Dancing with the Octopus

by Debora Harding

  “Let’s take Zorro for a walk and have a Chautauqua.”

  A Chautauqua was the name for special talks my father and I had, where he would impart wisdom. Later on I learned he got the name from the salons hosted by pioneers, the first being near Lake Chautauqua, which once belonged to the Native Americans in New York. Here was the wisdom my father imparted that day:

  “Half of Nebraska’s farmers are Indians,” he said as we walked, “and they were such good farmers that the United States government gave them land, but not any land, the most difficult land in the country to farm. This is because they thought if anyone could work miracles out of that soil, the Indians could. And that is how Omaha got its name—from one of the great Nebraska tribes.”

  Anyone hearing that story might think Dad was minimizing the tragic violence inflicted on Native Americans, but that wasn’t Dad’s way. Instead, he was always looking for the positive spin on a helpless situation, no matter what emotion had to be ignored. I listened, I registered: Indians, great farmers, U.S. government, very smart and generous. Omaha, Indians.

  “But the most important thing about Nebraska,” Dad continued as we looked over the distant cornfields that disappeared into the horizon, “is the Cornhuskers football team. In fact”—he jabbed his finger in the air—“there isn’t a better college football team in the country. And that’s the truth.”

  And there was indeed some truth to this. The Nebraska Cornhuskers were on the way to a two-year national championship winning streak in 1970 and 1971.

  He looked at me then, to make sure I understood, really understood, the value of the real estate we had landed on. “Yeah,” I said, my eyes opening wide with enthusiasm. And to punctuate the deep meaning of the moment, he put his arm around my shoulder, and the three of us—Dad, Zorro, and I—looked out at what was to become the view from my bedroom window, where the sinking sun would hypnotize me to sleep for the next eight years.

  “Those Cornhuskers,” Dad added, looking dreamily out at the cornfields, squeezing my hand.

  “Yeah, those Cornhuskers,” I said dreamily back as I spotted a huge oval water tower farther beyond the golden-tasseled stalks. Dad told me it belonged to Boys Town, a juvenile detention center founded by Father Flanagan, who believed there was no such thing as a bad kid, just a kid needing one person to believe in him.

  My father and I didn’t know it, but Mr. K was in the landscape even then. At the time we were standing there, he was eight years old, living on the other side of Omaha in a nice middle-class neighborhood, maybe eating Cheerios.

  Reality surfaced like a whale, with Gayle running around the corner, hollering that a neighbor had arrived with a pitcher of iced lemonade and chocolate chip cookies. Shortly after introducing ourselves, we heard the strained sound of shifting gears as the semitruck with a Mayflower logo pulled all our earthly belongings up the hill. My childhood in Lee Valley was about to begin.

  In Which I Think Respectfully on Postnatal Depression

  Omaha, 1970—Not long after we settled into life in Lee Valley, we had a family conference where Mom announced she was pregnant again and, after what felt like five years because I was so damn excited, my baby sister Jenifer arrived.

  By that time, Genie and I were trained in the art of running a household. This isn’t so unusual in families short of an extra pair of adult hands—the older kids just pick up the slack. By the age of six, I could clean the kitchen, wash the clothes, vacuum, and change my baby sister’s diapers. When Dad was home, he took over most of the jobs, though it was never really clear he understood whose load he was easing. He would pull up at the end of a workday, or most often a workweek; we’d run down the hill, Zorro chasing after us, and leap on him. Sometimes we would even tackle him to the ground.

  “Here comes Jesus Christ,” Mom would say on cue.

  Once inside, Dad would perform his Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof routine, thrusting one hand up in the air, then he’d put one wrist behind, snap his fingers, and sing “If I Were a Rich Man” while thrusting his hips side to side, stomping a beat, Zorro running in circles around him barking. He was better than Chaim Topol in that role, the way he expressed the sweet and bitter pain of life so well.

