Crazy Enough

by Storm Large

  For a while, we would spend every Thanksgiving at their house in Connecticut, where we were sequestered in the downstairs apartment. Not a bad place to hang while the grownups got crocked upstairs. There was a wall of closets to go through, full of old pictures, board games, plastic horses, and croquet mallets. We would play Chinese checkers, usually, or ding around on the old sixties-style organ that had a built-in rhythm machine. Pop, waltz, and calypso were a few of the selections. Push a button and a cheesy booping pattern would play to accompany whatever number you planned to rock on the keys.

  The kids would eventually be called to walk, not run, up the stairs, thickly carpeted with a lush, leopard pattern, into the wide, airy living and dining room. The house would be jammed with family and friends of the Banks, people whom we would only see at Thanksgiving, then never see or hear from for the rest of the year.

  I think we stopped going there by the time I was nine. I remember wanting to like them but, even as a little one, I got the impression my brothers and I weren’t liked very much by most of the people there. Grandfather Banks, throughout dinner, would get redder in the freckles and gruffer in his voice. I suppose he was very funny because many of the grownups would laugh at things he said. In a room full of drunken partygoers, he would snarl jovially at me, “Hey, Stormy! C’mere. Hop up in my lap! Atta girl! Hey, you wanna see smoke come outta my ears?”

  Being in his lap was always weird because I was fairly sure the man hated me, but, when a grownup pays attention to you, and is holding your little four-year-old person in their lap, that’s a sign of affection, right? And, of course, I wanted to see smoke come out of his ears!

  “All right, now, I’m going to take a drag off my cigarette and you’re going to push on my chest with both hands, okay? Ready? Watch my ears now!”

  He had big, red, sticking-out ears. I wondered if the smoke would puff out or maybe, hopefully, he could somehow make smoke rings. He took a drag, and I pushed and watched, and I didn’t see. . . .

  “OWWW!”

  While I stared at his ears, he’d puff his cigarette to a glowing cherry, then quickly poke the lit end into the back of my hand. I yanked my hands away as he laughed two lungs full of smoke at me. Everyone would laugh, I guess, because, it was a grownup joke. I must admit it was a neat trick, because I fell for it more than once.

  Regardless of whatever the truth was about the Banks and my mom’s childhood, it was clear that a lot of her loneliness, and her unfixable broken heart, had taken hold partly on their watch.

  The longer I lived, the more I understood why she needed to be sick. And why a new diagnosis was like a new crush, and she would fall all over it like a swooning teenager.

  “I’ve finally figured it out! They know what it is!” Mom announced, catching me in the living room one afternoon. “I have alters.” The timing on her diagnoses blend together a bit, but I know I was at least at an age where I did not give a flying fuck anymore, and John had his own place, so I must have been around fifteen.

  Multiple personality disorder was a big one for Mom. She was positively giddy with it. It was as intoxicating to her as her other go-to malady, bone cancer. More on that later.

  She could barely contain her enthusiasm as she explained how, like in the movie Sybil, there were these different personalities, or alters, that would come out and make her do and say crazy things. According to Mom, the most extreme case of MPD her doctor had ever heard about involved a woman with nearly two hundred personalities. While I burned holes in the television with my eyes, trying to tune her out, Mom went on to marvel at herself because she, Suzi Large, somehow, had amazed her medical team by having more alters than that other woman, thus beating that record. “By forty-three percent,” she said.

  The doctors were so confused at the intensity of her disorder, yet her ability to still function, somewhat, that one of them was going to cite her condition at his next lecture and her case would end up in yet another medical journal.

  Wow, so I guess you win and congratulations are in order.

  “It explains everything! The voices, the wobblies, how I suddenly can start speaking fluent German.”

  The wobblies we knew about. They were dramatized dizzy spells that, we believed, were used as an excuse for her to fall down on purpose, in public. Weddings, graduations, or funerals, pretty much anywhere people were gathered or participating in an event geared toward loving and celebrating somebody who wasn’t my mother. The fluent German thing was a new one. When she tried to show us, she seemed to be parroting all of the German one could learn by watching Hogan’s Heroes. “Nein! Dummkopf! Schnell! Macht schnell!”

