But still, in our sessions, I cry from the guilt of betraying my mother, for not keeping the shroud on her secrets when I held them locked in such trust. And I feel terrible about my own secret. I have been writing, writing about what it feels like to be cut open while your mother's tight, thin smile mouths, “Doctor's orders, honey.” To be emptied and filled by your mother, just like the IV bag she's arranged for you. And to believe you are genuinely ill because that is what everything in your world mirrors back to you.
My therapist explains that my mother was cannibalistic. That she wanted to ingest my living flesh, to tear chunks from my body. That the closest she could come to cannibalizing me was to lift me onto the serving platter for the men of the medical community to carve. The longer I hold guilt for betraying her, the more I will keep climbing on the platter all by myself.
And yet the hand that pushed me down was the hand that helped me up. The one who beat me was the only one who could save me from being beaten. The one who wanted to kill me was the one who would kill herself if I didn't offer myself under the knife. I was trained from the womb as an alibi to her innocence. She would snuff out my life if I went against her, even in thought. She brushed me this way as casually as you would slide a lint brush down a pair of slacks, to get all the grain running the same direction.
I still told myself that it was okay, it really wasn't that bad. A normal sacrifice for any child to make for her mother. Words programmed into me as my own. Tangled in her web, if a doctor couldn't decipher what she did, how could I?
UNTIL I TURN THIRTY. Then I see her almost as clearly as if I was standing on a wind-swept sea cliff and she was looking up from the sand below. There is only one line that connects us, and it is wrapped around my waist; my hunger is tied to the most intimate, emotionally deep contact you can ever get: a mother's touch. Anything less than where she took me feels like not enough.
And so it is for the people I bring into my life. My relationships, like the one I had with my mother, turn immediately intense, sometimes violently invasive. I start to see that I surround myself with broken people; more broken than me. Ah, yes, let me count your cracks. Let's see, one hundred, two… yes, you'll do nicely. A cracked companion makes me look whole, gives me something outside myself to care for. When I'm with whole, healed people I feel my own cracks; the shatters, the insanities of dislocation in myself.
So I start over. When I ruin something or when someone vines around me, I move on. It is just another opportunity, another chance to interact with the outside world and not have it take me completely, utterly, to the bone.
I am leaving Ohio. My farmhouse is being torn down; its south side is sliding into the ravine below. I take a mallet to the wall that used to hold my largest mirror and haul my arm back, again and again, bellowing out the names of anything or anyone who ever hurt me. Holes open in the plaster and swallow sheets of ancient wallpaper. I build a pyre in the backyard and toss in the emergency boxes of cake batter, page after page of duplicate medical records, college papers with As and Fs, letters from boys, letters from men, piles of belongings that never fit, not then, not now—all the things I've collected and clung to since the first fire ripped away everything I'd ever loved.
The singed ashes waft up, up, high into the night sky, just as I used to envision my body, thin and brittle as a maple leaf. I close the back door on my empty farmhouse, now as devoid of life as the crisp locust shell left behind after the metamorphosis. I load my guitar and a paper bag full of clothes in my old convertible and pull out at midnight with a sack of vegetables and juice. I am driving clean and clear to Los Angeles, where you can start over on a daily basis, where you can be anonymous for life, where you can dissolve into a sea of people, and no one could care less if you lived or died on the sidewalk.
AND WITH EACH MILE THAT TICKS on my odometer, my memory of my mother falls away just a little more, broken cliffs dropping off into the depths of memory. Like the shopping stops we made after my doctors' appointments that severed me from what had really happened earlier that day, the quick and abrupt changes I take in life place me that much further from trusting my memories of the past. And the more I acclimate to the normal world, the more and more surreal and unbelievable the world I came from seems.
I'd lived through it without anyone seeing it. Then I'd untangled from it without anyone confirming it. Now, years later and thousands of miles away, little rays of doubt were beginning to sliver my thoughts.
Surely she had never been all that bad. Surely by now, she had changed. She did what she did because she needed to. She reenacted it on me, just like an abused kid would do with a doll. Now that it was over, I was sure she'd be a whole different person.