  And if he was home on a Friday, he would clap his hands and tell us to pile into the car for a trip to the Dairy Queen. After getting our double-dipped ice-cream cones, we detoured over to the new apartment complex behind the strip mall where Dad would drive around in circles until we were dizzy. Genie, Gayle, and I would laugh so hard it sucked the oxygen out of any misery.

  One winter morning, Dad had gone off to work and Genie, Gayle, and I went off to school—as was the normal routine, leaving Mom at home alone with the baby. We’d been standing at the bus stop for what must have been twenty minutes and had started doing the Virginia Reel, a barn dance strategy we used for keeping warm, when a neighborhood parent yelled at us from her front door. Hadn’t we heard? School had been canceled because of the two feet of snow we were do-si-do-ing in. Trudging back to the house, I became excited thinking about the fort I was going to build, where I was going to run the tunnels, and wondering whether we had carrots in the fridge for the snowman—normal Nebraska blizzard kid thoughts.

  Those thoughts evaporated when we came through our front door and I heard the baby crying. Mom was deaf in one ear because when she was sixteen, her half brother accidentally shot her with a popgun and burst her eardrum. Nothing could wake her up, and to tell you the truth there was no benefit to doing it.

  I went to get the baby, reached down in her crib and found she was sopping wet because she was wearing one of those cotton diapers that leaked all over the place. So I grabbed some dry cloths and wiped her down, but she didn’t like it. She started kicking like a frog and waved her strong little angry fists while her face blew up into the color of a cherry. It made it impossible to get the safety pins into the diaper, and I didn’t want to stick her, so I was making funny faces, and just then I heard Mom stomping down the hall, yelling, “What the hell is going on!”

  The next thing I knew Genie, Gayle, and I were getting hustled out the basement door into the unheated garage. She didn’t give us any time to collect our coats, hats, and gloves. Footwear would have been nice, too. We weren’t sure what we were meant to do next. We hoped she’d cool off quick enough and let us back into the house. It wasn’t clear what we’d done wrong.

  After fifteen minutes, we started thinking about going to a neighbor for help. But I had the next thought—if she wasn’t angry now, we’d hate to see her when a neighbor showed up at the door. So we distracted ourselves the best we could by taking turns riding our Big Wheel tricycle around the garage floor and playing hopscotch and four square with a ball. More time passed. Gayle started crying. She was four years old. The cold was hurting. Genie picked her up while I started banging on the door as hard as I could. Nothing. We had to consider other options. I rolled up the garage door and started looking at which neighbor’s house we could go to when I heard Gayle start shouting—“Dad is coming, Dad is coming!” I remember thinking she must be hallucinating, until with my own eyes I saw him down the hill, pushing his way, one leg at a time through the deep snow, the car parked behind him. We waited for him to reach the garage, then monkey-tackled him. He hugged us, grabbing Gayle and me, each under an arm, Genie on his back, carrying us into the basement and telling us to please sit, while he went upstairs to see what was wrong with Mom.

  I remember him coming back down and saying how sorry he was, as he blew on our toes and warmed up our feet with his hands, saying, “Damn, you could have gotten frostbitten,” and you could see he was a man sick with worry for his children and for his overwhelmed wife, who clearly wasn’t coping. But it was all okay because Dad was home. And when Dad was home Mom was as different as a blackbird is to a vampire. Both have wings, but one sucks your blood.

  In Which the Aftermath Comes Knocking

  London, 1992—You might say, for me, the first major fault line
made its appearance when I arrived at the door of a hard-earned adult-made happiness.

  I was twenty-eight years old and had recently moved to London to join my husband-to-be. Given both nature and nurture, I viewed myself more a prime candidate for prison or a mental asylum than good marriage material, but Thomas assured me he had vetted me well. I had just unpacked my luggage when a postman arrived at the door with a medium-size box. I opened it to find the most unusual bearer of messages—a large stuffed frog with a note in its mouth.