  Mom’s award-winning multiple personality phase lasted quite some time, as it was creepy, and people had heard of it. She got a load of mileage out of the disorder.

  My brother John was the best of all of us at forgiving Mom and her curiously revolving ailments. As much as she pissed him off and broke his heart, he would visit her in the hospital long after the rest of us had given up.

  During Mom’s “schnell dumkopf” period, John brought his new girlfriend over to visit Mom in her temporary digs at some halfway house. Mom met the girl, made tea, and some small talk. The young lady was studying to be a nurse and, though her focus was on pediatrics, she had taken some psychology classes and oh, yes, she had heard about multiple personality disorder.

  Green light.

  Not long after tea, Mom excused herself for a minute and came back with crayons and paper, plopped on the floor, and cooed like a toddler, “Sumbuddypwaywiffme!” John must have wished he could blow away like a palm full of talcum powder. John’s girlfriend, however, was new to all the many splendors of Mom, so she snapped into nurse mode. She crouched in front of Mom and said firmly, “If Suzi is in there, I’d like to talk to her. May I please talk to Suzi?”

  My brother burned against the wall he was leaning on, grinding his teeth into stony little nubs, as he watched Mom dip her head as if nodding out, then looking up and around, feigning confusion, saying, “Oh, oh my. How long have I been on the floor?” Then to John, “Are you all right, darling? Did Mommy scare you?”

  As loyal and diligent a son as John was, I think it was about a year before he ever saw or spoke to her again. I, on the other hand, was more than ready to cut her off forever.

  Even though Mom allegedly had a cast of thousands within her, not a single one was very motherly. So naturally I sought the affections of other mother types and, thankfully, struck gold with a few.

  The first and longest-running momstitute was Daphne’s mom, Annie Leavitt. In the early days of Mom’s illness, Annie and the Leavitt family made me feel totally at home whenever I had to stay over.

  Annie was a biology teacher and easily one of the most knowledgeable people on the topic of all things in existence. Any bug, bird, rock, cloud, bone, leaf, she would know its name, origin, purpose, and, in most cases, an historical anecdote about it. A true Anglophile, she was also a badass gardener, and kept a girly mass of flowers growing in all directions in her sunny backyard all spring and summer.

  Annie taught at Fay, the grade school down the way from St. Mark’s. Fay was a fancy boarding school that went up to ninth grade. My brothers and I went there for awhile but, for some reason, we never finished there. I went there from third to fifth grade. I heard we couldn’t afford the tuition because of the terrible hospital bills that decimated my dad’s savings. I also heard rumblings that my brothers and I started displaying behavior problems and were asked to leave.

  I hated it there. Every day was the worst day ever. Fay was where I learned that if you were rich, or pretty, you had quite an advantage over other humans. If you were both, well, then, you could be as big a cunt as you could be and it would be just ducky with the whole world. I wasn’t rich or pretty. I had behavior problems. Fay was where my werewolf phase started.

  However, Annie was a ray of sunshine that would peek through the black, preppy clouds at that schoo
l. I only had her as a teacher once in three years, but I would see her now and then in the hall or in the dining room and I would literally gasp like a kid lost in a huge foreign mall finally seeing her family. I would hug her, trying to soak in as much of her big cinnamon and nutmeg scented, roundy round momness as I could. That would carry me through the day.

  One day, as spring seemed to be on its way, it was warm enough, in my estimation, to wear a dress. I pulled on my dress, slipped into my brother’s rain boots, had a bowl of Cheerios and hoofed it off to Fay. My dad was already long into his first class or meeting or checking light bulbs in his office, (any old thing to keep him away from the house) by my first bite of sugar heaped oat-y goodness. Otherwise, he might have not let me leave.

  The beautiful, rich Izod princes and princesses laughed at me openly for my big mouth, crazy dreams, and fashion limitations, but on this day the amusement was apparent before I even put my book bag down. Word must have gotten to Annie, or maybe it was dumb luck, but she swooped in, gave a look that silenced the cackling bastards and took me to her house down the road.

