Impossible Vacation

by Spalding Gray

  WHILE MOM WAS AWAY at the institution Dad, to his credit, had realized that maybe part of Mom’s breakdown had to do with their moving away from Narragansett Bay. He even tried to buy the old house back from the new owners, but they would hear nothing of it. Oh, they were sympathetic, of course, but they weren’t going to move. They told Dad that Mom’s missing the bay was only a symptom of some larger problem. What could be a larger problem than Narragansett Bay, except for the ocean? I wondered. Perhaps a woman might miss a bay so much that it would drive her mad. Only the Narragansett Indians would know about that one, and they were all gone. Maybe Mom was a reincarnation of a Narragansett Indian, I began to muse. Maybe she tapped into that bay so much that she became the bay, but had no words for her condition. What does “I miss the bay” really mean? It all depends on who’s saying it, right? And when Mom said it I trembled. We all trembled.

  Dad had the good sense to rent a bathhouse for Mom down on the coast at Bonnet Shore. Of course that was not the same as stepping out on your lawn and having your head open up over the bay, but at least it was the ocean. We had to drive forty-five minutes to get there, which was a problem because we had to go down Route 2, by Rhode Island standards a rather fast and crowded highway. I could see how driving on that road could make Mom real confused, especially since she was on some sort of medication and had just returned from electroshock treatments. So I always drove her to the beach. She hadn’t made any friends yet on this side of the bay, and I couldn’t bear seeing her go alone. But the truth was, I was sure she wouldn’t make it to the beach by herself.

  On nice summer days we’d try to go to the beach as often as we could. At first the shock treatments seemed to be working pretty well, because except for that occasional bird flutter in her eye, she apparently was coping, which put Dad at ease. So Mom and I had a few days that were actually quite relaxed. We lay on the beach and dozed in the sun, both catching up with our much-needed sleep while the distant waves and children’s voices played like lulling music in our ears.

  But some time around the second week Mom was home, it slowly started up again. The effects of the shock treatments were wearing off. She turned on those old what-ifs, those old maybe-I-should-haves, the regret mechanism. She’d say things like “Maybe I should have been a better mother” or “Do you really think I did that?” or “Maybe I should have gone to Spain to visit Cole when he first went there and I had the time and money, when I had saved all that money to go and visit him” or “Maybe I shouldn’t have stolen you boys away from your father.” She’d turn to me and say, “Do you think I stole you away from your father? Do you think I was a good mother?” These questions made me very uneasy and confused. Deep down inside I thought that if she’d been a good mother I’d be able not to be there, I’d be off with my own woman. I would have been able to have flown the nest by then. I wanted in the worst way to fly, just fly this nest and get out, but I still couldn’t.

  When I was sixteen and Cole was nineteen, Mom would sometimes take a bath in the upstairs bathroom and not lock the door, and Cole and I, instead of using the downstairs bathroom, would go upstairs to pee while we looked over our shoulder at her. It was like this odd kind of peep show. She’d let us look as long as we wanted, which was never very long: before we could get a good and steady look, Dad would come to the bottom of the stairs shouting, “Are you fellows”—Dad always called us “fellows” when reprimanding us—“are you fellows up there in that bathroom with your mother again? I don’t like that one bit, and I don’t want to have to come up there!” Dad didn’t like it. That was one of the few things I can remember him ever thinking was wrong.

  On those frantic summer nights after her return from the sanitarium, I would often try to calm Mom down by taking her to the movies, just to get us both out of the house and give Dad some relief. There were no new Bergman films around, and Mom had recently seen The Sound of Music at the sanitarium. So one night I made a big mistake. I took Mom to see the recently released film of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? She wanted to go because she had this fascination with the life and death of Virginia Woolf. I’m not sure that she knew Virginia Woolf’s books all that well, but she did know the story of how Woolf ended her life by filling her pockets with rocks and walking into a river. She seemed to know that story as well as she knew the story of how Hart Crane, one depressed morning, walked off the stern of his cruise ship in the Gulf of Mexico, never to be seen again. At the time I didn’t know what effect that film would have on Mom. I did notice how quiet she was as we rode home, but I didn’t find out how disturbed she really was until Dad told me the following morning. He said, “I think you took your mother to the wrong movie last night. She’s so upset that we may have to take her back to the institution.” At the time I felt like saying, “Well, why didn’t you take her to the movies, then? You choose a good one for her to see.” Outside of The Ten Commandments, which wasn’t on the summer circuit that year, I didn’t know what to choose. Some years back I had taken Mom to see The Ten Commandments and she had loved it.

  Well, it did turn out that Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was a real mistake, because Mom completely identified with the role of Martha, which was played by Elizabeth Taylor. In fact Dad told me that Mom thought she was Martha the next morning. She went into one of those funky tailspins. I had to spend that next beautiful summer day indoors with her while she flew around the house like a frightened bird again, like that bird that couldn’t get out. That was a bad day. I remember it well because that was the day when she told me right out how she planned to do it, how she planned to do away with herself.

