KooKooLand

by Gloria Norris

  Sign me up for a Jimmy lobotomy.

  So what if it made me a dummkopf?

  Happy Holidays

  I didn’t end up returning home until right before Christmas. I hitchhiked there and had no trouble getting rides ’cause old codgers always picked up eighteen-year-old girls. I carried a pair of scissors in case any of the codgers got fresh, but I was a lucky so-and-so and none of them did. I had the last guy drop me off near the projects and walked the rest of the way, lugging my suitcase. It was only about four thirty, but it was already pretty dark. I trudged along those familiar streets that didn’t look so familiar anymore. Strings of half-lit Christmas bulbs drooped around iced-up windows and didn’t make me feel merry. I was afraid of finding Jimmy half-lit himself. But, when I got closer to our apartment, I was relieved to see Jimmy’s car wasn’t even there. I walked up the icy, muddy path to the front door, took a deep breath, and walked inside. Shirley raced over to greet me. She’d put on a pretty new dress for my homecoming and a little face paint but not too much. None of that could disguise the fact that she looked exhausted. When I hugged her she felt thin and as fragile as phyllo dough.

  “This place must look small after living in such grand style,” she said, embarrassed.

  “My dorm room is tiny,” I assured her. “And this place looks great. I love those new curtains.”

  I could tell she’d gone all out decorating, shopping, and baking, even more than usual.

  “I got ’em at the secondhand store. I get everything there now. Except your presents. Those are brand spankin’ new. Don’t tell your father, though.”

  “How’s he been? He’s always crappy around Christmas.”

  “Oh, he treats me good now. Go see how I fixed up your room.”

  I walked upstairs to my old bedroom, carrying my suitcase.

  When I got to the top of the stairs I saw them.

  Two bullet holes in the ceiling.

  I dropped my suitcase. It went tumbling back down the stairs, splitting open and spilling its contents.

  “What happened?” I screamed, running down the stairs, trampling on my stuff.

  Shirley already had her story worked out.

  “The gun went off by accident.”

  “You’re covering for him!”

  “No, he was horsing around. Just trying to scare me.”

  “This is it! You have to leave!”

  “It was my fault. I opened my big mouth.”

  “Next time he’ll kill you!”

  “He’ll kill me if I try to leave. Doris learned that the hard way. This is my cross to bear. Now, let’s just try and have a nice Christmas.”

  I knew right then and there, I couldn’t save her. I couldn’t beat him. He was bigger, stronger, faster, meaner. He could charm a bird off a tree. And if not, he could shoot it off.

  I repacked my suitcase and lugged it back upstairs. I felt empty inside. I saw my room had bright new curtains and matching rainbow bedspreads on the bunk beds.

  I went to the bathroom and peed. As I sat on the toilet, I noticed a hunk of the bathroom door had been kicked out and superglued back in.

  “I was stupid and locked myself in,” Shirley explained when I went back downstairs and asked her about it. “Your father had to rescue me. I don’t know what I would’ve done if he hadn’t been here.”

  She needed to lie—to herself even more than to me. It was the only way she could keep going.

  “How long were you stuck in there?” I asked, resigned to playing along.

  “Oh, not too long. Anyway, it’s in the past. It’s all in the past.”

  We let it go. It was Christmas. Hark! Jimmy was the savior.

  A short while later, the Savior came home from hunting. He’d bagged a Christmas goose and a trunkful of ducks. He’d outwitted the wardens once more and was jubilant.

  “The prodigal daughter is home,” he said, aiming his rifle at me. Ha ha. Just horsing around.

  The next day, Shirley cooked his goose. Ha ha. If only.

  I wasn’t hungry, but I put on a good face, and goddamn, if that goose wasn’t delicious.

  I asked for seconds.

  Jimmy took off to go hunting again, and it was the best Christmas gift he could have given us.

  Virginia came over with Dustin and we opened some presents. Shirley gave Dustin lots of toys and said how nice it was to have a kid in the house again for Christmas.

  Virginia told me she’d met a new guy at the massage parlor. He was married but he treated her like a queen.

  We all had to make the best of things.

