Crazy Enough

by Storm Large

  Mom was happy at the end. Of course, I only knew her for two days out of the six years I ran and hid from her while she had lost her leg and found herself. I told myself she was happy at the end. She sure had looked happy.

  The boy who found her said she looked like she was asleep. Peaceful and pink with no evidence of distress leading up to the end. In every room at the facility, there were emergency call buttons, one by the bed and one in the bathroom. Mom hadn’t pushed hers, so it was safe to say she wasn’t suffering. Mom loved emergencies, especially when she was the headliner, but she rolled into the great unknown without fuss or fanfare. She simply had gotten up, put her one-legged, paraplegic self into her wheelchair, navigated around her open suitcase on the floor, in the dark, got to the bathroom, onto the toilet and . . . was gone. Just like Elvis. The boy came in the morning to collect laundry and do a general check in and said she looked fine. She had only been gone maybe a half hour.

  It was a bit insulting, to my brothers and me, that after a life so hell bent on misery and self-destruction, our mother died as soon as she got some peace. Mom wheels into her little halfway house of happiness, and God or whoever, goes and kicks the plug out. Oops.

  The last time I remember seeing Mom happy was in Little Boar’s Head. So we would have her service there. In her stuff I found a framed picture, of the five of us, in front of “Kittywake,” the shingled beach cottage my dad’s parents would rent every summer. In the photo, Mom gleamed next to my dad, my brothers were in matching bathing suits, and I was snapped in mid-yell. I was probably crowing “Cheeese!” Mom was holding my shoulders. Though I was about four in the picture, my white sprout of a ponytail on top of my head was higher than her hip. We were all very tan, and looked happy. Mom hadn’t tried to kill us yet, though I later learned she had already begun trying to off herself around the time the picture was taken. It looked like the capture of a happy moment, though. So I kept it, and my brothers and I started to plan the service based on it.

  We would do it at St. Andrew’s By The Sea, a tiny church on a shady hill just off Route 1A. John, being the oldest, would do the eulogy. Henry would do a reading and I would sing a song. It would be a quick and personal service with all Mom’s favorite hymns, mostly Christmas carols. Then we would go to Ray’s Seafood for fried clams and lobsters that we could eat outside off sticky red-and-white-checked tablecloths. A perfect send-off for a woman we would never forget, but didn’t know all that well.

  Dad, my brothers, and I decided to scatter her ashes ourselves before the service. Family and friends were coming from all over, and it was shaping up to be a beautiful, hot July day, but at five something in the morning on the beach, the sun just peeking through the gray dawn over the ocean, it was chilly. We met directly across the street from Kittywake. Our little house, full of happy salt-water-taffy memories, was still there. Sort of. Now a monstrosity stood with it or rather, on it. An unfinished construction project literally straddled the original cottage. Some madman had tried to build a new, ultramodern thing, yet still incorporate the original house’s footprint for some reason. At some point, though, whoever they were ran out of money and abandoned the whole horrible mess. It looked like Kittywake was getting slow-motion raped by a huge, tacky mansion from Florida.

  Henry brought flowers. Dad brought big Styrofoam cups of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and Mom . . . half of her, anyway. The other half had gone to Grandmother Banks, who had her small service for Mom, earlier in the year.

  We had one large Ziploc baggie full of dust and weird, nubby . . . bits. We mixed her ashes in with flower petals and both brothers and I scooped up a handful each, to pour into the Atlantic.

  One at a time, we waded into the water to, I guess, meditate or pray before we released her.

  I took my scoop of Mom and some flowers and high-stepped into the ocean. My feet quickly began to ache from the cold, and I couldn’t think of anything to say. I stood holding the gritty stuff in both hands, cupped together, wondering what part of her body I had. Her knee? Her head? She was a small lady, so there weren’t a lot of ashes to start with. Did they blend the ashes? I guess they had been shaken pretty well in their bags for some time, six months?