  That whole morning she was pulling her hair and picking at her ears until they bled. She had a little bald spot now, at the back of her head, from tearing her hair out, just like people do in the movies when they’re supposed to be going mad. I would try to calm her down by reading to her from my favorite book at the time, Alan Watts’s Psychotherapy, East and West, but this didn’t seem to help at all. She wanted to read from Science and Health but she couldn’t sit still long enough to read. So at last, some time in mid-morning when she seemed about ready to pop, Mom began calling her Christian Science practitioner on the phone and she just stood there repeating after him what he told her, which seemed to be rather incoherent passages from Science and Health. I was never sure what it was he was saying to her because Mom would repeat it all in halting confusion—things like “Error is unreal because untrue, all reality is in God and His creation harmonious and eternal. That which He creates is good and He makes all that is made.” Then there was a long sentence which Mom was barely able to repeat back to him because she was too distracted, perhaps by the raving image of Elizabeth Taylor playing Martha in her mind, but she was able to get it out just once and she said it slowly back to him like a child trying to memorize a secret code. She said it once, all the way through: “Therefore the only reality of sin, sickness, and death is the awful fact that unrealities seem real to the human erring belief, until God strips off their disguise.” The practitioner went on as Mom paced and pulled and stretched the phone cord until it almost broke, almost pulling the phone off the wall as she repeated the next phrase: “The science of mind disposes of all evil. Truth, God, is not the father of error. Man is not matter, he is spirit. Man is made in the image and likeness of God.” Then the practitioner hung up and Mom held the phone and looked at it with this crazy scowl, like a little kid who finally managed after years to get in touch with Santa Claus on the telephone and, right in the middle of asking for everything she ever wanted, got cut off.

  Then Mom hung up and began to pace again and tear at her hair and pick at her ears and tried to repeat the phrases the practitioner had told her. But they came out all mixed up and broken like, “Disposes of evil—man is not error—error is not man.” I just sat there on the couch, I just sat there staring at her thinking, What the fuck is happening to this woman? The whole world was breaking down and falling apart. The whole house was shifting; I
was getting dizzy and had to run outside, where I threw up green stomach bile that ended in dry heaves. When I came back in, this frantic birdlike creature was running from window to window as though she couldn’t get out.

  That was the day I clearly saw, once again, how like a sky hook that wasn’t there when she needed it, the Christian Science wasn’t working for Mom. It was one of those pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps situations, but there were no more bootstraps. One part of the mind has to be the bootstraps for the other part, and all parts of Mom’s mind seemed to have gone.

  By late morning Mom had decided to take a bath. I wanted to trust her but I couldn’t stop myself from pacing outside the bathroom door, calling in every so often over the sound of the running water. The sound of light splashing in the tub produced even more fear in my mind. “Are you all right in there?” I called in. But there was no answer, just a little sound of water splashing. I was sure she didn’t have a straight-edge razor. I knew we didn’t have one in the house and I didn’t think she was capable of driving anywhere to buy one.

  After her bath Mom seemed calmer. She came out dressed in her pink robe looking just like a normal suburban housewife and curled up on the couch to read the Christian Science Monitor. I thought now that she was a little calmer it might be a good time to try again to introduce her to a few well-chosen passages from Alan Watts. But Mom would hear none of it. As soon as I started to read to her she lifted her newspaper up and made a kind of paper wall between us. I put all my anger into my index finger, curled it back tight against my thumb, fired, and hit that paper wall with a hard snap. Pop! My finger exploded against that newspaper like a shot, and Mom almost jumped off the couch. Then, quickly composing herself, she looked me clearly and directly in the eye and with that crazy bird gone out of her now, she said, “Oh, Brewster dear—how shall I do it? How shall I do away with myself? Shall I do it in the garage, with the car?”

  I don’t remember what happened after that. I don’t know if I said anything back. I was amazed at her clarity. Something inside of me knew that for her it was time to go, that she had made a decision.

  I made no effort to hide the keys to either of the cars. I did not tell Dad what she had said to me. It was as though Mom and I had made one last private pact together. Perhaps I was trying to help some sad sick part of her, which had now become almost the only part of her left, to die. But it was not as clear to me then as it seemed to be to her.

  That night things got a little better before they got worse again. Every night around what was the traditional cocktail hour Mom would seem to get worse. She’d go into this double-bind behavior: by then she was looking at Dad as her keeper, and she knew that if she acted weird in any way he’d pack her off to the sanitarium again; but the effort to act sane only made her more insane. Every night, just before Dad was due home, she would go try to make dinner and end up standing over the stove staring out the window into the encroaching woods like some fearful Pilgrim anticipating an Indian attack. She’d just stand there stamping her saddle shoes, which made her look like some weird cheerleader. She’d stamp and stamp and stare, trying to get it together to cook frozen peas, saying over and over again, “Don’t let your father see me this way. I’m all right, I’m okay—perfect reflection of God—there is no error. Please don’t let your father see me this way.” Then Dad would come home and give her a peck on the cheek and she would relax a little bit and ease into making the rest of the dinner with her mad birdlike flutters of panic surfacing here and there. Then Dad would fix himself a tall bourbon and, seeing that crazy bird in her, would begin to realize things weren’t going well.

