by Torey Hayden
‘It’s weird to think about. Really super weird.’
We lay in the grass without speaking. I munched my way through half a packet of corn chips and most of the can of bean dip. When I had emptied the packet, I scooped out the remaining dip with my finger. I was surprisingly hungry.
‘Les?’ said Megan, rolling over on her stomach.
‘Hmm?’
‘I want to ask you something.’
‘So, ask.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘if that was us, do you think Mama would have tried this hard to find us?’
‘You mean if it had been us the Nazis had taken away instead of Klaus?’
‘Yeah.’
I reached for my can of pop. ‘Probably. I don’t think she’d ever want to lose us either. I think all Mama really wants is to have all her family together in one place, like they should be.’
‘I wonder sometimes,’ Megan said. ‘I wonder if because she’s got us, she cares as much about you and me as she does about all the things she’s lost.’
‘Well, she lost a lot, Megs. You have to be understanding.’
‘I do understand. I’m just saying that, well …’ She paused over another pretzel. ‘Well …that sometimes inside me, I don’t.’
We stayed in the yard for the better part of two hours, until dusk came. Then we went inside. Megan settled in front of the TV to watch the Muppets. I stood in the front doorway and stared out into the street. Feeling heavy with the need to get away from the house, I decided to go over and see Paul.
Upstairs, I knocked gently on my parents’ door. There had ceased to be any noise from their room quite a long time before, so I was very quiet in case they were both asleep.
‘Come in,’ my father said, his voice barely above a whisper.
Carefully, I eased the door open. They were on the bed. The bedclothes were rumpled, and my parents lay on just the sheet. My father wore only his T-shirt. Mama had nothing on at all. His one arm stretched out across the sheet, my father lay on his right side with my mama curled up, lying very close to him, her head tucked down against his chest. Her hair was loose and hid her face, but I could tell she was asleep. Dad had his left hand over her, his arm on her arm and shoulder, his fingers twined through her hair. The room was very warm and humid, and he asked me to crack the window open for him. I did.
The sun had set, and the room was murky with April twilight.
‘I was wondering if it would be all right for me to go over to Paul’s,’ I asked, still standing by the window. A rush of cool air pushed into the room. ‘I called, and his mom said it’s OK.’
‘What’s Megan doing?’ my father asked.
‘Watching television.’
‘Have you two eaten?’
I nodded.
He gestured for me to hand him the top sheet, from the foot of the bed. I came and drew it up over them. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But don’t be too late, will you? And take your keys.’
I nodded. ‘I will.’
What I thought about as I walked to Paul’s house was sex. Seeing my mother and father like that, I wondered how Mama could do it. How had my dad made sex good for her again? How was it that she could come home from the police station, hysterical with fear, and a few hours later be in bed like that with my father? I couldn’t fathom what kind of communication they had together. How had he managed to comfort her and breathe life back into her right in the centre of the vortex? I wished I understood. I wished I could ask one of them, although I knew I never would.
Paul and I sat together on the curb in front of his house. A neighbour had been watering, and the gutter flowed with runoff. Paul made up little boats from leaves and twigs and set them sailing under our legs. Then he rested his face on his knees to watch them.
Behind us, Aaron’s stereo blared. As always, it was so loud you could feel it if you were in the house. But outside where we were, it was tolerable. I found it a comfortingly normal sound.
‘My family’s driving me insane,’ I said, leaning down to trail my fingers in the water running alongside the curb.
‘Yours is?’ said Paul. ‘You ought to see what’s going on around here. You know what my half-assed brother did today? You know Marianne MacAlister?’
‘No, Paul,’ I interrupted. ‘I don’t mean things like Aaron does. I mean insane. The real thing. The thing you get locked up in Larned for.’
I told him. I told him precisely why I wasn’t going to school. About Klaus and Toby Waterman. About my mama and the war. I think in a way he knew. Not the details. But he’d gotten the substance by osmosis.