  “I’m sorry, Mom.” I looked for a sign, her face in the clouds, her voice in the seagulls screeching overhead. Nothing. I secretly hoped for a sign. Something magic, something significant that would tell me she was all good where she was, she was complete, happy, and I was forgiven. For some reason, I assumed there would be something, a nudge, a nod from the other side. Mom always said that she was magic. One of her doctors told her that. I’m pretty sure it was the same doctor who said I should be crazy by now. Maybe I am. I’m freezing and wet, my mom is dead, I might be holding her actual face in my hands and I’m incapable of coming up with a single fucking worthwhile thing to say. I am an utter ruin of a human being.

  “I’m . . .” Then I dropped her. My hands just opened. Ashes swirled like powdered milk and the flowers floated.

  Nothing. I rinsed off my hands in the water and trudged out to my dad. We watched my brothers wading out and he patted my back. I tried to look as if I had felt a significant shift, that I had made peace, that all was well, but I just felt wet and cold and pissed at myself.

  I went to my hotel and dressed for the service as half of our mom floated away.

  I think the minister was a bit appalled with our sendoff, but I could care less. He was a nice man, but this was our deal.

  The service was a perfect blend of Episcopal tradition and customized extras. John’s eulogy was legendary, quoting from the Book of Matthew, blending in a ripping rendition of the blessing of the Holy Hand Grenade from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Henry read a children’s story, I planned to sing one of my songs.

  Henry was always the tough one, the straight one. Besides getting angry once in a while, he was usually fairly stoic. While reading the sweet bedtime story that he read to his children but never heard from Mom, tears started to shine in his eyes. The poor guy hung in there as best he could, but started to lose it towards the end. I was crying openly, but trying to be quiet. Everyone was, out of respect and surprise to see my brother, who looked like a Heisman Trophy in a Brooks Brothers suit, regress to a sad little boy.

  I was sitting next to my dad in the first pew of the church. While we watched Henry read, I noticed the wood of our seat would squeak with any movement. Of course, I sat in the loud pew, the only one making any noise in the whole church. If I barely shifted my weight, it would give a sharp creak. Still as I sat, though, the squeak kept chirping out of the old dark wood. I looked around to find what could be making the noise.

  Dad. His hands were tightly balled together between his knees and he was completely still. Face forward and set, semper fi square jaw fixed, eyes on his son. He had his glasses on, and he looked so still, as if he were holding his breath. The only movement was the endless track of dripping tears down his stony face. And every minute or so, a tiny sad squeak would escape his flexing throat.

  I put my hand on his leg and kept my eyes trained forward until it was my turn to get up and sing.

  Well, I tried to sing . . . did my darndest. But after my two brothers’ incredible moments at the pulpit and my sobbing, squeaking statue of a father, I had cried my throat damn near shut. I got off to a good start, but then lost it at the end. I sang one of my own songs, “Here We Are.”

  Here we are. Floating around outer space.

  We’re all looking for the final frontier, my dear, it’s right in front of your face.

  Here we are. Why are we so afraid?

  We’re so afraid of ourselves, and each other,

  And the humongous mess that we’ve made . . .

  Right around the first chorus, my face slammed shut and I could barely breathe. “Please someone . . . guys? Help me . . . I can’t.”

  The back of the church was full of my cousins from my dad’s side, they are all a little bit older than us and h
ad their teenage daughters with them, all of whom knew, by heart, every song I ever recorded. They were all big fans of cousin Stormy. The girls leapt up and sang, “Time and again I’m at the end of my rope, and I feel life’s a joke that I’ve been sharing with you. After all we are all what we are about to be . . . and here we are, heeere we aaare!” It was perfect. My brothers and I paid tribute to Mom in our own individual ways. As individually as we had responded to her and the lack of her. John, fiery, Henry, soft but soldiering, and I fell apart.

  Later, Henry and his wife were playing with their kids at the beach, near where we had sent Mom’s ashes off. He saw three roses wash up softly in the waves.

  Love you, ’bye.

