My mother let me take innumerable sick days. She knew school was tough for me. She saw the way it made me feel. I never talked about it. I never wanted to talk about anything, but she knew. She always said that she could feel everything I felt, that she had ESP. Andrew was always furious to find out she had let me stay home. “He gets to stay home all the time!” he’d shout at her.
Sometimes, I think she just let me stay home so she could hang out with me. She and I would gather snacks and watch marathons of Star Wars. Every time, she’d say, “You know, people say I look like Princess Leia. Don’t you think she’s pretty?” And I’d say, “Of course, Ma.”
On one of our “mental health days” she sat me down and taught me how to do a tarot reading. She loved mysterious spirituality and found higher meaning in everything. She’d draw the cards gravely, theatrically. She taught me cat’s cradle and how to knit. And she and I made countless meals together. Our mental health days were fun and full of laughter and silliness. She tried so hard to teach me spirituality and empathy, but I just couldn’t get it. I didn’t get it.
CHAPTER 9
Nancy was enjoying her life until she developed another high fever. Her toxic shock had returned, and this time, it was even worse. She remained in her bed for a very long time. Nurses came by to administer intravenous drips and dole out painkillers. All her hair fell out and her skin bubbled and blistered. She turned a livid pink as her skin burned off from the inside out. Her finger pads shed their prints and became white, scarred, senseless things. Her eyebrows and eyelashes fell out as her lids swelled and turned purple. The steroid Prednisone was again prescribed. Her face and body swelled and bloated. Her fevers raged. Here was Nancy, who had just turned fifty, put herself though nursing school, endured a home-wrecking flood, rebuilt a home, and married a lovely gentleman, and now she was bedridden with a mysterious, painful, debilitating illness. Her whole body burned. She was a fire of pain, fury, and disappointment.
This second toxic shock syndrome was the hole into which she fell, like Alice in Wonderland. Nancy suffered a classic opioid addiction before it was headline news, leaning heavily into the painkillers and downers she had been dabbling with for her whole life: Valium, Fiorinal, Vicodin, OxyContin, Trazodone, Gabapentin, Klonopin. The grit and power she had displayed for the last fifty years was beginning to wane. “How can I keep fighting?” she thought. “All I do is fight. I’m so tired.” Her body was draining her ability and willingness to fight. She lay in bed, hooked to an IV, groaning in pain as she swelled and swelled, her skin flaking and burning off. With tears in her crusting, turgid eyes, she asked someone, anyone: “Why?”
1999: FIFTEEN YEARS OLD
When my mother was diagnosed with the second bout of toxic shock syndrome, I was deep into my teenage angst and shame. I took her a big glass of Coke, with extra ice, as she always instructed, and set it on her bedside table. An IV and vitals machine beeped and dripped beside her. She looked at me and said, “Jimbo. You never visit me. Do you even care if I die?” I didn’t know what to do or say, so I just rolled my eyes and retreated to my room. She had a flair for drama and was trying to manipulate me into professing my deep need for her and her love, but I didn’t know how to do that. It was unnatural to me.
The truth is, I didn’t really care. I was so selfish and I didn’t understand how sick she was. I could barely bring myself to look at her. She was horrifying, with her skin all burnt off. At fifteen, I couldn’t identify fear. When I look back, I see now, I was so scared. Good God, was I scared. But my fear prevented my feeling anything. I stuffed it down and away, God forbid I cry or display any sort of emotion. I hated crying. I wouldn’t do it. So I went to high school and I went to my dance classes. I went to parties and I won dance competitions. I learned how to drive and I ignored my father. I went on and moved on and kept myself busy until I didn’t care about my dying mother, for fear I might actually feel something.
CHAPTER 10
It took time, but Nancy recovered. Her hair grew back and her skin healed over. Andrew went off to college and James came out of the closet as a homosexual. There were grandchildren and happy birthdays. Life barreled on.
As a result of her illness, Nancy had missed out on so much work that she and Paul were forced to sell the Reef Road house and move to Milford, Connecticut. They bought a simple house close to the home of Pete, Nancy’s eldest. Nancy began a part-time job as a night nurse at Fairfield University, where she saw many an alcohol-poisoned student.