  Call home. Mom in hospital. Seems to be doing fine. Will be home soon. Love Dad.

  I had time to puzzle over the MacGuffin’s meaning with our six-hour time zone difference. It wasn’t unusual for Dad to use humor to lighten a heavy emotional situation. But when I finally reached him, he sounded odd, asked me about the English weather and was more interested in talking about the Queen Mother than getting to the point. I asked him to please just tell me what happened.

  “Your mother was in the hospital.”

  I reminded him the frog arrived ahead with the message, and then asked if it had been serious.

  “Well . . . serious . . . yes and no.” He told me they’d gotten into an argument six weeks earlier; Mom went psychotic and tried to stab him with a kitchen knife. After he wrestled the knife from her hand, she locked herself in the bathroom.

  “They gave me a choice to press charges or call the ambulance and have her committed . . .”

  “Hi, honey!”

  Evidently, Mom had been standing next to him. This term of endearment, addressed to me, was definitely out of character. She then told me about her time in the hospital. I won’t go into too much detail, but phrases like “triggered a childhood wound,” “discovering her child within,” “daily group therapy,” and “art therapy” were used. I kept waiting for mention of “anger management,” but there was nothing that suggested the homicidal rage behind Mom’s attack was even an issue. By the end of the conversation, I was more concerned for Dad. One thing was clear. Whatever drugs she was on, they were doing a fine job of elevating her mood.

  Later that night, as Thomas and I were putting clean sheets on the bed, I shared the news headline from back home but had a hard time doing it with a straight face. Thomas didn’t think I was serious. I assured him unfortunately I was, and half-joked he might want to back out of our relationship now. While he stuffed pillows into cases and I grew more frustrated in my attempts to get the duvet into its cover, I shared it wasn’t that far out of character for Mom . . . but I was particularly troubled by her total lack of concern for Dad. What if he hadn’t stopped her? Thomas, seeing I wasn’t getting anywhere with my duvet efforts, took the wad of bedding out of my hands, disappeared into its cover sheet with the enthusiasm of Tigger pouncing on Winnie the Pooh, and emerged with the quilt perfectly fitted into corners. “It could be a cultural difference,” he suggested.

  That night, as I was falling asleep, the words from a Sesame Street song, “One of these things is not like the other,” kept popping into my mind alongside alternating images: the knife-wielding masked abductor of my childhood and my knife-wielding psychotic mother. It went straight back to the kid in me, setting off all kinds of peculiar effects.

  In Which I Make an Unusual Friend

  Omaha, 1978—I was now screaming, trapped on the van floor in front of the passenger seat, with the tip of the knife sharp between my neck and skull.

  “Shut the fuck up bitch before I kill you!” Mr. K shouted again, in a tone that left no doubt he would be willing to execute his threat.

  To convince me, he applied pressure to the skin. I tried to calm down, but found it difficult to bring the spasms wracking my ribs under control. He yelled louder, “SHUT THE FUCK UP OR I’LL KILL YOU!” which was completely unnecessary, as he’d just said this, and it didn’t help the situation at all. I gulped, choking down the spasms. “I’m trying,” I whispered. He acknowledged the change of attitude, and I felt a tiny shift in the pressure of the knife.

  We drove for what felt like ten minutes, my cheek cold against the floor from the dirty sleet on the bottom of his boots. I felt my body slightly shift with the turns of the van. During this time I began to breathe more normally.

  Mr. K turned on the radio, tuning into a classic rock station. A gentle ballad in a minor key from the rock group Kansas played. Dust in the wind / All we are is dust in the wind.

  It occurred to me that if I strained my eyes to the right, I could gather more information. I took in the tops of trees, telephone lines, street signs, anything that would help me determine the location and direction in which we were moving.

  It was then that Mr. K offered to take the knife away if I kept quiet.

  “Yes,” I said. You can imagine my relief.

  “What?” he said.