  It was just the three of us then. Topher was away with Gram; Cole was away in Spain studying some dead existential Spanish writer. The three of us remained in this strange kind of triangle. I was afraid to pull out of it because I thought the whole thing would collapse. Only a void would be left, some dark yawning impossible gap, only darkness after so many years of shared history, of good and bad times together.

  Odd, or worse than odd, that it should come to this after all these years: the mother bird gone mad. And yet that night after Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? we were still able to rally after all the confusion and madness of the day and Mom’s confessions of wanting to do away with herself. We were still able to rally around Dad’s surprising suggestion that we all go to the movies together. At last Dad had come through, and with flying colors. Not only did he want to go to the movies, but he wanted to go to a drive-in, to see, of all things, Mary Poppins, which he probably thought would be a healthy antidote to the horrors of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I laughed to myself at the thought of Virginia Woolf meeting Mary Poppins on some stark New England moor.

  We went in Mom’s car, a red Corvair convertible. It was a warm summer night, and Dad even put the top down. At the last minute I thought it might be fun for me to try to get in free. So I took a blanket off the backseat, lay down on the back floor, and covered myself. I could tell that Dad was proud of me in some way, almost like he thought I was being enterprising or something. For a moment Mom even slipped back into her old normal self, and suddenly we were all together again. Mom and Dad were sitting in the front seat like lovers, and I was wrapped in a blanket on the back floor like a child waiting to be born.

  The following day things took a turn for the worse. Mom hadn’t slept that night. She became like that anxious bird again, and when Dad went to pack up her little suitcase to take her back to the sanitarium, she got even wilder, running from room to room trying to avoid being caught and put back into the cage for those awful old shock treatments she couldn’t bear.

  At last, completely exasperated, Dad asked me to help round her up and get her into the Corvair, which by now had the top up. She tried to call her Christian Science practitioner, but Dad wouldn’t allow it. He made her get in the front seat between us so she wouldn’t try to jump out. I was as firm as I could be with her but my words sounded hollow and distant, as if I were doing a bad reading of someone else’s script: “C’mon, Mom, we are only trying to do what is best for you.”

  The trip to the sanitarium was one of those rides that take no time and forever. At last, when we were right outside the heavy stone gates, so different from the happy gates at the drive-in movie the night before, Mom pulled her hand away from mine and, putting both hands over her mouth, looked up at the gates of the sanitarium and cried out in horror, “Oh, my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

  DAD AND I didn’t talk much driving home, just a few words about the weather and how there wasn’t a whole lot of traffic for a Saturday. Dad stopped at the liquor store to stock up. When we got home we watched the Red Sox game on TV and got quietly drunk together.

  The following day I knew I had to get out of there. I was in a total panic, as if the house were on fire. I thought of fleeing to Melissa on Block Island, but when I called her she sounded all cranky and whiny. She said she had a bad case of poison ivy on her left thigh and really had no place of her own to put me up, so I decided very quickly to just hitchhike to New Paltz, New York, to see Joe McCreedy, the man I’d shared that mad, life-saving dance with.

  It only took me four rides to get to New Paltz. Not bad. But I was younger then, and those were the old days when people would take chances picking you up on the highway.

  My first ride was in a red-hot MG convertible. There were two guys in it, and they shoved me in the back behind their bucket seats, where I knelt with my head above the windshield like a dog in the wind until they let me off on Route 128 just outside of Boston.

  I stood there for quite a long while, but it didn’t matter how long I waited; it just felt good to be out there in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of time. I thought I was beginning to learn how to hang out. I was suspended between Rhode Island and some unknown future point waiting for me in New Paltz.

  Then I saw this big, bright powder-blue Cadillac, which was going in the other direction at first, make a sweeping U-tur
n and slowly cruise back to pick me up. The car reeked of perversion. It smelled of cheap cigars and puke. All the windows were up, and all the electric controls were on a central switchboard to the right of the driver, who looked like a combination of an Italian butcher and a Greek barber. He was enormous and gross and he had big, hairy forearms and a big moon face with a set of lips that looked like they could suck you whole. He also had three or four gold chains around his neck with black hairs bristling out between them. And what was worse was that he didn’t really speak to me—only “Buckle up” and “Where ya off to?” I think I said something like “Upstate New York,” in a dry and nervous little boy’s voice. I was dressed only in cutoffs and a sweatshirt, with the rest of my stuff in a knapsack on my back. I could feel his dark black eyes go all along, up and down my thighs. Then he began to throw some of those electric switches on his control board. My seat was a separate bucket seat, something like a modern dentist’s chair. Buzz, buzz, buzz, the seat went flat out and all I could see was the plush ceiling. And then buzz, buzz, up it went again. Strapped into my safety belt, I began to feel a little claustrophobic. “Just tell me how you like it,” he said in a thick, fat, heavy voice, like he had a clump of warm mashed potatoes stuck in his throat. “Oh, that’s fine, that’s good,” I said. “I like it just up and normal, so I can see out, you know? I love to see out. That’s why I travel in the day. I like to see where I’m going.” After ten miles or so, he just stopped and let me out. Without a word. That was that. He made another U-turn and headed back toward Boston.