My grandmother scheduled Allison for beginning piano lessons, and took her for informal conversations with a French-speaking neighbor. My grandmother didn’t invite me to come, which saved me the trouble of refusing to leave with her. In any case, she wouldn’t have had grounds to force me. My mother shared her views on language and music, if not her approach. I attended bilingual elementary school, and was in the school orchestra. Had she asked, my grandmother would have found out that I spoke fluent Spanish, and played the viola quite nicely.
There was a long time that I didn’t talk about that summer at all, and then there were times when it was all I could talk about. It was the sort of thing that made a person interesting in college: My Youth as Real Live Tragic Mulatta. My recovery turned my scars into party favors. If you had seen them—the dot on my leg, the line on my elbow, the water in my eyes when I talked about Allison—then you had something about me to take with you. If you knew what was behind it, you had even more. If you think your family was messed up, people would whisper, you should talk to that girl. In my first year of law school I was famous for using myself as the basis for a sample torts question in study group. People wondered whether being so casual about it meant that I was screwed up, or that I was OK. I couldn’t have answered them.
A confession: because I didn’t know the difference between kinds of intimacy back then, I told each of the first four men I slept with that he was the only one I’d ever told this story. Jason was the fourth, and the only one to call me a liar: he’d already heard the story from my roommate the week before. According to him, it was part of what made him like me in the first place. I was so stunned that I kicked him out of bed and didn’t speak to him again for months. But after he had left and I had given up trying to sleep, I wondered which part of the story had drawn him to me. I never asked, but I wondered. I wondered years later, when he called the Yale housing law clinic on behalf of the New Haven Register and, upon recognizing my name and voice at the other end of the line, asked me to dinner. I wondered—it was a tiny flash in the back of my mind, but yes, I wondered—when he brought me takeout during finals week at the end of my second year of law school, and I cracked open the fortune cookie and found an engagement ring. Was it the part of the story where I was strong that made me special, or the part where I was weak? It mattered more than I could say.
This is what I told him: My grandmother, it seems to me in retrospect, was a woman whose better impulses frequently led to her worst, the sort of person who would offer you a genuine favor, then punish you for having the gall not to take her up on it. The afternoon I ended up in the hospital, I think she started out meaning to help me.
“Look,” she said, approaching me in the living room that day, bending down to my level to look me in the eye. “This is too much. You need to go outside today. I’m taking Allison swimming. You’ll come with us.”
“I don’t swim anymore,” I said. “Snakes like water.”
“Be that as it may, they don’t like chlorine. Go get your swim-suit on.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t want to be eaten.”
“Look,” said my grandmother, exasperated, “it’s possible that I exaggerated a little, so you would learn a lesson about running off. There is a Burmese Python, and they have spotted a few in the Everglades, but no one’s ever heard of one this far north, and no one’s ever heard of one eating an entire person, and the only dog missing around here is that Saint Bernard, who probably ran away because his owner is a fool and a drunk, and he may not even have stayed missing if she hadn’t written her own damn phone number wrong on the lost dog poster. Get dressed.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
“Why would I lie to you now?” she asked.
“Why would you lie to me about it in the first place?” I asked. “Either way, it makes you a liar. Maybe you just want me to get eaten.”
“Don’t you get smart with me,” said my grandmother. “I never took lip from your mother and I certainly won’t take it from you.”
“Daddy says you took everything from my mother,” I said, more innocently than was honest. There was a thick feeling in my throat.
My grandmother’s eyes narrowed. She was silent for some minutes. When she left the room I could hear my breath coming rapidly in tune with her retreating then returning footsteps. In the moment I first saw the gleam of metal in her hand, I truly believed she was going to stab me.
She never said a word. She started snipping quickly, unevenly, the rhythm of her anger punctuated by the growing pile of tight black curls on the floor. It didn’t occur to me to run. It didn’t occur to me that there was anywhere to go. I don’t know how long Allison had been watching. I only know that when it was over, and all but half an inch of my shoulder-length-when-it-lay-flat hair was piled on the floor, Allison was in the doorway, looking straight at my grandmother.
She walked over to me and grabbed my hand, dragging me toward the front door. I didn’t know what to believe about snakes anymore, but at that moment I would have preferred being inside a python’s belly to seeing my grandmother look at my practically bald head like she had proved something to me. I followed Allison down to our lake, climbed with her to the top of our tree. We were out of stories, or we were out of words. We didn’t pretend to be my mother in the Amazon, or hers on a cruise ship, because we knew what we were right then: people too small to stop the things we didn’t want to happen from happening anyway. The bottoms of my jeans and Allison’s thin ankles were muddy then, our socks wet from a puddle I could not remember having stepped in. I looked down before I remembered not to. I saw our watery reflections blending into one on the water’s wet canvas, pink and peach and beige and denim softly swirling, and wondered how my grandmother managed to see two of us so clearly.