He sat on the curb, feigning an interest in his leaf boats I knew he didn’t have. I was unable to tell how shocked he was by what I was saying. At that point I didn’t care. The need to share was so pressing to me that I had no room left to worry about anyone else.
‘What I wish,’ I said, ‘is that my father would do something. I keep telling him that – that we ought to be doing something to change things. That we ought to have been doing something all along. But my father ignores me. He never does anything but hedge.’
‘But he’s doing something now, isn’t he?’ Paul asked. ‘If your mother’s going to see a psychiatrist.’
‘That’s only because Mr Waterman threatened to press charges if he didn’t. He wouldn’t have otherwise.’
‘But what more can he do than that?’
‘I don’t know. There’s got to be something. Why do I have to think of it? He’s the adult. He ought to know more about these things than I do.’
I rested my cheek against my knee. The night was warm, and it being Saturday, the area was alive with activity. You could hear the cars zooming up and down Main Street a couple of blocks over.
Paul leaned forward and studied something on the street’s surface. ‘You’re lucky, though,’ he said. ‘You know what I think’s so super about your family?’
‘What?’
‘That you all love each other. I mean, God, I’ve never seen two people who love each other like your mom and dad. You all do. You all love each other like mad, Lesley. You stay home with your mother, and your little sister is always trying to do things to help and everything. Believe me, you don’t know how lucky that makes you. A million kids in this country would probably be more than happy to trade places with you, to have to put up with the problems your mother has, just to be in a family like yours.’
‘Are you kidding? Paul, is that what you seriously believe?’
‘Yes,’ he said without looking up. ‘Most people would give anything to live in a family where everybody loves everybody else and they all know it. I sure would.’
I sloshed my fingers through the water and said nothing.
‘It isn’t enough,’ I finally replied. ‘Love helps, but it isn’t enough. You’ve got to change things. You got to get out and find why things are wrong and make them better. That’s where my dad and I are different. That’s where he’s wrong. If you’re going to make the world better, you’ve got to change things. Daddy comes along and puts his arms around you and you feel better, but things aren’t better. That’s what he does with Mama. He hugs her and he kisses her and he makes her think she’s wonderful. But she’s still got all her problems. Nothing’s changed.’
‘But how do you change that kind of stuff?’
I sighed. Watching the launching of another leaf boat, I sighed again. ‘I don’t know. But there’s got to be something.’
Chapter Nineteen
The police had phoned down to the regional mental health centre in Garden City on Saturday afternoon and made a Monday appointment for my mother to see one of the psychiatrists there. We all realized that Mama was going to be decidedly underwhelmed by this information. When my father and I met early Sunday morning outside the bathroom door, he said to me that he thought breakfast would be the best time to broach the subject with her. He reckoned the sooner she was told, the better, and Sunday morning breakfasts were always very relaxed. He said that if Mam
a got upset, he didn’t want Megs or me to aggravate things by taking sides. Then he went down the hallway, back to their bedroom. Left standing outside the door, gripping my blow dryer, waiting for Megan to get out of the bathroom, I was filled with dread, convinced that the morning was doomed to deteriorate into a repeat of the horrific earlier scenes of hysteria. I wondered if I could get away with skipping breakfast altogether.
My father was capable of great gentleness. He had an innate sense, in particular, of how to touch you to convey a caring so deep it was almost raw. Hands on Mama’s shoulders, he stood behind her as she sat at the kitchen table and he explained carefully how the police had released her on the condition that she go to this appointment, how Dr Carrera was there to help her work out some of the things troubling her about Klaus and how she would eventually feel so much better for it. My mother sat with her elbows on the Sunday paper, her hands clasped together in front of her mouth. Her expression blackened. Even though he could not see her face from where he was, my father began to massage her shoulders. In a tender voice he said he had supported the decision to get some help for her.