Fresh out of toxic shock hell, she was utterly dependent on prescription pills. She took so many, they gave her a slightly loopy gait. On her drive home one night, she crashed her car and shattered her femur. It is not known whether she was overly medicated. She simply drove her car into a telephone pole. A surgery was performed on her leg that made her nearly bionic. Plates and screws littered her bones, which had been made brittle by the Prednisone. Yet again, she was relegated to her bed.
Paul kept working and took care of Nancy as she convalesced. He was a good caretaker, with a patient bedside manner. He made sure Nancy was comfortable as she got used to using crutches. He made sure she had her beloved large Dunkin’ Donuts order, which the employees called the “Crazy Nance”: an iced latte with extra ice, two pumps of vanilla, and whipped cream. He brought her packs of Marlboro Light 100s, which she had switched to a few years earlier. They were enormously long cigarettes. Truth was, she’d light a cigarette, forget about it, and move to another room. There might have been at least three cigarettes burning in any room at a given time.
Paul stood valiantly by as his new wife suffered pitfall after pitfall. But he was a man with demons of his own. When Nancy, doped up on her pills, lost her balance and fell, re-shattering her already bionic femur, it was the straw that broke the camel’s femur. He took the car out and came back with a bottle of cheap vodka. He twisted off the top and took a swig. Sweet, sweet coping mechanism. Paul had lost the battle with alcoholism once again.
Nancy became despondent and understandably depressed. She was incredulous at her misfortune, which seemed comical in its frequency. Upon finding out that Paul had begun drinking again, she blew a gasket. Their marriage devolved into trivial squabbles and gibes. They dug into each other with sharp, abusive words. The love and care they had built their early marriage on evaporated, replaced by injury, pettiness, and deceit.
As Nancy’s health improved, so did her resolve to leave Paul. Andrew had gone to college, and James had left for ballet boarding school in Virginia. They had no distractions from their ire. One dark evening, Nancy called the police on Paul. She claimed that he was neglecting her, that her injury had left her disabled and he was leaving her in her upstairs bedroom for days at a time. When the police arrived, she kicked him out of the house, shouting, “Get out! Just don’t you dare take the Klonopin!”
2001: SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD
When I returned to Milford, Connecticut, from Virginia School of the Arts for Christmas, I was greeted by a filthy house. My mother was still healing from her second broken leg and she had recently kicked Paul out. I didn’t know where he had gone, and I didn’t ask. I was so disappointed in my mother. Who the hell was she? What was happening? This would be her third divorce. I didn’t want to judge, but of course I did.
I really liked Paul. I loved him. He was a dream of a stepfather. He accepted me immediately when I came out, even though my mother had gone through a strange journey of her own regarding my homosexuality. He’d cook me tasty goulash when I returned from a late-night dance rehearsal. He never judged me the way I felt everyone else did. He saw who I was and thought, “Sure, why not?” He was also depressive and was constantly being tested by the realities of being alive.
I looked at my mother, in her full leg brace, and realized how small she was. She wore pajama shorts that exposed the horseshoe-shaped scars on both knees from her days as a gymnast. Her exquisite hands were marred by toxic shock. Her
once perfectly painted nails were now a jumbled mess of lacquer, with color blotched haphazardly over her cuticles, and her bottle-bleached hair was thinning. I didn’t understand the feeling I felt. Many people just watch their parents age. I was watching my mother disappear.
We spent a lot of time together that Christmas. I was home for a full week and I asked her to start teaching me all her recipes. She was a wonderful, unhealthy cook, which meant everything was delicious. We went overboard that week. She taught me how to make her famous chili, her orange-glazed ham, her pot roast, her meatloaf, her corn soufflé, her chicken pot pie, her chicken à la king, and Grandma Jennings’s hot fudge. She wasn’t terribly mobile, so I was getting a real hands-on crash course in the culinary arts. I watched her revert to the Greenwich housewife she used to be as she directed me to dice, pour, sift, grate, and simmer. I must’ve asked her to start teaching me her recipes because I had realized she was mortal. A mother is forever until you’re faced with the reality that she isn’t—that no one is.