This is how I led myself back. Because the more I changed my scenery, the more I gave away. The more I gave away, the more I needed. The more I needed, the more I pined for a mother, a mother to help me, a mother to belong to. I desperately searched the eyes of other mothers, hungering to be embraced as a little girl—just what my mother wanted from me. I longed to lay my head in a mother's lap. I soothed myself to sleep during middle-of-the-night panics by imagining a kind, soothing mother sitting on the edge of my bed, hand slowly caressing strands of my hair, curling it behind my ears, around her fingers, sinking me dreamy with electric pulses that dropped like shooting stars across my scalp. Healing my skull with the heat of her hands.
IHAVE NOT SEEN HER in seven years. Our last photograph was taken on Mother's Day with the two of us sitting on a log somewhere out in the woods on a trail ride, eating pack lunches and smiling for the camera, Mom's brassy hair glinting in the sun from a fresh scrubbing of bleach.
A few months later I would be crumpled at the bottom of a stairwell, my life charred to nothing, and she would be on her way to Montana, leaving her nothing life behind, to start over. Now, so far away from my past and changing my life every six months, I have rummaged through my memories and selected the tiniest shards of our life together to reconstruct an apparition; bending or soldering strands of memory to erect a motherly hologram that wavers just out of reach, beckoning to me.
ONE AFTERNOON WHEN I AM THIRTY-ONE, I hold my breath and dial her number.
“Sandy?” I could not bring myself to mouth Mom. “Hi. It's Julie.”
I am expecting nothing, anger maybe, or a tidal wave of guilt from her.
“Sis? Oh, my God, Julie, it's so good to hear your voice. Where are you? I've been worried sick.”
And so it began, the gradual reopening to my mother. After several smooth phone calls, in which I deny her my own number each time she asks, I eventually wear down and give her a way to reach me. She promises she'll never call too late, her own unspoken apology for all those middle-of-the-night suicide calls she used to make.
LOS ANGELES IS A LONELY PLACE. Being anonymous gets tiring. In Ohio I stood out; in L.A., everyone is different. You can never be enough for L.A. People you give your phone number to never call you. The more you hunger for contact, the less you get. People can smell need in Los Angeles, and they stay away.
By default, my mother became my one lifeline back to people more solid, who weren't washed away every twenty-four hours by the tide. I told her my woes of life in a big empty city.
“You can always come home, Sis.”
Home, Sis. The concept of flying off to live with my mother seemed absurd. But I was so tired of my independence, turning myself over to be taken care of by her had daydreamy high points.
Over the year, Mom sent me boxes of things I needed but didn't have the extra money to buy. When my car got clamped, she sent me the check to get it out of the clink. She helped me at my lowest points and, for the first time, she was my mom. I didn't need to save her. I needed her and she was saving me, saying all the right words to support me, calling at all the right times. My wariness evaporated. She's changed, she's trying to make it up to me, we don't even need to talk about what happened, just her reaching out is enough.
SANDY IS COMING TO GET
ME in Great Im} Falls, Montana. I have little money and fewer plans. I was going to write a book about my life with her, but I need my mother more.
I have to know: know if she really can be the mom in person that she is on the phone—or have I just filled in the blanks with false hope?
She has a little farmhouse on the lot next to hers she is going to give me so I can rest and put down some roots. I will live there with my little dog LuLu, and all will be well in my life because I will have a mother at last.
It takes three planes to get to Montana, each of them growing successively smaller, like the doorways of Alice in Wonderland, until the last plane dips through the empty sky like a pop can on a kite string.
I come off the ramp at the tiny Great Falls airport, laden with belongings for my new life; my little dog in a leopard-print shoulder bag, clothes, books. I spot my mother.
My God, life has been hard to her.
I barely recognize her. She certainly doesn't look capable of her past or mine. Her face seems swollen, as if a toxic buildup has been brewing under her skin. Standing behind her is a small cluster of people she calls her family, who she introduces as her husband Ed and their two small adopted children, Tina and Paul. I swallow.