  “A little cold for a summer dress, Stormy. Put these on.” As she laid out some of Daphne’s clothes for me, hot tears started pouring down my face. I thought the dress had maybe been too short, but I wanted it to be spring, so I wore it. Standing in my best friend’s Laura Ashley bedroom as I put on some of her corduroys, I realized my faux pas. The dress, which had been fine last summer, was a little seasonally inappropriate. More important, I had grown so dramatically since the summer, that it was now, technically, a seasonally inappropriate shirt that barely covered my ass.

  Annie passed no judgment, nor scolded me, and, most important, did not tell my father. He heard it years later as an amusing, and now harmless, look-back-and-laugh story. I went back to school with her and nobody said a word to me about it afterward. She was magnificent.

  Daphne loved my mother and called her Mom as well. Besides the shicken mush episode, when we were seven, she had been privy to some other kinds of crazy from my mom. But Daphne felt sorry for her, and would reprimand me, now and then, for being hard about it.

  When we were twelve, Daphne came over to see if I was home, and found Mom all alone in the kitchen, crying, smoking cigarette after cigarette. “What’s wrong, Mom?” Daphne asked as she gave her a hug, waiting for her to compose herself.

  Mom blew her nose, wiped her face, lit another Kool Mild, and, as if she were an actress in a TV movie about her own life, looked at my little friend and said, “I have bone cancer.” She then proceeded to tell Daphne that she didn’t know how to tell us because, she explained, we all hated her. She was afraid nobody would care, “They’re already so mad at me; please don’t tell anyone!”

  What Daphne didn’t know was that Mom had not been diagnosed with anything of the sort; it was just wishful thinking on her part. Mom simply longed to get bone cancer. If she could’ve caught it somehow, or contracted it by sheer will, she would have been all over it.

  Mom loved the idea of having cancer. Her mental-health issues were looking more and more like attention-seeking, made-up BS, but cancer? The big C was a capital T tragedy. Cancer tore families apart, took down babies, athletes, and movie stars. Weeping crowds would fill the streets to walk, wheel their stricken loved ones to raise awareness and money to fight this monster. Everybody loved somebody with cancer, and for my mom, that was reason enough. Why bone cancer? Possibly because it sounded horrible enough, painful and scary enough, and as sure a death sentence as anything else in the cancer menagerie. A perfect thing to tell a child to get her completely freaked out.

  Daphne didn’t know any of that. She just saw the sad little lady she called Mom crying and smoking and supposedly sharing a heavy secret with her. For weeks following this news, Daphne later told me, she would stare at me in school, wondering if I had been told yet. And if I had, how could I just be my big, loud, silly self, and not totally crack knowing my mom was dying of a hideous bone disease? She thought that maybe I hadn’t heard, or, maybe my mom was right, that I didn’t care. For awhile she thought I was the coldest kid on the block, or just crazy.

  At the beginning of my junior year of high school, I made a declaration to myself to be more positive. I was determined to get more involved in school, and make the best of it. I knew I was a huge disappointment to my father for much of my growing up. I went from little shit to complete asshole with very little variety between the two. But I knew, somehow, that it was a temporary thing. I had a feeling that one day, I would make him proud of me. The man had done his darndest with the hand he’d been dealt, and so far had gotten hosed. I wanted to give the poor guy a little happiness in his bleak, locked-box-up-in-his-head life. I had been so miserable; I figured it was up to me to turn it around. So I gave it a go and was victorious! Well, for a minute, anyway. It was a nice minute, too.

  I started to give little concerts after dinner, quickie concerts with my vocal coach, Ruth Cooper. She was a tough old broad who had no patience for the preppy brats at St. Mark’s, but she loved me to pieces. “You get a lot of crap here, I can tell,” she’d growl at me. “You know why, dontcha? It’s ’cause you’re good. They don’t like you, ’cause you’re good. You’re talented. They don’t like that.” I didn’t get it, but I loved that she was into me and hated everyone else.

  I also tried to get into sports. Not only playing, but cheering on the teams and having some spirit, some spunk, some school pride! Yay, everything!