Mama, as characteristically unpredictable as ever, showed no fright whatsoever. Instead, she exploded. Like a kitchen-sized atom bomb she went off, right then and there, without excusing herself and my father to another room, without telling Megs and me to leave them alone. There we all were together, having finished Sunday breakfast, all still absorbed in the leisurely business of having a second or third piece of toast and browsing through the newspaper, when my mother let go of a wrath that would have done justice to a betrayed warlord.
‘Those bleeding motherfuckers! Are you on their side? They steal my son and you are standing there. Agreeing with them! Why the hell don’t you help me, O’Malley? You big fucking bastard, whose side are you on?’
She roared up from the table, knocking my father’s arms back. He moved away from her. First to one side of the kitchen, then around to the far side of the table. She pursued him, screaming furiously at him. She didn’t need anybody’s help working out what was troubling her about Klaus, she yelled. Nobody’s help but my father’s was needed. Because he was her husband and he was supposed to help her. So why was he just standing there? Why was he telling the policemen she would go to a psychiatrist? He was the one who needed a psychiatrist. To have his head examined. To see who had bewitched him. To find out what kind of man he was, who wouldn’t even stand by his wife.
I was afraid she was going to hit him. All the hitting I’d ever seen Mama do was confined to occasional smacks on the bottom when Megan and I were little, but just then, I thought she was going to hit my father. She grabbed hold of a chair by its back, and I closed my eyes. But when I opened them, she was still in the same spot, still holding on to the back of the chair. My father kept the table between them.
Embittered by our refusal to support her, by our recent treatment of her, as if she were an untrustworthy child, she raged at us, saying vicious, tortured things. All these weeks she had borne what was to her our humilating, degrading treatment, all these weeks she had suffered our betrayal and had said nothing. Now the hurt and rage came spilling out of her like vomit.
Our unwillingness to help her reclaim Klaus had clearly caused her deepest wound. Time and again she came back to that point. Why had we abandoned her? She was right. She knew about these things. She understood these kinds of experiences better than any of us. Why wouldn’t we trust her? How did we let ourselves be fooled by their dirty tricks? How had they convinced us to believe them and not her? She knew she was right, and she was horrified that they had the power to make the people she trusted most suddenly desert her. Or was it just that we were weak people?
‘I can’t understand this! Why are you just standing there, O’Malley? You said you would help me get Klaus back. You promised me. You did, O’Malley. You swore you would. And now you betray me!’
Then abruptly she turned on me. ‘And what about you, you big lout? Why do you always sit there like shit in a bucket? Why don’t you listen to what your mother tells you to do? You are soft. You are spoiled by this good life. You don’t know what it’s like to have people beat you every day, to have no food to eat except what you wouldn’t give a dog here. You don’t think it can happen to you. You’re spoiled. You’re nothing but a lazy lout.’
I ducked my head and stared at the newspaper.
‘Well, what do you say for yourself? You just sit there. Did I come out of Ravensbrück just to have a child like you? I might as well have died there. It would have been better. I can’t understand you. I tried to make you a good person. Why won’t you help me?’
‘Because you aren’t right about this, Mama,’ I said.
My father frowned and put a finger to his lips for me to keep quiet. Frustrated and upset, I lowered my head again.
Mama began at last to cry. They were hardly tears of defeat, however. She was still furious, but finally all three languages had failed her. Standing in the middle of the kitchen floor, she wept for several minutes, shoving the tears back roughly with her forearms, her fists clenched.
‘You treat me like a child,’ she sobbed. ‘You all do. Even her, even the baby does,’ she said, gesturing toward Megan. ‘Don’t you think I know how you treat me? Do you think I want this? Do you think I’m happy?’
I felt wretched. Mama had a good deal more insight into this dreadful situation than I had realized, and obviously we must have been crucifying her over these past weeks. There was no way to listen to her without being heartbroken. And there was no way not to listen to her.