  I knew I had to. I was going to be living there for three long months. Classes didn’t start up again until March. During the winter, Bennington students were required to go off and get Life Experience. They were encouraged to pursue whatever arty thing caught their fancy. It was a total blast for the kids who studied mime with Marcel Marceau in Paris or worked for the New York Times in Cairo or photographed sea turtles in the Galápagos.

  For me, it was pretty frickin’ terrible.

  I had to move back in with Jimmy and go back to wiping pip-squeaks’ noses at the day care center I’d worked at the summer before.

  At first, it wasn’t so bad. Jimmy was off hunting a lot—sometimes alone, sometimes with Hank. The track was closed for the winter, so he didn’t have to collect horse pee in the spit box for a while. In the meantime, he was making dough selling Percodans he had snowed his doctor pals into giving him for his bad back neck elbow wrist you-name-it. He was also selling Percodans that those same docs were prescribing to Shirley for her bad back neck elbow wrist you-name-it after Jimmy had coached her how to describe the ailment convincingly.

  I tried to ignore the drug dealing and did my best not to get on Jimmy’s bad side. I dressed like a Greek crone and learned from YaYa how to make baklava that Jimmy gobbled down and deemed “not too terrible.”

  I went food shopping with Jimmy—a day-long affair. We drove a half hour to a market owned by a Greek ’cause the prices were cheaper and ’cause Greeks had to stick together. We drove to a meat market where the butcher would let Jimmy go in the back and cut up his own lamb. We drove to a farm that had eggs that had just dropped out of a chicken’s Shame.

  Once we passed a kosher market and Jimmy pulled over on a whim. We went in and he asked the guy for a pound of bacon. Just for the fun of it, he said, when we were back in the car. Just to ride a Jew ’cause they didn’t have a sense of humor. The guy in the market didn’t have one. He’d ordered us off the premises.

  As we drove away, I stared into the passing cars. I projected myself into one of them. I counted how many days I had left. Too goddamn many.

  My only escape was going to the movies. At least once a week, Jimmy took me to one. He was glad to have me around again as a movie companion, since Hank and his other hunting buddies weren’t movie buffs and wouldn’t know Rossellini from Ronzoni. Usually, we snuck booze and baklava into the theater so he’d have something to drink and I’d have something to eat.

  That winter, the film Jimmy was most looking forward to was Last Tango in Paris. He idolized Marlon Brando and saw himself in the characters Brando played. The tragic ex-boxer in On the Waterfront. The rebellious seaman in Mutiny on the Bounty. The soulful gangster in The Godfather. The sexy tough who knew how to keep a woman in line in A Streetcar Named Desire.

  But watching Last Tango with Jimmy was torture. After the scene where Brando used a stick of butter on Maria Schneider—an actress not much older than me—Jimmy slipped away to the bathroom and didn’t come back for a while. When he returned, he looked sweaty and disheveled, and from then on I kept my eyes glued to the screen, pretending I was absorbed in the movie, just like I had done years before at Blood Feast.

  When the film was finally over, all I could think was I never wanted to see any movie with Jimmy again. Never wanted to sit beside him in the dark, feeling his breath rise and fall and having him squeeze my arm during the good parts.

 
I kept counting down the days until I could get out of Jimmy Jail.

  But the days moved as slow as the horses Jimmy was betting on at the bookie joint.

  I didn’t have much to distract me. I didn’t even see much of Virginia. Between working at the massage parlor, taking care of Dustin, and her new romance, she was pretty tied up.

  I did get to see Hank a few times, though—not that I wanted to. One night, he came over for one of Shirley’s home-cooked meals. Nearly a decade after he’d murdered Doris, Hank still didn’t have a wife. He’d kept his word never to return to Marriage Jail and have another ball and chain. By then he was in his mid-fifties—ancient in my estimation—but he still seemed tough as nails. He still blamed Doris for her failings, chief of which was giving birth to a daughter who took after her. A female who popped pills like jelly beans to get through the day and who drained him dry. A female who was a quitter and couldn’t tough things out. A no-account loser who checked herself in and out of the nuthouse.

  “That kid’s the biggest disappointment of my goddamn life,” he said, as Shirley dished up seconds of her meltingly tender lamb and orzo and then melted into the background.