  My earliest memory is as a baby looking out from a stroller. Staring up at the little navy blue awning thing pulled over me, and the big blue sky beyond it. I remember I was moving, seeing the tops of school buildings, the clock tower, the gymnasium. I remember the wheels under my back getting louder and bumpier as I was being pushed faster. Then I heard my brothers’ laughter behind me, growing distant as they had given the stroller a heave-ho and pushed it down a hill.

  This memory is as vivid as any, and I have no idea if it’s even remotely accurate. Knowing them, it is a stunt my brothers would absolutely have pulled. They say they remember it, too, somewhat, but with the caveat that they would have never let anything really bad happen to me. They were way too terrified of my dad.

  Memory is a moving target. They say that if five people witness a car accident, there were five different car accidents. In the eighties, there was an epidemic of so-called repressed memories bursting to the surface in some people. Oprah, Donahue, and Sally Jesse Raphael all had people on their shows who had blinding visions, out of nowhere, of themselves as children when they had been molested or beaten. Tons of people came forward to talk about their repressed memories, including Roseanne Barr.

  I remember Mom loving this idea. Out of the clear blue sky, you could remember whoever did whatever terrible, awful thing to you. And, because you remembered, you could then heal and move on. Your shitty life was totally someone else’s fault, and thank God you remembered!

  Mom’s memories would change with whatever topic was on daytime television, so when repressed memories became kitchen-table subjects, Mom was psyched. She could remember being kidnapped by aliens, raped by Satanists, and her brother was the Son of Sam.

  I know! Isn’t it just so awful?

  It was true that Mom was adopted, though. Every now and then she would talk about finding her birth family, and would say aloud that she was going to hire a private detective or start researching herself to find where she really came from. These fanciful plans would come and go, but then she would find it more satisfying to invent her real background, usually starting with a “What if . . . ?” ending in hardboiled facts that she had completely fabricated.

  She never got terribly far in her searching, I imagine, because she was terrified to discover that she was the result of a sloppy drunken oops, or some other, completely common scenario. My biggest fear was being crazy; hers was being normal and not a completely unique little snowflake of tragedy.

  “My father was a cop and he blackmailed my mother who was a beautiful dancer,” or, “My mother was a movie star, and she got pregnant auditioning for Gone With the Wind,” and so on, you get the idea. “My mother was raped” was a big one.

  I had always been a bit curious about Mom’s birth family. Insofar as getting some actual medical history besides the cobbled-together mess of half-truths and bullshit fed to all of us by endless doctors and so-called experts. I was in my thirties, past the age of prescribed madness by some years, and decidedly fine. Other than hypersexuality, addiction, hallucinations, panic attacks, and general fits of blackout depression, I was totally normal.

  I was just curious.

  When I got back to Portland, however, the manila envelope Suzi2 had given me, a packetful of potential answers, stayed on my dresser for months. I didn’t think about it too much, but every time I saw it something in me said, “Leave it alone, dude.” There was no info inside, just a last form to fill out, get notarized, then send off with a check for thirty bucks. The envelope sat, until spring.

  “What if you want to have kids?” asked my girlfriend, Stephanie, who wanted kids. “It would be really helpful to . . . you know . . . know.” Steph looked at me with her cartoon, baby-deer eyes. Steph is ten years younger than me, a silky sweet beauty with a giant, natural heart. We are very different but I consider her my baby sister.

  “I don’t want kids, Steph. Besides, all the eggs I have left in me are the bitter last batch, and nobody wants those to come to life. They’re all shriveled up in there, sitting in rocking chairs on a porch in my ovaries, smoking, and bitching about their frustrated lives.” I put on a sourpuss old lady face and mimed smoking a filterless cigarette and croaked “Gaaah! I coulda been somebody!” I cracked myself up. She smiled.

  “Seriously, Stormy, don’t you want to know? They might be amazing people.”

  “Or, I could call and be patched through to an insane asylum, or a phone on the wall of some common room of a maximum security prison.”