‘Why in God’s name are you doing this to me? Why do you treat me like this? Like I’m defective. Like I’m stupid. Ein Dummkopf. Bin ich ja kreuzdumm? Eh, O’Malley? Bin ich?’
My father remained stoic. He was leaning back against the counter to the right of the stove. He stood, hands on his thighs, and studied the linoleum. He did not look at her. He did not refute anything she said. He did not answer her questions. He just stood. I felt sorry for him. He was the recipient of almost all my mother’s anger, and she grew so provocative that I found it difficult not to come to his defence. But I didn’t. I knew only his exterior was calm, and that if I said anything, it would be me he’d get angry with.
The whole of that Sunday morning was excruciating. Mama went on and on and on without pause from breakfast-time until nearly half past eleven. Still choked with tears, she raged and cursed and cried. It was like having a septic sore burst, pus running everywhere, only to discover that the pain that followed was worse than the pain before. Megan sat petrified over the comics section of the newspaper. Her knuckles had gone white where she gripped the edge; her eyes went back and forth over the panels of Charlie Brown and Snoopy and Lucy. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Otherwise, she was entirely motionless. I couldn’t keep myself that still. Muscles twitched. I became acutely aware of needing to use the toilet as the morning wore on. My feet were cold. But like Megan, I didn’t dare move. And eventually, I went numb, body, soul and spirit.
In the end Mama broke down once more into sobs, heavy with weariness. She sagged into a chair across the table from me, covered her face with her hands and wept. The three of us all remained frozen, watching. No one dared touch her. She sat only a few moments, then rose and left the room. We heard her go upstairs, come down again, rattle around in the back cupboard and finally go outside. And still we remained silent and immobile.
My mother spent the rest of the morning and the early afternoon in the garden. On her knees, she fiercely ripped weeds from the flower beds. Her face was smudged from where she had wiped back tears with dirty hands.
Then in the late afternoon I again heard my parents, Dad once more explaining things to Mama. This time her voice was only plaintive. She was exhausted and unhappy and all she wanted from him was sympathy. Again she was in tears. My father continued, calmly, patiently, relentlessly, to explain how Mr Waterman was going to get his lawyer if she didn’t g
o see Dr Carrera. They were upstairs in their bedroom, and I could hear them through the open window as I sat on the lawn. I felt like screaming at them to shut up. But of course, I didn’t.
Monday morning, I expected Mama to be, if not resigned, at least too worn out from all the hysteria on Sunday to be troublesome. She wasn’t. The appointment was for ten in the morning, and when I came upstairs to tell her it was time, I found her sitting on the bed, absorbed in a book.
‘Are you ready, Mama?’ She wasn’t. She was wearing a pair of old blue jeans and one of Dad’s shirts with the sleeves rolled up.
‘Mama, it’s time to change. Come on now. Put the book down.’ I went over to the closet and sorted through her clothes. She didn’t have a large assortment, mostly because her communal spirit kept her rifling through Dad’s and my wardrobes. But there were a few nicer things, and Mama could look really beautiful when she tried.
‘What about this?’ I asked, taking out a pink wool dress. I turned around.
‘No,’ she said, not lifting her head.
I put it back in the closet. ‘What about this brown shirt? Yes, this looks nice.’ I pulled it out. ‘You like this, Mama?’
‘I don’t want to wear that.’
‘You could have my white blouse to go with it. You know. The one with the pointy collar. That would look nice with it.’
‘No,’ she said, and I was not convinced that she’d even bothered to look up.
Piece by piece, I took out each garment. Piece by piece, she vetoed them.
‘Look, Mama, you got to change your clothes. That’s all there is to it. You can’t go wearing stuff like that.’
‘This is clean, what I’ve got on,’ she replied. ‘If it’s good enough for O’Malley to see me in, then it’s good enough for that doctor.’
‘Mama, this is different. You have to put nice clothes on. Clean clothes aren’t enough. You try to look nice when you go to see a doctor like this.’
‘These look nice.’
‘They don’t, Mama.’