We bunch up under the stuffed airport grizzly, sadly positioned on its hind legs to look menacing, and Ed snaps a picture. Mom tells the children to smile and they beam just as we used to do, while she cocks her leg like a model's, just like always.
We load up in the family minivan for the hundred miles to their remote cattle ranch. On the way, Mom wants to stop at Ponderosa Steakhouse to celebrate. As we sit around a wood-veneered diner table, the ice slowly starts to melt. I am the grown adult daughter and this is my mother's new life. I have come here to slip into it, and I am willing it to work out for all of us.
Over our steak dinners and tin-foiled baked potatoes, I eye Tina carefully. She is eleven and her brother, Paul, is four, the same age difference as Danny and me. She is small, like I was, and she wears her hair in the same ridiculous shag my mother gave me when she lopped off my waist-length locks. Fiddling with my meal, I am watching my mother between the blinds, looking in the spaces between her words as she talks to Tina and Paul, seeing if she still is the woman of my childhood.
But she isn't.
Everything goes well, the kids laugh, she and Ed seem to be stable. She has a big wedding ring on her finger. When we finally get to the house, the kids pull out presents for me and squeal, “Will you be our big Sissy?” while Mom hauls out a cake with candles from the kitchen. I have never known such welcome from my family before. I am moved. We all crowd together by the refrigerator and set the auto timer on the Kmart camera. The hugs and affection make me tear up right there at the kitchen table—the same fake wood-look kind that I sat at all those nights back in Ohio, talking with my mother. I am looking forward to being wrong. I am looking forward to tearing up the writings that would haunt me; haunt me like hell if I could ever call her “Mom” once again.
She has made me my very own room, with an electric blanket because she knows I get cold at night, with extra pillows to tuck between my knees. She has laid out the best towels. She shows me where everything is and treats me like a guest. She has bought me some clothes and given me new sheets, in spring colors she's hoping I'll like. I climb in bed like a child and bring myself to mouth what I could not say for seven years.
“Good night,” it sticks in my throat, so out of practice, “Mom.”
She turns out the light. “Nighty-night, Sis.”
I sleep like a baby.
THE NEXT MORNING, the house is up early. Mom and Ed are outside working and the kids sit at the table, hunched over bowls of Sugar Snaps.
Today I tour the farm. The house Mom and her family live in is a cleverly concealed double-wide trailer, thanks to various add-ons, cute country throw rugs, and a concrete porch goose dressed in gingham. The kids' rooms are stocked with toys and movies. Tina has a canopy bed done up in pastels, just like I did. Paul sleeps in a bed shaped like a race car. It all looks good.
But I start to notice other details. Mom's shoes have multiplied by the hundreds and are brutally stuffed into large storage boxes, their toes and heels jutting desperately from the hand slots and out from under the cheap cardboard lids, as if gasping for breath. The boxes are stacked haphazardly upon one another. And still more shoes: piled into black garbage bags, tossed into the tack sheds and pull-behind trailers that scatter the yard.
Neighbors are nonexistent. The land they live on spans hundreds of acres, and though the house sits on the edge of it by the road, miles run between them and any other home. The slaughterhouse horses of my time are now fat-bellied Paints and breeding mares. Their heat cycles mark the calendar that hangs in the kitchen, and babies are always on the verge of being born and being sold. They need buckets of grain, bales of hay, hours of work. Everything else in the day is secondary. The school Tina attends has a total of eight students, spanning kindergarten through the sixth grade. I wonder how a child could learn anything in such a limited and contained setting. One man serves as principal, custodian, and teacher. In the summers, during school break, he doubles as a big-rig truck driver.
Later over dinner, we inch into one another carefully, trying to pull our worlds, as fragile and shiny as Christmas bulbs, together, without breaking them. Paul babbles incoherently at the table and Mom strains to address everything he says with patience and a smile, to show how she's changed. Tina is unusually quiet for a girl of eleven. I want to draw her out and see if she comes with me.
“So, Tina, what are you up to in school?”