“I want to go home,” Allison said. “I want us to run away. I hate that woman.”
“She likes you,” I said.
“If she liked me, she’d like you too. You’re my best friend.”
“No I’m not,” I said, and realized as I said it that something about the last few weeks had made it true.
Then I saw Allison’s reflection lift her arms, felt the weight of her palms on my back, felt myself rock forward. In those first few seconds, I could feel the fall in my belly, a sharp reminder of gravity, the constancy of the laws of physics even when they run counter to everything else we’d have ourselves believe in. We are safe, with our families, until we are not. On the way down, I remembered dropping out of the bunk bed, thought about how much worse the first moment of the fall had been than the actual impact. I braced myself for the slap of the water, but was still unprepared for the sting of it against my nostrils, the sharpness of the underwater rock on which I landed.
I woke up in a hospital room with blue walls. It was not my mother cradling my head and humming but my aunt Claire, who, as always, had soft hands and smelled like peach lotion. She was much thinner than she’d been two months ago: for the first time I believed she was as sick as my mother had said and felt the sharp stab of what I could finally name as anger fade a bit. Aunt Claire apologized to me nonetheless. “If I had known,” she said over and over again, “what kind of people they were leaving you with, I would have insisted you stay with me.” Allison had admitted what she’d done, and my aunt Claire had already dismissed my grandmother from the premises, told the nurses she was not allowed in my hospital room, though I couldn’t exactly see her trying to sneak in.
The department chair had located my parents, who were on their way home. I spent a few days in the hospital looking, between the piles of blankets well-intentioned nurses kept putting on my bed and the scratchy blue paper hospital gown, worse than I actually felt. Help had arrived quickly enough that there hadn’t been much water in my lungs. I had scraped up an arm pretty badly, and knocked myself unconscious with some combination of fear and impact, but the worst of my injuries was a broken tibia. Once the wound above it closed and the risk of infection passed, the
doctors told me it would heal normally. Though my leg occasionally throbbed, and the cast I wore itched like crazy, I reminded myself that I was lucky. I’d overheard a doctor telling my aunt that if the rock had hit my head two inches lower, the fall would have killed me.
Aunt Claire stayed in a Tallahassee hotel until my parents got back, visiting and reading me kids’ books. I was too exhausted to pretend I was too old for them. She made me excited promises about all the things we could do with my hair when it started to grow back, and was always reluctant to leave me for the hotel in the evening. I turned nine in the hospital; a nurse baked me a homemade red velvet cake; the entire pediatric staff sang to me; Aunt Claire bought me a beautiful set of turquoise-jeweled hair combs to decorate my shorter hair.
When my mother finally arrived, I heard her before I saw her. My parents had gotten in at midnight and come straight to the hospital. It was one in the morning when they got there, four days after my admittance, and they had to threaten several overprotective nurses in order to be allowed to wake me. When my mother saw me, she cried. My father was so wrapped up in hugging me and so close to crying himself that I don’t know if he even noticed her tears, but I wished somebody would have held her.
“I’m so sorry, baby,” she said when she had composed herself. “We never should have left you. Allison is damn lucky she called the cops, lucky you’re alive, and lucky your father and I don’t believe in juvenile detention centers, or we’d be pressing charges against her for pushing you off in the first place.”
“Maybe it was just an accident,” I said. What I meant was that Allison might have wanted to go home, more than she wanted to hurt me. Hadn’t she said so? Hadn’t she confessed, even before I was awake to accuse her?
My mother waved this possibility off.
“I called my brother,” she said. “They cut their cruise short in Guam and came back several days ago. She’s got a lot of problems that have nothing to do with you. She’s very confused. This is all your grandmother’s doing. I’m sure if she hadn’t been treating you so badly, Allison wouldn’t have thought she could do the same. Why didn’t you tell me what was going on in that house?”
I considered this. I was very confused.
“You were in Brazil,” I said finally. “What are they going to do to Allison now?”
“Frankly, that’s her parents’ problem now, not mine,” said my mother, cradling me closer to her, and stroking my still naked feeling head. “My only job is to take care of you.”
But Allison was the other half of the story; the half I didn’t tell because it didn’t belong to me anymore. People would ask me sometimes what happened to her. “I’m sure she grew up,” I would say, and they would nod at my empathy and rarely point out that growing up did not mean and never has meant the same thing as getting better. The truth was I didn’t know much about how Allison was doing. My mother had deliberately cut off contact with her family after that summer, deciding the whole lot of them were toxic. I’d heard her though, talking to my father about the fact that my uncle had decided to leave Allison with my grandmother for a little while, to straighten her out. “That’s a mistake,” my mother had said. “What an unfortunate pair.”
