps. The Death, underpowered to begin with and further slowed by the U-Haul, simply wasn’t up to them. I’d get up the best head of steam I could and keep the accelerator pressed to the floor as I entered the ramp, but then there was nothing to do but watch the speedometer inch backward—20, 18, 15, 11—until finally our forward momentum wouldn’t even register at all and the car would begin to shudder violently. “Come on, Bess,” my mother would whisper, patting the metal dashboard encouragingly, terrified that we’d come to a complete halt and block the long line of cars behind us, “you can do it.” (She refused to call our getaway car the Death and became irritated when I did.) All the way to Arizona, our lives were ruled by ramps. We had to get on and off the interstate several times a day, but no matter how low we were on gas, or how hungry we were, or how badly my mother needed to pee, if the exit’s ramps, whether off or back on, looked too severe we kept on driving until we found one with a gentler incline. At day’s end we avoided the busy exits where we’d have a choice of places to stay and eat, opting instead for more remote ones where th
ere’d be a lone Holiday Inn that had an on-site restaurant, because once we were done for the day, there was no chance we’d be getting back in the car before morning. We parked in the farthest, darkest reaches of the motel’s parking lot, taking up three or four spaces, because our one absolutely inviolable rule was to never, for any reason, put the Death in reverse. One morning early on I’d wasted a good hour trying to back out of the space we’d taken near the motel’s front entrance. No one had told me that backing a trailer would be counterintuitive, and before I’d figured that out I’d jackknifed the U-Haul so completely that the two cars to my left were utterly hemmed in. We’d had to enlist the help of the desk clerk to locate and rouse from their slumbers the drivers of the two vehicles on my right so I could extricate us by means of a forward gear.
My other great concern was the temperature gauge, especially in the afternoon when the July heat was worst and the needle crept slowly up into the red danger range. Then we’d have to pull over at a rest stop and let the ticking engine cool down. When I couldn’t find one in time and radiator steam began to billow from under the hood, the only solution was to pull onto the shoulder and wait for an hour in the broiling sun. What I didn’t like thinking about was that we still hadn’t crossed the Mississippi. What would happen when we hit the desert and the temperature soared into the hundreds? Standing there beside the interstate, wilting in the brutal heat, the steady stream of air-conditioned cars and professionally maintained trucks whizzing by and blowing angry gales of dust in our faces, we must have looked utterly forlorn. Surprisingly few people stopped to offer assistance, and those who did we quickly sent packing. Everything was fine, we told them. No, we didn’t need a tow. We were just waiting a bit for the engine to cool down, and then we’d be on the road again. We didn’t want complete strangers to know our true plight, or that we were losing heart with each passing mile.
Elsewhere: A Memoir Page 4