  Look who’s talking, I could’ve screamed. You’re a frickin’ murderer.

  I felt like pushing his face into that plate of food. Instead, I kept my eyes focused on my own plate even though I had lost my appetite.

  “My kid won’t quit in the homestretch like yours did, Polack,” laughed Jimmy, half-lit and already gobbling down his second helping. “She’s gonna be a rich goddamn doctor and write me all the prescriptions I want and buy me a stable full of racehorses. If she don’t, I’ll put a bullet through her goddamn egghead.”

  He poked me on the forehead, leaving a buttery fingerprint.

  Hank sneered at Jimmy. Then he started in on his son. Hank wasn’t happy with Terry either. He’d screwed up royally by leaving the Catholic church to become a follower of some TV evangelist.

  “Goddamn kids. If I had it to do over I wouldn’t have had any,” said Jimmy, like I wasn’t even there. “I’d be free as a goddamn bird.”

  I guess he was in Jimmy Jail too.

  We were all in goddamn Jimmy Jail.

  Only Shirley managed to find a way out.

  She went to sleep.

  At first, that’s all I noticed. She started sleeping all the time. Sleeping more than Rip Van Frickin’ Winkle. I told myself she worked too hard and I tried to be as quiet as a mouse.

  Then, she began to waste away. She lost so much weight she was skin and bones. I tried to get her to eat, but she was never hungry.

  She stopped cleaning the apartment. A pile of laundry grew like mold beside the wringer washer. Balls of dust, cat hair, and pinfeathers from Jimmy’s plucked ducks drifted across the floor. Splotches of deer blood spattered the linoleum like a Jackson Pollock—by then I knew who he was. I tried to pick up some of the housekeeping slack, but Jimmy could dirty a room faster than you could ever clean it up.

  The last straw for Jimmy was when Shirley’s cooking went down the tubes. One day, she even burned a pan of spanakopita.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you?” he screamed.

  Shirley just shrugged and said she was stupid and promised to eat every burnt morsel, nothing would go to waste.

  I said I’d eat some too.

  The next day, Jimmy dragged Shirley off to the Yankee doctor. I was worried sick what the doctor might find. I knew Jimmy was thinking the Big C, and I was too. But the doctor said Shirley was just run down. He told Jimmy to give her some vitamins to pep her up.

  When I got home from work, I was happy to hear Shirley was probably OK. As Shirley changed back into her nightgown, Jimmy went rooting around in the medicine cabinet and unearthed an ancient bottle of One A Days. When he opened the bottle, we both got a big surprise. Instead of vitamins, he found booze.

  Jimmy went ballistic. He knew what it meant. He’d found YaYa’s booze hidden all over when he was a kid. He screamed at Shirley that she was a goddamn alkie.

  Shirley barely reacted. I tried to talk to her, but she just wanted to go back to sleep. Jimmy told her to get her alkie ass back to bed—which she did, gladly.

  I sat there, flabbergasted. I knew Shirley drank a lot, but relative to Jimmy, it hadn’t seemed that bad.

  Jimmy told me to give him a goddamn hand and we tore the house apart. We found booze hidden everywhere—inside empty bottles of Aunt Jemima pancake syrup and boxes of Tide detergent and jars of Pond’s Vanishing Cream.

  Jimmy sat down and had a drink. He told me to have one too, but that was the last thing I felt like.

  The problem, Jimmy quickly concluded, was Shirley’s goddamn hormones. Women just went batty around her age.

  He picked up the phone and called a female cousin of his. She’d had a crack-up from her hormones not long before but was doing OK now. The cousin recommended a shrink near the Massachusetts town where she lived.

  The next day, we drove Shirley there.

  The doctor took one look at Shirley and put her right in the hospital.

  Over the next few days, the doctor dried Shirley out. The nurses tried to get her to eat, but she just scrunched herself up and went back to sleep. When they finally coaxed her into nibbling something, she threw it up.

  After several days, Shirley wasn’t getting much better. The shrink transferred her to a private nuthouse that looked like a country club. Jimmy and I met with him in his office and he told us she might be there for quite a while. I was worried about how we were going to pay for it, but the shrink said Shirley had pretty good insurance and he knew how to finesse it.