She stood with a Marlboro Light 100 dangling from her poorly lined lips while she sang along to Joni Mitchell’s “Cactus Tree” blaring on the small Bose CD player. She had introduced me to so much music. Once, when I was very little, she handed me a Walkman cassette player and headphones. I went to the room I shared with Andrew, hopped onto the top bunk, and pressed play. It was Christmastime, and “The First Noel” began to play through the tinny headphones. I sat on my bunk, clutching my blue-and-white knit blanky, and cried inconsolably. Andrew was confused and fetched our mother to come into the bedroom. He asked her, “Why is Jimbo crying?” She looked up at me on the top bunk and said, “Sometimes, something beautiful makes you cry . . . and that’s all right.”
While I busied over the stove, mixing up her famous chili, she removed her cigarette, looked at me, and asked, “Am I still pretty?” And I said, “Of course you are, Ma.” But the question just made me sad.
CHAPTER 11
Nancy was on disability pay and her trust fund payments from Uncle Warren were, at this point, next to nothing. She lived alone at the house in Milford until her funds were depleted. Pete, who had begun a family of his own with Heidi and lived in Milford’s charming seaside neighborhood called Woodmont, bought a condominium for Nancy, just a few blocks from his home. She would downsize to a two-bedroom apartment and pay rent to him. Pete and Missy also started managing Nancy’s paperwork and bills. They found her to be in dire financial straits. Nancy spoke constantly of Uncle Warren. She’d say, “We just have to wait for Uncle Warren to pass.” She was waiting for an inheritance.
Nancy spent nearly all her time at home in her apartment, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee with hazelnut creamer, and ordering things from QVC, a TV channel geared to at-home shoppers. Nancy was famous for giving gifts. She had the most generous soul imaginable. She loved providing for people and feeling needed. All throughout their childhood, her kids had lived a life of excess. Nancy even bought a secondhand ’88 Chrysler LeBaron convertible for James when he got his driver’s license. It was $1,000. The retractable top was broken, and he had to hold the wheel halfway turned to go straight, but it was a great, sporty vehicle.
Nancy’s nuclear family always gathered every year for Christmas, even though her children were scattered across the United States, living exciting, dramatic lives of their own. For Christmas in 2004, Nancy went a bit overboard. Her mobility was limited by her leg and the residual weakness from having toxic shock twice in a row, so she did all her shopping on QVC, buying multiples of everything: bedazzled pens, gemstone keychains, ornaments, blouses, purses, tool kits, baubles, books, scarves, blankets, kitchen utensils. When Missy came over to pick her up and take her to Pete’s on Christmas Day, she was stunned by the Jenga stacks of cardboard boxes completely filling Nancy’s small living room. Nancy instructed her to load the boxes into the car. Missy did as she was told. That Christmas, each child and niece and nephew opened strange, unnecessary gifts with bewilderment and confused faces.
After that QVC Christmas, Pete and Missy staged an intervention. They asked Reverend Jim, a local clergyman, to attend and show his support. In doing her paperwork, Pete and Missy had found $7,000 in overdraft charges to her checking account and nearly fifty revolving payment plans on her QVC account. Nancy, who was of course smoking a Marlboro Light 100 and drinking extra-light hazelnut coffee, acknowledged that she was “maybe overdoing it a bit” and vowed to cut back. Robbie called QVC and placed her account on a “do not buy” list that prevented her from ordering any more items.
The children were then stunned to learn that Nancy had purchased a dog from a local breeder—a sheltie, which is a miniature collie breed. She named her Sunny. Why a woman in debt would purchase an expensive purebred puppy was beyond their comprehension. Sunny was a happy, beautiful dog, with smart, friendly eyes and a gentle demeanor. Though Nancy shouldn’t have bought her, Sunny was the best thing to happen to her in a long time. They became best friends. Nancy loved sitting in her blue recliner, smoking cigs into next week, watching Anderson Cooper on CNN with Sunny’s head in her lap.