An unfortunate pair. Her words were in the back of my mind when she called me a few weeks after my law school graduation. I had been hibernating, wearing headphones and reviewing for the Connecticut bar, and it was only because she called three times in a row that I bothered to pick up the phone.
“Tara,” my mother said, “the first thing I want you to know is you don’t have to do this.”
“OK...” I said.
“Allison is in the hospital,” she said.
“What’s wrong with her?” It occurred to me, stupidly, that maybe she needed a kidney.
“She tried to kill herself,” my mother said.
“My God,” I said.
“She’s asked to see you,” my mother said. “Apparently, her therapist thinks it would be good for her to talk to you. I’m sure she wants to apologize in person. But I told them, you have a life, too, and we’ll do this on your schedule, if at all, OK?”
“I’ll do it,” I said.
My mother paused on the other end of the line.
“I’ll book us flights,” she said finally.
“I can go by myself,” I said.
“No you can’t,” she said. “I don’t trust those people with you for a second.”
Her fear was understandable, if belated. The year after my summer with the unfortunate pair, I didn’t sleep more than an hour a night. When I said so later, my mother said that wasn’t biologically possible, and then changed the subject. My father said it simply wasn’t true, because he didn’t sleep well that year and he remembers waking up nights, walking down the hall, and pulling back the blankets in my room to check on me. “You slept,” he told me, “like an angel.” Perhaps they are right. When I was very little, my mother used to say there was something of my grandmother in me, in how I tell stories the way I need them to be and not the way that they actually happened. In any case, I remember staring at the ceiling every night for a year, tracing shadow patterns with my finger. I remember closing my eyes whenever I heard footsteps outside the door and relaxing every time I realized it was only my father.
My parents were careful with me like they’d never been before; I was in college before they were willing to let me out of their sight for more than a few hours. Even when Aunt Claire requested my company, to sit beside her bed and read to her those last few months before she died, they were reluctant to part with me. That summer was still with me somewhere, and so was Allison, and my grandmother, but thinking about any of it was like looking at an old photograph of myself, staring a long time and all the while trying to figure out whether it was really me in the picture.
And then there I was in Tallahassee again, this time in a downtown mental institution, only the kind with a marble lobby and a fountain on the grounds, so you were supposed to call it a wellness center. I had waited for my mother’s flight at the airport and had lunch with her when she landed. Though she insisted on driving me to see Allison, she announced in the parking lot that it was probably best if she not come in, and I agreed with her. The grounds of the wellness center reminded me of the grounds of the country club so long ago. Everything was flowering, in obstinate resistance to the severity of its locale.
When I announced who I was and whom I’d come to see, the woman behind the desk looked at me sharply for a second but then looked again, nodded, and told me I had my grandmother’s eyes. A nurse in a powder blue uniform escorted me down the hall to a waiting area with plush teal chairs. I sat in one of them before I even took note of who was sitting on the other end of the room. My grandmother looked older, of course—her hair now gone completely white, her face creased with wrinkles—but there was no mistaking her. Her eyes were still as sharp as ever, her mouth still set in a line of grim determination. Her wardrobe, though, was in a state of disarray, her silk scarf tossed on the chair beside her, her blouse and pants wrinkled as though she had been sleeping in them—which, I supposed, was entirely possible. She looked at me, gave me an almost smile. I tried to think of a comforting thing to say to her, the kind of thing you would say to a stranger in similar circumstances, but nothing came to mind. I focused instead on the insulting giddiness of the waiting-room magazine covers, their cheerful refusal to be about anything that mattered.
A nurse punctuated the silence. “Miss Ellis?”
She led me down the hallway and opened the door to a room, but didn’t enter. I could see her hovering in the entry. Before I walked through the door, I heard Allison’s voice, still thick like sweet liquid. “You came.”
She looked worse than I was expecting, but I already couldn’t remember how I’d pictured her all this time. Certainly I was never picturing her in a hospital bed, with bandages and an IV and a red plastic food tray in her lap. She was thinner now than she had been when I had known her as a child;
the roundness I remembered in her face had given way to something angular. Her eyes, which I’d remembered as being almost electric blue, seemed gray in this light, and her long hair was feathered with split ends. She looked exposed in a flimsy cloth gown; I wondered if there were levels of crazy here, if some people qualified to wear real clothes and others didn’t. I closed my eyes, then opened them again. Allison smiled at me. I smiled back. I looked around the room, wondering what was coming next. The clock on the wall ticked loudly, as if counting down for an explosion.
“What happened?” I asked, which was the most delicate way I could think of putting the question. Something cold flashed through her eyes briefly, and then she smiled at me again. “I got divorced last month,” she said. “But I got divorced once before, and I didn’t try to kill myself afterward, so I guess that’s not it, is it?”
Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self Page 5