  I was not sure how to interpret his question. It may be that he wanted me to understand that he was strong, an adversary to be contended with, and my yes didn’t reflect the proper register of fear. Or it may have been that he sincerely did not hear me and was concerned to know which option it was I preferred—the knife at the back of my head and screaming or removal of the knife and silence. So I chose to respond with a somewhat louder yes that conveyed a mixture of both great respect and fear. May I tell you, it did not take much acting effort.

  I felt the knife lift and was able to breathe again without fear of being cut. We passed more time listening to music. This time it was Little River Band’s single “Lady.” Look around, be a part / Feel for the winter, but don’t have a cold heart.

  The stanzas in these songs could have been a compilation tape for the drive, so appropriate were they to the situation, but no, it was just a classic rock station.

  In Which I Consider the Nature of Dreams

  London, 1992—A couple of days after Dad’s frog arrived, the night terrors began. I was lying there asleep, eyes wide open, waiting for a trip wire to blow, my nerves tuned into a sensorily perceived threat in the room, nondescript yet palpable. Thomas tried to wake me, soothe me by talking, but this only alarmed me further, and I jumped out of bed, awake but unable to step out of the dream. It was like a director had called a cut in action, but whatever the source of the malevolent feeling was, it hadn’t cleared the room.

  I’d been having night terrors all the way back to adolescence, but realized I had never had anyone witness one. My unconscious strategy for dealing with them was to avoid sleep altogether. All-nighters, often twice a week, had been a part of my lifestyle as long as I could remember. I had plenty of excuses. There are never enough hours in a day for a workaholic. And then there was my manic thirst for knowledge. Once I got on a reading bender, I hated to stop. And often, just the stimulation of the day made it impossible to sleep.

  But a mutual bedtime was a nonnegotiable term for Thomas. Sharing life together should include going to bed at the same time, in the same bed. He wasn’t unreasonable, though: he understood there would be exceptions.

  After the start of the new nightmare season, I decided to stop at a local bookstore and check out the self-help section. I found information on night terrors; while not that common, they weren’t rare. It was a form of lucid dreaming. Children were more likely to experience them, and most grew out of them; scientists didn’t know why. Nothing suggested that they were anything to be worried about. Relieved at the findings, I shared my research with Thomas over Marmite and toast, a newly acquired taste for me. We now understood why his attempts to wake me up were counterproductive. We both decided to trust the experts and assumed the terrors would just run their course.

  But I couldn’t let go of the fact I was interrupting his sleep. I decided to try analyzing my dreams. Perhaps the night terrors were nothing other than a neurological digestive problem, an overload with all the new information I had to process given the transatlantic move, and writing them down would help. I decided on a narrative analysis—I’d track the following items:

  • Time (date and age in my life the conte
nt pulled from, which was not always obvious)

  • Time in the dream (which proved interestingly nonimportant, and usually a mystery)

  • Location (rather straightforward, but still sometimes not clearly discernible)

  • Theme (was it concerned with my childhood, my family life, my health, my impending marriage?)

  • Length (was it one of those all-night marathon dreams, or was it a series of short ones? medium-length ones?)

  • Structure (nested: a dream within a dream? linear: a straightforward narrative? nonlinear? meta?)

  • Character (family? animals? friends? workmates? famous figures?)

  After keeping a log for a month, I tallied the results. Nightmares made up about 30 percent of my overall sleep. Night terrors, less than 5 percent. I took comfort in the insight the exercise offered. I thought storytelling was the reserve of those who practiced the craft, but there was no refuting it. Humans are biologically wired with the need, but most of us do it unconsciously. It helped me reframe my attitude: it wasn’t the product of my dysfunctioning mind after all.

  But it still couldn’t remove the anxiety of the 5 percent of the dreams that felt traumatizing. These dreams didn’t feel like dreams, but like another human being was breathing in the room. I never “saw” the object of my fear, only sensed an abstract figure in the dark.