2000: SIXTEEN YEARS OLD
I had been shuttled back and forth between my parents’ houses since I was a toddler. Being a teenager and coming to grips with the reality of one’s court-ordered custody is an unpleasant affair. When I was a wee bonny bairn, I’d simply scream bloody murder as my father dragged me out of my mother’s front door. “Just let him stay!” she’d plead. “He doesn’t want to go with you!”
“This is the arrangement.”
At sixteen, I was ready to emancipate myself from my dry existence at my father’s house. He and Katie had moved with their two sons into a pleasant home on Catherine Terrace in Fairfield. I had spent much of my time finding ways to never be at his house. I have rehearsals. I’m staying at a friend’s. I’ll be away for a dance competition. I conspired with my mother to confront my father and liberate myself from the clutches of my settled-in-court custody. I wanted to stay at my mother’s at all times.
Mom and I sat him down in the living room of the Reef Road house, the house that they had bought together, and that she had knocked down and rebuilt with another man. I picked at my cuticles as I quietly told my father that I didn’t want to live with him anymore. He replied coolly, “OK. I understand.”
I think I know now what he meant. He saw the bond I’d forged with my mother over the years that had shaped me into her minion. As I said before, he didn’t stand a chance.
CHAPTER 12
Nancy was becoming more and more fragile. Her skin was damaged and thin from toxic shock, and she consistently bruised and cut herself simply from grazing a wall or the edge of a chair. She was diagnosed with an iron deficiency and began receiving intravenous immunoglobulin infusions that bolstered her compromised immune system. These infusions made her weak, and it became clear that leaving her alone at her condo with Sunny was not safe.
Pete and Missy arranged for her to be moved to a two-bedroom apartment in an assisted independent-living community in Shelton, Connecticut. There were nurses on staff who would frequently check on Nancy and administer her medication and infusions. Once again, her life was downgraded. She crammed as much of the furniture from her previous lives into the tiny apartment as she could. Thankfully, Sunny was permitted to stay with her.
When Andrew returned from college and his new life on the West Coast, he sat on the street and wept for her, as his father, Pat, had done more than a decade earlier. Watching this exquisite, brilliant, vibrant creature languishing caused him real pain.
These years were scary for the family. The addiction and denial played out in a sick loop. Nancy’s childhood friend, inexplicably nicknamed “the Wolf,” successfully convinced her that she wasn’t really an alcoholic, and they sat together often, drinking bottles of wine that the Wolf brought over. Nancy’s children anguished over her lapse in sobriety. They watched as Nancy dismantled herself
, taking chip after chip from them in a game of emotional poker. They became closer than ever, bonding over the savagery of being adults.
After one of her wine-soaked evenings with the Wolf, Nancy took Sunny outside to the large field behind the apartments. She was standing there, pulling at a cigarette, when she lost her balance and teetered over the edge of the single step into the field. Her shoulder shattered as she hit the cold, hard grass. She passed out from the pain and was not discovered until the early morning, when Sunny’s shrill barks alerted the groundskeeper that one of the tenants was in danger. Nancy was patched up, given more pain medication, and sent on her merry way.
Once again relegated to her apartment, she dove back into the comfort of material purchases. One of the perks of being married and divorced three times is a wealth of aliases to choose from. She signed up for QVC from her new address, this time with her maiden name, Nancy White. This name and address had not yet been added to the “do not buy” list. When Missy inspected the bills in her mail, she discovered the new QVC charges, including $14,000 in recurring overdraft and interest charges. During one visit to Nancy’s, Missy witnessed forty boxes arrive in the mail from QVC.
Uncle Warren passed away in 2010, leaving Nancy the remainder of her inheritance. Her trust fund had been whittled down to $40,000—by no means a small number, but nowhere remotely resembling the millions of dollars she’d once had. Uncle Warren also left her and her brother, Bruce, a simple house in Old Greenwich. They were both struggling financially, so they sold it immediately. With the help of Pete and Missy, Nancy began paying back the multitude of debts she had amassed over the last decade. She liquidated assets willy-nilly, pawning her three engagement rings and family heirloom jewelry without telling anyone. Lacking in funds but rich in experience, Nancy began to look toward the future.
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