  Jimmy said frick this. He missed the old Shirley’s home cooking, before she went bonkers and started to burn things. He said he was losing weight himself without any decent food and was probably worse off than she was.

  “Give her some goddamn happy pills and send her the hell home bingo bango!” he yelled at the shrink.

  But the shrink held his ground. He’d seen Shirley tremble when Jimmy walked in the room. He refused to send her the hell home. In fact, he said he didn’t think it was wise for Shirley to see Jimmy at all right now.

  “Not wise? I’ll show you what’s wise! Me! I’m wise! I’m Mr. Wiseguy!” shouted Jimmy, looking like he was going to clock the guy or, worse, go get his gun from the car. “Nobody tells me what to do with my own goddamn wife! She’s mine! Now sign her the hell outta here or you’ll be headin’ out—feet first!”

  The shrink didn’t flinch. He was from a Middle Eastern country and no doubt had seen his share of tough guys. He had Jimmy’s number. He told Jimmy if he sent Shirley home she’d die in a few weeks and her heavenly spanakopita would go to heaven with her.

  “You’re this close to losing her,” the shrink said, holding his fingers a millimeter apart. “Now, I’m an agnostic like you,” he continued, having by then listened to his share of Jimmy’s ranting about the sad and pointless state of human existence in a possibly godless universe. “But, on the off chance there is a God, I wouldn’t want to offend him by depriving my wife of lifesaving medical attention. I don’t think that would go down too well, do you?”

  Jimmy started to tremble a little himself. He couldn’t quite shake the fear of eternal damnation he had acquired sitting beside YaYa in the Greek church when he was a pip-squeak. Even if the odds of hell being real were a million-to-one, it didn’t seem worth the risk. So Jimmy did what the shrink said. He agreed to let Shirley stay and not to visit her. He agreed to drive me there to see her and wait outside like a dog in a doghouse.

  “Congratulations,” he told me. “You did it. You got your goddamn mother to yourself.”

  The day after the shrink informed Shirley that Jimmy had been barred from seeing her, she started to eat. Within a week she was gaining weight, participating in activities, and looking forward to therapy. She developed a bit of a crush on the shrink.

  By my second visit she told me she didn’t miss the booze at
all and felt like she was on a holiday.

  “I better not seem too happy, though, or they’ll make me leave,” she whispered.

  Eventually, we both knew, it would come to that. She’d have to leave.

  And so would I.

  I returned to my by then much-missed college nuthouse.

  And, shortly after, Shirley returned to Jimmy.

  She said she was done with booze and done with swallowing Jimmy’s baloney.

  “Things are gonna change around here,” she said. “You wait and see.”

  Happy Together

  Jimmy was so relieved to have Shirley back, he finally got her a new washing machine. Well, not new exactly—some guy he knew had salvaged it from an apartment building that was being torn down—but at least she didn’t have to yank stuff through a wringer anymore.

  I called home every Sunday to check up on her.

  “He waits on me hand and foot,” she said. I wasn’t sure I could believe her, but then Jimmy confessed he’d even mopped the kitchen floor.

  As spring arrived, he trekked deep, deep into the woods to find a rare trillium orchid for her for Mother’s Day.

  “We’re like newlyweds,” Shirley insisted.

  Meanwhile, I developed a crush of my own. The boy with the Moog synthesizers and I hit it off even though he’d grown up in Locust Valley with a maid and his father ran a big corporation and had written a best seller.

  That summer I moved to New York for a job at a museum. I crashed with a Bennington friend in her artist father’s painting studio and lost my virginity to Moog Boy.

  I’d already been on the pill for months. After what had happened to Virginia, I wasn’t taking any chances.

  One balmy night, Moog Boy and I drove all around Manhattan in his father’s brand-new Fiat. We had the top down and a full moon was peeking out between the glittering skyscrapers.

  Moog Boy was wearing sunglasses. We passed a joint back and forth and listened to jazzy, Moog-y music. Sun Ra.

  We ate garlicky veal piccata in Little Italy.

  I felt like I was living in a Fellini film. La Dolce Vita.