  The only thing that seemed to bring my father any joy at all was sports. He was a football captain when he was in school and had grown up to be a celebrated football and baseball coach at St. Mark’s. Both my brothers were captains of football and lacrosse. They both kicked all kinds of athletic ass to the tune of multiple injuries for both of them. I was fat and liked Bauhaus. But that was the old me, the new me gave a hoot, gosh darn it.

  Sports ruled our house. I guess because it made sense. There were rules, goals, a motivation to win, obstacles to overcome, and methods to overcome them. My dad and brothers would have lively and impassioned talks around sporting events. Football, especially. Upcoming games, games of the recent and distant past, pro and college games, stats, players . . . when our house and family would shatter, sports acted as glue for the boys.

  When there was a game on the television my dad would be hermetically sealed to it, and to his cigarettes and a bottomless glass of Heineken, until the final whistle. I would try to get in on it, chiming in at commercial breaks, “Hey, Dad, if a player had a glass eye and got tackled and it popped out, would they stop the game to find it? There’s a kid at my school with one and it falls out all the time. Oooh! I love this commercial ‘The UN-Cola-ah-ah . . .’ Do the players go to the bathroom during the commercials, Dad? Is that why they even have commercials, Dad? Hey, Dad?” Try as I might, however, he and his smoke and drink of choice were in a soundproof and daughterless vacuum. I could never get in on any of it. Around the Super Bowl one year, I asked my dad to teach me about the game so I could join in the festivities. He tried to, but to me, it sounded like a lot of math and confusing dance moves performed by big, unattractive men. So, I just gave up.

  So, imagine my surprise when I suddenly found myself being called a star athlete.

  At fifteen, I weighed in around 190 pounds and was a thick chunk of girl muscle. Still plushly upholstered with baby fat, but I was as strong as a bear with a similar temper.

  I fucking hated sports and the rapey testosteroids who loved them. But the new me, the me who was trying to be all right and fit in, grit my teeth and went for it. And in very little time, I found myself growing in athletic reputation. First, I was asked, nay somewhat begged, to be the varsity goalie for the girls’ soccer team. The coach so wanted my big blocky, rageaholic self in the net, he pretty much let me do whatever I wanted there.

  I relished my position. I didn’t have to run with the other ponies at practice. I could just hang around in my sweats a
nd be a menace. Another girl from the team and I would go to my house right around practice, get stoned, then go to the field. It was my first feeling of being a spoiled rock star. Very little was asked of me, but I was awesome at my job. It was the perfect outlet for my frustration to vent on other people. The coach and my teammates encouraged me to be as brutal and scary as I wanted. At games I would smoosh mud all over my face, and straight up tackle chicks. It was great.

  I had also become a bit of a superstar in varsity crew as well.

  My giant body and black little heart made me a monster with an oar, and I was ranked in the top rungs of New England and the Eastern seaboard for my age group. The ergometer is a rowing simulator, and a measuring tool for your strength and stamina. And, though I loved my Marlboros, and cocaine was becoming a more frequent treat for me, I constantly made the ergometer my bitch.

  Suddenly, my dad thought I was great. He positively glowed when the St. Mark’s athletic director announced my name at assembly, telling the crowd how I would be spending the summer, training and kicking ass for St. Mark’s at the Junior Nationals in upstate New York. There was finally something about me he understood and could be proud of. At least, for a minute.

  He would come to my meets, chat with my coach, and I was suddenly awesome. His little girl, who had saddened and confounded him for so long, had grown into a giant meat triangle of broad back and shoulders, huge, shoebox thighs, and no boobs or booty to speak of. So, not only was I now an athletic asset to the school’s rep, I was so fucking unattractive that, in my dad’s mind, no boy would ever want a piece of me. I was the perfect daughter.

  For those of you who don’t know about crew, allow me to inform you that, while it is the preppiest sport this side of croquet, it is one of the least attractive. Brutal, grunting, yanking, there was very little room for hotness. Field hockey girls were plucky and quick, usually superhot with wide, swinging ponytails and delicate limbs plunging out of flippy skirts and grass-stained jerseys. Soccer girls were a tad more boyish, tougher, more contact and aggression. Crew ladies are moose. Big, butch moose.