  “Or she could be some nice lady who had to make a tough choice a long time ago who would love to know that, well, that her granddaughter is a wonderful person and a kickass talent.”

  “Hippie.”

  “I’m serious.”

  Of course, I was being dramatic about the whole prison thing, but part of me didn’t want to welcome more moms into my life. I had lost mine without really having had her in the first place and our whole dance around each other for thirty-plus years went from sad to horrible and rarely varied beyond those two points. Why would I want to meet more of . . . her?

  My curiosity got the better of me, though, and with my sweet lil’ sis, Steph, cheering me on, I filled out the form, got it notarized, and sent it off.

  I imagined it would get stuck into a ream of impossible requests somewhere in a Connecticut records room. I pictured a fussy, exhausted file clerk cursing at the pile of work he’ll never get to, and the lost children out in the world dumping their impossible dreams of finding long-lost loved ones on his narrow shoulders. I figured if I heard anything it would be at least a year or so.

  Two weeks later I get a call from a man at the agency.

  “Storm Large?”

  “Yes?”

  “We’ve received your request and processed it. Have you gotten your packet yet?”

  “My . . . uh.”

  “Oh, you’ll get it any day now. Unfortunately, your mother’s birth mother is deceased, but she had children and they would like to talk with you.”

  “They what?”

  “Would it be all right if I gave this number to one of the daughters so she can contact you directly?”

  “I dunno, is it safe?”

  “Safe? She’s your aunt.”

  “I know, but . . .”

  “They have a right to know who’s looking into their family history. It doesn’t have to be on the phone, it can be your address or email.”

  “No, give her my number. This number, sure. Was she nice?”

  “She seemed nice, yes, just very surprised to get the information. You’ll hear from her, I’m sure, very soon.”

  “Okay, um, thank you.”

  I don’t know what I was thinking starting this whole process. Of course the family has to be informed that they’re being somewhat investigated. I can’t just snoop around private medical records and explore the lineage and records of real people, potentially related to me, without their knowledge or permission. I was worried about my safety? They weren’t looking for me.

  Now they are.

  Shit.

  A day or so later, I get the packet of records from the adoption agency and foster-care providers. The photocopied pages contained Mom’s birth record, nurse’s notes on the birth and recovery of the birth
mother, and then the stretch of years that followed, before my mom was finally adopted. There were a pack of handwritten accounts on Mom’s progress in her various, temporary homes.

  Mom was born on March 14, 1943, to a twenty-three-year-old woman named Loretta V. Hospital records said she was born healthy and didn’t cry or fuss too much, even though Loretta refused to touch or hold her most of the time.

  Mom’s name, at birth, was Sandra.

  Sandra was described as a “good baby,” sweet and cuddly. Loretta took her home for about three weeks, then decided to give her up. Sandra’s first round of foster care was a lovely situation. She was held and played with and doted on, plus her birth mother was encouraged to visit her. Loretta was allowed to spend an hour with the baby a few times a week (why they did this is unclear, maybe to get the birth mother to bond with, then take the baby home, and out of the overcrowded system), and, for a short while, she did. When she would come to see her baby, though, she refused to hold her and would only stay a fraction of the time allowed. On one or two occasions the foster agent described Loretta as “distracted,” often showing up for these visits with one or several friends, and they were often drunk. Loretta and her posse, one time, were so wasted when they showed up to visit my wee baby mom, they were asked to leave.

  She eventually stopped coming at all.

  There was no mention of mental illness in the medical records, but the record was everything the birth mother offered to the hospital when she went to have the baby. According to Loretta, her own general health was good. The only information on the father was he was a naval officer, around the same age as Loretta and his name was “Whitey.” Where the hospital record had a space to write down the general health of the father, Loretta had written, “clean and nice looking.”

  I had begun to research the family name to see if anything came up crazy, when she called.

  It was my mom’s half-sister, Grace, my aunt Grace, technically.

  “Is this Storm?”

  “Yes, hi! Wow. How are you?” Please don’t be insane.