Tina pivots her face to my mother, who answers without looking at her. “Well, Tina's slow, she's got fetal alcohol syndrome. She does okay in school, but she's not going to get past a certain grade level. She was in bad shape when she came here, weren't you, Tina?”
“Uh-huh, Mom.”
“But she's doing real good now. Right, honey?”
Tina nods. I cannot seem to finish my pot roast. And neither does Tina. She scoots it around her plate, resting her head on a back-flipped wrist, and dismisses herself with an apologetic “I don't really like meat.”
That night, Mom and I sit at the kitchen table and talk, just like we used to, but with me on the outside now, hoping to lay to rest the small fracture that formed at the dinner table.
She is talking about old times with Smokey and how my birthday falls on their wedding anniversary. Each May sixteenth, she cannot reach me because I have buried myself in the world, and she cannot reach him because he is simply buried. And she is talking about her new life here, how good a man Ed is if only by the qualifier that he doesn't beat her like my father did. In her eyes, she's moved up. He has a brother, you know, good man, wants a wife and kids; she showed him my picture. Sure would like to meet me while I'm here. And she relaxes into telling me of the day-to-day life she lives now, here on the vast plains of Montana.
“We drove through two creeks with no bridges to get on this pack trip and ride over the Continental Divide from Palookaville. We musta been thirty miles into that trail ride when Jonas Walker's horse got flanked and commenced to bucking. Bucked him headfirst into some rocks and broke his neck and killed him. That's the first year we ever carried a cell phone, being out in the high country. Now, Jonas was a white man befriended by the Indian, very loved by the Indians, by the Sioux tribe, and they held ceremony for him high on a hill overlooking the twin rivers, Indian ceremony, you know. They summoned the spirits, they did their drumming, and my God, a couple of eagles started flying overhead and I got chills all over.”
These are the stories I like to hear most from my mother, told in the cadence of old-time gospel or the slow, pausing pace of a good Indian story. They are never about my father or the hard life she's lived, but of the events that give her goose bumps or awe her in heart or spirit. In these small silent moments, waiting for a pause to pass, I notice her hands, swollen and knotty, from a self-imp
osed sentence of hard labor. One of her fingers has been sewn on at the knuckle; it flips out sideways from the rest.
“So, Mom, how's your health been?”
“My God, Julie, I am just about sicker than a dog most of the time. Look at this thing.” She lugs up her shirt to expose a thick raised scar running across her back from her armpit to her bottom. It looks like a mole has burrowed diagonally across her ribs. “This one nearly killed me. They sawed my ribs out and nearly cut into my spine, my discs was fused together.”
I cannot get a straight answer as to why, exactly, she had to have this serious surgery. But it was due to the incompetence of these country bumpkin doctors out here, she says, that her finger got stitched on backwards. Another time, she goes on, her eyelids got laced with the toxic powder from an incandescent lightbulb when she went to change it and it burst in its socket. And just this past year, she has been seeing cardiologists.
“They got me wearing something called a Holter monitor.” She articulates this slowly to make sure I can follow. “That's one of those things they make you wear so they can monitor your heart at home. I asked my doctor what's the worse-case scenario here? A bypass? Open-heart? Tell me what the damage might be, just so I know. You know?”
Blood drains from me. I look around the kitchen while she talks. Her hutch is lined with hardcover medical books and thick pill-identification guides. Medication bottles cluster on the ledge beside the microwave and cover a plate that sits on top of the fridge.
“She said they might have to do this invasive procedure they call a heart cath—that's, you know, cardio terminology—if I get any more of these episodes here at home.”
I grip my cold fingertips to the bottom of the chair. I lead the conversation back to Tina.
“Oh, Julie, that little girl came out of the most godawful situation you could imagine. Her dad's in jail, mom's a drug addict, and that's what's wrong with her, see, she was born slow, she's got that fetal alcohol thingy that makes kids small, you know? And she has just done great since she's been here. She tested at first-grade level, but she's come a long, long way. She's so happy now. I know we've had our past and all the hard times with your father, but now that I'm away from him, I'm a better person. You just watch, you'll see.”
Sickened: The True Story of a Lost Childhood Page 18